I found the final episode of West Wing to be intensely meh, but then, the show had been in a 3-year slide up to that point, having lost its comedic edge.
Battlestar Galactica.
Well, it wouldn’t be the finale, but pretty much from near end of Season 3, wiping out Season 4 completely.
The five aren’t the five. Starbuck is at least one of them (some others could be, less important who). The reality is that the seven don’t know who the five are (and there certainly wouldn’t only be one of each of them, duh).
The background is the split, the five and the seven had a civil war over killing or helping the humans many years before, and the five won. The consequences were that the five wiped the details of the seven from their minds and sent them off.
Since then, the five, who are pro human have been shadowing and leading the humans on their way to earth, having failed to prevent the sevens attack. Its complicated too by the fact that when some seven cylons die away from the sevens ships, they reincarnate in the fives ships, leaving cyclons to convert and imprison (and some escape).
Each of the five are revealed at different stages, the first being the thousands of Starbucks who are revealed. The humans don’t get who all the five are and they certainly aren’t like the likes of Tigh (who’s plot hole is massive, so Adama has known him for years and yet he’d never aged, because he was a cylon?).
Some of the five switch sides, and a civil war ensues within the Cylons. Humans do make it to earth, but the war rages on. The five eventually win, by suicide missions, destroying all cylons.
The people make earth, they celebrate their cylon allies.
Except at the end, it reveals, that their are 13 cylons. Another ship is watching over the humans. Its not revealed whether they like them or not.
Lost
Apart from marching out the writers to apologise and be shot, there’s only real way to have a decent finale to Lost.
Finish it at end of Season 3.
Oh yes, and cut middle of Season 2.
Pretty much. Striking the sets immediately thereafter was a pretty big FUCK YOU to the fans.
Although I do consider the followup movie to be a pretty good apology.
I wouldn’t count Turnabout Intruder, or the last episode of most series from the fifties, sixties, & seventies. In that era, deliberate series finales were the exception, not the rule–particularly for short-running series. Real!Trek only lasted three years, after all.
The Undiscovered Country is the real Shatner/Nimoy! Trek finale.
My immediate reaction was confusion because of the fade to static ending. At first, I thought something happened to my set or sabotage somewhere along the line, due to the expected huge audience.
Had they simply rolled the credits, at least I would have realized that was the ending, instead of being completely taken out of that extremely tense buildup.
Gilmore Girls. I didn’t like that Lorelei and Luke never officially got (back) together. Rory dumped Logan for - what reason did she give, again? She wanted to be a career girl? Logan never did anything EXCEPT help her career!
While I agree with you about Lorelai & Like needing a more definite resolution, I cna’t agree when it comes to Rory and Logan. It’s not so much that Logan per se was bad for Rory as it was that she needed to grow up and find a way to identify as herself, not as an appendage to her boyfriend of the moment. That girl needed therapy.
Roseanne. The last year was all fiction. Dan Died?
No, no, no.
+1
Or walking out of the bathroom apologizing for taking so long
I have never been a fan of that show, but to me that was an awful way to end one.
God bless you always!!!
Holly
IIRC the WHOLE show was what Roseanne wished had happened.
THE WORST ENDING EVER! I think “St. Elsewhere” was even better than that! We get a golden jacuzzi with a plumbing problem to set it up, and (even though we were promised that they’re not dead) they’re dead! Dharma was a ruse? Daniel’s math means shit?
It felt good to erase the entire series from my DVR.
Concur. And kudos to Bob for having the clangers to pull it off.
As for most disappointing, I’d pick Cheers. It just sort of… stopped mid-episode.
One more change. George gets a woman groupie who visits him in prison, who is utterly gorgeous, but he can’t have sex with her because he’s in prison. I’m trying to figure out a way that he can get his sentence doubled by trying to have sex with her – whatever the network TV version of sticking his dick through the bars would be.
Fugitive sex!
Dallas- Bobby hears the shower going, goes into bathroom, peels back the curtain to find… JR and Pam.
Brady Bunch- Brady home surrounded by crime scene tape, close with FBI wanted poster with photos of Alice and Sam the Butcher.
Beverly Hillbillies- EPA fines Jed $80 million for oil spill that happened when he was shootin’ up some food, winds up a pauper back in the hills.
Since we’re picking on Star Trek, I’m going to add TNG. “All Good Things” was an attempt to wrap up loose ends, give some hints as to where the characters would end up and link to the pilot episode to tie the whole thing together.
Except that it was clumsily done, the time travel stuff wasn’t very consistent and the whole experience gets erased at the end anyway. Deeply unsatisfying.
I agree with this as well. The whole time I was watching Lost, I kept saying, jokingly at first and then less and less jokingly as we approached the end, “They better not pull an X-files on us.” But they did. So screw it, from now on for shows like this I’m waiting until the series is finished. IF lots of people seem reasonably happy with the payoff, then I’ll watch. But I’m not investing a lot of time and energy into a show that turns into a big pile of unexplainable crap again.
The thing with Quantum Leap is not that Sam didn’t go home. That’s somewhat acceptable. What bothered me was the supernatural bend the whole finale took. He leaps into himself at the time he was born, so he’s older version of himself in some Diner. It’s weird.
That beginning is really all I remember from the one time I watched that finale.
Anyways, I would replace all shows that are not tragic that have a tragic ending. I hate that! It feels like I’ve been misled, pulled along just to be made less happy than when I started watching. Tragedies only work for me if I know ahead of time they are going to happen.