Comic Strips

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

enterprise had a really bad ending, because les moonves hated the franchise so he made it a wierd PEGASUS tng sideplot, and it was suppose to have a season 5 to involving the romulan war. 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.

Disagreed, there are many shows that spend seasons building on the ending that if the ending is really bad, it makes the rest of the show feel pointless.

Really putting the "ass" in comparison there. Also, if a person say... wrote a best selling beloved children's book series, but then heel-turned into a piece of shit, it absolutely does ruin their entire body of work for a lot of people.

Like, this happens, what is the comic even talking about?

What a stupid logic.

If a show tells you it's building to something, then fails to deliver, it has disrespected all the time and effort invested.

See:

Lost
Battlestar Galactica
How I Met Your Mother

What no? A show has a narrative structure - buildup to a disappointing end devalues all of that which came before.

A narrative and a person ain't the same. It also follows that we evaluate them differently

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.

Well, Alfred Nobel tried to do a uno reverse on this one. And I think it worked!

If a story doesn't have a satisfying conclusion, then I would say starting the story is pointless.

"Too late, I've already drawn you as the soyjack"

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.

We absolutely do apply these to people. Kevin Spacey? Bill Cosby? Jeffrey Epstein? Jared Fogle? Joe Paterno? Louis CK? Chris Brown? P. Diddy? Harvey Weinstein? OJ Simpson?

Let's say you build a bridge. You build the nicest on-ramp, you put the nicest lamp posts, the nicest pavement, and the most beautiful railings in the history of bridges. And the bridge ends on a cliff. There might be some nice views on top of the bridge to nowhere, but it's a bridge to nowhere.

That's a work of fiction with a bad ending. A work of fiction is a work, not a person, so where it leads to is very much an integral part of the work.

meh. if people report that the ending of a show was terrible, i'm not going to watch it, no matter how "good" the rest of it was.

similarly, if someone turned nazi at the end of their life, i'm calling them an asshole, no matter what they did before that

also, comparing tv shows to people's actual lives is a dubious half ass analogy

This comic is out of touch with the politics of Netflix style script writing where there's no story arc being followed.

This comic has a solid set-up, but the punchline is weak.

A Person isn't a story though the ending being rubbish rings the whole story