In another thread, I laid out my preferred ending for Friends:
One of the other participants in the thread offered the following assessment of my ending:
Burn Notice.
The series ends when Ansen shows up. In stead of successfully blackmailing Michael to do his bidding, Michael turns him in as well. No harm comes to anyone from doing that (the evidence against Fiona “disappears” (because the Agency takes care of their own)). We also learn what happened to “Management” - he became head of the CIA.
Michael gets his regular job back, full restoration of pay and pension. But the years running off the grid, plus the the failure of any justice aimed at Management, taught him that there really isn’t any difference between the good guys and the bad guys. He even finds that some of his missions when was was in the Agency were themselves off the book missions for Management. He was just a tool used equally by both sides.
He quits and returns to do what he does best - helping those that need it. He becomes like The Equalizer. We can imagine he continues to help others, we just don’t get to see those stories.
Downton Abbey: Lord and Lady Grantham pay for all the family and staff for the maiden voyage of the Hindenburg. It would be a blast!
The final episode of Battlestar Galactica :TOS would have ended with Adama addressing the United Nations via a giant TV screen.
As opposed as tame tamedabeast?
Dexter - same as the real ending, but I’d have let him actually die in the hurricane on the boat!
With Doakes as the lumberjack in the epilogue?
Gilligan’s Island
A working and fully fueled yacht drifts into the lagoon, and the castaways use it to cruise back to civilization…
…only to find out that a mutant viral disease has wiped out Earth’s entire population.
… And they all had a grand time.
The Hindenberg crashed on it’s 63rd flight including multiple round trips from Germany to Lakehurst and German to Rio de Janeiro.
I’m a very uncreative person, but I bet just by going with the most predictable ending possible I’d do better than the weird and nonsensical ways a lot of TV series ended. TV shows today seem to be handicapped by their own brilliance. Viewers have come to expect that things will not go exactly as they foresee, that they will be continuously pleasantly surprised, and it seems to work fine until you get to the end. Maybe they should just shoot for the predictable endings, but try to do it with style. Dexter had only two decent ways to go, as fans had been debating for years: a bad end(death or arrest, conviction and execution), or a good end(he gives up killing, which the show had teased was possible for years and which they teased again in the VERY LAST EPISODE). The show worked very hard to earn Dexter’s redemption by telling us that maybe his dad was wrong, that maybe he was capable of being human. The only way to pay that off is to either give him his redemption, or have him go downhill(which the show also teased once Debra became aware of his hobby) The show set up two possible endings and instead we get a curveball and a non-conclusion. I would have just flipped a coin and then write a predictable ending. Would have come out better.
And somehow have Gilligan responsible for it.
Never watched Lost that much, but I thought a good ending would have incorporated Thurston Howell III and the Professor as having been behind the whole thing. Would have pissed so many people without a sense of humor off.
Damn you!:smack:
I was on some sort of autopilot with the “maiden voyage” part:)
At any rate I thought the real final episode was just too neat, tidy and nice.
Consider the much-maligned final episode of ENTERPRISE: there’s drama and there’s action and the through-line of it is our hero – who’s spent years building humanity’s reputation as cooperative explorers who make damn fine military allies – preparing to give the historic speech that will set the Federation in motion. But we run out of time right before we get to see him say a few words.
Oh, and we spend a lot of time watching two characters from another series chat with each other, because the series finale of ENTERPRISE is, well, just something they’re watching – as well as something they keep pausing, because, c’mon, their chats aren’t going to have themselves, amirite? Hey, look at that guy! Isn’t he short? It’s weird; I thought he’d be taller, but he’s kind of short.
It also shows that in the future there will be no such thing as “personal privacy”-every single moment is there to be examined by perfect strangers.
Seinfeld, I would have started the final episode like a normal episode, then suddenly have everyone break the fourth wall and begin saying goodbye/thanks for watching/etc.
Yes!
Yes!
That is the way he acted in *Enterprise.
*
I liked the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series finale, but in the very last scene, during the long camera pullback that wraps things up, I would’ve panned past Morn (the alien who never says anything ever) and had him give a little wave and say, “Goodbye.”
I like it. Much better than what actually aired.
…turning them into flesh-eating zombies!
The whole last season or so of Galactica was pretty bad, but you could salvage a lot just by changing about five minutes of the last episode. Just make it clear that it really was time travel. I know that’s not what they intended, but they managed to do a heck of a lot of setup for that even if it wasn’t intended, and it’s the only explanation that makes any sense, given that they conclusively proved that both the other planet with modern tech was our Earth, and the planet they end up on is also our Earth. Oh, and if you’re going this route (or even if you’re not), make it so that the only ship (and people) who make it to this planet are the badly-damaged Galactica and those onboard-- No sending a raptor back to fetch the rest of the fleet.
And I never saw the end of Star Trek: Voyager, but I assume that they end up making it back home somehow, and I assume that once they do, Janeway is not court-martialed. She should be: The whole reason they got lost in the Delta Quadrant to begin with was because Janeway was so adamantly insistent that they absolutely must violate the Prime Directive.