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| Events | Ads | Fluff |
* Today's events: the men's gold medal hockey game, the men's 50 km cross-country race, and the finals of the four-man bobsled. And what are we going to spend the first 90 minutes of the final day of Olympic coverage on? A 20-year-old story about a couple of figure skaters. Yeah, because who would want to see all of that other exciting stuff that happened today?
* So, from the start of the Olympics through Thursday, NBC had shown only 143 minutes of fluff. That's barely over ten minutes per day. Obviously, I'd rather see ten more minutes of event coverage per day, but given past years, that's not a bad total. However, by the end of tonight's show, it's almost guaranteed that we will have doubled that total in the last three days. A great performance at the beginning followed by a complete collapse at the end. It's like the University of Alabama's football season last year. Sorry, Tide fans!
* We start the show with Nancy Kerrigan. She is from a blue-collar background with a very supportive family. She's America's sweetheart even now, 20 years later. We meet Tonya Harding in a karaoke bar, butchering a song with her out-of-tune voice. So, let the hatchet job begin.
* I, for one, believe Tonya Harding when she says she didn't have advance knowledge of the attack. I mean, look at the random assemblage of idiots who pulled off this act. After 20 years every bit of minutia that could have come out on this case has come out and there's no hard piece of evidence that could be used to nail Tonya. Listen to her tonight. Does she talk like a mastermind who could pull off the crime of the century? She doesn't even sound like a person who could talk her way out of a speeding ticket.
* Look at Scott Hamilton in 1994! It's not often that a bald man's haircut looks better now than it looked 20 years ago.
* Nancy Kerrigan skated very well, but ultimately lost to Ukrainian Oksana Baiul. You know, if Nancy would have just hired someone to hit Baiul across the knee, she would have won gold and Tonya would have been blamed. See, that's what you get for not thinking on your feet!
* "You guys," says Harding, referring the Mary Carillo and the media, "Every four years, every two years, whatever. Nobody wants to hear this stuff anymore." And with that, Tonya has proven herself smarter than everyone on the NBC production staff. Hmm... maybe she is smart enough to have pulled this off.
* And now Nancy joins Bob "live" in the studio. We're having a recap of the fluff we just watched? So first there was fluff promoting fluff, then there was the fluff, and now there's fluff talking about the fluff we just watched? Would that make this the third circle of Hell?
* Finally we get to the Closing Ceremonies (from now on, "CC") with our hosts Al Michaels, Cris Collinsworth, and Vladimir Posner. Let the drug-induced hallucinations begin!
* A group of dancers holding seagulls on sticks above their heads runs around under hundreds of giant, vertically-oriented, fluorescent lightbulbs. A rowboat sails through the sky while hundreds of dancers wrapped in mylar space blankets run underneath it in an enormous yin-yang symbol. On the rowboat, a clown looks around the sky as they're surrounded by angels. The space blanketed individuals, in the lone portion of this opening segment that makes any sense, form the Olympic rings except --in a nod to the mishap in the Opening Ceremonies-- one of the rings doesn't open. Well played, Russia. Well played.
* Next up, a group of Russian athletes bring in their flag so that everyone can sing the theme from The Hunt For Red October. Vladimir tells us that this is the same music as the Soviet Union's anthem, they just changed the lyrics. Al asks what they removed and Posner says the references to Stalin and Lenin. Also, I'm guessing, they added a line about Vladimir Putin. No? Just wait a couple of years.
* NBC keeps showing Putin in the VIP box. What's the over/under for when he falls asleep at the CC? Looking at him, I'm betting that he already has, and that he just knows how to sleep while standing up.
* The parade of athletes! In the OC, they come into the stadium by country in alphabetical order. In the CC, just get 'em in there! We have stuff to do!
* Finally, the athletes are seated. Now the seagulls are back on the ground and an upside-down town floats over the floor. Supposedly it represents the paintings of Marc Chagall. Cris asks why the house is upside-down. Posner says it represents how Chagall saw the world in a different way, where everything was upside-down. Here we have two things that I hate most in commentators: Cris is a know-nothing and proud of it, and Posner is a know-it-all who doesn't really know it all.
* Ah, ballet! Please, could we just do this for the next two hours? Sadly, no.
* Posner, who earlier told us that if there was one thing that Russia had contributed to the world, it was ballet, now tells us that if there's one thing Russia has contributed to the world, it is writing. I think if there's one thing that Vladimir Posner has contributed to the world, it is his one cliche.
* Now it's time for the Olympic flag handover, where the mayor of Sochi will transfer the Olympic flag over to the mayor of PyeongChang, South Korea, host of the 2018 Winter Games. Symbolically, Thomas Bach, president of the IOC, is the middleman in the transfer. That's probably how the under-the-table-cash system works, too.
* Next up, the South Korean presentation. If this doesn't include Gangnam Style, I'm going to be extremely disappointed.
* We start with more people dressed as birds, flitting about to a South Korean opera singer. They're followed by people holding giant light globes and dancing through Olympic constellations projected on the floor. The symbolism is so obvious that even Cris Collinsworth would get it. If you don't understand, just ask Vladimir Posner. He'll gladly tell you everything he knows.
* The mayor of Sochi proclaims their Olympics the best ever. That's not really the way it works. Thomas Bach then gives his speech, saying that "these were the athletes' games." Then he closes them. Someone go out in the parking lot and put out the flame!
* A series of giant, rotating mirrors enters stage right. Then the giant teddy bear Sochi mascot arrives enters stage left along with the rabbit and cat mascots. Vladimir Posner rambles some more about how Russia is... forget it. I can't even figure out what he's talking about. It's like he took every cliche he knew and then only told us the first half of each one of them. Now the bear is looking wistfully around the arena, standing in front of a replica of the Olympic flame. Are we really going to snuff out the Olympic flame with a giant animatronic bear? The bear winks, then blows out the flame with his icy cold breath. Even better! He sheds a giant bear tear!
* A hot-air-balloon-powered air ship enters the arena, an operatic fat lady singing on its bow. I guess it is over, then. Confetti falls like snow all around the stadium as fireworks explode indoors. The bear, the cat and the bunny extend their arms to the crowd, imploring them to applaud lest they be consumed by their giant animatronic jaws.
* Outside, where no one who paid for a CC ticket can see, more fireworks erupt and we can verify that the official flame is indeed extinguished.
* On the floor, Mary Carillo, asks American Olympians what they thought about her Nancy Kerrigan story. Ha ha ha! Not really! After all, who could possibly be interested in a 20-year-old story about figure skaters?
* Al Michaels gets to wrap it up as an animated cat DJ parties with the Olympians in the background. And we end with a montage of Olympic highlights. Is this fluff? Well, it is in slow-motion and set to dramatic music, but this is actually the one time during all of the Olympic coverage that I don't mind that. Even I can get soft at the end.
And thus it ends again, not with a bang, but with a whimper of icy cold breath from a robot. There were 143 minutes of fluff in the first 14 days of the Olympics, and 142 minutes in the last three days. What do you say about that? "Oh well, the rest of the Olympics were good?" Let me think about it. All I know for now is that the Games are over. Tomorrow, come back and see how I wrap it all up. See you then!
