BEST finale ever is Six Feet Under.
Something that I don’t see mentioned a lot outside of fandom, even though apparently the show was quite big after Netflix picked it up. Lucifer arguably started going downhill in S3, mostly because Fox execs wanted to turn it into a soap opera. Which of course failed, so they dropped the show altogether, only for Netflix to “save” it.
I put that in quotation marks because I kind of wish they just let the show die at the cliffhanger instead of letting the narcs in charge run it into ground. Narcs being the two lapsed Catholic showrunners. The show was still salvageable by the end of S5, but S6 retroactively destroyed everything, making it unwatchable for half of the fandom, while the other half was vaping copium.
I’m not going to write the synopsis, because fuck that burning cesspit, but these are some of the issues with it:
- abuse apologia and perpetuation of generational trauma “for the greater good” in a universe with an omni-potent god
- uncontested sentiment that bio children are worth more than adopted/step-children
- sex shaming
- rampant misogyny
- glorification of suffering
- hamfisted tragic ending clumsily masked with a “bittersweet” wrapping
- plus many more very Christian sentiments that nobody asked for (except for the part of the fandom that can’t separate their religion from a TV show).
I have never watched GoT, so I’m not a good judge on this, but not a negligible part of the fandom claimed the Lucifer season/finale was worse. So there’s that.
It’s Game of Thrones, by far.
And they can’t use the excuse that they ran out of material and had to write their own ending. Tokyo Ghoul Root A did it to moderate effect, and Fullmetal Alchemist (the first one from 2003) did it extremely well. They just couldn’t write worth a damn so they said Fuck It and flipped the table. They’d already made their money from it. They had good options and they walked right past them. I guess they just wanted it to be a surprise?
LOST gets an honourable mention for being so weird. But I feel like they painted themselves into a corner, though that’s no excuse. Again looking to anime as the standard bearer for storytelling others should be measured by, Assassination Classroom painted itself into a tighter corner. (Long story short, alien blows up the moon and threatens to blow up Earth if humans can’t kill him in a year… but only some students are really allowed to try and he can only be harmed by rubber bullets and knives that wouldn’t harm a real person — traditional weapons, whatever you can think of, have no effect. Oh, and he can also move at, like, the speed of light, squared, or something dumb like that. And holy crap what a stupid ending, but… they made it work. It’s still stupid, but it worked better than the LOST ending, and the LOST writers had a lot more space to work in.)
With Lost they repeatedly said that nobody, not a single person, had guessed what the ending was, not realizing that this was one of the first shows to go massive for fan theories on the Internet so everything even remotely plausable had been guessed.
So yeah, they painted themselves into that corner fair and square as it was clear they had no fucking clue what the ending was when they started that show.
If it was me, I would have admitted someone guessed it and just picked whichever fan theory seemed the most sensible to me.
How is the Game of Thrones ending controversial? It’s pretty unanimously hated.
I’m still amazed at the Two and a half men finale
Las Vegas. It’s a show with James Caan and Josh Duhamel that ran from 2003-2008. The finale was supposed to be a 2 parter but fell victim to the writers strike so the second part never got finished and then it got cancelled before they could wrap it up. It ended on a cliffhanger of course.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can’t talk about controversial TV endings without mentioning St. Elsewhere. For a long time this show had the most infamous. The big reveal that the entire run of the show took place in the mind of an autistic boy with a snow globe was not a hit with fans and remains an object lesson in how to rug-pull your fan base.
But it did lead to the fanon that, because of crossover episodes, basically all media takes place in that kid’s mind.
Including reality - “Cops” is in the crossover chain even if you don’t count celebrity appearances as themselves.
The Tommy Westphall Universe. If you take the spin-off characters from St Elsewhere, and the spin-offs from the spin-offs, and character crossovers to other shows, it means that hundreds (at least 419, so far) of shows all took place in the mind of an autistic boy named Tommy Westphall.
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.
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.
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
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)
It’s the one where the show was cancelled by the idiot studio and we never had any closure to the show so many of us really loved.
Ahh yes, Firefly… Actually, pretty much every Joss Wedon project except Buffy. I guess SMG was able to rebuff his shit better than a lot of other actresses.
“You know the kind of guy who does nothing but bad things and then wonders why his life sucks? Well, that was me.”
Who was Earl jr.’ dad?
Which actually had a kinda nice ending in Justice League Unlimited.
“You can’t take the sky from me…”
( ˘ ɜ˘) ♬♪♫
Don’t speak that way of The Orville
Oh no, they cancelled it? I was still hoping for a season 😢
I’ve heard there was a season in the world, but that was a while back. I hope it’s still on.
I thought there was a season 4 in development
theres also the issue that the actors dint like the in between season were so long because of it too. i believe palacki said in a statement how they cant afford(financially afford to live close to the studio) to be in a show that rarely has any seasons, she was on a podcast explaining as much on michael rosenbaums channel.
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
Genuinely controversial or just bad?
The Lost finale is probably both
Unrelated, just realized how the advent of streaming has changed the way we talk about past TV series.
Before streaming we would say the Lost finale was
past tense, because it had finished airing
Nowadays, no show really finishes airing so it’s discussed in a present tense
Sorry, I’m old
But reruns have always been a thing
Not like this
Never apologize for being old
Get mad at them for having the audacity to be so young
I’m one of the weirdos who liked the finale!
What chaotic god has corrupted you for finding pleasure in something that tormented me? ;)
I think that even the best writer in the world cannot find a satisfying reveal of 10 years worth of secrets build-up.
I think the final was the perfect balance between tying all the loose ends and not fully explaining what the island is. (Or rather, they did in some way, they just left some bits to the imagination).
And to everyone thinking that the finale makes it so the entire previous seasons did not happen, sorry but you just didn’t get it.
The only thing to “get” is that the show was written solely to drive engagement: constant cliffhangers at the cost of a coherent or consistent plot.
ALF got captured by the FBI
Not exactly a bad ending to the show but Dinosaurs killed off EVERYONE in the show’s finale. It was more than a little depressing.
He did?!?
Even worse, he got a shitty movie after that.
The Seinfeld one always gets a lot of shit
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.
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.
The Sopranos final episode immediately springs to mind
Someone posted an explanation to the last episode, and it all made sense. As the writer said, “It’s all on the screen.”
Bottom line: Tony got whacked in a diner booth with his entire family present.
I like it since I learned that it ends so abruptly because the last POV is Tony’s as he dies.
That said, it whooshed nearly everyone who watched it and therefore pissed people off.
This one stands out to me as it was a “love it or hate it” ending, not just terrible or a giant let down.
Yeah. I would put this one as actually controversial because it fit the series and even gave you some of the paranoia that Tony dealt with from day to day.
Sopranos and Game of Thrones are the ones I recall having the most uproar. To this day, new videos on YouTube about how awful they were.
It’s hard to know if GoT counts as “controversial” because it seems like everyone unanimously hated it.
Battlestar Galactica.
If you’re talking about the more recent, serious show, I understand where you’re coming from, but I binged through the series a few years ago during the lockdowns and I feel like they were signposting the weird religious sort of ending the whole way.
Gaius and blondie being angels was weird as fuck, but the whole show had a pretty heavy religious undercurrent. Maybe I’m too used to time travel shenanigan stories, but the whole “it’s all kind of a loop” concept didn’t feel like an out of nowhere ass pull to me like it seemed to for a lot of people.
Original or the new one? I actually loved the new one. Haven’t watched all of the original yet.
The new one. As for the old one, if you count Galactica '80 as its “finale”, most people would agree it’s terrible.
Which one?
The new one. As for the old one, if you count Galactica '80 as its “finale”, most people would agree it’s terrible.
I found that show really interesting to watch. I think a lot of the series holds up, in terms of acting and storytelling, to the point where I’ll rewatch the series despite knowing the awful ending—but the ending was fucking awful.
the reigiminaged series was all wierd from start to finish, apparently it was because of the showrunners christian views, that he wanted a bsg, to have christian like ending.
You wash your mouth out this instant
