I liked the open ending (it was pretty open) because it allowed me to read into the story more than may have been intended. I always thought Sam ensured another leap just by fixing the “problem” on the present one. Thus, to return home, he just had to take his hands off and let the bad stuff happen: but was unable to resist helping, due to being an all-round good egg. Decent chap, what? One of Us.
But I have no proof, even no background, to suggest that Sam never failed to fix a problem.
The worst I saw was the final episode of Ellen. A complete incoherent mess.
I’d like to vote for
– SOAP. Basically everybody is just about to die and then the show ended and they never renewed it. It just makes me seeth.
– This doesn’t really count but at the end of Cheers Woody was elected to City Council, years later he’s on Frasier and he’s back to being a bartender. Made me feel bad for Woody.
Overall, I thought Cheers was a terrible season finale. It was very depressing, and made you ashamed for keeping up with such a batch of futile losers for all of those years.
I thought the ending of Deep Space 9 was a disappointment as well. The whole energy of the war arc had been deluted all season with detours into Ferengi low comedy and Ezri Dax love and detective stories. While the final episode had great moments, it really blew it with the “is Sisco really dead or isn’t he” set-up.
Put me down as one of those who thought the Magnum ending blew chunks as well. He was better off dead.
I was especially disappointed because I thought the show got a bum rap. It did some clever stories with the secondary characters and tried to be more than just another detective series.
That last year was pretty much forgettable.
As for “Newhart,” I grew up with the first show, so the ending made perfect sense to me, but I can understand all the headscratching that went on with some people.
I’ve never quite decided whether or not to love or hate how Blake’s 7 ended. It was definitely memorable for me–moreso than most of the show after intervening years.
The last episode for Voyager was an utter pooch-screw. Wait, no, the whole last season of Voyager was an utter pooch-screw. Sure, they had some good episodes, but there was absolutely NO build-up to the final confrontration. It was set up like any other episode - “Oh, the Borg are doin’ not-nice stuff again!” - except at this one, the producers remembered at the last minute that it was the final episode, and tacked on the whole “Hey, we got back to Earth!” as an aside.
That’s the feeling… “tacked on”. You’d a-thought that the finale for a seven-year run would have taken a bit more build-up than just one episode. As such, the whole thing felt VERY rushed. I mean, hell, in several parts, I felt like the actors were talking very fast in order to squeeze it all in.
I liked Quantum Leap’s ending.
Silvio, here’s an old thread I created on DS9’s final episode. My OP is quite long so I didn’t want to repost it here. In the words of Jay Sherman, it stinked!
Also, what about Alien Nation? The ending was crappy because there never was an ending. They left it open for a cliffhanger and then necer got to film the second half. Why? They cancelled it after one season! One season! That show was excellent, IMO. I still haven’t forgiven Fox for it.
Before I move this to Cafe Society, I’d like to give my take on the Quantum Leap finale. Sam didn’t go home because he deliberately eliminated much of his own history by fixing Al’s life. I believe he met his wife through the Project, and without Al there was no Project. Sam knew exactly what he was sacrificing when he did that jump, and that’s what made it the hardest jump of his life.
There was a late 1980’s cops and robbers series called Crime Story. Michael Mann produced it, it starred a young(er) Dennis Farina. It also was a victim of the “network wants to axe us so lets make a cliffhanger episode so they wouldn’t dare not let us come back next season” syndrome. They did dare. They didn’t come back. The last episode ended with all of the major characters, good and bad, on a plane that was about to crash, with the pilot and copilot dead or incapacitated.
First, the final episode “Green Eyes” wasn’t bad in itself – just a letdown because they never filmed the conclusion. Second, they did film the conclusion! In 1994 (4 years after cancellation), the TV film “Alien Nation: Dark Horizon” wrapped up the cliffhanger. Since they didn’t want to recap the previous episode, the events were restructured in such a way that it stands on its own. Unfortunately, after 4 years the cast looks mighty chubby. They slimmed down for the subsequent TV movies.
(When this thread was revived as part of the Quantum Leap discussion, I noticed that it had ended prior to ST:Voyager’s finale. And I just knew there was more to be said.)
From 94-95’ there was a trashy night-time soap called ** Models Inc.** that was trying to cash in on the fame of Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place. Though I liked it, even I could see a pattern of it’s episodes bearing an errie similarity to MP episodes that aired two weeks before. Ok, I watched it because there were hot guys. Happy? Anyway, in the season finale Grayson comes to a wedding with a gun, and is planning to murder one of the happy couple. Just as she pulls the trigger a toddler, the son she and the groom had, runs towards the couple and…** To Be Continued.** Arggh!
Mork & Mindy. They died. Very, very disturbing to an 8-year-old.
Roseanne’s ending was horrible. Since I’ve been watching the show in reruns, I was cursed with seeing the last episode again.
In the final season, the Conners won the lottery, Dan had an affair, the family went on long trips, met terrorists, and so forth. Most of it was stupid, but they got the show back on track when Darlene and David’s baby was born. Then, in the last episode, it is revealed that none of the preceding events happened. All of events were part of a story Roseanne wrote after Dan died.
Strangest of all, Roseanne’s voice-over says that she thought Becky and Darlene were better with each others husbands, so she switched them around. Does that mean Darlene was married to Mark and Becky was married to David?
I’d look to put a big thumbs up vote in here for every TV series that ended by explaining the entire series as some kind of work of fiction. I LOVE those endings – they give the shows a special kind of cohesion.
St. Elsewhere - The whole show was always slightly off. Wacky stuff that would never happen IRL kept happening. The ending tied it all together by making it a child’s imagination. I mean, how else do you explain Howie Mandel?
Newhart - My vote for best TV series ending ever. It played on the way the audience always identifies TV actors by the parts they play. So many people saw Dick Loudon as just another version of the psychiatrist Bob played on his earlier show. And adding Suzanne Pleshette was just the icing on the cake. Again, could you really explain Larry, Darryl, and my other brother Darryl as anything except a truly bizarre dream?
Roseanne - By far the sweetest, and another one of my favorites. Of course, I’d loved the original conception of Roseanne as this tight-knit, middle class, middle American family. I liked the show less and less as it drifted away from that concept. But the ending made it all good again (except for Dan being dead of course). And it made perfect sense that Roseanne would see things the way she did. Plus, she got to be a writer after all. (Yes, IRL, according to the show, Becky was married to David, and Darlene was married to Mark).
I also really liked the ending of Magnum, but mainly because Lily turned out to be alive. I had basically said that the one thing I wanted from the final episode was to bring back Lily, and they did, so I was happy.
As for Soap, even though I know it ended abruptly because of the cancellation, it really couldn’t have ended any other way. It was a soap opera, after all. They can’t end.
As for the OP, I agree with everyone who suggested Quantum Leap. No conclusion, no answers, and really depressing too. I also want to throw in a vote for Cheers, which was hyped so much that anything they did would have been anticlimatic, and which violated the cardinal rule of sitcom endings – it wasn’t funny. Finally, Seinfeld had an extremely depressing and unfunny episode. The joke was that these people were jerks without knowing it. Once they learned the truth, it burst the bubble (sort of like a heckler at a standup show completely deflating the comedian).
Gotta weigh in on a couple of these.
Quantum Leap: My take is that near the end, they have finally found the correct calculations to bring Sam home. He can choose himself, or he can choose to help Al, but by choosing to help Al, he would change his own history so much that the Quantum Leap project would never come to exist (as Czarcasm said). Al is the navy admiral who is responsible for getting funding for the project, presumably as a part of naval intelligence. With Al happy with his first wife, the project never comes to be, and our Sam is set adrift. But this isn’t a sad ending. Sam, being who he is, can’t do anything but choose the path of helping others over helping himself. Controlling his own leaps is a natural consequence of losing his guide (Al) and possibly the entire support team. By the way, am I the only one who sees a strong resemblance between Sam Becket and Deadman?
Roseanne: Ballybay has it close. I think the ending indicates that everything that happens is a story written by Roseanne, but the point of divergence isn’t Dan’s death at the end of the penultimate season. In the first or second season, Roseanne is given as a birthday present a writing workshop in the basement. Everything after that is part of the story, which explains the switched boyfriends/husbands, both of which had been going on for several seasons by the end.
St. Elsewhere: It was supposed to end with the fourth season closer, which had the hospital being torn down while Dr. Aushlander runs down the main hall in a hospital gown screaming, having been left inside. This was a good final episode. The show was renewed, and they took back Aushlander’s death and the hospital’s destruction, leading to the finale we now have, which I like, but not as much.
Magnum, P. I.: Another final episode that was negated by the series being renewed. I liked this one because of a subtle touch. Every Magnum episode begins with a Magnum voice-over in the first scene Magnum appears in. This is the film equivilent of a first-person narration that is the standard for detective novels. First person narration implies that the narrator is alive at the end of the story to tell it. This episode begins with a shootout in a warehouse involving Magnum, but with no voiceover. The first time I saw it, I was uneasy, and didn’t realize what was wrong until after he gets shot and then begins the narration. He isn’t narrating at the beginning because he doesn’t survive to tell the story.
The revival episode sucked, but I liked the final scene from the “new” final episode also: Magnum walking on the beach holding hands with his daughter.
I loved the finales of Newhart, imho the greatest series finale ever, and Cheers which was more drama than comedy, but worked in a series that in its beginning was often as much drama as comedy.
Let me add a series finale that I dislike. In the final episode of Happy Days, they entirely forget that Richie and Joanie had an older brother, Chuck, who figured prominently in several first season episodes.
Laughing Lagomorph: A&E is running Crime Story most Mondays at 9. Since I missed the show first time around I get a 2001 perspective on a 1986 perspective of 1963 Chicago. Great honking Detroit steel, music arranged by Todd Rundgren and Al Kooper, first-rate bad guys, grown people twisting–it’s the lurid, sleazy high-light of my TV week.
Don’t I know it! And don’t miss Andrew Dice Clay, acting! And not doing a bad job of it, either. But watch out, my friend! That ending is going to leave you hanging!
Blackadder Goes Forth
I’ve always thought the last episode (or last scene I should say) of the last installment of this terrific, insensitive, irreverent and blasphemous series was unnecessarily sentimental and maudlin. A betrayal to the true nature and attitude of the show.
Blake’s 7. I have a sort of love-hate relationship with it looking back. That the crew all ended in such a pooch-screw fit the rather bleak future, but still…
American Gothic falls into the categories of shows that ended badly because of the network (CBS in this case) killing it–that after a season of continually preempting it for, well, crap, changing its timeslot repeatedly, etc.