TV series finales never fail to stir conversation—especially on Wikipedia
These TV shows—and Wiki Wormhole—wrapped up with a series finale
Aux Features wikipedia
We explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our 6,321,634-week series, Wiki Wormhole.
This week’s entry: Series Finale
What it’s about: The end of the road. Whether tear-jerking, anticlimactic, or so disappointing it makes fans retroactively question their love of a series, most long-running television shows conclude with a much-hyped final episode in which storylines are resolved and the writers and cast say farewell to viewers and try and build a satisfying ending. An appropriate topic for what, after eight years and 6,321,634 entries, is the final installment of Wiki Wormhole.
Biggest controversy: While final episodes can be a victory lap for a beloved show, they often leave viewers angry. Wikipedia cites Roseanne (the first iteration, in which it’s revealed the entire previous season was a story Roseanne Conner made up to deal with the death of her husband Dan; a development that was quickly retconned when the show was rebooted in 2018), Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother, Game Of Thrones, Dexter, and the brilliantly ambiguous Sopranos, whose abrupt cut to black “caused millions of viewers to temporarily believe they had lost cable service.”
Wikipedia also gives credit to series that went out on a high note, including Newhart, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cheers, Breaking Bad, Community, Gravity Falls, and Six Feet Under, and controversially puts Lost’s divisive finale in the good column.
Strangest fact: Series finales weren’t always a thing. As virtually all television was episodic before shows could be recorded, there were no ongoing storylines that needed to be wrapped up, and many series just ended with a run-of-the-mill episode. That all changed in 1967, with the final episode of The Fugitive. The show’s premise—Dr. Richard Kimble goes on the run after being framed for the murder of his wife—allowed for an episodic series where Kimble’s flight from the law took him to a different town every week. But it also set up the show for a thrilling conclusion in which he confronts the real killer, the famed one-armed man—an episode watched by an astonishing 72% of households, which convinced networks that series finales were the way to go.
Thing we were happiest to learn: Finales aren’t always the end. Several series—from Here’s Lucy to Charmed to Arrested Development—wrapped up with a finale, only to be brought back on the air. Futurama came and went so many times the show actually had four series finales by Wikipedia’s count. Magnum, P.I. was even brought back after a series finale in which Tom Selleck’s Magnum was killed, spent the episode as a ghost, and ascended into heaven! But fans were so outraged that the show returned for an eighth season with an alive-and-well Magnum.
Some series have also ended only to pass the baton to a spin-off. In many cases, the “spinoff” was simply the same show minus a few key cast members, as when Andy Griffith left The Andy Griffith Show, but the supporting ensemble continued on for another three seasons as Mayberry RFD; or when Bea Arthur had had her fill of The Golden Girls, and her costars inexplicably un-retired and ran a hotel for one season on The Golden Palace. But there are also more traditional spinoffs, in which beloved supporting characters get to take center stage, as when The Practice’s finale set up James Spader and William Shatner’s characters to star in Boston Legal.
Thing we were unhappiest to learn: There isn’t a category for inadvertent season finales. Many series are cancelled in the off-season, so the writers and cast don’t get the chance to say good-bye. But a few shows that have suffered this fate serendipitously ended on a meaningful final episode anyway. WKRP In Cincinnati’s writers didn’t know “Up And Down The Dial” was to be the final episode of the show, but the storyline—in which the struggling station is finally successful, only to be threatened with a format change to 24-hour news—ends the series on an emotionally satisfying note, in which the station is saved and would keep on playing rock and roll and getting into wacky misadventures, even if the show itself wouldn’t.
Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: There’s no talking about series finales without talking about the granddaddy of them all. “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” the two-and-a-half-hour episode which wrapped up wartime comedy M*A*S*H after 11 seasons, was the most-watched episode of television in American history, and remained so for 27 years, until it was knocked off its perch by Super Bowl XLIV.
The end of the Wormhole: Alas, our 6,321,634-week series has also come to an end. Thanks to everyone who’s followed along through the years; thanks to Josh Modell for deciding a one-off Great Job, Internet! I wrote eight years ago had the makings of a recurring feature; and thanks to reader Unexpected Dave for his long-running feature-within-a-feature Talk Page Highlights. I’ll continue writing for the site here and there, my podcast Why Is This Not A Movie? releases a new episode every Tuesday, and my sixth book, The Planets Are Very, Very, Very Far Away, comes out this November, barring any more COVID-related delays.
One final note. The internet was created by the U.S. Department Of Defense, but it didn’t really come into its own until a young Senator named Al Gore passed the High Performance Computing Act Of 1991, which expanded the DoD’s network to major universities and funded the development of the first web browser. This led to the creation of the modern internet, and the thinking at the time was that it would let researchers and great academic minds share information. Naturally, this lofty goal was very quickly outpaced by video games and pornography, which became the internet’s mainstay until 2001, when Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia. And in the 20 years since, Wikipedia has truly fulfilled the promise of the internet—a repository of the sum total of human knowledge, whether obscure problems in quantum physics, or minor characters from Spongebob SquarePants. I can say without irony it’s one of humanity’s greatest achievements, and it’s been a joy to investigate its weirder corners for the last eight years.
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TALK PAGE HIGHLIGHTSspoiler tag not neededHow in the world is a spoiler tag needed on a section that makes it clear that the finales of various shows are being discussed? Our readers are not so stupid that they cannot realize that reading about finales is going to give away the endings… — Carl (CBM · talk) 05:12, 30 June 2007 (UTC)Why is Futurama listed without a series finale?It resolved what was probably the longest-running plotline on the show, Fry’s feelings for Leela. — Antaeus Feldspar 17:50, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)get rid of non-notable “buffy” and “knight rider” finales (fan cruft); add “Newhart” and “St. Elsewhere”Buffy finale, fancruft. Ditto Knight Rider. Must we put up with this? —Ling.Nut 19:44, 15 April 2007 (UTC)Fancruft? There the detailed breakdowns of the episodes, what’s so “fancruft” about it? Buffy’s finale IS noticable, and Knight Rider’s spin-off canocity is unclear to the point this was the closest thing to a conclusionIf the powers-that-be-utter-morons had’nt deleted the series finales articles, or had at least merged them all in one, we’d have shows like Newhart already there in contrast to what we have now.I’ll see what I can do about including the others, but I should’nt be having to clean up the mess the idiots have directly caused themselves by thinking with the “delete button” first, and what was good for any future version of an article later. I really should bring this up with ‘em, and tell them to save any information that comes with too many articles on the same subject. Dr. R.KZ. 19:49, May 7th 2007 (UTC)I second the motion that Newhart should be included. The last episode was one of the best, most truly originial shows ever in the history of television. While it did not have the giant ratings of M*A*SH or the Fugitive, it was one of the most critically praised programs ever shown on tv. The series was great as well. The fact that it did not win any Emmys means nothing. The Emmys have a very long history of giving the same awards to the same people and same shows year after boring year.204.80.61.110 18:26, 11 June 2007 (UTC)Bennett TurkReally “Notable”?Are the finales of “Friends” or “Seinfeld” or “Frasier” really all that notable? They’re pretty typical, mundane finales. They don’t break any ground, they don’t get “creative” in any way — these are just popular shows that ended with something. (Commando303 (talk)) —Preceding undated comment added 01:49, 7 April 2009 (UTC).Lost Series FinaleAll right, I know I may be in the minority but I don’t think the Lost series finale The End is all that notable. The ratings were just average, it didn’t break any records. Plus the entry seems to be based just on Emmy nominations. The End was nominated for seven awards—Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series, Outstanding Direction for a Drama Series, Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series plus Creative Arts Emmys for Art Direction, Camera Editing, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Music Composition. With the exception of the guest actress award, these are all awards the series has been nominated for before—how is that notable? Awards aside, the Lost series finale did just what a series finale is supposed to do. It ended the series. It wasn’t the highest rated finale ever (M*A*S*H), it wasn’t controversial (The Prisoner) or unique (Newhart, St. Elsewhere). So instead of getting into an edit war, I’d rather just come to a consensus on this. Bhall87Four Scoreand Seven 18:33, 12 August 2010 (UTC)Made in America: Hidden sounds after the cut to blackJust a note that I found what appears to be hidden audio that occurs after the cut to black. You need to use an audio editing program to amplify and filter the sound. I used Adobe Audition. After amplification and background filtering, there is an audible gunshot that occurs directly after the cut to black. It is not the tail end of the music. There are also three muffled banging sounds that occur a few seconds after that, during which you can hear someone screaming something like “Oh my god!”. Can someone with more expertise than I possess try to enhance and filter their own copy of the audio?My filtered copy is here. Mike (talk) 01:21, 26 March 2010 (UTC) Yeah, for real. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.0.219.225 (talk) 04:19, 26 June 2010 (UTC)I’d like to know more about this… 5 years on xD – Jetro (talk) 03:34, 2 April 2015 (UTC)The Iron ThroneI originally added A.V. Club with IGN because those are two top “internet critics.” SportsEdits1 (talk) 08:37, 23 May 2019 (UTC)
“Top internet critics”-The A.V. Club
And only now, at the last moment, have I come across the term “fancruft,” which is apparently Wikipedia-only slang!
Also, I don’t remember Knight Rider having a finale of any significance, so I looked it up, and the episode description is, “Michael tries to stop a voodoo woman, who is using mind control on innocent people and forcing them to commit crimes for her.” So, had Knight Rider gotten a fifth season, it sounds like it would have turned into Baywatch Nights.
Everything turns into Baywatch Nights eventually
Will the universe end with a bang or a whimper. Neither, it will end as all things do, as Baywatch Nights.
I was obsessed with Knight Rider as a kid and had only these amazing fuzzy memories of fondness for it. As an adult, when I stumbled across it flipping channels one day, I was so excited to relive the show again! Five minutes in, I thought “…Hey, this isn’t very good. What’s going on? Maybe it’s just a bad episode.” Then another came on… “Nope, this is a bad show. Like really bad.” Approximately 20% of my childhood remains ruined to this day.
On a side note, when I started playing GTA:V, they had added the M.O.C. (Mobile Operations Center), which looks suspiciously like ‘Goliath’, KITT’s nemesis. I was giddy as a schoolgirl.
I’ve experienced exactly the same thing, but I like to think our standards got higher.
So many things I’d have been astounded to have box sets of as a kid need to be very gently sampled as an adult so as not to ruin the memories, see also McGyver.
I feel the same way about The Love Boat.
The thing that’s the best about Love Boat is every week there’s a canal, or an inlet, or a fjord, when love gets loose on land.
“Michael tries to stop a voodoo woman, who is using mind control on innocent people and forcing them to commit crimes for her.”But it would have no doubt involved long sweeping roads with spots where KITT can pull off some sweet jumps and maybe a wall or two he can drive through.
“Must we put up with this?”
I think I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow.
How does history regard the St. Elsewhere finale? It was a big deal in its day, and impactful enough to be spoofed on Newsradio and 30 Rock.
BONUS COOKIE MONSTER TALK PAGE HIGHLIGHTSOriginally named SidIt should be added that Cookie Monster was originally named Sid before he got into cookies, as documented in this BBC news article (at the very end). Scorpiuss (talk) 17:16, 25 February 2008 (UTC)Cookie Monster#EvolutionSorry to use this as a forum but I have to express this. I can’t believe what the world is coming to. Cookie monster is portrayed as a fat, hairy, silly slob. That the critical thinking departed onto children by their value-shaping institutions is so bankrupt to make this necessary is discouraging. Trickrick1985 (talk) 00:48, 11 November 2008 (UTC)I can’t believe what the world is coming to. People who appear to have read and understood WP:TALK are nonetheless using talk pages as a forum. 😉 Sorry for teasing, rick, but do try to keep the discussion about the article. If you can find a source which discusses the socio-educational implications of the Cookie Monster character (I’m sure it exists somewhere), then by all means, discuss. —Fullobeans (talk) 01:54, 11 November 2008 (UTC)No problem. I warned myself about WP:NOTFORUM just to make sure it didn’t happen again. Trickrick1985 (talk) 02:24, 11 November 2008 (UTC)OK, but did you warn your other self??? Baseball Bugs What’s up, Doc? 03:45, 11 November 2008 (UTC)Evolution? Does this term hasn’t a rather positive connotation? I’d call this eco-fascism a degeneration of this former purely fun meant character. A Cookie Monster that is now molested by speaking and singing vegatebles not to eat cookies.—91.36.231.134 (talk) 13:46, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
Fat? Hairy? Silly? Slob? Me only some of those things. Okay, me all of those things… but so much more! Anyway, me agree with Trickrick1985 that me have more range as actor and deserve to get opportunity to stretch out on show.Also, me have heard it called ‘cancel culture’ that me sometimes talk about vegetables and healthy eating, which very, very dumb. But “eco-fascism” just hilariously even more dumb. Me once ate entire car on-camera, and people mad that me eat vegetables sometimes? Me discovered important thing about life: spend too much time eating nothing but cookie, and they all start to taste same. But cleanse palate by eating apple, and next cookie will taste sweeter for it. Also, me was at incredibly high risk for diabetes.But me want to assure everyone that Mrs. Cookie got me gigantic cookie cake for Father’s Day (when in Jersey City, me highly recommend Bang Cookies, bakery that not bother with lesser stuff like croissants and rolls and stick to what matter most in life.)
These are all good points. And also just much respect to the greatest gimmick commenter of them all
𝑩𝑶𝑵𝑮
I don’t really get this one
You mean Taco Bell Bell?
I think you know that I do not
And Happy Father’s Day! Hope you, Cookie Jr, and Bagel Monster celebrated the end of an era here.
So anyway, fuck Jim Spanfeller.
Go to hell, Spank-a-fella!
Funny enough, the series finale of The Promised Neverland just aired on Toonami less than an hour ago. And it was complete shit. As if condensing 140-some chapters into 11 episodes was bad enough, the last 15 minutes set up a plotline that could have easily been its own season unto itself, only to literally pass it by via a bunch of still frames.
Most anime finales are pretty weak, especially ones that have a huge manga series to follow
At the same time…if you have 80 issues, you definitely need more than 23 episodes.
TPN is a bit more infamous, though, since they crammed 130+ chapters into 8 episodes. Not only did they cut out about 4 or 5 different arcs and about 20 or 30 very important characters, but they didn’t introduce the Big Bad until the final episode, and then didn’t have her speak AND was defeated off-screen during a PowerPoint montage.
NEONGENESISEVANGELION(Ending for at least the third time any day now!)
Are we talking the original season, or the more reason season 2 stuff? I’ve only seen the first season.Not having read the manga, I loved The Promised Neverland and thought they did a good job with the finale. I didn’t really see anything missing. If they cut anything out, it doesn’t seem to me that it was the weaker for it.
Yea, second season. First season was great. Second season cut out a TON of shit and more or less made up the final few episodes. There are many, many significant scenes and events changed, but the most damning is probably what they did with the Demon Queen. She is the Big Bad of the franchise and the one who insists on keeping the Status Quo, yet she is not only not introduced until the finale, she’s defeated off screen during a silent PowerPoint montage. She doesn’t even get a single line of dialog.There’s a reason all the writers had their names stricken from the credits from the final few S2 episodes.
Saint Elsewhere had an interesting finale. It was an MTM production. Also tear jerking was the end episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. The memorable and oft-parodied scene culminates in an emotional huddle, during which nobody wants to let go, and, needing some tissues, the group shuffles en masse toward a box on Mary’s desk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Show_(The_Mary_Tyler_Moore_Show)
It’s a long way to Tipperary…
Saint Elsewhere had an interesting finale. If by ‘interesting’, you mean ‘WTF?!?’, then yes. *SPOILERS* I’m hard pressed to imagine that there was ANY point to ending it as the daydream of an autistic kid staring into a snow globe. (at least, that’s how I remember it. I refuse to look it up again to be sure)
One comment on the YouTube clip for this that appeals to me is that the end scene was what was made up – that kid knew the pain his father felt at loosing Auschlander, so he created a vision where Auschlander was a true father to his dad, both alive, and neither suffering the strain of life and death decisions. However searching for this leads to the rabbit hole that St. Elsewhere is the center of an alternative universe as seen in 200 to 419 different shows. Specifically the “The Tommy Westphall Universe“ https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tv-show-fake-tommy-westphall-universe_n_55f84ba1e4b00e2cd5e8118a#or maybe not – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_WestphallAfter all these years and the MTM team still gets people thinking.
By sheer coincidence, we finished our rewatch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine tonight. Well, not exactly a “re”-watch, since I only really watched the first couple of seasons, and then sporadically watched the next couple of seasons, then more or less stopped somewhere in season 5. But we rewatched all of TNG last year with our kids (from March through December), picking up DS9 at the point in the TNG broadcast schedule where it aired, and watching the episodes for both shows in their airdate order until TNG ended and then we continued with DS9.I have to say, DS9 ends really strong. I actually had no idea that the final 10 episodes (including the series-ending double-length episode) were one long continuous storyline. There obviously were some serialized elements in the show (like the ongoing Dominion War), and the occasional two-parter, but those last 10 eps really felt almost like a modern serialized show. My kids both say they liked DS9 more than TNG, and at this point I can’t say I disagree.We’ve thought about trying to slog through Voyager, but I think next we’re actually going to finally get around to showing the boys Buffy and Angel, which should be a hoot.
DS9 is not my favorite Star Trek series — TNG will always occupy a specially place in my heart and was my gateway into Star Trek. But it definitely started stronger and ended stronger than any of the other series.It’s a shame what happened with Enterprise. The first three seasons were not great, but had their moments. It was finally starting to hit its stride in season 4, and I think it could have become a legit good show in season 5. But it was unfortunately cancelled, leaving us with one of the worst series finales I have ever seen.
DS9 is the best Trek. All right thinking aliens living amongst humans know that.
One other sci-fi show I liked that I thought had a lousy finale was Stargate SG-1. Luckily, they had two DVD movies I thought wrapped things up pretty well.
That one we can blame on the network.From sixth season on, the producers kept producing each finale with it the potential to be the last, and then they’d get renewed again. So they finally wrapped things up with the Go’auld and Replicators in Season 8 and effectively rebooted the show with the Ori and the possibility of lasting a lot longer…and then Syfy cancelled. Stupid Syfy.
I hated ST:TNG. I was glad when it ended, no matter how it ended.
I didn’t like DS9’s finale, but everything leading up to it was fucking amazing (and DS9 is still my favorite of the Treks).Of course, “All Good Things…” is still one of the best series finales ever so that tracks that DS9’s didn’t live up to it…
DS9 effectively invented the serialized show. X-Files had done 3- or 4-episode runs, but that last season of DS9 was basically one long story, with the occasional one-off, and it was terrific.I also love your rewatch idea, alternating late TNG and early DS9.
NOT REALLY. WHILE A RARITY, SERIALIZED PRIME-TIME TELEVISION WELL PREDATED DS9. HILL STREET BLUES, FOR EXAMPLE. ALSO, IF WE INCLUDE SOAP OPERAS, SERIALIZED TV HAS BEEN AROUND FOR A VERY LONG TIME.ALSO, YOU ARE GOING TO ANGER A GREAT MANY BABYLON 5 FANS.
lmao, what?I can tell if this is serious or not, but just in case it is: serial dramas have been around since before TV even existed, and were literally some of the first shows on TV…I mean what do you think soap operas are? lol.
DS9 effectively invented the serialized show.Babylon 5, which DS9 ripped off, would have something to say about that.
Just like B5 “ripped off” LotR.
Babylon 5 was more of a serialized show than DS9 and certainly deserves credit for that (but let’s be clear, serialization was something which NEITHER show originated.)
But calling DS9 a ripoff of B5 is reductive as hell, especially since B5 was heavily inspired by Star Trek to begin with, and neither show invented the concept of “a space station where lots of adventures happen.” These shows both drew from a pool of scifi literature tropes that had been established long before they came along. Both are excellent in different ways. Enough already.
JMS was quite annoyed by the fact that he took the idea to Paramount, laid out his plans in some detail, they rejected it, and then mysteriously a new space station show, which was previously anathema to Star Trek, magically appeared.They even grabbed an actor from B5 mid-run.So, yes, it’s an exaggeration to call it a ripoff, but neither was it apparently mere coincidence.
Given that they were exact contemporaries, I’ve always figured that the influence of B5 upon DS9 was nontrivial but kind of superficial, though this seems to still be a topic of intense feelings.Their points were quite different. At the end of the day, DS9 was bog standard Trek: we’ve found some new life and new civilizations; they’re interesting (some of them excessively interesting and well armed); we’re figuring out how to live amid them. B5 was about the ascent of man into a new stage of history, which turns out to be mediated by two philosophically opposed kinds of aliens.As for serial nature, that had of course been seen before. However, my (mis)understanding is that B5 was among the first prominent examples, or at least the first one that I noticed, of something that has recently become commonplace: an intentionally finite series whose overall story was laid out from beginning to end at the outset. Both are excellent in different ways.Exactly.Circling back to the topic of best endings, though, they both had pretty good ones… and DS9 took a twist I hadn’t seen coming, setting Sisko up for a conventional happy ending, with his grief process reaching some sort of closure or at least ability to move on (and setting him up with an intriguing romantic possibility), but then… well, I shall avoid spoilers for a generation still discovering the show, but as you know, something entirely different happens.
“Twin Peaks” has entered the arena.
I mean, you’ve gotta REALLY gerrymander the shit out of your claim to make it even remotely plausible. The decade before, for instance was FILLED with serialized shows, of which Dallas is one. Serialized Sci Fi? Well, right off the top I say Quantum Leap beats it. V beats it. Serialized Space Sci Fi? While not great, I say the original Battlestar beats it. Serialized Sci Fi Space Show with Aliens? How ‘bout that?
And if you go outside the US, you’ve got Doctor Who (serialized sci fi space show with aliens) which celebrated its 30th anniversary the same year DS9 premiered!
Quantum Leap is the definition of an episodic show. It was more-or-less engineered to make serialization impossible.
Took me this long for your comment to even register in my feed. Kinja is an abomination.As to the point: I suppose you’re right. I haven’t watched the show since the original run. I always had it in my head where a part of every episode was Al and Sam trying to figure some way out of the Leap, advancing that storyline. It doesn’t count after reflecttion. Ok, Flash Gordon, then.
“Quantum Leap” was not remotely serialized. yes, it remembered its own continuity and would occasionally reference things that had happened on the show, but it was the definition of an “adventure of the week” series.
Something something Babylon 5…
Babylon 5, which ran almost contemporaneously with DS9, was serialized from the start. It was the first time I heard anyone talk about a “season arc.”
J. Michael Straczynski has steam coming out of his ears right now
“Invented” is a pretty strong word. I try to avoid comparing DS9 to Babylon 5, as I like both shows, and the conversation is beating a dead horse at this point. But, while DS9 was heavily serialized at the end, B5 did it for 5 seasons (plus TV movies).
Aren’t we forgetting a little show called The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin ?
But I certainly agree that the sort of serialization that existed in primetime TV changed in the early 2000s, and that DS9 was hugely influential on that change. Prior to 2002 or so, most primetime genre TV shows had a “conflict of the week” story, and they might have a few scenes dedicated to a wider plot arc. But the kind of serialization that you had in DS9’s last season (and saw more often as the 2000s have progressed) was a throwback to the kind of serialization that was in soap operas and matinee film shorts: episodes would end with a cliffhanger rather than a tentative feeling of resolution.
We did the same thing over the past several years, and we even managed to get through Voyager, but only by watching the ten best episodes of each season (as voted on somewhere on a site that broke away from this one) and I have to say, there’s half of a good show buried in there. You just gotta ignore all the tedious resets and Neelix nonsense and Janeway’s ever changing character. The only thing I missed was B’elanna Torre, who has some interesting character arcs but only mostly in terrible episodes that we skipped.
And there were actually some major last-minute writing shifts going on with that ending, most notably their having to bring in more Defiant-class ships after blowing up the original, since there wasn’t any money to make new CGI models. And the second half of the very final episode suffered from Ron Moore not being able to work on it, which is why the whole resolution with Dukhat and Winn feels so out of place. And Avery Brooks had some choice words about the show ending with its black hero essentially abandoning his pregnant girlfriend, so there was one more rewrite to make clear he wasn’t leaving for good.
Ha, we’re also in the middle of a family DS9 watch, after finishing TNG a few months ago (we watch 2 episodes a week). We’re still in season 2, but my son wants to start Voyager when it ends as well. I am still a TNG girl, though, and I feel like our family discussions after those episodes were always a little more in depth. TNG dealt with more explicitly Science Fiction questions whereas DS9 seems to deal more in characters and their relationships to one another. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I still feel like TNG is the stronger show over all.
‘Voyager’ is probably my least favorite of the heyday franchise. Don’t get me wrong, Kate Mulgrew and Robert Picardo are wonderful as their respective Captain Janeway and EMH Doctor but the bulk of the show were subpar stories with awful villains of the week that leaned heavily on the borg and a tall, blonde sexpot in a shiny catsuit to hold viewer interest after season 2.I have a soft spot for Scott Bakula since ‘Quantum Leap’ but I can acknowledge the first 2 seasons of ‘Enterprise’ were, not great but from the Xindi arc through season 4, it really was showing its potential. It deserved at least 2 more seasons, considering ‘Voyager’ undeservedly got 7.
Seven’s my favorite female character in Trek history even though, despite being a straight guy, I never had a thing for Jeri Ryan(too “sexy” as opposed to “cute”).
Janeway was such a poorly written character and I don’t feel like Mulgrew’s performance got past the writing. Seven was added at beginning of season four, and while the producers brought Jeri Ryan on as a sexpot for them to drool at, she turned out to be one of the better actors on the show and had really good (buddy, not romantic) chemistry with Picardo, leading to some fans complaining that there were runs of the show which were essentially the “Seven and the Doctor Show”. If you watched Voyager all the way through (It’s still a fairly bad show and I would only recommend doing so if you really want to), you’ll notice that Seven’s outfits get less ridiculous and gross as the show goes on. Similar to how on TNG they eventually wrote in the scene where the captain-pro-tem tells Troi to put on a real uniform, which was done as a mercy for Marina Sirtis.
You’re crazy, Voyager had some weak episodes, sure…but so did literally every other Star Trek. It also had some very solid episodes. I’ll take Year of Hell and Equinox over literally anything and everything in Enterprise any day.Honestly while DS9 has some absolutely great episodes, as a whole I actually dislike it more than Voyager because of the whole Space Jesus/Space Israel plot that runs the entire length of the show. I also have to give Voyager points for wisely dodging that horrible Mirror Universe bullet lol.Also, Jeri Ryan wasn’t a cast member until season 4, and obviously the Borg are gonna play a little larger role in the show when one of the main characters is literally one. That’s like complaining that TNG and DS9 leaned a little too heavily on Klingons lol.
At least watch the Voyager “Year of Hell” episodes.
I can’t watch anything with Kurtwood Smith without hearing “Bitches, LEAVE” in my head. He’s great in everything he’s in.
“Call me, Bobby…” (Whoops, responded to wrong comment, sorry.)
I’m halfway or so through s5 of DS9 and a frustrating thing about it is how its nascent semi-commitment to serialization so often works against it. I don’t mind bad episodes on TNG; bad episodes here aren’t just bad but they happen while I’m tapping my foot waiting for them to cut the shit and get back to the long-arc stuff. Watching DS9, I feel like I’m on a schedule; watching TNG, I’m just hanging out and seeing what’s next. The heightened, sustained stakes that serialized storytelling goes for are hard to sustain when you keep breaking them up with farting-around episodes. I remember having pretty mixed feelings about the finale, but I’d like to see it again when I get there.
This is a bad take. Ds9’s “farting around” episodes are generally terrific.Sure, on rare occasions, you follow up the extremely serialized and extremely good half-dozen episodes that kick off Season 6 with a corny dud like Worf and Dax’s wedding. But, most of the time, I was delighted when they took a break from the Dominion War to go back to the show’s weirder side.
I do find that the two things that put me off of the prospect of revisiting this for so long – the Ferengi and the Bajorans – have definitely turned out to be my least favourite things about the show all over again, the Ferengi being more revolting than ever, and the barely-designed Bajorans get such a great deal of story time that tells us scarcely anything about them other than their history of oppression. I’ve seen like fifteen Bajorans-take-their-religion-very-seriously episodes now and I still could not tell you anything they actually believe beyond their reverence for “the Prophets”. But I have to disagree on the farting around. I’m not finding it very weird, and the very nature of a serialized show makes these episodes stick out like speed bumps – I wouldn’t hate “Explorers” nearly as much as I do if it didn’t come in when it did, and while I never felt let down that “The Inner Light” didn’t cast a long shadow, it does bother me that “Hard Time” – with the same premise, in a different kind of show – didn’t either.
a frustrating thing about it is how its nascent semi-commitment to serialization so often works against it. Actually, that’s something I like about it and wish more modern series would embrace. Don’t get me wrong, if a Ferengi episode would come along I’d groan, but there’s a bit of a lost art to having a serialized arc without being completely beholden to that single season-long story. So much serialized TV these days end up with a lot of table-setting and wheel-spinning waiting to get to the fireworks factory. Building those season-long arcs while also telling smaller scale, standalone stories that have an actual beginning, middle, and end within the space of the episode (and also providing a sense of time where it really feels like that season-long arc takes a full year to come to fruition) is sorely missed.
DS9 is a wonderful series and it’s final season ends with a terrific (seven? eight?) episode heavily serialized conclusion which is marred only by the HORRIBLE Gul Dukat/Kai Winn/Pah Wraiths storyline.Ugh. I skip through that crap during every rewatch. It’s awful. Yes, it’s a shame Dukat’s character had already come to a natural conclusion previously, but prolonging his presence in this fashion was dreadful.
Basically went for an occult-horror thing there, didn’t they? Not something Trek is great at.
I won’t have you speak ill of Dukat impersonating a Bajoran and then somehow becoming a magician!
For Boston Legal fans:But there are also more traditional spinoffs, in which beloved supporting characters get to take center stage, as when The Practice’s finale set up James Spader and William Shatner’s characters to star in Boston Legal.James Spader is in 22 episodes as Alan Shore, appearing in every episode of the last season of The Practice, and William Shatner is in 5 of the final 7 episodes of the show, not just the finale. To quote Wikipedia: [The final seven episodes of This show’s finale aired back in 2005 before streaming was a thing, and it used to be impossible to find the show. It’s only been in recent years that you can watch the entire final season.If you are a fan of Alan Shore, Denny Crane, and Boston Legal, do yourself a favor and watch all of the final season of The Practice because it contains a full-blown season of television that introduces and follows Alan Shore in a brilliant bravura performance by James Spader at the top of his game.So happy today! If you ever wished that Boston Legal had a prequel series starring James Spader, your wish is granted. It’s streaming on Hulu currently. I think I’m going to check that out myself tonight perhaps.Also, fuck Jim Spanfeller.
Best wishes to you, Mike Vago. It’s been quite a long time since I made a comment on an article, but you deserve a farewell toastFrom the magnum pi season seven finale, with John Denver’s “Looking For Space”:
James Spader at the top of his game.I resent the notion that James Spader has any type of game below the top lol.
What’s heavenly is those short shorts. Rawr!
First Reasonable Discussions end for no reason, then the comments section being fucked up, and now the end of Wiki Wormhole?
We are all doomed – mr.angry, Bombay, United States, 11 months ago
But how fitting that it comes just as you are stopping your comments.
Thanks for doing this for so long and I’ll miss this feature. Good luck and I’ll check out that new book of yours.
Mike, thank you so much for these articles over the years. They’ve always been a highlight for me and I wish you well in your future endevours. Thanks for the laughs.Some of the great what the fuck finales/almost finales:* Babylon Five famously have a five year plan but it got cancelled during its fourth season. They wrap up the storyline and shoot their finale. Then the show gets uncancelled so they put the finale on ice for a year and do a fifth season which isn’t great because the vast bulk of the storyline had already ended.The end of the Practice/beginning of Boston Legal is one of the great up yours moments. David E Kelley had become so deeply bored of his own original characters and had already forced to sack half his cast by the time season 8 began. James Spader’s Alan Shore reinvigorated him and after spending half a season of him causing chaos, he had Alan more or less destroy the firm in gleeful fashion.The final six or seven episodes are bizarre because the firm just ends and the show increasingly just becomes what would be Boston Legal, to the point where The Alan/Denny plot takes out 2/3 of the last episode.
You could almost say The Practice morphing into Boston Legal was a “Plan B”.
The Practice did at least have a nice farewell for Ellenor, Eugene and Jimmy.
The Practice gave Rosalind one of the best farewells ever.
Taxi had a bunch of hiccups. Season 4 ended with a two parter that would have worked as a series finale, and then ABC dropped the show. NBC picked it up and the second to last episode would have also worked as a finale, but for some reason they ran a show titled “Simka’s Monthlies” which wasn’t filmed in that order as the actual finale before dumping the show for good.
I caught maybe 3 episodes of One Tree Hill (3 too many) and I would have bet you good money they were all series finales. They were filled with people saying goodbye and montages set to sad music. But none of them were.
Funny, One Tree Hill had a season finale that would have worked really well as a series finale, but then came back the following year with a time jump to adulthood and (imo) was not nearly as good as it had been.
“Sleeping In Light” is a great episode no matter where you choose to place it in the Babylon 5 watchlist.
Agreed!
I have greatly appreciated your work and wish you the best of luck in your current and future endeavors. Maybe Wiki Wormhole could live on, but I’m sure it’d just turn into a Wiki deep dive of how racist Ellie Kemper really is.
Sad to see this column go, but thanks for the ride. I’ve learned a lot of fun facts through this every week and I’ve made a lot of dumb comments down here as well.*Looks back at the empty set and turns off the lights*
Flashback to all of the faces and voices and their catchphrases, now nothing but memories….
OF COCK!
If St. Elsewhere aired its finale when the internet existed, the internet would have exploded. The Tommy Westphal Cinematic Universe is huge and includes such modern shows as the Chicago shows on NBC, the FBI shows on CBS and The Simpsons.
I blame Richard Belzer.
The whole Tommy Westphal bit is a great encapsulation of how internet ideas turn bad.When Dwayne McDuffie started the whole thing, he was mocking the idea of obsessiveness about shared universes and continuity, and brought up the example of St. Elsewhere as a joke.Of course, over time it became an argument *for* obsessive reductionism and overanalysis, and what McDuffie created celebrate the looseness, illogic and fun of comics became nothing more than an illustration of rigid formulaic joylessness.And speaking of rigid formulaic joylessness, how about that Jim Spanfeller? What a herb.
https://www.cbr.com/revisiting-mcduffies-six-degrees-of-st-elsewhere/
McDuffie may have also had in mind Philip Jose Farmer’s “Wold Newton Family”, and that too has mutated into various degrees of self-parody over the decades.
This happens with a lot of semi-serious arguments. Godwin’s Law was originally just a mockery of how Internet arguments often get overblown, with people being compared to Hitler even when arguing about things like desirable features in programming languages. But then people took it to mean that comparing someone on the Internet to Hitler was automatically bad, even when it was justified.
Schrodinger’s cat-in-a-box paradox also started as a joke.“It sounds like you’re saying that an object can exist in two different states at the same time when I’m not looking.”“Actually, that’s a great way of putting it.”“Wait, what?”
I wonder why nobody has done a similar thing for Newhart (Bob Newhart’s 1982-1990 show). The finale implied that the whole thing was a dream by the characters in Bob Newhart’s original The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978), so you could do a similar thing there.
Probably because McDuffie found the connection from St. Elsewhere to the Bob Newhart Show and already claimed it for Westphal.
Fans of classic British sci-if remember the last episode of Blake’s Seven, with most of the main cast dead or seriously injured, and Kerr Avon smiling enigmatically before fading to black with the sound of blaster fire…
“Good news writers, we’ve been picked up for another season. Hey, why’s everyone so glum, it’s not like the main characters have all been killed or – wait, NO! WHAT DID YOU DO?”
Funnily enough everyone thought Blake’s Seven was cancelled after Season 3 but as the story goes, the director of programming watched the last episode and was quite enjoying it and rang the station and asked them announce Season 4. Which was news to the cast – and the people making it who were already dismantling sets.Anyway, they managed to scramble, the people wanting to/able to stayed and the aforementioned massacre at the end of Season 4, anyone who wanted to come back was “stunned”, the actor who played Blake came back on the condition he was clearly dead (even though his character’s name was in the title, he left at the end of Season 2 bar one appearance in the Season 3 finale).Anyway, the show *was* cancelled after Season 4 and thanks to that ending (unlike the cautiously optimistic but opened ended Season 3) passed into legend as a result(Imagine what the Series Finale of Angel might have ended up like if they’d left the camera running for 10 more minutes or so.)
“Hah! Only a flesh wound, by Jove, although it somehow caused me to age a couple of years and my hair to change colour!”
Thanks to the Season 4 cancellation of Blake’s 7, every one of the heroes of the show has been canonically dead since 1981.But thanks to that particularly brutal ending, the show and especially its finale has passed into a legendary status it probably wouldn’t have had if it was cancelled after 3 seasons or ran for 5 or more.
Never was a fan, myself, but had a friend who was an avid B7 fan and showed me a couple of episodes. From what I understood, the finale massacre basically meant that *everything* the group had done or tried to do had, in the end, been an utter waste of time and the bad guys won decisively. Damn.
I’ll miss this column a lot Mike, especially as on Sunday’s there’s little new content on the sites I visit and this was always a really fun read, so thank you for all the time and effort you put in to it and all the best for the future.
Have really enjoyed these articles and I’m sorry that this will be the last one.Also part of me is still hoping that one day the Next Picture Show crew will team up, buy the AVC for a dollar and restore it to its former glory. When that day comes in this fantasy they will also kill Kinja, decouple the AVC from all these other sites and find another commenting platform. Also they will have a Dissolve section for those peeps.
Is Spot.IM still a thing?
I have no idea but I still fondly remember the AVC trying it out and trying to reply to someone’s comment or upvote them was like playing some sort of early Nintendo game where the post you want to respond to is quickly shuffling down the screen into oblivion….
Thread: recent good series finales.I have to say when it comes to more recent shows, I really think The Good Place killed it. That finale is heart-wrenching, especially the moment when Eleanor realises Chidi has felt the way he feels for a long time but has held it in for her sake.
I thought both Warehouse 13 and Eureka had excellent series finales, emotional but not overdone
Were they? I checked out of both series at least a season or two before their ends. Both of them suffered from Season Plot Escalation and should have ended sooner.
Eureka I think ended at about the right time.Warehouse 13 I thought had more life in it. It had created such a big world
Aw man, the heartbreaking way that William Jackson Harper delivers that line…He really was robbed of that Emmy.
It’s been over a decade, but The Shield had a really good finale.
Absolutely. A stunning piece of television
Yup. And really the whole last season was killer.
I tell BREAKING BAD fans who haven’t watched THE SHIELD that the last season/half-season is “Ozymandias” levels of tension over multiple episodes. Those that watched on my recommendation have not disagreed. . .
How recent is recent? Totally agreed on The Good Place.Somewhat recent: Person of Interest killed it. 12 Monkeys was awesome and went out as it lived: perfect for what it was, and much better than it had any right to be.Going back further… some of my all time favorite series finales were: Babylon 5, Star Trek: The Next Generation, The West Wing…I feel like I’m missing some in there…
I love the last season of PoI in general. One of my favourite shows of recent times.
Angel. Fringe. Timeless, which was legitimately special. Superstore did right by the characters. Mr. Robot!
Superstore nailed the whole final season, man that was like the last network comedy I was still watching other than Bob’s Burgers. Such a bummer. I think it had at least a season or two more’s worth of juice even without Amy/America.
Jonah was an interesting character. He clearly meant well and had an inherent goodness but he couldn’t sense that his woke rhetoric was useless to the people that his rhetoric was meant to help. The finale verbalized this, but the unspoken question of why a guy like Jonah would still be working there post-Amy was answered by calling out his privilege in cruel ways and then kicking him while he was down. I never liked Amy (America has a dithering rhythm to her line readings that frustrates me) but without her, it was just too obvious that Jonah didn’t belong there anymore. I think Ben has said that no one wants to watch a character like Jonah anymore, and my suspicion is that he (as a producer) didn’t fight cancellation. A few more years of playing a handsome privileged white guy would have been bad for his career.
Review ended perfectly. Other strong finales in the last couple of years: The Americans, Broad City, BoJack Horseman, You’re The Worst, and Brockmire. Agree on The Good Place.
Agreed on Bojack, I forgot about that one.
Oh fuck, Review. That ending was so good it helped with the pain of the final season only being 3 episodes.
The Good Place for sure, and Parks and Rec is a standout for me as well.
Two words: Gravity Falls.
I’m not arguing with you by any means because I realize it’s all a matter of opinion and subjective, but I was kind of disappointed by The Good Place finale. I don’t know what I was expecting, exactly, but it just fell flat to me.
I can see where some people might have expected another “this is another layer of hell” twist from what had gone before…
Well, there goes the one remaining feature that makes this site still worth visiting occasionally. Thank you Mr. Vago for providing so many enjoyable articles over the past eight years (and for sending me down so many Wiki Wormholes of my own in the process). Best of luck to you in all your future endeavors.
I still enjoy Random Roles myself but am also puzzled as to why the AVC is killing off a good popular feature even if Mike Vago doesn’t want to keep writing it.
This was a fantastic series and I’m sad to see it go. I wish you the best of luck in all future endeavors. Also thanks for making me cry again by mentioning Six Feet Unders finale. I genuinely think its the greatest ending to anything in television history. I mean good lord.
Like Wiki Wormhole, Malcolm in the Middle stayed strong right through to the end, using this absolutely phenomenal speech to bring the curtain down.This feature will very much be missed. Clear skies to you, Mike, and to hell with the herbs.
Thank you for everything!
I want to continue this somehow. I love the idea of clicking the random article button until it gives me something to work with then running wild and writing like you have.
The Fugitive movie did a great job of finding an actor who resembled the TV series’ original one-armed man.I don’t know what I’m going to do with my Sunday mornings now that this column has come to an end. Maybe someone can start picking IMDb or TV Tropes entries at random and writing articles about them? Or just go randomly critiquing Instagram accounts?
Even though The Fugitive was a landmark in terms of series finales, I was under the impression that M*A*S*H was what really popularized series finales being treated as a big event. How many really impactful series finales were there between 1967 and 1983?
The article and commenters have brought up The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which had a highly promoted, highly rated finale. Barney Miller had a big sendoff too, with the precinct house slated for demolition and the detectives scattered throughout the NYPD.I think the big sendoff was generally limited to favorites of network execs of shows where the producers had the clout to negotiate a finale. Most shows were in more of a limbo status where execs would see how final ratings came in and what star salary demands were before deciding whether to continue for another year. Even something like All In The Family just sort of drifted off.
I’m curious how much the success of home video changed things. I am betting that producers started thinking more in terms of longer arcs and more cohesive storylines when it became obvious they could make millions more by having people watch show after show in sequence on video.
In the same way, I bet the old days of syndication probably worked against too much in the way of running stories — Channel 79 wasn’t so likely to buy rerun packages that they couldn’t show out of order to keep replaying the most popular episodes and chop up to fit more commercials.
In my memory of the old days of syndication and reruns, it’s unclear to me how much attention was paid to the popularity of individual episodes. I think they pretty much just ran them on a chronological loop anyway. The hesitance about running stories was probably focused on the perceived irregularity of viewership — presumption that people “coming in in the middle” would be frustrated and not want to watch again.
It may have been the stations I watched, but I remember absolutely no coherence to reruns. You’d see the same ones popping up a lot, entire seasons skipped over, MASH episodes that would jump from Henry and Trapper to Col. Potter and Charles back to back…
Maybe once they went through the rotation a couple of times, they figured people were just watching because they were killing time while their frozen pizza heated up, which wasn’t necessarily wrong.
M*A*S*H is currently cycled through in order on Me TV, and is much better that way.
I think I might be remembering later years… like, the late ‘80s on, when everything was satellite fed. Earlier than that — my real childhood in the ‘70s — local affiliates might have been working with physical tapes, and been prone to run whatever was literally handy, which gave local programmers more discretion, but also displayed their laziness.
Pretty much every show I watched in syndication before 1997 or so would cycle through the episodes in chronological order. The network or the distributer might put an episode in the wrong place by mistake, they might omit particular episodes or seasons (usually early seasons, especially if they were in black and white or had noticeably lower production quality [MST3K and the Simpsons]), but they generally tried to keep things in order. In some cases, they might even add in the occasional unaired episode (as with Miami Vice) or an episode of a spinoff series (the Three’s Company syndication package included two episodes of the Ropers.) It’s also worth mentioning that the syndication package for M*A*S*H (where 2 episodes were generally aired back-to-back every day) added an extra airing of the “real time stopwatch” episode so that they could have an even number of half-hour episodes in the package.
But when cable TV really started to explode (especially in Canada), things changed. Episodes were more likely to air out of order, and be drawn from a much smaller pool that would repeat over and over. I can only speculate as to why the business model changed (more airtime to fill, looser broadcast regulations on how often something could be rerun, the increased popularity of unscripted shows).
My guess would be that shows that went out on top (with the creative team or actors wanting to wrap it up, rather than getting the axe from the network) got a big finale. I’m sure the network would have killed to have a few more seasons of MTM. (And Woody Harrelson said the day after they announced Cheers wrapping up, he got a breathless call from a network executive pitching him on, “okay, but what if now Woody owns the bar?”)As for All in the Family, because it segued right into Archie Bunker’s Place, they probably didn’t want any feeling of finality. Keep on tuning in to this lesser show, please!
Yes, the article is, I’m afraid, completely wrong about this. The import of the Fugitive finale is that, afterwards, the show did poorly in syndication, and from 1967 to 1983, series finales were considered poison. (Whether it was the finale that did this is of course up to interpretation.) It was only with the MASH finale that this flipped.By the way, my favorite thing about the Fugitive finale is that they ran the normal of the the episodes of the season, and then the summer reruns, so that the finale was truly the last episodes shown.. The finale ran in late August, which was a crazy idea at the time.
As I think back to the Sopranos finale, I’ve figured out what bugs me. It isn’t the ambiguity, or the sudden blackout, or the idea that Tony was killed.It’s the way a hit would have happened in a crowded restaurant in the middle of the day — something that would have been a stupid, sloppy move by someone who was beyond caring what happened to them.Which seems to sum up the spirit of the show at the end.
Here’s the thing, though: when Phil was killed it was done right in front of his wife and grand-kids, in broad daylight at a busy gas station, thus having Tony popped in front of his family might have been seen as just desserts by NY.
They must’ve found better hitmen than the ones that took a couple shots in Tony’s general direction, then walked up the car and just HANDED TONY THEIR GUNS.It’s one of the most contrived and lazy scenes I’ve ever seen.
Thanks for all the great articles and I am sorry to see this feature ending. But I guess like a great TV show you want to go out on top & on your own terms.
If I learned one thing from George Costanza, it’s to go out on a high note.
I learned that if you keep looking really annoyed at work people think you are busy and they leave you alone.
I’m gonna guess sadly it was ended by the powers that be. Kotaku just randomly ended there weekly photoshop contest articles and it wasn’t by choice, I think we are going to see another round of fun features getting the axe because they aren’t “on topic” or of-the-moment about the biggest pop culture stuff as the G/O sites continue their protracted death rattle. I wonder if Breihan will get another article series when Popcorn Champs comes to an end in the next few months.
Let’s hope Barsanti doesn’t come in and announce ““I have a message. Mike Vago’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors.”Although he’d probably do it with more snark and a misspelling.
Tragically, I was killed on my way back to my home planet. This is legally binding.
Vago was from another planet? Cool!
The snark would need to be pointless and just for its own sake to be truly in character for Barsanti.
Of course who doesn’t see Mike dancing into the Wiki-sunset in tight leather pants and low slung belt buckles?
Common misconception, but it wasn’t just the final season of Roseanne that was revealed to be her writing, it was the entire series after the season 2 finale. They show a flashback to that episode where Dan and the kids turned the basement into a room for her to write in, and she says she started writing about the things that were happening in her life, twisted in the way she thought they should be. That her daughters were with each other’s partners all along, her mom wasn’t gay but her sister was, and that when Dan had died unexpectedly a year earlier (when what we saw was a heart attack he recovered from), she started writing crazier stories like winning the lottery to cope. (Thus, a lot of things were retconned for the revival. Not just Dan’s story.)Just a pet peeve of mine that whenever the Roseanne finale is brought up people say it was only the final season that was shown to be made up. It was the majority of the series, but I think people remember it as having only been the final season because that season was so different from the rest, and because the “Roseanne’s writing” reveal was no doubt a way to explain why the final season was so ridiculous.
Yeah, I’ve always remembered the Becky and Darlene were with the opposite guys twist, as that along with Dan dying were incredibly frustrated. I also remember coming up with my own version of the finale after having watched the real thing: go back to the episode where Dan and Roseanne get high off their old marijuana and reveal that everything after that was a prolonged (day)dream while they were coming down. In other words, end on a joke (and a callback to what was one of the funniest episodes imo).
Thanks for all the wormholes, Mike. Maybe the true wormhole was the friends you made along the way.
The real wormhole was inside of us all along! Or, possibly, I have a tapeworm.
*starts reading wiki about tapeworms and heads down a wormhole.
HAHA MOTHER FUCKERS! YOU HAVE FREED ME FROM THE GREYS. PREPARE FOR ALL THE HOT TAKES IN THE WORLD!
You were an innkeeper in this crazy little town in a wormhole…
Wikipedia Wormhole died on the way to its home planet, sadly.
Oh, man. The last one. Thanks for all the eye-opening information over the years, Mike! I have sent these articles on to my family and friends so many times, and have gone down wormholes of my own. I will miss the weird segues and tangents of this column so much. As for series finales, for me you can’t beat Angel. God, that finale was amazing and heartbreaking and uplifting all at once. Love it.
I’m going to have to find a new reason to wake up on Sunday mornings now (I mean, there’s always my family, I suppose…) Thanks for doing these, Mike.
My own personal thing with finales: when shows are great (or at least, good) but go way off the rails I can hatewatch up to the penultimate episode but I just can’t do the finale. Dexter, Game of Thrones, Big Love and Damages immediately come to mind but I’m sure there are more. I think it’s because finales tend have so much gravitas to them, if it isn’t earned I just can’t do it.Anyway I’ll miss this feature dearly. It was a Sunday ritual for me and it’s sad to see one more vestige of the once-beloved avclub go.
Sometimes the finale gives crashing shows a soft landing. I thought The Wire’s finale, at least, did a decent job of wrapping up an absolutely terrible final season. Battlestar Galactica’s last gasp wasn’t quite so bad because of the finale, although I have to admit even then it was a rocky landing.
You know, this is kind of how I feel about Friday Night Lights, a show with great acting and direction, but major story issues. There was always too much table-setting for arcs that had really soft landings, and the incredible final three episodes might have been piped in from another planet for how unearned they were
I think it’s because finales tend have so much gravitas to them, if it isn’t earned I just can’t do it. Dodged a bullet with Dexter. Fuckin’ WOOF…
That Six Feet Under finale, it still gets to me.
I watched Six Feet Under when I was 18ish, we rented the DVD’s from Rogers or the library, I cannot recall which, maybe it was both. Sometimes I think I should rewatch that series, but I know it will reduce me to a blubbering mess, just like it did 15ish years ago. I don’t think I could handle that right now.
Oh Mike…. This is bad news. Thanks for so many hugely entertaining pieces which of course drove me back to Wikipedia and down many other wormholes. Of course it isn’t perfect, comedian Andy Zaltzman was surprised to find that his entry claimed he played the bassoon on a Boney M hit, but Wiki Wormhole found some absolutely startling material, particularly the one on Gef, the talking mongoose, which had me both captivated and damn near wetting myself with laughter the more utterly absurd it became. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GefThanks again, and shouldn’t Wiki Wormhole have a page on Wiki itself?
I always thought so, but Wikipedia has a “no-pages-about-yourself” rule.
Kung Fu filmed a four episode series ending (David Carradine let them know at the beginning of the season that he didn’t want to continue after that one), but the network wanted them for the May sweeps, so they were followed by another three episodes out of order.
So a series ending that didn’t end the series.
Similar thing happened with MST3K – one out of order episode broadcast after the official ‘final episode’.
Miami Vice went out the same way. The two-hour finale aired in May sweeps. Three more episodes aired in June. And an episode about child trafficking which NBC refused to air turned up in syndication the following year.
I feel all the more frustrated by this feature’s departure due to my own erratic ability to enjoy and contribute to it, owing to personal scheduling, computer/Kinja issues, and such. I particularly valued the frequency and content of Mr. Vago’s participation in the comments, as well as the overall commentariat here.I consider this feature to have been among the site’s greatest recent achievements, and I look forward to exploring whatever of Mr. Vago’s contributions turn up in the future.
Aw, no mention of The Shield’s “Family Meeting”?
Thank you Mike,This series has been a must read for me for the past 8 years. I always got a special thrill when the topic was something I knew about, wondering what would be included and left out, and what new things I would be able to learn. I’ve loved the journey, and I understand all journeys must end. Once again, thank you so much
This was an emotionally pleasant read, though not all are. Well chosen, and I can’t wait to see what else you come up with that runs for 8 years here.
Well, That Abouf Wraps It up for God.“Mike’s just this guy, you know?”We hope to see you back in some form soon, Mr Vago. Please try to bring cookies and Will Harris if you can!
RIP Wiki Wormhole
I’ll of course use this comment to once again harp on the fact that the Game of Thrones and How I Met Your Mother finales were the most amazing finales in the history of television which elevated these shows into timeless works of art.
So this is it? The only reason I pull up the AVC on Sundays is for the Wiki Wormhole. Just like the old school AVCers like Rabin and O’Neil, I always looked for Vago. I know we all have to move on, but this column is going to be missed. Good luck, sir, and I wish you godspeed in your future.
Great job, Mike. And like I’m sure someone said below:“I kinda wanna slay the dragon.”
Let’s get to work.
Thanks for all the great articles, Mike. I hope you safely return home.
But I’m still out there, somewhere, writing about an increasingly difficult set of Wikipedia articles!
Quantum Leap REALLY needs to be in the conversation whenever “best series finales” are discussed.
AV Club favourite (like Mike) Community had an excellent finale, paradoxically talking about what a theoretical Season 7 would have been about.Now on to the movie!
If we’re talking about the best last few minutes of a TV show, I thought that fake commercial at the end of the finale was a very Community-esque way to go out.
I loved Harmon’s scathing rebuke of the Nielson system.
“The Prisoner”’s finale was so controversial in the UK that Patrick McGoohan went into hiding for a little while.
“Hiding” . . . at a comfortable coastal resort village, I’m guessing.
Me and my partner got into M*A*S*H during the pandemic, going into it blind due to it ending approx. 12 years before we were born. I bawled like a BABY at the finale, it deserves to rank in the annuals of history as one of the best of all time.And I’ll miss this series of articles! Always a fun deep dive.
I still defend Lost’s finale. A lot of criticism came from people who never watched the show but still claimed to have been right about the island being purgatory all along, which wasn’t what the final season depicted; the sideways universe was purgatory but the island was real. I never knew what the actual viewer reaction to the finale was because so much of the response was watered down by non-viewers who didn’t have the facts straight. I also liked the ideas in the GOT finale even if the execution was bad. There could be no winner through warfare. Dany was always wrongheaded; we just approved of her targets before. All of the “recent” wars were started over the circumstances surrounding Jon’s birth, and he decided none of it was worth it. The new king is a non-human who may live for thousands of years, eliminating succession issues and potentially bringing human peace and prosperity to the realm, which is what the white walkers were attacking. Most amusingly, Tyrion was so, so wrong. All of that is GREAT stuff. Too bad the scripting failed it. Angel’s finale is a bit of a legend for how great it was. Law & Order’s finale was a clever mix of a standard case and character grace notes.
The thing about the LOST finale was that it didn’t answer any of the interesting questions that ther series brought up. I wanted to know about the numbers. I wanted to know about the Dharma Initiative. I didn’t care at all about Jack and Kate, etc. But after a decade (and “The Rise of Skywalker”) it isn’t really a shock to say that J.J doesn’t know how to end things properly.
Lost did answer those questions. Dharma was just one of the many groups that happened upon the island throughout history, tried to harness it for their own purposes, and left traces of themselves for the next group to find. The numbers were just a recurring motif to show how connected everything was. Maybe you’re saying that the answers aren’t satisfying, but there WERE answers.
The Numbers were explained. Dharma was explained.
Heck, everything WAS explained, but a lot of people thought the answers were lame.
I thought Fringe had a satisfying conclusion.
The Lost finale was hilarious for us in Australia/the UK as quite by chance, another long running TV show made in the UK had the same ending two days beforehand but nowhere near as pretentious (and also they were heading to a pub instead of being in church).
Mike, we worked together briefly in 2014 (I was an intern and assistant at [employer undisclosed in case you want it private] before moving into the library world) and I remember vividly when I realized you were the person writing these amazing articles. This was an excellent column and I’ll miss it tremendously, thanks so much for writing!
Racking my brain to try and remember which co-worker left for the library world and I can’t. But I’m very easy to find online if you want to say hi!
I was only there for a couple months, as it turned out I was way happier in a bookstore/library environment than a traditional office, so we only interacted in person like twice, but yeah I literally wrapped up reading a Wiki Wormhole, recognized the name from a group email we just got, and asked about it at some point. Just a neat small world thing!
THE BEST SERIES FINALES, RANKED:3 – “Come Along With Me” (Adventure Time) – There are a lot of ways to do a finale: you can flash forward in time, you can do a big epic final battle, you can have everything change, you can have nothing change. This finale does all of them, and somehow makes it all WORK.
2 – “Nice While It Lasted” (Bojack Horseman) – Bojack Horseman is a bad person, but he is also a wealthy celebrity, which means any public consequences he faces will always be temporary and relatively minor. Which is why the ending to his story focuses on the private consequences, and why those are the most devastating of all.1 – “The Real Folk Blues” (Cowboy Bebop) – It’s been 23 years and we’re still carrying that weight.THE WORST SERIES FINALES, RANKED.3 – “Of Course He’s Dead” (Two and a Half Men) – Always a bad show, but never so aggressively lazy as when it closed things out by having Charlie Sheen’s character (played by a body double) killed off by literally dropping a piano on him.
2 – “The Iron Throne” (Game of Thrones) – “You know who has the most interesting story in the entire world? BRAN!” said no one who was paying attention.
1 – “Last Forever” (How I Met Your Mother) – Then again, dropping a piano on someone is still vastly more dignified than spending nine years building up to a character’s introduction only to immediately give her cancer and kill her because the writers decided she was nothing more than an obstacle standing in the way of their favorite ship.
“because the writers decidedshe was nothing more than an obstacle standing in the way of their favorite ship.”That’s a misread and a half. The series ending was written and filmed during the first season. The writers didn’t count on the series lasting as long as it did, NOR that everyone would fall so utterly in love with The Mother (and coincidentally out of love with Robyn – and Ted for that matter).
Well, the scene with the kids was shot, anyway. Makes sense. It was 9 years since they first sat down on that couch.
Thanks for doing this.
Was hoping you would mention Scrubs. One of the best finales ever (S8) followed by spin-off that was mistakenly marketed as a 9th season.
25 years before the MASH final episode, Route 66 had a definitive final episode with one major character married to Barbara Eden and the other headed off to Texas to go back to his life. No more crossing back and forth across the country in a cool Corvette.
Just wanted to chime in with the others: thanks so much for this column! I loved it and am sorry to see it end. Not *quite* as bummed as when WKRP ended, but close!
That M*A*S*H wrap-up was such a disappointment, with Big Things happening to each and every character, one after another, like clockwork. But it had nothing on the Seinfeld finale, which was nothing more than rehashing old jokes in a wholly un-amusing manner. I couldn’t believe how lazy it was.
The Seinfeld finale was so – so, but the premise that the characters finally were held accountable for their actions AND the final joke being a repeat of the very first joke was tremendous.
I think the episode was thematically good, but structurally poor. It was a mistake to sideline the main cast for most of the finale in favor of a guest star parade.
Yup. Very much in line with what I was trying to say.
I always thought it was funny how social critics loved to point out how the most popular show in America was “A show about nothing”.They had their heads so far up their asses that they missed the joke.
Thanks for this, Mike Vago. The internet needs more, not fewer, fun digs into stuff.
I want to say thanks for this feature. This was what this site used to do very well. While I don’t think I read all of them, there were very few that I did read that weren’t interesting. I’m sad to see this go. Even sadder because I feel like it’s another chunk off the sites’ original carapace before it finishes moulting into what it’s become.
Thanks, it’s been fun! And my very unscientific poorly thought out list of greatest TV finales:Justified: “we dug coal together” works so perfectly on so many fucking levels.Star Trek: TNG: fun, perfectly paced, and ties up Picard’s metaphysical journey that started with episode one.Cheers: just fun and a perfect capperThe Good Place: fuck was that perfect. I still can’t believe it lasted four seasons on network tv, and told that story, so well, with just about a near perfect conclusion.
Damn, I think I rewatched the final conversation with Raylan and Boyd ten times that night. The “we dug coal together” ending was just so great. Didn’t like the final hat though. Didn’t look like it fit.
Fucking “Lost”. I loved the first five seasons of “Lost”, that was one of the most fun TV shows ever for a while. My SO and I binge-re-watched the first five seasons in the weeks leading up to the climactic season six, just to get ourselves up to speed. Then a few episodes into season six we started exchanging looks and eye-rolls as we both realized we’d been had.
The very last scene with Jack and the dog was nice but man did that finale suck. The whole season was just full of cheap distraction gimmicks (look, Sawyer is a cop! Jack is Locke’s doctor!), then the whole thing ends with that ludicrous cork and everyone dancing around in a gauzy multi-denominational church. What a shit heap. The deleted scenes on the DVD were way better than what they actually aired.
Seasons 4 and 5 were a gradual decline. Season 6 was a steep drop off right up until the dreadful finale. Ugh. “been had” indeed!
Since the AV Club was sold several years ago, Wiki Wormhole has been one of the few features that remained “can’t miss” every week. Thanks for the trivia and the memories, and good luck with everything that lies ahead, both professional and personal.
“As virtually all television was episodic before shows could be recorded”
Hate to do this, but: “Whaa?”
Since the beginning single-camera TV shows were shot on film, and had a cut negative like motion picture films do. For example, “The Lone Ranger” ran ‘49-’57, all on film. Even most 3-camera sitcoms were shot and edited on film. Programs broadcast live prior to videotape were Kinescoped for posterity. After videotape appeared in 1955 a program could be performed live and recorded for airing at a later date.
Starting in the early 80s shows shot on film had their camera negatives transferred to videotape and the shows were then edited for broadcast on video. This is why there is a dearth of HD releases from shows early-80’s to mid-00’s. It was all assembled in standard television definition.
All television was episodic because of the $ available in syndication and the needs of local stations. There was an AV Club column a few years back called “A Very Special Episode” and they wrote about “Hogan’s Heroes” final episode and how different it was to modern final episodes. Spoiler: it was about money and syndication.
https://www.avclub.com/hogan-s-heroes-unceremonious-finale-comes-from-the-era-1798237542
PS Here’s a going away assignment: How were the major network television shows broadcast to local stations across the country BEFORE communication satellites?
Take care!
The first Wormhole article I read was about Chicago being raised 6 feet, and I’ve been hooked ever since.Thanks for showcasing some of the wildest facets of mankind, Mike – your column will be missed. 🙂
On the subject of accidentally meaningful final episodes, I would use Soap as a weirdly perfect meta-example. I don’t think it’s last episode was meant to be it’s finale, but it ended with no less than four high-stakes cliffhangers, including the impending death of a main character, that were never resolved, which in hindsight seems to me to be the perfect way to end a parody of soap operas.And as far as finales that ended up not being finales, I must submit Sledge Hammer as a favorite. Sledge Hammer was also a parody, this time of cop shows. When it didn’t look like it would be renewed after the first season they had Hammer accidentally set off a nuclear bomb, which is pretty final. When it came back the next year a voiceover simply announced that the series now took place so many years in the past… which was nonsensical because one of the main characters was new to the precinct, and the other characters, at the start of the series.
So… Wiki Wormhole RFD, coming to ew.com in October?
There’s even a page for you, Vago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GreatestA solid end to a great feature.
Gravity Falls is mad underrated. Yes, even as a critical darling.
Aw, I’ll miss this feature! It was one of my favorites over the years.I read once that after the weird, baffling series finale of The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan essentially had to go into hiding for a while because fans kept accosting him and demanding to know what it meant.
Mike, I will miss this weekly feature very much. You did a great job. Good luck in your future ventures!
I’ve really enjoyed these. Thanks for doing them.
Lost’s finale was a classic. Yes, really.
We’ll just have to get lost in Wiki Wormholes on our own from now on. Anyway, Star Trek: The Next Generation had the best finale.
This is one of the columns I almost always read, even if the topic didn’t sound that interesting. I’ll miss it.
Auf wiedersehen, Herr Vago. I’ll always fondly remember this column and my intermittent accusations that you were in Big Somebody’s pocket. Little did we know . . . you were all our pockets all along. On a side note, I think the medication just kicked in.
Say what you want about the Dexter finale, but How I Met Your Mother basically murdered the show. I always enjoyed HIMYM. What a fun show. Great to check out re-runs, too. Then the finale happened. I can never watch it again. I should have known better and been out when they killed Dauber.
I believe I’m in the minority on this, but I liked the “Lost” finale. “Lost” is still my favorite TV show ever.
Aww, sorry to hear one of my favorite A.V. Club features is ending. But thank you for the ride!
I can only speak to the replies I’ve had on my comments but this was a civil discussion with lots of people who know their television. Just like the old days on here :: weeps uncontrollably ::
I’ve always thought that Hill Street Blues, which has come up for a couple of in-passing mentions in the discussion, also has a very satisfying finale, right down to a final scene and last line of dialogue perfect for the purpose. Thoughts?
One final note. The internet was created by the U.S. Department Of Defense, but it didn’t really come into its own until a young Senator named Al Gore passed the High Performance Computing Act Of 1991…and this is why it drives me a little nuts when they make fun of Gore. It is literally true we might not have the Internet as we know it without him.