Soap was like that as well. When it ended its fourth season there were a good half dozen cliff hangers and got cancelled the next.

I'd never heard of that and I looked it up on Wiki. The entry for the final episode makes it sound like the most mental telly show ever made :D

Although Susan Harris had planned for five seasons of Soap, the program was abruptly canceled by ABC after its fourth season. Therefore, the final one-hour episode, which originally aired on April 20, 1981, did not serve as a series finale and instead ended with several unresolved cliffhangers. These involve a suicidal Chester preparing to kill Annie (his wife) & Danny (his son) after catching them in bed together, an irreversibly hypnotized Jodie believing himself to be a 90-year-old Jewish man, Burt preparing to walk into an ambush orchestrated by his political enemies, and Jessica about to be executed by a Communist firing squad.
 
Avatar Korra: Have Amon remain the antagonist for the whole series and tie in elements of the other antagonists. He learns of spiritsm from Unalaq and tries to merge with Vaatu. He ends up butting heads with the Red Lotus before stealing their bending. His unnatural existence with that of the spirit vines raises the stakes. Additionally, introduce some more characters for Korra's iteration of Team Avatar.
Maybe introduce a granddaughter of Zuko and maybe a grandson of Sokka as benderless characters who are still capable in their own right, with the former becoming Mako's new love interest and perhaps the latter being the first male Kyoshi warrior or knows of the practices. Also, if you're gonna sell us on Asami with Korra, imply it sooner and don't intoduce a 3 year gap between Season 3 and 4, especially that, given how that would make it harder to sell most relatonship developments.

Simpsons: End it at Season 9 with 200 episodes at a high point. Still have Treehouse of Horror specials as a yearly thing, and perhaps being hour-long events of the year. Still have a movie. Plot varies on when it takes place; if just after it ends, serves as a grand finale to the show. If later, serve as a standalone showing the cast X years older (given how the show came out in 1989, then whenever the film comes out, takes place there. So if it came out in 2004, everyone would be 15 years older. )

Futurama: Have the show continue from 1999-2008 or 2009, going on for 200 episodes in around 9 or 10 seasons. Have a grand finale. Matt Groening moves onto Disenchanted, which would borrow inspiration more from Lord of the Rings with bits of Harry Potter (regarding magic).
 
Simpsons: End it at Season 9 with 200 episodes at a high point. Still have Treehouse of Horror specials as a yearly thing, and perhaps being hour-long events of the year. Still have a movie. Plot varies on when it takes place; if just after it ends, serves as a grand finale to the show. If later, serve as a standalone showing the cast X years older (given how the show came out in 1989, then whenever the film comes out, takes place there. So if it came out in 2004, everyone would be 15 years older. )
I'd personally end the show after "Behind the Laughter", keep the Treehouse specials, air a Christmas special every 2-3 years and even a movie (with at least one sequel), before a sequel series starting in 2019.
 
I very much like this angle, but yes.

To me the key is that they really needed another season, ideally two. At a minimum there should have been some time to settle into some kind of "new normal" with the two Battlestars prior to New Caprica with a longer election cycle more separate from the Adama/Cain issue. The back half of this alternate season could then focus on settling New Caprica, with at least some indication of the time gap there was supposed to be between settling and invasion. If the resistance and escape could then be dragged out to a half season the "second exodus" period would have more time to stretch things out and put the Cylon Civil War in better context. Put Baltar's trial between the new season 4 finale and 5 debut and you have a full season to work out the final five, tie up a lot of those threads that got dropped and ultimately do something more sensible with the ending.

OTOH the writers strike definitely bit the production, but Moore always said it was a four year project... I'm inclined think that there were real hiccups in the production at the end given how well the first two seasons went, and how much things fell apart after the strike.

FOR ALL THAT...

I think something closer to the original series landing on modern Earth fits the whole setting and structure better, however you want to justify it in lore terms. I suspect that Moore and company being adamant about not getting into a Battlestar 1980 situation is what REALLY killed serious consideration of that.

Were I writing the whole thing there are a few angles I could see going down, but I am inclined to consider a few concepts as preferential to what they did
  • Dropping the ancients angle and making our Earth the destroyed one rather than the 13th tribes planet
  • Introducing a 14th tribe in some way shape or form
  • Discovering a modern society to end the series, but as that 14th tribe rather than our actual real world, which frankly makes going forward in a serious vein AFTER that discovery damn near impossible to write
  • Finding ancient remains of a Battlestar/Basestar and/or quite possibly Galactica herself on the final planet and a tribal society
    • I like that this can absolutely be left ambiguous in terms of things like "is this time travel, this happening before, divine fuckery, etc" and "are those tribes survivors or parallel evolution" and "why do they have Cylon genetics"
    • Writing this out, it strikes me that the proper ship to find is probably Pegasus. While Galactica could be made to work alongside Kara's whole death/rebirth thing I see a very real chance to leave some real ambiguity about the ultimate end of Pegasus
    • It could also be a wholly other ship, especially if (as they should imo) there are hints dropped throughout the series that other Colonial Fleet units ARE out there somewhere
Suffice to say that my hope is that the new revival sticks to its guns about not being a reboot but avoids the 2000s series as well. My hope would be for a show that keeps the politics and looks at an attempt to salvage something from the ashes of the colonies, everything about the resistance screaming that at LEAST Caprica and quite possibly other colonies are absolutely teeming with survivors before the occupation begins. It's very easy to imagine another Battlestar and someone further down the succession list than Rosalyn returning at some point after New Caprica.
After watching the BSG pilot, I was stunned. I was expecting to see a cheesy reboot of a cheesy 70s Star Wars rip off and it turned out to be a chilling parallel to 9/11. Even the nukes detonating in the distance from Baltar’s house struck a nerve, reminding me of terrors I experienced as a kid during the Cold War. Star Wars zap zap blasters were nowhere to be seen.

There was always so much about BSG that I loved but I found that it eventually disappeared up its own mythology. As with many of these shows, the magic was lost when that happened. Watching the pilot made me think that the writers just couldn’t stick to the usual Chariots of the Gods stuff. It needed to be believable. There were a few things I wished they’d changed from day one.

Some thoughts:

a. BSG is made by HBO and not SyFy. So we get proper financial commitment, no big rush to the end of season 4 and a racier script.

b. Higher budget means more use of CGI mechanical Cylons. Which butterflies away the ludicrous sight of Tricia Helfer doubles in blonde wigs doing heavy labour aboard the Galactica or elsewhere.

c. No return to Caprica. Helo is dead. Leave him there. Or leave someone else on Caprica that would have flown the Raptor with Sharon (cos I think Helo’s character is great). The scenes on a nuked Caprica that eerily looked like Vancouver early on a Sunday morning filmed through a yellow filter were…silly.

d. The Colonials’ home world should have been called Kobol and the twelve tribes like Caprica should have been nations on that world. Apparently, that was the original plan but it was dropped to honour the original series.

e. The ragtag fleet should have had more than 50,000 people in it. Let’s say 500,000. With the original small population, I always felt that the New Caprica storyline felt a little ridiculous. You had an analogue for occupied Iraq in what must have been the equivalent of a small town. It’s not exactly Basra, is it?

f. The Cycle of Time should have been something that really had more resonance throughout the series. And humanity’s home world should have been Earth all along:

1. The pilot is set 150,000 years in the future.

2. 150,000 years before the events of BSG, a race of artifical intelligence rebels against humans on Earth (our Earth). They are defeated and are exiled into space. Some years later, they return and wipe out humanity. A small group of surviving organic humans flee the solar system after interstellar travel has been discovered (or re-discovered – see below). They eventually find their way to the planet Kobol.

3. Dark Ages on Kobol. Much of humanity’s previous history and technology is forgotten. The rise of the twelve great nations/tribes. Polytheistic Olympian religion rises on Kobol; its holy scriptures misunderstands that Kobol is the homeworld of humanity but that a 13th tribe left for a distant planet called Earth many hundreds of centuries before after a terrible War of the Gods.

4. Technological revolution on Kobol. The creation of the Cylons. The First Cylon War. Articles of Colonisation. Defeat of the Cylons. The return of the Cylons and the Fall of Kobol.

5. 500.000 refugees guarded by the Galactica make their exodus to Earth.

6. The series plays out as per OTL apart from the encounters with ancient temples and opera houses on the original series’ Kobol. These can be merged with various encounters with waymarkers on the route to earth like the Temple of Five or the ancient probe. The Human/Cylon alliance works out as per OTL.

7. The fleet eventually discover Earth as a nuked, dead wasteland (love that anti climax in the OTL series when they discover the nuked original Earth). Galactica and the fleet start to fall apart to internal fighting and despair as they linger in the solar system, discovering various remains of humanity. One thing they discover is that they originally came from Earth. And then they detect something in the vicinity of Jupiter, in an episode that - lo and behold - is called 'The Eye of Jupiter'.

8. Final show down with the Cylons near the orbit of Jupiter. This will take place near a handwavium spacial anomaly/time bridge/naked singularity/whatever. It seems that ancient humanity had built some kind of stargate in the vicinity of the Jovian moon Iapetus (nod to 2001: a Space Odyssey there). Now the Cylons have brought their forces there as they know it acts as a time bridge back to a time when Earth is populated with the hated humans. Yes, I know time travel is a bit crap but is it any worse than discovering a bunch of separately evolved humans on a planet a million light years away (to quote Adama in the OTL series)? Convergent evolution is amazing…but…c’mon…

9. Humans win at huge cost. Most of the fleet is destroyed, leaving a very small number of humans on a single ship, possibly the Galactica but maybe a single lifeboat. It enters the singularity, get taken back 300,000 years into the past. Humans settle in Africa only after abandoning their lifeboat which is now beyond repair.

10. Final scene shows the rediscovery of the remains of an ancient ship in Africa that seems to have FTL capability. Time still runs its article about Mitochondrial Eve.
 
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Game of Thrones: Give it at least two more seasons. Most of the Dany arch made sense, it was just condensed down ridiculously (as if the Return of the King had been turned into a 30 minute tv episode)
Yeah Dany went nuts faster than Anakin turned to the dark side ;)

A mate of mine 'wrote' an alt last season (and when I say 'wrote' nothing was actually written down)

Basically the siege of Winter Hold is an actual siege - the Dothraki do not take part as such but instead spend weeks conducting hit and run attacks on the approaching 'horde' trying to thin their numbers etc but cannot inflict nearly enough losses to prevent the 'Winter Kings' army from investing Winter Hold with a force many times the size of the defending one.

The actual attack is written by someone who has visited a castle and understand how an assault on a fortress town/city is carried out but goes pretty much as per that episode but with the fighting taking place on the walls (and in the crypts as tunnelling takes place etc) - the White walkers literally form ramps of the dead to breach the walls.

The twist however is that while 'the winter king' is killed by Arya and the army dissolves, the next day some of the surviving elements of the Dothraki manage to reach the city to tell them that the forces they 'beat' were simply a 'splinter' army of the white walkers - the balance of that army is still 'alive' relentlessly marching south to crush Kings landing.

The final episodes are of pretty much the same plots but Danys combined army is instead trying to race south to 'save' Kings Landing while elements go by sea in a combined fleet under the command of 'the Onion knight' and he despite his eclectic force defeats 'Euron Greyjoy's' fleet but arrives too late to prevent the White walkers from investing Kings Landing.

Anddddd so on.....

Dany burns the city as she sees it overrun (not realising that the defenders and John Snows ground forces have actually allied and are beating the White walkers) and fearing the million plus inhabitants being turned into an even greater army than the one they face goes full Pyro and in the process finally loses the plot.
 
Here's a silly one:

Steven Universe - The Diamonds don't get redeemed and instead make a devil's pact with another alien race to reclaim Earth and Pink Diamond. That race is a group of stagnant lizard people who get along oddly well with the Gems. Sequel Series - Steven Universe: Worldwar.
 
I'd personally end the show after "Behind the Laughter", keep the Treehouse specials, air a Christmas special every 2-3 years and even a movie (with at least one sequel), before a sequel series starting in 2019.
With Maggie(finally)grown up? And Bart either in prison, or making it big on Wall Street?(Am talking here everyone about THE SIMPSONS).
 
"House", when he drives into Cuddy's house.

"ST:E", with Archer's speech (OTL's penultimate episode).

"ST:V", when Janeway blows up the Caretaker's array & the blast is bigger than anticipated.:openedeyewink:

"STTNG" when Enterprise is sucked into a tachyon rift & destroyed. (I'd sooner have Q sucked into it in "Farpoint", but I can't figure out how.:openedeyewink: )

"Breaking Bad", after Walt & Skyler figure out how to set up a chain of car washes across the U.S. (& before Hank guesses).
 

marathag

Banned
"STTNG" when Enterprise is sucked into a tachyon rift & destroyed. (I'd sooner have Q sucked into it in "Farpoint", but I can't figure out how.:openedeyewink: )
I wanted Q to show up and abort the ST:E 3rd season Xindi arc, with Q erasing the whole Xindi area, as they were interfering with his tests of Earth in the ST:TNG era

Couldn't let those Temporal Cold War Shere-Building punks short circuit his test of Humanity
 
I wanted Q to show up and abort the ST:E 3rd season Xindi arc, with Q erasing the whole Xindi area, as they were interfering with his tests of Earth in the ST:TNG era

Couldn't let those Temporal Cold War Shere-Building punks short circuit his test of Humanity
:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:
"ST:E" was the one series of the franchise after he was introduced not plagued by Q, & you want to add him?:eek::eek:

Yeah, let's get rid of the preposterous Temporal Cold War, but not like that. I also happen to think the Xindi arc (if not their motivation) should have been Season 1: give Enterprise a reason to be rushed. Leave the Klingons & Romulans for Season 5 (& the Organians for never🙄 ).
 

marathag

Banned
Yeah, let's get rid of the preposterous Temporal Cold War, but not like that. I also happen to think the Xindi arc (if not their motivation) should have been Season 1: give Enterprise a reason to be rushed. Leave the Klingons & Romulans for Season 5 (& the Organians for never🙄 ).
Season 3 should have been more about the whole reason for ST:E, the founding of the Federation.

Plenty of existing nearby Races to deal with
1612762834358.png
do 3rd season on why Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarites would put in with the Earthto form the first Coalition of Planets, the precursor to the Federation
Besides, that give more screen time to Jeffery Combs.

Want a War for 3rd Season? that's what the Romulans are for.

Instead, were got Enterprise stooging around empty expanse looking for the Xindi.
Boring, and not what people were expecting for a lead-in to the TOS era
 
"ST:E" was the one series of the franchise after he was introduced not plagued by Q, & you want to add him?
Enterprise was so bad, even Q can't safe it.

Anyway, Enterprise could have a better ending, but I think Enterprises failed from the start and that is where you have to change it. You need new characters, a different setting, even a different time period (it needs to be either a bit earlier, if you want first contact with Andorians and Tellarites or a bit later if you want it to lead up to the Romulan war and founding of the Federation.

That said, season 4 was ok and although it still suffered from having the same horrible characters of the first three seasons, I would have given Enterprise a fifth season.
 
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Deleted member 160141

Babylon 5 - let Seasons 4 and 5 play out like they were originally meant to be: 4 is the Shadow War, 5 is the Clark War

Game of Thrones - get D&D fired after Season 4 and tell GRRM to get off his fat ass and shit out a real storyline (also, make sure to not let him near the borderline!porno scenes (aka "every exposition scene") lest he cream the script).

Avatar: Korra - euthanize the writers before they write the show, ensuring that Avatar, the one true god of Cartoons, will never be sullied by the taint of Mary;Sue

Man in the High Castle - have the BCR either be there from the beginning or not be there at all (since that would be the show writers passing up a social justice brownie point, I don't see the latter happening). Have the BCR be a real force in the story, and make the Japanese problems in China be less mysterious to the viewer.
Also, don't create this Nazi plot to take over every world, it just looks silly.
While we've seen the Japanese do some interesting things, we've never seen them do Auschwitz-level things, which they were more than capable of doing. Considering their racial caste system, they should have been more bluntly over-the-top evil about it than the Nazis. Considering Kido's job, he should have way more blood on his hands than he's even implied to have in the TV show. Easily John Smith levels, only with a very unironic "Doing it for the Fatherland makes it all okay" attitude.
By the way, where's Unit 731? You'd think they'd be a very integral part of the show in the IJA by this point in alt!history.​
Also, where the fuck is Italy?! I wanted Pizza-Nazi Romans, goddamn it!
 
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End Dynasty without a cliffhanger.

End Dallas in a proper way and not have JR meet the devil/angel or what the character was supposed to be.
 
Voltron - Legendary Defender: I think Schaffrillas Productions said it best. Have more focus and better planning in the final two seasons. Give Shiro more to do. No manipulating the audience with Adam: either commit or don't do it at all. Don't weigh down Season 7 with a plethora of underdeveloped, forgettable characters we don't care about. Either have Honerva be the main antagonist of Season 7 or make Sendak a better villain and not just a poor man's Zarkon. Handle Honerva's plan and the dimension-hopping better. Sacrifice the lions instead of Allura, because that would make more thematic sense and be more impactful.
 
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