#160. The Finale (Monday, February 21, 2022)

What was your best day…of coming back to something for a brief moment just to see the end?

The first three seasons of the long-running PBS Kids cartoon Arthur are among the three best seasons of any kids show produced ever. And I will throw down (virtually) with anyone who disagrees.

And the first of those seasons in 1997 aligned nearly perfectly with the commencement of my own mental capacity to synthesize semi-complex eleven-minute animated narratives into a clean plot architecture and (usually) moral lesson that could forever live-on in my long-term memory. Because I distinctly remember the contents of the first episode I watched¹, and even now, when I see certain parts, they instantly create a small but noticeable sense that I’m watching an unknown (hilarious) show for the first time.

And the first watching of every subsequent episode not also establishes a permanent residence in my psyche, but in the moment is essentially my first definitive life introduction to at least one core thing that the episode was about—glasses, hairstylists, strict teachers, spelling bees, swimming at beaches, dinosaur fossils, imaginary friends, lost library books. (I could go on with the other fifty-two Season 1 episodes, but I won’t.) It’s like half the experiences in my childhood, and by extension many in my adulthood as well, were filtered at least in part through a distinctly Arthur lens.

From second to fourth grade (and fifth and sixth to a slightly less religious extent), my daily after-school ritual was to make myself a small snack in the kitchen and plop down on the living room sofa to watch the TVO Kids block until dinnertime, with Arthur always, reliably in that prime five p.m. spot.

My interest falls off sharply in middle school, due to an inevitable combination of me having more things to do after school and the quality of the show starting to deteriorate. Very soon I lose track of the show and the seasons that go by, and not long after I lose awareness of the show as a continuing entity entirely. Seventh season (I knew because the season always matched my grade at the time), eighth, ninth, tenth, the start of Flash animation in the fourteenth which truly signaled the death knell for Arthur as quality children’s programming, all way to the twenty-fifth.

But a month before this date, I see a news article somewhere from PBS. This twenty-fifth season of Arthur will be its last. And all four episode pairs will air on one day.

I figure I should watch, but don’t think of it. I regrettably skip—or rather, find out it’s happening when it’s already mostly done—the brilliant five-day, twenty-four hour marathon that PBS puts on of all the episodes from the first twenty-four seasons (leading right into the airing of the final season).² Then, with my anticipation having slowly ramped up, the day of the Monday finale comes.

It’s coincidentally Family Day holiday, so I sleep in. My mom comes to my place late that morning, and wakes me up to randomly go cross-country skiing—because it’s a holiday and a fresh sheet of snow has fallen. I tell her yes let’s go, but I have to be back home by 3 PM, because I have to watch the Arthur series finale.

Yes, I literally tell her that. (Adding, in Mandarin, “Can you believe it’s the Arthur series finale?”) Because, even though she has long forgotten about any of it, I can still remember 1997 and early 1998, right before my brother was born, when the first season of Arthur was one of the few aspects of my at-home identity—standing beside the math study and triple-language index cards (#86) she devoted much of her (and my) time to—and she could relate to that. Most notably, a remember the first Monday of March Break in 1998, when something happens that morning that causes me to cry a lot (not a rare occurrence, to be fair). But then, miraculously, an hour or so later, I see a new episode of Arthur on PBS. The first episode of Season Two. And she directly reinforces my statement that these new episodes has instantly turned the rest of the day, and the rest of the week, into an infallibly positive thing.

Well, twenty-four years later, that memory re-triggers (only for me) as we go skiing on the banks of the river and then drive back. My anticipation at this point having reached another level.

And so, 3 PM comes, and on the PBS Kids website (which is streaming the final episodes for free), I watch. The first three and a half episodes feel like a satisfying but unsettling dream. They do not feel like final season episodes at all, but random episodes with both over-familiar themes from past seasons (kids doing a day of job shadowing, D.W.’s famous missing snowball) to insane stuff that I didn’t know they’d put in a kids show (a whole episode that’s a black-and-white silent film, and a pirate cove vacation spot that gets embezzled by its actual pirate owners). Most notably, the first half of the final episode is simply a throwaway episode about Arthur’s best friend Buster being a blabbermouth (that’s the title)—featuring a shocking turn near the end where Arthur acts like a total asshole to Buster and we see precise, jarring, high-quality animation of Buster crying with actual tears falling out. (I was not going to cross-reference the other five hundred episodes, but it would be wild if that’s the only time a character in the show cried like that.)

Then it’s the final episode. The final, final episode of Arthur. And despite being an inexplicably short standard eleven-minute episode (instead of a full one), All Grown Up a legit finale. The first eight minutes is Arthur, Buster, Francine, and Muffy—the four core kids from the start—playing this weird board game that tells them their future. And then a flash forward to twenty years later. In those three short minutes that will leave viewers wanting more for eternity, we get that brief glimpse of the adult version of most of these beloved characters—who we’d gotten to know a children through over a hundred hours of past episodes. And it ends, of course with the frame story: Arthur has finally published his graphic novel, and it recounts the whole series… starting from Season 1 Episode 1.

Then fade to black. What a finale.

So Long Spanky, the early first season episode where the pet parakeet of Arthur’s annoying four-year-old sister, which was only introduced in this episode, abruptly dies. (One of the only live deaths in the entire run of the show, I believe.) With its companion Buster’s New Friend, which features quite possibly the most passive-aggressive expression of genuine forgiveness in television history (see 2:34 here). I watched at the apartment of friend Fred Tian, who introduced it as “the incredible new show that has just exploded into the public consciousness, as per X, Y, Z metrics” (a paraphrase of seven-year-old terms I can’t remember).
Speaking as someone who did not actually go through what would’ve been extreme sleep deprivation or repeated exposure of Seasons 14 to 24, I think I legitimately could (and should) have done that once-in-a-lifetime crazy thing—or at least the majority of it during minimally reasonable hours.