There was only one proper way for Married, With Children to end; Al murdering everybody with an axe and being acquited by a jury of twelve shoe salesmen.
This is the one I came in to mention!
Add me to the people who liked the ending of Quantum Leap. It was a huge downer, but it worked. In a way, it wasn’t even that sad, since Sam gained the ability to return home when he chose, he simply chose to stay where he was and help people.
Nobody’s mentioned Voyager yet. I never saw it, but I remember a lot of people being pissed about that ending. Was it not as bad as I’d heard?
To me, it was much more acceptable than the final episodes of Deep Space Nine or Enterprise.
HEY! Hold on! “What You Leave Behind” was an awesome episode. Except the Vic parts.
You got me on Enterprise, though.
Word. By that point, it was pretty much in now way recognizable as even being the same show. It was like a long and drawn-out lobotomy that the patient is aware of the entire time.
I’m nominating the original Battlestar Galactica. Because, really, the world did not deserve Galactica: '80. That really moved a bit beyond disrespect into outright malice towards the fans.
Would that be Venom? I hadn’t read the comics, but to me he seemed like the weakest villain in the movie in terms of motives and personality (well, except for Harry’s constant brooding and stint of amnesia, but he at least came around in the end).
Speaking of comic book movies, X-3 didn’t sit real well with me, which is a shame since I loved the other two movies in the series. I mean, I know that tragic events can heighten the drama and tension, but come on. Cyclops dies. Jean Grey dies. Professor Xavier dies (is hinted to have been mentally transferred to a kid, but still…Professor X?!). A bunch of minor, underused mutants get vaporized. Mystique loses her powers. Rogue loses her powers. Magneto loses his powers (but maybe is gaining them back). And Nightcrawler is AWOL. Geez, what a downer. 
I wish Voyager had returned the ship earlier and spent some time on what happened to them; Starfleet would want to disassemble the Doctor, imprison 7 of 9, and perhaps as some Dopers wish, put Janeway on trial. They really screwed up with the Chakotay and Seven thing, but it wasn’t as bad as Enterprise. I’ve already posted about Admiral Tucker. 
DS9 had it’s moments; Garak shoots Weyoun.
Founder: “That was the last Weyoun clone.”
Garak: “I was hoping you would say that.”
How about Millennium? Not the John Varley book/movie, but the TV series. They weren’t sure if it would be picked up again the following year, so they gave it a sort-of pseudo-ending, which we’re still stuck with.
Chris Carter, you owe us explanations!
I always wish that the very last shot of the movie has Dorothy, now alone as her relatives have left her to rest some more, decide to get up, and she throws aside her blanket to reveal two shimmering ruby slippers (in color in the black-and-white
milieu) on her feet. Shocked intake of breath from Judy Garland and fade.
Re: Dark Tower. I grok the “eternal return” concept, my issue is how the entire last 3 books steadily petered out in a morass of cliches, twists you could see coming a mile away, and just overall horrible writing and pacing. The boy nemesis was absolutely wasted, coming across as a rather pathetic and folorn figure.
Re: Seinfeld. Halfway through the final ep. Newman tells Jerry that, before the episode is over, that he (Newman) will reveal himself in all his glory. Except that he never did. At that instant a sh*t-eating grin crossed my face as I realized without so much as a shadow of a doubt that Jerry and co. were in Hell and Newman was Satan. I was sure that the very last scene would show Newman in full devilish regalia laughing maniacally at the four of them in the jail cell-except that again it never happened. It seemed to me a perfect way to end the series and to show precisely how weird their reality was (and why). I really do wonder what exactly the writers had in store for Newman when he said that line; something obviously must have hit the editing floor because that to me was a rather loose end.
I liked the Quantum Leap ending, and even the Angel one (even tho I had pretty much bowed out of the series after the puppet episode utterly destroyed my suspension of disbelief); the protagonists continue to fight the good fight as others here said. I suspect a deux ex machina saved the Angel gang afterwards (cough Buffycomic cough). The real ending of Farscape was perfect; I loved the look on Scorpius’ face.
Anime’s been mentioned and I have to add my two cents that the endings of Fullmetal Alchemist were fairly mean to the viewer. I mean I know they’ve been grail questing to get their bodies back and I can be certainly happy with not-so-happy endings, but in the final TV episode:
One of the two brothers ends up having no memory of anything that happened during the entire series, and the other up on our Earth (of all places), no longer an alchemist, unable to contact his brother, or any of the people he interacted with during the entire series (their doppelgangers and his father). That’s about as far away from a respectful conclusion to a series as there is.
Ah, but then there’s the news that the real conclusion is going to be in the form of a major motion picture, Fullmetal Alchmeist: The Conquerer of Shambala. But instead of being about the characters and places that we’ve spent 51 episodes getting to know, 90% of the film takes place on Earth and is about the Earth politics of pre-WWII Germany, with the characters seemingly shown only in passing. And its disrespect gets even worse:
Ed spends nearly the whole movie trying to off Earth to join with his brother. But after they finally do join up in Amestris, within ten minutes the plot deposits the two brothers back on Earth! And once again they’re questing… this time to get back to their own world. The end.
However, the most disrespectful thing I think they did was build up this whole “will they/won’t they” thing between Ed and Winrey and then put them on seperate worlds unable to reach each other, and thus, not even give them the opportunity to say yes or no.
Oh and then there’s the whole mindfuck at the end of The Big O, which instead of explaining (assuming they have an explanation) what happened, the creators leave it up to viewer interpretation.
I hate viewer interpretation.
I hear ya, Skott. By god, how I hear ya. (In addition…didn’t they tack on some anti-nuclear stuff, to boot? Yeah, that’s sure worth ditching the unresolved romantic subplot between two favorite characters—another moral to remind us how “using nukes on people and other living things is bad, m’kay?” :smack: :rolleyes: )
I haven’t seen Shamballa, yet, so this was a hard post to cut without spoiling myself…
The anime ending of FMA was pretty much perfect (within the context of the anime…the manga might invalidate parts of it, but they’d gone on completely different tracks by that point), IMO.
Even ignoring the fact that it’s as happy an ending as they could possibly have gotten, it plays into one of the major themes of the series - you don’t get anything without losing something. Also you seem to have forgotten that Ed was living with Hoenheim in Munich. Granted he didn’t have a great relationship with the old man, and his friends and Al are cut off from him. But, hell, a chance to reconcile with his father’s not really something to sneeze at, for Ed, either. It’s a bittersweet ending - and it breaks up my favourite almost-'ship - but nothing that even approaches a slap in the face.
Unless you’re talking about the movie, which I don’t remember too well, you’re wrong.
It ends with Hitomi coming back to earth, but Gaia wasn’t a dream. Her and Vahn part ways because they can’t be sure of their ability to make it last, and it was their untainted love for eachother that brought the whole world back from the brink of destruction. Besides, Hitomi has a home and family to go back to. At the end, it’s vaguely implied that they’re still able to communicate or sense eachother somehow, but in a typically “take it how you will” anime way.
But there’s absolutely nothing about it all being a dream. Again, unless you’re talking about the movie or one of the manga adaptations.
I totally agree with you on this- in fact, the lengths to which Adams goes to ensure the complete destruction of his story are such that I’d think the book was a parody of genre if it wasn’t such a pain to read.
The thing is, though, that considering those lengths, the fact that there remains one loose end actually stands out as suspicious:
The Vogon narration specifically states that Earth is so multiversally unstable that if you don’t destroy ALL the earths and ALL the earthlings simultaneously, it just pops right back into existence; and yet, at the beginning of the story, Fenchurch has mysteriously disappeared, and Arthur never does have any idea what happened to her.
I suspect that, years from now, someone will be licensed to write a final book in the series based on it, with an obvious title:
“WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE”
Too late to edit!
I second Big O. It’s just sort of weird and bizarre. After raising the show from the grave to finally give it an ending, they come back at the viewers with that? :eek:
As for FMA; for about the majority of the series I had come to assume the show would end with Ed getting his limbs back but Al dying. Once Al became the philosopher’s stone, I was sure I was right. But no, instead we get this weird “Crossing dimensions into the real world” curveball, and them being separated.
Plus they tried to make Scar into a good guy. F-ing Scar! WTF? Ed was right about him in the very first episode they fought, and nothing he ever did changed that one bit. He was just a selfish, self-righteous murderer invoking the name of his god as justification for his actions.
The revelation about Pride was awesome, but the anti-climactic encounter at the end, the lame way they played out Envy’s secret, the shit with Scar, etc, etc kind of rankled it for me. Even then they at least did a good job of portraying it, but that doesn’t change the fact it was a series of bad plot turns.
I’ve learned what CoS is about, and it’s enough for me to know not to bother. I’ll collect the series on DVD and call it good. I had no problem with them ending the series in an unhappy way, but the specific ways they tied things up, or rather didn’t, pissed me off
A further thought about the FMA ending…
After the deaths of Nina and Hughes, and of the Chimerae, Scar, Lyra, Greed, Lust, and Wrath after they were made sympathetic characters, the fact that Hoenheim, Ed, Al, Winry, Rose and Roy all survived seems nothing short of a miracle. (The other Alchemists never seemed to be in much danger of offing, and none of the other characters were even in the way of the action - not that this would necessarily save them (see Nina again).)
Oh yeah. Xena was killed, I think beheaded, and then cremated, to lay rest the ghosts of a whole village she was accidentally responsible for getting killed, and Gabrielle went to wander the world, carrying her ashes.
BIG TIME SUCK!
Contrary to Hercules, which ended with the deaths of Zeus & Hera, the downfall of the Olympians, and Herc & Autolychus deciding to retire, realizing very quickly how boring it was, and deciding… “Well, maybe we’ll have the occasional adventure…”
The problem is that Xena couldn’t possibly end that way. There could never be a “riding happily into the sunset” ending for the character. She had to somehow die for redemption. I don’t like that it happened in a faraway land due to some crime she did in the past that we’d never heard about before, but the general thrust of the final episode would have to have been the same.
I will repeat what would have redeemed the last episode in the last five minutes-
the Guilty verdict is announced while Newman is gleefully stuffing his face with chips…
Newman laughs so hard, he starts choking on the chips, and the camera focuses on
each of the four with their thoughts-
Kramer thinks “My friend’s choking! I have to help him!” and rushes to Newman’s aid.
George thinks “If I help save Newman, maybe the judge’ll go easy on me!” and joins Kramer.
Elaine thinks “Newman’s choking! I’ve… always loved Newman!” and runs to help.
Jerry looks askance at all of them and thinks “Let the fat bastard choke.”