Thinking of the Seinfeld finale reminded me of the Xena finale – not an obvious connection, but when Jerry calls his parents to tell them his show’s been picked up by NBC his dad says he doesn’t watch TV anymore except for Xena.
Anyway, time has not changed my opinion about the Xena finale. I still think it was awful. I’d been a big fan of the show early on, although it jumped the shark for me in season four and I’d mostly stopped watching during the last two seasons. But my whole family gathered around the TV at my mother’s house for the two-part finale…and I don’t think any of us have felt the same way about the show since. I’ve never even bought the DVDs of the early seasons or anything.
The Xena finale was so bad that the brutal death of the heroine wasn’t even the worst part. I’d say the worst part was that it seemed like a totally unrelated film script had been slightly revised to include Xena and Gabrielle. The plot, setting, supporting characters, rules for the way the supernatural operated, etc., had virtually nothing to do with anything that had happened previously on the show. Had this been a midseason episode (that didn’t end in Xena’s permanent death) that would have been okay, although even then it would have seemed like a retread of season three two-parter The Debt with added ghosts.
As things were, the finale struck me as being created by people who didn’t care about the show or the fans, and as a nasty little bonus decided the throw in a “moral” that ran counter to the basic premise of the show. Instead of continuing to try to redeem herself through good deeds, Xena finally had to die for her sins…even though the specific incident in question was something from her past that had never been previously mentioned and that turned out to have been largely accidental. In retrospect I wonder if someone high up was deliberately trying to kill the franchise. Xena had recovered from death and near death multiple times before, but in the finale went out of its way to make it clear that she was really and truly dead this time and darn well going to stay that way.