Finales behaving badly

'The Curse' and 'For All Mankind' end on unfortunate notes, plus 'Echo,' 'Monsieur Spade,' and 'Fargo'

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I interrupt a superior officer when he's bantering...

Cancel the move… for now 

As discussed in the last few newsletters, I’ve been looking for an alternate home for the newsletter, due to Substack management’s reluctance to say that they don’t want to be in business with Nazis. Earlier this week, I had some great conversations with the extremely helpful  leadership at Buttondown, and was in the process of moving this operation over there, when Substack finally, reluctantly, acknowledged that perhaps it did not want to be in business with people offering “credible threats of physical harm.” 

The statement given to Platformer is pretty mealy-mouthed, leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and seems inspired less by self-reflection than by the bad publicity and various publications either leaving or threatening to leave. But it’s something, and at least for the moment, it’s juuuust enough to keep me here. Again, the newsletter is free, so Substack makes no money off of me that can then be used to subsidize hate speech. And there are certain conveniences to being here, for both me and for you subscribers. If anyone feels like Substack’s latest response falls far too short and intends to unsubscribe to this and all other newsletters here, I get it and respect that. But I’m now more than prepared to quickly relocate if the winds shift in a bad direction again. As The Good Place and many others have pointed out, ethical consumption in a capitalist society is… not an easy thing. So I’m going to play it by ear and see what happens next. 

Regardless of where we are, I continue to appreciate your readership of this newsletter, any and all of you who click on the weekly links to my writing at Rolling Stone (which in turn helps me in the job that actually pays me), who buy my books, etc. Platforms come and go, but you all have stuck by me in a lot of homes, and I can’t say enough about how much that means to me. 

An Echo of MCU disasters past, or not?

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has become such a mess in general, and all the messaging around Echo has been so bad in particular, that I assumed the Hawkeye spinoff was going to be an even bigger disaster than Secret Invasion. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised — at least, by the three episodes I saw. (Marvel for some reason opted not to give critics the full season in advance, even though it’s a binge release, and I haven’t had a chance to finish it yet.) It’s far from perfect, but the combination of Daredevil-style action with lots of Reservation Dogs DNA left me pleased more often than not, which I go into more detail in my review. 

It is not, however, the ideal launch for this new “Marvel Spotlight” banner, which is meant to apply to Marvel projects where prior knowledge of other movies and shows isn’t necessary. It’s a direct sequel to Hawkeye, replays several scenes from that show in its premiere, and features appearances by Daredevil and the Kingpin, both of whom will be reuniting in another MCU show. But it’s also got Devery Jacobs, Graham Greene, Chaske Spencer, Dallas Goldtooth, and a whole bunch of other wonderful Native actors, so it still feels like its own thing even with the ties to the other shows. 

Odds and/or ends

• As happens from time to time, the Rolling Stone publishing schedule is not wholly compatible with the newsletter schedule. In this case, my review of Monsieur Spade — a six-part miniseries, created by Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit) and Tom Fontana (Oz), starring Clive Owen as a much older Sam Spade (the hard-boiled private eye from The Maltese Falcon), who has been enjoying retirement in a beautiful French village when a series of murders forces him to work again — isn’t running until tomorrow morning, with the show premiering on Sunday night. You can find it on my author page, and I’ll add a direct link to the web version of the newsletter tomorrow morning. Without spoiling too much of the review, I will just say that this creative team, this subject, and this star should have been right up my alley, and… I didn’t love it. More on that next week, I suppose. UPDATE: Here’s the review.

• Speaking of Sunday premieres and an unpredictable publishing schedule, this is your reminder that my positive review of True Detective: Night Country dropped last week. I’ll also be recapping the show for Rolling Stone. (You can look for that Sunday night at 10 on, again, my RS author page.)

• Earlier this week, Disney announced that Ahsoka would get a second season, again run by Dave Filoni, while Jon Favreau would direct a feature film about Mando and Baby Yoda. While I had many problems with Ahsoka Season One, it’s a relief to at least know when and where the story will continue after that cliffhanger ending. As for The Mandalorian and Grogu, I’m on board so long as Favreau just makes it a standalone Space Western adventure, rather than something that ties into the larger mythology of the Filoni-verse. If there’s a 10-minute scene again explaining why members of Mando’s cult never take off their helmets, I will groan very loudly. 

• A couple of disappointing Max cancellations this week, with both Our Flag Means Death and Julia getting the axe after two seasons apiece. I never felt quite the love for Our Flag that a lot of others did, but the passion for that show was so palpable. As for Julia, I remember watching the first handful of Season One episodes and saying, “Okay, now that The French Chef is on the air and doing well, what is this show, exactly?” It turned out to have a lot to say about second acts in life, parasocial relationships, sexism and racism in the Sixties, and more. It wasn’t perfect, but it gave me a chance to watch Sarah Lancashire, David Hyde Pierce, and Bebe Neuwirth play scenes together for eight hours a year. And it gave me my favorite TV-watching side game: “Will Fiona Glascott be doing a Noo Yawk accent in this scene — and, if so, for how long into the scene?” It’s a big bummer.

Fargo recaplet: “The Useless Hand” 

I’ll keep this short, because I can go on at greater length next week after the finale airs. “The Useless Hand,” though, was pretty terrific, full of action, suspense, and big emotions. The feds prepare to raid Roy’s compound, and Witt leads a team of them onto the ranch to find and rescue Dot. Lorraine icy facade finally melts a bit, as she refers to Dot as a “daughter of mine,” while giving her an inspiring speech about staying alive at all costs. Ole Munch saves Dot from being taken out by Roy’s men, but only because he wants their next encounter to be on even terms. And before that, Munch brutally burns out Gator’s eyes. This is actually the second-worst thing to happen to Gator in the episode, since Roy’s response to seeing his mutilated son is to say, “If there ever was a point to you, it’s gone now.” What a disgusting, disgusting man. Everything is converging very effectively here, which is more than I can say for our next show. And speaking of which… 

For All Mankind recaplet: “Perestroika” 

Whatever other flaws FAM has, it’s always been great at finales. An uneven first season came to a thrilling conclusion with the convergence of several Apollo missions on and around the moon. The second season — the show’s one unquestionably great year (more on that in a minute) — had an all-timer finale, highlighted by Gordo and Tracy’s run across the lunar surface. Season Three was mostly a mess, but the combined American/Russian/corporate contingents coming together to get a pregnant Kelly off of Mars was terrific. 

FAM Season Four was, on the whole, not as frustrating as last year. But my goodness, did it fall apart at the end. 

“Perestroika” has many problems. But the main one is that I think the show wants us to root for Ed and Dev’s team — or, at least, to feel conflicted about which side we want to win the battle for control of Goldilocks —  when both of them are operating from purely selfish and annoying motives. Yes, Eli and a lot of the other people back on Earth are being completely mercenary about the asteroid, but it’s also something that will do a lot of good for humanity, and much more easily if it’s in lunar orbit rather than way over on Mars. Ed and Dev just want to create a legacy for themselves by turning Mars into a viable ongoing concern — and Ed wants to keep putting off his inevitable slide into old age. As someone watching a show about the wonders of an alternate timeline where we kept exploring space even after the race to the moon ended, I should in theory be entirely on board with the idea of a thriving Martian colony. But the season does a terrible job of selling Ed (who’s insufferable), and Dev (who’s too enigmatic to care about) as the ones who are obviously right to want to make this happen. Even when Margo and Aleida agree later on, it doesn’t feel like enough to want the outcome that the show so obviously wants me to. 

Beyond that, there’s the ongoing Sam and Miles problem. We barely know Sam, so her big victory over Palmer in their fight atop Ranger’s engines didn’t land at all. And Miles has until now been a one-note character who operates entirely out of self-interest. It doesn’t track at all that he would stand up to prolonged torture by CIA and KGB agents, just to protect a cause he has previously not seemed to believe in. And things turn even more into gibberish from there. Ilya and his guys randomly turn up to rescue Miles — even though Ilya has every reason to want to see his former sidekick suffer — and suddenly there’s a January 6th-style insurrection in the bowels of Happy Valley, and then a ridiculous death fake-out with Dani. At that point, it’s a no-win scenario for FAM: kill Dani, and you’ve eliminated one of the last remaining vital characters from the show’s early years, and someone the audience still likes; save her, and it’s utterly cheap manipulation. Plus, with Dani presumably earthbound for good, and Margo off to prison, it’s entirely possible that Ed will be the last original character standing, which… yeah. If the show hadn’t done such a poor job seeding the later generations of characters, this would be less of a problem. But it is. 

Which brings us back to the weird outlier nature of that second season. There are plenty of TV shows, like Homeland or The O.C. (which I wrote a book about, in case you hadn’t heard), that had great first years they could never live up to afterwards. There are some like Parks and Rec that had bad first seasons before making a big creative leap. And there are shows that were pretty good throughout their runs but had a middle season that was particularly strong, like the second seasons of both Chuck and Burn Notice.  It’s much, much rarer for a show to have only one truly great year that’s not its first. Sons of Anarchy did that with its second season, and Boardwalk Empire with the Chalky White-centric fourth year. (I liked a lot of other sections of those two shows, but there was only one year for each where all the elements came together perfectly.) I guess we have to add FAM to that list, at least until we see if any upcoming seasons manage to recapture that earlier magic.   

Reverse The Curse? 

Finally, we come to the series finale of The Curse, which drove me up a damn wall. Because I devoted a whole lot of words in my recap to explaining my dissatisfaction,  and because the episode just dropped this morning on Paramount+ with Showtime, I’ll spare you a longer rant here. In fact, I’ve set up a Substack Chat where people can talk about the finale without worrying about spoiling people. But if you want to discuss it in the comments here, go for it. I just… why did this happen? 

That’s it for this week! What did everybody else think?