Election Night part 2 is the season two finale episode and follows on from election night part 1 last week. This episode was actually quite good and ended this season on quite a jolly point for our ACN characters. In this episode we see Will and the team continue the coverage of the presidential election. Meanwhile Will McAvoy and Mackenzie McHale sort of spark their relationship back into focus. Sloan and Don have a moment and is Jim going back to Maggie?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x98c-qFDwgk[/youtube]
This episode as a season finale was quite good in that in tied up quite a lot of characters quite nicely and resolved a whole range of issues. One of them mainly being everyone wanting to resign as we saw in election night part 1 last week. Charlie continued to pursue his resignation permission from Reese and Leona Lansing. While Will McAvoy moved to reassure the team at ACN not to resign their positions. All of this in the end is left up to Reese Lansing but by many character’s own conclusions (Charlie Skinner/Will McAvoy) they choose not to. I think it’s the right choice in the end, they all love being at ACN and as Don Keefer said “I want to report the news here” with everyone he knows, not somewhere else. From that point it was clear to me, the resignations weren’t going to happen.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C8ZC_81Gqg[/youtube]
One of the strange things about this season finale though is that to me it didn’t feel like a season finale, instead it felt like a series finale. The reason I think this is because is had such a jolly, happy ending to it all. This has to do with what happened with Will and Mackenzie and their character’s relationship. They have been arguing about their breakup since the series started.While Will and Mackenzie are my favourite characters in The Newsroom and I wanted nothing more than for them to get together. But then in this episode Will proposes to Mackenzie and I never really saw it coming. Maybe I saw this as something in the series finale, but now I wonder what this will do to their characters in season 3. I sort of liked this happening, but I sort didn’t like how it happened. So i’m not sure about it yet.
The episode also spends quite a lot of time covering the election air time while not really mentioning much about what’s going to happen with Jerry Dantana and the Genoa case. I guess this has to be properly resolved next season but I was expecting it to be resolved at least mostly in this episode or maybe even to see a Jerry Dantana scene. While I understand that characters such as Will, Charlie and Mackenzie wanted to resign to avoid the case I saw it as a big part of the storyline. Now that they have all decided to stay we get to watch them all fight off Dantana next season. It was good, but I would have like to see something bad happen to Jerry Dantana.
Acting wise, this was episode was great. As it has been for all the season all the actors/actresses absolutely blew everyone away with their roles. Jeff Daniels and Emily Mortimer did a great job in their scenes. Having Jane Fonda more present in this episode was also great as she has a lot of screen presence in the show. I also really like what Olivia Munn and Thomas Sadoski did with their characters in this episode. It looks like we are going to see a Don and Sloan relationship next season….
The directing for this episode and for the season has been great as well and so has the writing. Interestingly though this episode did not seem to time jump at all. It was just one solid block of story. I like this better, but now I’m used to the time jumping which I didn’t originally like in episode 1.
Overall this episode was good, but I don’t know it just seemed too jolly especially towards the end. I also would have liked the ACN team to report on the story about Petraeus to get their credibility back, I guess next episode. It was very entertaining though and I wasn’t bored during it, in fact I liked the episode I was just expecting something different. Will and Mackenzie engaged? Good episode, it was just so jolly.
I do think it has been a great season so far and like the ending that this episode had with everyone giving Will and Mackenzie a clap, I think everyone who worked on the show deserves one to. It’s been a good season to watch and I look forward to season three of the Newsroom in 2014.
