The Guardian view on ending stories: it’s hard to do
It’s not just breaking up, but ending, that can be hard to do. How many departing audiences have said wistfully, of the play they have just seen, “The first half was so much better than the second”? Thrillers, as a genre, are prone to the anticlimactic ending, as loose ends are – or aren’t – tied up neatly and pyrotechnics are dampened, sometimes to fading to a splutter. For many, the understated ending of season six of the BBC TV drama Line of Duty came as a disappointment. Still, the fact that the series did not finish with guns blazing but, rather, with the weary recognition that corruption is banal, unglamorous and omnipresent, seemed peculiarly apt for the political moment.
Epics, no less than twisty-turny police procedurals, find endings difficult. Delay is their stock in trade, a necessary means of stretching and complicating their action. Hence, Achilles sulks in his tent for much of Homer’s Iliad; in the Odyssey, the hero fails to get home for 10 years (albeit spending many of them trapped comfortably on the nymph Calypso’s island). In Virgil’s Aeneid, Rome’s national epic, there must be a difficult and eventful journey from Asia Minor to Italy, followed by a war, before the hero, Aeneas, can truly be said to have fulfilled his epic purpose. A compliant Achilles, a navigationally successful Odysseus, or an unopposed Aeneas, would have made for substantially less epic epics. As it is, these poems find it easier to be in the middle of the tangle of their events than to wrap them up, and none of these poems ends in ways that have uncomplicatedly satisfied their audiences over the millennia.
The Iliad perhaps comes off best: the dead hero Hector is mourned by his mother, sister, wife and, crucially, sister-in-law, Helen – the woman who was the pretext for the war in the first place. That brings a closure of sorts. The Odyssey, on the other hand, requires actual divine intervention, in the form of the goddess Athena, to force a close to the action, which otherwise shows signs of rumbling on indefinitely.
The Aeneid ends with its hero butchering his enemy Turnus while the latter begs for mercy. It is a harrowing moment, leaving wide open the morality of Aeneas’s – and Rome’s – imperial project and causing debate on its force and meaning for two millennia. Wagner, perhaps, was the great master at holding and consummating tension on an epic scale, as in the final (though not unambiguous) scene of Götterdämmerung, or Tristan and Isolde, which resolves, after four hours, with an explosion of throbbing, aching, ebbing ecstasy.
And yet in the epic ending there is often the hint of a beginning to come. In some versions of the manuscript of the Iliad, there follows an extra pair of lines: “And there came an Amazon, the daughter of great-hearted Ares,” a reminder that the Iliad was once part of a much greater cycle of poems. Similarly, we are told in the Odyssey that Odysseus will soon set out on yet another journey. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote, “There is nothing final about homecoming … the home-comer will set out again, and return again.” A police procedural is not an epic poem. But still: one should not rule out a seventh season.