How would you rank the five in that article: LOST, Battlestar Galactica, Orphan Black, Twin Peaks, The Shield
For Twin Peaks, we are using the last episode of season 3, which really does serve as a series finale; I actually hope it doesn’t come back after that.
I would rank them like this:
Battlestar Galactica - It gets hate, but I absolutely loved it.
LOST - Also gets hate. I actually get some of the hate on this one, but I still found it very satisfying.
Twin Peaks - Haunting. Absolutely haunting.
Orphan Black - I actually like how they wrapped everything up in the first 15 minutes or so and then showed the aftermath for most of the episode.
Not seen: The Shield
Kind of like I did, feel free to leave out the ones you have not seen.
I’ve seen only Lost, so I guess it’s at the top and bottom of my list. (Well, I did see Battlestar Galactica, but I don’t think you mean the late-1970s version.)
I didn’t watch most of these (actually, any of them) to the end, so I’ll bow out of the actual rankings, but I think it’s bizarre that they didn’t include The Sopranos, which had literally ONE question to answer…and didn’t answer it (at least not to the satisfaction of most viewers).
I hated the metaphysical aspects of the BSG finale. After the show went on and on about how Star Trek would hand wave away things with technobabble, they did it with religious babble.
Also I felt that we should have learned we were the descendants of the Cyclons not the Humans.
I really liked the Lost finale. In fact I went from a mostly lurker to poster on this board because I really wanted to write out my thoughts on the Lost finale.
I didn’t watch the others. I never watched Twin Peaks or the Shield and I never saw the final two seasons of Orphan Black.
Only seen two. Rate Orphan Black ending at “don’t remember” and BSG ending as “a shit sandwich that has been soaked in aged donkey urine and sprinkled generously with alum and ipecac.”
See, “it was all a dream” is as overused a cliche as “they were Adam and Eve”, but in the case of Newhart it didn’t bother me because it was played (very well) for a laugh, instead of smugly acting like it was something profound.
There’s plenty of series with great endings, recently 12 Monkeys had a perfect ending. Spartacus: War of the Damned was amazing, so was another Starz show called Black Sails.
The article referenced isn’t really about series finales in general - it’s about finales of huge, sprawling series with lots of dangling plot threads that need to be tied off.
The only one on the list I saw was “The Shield”, which had a pretty satisfying ending. The last season was a mixed bag, though; I wasn’t a big fan of the “magic box of blackmail” plotline.
One series finale I really enjoyed was “The Leftovers”. It was an interesting way to end the series, and I found it very satisfying.
BSG ending was atrocious. I didn’t think the spiritual elements were that bad, but the luddite aspect was absolutely awful. Realistically most of the characters we followed for the duration of the series will be dead in 5-10 years.