delga | Unexpected

[Warning: The Lyon's Den finale spoilers]

Um, I think I'm going to have some sort of mental breakdown.

So it turns out that Rob Lowe can actually act pretty damn well. I just watched the last episode of The Lyon's Den and my god it was absolutely fantastic!

I still can't decide if Jack Turner was actually plain evil all this time or if he was just insane. But, here's the thing - the sonofabitch killed Grant Rashton.

I thought everything was going so smoothly; I thought, you know, Jack's the good guy. He works with Riley. He gets confused over Barrington's death. He's searching for justice; he's there when they find Det. Traub murdered.

Holy hell.

The background story was this: Jack was insane and one day killed his friend whilst on a boating trip. His girlfriends was a witness who was paid off. Jack never knew about this; a cover story was put into action by his father.

Ariel Saxon, working for her lover Grant Rashton (who wants Jack's job) finds all this out and the audience is slowly (ever-so-slowly) drip fed small useless pieces of information. Everything is cued up to explode on Barrington and suddenly that ends in a fizz.

And then you have this finale. And Jack Turner kills Grant Rashton.

At the end you think, maybe this will end the way the series started, maybe he'll jump too. But he doesn't. Yes, Barrington jumped because of his involvement in the ZeroTech scheme but Jack Turner just telephones his Daddy, the senator.

Holy flippin' hell. I nearly had a heart atteck.

All the other stories were nicely cleaned off too - Riley's just a guy doing his job; the paralegals won the lottery, Grant Rashton turned out to be the good guy (god knows about the story with Brit and Jack's dad - she was his secretary; I think they slept together or somethign but whatever...), Ariel did her job an dthe world went on. My only qualm was that I didn't get to see Daphne at all and it would have been great to know her disillusionment. Actually, anyone's disillusionment. But then you wouldn't have had such a brutally tense end.

Even though most of the series was utter crap I really want to see it again if only to see the strings come together for that amazing finish. Rob Lowe: you're a scary, cold-hearted bastard and I loved that very last scene.

Gorgeously brilliant. Just a deranged and wonderfully painful ending to a series that is so much better because it's so short and so self-contained.