Containment - Episode 13: Path to Paradise

Previously on Containment: “Yes Is The Only Living Thing”

“The path to paradise begins in hell.” – Dante Alighieri.

I’m not going to lie – I was disappointed in the finale. I was expecting plenty of resolution to The CW’s “LIMITED EVENT SERIES” in Path To Paradise; but instead I (and what remained of the show’s initial viewership) were lead on a tunnel to Sweet Damn All. By the end of the episode, pretty much everybody who was inside at the start of the series stayed inside. They got a new roommate, but that’s about it. Another character commits cold-blooded murder when he doesn’t get his way, but there’s no price to pay – and barring some other poor network taking this on (a-la Nashville), there never will be one. I felt cheated out of a decent closure, and I’m sure most people watching felt the same way, too.

To recap:

Lommers’ attempt to have Internal Affairs foil Lex’s continued efforts to circumvent her authority fall flat – he simply gets up and walks out. Despite IA seizing his and his father’s stuff, he still has an ace up his sleeve: a recording of the conversation he had with Lommers, when he got her to confess that everyone inside the cordon could die and it wouldn’t make the blindest bit of difference to her overall plan to perfect a bioterrorism weapon. Good call, Lex.

So he leaves it with Roy and tells him to find Leo and get it out there, because what he has to do next could prove dangerous. Given one hour to turn back escapees before they can get outside the cordon, he enlists the help of Officer Walden, who’s been aiding Meese in his money-making scheme (only he didn’t know there was money being made, seeing that Meese is an all-round bad guy and it was all need-to-know, anyway). If Lex doesn’t succeed, then Lommers will resume imploding the tunnels under the cordon. It all sounds real exciting, right? We’ll have a race against time, and then the good guys will win, right?

Wrong.

Speaking of Meese’s Pieces – because of the constant implosions, the group gets separated. Xander, Teresa, and their baby are left behind, and end up right back where they started, at the store. They eventually decide to make a go of life behind the cordon. The rest of the group meet Lex’s group of police officers, and deal with that in their own way: Meese shoots Walden dead for ratting on him and ordering him to turn back, while Lex offers to remain behind with Jana because that’s what he wanted all along.

Meanwhile, back at the lab, poor Cinco succumbs to Cannerts’ treatment, but at least his death pointed the doctor in another direction. If he can find another donor with similar antibodies to the drastically depleted Thomas, he could make a few tweaks in the serum. That’s all it takes to cure a pandemic – a tweak here, a twitch there. Sounds legit (and it quite possibly is, but I didn’t look it up on Google). So Jake tries to rally the good people of Cordontown to donate blood for testing. They’re not interested until Jake shames them with listing the names of the dead (including the sorely-missed Katie). When Trey and his thugs turn up as the first in line, everyone else follows suit. It turns out that a priest – yes, you read that right – is a source of the antibody. I gotta go back to church.

The only ones to get the whole end-of-series thing right are Bert and Micheline. Knowing that there was no way out for either of them, Bert laces a couple of glasses of fine wine with sleeping pills. They both die in each other’s arms, listening to music, dancing to the end of love. I found this scene very touching, played well by Charles Black and Sandra Ellis Lafferty. At least there was closure with these characters.

As Lex has run out of time, Lommers orders more implosions. As soon as she does this, the local network releases footage from Lex’s recordings, via Leo blogsite. (Just where he’s been for the last two episodes isn’t explained at all.) Whether or not Lommers will be held accountable for her actions is left hanging, like so many of the individual storylines. Lex is now an inside man, with no plan of what to do next. The people inside the cordon may have access to an antidote sometime in the near future. And Meese has gotten away with murder. So what if Leo and Roy are drinking on their victory, the people that really matter are left behind with no hope of a second season.

A final thought: If you want to find out what a real limited event series is, one where a complete story is told, but with just enough set-up for a possible second season, look no further than Stranger Things.