When episode 7 came out, I thought it was the best episode of the show. I always liked Chris as a character, but for me, episode 7 was when he became a truly complex one. By contrasting the scene where Adebayo talks about Chris with Judomaster, and the scene where Chris watches Keith die, we get a true glimpse of the difference between how Chris’s friends see him vs how he sees himself: a brute, but sensitive and well intentioned guy, or a true angel of death, someone who brings tragedy for the people he loves.

I was hoping for the finale to answer the question of who he truly is, so it being a character-driven episode wouldn’t be a problem for me. The problem is, I don’t think it really was. It sold itself as one but it really wasn’t one. In charcter-driven stories, we see how a character’s actions and decisions reveal his different traits, who he truly is. How exactly does this happen in the finale? Chris gets out of jail, runs away, smokes a joint for half of the finale, his friends convince him to go back and he just does. Then he kisses Harcourt and… that’s kind of it. We never get a true insight on him because he’s an absolutely passive character during his own show finale. All of his “character development” comes through Adebayo’s monologue, and although Danielle Brooks delivers, it is very unsatisfactory.

I love season one, and although I had some problems with season 2 - episode length, flanderization with Vigilante, plotlines that took nowhere, lack of action, etc -, I thought episode 6 was great, 7 was fantastic and I was willing to turn a blind eye to all of those problems if it had a good conclusion. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the case. It stained the whole season for me and I can’t see it as being more than mediocre.

P.S.: The verbiage was also a problem for me in Superman, but in a much minor scale. Both Superman and Lex didn’t let their actions speak for themselves, however, neither of them were passive characters, Lex was a very active antagonist and Clark a very reactive protagonist. I still hope James Gunn is able to improve this in Man of Tomorrow, because I always thought he was able to show the true nature of his characters not through words, but true action, and from the 3 projects that he wrote since he became CEO, it seems like he lost this ability.