Spartacus: War of the Damned, Episode 10 - "Victory"
From day one,
Spartacus defied the rules.
We all know the rules of television, even if we don't
know we know them. For example, we know that arcs move slowly, with maybe one major change of status quo per season (having two means people will call you "fast-paced").
Spartacus said "That's okay, we'd like our show to move with ferocity and purpose and cataclysmically shatter the status quo about every two or three episodes," and did just that.
We know an "epic" battle by TV standards means about twenty guys on each side (or maybe fifty in the case of
Game of Thrones' $12 million extravaganza "Blackwater").
Spartacus decided that wasn't good enough and that they'd like battles that rival those in
Lord of the Rings or
Braveheart and that, defying finances, logic and maybe even simple physics, they'd like to do them on a shoestring budget with more than one a season, and so it was.
We all know there's supposed to be a couple major character deaths in a TV season at most.
Spartacus decided it would like to slaughter over half the cast
every season, and slaughter they did.
We all know that a successful show – much less the highest-rated on an entire network, which
Spartacus was – is supposed to run on and on until it's squeezed bone-dry and the fire in its belly is but embers.
Spartacus decided three main seasons was just right (plus the prequel miniseries
Gods of the Arena), because they'd like every season to be completely different from the others and for each to tell a whole and satisfying story with a thunderous climax that leaves you wanting more.
Spartacus excelled above where it was expected and frankly where it was allowed to from day one. Stuck on a third-tier premium cable channel, it said "Fuck it, this is an opportunity!" and became that channel's highest-rated show and flagship property. It attempted and powerfully pulled off a grand, sweeping war epic on a small budget with little star power. It never got 1% the respect it demanded, its passion and energy and sheer, intense visceral pleasure baffling TV critics used to thinking of cable dramas as being something dry and grim and antiheroic.
Where other shows added to or, in the ballsiest cases, bent the unwritten but unmistakably felt and omnipresent TV Drama Rulebook,
Spartacus took that damn rulebook and fed it into a shredder.
Where other shows were content to tell stories,
Spartacus seared a
legend across our TV screens.
So perhaps the only course left for a show that lived to break the rules – a show that lived to shatter expectations and deliver one crazy "HOLY SHIT!" twist after another after another – to break the rules one final time was by breaking its
own rules and choosing to more or less align with history in its final hour. For a show that constantly went directions I couldn't have predicted, it's interesting that
Spartacus pretty much ends how I figured it would since the beginning of
War of the Damned, if not since the beginning of the series.
And this predictable – even predestined – hour was one of the most stirring, marvelous, thrilling, emotional, heart-pounding and heartrending episodes of television I've ever witnessed and easily one of the two or three best series finales in television history.
In this sense it reminds me of
Friday Night Lights' "Always," the best series finale ever (and perhaps the only one I've seen that trumps "Victory"), which put an abrupt halt to the plot-heavy nature of the episodes leading into it and let pure, stirring emotion carry it home. Twists are awesome, and
Spartacus had dozens, but "Victory" cements the idea that a truly great series finale doesn't need a mind-bending twist and perhaps even actively
shouldn't have one. When you reach the end of a terrific story, what counts isn't exploding expectations, but taking it home. And
Spartacus took it home masterfully, bloodily and beautifully.
