Miracles Complete Series Review
Christie and I finished up watching Miracles last night (to round out a Memorial Day that gave me a chance to make the yummiest jambalaya ever again, and where we made some of our own mushroom pastries with some puff pasty dough, le yum). In the end sum, it's a diverting 12-13 episode failed series, very good on the creep factor, hinting at an interesting (but ultimately unresolved) arc-plot, with some of its best acting done by characters who had the least screen time.
We watched the last episode twice, the second time with the commentary turned on. Considering that the final shot of the last episode of the series had a bit of a shocking reveal to it -- we figured, hey, the commentary on the last episode of the series (with series creator Richard Hatem and producer-writer David Greenwalt), given that there will never be more of it, may give us some extra closure and an explanation of the future directions they might have taken it.
It didn't.
We get toward the end of the episode, and there've been some minor, sort of interesting tidbits here and there, but nothing especially revelatory about the characters and their stories. And that's where Rick and Dave started to lose me. First off they start rambling about how their heart was always in the episodic bits of the show, not the ongoing plot: my rage, there, grows, because if you're going to put in some kind of wrapping mythology, you've got to be sold on it yourself. Nothing they said indicated that they were. Further, the episodic stuff in the series was its weakest point -- the thing that kept us coming back was the arc stuff. But it seemed as if the two biggest driving forces behind the series were blind to that, and didn't even like it all that much. Christie was put off by the fact that they said they were making up the arc as they went along, and didn't have all of it figured out much if at all. This, I can respect somewhat, but within the arc of a season -- even a half-season, which Miracles was -- you've got to at least know where you might be going. They didn't.
So then we get towards the big reveal, and I'm hoping against hope at this point that they'll at least comment on what they thought it could mean. Nothing. Instead they eat up the last 90 seconds of commentary doing little more than patting each other on the back. The big reveal -- the huge change indicated for the central character of the series -- drives off in the back of a garbage truck, without a single word given to it.
A big letdown to an otherwise moderately above-par supernatural mystery series. Sad, given what the series could have been saying ... and which the minds behind it, never cared to be saying.
We watched the last episode twice, the second time with the commentary turned on. Considering that the final shot of the last episode of the series had a bit of a shocking reveal to it -- we figured, hey, the commentary on the last episode of the series (with series creator Richard Hatem and producer-writer David Greenwalt), given that there will never be more of it, may give us some extra closure and an explanation of the future directions they might have taken it.
It didn't.
We get toward the end of the episode, and there've been some minor, sort of interesting tidbits here and there, but nothing especially revelatory about the characters and their stories. And that's where Rick and Dave started to lose me. First off they start rambling about how their heart was always in the episodic bits of the show, not the ongoing plot: my rage, there, grows, because if you're going to put in some kind of wrapping mythology, you've got to be sold on it yourself. Nothing they said indicated that they were. Further, the episodic stuff in the series was its weakest point -- the thing that kept us coming back was the arc stuff. But it seemed as if the two biggest driving forces behind the series were blind to that, and didn't even like it all that much. Christie was put off by the fact that they said they were making up the arc as they went along, and didn't have all of it figured out much if at all. This, I can respect somewhat, but within the arc of a season -- even a half-season, which Miracles was -- you've got to at least know where you might be going. They didn't.
So then we get towards the big reveal, and I'm hoping against hope at this point that they'll at least comment on what they thought it could mean. Nothing. Instead they eat up the last 90 seconds of commentary doing little more than patting each other on the back. The big reveal -- the huge change indicated for the central character of the series -- drives off in the back of a garbage truck, without a single word given to it.
A big letdown to an otherwise moderately above-par supernatural mystery series. Sad, given what the series could have been saying ... and which the minds behind it, never cared to be saying.