In the End

All’s well that ends well: but does it?

Where does anything end? A recent done-to-death cliché in films, TV and so forth has been the hero making a stand, saying ‘this ends here!’ before striding off to do what the script said to do.

Nothing ever does really end though – especially in films that need to beget a sequel – everything leaves threads untied, loose ends floating in the breeze to be caught up and blown out from the recent past into the near future by the winds of circumstance.

That is one reason for fiction, something to give the illusion that all those loose ends can be tied up, that things can become a story with a beginning a middle and an end, rather than going on and on like some interminable soap opera.

Events don’t happen in isolation though. Events beget events and the protagonist might have ‘ended it here’ and strode off into the sunset with - or without - the girl, depending on what kind of myth, and what kind of hero, the story has brought into being for its duration.

The trouble with walking off into the sunset, though, is what is going to happen the next time the sun rises. Will the hero still be walking down that lonesome road, heading for some new town, some new injustice? Then, what happens behind him when those loose ends he tied so well begin to untangle, unwind, unknot themselves?