“It was a righteous and most fitting death.”
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
The (series?) finale of Kurt Sutter’s The Bastard Executioner may have been entirely too convenient, but it did wrap the 10-episode run in a way that should give closure to those of us who stuck it out until the bloody end. Tuesday’s finale, “Blood And Quiescence/Crau A Chwsg” spent a good 40-odd minutes building up to what was meant to be the show’s last bloody battle, roughly eight minutes actually in battle, then another 10 minutes wrapping it all up. And therein lay the problem with the series from the beginning.
The finale, much like most of the other episodes in the set, featured a lot of exposition and set-up, with very little pay off. Still, it all wrapped with a pretty little bow and that’s all you can ask of a finale when the future of a show is in question. Annora and The Silent Mute (who turned out to be not-so-silent in the end), finally revealed the Da Vinci’s Code like truth to Wilkin, that they were hiding ancient scripts that could put the entire church in jeopardy. It was a reveal that set the entire episode’s events in motion, as Wilkin, Love and Milus then plotted to save the boy and the priest, therefore saving Annora and the scripts in the process.
Of course first and foremost the battle needed to be won. Luckily, Jessamy spilled the truth about Wilkin to the man the executioner believed to be his wife’s killer. Likewise, Toran confronted his own enemy. Rather than getting their revenge, both men walked away with strange new alliances, ones that certainly came in handy during the battle. The less likely allies during the actual battle — the Wolf and his men — served to give closure to someone else, when their allegiance proved to Milus that maybe he’s not entirely correct about the rebels after all. It was as though (an entirely too convenient) peace was just on the horizon.
Sure enough, it was. When The Silent Mute sacrificed himself via a human bomb, he paved the way for Wilkin and his men to overtake the religious zealots, save the boy and therefore Ventrishire. (Or so it felt in the moment.) It was a fitting end for creator Kurt Sutter, who as most of us know plays the aforementioned Mute. As he blew himself up on screen, it was like a poetic end to the show he poured everything into following Sons. If the show is indeed cancelled now (and I would put money on that being announced by Wednesday morning), that has to be a hard pill for Sutter to swallow. Blowing himself up on screen seems like a great way to go if you’ve gotta go though, doesn’t it?
With the battle won and only Ed Sheeran’s character making it out alive, it is fair to speculate that there was just enough of a story left open for a potential Season 2. However, even the fact that Milus addressed what Love could do about her fake child (pretend it died in the womb) closes that off quite nicely, while giving audiences a rare and tender moment between the Baroness and the Chamberlain.
If the show is cancelled, even fans of the series should be OK with that. By the closing moments, with Annora safe at the castle, Milus and Love’s handmaid flirting it up, Jessamy off to an old school mental ward, everyone kosher with Wilkin’s secret, and Love and Wilkin giving into their primal desires, the entire thing came off as a close-ended miniseries anyhow. This way, the story faltered but didn’t get too out of hand, and everyone can walk away knowing they put everything that had into the project. And for the audience? Well at least we got to hear that theme song one more time in the final scene. Get that one out of your heads.
The rocky 10-episode follow-up to Kurt Sutter’s Sons of Anarchy wrapped with a bit of a whimper, as the show strived to close out all loose ends without a second season renewal. Although FX has yet to announce official plans at time of press, the finale felt indeed like a series finale, with convenient twists bringing everyone together in the final moments, a massive character death and one final brawl for good measure.
