So even if the race is climactic, that may not be enough to make voting relevant to a wider audience.
Until that moment, I had been looking for the continuity of action and character that it is not unreasonable to expect from a novel — the sort of buildup up to a climactic finale that was so enjoyable in last month's selection, Shirley Hazzard's "The Transit of Venus".
Instead of providing a vague undertow of menace, the play also makes everything fatally explicit so that the climactic violence is all too clearly motivated.
"I know you want it to stay pleasant around here, but there are so many things that are so much better,"' says the unlikely hero, Bud, in a climactic courtroom scene.
It's a moment of terrible poignancy: a climactic attainment that is also a climactic loss.
Steven Moffat has said that the first episode, The Impossible Astronaut, should be regarded as dark only in terms of a series opener; they've flipped things so the climactic terror of a finale is served up first.
The orchestra delivers a climactic commentary that sounds simultaneously like a shout of joy and a cry for help.
It's John Le Carre lite in some ways, with a climactic scene that's virtually an homage to Smiley's People.
In his scathing review, Roger Ebert says that he cannot believe "that the director, Joseph Sargent, would film this final climactic scene so incompetently that there is not even an establishing shot, so we have to figure out what happened on the basis of empirical evidence".
(I wish they were real propeller engines, though, so that starting them would sound like that climactic moment in "Casablanca," where the plane engine starts with a whining kick).
