Had that happened, it would have been a neat allusion to the film Breast Men, which ended with his character driving, ogling a woman whose chest had perhaps been augmented by a procedure he had devised, and being hit by a truck while thus distracted.
zipperjj: Rachel was going to Paris because she got a job with Louis Vuitton. In previous episodes, Ross had tried to convince her to go back to Ralph Lauren, even though she had been seen by her boss from that company while interviewing with a Vuitton representative in a restaurant. She had waffled back and forth before finally deciding – or so it seemed – to head for France. Since the finale seemed so – um – inspired by Casablanca, I was hoping that the twist on that film’s ending would be that Rachel ended up having Paris while Ross never did. At any rate, the latter-day “Rick” and “Ilsa” should have ended up apart. Having the screen fade to black just as Rachel’s call from the plane got cut off would have made for a more powerful ending.
I had been led to believe that the series closer would provide some transition for Matt LeBlanc’s character into his upcoming Joey spin-off. At least we saw enough previews during commercial breaks to familiarize ourselves with the basic outline of that soon-to-debut show…
I had been led to believe that the series closer would provide some transition for Matt LeBlanc’s character into his upcoming Joey spin-off. At least we saw enough previews during commercial breaks to familiarize ourselves with the basic outline of that soon-to-debut show…[/QUOTE]
Actually, I read somewhere (no cite, sorry) that LeBlanc did not want the Friends finale to be used as a set up for his show. He wanted *Friends * to end on its own.
My guess is that the first ep of *Joey * will pick up about where Friends left off, at least for the title character (of Joey, not Friends)
I’m slightly amazed at all the hoopla about Friends. I always thought it was an okay show…just that, nothing more. It’s surprising how popular it became; I think my primary problem with it was that everybody in it was just too friggin’ adorable. Too cute for words. And it seemed to totally lack any of the edginess of Seinfeld, Frasier or even Newhart (both shows). Instead, everyone in it seemed to live an inordinately smooth life free of lonely Saturday nights.
I think it did as well as it did because it had several surefire components guaranteed to deliver an audience.
(1) Unbearably cute characters
(2) Said characters have no real liabilities or negative character traits. Joey
wasn’t the sharpest tool in the drawer, but he never had a girlfriend who
made him take an IQ test, as George Costanza did.
(3) Plot lines free from any edginess.
(4) Huge, cool apartments.
(5) New York, New York. 'Nuff said.
(6) Stars who, in the end, were branching out into major film careers.
I’m not sure whether this is a reflection on the talent of the actors, or of
the power the show had to drive their careers.
If you took away any one of those qualities, the show wouldn’t have been nearly as successful.
You said it. During the finale (and especially during the clip show), I kept thinking about getting together at my friend’s apartment every Thursday to watch the show during the first few seasons. And, like the characters in the show did, comparing my life as it was then to how it is now. That, plus sharp writing and a willingness to push the edge without getting just nasty, was what the show was all about – a social thing.
I must’ve stepped out during the scene when they showed the gang mocking and pitying their other single, child-less friends. That scene must’ve been in there, because that’s the only way you could’ve drawn that intepretation from this show.
There’s absolutely nothing in the show that even suggests that the only way to be happy is to have boyfriend/husband and kids. The only reason you could fault it is for having characters who decide what they want to make them happy, and they end up getting it and being happy instead of being pointlessly put through the mill for the sake of being “edgy” or “because that’s the way the real world works!”
It’s not as if it were a sudden surprise or anything, either. They’ve telegraphed it for 10 years – Monica’s desperately wanted a baby since the first season, when Ross had his kid. The whole Ross/Rachel thing has been brewing all this time. Rachel’s baby was completely unexpected, and she didn’t even think she wanted it until Phoebe tricked her into admitting that she did. All three of the women wanted very much to get married; otherwise they wouldn’t have spent a night wearing rented wedding dresses. And I don’t know who this husband guy for Phoebe is (I haven’t watched in a few years), but I’ve never seen any implication on that show that she was less of a person for being single, but it’s been clear all along that she wanted to get married someday and she wanted to have at least one baby of her own.
It’s a happy ending for these characters. No more, no less. I don’t see what all the criticism is about.
That might be because the cast of The Big Chill were younger at the time.
They ranged from 32-37, while the Friends cast in 2004 are 35-41.
And the one cool ending would be to have Aisha Tyler see Ross in the JFK terminal, tell him she dumped Nobel Prize Guy and she’s back for him so Ross never dashes over to Newark in totally contrived fashion. And the two paleontologists get together and do something brainy and worthwhile with their lives. Although they could also make pretty and very, very tall children.
There has never been a spin-off series about funny scientists. Hey, Warner Brothers, have I got a plot for you!
I agree with you. I was like ‘eh’ when it came out (I didn’t hate it), but I think I now ‘get it’. Remember, also, that Larry David came back to write this episode and it isn’t like he’s washed up or anything… I think the finale, instead of being a tribute to the fans, was a tribute to what David (and plenty of others) thought was the source of the show’s success… the secondary characters. Seinfeld, more than any other show I can remember, made good use of its secondary characters. I mean who can forget Neuman, J. Peterman, Puddy, Susan, Sue Ellen Mishkie, Jackie Childs, The Soup Nazi etc, etc (how many other sitcomes can I name even 4 secondary characters). Seinfeld wouldn’t have been the same if it was like other sitcoms in which the secondary characters only came out to play every once in a while. And the finale was a tribute to those characters by bringing them back.
And they were sent to jail in the end. No sappiness for Seinfeld.
I am a huge Quantum Leap fan; I have the season one DVD set pre-ordered.
You interpret the ending different than I do.
Al (the bartender) tells Sam that he’s been in control of his leaping the whole time, that he always had the ability to leap home, and offers to send him there, or anywhere else Sam chooses. Sam chooses to go back to Beth and save Al’s marriage, which he had the opportunity to do before, but refused. Then we get the two title cards, Al living happily with his wife and four daughters, and Sam never returned home.
These were added to the episode late. It was originally intended to be the set up for season six, presumedly with Sam being more in charge of his assignments. When the producers found out the series had been cancelled, they cut the ending short (it originally ended with a shot of a picture or Al, Beth, and their four daughters) and added the tag line you seem to hate. Though this wasn’t intended to be the series finale, I think it works well as one, including the closing title.
There are two ways to interpret this ending. First, Al is offering Sam a one time only choice, go home or keep leaping forever, and Sam chooses the latter so he can help Al. This was how I interpreted it at the time, and I thought it was a noble thing for Sam to do and fit his character well. Remember, he doesn’t know that his attempt to fix his marriage in season one worked, and he’s now happily married in the “present”.
The second interpretation, and one I like better after having seen the episode a few times, is that the choice Sam is given is to return home permanently, or continue leaping, but because he’s such a good person, he cannot turn down the opportunity to help the people that GFW is sending him to help, ie, he never comes home because leaping is what he chooses for his life’s work.
In either case, Same chooses to selflessly help others over helping himself. I can’t see how that is an insult to the fans.
I’m one of those who place Quantum Leap among the top series finales.
I was going to start a thread about series finales, the good to great, mediocre, and the awful, but since this is here, I’ll just post my list here.
Good to great: Does something other than just tie up loose ends, and does it well. A great finale finishes with a whole episode or a moment that makes you go “wow”. A great series finale tries to show us something new about the characters, or give us a new perspective on them that we’ve never considered before, and succeeds at it.
Mediocre: Plays like a regular episode of the show. Ties up loose ends, plays it safe, tries to satisfy fans and not piss anyone off. Can be a “life goes on” finale that implies things will be pretty much the same, or an “everybody moves on” finale. Most series finales tend to go this route.
Any show that ends with a wedding, birth of a child, or the main character taking a new job elsewhere belongs in this category. Any show that has some sudden change coming up in that show without any build up.
Awful: Any glorified clip show, any show that isn’t in the same spirit as the series that spawned it, shows that don’t resolve anything, or shows that overreach and fail badly.
Great series finales:
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
Quantum Leap
St. Elsewhere
Newhart
All in the Family
MASH*
Mediocre: Friends
Cheers
Night Court
The Bob Newhart Show
Happy Days
Hill Street Blues
ST: TNG
Home Improvement
Awful: Seinfeld
The X-Files
ST: DS9
ST: Voyager
Roseanne
Sliders
Series that didn’t have awful finales, but would have been much better had their finales been at the end of a previous season:
Newhart ranks as one of the best and one of the worst.
Why?
The actual finale was wonderful, but then they had to milk it by showing a retrospective where Bob went around telling everyone about his odd dream. I hated that show.
…put me in the “I grew to love” Quantam Leap and Sienfield endings… I didn’t quite get the endings first time round, but on reflection, grew to love them…
…and my all time favourite ending? “Sleeping in Light” for Babylon 5… “sun’s coming up…” :: sniffs ::
:: suddenly bawls ::
…and my all time worst ending would have to be the X-Files episode “Jump the Shark”. The Lone Gunman were cool characters-but I had my doubts that they could carry off thier own series… I was pleasantly surprised with how much I loved the series, but the writers had to go and ruin it with “Jump the Shark” :mad: :: pretends the episode never happened, the Gunman take Scullys baby into protection and run off into the sunset ::
What do people think about the previous final episode of Friends when they thought the show might end a couple of seasons ago? Supposedly there was a script written where Rachel was going to die during Emma’s birth and Chandler and Monica were going to adopt Emma. “The One Where Rachel Croaks” would have ended the series with a bang.
There might have been a script or idea that leaked, but it would have never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever aired. Should they somehow have actually gotten it filmed, NBC executives would have had it re-edited or reshot so that it ended differently. If the show had ever been anything other than light fluff, maybe. Or maybe if it had been a cult hit rather than the giant cultural phenomenon that it was, they could have gotten away with it.
And honestly, I don’t think that they should have. Series have a certain tone to them and that particular ending would not have fit.
A few comments on some of the other issues raised in this thread:
Where’s Rachel’s baby? - that’s pretty much SOP with anything other than a “family” show. TV writers love writing pregnancy storylines but the actual baby, once it arrives, is very inconvenient so it either is clumsily written out or just ignored.
The best series ending ever - Newhart, far and away. Surreal and totaly fitting the series. I am pissed to this day that some jerk “news” reporter spoiled it for me without giving me a fair spoiler warning first.
*MASH - As much as I liked the show, I have to disagree with the people who felt that it was a great ending. However, it was an appropriate ending - they finally stopped pretending that it was a comedy.
*Babies and families - although there are many happy, fulfilled single and/or childless people out there, for a good portion of the target audience of a sitcom married with a family is a happy ending and so it becomes the easy choice for writers who are trying to play it safe.
*Quantum Leap - (I’ve posted this opinion on this board before, but I’ll repeat it for those who may not have heard this particualr rant). I hated the ending. Fine. Sam gave up his own desires for the greater good. That’s totally fitting with his character. But I have some BIG problems with how it was executed. They totally ignore the parts of the very same episode where the “bartender” states that
A: Vacations/Sabbaticals are acceptable and
B: Sam is in control of his own leaps
So, even accepting that Sam spends the rest of his life leaping and helping others, why the heck can’t he stop home for a visit?
Also, here’s another thing that pisses me off. Sam supposedly makes this noble choice, right? But with his “swiss-cheesed” brain, how the heck is he supposed to make any kind of real choice about his life when he hardly remembers his own name, let alone minor details such as the fact that he’s married? Poorly done, IMHO.
As a general rule*, Sam can only leap to a time within his own lifetime–he has to be present somewhere else in a time to be able to leap into that time. Sam’s first leap occurred in 1995, and he’s been leaping ever since, so anytime after that first leap is after the end of his presense in the timeline. The only way for him to go back is to go back just before that, which could possibly result in the project not starting in the first place, for a variety of reasons. This would undo the good he’s already done for the people he’s helped, and even with his swiss-cheesed memory, he’s too good of a person to sacrifice all the good he’s done for personal benefit.
Also, I think it’s pretty clear that at the moment he chooses to go help Beth and Al, the bartender has made sure he has all he needs to know to make the decision; I think he had his full faculties at that moment. He at least seemed to know exactly who Beth was and where and why he had to go back to help her.
*There are exceptions, but these are established, in the best sci-fi fashion, as one-time only, non-repeatable exceptions.
That’s an interesting thought. Let’s see how long that would take.
Sam spends several days on average during each leap, and several days pass while he’s leaping. Let’s call it a week per leap. Sam’s effective operating time limit would be from his birth in 1953 to his first leap in 1995. Let’s assume that there are only about a billion candidates for Sam to fix, just to give us a reasonable number to work with. This gives us a billion weeks for him to fill before running out of candidates. A little division and we get about 20 million years.
I’ll surmise that one of several things will happen long before this.
GTFW will decide he’s done his job and send him to heaven or its equivilent.
He’ll be killed doing somthing dangerous.
He’ll die of old age (he doesn’t age between leaps, but it’s debatable whether he ages during them).
Finally, perhaps he spends all of eternity, or until he’s called up to heaven, in battle undoing things that the evil leaper messes up.