Inheritance and Legacy in Season Four

The force of season three’s ending stems from tensions in serial television drama between the conclusive and the ongoing. The meeting of the fatal gunshot with the season’s terminal cut to black marks Jesse’s sudden murder of Gale as a terrible act of completion. At the same time, no small weight is carried in our felt awareness of how this must deform whatever remains of Jesse’s life yet to be lived. The ending thus achieves its poise between a sense of events being irrevocably sealed and of their persisting force into a future they promise to always shape and limit. There are of course many celebrated films that similarly end by evoking the past’s sometimes inescapable restriction of what may be possible in the future. The pathos of the final moments of Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), for example, depends upon, in James Harvey’s words, the characters’ shared recognition of ‘too lateness’, seen in their capacity to ‘accept what cannot be unsaid or undone’.1 Another case is Jacques Tourneur‘s Out of the Past (1947), in which the characters’ histories leave them very little, but crucially some, just enough, room to act and so to retrieve a degree of their capacity to give intentional and therefore meaningful shape to their lives.2