It’s friendship, of course, but there’s another concept that the finale hits repeatedly: the team.

(Ron, after all, once said crying is acceptable two places: funerals and the Grand Canyon. Maybe the sweetest, and cry-makingest, of all these is Ron coming to Leslie as she did to him years ago, asking for direction in his life, and her helping him find it, in the least objectionable sector of the federal government, the National Parks System. April helps Donna help her husband finance his school’s fancy math-learnin’. Tom comes up with the idea for his self-help empire by seeing each of his coworkers as a different personality model for success. Ben steps aside for Leslie to run for governor, as she had earlier backed his run for Congress.

What makes the endings happy here is the characters’ mutual support for one another. That’s typical of Parks: it’s combines a sense of satire about the larger world with unashamed positivity about the smaller individuals in it. MORE Read What Amy Poehler Had to Say About the First Episode of Parks and Recreation Like the 2017 of the rest of the final season, “One Last Ride” is set in a kind of comedy dystopia: there are eight corporations left, the country has run out of beef, and schools don’t teach math. It’s interesting, though, that while Parks gives its characters happy endings, they don’t inhabit a perfect world. One assumes, like Bill and Hillary, they’ll each take a shot at it in some order.) (Sidebar: are we all assuming that, by the time Ben and Leslie visit Gerry’s graveside in 2048, she’s now President? Or is he, since the Secret Service agent seems to be addressing both of them? Nice touch–assuming it was intended this way–to toss in the reveal offhandedly, in such a way that you could conclude either Ben or Leslie could be POTUS. The one Parkster who dies, Garry, does so on his 100th birthday, after living an essentially perfect life. Like Dorothy’s companions in The Wizard of Oz, they get the gifts that suit them: fame for Tom, coolness (despite parenthood) for April and Andy, contentment (and 51% of the Lagavulin Distillery) for Ron, and so on. (Not coincidentally, I think, the episode that ended that arc, “Leslie and Ron,” was the best of the season and one of the best Parks has ever done.) In its place came a lot of ever-afters and mostly happy endings to use a comparison nerd Ben would appreciate, it was like The Return of the King, with a whole lot of postscript and goodbyes after the fall of Sauron.Įven by the standards of sitcom endings, this one was more sweet than bittersweet–at times, it hit the Sweetums a bit hard–with the characters not just finding happiness in the future but succeeding wildly in ways that were appropriate to them.

But it also meant that, once the Pawnee National Park arc was resolved, there was no significant central conflict driving the story. It allowed the last episodes to give extended sendoffs to our favorite characters and the expansive world of Pawnee without feeling rushed. There were tradeoffs to treating the final season as an extended finale.

Parks and rec quotes graduation