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Bleakest TV show endings

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liquidtmd

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So I finished up my rewatch of 24 last night, concluding with the pretty solid-ish Live Another Day

Loved the entire ride but having done the entire series in a relatively short time, I was struck by the kinda bleakness of it.

Spoilers are inevitable for this kind of thread so if you're sensitive to hearing the end of shows, I suggest you bail


At the end of LAD sure Jack averted a crisis with China, but ultimately

- He was facing exile and torture / jail in Russia
- Audrey was shot to death
- Heller had Alzheimer's and would forget everything and quit
- Renee Walker shot to death 15 seconds after having sex with Bauer :(
- Chloes seemingly only other friend was shot in the head in front of her, with her husband and son dead
- Kate quit knowing her friend for the last year was the one who drove her husband to suicide
- The hot actress who played Simone was dead :(

And in terms of the entire series run, all the characters we cared for as an audience

- Palmer assassinated
- Michelle dead, Tony in jail
- Teri dead, Chapelle dead
- Hassan throat slit, Taylor probably impeached with her daughter in jail and husband estranged
- Sherry Palmer dead, Wayne Palmer dead, Logan shot himself in the head
- George Mason got radiation poisoning and rode a nuclear warhead into a desert and blew up
- Bill Buchanan ran into a room of explosives whilst getting shot at

Admittedly I was drunk for some of it but the only people in nine years I think who got away were Kim and Naked Mandy.

Cheer me up GAF and share your other shows where the end result ended up being quite so nihilistic
 
Seinfeld is one that comes to mind. Basically ruins that whole show and just makes you feel like an awful person for loving those characters. Huge bummer.
 
Alf ends with alf getting captured by the FBI.

It gets darker when you think about what must have happened if it wasen't a show.

Family gets killed by the FBI and Alf gets experimented on for the rest of his life.
 
Tough to top Dinosaurs.

ALF got captured by government scientists in the series finale.

David the Gnome was just... holy shit.

Little House on the Prarie blew up the whole town.
 
Berserk 1997 anime stuff was like really emotional for me when I was a teenager and watched that. Amazing stuff.
 
Seen this thread before, so I'll repost some of what was posted.

ALF

Alf ends up being captured by the government and probably experimented on and dissected.
 
Live Another Day was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the title.

Also, Manhattan's ending is fairly bleak.
Fritz killing himself after finding out his bestie was responsible for his wife death, the bomb works, Helen getting a promotion... to oversee the bomb dropped on Nagasaki
 
90% of nip/tuck episodes.

I dont even know why I watched it. 'Im sorry, but the little girls body rejected her face transplant. The End'
 
Blackadder. The main character we've been following over multiple generations all get gunned down in mayter of seconds.
 
The winner has to be Dinosaurs. The show literally ended with the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Alf's ending is pretty damn dark, too. The show ended with Alf being captured by the US government and since they cancelled the movie where he was going to be saved we can only assume he died while the government was performing experiments on him.
 
Quantum Leap
9HhR2.jpg
 
The Knick

Season 2 spoilers
- Thackery dies operating on himself in a misguided attempt to prove that ether is dangerous while struggling with his grief over his girlfriend's death and his subsequent relapse into narcotics.
- Algernon's career as a surgeon is ruined after Galinger sabotaged his most important operation and permanently blinded him in his right eye. All because he didn't like working under a black man in the hospital. The faint glimmer of hope he has left is continuing up Thackery's research into what will eventually become psychotherapy.
- Galinger pushes eugenics, sterilizing many child immigrants, and eventually goes on a speaking tour around Germany pushing the benefits of the belief that whites are the superior race. Heavily hinting that he is the catalyst for the rise of Nazism.
- Cornelia's brother set up the fire destroying the new hospital and killing their father in order to save the company from bankruptcy. She flees the country after he threatens her life, abandoning everyone.
- Nurse Elkins murders her deeply religious and perverted father who suffered a severe stroke. She eventually couples with Cornelia's murderous brother.

Fantastic series, but that last season really haunted me. Still love it, though.
 
The X Files before the Season 10 revival. (SPOILERS)


  • Mulder and Scully hiding as they were wanted as federal fugitives
  • The X Files were shut down permanently
  • Alien invasion planned for 2012


The X Files Season 10 ending

  • Mulder and most of the world infected and dying due to some kind of virus
  • Possible begging of a hostile takeover by either a secret organization with access to Alien techor Alien colonists.
 
So I finished up my rewatch of 24 last night, concluding with the pretty solid-ish Live Another Day

Loved the entire ride but having done the entire series in a relatively short time, I was struck by the kinda bleakness of it.

Spoilers are inevitable for this kind of thread so if you're sensitive to hearing the end of shows, I suggest you bail


At the end of LAD sure Jack averted a crisis with China, but ultimately

- He was facing exile and torture / jail in Russia
- Audrey was shot to death
- Heller had Alzheimer's and would forget everything and quit
- Renee Walker shot to death 15 seconds after having sex with Bauer :(
- Chloes seemingly only other friend was shot in the head in front of her, with her husband and son dead

- Kate quit knowing her friend for the last year was the one who drove her husband to suicide
- The hot actress who played Simone was dead :(

And in terms of the entire series run, all the characters we cared for as an audience

- Palmer assassinated
- Michelle dead, Tony in jail
- Teri dead, Chapelle dead
- Hassan throat slit, Taylor probably impeached with her daughter in jail and husband estranged
- Sherry Palmer dead, Wayne Palmer dead, Logan shot himself in the head
- George Mason got radiation poisoning and rode a nuclear warhead into a desert and blew up
- Bill Buchanan ran into a run of explosives whilst getting shot at

Admittedly I was drunk for some of it but the only people in nine years I think who got away were Kim and Naked Mandy.

Cheer me up GAF and share your other shows where the end result ended up being quite so nihilistic

I don't remember this lol
I still remember Chappelle's death, was shocked at that time
That was one of the few death on 24 to shock me at that point.
 
The X Files before the Season 10 revival.

  • Mulder and Scully hiding as they were wanted as federal fugitives
  • The X Files were shit down permanently
  • Alien invasion planned for 2012

The X Files Season 10 ending

  • Mulder and most of the world infected and dying due to some kind of virus
  • Possible beggining of a hostile takeover by either a secret organization with access to Alien techor Alien colonists.

"The X-Files were shit down" is the best Freudian slip ive seen in a while :3
 
Holy....holy shit. I'm just reading about this now. I loved this show but never saw the ending as a child.

This would have broke me

I think this sort of thread comes up about once a month and ruins childhood memories for a couple new people.
 
Seinfeld is one that comes to mind. Basically ruins that whole show and just makes you feel like an awful person for loving those characters. Huge bummer.

You should already have felt bad for loving those characters, they were pretty shitty people :p

Also The Shield would be up there if it wasnt for
Vic's little exit with the smirk and the gun. It should have ended with him at the desk in a deskjob job he hates working with people that loathe him, not him having a last hero smirk at the camera, fuck I hated that. The rest was pretty bleak tho as it all came crumbling down.
 
As others said, Dinosaurs really takes the cake here. The last scene is literally the family (including a baby) worrying about how they'll make it through the winter and then the camera somberly pulling out.

Fughhh. Left a terrible feeling in your stomache, especially as a child.
 
I like to think that the guy from Quantum Leap ended up as Captain Archer on Star Trek: Enterprise. Which isn't as silly as it seems, as it had a running plotline about time travel.


Sledge Hammer.

The first season ended up with Sledge not managing to disarm a nuclear bomb and Los Angeles was destroyed.

They didn't think they'd get another season. But they did, so they set the second one 5 years before the last episode of Season 1.

But Season 2 ended with Sledge proposing to his partner (they are cops) and she thinking it was just a joke and he was crushed.
 
The Shield.

Shane's family suicide, Vic's betrayal of the always loyal Ronnie. He avoids a prison sentence, but he'll never see his family again and has lost everything and everyone he ever cared about in return. The ending left me feeling absolutely gutted.
 
My 2 are Lost and 6 feet under.

Granted Lost's ending shat over the entire series by being so incredibly terrible but also doubles as bleak.

6 feet under is when they all die. Surely doesn't get bleaker than that although in contrast to lost it was genius.
 
You should already have felt bad for loving those characters, they were pretty shitty people :p

Also The Shield would be up there if it wasnt for
Vic's little exit with the smirk and the gun. It should have ended with him at the desk in a deskjob job he hates working with people that loathe him, not him having a last hero smirk at the camera, fuck I hated that. The rest was pretty bleak tho as it all came crumbling down.
Nothing about that ending is
heroic. He's a shark who doesn't know how to do anything but swim forward
 
The Shield.

Shane's family suicide, Vic's betrayal of the always loyal Ronnie. He avoids a prison sentence, but he'll never see his family again and has lost everything and everyone he ever cared about in return. The ending left me feeling absolutely gutted.

This. By far the most depressing ending I've seen in a while.

Lem who did literally nothing wrong got blown up with a grenade by his closest friend.

Shane kills himself, his wife and his little boy...

Ronnie gets thrown under the bus for all of it.

And fucking Vic Mackey gets full immunity.
 
That thing of that show St Elsewhere all being in someones minds, and cos of crossovers within within crossovers, loads of TV technically doesn't exist except in this guys mind. Real bleak when you think about it.
 
The newest V series. Humans lose. Don't think I've ever seen a more depressing ending. Although it only ended that way because it was cancelled but still.
 
The Sopranos is pretty bleak, to me, and I don't understand how people have different readings of the ending because the season spends several scenes throughout it setting it up and giving you all the information you need to have to understand what happened, and Twin Peaks was also ended in a pretty bleak place, both in the last episode of the show and in the film. I have faith that Season 3 will probably end in a similarly bleak fashion, and I can't wait, because bleak endings are my favorite.
 
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