PrimeWire

TL;DR: Great premise of science vs. faith and the nature of good and evil; good mix of episode arcs and an overall story arc - at first. But each season the episodes drifted farther away from the premise towards “faith, not science” and the overall story arc has left hanging threads undeveloped and a core conflict underdeveloped despite knowing the end is coming (to the show, that is ;) ).

The premise of the show is brilliant, with the trio of sorta-ghostbusters giving the writers a fun way of letting “hard” science, “soft” science, and faith duke it out over these unexplained phenomena without having to do some kind boring talking-head docudrama. Adding in an equally unexplained and ambiguous opposition (Leland et al) and not ending with a definite “is/isn’t explainable” answer all the time is good too, makes it easy to suspend disbelief.

But since S1, the writing has been slipping and everything’s been drifting into a Whedonless version of Buffy or Angel. The scientific parts of the show have been reduced to a question of “are they hallucinating or is the supernatural stuff the answer to every episode now?” In S4 now they’ve taken the next disappointing step and tried to turn things with scientific explanations into supernatural stuff - debate’s over, faith won and science isn’t real. Which makes me wonder if they hired QAnon to be a writer this season. ;) It’s devolved into one of the apocalypse arcs from Buffy but is still missing something.

That’s the other problem with the writing slipping - the show had teased an overall story arc that was related to what was behind the episodic events in the show. It started to develop it into the Buffy-ish apocalyptic event of great evil (the whole demonic race?) coming to NYC. But nothing’s been wrapped up and more questions have been introduced without any clear answers about how they all fit together. Try stretching the “EPA dick frees all the ghosts” montage in the original Ghostbusters movie into a whole series, and maybe mention once in a while that Angel’s Wolfram and Hart legal firm is where the Evil demons are based as the overall arc. That’s what it’s turned into.

And god help me (not sure which one(s) I’m asking, though), I keep hearing Grand Nagus Zek from DS9 whenever Wallace Langham talks to David et al., and the priests from the Entity remind me so much of the Special Fathers from Lucy, Daughter of the Devil, that I can’t help but laugh whenever they show up.