"8. End of Days" – Stan Lee's Lucky Man S03E08 Review

Spoilers ahoy!

"End of Days"? Or "End of Series"? The final episode of the foreshortened season certainly wrapped everything up. Elsa is dead. Suri is dead. Harry has lost his bracelet. Rich is moving out of London. Eve is pregnant from Samuel, presumably. Samuel is dead. Steve is the new DSI, more from being the last man standing than anything. Daisy and Harry are off on a shore somewhere, walking away from the camera.

How'd we get here? Let's recap. After a rather convoluted conversation about luck and the bracelet in his life, Harry tosses himself over the edge of the roof where Samuel has cornered him. This ends up with Harry going splat, but not really, in a pile of garbage below. Samuel assumes he's dead and leaves with Eve.

The next morning some girl pokes Harry with a stick. She calls him "lucky man", seemingly casually, and I'm not sure who she's supposed to be. If she's a passing stranger, why does she use Harry's name? Or is that just Harry hallucinating? The girl dresses a little like Suri, and initially sounds like Suri when she's saying "Harry! Get up!"

But Harry doesn't say anything about this, and there's nothing further made of this. So other than a nod to Amara Karan, I'm not sure what it's supposed to signify.

Moving right along, Harry gets back to Rich's flat, confirms to Rich and Daisy he's alive. And then dozes off. Meanwhile, Samuel has put together a fusion chamber in an old factory, and plans to use it to melt down the two bracelets, cursed and uncursed. This will cause an explosion that will destroy a large chunk of London, but Samuel doesn't care. Eve does, and a lot of the episode is Sienna Guillory looking conflicted. Even though there's still no explanation for why she switched to Samuel's side after he a) tried to kill her, and b) gave her medical treatments to heal her and apparently sway her over to his side.

Really, Eve's heel turn has been the most erratic part of series 8. Credit to Sienna Guillory: she did what she could do with the part. But there just wasn't much there.

Harry has a father-to-daughter chat with Daisy, who only seems to have returned to give Harry pep talks. She says he's a superhero and gives him a string bracelet, and assures him he's always been lucky.

Samuel needs uranium to power the fusion chamber. This requires him to get the codes to the security network containing uranium deliveries. Elsa has the codes. Samuel finds the safe house (how?) where she's hiding out, kills her guard, and threatens her life. When Elsa refuses to tell him, he stabs her in the stomach killing her, and somehow gets the codes anyway. How? Shh, we're in final episode territory and can't stop to explain such things.

Since Samuel is wounded while killing Elsa, he asks Eve to slap the uncursed bracelet on him so he can complete his task. We get a few bits where Samuel's new super luck saves his life. Harry convinces Rich to help him, and the Claytons track Samuel down as he steals the uranium as it's delivered to a hospital. Samuel ends up fleeing when Steve and his men drive up, but Harry slips his phone into Samuel's pocket. And again, I'm confused as to how the super luck works. We've seen with Harry it protects him without his concentrating on it. So shouldn't Samuel's "good luck" fritz the phone so Harry can't track it?

Rich lures Steve and his men away, while Harry tracks the phone to the factory. There's a lot of fighting, and Eve has second thoughts and puts the cursed bracelet on Samuel's other wrist. The good and bad luck cancel out, and Samuel goes over a railing and falls to his death as Eve sets the fusion chamber to overload. Harry starts to fall as well, his life After Bracelet flashes before his eyes, and he smiles. And then the fusion chamber blows up as Rich and Steve look on.

In the aftermath, Steve speaks at Harry's funeral saying he was a good cop even though he never played by the rules. Daisy and Rich look on.

Steve gets promoted to DSI.

A pregnant Eve stands in the doorway of a trailer. Presumably she's pregnant with Samuel's child. So... what?

Rich gets a flask delivered to him with an inscription about making one's own luck.

Suri and Elsa decompose in their graves. Kamil's continues providing prostitutes to his customers. Anne sits in an apartment in New York and wonders where the heck her daughter is. No, we don't see any of this, but it's easy to imagine.

Harry and Daisy stand on the shore, and then walk off together.

In Hong Kong, Cheung's replacement Sam Lau puts the bracelets into their case. The end.

So "End of Days" wrapped up the season, and potentially the series. No word on whether it's been renewed yet, but if it is then it will probably have to start over even though the cast members whose characters survived the ending are apparently signed to show back up. I have no idea how it could progress from where they left it. I suppose Harry could get the uncursed bracelet back. Somehow. But it would seem to stretch credulity quite a bit.

They could go with a Lucky Man: The Next Generation approach. Daisy could get the bracelet, and fight Samuel's infant child. Or someone else until the child is old enough to be a threat. Or they could bring in a new "lucky man" and have Harry be his mentor.

Everyone's performances were okay. The episode seemed a bit rushed, with them skipping over some plot points. I've already pointed out a few. What was the significance of Harry (apparently) hallucinating the girl was Suri? How did Samuel get the codes after killing Elsa, when the point was to get the codes from a living Elsa?

How did Harry and Eve survive the big-ass blast near the end? Even if Harry's luck somehow kicked in sans bracelet, how did Eve survive?

The season as a whole progressed in spurts. Sometimes they rushed through some major stuff. And sometimes it seemed to drag interminably. We seemed to get a lot of Samuel as a MI6 agent (how?). And then he was a Triad leader. And then he was a traitor. And then he killed Suri. And then he was being hunted by the police. At the end he blithely puts on one of the bracelets he's sworn to destroy. Okay, as Harry points out, Samuel is weak and a hypocrite. But does he really plan to not destroy one of the two bracelets he's spent his entire life (and the entire season) vowing to destroy? And if he doesn't destroy both bracelets, will the explosion be as dire as predicted?

And what was up with his injecting himself in the gums with... steroids? And making a pointy-finger motion as his men gunned down Torch guards?

This ended up making Rupert Penry-Jones feel somewhat wasted. He basically ended up as a Bond villain: he's bad just to be bad. They gave him a scanty backstory to explain why he hated the bracelets. It's not that Penry-Jones was bad: it just seems like he could have done so much more with his character.

Ditto for Sienna Guillory. Eve has never been that solid a character, and season 3 did her no favors. She went from being a Harry loyalist, to a Samuel loyalist, back to a Harry loyalist or at least a "Don't blow up London" loyalist. All without any clear explanation, or enough screen time to give us a clear explanation. Maybe it was the fact that they cut the season down from ten (the first two seasons) to eight.

James Nesbitt is still a god among actors: I've liked him ever since Jekyll. Stephen Hagan was also good, and the byplay between the two actors and their characters was the highlight of the series. You could always count on Rich to cut through Harry's bullshit. And they got a nice scene or two in "End of Days" where Harry admits Rich has always been there for him.

Darren Boyd had the pretty thankless role of playing the bad cop turned good, who ended up on Harry's side. Other than the bit earlier in the season where he turned down Suri's drunken advances, Steve didn't have much to do except stand around a lot, look mildly perturbed, and stay loyal to Harry.

Neve McIntosh's character Elsa ended up dead. One gets the impression she was never intended to survive, and that's why they didn't bother giving her even the characterization they gave to DSI Alistair in the first two seasons. Ditto for Amara Karan and Suri. I liked the relationship between Suri and Rich. But it barely kicked into second gear before the creative team killed her off.

So overall, was Lucky Man a success? Sure. You had Nesbitt, who could do no wrong. You had a decent supporting cast even if they were sometimes wasted. The plot was good, even if the "super luck" was often erratic. Sometimes it worked, sometime it didn't. Harry says near the end that luck does what luck wants to do, but you get the impression it was more the creative team trying to convey a concept they (and admittedly, probably most people) couldn't pull off consistently. Thankfully, the show was never a waste of time watching.

And yes, this review sounds like a series wrap-up. Maybe it is: "End of Days" sure comes across as a series wrap-up, and I've reviewed it accordingly. I'd be glad to see it come back, but either they'll have to hit a massive reset button or change the concept entirely.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?