Well, the other shoe finally dropped. As expected, Awake will be a one-season wonder, joining the ranks of other promising short-order dramas—I’d say it falls somewhere between Terriers and The Chicago Code in terms of quality at the moment. Now that its fate is sealed, Awake only has one hoop left to jump through: creating a satisfying ending, if not some kind of meager explanation, to satisfy a story about a detective split between two realities. After some midseason wandering, the show finally hunkered down to deliver on that mystery. Last week made significant progress, and tonight’s penultimate episode is really just a continuation of that, the second in a final series of three heavily serialized episodes on a bullet train to some kind of conclusion.
The opening scene is another masterstroke, the kind of fever pitch Awake reaches when it tunes in to Britten’s internal struggles so precisely that the show imbues cutting between two therapy sessions where every character is sitting down with high drama and tension resting on a razor’s edge. Some of the match cuts that switched between filters to show Britten sitting in both worlds were amazing, as he raced through the same argument, increasingly frustrated that he wasn’t getting through to either therapist. This is one of the few times that Dr. Evans and Dr. Lee agree on something, that perhaps Britten is so bereaved to finally reach the “truth” that he invents a huge conspiracy behind the car crash, even if the show lets the audience in on the truth before Britten begins to uncover it through force.
Last week, Detective Britten reached the precipice of acceptance, breaking down in tears for the first time and exclaiming in exasperated sobs that his negligence killed his son Rex. While that was a powerfully emotional conclusion to reach, it wasn’t based on all the information Britten could remember about the crash. Once he has more details—albeit inexplicable details gleaned from a side view mirror with a terrible angle or seeing another driver’s face in the dark, as his Green reality therapist notes—he sees no other path. He’s got one goal, and that makes him just enough of a danger for Evans to tip Bird off that something isn’t quite right, while slyly not giving away any confidential details.
This week, Britten isn’t accepting or emotionally burdened with trying to get back to the other side of his life, he’s simply the most desperate he’s ever been, so wildly transfixed on the conspiracy plot that he sends Rex to live with his aunt and asks his wife to stay away from the house. Somehow he never reveals anything that’s going on to either of them, but that desperation leads to some catastrophic violence. In the Green reality, Britten confronts Hawkins at his home, kills him in a struggle just before Bird shows up. They’re at a standoff, with Britten claiming Hawkins had incriminating evidence that could trace the heroin and prove Britten’s family was attacked. He has to handcuff Bird to prevent him from doing anything about Hawkins’ body, and while in the car, Bird manages to knock Britten out. This sends him back to the Red reality, where he has to coerce Bird as his former partner to steal the file from Hawkins’ computer in a tense file-copying scene ripped straight out of Iron Man. Britten gets the file decrypted, revealing a lease agreement on a storage unit. When he goes to meet up with Bird, he finds that Hawkins has already murdered his former partner, planning to frame the suspended and mentally unstable Britten for the crime. This all plays out in a lot of complicated cross-cutting and world jumping, but Awake does manage to juggle the flow of information well, moving forward even as it jumps sideways back and forth between the realities.