Leslie's Ambition Fights Leslie's Heart In The Parks & Recreation Finale

A few hours before Parks & Recreation aired its Season 6 finale, Margaret Lyons wrote at Vulture that she hopes the coming seventh season will be the last for the show. She makes a good case -- the recent (terrible) example of How I Met Your Mother's absurdly protracted final bow is, indeed, a cautionary tale -- but I would go even further: I think the show's sixth season maybe could have been its last, and I feel like maybe it was supposed to be.

Looking back over the list of Season 6 episodes, it feels like all the characters did was say goodbye. Leslie ended her career as a Pawnee City Councillor. Ann and Chris gave up their lives in Pawnee. The former Jerry shed his old identity. Even Eagleton, city of dicks, melted away to be absorbed by Pawnee. By the time Leslie was offered the chance to run a regional office of the National Parks Service -- which would necessitate a move to Chicago -- it felt like her departure would be a typically optimistic way for the series to end. And then: fucking triplets.

I realize that actual living people sometimes find themselves having to make one major life decision at the same time another change of circumstances suddenly presents itself...but I bet the "change of circumstance" isn't a surprise baby in real life as often as it is on TV (teen moms excepted). I should have had more faith not just in the show generally but in Amy Poehler specifically that Leslie's pregnancy wouldn't be the reason she turned down what is so much her dream job that she hardly dared to hope it might ever come along. (And when we learned, in the season's penultimate episode, that she was pregnant with triplets, I thought there might be a chance that one especially Knope-y embryo who was really competitive might just absorb its siblings like Pawnee absorbed Eagleton. I am not a crackpot.)

The show we know couldn't dangle a job like this in front of the Leslie we know and then not let her take it. (Lord, it wouldn't be Parks & Recreation if someone wasn't changing jobs -- see also Tom opening his restaurant and Craig making his sommelier début AND I'm even going to count Ben joking that he's going to go back to work at the accounting firm.) If the episode had ended with the whole Parks Department staff seeing Ben and Leslie off as they departed Pawnee for Chicago, it would have been kind of samey after the sendoff Ann and Chris just got, but it would have made sense, and would have nicely ended the series by validating Leslie's ambition (and her choice of Ben as her real perfect partner for all her spectacular pursuits).

Instead, we got an Armin Tamzarian-worthy solution: Leslie gets the job and Pawnee when she convinces her boss to move the office to Indiana. ...Sure? I mean, if this is a world in which Tom can field an offer to invest in his latest business from the man who ruined his last one, I guess that could happen? I'm sure we also have Poehler to thank for the decision to jump us all forward three years, past Leslie's pregnancy and all the sitcommy business that surrounds one newborn, never mind three, and I am definitely grateful. But I guess I just don't know where things can go from here. From what the flash-forward showed us, Leslie's support staff is still intact, still no further ahead in their own careers; and Leslie and Ben are each on the cusp of some kind of huge change. I just fear that we're going to get another retread of Leslie on the campaign trail (now for Senate or Governor or something), and Ben about to sell the Cones of Dunshire for billions and find himself enough at loose ends that he's forced to return to his first love, stop-motion animation.

It's not that I want the show to end; I am still very entertained by it -- especially when it's preposterous -- and it's one of the rare sitcoms where its emotional moments don't feel unearned or tacked-on. (When Ben gave Leslie his pep talk, in the finale, about how important the Parks Service job would be for the millions of people who love nature, I legitimately got choked up, because I am one of those people sometimes!) But letting Leslie fulfill an ambition she never even knew she had would have been a lovely valediction for her and for the show. But I guess I can hang in for "Flu Season III" and "Galentine's Day IV." Apparently, Jon Hamm wants me to.