Entourage: Season 5 Finale: "Return to Queens Blvd."

Entourage: Season 5 Finale: "Return to Queens Blvd."
The last 5 minutes: F
The rest of the episode: A-

This season finale of Entourage is hard for me to judge. On the one hand, it was a great episode, one that held a lot of intensity and conflict that had been simmering for a while. On the other hand, it sort of dropped the aspects of the season I found interesting by negating them and decided to wrap everything up really nicely in the last 5 minutes in a way that felt completely forced and rushed.

Vince’s mini freakout towards the end of the episode was excellent. This is what I had been waiting 5 seasons for; Vince to actually show significant frustration. His argument with Eric was also excellent because it let out a lot of stress that had been simmering between the two. Turtle and Jamie are fantastic and thank God Drama knows about them and hopefully he can shut the fuck up for once and drive off of a cliff if I am lucky. Although Drama did say Milk was dope which was nice.

My problems were that this season has been questioning Vince’s acting ability. In the episode before this one, I was not convinced by Vince’s acting. Yet apparently Gus Van Sant was even though he had not been by any of Vince’s other work. If him and I saw the same dailies, I don’t know what is wrong with one of our tastes but I did not feel that his acting was good enough by any means to prompt Gus Van Sant himself to send them to Martin Scorsese who himself was personally so thrilled by the dailies that he casts him as the lead in his new movie without so much as an audition or even a meeting. That for me took me completely out of the episode and made me realize, “Wait, this is Entourage...what the fuck was I expecting?”

Vince and Eric conveniently wrapped up their conflict in literally a minute and a half and everything is hunky dory in the world of Entourage. Whoop de do. I am interested in next season but I have realized with this episode that while there can be great ones, the show does things I do not approve of and will never live up to the potential it carries as a show with any significant meaning. Everything works out for these people without them having to do anything to earn it. It just comes to them. And that makes for a completely uninteresting show that cops out on its audience. We get teases with the incredible idea of Vince going in to audition for Van Sant and that never happens. How amazing would that have been? But no. Nothing like that. We could have been set up for some episode with Eric functioning as a manager without Vince as oneof his clients. This is intriguing to me. But no. The show had an opportunity to slightly evolve and to challenge itself. How do we address these hard times in an effective way for the drama but also to keep the humor of the show completely intact? They took the easy way out.

So what is next for Vince? I feel like we shall be going back to basics here with him being successful. Since this seems to be as far down as the creators of the show were willing to go with him the next logical step is for them to make Vince more successful than he has ever been which is where I think this is going. Scorsese and Vince. Does this mean Oscar? Holy crap I hope not. Ugh the more I think about it the more I wonder why I watch this. It has great moments and this was overall a great season but a great season for Entourage is like a mediocre season of the other shows I watch. Again though this was a great episode until the last 5 minutes which set up the next season and made me completely rethink why I want to waste time on this show.

Judging by the reviews of this episode which I read after I wrote all of this, everyone is saying exactly what I am. Thank God I’m not the only one that watches this show that has some sense.