Episode Guide
Don’t Give Up – | Review Score – 3.5/5 Never Let Go – | Review Score – 3/5 Stay Strong – | Review Score – 2.5/5 Be The Change – | Review Score – 2/5 Love Yourself – | Review Score – 3/5 And This Too Shall Pass – | Review Score – 2.5/5 The Rain is one of those post-apocalyptic romps that severely under-utilizes its premise. With an intriguing hook and idea early on, The Rain quickly dried up and descended into a more formulaic melodrama. With a distinct lack of actual rain and more of a supernatural vibe, fans turned away by the second season will undoubtedly be disappointed with this third and final offering. Despite teasing a new direction going forward last year, The Rain Season 3 slips back into old habits with all the same tropes and flaws in the past cropping up. Throughout the 6 episodes it never rains, regardless of how dark or stormy the sky looks. Instead, rainfall is pushed aside in favour of a final conflict that boils down to conflicting ideas over the future direction of the planet. Given the world-ending implications, this drama does feel unusually small. Before we get there though, the story picks up 3 months after the events at the end of the second season. Simone, Martin and the others are on the hunt, looking for a weakness to sneak into Apollon and find Rasmus. Meanwhile, Rasmus has all but handed himself over to Sten, voluntarily imprisoned while they work with him to see their “brave new world” come to fruition. While interesting on paper, toward the middle of the season everything descends into formulaic good VS evil territory as battle lines are drawn and a sibling rivalry looks set to settle the fate of the world. Along the way, The Rain takes some pretty questionable detours that offset the pacing and consequently gives the show more of a lethargic feel than it should. Episode 4 for example sees all the built up urgency stripped away for a stand-alone quest. Even worse, it’s resolved completely by the end and barely mentioned again across the rest of the show. Much like before, there’s a lot of plot contrivances this season but the biggest one of all comes from how Simone stumbles upon a solution to all their problems. There’s an unbelievable amount of luck involved and worse, it essentially renders her quest for most of the second season completely irrelevant. Although many will see the ending coming a mile off, The Rain leaves a conclusive enough note to end the Rasmus saga but lots of questions still hanging over the fate for many of our characters moving forward. It’s an ambiguous ending no doubt but also one that poses a lot of logical issues. Then again, given what we’ve seen in the past for this show, logic isn’t exactly a strong suit for The Rain. Many characters have identity crises this season too and the character work in general is pretty lacking. Jean flip-fops between emotional states depending on what the script needs him to do. Patrick and Fie don’t fare much better while the returning Sarah is disappointingly under-utilized. Given she was teased to have a big part in the story going forward, she doesn’t really have any bearing over what happens. There are some flashback sequences for a couple of supporting players too and a few new faces arrive but many feel one-dimensional and half-baked. There’s definitely an overwhelming feel that this show has run its course and run out of ideas. It’s not all bad though and The Rain does have a few decent individual moments. A few shocking twists late on offer up a nice change of pace and it’s refreshing to see that not everyone makes it to the finish line. There’s a bit more world-building this time around too and the series does introduce a few interesting narrative beats along the way. It’s just a shame that most of this is poorly executed. Despite all of its flaws, The Rain is still one of those rare shows that falls into that “no matter how bad it gets, it’s still enjoyable” category. It’s a series that’s unlikely to be remembered for years to come but also watchable enough to stick around to see the conclusion. It’s not perfect, and the show has more than its fair share of problems. If you’ve made it this far though, you might as well take those final few bites from this slice of post-apocalyptic, rain-soaked pie. The Rain Season 3 debuts on Netflix globally 6th August 2020. We were granted all 6 episodes for this review.
