That sure sounds awful. So we can be really glad that the writers decided, instead, to go with
“Let’s see. I am going to skip saving MLK from an assassination and instead save a random housewife in 1971 who was killed by her abusive husband. And after that I’m going to program in a couple hundred other fairly minor events that involved bad things to random nobodies. Sure, I could help with some big things, but, eh. I’m only God.”
Apparently you’re not familiar with how God is said to work. He tends to do things like flood an entire valley, but it’s actually evidence of his Unfathomable Love and Grace that one child managed to survive by floating on a raft made from its dead parents.
So, yes, the God thing is even more believable now.
Carnivale was frustrating because the showdown between Ben and Brother Justin was pretty epic. Two season’s worth of build up and we get a nice payoff, only to have this coda added to the end that’s pretty creepy and hacks up any satisfaction we get from everything that just happened.
I don’t think so. The anomaly was created by Picard. Q, however, has come to regard Picard as a sort of favourite pet. He comes forward and tells Picard what’s happening. He moves Picard around in time, giving him the opportunity to close the anomaly.
The only way I can stomach that coda at all instead of seeing it as the ultimate lame-ass Friday the 13th resurrection ending is to imagine four more seasons in the future, and think that maybe this confrontation between Ben and Justin wasn’t the epic confrontation the prophecies had been hyping but just a little skirmish to whet the appetite.
I hate to say “I told you so” . . . Aw, who am I kidding, I LOVE to say that. I gave up on Lost two episodes into the second season because it was painfully clear to me that the producers and writers were just making it up as they went along, and that the chances of any sort of satisfying resolution was nil. I said that a few times (even somewhere in here, I’m pretty sure) and got shouted down. So to all those who slogged through the entire series, only to find disappointment at the end: I told you so.
That was my candidate, too–but I’ll go further to say that the finale totally perverted the essence of Hawkeye’s character, subsuming it into Alan Alda’s (as had gradually been happening for several seasons). I felt that Hawkeye’s whole reason for being was to show that being insane in a positive fashion was the only way to deal with the psychopathic insanity of war. To have him actually go insane obliterated that (to me) uplifting message.
The 80s tv show Beauty & the Beast was notable for being virtually the only show my sisters & I could agree to watch. Its finale was awful–rushed, unsatisfying, boring. It wasn’t the creators’ fault – it was clear that they were doing their best to wrap up a storyline they had hoped to extend another season – but it was still unsatisyfing.
That’s not actually right. They had the resolution planned from the very start. Everything they did was designed carefully to lead up to that resolution. It’s just that when it came to it, they didn’t do a very good job of explaining what it meant. Even so, it was a fairly satisfying resolution that came close to explaining the mysteries.
But the really bad thing was a sub-plot that was only in the last season. The show kept cutting between the two plots. There was a parallel storyline in which the plane had never crashed, so nobody had been trapped on the island. The dead characters are alive and well. The people from the plane keep on encountering each other, and feel that there is some mystery binding them all together. The resolution to *that *plot was utterly appalling.
The finale of Seinfeld was exactly backwards. The series always had a twisted logical consistency to it; the most improbable coincidences would always happen and people would follow the strangest goals and motivations, but it all made sense in a way.
In the finale the gang failed to intervene to help someone, and a lineup of previous guest stars testified about how their own lives had been fucked up in their dealings with Jerry, et al. By Seinfeld logic, all those people should have been testifying for the defense. Whenever Jerry, or any of them, got involved with anybody’s life, that person got screwed. Jerry tried to help a restauranteur, and it drove him out of business and got him deported. When they left that guy alone to get mugged, it was the best thing that ever happened to him. The trial should have been about the gang of four setting out to prove their own incompetence as the only way to stay out of jail.
Deadwood was poor. I understand that it wasn’t meant to be a finale but the mischaracterizations were just awful.
And didn’t Kelly almost get married in the last episode of Married with Children?