Distant Finale - Television Tropes & Idioms

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Simoun's ending takes place five years later.
The second season of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha (A's) ends with a montage showing the characters as they are six years after the series ends. The third season (StrikerS) begins 4 years after that.
GunBuster, in which the two main characters return to a hero's welcome twelve thousand years after the end of the war.
- Worth noting that while twelve thousand years have passed on earth, very little time has passed for the two main characters. For them the war ended just yesterday, or a few days ago at most.
- The sequel, DieBuster, has a much more modest version — only ten years. Turns out to be the exact same scene, from another perspective.
The final manga volume of Kare Kano is set many years after the series to show the cast as happy adults.
Both the anime ending and the manga ending of Mahoromatic happen about 20 years after the events of the main story but both offer different perspective endings where in the anime Suguru moves to the new Saint and human planet and gets cybernetic enhancements and kills combat androids. Either is dying or badly injured and sees Mahoro again and they walk together. The manga gets a different ending where Suguru becomes an officer in Vespar and defeats the last of Management and when he goes back home sees Mahoro again after she was reborn as a baby and grew up with all of her memories intact.
The Card Captor Sakura manga flashforwards 4 years to assure the reader that Sakura and Syaoran get together, and that any problem their relationship might have was taken care of. Just don't ask for details.
Scrapped Princess ends with a few scenes showing all the characters living Happily Ever After.
Da Capo Second Season ends with the two obviously destined characters getting married, and in the repeated ending animation, 2 adults are shown (faceless) reading a photo album.
- Of course, the finale's credits finally reveal (as if no one could have guessed) that the two adults are a married Nemu and Junichi.
Paradise Kiss (10 years later).
In Kurau Phantom Memory we see the lives of the main characters ten years after the events in the previous episode, in which Kurau loses her Rynax, causing her pair Christmas lots of grief. The most important event in the last episode therefore is the return of the Rynax-Kurau out of Christmas' body, much like Christmas herself did when she appeared out of Kurau years before.
The ending of Stellvia Of The Universe fast-forwards two years to the day when the protagonist's younger brother enrolls into same academy as herself. Since a sequel was planned, it's safe to assume that he would have been its new protagonist but unfortunately, it was canceled.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has a Time Skip and a Distant Finale.
The manga ending for Rurouni Kenshin picks up 5 years later, where Kenshin has retired from swordsmanship, Kaoru has revived the Kamiya Kasshin-Ryû with numerous students, and Yahiko has become a master swordsman. The ending deals with Yahiko inheriting Kenshin's reverse blade sword. This becomes a Time Skip with the release of the third OAV, which shows the final years of Kenshin's life.
.hack//SIGN had one of these, with the events of the .hack games taking place in between. The game characters show up in the final episode.
- I think that may have been a bonus episode. Not even sure if it's on the DVD.
- The bonus episode is called ".hack//UNISON", and was only included in a super-duper special limited DVD edition. It was shown in Britain on the Anime Central channel following the series proper, but wasn't included in the rerun because the rerun was cut short. It's available on You Tube, but only in subbed Japanese as far as ths troper can tell.
The final episode of El Cazador De La Bruja is set unspecified time after the showdown with the Big Bad. Judging by how much Ellis has grown, it must have been several years.
The last episode of Godannar is set seven years after the final battle, showing us what everybody is up to now. The last scene of that episode is then set one year after that.
The epilogue scene of Zegapain is set an ambiguous number of years after the final battle, with the lighthouse visited in an earlier episode now ravaged by time and reclaimed by nature. Depending on the viewer's interpretation, it can be a Bittersweet Ending ( as Kyo started aging once he had been reconstituted as a real human being, but the time needed to restore this technology, and save the rest of mankind, might have surpassed his own lifespan.)
The last chapter of Inuyasha takes place three years later, then jumps ahead a bit for the last pages.
Fruits Basket way overshoots the mark. The last few scenes completely skip past Kyo and Tohru's (and everyone else's!) marriage and life together and shows them as elderly grandparents (although indicating they've been happy.)
Sonic X originally skipped six years into the future for its finale, though the series was then resurrected for a further 26 episodes. These episodes took place 6 years after the original series in the Human World, but only six months in Sonic's universe.
Digimon Adventure 02 pulled one of these off, but it was subjected to heavy DisContinuity for the Character Derailment it put the characters through. The kids' adult careers and romantic entanglements bore little resemblance to any characterization that came before, and were all in service of a positively epic Talking The Monster To Death anti-climax. For the record not everyone disliked it all.
Turn A Gundam serves as something of a Distant Finale for the entire Gundam franchise. Although exactly which series count as actually taking place in Turn A's universe (Universal Century for sure, Gundam Wing and G Gundam very likely), it manages to do a surprisingly good job in tieing what would otherwise be completely separate timelines. Also referenced in SD Gundam: G Generation Spirits where an omnicidal autonimous Turn-A Gundam appears to bring about the apocalypse, effectively ending the entire Universal Century and leading to the events of Turn-A the series. Probably not the canon version of events,though.
In the final episode of Nadia - The Secret of Blue Water the main Characters are shown married and with a child.
The final episode of Infinite Ryvius takes place a year after the previous episode; the very end of the episode then jumps thousands of years into the future.
Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto ~Natsu no Sora~ skips five years, to show how the students and instructors of the mage institute are doing and how some of them are dealing with Sora's death.
The manga ending of Love Hina depicts practically a new beginning in the Hinata Inn, with a female character very much resembling Keitaro going through almost the exact same shenanigans he went through when he first arrived, and ultimately showing Keitaro's and Naru's wedding.
The last chapter of Yokohama Shopping Trip takes place at least a decade later.
There is one in Michiko To Hatchin, where Hatchin, grown up with a little kid, falls into the arms of her beloved Michiko.
Mx0 had an abrupt ending in which Taiga transferred out for a year, finally returning a year later.
One of thr ee possible interpretations for Takaki's recurring dreams in Five Centimeters Per Second. Any posited "happy ending" for that movie fits here by definition.
The final scenes of Solty Rei take place several years after the Final Battle (and attendant Heroic Sacrifice) to save the city from Eirene. Roy finds Solty floating in space, still alive.
The second bonus chapter of the Shoujo Sect manga jumped into the future to show that Momoku, Shinobu, and Maya were living together, and having this fact revealed to all of Shinobu's coworkers, much to her embarrassment.
The 13th episodes of both Please Teacher and Please Twins are these.
The ending to the Shaman King manga is one of these.
The ending to Dragon Ball GT is set 100 years in the future where Goku and Vegeta's ~~ancestors~~ descendants fight in a World Martial Arts Tournament.
- Dragon Ball Z's ending was roughly 18 years after the Buu saga.
The manga version of Chrono Crusade had an "epilogue" added in the final collected volume, which shows what happened to all of the characters (skipping between 1932 and 1999) and ties up some of the lose ends left over from the (much more open-ended) ending published in the original magazine.
Rose Of Versailles

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The final issue of Y The Last Man gives us a view of what Earth has become sixty years after the series' climax, with flashbacks to update us on how the surviving characters spent the intervening time. Somehow, the issue maintains the same dramatic tension and plot twist quantity as all the others in spite of this device.
- That is what we call a good writer.
Peter David set the final issue of his 12-year-run of Incredible Hulk 10 years after the previous issue. A Daily Bugle interview with Rick Jones serves as a fitting end to both David's tenure on the title as well as the Hulk mythos in general.
- David may have been influenced by Alan Moore's Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?, which uses a similar narrative device (a Daily Planet interview with Lois Lane) to end the legend of the Silver Age Superman.
There was foreshadowing that this device would be used in The Ballad of Halo Jones, with a scene set in a university history lecture several thousand years after the events of the main story discussing Halo's significance as a historical character/folk hero. However, the comic was, unfortunately, never finished.
Most of the last volume of The Sandman is this. Interestingly, it plays with the timeline by skipping back to Shakespeare at the end.
The final issue of Planetary takes place a year after the previous one. And was released three years after the previous issue.

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Billy Elliot - Last scene is of his father and brother going to see him as a professional Danseur (Ballarino).
The classic Hitchcock film North By Northwest ends with a tense and literal cliffhanger in which Roger is desperately coaxing a frightened, dangling Eve to grab his hand so that she doesn't fall from Mount Rushmore. The camera zooms in on her terrified face as she flails to reach him, and suddenly his encouraging words turn to "Come along, Mrs. Thornhill!" and the screen wipes to show the two of them playing in bed on their honeymoon. That little wipe contains the resolution to the danger as well as their return from the mountain, any debriefing between them and the Professor, and their engagement and marriage.
- Not to mention that right after this we're treated to footage of the train they're on going into a tunnel. This troper saw the movie in his Visual Lit class and it became immediately obvious what it was.
Gangs Of New York, initially set during the Civil War, ends with a view of modern New York. The Brooklyn Bridge and the World Trade Centers are visible in the final shot.

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Happens in The Bible, with Revelations skipping from the 1st few centuries A.D. to the end of the world. Obviously that makes this trope Older Than Feudalism.
- Your Mileage May Vary as to whether or not Revelations is metaphorical... Just don't get too carried away.
- Plus there's all the parts where it says it will happen within one generation...
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe almost ends like this. After the defeat of the White Witch it jumps to the children having grown up in Narnia. Then they wander back into the real world (having nearly forgotten it) and discover not only has no time passed since they arrived (because of Year Inside Hour Outside) but they're children again (because... I don't know. Magic?)
- Magic. They're not even re-aged when they go back to Narnia.
Every sequel to Arthur C Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey ends this way... and every other sequel ignores the previous one's ending, as they take place in different continuities from each other.
- ... What? I don't see that at all in the first two stories. "2010"'s distant finale takes place in 20001 AD.
The main events of the epilogue of War And Peace take place eight years after the events of the novel conclude. Tolstoy, per his genius, covers eight years in thirty pages, compared with the first seven years of the novel which took a thousand pages to describe.
The last chapter of Harry Potter takes place 19 years after the end of the story.
The Handmaid's Tale
- Which, if this Troper remembers correctly, is about x-mumble years later the finding the documents that made up the preceding book, and scholars opining: "Oh, my, weren't people back then just so foolish; of course, nothing like that could ever happen again."
Nation, set around the turn of the 19th century, finishes in the present day with an old man wrapping up the story to his grandkids, who are not remotely impressed by the Bittersweet Ending.
Arguably, 1984 - the scholarly appendix at the end on Newspeak is written in the past tense in standard English, implying Newspeak is no longer the spoken language. A matter of some dispute.
Subverted in And Another Thing, the sixth Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book, in which the Distant Finale was, in fact, a construct that took place in the minds of the characters while on an exploding planet. This was, oddly enough, at the BEGINNING of the novel. The story continues uninterrupted from there.

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Six Feet Under ("Everyone's Waiting," follows (almost) all of the main characters to their deaths years in the future.)
Mad About You ("Final Frontier," 22 years later, with flashbacks)
Babylon 5 ("Sleeping in Light," 19 years later)
- The fourth season finale as well. It basically shows how people view the events of the past four years immediately after, 100 years after, 500 years after, 1000 years after, and then one million years after, by which time humanity has evolved to a First One like state.
Dawsons Creek (Two-parter "All Good Things..." and "...Must Come to an End," 5 years later. This had the added effect of making the actors look only five years older than their characters rather than ten years.)
Star Trek Enterprise ("These Are the Voyages," 6 and 200 years later)
- Interestingly, the episode is woven in with a Next Generation episode that aired more the fifteen years before.
Eureka's first season finale is four years in the future, but this is a subversion because two characters then proceed to time-travel back four years.
- Star Trek Voyager's finale did the same thing, starting out 26 years into the future, then almost immediately traveling back to avoid that future.
Star Treks The Next Generation and Voyager both do this, after a fashion: in their respective Grand Finales, we see a good deal of the cast, years after the events of the show proper, in futures of varying degrees of desirability. Then it's all undone via Time Travel, in such a way that their lives, to say nothing of the galaxy at large, will probably be better for it.
ReGenesis "The Truth", 35 years later, although it's heavily implied to be David's dying hallucination.
The epilogue of Will And Grace occurs when the pair, who had a falling out out around the time they each had children, are reunited by the meeting-in-college and eventual marriage of said children.
Parodied in Tim And Eric Awesome Show Great Job!, as one of the earliest episodes is a preview of the 50th Anniversary Special.
Stargate SG-1's final episode Unending featured SG-1 and General Landry being caught in a time-distortion field and living and aging 50 years while time outside passed normally. This was undone, of course, and everyone but Teal'c completely forgot the 50 years that had been.
How I Met Your Mother reverses this - the premise is that 20 or so years after the main character has met, married and had kids with the girl of his dreams, said kids ask their father to retell the story of how the two of them met - and the entire series becomes a giant flashback to relate this story, going on for half a dozen seasons with only occasional remarks from the kids to keep the frame story intact.
Battlestar Galactica 150,000 years later...
Inverted on Newhart: In the final scene of the last episode, Dick Loudon wakes up to discover that his entire life from 1982 to 1990 as depicted in Newhart was actually a dream of Bob Hartley, the protagonist of The Bob Newhart Show, which had last aired in 1978
Dollhouse Epitaph One, included with the first season DVDs, is set 10 years in the future, showing what the consequences of the Dollhouse's technology will be on civilization. It's not pretty. Nor entirely accurate, since it ended up getting renewed.
The Guiding Light 's 72-year run ended with a not-so-Distant Finale scene, set one year after the rest of the episode.

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Garou: Mark of the Wolves takes place many after years Geese Howard's death, with his son Rock raised by Terry (who is now in his 30s). The game also features the students and relatives of other characters from the Fatal Fury series, like Kim Dong Wan and Kim Jae Hoon (who were mentioned in the series prior as Kim Kaphwan's sons), Marco Rodriguiz (Ryo Sakazaki's pupil, who is actually as old as Ryo), and Hokutomaru (Andy Bogard's pupil).
Asellus' ending in Sa Ga Frontier takes place Decades after killing the Big Bad Orlouge. Asellus either is: Dead in the Human Ending with a slideshow of her living out the rest of her life, Retains her Youth in the Half-Mystic Ending and visits an old friend, and becomes the new Ruler of Facinaturu in the Full-Mystic Ending, complete with Noblewomans Laugh however the Full-Mystic Ending is actually considered Canon in the Ultimania.
- Actually, If anything, the Half Mystic Ending is canon in the Essence. You got two facts wrong, because not only does Asellus NOT become a crazy dictator canonically, Saga Frontier doesn't have an Ultimania, it has the Essence of Sa Ga Frontier/
Megaman Battle Network 6 does this in pretty much pure text, presumably to eliminate the need for new sprites.
Final Fantasy VII's last scene is after the credits, showing Red XIII and his children, 500 years after the game, coming upon the ruins of Midgar.
The final screen of Marathon Infinity is set in the last quantum moment before the end of the universe.
- Not quite as impressive, but Marathon 2's ending screen detailed events happening ten thousand years after the end of the gameplay.
Used in the Visual Novel Crescendo, where the bad ending for Yuka's path takes place several years later at a class reunion

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Tech Infantry has the Y3K story, set almost a millennium after the rest of the plot, and the abortive '"Tech Infantry: Exodus'' project, set several centuries after that.

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Unicorn Jelly ends with jumps of 350, 116666, and finally 150000 years. Then the semi-sequel Pastel Defender Heliotrope jumps seven hundred thousand years after the original. And then that sequel has a 100000 years later Distant Finale.
- And if you can make sense out of any of them, you're clearly a better troper than I. True Art Is Incomprehensible!

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Rockos Modern Life: The final episode took place about 20 years in the future, complete with all of the generic Sci-Fi cliches about the future. It stars Filbert's kids, who ask Filbert, who suddenly is a VERY old man (Of course, this is lampshaded) about a banana they found in an abandoned house, which happened to be Rocko's. He tells them that a mix-up with a monkey that was intended to be launched into space eventually ended with Rocko, Heffer, Spunky, and the monkey travelling aimlessly through the stars. Of course, because Nickelodeon could never let a show truly end, the ship they were stuck on crash lands next to Filbert's house, and the main cast suddenly meets up again, probably meant to be the start of a Spin Off. One could assume that naming a futuristic spin-off of a show with the word "modern" in the title wouldn't have been too hard, either.
The second season finale of Justice League Unlimited was originally meant to be the series finale, and took place about 50 years later (and was also a Fully Absorbed Finale for Batman Beyond).
The Kids Next Door series finale takes place when the kids of Sector V have grown up into rather old adults (who, in an artistic twist, are portrayed by real life actors rather than animated characters). Most of the episode is told via interviews and flashbacks, and attentive viewers can infer what the kids of Sector V grew up to be.
There is an As Told By Ginger movie which gives closure to the series and shows us that Ginger ended up publishing her diaries. We also see that Ginger and Darren are now married and have a baby.
From the sublime to...there is a Family Guy episode which ends with the entire previous twenty-one minutes' shown as having been presented to a class or tour-group of children in the Future, probably in space. The only question raised was something like, "So what's the deal with the baby? Can they understand what he's saying, or not?"
Pepper Ann ended with a reunion in the future, with a B-plot set in the show's "present" shown through flashbacks.
In the upcoming second season finale of Chowder the episode will take place in the future according to creator C.H. Greenblatt. This may count as a finale as the show has been potentially Screwed By The Network.

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