The Ending Changes Everything / Live-Action TV

Note: This is a Spoilered Rotten trope, that means that EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE on this list is a spoiler by default and most of them will be unmarked. This is your last warning; only proceed if you really believe you can handle this list.

Times where The Ending Changes Everything in Live-Action TV series.

---

• The ending of 30 Rock parodies the St. Elsewhere ending twist by revealing that the entire series had just been part of a pitch for a TV show based on Liz Lemon's life, put together decades later by Liz's great-granddaughter and approved by the immortal Kenneth Parcell. To recap, 30 Rock is about people in a Show Within a Show putting on a show.
• The 100th Episode of The Big Bang Theory plays this way. The episode starts off with an homage to the pilot with Leonard seeing Penny across the hallway and instinctively asks her out, being almost two years since they broke up. Most of the episode was then about the various pitfalls reinforcing why they had such a hard time dating in the first place, with Leonard admitting every scenario for them inside his head ends badly and Penny telling him he overthinks things. The story then jumps back to the first scene in the hallway, most of the episode being a mental debate on if he should ask her out again. Despite the "bad ending" he imagined he decided to do it anyway and the episode ends by contrasting real life with his imagination, proving that his imagined scenario may not be the end outcome.
• Black Mirror:
  • Season 2's "White Bear" has us follow around an amnesiac named Victoria who starts the episode tied to a chair, but escapes and finds out humanity went crazy after a weird signal of an upside-down Y was broadcast. As weird costumed people start chasing her, others just watch, recording with their phones instead of helping. She meets up with more battle-ready survivors on a quest to stop the signal and gets flashbacks of her past. She sees a fiancé, a daughter, a white teddy bear, and fire for some reason. The group gets to the broadcast headquarters of the signal and fight off some henchmen, climaxing in Victoria shooting a shotgun at one of them. The gun just has confetti. Then the truth is revealed as the "headquarters" turn out to be a stage with an audience behind it. Victoria is chained down to a chair and breaks down crying as her past is played back on a projector: the little girl isn't her daughter; she and her fiancé kidnapped her. The fiance tortured and burned the little girl to death while Victoria recorded things on her phone. The white bear was the girl's, and a vigil-like symbol of the hunt to find her while she was missing. The weird brainwash symbol was the husband's tattoo. He hung himself in prison, but people decided Victoria should be punished to the extent he wasn't. The entire experience was that punishment. The brainwashed people with their phones out were willing tourists seeing a sideshow attraction. At the end, Victoria is taken back to the house where she woke up at the start and has her memory wiped away with a head collar device that has her in screaming pain as it does its work. It's shown that the people in charge of this punishment repeat this whole process every day.
  • In Season 3's "Shut Up and Dance", Kenny, a teenager who downloads a sketchy "malware remover" to reverse some damage his sister did to his laptop, is blackmailed when hackers record him masturbating. He's forced to pair up with Hector, a man being blackmailed for an affair, for a bank robbery. This later escalates to him having to fight a fellow blackmailed person to the death to see who gets the "prize money". In their conversation before the fight, it's revealed that Kenny was masturbating to child porn (as was the man he is to fight). This explains why he had to play along all the way through. Kenny wins the fight, but the hackers still leak everything they have on everyone, and Kenny is taken away by police at the end.
  • In Season 4's "Black Museum" as the curator Rolo Haynes is suffering a stroke, Nish's accent changes to American, showcasing she lied about who she was. The 'exhibit', Clayton Leigh is actually Nish's father who was revealed to be wrongfully executed. His wife committed suicide after seeing what happened to his digital consciousness, due to which Nish took it on herself to avenge her parents. It also turns out she poisoned Haynes due to making the deal which ended up with Clayton's And I Must Scream situation. She then transfers Haynes's consciousness unto her father's as she kills both of them, and downloads Haynes's perpetually tormented pendant as a souvenir, and burns down the eponymous Museum to hide the evidence.
• In the Season 4 finale "Face Off" of Breaking Bad, the episode changes everything Walt said to Jesse in the previous episode regarding Gus getting Brock poisoned by ricin being a carefully crafted lie to bring Jesse back to his side, as the Lily of the Valley plant in Walt's house is marked such, proving it was Walt who poisoned him.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Normal Again, The Trio tries to convince Buffy that her life as a vampire slayer is delusional, and she is really a patient in a mental hospital. The episode ends on Buffy in the Mental Institution going catatonic. (Joss Whedon claimed this episode was ambiguous, and the show snaps back in the next episode.)
• The 100th episode of Castle, "The Lives of Others", has Castle stuck in his apartment with a broken leg, increasingly bored to the point where he ends up spying on the apartment across the street from his loft, and ends up thinking that one of the tenants committed a murder there. Beckett insists that he's only letting his writer's imagination get away with him, and finally decides to visit the apartment to prove Castle wrong, only to be suddenly held at knifepoint by the tenant. Castle, Esposito and Ryan rush to the apartment, knock down the door...and then the lights turn on and everyone shouts "Surprise!" Turns out Beckett organized the whole thing as an elaborate birthday surprise for Castle. Notably this helped explain some seemingly inexplicable moments, such as Alexis giving her dad a pair of binoculars for his birthday and Beckett's rather hamfisted attempt to insert the word "fridge" into a conversation to trigger a "Eureka!" Moment.
• Crossroads: This revival of an old ITV soap, which replaced the old motel setting with a modern hotel, had flopped, and got relaunched only to fail even harder. So in the final episode, it was revealed to be all in the imagination of a supermarket sales assistant! In other words, everything that happened in the revived series was All Just a Dream, while leaving the continuity of the original series intact.
• CSI:
  • "Got Murder?". After finding that a dismembered body belongs to the estranged ex-wife of a man who had been accused of her murder, the investigators discover that that man's daughter is pregnant, and find evidence that he was molesting her. Just as their case starts to look watertight — that he killed his wife when she returned to find him in bed with their daughter — the truth comes out: it's just a hysterical pregnancy. The daughter killed her mom for threatening her fantasy life as the housewife. Dad had no idea what the heck was going on.
  • "Anatomy of a Lye" rips off the Gregory Biggs case from the headlines, with a drunk driver hitting a man with his car, then driving to his garage with the victim stuck alive and unable to move in the windshield, where he dies hours later. Meanwhile, the perp continues with his life in order to not raise suspicions, buries the body in a park the night after and doses the car and garage with lye to erase any evidence. Unlike in Biggs' case, the episode ends with the discovery of a suicide note from the victim: he walked in front of the car intending to kill himself. The ending thus makes the whole elaborate scheme of the perp to avoid prosecution pointless and counter-productive, since if he had just taken the man to a hospital, he would have been charged with nothing - not even drunk driving, as it was unrelated to the 'accident'. His Smug Snake behavior was what made him a murderer.
• One episode of Empty Nest has Harry seeing a series of patients all named Billy. They get progressively older as the episode goes on. The final patient is a young man about to leave for college who's come for his records. Harry and the college bound man have a brief conversation which includes a mention of past drug use (which another of the patients had issues with). Then the man gives him a book on sexual education (which Harry had given to a pre-teen patient who asked about it) and a Pez dispenser (which Harry had given to a diabetic patient). It's then revealed that all of the patients were the same boy at different points of his life. The last shot is all of the patients leaving Harry's office in single file.
• The Goes Wrong Show features an accidental example, thanks to the general ineptness of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society. Their production of a hoary old Downton Abbey / Brideshead Revisited rip-off called Summer Once Again keeps going off the rails and having to start again, which eventually leads to them running out of time to perform it all and for new director Robert to have to basically yell a rushed plot synopsis at the audience. It's only once he's at the end, however, that he realises that no one got around to bringing up the fact that the main character was dying all along from a Victorian Novel Disease, which was revealed in one of the first scenes and apparently put all of his otherwise utterly baffling character choices into context.
• The Good Place: Eleanor is a terrible person who dies and is taken to "The Good Place". She quickly realizes that there has been a mistake, and tries to hide the fact that she isn't supposed to be there. Eventually, she discovers someone else, Jason, who was also put in The Good Place by mistake. As the series goes on, it focuses on both Eleanor and Jason, living with their respective 'soul mates', Chidi and Tahani. The four of them proceed to get into ridiculous situations and make each others lives miserable, as one would expect from a typical sitcom...Except the season finale reveals that all four of them have been in The Bad Place the entire time, explicitly chosen to torture each other for a thousand years. And Michael, the well-meaning but kinda goofy Architect? He was behind the entire thing. He was getting tired of "classic" tortures like burning in lava pits or swarmed by angry bees and decided to build a fake Good Place so the "prisoners" and their clashing personalities could torture themselves! Hell is other people, indeed...
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • The episode "Time Travelers" has a surreal story of Ted and Barney dealing with duplicates of themselves in multiple time periods, a girl Ted met years ago showing up along with several potential future versions of how their relationship will turn out, along with a subplot of a Marshall and Robin conflict regarding the name of a new cocktail. It is then revealed that the entire episode was an Imagine Spot. The duplicates thing never happened and the Marshall and Robin conflict occurred five years ago. Ted was actually sitting in the bar all by himself because his friends were too busy to hang out with him. Future!Ted then talks about how that was such a depressing moment in his life that he says the only thing that he would have wanted to do was run to "The Mother" and be with her 45 days earlier than what really happened.
  • In the Grand Finale it's revealed that the Mother died in 2024 from an unspecified illness after being with Ted for 11 years, having two kids, and loved each other deeply the entire time. In addition we learn that Robin and Barney's marriage lasted only three years and that Barney regressed to his womanizing ways only to get one pregnant and become the father of a little girl, while Robin fell off the radar because of how much it hurt to see Ted and Tracy (the Mother) together, only returning when they got married in 2020. In 2030 as Ted wraps up the story, his kids don't buy his reason for telling the story and believe he wants to pursue "Aunt" Robin again (which they can see every time she comes over to visit). They give their blessing and the last shot of the series is a 52 year old Ted offering Robin a Blue French Horn.
  • In another episode, Ted and Barney go out to a bar and decide to live like there's no tomorrow. No matter what Ted does, it seems that the Universe approves and the night goes incredibly well for him. The next morning, he finds out that he had been butt-dialing Marshall all night, and much of his night had been captured on Marshall's voicemail. Listening to it again with a clearer head makes Ted realize what a complete and utter jerk he had been.
• Almost every episode of Hustle ends with the revelation that the main characters were in complete control of the situation, even though it seemed that they were completely doomed. The best example was the episode in which they were being conned, which revealed at the end that not only were they aware they were being conned, they had been aware before the episode had even started. Being a show about conmen, very, very occasionally, the exact opposite would happen, and the team would never even realise they were the ones who'd been played.
• An episode of Los misterios de Laura tells the story of a guy who wakes up after an operation with a girl he's never seen claiming to be his wife. She conveniently needs him to sign some papers to access a very shady security vault at a bank, the girl he claimed to be his real wife is murdered, then the "new" wife tries to get him incapacitated, which would give her automatic access to all those shady accounts...He was behind everything, he was truly married to the "unknown" wife and wanted to get her arrested by making it all look like she had been the one pulling off an elaborate rouse.
• The crime drama Motive tells the audience at the start who the killer is. The episode then shows flashbacks to the events leading up to the murder. The final flashback will often have a twist that reveals the death was different than expected, the motive was not what it was believed and quite often the "victim" was no innocent.
  • A limo driver appears to have killed a cop for his girlfriend. It turns out the cop was corrupt and he and the woman were scamming the poor guy.
  • One episode makes it appear that a pilot is cheating on his fiancee with another woman and killed her to keep the affair quiet. When he's arrested, he reveals that the victim was someone he sat next to on a flight and began stalking him, inventing their entire "relationship" in her mind. When he confronted her, she attacked him and the killing was self-defense.
  • It looks like a woman killed a call girl for an affair with her husband. Instead, the call girl had realized the woman was running a ponzi scheme and killed to hush it up.
  • An episode appears to be a man murdered by a guy who then kidnaps his daughter. It turns out the killer is the girl's real father and the "victim" is the guy who kidnapped her years before.
• Mr. Robot has two of these:
  • The ending of season 1 reveals that Mr. Robot is actually a split personality of Elliot, putting everything that has happened thus far in the season in a new light.
  • It is revealed in the series finale that the Elliot we've been watching isn't the real Elliot - he's just another alter, like Mr. Robot, created to protect Elliot's psyche - and the real Elliot has been trapped in a fantasy world inside his mind since before the start of the series.
• Nowhere Man, an early UPN drama, was about a man who was UnPersoned over a compromising photograph of U.S. Soldiers executing Third World peasants. He traveled the country trying to unravel the conspiracy that was behind his erasure and reclaim his old life. After twenty-odd episodes of Mind Screw and conflicting explanations about why the photo was important, the finale closed with The Reveal that his old life never existed. He was really a government agent that had been captured by the conspiracy and implanted with false memories, and his entire cross-country odyssey had been a test of how much of the lie he would believe. This may have been intended to lead into a second season, but it was never produced.
• Nickelodeon's short-lived sitcom The Other Kingdom centers around fairy princess Astral who gets curious about life in the human world and their ways, particularly because she has a crush on a human teenager named Tristan. She's given the opportunity to travel to the human realm, posing as an ordinary teenage girl, allowing her to personally interact with Tristan. A couple of episodes would center around Astral trying to interact with Tristan or even trying to hang out/date him, with often awkward results and humorous mishaps, although things would usually turn out well. In the final episode, the duo would finally reunite at the fairy-themed high school dance, where Tristan would admire Astral's optimism and love of nature. Astral would reveal to him that she was a fairy... and then Tristan would reveal himself to be a fairy as well. It'll really make the audience wonder just how to interpret Tristan's actions when re-watching the series or just what things were like in his perspective. One line from Brendoni says it all:
  Brendoni: Dude! I did not see that coming!
  • And to put icing on the cake, it turns out Tristan was the long-lost prince of Spartania destined to bring havoc to Athenia, which even he didn't know about, and he certainly doesn't want to fulfill the prophecy or serve his evil father.
• An overseas example from Japan: the tv show Papadoru!, or Papa wa Idol (meaning "Papa is an Idol"), where Kanjani8's Nishikido Ryo plays Nishikido Ryo, a member of Kanjani8 who falls in love with a convenience store worker with three children and marries her in secrecy but soon they are outed by the media. The show basically goes between getting to know his wife's children and him dealing with the backlash of his fans and the group members' reactions to him not telling them about his marriage. In the last episode, everyone gets a happy ending and then it's shown that the rooms are actually sets and it was all a fucking tv show within a tv show.
• The Paul Merton in Galton & Simpson's... episode "Lunch in the Park" (a remake of a Missing Episode of Comedy Playhouse) is an extremely naturalistic and downbeat two-hander in which Geoffrey and Sarah, both in unhappy marriages to other people, regularly meet in the park for lunch and stilted conversation about how unhappy they are. Only the mention that Geoffrey's dead-end job happens to be in the Ministry of Defence comes even close to foreshadowing that it will end with him passing her a folder and MI-5 swooping in to arrest them both for espionage.
• Played straight at the end of the Quantum Leap (2022) episode "Salvation or Bust." Just before Ben leaps out, a man confronts Ben, identifies Ben by his full name and year, and tersely orders Ben to stop following him or else. This means that there's not only a new unknown leaper out there, but Ben's own impetus for leaping may have to do with this person, and this person knows it.
• In the Red Dwarf episode "Give & Take", Lister is kidnapped by an insane medical droid, Asclepius. When Rimmer and Kryten rescue him they accidentally destroy a specimen jar containing two kidneys, then discover that Lister is missing his kidneys, and presume the kidneys they destroyed were Lister's, which had been removed by Asclepius. However, the plot is resolved when they travel back in time to remove the kidneys from a past version of Lister and implant them in the present-day Lister, meaning that his kidneys had already been removed before he even met Asclepius - the implication being that the droid was actually perfectly sane, and was trying to give Lister a life-saving operation, and if Rimmer and Kryten had not waded in the events of the episode would never have happened.
• The final episode of the original run of Roseanne, in which it's revealed that all of the show's characters are simply altered versions of the real people in Roseanne's life. Further that, a number of key events and facts were altered...including that the 'real' Roseanne's husband died of the heart attack Dan survived.
• Parodied on Saturday Night Live with Kevin Spacey as host (in an obvious reference to the end of The Usual Suspects). Andy Samberg was late to rehearsals and Spacey starts to give him a verbal beating, only for Samberg to relate a long and complicated story that explains his tardiness including meeting up with Radiohead and having to confront one of those human statues who wore gold paint. Spacey forgives him and lets him go, only to turn around and see elements of the story on his back wall. Radiohead came from a mannequin head on top of a radio and the gold painted human statue was a picture of Spacey with his Oscar. It then went a step further, showing an entire line of items and symbols that spells out an entire sentence Pictionary-style.
• The Scrubs episode "My Screw Up" has Dr. Cox dealing with guilt over a patient dying while talking with his best friend and brother-in-law Ben. The dialogue implied it was a one episode patient who died while under J.D.'s care while Dr. Cox ran trivial errands but it was actually Ben, whose cancer had returned and was a hallucination of sorts to cope with the shock. This explains why Dr. Cox was so angry at JD, it was not just any patient like the audience would assume. Earlier in the episode when someone made a comment about him always carrying around his camera, he replied with, "'til the day I die." The rest of the episode he doesn't have his camera with him and no other character acknowledges his presence despite some goofy antics. This is similar to the episode Ben first appeared in, where JD day-dreamed the entire second half because he didn't want to believe the test results that said Ben had cancer in the first place.
• Derren Brown's The Séance is about a séance with twelve medical students who volunteer to try and contact the spirit of a person who died as part of a suicide pact. The volunteers "make contact" with a young woman named Jane, complete with video and evidence confirming the things stated by the volunteer's selected medium. At the end, Derren explains some of what happened, asks the volunteers to wait, and walks outside. He reaches "Jane" in the van, perfectly alive, and calls her inside to meet the volunteers. The only thing missing is a rimshot. A good deal of Brown's specials have something like this.
• The final scene of the final episode of St. Elsewhere showed such a radically different interpretation of the major characters it opens the possibility that the entire series was an in-story delusion. One series writer deduced through Canon Welding that "90% of all television" is a subplot of a St. Elsewhere episode.
• The first episode of This Is Us seems to focus on three unconnected threads: Jack and Rebecca having two children with a third dying in childbirth; twins Kevin and Kate having their own problems; and black lawyer Randall finding his birth father. Then the final scene reveals that Jack and Rebecca are living in 1980, Kevin and Kate are their grown children and Randall is the abandoned boy they adopted. Thus, the entire show becomes about one big family.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): "The Invaders" features a lone woman (Agnes Moorehead) living alone in a rustic cabin in the middle of a windswept prairie. As she goes about her chores, she hears a strange noise on the roof and discovers an alien spaceship sitting on it, with two tiny aliens emerging in space suits. The rest of the episode, which is filmed almost completely dialogue-free beyond the unnamed woman's grunts and screams, sees her terrified of the titular invaders, which repeatedly come after her and attack with laser weapons and her own kitchen knife. After she finally succeeds in killing the aliens, we hear one of them beaming a desperate message saying to avoid this planet and its "race of giants". A case of Aliens Speaking English? No—the camera then pans to reveal that the spaceship the woman is destroying reads "U.S. AIR FORCE SPACE PROBE No. 1". Suddenly, we realize that the "human" woman we were rooting for is actually a sixty-foot tall alien, and the "invaders" were humans from Earth.
• Season one of Westworld: The scenes with William and Logan actually happened thirty years prior to the events of the rest of the series — and William, the goody-two-shoes who was reluctant to engage in the debauchery that Logan brought him there for, grew up to become the depraved Man in Black from the present-day sequences, the flashback serving as his Start of Darkness.
• In all places, the family sitcom Yes, Dear. An episode revolves around the lead character Greg's reluctant attendance at a therapy session. The episode consists of flashbacks to elements of his life that have scarred him in the present day. At the end of the session, right after he leaves, the psychologist (played by Michael Boatman) comes to a realization that the whole thing was a trick. The ending features an Affectionate Parody of The Usual Suspects as he drops his cup of coffee in shock, and the camera cuts to a limping Greg gradually walking normally (his leg had fallen asleep).

---