I thought the finale for Lexx was excellent. Everywhere the characters went, destruction followed. In the final season they came to earth, and for the finale earth was destroyed.
They also killed the character who was already dead, which was also a perfect finishing touch.
I’m always surprised the Mystery Science Theater doesn’t get mentioned in these kinds of threads. It had a very fun, very appropriate finale.
fusoya - One comment I would make about the Newhart finale. It was a very light, silly show. Saying “it was just a dream” was done in a light, silly way. It made sense, and it was a fun joke. It’s not even something you have to “believe.” I doubt anyone sits down to watch a rerun of Newhart and thinks, “Of course all of this is a dream.”
It’s not the same when a serious story does that. We’re waiting for a great revelation, an explanation, and instead it’s just a dream, or some strange part of the afterlife. It’s unsatisfying. Newhart was satisfying, in the sense that a great punch line is satisfying. They ended the show with a big joke, and people laughed. No one got angry because of how it changed that season’s story arc, because there was no story arc.
I’m one of those folks who hate the direction MASH took in its later years. The final episode is no exception. They missed a golden opportunity to regain my goodwill by not including the departed cast members in the final episode. How, you ask? Well, they had part of the solution by putting Hawkeye in a padded room. He could have been “visited” by Henry, Trapper, Radar, & Frank Burns. Or, if the idea of Hawkeye being that crazy puts you off, how about one final movie night? Someone finds a reel of film shot when the original group was still there.
Yeah, I pretty much despise every thing about MASH after Klinger took off the dress & Alda put it on.
Haven’t read through this thread yet (and won’t 'til sometime in November, after Lost’s final season comes out on DVD, and I’ve watched it as I’ve watched all the other seasons: on my hi-def TV, uninterrupted, with the Dolby 5.1 mix booming out of the speakers), so I don’t know if this has been mentioned yet, but here goes:
One I haven’t seen mentioned, and I’m a bit surprised, is The Wire.
I think The Wire is easily one of the top 5 TV shows of the last 25 years. The story arcs were all very good, the characters very well explored, and as a viewer, I felt like I was given a front row seat to the entire series. The other thing that really made the show special (to me, at least), was that each season could stand on its own. Each season had its own ending, but the last season, even though standing on its own, also tied together each season, the arcs of the main characters, and wrapped up 4 seasons of great TV all up in a tidy package.
So, I take you only watched the first four seasons and skipped the last and consider the ending of season four the finale? May’ve been a good decision. The ending to season four was the best of the series.
EDIT: Or is it just the you consider one of the seasons less than great?
That’s embarrassing. I know it had five seasons. (I own them!) I was working on no sleep when I wrote that reply, but still… that’s no excuse. The damn dvd’s are in the same room I’m in right now.
I think in one of the episodes in the finale miniseries Spidey points to one of the Spider-Men analogues who’s been gathered…the Scarlett Spider…and says “I don’t think I even want to know what your story is!”
Anyways, the Star Trek: The Next Generation ending wasn’t too bad. I would actually go out on a limb and say it’s the best ending to a Star Trek series, but I don’t think that’s actually saying much.
I really really don’t want to hijack this thread but here I go…
People think BSG was science fiction because it was science fiction. It had mystical elements to be sure but it was also the story of how civilization can survive the apocalypse.
I can only speak for myself, and admittedly I found all the religious stuff tedious almost from the beginning but waving your hands and saying Starbuck and the Head Six and the Head Baltar were angels is no less a cop out than when Star Trek would solve a story by reversing the polarity of the tachyon emitter. Since BSG’s creators liked to say over and over how much better they were than Trek, to use the same crutch was lame and disappointing.
Bob Parkhurst: I want to see how a war is fought, so badly.
Captain Blackadder: Well, you’ve come to the right place, Bob. A war hasn’t been fought this badly since Olaf the Hairy, high chief of all the vikings, accidentally ordered 80,000 battle helmets with the horns on the inside.
Too bad this is limited to series finales; the Deadwood season 1 finale is perfection personified. Probably my favorite hour of television ever produced.
My personal favorite series finales were Star Trek: TNG and Angel. Star Trek because it was one of the better episodes of the series (IMO), it tied together (and featured) pretty much the whole cast of the entire series run, and had a satisfying ending. Angel for different reasons; the arc it closed out was rushed as all get-out, but it really delivered an emotional punctuation to both the series and to its predecessor. The dualing themes of finality and neverending struggle was handled just right, IMO.
I watched both Newhart series in their entirety when they originally aired, and loved the finale of the second one just like everyone. (And always thought of EB Farnum from Deadwood as “Hello, I’m Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl.”) But I have to agree with fusoya. In objective terms, the ending of Newhart was hokey and inconsequential. People only consider it the best because it was so surprising and original. It’s fair to criticize the Newhart finale for not being organic to the series itself, because it wasn’t. It was a meta-joke. A great meta-joke, but how can a meta-joke be the greatest finale ever in any sense other than a novelty?
It would be like if the Lost series finale had Jack Shepherd wake up in a hospital room and look around to see Neve Campbell, Scott Wolf, Lacey Chabert and Jennifer Love Hewitt standing around him telling him he got in a car accident and was in a coma for a month. (His castmates from Party of Five.) I mean, c’mon, would that really be a good ending for Lost? The only reason that Newhart’s ending worked so well is because it was an inconsequential, fluffy ending to an inconsequential, fluffy show. It carried zero emotional resonance.
Well, the bar was just closed for the night. There was some effort to mirror the first episode (i.e. when Sam first appeared, he emerged from the pool room hallway, in the finale his disappeared back down it), but Cheers the bar was going to continue, and if Sam’s later guest shot on Frasier is any indication, continue it did.
Watching occasional reruns of MASH tends to reduce the power of the finale (and actually the power of the series itself, but that’s another issue), in my view. The idea of Hawkeye seeing something traumatic and then suffering temporary psychological illness was used three or four times during the regular episodes.
I liked the end of The Avengers when Emma Peel’s husband is found after being lost in the jungle. We don’t actually see her husband, but from afar his silhouette looks remarkably like John Steed’s.
That was not the end of the series, just the end of Diana Rigg’s role. She even symbolically passed the torch to her replacement on her way out of Steed’s flat.
The producers mention on the DVD set that they knew Fox would cancel the show so they went about making the season a self-contained story that would as a miniseries as well as a season one in the unlikely chance they got picked up.
