It’s because it wasn’t a bad ending unless you really hated Spike, which I admit some people did. The Anya thing was a sour note for sure, but your objection seems to be that it didn’t end with Buffy soloing a big bad or something, which seems like it profoundly misses the point of the last three seasons of Buffy,…

It’s AVClub bubble. There are a bunch of opinions popular solely on this site.

The problem with House is that it really did let the character off the hook.

Oh shit we found the only person on the planet who liked the last season of The 100.

With an episode that was actually funny and wasn’t a clip show?

An awful lot of these the actual finale wasn’t that bad, but the season it existed in was awful. Lost is another one. The finale is suprisingly well put-together and almost works if you carefully don’t think about it at all and forget how the last season betrayed many of the best characters in favour of the, er, white…

I don’t think nuBSG has faded as much as most of these shows, I’m curious why you say that.

I see you don’t understand how subtext becoming text is a great way to ruin a TV show or movie. As you sure you’re not a Hollywood writer from the 1990s or ‘00s?

I mean, if a show has been terrible for the majority of its run, then people aren’t going to be as upset by a finale.

“How many people can remember what happened in its last episode?”

Lost’s finale wasn’t too bad, but the last season as a whole was absolutely dire, and people pretending like it wasn’t is pretty awful.

“The only really bad part about the last season is that they messed up the order of events, and the whole bran storyline of the finale”

It exists in the context of a truly awful last season, and I think 99% of people who defend the finale go to huge lengths to ignore that. If we look at it in isolation, it’s fine, if insultingly Christian (but so are most Americans, so they’re unable to process that that’s awful). If we look at it in the context of…

The big problem was that the last season betrayed most of the characters I cared about most, focusing instead of the worst and most dweeb-ish characters. Particularly it screwed over Sayid. So that really only left the mysteries. It was a terrible season overall.

There were an absolute ton of cool fan explanations for the Smoke Monster, going all the way back to its first appearance.

The trouble is it exists in the context of the last season, and the last season was dire. It didn’t earn what it did, and the whole fucking deal where “Christian Shepard” was in charge was grotesque in the context of the multicultural cast. As such, it didn’t work very well at all, I would suggest.

“With LOST, I think people were more responding to the final season than the final episode.”

“On the other hand, Game of Thrones, The 100, Lost, and BSG* set up a massive set of mysteries that when revealed were not only vastly less interesting than what the fans had dreamed up for them”

Correct. Brendan here is prioritizing nostalgia over all else. It was a plot-heavy mess which effectively betrayed multiple characters and didn’t feel earned nor compelling.

“ just that it’s tone is clearly not entirely doom and gloom”