[7.4/10] A good, but not a great finale. Where a lot of the show has gone for complexity, the issues here are pretty simple, but they’re also done sweetly so it works.
There’s a nice dovetailing between Sam and Daniel here, two characters who’ve mostly been apart for the course of the series. Sam is starting to worry that he’s too geeky, and Daniel is worried that he’s not good at anything. A Dungeons and Dragons game turns out to be the solution to both their problems. Daniel finds out that he is good at something, unleashing “Carlos the Dwarf” and successfully completing a campaign in the way he was unable to successfully complete a math test or projector setup, and Sam (and the rest of the geeks) decide that if someone as cool as Daniel will play D&D with them, they must be getting cooler.
Again, it’s not complicated, but it’s sweet, and it brings together Daniel and Sam in an interesting way.
The other big story in the episode is Lindsay deciding whether to go to the academic summit she qualified for, or to go follow a bunch of deadheads to Texas to follow the band around for a while. It’s a microcosm of Lindsay’s choices throughout the show -- whether to fly right and hew toward her good girl roots, or whether to embrace her newfound freedom and desire to test her limits a bit.
Once more, it’s not illustrated in a particularly complicated way. Lindsay jamming out to the Grateful Dead is a perfectly fine way to show her embracing that desire to be free and unfettered, and it’s particularly nice that they give Kim a little closure and catharsis with her helping and getting out too. It’s just relatively simple in what it’s signifying.
The one part of this that I didn’t really care for is the stuff with Nick. I think I’m just over the Nick/Lindsay stuff. It’s also the one part in this episode that feels like a hook for a next season that would never come rather than a way to close things out for the season. I got a kick out of Nick’s disco dance, and there’s some interesting complications with Sara chasing (or theoretically having caught) Nick, while Nick’s still carrying a torch for Lindsay, and Lindsay has a certain amount of wistfulness now that she sees Nick’s stopped smoking pot and seems more together. But it’s pretty standard love triangle stuff that, once again, feels like a lead-in to further romantic entanglements to come than any sort of endpoint.
Overall, it’s a perfectly good finale, one that doesn’t knock it out of the park like the premiere did, or continue the stretch of great episodes that the last stretch provided, but it sticks to themes and ideas that the show’s been playing with from the beginning, and delivers them in an amiable way.
Lindsay’s farewell to her family and the Geeks at the bus station has heft to it, as does her final choice to jump in that VW van and head toward freedom, or at least a temporary sojourn before she has enough and gets on the straight and narrow path again. It’s a good metonym for Lindsay’s journey as a whole, the same way Sam and Daniel’s story ties up their arcs subtly but nicely. The series as whole hit higher highs, but the final scenes tie things up well and sent me home happy.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2018-02-07T04:56:56Z
[7.4/10] A good, but not a great finale. Where a lot of the show has gone for complexity, the issues here are pretty simple, but they’re also done sweetly so it works.
There’s a nice dovetailing between Sam and Daniel here, two characters who’ve mostly been apart for the course of the series. Sam is starting to worry that he’s too geeky, and Daniel is worried that he’s not good at anything. A Dungeons and Dragons game turns out to be the solution to both their problems. Daniel finds out that he is good at something, unleashing “Carlos the Dwarf” and successfully completing a campaign in the way he was unable to successfully complete a math test or projector setup, and Sam (and the rest of the geeks) decide that if someone as cool as Daniel will play D&D with them, they must be getting cooler.
Again, it’s not complicated, but it’s sweet, and it brings together Daniel and Sam in an interesting way.
The other big story in the episode is Lindsay deciding whether to go to the academic summit she qualified for, or to go follow a bunch of deadheads to Texas to follow the band around for a while. It’s a microcosm of Lindsay’s choices throughout the show -- whether to fly right and hew toward her good girl roots, or whether to embrace her newfound freedom and desire to test her limits a bit.
Once more, it’s not illustrated in a particularly complicated way. Lindsay jamming out to the Grateful Dead is a perfectly fine way to show her embracing that desire to be free and unfettered, and it’s particularly nice that they give Kim a little closure and catharsis with her helping and getting out too. It’s just relatively simple in what it’s signifying.
The one part of this that I didn’t really care for is the stuff with Nick. I think I’m just over the Nick/Lindsay stuff. It’s also the one part in this episode that feels like a hook for a next season that would never come rather than a way to close things out for the season. I got a kick out of Nick’s disco dance, and there’s some interesting complications with Sara chasing (or theoretically having caught) Nick, while Nick’s still carrying a torch for Lindsay, and Lindsay has a certain amount of wistfulness now that she sees Nick’s stopped smoking pot and seems more together. But it’s pretty standard love triangle stuff that, once again, feels like a lead-in to further romantic entanglements to come than any sort of endpoint.
Overall, it’s a perfectly good finale, one that doesn’t knock it out of the park like the premiere did, or continue the stretch of great episodes that the last stretch provided, but it sticks to themes and ideas that the show’s been playing with from the beginning, and delivers them in an amiable way.
Lindsay’s farewell to her family and the Geeks at the bus station has heft to it, as does her final choice to jump in that VW van and head toward freedom, or at least a temporary sojourn before she has enough and gets on the straight and narrow path again. It’s a good metonym for Lindsay’s journey as a whole, the same way Sam and Daniel’s story ties up their arcs subtly but nicely. The series as whole hit higher highs, but the final scenes tie things up well and sent me home happy.