Ending Fatigue / Live-Action TV

• Similar to The Lord of The Rings, the Season 2 finale of Lost has at least 3 perfectly viable endings, and has an unnecessary scene with Claire and Charlie between them, creating some ending fatigue. The endings are Desmond turning the key, Jack having the bag put over his head and the ending with Penny answering the phone.
• There have been a couple of instances in The Amazing Race where teams have gotten so far behind in a leg late in the season that they’ll never be able to catch up only to be saved by it being non-elimination. Since it’s a Foregone Conclusion that they will be eliminated in the following episode, it messes with the pacing of the ending. They legally are not allowed to change the placement of non-elimination legs once they are set because it would be insurance fraud so there’s not really anything that can be done if this happens.
  • In season 17, Nick and Vicki made it to the second to last leg and quit a task out of frustration in fourth place. Since there was another episode and the finale is three people, they should have known that episode was non-elimination but they quit anyway. The penalty is six hours added to the start time of the next leg so they were not able to get on the same flight as the other three teams. At that point, there was no way for them to come back so two episodes unwittingly became just pure filler.
  • In season 21, James and Abba’s taxi driver stole their bags and one of their passports in leg seven. They had had a twelve-hour lead on some of the other teams because of a missed flight but they spent the entire evening trying to track the guy down, including going to Interpol. They finally were allowed to check in once the two other teams who’d gotten so far behind did so to find out it was non-elimination. The next leg didn’t have any travel so they spent the entirety of the day trying to find the passport while still technically racing. Being non-travel also made it impossible for them to catch anyone when they finally did the tasks. Not helping matters is the looming fact that they’d be eliminated on the spot when they had to go to another country. This also made two episodes late in the game unintentional filler.
• Babylon 5 lasted for five seasons. However, the main arc of the show (the Shadow War) was wrapped up in the fourth season's sixth episode. Its secondary arc (the Earth Civil War) was resolved at the end of the fourth season (it would've been by the fifth season's sixth episode or so but was compressed due to events beyond control). The fifth season was a Postscript Season which mostly consisted of "what comes after" stories, which at the end resolved the arc regarding Londo and the Centauri as well as letting all the characters slowly depart the station and move on.
  • The Earth Civil War arc itself is seen by some, though by no means all, members of the fandom as this. On the one hand, Earth is clearly much less of a threat than the Shadows, so it makes sense to deal with the Shadows first and save Earth for later. On the other hand, the end to the Shadow War feels like much more of a natural climax, and once that's out of the way handling Earth just feels like wrapping up a loose end.
• The Blacklist has a particularly egregious example of this in the season 5 episode "Ian Garvey." First, Liz and Tom are attacked in their apartment in a long, drawn-out, slow-motion scene that gets extremely narm-y very quickly. Then they're found and taken to the hospital, which takes up another couple of minutes as seemingly every police vehicle in the city shows up to escort them while they exchange tearful declarations of love. Then they get to the hospital, and the camera takes a while to linger on the doctors treating them, the rest of the task force, et cetera. Then Liz slips into a Convenient Coma. Then Liz wakes up from the coma, apparently more or less unharmed, a year later. And then it's revealed that Tom Keen is dead. By the time the episode is finally over, it feels like it's had six separate endings.
• The DVD commentary of the Christmas episode of Father Ted has one of the show's creators and writer of the episode complaining that the plot has petered out, even exclaiming at one point "End! END!!"
• Subverted by Six Feet Under, which has a satisfying (if cliched) conclusion 10 minutes before the end, but then goes on to have one of the most amazing, heartwarming endings ever.
• Doctor Who sometimes runs into this:
  • The farewell scene in "The Daleks".
  • "The War Games" was Patrick Troughton's last story and intended at one point to be the finale of Doctor Who, period. The show at the time had been in Troubled Production, and it had to be written quickly to cover several cancelled serial ideas deemed not good enough to film. It is ten episodes long, with only the Hartnell-era "The Daleks' Master Plan" beating it in terms of length. Terrance Dicks has noted that it was possible to pad it indefinitely because its premise (the history of human warfare) was a case of 'how long is a piece of string?', so they were able to add in new groups of human warriors to deal with whenever they ran out of story.
  • "Pyramids of Mars" is one of the great triumphs of the Classic series, but Robert Holmes had an attack of writer's block about ten minutes of the way through the fourth episode and had to cobble the rest together from producer and director suggestions - and it shows. The first three episodes are suspenseful, gently funny Gothic Horror with elements of family drama and a terrifying villain. The last episode starts with an amazing moment in which Sutekh takes over the Doctor's mind, steals the TARDIS, and has the Doctor executed in front of Sarah by a henchman!... and then the Doctor's revealed to be okay via an Ass Pull of him developing a new power he's never shown before, and the plot derails into Filler of goofy puzzle rooms, with Sarah even doing an ad-libbed Lampshade Hanging on its similarity to a (lame) previous script from the previous season.
  • "The Face of Evil" has a weirdly long ending. The Doctor restores Xoanon to sanity less than halfway through the final episode, and the rest is him chatting in the Tesh "sacred heart" with Leela, chatting with Xoanon about what exactly had been wrong with him, the Sevateem and Tesh arguing over who gets to be leader, Leela helping with the debate... and ''finally' Leela facing the Doctor and demanding to come with him in the TARDIS.
  • "Timelash" feels like it should be nearly over when the Borad is apparently killed and the Doctor races to stop a missile strike that will destroy all life on the planet. Unfortunately, the episode was under-running, so right when the story should be heading at break-neck pace towards the climax, the plot instead stops completely for not one but two minutes-long Padding scenes of the Doctor standing around in the TARDIS bickering with Peri and Herbert while absolutely nothing happens. And even when he finally stops the missiles, there's another ending tacked on where the real Borad turns up and reveals it was a clone who died.
  • The episode "The Family of Blood" certainly has a drawn-out ending. First the Doctor deals with the Family, then saying goodbye to Nurse Redfern, then saying goodbye to Latimer, then attending a memorial. Whether this counts as too much depends on the viewer. (Human Nature, the Virgin New Adventures novel this was adapted from, has a similarly prolonged wrap-up. Paul Cornell wrote both versions.)
  • "Journey's End" spends the final quarter of an episode that had been extended to 65 minutes tying up all the loose ends. The ending, in which Donna has her memory wiped is quite climactic, but the ending had already dragged on, showing all the characters RTD had created, and showing a frankly ridiculous scene where the Earth is towed back to its original location.
  • The second part of "The End of Time" was the Grand Finale for the Tenth Doctor and Russell T Davies's tenure as show-runner, so he used its final stretch not only to revisit previous events and companions but also to realize ideas he had over the course of his tenure that he'd never managed to squeeze in. Thus, after absorbing a fatal dose of radiation, the Tenth Doctor takes his time paying his respects to every single one of his companions (apart from the temporary ones) and a few people who weren't, such as the great-granddaughter of the aforementioned Nurse Redfern. There are walk-ons by other past characters such as Midshipman Frame and a young Blon Fel-Fotch Slitheen, then he staggers around in the snow while the Ood sing him off, then he staggers around some more in the TARDIS, and then finally — finally! — he regenerates. As the DVD Commentary puts it, "It does have more endings than Lord of the Rings, this, doesn't it?"
  • Clara's death in "Face the Raven". It deserves focus and attention because it's the first time since the early 1980s that a companion left the series by dying even though she gets "wiggle room" two episodes later. But after it becomes a Foregone Conclusion we get the Doctor arguing with Ashildr about trying to find a loophole, Clara giving a big speech to the Doctor, Clara giving another big speech to the Doctor, and then Clara going out to confront the Quantum Shade in slow-motion. And then we get reprises of the event. She is a controversial companion to start with, but even the fans who liked her were wishing she'd just get on with it and be dead.
  • The final two episodes of the Twelfth Doctor and Steven Moffat's showrunner tenure, "The Doctor Falls" (Series 10 Season Finale) and "Twice Upon a Time" (Christmas Episode / Grand Finale) play with this concept. The denouement of "The Doctor Falls" reaches the How We Got Here point shown at the start of the previous episode "World Enough and Time", and then Once More, with Clarity kicks in: the Doctor doesn't regenerate because he'd rather just die. With that, a Ray of Hope Twist Ending sets up "Twice Upon a Time": he and the First Doctor, who felt the same way about regeneration, cross paths. Some of this comes off as a poke at "The End of Time"'s notoriously drawn-out ending. Steven Moffat has admitted that he intended "The Doctor Falls" to be Twelve's Grand Finale, but when the incoming showrunner decided not to handle the 2017 Christmas special, threatening the end of an annual tradition, he decided to give Twelve a happy, low-stakes adventure as a contrast to the sorrowful "The Doctor Falls". "Twice Upon a Time" flirts with this trope after the Doctors return the Captain to the battlefield and the Time Stands Still crisis ends. First the Captain survives after all thanks to Twelve having his return coincide with the Christmas Truce. Then the Doctors bid farewell to each other and the First departs and regenerates. Then Twelve bids farewell to all three of his companions in Glass People form, Clara and Nardole being Unexpected Characters, including a Who Wants to Live Forever? speech, before retiring to the TARDIS. THEN he gives a Final Speech to his next self and regenerates — but all of that plus Thirteen's first scene is accomplished in fifteen minutes or so. And since this is not an epic-length, action setpiece-driven story to begin with — again, unlike "The End of Time" — it doesn't feel like a big comedown to have the final stretch primarily involve characters having heart(s)-to-heart(s) chats.
  • Those last two examples also work on an arc level with regards to Jenna Coleman and Steven Moffat, both of whom had several false endings to their careers in the franchise.
  • Coleman was going to depart at the end of "Last Christmas", but then decided to stay on another year. The ending of the special therefore had to be changed: The Doctor finds her as an elderly woman reminiscing about her time with him decades prior, but this turns out to be another dream and she's actually still young. Another effect is that Clara's role is much reduced in series 9 compared to 7 and 8.
• After they finally find the real Earth (or rather our Earth, which is not the first Earth but merely named after it) in Battlestar Galactica, the show spends a good 45 minutes on what all the characters plan to do with the rest of their lives.
  • And even that, having what could be considered a poignant ending during said stretch (Adama sitting on the patch of land he plans to build he and Roslin's cabin on), it continues to keep going.
  • Also the end of Season 2, when they colonize New Caprica. Especially fatiguing is the fact that the episode is actually 90 minutes long, rather than the normal hour. If you don't know this going in, you may start to wonder just when the episode is going to end.
• Twin Peaks. Oh GOD Twin Peaks. Due to an unfortunate case of Executive Meddling, Laura Palmer's killer is revealed by the midway point of the second season, freeing up the rest of the season to focus on... James? Nadine still thinks she's a teenager? Civil war reenactments? The fact that the episodes are 45 minutes each does not help the situation. That being said, the episodes do have their moments, and it does build well to the finale, regarded as one of the best episodes of the series.
• Noticeably averted in Star Trek: Voyager, when the series ended when the ship arrives at Earth, much to the disappointment of many fans. This may have been the reason for the overly-long ending of Battlestar Galactica, given Ronald D. Moore's desire to make an 'improved' Voyager with that series.
• Kamen Rider Kabuto had it set in about episode 30. After that, expect to be facepalming as they try and fail to tie up all the loose ends.
• Even the most ardent fans of the Cook/Effy/Freddie Love Triangle in Series 3 of Skins admit that Katie and Emily's episode (which ends with Naomily's Relationship Upgrade) is a better ending than the actual finale (which ends with So What Do We Do Now?).
• For several seasons Smallville was only nominally about the whole superheroic destiny thing and was vastly more concerned with Clark and Lana's on-again/off-again relationship, leading every single episode to wrap up its Monster of the Week plot around the 45-minute mark to allow Clark, Lana, Lex and sometimes Chloe to each have a little epilogue where they ruminated about their feelings. You know how when you watch most shows you look at your watch and think "They've gotta wrap this thing up in the next five minutes or it's gonna be 'to be continued'"? With Smallville you'd say that when there were 20 minutes left!
• Subverted in Flashforward in the episode "The Gift". The episode plays out like all the other episodes of the series, following a different aspect of Mark's investigation wall with a different police plot. Indeed, it is one of the more prevalent plot threads in the first part of the season. However the culprit is locked away, and everything seems to be finished by about 30 minutes in. Ending Fatigue should set in for the remaining 12. However, it uses this time to create a brilliant Twist Ending that plays on the emotional undercurrents of one of the characters in the episode.
• Averted quite noticeably in late-'70s/early-'80s British TV show The Professionals, where the credits often ran straight after the scene in which the bad guy was caught or shot (or the objective achieved). In such cases, there were just a few seconds of terse post-action dialogue or banter before things finished. Where epilogue scenes did exist, they were still fairly short and no-nonsense.
• The series finale of Hannah Montana. Or basically any two-part episode, come to think of it. It was particularly tedious because the entire last season was a rushed mini-season with less than half the number of episodes a regular season had.
• The season four finale of True Blood. The season's Big Bad is defeated halfway through, which is followed by half an hour of character stuff that ranges from moving to "Shouldn't this be over?" But the last few minutes make up for it with a mind-boggling number of character deaths and cliffhangers. The fifth season is much worse. Even viewers who didn't suffer Arc Fatigue from The Vampire Authority's plotline were ready for a conclusion of some sort. Instead, the whole season ends right at the climax.
• Parodied in an episode of Frasier when he is reading a novel that an old friend of his wrote, based on a story he told him. Fraiser notices the end ludicrously overuses metaphors and skips to the end. The series finale is also a case of this, as the writers wanted to have an ending for as many characters as possible.
• American Horror Story: Murder House, after ending climatically and pretty definitively, covers twenty minutes of the Ramos family buying the house and being scared off by the then-recently deceased Harmon family, ends dramatically again, and then has a 3 year time skip to reveal beyond a doubt that Tate's baby really was the anti-Christ. Even worse in Asylum. Every Big Bad has been killed off by the third last episode, and the viewer has to sit through two and a half episodes full of nothing but loose-end tying.
• The final double-episode of season 7 of How I Met Your Mother; it should have ended with the birth of Marshall and Lily's baby, but then we find out that Barney proposes to Quinn, then it cuts to "a little ways down the road," where we find out the bride is Robin.
  • The entire final season. There are multiple perfectly good ending points, and the real ending is a rushed series of flash-forwards that create loose ends just to tie them up five minutes later.
• Happens In-Universe (thankfully mostly off-screen) with Sue and Brad's school play in The Middle episode "The Lonliest Locker". Unable to agree upon an ending, they use all of the endings they came up with. This leads Brick to comment that he likes the third ending the best.
• Scream Queens (2015)'s first season finale was criticised for this, being made up of mostly the killer's narration explaining the backstory of everything. Once that's over with, there's about ten minutes dedicated to trying to wrap the episode up.
• Beetleborgs impressively manages to feature this trope while having No Ending, due to the show being cancelled. After the Astral Coins saga, which resulted in the titular heroes acquiring the allegiance of a powerful sentient Humongous Mecha, the show kind of loses its drive. Many of the episodes following it are just the Beetleborgs and Crustaceans fighting and summoning their Humongous Mecha, who also fight each other. Most of the final episodes don't even feature a unique Monster of the Week.
• Jessica Jones (2015): The first season's main conflict, capturing Kilgrave, ended on episode 9 of a thirteen-episode long season, the following episodes would focus on Kilgrave somehow escaping every time he is captured, more often than not due to characters randomly grabbing the Idiot Ball.
• The Defenders (2017): The last third of the final episode is devoted to a bunch of very slow wrap-up scenes. Even worse, they're mostly based around the characters coming to terms with their grief over Matt Murdock's "death" in Midland Circle, which for the audience falls squarely into Like You Would Really Do It territory since it had already been announced in July 2016 that a third season of Daredevil (2015) was coming, and this would be a weird writing choice after season 2 of Daredevil went to the trouble of setting up Wilson Fisk starting to seek revenge on Matt, Foggy and Karen.
• Daredevil (2015): The credits for the season two finale roll about ten minutes after the final battle, and aside from Karen delivering a cheesy monologue, Matt revealing his secret identity to Karen, a scene setting Frank Castle up for his own show, and a brief shot setting up Elektra being brought back to life by Alexandra for The Defenders, not much happens.
• Luke Cage (2016):
  • The general consensus from the critics and fans seems to be that the show starts off incredibly strong, but begins to lag during the final few episodes. In particular, it's noted that the first seven episodes are incredibly strong in characterization and narrative flow, only to fall apart once Cottonmouth dies.
  • One of the major complaints about Diamondback is that he's able to escape time and time again despite having no real reason to actually do so. He's not superhuman, he's not a trained elite warrior, he's not an ultra-charismatic leader. But from episode 7 onward, the entire show revolves around stopping him and, despite everyone hating him, he keeps the upper hand until the final battle. It takes until the twelfth episode for him to pull another game-changing secret weapon to show why he's the main threat and he needed Plot Armor to use it (keeping Domingo's soldiers off when they had him dead to rights to get his Powered Armor.)
• In the final episode of The Haunting of Bly Manor, the story keeps going for another half an hour after the climax. While it sums up what happened to the main characters and reveals who the Storyteller is, a lot of it ends up feeling long-winded, bordering on plot fluff, and could've been condensed without affecting the overarching story.
• Madan Senki Ryukendo: The general consensus on the final battle with DaiMaOh is that it drags on for far too long, with many unfavourably comparing him to a JRPG Final Boss. Not helping things is the fact that he has no less than FIVE FORMS.

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