[13x07] August 2nd, 2009

[13x07] August 2nd, 2009

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Another first for Top Gear for me in this episode, it left me in tears... of sadness.

What an epic final piece to the season
 
best. episode. ever.

laughed hysterically at the VW Ads

absolutely loved the vantage ending, love it
 
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I've just finished watching that ending again. I'm not ashamed to say that I have tears in my eyes. It was incredibly beautiful and sad. The music, the landscape, the car and the gorgeous roar of the V12. It will certainly be a very sad day when cars such as this are consigned to history.
 
I have one word to say about this episode: Strange.
I don't think it was that great. But it wasn't all bad either.

And some parts in the Aston Martin-film looked like it were filmed in front of a green-screen. I think it all was a bit strange..
 
shellygrrl said:
In Brit-speak, "series" = "season". So consider this the season finale. (They'll be back in November sometime.)
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Actually, I'm curious about this too, and this doesn't fully answer the question.

In America, the last episode during a season is called the "season finale". In England, you call a season a series, so our "season finale" would be your "series finale".

However, here, we call a show's entirety its "series". So the last episode of a show to air, ever, is the "series finale". If you have a series finale two or three times a year, what do you call the very final episode of the show, ever? The "show finale"? Do you not give it a title at all?
 
Hated that ending - I thought we was halfway through the episode after the SIARPC and was looking forward to one last segment, after waiting and waiting with the dreary music and no talking for something to happen, the show just finishes. Never seen such a dull piece of video on a Top Gear show before. The earlier segment with the commercials was ok but I guess it lasted a lot longer than I thought, and left no room for anything else, I think we could have done without quite so many commercials in that bit.
 
If been worrieing about the ending to.
I dunno it just felt so.....'sad'

I'm sure if it realy was the end of topgear they would have atleast given us a clear and proper goodbye on al three presenters wouldent they? not just Clarckson going all mysterious , misty eyed and artistic on us? (especialy coming from the loudest man in the world with an obsession for blowing shit up :p )

maybee i'm just seeing stuff but I realy feel topgear coming to a closure.....Jeremy losing faith? Telling people to buy cheap and little but fun cars? (one of his collums) and now talking about the end of true supercars? he's always been the king op optimism......
 
Hrisebro said:
I have one word to say about this episode: Strange.
I don't think it was that great. But it wasn't all bad either.

And some parts in the Aston Martin-film looked like it were filmed in front of a green-screen. I think it all was a bit strange..
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It was. When the camera was panning slowly and the backdrop was changing, it was shot inside the car with a green screen. Notice the car wasn't shaking at all. It just adds to the mood, that peaceful and melancholy feeling. It was very strange experiencing that from a show that usually is full of testosterone.
 
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spicysaurus said:
If you have a series finale two or three times a year, what do you call the very final episode of the show, ever? The "show finale"? Do you not give it a title at all?
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The "last episode".
 
Wow. What an episode.

The HSV/Vauxhall Bath-hurst (lol) and Maloo were fantastic. In spite of my Australianitus I'm no fan of our homegrown cars (they're the weapons of bogans, basically...HSVs are for cashed-up bogans), yet I can appreciate Richard getting excited over them. And let's face it, an $80,000 sportcar-ute is a uniquely Australian concept. Certainly, the lap times don't lie. The review was well shot and Hamster's enthusiasm was very genuine... with that goofy look on his face, he was like a pig in shit.

His reading on the Bathurst 1000 as an event was spot on too!

The news was a hoot - I was in tears for the majority of it.

The VW ad challenge had me worried to begin with, thought it might be a bit dreary and full of cheap gags, but turned out to be absolutely hilarious. I agree it could have been shorted by a few minutes, but the ads JC and JM came up with were pure gold. The guy who commits suicide... I mean, suicide isn't normally funny at all, but somehow they made it so. The ad guy going "because it's shit" - classic. You UKers must have lame advertising guidelines... we had an ad for a powerful ute (not the Maloo) which involved it doing circlework/doughnuts on a dry farm until a tornado appeared and it started raining!

I have to say, JC's final ad was just pure genius. Up until the last 3 seconds of the ad I was thinking "where the fuck is he going with this?", wondering if it was some weird 28 Days Later themed thing... and then "Berlin to Warsaw on one tank" - I was literally laughing so hard it hurt. Just so Clarkson... I'm sure the BBC Complaints line* has lit up accordingly.

(* A question for Brits... when you do ring the BBC Complaints line does the voice prompt thing say "To complain about what Jeremy Clarkson said within the past 7 days, please press 1. For all other complaints and enquiries, please press 2"?)

Cool wall - great to see it back. Who cares if the whole lift thing with Hamster was scripted - it was genius. Especially JC hitting the kill switch.

SIARPC was better than I thought it would be... I'm no fan of Jay Leno (blame Bill Hicks) but he is certainly a true-and-through petrol head and the McLaren F1 story was pretty funny.

And onto the Aston Marton Vantage V12...

I've read through all 15 pages prior to my post, and yes - it was a total mindfuck.

Goppingly beautiful. Wonderfully emotive. Terrifyingly sombre. And yes, I did feel choked up at the end.

We know it's not the case as S14 is confirmed for later in the year, but it would have worked as TG's send off - albeit a very sad rather than celebratory one.

Rather than repeat what's already been said many times over, I'll make 2 comments.

1. It might just be a mighty big joke. JC's gone "it's an Aston, it's got a V12, what else is there to say except that pretty soon we won't be able to enjoy such cars for much longer because of Gordon Brown and hippies, so let's just film me with Top Gear's helicopter division through Wales for the day, and make it sombre, and all the Final Gear types will shit themselves and think I'm gonna pull the plug. Hell, they might even complain to the BBC and get them to increase our budget!"

2. I don't think the Internal Combustion Engine is done quite yet. Nor, for that matter is the Supercar. Yes, oil is getting scarce and what little is left is annoyingly located in all the messed up parts of the world. Yes, we're in a world overrun with self-righteous hippies and flat-shoed self-interest groups who want us to eat tofu and ride the bus instead of eat cow and drive our 5L twin turbo V8s. Yes, our leaders have panicked, and are pandering to these ecomentalists.

And yes, the car as we have known it for decades is about to change. Our town runabouts will soon sport electric motors, and our motorway repmobiles will have smaller, thriftier engines. Soon every regular car will be available as a "hybrid"... soon after it won't even be an option.

But supercars won't change so quickly. A supercar isn't about being PC. They're not about following the trends or doing what the government and self-interest groups want. They're not about miles per gallon or grams of CO2. Some series' ago TG themselves described supercars as loud, obnoxious beasts that should kill squirrels, reclaim the Falklands and consume all the world's oil. And they're absolutely right.

To drive a supercar is like flipping the bird to the rest of the world - it's a big, loud, hairy "fuck you" to Greenpeace in magnesium and carbon fibre. The rich people who buy Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Zondas, Astons and so on don't care if it costs ?1000 extra to tax a year just because too many carbon dioxides come out the tailpipe. They don't care if the car only gets 8 MPG and fuel's ?3 a litre. We care about that stuff, because we're not rich and it will be our Golf GTIs and other affordable fun cars that will be turned into electric 'transportation'. But the supercar will live on, so long as there are rich people who like cars.

There's also the minor fact that with a few simple changes, our engines can run on ethanol, which can never be depleted, grown just about anywhere, puts money in the pockets of our farmers instead of Arab sheiks and when that wonderful chemical reaction is complete and CO2 blasts its way out the exhaust, feel happy in the knowledge it will be absorbed by the plants that will be used to make the next litre of ethanol.

Of course, I might be wrong (it happened once, back in 1976...) so next time you're in your car, tell it you love it, and that you're happy its here. Maybe even go for a drive, just for the hell of it.
 
wikkedsnaab said:
2. I don't think the Internal Combustion Engine is done quite yet. Nor, for that matter is the Supercar. Yes, oil is getting scarce and what little is left is annoyingly located in all the messed up parts of the world. Yes, we're in a world overrun with self-righteous hippies and flat-shoed self-interest groups who want us to eat tofu and ride the bus instead of eat cow and drive our 5L twin turbo V8s. Yes, our leaders have panicked, and are pandering to these ecomentalists.

And yes, the car as we have known it for decades is about to change. Our town runabouts will soon sport electric motors, and our motorway repmobiles will have smaller, thriftier engines. Soon every regular car will be available as a "hybrid"... soon after it won't even be an option.

But supercars won't change so quickly. A supercar isn't about being PC. They're not about following the trends or doing what the government and self-interest groups want. They're not about miles per gallon or grams of CO2. Some series' ago TG themselves described supercars as loud, obnoxious beasts that should kill squirrels, reclaim the Falklands and consume all the world's oil. And they're absolutely right.

To drive a supercar is like flipping the bird to the rest of the world - it's a big, loud, hairy "fuck you" to Greenpeace in magnesium and carbon fibre. The rich people who buy Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Zondas, Astons and so on don't care if it costs ?1000 extra to tax a year just because too many carbon dioxides come out the tailpipe. They don't care if the car only gets 8 MPG and fuel's ?3 a litre. We care about that stuff, because we're not rich and it will be our Golf GTIs and other affordable fun cars that will be turned into electric 'transportation'. But the supercar will live on, so long as there are rich people who like cars.

There's also the minor fact that with a few simple changes, our engines can run on ethanol, which can never be depleted, grown just about anywhere, puts money in the pockets of our farmers instead of Arab sheiks and when that wonderful chemical reaction is complete and CO2 blasts its way out the exhaust, feel happy in the knowledge it will be absorbed by the plants that will be used to make the next litre of ethanol.

Of course, I might be wrong (it happened once, back in 1976...) so next time you're in your car, tell it you love it, and that you're happy its here. Maybe even go for a drive, just for the hell of it.
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My thoughts exactly ! (only in proper english ;) )
Thank you sir, and I wholeheartly agree.... exept for us all having electric runabouts......well maybee u people will , I wont, even if I have to convert my pertrol burning dinosaur to run on squashed watermellonseeds I will happily do so, even if I have to grow the damn things myself ! :p

Anything with batteries in it belongs either in you pocket or in a womans nightstand.....
 
I was so scared when I watched the Vantage film. It really felt like an "We're outta here" moment. In any case, awesome episode. Haven't laughed that much while watching Top Gear for quite some time. I just laughed my ass off at the headshot, and the Scirocco explosion.
 
Bathurst/Maloo was great, liked Hammonds review.
I think they cocked about a 'lil to much with the Scirroco advert.. Should've been less add's more driving the car, or just a shorter segment overall so they could do something else, like make the Vantage bit longer :)
Hoped they did more cars at the cool wall too.
Vantage film was stunning, it moved me, it was great to watch but I would've loved something more of a review of the car and after that perhaps that magnificent ending (it made me worry though)

Good episode, maybe my hopes for this last episode of the season were a bit to high.
 
TheRanter said:
I say build the Geothermal Plants, use the excess Electricity to produce Hydrogen
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Why not just use the electricity directly? Hydrogen fuel cell cars are electric cars anyway, and using electricity to create hydrogen wastes a lot of energy in the process.
 
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