10 Likes
Genius 
7 Likes
our mistake was thinking there was an overarching story
they were deliberately contradicting previous versions of “the story” all the time
their mistake was thinking we’d blame the aliens and not the writers
1 Like
The Sopranos didn’t have a final episode. It just ended mid…
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I was definitely glad to see Stargate SG-1 ranked higher.
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Suddenly, I feel better about all the time I wasted watching that show. Thanks! 
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Castle was one. In my headcanon, the series ended with Season 8’s finale, “Hollister Woods,” and the whole of the 9th season was a collective hallucination. (Yes, it was that bad. Between new showrunners who tried to remake the show’s “cozy mystery” concept into “action/thriller,” and the off-stage squabbling between leads becoming more and more visible onscreen, the last season was painful to watch, and IMHO is best forgotten.)
I hated the X-Files finale, but by that point I had soured on the show. I still find the early seasons brilliant, but to me it’s another show that went on too long and ran out of gas a full year before the end. (Don’t get me started on the reboot seasons, either. 
)
I’d add the Angel series finale on this list instead of Buffy. But it was the network’s choice to kill the show, not Whedon’s, and I’m still annoyed we didn’t get to see where they wanted to go with Illyria’s story. I wanted more.
>sob<
I can’t speak about Lost, but the second season finale of Twin Peaks was incredible, and very memorable. But I haven’t seen the continuation yet, so I can’t say if that ending was good or not.
5 Likes
A couple of interesting things in the data there:
Most series seem to go out on a high- it might not be the best episode ever, but the writing team generally pulls out the stops for that last hurrah.
Series that are conceived as a coherent whole do better than those that are given endless extensions and returns. The incentive to do one more series of a popular show is a lucrative trap that leads to declining quality.
2 Likes
Sometimes I wonder if Chris Carter ever got mad at JJ Abrams for stealing his “multi-season story arc woven around a central mystery only to reveal that the showrunners have no more idea what’s going on than the audience” idea.
3 Likes
To be fair to Arrested Development, I think the season 3 finale is the series finale. I’m not saying the Netflix continuation was completely worthless (it had moments), but it was a serious step down from the canonical three seasons.
2 Likes
Don’t forget Ronald Moore in there. The 21st century version of Battlestar Galactica had a lot of mysteries that ultimately didn’t mean anything as well.
6 Likes
Doll House ended well.
Though started very poorly.
I guess he jammed everything into the last couple of episodes.
I always think of this movie when I think of Doll House.
Great movie.
2 Likes
MAS*H is not in first place. List invalid.
3 Likes
That finale was terrible, I agree it should’ve ended with Season 8.
Too many plots involving missing Scully, missing Mulder, and messing with The Lone Gunmen. They missed me with all that, so much so that I can’t even remember the ending.
I’m still annoyed at what happened to Fred. 
I stopped watching after that.
2 Likes
It broke my heart, but I kept watching, and the arc really played out well. Supposedly, if the show had been renewed, Wesley wouldn’t have died in the finale, and Fred would’ve come back in the next season. I so wish we could have seen that!
1 Like
David Lynch was patient zero. And on some level, Carter was doing it on purpose.
Abrams and Moore … just write bad. BAD WRITERS! BAD! NO BISCUIT!
4 Likes
I tried watching the pilot episode of Caprica but it immediately lost my interest the second they started bringing up the “monotheism/polytheism” thing again. Hard to imagine why anyone would choose that angle to build a prequel series around given that it was one of the least compelling recurring themes of the Galactica series.
6 Likes
We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.
– Mona Simpson’s eulogy for Steve Jobs
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Twenty years later and I’m still upset season 5 of Farscape was canceled. At least they made the Peace Keeper Wars, and if you want to count that as a final episode, it was great. Considering they wrapped up an entire season of story arcs into essentially four episodes, I think it turned out rather well.
3 Likes
I just realized Fringe was #22…
I mean if you are basing all your scoring off of IMDB fine it explains all the hot garbage. The first two seasons of Fringe were great. The third and forth took a diffrrent direction and built a more complex story arc but moving forward in the plot sometimes made for stiff episodes. Season five flipped it all around and had it’s moments, but the final episode did its job of tying things together but that’s all it did. The same ending could have been made much better if you had not pushed the plot so hard and allowed for more nuisances from season 1 & 2 to creep in.
