What is true is not always popular. Far too many times in a life telling people what they want to hear is a far better path to success than telling them what they need to hear. It's easier to lie to people and give them a fantasy than to lay out a narrative which is realistic, whether if one wants to debate fiscal policy or tell a story for an audience. This is why for most of Hollywood’s history, there has been a bias towards happy endings, with executives afraid audiences would dislike spending their money and hours of their lives on a story which ultimately led them to a sad place.
Starting in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, there was a turn to more realistic depictions of dramatic loss, which tracked with the national mood after controversies which divided the American public and punctured idealistic notions of modern American life. The switch to summer blockbusters and big budget action films in the 1980s is also a reflection of cultural movement. After enduring hostage crises, oil embargoes, and multiple incidents of perceived American impotence, the public embraced films where the wish fulfillment of “getting shit done” and killing the “bad guys” could be achieved and enjoyed. These kinds of shifts in mood can be seen in television as well. The current “golden age of television” has been defined by dramas centered around middle-aged, white male antiheroes frustrated by their circumstances. For these characters, the world isn’t working the way they think it should. The resentments represented by these characters are indicative of a lot of Trump voters’ frustrations about life, and the shows can be seen as depicting a power fantasy of how life can be made “great again” and things can be the way they “should” be, if only we’d do some things in the worst possible ways.
With both Avengers: Endgame and Game of Thrones nearing conclusions for long-running story arcs, I thought it might be interesting to look at what people really want from a story. Does audience want to be entertained? Do they want an ending which makes the journey of the story feel worth taking, even if it ends in tears? Do they want to be moved emotionally, no matter the result? And if the ending is bad, does it make everything before it, even the “good” parts, less than it was?
In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell pulled together similar themes & patterns in thousands of years of myth, legend, and history to find similar patterns across different cultures for what he called "Monomyth" or "The Hero's Journey." The basic format of Campbell’s monomyth entail a hero venturing forth from a place of safety into a new world of wonder; strange forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the new insight and changed irrevocably by the experience. Arguably almost every story with heroic elements has one of the 17 Stages derived from Campbell's work.
It’s in the “reward” section many stories have issues. And there have been long arguments among writers and angry nerds about whether an ending should matter in some stories. If a story is about “characters” then should the end result be all that important versus the arc of where they came? But there have been many stories which left bad tastes in the mouths of viewers and readers.
Below are some of the most notable endings in film, television, and literature, which are considered some of the best and worst ever. Please note: There will be spoilers for the works titled in bold.
- The re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica was considered one of the best series on television during the middle aughts. The 1970s science fiction drama of the last remnants of distant humans searching for a mythical home named “Earth” was re-purposed to reflect anxieties about terrorism and the “War on Terror.” However, the show’s ending divided the audience, since it relies on a lot of “God did it” to explain plot questions. For some fans of the series, the last episode of the first half of Season 4 should have been the real ending. This means no mutiny, no revelation of who the fifth Cylon is, what Starbuck is, what the "Head" characters are, the back-history of the Final Five and the humanoid Cylons, that the Earth they find is not "our" Earth, the defeat of the Cylons, the resolution of Cally's murder, and the finding of “our” Earth. That is a lot to toss out.
First of all, BSG is not just a space opera, it's a mystery, and the answer to all of the show's riddles is one of the chief attractions of the final episode. The fact that the answers tended to be either "God" or "because we said so" was, to be honest, a bit disappointing. And because Ronald D. Moore decided to build the last two seasons around "big mysteries" instead of character-driven storylines, you can't excuse his failure to pay off those mysteries by saying the show is really all about the characters.
The other problem with God turning out to have been such a huge force in the show's narrative arc ... is the Ghostbusters rule: "If someone asks you if you are a god, you say yes!" (And the corollary is that gods, at least in science fiction, usually turn out to be false.) [There is] a huge, exhaustive list of all the plot contrivances and happenstances that end up being laid at God's door, including everything Head Six arranged during the course of the series, and it's quite an impressive list. It's fine to have a Supreme Being set the story's events in motion and cause trouble for our heroes, but not quite so great for God(s) to swoop in and solve all our problems at the end of the story.
- Fans of How I Met Your Mother reacted with extreme dislike towards the show’s series finale. The framing device of every episode is a future version of Ted (Josh Radnor) is telling his children the story of how he met their mother, whose identity is a mystery to the audience. The final season occurs over the course of one weekend during Robin’s (Colbie Smulders) and Barney’s (Neil Patrick Harris) wedding. However, fans of the series expressed revulsion when the show decided to, in the end, kill off the children’s mother almost as soon as she is revealed, divorce Barney and Robin in the same episode they’re having a wedding reception, and then make the story future Ted is telling one in which he’s explaining why he ultimately ended up with a future iteration of Robin. Part of the reason for the train wreck of an ending were proposed plans to spin off the series into a How I Met Your Dad series.
- One of the big problems with television series with an expanding, huge mythology which gets more and more complicated over time is how it eventually becomes a tangled, complicated, conflicted mess. An example of that is The X-Files, whose central alien invasion puzzle became so twisted, the “answers” to the questions posed by the show never really satisfied the audience. And this was true in the series’ original run, as well as in the revival.
- The hype around Lost led to many, many theories about what all the puzzles and mysteries meant. The series is one of the big shows where people argue about whether “the island” was important, or just a vehicle to tell the backstories of the individuals on the island. The show’s finale involved a “stopper” having to be placed in a mystical hole, which may or may not have unleashed evil upon the world if it hadn’t been plugged. But the greater narrative is resolved by depicting all the characters in a sort of purgatory, about to move on together to something else. This did not go over well with everyone.
Turns out, that’s not what audiences wanted. The expansive, feel-good ending, in which our main characters all got together and passed on into the next life in one big happy family, wasn’t the salve its writers had hoped. Instead, they were bombarded with demands for explanations. How did the Sickness actually function? Are they seriously not going to explain “the Rules,” or why the numbers functioned as they did? Explain the polar bear! Everything the showrunners thought of as fun window-dressing and mystical curlicues to amplify their story about human redemption and second chances turned out to be what other folks considered the meat and potatoes of the series. Never mind that these things weren’t really that important in the grand scheme of the narrative; you’ll never make a very loud percentage of people satisfied when your show is based on little mysteries you have no real intention of explaining. Lost doesn’t deserve a lot of the vitriol it received for its finale—it’s still a very good show—but it admittedly shot itself in the foot by assembling a staggering number of riddles it couldn’t hope to ever pay off.
- Considered one of the best film endings ever, Planet of the Apes (1968) was co-written by Rod Serling and has a signature twist which is nothing but memorable. Adapted from Pierre Boulle’s novel La Planète des singes, ideas about war, race, free speech, government oppression, and alienation are expounded on in what is really a two-hour Twilight Zone episode, with one of the most iconic endings in film history.
- If the 1968 film’s ending is beloved, Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes (2001) ending is reviled for being nonsensical. Closer in tone and spirit to Boulle’s ending, there is nothing in the film to even start to figure out how it is supposed to make sense.
- David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is a door-stopper of a novel with about 100 pages of end notes. Dealing with issues like the nature of self, family, emptiness, absence, addiction, recovery, the minutia of tennis, and a movie so entertaining it’s being sought as a weapon by Canadian terrorists and the United States government. But the book’s ending has been known to make readers want to hurl it across the room at the wall, and others who like how it resonates with everything else in the story.
Wallace: Plot wise, the book doesn’t come to a resolution. But if the readers perceive it as me giving them the finger, then I haven’t done my job. On the surface it might seem like it just stops. But it’s supposed to stop and then kind of hum and project. Musically and emotionally, it’s a pitch that seemed right.
- The ending for Ian McEwan’s Atonement pulls the rug out from under the reader by making everything the reader has consumed so far a fantasy. The narrator gives us a version of things, and then takes that version away when she reveals having imagined the series of events she’s just put forth as true. Whether it feels the reader leaving duped, or an interesting starting off point to reconsider the entire novel, is a matter of opinion.
- Se7en has a wicked story, that is both stylish & horrifying. The film revolves around two detectives, Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and Mills (Brad Pitt). Somerset is retiring & burned out, while Mills is a rookie who believes he can change the world. Both men are hunting a serial killer who murders his victims according to the “Seven Deadly Sins.” One of the central themes of the movie is apathy. As it's said in the film, whether raising child, having a loving relationship, or building a great society, it requires hard work and effort. And when the ending comes, it creates a truly dark experience.
- The Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men is regarded as one of their best films and exemplifies many of the themes in their other works. Greed, arrogance and a desire for order and karmic justice in the face of what seems to be a cold, uncaring world are brought out of the story to a bleak and chilling effect. The film and book both deconstruct the "hero" archetype, showing the protagonists as either prideful and stupid to the point of not realizing the consequences to other innocent people, or impotent and unable to keep up with a changing world. Many in the audience seemed disappointed there is no confrontation between Tommy Lee Jones’s Sheriff and Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh. But the non-climax fits the themes of the film and novel.
- Set at fictional St. Eligius, a teaching hospital in Boston's South End that practically no one wants to visit under any circumstances, St. Elsewhere is remembered for more than a few things. Usually in old TV series, there was very little continuity. If something happened in an episode, it would more than likely never be mentioned again and added no weight to the characters' development. St. Elsewhere had overlapping story lines spread across multiple episodes. And a lot of those story arcs dealt with topics that weren't usually covered in TV series at the time (e.g. breast cancer, AIDS and drug addiction). It's also one of the first medical series to show the practice of medicine at a hospital as not a pristine profession done under ideal circumstances, but as a tough job with long hours and shitty resources, where the patients may not like or thank you. The series had a huge cast of characters featuring many notable actors, including William Daniels, David Morse, Alfre Woodard, Bruce Greenwood, Ed Begley, Jr., Mark Harmon, Denzel Washington and Helen Hunt. However, the series is infamous for its series finale, which revealed the entire show to have occurred within the mind of an autistic child (Chad Allen's Tommy Westphall) while he stared at a snow globe.
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One of the most iconic film roles of 80s pop culture is Michael J. Fox's Marty McFly in Back to the Future. However, Fox wasn't the original actor cast in the role. Early in production, the powers that be wanted Michael J. Fox, but couldn't get him for the role because of scheduling conflicts with the TV series Family Ties. So the actor originally cast as Marty McFly was Eric Stoltz. Five weeks into shooting the movie, director Robert Zemeckis decided Stoltz was wrong for the role, and recast. A deal was worked out with Family Ties to open up Fox's schedule, and the movie became what we know as Back to the Future. The “To Be Continued ...” ending for the film everyone sees today is not what was originally shown in theaters. It was added after the fact for the VHS release and to set up the eventual sequel, and in the commentary track for the film Back to the Future creators Bob Gale and Zemeckis state that if they planned everything for a sequel they would have never put the Jennifer character in the DeLorean for the ride into the future, since it complicated things when devising the follow-up’s story. However, the entire final act of the original film with the clock tower sequence, reunion with the family and Jennifer (Claudia Wells), and “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads!” ending is spectacular, to the point then President Reagan actually quoted it for his “State of the Union” speech (after he himself was referenced in the film).
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Before the flame out of Roseanne’s recent return to television, the final season of Roseanne’s original run drastically changed the dynamic of the series, and was seen as one of the worst endings for a show which was once seen as one of the best sitcoms ever made. Where the original series found a black humor in the trials and travails of a middle-class family, the final season found the Conner family having won the lottery, and adjusting to being wealthy. To put it succinctly: this didn’t work. The final episode attempted to correct things by stating none of the events of the final season actually happened. It was all a fantasy created by Roseanne after Dan (John Goodman) had died. But that seemed to make things worse for Roseanne’s legacy. One of the explanations for why Barr decided to go in this direction for the series original finale was the British series Absolutely Fabulous. According to some reports, Barr loved the show and wanted to do an American remake of Ab Fab but was rebuffed by executives at ABC. Instead, she incorporated elements of Absolutely Fabulous into Roseanne and even had Ab Fab stars Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley appear in an episode.
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One of the long standing debates about the John Hughes scripted Pretty in Pink is whether Andie (Molly Ringwald) should have ended up with Duckie (Jon Cryer) instead of Blane (Andrew McCarthy). The film was originally scripted for an ending with the Duckie-Andie relationship reaching full romantic bloom, but was changed when test audiences disliked it. Instead, Andie goes with “Mr. Popular” Blaine, and Duckie is still in the friendzone.
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1989's Field of Dreams has been known to make people misty. The quintessential emotional nature of sports is that it ties into childhood memories and that time in one's life where everything was possible. Things seemed simpler, the world wasn't as complex, and there was an innocence about life. Field of Dreams is not really about baseball, and technically really isn't about sports. It's about regrets and opportunities, and hoping we can have another chance to have a catch with Dad some day.
- Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend has been adapted for film three times, and none of the screen versions quite can get the tone of the story fully. At its core, it’s a story about loneliness and alienation, which is not exactly easy to make into a two-hour action film. The 2007 Will Smith adaptation originally had an ending closer to Matheson’s ideas, where Smith’s Robert Neville would discover the infected zombie-vampires were in fact intelligent and had developed something of a community and relationships. However, this was changed to have an ending with a grenade and things going “BOOM!”
- The “lumberjack ending” for Dexter became synonymous for a series not understanding what the audiences wanted, or what made sense for the character’s narrative. Critics almost universally called it a ridiculous debacle.
- Described by series’ creators and executive producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga as a “love letter to the fans,” the series finale for Star Trek: Enterprise is disliked for ostensibly not being a real episode of the show. The framing device for the story involves The Next Generation’s Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) using the holodeck—Trek’s virtual reality simulator—to view a historical event during the 22nd century in order to work through a problem from an old episode of TNG. Many fans of Enterprise feel the true final episode is the next to last of the series, and even argue the events depicted in the finale may or may not be canon given the holodeck fantasy element in the story.
- Breaking Bad came full circle at the end with its story. Walt can only move forward after realizing his faults. He's only able to settle his debts to some degree, and find some form of peace when he recognizes how tragic his choices were. Walt can only achieve his original goal for his family after realizing his mistakes.
- On the commentary track for David Fincher’s Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk states he likes the ending for the film iteration better than the one present in the book. Fincher has the unnamed narrator complete his plan through alter-ego Tyler Durden, with the credit record being destroyed as he and Marla watch the buildings fall. In the book though, the narrator is in a mental institution, with the members of “Project Mayhem” surrounding him and possibly moving to help his escape.
- Considered one of the best reveals in recent film history, the twist of who is Keyser Soze made The Usual Suspects and is arguably why it is so memorable.
Director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie point out in their commentary track, they show you the truth, and then spend almost two hours trying to convince you that you saw something else, and then, in less than five minutes, complete re-frame the entire story yet again. It’s a film that delightfully messes with the audience by not only presenting an unreliable narrator, but also by showing the dangers in demanding to be fed a certain story.
- The ultimate dynamic between the characters in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown is the story’s big twist, as Faye Dunaway’s character Evelyn is slapped alternating between the words “sister” and “daughter.”
In Robert Towne's original script, Evelyn Mulray (Faye Dunaway) and her illegitimate daughter get away. Evil Noah Cross (John Huston) is killed. But Polanski would have none of it. According to Towne, Polanksi wanted a tragic ending, in which Evelyn is killed. Guess who got his way? Polanski said to a TV interviewer, if Chinatown had ended happily, "We wouldn't be sitting around talking about it today."
- Ridley Scott has put out many multiple versions of Blade Runner, which shifts the ending to some degree, and has varying levels of acceptance by fans of the film. Is Deckard a Replicant? According to Ridley Scott, yes. According to Harrison Ford, no.
- There was always the question of how far people would go in rooting for Michael Chiklis's crooked cop, Vic Mackey, in The Shield. Following Mackey and his Strike Team's exploits in the Farmington Division of Los Angeles, which was based on the real-life LAPD Rampart Division CRASH unit, the series centers on the decisions undertaken by the lead characters and how those actions radiate out in ways they could have never imagined. In interviews, Chiklis has talked about how he thinks fans of the show stayed with his character because they believed that Vic had some sort of utilitarian logic to his actions, and in some ways go along just like the other members of the Strike Team. In fact, Forest Whitaker, who joined the show in the fifth season, didn't understand why his character, Internal Affairs Detective Lt. Jon Kavanaugh, was hated by the fans and regarded as a villain for going after Mackey. The Shield’s ending is one of the best for a TV series ever. It is both shocking, satisfying, and in some ways a fate worse than death for many of the characters.
- The end of Newhart is very meta and memorable for uniting both Newhart and the 1970s The Bob Newhart Show through a dream. Dick Loudon, and all of the characters in the eight seasons of the series, never really existed. They were nothing but a sleep fantasy within the more realistic world of Newhart’s earlier comedy series.
- The finality at the heart of Six Feet Under comes from it embracing the central theme at the heart of the series: change. So much of life is spent on searching for significance and meaning in things which are destined to fade away. One of the quirky, but very true, notions within the show is the fact death does not obey the timetable we set for it, or come in the way we envision. A wise person once said the bitterest tears shed over graves come from words left unsaid and deeds left undone. Death is finality. It defines and finishes a story. But life is constantly evolving, moving, changing for better or worse. The finale of Six Feet Under goes through the course of all the character’s lives into the future, while Claire (Lauren Ambrose) embarks on her own path in the present.
I fear change. I hate change. Everybody dies—that I can deal with. We’re all dying right now. What really irks me, in a profoundly existential way, is the unpredictable instability, inherent to life and wickedly unfair, of everything you’ll ever know before it comes. Death, at least, has a swift finality to it. Living while everything is always changing around you is much more difficult, far more cruel. Like Claire, we can try to affix some permanence to that which is always receding. But the impossibility of holding onto a moment in time becomes a torment. Change is the hardest thing about living. Next to that, death is nothing.
In that way, art provides some comfort. For one thing, it’s something that reassuringly doesn’t change; no matter how many times I watch Six Feet Under, Claire will still try to take that photo, and she’ll still date all her idiot boyfriends. I’ll be 90 years old and breathing through a ventilator in my smog bunker, and I’ll still be grousing at her through my tubes not to fuck Russell. But also, watching the Fishers’ lives play out in microcosm always gives me solace. It reminds me that everything is always changing for everyone. It tells me that change makes for a good story. It reassures me that change is the only story. Without change, nothing happens.
- One of the most hyped finales as well as being one of the most disappointing, the final episode of Seinfeld is something where the audience apparently tuned in wanting to find something of significance in a show which was about “nothing.” Over the years, series co-creator Larry David, who returned to the show to pen the finale, has said he has “no regrets” over the direction he decided to go with things. However, the 2009 Seinfeld reunion for HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm was interpreted by many as a do over by many critics.
- The finale of The Sopranos was very controversial when it first aired, with some fans of the show feeling it offered no resolution, while others argued it was artistic and left enough clues for the audience to fill in the gaps. Did Tony die? Was it meant to offer no resolution?