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Well, so much for that.
Studio Gainax has become famous for, among other things, deliberate subversion of the subjects its shows tackle. True to its company's roots, most of its best subtle satire is of its own fans and their expectations.
Many of its endings are not light-hearted, though calling them strict Downer Endings is a misnomer here. The more common themes associated are lots of dialogue with obscure metaphor and conversation and a serious treatment. The philosophy of the series is most openly seen here. Indirect or Distant Finales pop up too. Basically a Genre Shift in the last episodes, usually aiming to dark. Expect a Drama Bomb Finale.
Even if another production company has done a story, saying a show has a Gainax Ending is usually a spoiler-free but well understood "warning" to the watcher for a strange ending. While certainly not the first or the only company to do so, this exaggerated stereotype has pretty much been stuck on them since Neon Genesis Evangelion.
A more cynical use of the term Gainax Ending can also refer to running out of budget before the end of a series leading the last episodes to contain lots of Stock Footage, voice overs, unresolved plots, and other tricks — Gainax once prominently had a Grand Finale done with a voice over and some sketchy stills. How well this works artistically is debatable. However, this is less common nowadays, as shows concentrate their budgets for the first and last sets of episodes most of the time, and the inevitable tidying up for the DVD releases.
Related to the above, but more applicable to solo creations, there are cases where an author runs out of time/brainpower/creativity/ sanity, and cannot come up with an ending to a story. In which case, the options are "shelve it until such time as it can be resolved" or "write something, anything, the first thing that comes into your head". The first isn't always an option, especially if they're being paid by the word.
A potentially even more cynical use of this trope is as a disguised Sequel Hook or ambiguous Cliff Hanger. Although such uses aren't always cynical. Sometimes the writers just don't want to flog that particular dead horse so hard. Sometimes they just don't know that the studio isn't going to spring for their intended sequel/season/spinoff. But sometimes they're just hedging their bets with an ending that will lead on to the sequel (if they get to make it), or just confuse the hell out of people (if they don't).
Compare Outer Limits Twist, Dada Ad.
Not to be confused with Gainaxing, which is not a downer so much as an UP and downer.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- As mentioned above, Neon Genesis Evangelion for both interpretations of the Gainax Ending. This, however, only applies to the original ending (episodes 25 and 26 of the TV series), as End of Evangelion is a perhaps less sophisticated , yet ultimately more satisfactory Grand Finale / Downer Ending.
- They're now remaking the series in the form of four movies, which will apparently have yet another alternate ending.
- And we can assume that there will be yet more alternate ending action if the manga is ever finished.
- Even the movie ending is pretty bizarre by normal standards, and would probably be considered an example by the standards of most of the other things on this page if the TV ending hadn't out-Gainaxed Gainax.
- Mahoromatic seems to end every episode in this manner. In fact, the entire premise of the show is that as a non-rechargeable combat android, Mahoro can literally number the days till she deactivates, and the viewers are constantly reminded of this fact.
- It should be noted as well that that The countdown is never finished, as Mahoro's ultimate attack drains the same energy that keeps her alive; she is forced to use it in the second season, leading to the Time Shift Enigmatic Ending
- The anime of Excel Saga actually subverts this trope; in the last few aired episodes it suddenly gets a real plot going and is much more serious. Then in the final (albeit unaired) episode, it becomes even more weird, as if to make up for the serious finale.
- Well really, the broadcast finale was a rather lighthearted mix of humor and light drama, while the second to last broadcast episode was the (almost) completely serious one.
- Episode 26 was never broadcast as the finale as it was intentionally too offensive. It ends with Hyatt drowning the entire Earth in blood for crying out loud.
- This didn't stop it getting a pre-watershed broadcasting in the UK.
- Chobits starts out as a typical Magical Girlfriend-cum-Moe show, then, about halfway through, gets... er, weird. And to top it off, after spending half the series contemplating the sentience of persocoms, the single most advanced persocom in existence states that she isn't really sentient, and neither are any of the other Chobits - they're highly advanced, naturally, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty, they're only following their programming. Most of the fans interpreted this turn of events as a gigantic middle finger from CLAMP.
- In the anime, they are sentient.
- Petite Princess Yucie is a light-hearted Magical Girl anime that just happens to be made by Gainax. Naturally, they run headlong into this trope with Arc's poisoning, Yucie's decision to use her wish to save him rather than break her own curse, and the revelation that not only does the wish made by the Platinum Princess require the sacrifice of the other contestants, but if the wish isn't made, the world of the Platinum Princess will be destroyed. All of this appears to culminate with the decision by the other four candidates to wipe Yucie's memories of them so she can make the wish without guilt. The very last episode then inverts the whole trope by taking a sharp whipswing back around as Yucie recovers her memories and, through The Power Of Friendship, restores the lives of all of her friends.
- Revolutionary Girl Utena. Of course, compared to the rest of the series...
- The makers of the Air anime were likely shooting for a Bittersweet Ending, but the ambiguity of what happens after Misuzu's death leaves many viewers in the dark.
- Same for Clannad: To understand the Gainax Ending requires a lot of analysis of the dialogue between Ushio and the Garbage Doll before the Illusionary World collapses. Also, one has to wonder why Nagisa has knowledge of Tomoya wishing that he'd never met her, as well as if the reality where Nagisa, Tomoya, and Ushio died really happened. It really did.
- Divergence Eve: Misaki Chronicles does this. It breaks the original theme of the series by showing everyone dead is alive again, and also is totally confusing.
- The bizarre way they treated Tetsuo's fate in the ending of the Akira anime counts, I figure.
- The Big O, partly because of the head writer's love of Mind Screw and partly because it was only intended to be a season finale. To summarize: The former Union agent Angel discovers that her memories of her childhood are false, and the enigmatic Gordon tells her that she's not a human being. He then leads her to an elevator going deep underground. She reappears either turned into or controlling a negative-colored mecha that erases everything it touches, finally leaving behind only a Star Trek-style holodeck grid, until Roger calls out to her to stop, giving an impassioned speech ending with "You must stop denying your own existence as a human being!". She seems to ignore him, but after both her mecha and Roger's erase each other, there's a flash of light, and the entire world reappears as it was
before episode 25 at the very beginning of the first episode. Full synopsis here . Message boards were flooded with "they pulled an Evangelion on us!".
- They weren't sure if they'd be able to have a third series, but only the epilogue would have changed - Chiaki J. Konaka originally had a different epilogue which went into more detail than the one we got and literally ended with a curtain falling, but was asked by the U.S. network to write a less conclusive ending in case they picked it up for a third season. They didn't.
- Creative differences caused a Gainax Ending in Kare Kano, causing the popularity of the series to shoot up considerably.
- Blame! has an incredibly confusing ending that had many readers scratching their heads, but the truth is that it was a good ending. Killy found (by pure chance, and after losing half his head) an uncontaminated place in which Cibo's "egg" could "hatch" and give birth to a child with Net Terminal Genes. So, Mission - more or less - Accomplished.
- He Is My Master, another show animated by Gainax, is a light, funny, gag series about a guy with a maid fetish. How else to end the series than with a sudden Mood Whiplash into angst and philosophizing?
- Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, made by Gainax, has an ending that may make no sense whatsoever to you if you didn't follow the shows' philosophy and possibly See The Sailboat.
- Xamd Lost Memories. An Ancient Conspiracy of soul-eating albino children. A stillborn Death Seeker kaiju. Only a mass-sacrifice Spirit Bomb can stop the Big Bad, except not. The main character goes to a Journey To The Center Of The Mind and defeats the Big Bad by giving him his name... Or was it the laser? Instrumentality! The main character dies, and gets better nine years later for no reason! ...Oh, and he has inexplicably aged in the meantime.
- Bagi, the Monster of Mighty Nature does this. At the end, Bagi is left prowling the jungle with her human intelligence destroyed, and Ryo just decides it would be better to stop trying to catch her.
- The manga version of Sound Horizon's Ark starts out straightforward enough, but a few pages into the second and final chapter, it takes a sudden detour through WTFville into Gainax Ending Land. This troper, who translated said manga and is quite familiar with the overall story line of the album it's based on, still doesn't get it.
- While the ending of the manga version of Chrono Crusade is better explained than some of the other examples here, due in part to some poor planning from Daisuke Moriyama and a rush to get everything explained in the end, the last volume or two of the manga feels like there's a sudden Genre Shift mixed with several open-ended questions, unless you were clever enough to pick up on subtle foreshadowing throughout the series. Some of the weirder points of the ending include the revelation that the demons are really Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, Rosette's soul leaving her body, causing her "death" and a trippy afterlife scene that ends with her and Mary Magdalene entering her body together to revive her, Chrono finding out that the demon Hive Queen was a human woman that was kidnapped by the demons and transformed into Pandaemonium—who was pregnant with human twins that would grow up to be Chrono and Aion, Chrono and Aion charging at each other for their final battle, only for the manga to cut away and change focus, deliberately hiding the outcome of the battle and Satella freezing herself and Florette/Fiore into crystal, and the two of them found and revived in the year 1999 and forced to start over their lives after (almost) all of their old friends have passed on. While the Gecko Ending of the anime is depressing enough that many fans prefer the manga ending, it's still known for being quite weird.
- Following the pattern of its own insanity, Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle has one of these, in which Fei Wong has somehow been defeated (or has he?), Watanuki and Syaoran did... something... which somehow resulted in bringing Syaoran back to Sakura from weird black void-thingy, the clones went *poof*, and Syaoran and Sakura appear to have gotten their memories back. I think. At this point, all anyone can hope for is that xxxHoLic explains what the hell just happened.
- Twin Spica, I am still trying to understand the ending!
- Bobobobo Bobobo ends with the entire cast saying "This is how our show ends?!" although it was really more a subversion of the unresolved cliffhanger imposed by the show's cancellation.
- In Lucu Lucu, you expect the main character, Rokumon, to end up in a Shipping with Lucu (at least in the first 30 chapters, and you keep hoping, but Your Mileage May Vary)...but, that's not quite what happens... You see Rokumon was created by Lucu, and his whole entire life has been a lie throughout the 'entire manga. His dead-father-turned-living-talking-cat is also not his real father and his whole entire memory comes back in the last 5 pages of the manga.
Comic Books
- The ending to DC's Final Crisis is really beyond explanation or understanding, as if Grant Morrison had all these epic ideas but never figured out how to stick them together coherently.
- Superman used a machine that granted wishes to destroy the physical incarnation (A super-vampire) of all the DEEP and Grim Dark that came out of The Eighties, everything that spewed from the popularity of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. Nothing more, nothing less.
- It's very simple, really: Darkseid had become a black hole that was sucking the Multiverse down. Superman and the rest of the surviving superheroes shrunk and froze the remaining population to save them in the JLA Satellite while they constructed the Miracle Machine from Superman's memories in the 30th century. Once the Miracle Machine was constructed, Superman killed Darkseid's soul with a note of music vibrating at the exact opposite frequency. Then Mandrakk the Dark Monitor appeared and Superman powered the Miracle Machine with the solar energy in his cells and Nix Uoton, who had become the Judge of All Evil when a Rubik's cube transformed into a Motherbox, brought forth Captain Carrot And His Amazing Zoo Crew, the Angels of the Pax Dei, the Forever People of Earth-51, and the entire friggin' Green Lantern Corps who stake Mandrakk and then help pull Earth out of the black hole, while the Miracle Machine restores the rest of the Multiverse (since Superman had asked for a "happy ending"). Then Nix Uuton declares that the Monitors should interfere no more and the Overvoid swallows them all up (they presumably turn into normal humans like Nix did). And Batman is stuck in the Stone Age due to Darkseid's Omega Sanction, where he carefully lays to rest Anthro. See? Simple.
- Now try explaining Batman: RIP.
- Or, indeed, The Invisibles
- The Invisibles is a magic spell in the form of a work of fiction.
- The ending to Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader. Granted, the series was intended to close the character of Batman with a metaphysical look at the character, but the ending grabs metaphysics and goes straight into the surreal, passing by Elseworlds, multiple universes, and the Golden, Silver, and Dark Ages of comics along the way.
- The last chapter of Watchmen is intended to come across as a Gainax Ending, until you re-read the comic and associated documents to pick up all the foreshadowing.
Film
- On the subject of the Mind Screw subtype of Gainax Ending, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essays have been written. Many, many, essays. (The book was slightly better explained.)
- Videodrome Long live the new flesh indeed!
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail. However, this might have too simple an ending for this to count. Everyone gets arrested. Interesting note: The original scripted ending was to have a large battle that the English begin to lose, but they are saved by swallows dropping coconuts. Considering how much of a horrible time everyone had working on the movie, it's not surprising they wanted to finish it quickly.
- A book written by the Pythons that explains the reason for the changed ending—all the actors were being used as the English side of the fight, so there was no budget and no cast to be the French. One of the Pythons suggested, "Oh, let's just have everybody get arrested."
- They also just ran out of money. Their budget was famously small (That's why they had coconuts instead of horses), and they spent most of it on "locations and drink."
- The Pythons were fond of these kinds of endings anyway. See below under Live Action TV.
- The ending works well or poorly depending on your reactions to puns. Because it is, of course, a "cop out."
- The Wachowski Brothers refuse to explain exactly what's going on with Neo and Smith, the Source, flaming truth vision, etc. etc. in the sequels to The Matrix. The fan theories are a bit odd, but that's unescapable given what they've got to work with.
- Lawn Dogs is a fairly realistic and depressing movie about the friendship between a 10 year old girl, Devon, and a 21 year old lower-class outsider, Trent. You know it's going to end bad, when after Devon shoots the man who is beating up Trent and helps him to his car, she gives Trent a comb and a mirror and asks him to throw them out the window as he drives away, to cover his tracks. When he later does so, a river rises up underneath him, and a forest sprouts up behind him. This actually makes some sense metaphorically and was slightly set up, but still seems to come completely out of nowhere.
- The ending of the movie adaptation of Silent Hill was quite opaque.
- The film of Being There ends when the main character is taking a stroll by himself after losing interest in Ben's funeral, and winds up walking out into the middle of a lake, actually walking on water. And, just so there's no confusion, when he realizes where he is, he fully submerges his umbrella before accepting the situation and continuing his stroll. This ending was not the scripted one, but one the director conceived because he figured the movie was so believably acted - given its plot - that audiences would not find it unbelievable that the protagonist could do this.
- There is a phrase uttered right before the credits, and if you listen to it and compare it with the final shot, you will see it is a clear statement on the film's Aesop. "Life is a state of mind."
- The ending of the first Dungeons and Dragons movie has the remaining main characters standing over the grave of the comic relief. They hold a stone over the grave and turn into little balls of floaty light and float away.
- Vanilla Sky, based on the Spanish Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), has a pretty strange ending. It appears to be something along the lines of a sci-fi All a Dream ending, except that, when he wakes up, just before cutting to credits, we clearly hear the voice of someone who shouldn't exist outside the dream. Or maybe that wasn't it, but there was some sort of contradiction in that final line that couldn't be explained.
- On the original Spanish film they make it clear it was all a simulation, he was connected to a machine dreaming until his body could be repaired, and the film ends when he accepts this as a reality. The last thing heard after he decides to go back to the (now future) world, on the black screen before the credits, is "open your eyes".
- The ending of The Black Hole. The crew go into the black hole and then... they're in Hell? And then they're in space? Wha?
- The graphic novel version of The Black Hole had them end up in another galaxy or an alternate universe with all the planets the black hole has consumed.
- One novelisation has the crew passing into the black hole, and somehow being spread across the Universe while still being aware. Some kind of trippy/pseudo-cosmic Ascend To A Higher Plane Of Existence kind of thing, presumably. The final line says that they then "...contemplate the universe they had become". Duuuuuude.
- Black holes will do that to you. Ellimist testifies.
- The ending to the remake of Planet Of The Apes. Marky Mark hops in his spacepod, flies back through the timewarp, and... suddenly he's on Earth (or what we assume is Earth), and apes have replaced humans. Did he just bump his head getting into the pod, and is hallucinating? Yeah, that's gotta be it.
- According to Tim Burton that was supposed to be a cliffhanger if a sequel was made. It wasn't, now it's just weird.
- Also, the book had pretty much the same ending (although since it was originally in French, they used the Eiffel Tower instead of the Lincoln Memorial).
- But in the French novel the astronaut had actually travelled to another world not through time. Apparently every world develops humans who are then replaced by apes
- Local Hero, for the most part a charming, low key dramedy about a Texas oil man being sent to buy up a small Scottish village, gets a little weird in its last half hour. It's hinted but never confirmed that the old man who's blocking the purchase is descended from the oil company's original owners, and that a major character's love interest is a mermaid. Then the oil man is sent back home, where he piles some shells he collected from the village beach on his counter, tacks up some pictures he took, and goes onto his balcony to watch the sunrise. Cut back to the village, and its one phone ringing with no one answering. It's also left a little vague who the title refers to, though most agree that it's Ben, the old man mentioned above.
- It's possible the female love interest was a selkie, a sort of were-seal from Celtic Mythology.
- The 'phone not being answered is hardly surprising if you've ever actually been to Pennan; there's almost nobody there.
- The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) ends on a deliberately ambiguous note. The Earth is hurtling towards the Sun, but a series of massive nuclear detonations in Siberia may avert the catastrophe. The last scene shows the journalists waiting in the print room with two editions ready for printing, one saying WORLD SAVED and the other WORLD DOOMED. (The American distribution however included the sound of church bells ringing, implying that the world had been saved).
- Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan ends with Jason being caught in a flood of toxic waste in the New York sewers (happens every night apparently) causing him to, for some reason, become a completely normal looking little boy in swimming trunks. The sequels never address this.
- Knowing. The world will end in a super flare from our sun unless something is done at the location of the very first Creepy Child's new home. What happens there? Some alien/angel/demon/somethings that have been following the main kids around for the whole movie take said kids into some spaceship. The main protagonist goes back to be with his family. The sun asplodes. Cut to a shot of the two main kids being dropped off in some sort of meadow centered around the tree, presumably the kids are to Adam/Eve the human race again on some other planet, maybe its earth after destruction, and why are there other similar spacehip things in the background? After an entire movie trying to stay somewhat scientific and avoiding the mystical, they end it like this?
- This troper is surprised that nobody mentioned the 1967 version of Casino Royale, starring David Niven and Peter Sellers. Due to the feud between Sellers and Orson Welles, Sellers dropped out of the picture midway through filming. Because of this, the part of Peter Sellers, in the final scenes of the movie, is played by... none other than a cardboard cutout of Peter Sellers. In later versions, this cardboard cutout is replaced by previously shot footage of Sellers, dressed in Highland garb.
- Titanic: Is Rose dreaming at the end? Did she die peacefully in her sleep and rejoin Jack and the crew? Apparently, we're supposed to decide for ourselves...
Literature
- In Nuklear Age by Brian Clevinger (who makes Eight Bit Theater), most of the book is a comedic parody of the superhero genre, somewhat akin to The Tick. The last section of the book, however, turns quite rapidly to dark, with a villain killing off main characters, extremely large segments of the world's population, and injecting a bunch of philosophy based somewhat off of Norse Mythology into the mix. It was an elaborate joke played on the readers.
- After a series of voyages to societies with satirical iniquities, the fourth book of Gullivers Travels features a trip to a Mary Suetopia of sapient horses who define all evil through a race of bestial humanoids. It ends with the heretofore inquisitive and tranquil Gulliver falling into despair upon realizing that the English are more like these beasts than the horses. Boo-friggin'-hoo.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events. Basically every single plot point in the series was left unresolved at the end. The last book can best be summarized as "Ha, ha! In life, there are lots of mysteries you'll never know the answer to. So long and thanks for all the book sales."
- In the Beatrice Letters, it explains very briefly what was happened to the Baulaires after the 13th book. Not a whole lot, just enough to keep the mystery alive.
- Moreover, the reader not only finds out the fate of almost all the major characters (even if that fate is occasionally metaphorical), enough information is given for the readers to make a good guess about the immediate Lemony/Beatrice backstory, even if the characters can't. The author doesn't give explicit answers, but a lot is done by implication.
- The Bible. Revelation is a bizarre and trippy (if evocative) Mind Screw set in the far future, or quite possibly Twenty Minutes Into The Future from its writing (1500 or so years ago), it isn't exactly clear. Just deciphering its meaning has led to quite a bit of Wild Mass Guessing and not a little Fan Dumb.
- The most common interpretation amongst academics (which has been adopted by some branches of Christianity as well, most notably Roman Catholicism) is that Revelation/Apocalypse is written in the tradition of prophetic allegory, in which then-current political viewpoints were discussed under the guise of a prophecy of the future. Part of the confusion resulting from said book in the modern day is that the imagery would have been easily understood back when it was written, it's rather obtuse today even if you agree with the theory that it is prophetic allegory. The closest anyone comes to agreement is that the Beast is the Roman Empire, and the Number Of The Beast is meant to represent the emperor (whether said emperor was specifically Nero, Caligula, or one of those two were used as a generic code name for Christian-hating emperors isn't agreed upon, either).
- Science-fiction author Philip K. Dick pretty much made a career out of this and Mind Screw. Ubik is the mother of all Gainax Endings.
- However, if you count the many short stories and The Man in the High Castle, he's not as screwy as compared to Ray Bradbury. Hell, a LOT of the stories make a lot of sense, especially the collection The Golden Man.
- This is arguably true of his early and mid-period work but I defy you to make that statement having read his output post the 2-3-74 event. Especially VALIS, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, The Divine Invasion and Radio Free Albemuth which form a loosley connected quadrilogy (really trilogy in four parts, since Dick never intended Radio Free Albemuth to be published) examining the revelation that Dick did (or did not) receive on that date from a variety of different angles.
- Three words, Faith Of Our Fathers. Philip K. Dick's most confounding story. Is it a satire of Communist soceity? An exploration of the true meaning of religon? Or a role reversal on LSD culture? Who can tell! I'll let you decide: The great communist leader is actually god in human form, and you can only see his true form(s) (a series of grotesque monstorsities ) when you take thorizen, the "antidote" to LSD.
- Pretty much everything Neal Stephenson ever wrote. Take for example, Cryptonomicon: although the novel's ending is implied to be suitably epic, by that point in the story, the POV character has lost interest, so all we get is a bare-bones version of events, with a month's worth of events crammed into just under six pages.
- Robert Sheckley's Mindswap has this. The hero ends up trapped in the "Twisted World" but believes himself to have regained his own body and returned home successfully.
- The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy books all seem to end up here, apart from the eponymous first book which ended on an intentional Sequel Hook.
- Not exactly intentional. Douglas Adams said that (as usual) he was late in finishing the novelization and eventually the exasperated publisher rang up and said, "For God's sake, just finish the page you're on and let's have it."
- Only Mostly Harmless really fits this; the others all have very comprehensible, if not substantial endings. Mostly Harmless sees, as far as I understand it, every possible version of Earth and therefore every version of Arthur and Trillian destroyed forever by the Vogons, concluding their plot arc nicely. However, it completely fails to tie up any number of outstanding plotlines but does give us a possible Ultimate Question in "Where does it all end?"
- William Gibson is fond of Gainax endings, particularly in Neuromancer. It was all of a piece with the general Mind Screw of his work.
- Most of Heinlein's endings tend to taper off into absolute nothingness. The Number of the Beast has often been said to be best left about 2/3rds of the way through, and Friday is much the same.
- The ending of the Dungeon fantasy series, which was written by multiple authors, leaves much unexplained and even makes the main character into some kind of god without explanation.
- British childrens'/teens' author Alan Garner has an affinity for the Gainax Ending unusual in non-adult fiction. Two of his books are particularly fine examples of this:
- The Owl Service ends with a young girl who had been possessed by an incredible supernatural force converting that force from anger - "owls" to peace - "flowers". However, everything else about the characters' relationships (which have been totally wrecked) is left unresolved.
- Frank Stocktons "classic" 1882 short story The Lady or the Tiger. Feudal Overlord finds his daughter is in love with a commoner. So he sets up a punishment where the lover has to pick between two doors, one hiding a beautiful lady who is the princess' hated romantic rival , the other hiding a man-eating tiger. The princess knows which door contains which. And her lover turns to her during the execution for a hint, she nods to the right, and the lover opens the door on the right. And after a page of Author Filibuster on human nature, he ends the story hanging in mid-air, and leaves the question to the reader. Which makes this trope Older Than Radio.
- There is an official extension to it, The Discourager of Hesitancy. Found here at the moment.
- Fredrick Pohl seems to like this. In the penultimate chapter of Gem the POV protagonist gets knocked out at the start of a war involving everyone on the titular planet. The next chapter is set in a radically different society several generations into the future with no real mention of how we went from one to the other, and nothing by tantilising glimpse of how this new civilsation came about, or how it works.
- In Gateway, the protagonist is undergoing psychatic care to resolve the issues in his life. At the conclusion, we discover the reason he's come to the psychatric (robot) in the first place, and the story ends. Without a real attempt at closue, just an ending.
Live Action TV
- The Prisoner is one of the earliest examples. A synopsis exists at Wikipedia.
- Kamen Rider Ryuki managed to pull off an Everybody Lives ending without ruining its There Can Be Only One premise, and while justifying the alternative continuities of the movie ("Episode Final") and the TV special ("13 Riders"). It's just damn confusing the first time you watch it, mainly because it's something of a Jigsaw Puzzle Plot.
- Most films by David Lynch, including Twin Peaks but excluding the aptly-named The Straight Story.
- Most Monty Python sketches, episodes, and films end in bizarre fashion. When the troupe felt that a sketch had run its course, they'd drop a 16-ton weight; have the "Stop, this is silly!" officer enter; or segue into an animated sequence, news broadcast or documentary. This was a reaction against conventional sketch comedy where every sketch had to have a punchline. The Pythons thought it would be funnier to deliberately subvert convention, and were dismayed to find that their comic mentor Spike Milligan had done it first with his show Q5.
- The episode that ended with The Argument Sketch turned the Gainax Ending almost into an art form. All episode long, sketches had been ending with the police entering and making arrests, and the Argument Sketch was going to be no different. Then another police officer comes in to arrest the whole show for Gainax Ending abuse, only to suddenly realize that his doing so made him guilty of the same thing. As was true for the next cop who entered to arrest him, etcetera ad inifinitum.
- Much of Monty Python's humor made fun of how British comedy shows were written, produced and performed, something the members knew about all too well, as they were veteran British comedy writers themselves. They hated punchlines and how anticlimctic they were compared to the goings-on within the sketches, so they did away with them or lampshaded their arrivals .
- In the American remake of Life On Mars, Sam Tyler is a New York detective from 2008 who somehow found himself in 1973. Was he mad? Lying in a coma in a 2006 hospital bed, dreaming of 1973? Back in time? None of the above. Sam and his fellow officers from 1973 were really all from 2035. They were astronauts on the first manned Mars mission, and were kept sedated, with artificially-induced dreams, for the voyage.
- To be fair, the show was cancelled it's first season so this ending was placed in. Had they had a season or two more they could have foreshadowed it more and not made it such a Gainax (there had been some hints about it, but they only made sense in retrospect). The final shot of the episode, Somebody in 1970s shoes stepping onto the Martian Surface also left enough ambiguity that had there been a super-last-second renewal they could have been able to explain it away.
- The Sopranos? Black screen?
- "...it's always out there. You probably don't even hear it when it happens, right?"
- In other words, someone might have assassinated Tony and that's all we see of it, from his viewpoint. Or maybe it was a 'we dropped into the life of this man abruptly, and we leave just as abruptly.' Or maybe the camera ran out of film at a crucial time and the director thought the accident looked deep. Who knows?
- The series finale of Farscape ends with John and Aeryn getting engaged on a boat in some random body of water somewhere, having tied up virtually all the major loose ends, and providing a fairly solid conclusion to the show with just the right balance of closure, and riding into the sunset style implications of continuing adventures. Then a freaky looking alien whose species we have never seen before, flying a ship we've never seen before, talks to someone over his radio, zooms in, and blasts them with a beam that causes John and Aeryn to shatter into a million little pebbles. To be continued... They knew this was going to be the series finale, and not only do they end it with that random Mind Frell, but they have the balls to top it off with a to be continued. The mini-series actually fixes this, and manages to make this relevant and even answer significant questions the show never dealt with. But before that, seriously, what the hell?
- They were under the believe that they were renewed and were suddenly cancelled right around the filming of the final ep. They debated options but in the end didn't have the time or money to change it so they relunctantly filmed it as it was and hope it would somehow work out. The cast and crew were notably upset about it though when informing the fans of cancellation.
- According to the makers of Stargate SG-1, the Sci Fi Channel never lets them know if they're renewed or canceled until it's too late to base the final episode around it. That's the reason every season finale of SG-1 blows the remaining special effects budget and generally wraps up the current plot - they don't know if it's the series finale or not.
- The end of Battlestar Galactica... The angels seen by Baltar and Six reveal that human/Cylon hybrid child Hera is Mitochondrial Eve and speculate on whether it's all going to happen again. After Head Baltar reminds Head Six that God doesn't like the name "God", she looks at him sternly and he cryptically says, "Silly me". They walk away unseen through the streets of modern New York while All Along the Watchtower plays over a montage of robot advances on television.
- Brazilian sitcom Toma Lá Dá Cá last episode: the cast was about to be killed by an invasion. And since one of the main actors is the main writer of the show, they hand him a laptop and order him to write an ending that saves them... involving the arrival of an alien ship, which had previously "rescued" a character Put On A Bus.
- Joss Whedon's Dollhouse kindly gave us the Lost Episode first season finale "Epitaph One", which is really different from all the episodes that preceded it. The series finale "Epitaph Two" is a little bit less of a Mind Screw ending only in that it's setting was somewhat foreshadowed in the latter half of the second season and it is a direct sequel to "Epitaph One". It still counts as an extreme case of this trope though. Think of all those viewers who watched it without having even heard of "Epitaph One"...
Musical
- Our House the Madness musical: was always going to have two endings due to the parallel universes plot. However, even after these are resolved via dual Twilight Zone Twists there's still time for a third 'ending' to turn it all into a Shaggy Dog Story (done by introducing a third option in the life-changing event at the beginning of the play which would mean none of the things we've just been watching happened at all.) Oh well. Song and dance number!
Radio
- Most The Goon Show episodes have no clear ending, unless everyone dies. The grand finale actually dissolves into random gibberish as the entire show comes to a crashing halt, and it doesn't seem atypical.
Video Games
- Treasure games are probably the most notorius of this trope, with their unexpected mood swing, symbolic references and/or Downer Endings (Gunstar Heroes, Silhouette Mirage, Radiant Silvergun to name a few) to complement their Unexpected Gameplay Change leave many to think that they are the Gainax equivallent to videogames.
- Probably the most famous example in gaming culture is Metal Gear Solid 2. It owes a great deal to The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster's mindscrew on the distinctions between author, character, reality, and fiction. Much it takes place in cheap talking heads CODEC sequences to boot, although it's not clear whether the game's production had any budgetary problems (it was certainly pressed for time and had the backlash of 9/11 to deal with). There is no way to summarise the key events in a reasonable amount of space, so you can look here if you want to know what happens. There was a point to all the meandering, but the end result was not popular.
- Depends on who you asked, and it's very much explained in Metal Gear Solid 4. And originally, it was supposed to be a simple story of Snake taking on another set of terrorists (basically the Tanker chapter stretched to the full length of the game). And, yes, the ending was supposed to be a lot more explained, but Kojima cut it out after 9/11.
- Xenogears, starting somewhere along the second disk, replaced virtually all overland map movement and scenes with the characters sitting in chairs narrating everything that happened. This actually is an openly admitted case of a low budget and forced rush to market causing a Gainax Ending.
- Monetary constraints aside, the ending was pretty straightforward: the party fights Deus in its sanctuary, Elly takes Deus away before it self-destructs on the planet, Fei enters Deus and he and Elly have a Battle In The Center Of The Mind with it, chat with Krelian, and leave before Deus explodes. Then they come back home to a very unambiguous, triumphant welcome from the rest of the heroes. It got metaphysical once or twice, but everything else was spelled out crystal-clear, leaving virtually no room for alternate interpretations.
- The ending of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge: LeChuck is actually Chuckie, Guybrush's creepy brother, haunting him through the game for breaking one of his toys. The whole thing was essentially an amusement park fantasy played out in the minds of two bored kids. Or LeChuck just put a spell on Guybrush to make him think so. Even for a game series that thrived on absurdist humour and Star Wars references, the mixing of the two with presumed Lotus Eater Machine involvement created a true masterpiece in confusing endings which was only explained by the next game that was released six years later.
- Well, more "retconned" than "explained." Series creator Ron Gilbert insists that he has his own idea of what MI2's ending means, and he's not telling.
- Since he's no longer involved with the series, maybe he should...
- Ron Gilbert is at least nominally involved in the current Monkey Island episodes as a "Monkeyologist"
- Super Mario Galaxy, surprising for a series that's usually known for shallow plots. It usually takes at least two viewings of the ending for players to figure out just what happened, which is convenient because you need to see the ending four times for Hundred Percent Completion. Apparently, it somehow involves the universe being destroyed and reborn. And Rosalina is... some kind of goddess maybe?
- Chrono Cross: The main character is supposed to be dead. A computer that controls destiny. The computer kept humanity safe from a race of dragon people, Nice Job Breaking It Hero. Everybody from the last game is inexplicably dead and your actions may or may not have actually done anything about it. Schala Lives! Then finally, a credits sequence of a girl running around in Tokyo with a necklace that has nothing to do with anything. And good luck figuring out if you actually accomplished anything from playing the game.
- This is actually a case of all there in the manual. There's a lot of supplementary material, including Chrono Trigger and Radical Dreamers, that you need to understand to put it together. The main character erased his own time line from existence. There's a... lot of reasons he did it, but that's he chose to do. The time line that happened instead is (Similar to) our time line. And that necklace that 'has nothing to do with anything' is actually referenced repeatedly thoughout the game, especialy on the key item list. I think it was called the 'astral amulet' but it's also the Schala's amulet from Chrono-trigger. Trust me, it looks nearly identical, though with far better bitage, than the chrono-trigger one
- Any video game ending with a strange glitch can be perceived as one of these in the right light. For example, this is the way you knew you'd beaten the original arcade version of Donkey Kong. By the 22nd level, the time limit wraps around to become physically impossible for Jumpman/Mario to complete the first stage in time. This has become known as the Kill Screen.
- The first two Earthworm Jim games were near-legendary for their bizarre endings: In the first one, the Damsel In Distressed, a mere five feet away from the protagonist's rescue, is crushed by a falling cow launched by the player way back in the very first level. The second game's ending is even more insane: Turns out the Damsel In Distress was a cow in disguise. As was the Big Bad. And the player. Wait, WHAT?!
- Kingdom Hearts: Imagine: You're a kid or teen or young adult, who bought the game, just because he/she likes Disney. I mean, it got Disney on the box after all, doesn't it? So, what are you expecting? A nice, happy, "everything's perfect" ending. But you didn't count on one thing: The Final Fantasy elements of the game! Suddenly, you find yourself in an ending where your best friend is trapped in some scary place, along with Mickey Mouse, for some reason you can't comprehend (after all, he could have just gone over to Sora, to the other side of the door, couldn't he?). Your girlfriend is suddenly appearing out of nowhere (wasn't she in Traverese town when we last saw her?) just to disappear again after two sentences (one of which consists of a single word: Sora!). And then, finally, your party is chasing a dog with a piece of paper in a place you've never seen ANYWHERE in the game, and there's absolutely no explanation of how they even got there!
- Beyond Good And Evil springs a last-minute surprise on the player that's set up in such a way that it's incredibly easy to miss - the Dom Z are feeding on the citizens of Hillys because their own weird alien lifeforce, which they call "shauni", was stolen from them — by Jade's parents. Jade's somehow the Dom Z's shauni, and they would very much like her back. In hindsight, it's a decent explanation for a lot of odd behaviour that the player's already put down to "it's a game". It's not terribly well set up even if you notice the extremely incidental evidence the game presents in the final level, specifically a conversation the player overhears that's optional, and how the sacred chant the Dom Z keep repeating has the same lyrics as the battle music — including the word "shauni".
- The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. After finally getting back the Macguffin, Martin is about to be crowned as the Emperor...and then hordes of Daedra appear out of nowhere even though the Big Bad behind their summoning into the mortal realm is dead, and said Big Bad's god arrives, driving you and Martin into a temple. Then Martin breaks the Macguffin, which somehow makes him morph into a dragon and drive off the Daedra, then inexplicably turning to stone. After going through all your trials, it feels like a sick joke and unrewarding, and it practically runs on A Wizard Did It.
- But it was awesome. It was like seeing Charizard and Goro fight!
- To be fair, the whole Martin-turns-into-a-giant-dragon thing sort of makes sense if you think about everything involved. The Amulet of Kings contains the blood of the god Akatosh. Since Martin is the last descendant of the Imperial line, and thus Akatosh's appointed peacekeeper on Earth, breaking the amulet allows him to "meld" with Akatosh in his physical form as a giant dragon. He then turns to stone because there's no more need for an Emperor once the Amulet of Kings is broken.
- On the topic of The Elder Scrolls, Daggerfall has a few of its Multiple Endings, specifically using the Totem yourself (and being destroyed by the Numindium), and giving the Mantella to Mannimarco (where he transcends his earthly body, rockets into the sky, and becomes a god. And note that both of these were canon.
- The problem with that interpretation, however, is that Martin is not actually descended from Tiber Septim, since Tiber had only one child (Pelagius I), who himself died childless. Every later "Septim" is descended from Tiber's brother Agnorith, and thus they're all pretenders to the Septim dynasty. Also, the Amulet predates the Septims by millennia, so it's unclear how or why it's tied to them in any way but accident. Also, it's unclear why the dormancy of the Amulet during the Akaviri Interregnum didn't have any apparent consequences, or how Empress Katariah (a Dunmer) and her son Emperor Uriel Lariat (son of Gallivere Lariat), reigned for a combined 89 years, despite definitively not having any Septim blood of any sort whatsoever. Also, etc, etc. In short, Bethesda broke the canon with Oblivion's story.
- According to 'ES Lore', the amulet was one of several 'towers' which stopped the Daedra making more than fleeting visits to the world, but these towers have been slowly removed by random events over the years. The Heart from TES 3 served as one of these towers, and through the events of TES 3 you effectively stopped it from acting as a tower. As a result, killing the emperor weakened the barriers enough to allow the Mehrunes Dagon to invade.
- Also I interpreted it as the Dragon fires themselves being a barrier, so when the emporer dies the fires stop burning and until they are re-lit using the amulet, the towers is down. At the end, the statue created by Martin's sacrifice is established as another tower.
- That's because they couldn't/wouldn't get the guy who does the voice-over back to do some more voice work =P
- Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic II had this for Light Side. You beat Kreia, she talks to you for a bit, explaining why she liked you, and explaining the fates of some of your comrades. Then, she dies, your ship picks you up, falls into a chasm to its apparent destruction, then flies away from the exploding planet unscathed. AND NOTHING ELSE HAPPENS. No denouement, no "what's next?", just hop on the ship GOOD NIGHT, EVERYBODY, leaving everyone wondering "Okay, is there ANY backstory for Sion or Nihilus? How did the remote beat G0-T0? And why was HK apparently completely extraneous?"
- Dark side wasn't any better, in fact it was worse. Your ship falls into a chasm before you even reach the academy for no apparent reason. Then, you beat Traya and become leader of the Sith Academy. That's it, no mention of what happened to the rest of your party, except for the remote, which G0-T0 presumably destroyed. Just you and the academy. A Winner Is You indeed.
- You can thank Lucas Arts for the rushed ending. Executive Meddling, indeed.
- No kidding. If I recall, the planned ending involved a variety of things, such as your friends actually trying to help (rather than mostly just disappearing once you hit Malachor), possible tragic deaths, and even maybe facing Atris instead of Kreia. Which would have been much better. But no. Thanks a lot, Lucas Arts.
- The World Ends With You is almost a Double Subversion: the plot is a Thirty Xanatos Pileup we don't get too many details about, and the ending is just utterly confusing. However, you're then given the ability to unlock reports explaining what happened. But then you eventually get all of them, and unlock a final scene that makes even less sense.
- When the events of the ending reduce the protagonist to screaming "WHAT THE HELL?!," it's a sure sign of this trope.
- Dragon Squadron Danzarb ends with the revelation that the soldiers in the squad are mind-wiped convicts who were sent to a remote island chain to fight staged battles (while being secretly filmed "reality TV" style). The money earned from their exploitation is being used to fund "real" military ventures in the rest of the world (which they've been sealed away from). After discovering the truth, the main character looks into a camera and chews out whoever is watching, scolding them for getting a kick out of watching other people die for the sake of their own amusement (implying that the player, who has been watching the whole thing, is one of those sickos).
- The Good ending for Star Soldier: Vanishing Earth consist of a nonsensical poem that doesn't have anything to do with the plot. The Bad ending, while making more sense, is still very strange.
- The first Silent Hill game invokes this trope no matter which of the Multiple Endings one achieves. Both Good endings have Alessa and Cheryl merging and forming a giant glowing woman thingy. Kaufman splashes some red liquid on it, and it suddenly becomes a giant red demon thingy, which Harry then has to kill. After its death, the glowing woman returns and gives Harry a baby, who then runs off into the fog. The end. The Bad ending has Harry kill the glowing woman thingy, which says "thank you" in Cheryl's voice before dying. Harry collapses in grief as the room crumbles, before Cybil snaps at him to leave. The Worst ending is also the worst Gainax Ending, as it only has Harry still in the car from the accident at the beginning of the game, unconscious/dead and bleeding from the head.
- By those standards, the alien ending, in which Harry is abducted by aliens after asking them if they've seen his daughter, almost makes sense.
- The following games mostly contain far less ambiguous endings (although they're still heavy on the Mind Screw), but they aren't immune from them. Without contest the most bizarre is one of the endings of the second game, in which James discovers that the controlling force behind the town and the cause of all his torment is a dog. No, not a talking dog, just an ordinary dog. A Welsh Corgie, to be specific. Her name is Mira.
- The "comedy ending" of The White Chamber seems to be this intentionally. The crew that Sarah had murdered turn up alive, and reveal that everything was just as planned for a surprise birthday party. It's rather entertaining, as the other crew members in this ending are a rather odd lot... Oh, and the meteor coming out of nowhere along with the karaoke bunny-ears guy riding it. "You were confused by the 'comedy' ending" indeed.
- Braid has one. We're not even sure how much of the entire game previous was metaphorical. Somewhere between 50 and a 100% probably.
- The final level has the Princess running away from a knight, while you follow underneath her and help each other overcome obstacles. At the end, you find yourself outside the princess's bedroom, and are only able to rewind time. Rewinding shows that in fact it was you who was chasing the princess, while she tried to stop you with a variety of traps that you managed to overcome, with the knight rescuing her at the end.
- Not considering the fact that if you get the seven secret stars some of the switches in that level become timeproof, so you can rewind and go fast enough to stand on the chandelier as it's going back up, catch the princess and... KABLAM!!!!! As with 2001 mentioned above, essays have been written. Long ones.
- "Now we are all sons of bitches".
- Drakengard. Legions of creepy floating babies, a giant naked woman who uses sound as a weapon, a main character turning into a clone army of demonic angels that destroy the world, and that's just scratching the surface. It's like they were trying to out-Evangelion Evangelion.
- Fortunately the first ending, which is apparently the canonical ending, is pretty straightforward.
- F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin's final battle is a figurative Mind Screw and a literal Mind Rape. And physical rape, too, while we're at it.
- Eternal Sonata.
- Practically anything and everything created by Suda51.
- World Of Goo - Every chapter has it's own Gainax Ending. The Ivy Goos float away with balloons! The world is powered by the beauty of a giant ugly woman! The World of Goo corporation's new product is the third dimension! MOM is a spam bot! The fish have wings and levitate the telescope! The title refers to the moon! Made even better by the insanely epic music that plays during each scene, despite the game's premise being, essentially, poking goo until it goes somewhere.
- Final Fantasy Tactics leaves us in the lurch about whether the main characters are really alive or dead. Due to bad visuals, there's also some confusion about whether Delita and/or Ovelia live or die after Ovelia stabs him.
- Battle For Wesnoth. Descent Into Darkness. "Forever and Ever, Amen."
- Leisure Suit Larry 3: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals has an extremely bizarre ending: After the player spends the last third of the game scouring the jungles of Nontoonyt as Patti looking for Larry, both characters get captured by lesbian cannibals and bound in a cage. Patti then uses a magic marker to draw a magical portal into the air, which transports them out of the game and into Sierra Studios, where they run around the Police Quest, Space Quest and Kings Quest sets until Roberta Williams offers Larry a lucrative deal to design and write adventure games based on his own adventures. Al Lowe had to skip the fourth installment in the series altogether just to write himself out of that one.
- Mondo Agency and Psychosomnium. Cactus loves this kind of thing.
- Who would end their game with a music video?! The same guys who brought us Earthworm Jim have apparently did this with their MDK.
- Michigan: Report from Hell ends with the player character finally being revealed and being shot in the head before he can reveal who unleashed the monsters.
- A single playthrough of Eternal Darkness leaves the plot unresolved and the player unfulfilled (not to mention confused). This is remedied after playing through with all three Dark Gods to get the true ending.
- Cryo Stasis arguably has one of these. The Crew being Ice Monsters aside, most of the storyline was fairly realistic, until you reach the end where Heat Cracks start appearing all over the ship and the Nuclear Reactor goes Chernobyl, whereupon Chronos, the God of Time, pops out and you have to defeat him using magical energy balls from your hands. Oh, and you go to some kind of ruins out in space where you get to go back in time to one of three different places and change history to prevent the tragedy from occurring in the first place. Presumably, it explains all the weird bits of the game, but I've yet to see how.
- Neverwinter Nights 2 did this, by simply making the temple in which your party defeated the Big Bad collapse on them, killing all your beloved characters in the most ridiculous and unnecessary way imaginable, rendering the whole journey practically pointless. In my opinion, one of the most infuriating endings in history.
- No More Heroes has one. Like the rest of the game, it get's played purely for laughs.
- Persona 3's ending was confusing enough to warrant the developers putting in a super-hard epilogue explaining everything in the game's Updated Rerelease.
- Little King's Story has you find out that your entire world is a carboard stage in the bedroom of a kid that looks like the king. The final boss battle is with some ordinary rats who are eating the stage, while a news reel keeps you apprised of what parts of your world are being destroyed by the fight. Then the real boy who looks like the king throws the rat out the window after the fight, and he and the tiny king see each other with gratuitous zoomshots of them being reflected in the other's eyes. Roll credits
- Tales Of The Abyss. The regular ending you see before the credits is simple enough: the Big Bad is dead, most of the party escaped, but The Hero stays behind to make a Heroic Sacrifice; he gets congratulated for his work by Lorelei. It's the post-credits scene that screws everything up; it's been a couple of years? And The Hero is back? Or is it his twin/clone? What promise was he talking about? Why is his hair so long?
- At the end of the I Wanna Be The Guy fangame I Wanna Be The Fangame, the final boss's father comes by in a cutscene in full Papa Wolf mode. Sic transit The Kid.
- Metal Black ending. Enough to fit a barrel of Mind Screw with High Octane Nightmare Fuel culminating in an Earth Shattering Kaboom and All Just A Dream. this link.
- Though the original ending to space shooter Tyrian is somewhat Gainax-y, involving the main character finally having enough of single-handedly saving the galaxy from the evil Microsol corporation over and over, and fleeing the galaxy, the rerelease Tyrian2000 offers a final episode that's even MORE Gainax-y. Your ship is intercepted and you're forced to fight the Zinglon cult mentioned numerous times throughout the game, who turn out to be behind all of Microsol's evildoings and plan to deprive the universe of it's food supplies and construct a fleet of warships made entirely out of fruit. Though the game's lore shows that the game designers weren't taking the story too seriously, the final episode is when the game stops any pretense of seriousness entirely.
- Second Sight features A series of jumps throughout the different levels you've played, which makes little sense considering Vattic doesn't have time-travelling powers. You kill the Big Bad, celebration insues... but what's this? It was all a dream? Except for the end? Wait, those flashback/teleport sequences were REALITY?! So you were never injured? But then how did you develop your powers? Did they all suddenly pop out at once AND with amazing proficiency? The term Mind Screw doesn't even BEGIN to cover this one. You need a flowchart to work it out.
Web Original
- An episode of Salad Fingers ends with the title character having his head eaten by a clone. Or was that the clone?
- There Will Be Brawl. Hoo boy. The reveal of Kirby as the ultimate mastermind and Ness and Lucas jointly acting as "the Butcher" isn't too hard to understand. The really weird stuff happens after the final battle when we see Kirby is still alive, has murdered Shigeru Miyamoto, and presumably is about to off Sakurai in the same way before it fades to black. Buh?
Western Animation
- The first season ending of Sheep In The Big City shifts to the Narrator escaping after all the characters are trying to capture him, then the Sheep rescues hin, going down the drain, and ends up having Sheep being Evil Overlord who can talk. Private Public start to speak French, and so is everyone else. Then the Narrator got put in the Narrator-powered raygun, with him begging that the whole thing's a dream then a flying pig appear and says This Is Reality or else he won't have wings. What?
AHHH. THE V. IT BUUUUUUUURNS.
Wut?
Let's get you home, you must be parched!
Number nine, number nine, number nine...
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