'Task' ends with tears, but also a smile
Mark Ruffalo has to work through his issues in the powerful concluding chapter
Thoughts on the Task finale — with spoilers for the entire season — coming up just as soon as I've kidnapped the most depressing human...
There's a long tradition of HBO drama seasons placing the story's climax in the penultimate episode, then treating their finales as an extended epilogue. The Wire was the most famous for this, but The Sopranos did it at least some of the time, as did Game of Thrones.
Still, those shows tended to leave some obviously unfinished business to be resolved in their finales. But if I didn't go into Task knowing that seven episodes had been made, I would have come out of last week's sixth chapter assuming that it was the end of the story. Robbie was dead. Lizzie was dead. Maeve was released from custody and reunited with Wyatt and Harper. Tom decided to take the orphaned Sam out of the group home and into his household — repeating the choice he and his wife Susan made once upon a time with Ethan and Emily, even though that ended in utter tragedy. Sam got his Lego set, and Tom got a chance to tell himself and the world that he hadn't made a mistake with Ethan, even knowing what happened to Susan. Yes, there were some loose threads here and there — Jay and Perry were in the wind, Grasso hadn't been exposed as the dirty cop, and Ethan's hearing was still to come — but all of them felt like the kind of things that didn't have to be neatly tied into a bow. Sometimes, bad guys get away with it. (Fairly often, in fact, these days.) And Tom's decision with Sam implied how he might behave in the hearing.
The end, right?
