No Right Answer: Most Depressing Series Ending
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I can think of three Blackadder goes forth, Berserk which was just wow and Cowboy Bebop which I just finished watching
This part in FMA?NameIsRobertPaulson said:
Chimera?
Luck of the Fryish was a much sadder episode than Jurassic Bark. "Named for his Uncle, to carry on his spirit." How could that not make you bawl?
I think I'm going to have to go with Quantum Leap's final episode. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, go watch it. It's a rather interesting series, and you can actually watch most of the series out of order.
The fact that the ending actually clashed with the entire theme of the series that was being built up over the course five seasons makes the ending come down on you like a ton of bricks.
?Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home.?
The fact that the ending actually clashed with the entire theme of the series that was being built up over the course five seasons makes the ending come down on you like a ton of bricks.
While not the actual ending to the series, Serenity was essentially the end. Not the actual ending mind you, but three scenes before it:
This was honestly the most depressing ending of any series for me, not just Television.
Every character throughout the series has added some particular flavor to the show. Wash was the heart of the group. The charming, silly, good guy that kept them all in good spirits. He made people laugh. He made you laugh. Then, right after his big shining moment in Serenity, BAM. Dead. Right there. No time to process how or why, only the cold truth that he's gone. We cried, yelled in anger, and felt our own hearts sink in one instant. No amount of the good that came after lifted that emotional weight. It was the signifying moment that the series was over, as it's heart was now gone.
This was honestly the most depressing ending of any series for me, not just Television.
Just hope they don't make a two part ending out of "Big Apple Massacre" and "Cupcakes" as the finale when the series ends.DVS BSTrD said:Well after that, I'm sure glad My Little Pony is coming back this Friday
Infamous shock-fan fics, if you don't know them you might look them up, just understand what your getting into. The title of the former pretty much gets to the point, "Cupcakes" is more disturbing and well... let's just say the story does involve cupcakes.
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I'll also say that I think shows that really have no ending or end with a cliffhanger before not being continued are worse than ones that have some kind of finality. I'll also say that the ending of a series should make sense within the context of the show, and should ultimatly be positive.
To be honest with you at least with "Dinosaurs" and "Roseanne" you know what happened. If you take something like say "The Sopranos" which was a non-ending, it's infinatly more annoying, and compounded by fanboys who run around saying you don't get it, and how much of a genius the guy doing the show was for ending it that way.
I'm going with something completely different: Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes (both UK versions).
Life On Mars:
Ashes To Ashes
Both are really insane endings, but they're depressing just for the insanity of it all.
Also, House MD:
Life On Mars:
Okay, so for the entire series you had the ambiguous nature of if Sam Tyler is ever going to wake up from a coma he gets from being hit by a car (which propelled him into the 1970s). He spends the time making friends with the rest of his team and finding a girlfriend. He even helps his family from when he himself was a child in the 70s, which he's gone back to. However, in the final episode he discovers that to get out of the coma he must pretty much doom his friends and love-interest in the coma to a certain death via gang-members.
So he wakes up in the modern day, his love-interest from the modern day gone after she breaks up with Sam while he was in a coma and without any friends at all. During a meeting, he starts spacing out. Finally one of the people in the meeting mentions to him that he's bleeding. He looks down and realises he's just been pushing his thumb into his pen so hard that he caused himself to bleed, but never felt it at all. This relates back to a pub owner he talked to while in the coma who told him he'll be able to work out what is real and what isn't if he actually feels anything.
So, he leaves the meeting and goes out onto the roof for a quick breather. Finally, he gets an idea. He runs as fast as he can and jumps from the building, so he may not only be with his coma-friends and love-interest but to save their lives. Meanwhile, it's hinted that Sam dies due to this.
So he wakes up in the modern day, his love-interest from the modern day gone after she breaks up with Sam while he was in a coma and without any friends at all. During a meeting, he starts spacing out. Finally one of the people in the meeting mentions to him that he's bleeding. He looks down and realises he's just been pushing his thumb into his pen so hard that he caused himself to bleed, but never felt it at all. This relates back to a pub owner he talked to while in the coma who told him he'll be able to work out what is real and what isn't if he actually feels anything.
So, he leaves the meeting and goes out onto the roof for a quick breather. Finally, he gets an idea. He runs as fast as he can and jumps from the building, so he may not only be with his coma-friends and love-interest but to save their lives. Meanwhile, it's hinted that Sam dies due to this.
Ashes To Ashes
The main character, Alex, gets shot by someone. She falls into a coma and continues to be desperate to wake up to see her child. Turns out that at the end, not only she is actually dead, thus she will never see her young daughter ever again, but so are the rest of the cast (including some of Sam's friends from Life On Mars). That even the main big bad-arse gov' of the unit Gene Hunt actually got killed, but unlike the others he didn't remain his true form. He actually goes from someone who was about 20 in real life and a wimpy small thin man, to a 30-40 year old man who is an absolute bad-arse. That the purgatory for police officers are for people to realise what faults in their personality that caused them to die, and then they succeed over their own personal faults to go to the other side. That Gene Hunt is pretty much designing purgatory in the image of what makes him happy, and it's his task to deal with the fallen and lost police-officers on their path to contentment with who they are and then onto the after-life.
Both are really insane endings, but they're depressing just for the insanity of it all.
Also, House MD:
Everything in the final ending where House is not sure if to die or escape, up to when it's revealed House got out alive. It would of been an excellent ending, and a very depressing one, had House properly died. It also would of felt so right.
I couldn't agree with you more with the Blackadder finale.C117 said:
"Rather hoped I'd get through the whole show, go back to work at Pratt and Sons, keep wicket for the Croydon Gentlemen, marry Doris. Made a note in my diary on the way here. Simply says: "Bugger"."
I never actually watched the ending to Dinosaurs, and the first time I learned of it was on Cracked (I somehow missed it, go figure), but while it does strike me as the most depressing ending to any show I know of, it also strikes me as entirely fitting.
Light-hearted show? Yes, but it was also a show with heavy social commentary. From sexual harrassment to mocking our dependency on television to the deplorable use of religion as a tool to make money, Dinosaurs used all those animatronics to make a point or two. Sometimes the best way to get under people's defenses is to trick them into believing they're watching something harmless.
I rememeber an old Disney cartoon based on the Chicken Little story, where a clever fox uses rumors, mass hysteria, and a guilible sap (Chicken "the sky is falling" Little) to steer an entire farm's worth of fowl into a cave, where he planned on devouring them at his leisure.
Do they escape? No. The fox won and kills them all (yeesh, it was a dark ending for a Disney cartoon). The point of the cartoon was to teach a moral about the dangers of rumors and getting caught up in panic and fear. It was there to teach us a lesson, not the characters.
Dinosaurs was the same way. The ending was to remind US of our potential future, not the dinosaurs. Pretty brave, I'd say.
Light-hearted show? Yes, but it was also a show with heavy social commentary. From sexual harrassment to mocking our dependency on television to the deplorable use of religion as a tool to make money, Dinosaurs used all those animatronics to make a point or two. Sometimes the best way to get under people's defenses is to trick them into believing they're watching something harmless.
I rememeber an old Disney cartoon based on the Chicken Little story, where a clever fox uses rumors, mass hysteria, and a guilible sap (Chicken "the sky is falling" Little) to steer an entire farm's worth of fowl into a cave, where he planned on devouring them at his leisure.
Do they escape? No. The fox won and kills them all (yeesh, it was a dark ending for a Disney cartoon). The point of the cartoon was to teach a moral about the dangers of rumors and getting caught up in panic and fear. It was there to teach us a lesson, not the characters.
Dinosaurs was the same way. The ending was to remind US of our potential future, not the dinosaurs. Pretty brave, I'd say.
cupcakes is actually why i started watching the show...sort of. when i originally asked about it someone told me to check out cupcakes. i googled it and pinkie pies cupcake song was the first thing that came up so thats what i thought they meant. it wasnt until halfway through the first season that i realized they had been talking about something completely different and i have no intention of ever finding out what i missedTherumancer said:
I still think Teen Titans had the saddest ending. Now THAT was an ending that felt like it shot someone you loved in the face. The title of the last episode (as well as the end lines) were not a message to the characters of the show, but the audience of (probably) still children. "Things change," AKA, "we're done. Grow up and get over it."
Riobux said:
In my head the ending of house is he dies, and Wilson is having a phycotic episode due to the crazy treatments he took.
Some shows deserve a endings and house is one of those shows.
But I do think dinosaurs does take the cake.
I actually wonder. Is it possible that the frozen baby was deemed "safer" for children?Scarim Coral said:
I mean the news person final line was very grim, perhaps they thought a "frozen smiling baby" would cause fewer questions from children. In fact most would just assume that the "frozen baby" was just a picture, only the older children and adults would possibly realize the truth.
I'm throwing my hat into the Black Adder Goes Forth ring, because it was ever- so well done.
Although, I did just see the final episode of Full Metal Alchemist for the first time, tonight.
In a dusty room.
...
A VERY dusty room.
(I think I'll get a little choked up now, every time I see a pic of Al's suit of armor...)
Although, I did just see the final episode of Full Metal Alchemist for the first time, tonight.
In a dusty room.
...
A VERY dusty room.
(I think I'll get a little choked up now, every time I see a pic of Al's suit of armor...)
Here's a clue for my choice, the ending was stipulated as a forgone conclusion from the opening credits of the first episode. So in other words, the jackals who made it should have had the last episode sitting in the can from the get go, yet they didn't.
Six seasons later they simply stop. No ending.
Yet here is the opening phrase spoken every single freakin episode:
I am Duncan MacLeod, born four hundred years ago in the Highlands of Scotland. I am Immortal and I am not alone. For centuries we have waited for the time of the Gathering, when the stroke of a sword and the fall of a head will release the power of the Quickening. In the end, there can be only one.'
Yet in the end, we were left with many. Talk about depressingly stupid endings. Nothing could have been easier to script than the ending of Highlander.
Six seasons later they simply stop. No ending.
Yet here is the opening phrase spoken every single freakin episode:
I am Duncan MacLeod, born four hundred years ago in the Highlands of Scotland. I am Immortal and I am not alone. For centuries we have waited for the time of the Gathering, when the stroke of a sword and the fall of a head will release the power of the Quickening. In the end, there can be only one.'
Yet in the end, we were left with many. Talk about depressingly stupid endings. Nothing could have been easier to script than the ending of Highlander.
I didn't find the ending to Roseanne all that depressing. Forget the fact that the final season dropped all pretense of plausibility, the show had always been about how life kicks you in the teeth, but you keep going, so while the ending was a bit out of left field, it's only depressing if you find real life depressing, and a somewhat sober ending fit the show. Now Dinosaurs did the opposite. You expected the series to end on the extinction in some goofy and funny way, but the majority of the episode went to punch you in the testicles ending on the final low blow of the realization of that Baby being cut off of life at so young an age. Any show that kills a baby wins out.
Of course there's anime that's done a lot to crush my soul, and while I give points to the Kenshin: Reflection OAV finale and Chrono Crusade, the final two episodes of Fruits Basket just hit you like a semi truck after a series made of mostly happy fluff.
Of course there's anime that's done a lot to crush my soul, and while I give points to the Kenshin: Reflection OAV finale and Chrono Crusade, the final two episodes of Fruits Basket just hit you like a semi truck after a series made of mostly happy fluff.
Look left, then read post. You know what my vote is.
Also, the last lines are via the newsman "And taking a look at the long-range forecast, the continued snow, darkness, and extreme cold. This is Howard Handupme. Goodnight. Goodbye.
Also, the last lines are via the newsman "And taking a look at the long-range forecast, the continued snow, darkness, and extreme cold. This is Howard Handupme. Goodnight. Goodbye.
What? I'm the Baby, gotta love me!LostintheWick said:Agreed. Nothing makes me happier than knowing that f**king baby died horribly