The box packing is now completed, all that remains is to tape them up and finish the paperwork in time for collection on Wednesday. I was absolutely shattered, though; I don’t find it emotionally taxing to pack up a home as some do, but it is physically tiring and anxiety inducing.
Even more satisfying was the end of The End of the Fucking World, which we completed last night. SPOILERS below.
I don’t want a sequel and certainly not one in which Alyssa and James appear. I would prefer never to see them again, though I could accept the two police officers playing a similar supporting role (I don’t think they were interesting enough to hold up any more). A series about Frodo, perhaps?
Things I was especially struck by:
- This was a great depiction of what it felt like to be a teenager. I was fairly well-adjusted at that age and had a happy home life, but the series caught the mixture of confidence and uncertainty, powerlessness and growing into power, a sense of simultaneous vulnerability and invulnerability, that I remember.
- There were I think 7 different parent-child relationships, and even the relationships that were on screen for seconds (Leslie’s ex-partner and her son) were excruciatingly damaging.
- What a lovely little love story it was, such a genuine exploration of first love and coming to understand what it means to love someone selflessly, in contrast to all the parental figures over the course of the series.
Now, BIGGER SPOILERS!!!!!!
I thought the ending was nearly perfect. They could have done without the sound of a gunshot – it would have perhaps been even more effective if it just ended with him running along the beach with nowhere to go. But the story inexorably led up to that desperate, pointless dash from the very first episode onwards. (To be fair, I also liked the ending of the Sopranos and thought it was as inevitable). The shooting didn’t seem a massive stretch to me: he was now an armed adult, a known killer, with a loaded gun, and although he was running away, I think it’s not unlikely that a police officer would make the wrong judgment call and consider him unstable and “armed at the point of opening fire”. But it would have felt more elegant to have just finished it.