With Game Of Thrones coming to an end, lots of fans are upset about the way everything has gone down this entire season.
Of course, it’s hardly the first show to disappoint its viewers at the last minute (or before that).
Not sticking the landing is one thing; what these finales did is screw it up so bad they made fans like the whole show less!
See our bottom barrel picks for WORST endings of all time (below)!
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Seinfeld
The so-called “show about nothing” became one of the biggest sitcoms of all time thanks to all the beloved, unforgettable nothings Jerry and the gang dealt with.
From the Soup Nazi to the marble rye, from the yadda yadda to the shrinkage, there are probably more quotable lines and memorable moments on Seinfeld than any other show.
OK, maybe second to Friends. That’s still pretty great.
The point is, for the final episode, fans were geared up for one last super memorable sendoff, and what they got — all they got — were memories.
That’s because the last episode of Seinfeld was freakin’ clip show!
You know, the episodes they used to do all the time on TV to save money, where the characters just sat around and said HEY THIS ISN’T AS BAD AS THE TIME YOU YADDA YADDA then the show cuts to a clip from that episode?
During a trip out of state, Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer see a man getting mugged and fail to help or even call the cops — and end up getting arrested and charged under a “good samaritan” law.
The entire episode is the prosecution bringing in all the people they’ve wronged over the course of nine seasons as character witnesses — and cutting to clips of what they did.
The foursome end up getting convicted for being such awful people and go to prison.
But really it’s less the resolution that’s a problem and more the unparalleled disappointment that was the episode that got us there.
LOST
OK, we have to start off by saying this about the show; they were NOT dead the whole time.
It’s a common misconception about the show because of how clumsy the final season and episode ended up.
For the five people who didn’t see LOST, the show is about a plane crash on a deserted island that just gets weirder and weirder.
We’re pretty sure ABC just wanted a drama version of Survivor, but J.J. Abrams created an incredibly ambitious high concept sci-fi/fantasy that tackled serious philosophy questions.
Though TBH what people came back for time and time again were the human dramas.
https://giphy.com/gifs/evangeline-lilly-kate-austen-sawyer-ford-4bshNonELyDbq
Early on the show sets up tons of intriguing questions; there’s other inhabitants, a monster, science experiments, even a wee bit of time travel.
Unfortunately the back half of the show never pays off with answers to 90% of them. And some of the answers we did get made the earlier episodes not make sense.
Not only that, several of the “twists” seemed more like the writers just changed their minds (or because actors very publicly got quit or got fired) and had to retcon themselves.
But the really annoying part of the ending is that the showrunners SWORE up and down that the most common fan theory early on — that everyone died in the crash, and the island was purgatory — was not accurate.
Then they proceeded to create a final season that WAS depicting purgatory, so when that twist was revealed in the last episode, everyone thought they were being lied to the entire time, and all the crazy stuff they saw in the previous seasons wasn’t real.
Did we mention there was time travel?
Dexter
Dexter is a textbook example of a show committing one of the cardinal sins of storytelling — impatience.
For those who never watched, the premise was Dexter Morgan, a forensic analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department who helped the cops take down serial killers — all while secretly being a serial killer himself.
In a unique twist, Dexter (Michael C. Hall) was taught to use his homicidal compulsions for good by only killing dangerous criminals, making him something of a hero, albeit a super disturbed one.
So naturally the final story to tell is the ultimate clash of his secret life and his outward life, right? Have him on the forefront of the investigation for HIMSELF??
Nope. That was Season 2. They blew their wad in Season 2.
After that the show struggled to find something more dramatic than the protagonist being pushed into such a corner and mostly floundered. But there was the odd excellent avenue, like guest star John Lithgow as another serial killer trying to keep a family life.
However, the final two seasons of the show was a hot mess that should’ve been cut into pieces, wrapped in garbage bags, and thrown into the bay.
Here are a few of the AWFUL turns in Seasons 7 and 8:
- Dexter’s sister Debra realizes she’s in love with him (WTF?!?), totally ruining her character.
- That doesn’t matter anyway because she gets killed by some random serial killer no one even remembers.
- Everything becomes about the mob and people killing each other for very mundane, non-serial reasons.
- Hannah is introduced halfway through the penultimate season and basically becomes the most important character in Dexter’s life. She’s this ridiculously badass who, like Dexter, also has no qualms about killing people who get in her way. (Almost like someone was trying get a spinoff going…)
But of course, nothing stings like the ending.
Dexter decides to solve all his problems by… committing suicide by driving his boat into a hurricane. Ew. 70 mph of ewwww.
However, the final scene of the show reveals Dexter didn’t die but instead faked his death. And is now working for a logging company in Oregon, and is sporting a really bad fake beard.
He gets off work and then sits and stares at the camera, doing… nothing. For real. Nothing.
Presumably this is to show us he’s unhappily REFRAINING from murder. But it’s just such a whimper of an ending.
It’s maybe the single worst final shot of any series.
Battlestar Galactica
Man, did this show come out of nowhere!
Who knew a reboot of a failed late ’70s Star Wars knockoff would become one of the most beloved science fictions shows of all time??
The basic premise is this:
Humans created artificially intelligent robots to do manual labor; the robots (called CYLONS) revolt and there’s a war. The show takes place years later when the Cylons come back, this time with new models that look exactly like humans and are able to infiltrate us.
https://giphy.com/gifs/cooper-ripa-zeggy-8sr8xBgDKdXsQ
They end up blowing up Earth and most of humanity in the FIRST EPISODE, leaving only a few thousand humans left trying to get away on spaceships.
Right? Damn.
There was political intrigue, sexy relationship drama, brutal action — all heightened by the knowledge this was it for humanity.
The high stakes and shocking twists turned the space opera into an early binge favorite. Portlandia even made a sketch about how addictive it was.
https://giphy.com/gifs/best-portlandia-battlestar-galactica-Y4z7IQ7LgjONi
Unfortunately the show ended up stumbling over itself toward the end.
In order for there to be dramatic reveals, characters were revealed out of nowhere to secretly have been Cylons the whole time, in some cases when it wasn’t logically possible.
Kind of like the first 5 minutes of Austin Powers 2 when Vanessa turns out to be a Fembot. Only it was supposed to be serious.
https://giphy.com/gifs/austin-powers-elizabeth-hurley-BBgAwdDFYmSoE
Then a couple characters were revealed to be — get this — ANGELS.
For real. There were space angels.
Then the last of the humans find a new planet and make peace with the Cylons like in that terrible Matrix ending and the show cuts to…
That planet is revealed to be OUR Earth.
The colonists renamed it after their old planet, and the babies they had with the Cylons eventually became US.
Not only that, the space angels reveal that was all God’s plan for humanity.
https://giphy.com/gifs/season-2-battlestar-galactica-HtjstYnUb2B0c
It went from serious, adult storytelling to something you have to pay a LOT of money to Scientology to find out about.
True Blood
Talk about bad blood!
True Blood was an envelope-pushing show full of sex and violence — but also real romance.
The finale seemed to reject ALL of what the series began with.
Basically, the premise is simple. Vampires exist and thanks to a new synthetic blood they don’t have to kill humans to live anymore — meaning they can also “come out of the coffin” and reveal their existence to humans.
Sookie (Anna Paquin), a waitress in a small Southern town, meets and falls in love with a vampire named Bill (Stephen Moyer).
Think Twilight but with full frontal nudity and bloodier decapitations.
https://giphy.com/gifs/true-blood-sookie-stackhouse-bill-compton-q8hXPSSqtSdXy
Things get complicated by the couple’s baggage, by the Romeo and Juliet group politics, and by other love interests (the ridiculously hawt Alexander Skarsgård and Joe Mangianello to name a couple).
https://giphy.com/gifs/true-blood-season-4-fEpwL4YvzpW2k
If you think the sexual relationships get tricky, there’s also werewolves, fairies, and werepanthers.
But for a show that got so wild, so subversive, so bohemian — it really ended up quite conservative.
Oh, but don’t think that means it all became about how Sookie and Bill are married soulmates who live happily ever after for a thousand years, Twilight-style.
No, Bill gets infected by a disease called Hep V and decides to reject the cure and let himself die because he can’t give Sookie children. And that’s all that matters for her, because she’s a woman and that’s really the only thing her life should be about.
So he dies, and we see an epilogue where she gets to be pregnant — her true calling.
Yep.
The show that began as a wild, decadent, blood-drenched soap opera ended up being more red state than red blood.
So no big message, no emotional satisfaction, no… anything. And the guy she wound up getting pregnant by wasn’t even anyone we knew! They didn’t even show his face. We just got to see the back of his head. She doesn’t even end up with Eric!
Even Nicholas Sparks was snoring.
[Image via Syfy/Showtime/NBC/YouTube.]
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