The Worst Season Finales of All Time

10 Worst Season Finales Of All Time 10) Dinosaurs Jim Henson’s 90s sitcom Dinosaurs was about as family-friendly as a show could get So fans were just a tad surprised when this light-hearted show ended with

well, the apocalypse Even more bafflingly the show didn’t go with the standard meteorite extinction storyline but completely change the way the dinos died out They don’t get yeeted to death by a space rock, they die out because greedy corporations destroyed the environment Hey, that’s also the way humans are gonna die: what a neat coincidence

At the start of the episode, a plant known as cider poppies is growing everywhere Under pressure to find a solution, the WESAYSO Corporation forces bumbling lead character Earl to drop poison on the flowers It works In fact, it works way too well, fatally poisoning all plant life on Earth The result? Well, with no food the dinosaurs are done for

Obviously, Henson and co were trying to subvert the traditional extinction storyline and make a point about the dangers of our effect on the environment But still, it was a weirdly dark way to close out a previously family-friendly show And one that critics and audiences largely rejected 9) How I Met Your Mother The final season of this show had a difficult job After years of teasing, they had to find someone who could live up to the part of the “Mother” character

You know, the person they’ve been hyping up since day one But amazingly they actually pulled that part off Fans loved Cristin Milioti as the titular ‘mother’ role And they still managed to find a way to screw up the finale In a last-minute twist, we see a montage in which the mother dies and Ted asks other lead character and ex-partner Robin out on a date

The problem with this finale was that it had to be filmed years before the end of the show: when the child actors playing Ted’s kids throughout the series were still young enough to do the scene But the nature of Ted and Robin’s relationship had changed after the first few seasons And this late-story twist turned the reveal of the mother, which should have been the climax of the show, into almost a side-story 8) Game of Thrones You all knew it had to be on here With the possible exception of the first couple of episodes, fans hated basically the entirety of Thrones Season 8

And while the final episode may not even be the worst of the series, it was an unbelievably disappointing ending to a show that had built up a dedicated fanbase through its conniving plot and smart characterisation Daenerys turned into a nazi for no reason Bran became the world’s most disinterested King And Drogon the dragon seemed to develop an understanding of symbolism and burned down the Iron Throne It made no sense, and felt like a forced, premature ending, rushed out because the writers all wanted to leave for other projects

Mainly, because it was forced, premature ending, rushed out because the writers all wanted to leave for other projects Benioff and Weiss were given as much time as they wanted to draw the show to a less rushed conclusion But they wanted to go and write a certain star-bound franchise Let’s George RR Martin’s overworked heart lasts long enough to give the books at least a real send-off 7) Rosanne Everything has to come to an end

Youth Beauty But since we all have to go, why oh why would you choose to do it the way Rosanne did? The beloved, and iconic middle American sitcom built up an adoring fanbase, partly through being grounded and realistic This wasn’t a wacky show, just a sitcom about a blue-collar family trying to make ends meet The ending threw all that away

In the finale, it was revealed that all the events of the show's ninth season had been made up Well, I mean the whole is made up obviously But even in the show’s universe, they were made up, fictionalised by the character Rosanne, who was writing a book Most significantly, her husband Dan had actually died a season earlier from the heart attack viewers had been led to believe he survived at the end of season 8 This move proved massively controversial

And when the reboot season of Rosanne came in 2017, this move was retconned away as quickly as possible 6) Lost JJ Abrams is famous for writing what he refers to as “mystery box” stories This is a style of writing that focuses on withholding just enough information to keep things suspenseful and engaging And his work on Lost was no exception

The show expertly and deftly raised question after question, mystery after mystery until viewers couldn’t bear to look away But the problem with that style? When you have to say what’s in the box No finale to Lost was ever gonna be able to satisfactorily solve all the loose threads it had cast But fans found the ending, which basically shrugged and said “they were all in limbo”, kind of – a particularly unsatisfying denouement Most fans were confused as to what the show’s conclusion even meant

Had they been dead since the plane crash? Did they die at some other point in the story? If so, when? Was it all at once? You get the idea Those who thought that they did understand the story still felt it was a cop-out, and wasted send off for the characters and story that the fans had come to love But what do you think 5) Two And A Half Men Charlie Sheen’s 2011 meltdown remains one of the greatest moments in the history of pop culture chaddary But clearly, Two And A Half Men creator Chuck Lorre has never gotten over Sheen’s behaviour, because he used the show’s finale to have one last pop at Sheen Although there had been four seasons since Charlie’s character, also called Charlie, had died: Lorre decided that the character was actually alive This twist, around which much of the episode was based, seemed like it would bring Sheen back for a swansong Instead, the episode ends with us seeing Charlie from behind approaching his old home

Just as he’s about to return, a piano falls out of nowhere and splats him Something no amount of tiger blood and Adonis DNA can save you from The camera then pulls back to reveal Lorre in the director’s chair Lorre gives a thumbs up and recites Sheen’s famous catchphrase “Winning”, before also being crushed by a piano This strange ending felt less like a wrapping up of storylines and characters that audiences had come to know over 12 seasons, and more like a bitter director sticking the knife in an ex-employee who’d annoyed him

4) The X Files Writing an ending is hard That much should be clear by now But The X FIles deserves special mention for getting two cracks at tying things up And failing hard at both The finale to the original series aired in 2002 and had Mulder on trial for finally proving the government was covering up a planned alien invasion in 2012

Which, was wrong or these aliens are reaaaaally fashionably late Fans criticised the finale for not answering many of the questions the show had raised Instead, it raised depressing new questions and left people feeling frustrated Still, it was better than the show’s second ending The finale to Fox’s X Files reboot series revolved around the shock twist that Mulder and Scully’s son was actually the offspring of the main alien villain

Luckily, the kid is killed off and neither Mulder nor Scully seem remotely bothered by the death of a child they’d thought was theirs until a few hours earlier 3) St Elsewhere It’s not a show many people think about now But in its day, the medical drama St Elsewhere was huge Running from 1982 to 1992, the show won tonnes of awards, pulled in a stable audience and was even critically considered one of the best shows of all time So imagine how pissed fans were when the grand finale to the show was… are you ready for this… it was all in the imagination of an autistic child staring at a snow globe

Yeah, they went with the “it was all a dream” ending that even most 6th graders would be too embarrassed to include in a creative writing project Apparently, the thinking of the writing staff was that they wanted to ensure the show was definitely over, with no chance for spinoffs or reboots And saying the whole thing was made up by some kid we’d never seen before was their way of completely killing off any chance of that happening It’s a weird mentality because presumably, the fear of a spinoff is that it would ruin the reputation of the show Which this did anyway… Most of the cast have since admitted they hate the ending

A sentiment fans certainly share BUT it did set up the frankly fascinating Tommy Westphall Hypothesis, which you can hear all about in our video on Franchises That Share The Same Universe 2) Quantum Leap On the one hand, the terrible terrible ending to Quantum Leap wasn’t the writer’s fault They’d written what was only supposed to be a season finale, not a conclusion to the full show But the studio had cancelled them, meaning that would indeed be the final episode

Still, you’d expect them to think of a better fix than they did The last outing of the time travel show opens the way all the other episodes did: with lead character, Dr Sam Beckett trying to return to his own time That’s Beckett with two “t”s by the way, you’ll see why that’s important Beckett meets a character that’s essentially God who tells him to could have returned home any time he wanted, but his will to help people was too strong Then the episode fades to black and we get the “fix” the writers thought of: a single title card saying “Dr Sam Becket never returned home”

This is the bleakest possible ending to a show that viewers really loved And just to complete the gut punch, look: they spelled his name wrong What a sad way for this once-loved show to go 1) Dexter Dexter was everyone’s favourite show about a serial killer of serial killers A serial serial killer killer? The Showtime hit aired for eight seasons

And over that time, viewers became obsessed with Michael C Hall’s charming vigilante serial killer The show peaked around Season 4, but many fans hung on to see how things would end for Dexy And the answer? Pretty boringly Some viewers believed Dexter would finally be caught and punished for all that killing he just loved doing Some believed he’d find a way to fully redeem himself

Instead he basically just retired from being a serial killer and became a lumberjack after throwing his sister’s body into a… hurricane? They did suggest he was still constantly tortured by his own violent past But still, it seems like an anti-climax to see one of the great killers of all time reduced to hacking down cedarwood, with no reference to how others perceived his crimes Hopefully, he least stays true to his character by only chopping down trees that have been chopping down other trees

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