vendredi 26 mai 2017

Let's Talk About the Ending of Netflix's Bloodline


Let's talk about how things ended for the Rayburn family.

Greetings, fellow bingers. Down below you'll find some of my thoughts about the way Bloodline's final season ended, along with a few notes on some specific things I didn't want to spoil in my full Bloodline: Season 3 review. If you haven't finished the third season, you've been warned...

I wasn't crazy about some of the stuff that went down in the final three episodes, but man did I love Meg's exit, which came right at the end of the second min-arc - the trial storyline. I adored the fact that she got away from the family. I mean, she actually changed her name and became a different person because her family was so rancid.

And the show made us twitch a little bit regarding whether or not Chelsea, in a retaliatory effort, would be successful in framing Meg for Marco's murder, and that John would inadvertently wind up luring Meg back into a trap. But none of that happened. Out of every one, Meg managed to realize (and Danny did too, right?) that you just need to get as far away from that family as possible. Hell, even Mike (Mark Valley) tried to get John to ditch the Keys for Boston. Just about everyone could see the storm for what it was except for those inside of it.

Meg not returning (and that message from John - "Hide Better") wasn't my only favorite part about the final throes of the court case. Sally's tearful testimony, where she told the truth about her family's dark secret -- peppered with a Meg alibi lie at the end that everyone would believe because she'd been nothing but confessional and bare up until then -- was another great moment. Sometimes the Rayburns get out of the scrapes they're in due to something overly convenient. This save felt right. This was big Sally moment and one that managed to connect everything back to the start.

Oh, and before I get into the final three episodes, I also want to mention that I really appreciated the time jump after the third episode. The first three episodes, dealing with Marco's murder and the whole plan to shoot Kevin and frame Eric, was a frantic mess at times. It sucked you right back into the overly anxious nature of Season 2 where everyone was miscommunicating and yelling at one another and making dumb mistakes because they're impulsive and don't have all the information. So the quiet "five months later" deal was a nice way of letting everything settle down while allowing our main characters to find their bearings. Also, you get the feeling that if the show did continue on for a few more seasons, Kevin's "partnership" with Ray would have been explored more and the show would have had more time to embed the weakest-willed Rayburn more in the criminal world.

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The final arc here, where John's friend Mike appeared out of nowhere and then John lost his mind and for an entire episode and kept waking up into different alternate realities where either he tried to kill himself or Sally did or... whatever... it didn't hit the mark like it needed to. Though, to be fair, I did appreciate the focus on John and the return of Ben Mendelsohn as Danny. I thought, even as a dream or a figment, Danny was used much better this year than in the Season 2 flashbacks.

There was also a part of me that chuckled at John trying to finally confess to Aguirre and Aguirre was like "Look, I don't want to hear any of this." After all those times where it seemed like Aguirre knew everything but was playing coy, this is how it went down. Every conversation between these two felt like a cat toying with a mouse, where Aguirre was being suspiciously friendly and/or vague. Anyhow, I thought it was funny that, for a brief moment, it seemed like John was going to get away with everything. Even after spending two episodes losing his mind and finding his conscience.

But he wasn't NOT going out like that. He was going to confess to Nolan. Nolan, a character I still couldn't grab onto this year (though I do like how Sally's plan to pretend like her kids no longer existed so she could leave her family's future in the hands of her grandkids went up in smoke). So after John confessed (which we have to assume he did), what's next? Like I brought up briefly in the season review, after all this tension and depression and anxiety, for three seasons, the show needed to send us out with a clearer understanding of where everyone landed.

Kevin got nabbed in Cuba, but then what? It doesn't feel fitting, given the series, for fans to write their own endings. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for Kevin going down. Occasionally, his dumb-assery was excusable and almost lovable, but he'd been given chance after chance to do the right thing and the final straw was fleeing the country. Also, I suppose, he's a murderer. Hah. Credit where credit's due too, Norbert Leo Butz did an excellent job with such a walking whirlpool of a character. Kevin was always in quicksand.

But yeah, Mike coming in (and then vanishing for the final episode), Roy having a heart attack (and then vanishing in the final episode), and the ambiguous elements to the final beats made for a strange close-out. I'm all for this being the final season, trust me, but it's in these final three episodes that things actually felt strangely rushed. Which is weird to say given that one of them was a dreamscape mosaic that sort of touched upon Bloodline's most Bloodline-iest moments.

What did you all think?

Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association (TCA). Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at http://ift.tt/2aJ67FB.

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