The Re-Read: Bad Endings

Sunday's Child Is Bonny and Blithe

Just in case you were wondering about the sandwiches from yesterday, here’s one of them.

Anyway, speaking of how things turn out in the end, after watching the original Star Wars trilogy with my young relatives last week, I found myself mulling over the question of when a bad ending for a series or franchise has been bad enough to not only turn me away from future franchise work but to ruin any pleasure I might take in re-watching the better installments.

The quintessential case of that is Game of Thrones (the HBO series), and it’s easy to see why so many people feel that way, including me. I tried rewatching a couple of earlier episodes and knowing it’s going to all turn out as badly as it did just makes me change the channel. It’s not just that the last season and a half was badly done but that it failed to pay off almost everything that was set up earlier with great fanfare as if it were going to pay off. I understand that Martin himself has been trying to avoid playing out familiar tropes in familiar ways in the books, but that’s not really what went wrong. In the end, it seemed pretty simple: the showrunners were fine when they were improving someone else’s fully-written first draft and then lost when all they had were some notes about what should happen next. I think what made it so unforgiveable is they were so close: you could readily imagine what the best moves on the chessboard were for most of the plots and even some of the twists or surprises that might work. And instead what we got was a bunch of rushed resolutions and truly bad ideas.

An opposite example might be the last season of Babylon 5. Much of it is painfully bad and hard to watch, but if you know the details of the production, you can forgive the worst material and just move on to the last third or so of the season, which returns to long-foreshadowed (or literally already-seen) events and does a good-to-great job with them. My only complaint about the foreshadowed material is that I honestly thought Future Londo’s fury with Sheridan would turned out to be substantially unfeigned—I thought Sheridan would turn out to be less gifted as a president than he was a messianic military leader. I still can’t shake the feeling that the showrunner became more sentimental about his major characters over time and couldn’t quite have any of them suffer a tragic fate of their own making. (Even Londo’s bad situation at the end is at least not entirely his fault.) I suppose you could say that the pretty terrible attempt at a spin-off also tarnished the whole thing a bit, but it wasn’t a big deal. The major thing with Babylon 5 is that the showrunner had a plan, the plan was good, and where the plan went bad it wasn’t his fault for the most part.

I think most of us can tally up a balance sheet of unforgiveably bad endings that spoil everything that can before against “well, that wasn’t a great ending, but that’s ok”. (Not just for long-running franchises or major plot arcs, but sometimes even in a single episode or film.) If nothing else, that accounting off helps clarify how much a great ending that completely fulfills the rest of the show or franchise is a rare and beautiful thing. (Say, The Last Airbender series, or the Prydain series’ The High King.) There’s also I suppose the complicated case of bad-ending-fixed that’s also quite rare—I think the best example I can think of is Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series, with its original catastrophically bad ending that spoiled almost all the mysteries that drove the earlier books onward (and thus ruined possibly one of the ten best premises in speculative fiction ever) but then Farmer figured out a fix in a final-final book that undid almost everything terrible about the first attempt at a conclusion.

Where does the entire nine-film Star Wars saga fall in that? It’s complicated in part because I’ve never bought for one moment the proposition that George Lucas had the major twist of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi in mind when he made the first film. The first film made, aka A New Hope, is so much a thing of itself and for itself that you can’t hold it accountable for anything that was done with the universe later on. It’s like the koan, “What did your face look like before your parents were born?” Every other Star Wars film could have been absolute garbage and it wouldn’t really hurt the original film, any more than the hideous slurry of sequels to Jaws affect the original film. But it’s because they weren’t that the next two movies created greater expectations about what the story of Anakin Skywalker’s fall might have been like and what the story of after the end of the Empire might turn out to be.

Well, we know now—the prequels have their moments and more importantly maybe they have a narrative and thematic idea that’s better than George Lucas himself was able to realize or fulfill. You can do head canon work on the prequels to improve them, and they’ve been a fertile ground for Dave Filoni to improve upon with the Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons. The sequels, on the other hand, tally up as “cynical but watchable reprise”, “daring but flawed deconstruction of the series with promising but wholly unprepared-for implications”, and “repellant disaster”. The last film is so bad that it almost spoils my ability to enjoy any Star Wars but what saves everything else in the end is the disjunctive quality of its badness and maybe that the penultimate step had its moments, despite its flaws. The whole thing is a corporate failure rather than a purely creative one (though really, Abrams needs to be kept away from any franchise but his own).

On the other hand, the ending is so bad that it makes anything futureward of that moment unlikely or unwholesome. It doesn’t set up a platform for more storytelling, it extinguishes it. It’s like the seal on the Time War in the rebooted Doctor Who: it keeps us forever inside the contours of the series up to The Last Jedi and not even that. (If you keep thinking about Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi, and trust me, I really really loved that material, you can’t help but feel anything but sadness and pity watching Luke ineptly try to train Grogu in The Book of Boba Fett.) So it’s not a bad ending that taints the whole franchise to date, but it is a bad ending that leaves future storytelling in a bind.