• Katana314@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    I think there’s two kinds of shows, and this notion is true for one of them.

    Burn Notice had a crazy and weird set of dramatic final seasons. I never bothered with them. But previous seasons were excellent things with only a few minutes focused on the central plot of unraveling the Burn, the rest devoted to serials of helping some innocent person evade a gangster. Always enjoyable.

    But there’s other shows where all they are building is plot anticipation; just a growing feeling of “I wonder how this will end”. I’ve even become alerted to video games doing this with excessively long running series, or anything touched by the creator of Kingdom Hearts.

    Each solid piece of media should have an enjoyable ending to it - even if it’s also building towards future endings.

  • Gal@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    I mean, a show tells a story with a start, a middle, and an end. Each of these sections rely on the previous one to build a world that the watcher can engage with it. If one of these is bad, it reflects on the entire show.

    And out of these 3, I would argue that the ending is most important. The ending is what the entire story has been building to. All interactions and choices made have lead to this one point. And if all of those choices lead to an ending that is poorly made, it makes those choices that the characters made feel pointless. It leaves a bad taste of the possibilities of a better ending for the show.

  • AItoothbrush@lemmy.zip
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    5 days ago

    Its more like “this man stopped ww3 but then in the later part of his life he said he shouldnt have and wants all the insert ethnicity to die a horrible death”, still a legend for stopping the war but maybe that last part is a bit fucked.

  • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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    5 days ago

    enterprise had a really bad ending, because les moonves hated the franchise so he made it a wierd PEGASUS tng sideplot. nutrek was just terrible from start to finish, animated however was superior to the 3 series, but inferior to old trek.

    BSG as well, due to the writer strike, the showrunner forgot about the show and made it a messianic, jesus/god ending. the showrunner hated the sci-finess of the show, so he made them without any advanced tech of the old series.(allegedly the showrunner wanted a mormon themed show.)

    Blood of zeus was rushed because netflix cancelled the show.

    SPN is another terrible ending, but honestly the show was way past its prime and lifespan anyways.

  • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    The ending of a series can completely destroy all the meaning and character development of said series.

    Or let me put it differently:

    Essentially what this is saying is “it’s about the journey, not the destination”, but ultimately it’s a pretty flawed notion. It doesn’t matter how pretty the journey is if you’re going to someplace to get tortured or beaten.

    Also, as far as people go; you may cure cancer, but you can still suck. Steve Jobs sucked. He died a stupid death because he didn’t listen to anyone about curing an easily curable cancer. Something which also defined his career, as he never listened to anyone about computers and technology, meaning his stuff sucked all the way up to the 90s.

  • Jikiya@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    The last season of GoT invalidated all of the growth that was witnessed in all the previous seasons, ruining the story.

    How I Met Your Mother’s last season broke a spell that was over me, thinking that any of the characters were decent people. And allowed me to look at the whole thing without any of the nostalgia that carried me throughout the show. Was a young adult with questionable opinions that got better as I got older. The show seems to have never done so. And so I can say that the bad season did ruin the rest of the show, as I may have never given it a critcal eye if they had written it better.

    • morbidcactus@lemmy.ca
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      4 days ago

      I remember reading all the alleged leaks on freefolk for s8, couldn’t believe they’d be accurate, some of them just seemed too dumb to be real.

      By e3, so much of them had been correct (well, at least from the parts of that episode I could see), I just embraced it. Was a far more enjoyable experience for me, at least got me through the remainder of it. Cracks showed before s8 (once they ran out of book material I think is when it stated), but there was so much dumb shit that final season.

      We used to do rewatches, my partner hasn’t touched it since then and has said she probably never will, s8 just ruined it for her (she also leaned into the spoilers after e3)

  • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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    5 days ago

    Shows all sort of suck after about the 5th episode. They all start doing filler at some point.

    • III@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      You should go back and watch network television shows. There’s so much post-commercial recap, start of the episode recap, “gotta fill my 43 minutes” and “gotta make 20 episodes” filler that you will greatly appreciate modern streaming shows.

  • Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net
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    6 days ago

    Except that isn’t the same logic?

    A show’s ending is the culmination of its plotlines. A bad ending essentially invalidates all the plot development of the show.

    Similar logic applied to a human would be if someone spent all their life trying to cure cancer and told everyone about how they were about to release the cure to then, suddenly, abandon the project, destroy all research so no one else can use it, and fuck off to retire in Tahiti.

  • Jomega@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Meanwhile you have BNA:Brand New Animal, A show with an ending so bad it taints everything that leads up to it. I have never seen a show undermine its own message like that.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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    6 days ago

    Every single person of note in Canada, lauded for building something good in Canada, for all Canadians, is eventually found to have cursed out a left-handed albino otter one day on a Monday, and is thus Satan incarnate.

    Here we chastise people in glass houses from throwing stones; but we also don’t respect a redemption story or long-lasting contributions in case Buddy had a bad day once.

  • Zorque@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Well when the preceding story is contingent on it leading to a satisfying conclusion, that being 99% of the shows I’ve seen critiqued this way… I’d say it’s a valid conclusion.

  • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Like a punchline is to a joke, the ending is the most important part of a story. The conclusion gives the journey meaning. Blowing the ending can - and often does - retroactively ruin an entire narrative. This comic is akin to saying “a bad punchline doesn’t ruin a whole joke.” It does. In the same way, a bad or missing conclusion undermines the narrative as a whole.

  • BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip
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    6 days ago

    I think both “the show had 5 great seasons but a terrible ending” is as bad as “the show has 3 bad seasons but the last 2 are great!” are equally bad and reasons that I would not watch something.

    It’s not like there aren’t hundreds of other options.

    • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I guess I agree except The Good Place season 1 is a must watch. Later seasons fell off a bit and pushed my suspension of disbelief in places, but if you don’t care about the ultimate plot you can just watch S01 and call it a day.

    • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      Babylon 5 was a great show… with this caveat:

      1. Season 1 is slow and you won’t know how important it is until you watch 2, 3, 4.

      2. Season 4 is the single best season of sci fi television ever produced, but you have to have seen 2 and 3 to fully appreciate it.

      3. The reason Season 4 is amazing is because they didn’t know they were getting a Season 5 so they stuffed 2 seasons worth of television into 1.

      4. Then they got renewed for Season 5 by a different network and were like “Season 5… um… yeah! We totally have a plan for that… Yeah… totally ready to go.”