Unbearably sad ending (spoilers)

First off, I'm a trainee archivist, so Shooting the Past really got to me on a personal level. But I found the last few minutes, especially that final shot of Timothy Spall staring into the camera, almost unwatchably sad. This is why:

None of the characters really understands what Oswald was trying to do. He leaves the trail for them to follow, and it achieves his aims of getting Marilyn to adapt to the modern world and Christopher to embrace his less straightlaced side (remember, throughout episode 2 he correctly predicts what they're both doing even when he's banned from the collection). He knows that the two of them, with a little shove, can change to meet new circumstances.

But he was also erecting a monument of sorts to himself. The "connections", as he calls them, which enable him to find the photo of Christopher in the collection, are open only to his mind, because he knows the collection's contents so well. This is, by the way, the unspoken subtext of the unforgettable Lily Katzmann sequence - Marilyn is only able to tell such a story because of Oswald's incredible knowledge of the collection's photographs.

And so, Oswald leaves the trail partly because it demonstrates his consummate knowledge as the collection's archivist. Only no one quite appreciates this.

Why does he do it, though?

The reason, I think, that Oswald hides the letters from the American company, is because he knows that there is no one who knows the collection as well as he does. There's a rudimentary filing system, but to make the connections between 10,000,000 photos of shop fronts and street scenes requires a degree of familiarity which no new-comer can hope to gain.

Oswald knows that, even if the collection were sold in its entirety, he'd never be rehired because he's behind the times. And he also knows that, even if it's saved, even if it's kept whole, *without him*, the collection will never perform at the same spectacular rate as it does to allow Marilyn to tell the stories of Lily Katzmann and Christopher's grandmother.

The moment the letters arrive, Oswald does the calculations and works out that it's the end, for him and for the collection. That's it. The End. They're both behind the times, both incapable of adapting to change.* And, as Marilyn tells him right at the end, he decided it was time to check out early.

But it goes wrong. Marilyn saves the collection, and saves Oswald. But in selfishly keeping both alive and intact, she wrecks them, renders them both useless relics, of huge sentimental value but incapable of functioning. The archive is now in the hands of an American company who don't really want it, and lacks an Oswald to make it work at full speed, and Oswald... saved from his choice of an early death, he's kept alive, but his mind is broken and he's doomed to a long, institutionalised, sentimentalised life at quarter-speed, kept alive by nurses, visited by friends at the weekend, but borderline useless.

And this is presented to us as a happy ending.

This is why Shooting the Past chokes me up, every time I watch it.

-Matt



*alright, modern digitisation techniques and a host of unpaid volunteers would, in reality, make short work of the collection, but Poliakoff's created a slightly artificial world in which to tell most effectively a human tragedy. Rather like Sophocles' "Oedipus Tyrannos"