Examples of shows where the final season was the best

Discussion in 'Science Fiction & Fantasy' started by Ensign_Redshirt, Nov 11, 2010.

  1. Ensign_Redshirt

    Ensign_Redshirt Commodore Commodore

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    Single-season shows and show who are still in production don't count.


    Off the top my hat:

    -Star Trek: Enterprise (although some might say Season 3 was the best)

    - seaQuest DSV/2032 (although some might say Season 1 was the best)

    - Dollhouse

    - Jeremiah (?)


    Any other examples? And is there a show which ran longer than four seasons and meets this criteria?
     
  2. startrekwatcher

    startrekwatcher Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    DS9 Season Seven--everything came together that year with a nice mix of stories and chances to get nostalgic and say farewell plus an exciting 10 episode Final Chapter tying together a lot of different threads spawn over the seven years of the show. It felt like there was still so much story left to tell.

    Beyond that I really can't think of anything else most other shows have overstayed their welcome continuing to produce diminishing returns--Lost, The X-Files, Roseanne, Melrose Place, Dallas, TNG, Voyager, Heroes, nBSG, 24.
     
  3. Temis the Vorta

    Temis the Vorta Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    S5 and S6 of DS9 were better. You're forgetting how bad the whole first half of S7 was. The best "season" of DS9 was actually mid-S5 thru mid-S6.
     
  4. startrekwatcher

    startrekwatcher Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    S6 started out well with the Occupation arc--barring the middling "Sons and Daughters"--but after "Sacrifice of Angels" the season wandered aimlessly pretty much putting the more interesting arc material on the backburner giving us a whole bunch of uninteresting filler--"Resurrection, "You are Cordially Invited...", "Time's Orphan", "Valiant", "Profit and Lace", "His Way" etc.

    S5--to me-- was uneven with some of the series' highest highs like "In Purgatory's Shadow", "By Inferno's Light", "Call to Arms" all which helped set-up important threads and shook up the status quo in fundamentally interesting ways but it also featured a bunch of awful or mediocre episodes like "Let He Who is Without Sin", "Ferengi Love Songs", "A Simple Investigation", "Soldiers of the Empire", the overrated "The Ship", "Looking for Par'Mach in All the Wrong Places", "The Begotten" with that horrible sitcom subplot with Kira giving birth and O'Brien & Shakaar sniping at each other etc.

    S7 started off slow and had a few average offerings but for me the good outweighed the bad and was more consistently entertaining this year than the other two with "Take Me Out to the Holosuite", "Inter Arma Silent Leges", "Treachery Faith and the Great River", "Badda Bing Badda Bang", "The Emperor's New Cloak", "Images in the Sand", the Final Chapter and Ezri was a welcomed improvement over Jadzia.
     
  5. Sketcher

    Sketcher Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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  6. PsychoPere

    PsychoPere Vice Admiral Premium Member

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    That first and only season really was something, wasn't it?
     
  7. Hyperspace05

    Hyperspace05 Commodore Commodore

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    Angel?

    But of course any season without the "nails on chalkboard" Cordelia was a big improvement.
     
  8. LOKAI of CHERON

    LOKAI of CHERON Commodore Commodore

    Agree with Enterprise S4, but I'm really struggling to think of any other examples - as startrekwatcher states - it's usually diminishing returns to a greater or lesser degree.
     
  9. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    The grammatical pedant in me is compelling me to say that, strictly speaking, two-season shows should be excluded, since the word "best" can only be used for comparisons of three or more things; in comparing two, you can only say which is "better."

    But now that I've gotten that out of my system and appeased the inner pedant for the moment, feel free to ignore it. It's kind of a silly rule anyway.


    Let's see, I'd have to agree with Enterprise's final season being the best. I loved its innovative use of variable-length storylines ranging from 1 to 3 episodes; it was a great middle ground between episodic and serial approaches and gave them a lot of flexibility. It's a format I'd love to see repeated elsewhere.

    As for SeaQuest, I didn't care for the final season at all, but then, I found the first season largely mediocre and uneven, and the second isn't even on the table. Mainly I didn't much care for the new, darker format and characters, but I can see how some might prefer it.

    I don't agree about DS9 either; I felt they dragged out the Dominion War arc too long. Both TNG and DS9 were kind of showing their age in their final year or two, and were strongest in the middle.

    I wouldn't say it's the strongest, but Voyager's final season (run by Kenneth Biller) was a step up from the previous two (run by Braga). The writing was better, there was more progress in the storyline, and the characters were allowed to evolve in ways that they weren't in the previous couple of seasons. But "Endgame" drags down the average.

    I'd cite Power Rangers if it weren't back in production now. Power Rangers RPM was by far the best season to date. But it won't be the last season for much longer.

    I think that each of X-Men Evolution's seasons was better than the previous one. It started out as a pretty dull "superpowered kids in high school" show, but with each season finale, the stakes got higher and the stories more epic. The show really came into its own after the second-season finale, when the existence of mutants was publicly revealed. Keeping weird stuff secret to preserve the normal status quo is a pervasive trope in SFTV, but it's so much more interesting when the secrets come out and do affect the world. I think XME had a shortened final season and was given a rather abrupt ending, but I daresay the last was the best.

    Which reminds of The 4400, one of the few shows that made the weird stuff public from the get-go and really embraced the exploration of how it changed the world. I'm trying to remember whether its final season was the best, and I think it was in some ways, in terms of the epic quality of the evolving narrative, but disappointing in others due to cast departures and annoying aspects like the Cassie character.
     
  10. Gaith

    Gaith Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Carnivale

    Rome
     
  11. LitmusDragon

    LitmusDragon Commodore Commodore

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    Deadwood maybe, though that wasn't intended to be final season at the time.

    Seinfeld arguably. Some people think it got too cartoony but I liked a lot of those crazier episodes.
     
  12. lennier1

    lennier1 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Enterprise, but after the whole space-battle-of-the-week/Rambo-in-space bullshit that wasn't that hard.

    seaQuest finally made the show worth watching again after the second season had turned the whole thing into a travesty

    Those are the only ones that come to mind. Apart from that it's usually the opposite, although it's rarely as bad as Earth: Final Conflict. Even Babylon 5's fifth season wasn't that bad, even though they must've been several levels of drunk when thole telepath storyline was worked out.
     
  13. Evil Twin

    Evil Twin Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Aside from Enterprise, the only other one that springs to mind is Angel. The switch to Wolfram and Hart was just a breath of fresh air after the convoluted storylines of seasons 3 and 4, and Spike was a welcome addition to the main cast. Always love watching him and Angel together. :)
     
  14. Robert Maxwell

    Robert Maxwell memelord Premium Member

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    I agree on seaQuest 2032 but it was really like a different show.

    I thought the last season of Sliders was excellent. They really mined the premise of the show that year. Too bad they got canceled. :(
     
  15. bigdaddy

    bigdaddy Vice Admiral Admiral

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    The main problem still is around for season 4, the actors / characters suck. But yes the best out of the mess.

    How about Six Feet Under? The last half of the final season was amazing, I can't rememeber the first half.
     
  16. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    I was hoping Sliders would come up, because my opinion doesn't quite fit the topic enough for me to bring it up myself. I think the first season was the best overall, but no show has ever made as great an improvement as Sliders did between its third and fourth seasons. The back half of the third season -- its last one on FOX -- was the most painfully bad scripted television I have ever seen in my life. It was in the hands of producers who thought that writing science fiction TV meant doing bad pastiches of old sci-fi, fantasy, and horror movies and that writing character interaction meant constant, unmotivated petty bickering. But when it moved to Sci-Fi for season 4, it got a new writing staff consisting of people who actually knew what science fiction was and what characterization was. And although the show still had problems due to David Peckinpah's pettiness and Jerry O'Connell's nepotism, seasons 4 and 5 were profoundly better than what had preceded them.

    However, I didn't like S5 as much as S4. I liked the S5 cast, which had a rapport nearly as good as the original cast, but the writing just wasn't as strong overall as in S4.
     
  17. Greg Cox

    Greg Cox Admiral Premium Member

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    This is a tough question, but, yeah, THE 4400 crossed my mind, too. It's certainly a show that hadn't declined in quality near the end, although I'd have to go back to watch the entire show again before I could definitively say which season was best.
     
  18. scnj

    scnj Captain Captain

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    The only one I can think of is Firefly. But I doubt that counts.
     
  19. Mr Light

    Mr Light Admiral Admiral

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    I can't think of any show that's final year was its best. Most shows have a very disappointing final year, or at best maintain a level of quality earlier achieved.

    Hell, all of my favorite shows had disappointing final seasons. B5... Farscape... DS9... LOST... Angel was a good ending but I did like S3-4 more.
     
  20. Lonemagpie

    Lonemagpie Writer Admiral

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    I haven't got that far in Angel or Lost yet, so unless one of those two qualifies, I can't think of a single one, SF or otherwise.