Hated Tropes
(Hated Trope) Endings so awful they completely destroy the legacy of the media.
Two and a Half Men's final episode teased Charlie Sheen's character coming back and going to harm the other characters whilst also having insults to his character and Charlie Sheen himself. It's clear the director had a grudge and the ending where his character comes up to knock then get crushed by a piano before it cuts to the director before he says "winning" before getting crushed by another piano
This was an upbeat animated show about a magical teen princess. The writers desperately wanted a romantic endgame for her and her best friend, but the way they got there was essentially multiversal omnicide. To stop a villain, the main character unilaterally decides magic is the root of all evil and destroys it entirely. By doing this, she casually commits mass genocide against every purely magical being in the multiverse. It also triggers a massive apocalyptic event that violently crashes different dimensions together into a chaotic hellscape. But the show frames this horrific, mass-extinction catastrophe as a sweet, triumphant ending just because two teenagers get to hold hands in the rubble (Star Vs The Forces Of Evil)
Pretty much every medical drama made after St. Elsewhere owes it something, it's a true classic of television, and yet the thing its most remembered for is it's finale where it turns it was all a dream in the mind of an autistic boy playing with a snow globe.
I'm not from the US, so I never saw St. Elsewhere, and I only knew that ending as a joke from shows like Newsradio and 30 Rock, so I was really astounded when I found out that a show did that for real.
Because St. Elsewhere and Hill Street are spin offs, and because Dt. Munch was on so many shows, hundreds of different shows are also the imagination of Tommy Westphall, including Cheers, Arrested Development, and Sesame Street.
The fun part of this shitty ending is how many other shows & movies are connected to the St. Elsewhere universe. All of the Law & Order series, for example, are apparently also a part of this kid's fantasy.
That's not even half of it, you know about the Munchiverse? Two characters from St Elsewhere also show up in Homocide: Life on the Streets (an excellent show that was David Simon's kind of first crack at The Wire), suggesting that show is a dream. Richard Belzer plays a character named Detective John Munch on it who goes on to appear in a slew of other shows. So by extension you end up with every show Munch is ever on being just a dream: Law & Order, SVU,The Wire, even like The X-Files, and Arrested Development.
Fellas, let me tell you about the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypithesis. It's not just all the shows you mentioned, it's estimated the 90% of all TV, live action and animated, canonically takes place in this kids head. Obviously no one can know for sure, but thousands of shows have been linked and traced back to this kid.
The creators got 7 whole seasons from Netflix to tell a whole story, which is very generous since lots of series get axed after 1 or 2 seasons.
So naturally, the writers decided to end the final season on a cliffhanger while also confirming a dumb theory, then went to Kickstarter to fund a pilot for the sequel series in hopes a network might pick it up and greenlit more episodes, because Netflix said no.
Yep. If Netflix had canceled it after season 3 people would be talking about how it was a masterpiece that never got the chance it deserved. Instead no one is talking about it at all, except conversations like this.
While I do hate how Netflix tends to cancel stuff early, I also kind of get it. It seems like everything that goes on for more than a few seasons (on Netflix) dips in quality pretty fast.
So they can either spend a lot of money & people get annoyed at the quality, or they can spend less money & people get annoyed that it gets cancelled.
I maintain that three, maybe four seasons is enough to tell most serialised stories.
Dark, for example, works very well as a three season show but I remain disappointed we never got to see where 1899 was going.
Stranger Things, on the other hand, would be far better remembered if the story as it is was condensed into 4 seasons since so much of season 5 was a meandering mess.
My fiance 10 years ago got me into watching Dexter and just kept saying “oh just wait until he kills his sister and becomes a lumberjack” and I legit thought he was fucking with me until I got to the actual ending 😭
Stuff started getting weird with the kind -of-incest plot and the show never really seemed to recover after that
i'm really hoping that in future seasons of resurrection, Dexter gets cornered by the cops and fakes his own death again and just goes back to lumber jacking.
Yup! But let’s be honest most of the people naming there children Arya were not from India or even of Indian descent.
My grandmother (Gujarati) was so happy to hear that my sister had another Indian in her class, only to be supremely disappointed to learn it was a little white girl named Arya.
Not that she should’ve been disappointed because Arya is super sweet but my grandmother really wanted me and my sis to have Indian friends
They didn't get fired from Star Wars specifically. Disney shut down every single A Star Wars Story movie project at once, when they had about 8-10 in various stages of development, ~6 months before the GOT finale in response to Solo bombing, Episode 9 becoming a mess and the decision to launch their own streaming service and retool movie projects as TV. This included James Mangold's Boba Fett movie (which eventually was given to Jon Favreau as the TV show Book of Boba Fett), Stephen Daldry's Obi-Wan movie (which was given to Joby Harold as the TV show Obi-Wan Kenobi), David S. Goyer's Jabba the Hutt movie (cancelled), Laeta Kalogridis's Knights of the Old Republic movie (cancelled), Kevin Feige's unspecified movie (cancelled), J. D. Dillard and Matt Owens's unspecified movie (cancelled), and Rian Johnson's trilogy (never entered pre-production, this call came during its early planning) in addition to Benioff & Weiss's.
By the time the GOT finale aired, Benioff & Weiss had long abandoned Star Wars and were in negotiations with Netflix for what became 3 Body.
I was engrossed by the show since it aired. I read all the books because of it. And by the time the credits rolled on that last episode I didn't care anymore. And that might be really be the bigest insult I can give it.
Everyone was invested. It was on tracks to become an absolute gravy train
And the thing is, the legacy was basically erased. It's like it almost did not exist, and it was so bad, that even the spin-offs, while they exist, are barely relevant. They are just... there. Sort of.
I see almost no merch, barely any cosplay, games, etc
Hell, The Witcher LARP event had like 2,000 participants a couple years ago. THOUSANDS of people dressed up and showed up to play as regular folks, because there were like what, maybe thirty witchers in the entire thing. Warhammer LARP events in Moscow have had 1k+ people since 2018 or something similarly wild, excluding the Covid times
Last big GoT game was had before season finale, there is basically zero interest in larping them. I'd say that seems like a pretty good indicator of the fan response being like "eh, we're not interested enough to throw together costumes and camp for a week"
What about all those poor little girls named Khalissi? Go through life like that, or change your name? I know what I’d do, even if it made home for the holidays hellish.
I live in Northern Ireland where GoT was partially filmed. It was huge for little rural towns because they'd have loads of tourists coming through to see filming locations where previously these towns were barely on maps. I drove through one 10ish years ago and they had Stark banners hanging outside the Tesco because the tourism they were getting was insane. That is how big GoT was, and then it all just vanished after the finale because it was so bad
What perplexes me is why WB didn't just... give the show to another showrunner. Like, seasons 7 and 8 weren't bad because D&D took some creative risks which didn't pan out, they were bad because they rushed through pre-production and basically wanted to tell 40 episodes' worth of content in 15 episodes so they could go and do Star Wars. HBO apparently wanted 10 seasons of 10 episodes each, and the actors were down for it. None of them had some kind of career waiting for them after GoT which would have kept them super busy, and GoT probably paid great.
D&D were the weakest link here. When they said "hey, we want to do two more half-seasons so we can do Star Wars" why didn't HBO just say "OK, go do Star Wars, Bryan Cogman is gonna be showrunner from S7 till S10" or something like that? Surely the risk of another writer taking up showrunner duties was lesser than the risk of the showrunners absolutely rushing through the plot in 1/3 of the episodes?
IIRC, Dipshit and Dingleberry themselves have some kind of direct "ownership" of the rights to TV adaptations. Something about them talking with RRM directly to secure the rights that he had refused to license up to that point, and knowing the released source material well enough by heart that RRM trusted them - and only them - to do the adaptation.
Unfortunately, it turns out that memorizing the source material doesn't mean you can write good fan fics of it over your TV show catches up to where the books had left off (surprise!) So there very likely wasn't a way for HBO to drop in a new show runner. I'm sure they could have probably paid D&D to go away, but they probably wanted too much money and HBO after a certain point was probably like "whatever, its your reputation", because they had secured the rights to do some spin-offs.
GoT's rise and subsequent fall needs to be studied by future show runner generations. They were everywhere. They had the whole world in their grip. There were totally "normie", non-nerd related bars doing watch parties, giant fandom stretching across so many age and culture strata.
And then the last season was so bad that not only was it not liked, it actively undid all their fame beforehand and just almost erased the show. It's crazy.
The Walking Dead has been doing this for the last 10-5 years. They fucked up most of the storylines and destroyed the feel they had earlier just to put some action slop with everyone being a badass, epic one liners, explosions, military governments and other Resident Evil-like plots that ended up damaging the idea casual people has of the IP just to push more spin offs and grab some more money
It really does go to show how as long as a show had an interesting hook in the start the quality can drop considerably and people will keep watching out of habit.
The Walking Dead also started back when people, mostly, still watched shows as they came out weekly on cable.
it started when streaming was still in its infancy, Netflix was still only streaming in the US, they opened to Canada the same year TWD started, and hadn't even gone worldwide yet.
So you didn't have the level of choice thats available now. Shows felt a lot more like a commitment then, and you'd be a lot less likely to switch to something else, or drop a show.
IIRC, Two and a Half Men's legacy was already in the gutter by the end, and tbh it wasn't that great to begin with, even if it pulled huge ratings.
The ending is basically a fuck you from Chuck Lorre to Charlie Sheen for torching the show's prospects and one of his cash cow with his meltdown and getting himself fired. They offered him a spot in the finale where he'd go on some unhinged rant about how drugs can't touch him because he's a warlock from Mars or whatever, and then they'd drop a piano on him. Sheen was arrogant enough to say no unless they wrote him some heartwarming bullshit scene to launch a spinoff, as if he was still hot shit.
This is essentially a fuck you from him where instead of boring shit, Chuck decided to be bat shit insane.
While i agree charlie sheen had a problem and his real life simmilarity with the character end up burning the bridge and the show ,he was not wrong in refusing the return that they proposed to him it was still a fuck you just more disrespectfully.
Umbrella Academy, that ending is something has just wrecked the legacy of the show entirely even with the seasons before being good or great as much. It just burnt it out and the legacy since then
100%! Yep I believe Netflix cut their budget in half and from 10 to 6 episodes, nevermind apparently the director was running out of time supposedly as well as money. It's the most swift death of a series beloved by many fans and it's killed the legacy sadly.
Less well-known than Game of Thrones or How I Met Your Mother, but every bit as series-destroying.
My advice to anyone who hasn't seen it is to watch the first season, pretend it got cancelled after that, then pick a super-hero rpg system, get some friends together, and play out a better ending.
Personlly, as somebody who read the two originl comics when I was in high school, I realized once they announced the show “Gerard Way never figured out how to end this story in the first place.” Then everyone started heaping praise at it season 1 and I said “Not worth investing time into.” soooo glad I didn’t!! Lmaooo
I am so deeply glad that I stopped watching after the first season. 90% of the "drama" was just Diego being an inexcusably toxic hateful little shit for literally no reason, and every other character refusing to react in a realistic way.
Lesson to all not to get a tattoo until a series is over haha. I actually loved the story for season 4 it was just SO. RUSHED. We deserved 10 episodes. The Five and Lila subplot alone deserved a full episode and we got like 15 minutes.
Umbrella Academy final season was so bad. They should call it 007. Zero well done plots, zero good jokes, seven superheroes who choose to die to prevent the multiverse from being destroyed
I hated that every single season starts the exact same way with every single main character separated and unlikely to team up. It's the same damn story every season
Star Trek Enterprise -- whoo boy, this episode pissed off the Trekkie base. It turned out that the entire episode was Riker on the holodeck, and it included Trip dying for really stupid reasons. To this day, Trekkies argue that the Holodeck simulation "isn't what really happened and it was just Riker manipulating the program" to "Trip faked his death and joined Section 31."
Transformers: Beast Machines -- the show was a critical and commercial flop, and didn't get renewed for a third season. Indeed, Hasbro cancelled the follow-up series and imported a Japanese cartoon while it reworked the entire franchise. Mainframe Entertainment, the group involved with the cartoon, decided to kill off both Optimus Primal and Megatron by launching them into Cybertron's core and reformatting the planet into a techno-organic paradise (it was basically the Mass Effect "green" ending seventeen years early.) Fans hated it, and Hasbro has never put considerable effort into revisiting that particular timeline aside from some pack-in material and convention comics.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow -- Konami decided to reboot the series in 2010, and things looked like they were off to a pretty good start. Hideo Kojima was producing, there were gorgeous 3D graphics and an orchestral score, a high fantasy setting, and a twist ending. But then the sequel neutered Gabriel Belmont, made him uninteresting, set the game in the modern day, and crowbarred in bad stealth gameplay segments -- and, most bizarrely, released on the PS3 and Xbox 360 but NOT the current-gen PS4 and Xbox One. The ending was also surprisingly definitive with you literally killing Satan. The game flopped, and Konami wouldn't release a new Castlevania game until literally just today. And, surprise, it's in the original timeline and cribs HEAVILY from the Netflix series.
I enjoy Enterprise by telling myself the whole thing is Riker’s extremely elaborate holo-fanfiction project and that’s why it’s Like That. At the very least it explains the weirdly horny decon scenes
Umbrella Academy. The last season was so bad, and the ending so comically offensive, that if the show had been more popular I am confident it would be the top answer every time this comes up.
I have yet to meet a solitary soul who thought it was good. I’ve never seen such an impressively terrible ending. Truly one for the history books.
Like we went through all that, season after season of world ending apolocypses only for the answer to be that they never existed at all. Everything we watched was for literally nothing.
I’m not a critic by any means, and I can find enjoyment in things most people find to be hot garbage. But that entire season was so bad, I literally spent the last episode wondering if they were just fucking with the audience at that point.
Chuck. The last few episodes of the final season wiped away the memories of the female protagonist, removing 5 seasons worth of character development. This completely destroyed the rewatchability of the show.
Ah Christ, every time I do a rewatch I always wonder why I can't really remember the final season, and then I get to a certain point and have a Chuck-esque memory sequence unlock and go "aaaaah yeah that's why, it's so bad I blocked it out" lol. Doesn't really affect my view of the show as I still enjoy it, I just prefer to forget the memory wipe rubbish at the end haha.
The Star Wars sequels were contentious but no one liked TROS. It's most enduring legacy is the infamous "somehow, Palpatine returned". Oscar Issac's delivery of that line is hilarious.
“Somehow” would be acceptable as a start to the characters figuring out how it happened, but no one ever bothers.
You can even have an unexplained impetus that works, like Cloverfield or the Mist. We never really know what exactly made these things happen, but it’s ok. Palpatine is obviously back because they killed the intended Bad Guy in the previous movie and had no plan of any kind. “Somehow Snoke returned” would have work just as well/poorly.
What do you mean? Legally distinct darth vader watching the legally distinct death star blow up legally distinct coruscant on the orders of legally distinct palpatine, and then the legally distinct rebellion defeats the legally distinct empire by doing a legally distinct trench run was peak storytelling. /s
What really boggles my mind is that they knew what their ending was going to be from the beginning and then deliberately went in the opposite direction until the finale. It’s like they spent 9 seasons making a lovely square peg that they then had to crudely cut down to fit the round hole that they made back in season two.
I know they pretaped the scenes with the kids but they could have easily shot new scenes and made a joke about how Ted has been torturing them with this story for a decade.
There was just no need to undo all that character development in order to service a relationship that the show had spent a decade telling us was unhealthy and better off as a friendship.
I hate how the whole show is completely written off because the ending completely throws out all of the genuinely great character development throughout the show. I really wish the alternate ending was more well known.
Which is why it's so awful knowing the showrunners had a perfect ending lying on the cutting room floor. And now only big fans of the show ever know about and have seen it. Everyone else just knows it had a dogshit ending, immediately turning off potential new viewers.
There's a lot of ways on paper to fix the bad choices GT made, but none of them change the actual problem: the people running the show were very bad at running the show. They didn't understand the appeal of the series, and were not experienced enough to man a series like it.
It fell off so badly... but I'm still grateful for the manga introducing Asa. Asa is a top tier character and I wish we could have a whole Manga for her. The manga went downhill when it shoved her to the side.
I’m grateful for that meme. Every time i argue that there is weak writing in something and someone replies by resorting to the themes and authorial intent, philosophical jargon, etc I just think “themes and such”
I usually think “THIS ENDING IS DOGSHIT” people overhype things for their given piece of media. AOT’s ending was flawed but not property-destroying and I think TADC’s was actually pretty decent.
Not with Chainsaw Man. This ending fucking blows. It’s genuinely the worst conclusion to any piece of media I’ve ever seen. It is legendarily terrible and Fujimoto will never and should never live this choice down.
I'd really like to see what was going on behind the scenes of Part 2's production.
Part 2 arguably started way better than Part 1. Asa was a better protagonist, the artwork was completely flawless, it was absolutely shaping up to be a perfect sequel.
Then you get to Chainsawman Church and its like he had a stroke. Nothing makes any sense, the pacing is completely breakneck, the artwork completely falls apart (obviously due to being overworked).
So much of later Part 2 just feels like malicious compliance.
Almost certainly a case of "shonen jump mangaka had beginning of series as an idea in their heads for years, then eventually reached a point where they didn't have a plan and ran up against how brutal jump's deadlines are, not giving them the breathing room to figure out what to do, resulting in them essentially doggy paddling until they can't anymore."
Happens more often than you would think. Chainsaw man is just a REALLY egregious example of it.
My theory is the publisher wanted chainsaw man to be the focus of part 2 and pressured Fuji. The ending is a big fuck you to them and the fans that didn't understand what he was trying to do with part 2
I think he just got in over his head with how convoluted the second part became. It was an amazing run, and pulling it all together would have been a masterstroke, but he just did not have it in him. Too bad (but seriously how you gonna do Nayuta like that?)
From what I heard, he was getting bored writing CSM and just wanted to finish it no matter what so he could move onto the next idea that had him interested. No idea how much truth there is in that but I believe it.
This would be one of the few instances where I would be completely fine with the anime studio making massive changes to the story for the adaptation or just not adapting Part 2 at all.
Troll hunters and the flaming shit show that was the movie https://giphy.com/gifs/l0HUgm9t8pFvmXTUI
A childhood gem for all, just for it all to be mean nothing in the finale movie
The show was already decreasing in quality (starting in either S5 or S7, depending on who you ask and whether that person has read the books), but S8 was almost unanimously considered one of the biggest disappointments in television history.
My favorite part is that it was such a phenomenon that it got the directors a Star Wars contract and they got so desperate to do it they rushed and crumbled GOT in such a fashion that they turned into pariahs that no one wants to contact
Wtf are you talking about. Perfect single season anime. It's great whenever they come up with such great things anime only without a manga to draw from.
The Sarah Connor chronicles was awesome and Salvation was a fun look at post judgement day. I also heard the anime was good too. Most of the movies suck because they are just rehashes of T2 over and over
To be fair, they had a much better ending in mind, but Covid-19 hit right as they were finishing up production, so they HAD to rush an ending without the resources or cast they had originally planned on having available.
Sherlock was never great, but ending is so offensively terrible that it makes me angry every time I remember it. The sister is literally the worst character I have ever seen in any media
Dragon Age , Veilguard. And no, not for the reasons culture war tourists talk about.
I loved Bioware, and Dragon Age, but imagine building up a series over three games where your choices matter, the world you build matters, there are always references and consequences to your past actions, only for all of it to be discarded in what was supposed to be the finale of the series.
A few beloved characters returned , only to suffer from complete amnesia about their past, or be relegated to a static NPC with a few throwaway generic lines [looking at you Dorian]
Not to mention so much that was teased in the past three games , setting up for the finale...just didn't happen. Like how by the end of the third game we learn that Solas, the big bad, had amassed an army of disgruntled elves to fight for him. Only to learn in the final game that the army apparently got disbanded....offscreen!
You know what's the worst part? The game actually had some good stuff in it. The itemization was really good, the build variety and the combat system, and even in the narrative there was some redeemable stuff, like the necromancer fella, or that suicide mission which I thought was handled nicely. It had some great cutscenes! The twist was handled pretty well. It actually has a fairly strong third act, all things considered.
But it really does completely shit all over the previous entries.
With how troubled the development was, it's astounding that the game worked at all, let alone pretty bug free at launch (I know they existed but compared to other games in the series they were rare). And the combat was actually pretty decent and worked well.
Writing aside, the people that worked on the game stability and level wise should be proud of it. The game worked, and it worked really well.
Dont even get me started... Old Gods, Darkspawn, spirits, blood magic? All completely different than anyone thought. There was no worldbuilding, no setup, no payoff. Just pure retcon for the sake of retconning.
It didn’t help that it was shrouded in a culture war bullshit thing.
I personally just didn’t like how far the series devolved from the first game.
Dragon Age: Origins is one of my favourite games of all time. I’ve probably replayed it 8-10 times. Every other game in the series feels like a chore to get through.
The 100. The showwriters killed off one of the main characters is an idiotic useless way out of spite. And the themes the ending tries go completely against the themes of the rest of the show.
https://giphy.com/gifs/rFjxBeE4SlNBe
Game of Thrones at it’s peak was considered one of the best shows ever. While it showed a gradual decline in its later seasons, it wasn’t until the infamous season 8 kai-boshed the franchise in general. We had characters with built up story archs completely pivot and change, plot lines get either abandoned or ignored, poorly lit action sequences that the creators blamed fans’ TVs for, and end results that were so universally hated, a petition spread to get it changed that almost had a million signatures
This is arguably the example of this. The show went from a massive cultural phenomenon to completely gone in the span of just an evening. Once the series finale aired, the show essentially vanished from the cultural zeitgeist.
people complain about the endings of Dexter and How I Met Your Mother, and those complaints are valid, but neither of those shows were the cultural juggernaut GOT was. it’s wild how it went from being impossible to ignore to never spoken about again.
It cannot be overstated how huge this show was in making "nerd" culture (dragons, fantasy, etc.) totally mainstream. Everyone and their dentist's cat was watching the show and speculating on what's going to happen next. Even some of the phrases have entered popular speech ("bend the knee", "sweet summer child").
I have older relatives that haven't even seen Lord of the Rings who still will go on Thanksgiving rants about how bad the ending was and how it should've gone.
Most good series end badly. Even Game Of Thrones one of the best ended awful. Years of political intrigue, wars and build up only for a rushed final season where nearly every character’s arc gets butchered.
"Yes, the magic cripple has a better story than the half Targ half Stark who came back from the dead, brought the wildlings over the wall, and is the only reason there was an organised resistance against the undead army"
Season 1-4 were really fun watches with Season 4 setting up the whole "upside down taking over hawkings" cliffhanger only for 5 to be like "eh they just covered that shit with metal plates lol", "lets focus on these new kids nobody cares about", "You wanted to see the conclusion of Susie and Dustins storyline? Too bad, we forget".
I’m convinced the show runners gave up by the end. Zero of the main characters were killed dead, zero repercussions, and sub-plots set up in seasons previous went nowhere like Vecna’s presumed interest in Nancy, Powell getting to reunite with Hopper, etc
now you can find BTS footage that all but confirms that. cast & crew repeatedly ask the writing team for clarification on plot details relevant to their jobs and get back “we’re figuring that out” or “we don’t know yet” instead of an actual answer. it’s shameful tbh
The off-screen break up of Dustin and Susie is the only the thing I can't forgive
And the Dustin character in this season as well. I get he's griefing, but where's my silly boy? He was always optimistic, even in the darkest situations.
Yes, I know there's Nine Realms or whatever after this movie, but this ending is still abyssal.
After everything that came before it talked about how humans and dragons would face the future together, about how they were better together, about how they would never fall apart, dragons decide to leave the human world because... Berk kicked the crap out of a threat that didn't even kill anyone?
No, really, Grimmel sucks. At least Drago killed Stoic! And New Berk is infinitely unassailable without flight, and anyone capable of it (IE: an enemy army of dragons) would have been a threat at the old place too.
And this is after our heroes defeat an armada of ships without a scratch on any of them.
There is no reason for dragons to leave, and yet...
Star didn’t end quite that way: it ended worse. There was a surviving purely magical creature, the most annoying one. Also, it wasn’t 2 teenagers holding hands, it was 1 teenager holding hands with a mid-30s man in a teenager’s body.
Spottedleaf becoming a medicine cat so her groomer wouldn't be allowed to groom her anymore, the narrative blaming her and only painting Thistleclaw as the villain because he trained in cat Hell, not because he was preying on a minor. (Spottedleaf's Heart)
I admit, I haven't read it and don't plan to. Just read and heard summaries.
Vikings would have had the best ending if they stopped with Ragnar declaring his loyalty to his pagan gods, his trip to Valhalla and the coming vengeance of his sons. If you can't effectively shoot a good story with what comes afterwards you can always end on the highest note.
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u/gilroygilgalahad 2d ago
Pretty much every medical drama made after St. Elsewhere owes it something, it's a true classic of television, and yet the thing its most remembered for is it's finale where it turns it was all a dream in the mind of an autistic boy playing with a snow globe.