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.)
Las Vegas. It’s a show with James Caan and Josh Duhamel that ran from 2003-2008. The finale was supposed to be a 2 parter but fell victim to the writers strike so the second part never got finished and then it got cancelled before they could wrap it up. It ended on a cliffhanger of course.
I thought the ending of Friends was pretty good.
One that made me feel like I had wasted time watching the show was How I Met Your Mother. It was a fun show and really picked up in quality in seasons three - five. They could have ended the show in season 7, really, if they had planned for it. Season 8 was kind of a bore, and season 9 was bad, as all of the season took place over a weekend. And when we got the finale of the show… I was so tired of holding on to what might come that it really hit me negatively how they ended it.
That being said, Game of Thrones ended so poorly that I was baffled as to how haphazard and dull the writing and storytelling was that I, just like a lot of others, held on to hope that the last few episodes might bring things all around. (Morgan Freeman as Narrator - It didn’t.) While cracks were showing since late season 6, the finale of that show was horrible. The payoffs didn’t come, and everything just felt so rushed, watered down, and a tremendous feeling that content was missing from the season, if they were to help make sense of the finale.
The best way I’ve seen it put; the GOT ending was so bad, it made you feel ashamed for liking the show in the first place.
Game of Thrones went from a worldwide cultural phenomenon to barely a footnote pretty much overnight. That says a ton on how disappointingly the show ended.
My partner was a GOT fan. He was so utterly disappointed by the ending that still nowadays he would randomly stop doing whatever he was doing to look at me and say “I am still mad”. He is such a peaceful person this is honestly the only thing he has ever been genuinely mad about… so I always know what he is referring to.
Totally agree on both.
I read the GOT books, and I’m convinced that HBO is the reason why Martin messed this all up. There was a whole other Targeryen, Aegon VI, that was running around being some charismatic cool dude and also making a claim to the Iron Throne. HBO just cut him out, and I’m convinced that what was supposed to happen was everything was him vs. Danerys at the end, and he took the iron throne, and would have been sitting on it when the dragon fried it, which would have killed him and the throne and left Danerys as the obvious true ruler because she has that fire magic.
But we’ll never know because Martin cashed his checks and peaced out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
It’s the one where the show was cancelled by the idiot studio and we never had any closure to the show so many of us really loved.
“You can’t take the sky from me…”
( ˘ ɜ˘) ♬♪♫
Don’t speak that way of The Orville
Oh no, they cancelled it? I was still hoping for a season 😢
theres also the issue that the actors dint like the in between season were so long because of it too. i believe palacki said in a statement how they cant afford(financially afford to live close to the studio) to be in a show that rarely has any seasons, she was on a podcast explaining as much on michael rosenbaums channel.
Genuinely controversial or just bad?
The Lost finale is probably both
Unrelated, just realized how the advent of streaming has changed the way we talk about past TV series.
Before streaming we would say the Lost finale was
past tense, because it had finished airing
Nowadays, no show really finishes airing so it’s discussed in a present tense
Sorry, I’m old
I think that even the best writer in the world cannot find a satisfying reveal of 10 years worth of secrets build-up.
I think the final was the perfect balance between tying all the loose ends and not fully explaining what the island is. (Or rather, they did in some way, they just left some bits to the imagination).
And to everyone thinking that the finale makes it so the entire previous seasons did not happen, sorry but you just didn’t get it.
Never apologize for being old
Get mad at them for having the audacity to be so young
I’m one of the weirdos who liked the finale!
What chaotic god has corrupted you for finding pleasure in something that tormented me? ;)
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
ALF got captured by the FBI
He did?!?
The Seinfeld one always gets a lot of shit
I loved Curb Your Enthusiasm recognizing that.
Larry’s self awareness is incredible. The references in curb to it had me in tears
“Huh, mistrial? Why didn’t we think of that before…”, yeah, I chuckled when I saw that.
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 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.
Battlestar Galactica.
Which one?
I found that show really interesting to watch. I think a lot of the series holds up, in terms of acting and storytelling, to the point where I’ll rewatch the series despite knowing the awful ending—but the ending was fucking awful.
the reigiminaged series was all wierd from start to finish, apparently it was because of the showrunners christian views, that he wanted a bsg, to have christian like ending.
You wash your mouth out this instant
The Sopranos final episode immediately springs to mind
This one stands out to me as it was a “love it or hate it” ending, not just terrible or a giant let down.
Sopranos and Game of Thrones are the ones I recall having the most uproar. To this day, new videos on YouTube about how awful they were.
It’s hard to know if GoT counts as “controversial” because it seems like everyone unanimously hated it.
These Are The Voyages is definitely unpopular
I can’t get over how Scott Bakula starred in two shows involving time travel and both had infamously bad finales.
Fun fact: In one episode, they talk about how a leap has to be completed in a certain amount of time in order to guarantee the ability to leap home. They say that the amount of time that each leap must be completed within falls by a certain percentage each time. I did the calculation once. Sam was still within the threshold even after all the many seasons. He should have leaped home.
And it would have been to the alt-timeline where Al and Ziggy were replaced by St.John and Alpha, the one which showed up when Sam previously leapt into Al and temporarily changed history.
All the pieces were there.
(If this feels familiar, I have posted this online before.)
One interesting thing about the Quantum Leap finale is that God is played by Bruce McGill (who shows up in a number of Bellisario’s shows, but ignore that for now). Which doesn’t seem particularly interesting until you realize that Bruce McGill also appeared in the Quantum Leap pilot, implying that God has been involved in the whole “Leap that went wrong” thing from the very beginning. I’ve never been entirely sure how I felt about that, but it was an interesting bit of casting, regardless.
The dude is intrinsically linked - in my mind at least - to time travel plots too. He’s in Timecop as the boss of the time agency, Quantum Leap as “Bartender Al/God(?)” and Voyager as Braxton, the rogue time-travelling captain who repeatedly breaks the temporal prime directive to get back at Janeway.
les moonves pretty much ruined the franchise, he did the last episode that way because he wanted a “fuck you statement” to the viewers, i believe frakes did not like the episode as well.
I was advised to skip it and I still have not seen it. Don’t plan to change it. I like to pretend nothing bad ever happened to Tripp!
Don’t worry! They just faked his death so he could go work for section 31.
