Having Been Human

Well, hang on...

OK.  Before I go any further, let me just say; I've seen much, much worse finales to a TV show. And some of what went wrong last night has more to do with the ending not quite having the effect it should because of the total absence of the original cast, which can't have made things easy for anyone.  It was imperfect on it's own terms, too - the middle sagged somewhat, the show's overarching theme suddenly reappeared after at least a year's absence and rubbed uneasily against what's happened this year - but, really, it was at the very least a B- finale.

But because I'm me, just because I enjoyed the finale and the finale season overall doesn't mean I don't have questions about just what the fuck was going on, anyway.

Unterfold, ueberspoilers.

Right, so here's my thing.  Does the ritual really just boil down to a ghost drinking vampire and werewolf blood?  Isn't that a bit rubbish and easy when you're trying to take down the very Devil hisself?  Or did they do the ritual off-screen, and it's designed so everyone can sit down and have a nice cuppa and watch a film before finishing things off?

I presume it's the latter, because otherwise wouldn't the other vampire's blood work just as well?  Whilst we're on the subject, what exactly does the ritual do in any case?  It didn't destroy the Devil, it just released him.  Fortunately for the planet Earth, the Devil can't open doors or break windows (phew!), but what would have happened had Alex managed to chug down her supernatural blood smoothie in the TV station?  Would Satan just have jumped into one of his zombified servants?  Does there need to be an entire queue of Types 1 through 3 waiting outside to force Old Nick to burn through the potential hosts nearby?  Would the werewolves handle blood stirring whilst the vampires ate abandoned vessels before Satan could return to them?

Surely it'd just be easier to shoot the fucker.  After all, it turns out that works no less well than the world's worst cocktail.  Plus it has the distinct advantage of not destroying the three monsters performing the ritual, although of course that turns out to have been bullshit anyway.

Actually, that last part is easy to rationalise; we can probably take it as read that Satan would have spent significant energy misinforming the supernatural community about the effects of the ritual, to discourage people trying it.  This does lead to another point, of course, which is whether every werewolf and vampire is cured, and more importantly, whether every single ghost just suddenly returned to life (what a pisser for poor lady Mary and that precocious brat, huh? Just weeks away from a whole new life and they've gone skipping through their respective doors).

I don't really need an answer to that last one, I suppose, though it will bug me for a while.  It's all the stuff about the crazy ill-defined plot-device of the ritual that pissed me off.  Yes, it resulted in a happy ending, which makes a nice change these days.  Yes, as bollocks contradictory nonsense, it's still a thousand times better than the ends of, say, Battlestar Galactica or Mass Effect 3, and Toby Whithouse has a more plausible case than either of those properties should he want to put forward the "we had to wrap things up in a real hurry" argument.

All of that, and there's the cold fact that endings are as hard as all hell.  So I rally don't want to complain to much.  Like I said, B- at least.  I guess in the final analysis, it would have been nice if a finale that starts with a blood-soaked vampire miming to Puttin' On The Ritz didn't manage to get more silly and inexplicable as it went on...