5x16 The Fallout

[7.3/10] That wasn’t bad. The ending felt extraordinarily rushed, with the show wrapping up 1. The Funkes’ familial dysfunctions, 2. The Bluths being indebted to the Chinese and threatened by Sally Sitwell, 3. Tony Wonder’s disappearance, 4. Lindsay’s search for her real mother, 5. Michael and George Michael’s father-son relationship, 6. Michael’s need to return to save the family, and 7. The family needing to be kept altogether in the span of maaaaaybe ten minutes? And a lot of it happened in less than five.

A lot of the points are satisfying to see, but not fully earned, and certainly without enough time to breathe and really make much out of them. I’m glad for all those ending points, sending the series off with a note of closure and a chance to wrap up all the loose threads that have been kicked up in the last thirty-one episodes. I’m especially glad that Portia de Rossi showed up for the finale, since the whole thing would have felt a little lesser without her.

But man, the episode spends a lot of time on both the trial and the mystery of who killed Lucille 2 long past the point of my caring. All the red herrings weren’t especially interesting, and while there’s comedy to be had from Michael trying to play lawyer again (this time with an explicitly A Few Good Men spin), the whole thing wore on way too long. It did give us some decent Michael/Lucille moments, both for antagonism and signs that Lucille actually did care for her children, or at least some of them, sometimes. Also Michael accepting that he’s the “worst Bluth” (save for GOB, of course) is a good moment of epiphany for him. On the whole, though, there just wasn’t the zing to the storyline this one needed.

Likewise, I appreciate the show closing with the big set piece of GOB’s magic trick to demonstrate the wall and FakeBlock software to the world (especially the Chinese investors). It has a whiff of the show’s old attempts to do genuine clockwork storytelling, and the fake out with a boy fight between Michael and George Michael to throw off their foes worked well. The plotting is ultimately a little convoluted, but that’s par for the course for Arrested Development, even at its best, and every Bluth had a part to play, which is nice for the show’s swan song.

Oh yeah, and Buster did it! I’m glad we get an answer at all. (I was afraid this was going to be yet another cliffhanger.) There’s also something funny in a cosmic sort of way that after all that, it’s simply that Buster’s the killer all along. Again, I can’t say I was terribly invested in the mystery, but the literal and figurative thud ending earns it some points for the dismount. (Plus hey, we finally got Michael’s chicken impression to add to the collection for his red herring moment, which is something.)

On the whole, I’m glad for season 5. I’d be lying if I said it redeemed all of the misfires from season 4, but it at least wrapped up all of the major loose threads in a solid, if not always soaring fashion. It also bumped up the quality, which may not be a high bar given how low season 4 sunk at times, but at its worst, the show’s (hopefully) final season felt like a watered down version of Arrested Development’s original run, rather than a totally different, pretty bad show that happened to have the same performers.

Most of season 5 feels like a course correction, but the new course is a better one, and there’s even some highlights along the way, whether it be Maeby’s old lady routine or George Michael hashing things out with both his cousin and his father. Some of the closing moments feel rushed (to the point that I wonder how much had to be edited in or required trick photography after the fact), but as Marge Simpson once put it, “It’s an ending. That’s enough.”

And yet, at the same time, it’s clear to me after thirty-one episodes that Arrested Development never should have been brought back. There are high points in these last two seasons, but outside of a few fleeting moments, the show was never quite able to recapture the magic. The original episodes will always still be there, and I don’t think anything here retroactively tarnishes the series’s past brilliance. (Though god, that New York Times interview is a different story.) But the revival never fully justifies itself either. I’m still attached to these insane characters and Mitch Hurwitz’s sense of humor, but if I’m honest with myself, I stuck it out through these last couple of seasons out of loyalty to what Arrested Development once was, not anything it showed me after 2006.