This is the end

I’ve been suffering from a bad case of what my friend Rachel calls "Adama."

"I don’t remember how it ends," Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) says, in Season 4 of sci-fi great Battlestar Galactica (2004-09), when William Adama (Edward James Olmos) shows her the book he brought to read aloud to her during a cancer treatment. The novel, if you are equally nerdy, is Searider Falcon, a "classic" in the BSG universe.

"I don’t either," says Adama. "I’ve never read the ending. I like it so much, I don’t want it to be over. So I’m saving it."

A few episodes later, pining for her with a now-singed copy of the book, he finally indulges.

Rachel and I were both sulking about the then-impending end of the FX series Better Things, which wrapped its five-season run a few weeks ago.

I couldn’t resist and watched the final hour in real time with a tumbler of wine and only one eye open. More than not wanting it to be over, I wanted to ensure it ended as purely and brilliantly as it began its exploration of the life of a 50-something actor/single mom in L.A. I need not have feared, and watched it again twice, smiling like a fool the whole way.

Rachel went full Adama for a few more weeks but was effusive in her eventual review, revelling in not only the period jokes, the return of many characters, and one’s "admission that some mothers and daughters aren’t good for each other."

Bad mothers (for real, not for laughs) is trademark Better Things, showing achingly and often hilariously relatable parts of life — fights, bad sex, screwing up, breakups with friends and family, forgiving the unforgivable, finally getting your El Camino, whole scenes on the toilet, cooking as a character in its own right, being there for a young person/old person who is acting out and simply does not know what to do, shutting the hell up and just taking a breath.

What I loved about this show about Sam Fox, mother to all, was that it was only occasionally plot-driven. Most often, it was a half-hour of character scenes, interspersed with great music — and what characters: three loving but unholy-terror daughters, a self-involved mother with dementia, friends with equally messy lives. It ended the same shaggy, beautiful way (no spoilers, you should watch it), around a giant dinner table under a beautiful night sky.

That this most female-oriented series was co-created by the now disgraced Louis CK — though helmed all the while by Adlon, who also wrote and directed the finale — is a mystery for the ages.

What I have come to call the Adama Stall hit me hard with two more just-wrapped series, both on Netflix.

I plowed through all but the final two episodes of Grace and Frankie as soon as they dropped last month. Here, I wasn’t worried about ending on a wrong note. While the adventures of two elder kooks (Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin) and their kook friends and family have been more and less interesting over the past seven years, the silly humour has never waivered. The finale, when I eventually tricked myself into watching by not keeping count of the episodes, was silly and sweet and corny. Perfect.

 

Ozark, about the suburban Byrde family breaking badder and badder on the increasingly flimsy hope of bankrolling themselves a new life, was a different story. The complex plotlines as well as the strong suspicion (no spoilers!) that some characters don’t survive, the intensity and guaranteed violence all had me doing days of housework to avoid the terrifyingly titled finale, A Hard Way to Go.

Only this deadline got me in the recliner. By the end, I’d cried and laughed, shrieked once out loud and cried again. The final scene does not disappoint. Also best to avoid the double espresso while watching unless you have your heart meds handy. Is there nothing Jason Bateman, who stars in and directs the finale, cannot do? How I will miss his huge, corrupted heart and anguished face as his wife (Laura Linney) falls apart and his children become inscrutable players while Ruth, majestically played by Julia Garner, rises like a benevolent queen.

But what of the other series finales that feel like betrayals or at least abandonments? Some questions to keep from crying and raging against the dying of the light of my flatscreen/iPad.

 

● This Is Us (ending May 24): The final, sixth season of the time-shifting Pearson family drama is a return to strength after a few weak seasons where it felt like the series was pulling its own Adama Stall to avoid the end. Momentum is building as Kate’s (Chrissy Metz)) wedding served as a spoke from which we fast-forward/backward with each of the three siblings as well as step-dad Miguel (Jon Huertas). Flash-forwards have filled in many blanks to the deathbed of matriarch Rebecca (Mandy Moore), but how far into the inevitable future flash-forwards will Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) appear? And will bosses all over North America be OK with overwrought fans calling in sick the morning after, as Moore predicted on Today?

 

● Better Call Saul (ending Aug. 15): With one more episode before the midseason break, the tension is high in this Breaking Bad prequel, covering the first years of new lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) to his becoming Saul Goodman, sleazy counsel to teacher-turned-drug magnate Walter White (Bryan Cranston). Flash-forwards have introduced us to our antihero’s presumed final iteration, Gene the nervous, mustachioed mall clerk. The most pressing question is what happens to Jimmy/Saul’s one true love, Kim (Rhea Seehorn), who does not appear in Breaking Bad. And what will happen when Walter and his friend/foe Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) are slated (according to IMDb.com) to appear in the May 23 midseason finale?

 

What’re you watching? Dreading the end of? You and I and Adama can get through this together.

denise.duguay@winnipegfreepress.com

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