Yea. And religion can be a fun theme. I enjoyed the Dune books.
Maybe what I am against is poor writing and Deus Ex Machinas.
Lost, to me, was always about the characters and their arcs with a background of whatever shit the writers pulled out of a hat. In that sense, it was consistent and about what could be expected of it.
GoT had clearly lost its thread years before, more concerned about hitting plot points than telling a coherent story (the writers consistently say “I think the character thinks/did X”. If they don’t know, how can the audience?). Despite early season optimism, it was never going to be more that it was.
BSG was special. In hindsight, knowing the struggles to not get off the air and the writers strike, it’s not surprising that the last season feels rushed and haphazard. But at the time, I was very disappointed to find that there really was no plan at all. Even if I later realized that religion was a bigger part of the story than I remembered and that some deux ex machina was appropriate, it still had that stupid abandon all technology and die quickly ending.
So BSG would be it, because I actually cared. But, no, D&D couldn’t just be bad writers, they had to be bad writers while writing a bitches be crazy story, with a callous depiction of domestic violence. That elevates the ending to an unbeatable level of ineptitude that I can only hope is never beaten.
This is me, as well. Lost visibly derailed (for me) in season 5. GoT visibly derailed when the writers decided having Sansa raped was a good way to redeem Theon, of all people (your links make it clear that the creators have been very consistent since then).
BSG… well if we’re honest it probably derailed fairly early in season 3 but I just didn’t see it at the time, and was hoping that there really was some internal logic to all this right up until that last god-awful mess of an episode.
BSG derailed very heavily just after the destruction of the Pegasus. The show became a travesty right after that, with very few, if any, redeeming episodes.
It was so, so good up until then. Perhaps the fastest, hardest shift in quality I remember. We got 2.2 good seasons and 1.8 crap seasons. Even then, the ending was very bad. The dip was significant, but it kept getting worse until the very end.
GoT for me dipped on season 6 and 7, but I actually liked season 8 a lot (even if the pace that too fast and we could have used 4 more episodes). And I loved the ending.
Lost lost me on season one and I actually stopped watching, so I don’t have a frame of reference for the ending. I have very little tolerance for randomness, it seems.
I’m pretty much right with you on both of these. Had BSG ended right before the time-jump, I would have considered it one of my all-time favorite shows. I never even finished the final season. And I guess my GoT dip was more seasons 5-6. Still, I largely agree with you.
Lost for me, mostly for the reason cited above: It explained essentially NONE of the central mysteries that kept you coming back week after week. The writers essentially pull an “It was all a dream!” stunt and told you that all those things that you had previously assumed were intricate puzzle pieces were in fact just fever-dream crap that didn’t have any purpose after all.
BSG certainly took a weird turn or three at the end, but it still wrapped most things up. GoT was rushed and the plot was on rails at time, but at least they answered most of the audience’s questions.
BSG was always a bumpy ride, and it seemed likely part way through that there was never a plan to begin with, so the lackluster end wasn’t surprising or particularly disappointing.
GoT had so much potential, but it they squandered it and rushed through predictable story points. Unlike BSG, it was a steady decline in the last couple of seasons.
All relative to what could have been though. I still really enjoyed both series.
I just checked the result of the poll so far in the original post. It’s almost a 3 way tie between the three shows. That’s a sign of good poll. Well done @Dan_Theman.
I voted GoT, but I had forgotten about BSG… that ending was really just turbo bad. The more I think about it, I feel like it might actually be the worst.
GoT was poorly written… Lost failed to address a lot of questions…
BSG took an extremely well written sci-fi show, and then just added some kind of weird space-magic/religion crap into it that made zero sense.
Like, while bad, I can easily explain exactly what the final plot was with Lost and GoT.
I honestly cannot even tell you what the final story arc was for BSG. Just nonsense.
How about the last 15 seasons of The Simpsons?
I keep being shocked that it still exists.
Who are the people watching this?
Not me. I can’t even remember the last time I tuned into FOX. (Probably why I didn’t see Firefly until after it was cancelled. And I think Farscape started out on FOX too.)
Nope, Farscape was always on Sci Fi (now Syfy, which always makes me think it’s the syphilis channel).
Okay, they pitched it to FOX originally, then got picked up by SciFi instead.
Originally, it was supposed to air on FOX (Titled Space Chase), but the broadcast didn’t come to fruition.
LOL, love that name. TOTALLY NOT THE MOST GENERIC NAME EVER!1
If I ever knew that, I’d forgotten about it. Interesting.
We originally developed Farscape in the early nineties for the then pretty young Fox network and it didn’t fly there because we couldn’t afford to just shoot a pilot. It would be too expensive, so we needed an eleven-episode order to amortize the cost of building the sets and the prosthetics and all that. So it didn’t fly at Fox, and Brian, much to his credit, just wouldn’t let go. We kept taking it out, we’d dust off the creatures and the four scripts we’d developed for Fox and finally along came exactly what we needed, which was the Sci-Fi Channel. In 1998/1999, they bought it and gave us a year commitment.
Season 1 was also filmed at FOX Studios Sydney.
The latter seasons were filmed in a hangar or warehouse somewhere. The acoustics were so bad (compared to FOX Studios) that they had to overdub 90% of the dialog.
It’s interesting to think about how GoT and BSG were similar ending-wise. Like GoT, BSG at some point realized they had to end with their preordained conclusion no matter what, and they had to make their way there regardless of what the characters needed. Same as GoT post season 6.
Lost was just crap. I watched it for the mysteries and they did a good job of ending each season with a feeling of ‘you thought THAT was the mystery? It’s actually SO much bigger!’ until they ran out of space to grow or make any sense. The time travel season showed me they hadn’t planned anything, or they would have had some clever interactions explaining previous seasons. The last season was a cruel (literally, cruel to the characters) joke.
Nice article, and Ellis is on point, as often before. I actually think I dislike the ending more now.
Dexter the lumberjack.
The Last season of Babylon 5 wasn’t on the writers/producers. It was forced by the network at the last moment. It also doesn’t just end with a giant FU like the ending of Lost does. Just a pointless and bland tacked on series of episodes.