Everyone knows there's nothing quite like a good tearjerker ending,
but did you know Twin Peaks had not one but two? This list includes a few you might not expect.
Be warned, though: here there be spoilers...
The second and final season of Fleabag proudly announces in its first episode that it's going
to be "a love story." By the end of the season, though, you realize that it's not necessarily a
love story with a happy ending. The season's thrust involves the titular character falling
for a priest, who ultimately decides to remain devoted to God. In the final scene,
he visits her at a bus stop, and she tells him that she loves him. His reply is devastating:
"It'll pass."
So in the end, Fleabag doesn't get to be with him,
even though he admits he loves her as well. It's a terribly sad ending, even when you realize, by
the end, that Fleabag will probably be okay. In a gesture that suggests the finality of the ending,
she walks away from the camera that's been following her this entire time. She no longer
needs to share her life with the audience, and the audience too needs to be okay with it.
The final moments of Six Feet Under were almost certainly designed in a lab to
completely devastate everyone who loves the show. As Claire, the baby of the Fisher family,
drives away from the life she's known, the show transitions to a montage in
which every single one of the show's recurring characters meet their maker.
It's a perfect summation of death's beauty and inevitability. The show suggests that each of
its main characters go on to lead meaningful lives, and then, at some point, pass away — as
all people must. It doesn't treat death as a cudgel, or as something that only exists
to get an emotional reaction out of viewers. Instead, Six Feet Under shows death as what it is:
A natural part of being alive. Everything is temporary, and in the final moments of the series,
the show provides a gut-wrenching reminder to hold on to what you've got.
Although it's only five episodes long, Chernobyl nevertheless leaves a huge impact
on its audience. The series tells the story of the Chernobyl disaster, with particular focus
on the bureaucracy that proved so ineffectual in dealing with the crisis. In its final episode,
the show depicts the USSR's half-hearted effort to hold people accountable for this.
Ultimately, a few low-level men inside the facility are held responsible, while the entire
system that they existed within is ignored. The lies that were told about the Chernobyl facility,
and the conditions that led the facility to be unsafe, are not reckoned with at all.
In the end, Valery Legasov, the crusader who wanted to change how the USSR handles its nuclear
facilities, is revealed to have taken his own life. He knows that the change he longs for will
not come, that people are much happier living with the lie. And that is a truth he cannot live with.
Although each series of Blackadder is set in a different era in history, the show's overall
tone always remains relatively constant. The show's final season, Blackadder Goes Forth,
places the show's antihero and his supporting cast in the trenches of World War I.
Because it's a comedy, you might be tempted to assume that Blackadder
is going to trivialize the grim nature of the war it's depicting.
But the show takes the opposite approach. In its final episode, Blackadder and the rest
of the show's characters realize that they are about to be sent on a suicide mission.
They spend much of the episode attempting to escape from their fate, but to no avail.
"Good luck, everyone."
In the show's final moments, they charge out of their trench and are presumably mowed down in
a hail of gunfire. Few shows are bold enough to kill off their entire main cast in their finale,
but that's precisely what Blackadder does.
The finale was widely acclaimed after it aired, not just for its bravery,
but also for the ruthlessness with which it is able to depict the horrors of war.
During World War I, countless soldiers were sent to die totally meaningless deaths — and Blackadder
is one of the few shows willing to depict that reality in full.
The final moments of Twin Peaks are anything but uplifting. Disregarding The Return,
which functions more as a sequel than as a continuation of the original series,
Twin Peaks' season two finale leaves things in a pretty dire state for its heroes. Initially,
you're led to believe that Dale Cooper has managed to enter the Black Lodge,
rescue Annie Blackburn, and return to the town of Twin Peaks unharmed.
In the show's final moments, however, it becomes clear that Dale Cooper is no longer
the stand-up FBI agent he was at the beginning of the series. Instead, he's been corrupted by Bob,
the evil presence at the heart of the town who is responsible for the death of Laura Palmer.
In the final moments of its original run, Twin Peaks pulls the rug out from under its audience,
revealing that the show's stalwart hero is gone, having been replaced by a vision of pure,
unbridled evil. And although Coop certainly wouldn't be gone forever,
it's not like The Return gave him much of a happy ending, either...
Veep's ending isn't sad in the sense that it might make you cry.
Rather, the show devotes its final episode to the emptiness of politics. As Selina attempts
to win her party's nomination for president, she reveals that she's willing to sacrifice everyone
and everything she's supposed to care about in order to get it. She trades away her principles
to earn support from other wings of her party, and blames Gary, the person who has been at her
side throughout the entirety of the show, for an FBI investigation into her charity fund.
Selina betrays everyone — and as a result, she gets exactly what she wants.
Ultimately, though, viewers know that her victory is a hollow one,
because it comes at the cost of every character they've grown to love. From its first episode,
Veep presents a world in which what you achieve as an influential politician matters far
less than how much power you accumulate. In its finale, Veep doubles down on that brutal theme
and digs into the dark heart of what makes the American political system so absurd.
The ending of Parenthood is dark in a uniquely simple way: It focuses on the death of the
Braverman family's patriarch, Zeek. The show's final moments take place after Zeek's death,
as we see the rest of the Bravermans assemble to play baseball in his honor.
It's a beautiful, moving tribute that acts as a reminder of the legacy that Zeek has left behind.
He created the family at the center of the series, and in its final moments, the show chooses to
spotlight that. Zeek's death is a sad event, but Parenthood reminds its audience that feeling sad
is just one part of the human experience. Losing Zeek feels like losing a member of
your family should: It breaks your heart, but it also gives you a chance to remember all the great
things the person did while they were alive. It's bittersweet, contemplative, and totally honest.
How do you end a show when your principal characters have been dead the whole time?
As it turns out, the answer is to kill them again. In the final episode of The Good Place,
all four core members of the show's human cast have all finally arrived in the Good Place.
Once there, they're able to fulfill every desire they've ever had.
Eventually, though, they realize that they're ready to move on, and essentially phase out of
existence itself. It's a concept that's almost too heady for TV, but Chidi, ever the professor,
explains it well. Life in The Good Place is like a wave: Once you crash on the shore,
you disappear, but the water you leave behind is still very much there.
"The wave was just a different way for the water to be for a little while."
The Good Place's finale is about learning to accept the end of your own existence.
Specifically, it's about willingly relinquishing your identity and becoming a positive force in the
universe. Death isn't the end for the show's main characters, but in the final episode,
they all blink out of existence for good — in a way that goes far beyond the mere stopping
point that is physical death. The show makes clear that they've all accepted this choice, of course,
but that doesn't mean it's not utterly heartbreaking.
After 11 seasons on the air, no one expected M*A*S*H to do anything all
that daring in its final episode. The series finale chronicles the end of the Korean War,
and the party that the members of the camp throw before they say their tear-filled goodbyes to
one another. Before those farewells happen, though, the show offers up a meaty plot about
the weight of the conflict, and what it's done to Hawkeye Pierce, the show's main character.
In this episode, Hawkeye revisits a traumatic incident that occured as his unit was returning
from a beach outing. Their bus eventually picked up a number of refugees, but was forced to pull
off the road in order to avoid being spotted. Hawkeye specifically recalls telling a woman
to quiet her chicken, and the woman killing the chicken to keep it from making noise.
"Everybody's life was in danger because of that damn chicken."
Later on in the episode, it's revealed that Hawkeye has repressed the real memory:
It wasn't a chicken she was trying to keep silent, but her own baby. The woman smothered her child
in order to survive, and Hawkeye can't cope with the reality of that memory. It's a dark,
dark turn for the final episode of the show, but one that feels necessary. Even though M*A*S*H
is ostensibly a comedy, it never shies away from depicting the brutal realities of war.
The series finale of Merlin plays out like a brutal tragedy. From the very beginning,
the show is centered around the friendship between Arthur and Merlin. As Arthur ascends
the throne and heads off to adventure with the rest of the knights of the round table,
the show’s primary interest doesn't change. In the final episode, though,
Arthur is struck down, and Merlin is unable to revive him. He's told that
Arthur will rise again, but neither Merlin nor the audience gets to see that happen.
Instead, the episode follows Merlin as he spends millennia waiting for his friend to come again.
He's an ageless, eternal being, doomed to be traumatized by a past that he has no power to
change. While the rest of the characters in Merlin get to live complete arcs,
the show's central figure must remain in stasis. The life he leads now is one a life of waiting.
He's lost his best friend, and now, all he can do is pray that he'll get to see him again… someday.
The ending of How I Met Your Mother was hugely anticipated by the show's fans. That excitement
stemmed in part from the show's premise, which suggests that eventually, Ted will get to the
part of the story that involves his wife. The finale does indeed reveal their first meeting,
before offering an abbreviated look at what his life with his kids' mother,
played by Cristin Milioti, went on to be like. It's just as sweet and romantic as fans hoped for.
The episode ultimately reveals, however, that the mother died in 2024. She and Ted built a life
together, but it wasn't one meant to last forever. Although Milioti only plays a prominent role in
the final arc of the show's run, she made such an enormous impression on audiences that her death
proved to be a deeply sad and divisive event. The entire show builds up to the mother's arrival,
and when audiences finally meet her, she doesn't disappoint — but the show's decisions might.
How I Met Your Mother's final episode became further controversial for suggesting that,
after the mother's death, Ted ultimately falls back in love with Robin. To many,
this choice rings hollow, in part because of all the hype that had been built around the mother.
If you present a simple and factual account of what happens at the end of The Americans,
it might not seem all that devastating. Philip and Elizabeth, the Russian spies at the center
of the show, manage to safely return to the USSR after spending years living as Americans. In
order to make their escape, though, they have to give up the entire life they've built in the US.
Their daughter, who was supposed to join them on their journey to the USSR,
decides to stay behind, and it's unclear whether they'll ever see her again.
When you dig into the human emotion at the core of this finale, its true tragedy is revealed. Philip
has to tell his best friend that he's been lying to him for years, and entrust him with looking
after the son they're leaving behind. What's more, the society they're returning to is on
the brink of collapse. All of the crimes and the lies that the two of them have been caught up in,
all for the sake of their homeland, will have been for nothing. They built their lives in
the US and were forced to abandon those lives for a country they haven't lived in for years.
And then, at the end of it all, that failing country makes it perfectly clear that it doesn't
actually care about them. It's a crushing final blow for the show's protagonists.
The final episode of The Leftovers has a happy ending, but it's one that comes after an enormous
amount of trauma. The finale is set more than a decade in the future, as Nora lives a quiet,
remote life in Australia. That life faces a huge disruption when Kevin, her former boyfriend and
the love of her life, shows up out of the blue. The entire episode is built on the weight of
the history between these two characters, and that history is more than a little grueling.
When they finally reconcile, it's a moment of enormous relief, and a reminder of how
far they've both come. The Leftovers is set in a world in which two percent of the world's
population has inexplicably vanished, and the show's finale chooses not to provide any
firm answers about this. Instead, it suggests that what matters is how its characters feel,
and whether or not they've been able to overcome their struggles. Indeed,
Kevin and Nora have certainly struggled before, but the finale suggests that maybe, just maybe,
there might be cause for hope. It's an optimistic ending, but one that serves
to highlight the deep sadness that the two of them have shared throughout the series.
BoJack Horseman's final episode opens with the titular character being rescued from the pool
at his former house. He winds up in prison for trespassing,
and finds that the routine his life takes on in jail helps him in his battle with addiction.
The finale then leaps forward one year. BoJack is released for Princess Carolyn's wedding,
where he sees all of his old friends again. But it becomes increasingly clear that these
friendships, which have been the core of the series, may not last forever.
BoJack is a better person than he was when the show started, but he's done
irreparable harm to the people he's supposed to care about most. They still love Bojack,
but they know that if they're looking to build healthy lives for themselves,
they might have to leave him behind. As Diane, BoJack's closest confidant, tells him:
"I think there are people that help you become the person who you end up being,
and you can be grateful for them, even if they were never meant to be in your life forever."
The finale of BoJack Horseman is about knowing when relationships have run their course,
and allowing people to leave your life, even if it hurts in the moment.
When They See Us has an ending that could actually be described as happy.
The Central Park Five, who have spent years in prison, are eventually exonerated for the crime
of sexually assaulting a woman, and the real criminal is brought to justice. In the end,
their story is one of triumph, but that triumph comes at an enormous cost.
The young kids at the core of the series have been brutalized by a system that was
built to automatically assume the worst of young Black men like them.
These characters have been traumatized, and the fact that they are eventually exonerated
does not erase what has happened to them. When They See Us sheds a light on the crime
that was perpetrated against these boys, and what it reveals is devastating. They
were totally unable to defend themselves, and so they were swallowed up by a vicious establishment.
The fact that they're spat out again is little comfort to anyone.
A TV show about the AIDS crisis was never going to be a great time,
but It's a Sin is still a particularly horrifying reminder of what the early
days of AIDS were truly like in the U.K. The show follows a group of young, gay Londoners
who are thrilled to be able to live their lives as who they really are. Slowly, though,
the unfolding AIDS crisis invades and transforms those lives, as well as the world around them.
By the end of the show, several of the main characters have died, and the show's final
moments are rooted in the show's protagonist succumbing to the virus. He was once vibrant,
cocky, and full of life, but he dies alone in his childhood bedroom, cut off from his friends by his
panicked, homophobic mother. It's a Sin is about what it meant to be gay during this era, and how
AIDS redefined an entire generation of people. It's also about a few particular young men whose
lives are cut tragically short. The finale brings this tragedy into sharp and unforgettable focus.
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