10 Most Bizarre TV Series Finales In History
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00:00As the writers of Game of Thrones know all too well, it's difficult to write a final episode
00:05that satisfies everyone, or anybody in the case of that particular finale. It's especially
00:10difficult in an age of instant reaction on social media and endless fan theorizing. This list
00:16collects 10 of the weirdest endings for much-loved TV series that delighted, flummoxed, and horrified
00:22viewers. I'm Jess from WhatCulture and here are the 10 most bizarre TV series finales in history.
00:2810. Riker and Troy Upstaged the Crew of the Original Enterprise
00:34Enterprise is often cited as the show that killed the Star Trek franchise. Whilst poor ratings led to
00:40its cancellation, it's more likely that the burgeoning Abrams Trek universe made commissioning
00:45new TV series more complicated. Whatever the truth, 2005's finale was the last Star Trek episode to air
00:52on TV for 12 years. Due to a strange decision by writers Brannon Braga and Rick Berman, it was
00:58received poorly. In a well-meaning but ultimately misguided attempt to lovingly bring the franchise
01:04full circle, they decided to write the finale as a lost episode of Star Trek The Next Generation.
01:10To help him make an important decision, Will Riker seeks inspiration from a simulation of Captain
01:15Archer's final mission. The episode disappointed fans and irritated members of the cast, including
01:22the ship's captain. It was the only time Scott Bakula was mean to me, Braga later told a convention
01:27audience. It's not hard to see why everyone was frustrated either. After spending four years with
01:33the crew, we say goodbye to their holographic echoes rather than the characters themselves,
01:37while simultaneously being reminded of a superior Star Trek show.
01:42Number 9. The Little House on the Prairie Blows Up
01:45The Little House on the Prairie was a wholesome, all-American family series about the country's
01:51frontier spirit in the face of adversity. The official website talks of the themes of optimism,
01:56love, and joy, all of which is at odds with the series' final feature-length TV movie entitled
02:02The Last Farewell. This finale finds the residents of the tight-knit community of Walnut Grove
02:07faced with the grinding gears of Progress. Progress takes the form of a ruthless land grabber who
02:13claims the town is owned by his boss, a rich railroad tycoon. In protest against this, the
02:18townsfolk decide to blow up their own homes with dynamite, leaving the rich tycoon with nothing but
02:24dirt. After the destruction, the frontier folks simply move on to the next town to start all over
02:29again. The story goes that the dynamite plot was purely a practical decision on the part of the writer
02:35and the producer. As part of the agreement producer Kent McRae had in renting the land on which the
02:40set was built, he had to leave the place as he'd found it. The quickest way to do this, he and writer
02:45Michael Landon decided, was to just blow up the whole town. Number 8. Mulder and Scully's Miraculous
02:52Conception The original X-Files series finale in 2002 was a chaotic climax of nine seasons' worth of
02:59conspiracies. When the series came back in 2016, there was a hope that fans would get something
03:04more satisfying. The 11th season was loosely tied together by the search for their son William,
03:10who wasn't their son at all. The season premiere had revealed him to be the son of Scully and the
03:14cigarette-smoking man, the result of a non-consensual science experiment conducted by the latter.
03:20William was technically Mulder's half-brother. The series ends with a blood-soaked finale that asked
03:26more questions than it answered. In 43 minutes, Skinner kills Ray's. The cigarette-smoking man
03:31presumably kills Skinner. Cigarette-smoking man kills William, believing him to be Mulder. Mulder
03:37kills the cigarette-smoking man. Scully reveals that she's miraculously pregnant. William is able
03:42to survive the shooting due to his regenerative abilities. It's a lot to take in. This was never
03:47intended as the very end of the X-Files, and Carter harbors hopes of a 12th season to build on the
03:53events he set up. Gillian Anderson has no intention to return, however, so for now,
03:57this brutal gunfight marks an abrupt ending for decades of mythology.
04:02Number 7
04:03The long-running Texan oil and cattle ranching drama Dallas ended in 1991 with a spectacularly
04:12out-there finale. It may have once revealed a whole season to have been a dream, but the final episode
04:17went several steps further. It begins with lead character JR Ewing drunken alone, contemplating
04:23suicide. He's visited by a spirit who shows him just how the world would have been if he'd never
04:28been born. In a direct lift from It's a Wonderful Life, JR and his guardian angel watch as his brother
04:34Bobby becomes a down-and-out, and his brother Gary runs the family business into the ground. It soon
04:40becomes clear that several people actually benefited from never having met JR. His ex-wife becomes a highly
04:46successful actress whilst a distant relation never learns of his connection to JR and lives a
04:51fulfilling family life. After these revelations, the guardian angel reveals himself to be a demon
04:56and demands that JR kill himself to improve everyone's lives. Staring at this demon in the
05:02mirror, JR raises the gun to his head and we hear a gunshot ring out, his fate unknown. In a bizarre
05:08coincidence, a month later, David Lynch's subversive soap Twin Peaks also ended with the protagonist doing
05:14himself considerable harm in front of a mirror. Number 6. Beckett and Castle Die?
05:20Castle was always a bit of a tonal mishmash. It was a frothy romantic comedy about a roguish crime
05:26writer and a steely detective that also featured grisly murders. It was basically moonlighting for
05:31the CSI generation. Once the series eventually paired Castle and Beckett, played by Nathan Fillon and
05:37Stan Akadok respectively, they had to find dramatic ways to challenge the relationship. Rather than infidelity
05:43or divorce, there were new careers, kidnappings, amnesia, and in the final episode, a double
05:48shooting that left them both bleeding out on the floor of their apartment. This ending was originally
05:53intended as a cliffhanger that would have led into the ninth season. When the production team discovered
05:58that there would be no next season, they were granted permission to hastily insert an epilogue.
06:03Taking place seven years later, Castle and Beckett are seen to be enjoying breakfast with their three
06:07children having apparently survived the shooting. Some fans reacted with frustration at the insulting,
06:13happily ever after climax, whilst others pondered whether or not the ending was an idealized future
06:18dreamt up by two dying lovers.
06:205. Kenneth the Page is Immortal
06:24In the hands of any other writers than Robert Carlock and Tina Fey, the final scene of 30 Rock's
06:30last episode would have been an indulgence too far. Far from being a disaster, it's a meta gag that stays
06:36true to the show's absurdist streak. The final episode is fairly standard sitcom fare, or as standard as a show
06:42like 30 Rock can manage. Liz Lemon becomes a mother to two adopted kids, Jack Donaghy finds himself
06:47again, and production on TGS comes to an end. It's in the final coda to the episode that things get wonderfully
06:53weird. The new head of the network, Kenneth Parcell, is listening to a sitcom pitch from Ms. Lemon, based on the
06:59stories of her great-grandmother. Giving the audience a knowing look, Kenneth commissions the show, and the camera zooms out to reveal
07:06flying cars in the background. We're far in the future and he hasn't aged a day. It's a very silly
07:11joke, but a brilliant payoff to one of 30 Rock's most enduring gags. That is, what's going on with
07:17Kenneth? Well, he's an immortal. An immortal who loves television.
07:204. Saint Elsewhere took place inside a child's mind
07:25The 1980s hospital drama Saint Elsewhere is best known for two things, launching the career of Denzel
07:31Washington and unwittingly creating a sprawling fictional universe. Knowing that the show was to
07:36be cancelled, Saint Elsewhere's writing team pitched increasingly ridiculous ways to end the series with
07:42a bang. Possible endings included a nuclear bomb wiping out the hospital, whilst another had one
07:47character admit to assassinating JFK. The least bad option was that the Saint Elsewhere hospital was
07:53actually inside a child's snow globe. The characters and situations weren't real at all,
07:58they'd been thought up by young Thomas Westball. It's a daft ending, a Hail Mary by a departing
08:03writing team. However, it had extraordinary unintended implications for the rest of network
08:09television. The show had alluded to several different shows whilst it was on the air.
08:13If Saint Elsewhere was invented by Thomas, then surely so would those other series.
08:17It's a mind-bending concept that, in essence, means that series as diverse as Cheers, The X-Files,
08:23The Wire, and Arrested Development all share the same fictional universe.
08:27When you look deeper into the Tommyverse, it makes the MCU look like Amateur Hour.
08:32Number 3. The Dinosaurs Faced the Ice Age
08:36Dinosaurs, a Jim Henson production for the ABC network, was a popular family sitcom in the early
08:411990s. It's best described as a reverse Flintstones, with intelligent dinosaurs living domestic lives
08:47alongside simpleton cavemen. It ran for four seasons and playfully turned various sitcom conventions
08:53on their head by having them performed by a cast of dinosaur puppets. It's therefore a shock when the
08:59final episode of the show goes down an incredibly dark route. It begins normally enough with Earl,
09:05the father, trying to work the new barbecue, and ends with the family facing down their inevitable
09:10extinction. In a convoluted series of events, the local corporation and an unwitting Earl have
09:16inadvertently brought about an ice age with toxic pesticides and deforestation.
09:22The show's writers wanted to use the finale to educate the younger audience about humanity's
09:27own potential extinction event. Having been informed of the cancellation before writing the
09:31final series, creator Michael Jacobs felt that this was the only way to go.
09:35When you do a show about dinosaurs, he said,
09:37you always have that extinction card in your pocket.
09:402. Life on Mars Goes to Mars
09:44On paper, an American remake of the BBC's Life on Mars had legs. By transporting modern cop Sam
09:50Tyler back in time, the show explored the tropes and problematic aspects of both 1970s television
09:56and policing in the UK. A remake could do something similar with American attitudes to both policing and
10:01cop shows. After all, there are marked differences between the grimness of the Sweeney and the hip coolness
10:07of Starsky and Hutch. Despite featuring some impressive performances, the remake never took off and
10:12was cancelled after one season. In ending the series, the American writing team made a wild
10:18departure from creator Matthew Graham's original vision. Rather than reveal that Sam had been in a
10:22coma, they opted for something much more literal. The closing scenes of the series find Sam waking from
10:28hypersleep on the first manned mission to Mars. The 1973 cop show he's been inhabiting has been a
10:33simulation created by the ship's computer to keep him entertained on his long journey. His fellow cops
10:39were all members of the crew, including Gene Hunt, who's revealed to be Sam's estranged father.
10:44Now that's far out.
10:46Number 1. How I Met Your Mother Kills the Mother
10:50Yes, you saw this one coming. How I Met Your Mother's finale is notoriously controversial and
10:55regularly features in lists of the very worst season finales. After spending nine seasons and nearly a
11:02decade building up to Ted Mosby meeting his future wife Tracy, the season finale gives viewers exactly
11:07what they want. Then it does something crazy. It kills her. The show's final episode jumps through
11:1310 years of the characters' lives to reveal that Tracy died of an undisclosed illness after four years.
11:19To make matters worse, it's also revealed that the series' framing device, Ted's story to his teenage
11:25kids, hasn't been about the mother at all. It was all a means to seek their permission for
11:28him to get back together with his ex-girlfriend Robin. The kids give their blessing and he runs
11:33off to be reunited with her. Creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas had conceived this finale
11:38during production on the second series. Eight years of speculation and emotional investment later,
11:43it just feels gross as we're told rather than shown that Ted has grieved Tracy's abrupt death for six
11:49years and the closing scene of him arriving at the doorstep of the one who got away isn't the big
11:54romantic ending the show thinks that it is. That's the end of our list, but do let me know down in
11:59that comment section if you can think of any more bizarre TV series finales that deserve a spot on
12:04this list. As always, I've been Jess from WhatCulture. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. If you
12:09like, you can come say hi to me on my Twitter account where I'm at JessMcDonald, but make sure you
12:13stay tuned to us here for plenty more great lists.