Dramatic excesses in concluding series

CARIÑO. Effective and affecting.

HOW can you tell when a teleserye is on its last few telecasts? Its resident villains either start turning remorseful—or become even more monstrous than ever, rivalling the Devil himself in their phantasmagoric cruelty and evil.

More often than not, there’s a huge fire, or a series of conflagrations, plus an explosion that gives the finale the requisite extra visual oomph! And always, always, there’s a confrontation with an army of goons—and don’t forget the kidnapping that leads to a rescue, culminating in a long, visually exciting car chase that finally stops the series’ principal villain dead in his tracks—unless he repents.

By those yardsticks, it was clear last Monday that “E-Boy” was on its final week of telecasts. True enough, Ariel Rivera was held hostage and beaten up to within an inch of his life, so he had to be rescued—no, not by lawmen, but by a bunch of kids and robots.

Resolution

After all, robotics and the link between humans and automatons were the just concluded series’ main thematic “hooks,” so they had to figure strongly in its denouement and resolution. It’s just too bad that some of the show’s concluding twists and turns were stultifyingly predictable.

To its credit, however, the series did introduce young viewers to the imaginative prospects of an impending rapprochement between humans and “feeling” robots, and that remained the show’s best suit.

On the other hand, while some child stars like Bugoy Cariño were effective and affecting, there were too many kids on the show, whose loud and attention-calling gimmicks and antics ended up as a cacophonous mess.

For its part, “Dahil sa Pag-ibig” is by no means on “concluding” mode, but it also deserves to be cited, because its storyline has just taken a big twist and turn of its own, and new characters have been put into play. Piolo Pascual is in the Vatican, making peace with God, Christopher de Leon and Cristine Reyes are also momentarily cooling it, so the field is wide open for a major subplot featuring Jericho Rosales, Maricar Reyes, Rafael Rosell and Denise Laurel to finally kick in.

What do they have to do with Piolo, Cristine, etal? Rafael and Cristine were childhood BFFs, so when he suddenly up and married Laurel, she was more than miffed.

What about Jericho and Maricar? As often happens in teleseryes, there’s a missing ring that links their fates together, but why and how are still mystifyingly murky at this point. To complicate matters, their relationship started off badly, because his company had brought her father’s business to its knees. As of last Monday, however, the former adversaries had literally kissed and made up—and kissed some more—but, her dad nixed their love, so expect more romantic upheavals in the days to come.

Of course, the big, tantalizing question is, how will the Jericho-Maricar subplot finally dovetail into the original Christopher-Piolo-Cristine equation and, why all the dovetailing? Could the missing ring be the key? And, whatever happened to the boy who saw Christopher (accidentally) kill a rival for the big tract of land he desperately needed to make his financial and political fortune, way back when?

Abangan!