Running Point Season 1, Episode 10 Review – “Game Seven”

There are bad episodes of television, and then there is Running Point‘s “Game Seven”, one of the worst season finales I’ve seen in awhile. “Game Seven” feels like someone picking random plot points and cliches out of a hat, then assembling them in a spastic, almost illegible structure as quickly as they possibly can – a construction that not only highlights the show’s profoundly obvious flaws, but absolutely airballs at every point imaginable in its most critical moments to be engaging or poignant. Make no mistake; “Game Seven” is one of the worst episodes of TV in 2025, 30 minutes of trope-y disappointment that not only fails to resolve any of the season’s stories, but also fails in convincing any member of the audience who managed to survive until the finale, why they should return for season two.

Beginning a month after the events of “The Playoffs” (which… why did we just skip the entire fucking playoffs??!), “Game Seven” opens with a depressed, slightly aloof Isla contending with what she’s calling the ‘biggest game of her life’. After she turns down Jackie’s invitation to go to dinner, we find out Isla – the team president who has spent four seconds in the locker room all season – has to give a pre-game speech to the team before game 7.

Forget that on its face, Isla giving a pre-game speech makes absolutely no sense (which it shows in practice, when she names five players on the team we know almost nothing about, nor have any sort of emotional attachment to). Her motivational ploy is posed as the dramatic foundation of the episode, but it leads to another cascade of empty, cringe-y moments; you can decide whether Isla doing a bunch of John Wick quotes or Sandy singing Taylor Swift is worse, but both epitomize the empty gestures and back-patting Running Point calls character development and emotional pathos – and it leaves a sour taste in the mouth, right as the episode pivots to actually being about basketball (at least for a few blinks of an eye).

Before we get to that, of course, “Game Seven” has to fill some time by pulling from the random assortment of side plots it has failed to develop this season. First up is Jackie, who reappears out of nowhere this week to be sad about his dead mother, pouting to his siblings and the cheerleader (yes, the gave chlamydia to) about how nobody understands him. In the season’s big emotional moment, Isla, Sandy, and Ness find Jackie sadly eating lunch alone on his dead mother’s birthday, where Isla tells him “maybe you could teach us how to be family” and they bond over the fact Jackie said his mom was “funny”, and Isla’s brave declaration that their moms all had big personalities.

What do we do with any of this? Nothing, of course – our only time with Jackie this season has been in his selfish pursuits, fucking random women and trying to install himself in the Waves leadership for a paycheck. Even his relationship with Sofia is handwaved; she goes from not talking to him (using her sassy teammate a a racial cliche to tell him off) to defending him and admonishing his family in the next scene, a perfect encapsulation of how Running Point treats itself to all these unearned emotional moments and resolutions throughout the second half of the season.

After that – and a long scene of them running to the arena, where I’m supposed to believe they bond over Sandy offering his loafers for Isla to run in – we get Isla’s terrible speech and then we’re off to Game 7 of the Finals, which arrives with all the hype and anticipation of a wet fart. After all, this season we went from being out of the playoffs, to on the biggest winning streak ever, to barely making the playoffs, to making the finals and having one of the best seasons in franchise history, 99.9% of which happens offscreen!

Anyone hoping for a resolution to Travis’s rehab or maturity, Marcus’s ascent to becoming a leader, the granny shot dude and his granny shot… none of it matters a lick in “Game Seven”, which is too busy rushing through the big game to get to a series of incomprehensibly stupid plot twists.

The actual basketball in this episode is not terrible (it’s better than Winning Time, that’s for sure) – but how it is filmed and edited is laughably awful, never establishing any kind of rhythm to the game, just random plays with occasional shots to a scoreboard always showing the Waves down by seven or eight points. Then, everything accelerates in the final seconds until, *surprise* the Waves lose on a half-court buzzer beater, sending everyone into a spiral and Running Point into an ending where Isla and the coach kiss each other in an empty arena.

While we all knew that kiss was coming, it once again points out how little Running Point does to actually establish any of its characters or their emotions; we still have no bearing of what their relationship has been like over the years, why he decided to do this now, why she’s throwing herself at him while talking about how amazing and perfect Lev is, or literally anything about how this decision informs anything else about the episode, or the season (after she goes to make her speech to Lev at work, we…. never hear from Lev or the plot again!). The scene simply ends, and then we get a ‘mic drop’ moment when Isla sees Cam sitting at her desk, after buying his way out of rehab for… reasons?

It all feels like a tv show with no identity throwing half-cooked ideas at the wall to see if anything sticks, which none of it does. With its lifeless, trite finale, Running Point failed to be a believable sports comedy (nor did it really show any interest in being one), it underwhelmed at being a nascently funny office sitcom – and boy, does “Game Seven” show how much this show crashed and burned about being a family dramedy. When Isla declares “my life is not a good sports movie” near the end, I honestly began to wonder what the point of this series was at all; after spending nearly a half hour reinforcing the cliches of good and bad sports movies, it seems neither Isla nor Running Point even has passing interest in exploring that concept itself.

“Game Seven” is complete failure; it resolves none of its long-running tensions, skips over every single important moment of character development, and tries to hang its hat on an ‘aw shucks’ family dynamic it’s done no work to establish in the nine episodes prior. It leaves nearly all of its ongoing stories hanging (whatever happened to Sandy’s boyfriend, by the way?), in order to pursue some twistedly hollow version of Ted Lasso and an early-2000’s rom-com. The result is a grotesque abomination, unfunny and vacant, interested only in the most superficial pursuit of narrative and humor at the cost of anything engaging, intriguing, or resonant. Even those who spent nine episodes having their expectations lowered will be disappointed with “Game Seven”, one of the most insidiously hollow, emotionally disingenuous television episodes of recent memory.

Grade: F

Other thoughts/observations:

• well… that’s season one of Running Point, I guess? We’ll see if I return for season two, but my inclination is this may be the end of the road for my coverage of this thoroughly disappointing series.
  
• we don’t find out what team the Waves are playing until after Game 7 is over. Just noting that.
  
• Remember the streaming service deal that made no sense, but took up multiple episodes of plot? Neither does Running Point.
  
• So Isla has one of the best seasons in years, and so she spends the time taking credit for… not trading a player they ended up sending to rehab? That’s the only basketball operations we got on this show for the entire season, so the proclamation she is killing it at her job, is one of about 11 plots this series just tells the audience to take them at their word for.
  
• “This team is like John Wick“… I yelled “noooo!” at the TV, I could not help myself.
  
• that halftime routine by the Waves dancers was… a series of movements choreographed to a song, that’s for sure.
  
• The only time I laughed: when Sophia asks if they can get health insurance, and Sandy immediately and instinctually says “NO”.
  
• “I can’t do life without you, I’m such a mess.” And all the ladies swooned.
  
• Really cannot get over how they thought this was the season finale this series needed.