It is the season
finale of Z Nation and, sadly, the utter finale of Z Nation
though I have a lot of thoughts on that to digest in the Requiem
Sun Mei died last
episode and her brains have been passed on to Red to keep safe. Which she does.
All episode. Bye Red, do you want a cushion for that plot box?
George is having one
of her moments of struggle and doubt, struggle over what everyone has had to
endure for Altura, if what it will achieve will be worth it or even be
possible. If they are good enough for Altura and if she can keep going. This is
an excellent emotional moment and perfect for George because she’s just endured
torture. That should leave a mark - that should leave psychological marks. That
should take some time to recover from it. And of course Warren gives her an
excellent pep talk
Which… I get because Warren is a leader but at the same time Warren being George’s crutch has happened for far too long.
The bad guys
continues being evil with Estes being all paranoid and Pandora using lots of
sexiness to fight back. Including in front of Sun Mei’s corpse. Classy.
He has gathered all
his militia and all his volunteers to send them to the staging ground
identified by George… Pandora is so very very sure that she broke George
She is wrong… there isn’t an army of Talkers there. There’s 10k, Doc, Addie and Murphy all having awesome little character moments earlier. But now there’s Doc with a loud speaker making gun noises drawing them all in. And then 10k looking on, from a distance. Now, what can one sniper, even one as ridiculously good as 10k do against an army?
Weeellll, this is the
apocalypse. And the show has belatedly remembered the real enemy out there
isn’t Talkers or humans - it’s zombies. And how one human dead turns into a
biting infectious zombie and how one sniper taking out 4 or 5 men in a tightly
packed group can pretty much kill them all
I would think that
this would cause 10k, Doc or George a little consternation? I mean they just
caused a not-small massacre: that was Altura’s entire militia and a number of
volunteers. That’s got to be a significant percentage of the population killed.
Estes and Pandora
have a freak out over their entire army being destroyed when Addie and Murphy
arrive with a lot of conscious Talkers… all here and ready to vote. With
sympathisers at every gate to to let in more Talkers. See it’s election day and
Estes expected all of the Talkers not to be there so the paranoid living humans
could then vote for security and his Supreme Leaderness. Except the problem
with no real alternative and, at the same time, threat of bombing means most
the humans have stayed at home. Curse those low turn outs, scourge of
democracies and dictators who are doing dictatorship wrong.
Now with lots of
Talkers flooding in they can all cast ballots (because Estes has still left
peace justice democracy and a constitution on the ballot?) and the living who
were willing to see their loved ones kicked out decided to… just let the
Talkers in now? Apparently?
Anyway, this is happening
Meanwhile Estes and
Pandora run away chased by the good guys and Cooper is here! Yes, Warren’s sort
of love interest from the beginning of the series. He’s here to remind Warren
that he loves her and… put a pin in that Cooper, currently saving the world,
‘kay
But for reasons
Murphy is going to stay and glare at him so Warren and George can go on to
their big confrontation on their own. This involves confronting Estes and he
doing the proper supervillain thing and explaining his big bad plan
So he has to kill the Talkers because they eat Lithium to stay “alive” and eventually they will run out (Sun Mei’s quote aside) and eventually they’ll have to kill them all. Which would sort of have a plan except we’ve already seen that zombie brains can feed Talkers, there’s a load of zombies and it take relatively tiny amounts of brains to keep them human. And hey if you have to kill them all you could wait until they’re mindless monsters rather than… well… jump the gun? Also I seriously doubt his estimate of how much lithium there is in the country because… yeah, there’s a lot more than what they’ve found. It’s not that rare.
Perhaps recognising
that “kill them now so we don’t have to MAYBE kill them later” is a dubious
motivation the writers have a second motivation for him- the planet. See to
keep Altura working and being eco-friendly, they need solar power and batteries
to work when the sun is down and these batteries need to made from Lithium so
we can’t possibly feed them to Talkers - we have to annihilate all the Talkers
so we can run a green economy! Yes to granola! No to fragile loved ones!
Um…
Ok, look, I greatly
praise Estes desire to make a better, greener future. But the population of the
world is pretty much less than a million people at this point? At least as far
as we can tell. And they’re not using a whole lot of industry here… global warming
is not a pressing issue any more… burn some damn coal. Or set up a wind
turbine! The wind still blows at night! We’ve seen the dam already for that
matter! This is not a reasonable motivation.
So he explains all
this and Warren is recording it and Citizen Z is broadcasting this live to
everyone who collectively gasp “ZOMG HE’S EVIL!!!! All of our prejudices are
now invalid, let us not murder the Talkers we were rounding up and massacring a
few days ago!” Because this is how prejudice works.
Anyway, he is FOILED!
And more he’s just said Talkers are like totally totally icky and Pandora heard
him! And this sinister characters has just learned that the guy who hates all
Talkers hates, her, a Talker. She decides to blow up all the things, as one
does.
This has Warren
working with Estes to try and not blow everything up while George and Pandora
have Blatant Character Moments in case anyone was asleep through all the
previous character building. So, simplified: Pandora is evil and hates hates
hates herself because she’s a Talker and is ugly underneath that mask and
thinks it’s terribad awful. In case you missed that the woman who always wore a
mask and denied being a Talker, hates being a Talker. While George refuses to
kill her and tries (and fails) to save her… because she’s George and she cares
Except, y’know, about
the entire armed forces of Altura who are dead who no-one seems to care about.
And Warren gets shot.
And I’m just kind of irritated about this - Cooper’s come back expressly to
fill in that Warren actually died when he first met her and she’s actually a
super Talker because black Rain/Zona/this is the last season who cares? I
assume this was setting up for a new season of plot hooks but as it stands, the
reintroduction of Cooper (especially when he says “hey you’re dead, I voted,
don’t be a stranger, buh-bye”) and her being shot at all feels pointless. Why
have her “killed” when it gives us exactly, like, 3 minutes of tension. And
then hand waves the whole thing. Why…?
I think this whole
ending just kind of emphasises how much Z Nation didn’t intend to end
this season...
Similarly, Red climbs
out of her plot hole to hand Sun Mei’s brain to Murphy who eats it and then
gets… kind of sinister? This hasn’t been flagged at all - if anything all
season we’ve emphasised Murphy’s heart of gold. So where has this come from?
Especially in the middle of this whole happily ever after everyone else is
living
But that lack of
foreshadow - and the complete character about turn really means I can’t blame
the failing of this season on the fact the show was cancelled before it got to
explain stuff. Especially since the cancellation wasn’t apparently planned
until quite late in the season. In fact, I rather think the weakness of season
5 led to the cancellation far more than the cancellation causing season 5 to be
weak
Ultimately this
series was hugely rebooted with the beginning of the season and the Black Rain
- but it wasn’t exactly done well. We went from a world where humanity was on
the very brink of extinction and barely scavenging an existence to suddenly
having a whole network of settlements we didn’t know about. This fundamental world building changes that weren’t really supported
and end up hurting a lot of previous characterisation
All of this compounds
with a storyline which is pretty weak - a society is rushed into, Pandora is a
2 dimensional nothing of a character, we breeze through other settlements
without ever really explaining why Altura rules them all, Estes’s motivation is
nonsensical. Hey and remember he had a tie to Zona? What was that plot hook
for?
I feel like the
writers finished the last season not knowing what to do and then some other
writers came in and wanted to tell their OWN story but it wasn’t really related
to Z Nation in any way it just had zombies. And we had a plot line that
wasn’t zany ENOUGH for the plot holes not to matter, and not structured enough
not to be justified without zaniness.
Representation wise, Z
Nation has always been surprisingly strong with Warren as indisputed lead,
awesome character and generally amazing character. She has managed to bring a
steely core to a whacky show that somehow made it all work - and somehow made
this season worse because she was pushed back for George to step into the
spotlight, even if she did get her own romance. Kaia was effortlessly awesome
in any scene she was in and Sun Mei was excellent if somewhat troped and
unnecessarily killed. But all were pushed somewhat to step back. Multiple
awesome female characters is an excellent element of this show and cannot be
denied - but Pandora-the-unnecessarily-sexy-evil-one I could do without.
We have no LGBTQ
characters this season or, well, ever unless we count a single episode
trainwreck of comic relief.
