{ whoa, incomplete. }

[delga]

So one of the issues with my not taking time over these season finale diatribes of mine is that - as evidenced by my rewatch of the S5 finale last week - I get wrapped up in the momentum of the episode & the season, and my ideas are formed very quickly. I have no time to play them through properly before writing them down. I did okay with Criminal Minds' Demonology earlier this year, but there's still a lot of repetitious incoherence in that post. I often go back to read my NCIS posts because they give some sort of order to my thoughts but I am also struck by how my opinion changes (which is natural) and - on occasions like this one - all of that 'work' is thrown by split-second revelations in new episodes. Now, that's the nature of the beast, of course, but just because you've held with one way of thinking for so long doesn't mean you can't be more flexible. What I'm saying is: there is no sense in looking at this episode and protesting what we learned, even if it goes against your romanticised notions and expectations, because this is canon now. Fandom fills in the gaps, and makes room for itself in opposition to canon, and that's all very well, but I am going to talk about this episode in relation to a) my personal fanon (let's call it idiofanon) and b) the serial arcs as a whole. I won't speak for you so there won't be any 'I don't believe that so it can't be true' elements. That's not how this works.

--

Season 3, in many ways, is a remarkable season and I am aware of the irony of my saying that. Afterall, I abandoned the show mid-s3, only to come back to it at the top of s4. But if the obvious changes in s3 were the dynamic cast changes (Kate, Jenny, and Ziva) then the less obvious change was the shift in narrative form. S1 & S2 were fairly self-contained as seasons go, and I tend to group them together because they're tied together in nascence by Kate, and Ari, and by that peculiar liberty that serialised shows have in early seasons, not being beholden to a body of canon.

The shift happens in s3 because that's when season arcs presented themselves more clearly. The arcs aren't so straightforward, though. You can't say that the La Grenouille arc starts in 4x01 & ends in 5x19, and you definitely can't say that the La Grenouille arc is Jenny's arc, or Tony's. The storyarcs overlap and intersect. They are more fluid than the season structure. My favourite example is the beginning of Jethro's arc (oh gosh, Enigma is so intriguing to me, even after all this time) and how destructive and important Kill Ari is for so many people. It's not just one story, it's many stories, and people's emotional ups and downs don't synchronise.