#I keep circling around it in a parody of normal fannish activity

[alex51324]

Second Act Problems and Izzy's Death

I thought I was out of things to say about That Ending, but now that I'm thinking about the rest of the show, here's what I'm figuring out: to me Izzy's death seems to set the season's flaws in stone, in a way that makes them a lot harder to overlook.

Like, second acts of trilogies are hard--you have to move pieces into place for part 3, while telling enough of a self-contained story to keep the audience invested, but not resolve so much that there's no tension left for part 3. It's difficult, and it's pretty typical for the middle installment of even very good trilogies to be considered the weakest of the three. (I had trouble getting through The Two Towers, and I know I'm not alone in that.)

What we got, with OFMD, was a part II that has a lot of really fun moments, but doesn't hang together very well. There are lots of loose ends, things that don't quite make sense if you think it through, bits that never pay off, but it's fun to watch--and gives the invested viewer a lot to speculate about in terms of how things are going to resolve.

If you have to pick a direction to err in, that's a good one to pick--especially for a sitcom! We've still got part 3 to weave in the loose ends: some of the things that don't make sense now, will make sense once we see where it was going, and the rest will seem less important once we're looking at a complete story.

But, to those of us invested in Izzy's character, his death brings all of that to a screeching halt. The loose ends involving him can never* be woven in. His relationship with Ed can't be resolved, and his relationships with the crew can't develop any further--even if Ed and the other characters come to understand things about him and his death (perhaps through flashbacks, guilt hallucinations or other devices which will give us Con on our screens), that will only develop their arcs, not his.

(*Unless, of course, we get real, autonomous ghosts, a resurrection, or a complete retconning of the death into something else. I'd personally take any of those, over a complete lack of Izzy, but I'm not able to fool myself about it being good writing.)

It also sucks a lot of of the fun out of the earlier parts of the season. For a lot of people who are already upset about how it ended, rewatching the good parts just makes them feel worse. Ditto for speculating about where it's all going. I have some ideas about what the narrative payoff for Izzy's death is going to be, but thinking about them isn't fun.

Izzy's death seems pointless, because one of the challenges of writing a second act is that the audience doesn't yet know the payoff. I'm sure Djenks and the writing team have a plan, and it might even be a good one! But at this point, trying to figure out what the point of it all was, just throws a spotlight on the loose ends, the hurried pacing, the muddled messaging around the themes of love, violence, and revenge, of what exactly piracy represents.

"Doesn't hang together very well, but has a lot of fun moments" is a good direction to err in on a Part 2, as long as you don't plan to suck all the fun out of the room in the last few minutes.

#ofmd #ofmd critical #izzy hands #that's the real honest distillation of what went wrong here #I'm not having fun #are you? #I keep circling around it in a parody of normal fannish activity #looking at gifsets/reading metas/trying to start inside jokes/developing theories #all the usual stuff #but it's not fun