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Well that felt a little rushed. Hindsight is 20/20 and everything, but I wonder whether Tim Kring didn't miscalculate when he rewrote this episode as an impromptu season finale. Instead of leaving a bunch of threads hanging sort in a sort of enormous cliffhanger, he's instead capped them off in a really unsatisfying way. In my mind, this actually provides far less incentive to tune in for the next season – whenever that may occur.
My biggest criticism of the episode is that we still don't have a terribly good explanation for why Adam wants to destroy humanity. It feels lazy to chalk this up to insanity, yet what other information do we have? With his biblical name and explicit references to God and his flood, it feels like the show's writers were intending to create something much grander with Adam. But in the end all we got was a vague speech about wars and plagues, before concluding that the world would be better off without humans. Humans suck - there's no getting around that - but the inner-grade-school-teacher in me really wants Adam to show his work here, instead of just blurting out the answer.
Also ruined by being rushed: the Noah-Claire reunion. What could have been a
timeless piece of slap-stick comedy got compressed down into one of the weirdest two minutes I've seen on TV. The dialog was weird, the timing was weird, and the reactions were weird. It was all weird. The whole scene could have been acted out by monkeys on a trampoline and come off more fluidly. What a wasted opportunity.