Also, on the subject of Ice-9, I think people have forgotten about 4x12 "Ctrl-Alt-Delete", where the "terrorists" were creating a virus and Samaritan recovered it. Though the virus's name was never specified, I imagine in the ideal world this would've been the Ice-9 virus. It was a fun plant, like Caleb was in season…

From what I've seen floating about the Internet, Nolan had a six (I should imagine full) season plan. (Sorry I'm a little late to the party.)

I know I'm a little late to the party, but to refer to your point about Terra-ble Incognita moving the story forward, the difference between that and 6741 is Terra-ble Incognita was one of 22 episodes in the fourth season of a pretty successful show, and it was the expectation that POI would return for season 5 in the…

I'm behind the times a little but I thought I'd chime in, just to say that while POI did a good job wrapping up its final season, it's gutting that Jonah Nolan had a 6-season plan and couldn't finish his story because of technicalities. They had to condense 44-46 episodes into 13, which is why we kept having things…

Walking Dead is definitely better, even these days. I gave up on NCIS a long time ago. I can't speak to any of your other examples because I've never seen any of them. But you're right, I only argued one point, which is that ratings and quality drop alongside each other. That's not strictly true, although of course…

I don't hate the series, I want to enjoy it. But this is the second season I've been wanting to just end because it's been so poor and at this rate the show just doesn't have any kind of consistency, either episode-to-episode or season-to-season. As you say, "if you're a true fan,unless the writing get too bad,why…

No, from my understanding they never wrote anything like that, just the cliffhanger.

No, it was always supposed to start at 10pm - that was its timeslot.
But writing and ratings do go hand-in-hand. Bad writing leads to bad ratings, but also so does a sucky timeslot. The thing is if Elementary had had better ratings even before s5 it wouldn't have landed itself with the Sunday death slot. It's…

In "Control-Alt-Delete", Samaritan frames 4 Muslims as terrorists because they were creating an unnamed virus capable of destroying it. I reckon with more time, we'd have learnt that Ice-9 was that virus.

Hi from a year in the future. Just thought I'd reply and say that Nolan had a 6-season plan for the show. So I'm gonna say that would be the ideal series length, although a full season 5 would have worked for me.

I don't wish any writers out of their job, but it's the writers penning poor storylines, for which the show was pulling horrific ratings and thus deserved to be cancelled. The more shows that get lucky renewals like this following unresolved cliffhangers the more it will tempt more writers to do it and so many more…

Given the state of season 5, unlucky might be more accurate. Sherlock being ill could be a good plot to explore, but it's hard as a viewer to put faith in writers who crafted Shinwell's rubbish arc, when the final 2 episodes proved the entire storyline could have been more effectively handled if he had never been…