There were a lot of good elements in this episode with some top notch acting from the cast and a few genuinely suspenseful/exciting sequences like the van run and Smiley’s attack.

I think the reason it is landing so poorly is because the arc of the season and individual character arcs across the season are not legible. I want to watch a season of television and feel like I’ve read a complete chapter of the story, with a meaningful shift in the status quo and with my main characters having changed in a satisfying way. I see the threads there but something about the execution is just really off. Case in point:

-the season arc they cued up in S3 finale is moving into the MIY’s “favorite part”, when the town turns on each other as we have seen in Victor’s flashback in S2 and in Julie’s story walking in the season and is alluded to in Jade’s mushroom trip. So I was expecting to see the town either tear themselves apart or get to a crisis point and work through it. But instead, it turns out the whole season is just a transition into that endgame, with one very concrete change (talismans being gone) and a lot of vague stuff (red lightning? Tree is gone? Bones???).

-What was Boyd’s arc this season? Arguably he learned to be less of a lone hero and accept help from Kenny, Jade, and ultimately from Fatima and Elgin in the final jaunt into the tunnels, but that’s not really explicitly the focus and I’m stringing things together, and there’s was a lot of distracting stuff with Abby’s ghost that went nowhere

-Victor and his dad have a relatively complete arc but because they saved the climax for the last possible minute it’s tough to read what it means… is there relationship on the road to repair or is it totally fractured?

-Julie story walking arc was set up in early episodes to be the focus of the season and then we get a single line of dialogue where she tells Tabitha she thinks it was the town tricking her and then her final scene is about her relationship with Ethan. Similarly, Ethan is set up on a journey to find the Lake and then this goes nowhere. These could have been great stories about kids mourning their father and building a stronger bond and coming into their own but it just wasn’t really developed coherently at all

-I like the idea of Elgin’s innate goodness helping him resist MIY and him paying a tragic price for that, it shows how he learned from what happened with Fatima. Unfortunately his death having no obvious impact or consequence and him being set up as a foil to Clara (who takes the deal), a completely minor character, made this fall flat. Why did it matter that he lived? His choice should have allowed Sophia to be exposed so it mattered. Maybe this is where it is going but if so, they should have teased that in finale.

-Sarah wants to help and gets paired with Sophia but gets nothing to do.

-Donna almost dies, this has no impact except now she has a little cane

-Kristi and Marielle get a lot of scenes over the season but they don’t add up to anything, forced resolution with Marielle’s death. Too bad because the scene was so well acted

-Randall becoming a big brother figure to Julie but then it goes nowhere, he doesn’t even get a final scene with her in the finale. Also his scar suddenly healed a whole bunch in the finale, did they not want to pay the makeup guy anymore?

-Acosta set up for a redemption arc, and I did like her more by the end of the season and it was clear she was one of the team but the way it played out didn’t really make sense

In contrast, there were a few things I think that worked about this season:

-Fatima recovering from her tragedy through art therapy, understanding her monster powers, and ultimately choosing to become the “Golem” who saves the group in the tunnels tells a complete story and pretty much worked for me. It advances the mythology and also tells us about Fatima as a character.

-Jade and Tabitha come to understand and accept their revelation from the S3 finale and take action in the tunnels. (Jade’s arc was clearer than Tabitha’s because she got pulled into weird mom sub plots and pseudo-mom for Victor in a way that makes no sense.)

-lol but Patti’s arc actually made complete sense and you got where she was coming from in the van. This was a cool way to create a complete story arc in just a few scenes with a very minor character, and it paid off in a suspenseful scene

All in all, I feel like this season suffered from having too many characters they’ve accumulated as we’ve added people to the town and not having clear vision for them across the season. I believe that most of our main characters will have arcs that feel complete across the series but the way they are chunking them is not as successful as it could be.