Top 10 Worst Season Finales Of All Time

We bloody love television. It's such a huge part of our lives, and let's be real, the obsession has only gotten stronger since the invention of streaming - Thanks NETFLIX. But what happens when the shows that we obsess over, come to an end? Or even worse, what happens when the creators absolutely RUIN the ending of shows that have been a part of our lives for years? Remember how mad the internet went over the end of Game of Thrones?! Well, these are the 10 WORST Season Finales of All Time...

10) Dinosaurs

Jim Henson’s 90's sitcom Dinosaurs was about as family-friendly as a show could get. So fans were just a tad surprised when this light-hearten show ended with... well, the apocalypse.
Even more bafflingly the show didn’t go with the standard meteorite extinction story line but completely change the way the dino's died out

They don’t get yeeted to death by a space rock, they die out because greedy corporations destroyed the environment. Hey, that’s also the way humans are gonna die: what a neat coincidence.

At the start of the episode, a plant known as cider poppies is growing everywhere. Under pressure to find a solution, the WESAYSO Corporation forces bumbling lead character Earl to drop poison on the flowers.

It works. In fact, it works way too well, fatally poisoning all plant life on Earth.

The result? Well, with no food the dinosaurs are done for.

Obviously, Henson and co were trying to subvert the traditional extinction story line and make a point about the dangers of our effect on the environment. But still, it was a weirdly dark way to close out a previously family-friendly show. And one that critics and audiences largely rejected.

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9) How I Met Your Mother

The final season of this show had a difficult job. After years of teasing, they had to find someone who could live up to the part of the “Mother” character. You know, the person they’ve been hyping up since day one.
But amazingly they actually pulled that part off. Fans loved Cristin Milioti as the titular ‘mother’ role. And they still managed to find a way to screw up the finale.

In a last-minute twist, we see a montage in which the mother dies and Ted asks other lead character and ex-partner Robin out on a date.

The problem with this finale was that it had to be filmed years before the end of the show: when the child actors playing Ted’s kids throughout the series were still young enough to do the scene.

But the nature of Ted and Robin’s relationship had changed after the first few seasons. And this late-story twist turned the reveal of the mother, which should have been the climax of the show, into almost a side-story.

8) Game of Thrones

You all knew it had to be on here. With the possible exception of the first couple of episodes, fans hated basically the entirety of Thrones Season 8.

And while the final episode may not even be the worst of the series, it was an unbelievably disappointing ending to a show that had built up a dedicated fan base through its conniving plot and smart characterization.
Daenerys turned into a Nazi for no reason.

Bran became the world’s most disinterested King. And Dragon the dragon seemed to develop an understanding of symbolism and burned down the Iron Throne. It made no sense, and felt like a forced, premature ending, rushed out because the writers all wanted to leave for other projects. Mainly, because it was forced, premature ending, rushed out because the writers all wanted to leave for other projects. Benioff and Weiss were given as much time as they wanted to draw the show to a less rushed conclusion.

But they wanted to go and write a certain star-bound franchise.

Let’s George RR Martin’s overworked heart lasts long enough to give the books at least a real send-off.

7) Rosanne

Everything has to come to an end. Youth. Beauty.

But since we all have to go, why oh why would you choose to do it the way Rosanne did?

The beloved, and iconic middle American sitcom built up an adoring fan base, partly through being grounded and realistic. This wasn’t a wacky show, just a sitcom about a blue-collar family trying to make ends meet.

The ending threw all that away. In the finale, it was revealed that all the events of the show's ninth season had been made up. Well, I mean the whole is made up obviously. But even in the show’s universe, they were made up, fictionalized by the character Rosanne, who was writing a book. Most significantly, her husband Dan had actually died a season earlier from the heart attack viewers had been led to believe he survived at the end of season 8.

This move proved massively controversial. And when the reboot season of Rosanne came in 2017, this move was reconnected away as quickly as possible.

6) Lost

J.J Abrams is famous for writing what he refers to as “mystery box” stories. This is a style of writing that focuses on withholding just enough information to keep things suspenseful and engaging. And his work on Lost was no exception. The show expertly and deftly raised question after question, mystery after mystery until viewers couldn’t bear to look away.

But the problem with that style? When you have to say what’s in the box.

No finale to Lost was ever gonna be able to satisfactorily solve all the loose threads it had cast. But fans found the ending, which basically shrugged and said “they were all in limbo”, kind of - a particularly unsatisfying denouement.

Most fans were confused as to what the show’s conclusion even meant. Had they been dead since the plane crash? Did they die at some other point in the story? If so, when? Was it all at once? You get the idea.
Those who thought that they did understand the story still felt it was a cop-out, and wasted send off for the characters and story that the fans had come to love.

But what do you think...

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5) Two And A Half Men

Charlie Sheen’s 2011 meltdown remains one of the greatest moments in the history of pop culture chaddary.
But clearly, Two And A Half Men creator Chuck
Lorre has never gotten over Sheen’s behavior, because he used the show’s finale to have one last pop at Sheen.
Although there had been four seasons since Charlie’s character, also called Charlie, had died: Lorre decided that the character was actually alive. This twist, around which much of the episode was based, seemed like it would bring Sheen back for a swansong.
Instead, the episode ends with us seeing Charlie from behind approaching his old home. Just as he’s about to return, a piano falls out of nowhere and splats him. Something no amount of tiger blood and Adonis DNA can save you from.
The camera then pulls back to reveal Lorre in the director’s chair. Lorre gives a thumbs up and recites Sheen’s famous catchphrase “Winning”, before also being crushed by a piano.
This strange ending felt less like a wrapping up of story lines and characters that audiences had come to know over 12 seasons, and more like a bitter director sticking the knife in an ex-employee who’d annoyed him.

4) The X Files

Writing an ending is hard. That much should be clear by now. But The X Files deserves special mention for getting two cracks at tying things up. And failing hard at both.

The finale to the original series aired in 2002 and had Mulder on trial for finally proving the government was covering up a planned alien invasion in 2012. Which, was wrong or these aliens are reaaaaally fashionably late.

Fans criticized the finale for not answering many of the questions the show had raised. Instead, it raised depressing new questions and left people feeling frustrated. Still, it was better than the show’s second ending. The finale to Fox’s X Files reboot series revolved around the shock twist that Mulder and Sculley's son was actually the offspring of the main alien villain.

Luckily, the kid is killed off and neither Mulder nor Sculley seem remotely bothered by the death of a child they’d thought was theirs until a few hours earlier.

3) St Elsewhere

It’s not a show many people think about now. But in its day, the medical drama St
Elsewhere was huge. Running from 1982 to 1992, the show won tonnes of awards, pulled in a stable audience and was even critically considered one of the best shows of all time.

So imagine how pissed fans were when the grand finale to the show was… are you ready for this… it was all in the imagination of an autistic child staring at a snow globe.

Yeah, they went with the “it was all a dream” ending that even most 6th graders would be too embarrassed to include in a creative writing project. Apparently, the thinking of the writing staff was that they wanted to ensure the show was definitely over, with no chance for spin offs or reboots. And saying the whole thing was made up by some kid we’d never seen before was their way of completely killing off any chance of that happening.

It’s a weird mentality because presumably, the fear of a spin off is that it would ruin the reputation of the show. Which this did anyway…

Most of the cast have since admitted they hate the ending. A sentiment fans certainly share. BUT it did set up the frankly fascinating Tommy Westphalia Hypothesis, which you can hear all about in our video on Franchises That Share The Same Universe.

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2) Quantum Leap

On the one hand, the terrible terrible ending to Quantum Leap wasn’t the writer’s fault. They’d written what was only supposed to be a season finale, not a conclusion to the full show. But the studio had cancelled them, meaning that would indeed be the final episode.

Still, you’d expect them to think of a better fix than they did. The last outing of the time travel show opens the way all the other episodes did: with lead character, Dr Sam Beckett trying to return to his own time. That’s Beckett with two “t”s by the way, you’ll see why that’s important. Beckett meets a character that’s essentially God who tells him to could have returned home any time he wanted, but his will to help people was too strong. Then the episode fades to black and we get the “fix” the writers thought of: a single title card saying “Dr Sam Becket never returned home”.

This is the bleakest possible ending to a show that viewers really loved. And just to complete the gut punch, look: they spelled his name wrong. What a sad way for this once-loved show to go.

1) Dexter

Dexter was everyone’s favorite show about a serial killer of serial killers. A serial serial killer killer? The Showtime hit aired for eight seasons. And over that time, viewers became obsessed with Michael C Hall’s charming vigilante serial killer.

The show peaked around Season 4, but many fans hung on to see how things would end for Dexy. And the answer? Pretty boringly. Some viewers believed Dexter would finally be caught and punished for all that killing he just loved doing. Some believed he’d find a way to fully redeem himself. Instead he basically just retired from being a serial killer and became a lumberjack after throwing his sister’s body into a… hurricane?

They did suggest he was still constantly tortured by his own violent past. But still, it seems like an anti-climax to see one of the great killers of all time reduced to hacking down cedar-wood, with no reference to how others perceived his crimes.

Hopefully, he least stays true to his character by only chopping down trees that have been chopping down other trees.