What episode/season/movie do you consider as the ending in an otherwise long running franchise, and Why?
What episode/season/movie do you consider as the ending in an otherwise long running franchise, and Why?
60 comments
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I feel compelled to say Scrubs s08e19, which is weird because they only ever made eight seasons of Scrubs.
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Last episode of The Simpsons Season 9
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new season has been goood
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In my own opinion, it's Disney good.
Early Simpsons was slightly edgy, not in a shock factor way, but in a way where it could explore mature themes without any tonal whiplash, while still being entertaining for kids and adults.
As Fox deteriorated, so did the Simpsons, presumably from bad producing and low funding. Pretty much as soon as the Disney acquisition happened, quality began to climb again, and people have been saying it's good for a few years.
But I can't shake the feeling that the real feeling isn't that it's good, just that it isn't bad anymore. It's as inoffensive and bland as many Disney IPs, but doesn't carry the true badness of Fox. I don't trust that Disney is able to give it the ingredients for it to be great again.
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Toy Story 3.
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Well with an ending like this they didn’t really leave anywhere to go.
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I watched it with a guy on my floor in college. First time for both of us. He was told before that that was the ending so we were both tearing up and he thought it was about to roll credits.
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The Office when Michael moved away. It was never the same after that.
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The "new" episodes they released afterwards don't count. I acknowledge that they exist but I do not grant them the title of canon.
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The last harry potter movie (deathly hollows pt 2) marks the end of the franchise as far as I am concerned. 8 great movies and 7 great books. I wish there was more but I fail to see how it can be extended. Both fantastic beasts and crushed child do more harm than good to the original franchise
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Both fantastic beasts and crushed child do more harm than good to the original franchise
I really liked the first FB movie, it captured the whimsical charm of the intial 3 HP movies and books quite authentically. I could go on and on on how the next film changes the tone, breaks established canon, and generally feels like a cobbled together mess of story beats hastily Scribbled on sticky notes(didn't anyone proofread the thing?) So for me it ends with newt Scamander helping to apprehend grindelwald and the rest of the story is implied in the main HP books.
Cursed child doesn't exist, what are you talking about?
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The Office when Michael left.
Terminator 3 is the last of that series in my eyes. The others - although not too shabby (excluding Salvation of course) - I regard as fan fiction.
Arrested Development - that last season just did not agree with me.
Community - things dropped off quickly when Troy left.
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Episode IV. That's my hill.
NeuTrek. TNG squeeks by, but any Trek with a dysfunctional, corrupt Federation with a Black Ops team is out.
The West Wing, season 4. After Sorkin left it went to shit.
Ren & Stimpy was hit or miss, but really after the first season it fell off a cliff pretty fast.
Nobody's ever done an adaptation of Asimov's The Foundation Trilogy, which is too bad.
TLoTR had 3 movies; everything after has been just a shitty job of milking the success of the first 3. Which is too bad, because Cumberbuzzle was brilliant as Smaug.
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So episodes 1 through 4 then stop watching?
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You mean R&S? Yeah. There were maybe 4 funny ones, and the rest were crap. Space Madness, however, is IMHO one of the greatest pieces of comedy ever produced. Maybe it was just one-hit-wonder syndrome.
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Nobody’s ever done an adaptation of Asimov’s The Foundation Trilogy, which is too bad.
Are you saying that Apple's adaptation isn't worthy of acknowledgment or are you not aware they've been producing it?
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The what? Apple's never done an adaptation. Nope. Not Apple, that's for sure.
Honestly, though: brilliant graphics, design, and acting. The writers should all be taken out and shot, though.
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Strange New Worlds is great Trek if you haven't seen it.
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I have. It's not bad, despite my several grievances with it. Mainly the Gorn redesign as cheap knock-offs of Xenomorphs, that Kirk could never have hand-to-handed. And I really, really dislike the whole Spock/nurse Chapel story line. T'Pring was grossly mistreated, and it makes Spock's surprise at her behavior in Amok Time completely out of character: he knew what he did. I'm also not fond of jumping directly to musical episodes in so early; shows usually only do that when they start running out of other ideas. I had to fast-forward through most of that one. I was really unhappy about killing off... who they killed off. I would have preferred almost any other character be sacrificed if they really felt it necessary.
But all that said, there is a lot of good, and I'll keep watching it. I think my biggest gripe is that they picked SNW to continue, over Lower Decks‽ That was bogus; LD was a far better show.
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Season 5 of Supernatural was the logical endpoint
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Rocky ended at Rocky. Even Rocky 2, the second best movie if you're judging its qualities with the same ruler Rocky's measured, feels off compared to the original. Rocky is a love story/character study with a little bit of boxing at the beginning and at the end, whilst the rest are boxing movies primarily/solely.
Also, while everyone knows Terminator ended with T2, did you know Kung Fu Panda also ended with KFP2? 🙏
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Rocky is so all over the place. You make great points and I don’t disagree. Another metric is how watchable they are and by that standard you could argue it makes it up to and including Rocky IV. I don’t even know what to do with the newer ones.
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The Matrix
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Vikings ended like an episode or two after Ragnar died. It didn't need to drag on with everyone's stories so Ling after amd it all just went nowhere. It needed to end after the sons got their vengeance and celebrated. Everything after that was stupid.
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- die hard ended at 3
- highlander ended at 4 (and there is no 2)
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Walking Dead S07E01. I think that episode could have been a perfect ending. They dragged it a lot after.
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I know your question is worded for movies and shows but I have one example from the world of video games that still makes me sad. Final Fantasy died shortly after X, maybe X-2. XII if you really want to stretch things. After that, they were too focused on "modernizing" gameplay. I just want something with a colorful world, quirky characters and turn-based combat that's more about finding the right strategy for a boss than reflexes.
I guess XIV is nice in its own way but as an MMORPG I see it more as a spin-off than as a part of the main series. The VII remakes tickle some nostalgia neurons but would have been better without their real-time combat. XIII, XV and XVI were just meh. If you really want to make me happy, make a faithful remake of VIII with modern graphics, rebalanced but otherwise faithful gameplay and a few more scenes in the last act that answer a few questions that the community has been trying to answer for 25 years.
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If we're including video games im gonna say mass effect. I didn't give 2 enough of a chance because at the end of ME1 the entire known universe bands together to defeat a single big-bad ship and it's a fully annihilating battle where the good guys barely scrape by. Then thousands of the big-bads turn up at once and the credits roll. Its a devastating ending that really drives home the central themes.
Then in ME2 your guy(orgirl) just wakes up in hospital after the battle? No chance. I just couldn't get past it long enough to give it a chance. I still have them and I know I should but...
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Interesting take and totally understandable though that's not quite what happens in the plot:
- The battle for the Citadel at the end of ME1 wasn't the entire known universe banding together by far. What we see is a couple of ships that happened to be nearby because at that point, most of the universe still doesn't believe the reapers even exist.
- After the battle, the reapers don't show up at the Citadel but at the edge of the galaxy. They are still months to years away from eradicating the Alliance. Yes, they have a whole lot of firepower but taking down thousands of planets full of enemies who now know what's coming takes a lot longer than an attack on a single space station where nobody was prepared for an attack.
- At the beginning of ME2, Shepard doesn't just wake up at the hospital after the battle you saw in ME1. During a later battle/patrol (?), the Normandy gets ambushed and completely destroyed. Shepard dies and their corpse drifts through space. Cerberus (who were only briefly mentioned in a side quest in ME1) manage to retieve the body and use an experimental technology to bring them back to life (it's implied that they basically built a Shepard-shaped cyborg who has access to at least some of ME1 Shepard's memories). The goal is to have a well-respected figurehead who can assemble a squad to take down some critical Reaper infrastructure.
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Do games count? I would say Halo 3.
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Season 4 of DEXTER, season 5 maybe to see the aftermath. The last 3 seasons were unnecessary.
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There's a lot of horror franchises that shouldn't've been more than a single film. Off the top of my head: Hellraiser, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Blair Witch, and Black Christmas.
Only Fools and Horses shoulda ended on the episode where they finally strike it rich. None of the episodes after that justify bringing it back.
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Season one of Twin Peaks. Never should have been a season two. I'm ambivalent about Fire Walk With Me. Season 3 was a nice touch.
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Endgame is the end of the MCU. After endgame disney pished out too much MCU shit and ruined it. They should’ve stopped at endgame and not try to make many shows that also factor into the overall MCU. Some may argue that this problem was already too much before endgame premiered. That is a valid argument.
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Episode 25 of Death Note would have been a dark, but logical place to end the series. After that point the entire dynamic of the show changes. There are some good and interesting moments, but it doesn't really feel like the same show.
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The Gunslinger by Steven King.
He wrote some dark and towerry other books, but they're unrelated fan fiction
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Season 1 of Westworld. It’s okay to have an ambiguous ending, you can leave it to viewer’s imagination. That show went downhill with every season because it was trying too hard to be smart.
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I only wish I ever learned who's the mother and how he met her...
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S08 of Two and a Half Men, before Charlie died. It was okay after but just not the same anymore.
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S10 E12 (The Doctor Falls) is the end of (Modern) Doctor Who. Such a perfect episode epitomising the character, and closing an arc for one of the longest villains. He even 'dies' at the end.
Everything since then has been badly written and purposefully disrespectful to the cannon and the audience, and has wasted so many fantastic actors.
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The last episode of Supernatural should not exist.
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Aliens ended the franchise. Slightly different answer, nothing occurred between the release of Predator and Prey.
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Psycho-Pass ended at Season 1. There are no further seasons or movies.
Misfits ended at S2E6.
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If we are going into books, the Hyperion series should have ended at 2. The first 2 books are so good! Books 3 and 4 are terrible.
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Season 1 of Once Upon A Time. Its OK afterwards, but an awful lot of what made the show good was wondering whether it was real or if the kids a mad fantasist. Afterwards it's watchable but it's different.
60 comments
Andor is probably the last Stars War that I'll watch unless they come out with another one that learns from it. DS9 took Star Treks seriously and the result was a show that has relevant ideas 30 years later. Until Andor, none of the Stars Wars I've seen have taken the universe seriously. They've expanded on it in unnecessary detail and obsessed over that detail, but intellectually they've all felt flat and liberal. Andor spends three episodes showing the Death Star through Foucault and you get one brief shot of it after a full film-length of watching how a gear is made using slave labour. That dialectical materialist analysis of the empire is so much more interesting than any battle or Jedi scene across the whole canon.
I really liked the Acolyte. Not necessarily for its acting but it leaned into the idea that dark side and light side are not so different and the Jedi can cause a lot of suffering by sticking their noses where they don't belong. Also, there are force users that don't fit neatly into those two categories and just want to do their own thing.
Sadly, we won't see a second season, because some "fans" on the internet got mad that women, people of color and - very shocking - queer people exist in the Star Wars universe.
It sucks that these people exist, for many reasons. One of these reasons (surely not the worst one, but the one I want to focus on) is that it muddies all criticism of a project. Your comment implied that this was the sole, or main, reason that The Acolyte was canceled, so I want to jump in here to say:
Having more women, people of color, and queer characters was the only refreshing thing about The Acolyte, and I wish more Star Wars projects took notice. Other than that though, the show is an utter disaster. It was incompetently written and directed, its story and characters make no sense, and the effects can be jarring.
Characters either have no defined motivations, or their motivations flip flop at the drop of a hat. Scenes dealing with the Jedi order and the republic fuck with established lore and do lasting damage to the Jedi order (not in the sense that they are shown as morally gray, but in that they are utterly incompetent and seemingly don't remember the appearance of the Sith during living memory, for example).
Speaking of which, yes, the show tries to portray Jedi/Sith as a gray area, but
a) that has been done to death at this point, seriously, every other SW project tries to do a "ooooh but maybe Jedi not completely good!", and b) The Acolyte is probably the most incompetent version of that I have seen (so far!).
I hope I have demonstrated that this show can be critiqued bar any bigotry, and I think it should be acknowledged that that, together with the giant sum of money it ate, are the reasons it got canceled - I am sure Disney also does not like the bigotry, but sadly, they get that with every project, even those that do not get canceled....
In any case, there is no comparison to Andor to be made, SMH.