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| By Laura Akers |
Take Battlestar Galactica, for instance. The show was everything most of us never dreamed a Galactica reboot could be: serious and epic; great stories performed by great actors.
I got the chance to meet Edward James Olmos last year and thanked him for doing the show, pointing out that when actors of his stature do sci-fi, it helps to elevate the genre in many ways. He quickly corrected me: Galactica wasn’t really sci-fi. It was a drama that took place in space. And I must admit that I defer to Blade Runner’s Gaff on this.
What I didn’t have the heart to tell him is that no matter how much I liked the show, the ending almost ruined it for me. Yes, the show was more of a drama set in space than sci-fi. But its fan base was largely sci-fi geeks.
We’re smart people.
So when the last five minutes of the series is devoted to heavy-handed explication of the entire fucking series, not only are you wasting our time, but you’re talking down to an audience that doesn’t like (or need) to be patronized. We understood what we were seeing. We didn’t need the damned Cliff Notes.
Little House on the Prairie ended with the citizens of Walnut Grove blowing up the town. St. Elsewhere turned out to have been an autistic child’s fantasy. Hell, even the incredibly mediocre ALF was ruined at the end when the light-hearted show climaxed with the annoying alien being captured for eventual dissection.
To be fair, we can’t confuse a sad or tragic ending with a bad one.
M*A*S*H, for instance, ended with Hawkeye suffering a mental breakdown. Terrible, yes, but utterly in keeping with the theme of the show: largely about a group of people doing literally anything to keep their sanity in the face of the brutality of war. Remember the show was ostensibly about the Korean War, but based on a book released during the Vietnam “police action,” the film and TV show were largely about that latter conflict, and made in full knowledge of the terrible effect it had on our vets, many of whom are still living on the streets today due to the mental illness caused by what they saw and did half a world away. An ending does not need to be happy or hopeful to be the right ending.
Unfortunately, this week’s OUaT’s misses the mark and potentially cuts off one of the most interesting stories on the show.
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