SPOILER ALERT: This post discusses series finales of many television series. If you are still catching up on any of the following series, proceed with caution: How I Met Your Mother, Dawson’s Creek, Charmed, Boy Meets World, The Sopranos, Dexter, Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dollhouse, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, Being Human, Psych, and Breaking Bad.
In the past two weeks, I have watched four series finales, each one very different, with its own faults and triumphs. I’ve also been watching fan reactions to each of those finales, curious to see who liked it, who didn’t, and what their arguments for each position were. My conclusion is this: no matter how good or bad a series finale is, you can never make every fan happy.
It doesn’t matter if a series has been on the air for only a year or two, or for nine long seasons: fans become attached to the characters and the plots. Over time — possibly without even realizing it — every fan will start to imagine how they would like to see the series end, even for shows that still have no end in sight. A lot is riding on that final episode. When the finale doesn’t live up to those expectations, fans are left feeling frustrated and betrayed, as was evidenced by the controversy over the How I Met Your Mother finale last week.
I was in the camp that, for the most part, enjoyed the HIMYM finale. I always had a feeling Robin and Ted would end up together, so the last few minutes were no big surprise. My major complaint with the episode was entirely about the pacing. Everything seemed to happen much too quickly; there was so little time to adjust to events in one time period before we moved on to a year or so later, leaving viewers with temporal whiplash.
Unfortunately, the writers of HIMYM aren’t the first to make this mistake when plotting out a series finale. Many shows seem to think viewers need to see the characters’ futures in order to be content with the ending, because I guess we’re not capable of imagining a happy future for the characters ourselves. Dawson’s Creek jumped ahead five years for its finale, Charmed fast-forwarded through time as well to show everyone how the sisters lived happily ever after. Many shows use this technique, but few do it well.
Those that don’t jump into the future for a finale often decide to go in the opposite direction, incorporating clips from previous episodes. This often feels like laziness to me. I would much rather see a well-written episode that makes clever use of callbacks and references to earlier episodes than just be shown older clips. This approach also has the tendency to feel overly sentimental, like the producers are clinging to the past.
The Boy Meets World finale is one example that comes to mind. While I remember loving it at the time, looking back now it seems a little heavy-handed with sentimentality as everyone is saying goodbye and clips play to show various scenes from the life of the series. I’m sure I’d still enjoy it if I watched the finale again, but it wasn’t perfect. (But I am pretty sure the compilation of Eric’s “Feeney!” calls probably still holds up.)
Some series finales are hated for perceived deficiencies in their plots. I’ve never seen an episode of The Sopranos; however, I remember all the criticism of that finale after it aired. I also have yet to watch the final two seasons of Dexter, but I’ve heard from more than one source that it may be one of the worst series finales ever.
One of the more controversial finales in recent history was the last episode of Lost, which left many fans feeling outraged by a lack of resolution. On the other hand, some fans were content with how the characters’ arcs were completed. From what I can tell, the Lost finale divided fans into two groups: the fans who watched the show for the mystery of the island, and the fans who watched because they were invested in the characters themselves.
Guess which group actually enjoyed the finale? I started out fascinated by the mystery of the island, the numbers, and the polar bears but eventually became more interested in the lives and interactions of the characters. Therefore, I appreciated the ending of the series because each character’s journey felt complete by the end.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one series finale that I felt did a good job of wrapping the season arc as well as the entire series, while still opening doors to the future without telling fans exactly how the characters’ lives ended up. In my opinion, the entire seventh season improved on the lackluster sixth and drove the action toward the endgame right from the start. All throughout the final season, there were parallels to earlier seasons without smacking viewers over the head with the references via clip shows. By the end, it felt like the series had come full circle.
Buffy‘s spin-off, Angel, did not have as much resolution. After hearing the series had been canceled, creator Joss Whedon chose to stick with the initial season finale plan, in which Angel and the gang go out with a bang. While this was a good episode — and would have made an incredible season finale — it made for a frustrating series finale; we are merely left with the image of the surviving members of Angel’s team preparing to face off against the armies of Wolfram & Hart, which included a dragon. Only the character of Wesley got a proper sendoff.
While on the topic of Whedon shows, I feel it necessary to point out that Dollhouse is one of the few series to successfully pull off the jump-forward finale. The last episode of each of its two seasons was essentially two parts of a whole. The scheduled first season finale, “Epitaph,” never aired on Fox, though it was included in the season one DVD set. “Epitaph Two: Return” aired a year later as the series finale, and these two episodes are arguably the best of the entire series.
Fortunately, of the four series finales I’ve watched in the last two weeks, HIMYM was the only one I could find serious fault with. Once Upon A Time in Wonderland only lasted 13 episodes and was not nearly as well done as its progenitor, Once Upon A Time, but it wrapped up its story lines nicely.
Being Human felt slightly off in the pacing, but the ending was bittersweet and almost perfect for each of the characters. In fact, that ending was almost exactly how I had hoped the original United Kingdom version would end when I first heard Aidan Turner was leaving the series, so it was nice to see at least one set of Being Human characters get a (mostly) happy ending.
In an earlier column, I wrote about my favorite show Psych coming to an end. That finale aired two weeks ago yesterday, and I must say it was probably one of the best series finales I’ve seen in a while. I have yet to see any of Breaking Bad, so I can’t weigh in there, though I know a lot of fans were very happy with how that ended as well.
In an interview, Psych creator Steve Franks told E! Online, “I didn’t realize just how challenging writing a finale was going to be … I started watching other shows’ finales to see how they did it, and I realized I didn’t really like any of them. They felt different from the show I remember … and I wanted it to feel like a regular episode. I wanted it to feel like these characters were going to live on, they were going to be having adventures and doing things, and we were just not seeing them for the time being.”
I think this is why Psych may have succeeded where previous finales have failed. The writers didn’t set up some huge, climactic ending. To be sure, there were a lot of changes in the finale — for example, Shawn moving to San Francisco to join Juliet — but it didn’t feel like an ending. If anything, it felt like a new beginning. Like Franks said, it was like they were just moving on to a different chapter of the story that we can’t see anymore.
Plus, there were some really great callbacks, and cameos from three actors whom the show has referenced repeatedly in the eight years it was on the air. I honestly think the only thing that could have possibly made that finale better is if we had actually gotten a cameo from Tony Shalhoub’s Adrian Monk, instead of just a quick reference.
However, even though I consider the Psych finale nearly perfect, I’m sure there are plenty of fans out there who were somehow disappointed because something they wanted to see was missing, or a certain character didn’t get enough screen time. There’s simply no way to make every fan happy.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how we have to take films adapted from books on their own merits and not compare them to their source material. I could say something similar here. In judging series finales, it’s important that we don’t put too much of our expectations into our judgment. A lot of writers do listen to fans online and will sometimes adapt story arcs based on reactions, but when it comes down to it, we are not the ones writing the series. We did not create the characters, we do not sit in the writers’ room breaking stories, and we have no say in what the characters do or how long their marriages last. All we get to do is sit back and enjoy the journey with them.
Of course, there will be times when we’re not happy with the direction the show takes, or when we feel like the writers have betrayed the fans. But as with many things, these disappointments will only help us to appreciate it more when a show gets it right.