Another one for Veronica Mars. It was rather nice having a teen-oriented drama where the protagonist wasn’t a vapid idiot. And of course it was also nice to have mysteries that were solvable without being predictable. Grrr.
The (non-)ending of Reaper pissed me off, with the promise that God had some Big Plan that would make everything better that we never got to see because the show was cancelled.
I still can’t decide how I feel about the abrupt ending of Dark Skies, the sci-fi version of Forrest Gump. It started out interesting, sputtered for a bit, got cancelled and had a tacked-on ending that sort of vaguely closed it off but not really. Then Eric Close became a cowboy, Jeri Ryan became an alien and JT Walsh died. Bah.
As much as the sudden end of mystery shows resulting in an open ended finale have pissed me off, nothing, nothing pissed me off as much as the finale of Quantum Leap. If you know that your series is ending, you do your best 1) to wrap things up and 2) to make a happy ending.
“Sam Beckett never leaped home”??? WTF!??
No. The network tells you you’re cancelled? You hire the actress who plays Sam’s wife for a 15 second extra scene in which Sam leaps home, and runs into her arms. Then you do the titles that say that Sam lives happily ever after, as does his holographic companion, who returns to Beth instead of several unhappy marriages. If you really can’t afford the actress for a non speaking 15 second scene, then you put a happy ending in the end titles instead of a random bummer ending. “Sam Beckett finally returned home. Al…”
The unhappy ending titles distressed me so much that I can distinctly remember photographic details about the room I was in when I watched it, despite it being many years ago, and me generally having a fuzzy memory.
I’m fuzzy on the specifics but I remember the Native girl saying something like “you will become one…” or something cryptic like that. I got the impression that it wasn’t as easy as simply finding the girl and having sex. This was a show that I wished the writer would have thrown a bone to it’s fans. I get why it was canceled, but to go through a dozen episodes and not get a hint of how it turns out is maddening. How hard would it be to write out an ending on a website, so we could get some resolution.
Slightly off-topic…I’m glad to see the lead is going to be in Game of Thrones. He oozes charisma.
Only in the Dope can someone steal my Dregs of Humanity answer!
As Justin said, it was on Fox. The show was one of the earliest I recall to routinely use bleeps so Jay Mohr could be on television.
Shows like this make me wonder why the networks do not allow for a two hour movie of the week to take a stab at wrapping up subplots. Maybe not for a single season wonder like Nine, but for shows with at least 40+ episodes.
I knew someone would bring this up. I just didn’t know if it would be travesty or brilliant. I vote brilliant.
It makes me sad because they had come back so strong from an off Season 4.
One of the things of this season was that the shadows were attacking Melinda through her visions through fear, her largest fear being revealed to be clowns. I strongly suspect that tonights season finale will trap her character in a very dark place with a cliff-hanger that will never be resolved.
Look, that girl doesn’t deserve to be trapped for all eternity in Mime-Hell. She dated Jaime Kennedy. She did her time…
This is the same way I felt about The Soprano’s ending. Besides the fact that way the last scene ends leaves room for each viewer to decide for themselves what happened, it’s a perfect metaphor for Tony’s way of life in general that we don’t know what that final camera angle/look on his face means.
Did I want to know with certainty the fate of all the main characters. Sure, must people would. But, if one looks at the brilliance of the show’s writers overall, the way the series finale was crafted that was was an appropriate, well-thought-out homage to the attentiveness and insightfulness of the dedicated fans themselves, and not a slap in the face as some suggest.
Huh? The whole point of God’s Truck Stop was that Sam had a choice - he could go home or he could just spend the rest of his life doing good. He chose to do good.
“Las Vegas” ended with Molly Sim’s character rushing to the hospital to have Josh Duhamel’s baby, we never saw what happened. That was a pretty good show, lightweight but good characters.
“Life” ended its second season with the main conspiracy effectively solved, but we don’t know where Crews and Reese are going and how big the police corruption is.
He did get shot, though, and it did produce a fairly large blood splatter in the air, which you can see if you examine the scene frame by frame (as I’ve done more than a few times).
However, I’m in agreement that the people who kept wanting a resolution to this unto the series’ final episode kind of never got the point of The Sopranos.
Wow, this thread is remembering all of the shows I loved that were canceled mid-stream – the aforementioned NoWhere Man, Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Drive (Nathon Fillian – not a great show but had serious potential).
The one I’m still majorly pissed over is Crusade. TNT promised JMS complete creative control and then proceeded to meddle it into a mess and then cancel it because they didn’t understand what they had or what it needed. Add some fist fights! There isn’t enough action! Why isn’t the action working for this show? Change the uniforms, maybe that will fix things!
To this day, I still want to put a few steel-toed boots into assorted dark and hairy places at high velocity. Bastards.
Thirding Veronica Mars. The third season finale was like a fan’s wet dream – tying everything back to the Kane family, taking us away from the not-quite-as-interesting Neptune College plotlines of that whole season.
In a way, it was actually a perfect setup for a masterful fourth season that could have tied everything together and ended the show properly.
I’d love to see a movie to do just that, but since Kristen Bell and Amanda Seyfried are both legitimately famous now, that’s probably not going to happen.
I tend to think it would have been about the same (bar Claudia not pulling her “pay me more” stunt). JMS wanted to examine what happens after a war on top of a civil war. It’s messy, people are trying to take advantage of the mess, no one’s sure who has jurisdiction over what (especially with two major governments at the station), and people are trying to learn new roles and making mistakes, sometimes really really BIG ones, in the process. Season 5 is my least favourite, but I think that’s my lack, not the creator’s.
