Dispatches From Elsewhere Review: The Boy (Season 1 Episode 10)

Dispatches From Elsewhere Season 1 Episode 10, “The Boy,” bursts through the fourth wall as it searches for closure.

At times the season finale feels a bit like the game-ending that disappointed Peter in Dispatches From Elsewhere Season 1 Episode 7, “Cave of Kelpius.” As Simone put it, “This whole thing was just a lesson in cooperation? Barf.”

The last few minutes certainly try to convince us that the real Elsewhere Society was just the friends we made along the way, and it’s a grating, condescending end to a show that feels capable of something better.

But then again, how does one conclude a project so personal that it ends with the show’s creator, Jason Segel, playing the role of himself?

It’s difficult — impossible, even — to write an ending for what you have explicitly claimed is your own story, the one you are still living in the midst of.

Pen something too tragic, and both the story and the teller seem pathetic. Make it too aspirational and it feels trite; write it as wish fulfillment, and it reeks of egoism.

The finale of Dispatches From Elsewhere is all of those things, and also none of them. It’s self-indulgent, certainly, but it’s also tremendously honest.

The opening sequence of “The Boy,” filmed in Old Hollywood black and white, is a tale highly recognizable within the show’s universe. It’s about a child who loves performing and wants to make it in showbiz, but whose joy begins to sag under the weight of success.

Like Clara (or Lee, if you prefer), the boy loses touch with the vibrant, creative part of himself that made his career possible. He does what he set out to do, but it doesn’t feel the way he’d hoped it would. 

The story of the boy fades out, and the next scene opens on a closeup of Jason Segel speaking in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Jason: For the past twenty years what I would do is I would make a bunch of jokes and I would make you all like me. But I don’t think anything is funny right now, and I don’t like myself, and I don’t expect you to like me. I feel done, and I don’t want to be here.

The words rush out in a stream of consciousness, and then the real gut punch arrives: this is not Peter speaking, but rather Jason — the actor, the writer, the real human person responsible for putting those words on the page.

The story is no longer fiction, no longer a fanciful romp through the lives of people who don’t exist.

Instead, it becomes a memoir. It becomes real. 

It’s a knife twist of a story turn, one of the most arresting and brave choices I’ve seen on television in recent years. I’ll be thinking for weeks about that moment when the curtain of fantasy falls, and what’s left is a man whose life is a half-written script, holding his empty palms out to an invisible audience.

If only the rest of the episode felt as close and as daring as that moment.

Instead, the final half-hour is the television equivalent of an author giving a book report on his own novel. It’s a painstaking breakdown of fact-to-fiction parallels, hammering home themes and metaphors that would have more power if they’d been presented without explanation and consigned to the audience’s intellect. 

Much of this material could have been cut for time, and the episode would have been stronger for it. 

But cheesy addresses to the camera aside, what Dispatches From Elsewhere leaves us with is the bracing observation of a tendency to mythologize ourselves, to try and force the pieces of our lives into a recognizable narrative.

We cast ourselves in roles, viewing ourselves as the victim, the villain, the outcast, or the good samaritan. We believe ourselves to be tedious and dull, or else the most interesting person in the world. We seek to understand ourselves according to the extremes of our behavior and emotions when the truth of our potential is always somewhere in between.

Jason: So I was a selfish, self-centered, entitled, spoiled guy who lost his way. No victim, no villain, just me and my choices. Is that right?

The Boy: There you go. You’re cured.

Jason: I am?

The Boy: No, you’re a goddamn mess. But it’s a start.

That’s the story of Dispatches From Elsewhere in a nutshell: a courageous, flawed, fantastic, and often frustrating journey toward self-awareness, inviting us to delve inside our own minds.

What did you think of the season finale of Dispatches From Elsewhere? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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