Lost’s finale aired this morning, with many of us here in the UK braving the early start on a Monday to tune in. I wasn’t very impressed with what happened – the Smoke Monster was taken out far too early and I didn’t think everything should have ended on quite such a happy note at the end, but maybe that’s just me.
At any rate, here are five shows that finished poorly, and earned the ire of fans as a result, or split them down the middle.
Quantum Leap
This is always on any list like this, so let’s get it out of the way now. After so many adventures through time, a small epitaph telling us that Sam Beckett never made it home is all we get? Thanks a lot, guys. This surely has to rank as one of the biggest screw-ups in the history of ending television, except for Dallas, maybe.
Battlestar Galactica
This divided fans clean in half, it seems. Some thought it was a wonderful conclusion; others thought it was hackneyed and overly saccharine at the end. Not to mention the unfathomable logic of Lee Adama. I’m in the latter camp – a true disappointment for an otherwise amazing series.
Supernatural
More specifically, the last ten minutes or so. How incredible would it have been to have just pulled the camera out as Dean knelt where Sam had been pulled into Hell, battered and broken while the bodies of Cas and Bobby lay beside him? A bit morbid, perhaps, but better than making Chuck God and having Samifer back at the end. It was a perfect episode up until then.
Star Trek: Voyager
Again, we spent seven long years watching Voyager try time and time again to get home, and we didn’t even get to see them actually get home in the end? What a jip. Of course, the extended universe went some way toward mollifying us in the form of books, comics, Star Trek Elite Force II and a small scene in Nemesis, but it’s not the same.
Stargate SG-1
What show runs for ten years and doesn’t bother at least trying to wrap the story up in the finale? ‘Unending’ was a good episode, but a poor finisher for the series as a whole. Yes, they were saving it for The Ark Of Truth, but really, that was little more than a filler episode, and not the finale the show deserved.
