S01.E10: ...And the Cost of Forgiveness

[peachmangosteen]

Series finale. Airs August 2nd.

[Chicago Redshirt]

And so Tom Swift comes to an end. The show had a lot of potential IMO but wasted it. 

I am glad that Tom had the benefit of hearing his father say he loved him and being able to talk to him one last time. I'm surprised that it actually turned out to be true that Barton did try to de-gay Tom. I am not as willing to forgive the character as Tom is. 

I predicted Rowan was from the future, but that of course opens a whole can of worms as to why he didn't do better in terms of helping Tom and stopping the Road Back. And of course, introducing time travel into stories means almost anything can be undone by further time travel.

Tom should have gotten a way more incriminating confession from Susanah.

I love Barclay and am glad that Levar Burton was getting the work. But no offense, he's just a bunch of code, almost all of which can be recreated. The notion that there's a dilemma between saving it and saving a human being, no matter what reprehensible things he has done in the past, is nonsense.

I guess we'll never know if Eskol faked his own death or was taken out by the Road Back, but my money would have been on the former. 

At least Kenzi didn't leap into Isaac's arms and Isaac didn't try to put her there immediately.

I refuse to believe that Claire would have been the first to discover the hypnotic effects of the lip gel or that Lorraine would have allowed herself to be blackmailed by Claire. An easy, if slightly unethical, way to get out of it is to use the lip gel on Claire, get her to confess to everything that she had done to Lorraine will under the influence of lip gel, and make her destroy the evidence, never speak of it again, and then fire her. 

With the power of hindsight, some changes I would have made in the overall series:

-Either cut the character of Lino entirely or integrated him more into Tom's squad. The notion of him having super-powers didn't really go anywhere and it didn't seem like he was playing a role in any of the Road Back plot except for the one time with the cowboys. Plus he seemed to be in the pretty-can't-act category that all too many CW stars are. Lino and his mom and the custody battle...don't care about any of that.

-Incorporate Lorraine more. It made NO sense why Tom didn't confide in her earlier that Barton was alive and that there was a conspiracy called the Road Back that was trying to stop progress. Having her involved would have made the season much better. I was interested in learning more about the Tubman Group, but alas, it doesn't look like we'll get the chance.

-Truly establish the Road Back as a pervasive and powerful threat with things on screen. It's not enough to say "Hey, there were a bunch of scientists killed off screen. Must be the Road Back!" Or even to show that the Road Back arranged to try to kill a bunch of people at Swift Enterprises. They need to show that there is reason for Tom to not just report, "Hey Susanah Robb just admitted to killing two men in my wine cellar" or "Susanah Robb just poisoned a bunch of people at Swift Enterprises" or "Susanah Robb just blew up a Swift Enterprises facility" because the Road Back will arrange for her to beat the charges. And more than that, he shouldn't just let her or people go! If you for some reason can't trust the authorities, figure your own way of dealing with her. You're supposed to be a genius, Tom. So don't act stupid and just let her go because reasons.

-I know representation matters, and I'm glad that the show had its black and LGBTQ characters, but I would have sprinkled in more nonBlack or straight-presenting characters who was good as well as Black and LGBTQ characters who were shady. For better or worse, I think the  show would have had better ratings if it had not had basically all the Black characters being good, all the LGBTQ characters being good, all the nonBlack being shady, and only Lorraine and Kenzi being presumably straight characters who are cool.  (We don't really know anything about Lino's sexuality)

- I would have had Tom show more range than "I'm the fab-u-lous Tom Swift!" The actor seems to be charismatic and can bring it.

[Trini]

Time travel?? Really? Well, since the show is done forever, I guess that's a good enough place to end.

I was about to be really upset at the loss of Barclay, so I'm glad Zenzi mentioned she had backups.

Tian and April Parker Jones are the best scene partners. Also Lorraine looked amazing in that gold outfit.

Really liked the scenes with Tom rallying all the Black scientists, and them solving the problems.

Glad Tom has grown and matured a bit compared to the start of the show.

[Cress]

I had audio problems with this last episode, where the music soundtrack was really loud and the dialogue was silent or very faint and whispery. I could only understand by reading subtitles, but it was still annoying. I almost gave up on the episode, but it finally cleared up after 5 mins.

Lino finally came back, but had little to do other than suffer a traumatic memory. Tom motivated all his engineers to come up with solutions, but I was confused why he was so quick to use Swiftsight again. I know he fixed the programming code, but I worried that there was still something wrong with it that he didn't notice.

His mom gave him a speech about grace and mercy, so Tom finally got on board finishing the rescue mission. Finally got some closure on that, though they left things open-ended about Lorraine and Claire, and the time travel.

Overall the show was doing too many things at once. If they had pared down some of the mysteries and the love interests, we could have focused on really strong storylines and character development. Tom did mature a bit, but he spent too long being smug and overconfident, when what we needed was more emotion from him.