Very true. And I kept wondering why they’d keep Hawkeye on (as opposed to Alda–I know the “real” reason, but why would they in story? Pierce is a great doctor, and was wanted by a General for his personal staff, but c’mon, he was no Albert Schweitzer. Pierce was obviously damaged goods long before the final episode.)
Quantum Leap. Made no sense at all. Sam was controlling his own leaps all along? Then how did he know what needed fixing?
The Prisoner. The best explanation I heard for it, years later, was that Number Six finally snapped from all the interrogation techniques used on him, and he hallucinated the whole final episode.
Roseanne. I was never a fan of the series, but the final episode just made me drop my jaw and go “Wha–?”
The long-term fans would have taken to the streets with pitchforks and flaming torches, and probably even some flaming pitchforks as well, had it not ended with Ross and Rachel together. Personally, I thought it would have been better if Ross would have remembered that he’s fairly wealthy and bought a ticket to Paris.
“It was all a dream” has been done to death. (See Roseanne for another example, although the main problem there was the entire last season.) I liked the first intended ending, where the hospital is being torn down.
I for one don’t like questions like this as my answer is probably going to change ten minutes from now, but right now, I vote for Seinfeld - “Hey, remember all of those people from past episodes that acted as if they were so much better than the main characters? Well, guess what? They are, since they’re not the ones going to jail for not trying to prevent somebody with a gun from committing a robbery!”
You know, folks say this a lot, and I’ve genuinely never seen the problem: most of the episode consists of his captors trying the same things they’d tried before – which all fail, just like they when they were tried individually instead of in a row – and what little is left of the episode is him trying to fight back as best he can with whatever allies he can rally, just like he’d tried before.
It strikes me as a simple and straightforward conclusion that follows logically from what had come before – because it pretty much is what had come before.
I thought that was clear on the show. Sam never really knew what needed fixing. Ziggy the computer at the project would calculate the odds of various outcomes and communicate them to Al, who would pass them along to Sam. But most frequently Sam used intuition and insight to complete his missions.
I can agree with you if you’re thinking of the penultimate episode, “Once Upon a Time.” But the final episode, “Fall Out,” was a surrealistic non-story, that ended with Number Six unmasking Number One, only to find his own face under the mask, and then escaping from the Village (which was on an island) by car, to the tune of a Carmen Miranda song.
She should have just shot Stroh as well. Would have saved us all his story arc angst, and also save us Other Sharon, aka Rusty’s drug-addicted “mom”. Who, for some unfathomable reason, Rader wants Rusty to spend more time with, and help her raise her baby! Like Rusty had such a good childhood, yea, he knows how to raise a kid.
They should just called major Crimes “The Rusty Show”.
I learned my lesson. I didn’t watch the entire last season, and never will. So as far as I’m concerned, there was no series-ending episode, and you can’t convince me otherwise. LALALALALA.
I would nominate Burn Notice, but then, I didn’t watch it either. So I never got to see the evisceration they did to their own premise and characters.
I think all the Trek series suffered from bad finales.
Turnabout Intruder (TOS) is one of the worst episodes of the series (second only to The Omega Glory).
The Counterclock Incident (TAS) makes less sense than Spock’s Brain and Darmok put together, and wasn’t as well written as the latter, nor as fun as the former.
All Good Things… (TNG) is a goddamn abomination. The time travel makes no sense and nothing was particularly well written even ignoring that. (Hmm. I sense a theme in those last two.)
What You Leave Behind (DS9) would have been OK if they’d concentrated on the Dominion War stuff, but the Pagh-Wraith arc which marred the season as a whole did a number on the episode.
I don’t actually remember the Voyager finale, so I can’t actually comment on if it’s a sequence breaker.
But if Sam was controlling his own leaps, as was stated in the final episode, then he must have subconsciously known whose life needed fixing at what point, in order to leap into it. On top of that, there were several episodes in which Ziggy was wrong, and Sam didn’t leap out until he had completed a secondary mission. (The Buddy Holly episode comes to mind as an early example.) Again, if he was the one in control all along, then how did he know that he still had something more to do?
But it wasn’t a dream - it was an extended fantasy. And a truly shocking twist for a reality-based series.
Okay, so ratty old St. Eligius finally gets torn down. THAT you could see coming from the pilot.
Put 20 Star Trek fans in a room, and get 50 different opinions about which episodes are the best and worst. I think the majority of fans would pick City on the Edge of Forever or The Trouble With Tribbles as the best episode, but I have a friend who thinks The Omega Glory was the best, a co-worker who puts The Tholian Web at the top of the list, my wife favors The Ultimate Computer, and I have a soft spot for I, Mudd and The Changeling. I know several people who think A Piece of the Action is tops, but I consider it pretty average. For me The Lights of Zetar and The Alternative Factor are at the bottom of the barrel, but another friend of mine agrees with you that Turnabout Intruder is unwatchable.
Again, they hit him with stuff from the previous 16 episodes – telling him he’s now in charge, making it seem that he’s free to leave – and they didn’t work before, and they don’t work now. (That’s not even counting the first episode, where they let him think he’s escaping via helicopter, and then dramatically reveal how, no, that was never actually going to work. Ha-HA! Demoralized yet? No? Huh. How weird!)
So, okay: they’d also already hit him with the “look, another guy with your face” ploy; that of course didn’t sufficiently freak him out then; it doesn’t sufficiently freak him out now. They’re really not all that bright.
So what’s left? The reveal that he’s now being held within driving distance of London? That’s a bit jarring, I guess – but no odder than stuff in other episodes.
Well, yeah, Sam was left to figure out a lot of things on his own. Or as I said, intuition.
Although I wish he could have foreseen what would happen when he advised a young Donald Trump to invest in real estate.
Those two are in my bottom ten, too…Which happens to be the number of episodes I skipped when rewatching recently - the two I mentioned, those two, Charlie X, The Empath, Friday’s Child, And the Children Shall Lead, and Elaan of Troyius…so my bottom ten annoy me so much I couldn’t even sit through them again. <_<
“Mark of Gideon”. overpopulated planet is my chance. But it’s tough to find even a good episode in “season 3”
Sam was controlling his own leaps and kept doing it because he was an altruistic guy. That’s just who the character was and that’s why he could never leap home.
Depressing ending in a way but then Sam gets what he wanted to do an help/save people. I am sure there is a Jesus Christ parable in there somewhere.
I know I’ve harped on Sons of Anarchy a lot (mainly because I’m disappointed in myself that I continued watching after the third season).
The oh-so-symbolic ravens cawing around Jackson as he splatted himself into an oncoming diesel truck was just lazy, stupid, sophomoric writing. Hey, audience, do you get how clever this is? 'Cuz remember, his father was also squished on the highway?!!
Oh, the hooomanity!
A bit unfair, as the final episode of St. Elsewhere was in 1988. The dream thing hadn’t been done to death at that time, and when it was done, it was like* Dallas*, a big fat reset button that allowed the show to escape from its own problem.
Hmmm… maybe. Everyone I know, myself included, always assumed that the final episode was intended as the “big reveal” that was meant to answer all the questions, but the answers were incomprehensible. Guess I just never considered the possibility that it was just more interrogation and brainwashing.
The real answer, though, is that McGoohan himself wrote and directed the last episode, and decided to throw all semblance of logical storytelling out the window and make it totally allegorical (of what, I have no idea). In his words, “There are numbers here, there are no names, so you can’t expect it to end like James Bond, so you have to have an allegorical ending. Now (…) what is the most evil thing on earth? Is it jealousy? Is it hate? Is it revenge? Is it the bomb? What is it? When one really searches it’s only one thing, it’s the evil part of oneself that one is constantly fighting until the moment of our demise. The Jeckyll and Hyde if you like, but on a much larger scale.”
Transformers: Animated. Practically ruined the series for me.