Friday Five – Worst TV Series Finales

 
Welcome to the Friday Five! Each week I try to help you get to know me a bit better with the help of a Top Five list. This week I’m listing my Least Favorite TV Series Finales!
 
Last week I listed my favorite TV Show Finales. Logically, this week I’m listing my least favorite!

Series finales are a relatively new invention. In the early days of television, series just ran until the production company decided they were no longer profitable. There were no planned arcs, no fanfare, just one last episode to film, no more special than any other.

These days, we as viewers expect some closure, and at least a little fanfare. At best you might get a clip show, like on Full House, Growing Pains, The Facts of Life, or Home Improvement, as they are cheap to produce and ring the last bit of profitability out of a failing series, while reminding us of all the good times we shared together. But sometimes, like in my choices below, in trying to make something special, the powers that be go too far, and end up tampering with the legacy they spent seasons building by either not having closure, the wrong type of closure, or by changing the premise so drastically, the finale has no resemblance to the rest of the series as a whole. Also, I only included shows I personally watched all the way through, so no Sopranos, Dexter, Lost, or Battlestar Galactica, but I hear they all really sucked.

1. Star Trek: Enterprise – I’ve gone off on this before, so I’ll try to keep this short. This is a terrible finale because, for one, none of the main characters actually appear in it. It’s all just characters in a holodeck recreation that actually takes place during an episode of The Next Generation. Sure, I get what they were trying to do, make a “valentine to the fans”, after Star Trek was in production continuously for 18 years. For that, they almost succeeded. As for a finale for the actual show, it was pretty epic failure. There was no growth or closure (including not a single promotion for the entire bridge crew in the 6 years the episode jumps forward from the previous one), and they killed a major character for no reason at all. Fortunately the whole “it’s a holodeck episode”, and the lack of growth have allowed all the ancillary media to just kinda forget that it exists, or that it exists the way we saw it happen, and go their own way and pretty much ignore it.

 

2. How I Met Your Mother – Now I know several people who would have picked this for best last week, but let me argue the opposite. I for one, don’t like being lied to. In the first episode you specifically tell me this isn’t Ted and Robin’s story, but then you pull the rug out from under me and tell me that’s exactly what it was the whole time. For years I’m told to expect one thing, but the finale delivers something else entirely, then waves away what I was promised and tells me I didn’t want that in the first place. It’s like “You want some ice cream? Here, have some rock salt!” While yes, I can make ice cream by adding milk, sugar, and ice to the rock salt, you promised me ice cream. I get they wanted to go for a more “real” ending, but the execution just wasn’t right. Don’t spend 3 years (and an entire season) building up to a wedding that is going to be reversed 5 minutes into the finale. Don’t build up a character as the end all be all that we’ve been waiting years for, only to have them die offscreen, with no remorse shown for them. The episode just has so much going on, it can’t seem to focus on anything. They crammed about a half season’s worth of content into 40 minutes. In fact, 18 minutes was cut from it. If they had shown a little bit more, I could maybe get on board. But the quick succession of “We’re getting divorced, We’re having a third kid, Your mom’s dead, You should totally bang Aunt Robin!” happens far too fast for the viewer, and without any chance to adjust that it causes emotional whiplash. The main issue is that, while the finale may have made sense when it was filmed at the end of the second season, the characters had grown far beyond who they were then for it to fit anymore. Stubbornly sticking with a planned ending, rather than adapting the ending to meet the needs of the characters is no way to serve them. In fact it regresses them. Especially after they dedicated two episodes, one to each of them, of Ted and Robin letting each other go, both figuratively, and in Ted’s case, literally. If they had just cut to black before the Robin ordeal at the end, the episode would have been much better.

 

3. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles – I tried not to pick shows that were canceled prematurely, but I’m putting this here anyway, since it wasn’t really canceled, just not picked up again. This whole show had a bunch of things going against it from the beginning that weren’t really it’s fault (name recognition, high production costs, the 2007 writers strike). But while the second season started out slow, it really built up to a awesome final episode, that had plenty of juicy reveals (Shirley Manson wasn’t a bad guy after all!), but it left on such a awesome cliffhanger that was begging for more: John Connor travels into a future where no one knows him, huh? The bait of a cliffhanger wasn’t enough to get a renewal, as even though T:SCC had better ratings, Fox chose to renew Dollhouse instead, because it was cheaper. And that worked out so well for them.

 

4. Quantum Leap – In the finale, Sam finally meets “God, time, fate, or whatever”, and learns that he has been in control of his leaping the entire time, and can go wherever and whenever (within his own lifetime, of course, except for that one time he leaped into his own grandfather. Season five got pretty weird.) he wants. He then immediately leaps back and tells Al’s first wife that he’s alive in a P.O.W. camp and she should wait for him instead of moving on. This then leads to a shot of a photo of Al with his first wife and 4 daughters. But wait, didn’t Sam meet Al because his depression stemming from his marriage falling apart lead him to four more failed marriages and alcoholism, which in turn is why Sam encountered Al drunkenly fighting a vending machine? Does that mean Al is now a totally different person than the one we just spent 5 years traveling with? Was Al ever the observer at all? Did any of the leaps we watched happened the way we saw them happen, or are they now different? The last shot is just a title card saying “Sam never returned home.” Not only do those two final shots make for a huge downer of an ending, they rewrite the entire show, and not for the better. While it’s awesome Sam spends the rest of his days helping people, he can’t spare even a day to stop back and say goodbye to his wife or the biological daughter he somehow conceived on one of his leaps back? What a bummer! And to add insult to injury, the final title card doesn’t even spell his damn name correctly.

 

5. Evangelion – 25 episodes of awesome robot battles, and then out of nowhere a deep meditation about the nature of being and all kinds of crazy metaphysical crap? Huh?

 
Special mention to Dinosaurs, for being so bad it circles around to being good again, for literally destroying the planet on the finale of a family sitcom.
 

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook