So What The Hell Happened On 'The Passage' Finale?

By Emily Cutler | TV | March 14, 2019 |

By Emily Cutler | TV | March 14, 2019 |

Spoilers

Allow me a brief tangent before I explain just what the hell happened on this season of The Passage. See back in the Before Days (pre-2016 election), I’d recommend my friends watch Mr. Robot. The show might have lost its way, and I might have fallen off, but the first season was good, and I’d tell people as much. Only with one warning: “Just a heads up, but Christian Slater is there.” I had more than one person tell me that the warning was appreciated as the sudden sight of Christian Slater in a high-tech, paranoia show might throw them off. I’ve used a similar technique with recommending The Passage, only now there are different warnings depending on what I believe about the person I’m talking to. There are the you-should-watch-this-vampire-show-but-heads-up-Zack-Morris-is-there people, and there are the you-should-watch-this-Zack-Morris-show-but-heads-up-there-are-vampires people. You all should know which group you fit into.

But more importantly, you should watch this vampire show starring Zack Morris because it turned out surprisingly well. As both Dustin and Joelle can tell you, the majority of the show’s appeal comes from the leads Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Saniyya Sidney. God bless Saniyya for giving the least cloying performance I’ve seen from a child actor in a while, and bless Zack Morris for refusing to lean too hard into either hard-ass or nice guy. Their interplay is phenomenal, and if anyone wants to give us a second show where Saniyya plays a smart-ass pre-teen and Gosselaar plays an army DILF, I’d be happy to watch it.

Of course, there’s also the whole plot and story involved too. I don’t want to yadda-yadda-yadda over the mid-season episodes, but I’m not sure there were a lot of people tuning in to find out how the Tim-Elizabeth-Jonas love triangle was going to resolve itself. Most people were tuning in to see Amy be a bright, capable, yet believable child-badass. Or to see the Agent work his hot daddy charm over everything. Or, most importantly, to see how humanity fought off the vampire scourge, thus allowing Brad and Amy’s escape. So how did it go down?

Seriously SPOILERS

OH SHIT, THEY SUPER DIDN’T.

I mean, technically, Amy and Brad got out, but it was less of an escape, and more of a we-just-bombed-the-building-the-vampires-are-loose-get-the-fuck-out maneuver. Which, incidentally, means THE VAMPIRES SUPER GOT OUT AND TOOK OVER. Sort of. The second half of the two-part finale picks up about a month after the explosion at the NOAH facility, and things are not looking great in the U.S. The vampire virus has been mostly contained to North America, but U.S. cities aren’t doing a great job at fighting off bloodsucking immortals. Must be all that money the boomers poured into infrastructure. Casual bitchiness aside, Amy, Brad, and Lila are holed up in a cabin somewhere in Oregon and seem to be doing OK. Until Lila decides she needs to take the vaccine (remember to vaccinate your children against the monster epidemic!) to the CDC, and Vampire Dr. Tim Fanning sends a vampire after Amy and Brad. Brad kills the Vampire Bob, but not without getting bitten. Amy kills the two humans that lived nearby, who were about to put Brad out of his vampire misery, and instead injects Brad with the last syringe of vampire vaccine in the cabin. I think? I’m going to level with you guys, there was a lot going on in forty-six minutes, and I haven’t even touched on the Clark and Shauna, and their whole Jaime-and-Cersei-minus-the-incest vibe. Just a lot-a lot.

The large point is the last few minutes of the season seems to jump ahead again, although for an unspecified amount of time. Amy’s voiceover says that the world belongs to the vampires now, but there are groups of humans still hiding out in a largish camp. She thinks Brad is still alive, but we’re not entirely sure. What she does tells us explicitly are all of the things the Agent did for her. He taught her what it meant to have a family, how to take care of herself, how to pay attention, how to be ready, and how to not panic. It pretty perfectly brings a show with an atomic winter and vampire plague back to the importance of the relationship between Amy and her Agent. It was also the best way for the season to end given that it hasn’t been picked up for season two yet.

WAIT, IT HASN’T BEEN PICKED UP YET? Shit. Goddamn. Well, still, you should watch it. It’s great. Just heads up that Zack Morris is there.