Many philosophies, myths, religions, schools of thought have an idea of cyclical recreation.  The best known examples are the Phoenix or the Ouroboros.  It’s a comforting idea that everything we know will continue to go on and on and that the ends of things are just the beginnings of other things.  It gives us hope that this life is not all there is, it allows us a certain measure of ease that there can be second and third and forth chances.

The tail devouring serpent lead us all the way down a path that started in with a blast heard around the universe and ended with the rebirth of a story.  Sadly that’s where it will end.

We ended last time with everything seemingly on the up and up with the exception of Reena who still nurtured a kernel of chaos.  Well, unfortunately 01 Boxer doesn’t keep his word and allows the link to open.  Charlie, fresh off a night of adventure with Blues, goes to stop him.  What happens next is roughly 40 minutes of acid tripping.  Conversations are had in between universes, all the players speak in riddles, people disappear and it generally felt like someone explaining their dream to you after they’ve had a case of beer and you’ve removed your brain, covered it in sugar and fire ants and put it back in your head.  Here’s the gist.  01 figures it’s better to take the chance to keep the Link up.  Charlie, Karl, Blues and Reena try to stop him but Charlie ends up shifting between universes and being stuck in a sort of netherverse where 01 continually tortures him with unanswerable questions, one liners and his boots to the face.  All the while we keep hearing, “This, we did not expect.”  Charlie keeps feeling off, saying it’s not real.

The good guys deduce that the only way to save Beta and Gamma is to send Charlie into the Link and have him shift and pull all three verses together.  So he does, but now he’s trapped – forever.  But the universes now know of each other and it’s likely Alpha will flood people into Beta and Gamma.  Reena gets to go home, Karl goes with her.  Blues stays in Beta.  Wrapping things up completely, we see Sew Sew and Jasmine enjoying Alpha’s new prosperity announcement via a wide area broadcast and a scene with a drunk Julius Galt seeing visions of Essa Rompkin.

There were other parts of the story including an odd trial scene with Charlie, 01 and Essa where Charlie was tied to some rocks and blindfolded while 01 waved a gun around.  Also, the box that Reena had last week was apparently instructions or a signal for her to do something to the Link but we don’t know what.  I think she’s a bomb of some kind or would have acted as a reflector and pulled the Link back in on itself.  It doesn’t matter, Karl talks her down and they let Charlie do his thing.

And his thing succeeded.  Holes open up between the universes, but where’s Charlie?  Well, last we see of him, he and 01 are somewhere with smashed ice, holding it together to create water.  Charlie says he can’t do it without 01.  But the, after flashbacks to the first part of the episode, we see he’s in a hospital bed with a tube coming out of him carrying blood.  A similar tube is going into a person in the next bed.  That person is 01 Boxer.  We pan back to see a room full of similar beds and in a control room a man looks at another man and says, “This, we did not expect.”

(for a list of lingering threads from Charlie Jade, you can check out the Wikipedia entry.)

So that’s all for Charlie Jade and we end on a question mark that, to me, negates the entire show.  It’s not as artfully done as the end of Newhart where he wakes up with his wife Suzanne Pleshette saying it was all a bad dream, but it’s close.  The biggest problem is that we’ll never know.  Lately it doesn’t feel like sci-fi unless there’s a big conspiracy behind it all.  All of the universe hoping, all of the love lost and gain, all the hurt and death and torment is for naught if they are but creations inside the minds of Charlie and 01 (if that’s even their names.)  And was it a dream?  Maybe they’ve been rescued from the netherverse.  Maybe they are the gate keepers of this collection of verses but something went wrong.  When you have things living on a quantum level and dealing with the human mind, the level of complexity is staggering and any combination of events is possible.

What wasn’t expected is how much I started to like this show.  I didn’t get half of it, but not because it was a type of humor or writing I didn’t get, I just know it was a type of show that was up to interpretation.  What I got out of it was the pleasure of watching a smart show that may have been too smart for its own good, a show that at times nearly stylized itself out of any meaning.  That said, this show was made by a group of studios ranging across the globe and I’m starting to see a bit of what could be its influence on newer shows.  The repetitive cutting of the same lines, the quick edits showing the passage of time, the angle of the camera behind an object blurring the surroundings are all things I see now on Life on Mars.  So was Charlie Jade some how influential?  It’s hard to say.  The show still has a following and the creators are even doing commentary for the sci-fi airings.

The creators, hats off to them, put together a gem of a show.  I’m sad to not see it on my DVR any more but you can’t always dictate which shows get extended and which don’t.  Knight Rider is still going, so is Heroes but a decently written show like Jade can’t even finish its story.  I won’t turn this into another rabid fan monologue and start mailing crackers or anything crazy, I just hope more shows like this come along and we start getting rid of ridiculous and poorly written shows.

This episode, however, wasn’t the best and was a bit of a drug trip.  However I still enjoyed it, so I’ll give it four shiny blue stones.