Was anyone else disappointed with Season 3's ending? (SPOILERS)
Let me just start by saying that while I haven't posted much, I love Sam and Max. Some episodes (S1E4, S1E5, and S2E4 especially) were just brilliant. I also loved Season 3.
Until I got to the ending that is.
I had two major problems with it.
1. Max went completely out of character. After Max has been built up as evil for the entire series, it's not believable that he would die just so Sybil wouldn't have to give birth outside of a hospital. I don't think Max would even care if Sybil died, honestly.
2. Girl Stinky died despite the fact that she's alive in the future. This was a pretty glaring plot hole.
The worst part about it though is that I can SEE a brilliant ending in Season 3. Had they not made those mistakes, I would want that to be the finale of everything Sam and Max, just because of how beautiful an ending it would have been.
#1 could have easily been fixed if it were Sam who Max died for instead of Sybil. Sam is the only person I think Max would die for, and it would still get across the point that Max isn't completely irredeemable.
So yeah, thoughts?
Until I got to the ending that is.
I had two major problems with it.
1. Max went completely out of character. After Max has been built up as evil for the entire series, it's not believable that he would die just so Sybil wouldn't have to give birth outside of a hospital. I don't think Max would even care if Sybil died, honestly.
2. Girl Stinky died despite the fact that she's alive in the future. This was a pretty glaring plot hole.
The worst part about it though is that I can SEE a brilliant ending in Season 3. Had they not made those mistakes, I would want that to be the finale of everything Sam and Max, just because of how beautiful an ending it would have been.
#1 could have easily been fixed if it were Sam who Max died for instead of Sybil. Sam is the only person I think Max would die for, and it would still get across the point that Max isn't completely irredeemable.
So yeah, thoughts?
Sign in to comment in this discussion.
Comments
We never see Stinky alive in the future. All we know is it's a girl stinky, not THE Girl Stinky.
Also, you clearly do not understand the concept of character development.
No, Max isn't evil his alter ego is
BUT, Max isn't evil. Not strictly evil, atleast. He acts like he doesn't care, but he does save the world an awful lot for not caring. Season 3 even has him actively saving the world on his own at times. He may use the Toys of Power for... stupid purposes, but he doesn't use them for evil. (Hey, if it was up to me, I'd be using those Powers for Stupid more than for Good, lol.)
And, as crfh explained, he doesn't die just to save Sybil, he dies to save everybody (including Sam). Saving Sybil wasn't his only goal, although it was probably emphasized to make it seem that way, because Max dying to save someone other than Sam is more unexpected.
There's a difference between character development and someone going out of character.
Development has to be believable, and I didn't believe Max would do what he did.
IIRC, they were trying to save Max by getting rid of the tumor when he told them to help Sybil instead. His death wasn't inevitable, and if he had been saved he wouldn't have continued to attack the town anyway.
The fact is that Max being selfish was emphasized again and again throughout the series. I didn't get the impression that Sybil was someone Max particularly cared about, so it seemed strange that he would die for her. There was only one character who Max actually seemed to care about at all - Sam.
I was under the impression that Sam and Max only save the world because they have fun doing so.
True, but they could have just as much fun aiding villains, or being villains. And they choose not to. The choices characters make (especially under pressure) are what define their characterization.
Sam: Crime is a disease and we're a pink chalky-tasting medicine!
Max isn't evil, just...chaotic. Steve Purcell's always insisted that despite their sociopathic tendencies, the Freelance Police are good at heart. They're not the type to, say, assault innocents for no reason.
And it's not that he was dying for Sybil. He was going to die no matter what, and he didn't want the people inside of him (Sam is there too, remember) to get killed as well.
Sam and Max has always been firmly anti-continuity. While the Telltale episodes have reversed the trend, continuity can still be sacrificed for the sake of a joke.
If you want an in-universe explanation, Sam and Max constantly messing with the timeline has caused the future seen in Chariots of the Dogs to never happen. On the bright side, though, this means Sam won't be a delirious old man in Davros' wheelchair.
Beside I loved the idea of the alternative universe where is Sam that gains the powers and Max is forced to blow him up.
- Let's fight crime? (draws Lugan)
- Let's.
I thought that they were about to change him back to normal and stop him from dying?
One thing I liked about Telltale's Sam and Max stuff was that the continuity was surprisingly good. At the very least when they wanted to retcon something they would give a half assed explanation for it (like when the internet died but then came back).
If Max's friends weren't out by that moment, they would have been teleported into Skunkape's ship and killed. That means Sybil, Paperwaite, Norrington... and Sam.
There's a little bit of this characterisation in the comics, in Beast from the Cereal Isle (which I'd guess is the main influence on Devil's Playhouse). Right at the end of the story, a kid falls off the Beast, and Max, without breaking conversation, catches him and sets him back on the ride. He's not really paying attention to what he's doing - he just instinctively decided to help the kid, and so he did.
Max is a freelance police because he likes mayhem, but he likes a free card to do it. It's not just randomly hurting people, or at least not always. Somewhere under those fuzzy ears lie some scruples, and so he justifies his admittedly over-the-top violence because he's inflicting in what he perceives to be bad people, or with a "end justifies the means" policy.
It's weird seeing two slightly differentiating viewpoints of a character side-by-side that I both wholeheartedly agree with.
On topic, though, I wasn't really disappointed at all, the reasons having pretty much already been discussed in this topic. With Stinky's death, much like the use of Future Vision, her future success is pretty much a possible timeline. Plus, didn't Sam and Max screw that future over with their tar cake patent shenanigans, or was that just the adhesive? Eh.
Whilst Max's character is difficult to pin down at times, I can't classify him as evil. He will act on id most of the time, and mainly seems to act in his own best interests, but in the grand scheme of things, he's not out to destroy the world - otherwise he'd have done so already.
However, even if I don't recall the particulars, I do remember that I very much enjoyed season 3, including the dramatic ending, which I feel compelled to point out with all the complaining going on in the forums.
(Also, I don't think Max can be described as particularly good or evil: he seems mostly amoral. I don't think it was out of character for him to save somebody he liked; it seemed like something he might do on a whim.)
This is a good explanation, actually.
I was still disappointed by that part of the ending, but your interpretation helps.
TTG injected a heart-crushing downer of a dramatic ending into absolutely the wrong game series. It was terribly out of character for the Sam & Max games and fiction, and to be honest, I'm very wary about playing any future TTG S&M games.
It felt like a valid choice to me since, at least in my experience playing it, the season ended up dealing a lot with the nature of Sam & Max's friendships, and accidentally with their personalities underneath their veneer (303 for whatever faults it had, I thought did a great job with that, with the first half of the episode focusing on Sam without Max, and the second half including a lot of Max having to be self reliant for the first time). I don't know how on purpose that was, but it ended up coming up again and again in the season, so closing on a big version of that felt like an okay thing to do. I think we expected it to play as more over the top/gratuitous than it did, though, as a lot of people were bothered by it either positively (as in, were genuinely emotionally effected by it, which wasn't expected*), or negatively (felt that we didn't earn it**, or that it was inappropriate, or a cop out), but I'm still proud that we made the choice to go for it.
* but which is okay!
** also a totally fair opinion to have!
That was what made it so powerful and moving. I'm sorry, maybe you just can't take emotional storytelling, but it was beautiful.
The future changed. When does that happen? Time travel. I'm thinking Skunkape is from some distant future, and he used time travel to return to a point where the toys of power were still intact and obtainable. It's a theory, and it doesn't solve anything, but you know. A possibility. This caused most of the events of Season 3 when you think about it.
Yeah, I don't agree with that, for reasons that Jake has listed through. If anything a sacrificial ending may come too clichéd and maybe too subtle (any subtlety in a Sam and Max storyline is too much) as a whole, to be used in a game related to Sam and Max. I can also say the deus ex machina was implemented TOO good and actually did make sense, which is ironically a bad thing for THIS franchise, I guess.
I had no big problems with the ending though. The whole main storyline just made more sense than the ones we sat through in previous seasons, except for the Girl Stinky subplot which was... Okay well, Girl Stinky subplot may be classified as a Sam&Max-ish storytelling, with all loose ends and weird revealizations. The problem with THAT is; it was like that UNINTENTIONALLY, and storyline itself was too busy getting adjusted into the sensible direction (yes, I just called a mermaid going out with a giant cockroach SENSIBLE) instead of using the joke opportunities OR better yet; going for creating joke opportunities -like Sam and Max always did for, like, uh, always.
I believe that Skunkape clones himself, girl stinky, and I'm guessing SamunMak; (possibly Sal) sometime in the future. I got that from this
The expectation of snide insults like this is exactly why I didn't comment on the ending when the game came out.
I can definitely take emotional storytelling. I just don't tune into Sam & Max to get it. I tune into Sam & Max for chaotic, irreverent slapstick and high-speed absurdity.
Telltale's otherwise done a good job of infusing an actual, gripping plot into the episodes without losing touch with the spirit of S&M, but the end of season three, IMHO, strayed too far from the tone which is the entire appeal of Sam & Max.
The ending is something that elevates the game to the best Sam&Max game IMHO.
So deeply emotional, asbolutely poetic, and not usual.
Thank you TT for this.
I wasn't bothered by the choice to be dramatic (though some other people were), I think for the most part things were handled quite well in Season 3.
It's just that a couple things (particularly the fact that Max died for Sybil of all people) bothered me.
I think I just get upset when something comes so close to being brilliant but is held back by a couple little things.
Anyway, I'm kind of surprised someone from Telltale posted to give such a humble response.
I think part of your issue with all of it might be that you're reading Max as being "evil" for the whole series. Was that the case? To me it seemed like Max was being built up as a force which could destroy itself and those near it; so, a strong damaging force yes, but not necessarily a malevolent or malicious one. Maybe that's too nuanced, or I'm totally off base? I don't know.
The way I see Max at least, I know he revels in screwing with people, and that he's generally just a bundle of id, but I don't think he ever wants to hurt people if he thinks they don't deserve it. He'll ploink a purse snatcher in the eyes and pull out a clump of his hair and maybe an eyebrow, but the lady who was being robbed won't suffer a scratch. (She may suffer the unshakeable trauma of watching a crazy 3 foot tall lagomorph leap into the air, scream "booga booga!" and turn some dude inside out (metaphorically speaking), and Max might get some glee from that knowledge, but that would be the extent of it.)
Maybe the turn at the end of 305 was too abrupt (though it was deliberately abrupt, it may have gone too far), I think it still played fair, in that while Max is always a chaotic force of destruction and general gnawing on things, he's always aimed more or less in the direction of Justice and Truth and Stopping Bad Guys (or at least whoever falls into his personal definition of People Who Deserve It). When Sam says "there's still some of Max in there, I know it," he's quoting Star Wars, but also I think he's right -- the Max he knows wouldn't blow up a friend, unless they were really asking for it. I don't know why Sybil in particular was chosen, other than the fact that she was the last one talking (and has a baby), but I was personally glad that a specific non-Sam character was chosen. We all know Max will save Sam. Max giving a crap about anyone else makes it a more interesting test. Again, maybe "a more interesting test" makes it less "Sam & Max," but I was glad it went somewhere unexpected, even if it didn't fully work for everyone.
Thats what made it more emotional. Max is violant to those that deserve it(he ripped the head off someone in hit the road's begining) but never to those that dont deserve it(then again he did willingly shoot sam for no reason in episode 102).
I was basicaly shouting at the computer "WHAT DID HE DO TO DESERVE THIS" when I watched as their was no hope for his survival.
Great ending telltale, a little deues ex michanimaie with the "oh he was time traveling, there was another max" thing, which is my complaint, but sam and max has done that before.
Girl Stinky was a major plot point at the end of "Beyond Space and Time". Later on in "The Devil's Playhouse" we are told that the hole turning her into a cake was an optical illusion. Which makes me question the ending of "What's New, Beelzebub?", with using the recipe to make a cake to help defeat the poppers.
The Penal Zone seemed to be a nice place to spend a weekend. Even after Sam and Max send Skun-ka'pe back into it, in "The Penal Zone", he comes escapes without any mention of how he did it, though I could have missed that bit of information.
I felt a bit overwhelmed by the storyline this time around. The Toy abilities were nice to have, but they did add to a few headaches for me personally. Time travel was fun in "Chariot of the Dogs", but it felt like too much of a good thing when using future vision.
Short list of what I liked and still remember from my playthrough of "The Devil's Playhouse". Flipping between the reels and playing with the curses in "The Tomb of Sammun-Mak" was extremely fun and the comedy in that episode was spot on(Tally Hoo!). The hardboiled detective work that Sam did to try and find Max's Brain in "They Stole Max's Brain!" made talking to people more interesting. The epic battle with Charlie Ho-Tep was the highlight of "Beyond the Alley of the Dolls". Also I can't wait to see how the german tourist does in the next season.