A look on the Lighter Side: This is the end…or is it?

Judy Epstein

The television blared, “Tune in again next week for the final episode of….”

“No!” I shrieked, leaping up off the couch.  “Turn it off!  Where is that remote? Turn the show off right now!”

“What on earth for?” my family wanted to know.

“Because the second that I know there’s a final episode coming up, something always goes wrong. The TV breaks, or the cable goes out – something always happens to mess it up.  It never fails – I mean, it always fails. I mean, you know what I mean.” 

What I mean is, it’s as if, when I was born, an evil fairy had pronounced “This child will  never manage to see the final episode of any television series she is following.” Of course, that’s ridiculous; why would an evil fairy waste her time on me?  But how else do you explain it?    

Consider what happened to me with “Ghost Whisperer.”  I got hooked on it in reruns, watching Jennifer Love Hewitt struggle through marriage, tragedy, and recovery, all the while banishing ghosts from people’s lives.  I followed, recording every episode I could,  right up through one that wasn’t marked as final, but sure started to feel like it.  All of a sudden, the program was replaced by a newsroom, breaking in on my show all breathless and urgent about some impending storm.  It was all already recorded, so I knew there had been no storm – but the damage was done, and the recording ended without ever coming back to my show.  And it turns out that, thanks to the original network’s sudden cancellation of the series, that had indeed been the final episode. 

My experience with “The Mentalist” was even worse.  I’d become a fairly regular fan, but I managed to get distracted – so much so, that one day, as I was browsing on the web, I caught the words “Mentalist,” “finally,” and “tonight” and realized that the Mentalist hero, Patrick Jane, was about to finally identify and catch the serial killer Red John, whom he’d been chasing for more than 10 years –  and it was airing that night. As I sat there, in fact! And I hadn’t even set up a recording.

I raced into the living room, turned on the TV and changed to the channel –  just in time to catch the closing credits.  And even in this age of TIVO, You-Tube, and Watch on Demand, I have yet to find a way to see the rest of that episode.  

In fact, the only finale I have ever successfully recorded is the one for “Breaking Bad.”  Which would be a real accomplishment, if I had ever watched any of the episodes before it.   Maybe I could swap with someone, for “The Mentalist”?  

But that isn’t even my worst experience.  My prize for Personal Worst would have to go to the time back when my husband and I were living in our shoe-box-sized apartment in Manhattan.  We had a TV but no VCR, which made it a major accomplishment that we’d managed to race home in time for almost every episode of a rare re-broadcast of my husband’s favorite series, “The Prisoner.”  (He’s such a fan that we visited the location in Wales where it had been filmed, for part of our honeymoon.) 

We even made it home an hour early, the night they aired the next-to-final episode. After it was over, we turned off the TV and had dinner. “What a shame we have to wait another week just for the finale,” we both agreed.  

At least, I was happy about one thing. “Good thing I spotted that it was an hour early tonight,” I said, helping myself to a spoonful of my husband’s ice cream.  “I wonder why they did that?”  

“You don’t suppose,” said Jeff, “that it’s some kind of programming stunt?  And they’re running the last two episodes, together?”

“If they were, wouldn’t we be big fools, sitting here with the TV off and complaining about waiting a week!” 

Together, we leaped for the set, turned it on, and sure enough, there it was: “The End”  of  the entire series!  Which is why I ended up buying the entire boxed set for my husband, for our Fifteenth, or “Video,” Anniversary.  And which is also why no one should blame me if I’ve developed a bit of a twitch, a bit of an allergy, whenever I hear the words “final episode.”    

For me, it ain’t over till the Bad Fairy has waved her magic wand!

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