The Bob Newhart Show famously ended the series by saying the whole show was nothing but a dream.
Weirdly, didn’t one of the Star Treks reveal to be just a holodeck sequence?
Enterprise.
Controversial as in it ruined an otherwise great show? Dexter.
Dark.
I was super invested in the show, the concept of time travel and how everything (or anything) is connected (or not) if time is not linear. The end just ruined the whole flow. In my head, I actually have a different ending, which I can elaborate if anyone cares.
I watched Dark through once and thought the ending was weird, but I have good memories. I’m currently rewatching, I’m about halfway through S2. I would like to hear your theory because I think Dark is a really good show, but I won’t read for a couple of weeks to avoid reminding myself too much and spoiling it
I quite enjoyed dark, and imo the ending ties up the show rather beautifully
BEST finale ever is Six Feet Under.
Can we mention Farscape? Without the movie it was a massive let down, with the movie it became an impossible mess. Either way, an incredible let down.
I introduced my wife to Farscape in 2008 and she absolutely fell in love with the series, as had I when I first watched it. We binged watched the entire series inside of two weeks.
We got to the final episode of season 4… And…she… was…piiiiiiiiissssssed. She absolutely abhors cliffhangers. I cannot count the number of times we’ve had to stay up late to finish on an episode that didn’t end on a cliff hanger.
I might have forgotten to mention “The Peacekeeper War” mini-series… evil laugh.
She stomped off and made herself a cup of tea, as I was “getting Season 1 of Battlestar Galactica 2004 ready to watch”. wink wink
She came back sat down on the couch and I hit play… “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS!” She only uses the word “fuck” when she’s truly angry BTW.
We then stayed up late to finish “The Peacekeeper War”.
As to it being a mess… Yeah, I can see your point. An entire season was rammed into the equivalent of 4 episodes. I think it was done about as well as it could of been. With that said, it would have been great to get that 5th season.
It still remains as my all time favorite Sci Fi series. There was just too much creativity and uniqueness through out to just throw it out at the end as a fan.
These Are The Voyages is definitely unpopular
I was advised to skip it and I still have not seen it. Don’t plan to change it. I like to pretend nothing bad ever happened to Tripp!
Don’t worry! They just faked his death so he could go work for section 31.
les moonves pretty much ruined the franchise, he did the last episode that way because he wanted a “fuck you statement” to the viewers, i believe frakes did not like the episode as well.
Moonves later had to resign from CBS due to sexual assault allegations
people hated him for how he ended trek, it made sense, just taking his anger out on franchise, likely due to him being accused of SA(as a vendetta against cbs)
I can’t over how Scott Bakula starred in two shows involving time travel and both had infamously bad finales.
Fun fact: In one episode, they talk about how a leap has to be completed in a certain amount of time in order to guarantee the ability to leap home. They say that the amount of time that each leap must be completed within falls by a certain percentage each time. I did the calculation once. Sam was still within the threshold even after all the many seasons. He should have leaped home.
And it would have been to the alt-timeline where Al and Ziggy were replaced by St.John and Alpha, the one which showed up when Sam previously leapt into Al and temporarily changed history.
All the pieces were there.
(If this feels familiar, I have posted this online before.)
One interesting thing about the Quantum Leap finale is that God is played by Bruce McGill (who shows up in a number of Bellisario’s shows, but ignore that for now). Which doesn’t seem particularly interesting until you realize that Bruce McGill also appeared in the Quantum Leap pilot, implying that God has been involved in the whole “Leap that went wrong” thing from the very beginning. I’ve never been entirely sure how I felt about that, but it was an interesting bit of casting, regardless.
The dude is intrinsically linked - in my mind at least - to time travel plots too. He’s in Timecop as the boss of the time agency, Quantum Leap as “Bartender Al/God(?)” and Voyager as Braxton, the rogue time-travelling captain who repeatedly breaks the temporal prime directive to get back at Janeway.
In this thread, mostly: “Yeah, I know the show was poorly written through several seasons, but I thought the ending would at least be satisfactory.”
Supernatural, yes we know should’ve ended as long time ago. But the last episode was strange, the prior episode should’ve been the end. It’s a glorified run of the mill episode
The Seinfeld one always gets a lot of shit
I loved Curb Your Enthusiasm recognizing that.
Larry’s self awareness is incredible. The references in curb to it had me in tears
“Huh, mistrial? Why didn’t we think of that before…”, yeah, I chuckled when I saw that.
But I loved how it was incorporated into Dharma & Greg. They wanted to use it to have sex in public because everyone in the US would be busy watching the Seinfeld finale. Every so often they’d glance at a TV screen, chuckle, and say “That Kramer!”
That’s actually all I remember about it. Don’t know if I ever even saw the actual finale.
Everyone was very shocked back in the day at the ending of Seinfeld.
i think people are seeing “seinfeld” alot differently these days. cant watch it without thinking what a shill jerry has become for AIPAC/israel, plus he dated a minor.
Some of us thought they were just taking a year break (which they explicitly said in the last episode)
One that made me feel like I had wasted time watching the show was How I Met Your Mother. It was a fun show and really picked up in quality in seasons three - five. They could have ended the show in season 7, really, if they had planned for it. Season 8 was kind of a bore, and season 9 was bad, as all of the season took place over a weekend. And when we got the finale of the show… I was so tired of holding on to what might come that it really hit me negatively how they ended it.
That being said, Game of Thrones ended so poorly that I was baffled as to how haphazard and dull the writing and storytelling was that I, just like a lot of others, held on to hope that the last few episodes might bring things all around. (Morgan Freeman as Narrator - It didn’t.) While cracks were showing since late season 6, the finale of that show was horrible. The payoffs didn’t come, and everything just felt so rushed, watered down, and a tremendous feeling that content was missing from the season, if they were to help make sense of the finale.
How I Met Your Mother. It was a fun show and really picked up in quality in seasons three - five. They could have ended the show in season 7, really, if they had planned for it.
I heard they were being cancelled after 7, and thus were on target to wrap it up by then, but then got the cash to do the last season and found themselves short on material but needing to end it properly.
My partner was a GOT fan. He was so utterly disappointed by the ending that still nowadays he would randomly stop doing whatever he was doing to look at me and say “I am still mad”. He is such a peaceful person this is honestly the only thing he has ever been genuinely mad about… so I always know what he is referring to.
Totally agree on both.
I read the GOT books, and I’m convinced that HBO is the reason why Martin messed this all up. There was a whole other Targeryen, Aegon VI, that was running around being some charismatic cool dude and also making a claim to the Iron Throne. HBO just cut him out, and I’m convinced that what was supposed to happen was everything was him vs. Danerys at the end, and he took the iron throne, and would have been sitting on it when the dragon fried it, which would have killed him and the throne and left Danerys as the obvious true ruler because she has that fire magic.
But we’ll never know because Martin cashed his checks and peaced out.
I’m actually convinced that this is Martin’s ending and everything to get us there was made up by HBO. Seeing the absolute backlash has scared the shit out of him and that’s why it won’t be finished.
100% same. As if he saw all the hate, didn’t want to put forth the effort to explain the discrepancy, and shelved the last book until it all dies down. Maybe even a posthumous publishing just to avoid the haters.
People are trash. What is wrong with us? It’s like anyone that does anything cool and can’t keep up perfection forever has no other option but to be a total pariah is they slip.
He’s already admitted as much, there are minor changes to what he’d planned but the show’s ultimate ending is very similar to what he’d written in his notes. Bran becomes the king in the South for some reason, Samsa queen in the North, Aria goes off on an adventure and John Snow goes back to the night watch, having grown exactly 0% after they fucking murdered him, which consequently is where the books leave off.
So if you take that ending as canon, that John Snow dies and so Westeros falls, I gotta say it’s a brave ending.
Oh, I wasn’t aware he had talked that in detail about his ideas.
And it’s weird that he goes from “No one is safe” dispatching Ned Stark early on, to some Breakfast Club ending. I always figured HBO rounded down to their lowest common denominator level and that’s why we got what we got. Oh well…
Jon doesn’t go back to the Watch in the finale. He gets exiled to the Watch again, but immediately goes AWOL to join the free folk.
That’s right, well that at least makes more sense.
Game of Thrones went from a worldwide cultural phenomenon to barely a footnote pretty much overnight. That says a ton on how disappointingly the show ended.
Let’s be honest cracks started showing in season 2 its just the source material covered it up for a while.
I was never super into it, i only watched it sonetimes when my girlfriend was watching it.
Aside from not finding it very funny to begin with, i never really got the premise. The whole show was the guy telling his children how he met their mother. Whenever he dated someone it was like: is it gonna be her?? Is it her?? And there was an on and off thing with the other main character. Omg is it her? But the children have to know the name of their own mother. So they know and he’s just telling them who he banged before he met their mother?
I see a lot of hate for the HIMYM finale and… I truly do not get it. I will not praise it as a cinematic masterpiece, because it isn’t. But it is an ending that they have been building up since the very beginning, and it makes perfect sense given the characters and what they went through. There are a lot of show endings that cannot claim that at all, with random last-minute additional arcs or forgetting things from earlier seasons. I haven’t seen any of that in HIMYM. So yeah, I think it’s a decent ending overall, and I truly do not understand the hate it gets.
As for GoT; yeah that went into shitshow territory from season 7 for me personally.
The best way I’ve seen it put; the GOT ending was so bad, it made you feel ashamed for liking the show in the first place.
I’m a weird case. I didn’t like the show too much, but when I saw the final series was so shitty, I binged the whole thing just so I could understand the memes.
Worth it.
Babylon 5 (whole last season actually); just ran out of gas.
Didn’t they famously get cancelled in season 4, then greenlit for the final year?
Yes, so they used all their best ideas.
However, we got a bunch of Bester episodes, so if kinda has a place in my heart. It’s just not as good as Season 4, which was spectacular.
Stargate: Atlantis
I hated how a show about exploring and pioneering ended with them turning tail and running back home.
Also, I know it is an American show, but sometimes I would just love to see the spacecraft landing someplace other than by a national landmark in the US.
What if they had landed in say Norway, or the Gulf of Finland? The diplomacy would have been very interesting.
Afaik they were supposed to do a movie still but that sadly never happened.
I agree with you, just leaving that galaxy behind was a very disappointing ending.
it’s both ironic and cruel that throrough SG-1 and early Atlantis they made the season endings so ambigious so often just in case there would be no next season, and then they do a left-field ending like this that would have been fine enough if the next season had them flying back to pegasus episode 1, so naturally this finale ends up being the finale finale. of course!
i’d love to see an animated movie pick up from there and wrap everything up- that way some of the original cast can come back but not all of them are needed and they can continue the story without needing to explain why atlantis was on earth for 20 years
It was very sudden and jarring, I believe they only learned they’d been canceled late into the season but had plans for a movie to return them to Pegasus, which never happened.
they definitely were planning something in season 6, in a interview i believe they were going to have a different alien enemy(the deadalus variation enemies to be the part of the next season)
The “Attack On Titan” finale was a bunch of nonsense.
Everything just whipped back and forth at the whims of being artsy. None of it aligned with what the show had been known for in writing or foreshadowing. Characters constantly acting unreasonable for the sake of conflict. Shit just stopped making sense and everything felt like it was being made up on the spot.
All of the Ymir lore felt forced. Why tf was it a worm?
Oof, I was already having trouble with the MC’s last fucking minute heel turn that didn’t seem to be built up quite enough. Guess I’ll just skip that ending.
I disagree with OP that it’s a bad ending. I think it ties it up well, and explains why the characters acted the way they did. There’s a lot going on and it’s easy to miss details that might make things seem like they come out of nowhere, but I think it was well done personally
If you don’t mind saying, where in the show are you currently? Because depending on that, “MC last Minute heel turn” can mean drastically different things
I disagree. I don’t think it whipped back and forth at all, I think it was pretty solidly foreshadowed, even from episode one. Who was acting unreasonable? Eren? That’s very clearly and explicitly stated to be him doing so on purpose. The rest of the cast seemed to act in accordance with their history from my view.
I also don’t feel like the Ymir lore was forced. I mean obviously there’s going to be some fantastical element to the lore of a show with titans and magic and such, so that part aside, I thought her story was really heartbreaking and encapsulated the themes the show was hammering home the whole time.
I think the time travel stuff was a bit fucky, which is one of my biggest criticisms of the show, and I also felt like Mikassa’s character should have had a better arc. I didn’t like the deus ex machina of Falco coming in to save the day with the people who didn’t want to be there, but the rest of it felt like a pretty satisfying conclusion to an incredible show.
To each their own of course, no shade or anything.
Attack on Titan and The Promised Neverland are both examples of stories that had an awesome premise but went off the rails after their big moment.
For Attack on Titan, I only ever watched the anime. I don’t know if the manga was any better. But I feel like once we got past the big reveal at the end of the third season, it was just like “okay what now?”. And then it was like Final Season, Final Season Part 1, Final Season For Realsies This Time… like they had no sense of direction.
With The Promised Neverland, I’m only talking about the manga. They screwed up the anime, the less said about that, the better. So the manga had this awesome premise of the kids having to escape the orphanage. But after that? It just got weird. Some of it was good (Goldy Pond, and Lewis/Luvis/whatever… the main demon singer from KPop Demon Hunters (of the Saja Boys, I mean) reminds me of him) but some of it was just weird.
I believe the multiple AoT final seasons was a product of covid, and that probably messed up the final product alot.
I reasonably liked it, but I agree. For me, the series had built enough suspension of disbelief that I was able to accept the explanations, but it did feel overly complicated, with flashbacks and flashforwards and what not… not on par with the rest
it took to long to finish the series, by then people moved on.
I’m still amazed at the Two and a half men finale
