Unexpected

[delga]

[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.

Comments

[mirabehn.livejournal.com]

*waves*

pointed here by denz_ka

Actually, anyone's disillusionment.

Actually wasn't that why Ariel got herself drunk and sobbing? They'd been friends for years, it must have been shattering.

Not that she's ever been even approaching my favourite character, but hey...

I loved that very last scene

Ah, me too! :)

Btw, I'm trying to make medical sense of Jack's condition. The antipsychotic drug thing would imply schizophrenia but it doesn't seem like he's schizophrenic. Except that he was presumably taking his medication like a good boy for a long time. So maybe he went off his medication and Grant was the result? Or he just had an episode anyway?

I am so high on that last seen, you know. And "there's been another accident"... Hell. *gapes*

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

*waves back* Hi!

[Psst, Denz! You found someone else! Hee]

Actually wasn't that why Ariel got herself drunk and sobbing? They'd been friends for years, it must have been shattering.

You know what? I totally forgot about that; for once, she didn't bug me so much. Her character was almost bipolar in the sense that I could never decide whose side she was on (but I guess that last episode hit the nail on the head with that too). I actually quite liked the scene with the drunkeness; I thought it was well played out after everything else.

And yeah, I was thinking about the illness too because there were no real outlying symptoms of psychosis. So saying that, he was taking pills and we did see him run out of them at the end of last week's episode; maybe the pills sustain a lucid state which would indicate that he was no longe ron them or had decided against getting a refill. In which case, can we really place blame on Jack??

Another thing: he seems completely apathetic (damn! that was the word! I was looking for it earlier!) about what he's just done. there's a sense that he's diassociated himself from it ("accident"); he doesn't care at all. So I was thinking something along the lines of affectionless psychopathy which (for those of you who don't know) is a result of childhood maternal deprivation/privation that causes you to be totally without empathy - that would fit with the idea of his mother's illness (she was taken from her child so he was deprived of the maternal bond - it was broken; or she never formed a bond with her child and neither did his father so he suffered privation). I get the sense I've been thinking about this too much.

The reason I dismissed AP was because I didn't think it was something you could medicate. But anyways, weren't the meds he was taking for suicide aversion?

Schizophrenia also makes sense because of the two way functioning but it's rarely a violent disease.

Except that he was presumably taking his medication like a good boy for a long time.

I agree and the meds would have overlap - their effect wouldn't run out immediately. Unless, of course, he hadn't refilled since the last episode and enough time had passed from him to run into his psychosis again.

OK, need to go think about other things now. Nice to meet you :o)