AzuranX wrote:
There was once a time when a cancellation of a good show meant The End - regardless of if it ends on a cliffhanger or not *cough*Angel*cough*.
Oh, I don't think you could really call the
Angel finale a cliffhanger, unless you mean in the
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid sense. Which is to say, it wasn't so much a cliffhanger as it was "they're jumping off the cliff, and it's pretty much certain they
are going to die, but we're going to fade to black before that happens."
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As mentioned, Angel could definitely use this. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a great ending for its show but a movie to show what happened to all the awakened potentials would be nice too. Just a couple off the top of my head.
BSG relied a lot on extra materials to tell the story. Each summer they had the webisodes which--while not essential to understanding the next season's events--filled in the blanks about what happened during the hiatus and set up a lot of what would be going on with the characters, and I really think that was a cool way to go about things, in large part because it seemed to really be done for the sake of the fans, rather than as a means to squeeze a few more dollars out of the franchise.
Like I said above, with
Angel, it really was a "Butch & Sundance" ending by design. They're dead, we just didn't see them die. They jumped into the canyon, we just didn't see them go splat. As much as it grieves me to never see Spike again, end of story. I'm really okay leaving it there.
As for
Buffy, oy! Finding out what happened with the potentials ranks right below "Voluntarily experience a non-anesthetized root canal" on my list of things I'm just dying to do. I can think of nothing less interesting or more annoying than seeing any of the potentials again, as they were all pretty much irritating to the nth degree. I'm not even all that interested in seeing Buffy, Xander, Willow and Giles again, since most of them had managed to **** me off and make me dislike them in the last couple seasons. By the end of season 6, the only sympathetic and interesting characters on the show were Spike, Tara and Anya...and they're now all dead. So yeah, pretty much okay leaving that one where it rests, too.
I think the problem is, I've been a fan of too many shows which went way WAY too far past their peak (
X-Files, I'm looking at YOU) because the producers didn't know when to call it quits and put telling a good story ahead of milking the last few pathetic dollars out of the franchise. And I've been a fan of some that have peaked really early and really dragged on to a very inglorious ending (
Veronica Mars, BSG.) These days, if a show can end strong, like
Angel did, I'm HAPPY to let it go, because I then know my memories of the show will be that it was solid from the beginning to the end, without being tainted by frustration and annoyance over bad storytelling and annoying characterization at the end.
Edited, Sep 12th 2009 11:47pm by Ambrya