The Ending Everyone Hates

Right, so, I'm going to say it, and I'd like it noted that I said it in a pub full of people wearing the t-shirt: I liked the ending. Silence at the table. Josh does the thing with his eyebrows. Anita actually puts her drink down. "You liked it." "I liked it." "The ending. The actual ending. The one from Sunday." "Yes." "With the boat." "With the boat, yes." Look, I understand. I've read the same threads as everyone. I know the show built up six years of something and then the last forty minutes went a different way. I know people wanted the big fight and they got a conversation instead. I know the boat is, on the face of it, ridiculous. But here's what I think, and I said this to the table, and I'm saying it to you: the show was never about the fight. It said that in the first episode. The very first scene. Two people on a doorstep, and one says "what if we just didn't," and the other laughs. Six years later they don't. That's the ending. It was always going to be the ending. Everyone just forgot, because the middle bit was exciting. "That's revisionism," says Josh. "It's literally the first scene." "Nobody remembers the first scene." "I remember the first scene." "You've got a problem, then." Anita's quieter. Anita, I know, cried at the boat. She's told me she cried at the boat "out of rage", but I've seen Anita cry out of rage and it's a different face. "The boat was too long," she says. "The boat was exactly as long as it needed to be." "Nobody needs eleven minutes of boat." "They needed to sit with it. We needed to sit with it. That was the point. You don't get the big music and the cut to black. You get eleven minutes of two people on a boat working out what to do next, because that's what it's actually like." "What's actually like?" "Anything. Ending anything." That got a bit of silence. Then Josh said "that's very deep for a Wednesday" and went to the bar, and Anita looked at me for a second longer than she needed to.

"I did like the bit where he gave her the coat," she said, quietly, so the others couldn't hear. "I know." "Don't tell Josh." "I won't." She picked her drink back up. So that's my position. I'm not going to win this. I know I'm not going to win this. Every review, every thread, every podcast is going to say the same thing for the next ten years, and then in about fifteen there'll be a piece somewhere called "Was the boat right all along?" and I'm going to print it out and bring it to this pub and put it on this table. Anyway. Josh is back. Whose round is it.