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
How is the Game of Thrones ending controversial? It’s pretty unanimously hated.
The controversy is not amongst us, the audience, it is the vitriol directed at the show runners by the fanbase.
Lost
Can’t talk about controversial TV endings without mentioning St. Elsewhere. For a long time this show had the most infamous. The big reveal that the entire run of the show took place in the mind of an autistic boy with a snow globe was not a hit with fans and remains an object lesson in how to rug-pull your fan base.
But it did lead to the fanon that, because of crossover episodes, basically all media takes place in that kid’s mind.
Including reality - “Cops” is in the crossover chain even if you don’t count celebrity appearances as themselves.
The Tommy Westphall Universe. If you take the spin-off characters from St Elsewhere, and the spin-offs from the spin-offs, and character crossovers to other shows, it means that hundreds (at least 419, so far) of shows all took place in the mind of an autistic boy named Tommy Westphall.
Stargate: Atlantis
I hated how a show about exploring and pioneering ended with them turning tail and running back home.
Also, I know it is an American show, but sometimes I would just love to see the spacecraft landing someplace other than by a national landmark in the US.
What if they had landed in say Norway, or the Gulf of Finland? The diplomacy would have been very interesting.
Afaik they were supposed to do a movie still but that sadly never happened.
I agree with you, just leaving that galaxy behind was a very disappointing ending.
it’s both ironic and cruel that throrough SG-1 and early Atlantis they made the season endings so ambigious so often just in case there would be no next season, and then they do a left-field ending like this that would have been fine enough if the next season had them flying back to pegasus episode 1, so naturally this finale ends up being the finale finale. of course!
i’d love to see an animated movie pick up from there and wrap everything up- that way some of the original cast can come back but not all of them are needed and they can continue the story without needing to explain why atlantis was on earth for 20 years
It was very sudden and jarring, I believe they only learned they’d been canceled late into the season but had plans for a movie to return them to Pegasus, which never happened.
a movie to return them to Pegasus, which never happened
It happened in comic books instead.
they definitely were planning something in season 6, in a interview i believe they were going to have a different alien enemy(the deadalus variation enemies to be the part of the next season)
The Bob Newhart Show famously ended the series by saying the whole show was nothing but a dream.
Weirdly, didn’t one of the Star Treks reveal to be just a holodeck sequence?
Enterprise.
Everyone was very shocked back in the day at the ending of Seinfeld.
i think people are seeing “seinfeld” alot differently these days. cant watch it without thinking what a shill jerry has become for AIPAC/israel, plus he dated a minor.
Some of us thought they were just taking a year break (which they explicitly said in the last episode)
Controversial as in it ruined an otherwise great show? Dexter.
Yes, that ending was so bad… I still watched the continuation, Cold Blood. It was OKish…
Something that I don’t see mentioned a lot outside of fandom, even though apparently the show was quite big after Netflix picked it up. Lucifer arguably started going downhill in S3, mostly because Fox execs wanted to turn it into a soap opera. Which of course failed, so they dropped the show altogether, only for Netflix to “save” it.
I put that in quotation marks because I kind of wish they just let the show die at the cliffhanger instead of letting the narcs in charge run it into ground. Narcs being the two lapsed Catholic showrunners. The show was still salvageable by the end of S5, but S6 retroactively destroyed everything, making it unwatchable for half of the fandom, while the other half was vaping copium.
I’m not going to write the synopsis, because fuck that burning cesspit, but these are some of the issues with it:
- abuse apologia and perpetuation of generational trauma “for the greater good” in a universe with an omni-potent god
- uncontested sentiment that bio children are worth more than adopted/step-children
- sex shaming
- rampant misogyny
- glorification of suffering
- hamfisted tragic ending clumsily masked with a “bittersweet” wrapping
- plus many more very Christian sentiments that nobody asked for (except for the part of the fandom that can’t separate their religion from a TV show).
I have never watched GoT, so I’m not a good judge on this, but not a negligible part of the fandom claimed the Lucifer season/finale was worse. So there’s that.
i thought it was wierd, since the shoe-horned rory intoa show, which is a nephilim of an archangel and a human, which is much more powerful than the angel parent. i think they took some elements from supernatural show because there are some eerily similar scenes, or things that are uncanny between some of the episodes. (both shows had a nephilim, of you guess it lucifer and a human and it was the endgame of the series)
Your mistake is assuming these showrunners had any clue what they were doing and weren’t malicious. As someone who knows way too much about the show, I can tell you that those two showrunners were the death of the show.
If you take a step back, you can see that the highly acclaimed S4 is just a rehash of S3. We have a love triangle—again—that serves to artificially keep the lead couple apart and cause forced drama. S5a is somewhat decent, has its moments, but then S5b crashes hard. Why they had to introduce actual god as a character is anyone’s guess. And then try to absolve him of his terrible behavior, because “he just meant well when he was incflicting trauma on his children. Uwu, look how cute he is”. Not to mention all the episodes they waste on side characters while giving their lead female character nothing.
Come S5b finale and things might be actually going well? Lol, just kidding. Lucifer suddenly isn’t god, he’s just this immature clown who has forgotten all about his monologue about unnecessary human suffering. S6 was just constantly shitting on his character. Like, you can almost physically touch the hatred showrunners felt for him.
Plus, the whole Rory plot? Straight up plot of Flash, except in Flash the daughter didn’t turn into a selfish psycho bitch who chased away her dad to Hell forever (and we could definitely go into the tragedy Rory’s character truly is and how much manipulation and abuse has to go into shaping her to grow up so angry that she travels back in time).
With that said, if we go a little bit back to S4, you can see the big shift in Lucifer as a character. Remember how he blames his dad for manipulating him and making his life miserable in S1-3? S4-S6 Lucifer didn’t put the blame on God one single time. In S4 he blames himself (“There’s something rotten inside of me”), even though he has every right to believe Dad is manipulating him by sending Eve back to the living (which lol, was never explained, just like most of the lore… don’t
overthink!). He also has every right to believe his omnipotent Dad doomed his daughter to a closed time loop, since it’s a paradox.And yet, Lucifer keeps blaming himself, and in the end accepts that going back to Hell is “all part of Dad’s plan, cheeky bastard”. So we go from Lucifer fighting tooth and nail to never go back to Hell (his prison), one of his siblings is literally eradicated from existence in the war for throne in S5, just for him decide he doesn’t really want to be god and instead go back to Hell to “help souls” by… giving them therapy? I.e. doing a sisyphus task because the system remains broken. The stupidity of that alone is mind-boggling (this is another Chloe erasure, btw).
In the end, instead of S6 celebrating how far Lucifer has come despite his awful upbringing and letting Chloe and he enjoy themselves, the showrunners twist these characters into a pretzel to create even more tragedy and drama. S6 makes way more sense when you know that the showrunners worked backwards, i.e. they had a fixed ending for S6 and then had to fit the characters into this inorganic narrative.
As you can see, I could write a 100 page essay on what went wrong with the show and how it’s the showrunners’ fault. Sorry for offloading all this, but there hasn’t been a single show that has made me this salty to date, lol.
Hard agree, I remenver thinking netflix had fixed the show making it more of a comic book show, then it went downhill It was screwed by it’s early popularity, they write to the lcd, the loud ppl on social media, like felicity becoming the main character of arrow
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 reasonably liked it, but I agree. For me, the series had built enough suspension of disbelief that I was able to accept the explanations, but it did feel overly complicated, with flashbacks and flashforwards and what not… not on par with the rest
it took to long to finish the series, by then people moved on.
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
If you don’t mind saying, where in the show are you currently? Because depending on that, “MC last Minute heel turn” can mean drastically different things
Watched everything before the gap for the “final seasons” I think the last episode was an AU of them all living happily in the more developed enemy state. Last thing I remember Eren doing is running off and becoming this big doomsday titan with an exposed multi mile ribcage thing leading a stupid big horde of titans.
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.
imma go with sopranos.
Dexter. I noped out after the Season 3 finale where they (John Lithgow’s psycho killer character) killed his wife. My gf kept watching, and was predictably pissed when they killed the sister in the series finale. I laughed like hell. I will not be watching the reboot.
Supernatural, yes we know should’ve ended as long time ago. But the last episode was strange, the prior episode should’ve been the end. It’s a glorified run of the mill episode
Dark.
I was super invested in the show, the concept of time travel and how everything (or anything) is connected (or not) if time is not linear. The end just ruined the whole flow. In my head, I actually have a different ending, which I can elaborate if anyone cares.
I watched Dark through once and thought the ending was weird, but I have good memories. I’m currently rewatching, I’m about halfway through S2. I would like to hear your theory because I think Dark is a really good show, but I won’t read for a couple of weeks to avoid reminding myself too much and spoiling it
I quite enjoyed dark, and imo the ending ties up the show rather beautifully
sgu, sga, sg1 was past its prime and needed a ending as the people working on the show felt it.
both sgu and sga were cliffhanger endings that unfortunate problems like mgm losing money and bankrupting to lower vierership and cancellation. according to the showrunners, and writers they were going to be more arcs being revealed if they continued the next season for both shows.
Oh, yeah defo, that ending is terrible. Great series, but I wasn’t given it’s chance to die.
after the series ended, the showrunners/writers went in an interview, and reddit. saying that season 6 of atlantis was going to have those aliens from deadalus variations show up and reveal themselves to main universe atlantis, im guessing thats why they foreshadowed those aliens in “deadalus variations” by pointing to the insignia of the aliens, plus Replicator wier also was foreshadowing in ghost in the machine episode “advanced species in the milky way that kept themselves hidden from the wraith”, they definitely were setting up season 6 to have more interesting plots.
for sgu they said/writers were alluding the creators of the berzerker drones/carriers being created by one of the novus colony humans centuries ago in season 3. Plus the OP planet builder aliens plot. they did a AMA on reddit, stargate sub.
