Favorite unintentional series finales

[Christopher]

It sounds like you're describing exactly the series finale of LOST, doesn't it?

I wouldn't know. I, err, lost interest in that show fairly early in season 2, when it became clear that they were systematically reversing all the interesting character growth of the first season, abandoning the cast's journeys of redemption and regressing them to their old behaviors and sticking them in permanent holding patterns, because the show was more successful than they expected and so they wanted to drag things out as long as possible. (Also when it became clear that Harold Perrineau wasn't likely to stop yelling "WAAAAAAAAALLLLLT!!!" anytime soon.) I think I dropped back in for part of the third season, but it didn't hold my interest for long.

I liked the way Nowhere Man started out but it never really defined the motivations of the central villain. Their conspiracy seemed to be this. Take some guy. Erase his memory and implant fake memories. Convince him that he was a photographer whose identity was erased to cover up a photograph of some execution in South America. Program his fake memories to self-erase after a set period of time. Have a bunch of random agents pretend to be his friend every so often. Gain absolutely nothing from it but lose several of your best men. Repeat.

But that's the retcon introduced in the finale -- that his whole identity had been fake from the beginning rather than erased. And that just didn't make any sense in the context of the rest of the season. It was a bad reveal because it made things even dumber than they'd been before.

I think Nowhere Man is proof that some stories work better as self-contained tales rather than ongoing series. It would've been excellent as a movie or miniseries, but it just wasn't a concept that could sustain a weekly, open-ended episodic format. Heck, even The Prisoner only ran 17 episodes, and 10 of those were padding.

 

[DonIago]

If it helps, Harold Perrineau's "Walt!"ing ends at the end of S2. And depending on when you came in in S3, you may have caught what's generally agreed to be the lowest point of the series.

Ironically I got into Lost at said lowest point of the series, then while it was on mid-season hiatus watched seasons 1-2. It made for a somewhat confusing scenario as I had some trouble keeping track of what had happened when.

Later watched the show on Blu ray and got myself properly realigned.

This is by far the epitome of a guilty pleasure...though it has some tenuous links to Trek given that the actor who played Chakotay was in it...and I suspect I'm about to forever sully my reputation here, but I still wonder what was going to happen after what turned out to be Models, Inc's series finale. There'd been a shooting, but we have no idea who was shot, and one of the characters had woken up abducted to a foreign country. I won't pretend it was ever a great series, but I still want to know how the heck those two items were going to resolve, dammit!

 

[Awesome Possum]

Journeyman. I wish there was more, but the ending works.

 

[Gaith]

As I've said before...
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To quote myself: As much as I'd love to see the other prospective two "volumes" of two seasons each, Carnivàle was a beautiful nightmare of a show, and no dream ever really lasts long enough to resolve all its plot points. In a way, Carnivàle's abrupt ending is perfect.​

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Wonderfalls "Caged Bird." Although it leaves everything wide open for another season, it resolves the Jaye/Eric & Aaron/Mahandra romances, at least for the moment. You could easily tack an "...and they all lived happily ever after" onto the end of the series at that point and it totally works.

7 Days almost. They should have switched the last 2 episodes. While "Live from Death Row" is too light to be a good finale, the penultimate episode, "Born in the USSR," would have been a great big finish. It raises the stakes by having the Russians develop their own Project Backstep and has a nice juicy role for Olga.

Red Dwarf Series VIII "Only the Good..." If only for the final scene when Rimmer kicks Death in the balls!

And in the category of totally unresolved cliffhangers that are still awesome, I nominate Odyssey 5 "Fossil."

 

[Christopher]

Red Dwarf Series VIII "Only the Good..." If only for the final scene when Rimmer kicks Death in the balls!

I hate that ending. It's clunky and abrupt, most of the cast is absent, and it makes no damn sense. I recently binge-rewatched Red Dwarf and tracked down the unaired alternate ending to "Only the Good...," and it works so much better. It isn't this weird, rushed, finale that's just Rimmer and a vending machine and a random Grim Reaper -- it's got the whole cast, it resolves the plot, and it has a cool final scene that provides a solid bookend to the seasonal arc. Also, the status quo in the revival seasons makes far more sense if you assume they follow from the alternate ending.

Spoiler: "Only the Good" alternate ending

Red Dwarf is saved, but the crew has evacuated and Rimmer leaves them behind, so it's back to just the core group alone aboard the Dwarf, as we see in "Back to Earth" and Series X. The only part that doesn't follow is Rimmer being a hologram again, but he could've suffered a fatal accident in the interim between "Only the Good" and "Back to Earth."

I really don't know why they didn't use the alternate ending. At the very least, they should've completed the effects and done an alternate edit of the finale on the DVD version.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

But that's the retcon introduced in the finale -- that his whole identity had been fake from the beginning rather than erased. And that just didn't make any sense in the context of the rest of the season. It was a bad reveal because it made things even dumber than they'd been before.

I think Nowhere Man is proof that some stories work better as self-contained tales rather than ongoing series. It would've been excellent as a movie or miniseries, but it just wasn't a concept that could sustain a weekly, open-ended episodic format. Heck, even The Prisoner only ran 17 episodes, and 10 of those were padding.

Heh, and the producers only wanted 13 episodes and a few of the later ones were made after the set had been destroyed.

The idea that his identity had been fabricated came up long before the finale. In one episode toward the middle of the run, he was sitting down at some diner describing the time he took the photos. Then at the end he started yelling "It's not real! It never happened!" And the bad guys who were listening from a distance activated some heart attack implant. And the idea that his memory would be erased on a timer was introduced like two episodes before the end when he was in the asylum.

 

[Captrek]

"Sledge Hammer!" is the only case I know of an unintentional non-finale. In what was expected to be the finale, they put the protagonist at ground zero of an atomic bomb explosion. Then they were surprised when the network asked for another season.

 

[Christopher]

The idea that his identity had been fabricated came up long before the finale. In one episode toward the middle of the run, he was sitting down at some diner describing the time he took the photos. Then at the end he started yelling "It's not real! It never happened!" And the bad guys who were listening from a distance activated some heart attack implant. And the idea that his memory would be erased on a timer was introduced like two episodes before the end when he was in the asylum.

I'm still not convinced they weren't making it up as they went.

"Sledge Hammer!" is the only case I know of an unintentional non-finale. In what was expected to be the finale, they put the protagonist at ground zero of an atomic bomb explosion. Then they were surprised when the network asked for another season.

Yeah, they kind of outsmarted themselves there. They expected cancellation so they went out with a grand gesture, then it had enough of an impact that it got their cancellation reversed, and they had to figure out a way around it.

Their solution, at the top of season 2: "The following season takes place five years before that nuclear explosion." So they retconned a 5-year gap between the penultimate and final episodes of season 1, giving themselves room for a long run this time -- so of course they got cancelled at the end of season 2.

 

[DonIago]

SG-1 had several semi-intentional semi-finales. For some time they kept expecting to get canceled, then would get renewed.

Then there's B5, which was written with the idea of 5 seasons, then JMS was led to believe they'd have to end after 4 and restructured accordingly...and then they got their 5th season and he had to restructure again.

 

[HIjol]

Does anyone remember the UPN show "Nowhere Man" from the 90s? I think the ending fits in with this discussion.

Except this is supposed to be about good finales. Nowhere Man was a mess overall -- its attempt to tell a Prisoner-style paranoia show in a Fugitive-style wandering format couldn't really work, because it pretty much required most of the population of the United States to be cooperating in the "secret" conspiracy against this one guy -- but its finale was a much greater mess. They basically revealed that nothing we'd seen for the previous season was what it seemed, but in a way that made no sense whatsoever and gave the impression that they were just making stuff up as they went and had never really had any idea what the secret behind the conspiracy was. It was the kind of finale that made everything before it seem worse and more pointless.

Maybe it's because I was thirteen when this show was on the air, but I always thought the whole thing was absolutely brilliant!

Kor

Hmmm...looking at the Original Posters original Thread title, I thought this Thread was about "favorite" endings, not "good". I was gonna offer "Deadwood", but maybe I misunderstood the thread title...

 

[Christopher]

Not clear on how something can be your favorite if you don't think it's good.

 

[HIjol]

Not clear on how something can be your favorite if you don't think it's good.

I HATED the ending to Deadwood, because it was over...and it should not have been...but it was a very well-produced piece of work.

 

[Christopher]

^I don't see how something can be your favorite if you hate it. Unless it's your favorite thing to hate. Are we defining the word "favorite" differently? I understand it to mean the thing you like more than everything else.

 

[DonIago]

I think what HIjol is saying is that he doesn't hate the episode for itself, but rather for the fact that it marked the end of the series.

 

[Kor]

Well... Something might be our personal favorite because of pure sentimental value, or a "so bad it's good" camp quality, while recognizing that it's not considered "good" according to other viewers' standards of quality.

Personally, I tend to favor stories that take what we know and love, and completely turn it upside down and backwards (or just end abruptly with no explanation) and leave the viewer scratching their heads, confused and frustrated. In terms of conventional narrative and storytelling, that might not necessarily be a "good" way to leave things... but it will undoubtedly be one of my "favorites."

Kor

 

[Jax]

Never Fade Away

Though I would of prefered the Angel finale to be called Fight the Good Fight, playing off Doyle's words to Angel at the start of the show

 

[Bob Morton]

Not Fade Away was superb. Without any continuation I just assume that everyone was killed and the world plunged into a never-ending monster apocalypse.

 

[Karzak]

Never Fade Away

Though I would of prefered the Angel finale to be called Fight the Good Fight, playing off Doyle's words to Angel at the start of the show

I seem to recall the writers knew that would be the final episode when they wrote it. If that's the case, I'm not certain how it would qualify as an unintentional finale.

 

[DonIago]

I think it was semi-unintentional, in that they found out they were being canceled mid-season, but I could be wrong about that; it's obviously been awhile.