Postscript Season - Television Tropes & Idioms

"The battle's done and we kind of won, so we sound our victory cheer...where do we go from here?"

— Giles, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, "Once More With Feeling"

Well, they all said your show was Too Good To Last. You fended off Executive Meddling, and stayed true to your original vision of the series.

Of course, you got cancelled, but that's to be expected. Fortunately, you had plenty of warning and were able to do a Grand Finale. It was a huge spectacle, full of guest stars and special effects and you tied up all the loose ends so that everyone could go home happy with a sense of closure. Nothing left to do now but record the DVD commentary track and sell the props on eBay.

Wait, what's that? The network just called. The fans, bless their hearts, launched the biggest letter-writing campaign ever, and the ratings on the finale were through the roof. They've decided to renew you for another season!

Oh no. What are you going to do now? You killed off Lord Voldemort, got the castaways off the mysterious island, got Voyager back to the Alpha Quadrant, sank the Bismarck, resolved all the sexual tension and/or saved the galaxy. There's nowhere else for the story to go.

But, hey, don't let that stop you. After all, you got yourself another season. Other producers would kill for a chance like this. Well, Fonzie, you'd better put on your water skiis; it's time to Jump The Shark.

The Post Script Season is what happens when a show is renewed after it's resolved its plot arc. You end up with a season, maybe two, where the show is forced to try out a whole new premise. This seldom goes well. In the first place, you've got to shoehorn these existing characters into a new premise that doesn't quite fit them. Expect Character Derailment. Secondly, you've already had a Grand Finale, and it's going to be hard to top that. You've already shot your dramatic wad. No wonder fans of other media get just a bit of dissonant feelings when they hear about how you threw away a perfectly good ending just because you wanted more.

A form of Retool. Results in Plot Leveling. Compare Trilogy Creep.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Super Dimension Fortress Macross: When the series was extended by several episodes in the middle of production, the writers added a Postscript Story Arc set After The End.
GaoGaiGar had an OVA which retconned the titular mecha's original purpose of construction from "fighting the Zonders" to "fighting the new A God Am I villain we just came up with". It actually went a lot better than it sounds, largely owing to sheer force of over-the-top-itude.
- The TV series itself had a "postscript last couple of episodes." The Big Bad Man Behind The Man was finally, decisively and explosively defeated. Happily ever after, right? Unfortunately years before the series began a spore for a "New Machine Species" implanted itself in Mikoto's nervous system and took her over, leading to a new, powerful and nigh indestructible foe to give GGG a hard time. While it reeked of an Asspull, it somehow managed to wrap itself up nicely.
GUNNM: Last Order might be seen as that, because when road accident forced Yukito Kishiro to Wrap It Up, he tacked a Happy Ending onto the series and left it for half a decade, until he returned to it in Last Order. However, as the "Post Script Season" is at this moment even longer than the original series, and it completely disregarded said happy ending, it is more like a cross between the sequel and the Revival now.
Dragonball Z was originally supposed to end after the Frieza saga, but the popularity forced the creator to come out with another arc, the Androids/Cell Arc, at which point it was supposed to end again. But it was still very popular, so the creator had to make yet another arc, the Buu arc, and the creator, likely fed up, finally did end that particular series there.
- But it was still popular... and the company wanted even more money so, Dragonball GT came about as ANOTHER Post-Script Season.
- The whole reason the anime is called "Z" is because Toriyama wanted to imply that the story was ending soon. Some info suggests he had planned to end the story as early as the fight with Vegeta.
  - What info? it's just Internet rumor that has no base in anything. There is nothing to prove that Toriyama was forced to continue series.
In many ways, Transformers Energon seemed to suffer from this in its final quarter, which featured a story that essentially had nothing but the most tangenital connection to any of the plot that had come before it (the villains had obtained their main objective and were defeated three-quarters of the way through the show, leaving nothing for anyone to actually do). The frustrating thing, though, is that it's not strictly a postscript - the show was always intended to run to 52 episodes, and this final arc was simply filling out that requirement, even though the actual story of the series had been finished.
Fist of the North Star (Hokuto no Ken) was originally intended to end after Kenshiro's final battle with Raoh, but contractual obligations forced Buronson and Tetsuo Hara to extend the manga for a couple of years more, which resulted in the sequel series Hokuto no Ken 2. With the other Hokuto brothers and Nanto Roku Seiken already dead, Hara and Buronson introduced two new rival martial art schools in the form Gento Kouken and Hokuto Ryuuken. The anime ended with Kenshiro's final fight against Kaioh, a a suspiciously similar substitute of Raoh, but the manga continued with what was essentially a post-script to the post-script that added little to the overall storyline other than introducing Raoh's son Ryu and provide a resolution to Lin's fate after falling to the effects of Kaioh's pressure point.
It may not look like it, but the original plan for the Pokémon anime was to cover only the first generation games, while giving sneak peaks to the Pokémon of Gold and Silver, which would launch shortly after the anime's end. This was due to the fact that video game adaptations to other media don't perform very well. Of course, things turned out a bit differently than what they planned for.
Yugioh 5Ds got this after the supposed end took place. It looked like an ending, the three main characters riding into the Sunlight. But the next week, with all anime, a new episode aired, acting as a filler two episode arc to ease into another season.
When World Events Productions was first editing/dubbing Voltron, the plan was to edit three short-lived, similar but unrelated Combining Mecha Anime shows (Go Lion, Dairugger XV, and Albegas) into one series for a combined total of 125 episodes to put into syndication. But with the unexpected popularity of Lion Voltron (GoLion) followed by the equally unexpected backlash against Vehicle Voltron (Dairugger), plans to dub Albegas were scrapped, leaving WEP 20 episodes short. So WEP actually hired Toei to animate 20 new Lion Voltron episodes that are not a part of Go Lion at all.

Live Action TV

Babylon 5 was originally plotted to a five-season arc. When the PTEN syndication network crumbled around it and the show was not renewed for a fifth season, the fourth season storyline was reworked to complete the entire arc. The show was subsequently granted a fifth season, but with almost all of its major plot threads resolved, the fifth season that resulted was much weaker, composed of a lot of stories that had been cut from earlier seasons as they weren't as strong.
- As originally planned, Season 4 would have ended with the episode "Intersections in Real Time" in which Sheridan is being held prisoner by Clark's forces. What actually happened was that "Intersections in Real Time" ended up as the fifth-last episode of the season, and the events which would have wrapped up the main arc of overthrowing President Clark and retaking Earth in early season 5 were squashed into the three episodes "Between the Darkness and the Light", "Endgame" and "Rising Star", followed by the Grand Finale "Sleeping in Light". The story arcs in Season 5 were indeed originally planned for Season 5, but the reason why it was generally weaker than previous seasons was because the developments intended for the season's beginning which were most pertinent to the series as a whole had already been shown in Season 4.
Twin Peaks sorta went downhill like this after Laura Palmer's killer was revealed, the main plot being resolved. (Due to executive meddling, no less - the writers had other plans) It felt incredibly awkward to have Dale Cooper still hanging around in Twin Peaks, even though he didn't have a reason to stay after the killer had been found. Wyndam Earl was more of a stand-in for Laura Palmer's killer than a real villain.
Earth Final Conflict neatly resolved its entire premise in the penultimate season, wiping out the entire species responsible for the action of the plot. As a result, an entirely new random alien race had to be introduced to keep the plot afloat.
Blakes Seven ended its third season with the destruction of the Liberator and the (apparent) death of the Big Bad. When the fourth season opened, they had to take the show in a radically different direction to compensate for the changes.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer killed off its titular character in the fifth season. While this did not actually undermine the premise, the power of the Grand Finale proved impossible to match, and some people consider the following season lackluster by comparison. The characters themselves talked about how much the sixth season sucked while it was still going on, repeatedly describing their own adventures as lame, filler, etc. It was even lampshaded in the Mind Screw episode.
- I think it was a might intentional, 6th season was about how you can't win you never get to retire, "The hardest part of life is living in it.", like Angel there's never an epic battle that destroys all evil, you have to continue to fight every day and every hour. Of course in 7th season they did win, So Yeah.
  - For certain values of win. Does this make the comic book a second Post Script Season?
Does everybody remember Goodbye, Farewell and Amen, the mother of all Series Finales? Thought so. Now, does anybody remember AfterM*A*S*H? Of course not.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 ended its seventh season by resolving its entire premise, so the eighth season had to begin with a Reset Button, the shifting of the setting five hundred years into the future, and the introduction of a new antagonist. It survived for three more seasons, mostly because the plot of the series was never much more than a Framing Device for the slapstick and snark.
The X Files faced retool after retool as they tried to wring a few more seasons out after the feature film. The seventh season is particularly guilty of premature closure. It "explained" the conspiracy arc, killed off nearly all the Syndicate antagonists, and perhaps most significantly, resolved the long-running mystery of Mulder's missing sister. Anything after this point falls well and truly into fans' very broad Dis Continuity margin.
Remington Steele married off Laura and Steele, as the show's cancellation looked certain and Pierce Brosnan had been offered the role of James Bond. However, because Brosnan got the Bond role, NBC decided to renew the show, bringing it back for a very lame half-season which lacked all of the charm of the preceding seasons and effectively scuttling Brosnan's big movie break. Brosnan didn't end up playing Bond for over a decade.
Sledge Hammer nuked its town in the first season finale, not expecting renewal. With the renewal, the second season was set "five years earlier", with all ongoing plotlines continuing uninterrupted.
Though it had already lasted about ten seasons, Seventh Heaven in 2006 arguably counts, as it got renewed on the basis of the ratings for its Grand Finale.
- Which is an incredible piece of reasoning on the newborn CW's part. Almost any long-running series is going to draw in their base, former and casual fans with a well-hyped Grand Finale. Even worse, Everwood was Cut Short by this abrupt decision.
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was originally a completed series at a mere 40 episodes, with a conclusion similar to ZyuRanger's (the Japanese basis for the first season) where Rita Repulsa was re-captured and thrown back into space in her dumpster after the defeat of Cyclopsis. However, the explosion in merchandise sales early into the series convinced Saban to pay Toei to film more footage to extend the first season to 60 episodes, as well as enter a contract for adapting whole future seasons. Traces of the original series finale are evident in the VERY choppy Command Center scene at the end of the aired version of "Doomsday Part 2."
- Power Rangers In Space was also initially set to be the final season following the Power Rangers Turbo debacle, and made great strides to finish off existing plot threads, even killing off established characters and redeeming others. The ratings were so good for the more serialized In Space that the series was recommisioned. Executive Producer Johnathan Tzachor (who later became more of an exexutive meddler) suddenly threw out the entire existing cast in favour of a fresh one, a trait that has continued with every post-script season ever since.
Old-school Battlestar Galactica, despite having left its plot arc unresolved at the time of its cancellation, was upon its renewal a year later retooled into Galactica 1980 with disastrous results.
After an unprecedented (at the time) letter-writing campaign saved Star Trek The Original Series from cancellation, fans were "rewarded" with a third season containing many of the show's weakest and/or goofiest episodes (even by the standards of the series), including the infamous Spock's Brain as season premiere. Since the series was always purely episodic, the usual reasons for a lackluster Post Script Season don't apply; instead, the blame goes to creator Roddenberry pretty much abandoning his duties since the show was moved to a Friday... er, Saturday Night Death Slot.
- It didn't help that the budget got slashed as well.
Stargate SG-1 had this happen multiple times, with seasons 6, 7, 8 and 9. The show was expected to be cancelled after five seasons, and so ended on a decent (but not Grand) finale ("Revelations") — the expectation was that they would then move on to The Movie (to be called "Stargate: The Lost City" or something similar) which would segue into the Spin Off (Stargate Atlantis, which was very different in concept at this stage). Then the show was renewed for a sixth season, and so was given a Grand Finale ("Full Circle") which introduced the planned concept of The Movie. Then the show was renewed for a seventh season, so The Movie was cancelled and its concept was rewritten as a season-long arc that would finish with a two-part Grand Finale ("Lost City") which would segue into the Spin Off instead. Then the series was renewed for an eighth season, so the Grand Finale's ending was changed to make more of a cliffhanger to be resolved in the Season 8 premiere, and Stargate Atlantis started running concurrently to Stargate SG-1. It was expected that the eighth season would be the last, however, so the end of the season was once again devised to close the book on the series: both major galactic threats were taken away in a three-episode arc ("Reckoning" Parts 1 & 2 and "Threads" — interestingly, these came just before the Grand Finale), and then the series ended with yet another two-part Grand Finale ("Moebius") involving time-traveling to ancient Egypt. The show was then picked up again for a ninth season, and was given a Re Tool which replaced several cast members and introduced a new Big Bad. Season 9 was made knowing that the show would be renewed for at least another year — and then, finally, the show was cancelled after the end of Season 10. Whether the final episode ("Unending") was a Grand Finale is doubtful; the real resolution of the series happened in the DVD movie "Stargate: The Ark of Truth". And then there was another DVD movie, and more to come... yep, Stargate SG-1 just ain't going away.
Sea Quest DSV also had this happen twice. It was not known if the show would be renewed, so at the end of the first season, they destroyed the Sea Quest. The show was picked up, so there was a Re Tool and a new Sea Quest was constructed. Then at the end of the second season, facing a similar situation, the Sea Quest was transported to another planet and then destroyed. The show was picked up, so it was renamed Sea Quest 2032 and moved ten years into the future. Partway into season three, it was Cut Short.
Only Fools And Horses: The British sitcom about two poor wheeler-dealer street-market trader brothers ended after 15 years (7 seasons and four sets of Christmas specials) with the Trotter brothers finding an antique watch in their garage, and becoming millionaires at last. The three episode finale, where the Trotters are finally shown in luxury penthouses and expensive sports cars, was shown over Christmas 1996 and attracted massive viewing figures for The BBC. A few years later they convinced writer John Sullivan to reprise the ever-popular characters for three more Christmas Episodes. Having the Trotters lose their investment money in a stock market crash (based on one in real life) and return to their original lifestyle, the specials were panned by critics and viewers alike, and no more have been produced since 2003. To add salt to the wound, "Time On Your Hands" was featured on Sky1's often repeated Top Fifty TV Endings feature...completely ignoring the three 2001-2003 specials.
The last (fifth) season of Angel The Series was, in its own way, a Post Script Season—albeit one that didn't arise from being renewed at the last second. The long story arc of the third and fourth seasons had come to a close, the characters had moved on to a completely different setting (the evil law firm Wolfram & Hart), several characters set out to be or were forcibly retooled, everyone except Angel had their memories of Connor erased and replaced by a false past, and Spike from Buffy The Vampire Slayer was added as as regular cast member. The change was apparently done at the network's request. Then, due to conflicting accounts, including the high per-episode cost, the show was cancelled anyway. What makes it a Post Script Season instead of a Re Tool is that, while it was intended to cover multiple seasons, the cancellation aborted the arc.
The fourth season of Xena Warrior Princess ended with Xena and Gabrielle both dying in the next to last episode and then their spirits looking all angelic headed off into the afterlife. This was followed up by an episode set in modern times featuring the modern day reincarnations of Xena, Gabrielle, and Joxer facing off against Ares (who, being a Greek god, has survived into the modern day). The fifth season opened with Xena and Gabrielle finding themselves in a different, Heaven-Hell based afterlife (as opposed to the Greek mythology version of the Elysian Fields and Tartarus previously seen in the series and its parent series Hercules The Legendary Journeys), setting up an arc where Xena and Gabrielle (after being brought Back From The Dead) are forced to kill every Greek god that comes on-screen with the exceptions of Aphrodite and Ares. And along the way, they're forced to sleep in suspended animation for 25 years, meaning all the non-god members of their supporting cast are now either dead or 25 years older. The show only lasted one more season.
The seventh season finale of Charmed was at first planned as the series finale. Just think about it: Darryl promised his wife he wouldn't help the Charmed Ones anymore, then they destroyed their own source of power so the Big Bad would die in the explosion as well, and finally changed their faces and started living normal lives! Not to mention their dead sister Prue was mentioned a lot, and even the episode title was a mirror of the title of the pilot episode. But then they got renewed... we all know what happened since.
The seventh season finale of That70s Show was clearly supposed to be the series finale: first, Red FINALLY caught the guys smoking pot in his basement. Then he finally said to his son he loved him. And, of course, at the end of this episode, the main character Eric left the series. Aside from an open ending of the Kelso-Jackie-Hyde love triangle storyline, there was nothing more to add to the story. Another season was a season too many.
Sliders suffered from this trope multiple times: after being canceled and then revived and then canceled again by Fox, the Sci-Fi Channel picked it up for two more excruciating seasons. In the process they lost actress Sabrina Lloyd to Sports Night and her character suffered an incredibly squicky fate worse than death, and then lost series star Jerry O'Connell for the last season.
In Boy Meets World, the highschool graduation season finale had changes like Mr. Feeny retiring and moving away, and Shawn deciding to take a job as a photographer instead of going to college. But when the series was renewed, both of these changes were reversed so that Shawn and Mr. Feeny could be part of the college experience along with Cory, Topanga, and the rest.
Scrubs is getting a ninth season, despite the (partially subverted) Grand Finale being in the eighth.
The final season of The A Team. In turn, it also had a post-script finale.
Magnum PI had such a definitive finale at the end of season seven, they aired commercials explaining that despite the main character being killed, tying up loose ends up as a ghost, and then being sent off to the afterlife, things weren't really over. It lasted another season.
The episode order for the fourth and last season of Felicity was increased after production had wrapped. The original finale resolved the existing storylines and gave a brief synopsis of the characters' lives for the next two years. The extra episodes, rather than simply being written to take place and be aired before the finale, instead created a new five-episode arc set after the two year fast-forward, in which Felicity magically travels back in time to the beginning of the season in order to make different choices. The show had never included fantasy elements before, and the whole arc, while interesting, felt undeniably tacked on to an otherwise finished product.
The ultimate example is probably Coronation Street, which has essentially been on a series of postscript seasons since 1960. It was originally intended to be 13 episodes long, with the titular street bulldozed in a Made For TV Movie. However, it proved so popular that a new series was commissioned, and it's been broadcasting more or less continuously to the present day.
This happened with Golden Girls. Bea Arthur decided to leave the show after the seventh season, and it ends with Dorothy getting married and moving to Atlanta. However, her mother Sophia decides to stay in Miami with the roommates, and the eighth season is retitled The Golden Palace as the girls open a high-end hotel. Needless to say, it wasn't well received and most fans prefer to think the series ended with Dorothy's wedding.
Sort of happened on Saved By The Bell. The show had finished taping its finale (which centered around the characters' high school graduation) when NBC ordered more episodes. Which shouldn't have been a problem, as the finale hadn't aired yet, and they could simply air the new episodes prior to the finale—except that the actors' contracts had expired, and everyone but Tiffani Amber-Thiessen and Elizabeth Berkley decided to sign new ones. As a result, Kelly and Jessie were replaced with a new character named Tori Scott. No explanation was given for Kelly and Jessie's absence in the new episodes, and since the finale was already in the can, no explanation could be given for Tori's absence at graduation.
La Femme Nikita. Despite being the USA Network's top rated drama during it's 4th season (even with no advertisement by the network), the cancellation was announced. After the large fan campaign to bring the series back, in September 2000 a truncated 5th season was announced. It did help out with some of the Cannon Fodder they had left behind, but gave one hell of a Bittersweet Ending.

Western Animation

Justice League Unlimited finished its plot arc in its second season, ending with an epilogue to the entire DC Animated Universe, set after Batman Beyond. The series went on for one more season, however, with an entirely different storyline involving Luthor and Grodd forming the Legion of Doom; however, unlike many other examples on this list, it managed to maintain its high quality until the end. The series' creators have stated that they made every season finale a possible Grand Finale, since they never knew whether or not they would get another season.
Teen Titans also got renewed for one additional season (season five) that year. The surprise of this development could be seen in that the three-part finale for season four was titled simply "The End".
- The Teen Titans Go! title remained in publication for two more years, during which it acted as an unofficial "sixth season" of the series, following from the events of the Titans In Tokyo movie and cementing the relationships of Flash and Jinx as well as Beast Boy and Raven. Batman even makes a one-page cameo, observing Robin and Starfire making out with binoculars!
Kim Possible's Season 4 is another rare but undeniable Post Script Season success. With its Grand Finale and the Official Couple now officially going out.
- Personally, I believe the success is due to the way that the fourth season seemed to be treated more like a sequel to the original series than simply another season of the same show, like an anime would do.
Across its first two seasons, Ben 10 Alien Force told a sprawling epic storyline of a battle against oldest race in creation, culminating in a final episode in which virtually every single dangling plot thread, character and story concept the series had set up over its 26 episodes were convincingly brought together for a dramatic final battle that ended with the saving of the entire universe....aaaand then they made a third season. Sure, it started out excitingly with the return of the Big Bad from the original Ben10 series and setting up some changes in the status quo, but it hass since featured nothing but one-shot stories of no consequence, little to no use of the new changes to the show's setup, and no overacing direction or plot.

Video Games

Mega Man X 5 ended the story and left Zero Killed Off For Real. Capcom produced a sequel anyway, without Keiji Inafune's involvement. X6's mostly pointless story tried to combine all 3 of X5's endings, used one of the worst Ass Pulls ever to bring Zero back, and demoted Big Bad Sigma to Anticlimax Boss status. It even included a robot shark for easy jumping purposes. Dis Continuity was inevitable.
- The less said of Axl, and the 2 further sequels, the better.
- There's also the fact that X5 was supposed to lead up to the Zero series.
Halo 3 suffered from a variation on this. The developers have been very frank in saying that a need to meet a publisher-enforced deadline for Halo 2 not only deprived them of much-needed game polishing time and various chunks of gameplay, but forced them to cut off the game's actual ending. They had to come up with a way to pad out a game's third act into an entire new, console-selling, killer-app extravagansa. They didn't do a bad job gameplay-wise, but the storyline suffered from the resolution of most of the plot points in the previous title.
It was an unwritten rule that Final Fantasy games didn't have sequels. Then came along Final Fantasy X-2, which only exists to provide copious amounts of Fanservice, to give cosplayers an orgasm and to reverse the incredibly poignant Bittersweet Ending of Final Fantasy X.
- And create an extremely bizarre numbering system.
  - Which was only used for Final Fantasy X-2. Every other true sequel or prequel to a numbered Final Fantasy uses a subtitle. Besides, the most shocking aspect of these sequels is that Final Fantasy XII is a prequel to Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story, and a spinoff of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.
- And to be a great game of its own.
- X-2 also constituted a half-hearted attempt to make X a prequel to VII.
- There were hints in Final Fantasy X that the Bittersweet Ending wasn't permanent. Namely, some Fayths hint that they may be able to keep Tidus alive after the Big Bad is killed and there is a scene of Tidus swimming after the credits are over.