Lost
Everyone was very shocked back in the day at the ending of Seinfeld.
Some of us thought they were just taking a year break (which they explicitly said in the last episode)
I personally think it’s a great ending, even though it was intended to be a cliffhanger for the next series before cancellation, but a lot of fans didn’t like the ending of Quantum Leap where it was said that Sam never made it home.
Babylon 5 (whole last season actually); just ran out of gas.
Didn’t they famously get cancelled in season 4, then greenlit for the final year?
Yes, so they used all their best ideas.
However, we got a bunch of Bester episodes, so if kinda has a place in my heart. It’s just not as good as Season 4, which was spectacular.
One that made me feel like I had wasted time watching the show was How I Met Your Mother. It was a fun show and really picked up in quality in seasons three - five. They could have ended the show in season 7, really, if they had planned for it. Season 8 was kind of a bore, and season 9 was bad, as all of the season took place over a weekend. And when we got the finale of the show… I was so tired of holding on to what might come that it really hit me negatively how they ended it.
That being said, Game of Thrones ended so poorly that I was baffled as to how haphazard and dull the writing and storytelling was that I, just like a lot of others, held on to hope that the last few episodes might bring things all around. (Morgan Freeman as Narrator - It didn’t.) While cracks were showing since late season 6, the finale of that show was horrible. The payoffs didn’t come, and everything just felt so rushed, watered down, and a tremendous feeling that content was missing from the season, if they were to help make sense of the finale.
I see a lot of hate for the HIMYM finale and… I truly do not get it. I will not praise it as a cinematic masterpiece, because it isn’t. But it is an ending that they have been building up since the very beginning, and it makes perfect sense given the characters and what they went through. There are a lot of show endings that cannot claim that at all, with random last-minute additional arcs or forgetting things from earlier seasons. I haven’t seen any of that in HIMYM. So yeah, I think it’s a decent ending overall, and I truly do not understand the hate it gets.
As for GoT; yeah that went into shitshow territory from season 7 for me personally.
How I Met Your Mother. It was a fun show and really picked up in quality in seasons three - five. They could have ended the show in season 7, really, if they had planned for it.
I heard they were being cancelled after 7, and thus were on target to wrap it up by then, but then got the cash to do the last season and found themselves short on material but needing to end it properly.
Totally agree on both.
I read the GOT books, and I’m convinced that HBO is the reason why Martin messed this all up. There was a whole other Targeryen, Aegon VI, that was running around being some charismatic cool dude and also making a claim to the Iron Throne. HBO just cut him out, and I’m convinced that what was supposed to happen was everything was him vs. Danerys at the end, and he took the iron throne, and would have been sitting on it when the dragon fried it, which would have killed him and the throne and left Danerys as the obvious true ruler because she has that fire magic.
But we’ll never know because Martin cashed his checks and peaced out.
I’m actually convinced that this is Martin’s ending and everything to get us there was made up by HBO. Seeing the absolute backlash has scared the shit out of him and that’s why it won’t be finished.
100% same. As if he saw all the hate, didn’t want to put forth the effort to explain the discrepancy, and shelved the last book until it all dies down. Maybe even a posthumous publishing just to avoid the haters.
People are trash. What is wrong with us? It’s like anyone that does anything cool and can’t keep up perfection forever has no other option but to be a total pariah is they slip.
He’s already admitted as much, there are minor changes to what he’d planned but the show’s ultimate ending is very similar to what he’d written in his notes. Bran becomes the king in the South for some reason, Samsa queen in the North, Aria goes off on an adventure and John Snow goes back to the night watch, having grown exactly 0% after they fucking murdered him, which consequently is where the books leave off.
So if you take that ending as canon, that John Snow dies and so Westeros falls, I gotta say it’s a brave ending.
Jon doesn’t go back to the Watch in the finale. He gets exiled to the Watch again, but immediately goes AWOL to join the free folk.
That’s right, well that at least makes more sense.
Oh, I wasn’t aware he had talked that in detail about his ideas.
And it’s weird that he goes from “No one is safe” dispatching Ned Stark early on, to some Breakfast Club ending. I always figured HBO rounded down to their lowest common denominator level and that’s why we got what we got. Oh well…
The best way I’ve seen it put; the GOT ending was so bad, it made you feel ashamed for liking the show in the first place.
I sailed the high seas when watching it and i felt ripped off…
Let’s be honest cracks started showing in season 2 its just the source material covered it up for a while.
Genuinely controversial or just bad?
The Lost finale is probably both
Unrelated, just realized how the advent of streaming has changed the way we talk about past TV series.
Before streaming we would say the Lost finale was
past tense, because it had finished airing
Nowadays, no show really finishes airing so it’s discussed in a present tense
Sorry, I’m old
Never apologize for being old
Get mad at them for having the audacity to be so young
It’s Game of Thrones, by far.
And they can’t use the excuse that they ran out of material and had to write their own ending. Tokyo Ghoul Root A did it to moderate effect, and Fullmetal Alchemist (the first one from 2003) did it extremely well. They just couldn’t write worth a damn so they said Fuck It and flipped the table. They’d already made their money from it. They had good options and they walked right past them. I guess they just wanted it to be a surprise?
LOST gets an honourable mention for being so weird. But I feel like they painted themselves into a corner, though that’s no excuse. Again looking to anime as the standard bearer for storytelling others should be measured by, Assassination Classroom painted itself into a tighter corner. (Long story short, alien blows up the moon and threatens to blow up Earth if humans can’t kill him in a year… but only some students are really allowed to try and he can only be harmed by rubber bullets and knives that wouldn’t harm a real person — traditional weapons, whatever you can think of, have no effect. Oh, and he can also move at, like, the speed of light, squared, or something dumb like that. And holy crap what a stupid ending, but… they made it work. It’s still stupid, but it worked better than the LOST ending, and the LOST writers had a lot more space to work in.)
With Lost they repeatedly said that nobody, not a single person, had guessed what the ending was, not realizing that this was one of the first shows to go massive for fan theories on the Internet so everything even remotely plausable had been guessed.
So yeah, they painted themselves into that corner fair and square as it was clear they had no fucking clue what the ending was when they started that show.
If it was me, I would have admitted someone guessed it and just picked whichever fan theory seemed the most sensible to me.
And it was the most obvious ending that everyone had guessed sitting int their couch with friends or family that didn’t even need internet theories. They made it sound like they had such a clever ending and it wasn’t even close.
I think it’s incredibly likely they had no idea how to end it until they had to do a last season and they went with the most obvious ending that was deeply unsatisfying.
Wow I cant believe someone downvoted you for that, only commented so you would know it wasnt me
The Seinfeld one always gets a lot of shit
I loved Curb Your Enthusiasm recognizing that.
Larry’s self awareness is incredible. The references in curb to it had me in tears
“Huh, mistrial? Why didn’t we think of that before…”, yeah, I chuckled when I saw that.
The Sopranos final episode immediately springs to mind
My then roommate worked on the series. He said, “You don’t watch it so I can tell you. Nothing happens. Nothing. People are gonna be fucking pissed.” Lol
This one stands out to me as it was a “love it or hate it” ending, not just terrible or a giant let down.
Yeah. I would put this one as actually controversial because it fit the series and even gave you some of the paranoia that Tony dealt with from day to day.
I like it since I learned that it ends so abruptly because the last POV is Tony’s as he dies.
That said, it whooshed nearly everyone who watched it and therefore pissed people off.
I watched it long after the fact, so I already knew about the controversy. I knew that it meant his death.
His death was also a great way to end the series, and the story arc they were in.
I even recognize the artistic merit of showing his death from his own POV.
And yet, somehow it all came together in a way that was very unfulfilling. Maybe it’s just that it’s not the way we’ve ever seen, but it felt very off.
Yeah, call it cheesy or too on-the-nose, but I think I would have preferred just having an explicit glimpse of someone about to shoot Tony. Can still do the cut to black, but there’s a split second of someone drawing a gun before it happens.
The viewers are not Tony Soprano, so it just seems weird to limit it to his perspective and obscure events to only what he would be aware of in that moment. It’s just that you have an entire series where viewers can see all of the moving parts that most characters are oblivious to, except for the very last one apparently.
Sopranos and Game of Thrones are the ones I recall having the most uproar. To this day, new videos on YouTube about how awful they were.
I loved it. It made me think about how life just stops. I love all the foreshadowing.
The Prisoner probably. Nothing is resolved. #6 escapes… or does he? The Individual was #1 the whole time.
Okay, but it turning out that the iconic “Who is Number 1?!” “You are Number 6” exchange from the intro was Number 2 literally telling him the answer was freaking brilliant.
“You are, Number 6.”
These Are The Voyages is definitely unpopular
I can’t get over how Scott Bakula starred in two shows involving time travel and both had infamously bad finales.
I was advised to skip it and I still have not seen it. Don’t plan to change it. I like to pretend nothing bad ever happened to Tripp!
Don’t worry! They just faked his death so he could go work for section 31.
The “Attack On Titan” finale was a bunch of nonsense.
Everything just whipped back and forth at the whims of being artsy. None of it aligned with what the show had been known for in writing or foreshadowing. Characters constantly acting unreasonable for the sake of conflict. Shit just stopped making sense and everything felt like it was being made up on the spot.
All of the Ymir lore felt forced. Why tf was it a worm?
Attack on Titan and The Promised Neverland are both examples of stories that had an awesome premise but went off the rails after their big moment.
For Attack on Titan, I only ever watched the anime. I don’t know if the manga was any better. But I feel like once we got past the big reveal at the end of the third season, it was just like “okay what now?”. And then it was like Final Season, Final Season Part 1, Final Season For Realsies This Time… like they had no sense of direction.
With The Promised Neverland, I’m only talking about the manga. They screwed up the anime, the less said about that, the better. So the manga had this awesome premise of the kids having to escape the orphanage. But after that? It just got weird. Some of it was good (Goldy Pond, and Lewis/Luvis/whatever… the main demon singer from KPop Demon Hunters (of the Saja Boys, I mean) reminds me of him) but some of it was just weird.
I believe the multiple AoT final seasons was a product of covid, and that probably messed up the final product alot.
I disagree. I don’t think it whipped back and forth at all, I think it was pretty solidly foreshadowed, even from episode one. Who was acting unreasonable? Eren? That’s very clearly and explicitly stated to be him doing so on purpose. The rest of the cast seemed to act in accordance with their history from my view.
I also don’t feel like the Ymir lore was forced. I mean obviously there’s going to be some fantastical element to the lore of a show with titans and magic and such, so that part aside, I thought her story was really heartbreaking and encapsulated the themes the show was hammering home the whole time.
I think the time travel stuff was a bit fucky, which is one of my biggest criticisms of the show, and I also felt like Mikassa’s character should have had a better arc. I didn’t like the deus ex machina of Falco coming in to save the day with the people who didn’t want to be there, but the rest of it felt like a pretty satisfying conclusion to an incredible show.
To each their own of course, no shade or anything.
Oof, I was already having trouble with the MC’s last fucking minute heel turn that didn’t seem to be built up quite enough. Guess I’ll just skip that ending.
I disagree with OP that it’s a bad ending. I think it ties it up well, and explains why the characters acted the way they did. There’s a lot going on and it’s easy to miss details that might make things seem like they come out of nowhere, but I think it was well done personally
Can we mention Farscape? Without the movie it was a massive let down, with the movie it became an impossible mess. Either way, an incredible let down.
I introduced my wife to Farscape in 2008 and she absolutely fell in love with the series, as had I when I first watched it. We binged watched the entire series inside of two weeks.
We got to the final episode of season 4… And…she… was…piiiiiiiiissssssed. She absolutely abhors cliffhangers. I cannot count the number of times we’ve had to stay up late to finish on an episode that didn’t end on a cliff hanger.
I might have forgotten to mention “The Peacekeeper War” mini-series… evil laugh.
She stomped off and made herself a cup of tea, as I was “getting Season 1 of Battlestar Galactica 2004 ready to watch”. wink wink
She came back sat down on the couch and I hit play… “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS!” She only uses the word “fuck” when she’s truly angry BTW.
We then stayed up late to finish “The Peacekeeper War”.
As to it being a mess… Yeah, I can see your point. An entire season was rammed into the equivalent of 4 episodes. I think it was done about as well as it could of been. With that said, it would have been great to get that 5th season.
It still remains as my all time favorite Sci Fi series. There was just too much creativity and uniqueness through out to just throw it out at the end as a fan.
In this thread, mostly: “Yeah, I know the show was poorly written through several seasons, but I thought the ending would at least be satisfactory.”
I’m still amazed at the Two and a half men finale
