Friday Five – Worst. Endings. Ever.

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Welcome to the Friday Five. Each week we help you get acquainted with our writers with the help of a top five list. This week we list our five most disappointing endings.

The end of a show, series, or movie is just as important as the beginning. The things that got the viewers hooked in the first place needs to be properly addressed in the finale, no matter what it is. If the prospect of two character hooking up was alluded to early on, it needs to either come to fruition or be turned town entirely by the end. If a hero is chosen to help stop the impending doom that shall befall the world, all the while battling ancient enemies of his ancestors, then he needs to stop the end of the world and his ancient enemies. If an enemy miraculously steps out of the shadows at the end of a movie and shouts “Hey! I’m the bad guy you were looking for the whole time, despite not really having any conflict with me throughout the duration of this adventure! Let’s do battle to determine the fate of the world!”, that’s a BAD ENDING!!! When we’re about to witness the final climax and instead we watch as our our main protagonists bite the dust without any proper closure, it’s called bad writing.

This crap happens too often, and one game in particular is really bugging me right now! Read on to see what games, movies, books, and TV shows you may not want to reconsider investing time in. Don’t forget to tell us your most disappointing endings in the comments below.

Chris

For the most part, the worst kinds of endings for me are cliffhangers. I don’t mind when it gets solved in the following movie, book, game, or TV show. Unfortunately that’s not always the case.

1. Heroes – This show had a lot of ups and downs during it’s four seasons, and while the third season wasn’t that good the fourth was improving each week. Then it got canceled with a cliffhanger ending and we’ll never know what happens.
2. Alcatraz – I thought this was a really interesting show, sure it got a little boring for some of the middle episodes, but the overall plot was cool. Unfortunately like Heroes it was canceled with a cliffhanger ending that we’ll never known the outcome of.
   Matrix Revolution – This was a pretty bad movie in all regards, but the ending was just terrible.
3. Lost In Space – The movie had a terrible ending, because it ended with them jumping to lightspeed or something like that and that’s it. They weren’t sure if they were going to survive and find their destination or not. And now neither are we.
4. The Golden Compass – The movie was pretty good, and stayed true enough to the book, until the end. It ended like half an hour too soon, and we end up missing out on some big plot points that would have led directly into the next movie. At this point we can’t expect to ever see a sequel either.

Special Mentions goes to last years show The River, which was a really good show that ABC decided not to pick up for a second season, but almost got picked up on Netflix. It’s ending wasn’t terrible, but it was obvious the writers and producers were expecting a second season.

Vogel

1. King Kong (2005) – I’ve always held myself as a movie buff. Throughout this entire movie they play out the romance of Adrien Brody and Naomi Watts’ characters with the ‘agreement’ that it wouldn’t be love. For the entire last third of the movie Brody realizes that he should’ve told her he loves her, chases after her and finds out she’d been carried off by the beast, follows them to the top of the Empire State Building where he saves the girl, King Kong falls and all is well. They embrace each other and roll credits. This may not sound problematic to most people, but the whole point of him tracking her down was to tell her he loved her, which he didn’t do. Bad writing/directing in my opinion.
2. Roseanne (TV Series) – Not as bad as St. Elsewhere, but it felt like they just didn’t know how to finish the show. “How should we end this show?” “What if we make it so that the entire series was a lie and the last two seasons were made up entirely?” “I like it!”
3. K-Pax (2001) – The ending of this movie never sat well with me. First he’s an alien, then he’s just a guy who’d gone crazy, then he tells people he’ll take one of them back to his home planet. The winner disappeared and then he went pseudo-lobotomized. I guess my main issue is what happened. Was he an alien possessing the body of a human? If not what happened to the chick from the psyche-ward? Inception reminded me of the ending of this movie but I felt Inception gave enough information to draw your own conclusions but still have enough to discuss with others.
4. Alan Wake (Game) – I beat this game in about 3 days. Not because it was short, but because my wife had to take it back to work (GameStop game borrowing policy). I really enjoyed the game up until the end. I thought that it was on the whole well written and kept me going. Usually if a game doesn’t grab my attention enough I’ll just stop playing. When it got to the end (and I’m going from memory here which is mostly hazy) the game was like a dream sequence and you don’t know what really happened to his wife but it could have just been the book he was writing the whole time. Like I said, I don’t 100% remember the details but I do remember being entirely disappointed.
5. Batman Arkham City (Game) – The ending to the game was actually really good as far as story and plot go. But the final boss was a complete let down. Way too easy, way too quick.

Walnut

In my day I have completed many many things and seen a few terrible endings. When they pretty much raise more questions than they ask, THAT’S BULLSHIT!!!!!!

1. Infinite Undiscovery – The game was ok, it wasn’t the best but had some good features and gameplay elements. I should have expected a bad ending, but not as bad as it was. They forced a happy ending.
2. Assassins Creed 3 – All I have to say is screw that ending! All the hype, all the deception, 5 damn games, and that’s what they do with the series. BAD UBISOFT. BAD!
3. Dead Nation – This was one of the best top down shooters I’ve ever played. The story was pretty good, but spending all that time to get that cop-out of an ending just infuriates me! I still play it every now and again though.
4. Heroes – They should have at least made a movie to finish off the series. The way they ended it made you want more, but the writers weren’t expecting to get cancelled, so they didn’t write a proper ending.
5. Zombie Powder – This is a manga written by Tite Kubo, the writer of Bleach. This manga was started around the same time as he started writing Bleach, but Bleach got too big so he had to stop. In the last issue he writes that he has interest in continuing. My hope is that he does bring it back, now that Bleach is over. Every time I’m in a bookstore I look for a new issue.

Eric

Ending a long running show, or game series, can be hard. There’s always that chance you’re going to piss someone off by not telling the story they wanted to see. Instead of taking a chance and telling a story they want to tell while bringing some meaning and closure to their work, we continue to see creators finishing their tales with the death of the main character. Sure this incites shock, but the feelings that arise after this initial reaction are generally negative. Anyone remember that Mass Effect outcry?

1. Assassin’s Creed III – I’ve been hooked since I turned the first game on during the christmas of 2007. It was startling to see this game, marketed as a historical assassination game, take a sci-fi twist right as the game loaded up! I have 100% completed every game in the series. Read the comics. Even purchased the Encyclopedia meant to define every element of this series! And in the end, Ubisoft moves for the classic cop out ending. I guess the DLC could fix it. . . but do I really want to spend more time with the wooden Connor just to see if the Desmond story takes a better turn? Probably.
2. Uncharted 3 – I love this series. It’s by far one of the better games of this current generation. Each game got subsequently bigger and better than the last. There was one downside to the games tho, with the exception to the original, they all had bad finales. While Uncharted 2 had a bad final boss fight, Uncharted 3 had a bad ending overall. It was a general let down, and the primary villain just sorta died right before the end of the game took place. There wasn’t even an epic confrontation! Very anticlimactic.
3. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days – You pretty much find out the entire game didn’t matter. Even Birth By Sleep, which literally explained EVERYTHING in Kingdom Hearts, glanced over this one.
4. Borderlands – I’m a sucker for roguelikes, dungeon crawlers, and loot fests. Borderlands took everything I loved about these games, turned it into a first person shooter, and god damn was it good! Sure the levels were a bit repetitive, but the loot was great! The story was hilarious, but the ending. . . wow. That was a let down! No treasure in the coveted vault. . . just some japanese tentacle porn.
5. Dragon Age II – This is more about BioWare then directly related to Dragon Age II, but since it’s the game I was most invested in when I started to notice their trend I’ve decided to use it as the example. BioWare has this awesome ability to craft incredible stories and worlds, with amazing detail. Everything they do is filled with rich histories, and different cultures. It’s amazing. Their only problem is creating proper stories worth paying attention to. Dragon Age II focused on the Champion of Kirkwall, and the events that surrounded the destruction of the city. Through 3 acts you face random challenges, enemies, and other series of disconnected events all the while. . . nothing happens in the background. There’s literally no over arching story blending it all together. Just you, in a city, doing random stuff. Eventually some conflict comes to a head involving 2 characters you’ve NEVER MET, and this forces you to choose who to side with. It doesn’t matter though, since you fight the same final bosses, and the story plays out the same no matter what. This isn’t the first BioWare game to do this, but it is the most offensive.

Drootin

It always sucks for something to have a good beginning and middle just to fall apart at the end. When that takes place it can easily take something that was good and completely make it do a 180. So here’s my list of the 5 most disappointing endings that I can remember.

1. The 2009-10 Philadelphia Flyers Season: SPORTS! The Flyers had a rough regular season but snuck into the playoffs as the 7th seed in the Eastern Conference. In the playoffs however the team stepped up their game. They dominated the #2 seed Devils 4 games to 1 in the first round. Then the Flyers had one of the greatest comebacks in all of sports history, trailing 3-0 in the series vs. the Bruins, they came all the way back to force a game 7, then falling behind 3-0 in the 1st period of that game, just to come back again and win the game 4-3 and the series 4-3. They then again dominated a series over the Canadiens to get to the Stanley Cup Final. It was a back and forth series, Flyers trail 3-2 going into Game 6 at home, the game goes to overtime and then the Flyers allow the weakest Stanley Cup series clinching goal that likely will ever be scored. It was confusingly disappointing, it seemed like only the player who took the shot knew it went in. It was depressing how soft that goal was and how that season ended.
2. The Matrix Revolutions: The Matrix is one of my favorite all time movies. Reloaded and Revolutions were bad, they were VERY bad. It seemed like the more money in the budget they had the worse the movies got. These movies are almost bad enough to ruin the original.
3. The 2004-05 Philadelphia Eagles Season: Yup, MORE SPORTS! Bet you didn’t see that coming! This is the only time during my life that the Eagles have gotten to the Super Bowl and it did not go well. The Eagles went 13-3 that year and made it to the Super Bowl despite some major injuries in the playoffs. The Eagles scored a TD with 1:48 left to cut the deficit down to only 3 points but couldn’t finish the comeback.
4. Batman: Arkham Asylum: This is more the final boss fight than the actual ending of the game although I don’t really remember much of the ending. The final boss fight, to me anyway, took all the fun of the combat of the game out and just was a very repetitive gimmicky battle and just really soured the game for me.
5. 2012 Philadelphia Wings Season: The Wings had a rough season last year but had seemed to get things turned around in time for a playoff run. They came out very flat in their playoff game vs Rochester and mounted a comeback late in the 4th Quarter but it fell just short.

Eric is not a boss. You can Email Eric or follow Eric on Twitter @EricSweeten or Facebook

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