Over the period of seven episodes, I feel I’ve been incredibly positive about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comedy action show about CIA agents trying to balance their lives in the face of an oncoming terrorist attack. Sure, the show wasn’t as funny as it could’ve been and the action was definately lacking, but thanks to my glass-half-full approach, I actually got to a point where I was almost starting to enjoy the company of this farcical, domestic comedy.
However, now the final episode is upon us, it’s time for me to roll up my sleeves and face up to some harsh truths that the season finale makes impossible to ignore and the main one is, while I found FUBAR fairly diverting on a episode by episode basis, as a whole, the show is probably one I wouldn’t have finished if I wasn’t reviewing it for a website. Maybe it was a show built primarily for binging so that you can rip its average nature off in one go, like a plaster, or maybe this entire season has merely been a set up for the next (which was already confirmed long before I wrote these words). Whatever the reason, Episode eight of FUBAR makes one thing abundantly clear. It wasn’t worth it
After being trapped underground with a explosive device due to go off at any moment, Emma and Boro mutually decide to call a temporary truce on their attempts to kill one another and instead try and find a way out of their fiery tomb. While they build a way to a air duct via stacking a bunch of filling cabinets, Boro’s angry rants about how Emma’s father raised him make a few points about Luke’s parenting hit home and while she mulls them over, the father in question has made it to the surface and is desperately looking for a way to save his daughter. After Luke discovers a way out for both Emma and Boro, he is torn between keeping his daughter’s truce with the vengeful terrorist, but while he agonises over his decision, Roo is still trying to re-inflate Aldon’s lung after his wound brings him to death’s door. However, as always, things work out and not only is Aldon saved and Boro seemingly neutralised by his own explosive device, but Barry is even successful in keep Tina from getting transferred.
So all’s well that ends well, right? Well, not really – because months later, we still have the wedding of Luke’s ex-wife, Tally and the sweet, but boring Donnie to muscle through and Emma is angered by her father giving up on his quest to win her back, however, that proves to be the least of their worries when a slightly crispier Boro crashes the wedding to prove he’s not quite dead yet. With their identities in the wind and the truth finally laid bare, it’s time for Luke and Emma lay their cards on the table once and for all.
While FUBAR has made quite clear that it intended to handle both its drama and action with a cou glibness, it’s still quite astonishing that the show offers up a season finale that’s this unaffecting. Compared to the drama and conflict the show managed two or three episodes ago, Episode 8 offers up an annoyingly trite wrap up that feels less stylised and more lazy than anything else. I’d mentioned in earlier reviews that FUBAR’s action was noticably lacking and instead of pulling out the stops, we get an uninspired, wedding-set shoot out that features less thrills and spills than an installment of The Drying Paint Show. Gabriel Luna’s, Boro is ultimately dispatched with a minimum of fuss and it seems that the entire final third of the episode is merely a set-up for the next season, meaning that all the drama we’ve been building to concerning Tally finding out what her family actually does is casually brushed under the carpet without a second thought. It’s the same with Jay Baruchel’s Carter – what was the point of setting up his crumbling relationship with Emma in the first place when we end it here without any resolution whatsoever. The frustrating thing is that if the second season was already greenlit (Arnie’s still got some clought, I see), then the need of a cliffhanger ending that pays of nothing was frankly unnecessary.
While the set up for Season 2, that apparently sees the entire Brunner clan (plus Barry, Aldon and Roo) all going on the run after having their identities potentially leaked to every terrorist and despot on the planet, seems like it could have promise, it’s tough to feel anything but apathy due to the slapdash way it’s all been handled.
On top of this, I feel I have to put the boot in on Schwarzenegger a bit, too. It’s not like I want to, but while I wasn’t expecting a man of his advanced years to be mixing it up like he did back in the day, not only was his action beats noticably lacking, but the guy sounded noticably winded even during the dialogue scenes! Plus, I’m not sure if it was down to his age or the writing was just sucky, but the dude couldn’t even rattle off a snappy one liner like he used to – surely, we are now living in the darkest timeline. Maybe I was expecting too much by witnessing Arnie – Danny DeVito in-joke aside – mercilessly phone it in for his first (and probably last) streaming series, but other aspects pissed me off too. Monica Barbaro’s Emma was nicely relatable and Travis Van Winkle and Fortune Feimster’s double act was frequently fun, but did anyone else visibly cringe every time Milan Carter had to engage in some horribly dated nerd-speak that sounded like the person who wrote it was getting his pop-culture references from wikipedia?
Also, numerous side-stories that were being built up over numerous episodes are also swept off the board in haphazard fashion. The revelation that Tina is, in fact, a mole working for a foreign power has almost no impact at all and the sub-plot involving the two guys from the rival sports supply company may be so shoddily handled, some might not even realised that a joke has actually occured.
With its emotional threads being cleared up with dialogue that would seem weak even for a movie made for the Halmark Channel movie and an action climax that features the worst aspects of having a 70-plus year old lead, the close to FUBAR’s first season frankly isn’t worth the build up; but it’ll be with the second season when we find out if the show is truly fucked up beyond all reason.
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