this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
109 points (96.6% liked)

Ask Lemmy

35362 readers
1758 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 47 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It's Game of Thrones, by far.

And they can't use the excuse that they ran out of material and had to write their own ending. Tokyo Ghoul Root A did it to moderate effect, and Fullmetal Alchemist (the first one from 2003) did it extremely well. They just couldn't write worth a damn so they said Fuck It and flipped the table. They'd already made their money from it. They had good options and they walked right past them. I guess they just wanted it to be a surprise?

LOST gets an honourable mention for being so weird. But I feel like they painted themselves into a corner, though that's no excuse. Again looking to anime as the standard bearer for storytelling others should be measured by, Assassination Classroom painted itself into a tighter corner. (Long story short, alien blows up the moon and threatens to blow up Earth if humans can't kill him in a year... but only some students are really allowed to try and he can only be harmed by rubber bullets and knives that wouldn't harm a real person — traditional weapons, whatever you can think of, have no effect. Oh, and he can also move at, like, the speed of light, squared, or something dumb like that. And holy crap what a stupid ending, but... they made it work. It's still stupid, but it worked better than the LOST ending, and the LOST writers had a lot more space to work in.)

[–] tankplanker@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

With Lost they repeatedly said that nobody, not a single person, had guessed what the ending was, not realizing that this was one of the first shows to go massive for fan theories on the Internet so everything even remotely plausable had been guessed.

So yeah, they painted themselves into that corner fair and square as it was clear they had no fucking clue what the ending was when they started that show.

If it was me, I would have admitted someone guessed it and just picked whichever fan theory seemed the most sensible to me.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] remon@ani.social 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How is the Game of Thrones ending controversial? It's pretty unanimously hated.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] HappySkullsplitter@lemmy.world 45 points 1 week ago (9 children)

Genuinely controversial or just bad?

The Lost finale is probably both

Unrelated, just realized how the advent of streaming has changed the way we talk about past TV series.

Before streaming we would say the Lost finale was

past tense, because it had finished airing

Nowadays, no show really finishes airing so it's discussed in a present tense

Sorry, I'm old

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 26 points 1 week ago

Never apologize for being old

Get mad at them for having the audacity to be so young

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] Wytch@lemmy.zip 40 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Can't talk about controversial TV endings without mentioning St. Elsewhere. For a long time this show had the most infamous. The big reveal that the entire run of the show took place in the mind of an autistic boy with a snow globe was not a hit with fans and remains an object lesson in how to rug-pull your fan base.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

But it did lead to the fanon that, because of crossover episodes, basically all media takes place in that kid's mind.

Including reality - "Cops" is in the crossover chain even if you don't count celebrity appearances as themselves.

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 8 points 1 week ago

The Tommy Westphall Universe. If you take the spin-off characters from St Elsewhere, and the spin-offs from the spin-offs, and character crossovers to other shows, it means that hundreds (at least 419, so far) of shows all took place in the mind of an autistic boy named Tommy Westphall.

The Tommy Westphall Universe Master List

[–] Marshezezz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 36 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The Seinfeld one always gets a lot of shit

[–] moistclump@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I loved Curb Your Enthusiasm recognizing that.

[–] Marshezezz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 1 week ago

Larry’s self awareness is incredible. The references in curb to it had me in tears

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 36 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Stargate: Atlantis

I hated how a show about exploring and pioneering ended with them turning tail and running back home.

Also, I know it is an American show, but sometimes I would just love to see the spacecraft landing someplace other than by a national landmark in the US.

What if they had landed in say Norway, or the Gulf of Finland? The diplomacy would have been very interesting.

[–] PureTryOut@lemmy.kde.social 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Afaik they were supposed to do a movie still but that sadly never happened.

I agree with you, just leaving that galaxy behind was a very disappointing ending.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] breakingcups@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It was very sudden and jarring, I believe they only learned they'd been canceled late into the season but had plans for a movie to return them to Pegasus, which never happened.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 9 points 1 week ago

they definitely were planning something in season 6, in a interview i believe they were going to have a different alien enemy(the deadalus variation enemies to be the part of the next season)

[–] InvisibleShoe@lemmy.world 35 points 1 week ago (6 children)

The Sopranos final episode immediately springs to mind

[–] FUCKING_CUNO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This one stands out to me as it was a "love it or hate it" ending, not just terrible or a giant let down.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] 2piradians@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I like it since I learned that it ends so abruptly because the last POV is Tony's as he dies.

That said, it whooshed nearly everyone who watched it and therefore pissed people off.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] gdog05@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sopranos and Game of Thrones are the ones I recall having the most uproar. To this day, new videos on YouTube about how awful they were.

[–] mrmaplebar@fedia.io 36 points 1 week ago

It's hard to know if GoT counts as "controversial" because it seems like everyone unanimously hated it.

[–] YeahIgotskills2@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

I loved it. It made me think about how life just stops. I love all the foreshadowing.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Davel23@fedia.io 22 points 1 week ago (12 children)
[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 week ago

I found that show really interesting to watch. I think a lot of the series holds up, in terms of acting and storytelling, to the point where I'll rewatch the series despite knowing the awful ending—but the ending was fucking awful.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 8 points 1 week ago

the reigiminaged series was all wierd from start to finish, apparently it was because of the showrunners christian views, that he wanted a bsg, to have christian like ending.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 20 points 1 week ago (6 children)

These Are The Voyages is definitely unpopular

[–] sheridan@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I can't get over how Scott Bakula starred in two shows involving time travel and both had infamously bad finales.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Fun fact: In one episode, they talk about how a leap has to be completed in a certain amount of time in order to guarantee the ability to leap home. They say that the amount of time that each leap must be completed within falls by a certain percentage each time. I did the calculation once. Sam was still within the threshold even after all the many seasons. He should have leaped home.

And it would have been to the alt-timeline where Al and Ziggy were replaced by St.John and Alpha, the one which showed up when Sam previously leapt into Al and temporarily changed history.

All the pieces were there.

(If this feels familiar, I have posted this online before.)

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] aramis87@fedia.io 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

One interesting thing about the Quantum Leap finale is that God is played by Bruce McGill (who shows up in a number of Bellisario's shows, but ignore that for now). Which doesn't seem particularly interesting until you realize that Bruce McGill also appeared in the Quantum Leap pilot, implying that God has been involved in the whole "Leap that went wrong" thing from the very beginning. I've never been entirely sure how I felt about that, but it was an interesting bit of casting, regardless.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The Prisoner probably. Nothing is resolved. #6 escapes... or does he? The Individual was #1 the whole time.

[–] Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Okay, but it turning out that the iconic "Who is Number 1?!" "You are Number 6" exchange from the intro was Number 2 literally telling him the answer was freaking brilliant.

[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

"You are, Number 6."

[–] BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Everyone was very shocked back in the day at the ending of Seinfeld.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] SailorFuzz@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (9 children)

The "Attack On Titan" finale was a bunch of nonsense.

Everything just whipped back and forth at the whims of being artsy. None of it aligned with what the show had been known for in writing or foreshadowing. Characters constantly acting unreasonable for the sake of conflict. Shit just stopped making sense and everything felt like it was being made up on the spot.

All of the Ymir lore felt forced. Why tf was it a worm?

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] AbsolutelyClawless@piefed.social 14 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Something that I don't see mentioned a lot outside of fandom, even though apparently the show was quite big after Netflix picked it up. Lucifer arguably started going downhill in S3, mostly because Fox execs wanted to turn it into a soap opera. Which of course failed, so they dropped the show altogether, only for Netflix to "save" it.

I put that in quotation marks because I kind of wish they just let the show die at the cliffhanger instead of letting the narcs in charge run it into ground. Narcs being the two lapsed Catholic showrunners. The show was still salvageable by the end of S5, but S6 retroactively destroyed everything, making it unwatchable for half of the fandom, while the other half was vaping copium.

I'm not going to write the synopsis, because fuck that burning cesspit, but these are some of the issues with it:

  • abuse apologia and perpetuation of generational trauma "for the greater good" in a universe with an omni-potent god
  • uncontested sentiment that bio children are worth more than adopted/step-children
  • sex shaming
  • rampant misogyny
  • glorification of suffering
  • hamfisted tragic ending clumsily masked with a "bittersweet" wrapping
  • plus many more very Christian sentiments that nobody asked for (except for the part of the fandom that can't separate their religion from a TV show).

I have never watched GoT, so I'm not a good judge on this, but not a negligible part of the fandom claimed the Lucifer season/finale was worse. So there's that.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] TedZanzibar@feddit.uk 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Controversial as in it ruined an otherwise great show? Dexter.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 9 points 1 week ago

Supernatural, yes we know should've ended as long time ago. But the last episode was strange, the prior episode should've been the end. It's a glorified run of the mill episode

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›