There are, in essence, two goals for season finales: One is to conclude the season that just finished, and one is to focus on setting up the next season. The best season finales do both well. Cliffhangers can be fun, but the most satisfying finales are the ones that organically and methodically set up future arcs, not ones that spring a plot twist on you.

It’s a tough balance to pull — consider one of my favorite season finales, The Job from the third season of The Office. Though it had some twists that could be described as cliffhangers — Jim asking Pam out, Ryan getting the corporate job — it was equal parts conclusion and set-up. Jim finally realized that only Pam can make him truly happy, and Ryan’s two years of putting up with Dunder Mifflin hell while studying at night turned into a major promotion. The episode excited me for the future of the characters while making me feel like they’d actually come a long way.

One barometer I use to evaluate the quality of season finales is to ask — how would I feel if the series ended here? Many of my favorite season finales can also serve as “de-facto series finales” as I call them. In other words, if the series is spontaneously cancelled (or the storytelling goes to hell and I want to pretend it was), at least I’ll always have this moderately complete, satisfying arc.

It can be tempting for shows, I’m sure, to focus on keeping us buzzed about where the plot is headed. Cliffhangers do this by only increasing, never releasing, the tension. But the wisest showrunners of all will tell you that good storytelling is what keeps viewers coming back, not artificially heightened drama.

I preface this recap with these thoughts on finales, because Moving does just about everything right. It balances closing old plots and opening new ones. It has some vaguely cliffhanger-esque twists, but it never feels overly dramatic. It also serves as a nice thematic capper to everything that’s happened to date. If seasons 4-6 of The Wonder Years suck, then I can just pretend that it all ended here and be satisfied with how it turned out.

Kevin thinks he might be moving, even though it ends up being Winnie who does. Either way, the episode is less about the move itself and more about what the move represents — the world getting bigger and the distance between Kevin and his youthful ideals growing. Kevin and Winnie share some nice moments in the episode, the best of which was a long embrace right before she left that seemed less about being a romantic couple, more about going through the bittersweet process of growing up together.

Winnie’s life hasn’t really been the same since her brother died in the pilot. In those two years, she’s gone through a lot more drama than Kevin has — the death of Brian and her parents nearly divorcing stick out. Because of this, she’s also always seemed more traumatized by the process of growing up. She consistently makes defiant acts of innocence, from her invitation to go swinging in S01E02, to playing hide-and-seek as a farewell to Harper’s Woods (S02E16), to bailing out of the make-out room (S03E17). And Kevin has almost always been there, whether as a friend or a boyfriend.

There’s some cheese here — Kevin’s grab for her hand as he realizes she recovered the ring, Winnie’s override of the narrator when she says “you” — but most of the Winnie-Kevin development lines up with the themes of the show and the characters’ previous behavior very organically.

I do have two complaints with the episode, one of them bigger than the other. My smaller complaint is that the episode hinges too much on a sneaky plot twist of Winnie being the one who has to move. The writers do a good job laying groundwork for it — Jack mentions he got the number for a realtor from the Coopers — and I loved the way the show convinced us that Jack was actually going to follow through on leaving the house. But it seemed just a bit out of left field, a bit too coincidental.

My second complaint with the episode is that Danica McKellar is not a very good actress. I really, really want to like her. I keep looking for little bits of subtlety. But the truth is she just carries herself like she barely memorized a script and is just reading directions. When she has the long scene in the moving truck with Fred Savage, it’s almost comical how much more convincing and expressive and nuanced Savage is. I kept watching scenes — even little moments like Winnie’s reaction to Kevin learning that she’s moving — and thinking how much more effective they could have been if McKellar gave us anything to work with. She’s gotten a bit better over the series, now and then shining, and her chemistry with Savage is decent, but she’s not quite there yet.

The end of the episode hints at some future themes about the world getting bigger and Kevin and Winnie facing more adversity in their relationship. I like the idea of the show broadening its scope at this point before it starts repeating itself thematically. I’m really excited to see where it goes, but even if it stumbles from here, we have three great seasons (more like two seasons, given how short the first season was) that paint a rather complete and very convincing portrait of both the characters and the culture growing up, losing their innocence, and dealing with complex modernity.

Clearly the MVP of the the third season of The Wonder Years is Dan Lauria as Jack. He’s already had some great showcases: The Family Car, Faith, The Powers That Be, and The Tree House come to mind. Daddy’s Little Girl is one of his best showcase episodes yet. It also echoes the most resonant theme of the series — growing up is a loss of innocence. The plot works especially well given the setting, early 1970 in the midst of a cultural upheaval.

Karen’s getting ready for the next phase of her life. To her, that means a nontraditional education, whether at a progressive college or a trip across Europe. To Jack, that means the end of her hippie phase and attendance at a state university. The question of who is ultimately in charge of her life is the central question of the episode, and, to its credit, it doesn’t fully take one side or the other.

Not a lot actually happens in Daddy’s Little Girl — a lot of push and shove between characters and some planning for Karen’s birthday party, really. The focus is instead on character interaction. Kevin asks Karen to go easy on their dad, and gets a brief glimpse of just how alone, scared, yet stubborn she is. There’s an air of fear for Jack as well — of losing his little girl.

The bubbling, complex emotions underneath the characters are subtly played by Lauria and Olivia D’Abo. I wouldn’t call D’Abo a weak link on the show, buy t she’s the least used of the regulars. This episode is her best showcase yet, and it gives her a lot more to do than play know-it-all teen, which is what she’s usually asked to do. Her best moment of the episode is her response to Kevin’s blunt cut to the chase — the whole family knows she’s going to be gone next year, and both she and Jack are having trouble really coming to grips with this.

Lauria has earned my repeated praise, and he deserves it again here. His take on Jack’s thinly veiled sadness at losing his daughter drives the episode. Jack’s both impatient and a little hurt that she’s rejecting his plans and suggestions for her, so he takes it out on the people who still have to follow his orders, Kevin and Wayne.

The episode builds to the tremendously moving conclusion of the episode — Jack finding the perfect gift for his little girl, allowing her to move forward while still holding on to him. Meanwhile, the porch light is always on. Even if she makes mistakes in her life (she already has and she certainly will) there’s forever a spot for her at home.

Jack is the one who finally ends the standoff, successfully coming to grips with the fact that he can’t make her do what he wants. For such a hard, stubborn man, it’s a pretty big move.

Those last few minutes choked me up, and it’s hard to look at Daddy’s Little Girl as anything less than one of the best, most moving episodes of the season.

In character-based, episodic shows like The Wonder Years, one of the oldest tricks in the book is to select two characters who don’t often interact and center a plot around them. Figure out the ways they’re similar, the ways they’re different, and construct a situation in which the two play off of each other. Cocoa and Sympathy is a textbook example of this technique.

We’ve seen lots of Norma, even more of Paul, but rarely more than an occasional line of them interacting. Cocoa and Sympathy considers mostly how they’re similar: both are disenfranchised in their own lives to a certain extent. Paul is judged as the brainiest eighth grade boy by Lisa Berlini in her annual poll of all the boys in the grade. Of course, anyone with a reasonable sense of scope would be able to tell you that “brainiest” is a rare bit of praise that could have actual application in life; yet, Paul is distraught that he didn’t win something more pleasant like Kevin’s Best Smile.

Kevin isn’t particularly worked up about the poll, in part because he’s a hair wiser than the average eighth grader and in part because he was handed a nice label. So Paul finds an unlikely source of sympathy in Norma. Norma’s facing her own crisis, albeit a much larger, slower-building crisis: Her life is a product of routine and monotony. Her children and husband don’t really care to open up to her. She’s largely taken for granted by her own family.

Most of the episode focuses on Kevin’s growing discomfort at the building bond between Paul and Norma, particularly from Paul’s end. Paul starts noting and sharing things about Norma that would put any son in a slightly uncomfortable position. Kevin doesn’t want to think of his mom as a woman. Just as a parent.

This culminates in a night out — no one would take Norma up on her idea to go see a concert, so Paul agrees to go. At the end of the night, Norma turns down a rose from Paul, thereby ending his attempt at a misguided courtship. But she gives him something bigger — a greater sense of self-confidence. Jack sees the kind way that she reaches out to Paul, and makes his own gesture of kindness by offering to see the next concert with her. Kevin comes to further appreciate his complex, deeply caring mother.

I liked the conclusion of the episode and appreciate the different sides of the characters that we get to see here, but large sections of the plot didn’t work for me. I could almost feel the writers trying to come up with a full plot to build around the pairing. The best episodes of The Wonder Years come from the top down, with a great theme leading to a great conflict leading to great character development and situations. Cocoa and Sympathy felt like it came from the bottom up — a situation (Norma and Paul connecting) led to the writers writing a conflict which led to them trying to add a good theme.

Again, it’s not a bad episode. It’s just one that doesn’t stick out as particularly special or memorable among a batch of truly phenomenal episodes during the second half of this season.

Fred Savage was nominated for an Emmy after only the six-episode first season of The Wonder Years aired. But his work here in Good-Bye is the most award-worthy yet. Those heartbreaking forty seconds, an extended shot of Kevin’s expression as he learns that Mr. Collins passed away, show Savage working with an emotional articulation and subtlety that isn’t just fantastic acting for a thirteen year-old; it’s fantastic acting, period.

Good-bye (which should have been named Math Class Cubed) could have been nothing more than an act-off between Savage and the always-excellent Steven Gilborn and it would have been memorable. But the plot brought back the reliable conflict of Kevin’s lack of natural math talent and gave it yet another spin: Kevin is satisfied with his C, but Mr. Collins doesn’t express any satisfaction with Kevin’s performance.

Kevin eventually starts up after-school lessons with Mr. Collins, who we don’t know is very sick, and the two develop their bond. The episode’s depiction of that strange relationship between a teacher and student — the ultimate paradox of personal and impersonal — is one of its greatest strengths. Kevin advances in the material, but also develops an emotional attachment to the journey that Mr. Collins always pushes him further through.

When Kevin admits that the bond is something special to him — he viewed Mr. Collins as a friend — the teacher has to remind him of the dichotomy. Kevin may click with Mr. Collins, but they can’t really connect in any meaningful way other than through math and the passing of knowledge.

Mr. Collins response may have been initially too impersonal, but we know that’s the type of teacher he is: on the surface, calculated, passionless, and pragmatic. But Kevin responds in a way far too personal; to an extent that it actually penetrates through Mr. Collins’ unbetraying shell. Kevin acted in anger and knows by the end of the weekend that he’d gone too far.

The death of a minor character is a common ploy by drama shows to pull at the heart strings without having to fundamentally change the dynamic of the show. But that doesn’t cheapen too much what Mr. Collins’ unexpected death wreaks upon Kevin. “A private hell,” he calls it. If the show had elsewhere used the death tactic (other than the defining death of Brian Cooper in the pilot), I would probably fault the show more for the coincidental timing of Mr. Collins’ passing. Instead, it worked very well.

Kevin makes up with Mr. Collins beyond the grave; Mr. Collins gives him another shot as a stroke of both apology and forgiveness. And Kevin proceeds to ace it. It’s a slightly saccharine ending, the second one in a row for the show, but it’s executed well enough that I didn’t particularly mind. Fred Savage’s brilliant performance as Kevin and Steven Gilborn’s understated work as Mr. Collins ground the episode and make every emotion feel earned.

After the set-up of the episode — Paul struggles athletically; Kevin is marginally better; Paul has some jealousy — I was worried that The Unnatural would turn into a thematic clone of Loosiers: that competitiveness can divide friendships, that Paul’s ego is easily bruised when it comes to his athletic struggles, that Kevin is a natural rally point for some of the school’s losers. Then, it turned into something a lot more interesting: an exploration of inheriting success versus earning it yourself.

Kevin comes to tryouts to support Paul’s doomed attempt to try out and make the baseball team. His words catch the ear of Coach Ted, who gives Kevin a shot. With nothing to lose, Kevin steps up to the plate and hits the ball deep into centerfield, earning him an invitation back to tryouts while Paul gets cut. Kevin wants to turn the opportunity down, but Jack shows an unprecedented level of interest in this extracurricular, so Kevin decides to give tryouts a stab.

But then something strange starts to happen: Coach Ted pays more attention to Jack — who happened to save his life in Korea — than Kevin. Kevin plays his heart out, yet constantly struggles in try-outs. For some reason — that he begins to suspect has something to do with the coach’s allegiance to Jack rather than Kevin’s own achievement — Kevin continually avoids being cut even as he struggles out on the field.

Eventually, Coach Ted implies that he sees heart, effort, and spark in Kevin. But the way he says it and the way Jack presumes Kevin will make the team actually have the opposite of their expected effect — they convince Kevin even further that he’s being gifted a spot on the team rather than earning it himself. He accepts he’s getting a spot whether or not he deserves it, and his last tryout effort suffers because of it.

Then, he spots the coach’s list and sees he’s actually been cut, and Kevin makes a revelation. He looks around him — at the supportive friends and crowd — and remembers that he really hadn’t made it there himself; the support around him helps him succeed more than he ever could on his own. At the same time, he’s not being gifted anything; he has to earn it, and the realization that he hasn’t earned it has the ironic effect of motivating him more making the team would have.

It’s a small story, but it’s told well. The episode, particularly the last scene, captures the American mysticism of baseball and uses its simple metaphor of a pitcher vs. batter as a struggle to succeed and maintain a dream in the face of adversity. In fact, the episode almost goes too far with it; that last scene of Kevin hitting a home run is built up so much, I was briefly convinced the show was going to pull out the rug and lead us to one of its anti-climaxes, like the time Kevin tried to punch the bully.

But the episode works overall and it has a nice, unusually sweet ending to reinforce its themes of kids rising above what they’re given and earning their own way in the world.

Other thoughts:

• I was really glad to see Paul cheering for Kevin at the tryout. His struggles at the tryouts was the inciting event of the episode, but he managed to get over the grudge quickly enough.
• I’m always pleased to see Winnie further developed as Kevin’s girlfriend. Here, she not only appears for his majestic (perhaps fabricated) home run, but struggles to see through what’s really bothering him about tryouts. I will say, though, that it seemed slightly out of character for her to be giving generic baseball platitudes; she’s more the sensitive, emotionally perceptive type.
• This is two episodes in a row that give us a peek at Jack at his warmest. In Faith, he recreated tax receipts with his wife; here, he cheers his son on at baseball tryouts.

In this world, nothing can said to be certain, except death and taxes.

-Benjamin Franklin

Faith isn’t an episode about anything important, except marriage, and uncertainty, and family, and faith (its title topic), and death, and the meaning of life. But nothing really important.

It’s one of those episodes like Whose Woods Are These? that reminds us that the show isn’t just damn entertaining and sweet, like Night Out, but also tremendously thoughtful and illuminating at its peak. It plunges deep into the fears of growing up (while still maintaining an excellent sense of humor) and emerges as a resounding testament to the power of family and faith against the daunting dark side of life.

I’ve described Jack’s and Norma’s marriage as “passionless” in the past. Faith doesn’t really attempt to refute that, but it does prove that passionless doesn’t mean unhealthy. That final revelation of Jack and Norma “closer than ever,” inadvertently reliving the past twelve months of their lifelong project that is maintaining a family, is weirdly poignant — honestly one of the series’ best moments yet.

Faith parallels three plots at once — the Arnolds’ impending tax day, the Apollo 13 space mission, and Kevin’s writing assignment. Through the lens of the the latter plot and Kevin’s narration, the episode considers the contrast of the former two plots. What do a failed space mission and tax day have in common? On the surface, nothing. One stretches as far as humans have ever gone; the other takes place under every American roof. But for the Arnolds, both are symbols of uncontrollable catastrophe; astronauts are lost in space, receipts are lost somewhere in the house or around town.

Kevin worries that only heavenly forces will be able to save either controversy, but both the astronauts and Norma handle their disasters with aplomb. We never learn the astronauts’ fate in the episode, but we know they’re saved through the astronaut’s ingenuity and communication with home base. Norma, similarly, communicates openly with her family and uses her own ingenuity to re-create the receipts.

Kevin worries that Jack’s brutish stubbornness will supersede his love of family, which often isn’t demonstrative. Jack defines himself, in the heartbreaking moment of the episode, as someone who has to wake up, fight traffic, bust his hump, fight traffic, come home — day in day out. And pay taxes.

But the true meaning behind that grind — the reason he puts up with it — is family. His marriage with Norma is at the heart of everything he does. So Jack doesn’t let something like Norma’s loss of the receipts break him down. Instead, he lifts her up. It brings them closer together than Kevin had ever seen them. This allows Kevin to come to the realization that what matters — what he really wants to write about in his mock obituary — is family and faith. Sure, there’s catastrophes and uncertainties (he calls his uplifting draft “a lie” or at best “a wild guess”) — but faith and family prevail.

For all its literary ambition, Faith also manages to be really funny. The best bits were everyone’s response to the obituary assignment. Paul’s thrill that he can both marry Marcia Brady and work at his dad’s practice is priceless, as were most of the other eighth graders’. I also thought Wayne’s version of Kevin’s obituary (“…died a butthead”) was hilariously played.

I had only a few minor complaints: The one bit of humor that didn’t work for me was Paul’s fear of not being able to contain everything in a school assignment. The cartoonish execution of Paul’s encyclopedic obituary stuck out in an episode that was otherwise very buttoned down. I also know the episode could have benefited from bringing up Brian Cooper’s death; there are only twenty two minutes per episode, but if ever an episode should have brought up the climactic twist of the pilot, it should have been Faith.

Nonetheless, Faith is one of the strongest episodes of the series yet in the series.

A few thoughts:

• Faith shows Jack and Norma as a couple that has figured out how to communicate with each other comfortably in a private setting only two episodes removed from an episode that focused on Winnie and Kevin’s attempt to figure out how to do that very thing.
• I was ready to call out the show for showing Kevin and Norma arriving at the church at the same time when Norma left first and drove while Kevin biked, but the episode actually explained the plot hole away — she went to the store first.
• This answers the question about whether the Arnolds are religious or not. They don’t go to chruch every week. For a family that adheres to the traditional, WASP structure and values, I was surprised to learn that they don’t go to Sunday service.
• It was a nice bit of subtlety that the episode never quoted Franklin’s line that I opened this recap with, even though it is clearly alluded to it numerous times.
• I’ve said it over and over. Dan Lauria and Alley Mills do incredible work in this show. They also get some of the best writing in the series. That makes episodes that focus on the Arnold parents nearly always a success.

I guess that’s when I realized that love was going to be a lot more complicated — and a lot more simple — than I’d ever dreamed.

Kevin

This is exactly the type of Kevin-Winnie story the show should be telling now: slow-paced, depicting the early stages of the relationship, letting the two build chemistry, giving us lots of warm moments —  really, just showing us that the characters (and the show) are going to build this romance into something special, something worthy of the wait and the characters’ history as close friends.

The Wonder Years has fundamentally been about the loss of innocence that comes with growing up, and, here, Kevin and Winnie are socially pressured into going to an event they both know might forcibly remove some of that innocence that they’re barely hanging on to. This unease about going to the party — which they know could be fun and romantic, but also pushes them out of their comfort zone — drives the two of them apart. It’s as if being formally recognized as a couple actually raises a barrier between them.

An interesting dynamic arises from this conflict — neither character really wants to go to the party, but neither wants to say that they don’t. Kevin comes the closest to saying that he’d rather not be pushed into it, but Winnie insists that she’d rather go. I thought this struggle for the two of them to communicate honestly was done very well.

They finally arrive at the party and they’re relieved to find it completely normal and fun — not the creepy makeout-fest they’d imagined. The barrier around them dissolves and they enjoy themselves at the party. This scene may have been my favorite of the episode; I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it as long as it’s true: It’s always fun to watch the characters just having fun and enjoying each other’s company. How could you not like seeing Fred Savage rocking out to “Shout?”

But then the party gets weird and starts to match the vision Kevin and Winnie initially had of the party. The delightfully creepy Robbie Hudson pressures Winnie and Kevin into the makeout room. In an extended moment of discomfort, the two fidget and shuffle for a minute before Winnie bolts. As Kevin realizes that Winnie doesn’t want to make out, he begins to suspect it’s because she doesn’t actually like him.

Kevin returns home humiliated and goes to sleep heartbroken. He wakes up to a beautifully-shot, angelic vision of Winnie outside his window. “Please don’t let this be one of those dreams where you can’t open the window,” he thinks. Winnie wants to walk and have a chat. Kevin assumes it’s to officially dump him, but then she finally breaks that barrier of poor communication from earlier in the episode: She admits that she didn’t want to be in that room with him; she didn’t want to kiss him.

This seems to confirm Kevin’s suspicion that she doesn’t want to be with him, but then she call him her “boyfriend” and everything changes — in fact, she’s the one seeking remorse. She didn’t want to kiss him then, not with all eyes on them and the magic artificially created.

So, when does she want to kiss him? he wonders.

Anyone could’ve guessed Kevin and Winnie would have their first big kiss by the end of the episode, so the ending didn’t exactly take my breath away. But it was so gently and sweetly told (I especially loved the line quoted at the beginning of the post) that I completely enjoyed it.

In all, Night Out proved that the series can tell stories very well centered around the Kevin-Winnie romance. It’s a predictable affair, but it reconfirms the show’s commitment to telling stories from the perspective of lost innocence and strong character development.

Other thoughts:

• Paul has a few great moments here but is largely absent from the second half of the episode
• The episode loses only a small shred of impact because we’ve already seen Kevin make out with a girl (Becky Slater back in Between Me and You…)
• Wayne really relishes those moments he gets to humiliate Kevin. Jason Hervey really nails these moments.
• But speaking of Wayne, where was he when Winnie knocked on the window? Still awake somewhere?
• Props to Greg Davis on oozing the role of the junior high Hugh Hefner with zealous grossness

I think I literally smiled the entire duration of this episode. This was a funny, kind of heartwarming, kind of dark, utter blast of an episode.

Kevin, Paul, and their motley crew of untalented comrades form the black sheep of RFK Junior High’s singing landscape. They’re okay with that, and their teacher is perfectly content not to mold them. That is, until Miss Haycock shows up.

Suddenly, she expects Kevin and the rest to actually try and sing. I did not object to this development, because every moment of this group singing nearly brought me to tears with laughter. Still, it seemed unlikely that this group of gangly, unmotivated teen boys would have any shot at pulling together anything presentable.

Kevin wins over Miss Haycock from the beginning by having “passion” in his audition, so he’s the only one who has the power to talk her down from her grand ambition of having the gorup perform. But, his new girlfriend Winnie Cooper pushes him to act more responsibly and support his teacher, even if this would end up being unwise.

With some persistence, the rest of the choir boys (minus the ever-enthusiastic Paul) are able to talk Kevin down from his support of the singing performance. So Kevin tells Miss Haycock that none of them really want to perform. I didn’t buy that she would get so upset; she seemed so unflappable that I had trouble believing this would be the thing that would break her.

Still, it resulted the absolutely fantastic reveal of Warren Butcher’s angelic voice. Tough guys tapping into their feminine side is always a funny brand of humor, and I was practically on the floor when I saw Warren belting out that beautiful note.

With this ray of hope, the group decides not to let down Miss Haycock. And this is where The Wonder Years’ defiance of the underdog story came in — much like at the end of Loosiers, the group stayed bad but gained something: a bit of self confidence, some sense of unity, and the pleasure of helping a young teacher come closer to achieving her life goal.

And everything goes worse than expected (though, I will admit, far better than expected from a comedy standpoint). Warren’s voice drops at the worst time, Paul relapses into the nervous sneezes that plagued him when Carla first courted him, and Doug Porter falls off the stage. It makes for brilliant, hysterical laughs — some of my favorite of the season. But Miss Haycock, who actually cares about the singing, is distraught that she wasn’t able to mold the kids at the rate that she did.

As someone who had to put up with lots of idealistic teacher types in the education department, I’m glad the episode both honored and mocked the passion and confidence of young teachers. Miss Haycock was an enjoyable character for me to watch. She reminded me of a dozen or so people I know personally.

There’s a hint of darkness in the way Miss Haycock completely implodes, but the way the episode defied the formula that any sports fan (including myself) knows by heart made up for it.

A few recaps ago, I talked about an episode of The Wonder Years can still work if it’s silly and shallow as long as its funny; this is a perfect example. Glee Club doesn’t really teach us much of anything about any of our characters. Still, it’s a fun romp full of hysterical scenes.

Other thoughts:

• We’re supposed to believe that Kevin has been going to this club twice a week, and the show never thought to mention it before now?
• I loved this use of Winnie. It showed us how their young relationship is beginning to affect the way he acts.
• Paul’s singing was great, but that curly haired guy (what’s his name?) had the funniest voice.