jace-rynearson

Normally, I would side with the audience over critical because their opinion is what people generally think, but ever since the whole subject of Review Bombing came to light, I've been reconsidering that stance. With that, I've seen people be blatantly wrong about some stuff in the past few years, especially with something like The Last of Us Part II, just people getting super biased if not outright untruthful about their own opinion, even if it would thankfully get some of the praise it actually deserves, but this one isn't so lucky. I feel like a lot of people were just judging it based off of how bad the finale of the original series was, and I myself agree with them in that case fully, that one was bad, but this one isn't at all. In this case, I fully side with the critics who praised it, I think it did everything that should've been done in the first place and gave a genuinely satisfying conclusion for the most part. I say the most part because I'm not gonna say it's a perfect finale, I know how strange that sounds with me giving it a 10 out of 10 rating, but I think I'd give it a 9.5 out of 10 if I could.

In this case, Dexter is finally punished for what he did all the way, something that didn't happen before, and that works really well, it's even quite bittersweet towards the end. I do think they should've done something like this before instead of making us wait 8 years, I'm still pissed off that they killed Debra, but I also think it's better late than never. I also think that Angel's story could've used a little more development, but at least we get someone who finally gets on the right track to learning who Dexter really was, and I think the implication is better than the answer in this case. Some may also think the aforementioned punishment of Dexter could've been handled differently, but that's not to say that what they did was bad, just different.

I think my whole point with the audience is pretty telling that the rest of the episodes have a couple thousand reviews while this one has 20k, that's pretty textbook Review Bombing behavior to me. If you watched it and really don't like it, that's fine, but don't just hop on the bandwagon. In my completely unbiased, truthful, personal review, this is a much better finale and a pretty good one, if admittedly not perfect. I just don't think it deserves the hate that it gets.

My title isn't to say this show is losing it's edge, quite the opposite, in fact. It's sharpening it's edge at every conceivable corner. We all knew this wouldn't end happily for them, but it starts to really show that by this episode. Finally, they all start getting punished for their past crimes, especially the ones that they thought they'd successfully covered up, we now know for a fact that they are not immune, and it sets up a new plot that will be the main storyline for the rest of the show, when all their careful planning comes to naught. It's just amazing how they manage to make the plot feel like it's always moving ahead, and deftly balance a bunch of episodic cases with overarching storylines, only now, those overarching storylines are coming to a climax, and it is exciting, to say the least. I'm so glad I chose to stick with this series, because I thought it was too slow for a while, but it's just so interesting, and it picked up pretty quickly, but now that's all coming to a head.