There’s a moment near the end of every blockbuster these days where the hero, battered and bruised, finally trudges back to where the whole thing started. The dusty farmstead. The childhood bedroom. The pub on the corner where the old gang used to drink. The music swells. You feel something in your chest that you’d swear was genuine emotion, right up until the screen cuts to black and a caption appears: They’ll be back.
And there it is. The con.
Because here’s the thing your English teacher told you and never quite finished explaining. The notion that all stories are, deep down, the same story is not new. Joseph Campbell — an American professor of comparative mythology who spent the better part of the last century reading every myth he could get his hands on — built a whole career on it. He called the pattern the monomyth, and laid it out in a 1949 doorstop called The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the book that George Lucas later credited with giving Star Wars its bones. Old Campbell’s thesis was simple enough to fit on a beer mat: the hero leaves home, faces the dark, and comes back changed, carrying some hard-won wisdom for the rest of us mugs. The return is the point. The arriving is the point. You go out, you suffer, you learn something, and crucially, you stop. You come home and you stay there. That’s the deal that’s been holding up storytelling since some bloke in a cave first grunted out a tale about a mammoth hunt.
Well, lads, they’ve broken the deal.
The homecoming that never lands
Watch what the streaming era has done to that final beat. The hero comes home — but the home is now a launchpad. The wisdom isn’t earned and kept; it’s deferred to the next instalment, which is already greenlit, already storyboarded, already has a release date eighteen months out. The return home, that sacred full stop, has been quietly downgraded to a comma. A sequel hook in a Sunday-roast costume.
Take the recent Apple TV thing, Widow’s Bay. Ten episodes that march, dutifully, through every beat Campbell ever scribbled down — the call to adventure, the descent, the dark night of the soul somewhere around episode seven. And then episode ten arrives and you genuinely cannot tell whether the story has finished. The big bad seems beaten. Or does she? Our heroine stands on the cliff, the storm clears, the strings do their tear-jerking business — and just as your chest goes tight and you brace for the credits, up flashes Coming in Season 2. You’re left sitting there in the dark, half-cathartic, half-cheated, trying to work out if you’ve just watched an ending or a very long advert for one. That’s the monomyth with the last page torn out and a subscription form stapled where it used to be.
Nobody ever actually arrives anymore. They can’t afford to.
Think about it. A story that genuinely ends is a story you’ve finished paying for. You walk away satisfied, your wallet shut, your evening freed up. That is, from the perspective of a man with a spreadsheet and quarterly targets, an absolute catastrophe. A satisfied customer is a lapsed subscriber waiting to happen. So the modern franchise has performed a small miracle of corporate alchemy: it has taken the one thing every story was for — the resolution — and turned it into bait.
The eternal story, the monomyth, the thing that supposedly lives in our marrow — they’ve put it on a subscription. Twelve ninety-nine a month and you too can watch the hero almost get home, forever.
The grift, dressed up as art
Now, I can already hear the objection from the back of the room. But Seán, serialised storytelling is ancient! Dickens did it! The Greeks had trilogies! And aye, fair enough, they did. But Dickens’s serials still ended. Little Nell didn’t get a post-credits sting teasing The Old Curiosity Shop 2: Electric Boogaloo. The cliffhanger was a device in service of a finished thing. What we’ve got now is the opposite — a finished thing held permanently hostage in service of the device.
The tell is in the language the studios use. Nothing concludes; it “sets up the next chapter.” Nothing dies; it’s “left open.” There’s always a multiverse, a timeline, a flash-forward, a mysterious figure in the shadows whose face we don’t quite see. Every door that closes has a foot wedged in it. It’s the storytelling equivalent of a bloke at last orders who keeps saying “just one more” until the sun comes up and he’s lost his coat, his dignity, and the will to live.
And we keep buying it. That’s the genuinely depressing bit. We’ve been trained, like Pavlov’s dogs but with worse taste, to feel that the open ending is generous — look, more story! — when it’s actually the meanest trick in the book. A real ending is a gift. It costs the storyteller something to give it. The open ending costs nothing and promises everything, which is the precise business model of every dodgy geezer who ever sold you a timeshare.
What we’ve lost in the deal
Here’s the frustrating part, and I’ll be honest, it’s the bit that gets under my skin. There’s nothing wrong with the monomyth. The hero’s journey is a beautiful piece of kit. It worked for thousands of years because the return home meant something — it told us, the knackered punters in the dark, that struggle leads somewhere, that you can come back from the worst of it and find peace.
Strip out the arrival and you strip out the consolation. You’re left with a treadmill dressed as an odyssey. The hero never rests, so neither do you, so neither does your direct debit. It’s not a story anymore. It’s a retention strategy with a soundtrack.
The truly grim joke is that the suits know exactly what they’re doing. They understand that the homecoming is the most powerful beat we’ve got, which is precisely why they’ll never let it land. Give the people their full stop and the people leave. Keep the comma dangling and the people stay, vaguely dissatisfied, perpetually hopeful, paying.
So the next time you watch a hero almost get home, and the music swells, and your chest does that thing — savour it. That’s the closest you’re going to get. The arrival was always the point of the whole exercise.
And they’ve cancelled it for season two.