Wow! This Thing Went Down The Tubes Even Faster Than Sons Of Anarchy

I was binging on this and enjoying it. It had good pacing and engaging characters and, perhaps most important of all, it didn’t insult my intelligence. I’m now near the end of Season 3, and it’s all turned to contrived, facile, lazy-writing dust. The series had always given us a real-world, omniscient view of the narrative—until Amanda manipulated Alex’s mind, and we were handed essentially a dream sequence of her captivity, only later learning that she has been brainwashed. This is the equivalent of writing, “And then she woke up. It had all been a dream.” Contemptible. Amanda has become the most one-dimensional antagonist imaginable, her sole motive being to “hurt Nikita.” She doesn’t even pay attention to her mission’s funding, telling Owen that all the Russian wealth is gone because she doesn’t “care about money.” So I therefore cannot believe that she is crafty enough to manipulate the events the series asks us to believe that she does. In the first two seasons, Amanda was a charming, slithering, sexy snake who got my attention. They’ve turned her into a blowup doll.

I’m done. I pulled the plug on SOA. I’m pulling the plug on this. What a waste, and what an insult to the audience.

Not for nothing, I am fully aware that there is a manner of “happy ending” to this series. I do not care. The writing has become offensively lazy and stupid; the development of the characters sophomoric. I guess the writers for this were all hired for Arrow.