Rabbit Hole Season 1 Finale Review: A Serviceable, But Preachy End To A Wasted Season
The Rabbit Hole Season 1 finale ties everything up and delivers some fun plot twists, but ultimately just doesn't hit that hard.
RABBIT HOLE SEASON 1 FINALE REVIEW SCORE
If you’re a 24 fan who was worried Paramount+‘s Rabbit Hole would somehow surpass the more well known action drama, I think you can feel secure that Kiefer Sutherland‘s more recent part as John Weir won’t overtake Jack Bauer as his signature role. The Rabbit Hole Season 1 finale arrived over the weekend, and while the show has improved since I wrote my series premiere review, it hasn’t earned my vote for a Season 2 renewal. “Ace in the Hole” pulls off some fun twists, but not only does its most important bombshell not feel earned, but it’s a surprisingly preachy episode.
The last few episodes leading up to the Rabbit Hole Season 1 finale reveal that the ultimate plan of the villain Crowley is the passing of legislation that will give him invaluable data on every single American. John races to do the only thing he believes can stop Crowley — to reveal to the public that Edward Homm (Rob Yang) isn’t dead, and to have Homm expose Crowley’s schemes.
The fight to get Homm to the press is filled with surprises, including multiple characters switching sides and the narrative playing fast and loose with our sense of time. The final stroke of Weir’s masterpiece is when we learn one character in particular was much more important than we realized. Unfortunately, the character in question shows up so rarely in Rabbit Hole that when we find out who they really are in the finale, the surprise feels unearned or at least extremely dulled.
The audience is ultimately delivered a sanctimonious speech about how we surrender information so easily on social media or while using the Internet to shop, and it’s a sentiment that perhaps might hit harder if it wasn’t being delivered by a program accessible exclusively from an online streaming platform.
While Peter Weller (RoboCop) appears to be the Big Bad in earlier episodes, in the penultimate episode, “Gilgamesh,” we learn he’s really just another puppet of the much more powerful Crowley. We finally get to see Crowley in the Rabbit Hole season finale, and the reveal of who’s playing him should be a joyful moment for fans of the actor’s work, but it’s also a confusing one. He’s a wonderful actor and I can only imagine the rest of the series would have benefited from his appearances more than it’s helped by his man-behind-the-curtain reveal at the very end of the season.
Which brings me to perhaps the biggest disappointment about Rabbit Hole overall, not just the finale. Along with Sutherland, the show gives us some wonderful acting talent that is ultimately wasted. Charles Dance (Game of Thrones) — whose most visible roles are almost always villains — does a wonderful play against type in this series.
Enid Graham (Mare of Easttown) is perfect as the FBI agent pursuing Weir, and in particular, I was surprised with the performance of Walt Klink (The English) as the turncoat Intern. Klink doesn’t have a lot of lines in the series, but when he does he delivers them with a genuine intensity. He gives off a very Timothée Chalamet vibe, and I hope we see a lot more of him soon.
But this truly wonderful cast seems wasted on a series that takes a while to figure out what it wants to be.
I sometimes feel like so much so-called “premiere television” has such a serious tone that I really should lock myself in a room with nothing but funny but brainless sitcoms to binge for a month, just to cleanse myself of all the doom and gloom. But Rabbit Hole, from the premiere to the season 1 finale, is the kind of show that definitely deserves a more urgent and earnest feel, but keeps awkwardly dipping into disingenuous levity. That’s no more true than in the romance between Weir and Hailey (Meta Golding).
In my series premiere review, I called it “The Bourne Identity by way of The CW,” and I stand by that. For a series like this to succeed, we need to feel the world-shattering stakes the heroes are dealing with. Generic dating humor and jokes about Homm finding out his wife isn’t exactly mourning his supposed death drain any sense of urgency out of the series.
Maybe it’s just my pet peeve about characters in movies and TV series falling in love while they should be, you know, focusing on not being murdered in their sleep, but I believe the romance between Weir and Hailey about as much as I believe Flat Earth conspiracy theories (which is to say I don’t, just to be clear).
Rabbit Hole is engaging enough that if it does earn a renewal after the season 1 finale, I’ll be there for season 2. But if that season 2 arrives, I hope the show learns from its missteps.
