Sticking The Landing

The longer a series runs, the higher the expectations to deliver a suitably grand finale. So what beloved series (in any media) failed epically down the home stretch, and which left you totally satisfied, like a Thai massage parlor patron with a 60% coupon?

Without getting too specific with spoilers...


Nailed It

The Lord of the Rings - While the final film was arguably the sloppiest, it was also the grandest, and it would be hard to say what character or storyline didn't get paid off suitably. Maybe kind of cheating, though, since the books were written and movies filmed in one shot, and only distributed in serialized form.

The Wire - Again, while many have identified the final season as the weakest, very few would debate that it was on the very short list of best things on TV that year. Only against the absurdly steep standards it had built for itself over the years could it be considered a disappointment. Like LOTR, virtually all the set-up was paid off in satisfying (if sometimes heartbreaking) ways. Unlike LOTR, though, the final installment suffered if anything from too much compression. Very few shows remained as acutely aware of their internal history, and it struggled to acknowledge as much as possible of it alongside the new storylines within a slightly shortened episode run. Still, it's that kind of awareness that is so rewarding for die-hard fans, particularly as a series draws to a close. It makes you feel like the journey you took with these characters actually mattered, and while the series was in large part about the ways that change is thwarted and things stay the same, you had seen so clearly how one thing led to another that you knew exactly how all the pieces mattered.

Harry Potter - You can say that JK Rowling isn't the stylistically gifted writer out there, and you'd be right. But she has an undeniable gift for plotting, and in the metaplot of her series comes together magnificently in the final installment. I had expectations firmly in check when I picked it up, thinking that there was no way there wouldn't be quite a few loose ends, and that a lot of the enormous supporting cast she'd built up years and thousands of pages wouldn't get the short thrift. I was so, so wrong. There's no way she could have had the entire thing mapped out from the outset, but you'd never know that just by reading the series start to finish. Locations and events from 3 or 6 books earlier are revisited so organically, and dozens of important to relatively minor characters are given such grand send-offs that it should feel like shameless fan service, but it has a totally effortless feel. The last movie should be a doozy.

The Shield - Another show that never forgot its history, even if it's rather easy to spot the point where they got the end firmly in sight and mostly stopped the wheel-spinning. You know how I said you need to feel at the end as if all the steps of the journey mattered? I can't think of a sequence that brings this home better than the justly-famous scene at the end of the series' penultimate episode. 7 years is a long time for a TV series to wear out its welcome, particularly an action-oriented one that traded as much in shock value as this one, so it's downright astonishing to me that the Shield ended its tenure with a run of episodes as strong as any they ever had.

Blew It

The Matrix - Duh. The reasons for this are well-documented, but they obviously have a lot to do with the fact that the original feels so removed from the sequels. There wasn't much of a cast to bring over, and they overcompensated for this by introducing way too many new characters, a few of whom were aggressively irritating and none of which we got to know well enough to care much about when they entirely populate a segment of the big multi-front action climax. The Smith stuff was obviously great, in large part due to Hugo Weaving, but characters like Morpheus, Seraph, and the Merovingian didn't get resolutions appropriate to their screentime, to say nothing of Trinity's not-completely-horrible-in-concept-but-legendarily-awful-in-execution send off.

The Dark Tower - There's all kinds of things wrong with the back half of this series, which I still love so much about. For starters you have major characters getting offed by Johnny-Come-Latelys way too close to the end, and hugely anti-climactic uses of some of King's most intimidating Big Bads. And then there's all the meta aspects, which again are introduced way to late in the game for the importance they wind up wielding, and have the effect of making much of the earlier books feeling kind of trivial in hindsight. And speaking generally, meta stuff should always be handled very carefully, and never by introducing the idea that creating the series the audience is reading is a crucial part of maintaining the existence of multiple universes.

X-Men - Talking about the film series only here, and it's not as big a failure as those above. But there was so much good set-up that was squandered in the third film that I think it deserves a mention. If you're going to be abruptly killing off main characters in a third film (and its as good a place as any to do it), the others should at least notice. And if you've been building up to a war between people with a dizzying array of superhuman powers for 2 films, said war should be a lot more interesting than a bunch of people in leather running straight at some other people in leather and getting clawed/beaten up.

Mixed Bags

The Sopranos - Actually, I pretty much love the ending of the show, as challenging and unrelentingly bleak as it had been from the beginning. But it was so notoriously divisive that I can't put it with what I consider unqualified successes. The first part of the last season was a bit hit-and-miss, but the last batch of 9 episodes they came back with could stand with just about anything they did in their prime (wherever you happen to place it).

Battlestar Galactica -While certainly not a failure, I personally felt that the last season of the show was its weakest. It had some dizzying highs (the Earth reveal and its fallout, along with the mutiny arc were great), and some rather dismal lows (an entire episode of exposition babbled at our heroes from a hospital bed, the resurrection of a character whose death was by far the most interesting thing ever to involve them). My biggest gripe, though, is with how the show resolved its long-ambiguous supernatural elements. They seemed to be answered in the end not so much to make a theological statement as to cover up the plot holes they couldn't fill in otherwise. Not a total disappointment, and much of the actual finale was fantastic, but overall the ending did not quite match the potential I saw in the rest of the show's run.

Actually, it's not a terrible question. This was prompted by wondering where Lost would end up falling on the spectrum. I'm pretty sure it won't be an abject failure, and given how things have developed I think it's much more likely to be consistent and satisfying than, say, Twin Peaks (which I haven't seen, but gather disappointed most fans in its Lynchian obtuseness).

I think there's a fundamental difference between a series and a movie (or book) with sequels. A series is by design one ongoing story in multiple installments, not a group of standalone adventures featuring some of the same characters. What I was talking about was series with a plot that extends beyond one movie/book/season. That is why I mentioned LOTR, but wouldn't include Bond or Indiana Jones or John McLane adventures, because those are very episodic and the requirements to cap off their "series" are different than if there had been an attempt to create a more solid throughline between them. Mad Max and The Man With No Name would probably fall somewhere in between, but I haven't watched either series recently so I can't go into too much detail about them.

Like I said, this was prompted by wondering what Lost needed to do and avoid to letting me down in its final season, and so I started thinking of how other series have ended and what it could learn from them.

One I forgot that pretty much nailed it - The Bourne movies. Never read the books, but I thought each movie got progressively better, and the third brought great closure to the character while maintaining close links to the earlier installments. Also, it has that final beat with Julia Stiles and "Extreme Ways" that is just totally kickass.

I love the first 3 books, and most of the 4th. The rest have some nuggets of goodness among miles of shit, but in keeping with the topic of this thread, I should say that I liked the very, very ending just fine. It's just by the time I got there I was so disillusioned with the series that I didn't register much beyond mild surprise that "hey, I didn't hate that so much."