Bad Endings

[ShadowBrain]

It's pretty simple, really: Which stories did you think ended poorly? I don't mean that it was an unhappy ending, but that the resolution (or twist) was silly, nonsensical, seemed rushed, or just left too many unanswered questions--or any other reason you can think of. Keep in mind that "story" here refers to books, films, and videogames--I'm not sure if TV episodes should count, but you're welcome to bring those up if a particularly egregious offender springs to mine.

I'll wait on my own opinions and see if this thread catches on or not.

[Kimimaru]

I think that the end of Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison was rushed a bit. Sure, it has symbolism, but I want to know what happens after.

[BP]

Worst ending to cool game in recent memory: Pokémon XD. I didn't play Colosseum and I realize a lot of the plot is kind of copy-paste from it, but whatever. You're a cool dude. You do cool things. The villains are beyond evil and have some number of scare tactics that induce pure paranoia. You blow up their headquarters (kinda). Anyway.

Then you get to the climax and ride a cool boat to their hideout on Creepy Impenetrable Island. You go all through the treacherous caverns and get to the top. The main badguy sics his evil legendary birds on you. They... crumble because my team and I are just that unstoppable... then he loses, the top two underlings show up. The blue one's all "Let's blow the [dukar] outta this place and get out." Main badguy is all "Ooh that's a good plan" and then the red underling is all "No... daaaaaaaaaaaad, we were bad and we should stop it." The main badguy is all "Oh... okay...." And then the red underling goes directly to you and basically says "Thanks for beating us, now we'll be good. Pinky promise." The end.

Not kidding.

[TEM]

The original ending to Fallout 3 was... poor. Particularly if you had a specific companion that was immune to radiation, the game still forced you to enter a highly irradiated area and sacrifice yourself. Although sacrifice of a main character is played out as hell, that didn't bother me, but what DID bother me is the game forcing the character to do so in a poorly written gambit to create some kind of meaningful twist to the end of the game. The expansion pack Broken Steel corrected this problem completely and totally.

[ShadowBrain]

I'll just throw out the first ones that come to mind, with spoiler tags when I feel they're appropriate (as the rest of you might want to):

Tick Tock, by Dean Koontz - From what I've read of him so far, this guy has a knack for coming up with cool plot hooks that end with profound stupidity. In this thriller, a Vietnamese-American detective novel writer is pursued by an increasingly-powerful demon delivered to him in the form of a cloth doll. However, this premise is gloriously effed up after two reveals, the first being that the demon was apparently summoned by a friend of the guy's mom, who... just didn't like him, or something. That's not really the ending, though--it's revealed somewhere around the beginning of the third act. No, the real kick to the nuts is when the quirky love interest and her dog (a Koontz trope, as I understand it) turn out to be aliens. Turns out woman gave the guy the power to never need to sleep earlier in the book, and then they get married.

Push - Yeah, that movie with the psychics. To add insult to the injury inflicted by its appalling unoriginality, this movie ended with one of those arrogant cliffhangers that assumes everybody's going to love it so much that'll line up for round two. I can't even remember exactly what happened, which I suppose says a lot about how much I cared. The same goes for Jumper--which, while a somewhat better film, also had a stupidly unresolved ending. I hear there really is going to be a sequel for that at some point, though, so I guess there's... hope?

Planet of the Apes (2001) - Is there anything else that needs to be said?

That's all I can think of for now.

[WarpRattler]

I'm surprised this thread actually went five replies without anyone mentioning Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I shouldn't even need to go how terrible pretty much the entire book is, let alone how bad it is as an ending.

The 3rd Birthday's ending is pretty dumb, but so is the entire story in that game. At least the gameplay is good.

BlazBlue: Continuum Shift's ending was a pretty dumb move on the creators' part. By this I'm referring to how Arc System Works basically locked themselves into having to scrap all the stages that exist in the current versions and make new ones if they make another game that continues the plot.

This is why the next BlazBlue game is Continuum Shift Extend, rather than something that actually involves plot progression.