Another anti-climactic psychological thriller series...

A plea to stop writing for the prospect of Season 2...

Once again we got to the end of a really good, compelling psych thriller series (on a popular streaming service) only to be let down by an ending sacrificed on the altar of Season Two…

(If you want to know which series I’m talking about, it’s in code at the end of the post).

It was gripping all the way through. The MC was SO HATEFUL I actually had to turn away from the screen when he was ‘being nice’ to his victims, duping them into believing he was a wholesome good guy with their best interests in his heart.

Huge kudos to the actor, who we know from comedy. He was chillingly good.

So it all boiled down to the finale, of course, because that’s how psych thrillers work.

But our MC didn’t get his comeuppance. Instead of the wonderful pay-off we had earned by watching his mounting deceit and evil, we got to see him sail off into the sunset, presumably ready for Season 2.

And this is not the first case recently.

Endings are hard, we all know that, but unless I’m missing something, it is traditional for the baddie to get caught and for the victim (and by extension) the reader to enjoy his/her ultimate failure.

I don’t understand this trend for the baddie getting away with it? If you want the series to have legs commercially just do what every previous writer has done from Agatha Christie to Freida Mcfadden; make the MC the good guy. OR, at least have him banged up, or thought dead. As The Night Manager proved, death is no barrier to a come back.

It’s possible there was some shallow ‘eat the rich’ message in here, as the victims were wealthy and maybe we were supposed to root for the killer? But the killer was so unhinged, NO-ONE apart from a fellow psycho is rooting for him. And the family, despite the usual levels of familial dissonance, loved their kids (and loved their dog). So if we were supposed to want them dead, that wasn’t written into the script.

Justice is satisfying. Injustice is annoying when it comes just before the end credits.

There’s a reason good authors stick to the same outlines and plot beats. Because a thousand years of storytelling has taught us some thing should not be played with.

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Obviously naming the series would be a spoiler, but if you want to know…

Using A=1, B=2 etc, here it is:

13, 1, 12, 9, 3, 5, 15, 14, 1, 13, 1, 26, 15, 14, 16, 18, 9, 13, 5