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
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.
I agree on the cliffhangers, sometimes unnecessary ones, but I find its plot to be one of the most consistent I watched (especially over 200+ episodes in 10 years), both compared to its contemporary shows and to modern ones.
Sure, many aspects are conveniently hidden behind unrevealed misteries and mistic rules, but it was done in a way that is still enjoyable and that didn’t feel overly forced.
Never apologize for being old
Get mad at them for having the audacity to be so young
But reruns have always been a thing
Not like this
I’m one of the weirdos who liked the finale!
What chaotic god has corrupted you for finding pleasure in something that tormented me? ;)
No idea, it just kinda spoke to me on some level. I’d still have loved tying all the loose ends, but the ending itself is fine by me.
I’m still amazed at the Two and a half men finale
imma go with sopranos.
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.
bsg is one of the ones people were upset at about, made it too christiany-messianic messaging. plus the showrunner largely forgot about the show, and instead wanted to write caprica which was a failed show too.
i only watched it because they went to sg1 shortly after it ended(claudia and ben browder) Claudia at least found some work later on, “originals” i dont know what ben has been doing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 was talking about Game of Thrones.
But actually since we’re on the topic, the show was wasn’t about the mother. Thats just the title. The show was about how he met and fell in love with Robin. He’s telling the story to his kids to explain to them why he is ready to move on and wants to try again with her.
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 sailed the high seas when watching it and i felt ripped off…
When i watched season 6 i thought, yeah it’s kind of bad, but at least, i can always go back whenever i feel like and still enjoy the good episodes. It got worse and worse and by the end of season 7 i wasn’t really sure if i even wanna see the next season. When i did see it, i realised that i will probably never go back to watch it. I didn’t even know it was possible to retroactively ruin a show for me. It’s kinda impressive
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.
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.
ALF got captured by the FBI
He did?!?
yeah, the show thought it had another season, but it didn’t
Oof. What in ignominious end for our old pal. :(
Even worse, he got a shitty movie after that.
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.
I don’t remember that lol
Yeah, the dad and the corporation that he worked for wrecked the climate and they froze to death. You didn’t see it, but it was heavily implied if not flat out said.
wild
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?
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.
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
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.
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
Watched everything before the gap for the “final seasons” I think the last episode was an AU of them all living happily in the more developed enemy state. Last thing I remember Eren doing is running off and becoming this big doomsday titan with an exposed multi mile ribcage thing leading a stupid big horde of titans.
it took to long to finish the series, by then people moved on.
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.
I was considering replying with something like this. We will never really know book.
“You can’t take the sky from me…”
( ˘ ɜ˘) ♬♪♫
🍃
Outer Range, I’m so pissed that show got canceled.
The 2400?
Santa Clarita Diet was the last straw for our Netflix subscription.
“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.
Don’t speak that way of The Orville
Oh no, they cancelled it? I was still hoping for a season 😢
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.
I’ve heard there was a season in the works, but that was a while back. I hope it’s still on.
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.
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.
These Are The Voyages is definitely unpopular
I can’t get over how Scott Bakula starred in two shows involving time travel and both had infamously bad finales.
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.
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.)
I mean, the rules kept changing, because the big idea behind it all was that it was being consciously controlled by God. And a little by Sam.
But, really, the biggest point is that the finale wasn’t intended to be the finale. They thought they had another series, but then got cancelled.
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 personally think it’s a great ending, even though it was intended to be a cliffhanger for the next series before cancellation, but a lot of fans didn’t like the ending of Quantum Leap where it was said that Sam never made it home.
I loved the ending because it fit Sam’s character perfectly. He’s essentially told (by god or whoever) that the only one who controls when Sam goes home is Sam himself. That when Sam truly, deep inside feels that his job is done, he’ll go home. The fact that he never returned home means that He never truly felt his job was done. And Sam wouldn’t. The essence of the heroic journey…always one more person to help.
It made the ending bitter-sweet, sad, heroic and tragic all at once. Just like Sam’s character.
I thought it was brilliantly done for something designed to also be a season finale “just in case”
Everyone was very shocked back in the day at the ending of Seinfeld.
Some of us thought they were just taking a year break (which they explicitly said in the last episode)
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.
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.
And it was the most obvious ending that everyone had guessed sitting int their couch with friends or family that didn’t even need internet theories. They made it sound like they had such a clever ending and it wasn’t even close.
I think it’s incredibly likely they had no idea how to end it until they had to do a last season and they went with the most obvious ending that was deeply unsatisfying.
Wow I cant believe someone downvoted you for that, only commented so you would know it wasnt me
How is the Game of Thrones ending controversial? It’s pretty unanimously hated.
The controversy is not amongst us, the audience, it is the vitriol directed at the show runners by the fanbase.
BEST finale ever is Six Feet Under.
