I know I’m late, but I still thought I’d weigh in on two of those other series finales that we got this past May sweeps, 24 and FlashForward.  Obviously spoilers are below.

FlashForward, billed as ABC’s next Lost, fell woefully short of that lofty goal. Sure it had plenty of slow-burning mysteries and a cool genre premise, but the execution just didn’t work. The characters refused to ask each other the important questions that would shed light on what was going on, the most glaring example being Mark waiting months to ask his daughter what she saw.  And the Benford breakup was just impossible to understand – Olivia was so worried that Mark, the love of her life and father of her child, would die, that she wanted him to run away with her so they could live happily ever after.  He refused so he could stay and try to help save millions of lives instead, so she kicked him out and started seeing another man almost instantly.  What?  And the storylines with Bryce and Aaron just felt extraneous and not all that interesting.  I know people are protesting the show’s cancellation by “blacking out” for two minutes and 17 seconds in front of ABC buildings, but I gotta say I will not miss this show terribly.

24’s last season wasn’t it’s strongest, not by a long shot.  There was a great deal of political bickering that went nowhere, Freddie Prinze Jr’s New York “accent” was pretty awful, and the entire Dana/Jenny story simply did not work.  We meet her and she is scared to death and threatened by an old boyfriend who’s extorting her, and then later that day she’s a trained Russian spy, shooting innocent bystanders left and right?  How does that make sense?  The sheer fact that there was another mole in CTU was bad enough, but the fact that it was so inconsistent with her character really irked me.  Still, the show did a lot right this year – it was great seeing Renee in a really dark place, and I liked the way that the show acknowledged how badly Jack wanted to leave this life behind once and for all early on in the season.  I found it a little hard to swallow that he would go on such a rampage for justice that he risked ever seeing his daughter again, but I guess that was just a necessary plot point.  Ditto for the character assassination of President Taylor – she seemed so moral and infallible – what happened?  Still, the show delivered a lot of great action scenes, especially in the final hours.  It would have been nicer of they had tidied things up a little more, but they had to leave the window open for the movie, so that wasn’t really an option.