This show was canceled due to poor ratings. While it started strong, it lost many viewers immediately, and never quite made them up across its thirteen week run. As much as I thought the show didn’t fully live up to its pilot episode, it’s still unfortunate that we won’t have any more. It’s a good thing then, that it ended so strongly.
By the end, Awake worked and didn’t work. It did round out its series premise pretty well, creating a whole narrative that is satisfying as science-fiction drama, but in the moment was clunky and awkward. The show didn’t need to be thirteen hours long, and would’ve worked better as a movie, as the best moments were those pertinent to the over-arching story — those in the first episode and the last two or three.
These moments, especially those in the series finale, are pretty intense and actually unpredictable. It’s good to see Michael Britten take risks and do things we don’t agree with, or put himself into dangerous situations — and lose at times. In this episode, he’s getting closer to the truth we already know, which puts his red reality in jeopardy.
*Spoilers to follow*
The big question throughout the series is ‘which reality is the real reality,’ and I did have a feeling that neither were, but with a title like Awake, I should’ve realized it was all a dream. So by the end the show becomes an interesting meditation on grief; it’s the story of a man grappling with the loss of loved ones and the journey toward acceptance. Accepting that one of his family members is dead runs parallel to accepting one reality, and in the show’s final scene we see that he’s finally awake, and his family is alive.
To reach this happy ending he must do as he always does, investigate, and it’s a great test to a seasoned detective. It’s a good story and when the ending revealed what was what the whole time, my first reaction was “lame,” but then the full weight of the situation caught up to it and the scene became a touching, satisfying moment that left me feeling pretty good about the series.
But then I thought back to those episodes in the middle, and on the whole, Awake was not a great show. It’s a narrative tugged back and forth by the realities of the television industry, which makes it a miracle that the story ended with an ending. There remain some loose threads, but it’s all good. Because when it’s over, we had in fact spent a whole lot of time following Jason Isaacs go around and solve cases by using parallel worlds, and that was pretty good.
And when time came to uncover the truth behind those worlds, we see the truth behind the series, that it was about a man struggling to overcome a fractured mind after a traumatic incident,who could know grief and accept it before everything returned to normal. Now that the show is over, sitcoms continue on, and we’ll wait for the next good, thought-provoking scifi show — just as it always is.
Return to the Awake Episode Guide
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June 3, 2012 at 5:34 AM
L
“which reality is the real reality,’ and I did have a feeling that neither were, but with a title like Awake, I should’ve realized it was all a dream”
Pretty lame analysis. It was all a dream because the series had to be canceled and this was the simplest way to wrap things up.
“it’s the story of a man grappling with the loss of loved ones and the journey toward acceptance” bla bla bla bla. Right, the finale is all about aceptance. Again, pretty lame analysis.
June 3, 2012 at 5:33 PM
Jung-ho
Showrunner Kyle Killen alleges that the story arc existing as broadcasted was in place before the cancellation notice, so I imagine he wanted to answer some questions but leave a lot to interpretation, which is kind of bullshit because I don’t believe that story is what we’re supposed to be thinking about and figuring out after the show closes in order to appreciate it in the long term.
To me this is the best possible explanation — the ending is a happy one and the show was about life and death, not dreams. I think any arguments people may have over the show’s ending would stem out of a frustration in the dual nature of a television series like this — the “stand alone” and “complex” episodes, to use old terms — more than any original vision. The themes of the story have been muddled not by an early cancellation but by a slightly confused story arc, which was a product of less than stellar episodic longform storytelling.