Stories that should've ended much sooner

[skykiii]

(I might do a similar topic for video games, comics, and books, though I won't complain if someone else beats me to it)

Basically, there's a lot of shows that would have gone out on a high note had they ended at a certain point, but instead they kept going.

Some personal examples:

Doctor Who (2005 revival)
So I'm gonna be honest, while it wasn't as good as the classic series, the 2005 Doctor Who was fun, and if it had ended with the David Tennant two-parter "The End of Time" it would have gone out on a high note... that episode really does feel like a series finale, and its a pretty good one, capping off a string of actually pretty decent specials I like to revisit time and again.

The first Matt Smith season was pretty good, to my memory, but this was the period where the show started to indulge its worst traits, the general feeling that you were watching some kid's bad fanfiction on screen. It was around this time I started to see articles and videos saying Doctor Who was shit, and I'm not at all surprised.

On rewatches, I like to pretend "The End of Time" was the final episode.

James Bond
Die Another Day should have been the last Bond film. To be honest I will never understand why people hate that one, but even if I allow for that, all it does is change it to "The World is Not Enough should have been the last one." Either movie would have been a fine note to end on.

It's not that either film had a sense of finality to it, but Casino Royale was a reboot anyway, and to be honest... Craig's era felt like it was James Bond In Name Only, and probably helped make Bond as irrelevant as he is today. It says a lot that the franchise is remembered more for one Nintendo 64 game than it is for any of the actual movies.

Dragon Ball
So... DBZ ended at the perfect place: the heroes had just defeated the most ridiculous exaggerated monster they could, encountered the biggest stakes in series history (the world had literally been depopulated), it literally required the contribution of all the people in the world for the first time in history the Spirit Ball actually worked... and to double-dog-sure it, Buu's "evil" half got reincarnated as a good guy, Goku is destined to live for 1000 years, and he's training a successor.

The primary reason none of the DBZ follow-ups ever worked, IMO, is because... there's nowhere to go. Unsurprisingly the various sequels do what superhero comics do: reset buttons, nostalgia baiting, introducing a multiverse.... and all the while they wind up just kinda making the end of DBZ kinda pointless, while the "lore" of the series--a series that was already accused of being rather autistic--gets even moreso.

There's one more I wanted to add but I'm debating if I should....

In the meantime though, got any of your own?

 

[Testacles Maximus]

Scrubs was lucky enough to get picked up for a proper final season after NBC axed it. Season 8 was a refreshing return to form, and the finale was perfect. Then they made another season, and it was a critical and commercial failure.

Edit: I also want to mention Monk. I can't be fucked to remember when it stopped being good, but it was relatively early. By the time the show finally wrapped, it was so far away from what was good about it that it literally forgot its own lore.

 

[Lovely Kin]

Squid Game
It would have been better as one season. The ending was perfect enough, despite it opening up to a sequel. As much I was fine with Season 2, it was never going to live up to the original Squid Game. More characters stood out in Season 2, but they felt one note, Thanos as funny he was, or undeveloped like Se-mi who had potential. It left me with more questions than not about the characters. It also didn't sit well with me it's technically half of a season, and season 3 is the second half. Felt like they were going for comedy at some points than not, or trying to make memes to stick.

Friday the 13th
The Final Chapter, and to be fair, 3 were perfect ways to end the series. The way the final chapter ended left me satisfied and the unused ending seemed cool to me despite it being rather cliched. While it's not the highest quality series, seeing the same tropes of characters got old for me. I'm a bit of a hypocrite though, and I did enjoy part six.

Edit:

WestWorld
This went on for way too long. Season one was excellent and season two was somewhat fine, the next seasons were watching it get shittier and shittier. Things stopped making sense, too many twists that weren't not needed at all. Pacing was a fucking disaster, tried going way too into depth while forgetting about the action, and the characters were not consistent at all. Scenes were rushed or took way too long.

 

[Preacher ✝]

Columbo had the perfect ending with Ashes to Ashes but then they went and made two more of them. Not that either of the last two were bad per se, Columbo Likes the Nightlife was a bit odd, but neither offered as good an ending as Ashes to Ashes did.

Also, preemptively, One Piece does not belong on this list and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.

 

[Lapsus of the bepsus]

x files shouldve ended in series 6

 

[NoReturn]

Completely agree with you on 2005 Who.
Contribooting.

Clean breaks:

• The Simpsons (low-hanging fruit, I know) should have ended with the movie
• Futurama should have ended with "Meanwhile"

Went on too long, but not sure where it should have ended

• Supernatural
• Archer
• Community should have ended as soon as they lost someone on the original cast
• Arrested Development
• Dexter should have ended before the it's-technically-not-incest
• Westworld should have stayed in the park
• The second part of Death Note after L dies is weird
• Inyasha doesn't have a sequel. I don't acknowledge it.

 

[Mayor Cody Travers]

Street Fighter

While it avoided Mortal Kombat's pratfalls to where MK's rebooted twice and is now suffering badly in MK1(2)'s "New Era" being an empty rehash.... it has fallen into the similar issue as other games where for marketability's sake they felt a need to bring back characters who have been killed off or plot points that have seen completion. M. Bison and his Shadaloo organization being brought back despite canonically being killed/destroyed roughly thrice now (SF Alpha 3, then onto the "original" destruction in SF2, then finally "final destruction" in SFV as claimed since SF3) while the rather interesting new villain plot of demigod Gill and his Illuminati society has been left hanging since SF3 in the 90s. Capcom is also suffering from aging its characters up too much, as the latest game pointlessly takes place ten years after the last one in the timeline and twenty-two since the series in-universe began. And they will never top their iconic roster and especially trinity of Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li.

Why they don't do what Fatal Fury did with its iconic villain Geese Howard or even Injustice 2 with the Joker and claim they're bad dreams, echoes of the past, or what-if visions and keep them explicitly non-canon befuddles me. Or finally allow the "iconic" roster to rest with stories that have been completed several times by now, building up less iconic but genuinely popular fan-favorites, while setting up their biggest characters in the trinity as just wandering and fighting per the nature of their character (Ryu and Ken, natch, but Chun-Li as an Interpol agent as well).

Mortal Kombat

Got too bloated in its original timeline's escalation of the stakes but promised to go out with a bang in MK Armageddon, AKA MK7. MK9 actually rebooted the timeline and played with the butterfly effect in a REALLY GOOD way, well before pop culture's obsession with multiverses and timelines, and the sequel MKX jumpstarted to twenty-five years later with some interesting ideas.... whoops, MK11 sets up the time traveling, multiverse bullshit to retcon in iconic characters and get them out of writing jams and they rebooted again to where MK1(2) is now a total twitterina-fied, MCU slopfest. And no one gives a shit because these aren't the same characters as the original two timelines.

They should have gone with their original Armageddon plan they sorta-kinda-played with in MKX, killing everyone off but the really iconic characters and having them be the "OG" remnants to a bunch of new fighters and designs. Sorta like what Street Fighter 3 did with an all-new cast outside of Ryu and Ken, and move the story on from there.

------

As you can tell, by the nature of the genre and medium, a fighting series can't quite end per se or eliminate its most major characters... but it can at least set up endings to its major plot points it inevitably builds up and for a lot of character stories while allowing its biggest characters evergreen reasons to keep fighting. These series also fall into the trouble of aging themselves up too much in-universe. Mortal Kombat rebooted in a surprisingly great way, giving it a genuine new lease on life, but fell wholesale into the worst of pop culture multiverse bullshit, while Street Fighter is too shackled to its 90s glory days and bad guys.

 

[Stumbling7]

RWBY
After Volume 3 the show when to shit. Animations and visuals started looking bad, either multiple bloated cast or existence characters getting more and more insufferable massive cunts like Blake and Ruby, including villains and antagonists, Adam when from an mysterious character to a abusive incel, same with Salem, I honestly think what killed the series is them destorying Beacon Academy, you can't reuse the same models, and because of that they had to make new models in which ate a lot of their budget.

House
Can't say in which season I quit, but it overstayed its welcoming, and became less interesting to watch.

Young justice
Ad least end it in season 2 if I'm being generous, similar to RWBY only worse, if you were new to DC Comics you would be confused and bombarded with a bloated cast, if you are a nerd who knows about DC Comics, you'll be punished and have an aneurysm because of how they butchered your favorite characters, Beast boy went from decent to dogshit, when they decided to add a PTSD Arc, in which they have to cut an interesting parts of the episodes, just to tell the audience "look how much he copes with his PTSD bro".

Edit: Added Young justice

 

[𒀭Δημιουργός χάος]

x files shouldve ended in series 6

In all honesty, The X Files had many potential send off moments, but if I'm honest Season 6 is  not one of those.

The series could have ended with Season 1, Season 5 or Season 7.

The episode "The Erlenmeyer Flask" S01E24 had concluded the Season 1 wonderfully; we get to see Scully finding and testing an Extraterrestrial embryo, Mulder finds hard Evidence of gene manipulation, Deep Throat dies to save Scully. Leaving us with the best and the most memorable qoute in the whole series. If the show e nded here X FILES would have been remembered as one of the best shows ever made.

Most fans probably like the idea of ending the series with the episode"The End" S05E20
Even though the episode itself was somewhat underwhelming, it was the last episode shot and produced in Canada.
The weird familiar-but-not-so-familiar feel of murky atmosphere was gone after this.

Now let's us dive into the reason why Season 7 Particularly should have been the final Season.
The fact that the final episode "requiem" S07E22 was written as a potential series finale, mainly because David Duchovny expressed his interest of leaving the show for good. There were even rumours of Gillian wanting to exit the series or her role to be largely reduced.
Because of this mess the final episode has a very intriguing harsh conclusion (which was sort of ruined with Season 8 onwards)
Episode starts with Mulder and Scully being investigated for pointlessly waisting taxpayers money. Krycek and Marita are brought back to finally end the last remains of syndicate killing the crippled Smoker.
Also the large portion of plot takes place where the whole series has started. There are many call backs to the series Pilot and its odd characters.
Mulder at the end is abducted. Scully finds out she's mysteriously pregnant, finally getting her wish being a mother.
It should have ended there.

Unfortunately we got two more Seasons and "reboot/revivals" instead.



PS: yes I've edited and expanded this pointless blog post ぉ( -_・)?

 

[The Last Stand]

Clean breaks:

• The Simpsons (low-hanging fruit, I know) should have ended with the movie

Speaking of which, the SpongeBob SquarePants Movie from 2004 should've concluded the series with a high note. I think Stephen Hillenburg planned for the movie to be the end all, be all but Nickelodeon demanded more since it was a cash cow (or a cash square.)

 

[PonderosaPete]

The Saga of Christian Weston Chandler

 

[McMitch]

The Simpsons (low-hanging fruit, I know) should have ended with the movie

You are correct in this but are missing the second half in that the movie should have come out in 1999.

Star Wars should have ended, as a franchise, after the Prequel Trilogy. Now, I’m not some zoomer revisionist who claims the PT is an under-appreciated gem, they’re unwatchable bad, but Star Wars had good to great media up through the lead-up to the PT, but the setting was dead in the water afterward.

Miura should have made a more concerted effort to end Berserk properly sooner. I disagree there is a specific arc as the story exists now where he could have cut off the story (the boat arc exists to being Guts to the same scope of agency the God Hand existed under), but I am convinced he had regular health issues going back to his Idolm@ster addiction that foretold him getting Tezuka’d.

 

[Old King Koaleamos]

James Bond
Die Another Day should have been the last Bond film. To be honest I will never understand why people hate that one, but even if I allow for that, all it does is change it to "The World is Not Enough should have been the last one." Either movie would have been a fine note to end on.

It's not that either film had a sense of finality to it, but Casino Royale was a reboot anyway, and to be honest... Craig's era felt like it was James Bond In Name Only, and probably helped make Bond as irrelevant as he is today. It says a lot that the franchise is remembered more for one Nintendo 64 game than it is for any of the actual movies.

They finally ran out of Fleming Bond stories, so IDK what the fuck they're gonna do now

 

[Not A Cat Person]

True Detective should have ended after the first season's finale.

 

[Daddy's Little Kitten]

My life.

 

[Chongqing]

The Matrix should have ended after one movie.

 

[Steve Martin Short]

Spider-Man should have retired after he married MJ. Peter's already lived through the deaths of too many friends and loved ones by that point, and his sense of responsibility should keep him from ever putting her in that position.

There should have never been a Mask sequel.

Fantastic Four movies should have ended with Corman's effort. They've ranged from mixed bag at best to mediocre at worst.

 

[FatMebius]

Literally every long-running shonen manga.

 

[Big Seej]

True Detective should have ended after the first season's finale.

Season 2 wasn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be, it was just so different that everyone expecting more of S1 felt they got hoodwinked. In fact I'd recommend anyone watch S2 before S1. Pizzalatte definitely needed Fukunaga to balance him out and S2 was a clear display of that, but it still wasn't BAD per se, it's just that an 8.7/10 show feels like you're eating shit when you're told it's the sequel to the 11/10 show you just finished.

Seasons 3 and 4? Fucking shit toss them in the dumpster they don't deserve the name.

 

[Molag Bal]

It was around this time I started to see articles and videos saying Doctor Who was shit

The guys at the forefront of all the 'Doctor Who is shit now' stuff eventually admitted that it's because Moffat (showrunner, wrote the starts and finishes on each series) didn't emphasize 'elevating queer identities' as much as RTD did. The reason they hated it literally was just because he made the series less gay. Series 5, 6, and 7 were all better than 1, 2 and 3, and I am not budging on this. At least series 5 and 6 actually felt like the kind of whimsical magic children's show that it SHOULD be.

The first few series were basically trash tv but in space and the only reason I bothered watching them was because my father was a big DW fan in the pre-reboot era.
Just as a few reminders of what the first few series were like, all the main characters beside the doctor were either council housing chavs with bad teeth or unfortunate brown mongrels and also the mongrel gets cucked. At multiple points, the show makes reality tv slop an actual focal theme of what is supposed to be a sci-fi series. The scariest monsters are either skinheads with a roastie's vagina for a face or literally just people with gas masks on.