You the Final Season: Some Thoughts

I just finished binging the final season of You.  Some thoughts:

[No spoilers ahead, until I warn you about them.]

For some reason in this final (5th) season of this series about the deeply complex serial killer  Joe Goldberg (though I guess most or even all serial killers are complex), I began thinking a lot about its comparisons to Dexter and its spin-offs (my all-time favorite serial killer series, and one of my all-time favorite TV series, period -- in the Top 5 all-time, I'd say).  Now, I may have made comparisons of You to Dexter in my reviews of the first four seasons of You, but I'd rather write this review right now than read over those earlier reviews, which of course you are welcome to, if you like (see the links at the end of this review).

Now Dexter Morgan, as we know, has a code -- he kills only monsters, including other serial killers, that for whatever reasons the police can't touch.  Dexter almost definitely would've killed Joe, even though Joe occasionally kills people who deserved to die, too.  Joe didn't have much if any of a code, but he does have something of a redeeming characteristic in his literacy.  Not that his way with words, spoken and written, in any way justified his killings, but they certainly made Joe much more worthy of a story than the kind of serial killers you encounter just about every week in Criminal Minds.

And Joe is refreshingly hipt. His inner voice tells him -- inner voices are another thing Dexter and Joe have in common -- and Joe's voice observes at some point, when he's annoyed at the press coverage his deeds or people he's involved with are receiving, "no wonder journalism is dying".  Good for Joe!  He (or actually his writers) must have read Andre Mir's masterful Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers  (which I highly recommend).

[And now I'll warn you about some very general spoilers ahead ... ]

I thought this finale season did a great job tying in major characters from previous seasons, including ones we thought were no longer with us, including a central character who is in fact gone, and another who in fact is not.   I also thought Joe grappled with this in a suitably entertaining way for a story like this, with an intriguing mix of unpredictability and predictability.  When a TV final season brings in so many different characters, it runs the risk of coming off like everything and the kitchen sink.  This concluding season of You by and large avoided that pitfall.

But here's what I didn't much care for in this last season.  When the first season debuted back before COVID in 2018, a lot of reviewers said they felt "conflicted" about enjoying so much a series about well, a cold-blooded psycho, however literate he might have been.  I entitled my review of that first season "Review from an Unconflicted Fan".  I thought the first season was brilliant, not because there's anything I admire about real-life serial killers, but because You did an excellent job of telling a unique story about a fictional serial killer.  In the final episode of this final season, Bronte/Louise tells us that falling in love with a fictional serial killer is a good way to learn more about how to apprehend or recognize and stop a serial killer in real life. I thought that was a very keen and apt observation.  But for that reason, I didn't much care for the heavy-handed way in which Joe got his due at the end.  It was almost as if the show's creators felt the need to shout from the rooftops that they were no fans of real-life serial killers, something that didn't need to be shouted because it should be obvious, and of course in fact manifestly is.

In any case, congrats to everyone who created, wrote, directed, and acted in this very memorable series.

See also:  You: Review from an Unconflicted Fan ... You 2: Killer Charm ... Spoiler-Free Review for You 3 ... You 4.1-4.5: So Far, Less than the Previous Seasons ... You 4.6-4.10: More than the Previous Seasons

 

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The Last of Us 2.1-2.2: The Killing Cold

 [spoilers ahead ... ]

So, Episode 2.1 of The Last of Us, up on Max last week, was pretty quiet. We did learn some important things.  There's a young woman, Abby, who is clearly a counterpart of Ellie -- the two even look somewhat alike -- who is intent on killing Joel.  That intention, of course, will put her on a collision course with Ellie, who therefore also of course gets into a father-daughter type argument with Joel, who also, as we know, is Ellie's de facto father.  We also see Ellie and Dina kiss at a dance in Jackson Hole, the center of the action so far in this second season.

As I say, pretty quiet.  And in a narrative of this calibre, pretty quiet has to be a build-up to something pretty calamitous.   But episode 2.2, just up of Max tonight, was a lot more than that.  I'd say it was one of most exciting, all-hell-breaks-loose, explosive episodes of anything I ever seen on any TV or streaming screen.  Right up there, in other words, with equivalent episodes of Game of Thrones.  And if we add movies into the comparison, with equivalent scenes in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings.

I mean, the hordes of the infected attacking Jackson Hole are right up there -- or down there -- with the Orcs attacking wherever it was in Lord of The Rings.  And in some ways even more powerful because it came on so suddenly.  And, to add to the knock-down punch of this second episode, it wasn't even the more powerful scene in the near hour.

That would be the killing of Joel, which, although we learned the hard way in the first season that everyone was expendable, nonetheless came as a shockingly horrendously unwelcome stun.  Like I'm sure everyone else who saw the episode, I didn't want to believe it.  I didn't want to believe it so much, I didn't really believe it until I saw the bag with his body being hauled through the snow.   And even now there's a part of me that believes, yeah, if I was writing the story, maybe Joel would get frozen in the snow, so much so that his brain will get frozen before it dies, which means he could be resuscitated, right?  (Actually, I think that sort of happened with Michael C. Hall's "Dexter".)  Yeah, suddenly immense cold can do that.  But, sadly, I'm not writing this series.

But speaking of the cold, it did get nice and warm in New York City the past few days, but the cold was such an impressive character tonight, I actually felt chilled watching this episode -- not just psychologically because of was happened to Joel, but almost physically because of the way in which the snow and the cold was so effectively depicted and played a role in this narrative.

And I'll see you back here with my continuing reviews of this chilling series.

 See also The Last of Us 1.1-1.2: The Fungus Among Us ... 1.3: Bill and Frank ... 1.4: Gun and Pun ... 1.5: Tunnels ... 1.6: Joel ... 1.7: Riley's Wise Advice ... 1.8: Ellie vs. the Resort ... 1.9: The Limits of Utilitarianism

Captain Phil interviews Paul Levinson about Tom Cooper's Wisdom Weavers

I returned to Captain Phil's Planet on WUSB (Stony Brook University) Radio the other day to talk to  Captain Phil about Tom Cooper's new book, Wisdom Weavers: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, to be pubished by Connected Editions (my publishing company) on May 1.  

As we discussed in the interview, I'll be interviewing Tom about his book via Zoom on the evening of Wisdom Weavers' publication -- 8pm (New York time), May 1.  If you'd like to attend, email me at Levinson at Fordham dot edu and I'll be happy to send the Zoom URL to you.

In the meantime, check out my Marshall McLuhan playlist on YouTube for 50 of my lectures, interviews, etc about McLuhan over the past 20 years.  Here are my two books about McLuhan: Digital McLuhan and McLuhan in an Age of Social Media.  You'll also find numerous essays about McLuhan on my Academia.edu page.  And, if you're a fan of audio podcasts, just search on "McLuhan" on my Light On Light Through podcast page.

Check out this episode!

Paul Levinson Interviews The Polar Editors

Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 410, in which I interview Kingsley Marin and Massimo Seriale, two freshmen at Fordham University, who have created and edit a new publication (independent of the University), The Polar.

More about The Polar here.

 

Check out this episode!