When a beloved television show ends, it's not unlike the death of a close friend (the kind who tries to sell you bullshit you don't need every ten minutes or so). It's hard to say goodbye after spending years laughing along with the lovable Friends, or solving mysteries with Columbo, or letting the Cheers gang enable your crippling drinking problem.
Unfortunately, TV show finales have a grand tradition of sucking. If you thought the worst example was when The Sopranos simply cut to black or when Lost implied that the whole show was the dream of a character in a novel in a library that was inside a snow globe owned by Hitler, then you must have missed ...
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The X-Files Brought Mulder Back ... Then Instantly Threw Him In Jail
20th Television
The X-Files is one of the best shows of all time. It reliably churned out spooky paranormal mysteries on a weekly basis, while simultaneously educating Americans about how every state in the U.S. looks exactly like Vancouver. By the last season, David Duchovny had left the show and been replaced by an aging T-1000, but the final episode promised a return to greatness. Duchovny would be back! Everything would be explained! Mulder and Scully would have sweaty, on-camera sex!
And sure enough, the finale starts out excitingly: Mulder breaks into a government facility and electrocutes an alien disguised as a human soldier. Unfortunately for fans of Mulder and story momentum in general, he's immediately caught and put on trial for murder.
20th Television
20th Television
"Hey, you know what series finale everyone loved? Seinfeld."
In order to prove his innocence, Mulder and Skinner call witnesses who each flashback to different plots of old episodes, laying out the convoluted mess of the show's mythology and trying to make it sound like it's not meandering nonsense. It's the TV writer's equivalent of poring through your drunken texts trying to figure out what the hell you did the night before.
Also, for some reason, Mulder's trial happens in a shitty basement which is presumably used to store the FBI's Christmas decorations. It's pretty ridiculous that the big series finale of a show predicated on traveling the country is mostly confined to a dank basement.
20th Television
20th Television
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