The two hour season finale was preempted by football here on Saturday. Fortunately, Windows Media Center caught it and recording the rescheduled broadcast early Sunday morning, when everybody was sure to miss it.
I really enjoyed the ending. Normally, I'd be pissed but this was essentially a season long Twilight Zone episode, and it had a Twilight Zone ending. In many ways, it mirrored the finale of "The Prisoner", in which the protagonist has seemed to escape but really hasn't. But rather than simply providing us with a futile ending, they pull back the curtain just enough so we know that Town #27 really did rattle the Mansfield Institute's cage, and Renbe and Kat got closer than anyone to blowing the lid off of things. When all of the town members besides Joe wake up on the container ship for level two, they are proceeding one step higher up the pyramid, same as Joe did once upon a time. Unlike Garrett, I don't think the Program was lying to them when they said only one survives. Normally level two would likely be comprised of six or seven "finalists" from level one. Because Town #27 (apparently somewhere in Iowa relatively near headquarters) managed to outsmart the system and all escape, they all earned the right to round two. On the other hand, Joe is ready to fall back into the program only to have the script disrupted right from the get-go: here is someone who knows everything about him, virtually better than he knows himself, and is a link to the woman he loves.
There were a number of moments which could have been foreshadowing for season two, or could have existed merely to shake up our assumptions, much like the train conversation in both versions of The Manchurian Candidate. One such moment was Robert Picardo's cameo with the excruciatingly bad wig job as one of the Mansfield board members. Another was Blackham's slip with the first name of Charlie Morse's dead wife. Was the dumbest of the town members actually the deepest undercover Program agent of them all? Will he fulfill Joe's role for level two? What team was the private investigator playing for? In a show like this, I'm personally glad they didn't tie everything up in a neat little bow. The explanations we're provided never live up to what our imaginations come up with.
