Almost Never About the Ending
Sixteen Signals arrived, and every one of them is telling on itself. The room asked for the endings that still bother, and the participants have described endings that stopped bothering, endings that started bothering differently, endings that were tangled with the death of a person, endings that ended their relationship to a whole medium, and one ending that has never been watched but has been passed down through a family for forty years. What the room is really about is not endings. It is about the specific ways an ending is being asked to hold something the participant is carrying.
Three shapes are doing most of the interpretive work.
The first is the ending as unearned withdrawal of the theorizing. This is the Lost participant, precise about what actually hurts: "The resentment is not the ending. It is being left holding the theorizing alone." That is a very particular kind of injury. Six years of collective imagination were being made every week between the show and its audience, and the writers admitted, at the end, that only one side had been theorizing. That is not a bad ending. That is a broken contract. The Game of Thrones participant is naming a similar break, at scale: "Something in me stopped trusting the format itself." Bad endings damage trust in the specific work. These bad endings damaged trust in the medium. That is a bigger wound than a plot resolution problem.
The second is the ending as accidental entanglement with grief. The Sopranos participant loves the cut-to-black now because the person who taught them to love it is gone. The Leftovers participant does not know if they resent the ending or the fact that their grandmother died two weeks after. The St. Elsewhere participant has never seen the show. Their father has told the story of the ending every Christmas for forty years. The ending has been in the family longer than the participant has been alive, and the participant is naming that this makes it a real thing they carry even though they never watched it. In these Signals the ending is not really a fictional event. It has become a container into which a real relationship has poured itself. The show did nothing wrong. Life did.
The third is the ending as an emotional tool the participant did not want to be handed. The La La Land participant resents the film for "teaching me a facial expression that ambushes me at real dinners with real partners." The Harry Potter participant, at 12, put the book down and thought "oh no adulthood is boring." Six years of ambition quietly reshaped by an epilogue. The Turkish drama participant's mother lost the reason she sat down in front of a screen at 9pm. These are Signals about how an ending stops being the ending of a show and becomes a small piece of psychological equipment the viewer now has to operate. The equipment is often unwanted, and often precise. La La Land installed a facial expression. Harry Potter installed a suspicion. The Turkish drama removed a nightly reason.
Two smaller edges deserve naming.
The Breaking Bad Signal is doing something few others do. It resents the ending because the ending was too flattering to a character it had spent years teaching the viewer to hate. "The show worked so hard to make me hate him. Then it gave him the shape of a hero's death. I resented the reward more than any bad ending on this list." That is a moral objection, not a craft one. Several participants are making moral objections in this room, though most are not naming them as such. The Dexter Signal is another one: "Lumberjacking is not punishment. Lumberjacks were mad." That sentence is funny and also serious. The complaint is that the ending confused wrongdoing with reflection, and produced a picture of atonement that did not honor either.
The Wire Signal is the room's quietest and possibly sharpest. It refuses to name the finale as the actual ending. "The scene where the kids replace the previous kids. That scene was the actual ending and I have never recovered. I did not resent it. I resented that it was the truth." That is not a complaint. That is a small piece of praise for a work that told the viewer the truth and refused to release them from it. Several Signals are doing this shape without saying so. The Mad Men Coca-Cola ad has ruined last shots for the next decade of prestige TV because it was too good, not because it was too bad. Some endings are resented for succeeding.
The room's real finding is that endings almost never bother a viewer at the level of craft. They bother at the level of what the viewer was carrying into the show and what the ending refused to take back out. Broken contracts of collective imagination. Accidental containers for grief. Unwanted emotional equipment. Moral objections dressed as taste. Refusals to release the viewer from a truth. Sixteen Signals in which the resentment is real and precise and, on close reading, almost never actually about the ending.
The resentment is real and precise and, on close reading, almost never actually about the ending.
