The problem with expanded media, like TV shows and movie franchises, is that the writers are so far up their own asses snorting cocaine that they can never end the series correctly.
Well scratch that, Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a good ending, but that’s because Joss Whedon isn’t human but a perfect transdimensional being gifted to us by some powerful omnipotent force, as long as we all forget about that one Alien movie he was involved with. You know the one, no you don’t. Don’t pretend too.
Also Dollhouse was kinda meh. But whatevs, here’s the major problem with how things end.
Pulling a Random Theme Out of No Where and Then Shoving It Down Everyone’s Throats Until It Comes Out the Other End Covered in Feces
Let’s look at few infamous examples.
Lost, The story of how a bunch of survivors of a plane crash survived on an island full of mysteries, exploring the themes of what people will do if they were given the opportunity to reinvent themselves, and also the fine line between faith of religion and faith of reality, also how intertwined peoples lives are even though we live on a planet of billions. This somehow becomes about a magic cork holding in the evil red wine of the world, and also about how friendship over comes all challenges, even the afterlife. Or some shit.
Bad enough they had to make the island Literally magic. They could of just said the island is place where people can reimagine themselves or something cheesy, and then have all the survivors leave with a cutsey “where are they now” montage to Greenday’s “Hope You Had the Time of Your Life”. At least then the reaction to the finale would have been “well that was dumb and cheesy, but ultimately feels like they tried to finish the story in a somewhat logical conclusion”
as suppose to “Seriously a two hour finale, the length of feature film, and they fix all the problems with one roll of duct tape, and the good guy punches the bad guy for and hour and 45 minutes, then they all go hangout with Jesus. Really?”
Oh here’s another, the infamous Mass Effect 3 ending, a story involving racism, classism, prejudice, military spending, scientific discovery, cooperations of all peoples, the willpower of humanity, and other deep shit like that.
Yeah it’s all about ether you all become cavemen again, get killed by terminators, or become a sexier version of the Borg from Star Trek. All those themes you explored while making choices that would mentally cripple a human being if made in real-life; whole thing was about if are we going to become robots, or are the robots going to kill us.
That whole giant fleet you built up to face a threat that will wipe out all life in the galaxy, the fleet made up of thousands of aliens that you went around uniting under one flag to face a common foe. You settled all of their petty differences and showed them that there’s a bigger picture, and that as one we are weak, but together we are strong. And as you make your final offensive that could mean the end to everything if it fails. Oh also your ship is named the Normandy, almost as if they were going for some sort of reference to how World War 2 untied millions of people against one common foe that would have destroyed everything, or something.
Maybe I read too far into it, since it’s all about robots and shit.
Oh don’t think you can run away Assassin’s Creed III, you may thing you could pass some stupid-ass ending shit by the rest of the world, since apparently no one cares about the Desmond story. But guess what, I gave a shit about the Desmond story, and man was I engrossed in it. I cared about Lucy, Desmond, Shaun, Rebecca, and even goddamn Subject 16. If I could draw I would have drew them as the Scooby-Doo characters for that’s how endearing they were to me.
Notice how I wrote that whole paragraph in the past tense Ubisoft. Because randomly throwing out ideas of questioning religion because it might of all been space magic technology, was only hinted at throughout the series. Not to mention that played more to the themes of “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” which USED to be the motto for the series. Apparently now it’s all, “hey look new shit to do, FUN”.
These games had a story, and I cared about it.
So when you have the character push some random-ass button that will:
A) Channel the entire energy of a solar flare into the body of Desmond Miles, killing him
and
B) Revives a eons old godlike being to re-enslave humanity, unrelated to the whole killing Desmond thing
But don’t worry the game did present Desmond with a choice, ether die and doom humanity, or become Jesus in a world without technology. And he would literally become Jesus, as the screen shows images of him emerging from a cave with a large boulder blocking it, him wearing a torn up hoodie that looks like a robe now, and then how his name will be forgotten and then just remembered as “the Shepard”, which is also what Jesus is referred to as.
OH CIRCLING BACK TO MASS EFFECT, same damn thing, Commander Shepard is remembered as “the Shepard”, and he/she also makes a sacrifice to save all of the world from the sins of being organic and not robotic.
Point being we had two games that were bookending a trilogy with a lot of build up, and they both end with some Jesus allegory out of nowhere, and some commentary about how we rely on technology too much. Now that I think about it, I think the games want us to go to church and play outside more often.
Lost is still pretty inexcusable, other than those two writers only know how to write 2/3 of a story and never know how to finish it. Hence why they were also the brains behind the magic blood in Star Trek: Into Darkness.
Here’s how I imagined that conversation went:
“Hey we killed a major character off, and we need some reason for his heterosexual life partner to go capture the bad guy who inadvertently killed him and escaped simply because we have another 20 minutes of movie”
“Can we finish by making another hot chick take her clothes off for no reason?”
“No the audience will notice that we’re only pandering to their penises if we do it twice”
“What if we have Spock go down and capture Benedict Cumberbatch and use his magic space blood to save Kirk?”
“You mean he has to go get Benedict’s blood, even though we have shown that there’s an entire cargo hold filled with people with the same blood currently frozen and making a much more easier solution to whole magic blood problem then some 10 minute long fight scene.”
“Yeah, but do you think that people who pay 15 bucks to watch moving images for two hours are really that smart?”
“No not really, so magic blood for no real reason it is, also we can’t just call Benedict Cumberpatch’s character Benedict Cumberpatch.”
“Oh, I know let’s just call him Khan, like the second Star Trek movie, and THEN we’ll make it a big reveal that he was Khan the whole time.”
“But that twist would only make sense to those would see it coming a mile away, like in the trailers, and it wouldn’t make any sense to those who haven’t seen the movie we’re poorly ripping off.”
“Yeah, but we’re the only smart people in existence, movie goers are a bunch of idiots who will watch anything, did you see how much Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made, that was literally just text saying ‘thanks for the money assholes’ and Michael Bay flipping the bird to camera for three hours, and it still got a sequel”
“Man this cocaine is really good”
“I know right”
“Do you think removing death as threat to any of the characters would ruin any sense of danger in the next film”
“Can’t hear you, hookers and blow”
Also as an honorable mention, The Conduit 2. The Conduit series is a first person shooter series on the Wii console. So since it’s a FPS on the Wii not called Metriod it didn’t sell. But it still goes down as the weirdest ending in all of history. Your character is fighting off of an alien invasion in the US, you beat the final boss. A portal forms and out walks George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in power armor saying that they’re here to help you out, as more figures walk out of the portal, presumably the rest of the US Presidents. I like to imagine that if the scene played out FDR would of rolled out in a hover chair like Professor X.
At least Breaking Bad ends with Walter White finishing the goals he set out to do in the first place, and he did die protecting his beloved meth lab. Even though out of context, him killing a bunch of Neo-Nazis to do so seems a little on the convoluted side.
Close enough.
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