End of the road for the Godfrey family.
Warning: this review contains full spoilers for the final episode of Hemlock Grove. You can also check out my spoiler-free review of the season as a whole.
If Hemlock Grove’s third season didn’t quite escape the hurdles that have plagued the show from the beginning, it certainly made a lot of strides in this final batch of episodes. The series finale was very fitting in that regard. Despite some lingering problems, “Brian’s Song” ended the show on a mostly tragic note and ensured that every character received the ending they deserved.
Luckily, the focused remained on the rivalry between Roman and Peter, despite the former being seemingly killed by the latter in the previous episode. Given how integral their roller coaster of a friendship has been to the show, it would be a shame if Peter’s “death” were the last word on the matter. This episode built up a fair amount of suspense as it maneuvered the two against one another. The actual showdown was pretty brief, but that might be just as well given how poor the show’s CG effects are. At times it looked less like Bill Skarsgård was wrestling with a giant werewolf than simply flailing about in empty space.
In any case, it was the performances that really mattered in this climactic showdown, and both Skarsgård and Landon Liboiron delivered as they usually do. Both actors conveyed the hollow emptiness of their respective character’s lives. Both men have essentially lost everyone close to them by this point. The tragedy of their duel is that there was really nothing left for either character regardless of which way the battle went. So it was appropriate that Peter claimed his righteous vengeance for the murder of Destiny, only to consign himself to a life a loner wolf. Roman’s death was easily the hardest hitting emotional moment of the episode. As he lay on the ground, paralyzed and sobbing, there was a sense that Roman finally realized that he really does ruin the life of every person that falls into his orbit. With a mother and half-sister that despise him, another sister that no longer needs him and a daughter who is now forever outside his grasp, he had nothing left to live for.
The finale was a little less successful when it came to wrapping up the Olivia and Annie storyline. Famke Janssen can be an entertaining villain on this show, but she also tends to operate on a different wavelength from the rest of the cast. Olivia a little campier and little more “out there,” and she’s one of the main reasons why this show has never quite seemed to figure out what kind of tone it’s striving for. That’s only become more true as Olivia has dealt with her worsening condition and her hallucinations of the late Isaac Ochoa. The Ochoa hallucinations are one thing. Jansen and Alex Hernandez built up a fun dynamic over the course of the season. The theater hallucinations were a bit much, though. We’ve more than gotten the message that Olivia’s grasp on sanity is slipping by this point. Those scenes were really just flogging a dead horse and injecting pointless silliness into an otherwise somber episode.
The other problem with this storyline is that the show never did much to make me truly care for Olivia or Annie. With the former, she really has no sympathetic or redeeming qualities. Any show of concern or compassion for another human being is just a ruse to get something she wants. So it’s hard to sympathize much with Olivia as she makes one last, desperate attempt to secure herself a new body. As for Annie, this season never did a great job of establishing who she really is or why she makes the decisions she does. After that incestuous fling with Roman in the blood bank it became hard to take her seriously as a character. It doesn’t help that actress Camille de Pazzis doesn’t meet the show’s usual standard when it comes to performances. Her thick accent robs her performance of a lot of emotion and sincerity.
But if nothing else, this storyline ended on an appropriately tragic note. Annie sacrificed herself (in a horrifically painful way, no less) to ensure that Olivia wouldn’t be able to cheat death. This really was the ending Olivia deserved – cradling the charred corpse of the daughter she wronged and succumbing to vampire cancer.
This episode might have offered too grim a cap to the series if not for Shelley’s storyline. Her journey this season has been equal parts tragic and hopeful. She emerged from her suicidal depression to find a new home, new family and even a potential soulmate in Aitor. All of that came crashing down in the final few episodes as Olivia’s dark hand intervened. It was good to see Shelley find the happy ending that eluded almost every other character. As a person whose only real crime was being born into the wrong family, Shelley deserved to escape the clutches of Hemlock Grove and seek a new life elsewhere.
This episode did leave a few elements dangling. For all that the writers sought to complicate the show’s supernatural mythology with the addition of Spivak’s reptilian race and the cancerous upir, they never showed much of an interest in wrapping up those elements. A lot of that seems superfluous in hindsight. Nor did this episode address the fate of the Greek delivery man who had Pryce’s mind imprinted on his. Shelley’s opening narration made reference to Pryce’s mind existing “in the cloud,” but we never did learn if some trace of the brilliant but troubled doctor still exists out there. This episode gave us closure for the main cast, which was the most important goal. However, it did leave some supporting characters by the wayside in the end.
In general, Hemlock Grove was a stronger show in its third season, and that holds true for the final episode. The finale provided closure for the core cast of characters and ended the show on a suitably tragic note. While this episode still wrestled with the same tonal weirdness, poor special effects and sometimes poor characterization that have plagued the show from the start, it offered Hemlock Grove the conclusion it needed.
