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Breaking Bad did a fantastic job at wrapping the story line, in all the directions it took you.
This. The final moments of that episode after everybody got gunned down were some of the best in TV history IMO. A very strong finish that managed to actually live up to the hype, especially compared to the Sopranos BS ending.
Six Feet Under did this better than any series I've ever seen. It not only wrapped up storylines, it took each character up until the end of their lives.
You took the words right out of my...well...fingers.
Six Feet Under had what I consider to be the best series finale of any television show, ever. Everyone's story was wrapped up in the final 6-7 minutes, and it was all done so poignantly (to a beautiful song, "Breathe Me" by Sia) that the emotions it evoked were deep, heartwrenching. Awesome ending.
People are noting Six Feet Under and how it wrapped up everyone's story so well. And I see that this appeals to the needs of a lot of people to have everything explained to them so they don't have to imagine anything. However, I hold fiction to be a collaborative effort between creators(s) and viewer(s)/reader(s), so it is not this aspect of that finale that I love but rather the way it was done.
As a counterpoint, I loved the finale of The Sopranos. The mood, the pacing, and then--- the you figure it out, audience, because there is no right or wrong answer to 'Did Tony survive?' expectation. Ditto Dexter - I loved the tragic, open-ended finale.
And that brings up another point - I don't crave the happy endings that some do. That's not the goal of fiction. Some stories will end happily, but some won't. Dexter running away to a new life with Hannah? I did not need that to be satisfied. And I found Dexter in the Pacific Northwest, his family and love gone, far from home and no longer without his professional access to fulfill his sociopathic drive, far more interesting than sailing off to domestic bliss in Argentina.
Breaking Bad? That's another good example of how the finale was done being more than precisely what happened. The opening scene of Walt in New Hampshire, with Marty Robbins' El Paso playing on the car stereo? And the ending, with Badfinger's Baby Blue playing as the fade-from-above shot shows Walt die? Incredible cinema!
Newhart nailed it with a nostalgic view back to The Bob Newhart Show that was also a tongue in cheek commentary on the use of dream sequences, such as that (in)famously used on Dallas.
So there's a lot of ways to end a series and it's more about how it is done than what is done.
Whatever makes a "great finale" seems to be missing from most of the great series I have enjoyed. Examples of bad or unfulfilling final episodes that come to mind:
The Sopranos
The Wire
Boardwalk Empire
Dexter
True Detectives Season 1 (since it seems that each season is to be unrelated to the previous season)
and several others that don't come to mind at the moment.
The final episode of Breaking Bad was ok (not perfect).
I think the shorter the series and the more focused it is, the better the ending.
Yes, I agree that the Dexter finale really sucked.
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