The series finale gives the creative team the opportunity to thank fans heartily for their time. M*A*S*H*, Friends, The Big Bang Theoryand recently Stargirl from DC, all the shows went right, not always giving the fans what they wanted, but they all gave them what they needed to complete their experience. Then there are the ones that give fans a big royal bird, ending the show with a sour aftertaste that in some cases ruins the whole flow of the show with how awful the ending is. Here are some of the worst series finales.
Game of Thrones Iron Throne (May 19, 2019)
Game of Thrones was during its run a must-see television show that enthralled audiences with its twists and turns, the small screen barely able to accommodate the spectacle of wild battles, dragons, zombies, alliances lost and won, the tension of not knowing if any of these characters were getting to end … and often did not reach. And so, with the promise of a satisfactory conclusion to the story, many fans waited with bated breath to see who would take the Iron Throne. And it frankly failed. He was denounced as boring and wrong at the core of what had been so carefully established before him. Bran (Isaac Helpstead Wright) became king not because of some heroic battle or rousing calls to action, but because Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) suggested this at the meeting and everyone agreed. And somehow he still managed to go even further down the slope.
Battlestar Galactica “Dawn” Part 3 (March 20, 2009)
Battlestar Galacticareboot of the classic 1970s sci-fi series (and the ill-fated Battlestar Galaktika 1980) is another example of must-see television that promised answers but delivered little. Like Game of Thrones, the series mixed politics, suspense, philosophy and action (albeit without dragons, only Cylons). We then end up saving the human/Cylon Hera hybrid (Iliana Gomez-Martinez), they find Earth and give up their technology to live peacefully on the planet… which happened 150,000 years ago from today. Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) - An angel who disappears after the fulfillment of his destiny, Hera - “Eve”, and all events are summarized “as part of God’s plan.” The word you are looking for hm?
Dexter: “Remember the monsters?” (September 22, 2013)
Having a serial killer as the show’s protagonist is a challenge, but dexter managed only this for 7 seasons. Except it lasted 8. The last season was in many ways a gong show with pointless decisions, mood swings, and plot twists. But in the end, everything had to work out when the beloved series rallied everything together. It sort of started along this path: Debra (Jennifer Carpenter) was Dexter (Michael S. Hall) last victim, he broke up with Hannah (Yvonne Strahovski) and his son Harrison (Jadon Wells), and Dexter just knew he was a bad person, no better than the ones he’d been killing for years. We were going to see the only possible solution: Dexter’s story came to an end with a reckoning that, despite its rationale, was well deserved. But no… he’s still alive, and now he’s a lumberjack who has escaped his past. What the hell is serious?
How I Met Your Mother: “Last Forever” (March 31, 2014)
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So here’s the pitch: a show about a man…let’s call him “Ted”Josh Radnor) telling his children about all the events that led him to meet their mother. Along the way, we throw in red herrings about her personality, introduce his friends and highlight their hilarious antics, and then end the show with revealing who the mother is. But we don’t! Instead, we introduce the mother, kill her between the penultimate episode and the finale, and Ted is given the blessing of his children to go after… Robin (Cobie Smulders). Yes, we’ll call her Robin. aunt Robin, and even though their romantic relationship is long dead and buried and she was married, he still haunts her. I just know people will love how it ends!
Dinosaurs: “Changing Nature” (July 20, 1994)
Jim Henson Productions Dinosaurs was a fun family sitcom starring the Sinclairs, a family of anthropomorphic dinosaurs whose antics in 60,000,003 B.C. delighted audiences from 1991 to 1994. (Kevin Clash) when he hits his father Earl (Stuart Pankin) with various items. The show did touch on some ill-advised topics, but overall it was just a fun half hour on a Friday night. What made the dark, sinister series finale so out of place. In short, in the swamp where the beetle lived, a factory is being built that has effectively wiped out the species. In turn, the creeping vines that the bugs kept at bay grew out of control, so a defoliant was used to poison the vines… besides causing all plant life. To revive the plants, bombs are dropped on the planet’s volcanoes to create rain clouds, but instead they bring snow, which created a global cooling that created the ice age and the end of the dinosaurs. And that’s how the series ends, with the family shivering together as snow falls outside, traumatizing a generation of TV viewers forever.
True Blood: “Thank You” (August 24, 2014)
Real blood dare to be different. It was hedonistic, bloody, varied, strange (in one story people were forced to lick ostrich eggs), deep and metaphorical for the LGBT community. The ending, however, was so radically different in tone that it still pisses off fans. It is a crime? Just be fur. Soft. Vanilla. Conservative. Some beloved characters got little screen time, such as Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis), while others had too much. For a show that shamelessly reveled in its uniqueness, the fact that the finale ended not unlike series finales that have been seen a hundred times, without a hint of hilariousness, hurt.
Roseanne: “On This Good Night” (May 20, 1997)
Season 9 Rosanna was a departure from the working-class family sitcom of the first eight seasons, especially the arc in which they won the lottery. “Into That Good Night” attempts to correct this misconception but fails epic by using a variation of the tried and true it was all a dream final trope (cf. Dallas or St. Elsewhere). Rosanna (Roseanne Barr) has apparently been writing a novel all along, taking liberties with the lives of those in her life to make the story better. So not only was everything we knew about the characters from Season 1 a reality scoop, but real reality sucked, topped off with the “fact” that Dan (John Goodman) died a year before the heart attack. The season and series finale were so satirized that when the series was revived in 2019, the events of Season 9 were completely ignored.
Two and a Half Men: “Of course he’s dead” (February 19, 2015)
two and a half people never set out to win any awards, but there were worse ways to spend half an hour. Interaction between Charlie (Charlie Sheen), Alan (Jon Cryer), and “half-human” Jake (Angus T. Jones) was often very funny, albeit rude. Sheen then left the show and started a very strange and very public crisis, ranting about “tiger blood” and other strange things. His role was replaced by a new character, Walden (Ashton Kutcher), and the show limped on for four more seasons. Creator Chuck Lorre, however, couldn’t let go of Shin. And so came “Of Course He’s Dead”, which ended up being just a big, giant “f**k you” for Sheen, resulting in Charlie (the deputy, not Sheen) being crushed by the piano. There were so many attacks on Sheen in this episode that it can only be logically explained as a kind of catharsis for Lorre, who came across as unnecessarily shallow.
Quantum Leap: “Mirror Image” (May 5, 1993)
Series finale for the original Quantum leap gets a bit of a pass considering NBC didn’t decide to cancel the show until the season 5 finale and ending had already been filmed. But not such a pass. The series itself was about the adventures of Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) as it has “jumped” into the bodies of various people throughout history to correct historical errors. The end goal from the beginning was to see Sam return to his own time to be reunited with his wife. Instead, the episode ends the series… ok, remember the classics The Simpsons episode of The Itchy, Scratchy, Poochy Show when Poochy is killed off-screen and the title card reads “Poochy died on his way back to his home planet”? Quantum leap ended in exactly the same way, with a title card attached showing that Sam never returned home. Beckett’s name is misspelled as “Beckett”.
St. Elsewhere: “The Last One” (May 25, 1988)
Adjectives related to medical drama St. Elsewhere: Hard, realistic. Oddly enough, in the end it would be neither. All six seasons took place in the dream world of a little boy named Tommy Westfall (Chad Allen). By the way, autistic, as if it mattered. Oh, and the hospital building is in a snow globe owned by Tommy, which somehow didn’t lead to a series of earthquakes and/or snowfalls.
Source: Collider
