Big Little Lies finale reaction: critics slam ‘insufferable’, ‘lacklustre’ season two ending
*Mild spoiler warning* Fans and critics are divided over the show’s climax
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Your support makes all the difference.While it has already birthed a number of fresh Laura Dern memes, the finale of Big Little Lies season two has otherwise been met with a critical drubbing, with critics slamming the “insufferable” end to a season that has been plagued with controversy in recent weeks.
Despite the season beginning with a host of positive reviews, with many critics expressing that its early episodes justified its very existence despite the show’s first season largely providing closure to the show’s cast of characters, it has been met with negative criticism in recent weeks.
For USA Today, Kelly Lawler criticised the show’s “insufferable end” but explained that the season as a whole contained none of the emotional complexity of its first season. “The biggest crime of season two is that it didn’t really say anything, whereas season one was loquacious,” she wrote. “The new episodes flirted with exploring the effects of trauma, but the writers shrugged when it came to finding a deeper meaning to suffering than that it simply sucks.”
IndieWire’s Ben Travers noted that the show’s acting was its sole saving grace, writing: “This group of actresses is so talented that they can make even the most dunderheaded scripts entertaining.” Added Alan Sepinwall in Rolling Stone: “These great performances were in service to a story whose merits washed away in the Monterey surf a long time ago.”
Many have also been quick to blame the show’s behind-the-scenes conflicts for the season’s creative downturn, on the heels of an IndieWire story that revealed filmmaker Andrea Arnold had been locked out of the editing room and had her work cut to ribbons without her knowledge by director Jean-Marc Vallée, who directed the show’s first season.
“To a large degree, the lost dramatic threads of this season, particularly where characters like Jane and Bonnie are concerned, have felt like casualties of Arnold’s sidelining,” wrote Aja Romano in a Vox review that called the finale “lacklustre” and “disappointing”. “As though somewhere in-between Vallée’s choppy editing and jump cuts are scenes where we could have gotten a richer sense of each character’s internal stakes.”
Twitter, however, appears to be more satisfied. A sequence in which Laura Dern’s character Renata took a baseball bat to her cheating husband’s model train collection has inspired a number of Beyoncé comparisons, while others contrasted Celeste’s legal finesse with that of Elle Woods, the heroic underdog lawyer played by Reese Witherspoon in the comedy classic Legally Blonde.
Memes, which have rapidly become the language in which we have spoken about Big Little Lies this season, have also been deployed in less celebratory ways, with others expressing slight bafflement at a closer that appeared to reflect a messy, directionless season of television.
The Big Little Lies finale will be shown on Sky Atlantic tonight at 9pm.
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