On Ending a Story

{Major SPOILERS in this article for tv shows: Mr. Robot: Season One (USA), The Killing (AMC), Breaking Bad (AMC)}

How NOT to End a Story

I was hooked on AMC’s The Killing. Addicted. Absolutely loved it–for 12 episodes. Hell, even in the 13th, the Season One Finale, I was in love right up until the last few minutes. Then they broke my heart. They laughed in my face. And then they had the nerve to ask me to come back for more abuse next season. No way. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” I would never be their fool again.

Not everyone agrees with me, of course. One of my very good friends–an intelligent, discerning connoisseur of the cinematic arts–was only slightly irked by the story’s ending, and he tried to talk me into going back for Season Two. But I couldn’t do it.

Here’s why:

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Three on a Match @ Next Iteration Theater Co.

It’s a little scary handing over your play to someone else.

I’ve been doing this for years now, so it gets easier, but it has actually been awhile since one of my plays was in another director’s hands. Of course, it’s a lot easier when that director is Dianne K. Webb.

After sitting in on the first rehearsal, I knew everything was going to be okay.

Houston

Was the city always this cool?

When we first started coming up here from Sweeny, back in the mid-to-late eighties, it was the coolest place in the world, to us. We were escaping a small town filled with rednecks and mouth-breathers to a big city filled with artists and free-thinkers. Coming up Highway 288, there’s a point where the curve of the Earth makes visible the distant skyscrapers of downtown. Actually, I think it’s the Transco that you see first, off to the west, a monolith against the amber horizon. And that distance–the space between that lone tower and the other Olympian peaks clustered farther east, straight ahead in the windshield, growing slowly as you loll closer at 75 mph, music playing on the cassette deck, cigarette smoke streaming out the sliver of opening in the window–that distance awakens you to the enormity of the city. Our city. Houston.

BulletproofRep.com

BulletproofRep.com is up and running. It’s in beta, but of course, it always will be. The purpose of the website is to provide a space to work and to share work. The same is true of this space.

Bulletproof Rep: Work space.

Haberdasher: Word space.