Season 5b

So some final thoughts about the last Arrested Development episodes. SPOILERS


There were some funny parts and worthwhile moments, but a lot of frustration and misdirection too. I will say that it was kind of clever how the writers did the last "on the next Arrested Development" so that viewers could choose to believe that Buster was guilty, or they could choose to believe that this is not part of continuity, that someone else like Stan Sitwell or Argyle Austero is the real killer. There was some closure to plots, but they also left things open with that ambiguity about Michael leaving until the next crisis, which he always does.

It's weird that the show would want us to view Michael leaving with George Michael as a happy/satisfying ending, when most of season 4-5 has been about Michael suffocating/controlling his son and not being able to let go of an image of his boy as 10-years-old, under his thumb. Also Buster especially kept complaining about Michael having to be the hero, and the flashback/crime show revealed that it started when he saved Buster from drowning in 1982. Yet the show validates Michael as the hero in the finale. Why? He's been shown as incompetent, screwing everything up from "missing persons" to bail to the court trial, yet now he's miraculously competent in running a scheme as intricate as the lessons in "Making a Stand"? Why feed into Michael's ego and his unhealthy obsession with rescuing his family? And when the hell did Gob get so good at magic that he could include Buster and Tony Wonder in the scheme and make everything work with Michael and GM's fake fight?

It's all coming out of nowhere, like all the Sudden Valley houses disappearing, even though they were there in the 1st half of season 5. Similarly, Argyle Austero is now running a gay mafia out of a Quick Dry Cement, with no mention of him running his sister's Austerity Clinic anymore. At the July 2nd parade, the narrator made a big deal about how Buster's jailbreak meant he was risking 30 years of imprisonment, but in season 5B, the early escape is no big deal, just a $75 process fee. We get told repeatedly that Fakeblock does not work at all, and yet Lottie Dottie in court insists that Buster successfully used Fakeblock to delete video footage from the security cameras on Cinco. I mean, what facts can we fucking trust if they're going to upend continuity whenever they want to? It feels sloppy and cobbled together wrong.

I'm so disappointed about Tony Wonder and Gob. What the fuck was that? I mean, I'm grateful that he turned out to be alive, but why string us along with suspense? We don't even get a kiss at their reunion, and they talk about going back into the closet with their girlfriends. They'll become business rivals, meeting each other for "just hands" not even friendship. They erased all the progress Gob had in season 4 and the first half of season 5 when he actually was ok with loving this magical man and had allies like the Closet Conversion guys. It feels like gay-baiting, and it's not at all worth the worry we felt about this cliffhanger for almost a year.

Plus the writers don't answer other questions like who the fuck sabotaged Gob's wedding illusion in season 4. They don't explain why Lucille was so certain that Oscar had run off with Lucille Austero. They don't explain how Buster hid the body on Cinco, then made up with his mother and convinced her to tell Michael to take care of him, nor why Michael would go to the model home "thinking it was long abandoned" if he had been told to take care of Buster by their mother. And where the hell did Buster hide the body for months/years since Cinco? They're just dropping plot points like they don't care about details and payoffs anymore. I'd hate to imagine what kind of garbage they would have written for season 6, if they'd been renewed.