Day 22 - Favourite Series Finale

[thessalian]

Tricky, tricky question. Again, I haven't been back into watching TV for long; there was a pretty huge gap in which I wasn't watching TV at all. I don't actually remember a lot of series finales from when I was a kid, and now? Well, either I'm lucky enough to be a fan of shows that are still going, and thus haven't had a real series finale yet, or I'm unfortunate enough to be a fan of a show that either a) ended before its time or b) went on a couple of seasons too long. So I ask myself whether I can count season finales as well as series finales ... and then decide that pulling that shit is just going to make the choice a lot harder. Broader scope, you know? Too many possibilities. So I'll stick with genuine, bona fide, 'I absolutely know it was the last episode' series finale.

And I'm going to go with Angel. But I'm not going for it because it was particularly good television, exactly. I'm going with that that particular series finale because it was good for what it was. And 'what it was' was a brilliant piece of last-minute television to tie up loose ends.

I'm the sort of Whedon fan who, while not actively loathing S6 and S7 of Buffy, thought that the series would have been much better had it ended with "The Gift". In my view, Whedon has what Stephen King refers to as 'diarrhoea of the word processor'. He came up with a brilliantly satisfying point of narrative closure with "The Gift" (S5 finale, for those not in the know) and ... sure, how he progressed from there started pretty cool but ended up as the start of a horribly preachy season of television. Not that it didn't have moments ("I'd like to test that theory" being the main one), but ... yeah, spoiled the shiny narrative closure. I wasn't a fan. Joss Whedon needs to learn when to call it quits.

In the case of Angel, Fox made that decision for him. He didn't have a lot of time to come up with an ending, as Fox told him that he had three episodes to wrap it up. For a last-minute finale, it was damn good, in my view. And as last lines go, "Personally? I kind of want to slay the dragon. ...Let's go to work" is pretty awesome, I feel.

(I am ignoring the comic. I refuse to pay attention to 'After the End'. You can't make me.)

Tomorrow? 'Most Annoying Character'. Ooooooooooooh that's going to take some thought.

So in other news, I had a job interview today. Getting there was relatively easy (train to Fins Park, bus to Hackney), but getting around the hospital ... I had main reception send me to Outpatients. I had Outpatients send me to a nurse's station. I had a nurse from said nurse's station send me to an outpatient clinic upstairs in another building. I had a secretary from that clinic send me back downstairs and to an entirely different building - again. And finally, when the department I was supposed to find (Rehabilitative Neurology, in point of fact - counterintuitive when you're interviewing for gastro-enterology, but they were probably short on interview space up in gastro) turned out to be poorly marked and not actually on the site map, it was only a lovely porter pointing me in the right direction that saved me from throwing something at a wall. From five minutes early, I ended up ten minutes late. Lucky me, the interviewers were running late themselves. My actual interview came an hour after I finally arrived at the unit, and I don't think they even realised I ran late. This is why I bring a book to these things. On the whole, leaving aside the issues with being pointed hither, thither and yon around the hospital, I think the interview went well, and I hope to hear from them soon. *crosses fingers*

Comments

[nutmeg3.livejournal.com]

Good luck with the job. Sounds like an incredibly frustrtating search for the right room, though.