Overall, I’ve been watching so much television lately that I feel like I’m starting to uncover some of the basic formulas and tropes used so much in television: there is often a single home/gathering place that everyone hangs out at… and, well, that’s the only one I can think of now — but I know I had more at one time.

Anyway, in my “analysis” of series finales, I’ve noticed that they tend to fall into three main categories. I purposely didn’t elaborate on my reasoning behind the shows so as not to spoil them. I think it’s safe to continue reading even if you haven’t seen some of the finales for some of the shows, yet.

Also: there is a bonus “type” of finale: The Flashback. But in my “studies” this seems to overlap with the three other categories, so I’ll note the episodes that use flashbacks with a *.

Total War: Especially in sci-fi shows with a “big bad” or overarching enemy, the series finale will involve confronting this big thing in a huge all-out war. It’s almost certain that some of our favorite characters will die in the process and in the end good will win. In non-sci-fi shows, this could also be considered the Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again ending: something huge happens that affects the lives of everyone on the show (someone gets married, the office where people work closes, etc.) and the show has to end because, like total war, the premise of the series would be so different if it kept going.

• Battlestar Galactica
• Buffy
• Angel
• Boston Legal
• Star Trek: Voyager (my favorite ending to a sci-fi show so far, by the way)
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
• Sex and the City
• X-Files *
• The L Word *

Just Another Day: As opposed to Total War/Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again, the Just Another Day ending tries to show that while this may be the final episode of the series, the lives of the characters we’ve come to love will keep going on just like normal. That’s not to say there won’t be any big events or resolutions to long plot lines, but for the most part Things Stay The Same or don’t change too much. The show could conceivably keep going after the final episode.

• Six Feet Under
• Roswell
• Roseanne
• Veronica Mars (this one sort of doesn’t count since the show was canceled…)
• Star Trek: The Next Generation *
• Arrested Development
• Knots Landing
• The West Wing
• The Sopranos (depending on what happens…)

The final type of series finale is by far the worst (depending on the circumstances): The Unresolved. Sometimes this happens when a show is unexpectedly canceled and the creators cannot create a proper ending. Or sometimes it happens when a show is unexpectedly canceled and the creators don’t want to do a proper ending. While I am usually a fan of twists and strange endings in a show, these endings are mostly “I wish it wouldn’t have ended so soon”-type of endings.

• Millennium (I think the show should have ended with the Total War ending that season 2 had)
• Twin Peaks

So what do you think about my categorization? Am I off the mark on some? (I’m sure I am!) Looking to the future, which finales am I most looking forward to based on the shows I watch now? Lost, Weeds (this show goes in all sorts of crazy directions!), Desperate Housewives (so long as it’s not an overly-sentimental flashback-based one), and Damages.

Too bad it looks like it’s definitely made out of leather, otherwise I might consider getting a pair.

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t watched this episode, I wouldn’t continue reading…

This is the scene I’m talking about:

I’m not sure what it is exactly about the scene that totally melts me down. Chances are there are so many small reasons they just add up and overwhelm me. I don’t think it’s because we see beloved characters die. I handled the deaths of Lisa and Nate fine. And in a show like Six Feet Under, you sort of have to expect it to end with death.

After some thought, I think there are two main reasons I find the finale so tear-worthy.

First, in a somewhat meta sense, it’s really sad that the show is over. It’s not just the sadness of the death of the characters, but also the sadness of the “death” of Six Feet Under. I often experience this after I finish watching an entire series — I miss the characters, I miss watching the show. In a way shows become our friends and when they are over, it’s like they are dead.

But that doesn’t entirely explain what makes the Six Feet Under finale so distinctive. What touches me the most about it is how happy everyone is. Last night I started losing it during the first “flash forward” showing Ruth and Betina overseeing their dog sanctuary. Ruth was so happy. Then we see Willa’s or Maya’s birthday party and everyone is so happy. And we see David watching his family play football and he sees Keith and he’s so happy.

So I think it’s a combination of the my genuine sadness that the show is over and empathizing with the genuine joy of the characters. And, of course, the song — Sia’s “Breathe Me” is haunting and to this day I tear up every time I hear it (however I’m skeptical that Ted [who made Claire the mix CD that she's listening to] would know such a great song).

Of all the finales of all the shows I’ve watched, nothing is as special as Six Feet Under. And I look forward to watching the entire series again in a few years and crying just as hard at the end — I doubt that’ll ever change no matter how many times I watch it (and yes, I even cried watching the YouTube clip above — so even without context it’s just as amazing).

I cannot think of any other show where there has been such delayed gratification. Sure, shows like Lost are extremely complicated and full of mysteries, but the nature of those questions are more ontological in nature. The matter of the identity of the cylons who look like humans are just a matter of fact. You could write essays (and many have) trying to understand some of the larger questions that shows like Battlestar and Lost and Twin Peaks and Heroes, etc. raise, but in regard to the final cylons, it’s a simple, one-word answer (not even an explanation).

We’ve been teased about the existence of these human-like cylons since the miniseries that preceded the show itself and trying to figure out who is really a cylon (and the paranoia and issues that causes) have been a major part of the show. So finally, with just 10 episodes left, we know know the identity of every humanoid cylon.

The only similar situation that I can think of off the top of my head is the whole “Who Shot JR?”on Dallas phenomenon. In the spring of 1980 we saw JR get shot. We had to wait all summer to get one-sentence answer: Kristin Shepard (JR’s sister-in-law, who he was, of course, having an affair with) shot him. Unlike most complex shows that I watch, the answer didn’t produce more questions (which, don’t get me wrong, I love). Likewise, after 4.5 seasons of Battlestar, the Ellen reveal at the end of “Sometimes A Great Notion” provided us with the one-sentence answer: “The identity of the only not-yet-revealed humanoid cylon is Ellen Tigh.”

This kind of a cliffhanger (that started during the miniseries) drives me nuts (in a good way!). For the entire week before “Sometimes A Great Notion” aired, I was going nuts trying to find spoilers and looking for clues (see also: The Final Cylon? A Gay Cylon?). Sure, the revelation opens a whole bunch of questions (e.g. “What does it mean that she’s dead?”, “So cylon love spans lifetimes?”, “What’s the deal with 2000-year-ago Earth?”, etc.), at least we have one concrete answer.

So now that we know that Ellen is a cylon, how do I feel about it?

To help me consider my thoughts, I went back and re-watched the episode in which we first meet Ellen, season 1′s Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down.” The awesome thing about his episode is that it basically reveals that fact that Ellen is a cylon. When she first arrives on Galactica, Adama gives her blood to Baltar to be tested using his cylon detector. After some obnoxious behavior at a dinner party, Roslin and Adama are convinced that she is indeed a cylon and I remember when I watched it for the first time, I was pretty convinced, too. Like the other humanoid cylons, she basically appeared out of nowhere. And at this point early in the series, I think we were expecting that all of the humanoid cylons would be revealed fairly quickly and without too much drama.

When Roslin and Adama go to Baltar to receive the test results (and get caught by Ellen and Colonel Tigh in the process), Baltar tells them that she isn’t a cylon. By this point, Baltar had decided that he wouldn’t really use the cylon detector and just tell Roslin/Adama that everyone is human (after Boomer is identified as a cylon). When HeadSix asks him what the test really said, and he responds, “I’ll never tell.”

This raises the intriguing possibility that Baltar knew her cylon identity quite early in the series.

(A disappointing side note: In an interview with the Chicago Tribune Ronald D. Moore, the creator of Battlestar, reveals that the idea for Ellen-as-a-cylon came about during season three and wasn’t finalized until season four — so any clues that we got during that season one episode mean pretty much nothing. Now that Ellen is a cylon we can gleam some meaning, but the intention of the episode was just to play around with the “anyone could be a cylon” theme.)

Overall, I’m actually happy knowing Ellen is a cylon.

I’m glad that the “final cylon” isn’t yet another class of cylons. We already have the “significant seven” and the “final four” that were revealed during “Crossroads, Part II,” so I’m glad that we now know that the “final cylon” wasn’t revealed during “Crossroads” because she was dead. It wasn’t because she was some super cylon that was immune to the music or yet another type of cylon. The whole, “Ohhh the final cylon must be a big special deal since we don’t find out until near the end of the series!” was manufactured on the part of the fans.

I also think that the Ellen-and-Tigh-both-being-cylons adds a sort of sweet love story to the show. We learn at the end of “Sometimes A Great Notion” that they were lovers 2,000 years ago, and they were lovers in the current timeline, so you have to wonder if they really are literal soul mates. I’m rarely a fan of sappy romance creeping into shows, but I like this since they are sort of star-crossed and fucked up lovers.

Throughout season four I kept worrying that once I found out who the final cylon was, I would lose interest in the show. The suspense and desire to know the identity of the humanoid cylons were definitely some of the things that kept me so obsessed with the show. I’m happy to report that now that I do know, I’m still just as obsessed with Battlestar as ever. I think one of the things that has made the show so enjoyable over the years is that unlike Lost it doesn’t answer every question with another question — we actually got some definitive answers. The combination of the two types of mystery kept me interested without getting exhausted.

Here’s to some great final episodes!

Swingtown was a short-lived show on CBS about swingers (but not really) in the 1970s. The characters were fun, the production design was excellent (you really felt like you were in the ’70s!), and the politics were smart (lots of issues around “women’s lib,” censorship, Nixon, etc.).

Imagine my sadness when I found out via the Swingtown wiki page that it’s effectively been canceled:

Cancelation
Show admitted that the series is canceled. [1]

Excerpt from TV Guide interview with Grant Show (Tom Decker).

“TVGuide.com: Is it safe to say that Swingtown is all swung out? Show: Yeah, unfortunately. I mean, they haven’t released me and they haven’t made any official statements yet, but our contracts are all up in December. They’d have to have us back working before then, and I don’t think it’s possible to do that.”

I’ve been hoping that the limbo-status of the show for the past few months has meant that it might be returning somehow magically. Looks like that probably isn’t the case…

At least I can look forward to the complete first season arriving in my mailbox sometime next week.

Oh well — I guess I’m glad to say I support it…

Although this show wasn’t quite as dirty or sexy or money as the title makes it sound, it was good. I loved the cast and the overarching mystery (“Who killed Nick’s dad?”) is the kind of stuff I love (a la the mysteries that encompass each season of Desperate Housewives). The show was also groundbreaking in that one of the major characters was an MTF.

I won’t miss Eli Stone — I watched two or so episodes of it and hated it. I hear from everyone that Pushing Daises is awesome but I never watched.

Let’s just hope they don’t cancel my other hanging-on-by-a-thread shows like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles or Friday Night Lights.

In other cylon news, io9 also has a spoiler about the fact that Gaeta is indeed gay!!

I was sort of hoping that Gaeta would be a cylon (and I read somewhere that he almost was — but they ended up going with Anders instead…).

Oh January cannot come soon enough!!

I’m not saying that the trope of a using a blind person for literary/storyline purposes is strange… going way back to Oedipus, for example, the “blind” Oedipus often “sees” (in a metaphysical sense) the truth of a situation better than the sighted people around him.

What is interesting, I think, is that in both of these shows I love and am watching/recently watched, a person who loses their sight continues to pretend to be blind in order to “see” the world around him better. Lionel is able to see the truth behind various plans that Lex develops and Blake is able to figure out what exactly is going on in the Krystle-Nick Toscanni-Falon love triangle.

Basically what I’m trying to get at is that this is an interesting technique since it basically gives the characters get the advantages that frequently come with blindness in literature (i.e. “seeing” better/more in-depth) as well as a sort of double-vision where they see people’s true nature since those people assume the character is blind.