

Early quickly infiltrates and incapacitates the entire Serenity crew, rattling their convictions at the same time. Whedon would continue to explore aspects of the implacable, monologue-prone villain Jubal Early (Richard Brooks) with Serenity’s “the Operative,” but his take on the character here is close to perfect.

In fact, Whedon has said that if he had to pick one thing to represent his entire career, it would be “Objects in Space,” which reflects his youthful obsession with Sartre’s existential novel Nausea. But for a while, all fans had was this final episode, and as far as addressing Firefly’s thematic concerns, you couldn’t do better. Joss Whedon’s beloved one-season wonder would eventually get a spectacular and conclusive sendoff with the 2005 feature film Serenity, one that would answer the series’ over-arching questions. The fans that aggressively campaigned for the series’ renewal probably wouldn’t agree, but creator Josh Friedman has promised never to reveal his plans for the future of The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Terminator probably would not have been able to maintain the quality of that dystopian future, so this bold move becomes all the more powerful because we can’t see what happens next. The finale built itself on all of that improvement, and (with the possibility of cancellation looming) took a massive gamble by abruptly sending John Connor (Thomas Dekker) into a future that, to his shock, has no idea who he is.
Wonderfalls caged bird series#
That’s a shame, since Terminator’s restrictive TV budget forced the storytelling to get sharper and sharper as the series went on. Though bolstered by an extremely enthusiastic fan base (and, hey! That’s an excellent pre- Game of Thrones Lena Headey as Sarah Connor!), the show’s viewership was cut in half over the course of its second season. The Sarah Connor Chronicles was the only 21st century Terminator installment that didn’t make you want to go back in time and murder (or else dissuade) James Cameron. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, “Born to Run” Few other finales are able to give us the impression that the world we’ve been following will continue to exist-we just won’t be watching.ġ2. Life just went on in an episode that eschewed finale theatrics, and gave us a closing moment that existed in quiet poetry with the pilot. Rosenthal managed to pull it off, delivering a loosely open-ended finale that treated the story of Stars Hollow novelistically. Rowling-y statement that she knew what the last four words of the show would be (or, following her exit, would have been). On top of that, Sherman-Palladino had fueled finale hype with her J.K. In capping off a mostly not-that-great final season-largely a function of creator Amy Sherman-Palladino’s departure- Gilmore Girls faced a dilemma: There was the possibility that The CW would bring back the show for Season Eight.

The latest in a string of shows that came back from the dead thanks to Netflix (to mixed results), Gilmore Girls initially ended a seven-season run with “Bon Voyage” in 2007. Here, Paste takes a closer look at the shows that pulled off a great series finale that was never-or not fully-intended as such, to see what made them great, and how they proved you don’t need a “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen” to round out a long-form story. (Theoretically, if a TV show is true enough to itself, any episode could serve as the last episode-and yes, that’s not how storytelling works, but it’s fun to think about.) Among shows that were cancelled midseason, shows that were not renewed, and shows that anticipated the possibility of cancellation and planned a flexible finale around that, the annals of TV’s “backdoor finales” include a number of episodes as impressive and satisfying as the finales of series that came to a close of their creators’ own volition. These shows, despite dying an early death, produced an unintended series finale that still works as a thematic closer to the entire series. Though we’ll never see what Rich would have done in skewering the surreal realities of married life, thanks to the strength of the Man Seeking Woman’s Season Three/series finale, the show joins a small but mighty collection of television shows. For a series with such low ratings, it was kind of a miracle that it even made it that far. For fans of the show, which featured Jay Baruchel as a lovesick young man navigating modern dating through a variety of increasingly absurd comic premises, it was unwelcome but not necessarily unsurprising news. In March, only a few weeks after it completed a critically acclaimed third season, FXX axed Simon Rich’s romantic sitcom Man Seeking Woman.
