Captain's Log
I should've saved "season finale season" for the excerpt
In two days, five of the shows on the Captain’s… manifest, I guess? had season finales. With so many shows coming to an end, I decided to take a quick look at those five season finales and which ones worked better than others.
Matlock Season Two
The final two episodes felt a bit rushed, but the flipside of that is that our heroes are now suddenly under time pressure, so our characters should at least feel rushed. Madeline, Olympia, and Julian are close to putting together the paper trail that could finally implicate Senior and anyone else involved in the coverup… but they have to do it soon, because if they don’t do it before the Lamar & Olson merger (and Senior’s retirement), the new firm takes on the legal liability and Senior skates free. There are a few fun twists and turns in this, and a couple of moments of great tension (perhaps not coincidentally, in two different one-on-one meetings where one party learns something about the other that puts the first in grave danger).
A few of the side stories and characters were maybe a little glossed over, and the cases of the week continue to not be the most compelling parts of the show, and most of the final ten minutes had the air of the writers saying “Hey, this will be what season 3 looks like now that we’ve wrapped the Wellbrexa story!” But, they did wrap it and satisfyingly enough so, rather than dragging on the story past the point it could reasonably keep going, and they’ve got plenty of time to break out what season 3 will look like (it’s not returning until 2026, in large part because Jennie Snyder Urman and the writing team asked for the extra time to break a season without Wellbrexa involved). So all in all, good enough to stand out as one of the best from the week.
Invincible Season Four
For a season that it occasionally seemed like wasn’t sure where it was going, or was content to go on diversions or even ignore large parts of its cast for nearly the entire season, the finale was arguably the season’s best episode. After a season with detours (Invincible visits hell at Damien Darkblood’s request) and what seemed like repetitive filler (the Flaxans are back yet again), we moved to the fight against the Viltrumites… which at least advanced the story and gave us some thrills, but also took us away from many of the most compelling characters back on Earth, and instead gave us the largely variety-free and personality-free Viltriumites, who are essentially “space Nazis who punch real hard.” (In other words, “What if the Nazis actually had the physical might to reasonably claim, or at least enforce, that they were in fact the master race?”)
But this episode finally tied the two parts of the story together, and in a way that focuses on what the show is at its best: the cost of being a superhero. Mark, still barely an adult, not only dealing with the aftershock of all the combat and brutality he’s seen, but also being thrust into responsibility for huge decisions, whether or not he wants to be (I remember there’s some popular line about power and responsibility from some other superhero comic about a teenager). And the conclusion was very satisfying in that regard, as well— a choice that is no choice, it is true, but also one where Mark was able to keep his more impulsive, immature side at bay. And what it sets up going forward is far more interesting than another series of epic battles where people punch each other in space. It was a rockier road than would have been ideal, but the finale pulled the season together about as well as could possibly be expected.
Going Dutch Season Two
No real surprises, and not the funniest episode of the show, but funny enough and reasonably satisfying. Of course Patrick would find a way to fend off the NATO takeover of Stroopsdorf. Of course Maggie and Shah would decide to give it a real shot. I will give them bonus points in that I didn’t see Papadakis’ awful haircut coming.
Abbott Elementary Season Five
The two episodes Abbott aired were mostly okay, but the apparent dramatic questions— will Janine and Gregory get back together, and will the school be closed?— lacked any real tension, because the answers were so obvious well in advance. On the bright side, the reason the school ends up staying open is not some heartwarming triumph but a matter of practicality (after investing so much in fixing the school furnace, the district doesn’t want to let that investment go to waste).
Animal Control Season Four
After a season of the rival precinct moving in, primarily represented by antagonist Templeton Dudge (and his sidekick Daisy), you’d expect our team to finally get the best of them and them to move back to more occasional, recurring villains. And if not, for them to grow enough to be integrated into the show, right? Wrong.
It’s no fault of Gerry Dee (or Kyla Pratt), but their characters are both so antagonistic to our protagonists, and Templeton in particular seems to have no redeeming qualities— Emily nailed it calling him crude and disrespectful (and that he’s openly been gunning for her job), and he’s a host of other things, dishonest among them. And he never seems to get any comeuppance for this. The increased presence of one-dimensional villains in a sitcom is only acceptable if they’re defeated in the end. Instead, Templeton still finds a way to win. He hasn’t grown or changed a bit, every seeming moment where he does so is faked on his part, and he’s awful and obnoxious, success or failure. And now he’s apparently going to be a significant part of season five, as well.
I feel like rule number one of a hangout sitcom is “don’t constantly feature a guy nobody at home wants to hang out with.”
And, aside, one can only drag out a simmering will-they-won’t-they for so long. It has only been 43 episodes— even Jim and Pam took 53 episodes before they got together— but when you air such short seasons (9-12 episodes each so far), and this particular will-they-won’t-they has been more on the backburner and occasionally hinted at rather than being the primary romcom-story focus, it feels like we might not get a real answer to this for five or six more years— long enough for the viewer to lose interest.1
(Also, while I was tempted to use a header image that gave, well, me something I’d rather look at, I couldn’t deny this was the funniest image I could find from the season 4 finale. It was also my last chance this year to use an Animal Control image, and I’ve used one for every other show I wrote about today except Abbott, which is popular enough that it doesn’t need the help— and, unlike Animal Control, returns in the fall, so it’s still not my last chance for 2026. And there’s your insider look at the behind-the-scenes process at the Captain’s Log.)
With the TV calendar finally thinning out, we caught up on some streaming shows we’d fallen behind on; specifically, we finally blasted through the rest of How to Get to Heaven From Belfast. So we actually saw six season finales, but since this show came out all at once two and a half months ago, I didn’t include this finale in the above section. Anyway, I rather enjoyed this show, although it’s difficult to describe because it bounces between tones so much. It’s almost akin to The Chair Company in that a comedic creator / persona is thrust almost by accident into a conspiracy thriller.
In this case, it’s somewhat like the grown-up Derry Girls (Saoirse, Robyn, and Dara map pretty well onto Erin, Michelle, and Orla, although I don’t know who most carries Clare’s worrying) getting a mysterious email and then finding themselves in the middle of a faked death, a conspiracy of dangerous people, and a very strange psychological experiment… not to mention their own history with their “dead” friend Greta.
It often bounces between these tones rather than trying to integrate them all, even scene to scene: the farcical comedy of errors a la Derry Girls mixing with a more standard police investigation (mostly led by Liam of the Garda) and a conspiracy around Greta not really dying, what her true backstory is, and the people who are helping Greta and interested in covering all this up (most notably Bronagh Gallagher2‘s Booker, who is definitely dangerous and whose interactions with our lead trio drive most of the “thriller” part).
I don’t know how well it all came together, and that may be in part due to wanting to leave open questions for season 2, but was I not entertained throughout? I certainly was. The funny parts were funny, the thriller parts were tense (and occasionally also funny), and even if I am unsure how it all came together, my interest in finding out what happens next was strong enough to drive me to keep going. I had a good time.
Season Finales: DMV May 11 (series finale), Bob’s Burgers May 17 (just returned Sunday), Elsbeth (May 21)
Season Premieres: Rick and Morty season 9 May 24, The Four Seasons season 2 May 28, House of the Dragon season 3 “June.” I got late-breaking word that Ted Lasso is premiering season 4 on August 5, but that’s a ways away and a show I may want to write more specifically about its return than just a line item here.
Our own Bridgett Taylor has some thoughts on DTF St. Louis. I did not watch the show, so I do not have any opinion on what she has to say. I did read the column, however, and it was well-written. So, enjoy while I take another week off.
And remember, TV Thursday is always open to any writer who has something about TV that they want to write about. Inquire in the comments, or on Discord, or really, any place you know how to reach me.
In particular, if you have thoughts on these or any other season or series finales, let’s hear ’em!
About the writer
Captain Nath
Born on the bayou, thriving in the mountains. Writer, gambler, comedian, singer-songwriter, bon vivant, globetrotter, and all-around Renaissance Man with perfect opinions about TV and music. Pronounced with a long A and with the H.
It's a gaming ship.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
M*A*S*H, Season Four, Episodes One and Two, “Welcome to Korea”
Writing these up together because they really do make one story. I already wrote this up once, for its incredible uniqueness in the context of television. Nothing else I’ve seen or read has ever sold two people finding a rapport in such a clear-eyed way; this is the kind of thing most shows have to spend a season trying to stumble their way to. I love that it isn’t quite instant either; one thing both the writing and Alan Alda do great is selling that Hawkeye has other things on his mind, but is slowly being charmed by BJ’s quick wit and reasoned sympathy. At first, Hawkeye’s just upset because he missed out on saying goodbye to Trapper – this works really well as the goodbye to him – and after that, he has one crisis after another to deal with.
This is where the show’s gift for imagery also comes in; once BJ and Hawk are on the road, the story is really a process of watching BJ gradually realise how horrible the situation is, and it manages to pick the perfect images – much we haven’t seen before, but still very familiar with viewers of this show. We watch him be shocked and process that shock – another great visual, as his uniform gets slowly more and more scuffed until he slips in the mud – and we watch Hawkeye watching him; on paper, Hawkeye’s attitude never really changes, but we watch Alda go from tossing off quips to holding court; he’s gradually realising how much BJ is taking him and the situation seriously, and seems able to handle it as well as Hawk does.
“Captain!”
“No man calls me that and lives.”
“I lived with the guy for over a year, he was my best friend!”
Hawkeye gets past the checkpoint by claiming Radar has neuropraxia.
“If you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs, you probably haven’t checked your answering service.”
“Rudyard Kipling.”
This is where you instantly know, before Hawkeye even does, that these two will be best friends.
“Is he a good surgeon?”
“With the same light touch as a German jazz band.”
“Frank! For a moment there it looked like you had a chin.”
This has an interesting situation where the recap starts after a flashback to before what we saw in the first episode.
One of the things the characters see is a local family sweeping for mines; Radar heroically charges in when a girl is injured (though he has no idea he ran into a minefield).
“What they lack in sanitation, they make up for in poverty.”
“The worst part is, you’ll get used to all of this.”
“The tedium is only relieved by the boredom.”
Elementary, “Deja Vu All Over Again” – Fun fact: while that expression is attributed to former Mets manager Yogi Berra (I think Berra might have played for someone else?), there is no hard evidence he said it first. Anyway, Holmes has Watson investigate a missing person who apparently left her husband when she re-examined her life after hearing about a woman shoved in front of a subway train. But Holmes takes being shoved in front of subway trains seriously and looks into that case. Unsurprisingly, the two cases are really one. But how the cases get connected and resolved is quite ingenious as the show keeps perking along.
NBA on Amazon Prime, ORL at DET – A pretty good game as the Pistons stave off elimination. The Amazon production feels very much like a TNT game, so I would assume many staffers from there made the move once TNT lost the rights. Ian Eagle is always reliable. Stan Van Gundy is smart, funny, and verbose. Too verbose. But wisely, it was a two man booth so that no one was tripping over SVG.
I Think You Should Leave, S2 E1 – some curious developments here, there are a couple of sketches that lean into a slightly different tone that I felt required some mental adjustment. The Jackass / Punk’d-esque one with Tim getting latexed up as a weirdly buff old guy but then having an existential crisis was unusually laugh-free but still oddly compelling. I absolutely loved the “Coffin Drop!” sketch and Sam Richardson’s weird “buff boys” host repeatedly calling the muscular children a “crop”.
“Coffin Flop” and “Ghost Tour” kill me. Like in the sketch itself, “Coffin Flop” I think gets funnier with repeat viewings.
Yeah the Ghost Tour one is very funny, strange ending though. They really put the work in making those Coffin Flop clips!
Someone uploaded a slime tutorial of the recent Sweeney Todd 2023 revival with Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford. Mixed feelings about the “dancing” added to the mix – this score wasn’t written for movement and at worst it looks goofy, but the effect is often interesting, herky-jerky, more interpretive dance than standard Broadway choreography. The second act is more effective than the first here, like the actors can’t play lines as broadly for as many laughs, and by the end Groban and Ashford are devastating (“You LIED to me!”) as is Galen Matazarro, much better known for Stranger Things, as Tobias. It’s of course hard to fuck up what is the greatest American musical; no one since Sondheim has come close to the power and Sublime terror of the music (“he served a dark and a hungry god”), though I adore it’s funnier descendants like Bat Boy and Little Shop of Horrors.
What does “slime tutorial” mean in this context?
I tend to prefer the funnier horror-musicals but I’ve only seen the Burton version of Sweeney Todd so I guess I’m yet to have the full picture on that one.
Slime tutorial is slang for a bootleg of a Broadway/Off-Broadway musical, not sure of the origins. There’s been some debate about the morality of filming them but I think it’s an important form of archival work when most shows don’t get official filmed versions.
You can do different versions of Sweeney Todd – there’s one where the actors play their own instruments and it’s much more intimate – but Sondheim’s intent overall was a musical that would scare the crap out of you, and I think (maybe by accident) it touches on ideas of horror as a dark encounter with the spiritual and demonic. It’s not an opera but it reaches epic emotions opera is usually very suited to. Removing “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” especially was understandable for the movie, yet I think by removing the artifice, the actors/people on stage talking to the audience, acknowledging this is a tale, you remove the aesthetic being unified with the music’s effect…yes, I have many opinions on this lol.
Interesting, what an odd term! Especially now that YouTube is full of videos teaching people how to make slime, for whatever reason.
I could be wrong, but I have the impression that the popularity of actual slime tutorials is what led to the term, with the Broadway bootlegs getting labeled with a ubiquitous tag to avoid them being as findable for people trying to have them pulled from YouTube.
Ha, that’s pretty inventive!
The video I found was called “the musical where Josh Groban bakes people into pies” which is a fantastic title.
…what’s an actual slime tutorial?
Columbo, “Prescription: Murder”
Since I’m all caught up on Slow Horses, it’s time to start another show! (Although the pacing on getting through this will be a little different, since some of the episodes are 90 minutes, and I won’t always have time for that on Thursdays, in particular.)
The show, aided by a trial run on an anthology series and a live theater adaptation I’d love to have seen (Thomas Mitchell! Joseph Cotten! Agnes Moorehead!), starts off strong. A psychiatrist plans his wealthy wife’s murder, complete with a seemingly perfect alibi: post-murder, his young mistress, disguised as his wife, will stage a fight right before their flight for Acapulco leaves, abandoning him on the plane carrying him far, far away from the scene of the crime that apparently will be committed overnight. The psychiatrist accounts for a lot of details (the episode uses this well, setting up an obvious mistake only to have the psychiatrist swoop back in and correct it), but of course, as Columbo points out, however smart he is, he’s only an amateur, not a professional. He doesn’t have Columbo’s practice.
The psychiatry angle allows for an unusually clever bit of pilot exposition: if it’s a tad obvious to have the killer spell Columbo’s essential strategy out to us, it also makes sense that he’d deduce it and then showboat about it. (In the process, he talks about Columbo adopting this approach because he “can’t get by on [his] looks,” which made my wife exclaim, “He can absolutely get by on his looks! His face card is never declined!”)
The psychiatrist makes for a good antagonist–smart enough to be at genuine risk (if you ignore the premise of the show) of getting away with it, but also so aware of and smug about his intelligence, which shows straight from the opening scene, that he’s almost pathological about accounting for things that he doesn’t need to, like some missing gloves, and then way too obviously gloating about it all, especially when he thinks he’s beyond being caught.
Lots of fun mystery plotting here, both in terms of crime and deduction, and the mistress not caving when she’s expected to is an especially effective and surprising dramatic beat.
The pilot is very good but it’s clear that Levinson and Link – and Falk – have only halfway figured out Columbo at this point.
Funny how the original Columbo and the original John Constantine were both well appointed, and it was only after their raincoats become so rumpled that they became icons.
I was surprised by how unrumpled he looked! I think he’s maybe a little more overt with the mistress here than he would be later on, too, at least from what I’ve osmosed.
Someone must have done a crossover fan comic at some point where Columbo and Constantine meet and maybe accidentally switch raincoats.
Yeah, he comes on pretty heavy there. The direct harshness he shows her goes away pretty quickly. As the rumpleness goes up so does his unfailing niceness and self-deprecation with all three becoming part of his disarming strategy. He has a Midwest nice passive-aggressiveness.
Got a laugh out of your last note there.
Fuck it, Matlock this weekend.
My mom wants me to watch DTF St. Louis but I still wanna get through Hacks Season 4 and the show also features David Harbour, and damn it, no one hurts Lily Allen like that.
Year of the Month update!
This May, we’ll be opening the doors for your writing on any movies, albums, books, etc. from 2014!
TBD: Cori Domschot: Earth to Echo
TBD: Cori Domschot: Jack Ryan
May 23rd: Ben Hohenstatt: Plowing Into the Field of Love
And in. June, you can write up any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1958.
Jun. 5th: Gillian Nelson: Paul Bunyan
Jun. 12th: : Gillian Nelson: Grand Canyon
Jun. 19th: Gillian Nelson: Elfego Banca
Jun. 26th: Gillian Nelson: Disneyland Gay Days