Every story is inevitably judged by its ending.
And in the TV world, until the ultimate series finale, it is the ending of each season that keeps the audience on its toes. It is also the episode that can make or break the show. There are some programs which have been able to bounce back, but still, many more whose shame is still spoken about even now.
Human beings generally tend to maintain memories of negative events over positive ones. Perhaps that is why we always talk about the worst episodes of television, even if it is a show that you tend to enjoy.
Here are the most disappointing season finales that we still can't get out of our heads!
1. Castle Rock Season 1
There has only been one season so far, but this show is going to have to step it up next season if it wants to keep our loyalty. The show started off with a slow burn that revved into a raging inferno as more layers were revealed to the story of a cursed little town. To have everything we thought we had learned thrown back in our faces at the last minute was quite distressing.
2. The Originals Series Finale
A series finale is even more essential to a program's ongoing reputation than a season finale because you don't get a do-over afterward. For a five-season-long TV show that is also a spinoff of a show that ran for eight seasons, the pressure is even more severe. So, for the showrunners to just decided to kill every fan favorite in the very last episode feels like the worst kind of betrayal.
3. Gossip Girl Series Finale
If a television show is going to center itself around a mystery that spans the entire series, it had better have a viable solution to that mystery by the end. Aside from the preposterousness of Dan Humphrey having access to all of the information he would need to be Gossip Girl, couldn't the identity of the internet Loki have been someone, I don't know, interesting?
4. Supernatural Season 7
Sometimes a bad finale is inevitable if the entire season up that point is infallibly awful. With a villain as un-terrifying as the Leviathans, there was no way that the stakes were going to be high enough even for a show as action-packed as Supernatural to deliver successfully.
5. How I Met Your Mother
The series finale of this show made everything that led up to it feel pointless. The entire series was an explanation of how the main character met his late wife. Then this wife was just discarded in order for Ted to end up with Robyn, someone with whom he never had any chemistry to begin with.
6. Hemlock Grove Season 1
A truly unique and beautiful season of television almost ended on an emotionally transcendent note, but then seemed to backtrack at the last second. Maybe the showrunners were concerned there wouldn't be enough reason to tune in next season if they didn't rev up the action in the last few minutes. Whatever the reason, not giving the viewers enough time to process Letha's death was a mistake.