On Finales and Fan Service

I’ve always been inordinately fascinated with the endings of stories. To me, well-told endings are all about life affirmation. They tell us that stories — and, by extension, lives — have meaning, that in their closing they show us that there’s a valuable shape to our existence.

Or something like that.

I think this is the primary reason I don’t respond to Volume 24 of a book series or the eighth installment of a film franchise or the fourteenth season of a television show. Those things are just endless. And I’m not just fascinated with endings; I look forward to them. It isn’t unusual for me to think, “I wonder how this is going to end” soon after starting a new story. In an expertly told story, the ending is the best part.

Last Thursday, my wife and I watched the series finale of The Blacklist. To contradict myself, this final episode was in Season 10 of the show. In my defense, sometimes there isn’t enough to watch on television. The Blacklist went on for easily five seasons longer than it should have, but James Spader is extremely watchable, and I kept waiting to find out how they were going to address the series’ core mysteries.

(Spoilers coming.)

As it turns out, they never did. The first episode of The Blacklist introduces us to Raymond Redington (played by Spader), the world’s most wanted criminal. Redington walks into an FBI office and agrees to help law enforcement track down many of the world’s greatest evildoers under two conditions: that he receive immunity and that he be assigned to a rookie agent, Elizabeth Keen. The episodes that followed (more than two hundred of them) saw Red, Liz (until her tragic murder), and a crack team of super-secret task force members put a lot of bad guys either behind bars or in the ground. How they did this was often exciting to witness. But what made the show worth watching was the bigger storyline. It turns out that Red chose Keen because he had a long history with Keen’s mother, Katarina Rostova, a legendary Russian spy. And then we learned that Red was indeed not born Raymond Redington but took on the name after the original Redington — also closely linked to Rostova — died. Who was Red before then? Why is he willing to kill to keep his identity secret? Why is he so dedicated to Liz that he’ll risk his life for her on numerous occasions? Why is he so crushed by her death that he can barely go on?

Sorry, we don’t get to know. The last season of the series was primarily about a member of congress discovering the task force and attempting to take Red and his FBI colleagues down. It was a straight-up thriller plot that could have been spat out by generative AI. In the end, there’s a bunch of shooting, a lot of narrow getaways, and an unfortunate if somewhat operatic encounter with a bull. However, the why of the entire series was left completely unresolved. I took this personally, because I’d declared to my family a few seasons into the show that I’d figured out the show’s biggest mystery — that Red was Liz’s mother. (There are enough clues to support this notion and enough switch-o-change-o “science” in the series to make this plausible in context. I’m also not alone in this. It turns out there was a whole “Redarina” group within the fan community.) I wanted to know who Red was either so I could spike the football or find out what the show’s writers devised instead. Their decision was to completely ignore the question of Red’s identity. The closest I got to a confirmation of my theory was a final conversation between Red and Liz’s teen daughter Agnes in which, after Red bestows some advice, Agnes tells him he's too much of a mother and Red acknowledges that he can’t not be.

After The Blacklist ended, my wife and I continued our third one-episode-a-night trip through Schitt’s Creek. This episode included the final scene between Alexis and Ted, one of the loveliest and most well-earned scenes in recent television history. The set piece was gorgeously written, beautifully acted, and it gave viewers exactly what they wanted by not giving them what they were hoping for. This wasn’t the Schitt’s Creek series finale. That’s a few episodes off, and I know from my first two viewings that it is a triumph. But it was the end of an important character arc, and it left us both in tears even though we’d seen it twice before.

The juxtaposition between these two viewing experiences led me to think about fan service. In short, fan service is about giving the fans what they want. Great fan service is more nuanced than that, though. It’s about giving fans affirmation for loving your story. It’s about justifying their fandom. At its best, it’s about providing them with what they wanted in a way that is completely true to the story while still offering some level of surprise.

The Alexis/Ted scene in Schitt’s Creek was magnificent fan service because it was entirely true to the story, it completed Alexis’s emotional arc, and it gave Alexis and Ted the only kind of “forever” they could have. The ending of The Blacklist was awful fan service because it did nothing more than end the series in the most obvious kind of way. The first thing my wife said after the episode ended was, “Why did we keep watching this?” (Actually, the first thing she said was, “That was it?” but you get the point.) I think that might be the worst possible reaction any creator can receive to a story.

Do creators owe their audience the endings they desire? Yeah, kinda. If not, they owe their audience at least a better alternative. David Chase didn’t give the audience what it wanted with his ending to The Sopranos, but it was probably a better ending than any fan could have imagined, and one could argue that it was the only possible ending. Lots of creators will argue against this — hey, it’s my story and I’ll do with it whatever I want! — but I believe as soon as you make your work commercially available you’ve entered a contract with those who consume it. You owe them your respect for the time they’ve given you. And in exchange you have our deepest appreciation if you make us feel that the time was well spent. I have endless admiration for anyone who can bring tears to my eyes the third time I see something. As for those who leave us wondering, “Why did we keep watching this?” I think I’ve made myself clear how I feel about that.