Summary
Yet another Netflix series ends unsatisfactorily in “Bloody But Unbow’d”, which leaves us with more questions than answers.
Well, here we are, folks – yet another Netflix series which barely ends in order to justify a second season. V-Wars Episode 10 isn’t as egregious as some I’ve seen, but it’s fairly close; a bunch of unanswered questions and unresolved story strands, a time jump, and so on, and so forth. This isn’t an ending, really, but unless the show does numbers it’ll be the only one this story gets.
Anyway, “Bloody But Unbow’d” begins with some bits and bobs involving Mila (Laura Vandervoort) and Elysse (Bo Martyn), which doesn’t end well, and Dez (Kyle Breitkopf) and Amelie (Sarah Abbott), which suggests it won’t end well a bit further down the line. But in good news, Senator Giroux (Laura de Carteret) and Luther (Ian Somerhalder) announce a revolutionary product to help with the infection, right when everyone seems to need it most. Mike (Adrian Holmes) is unable to feed, is losing his powers, and is behaving unpredictably, and it isn’t long before one of his own tries to kill him and Ava (Sydney Meyer), rather predictably, assumes control of the Bloods.
More on that in a moment, since there are further developments in Calix’s (Peter Outerbridge) master plan, which has turned him into a vampire. But we also learn that he poisoned BludSub, and the infection has been spread via the water supply to untold millions. These two strands quickly weave together, as Dez is kidnapped by the Bloods, and Ava announces to the world that Calix is their new leader.
Very little of this makes much sense to me. I imagine it perhaps would if it had actually been developed, but it seems to come out of nowhere and leaves more questions than answers. The final sequence occurs four months later, with Luther heading out to stop Calix, but it’s a lazy cliff-hanger that requires the passage of time to have occurred without any obvious effects. Right before this, Mila and Dani (Kimberly-Sue Murray) had a confrontation in the woods that we never got a resolution to either – as I said at the top, this isn’t an ending, it’s simply a show being cut off virtually halfway through.
You must imagine how much of an audience is going to put up with this. Will they return for a second season because they’re genuinely invested and interested in what happens next, or will they avoid it out of annoyance and apathy? Is this a smart way of encouraging fan interest and securing a second season greenlight so more of the story can be told, or is it a cynical way of making audiences wait for a story that probably should have ended a couple of episodes prior? I’ve enjoyed V-Wars a fair bit, probably slightly more than most will, and I’ve tried to be fair in my assessment of it, but this is always the point where I question whether the previous nine episodes were worth a tenth that couldn’t be bothered to wrap things up.
How other people feel about all this will likely determine whether we go through all this again next year. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
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