This might sound weird, but I have a bit of a gripe with every story having a perfectly happy ending. And by “perfectly happy,” I mean, “the villain is flawlessly defeated, nobody dies, the heroes walk away completely unscathed, roll credits.”
I mean, there’s nothing wrong with a feel-good hero story every now and again, but more and more, I’d rather the story NOT have everybody make it out in one piece.
For example:
Zyri fanboys over Flashpoint
Flashpoint. In my opinion, it’s probably one of the best police dramas ever made. If you don’t know of it, it’s a show that follows the Canadian ERT, who are, as best as I can tell, SWAT-adjacent.
Anyhow, one episode of Flashpoint has a situation develop where, while trying to disarm and deescalate a situation, one of the team unknowingly steps onto an armed anti-personnel mine.
I’m pretty sure I don’t have to explain the level of bad this is. Certainly, the guy’s team doesn’t need it explained to them, as they throw themselves into trying to figure out how to get their buddy off that mine, preferably un-exploded.
This leads into the entire rest of the episode being the team trying to strategize a way to save their buddy, while the poor guy is left to just stand, for hours, on a military-grade explosive that will kill him the instant he sneezes. And even watching this something like an hour-long long episode, you can feel how long it’s taking and how more and more desperate everybody’s getting, and how less and less likely it is that they’ll pull him out alive.
Then, one of the team gets a bright idea, which basically amounts to that old heist movie stunt where they swap the diamond with a rock to keep the alarm from triggering.
Problem is, by this point, several hours in-canon have gone by. This guy is exhausted. He’s seen the writing on the wall, and “just a few more minutes and we’ll get you out” ain’t happening. He doesn’t have a few more minutes left in him. And besides, this scheme his team have concocted depends on the mine not immediately going off the second he shifts his weight, and continuing to not go off long enough for them to slam a weight roughly as heavy as himself onto said mine too keep the plunger down, and continuing, again, to not go off long enough for him to run out of its blast range to safety. It’s not happening.
So, the guy calmly pulls out his phone, calls up his parents, tells them he loves them and is grateful for all they’ve done for him. Then he pops into comms and tells his team that it’s alright, they did everything they could, it’s not their fault, and when one teammate starts in with the reassurances that they’ll have him out in no time, “Yeah man, you’re right, it’s gonna be okay, we’ll get you out of there, I promise!”, he simply says, “That isn’t what I meant.”
And then he steps off the mine and lets the inevitable take its course.
Cue his team falling dead silent, still as the grave, and then completely falling to shambles as the weight of what just happened hits them all in the chest.
They saved the day, they got the bad guy, but the cost was losing one of their own, and nothing they did was enough to stop it.
That episode more than a little screwed me up when I first saw it. It’s a large part of why I have such high praise for Flashpoint.
And it’s why I can’t help but be annoyed these days by stories where everything works out without a hitch. Come on, damn it, put some stakes on the line!
