Newhart
Because there will never be a more perfect finale. Ever. Which renders the rest of TV history always striving for…second-best.
I always stand to be corrected, but I thought he never went home because he didn’t want to stop helping people, as per advice from the bartender.
On the subject of Star Trek, I never did like the end of the Original Series, Turnabout Intruder. Something along the lines of All Good Things, bit of discovery, bit of sideways thinking would have been nice. I suppose the film The Undiscovered Country counts as an end to the series in a way, so there’s that in compensation.
The MAS*H finale always bugged me. I think the finale should have featured everyone as they transitioned into post war civilian life and inevitable problems.
I wanted to meet Hawkeye’s Dad, and BJ’s wife, and Charles sister.
And I didn’t give a rats ass about After MASH.
Freaks and Geeks. Lindsey would not have run off to follow the Grateful Dead. In my mind, she met up with Neil’s brother who knocked some sense into her.
Yeah, I was satisfied with the ending - Sam transitioned from being “guy who was stuck jumping around in time, helping people” to “guy who choses to wander in time helping people.”
Now the ST: Enterprise finale - yeah, that was awful…
Angel and Pirates of Dark Water, in that they didn’t have endings.
I thought the finale of Angel was pretty damn awesome.
Besides, you find out what happens in the comics continuation of it and Buffy.
I still remember the sense of dread I felt as the run-up to the finale rolled on and it WASN’T MAKING ANY MORE GODDAMN SENSE AT ALL. I think by the last 2 or 3 episodes I knew I wasn’t going to like it, and I didn’t.
Almost anything else would have been better. This show has affected my viewing habits, and I won’t watch any other show that features a central mystery that can’t be solved by a statement like, “The butler did it.” At least, not before it’s done and on DVD. I put my faith in them that they would deliver the answers to the outlandish questions that they raised, that my time spent in suspending disbelief would have a payoff. It didn’t.
As far as Farscape goes, I think the last 5 minutes of the finale was written by the winner of the “What’s the most asshole thing we can end this show on?” contest.
Thank you.
I don’t know if I was fully conscious of this, but I think the same is true here to some extent. I almost felt like I should have known better having lived through the X-files fiasco, but I was never really a die-hard fan and they contradicted themselves too many times along the way anyway. Maybe that was true with LOST too and I just didn’t want to see but I definitely felt betrayed.
edit: for better or worse, that’s never a feeling I’m too far distant from though.
Forever Knight.
Natalie is semi dead in Nick’s lap because Nick can’t make the choice to let her die or to bring her across, after he drinks too much, LaCroix brings the stake down on Nick – credits roll. All the fans go WTF??
What should have happened: LaCroix gives Nick the choice to leave or stay. Nick finally sees that LaCroix is what is holding him back, so Nick stakes LaCroix. Some form of “I have faith, I have paid in suffering for the suffering I caused, I am human” speech. Nick walks outside in the sunlight. Montage of Nick and Schanke working together, Nick training Tracy, Nick with Natalie, ends with shot of grave:
Nicholas de Brabant Knight 1203 - 2053
Natalie Knight 1971 - 2053
Roll Credits
Yeah, that was pretty brutal for a show like 7th Heaven. Frankly they should have just left it at the previous season’s finale, as it just seemed more fitting than what they did the next year.
And Lost’s finale? Nearly perfect. Only thing else it needed was the little “New Man In Charge” segment that showed up I think on the DVD (I just got it online someplace) that answered a few more things about stuff like why food drops were still coming to the island long after the Dharma guys were offed and what WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALT’s fate was.
I really don’t get the griping about the God Did It finale to BSG. They told you up front that they were gonna go that way, kept telling you they were going that way throughout the show, so how can you get upset when in the end it turns out, yep they were right? Either you were watching with blinders on or watched a very different show than I did.
That’s not to say the show wasn’t a mess, or that they didn’t pull stuff out of their asses all the time, and all the talk of “they have a plan” was a total crock for sure, but for all its faults (yeah dumping all their tech was dumb dumb dumb) it was about the best finale you could hope for given what had come before.
It’s still bull.
The Buffy references were definitely good, but I didn’t love the comic.
Glad it wasn’t just me that liked that ending.
The Seinfeld ending was all wrong. The show always relied on a backwards, but internally consistent, logic. When Jerry and the gang are arrested for not helping someone, all the characters who testify at their trial would have been better witnesses for the defense than for the prosecution. All their stories were about how Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer had ruined their lives. The best thing that ever happened to that mugging victim was when they decided to mind their own business.
How it should have been: The show starts the same, and the gang are arrested. They realize that their best hope to be acquitted is to show how they’ve fucked things up whenever they’ve tried to help anyone. Their lawyer visits all the possible witnesses in New York (the Soup Nazi, etc.) and tells each of them that Jerry needs their help. They all turn him down and the gang of four are convicted.
When TOS was on the air, there rarely was such a thing as a series finale episode. Series simply ended with the last episode produced and stories weren’t written with the intention of providing a closure to the series. Any episode of the third season could have been interchangeable with Turnabout Intruder. It wasn’t even aired when it was supposed to be, on March 28, 1969, as NBC preempted the slot with a report on former President Eisenhower, who had died that day. It didn’t air until June 3, over two months later. IMO, it would have been better if All Our Yesterdays, the next-to-last episode, had been aired as the final one instead.
In order to reflect the lifespan that the show so richly deserved, I would “fix” the series finale of Firefly by making it 190 hours long. Set your DVRs!
Really? Again, another series that just ended awesomely. Especially in light of the final not so great season.
I would only alter that by having each of the four have different punishments. Kramer would get off scot-free because, having videotaped the crime, the police were able to identify and apprehend the carjacker. Elaine and Jerry would be found guilty but only have to do community service. George, being the butt-monkey of the group, would get hit the hardest and end up not only serving the full one year sentence but also bankrupt from legal expenses, jobless, and being disowned and disinherited by his parents.