Thus, the season and the series come to a close. This episode had quite a few loose ends to tie up, but it did it fairly well.
Of course, the first matter of business is dealing with Augustin and his cult. He announces that he doesn't plan on stopping with the town. Despite seemingly having a finite number of cultists from 400 years ago, he reveals that he plans to spread their influence worldwide. Then again, they did get large numbers under their thrall via the statue, so there is at least an established method of achieving the goal. Even though Annie and the others are unaware of this, it does add some degree of pressure for them to succeed.
The plan is pretty simple: Annie and Chance will go retrieve Joy while Nadia and Abdi set up explosives in the tunnels to blow up the crypts and especially the statue.
The episode does try to throw in some tension. Chance gets noticed almost immediately when she roams the crowd searching for Joy. She does try to play along and act hypnotized, but it doesn't work. We also see her drawing a gun, apparently going for a "take as many with me as I can" play, but they stop that too. Upon seeing this, Annie lets herself get caught so that she can rat out the whole operation in the hope of negotiating Joy's release. Joy has been her priority from the jump, but that was still pretty messed up. She doesn't really suffer any consequence for it either. Chance calls her on it, but that's about it.
Were it not for Pop's preparation, the operation would have failed. Even though we saw him inject himself prior to his confrontation with Augustin, it was still awesome to see his foresight. His ability to pretend to be Etienne was also impressive. The scene has the added bonus of bringing the schisma back into the fold and revealing how it ties into everything that's happening.
All in all, Pop does manage to allow his adopted children to end the threat once and for all. Sure enough, blowing up the statue does work, as the townspeople are freed from the spell and are left to flee in terror from the immense swarm of flies that has emerged.
You could argue that it's a little anti-climactic. All of this happens within the first 15 minutes of the episode, but the last episode put quite a bit of focus on a more direct confrontation.
It was a little weird to see the "angel" react. He's not mad. He doesn't seem disappointed that the 400- year plan was brought to a screeching halt. He just turns around, walks a few steps and disappears into thin air.
The rest of the episode focuses squarely on Annie and Joy as they try to rebuild their lives after what has transpired.
Annie does make a genuine effort to reach out to Joy, but she seems indifferent. It's pretty jarring and it does lay the groundwork for what Annie does later on in the episode. Given what we see, you can't really fault Annie for coming to the conclusion that she did. A part of me was expecting it all to be in her head. It's clear that she is still taking fake medication, as she still hears voices; but from what we see, everything happened as we saw it, she just picked up the wrong cues and concluded that Joy was still possessed.
There's another twist regarding Joy's fate. You kind of see it coming just because of how it plays out and because of how Annie ends up later. The episode doesn't spend too much time on it and there are plenty of hints to suggest it. Still, it made for a good episode ending reveal and it puts Annie on the path to do what she does in the original novel.
We do see her pick up and start reading one of Paul's books. At first, I thought that she and Joy would bond over it and that would feed the hold the material has on her, but she goes off and reads the books on her own. It happens quite a few times, so the suggestion that she's hooked is quite strong. I'm not sure I buy her claim that she's his number one fan, though. She didn't come off as that obsessed with it, not yet anyway.
All in all, it was a solid denouement. It wrapped things up and tied Annie's story back to where we know it. The focus on character actually worked overall and the acting was quite strong on both Caplan's and Fisher's parts. It was a good watch.
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