Not so much a rewrite, but I would end Arrested Development after the third season. I think the ending of Michael and his son leaving the family was much much better than the mess we got after Netflix picked it up.
Just because this always comes up in these types of threads: the ending of LOST might not have been mind-blowing, but it made perfect sense and was far better than the internet would have you believe. The island was real, they weren't in purgatory, and the ending in the church is just them all meeting up in "heaven" after they each lived out their lives.
LOST holds up VERY well today being binged...maybe even better than when it aired.
This is maybe an unpopular opinion but I don't mind about 95% of the finale of How I Met Your Mother. I know some folks hate that the mother died but there are so many clues throughout the show that she's not alive at the moment the story is being told to his kids. The things that really blow are Barney and Robin getting divorced, Barney reverting to sleeping around and Ted going after Robin again. The show had made the point that they weren't a good fit about 100 times, only to do a heel turn in the last five minutes. That's what really sucks. But you can pretty much lop off that epilogue and still have a very good finale.
Quantum Leap: Sam Beckett made it home. I get that you want to do the adventures continue thing, but throw the guy a bone. Maybe end the show completely cribbing from The Egg from Andy Weir, where Sam eventually becomes everyone who has ever been and becomes someone who guides the next generation of leapers, or turns that down to help Al, but it's a dick move to bounce him around forever.
Firefly seems like the poster child for a prematurely canceled, but other than Buffy, it seems like Joss Whedon never got to finish anything (e.g. Dollhouse). Serenity was not nearly the ending that series deserved.
To be clear, I think the Firefly class ship has sailed on this opportunity, and at this point, I would not like to see a reboot.
things I would add in later seasons (spoilers)
Explore River's powers more
Expand on what the Alliance was trying to achieve with the program, including finding out the parents were involved
An arc where Shepherd Book's past comes back to haunt him
Wash lives (he anchored the comedic side of the cast perfectly)
Zoe and Wash have a plucky kid
Mal and Inara end up together
Simon and Kaylee end up in a long distance poly relationship with one of the girls from the Heart of Gold.
I feel like the cast had the perfect chemistry for people to end up together and actually stay together, vs the usual soap opera / sitcom "will they, won't they" drama.
Spoiler
I don't like how Sarah got mind wiped and whether she got her memories back was probably a no but a little bit up in the air.
I would want 2 or three episodes of getting memories back and a happy ever after.
We spend 7 years bonding with a crew and set on a mission of getting home. The final episode is a high stakes drama of then making a final push, and they can see home in sight, and it cuts to credits.
Each character spent so much time yearning for home that we deserved a chance to see what that looked like for them. Even a short montage without any dialogue would have been better than the emptiness were left with.
HIMYM. For starters, the episode How Your Mother Met Me. This is from a write-up I did about a month or so after the finale...
the whole concept of the HIMYM, at least i believe, dealt with Butterfly Effect, Chaos Theory, causality, etc. How seemingly 1 small event could significantly change the course of peoples lives. in the premiere they touch on it when Ted mentioned meeting Robin, because that one moment set into motion a chain of events that permanently altered all their lives. I wont go into detail about the show in general, but 2 episodes encapsulate this concept better than any other way Id be able to explain. Lucky Penny, and Right Place Right Time.
"Lucky Penny" Ted is late for a plane to goto a dream job interview in chicago, but misses his plane because he had a court date. He and Robin reflect backwards as to why he had the court date and with each piece reassigning the blame to someone else until they finally trace it back to 1 tiny incident; Ted picking up a Lucky Penny he found on the subway. Ted's Penny > Sells it to a collector across town with Robin > while walking back find a wedding dress sale > Robin and Lilly camp out for the sale all night > Robin too tired to go home so crashes at Ted's > walks in on Marshall rubbing his chaffed nipples from marathon training > Marshall slips, breaks his toe and cannot run > Barney offers to run in Marhsall's place & finishes, then takes the subway home > Barney's legs stop working and can't get off the subway > Ted jumps the turn-style to get Barney but is arrested. Had Ted not picked up that penny, that series of events would not have occurred, he would have taken his interview, maybe gotten the job and relocated to Chicago, "And i never would've met your mother".
"Right Place Right Time". 4 separate events. Ted gets a design job, Robin get's sick from Ted's favorite bagel place, Barney's 200th partner, Marshall's addiction to charts and graphs. Ted needs to take a break from designing Rib Town, so he goes off to get a bagel, but since his favorite place now carries the plague he turns left instead of right. while on route he has to give a crazy homeless dude $1 as part of a payment plan to buy back Marshall's business charts he threw away. He stops to look at a magazine of Barney's 200th girl he had sex with. As a result, he is stopped at an intersection when it begins to rain and meets Stella and Tony; the first time he's interacted with them since she left him at the alter. this kicked off another series of events which lead to Tony getting Ted the professor of architecture job at Columbia (and we know where things went from there).
Now back to my original point. Tracy has been known to be present in a couple scenarios in Ted's journey thus far. The St. Paddy's party, his class, walking along the street when he's in the bar, the near-miss in Cindy's apartment. With my understanding of the base concepts of this show, i figured HYMMM would have been a similar series of journeys and stories told from Tracy's point of view with similar near misses and how they potentially both could have had a direct/indirect impact on each other steering their paths ever so closer to each other; thing back to Platonish where Barney is out picking up girls, hits on Tracy and she gives him a good talking to which leads to him writing the final play and proposing to Robin. Like that.
My preference for HYMMM would have been she's living the high life in New York with her gang, and the decisions she makes are somewhat interchangeable with Ted's, but there are key moments.
Tracy directly or indirectly leads to Robin and her friends [Pilot] having the breakup party at MacLaren's instead of another bar (saw her getting thrown out, making a scene, or perhaps just by recommendation). Robin Meets Ted...
She drops the Lucky Penny, which kicks off the chain of events with Ted missing the interview for his dream job
She's at the St Patrick's club and tips off Guareedo that someone is mooching off their tab. The punch knocked Ted off from being tilted (also umbrella)
She was responsible for either that particular taxi Ted got into (she had the previous one?) or the car that hit the taxi which sent Ted to the hospital [Miracles]
She got Schleagel sick from Schleagels Bagels, which turned him in the ultimate direction of Stella and Tony.
That's just select few, but there was opportunity to expand further, and reach back into Ted's history of things he or another part of his gang did, no matter how minute or trivial, and have those moments impact her in a way which helped change her course. She was the final catalyst which had set into motion the events which directly lead to the proposal and wedding where she and Ted would ultimately meet.
...instead...HYMMM opens with her friend crossing paths with Barney and Ted in the pilot. Then her long time boyfriend abruptly dies on her 21st birthday. Yes he was perfect for her in so many ways. But she spent the next 2-3 years doing nothing. Sitting on the couch, being a hermit, paints. Her roommate finally convinces her to go out one night (St Paddy's) where she stands in the back and does nothing except meet Naked Man waste of a cameo if you ask me). Then she does nothing for another 2 years until that Econ class where she admires a quick quirk of Ted, bails out thinking she's in the wrong class but cross paths with Ted as he's leaving to the right class. Then another year of doing nothing where she meets up with the devil and starts dating her first boyfriend since max. she has no feelings for him because he doesn't appreciate her quirks, but he apparently loves her enough *to ask her to marry him and spend the rest of their lives with each other. To which she turns down and walks away. Even at that moment i felt kinda bad for the guy because if she had her doubts that's something she should've at least talked about instead of leading him on and dating him out of convenience. But instead, she leaves him to go play the wedding, where she meets the person she's gonna spend the rest of her short life with.
IMHO that episode removed so much depth from her character. they had the opportunity intertwine their stories so tightly with each other where it was their destiny to meet each other they just didn't know. Instead, we got a completely separate story where they were relatively close to each other a couple times, she dated someone because it was convenient for her but she obviously didn't reciprocate the feelings and turned down his marriage proposal, because she felt her dead boyfriend Max didn't approve or wasn't ready to let each other go, but meets someone the next day and BOOM instant soulmates. this flattened out her character removing most of the potential depth she could've had. Now, had they given it more time (not the 3.5 minutes of finale screen time she got, and excluding her implied 3 second sick=death scene) they could have really expanded her character instead of just placing her in these moments like Robots vs Wrestlers.
tl;dr Tracy sat around for about 6 years not getting the death of Max, dates a guy but doesn't love him back, he proposes to her but can't come to terms with dead bf max, until the next day when she meets Ted.
Make it end 5 minutes earlier and you get a great somewhat acceptable ending.
Dexter disappears with Debra's body in the storm, while Harrison and Hannah go away together. While not perfect you tie all the loose ending, keeping it vague enought that the viewer can fill the gaps in what may or may not happen next.
For Game of Thrones, I think the worst part is that the ending felt really rushed. The final season should have perhaps been three.
Season 8 could have been devoted to just the Battle of Winterfell. Make it take place over the course of a year, rather than a single night. The White Walkers lay siege to Winterfell. We see the characters struggle through the different factions all living within the fortress. The Dothraki would most definitely get stir crazy. Perhaps a lot of fights would break out between them and the Northmen, or the Unsullied.
People would have to be so cautious about the dead. Grandpa passes away in the middle of the night, wakes up as a white walker, kills the rest of his family and suddenly we have Zombie Seal Team Six inside of Winterfell.
John would have the chance to continue to grow into the leader of men he is destined to be. He and Dany are growing apart. She's getting crazy. Her dragons are growing hungry. They need a lot of food and it's harder to come by in the long winter. The dragons are also maybe pulling shifts circling the fortress burning a fire moat around the walls to keep the walkers at bay. Stressed out and on the brink of starvation maybe they fight each other. It could be a super tense moment and would lead to a much more sensible death to one of the dragons than what we actually got from season 8.
I'm not sure how I'd do the rest of the ending, but we'd have the battle in King's landing be more than just an episode or two. Maybe that would be a whole season as well. Though that would probably be too tiring. A whole season of warfare would probably be fine, but two, back to back might be too much.
Then in the end once the battle is won it would feel deserved. Maybe Arya takes the face of a white walker and spends months living behind enemy lines. She can still have the cool knife drop call back kill scene, but instead of just the single scene of her sneaking around the library like Metal Gear, it's going to be a scene, or several in every episode.
Carnivàle - a final season to explore what happens to Ben and Sofie's child at the point where the holy and infernal bloodlines mix. Heck, the child could technically become both avatars in a single person based on the in-show mythology at the point where it ended.
…would acknowledge the happenings of seasons 1 and 2 when handling the Borg in season 3. They just ignored their own show completely for whatever reason. It wasted a once in a lifetime TNG reunion by throwing everything into a rushed mega action sequence the way Star Trek has generally avoided being for most of its history. Just adding a modicum of subtlety and complexity back into the finale would improve it considerably.
Spoilers
Spoilers...
Drop the awful refugee telepath subplot from Season 5. Expand Season 4 to fill the space.
The end of the Second Shadow War (The Battle of Coriana VI) should really be the Season 4 finale instead of just Ep. 6. All the mopping up and aftermath should be in Season 5.
I.e.: I'd just like to have seen it paced more as it was originally intended!
while season 4 til 6 have bigger problems than just the (rushed) ending that are not easily fixed. The ending of the series in season 6 was underwhelming.
For almost two seasons, we have Marcos building up a fleet for the belters, made out of all kinds of combat ships, including martians one. Everything in these seasons feels like a built-up to an amazing space battle between an allied fleet of the combined UN and (remaining) Martian ships and those of Marcos. Only for the combat to never take place.
It's almost literally 'poof' and Marcos' ships are gone. I would change the ending to the big space fight.
Samurai Jack was initially a show about a Samurai who gets sent to the future by a demon named Aku. He spends every episode trying to help people out in the hellscape world of the future while looking for a way back to the past.
The last season has what I feel is an unnecessary focus on finally getting Jack laid. I would rewrite the last season so that all the stuff with Ashi gets condensed down to like 2 episodes. After Jack returns to the past, Ashi dies and Jack realizes that by going back in time he changed the timeline and erased everyone in the future.
Jack resolves to find a way to return to the future and restore his friends. Back in the past, Jack is no longer ageless and begins growing old as usual, but while this happens, Jack begins traveling the world searching for another portal through time. Eventually Jack finds The Guardian from the original show, and fights him again, now as an old man.
After defeating him, Jack is able to use the time portal to go back to the first episode where Aku sent him to the future in the first place, and tunnel though the portal Aku opens to get back to the future we see throughout most of the show. Jack then rallies the people of the future to lead the attack on Aku that we see earlier in the season, and after he sees the other Jack return to the past, Jack confronts Aku on the future and defeats him there as well.
Then Jack reopens the Guardians time portal and establishes a link between the future and Jack's time so they don't get erased.
Battlestar Galactica. The reboot that started in 2004.
Spoilers!
Plenty of folks complain about the ending going the spiritual route: I don't mind that, since it was explicitly part of the story from the start (re: Head Six and monotheism versus the polytheism of the humans).
What I wanted was for the writers to lean more heavily into that: but that this "God" of the Cylons was some incredible hyper-dimensional supercomputer trying to engineer humanity and Machine life to be peaceful. For violence not to continue in the cycles we've seen through history. Which...it might actually be the case, given the tease at the very end where Angel Baltar says "You know it doesn't like that name", in reference to Angel Six calling "it" God.
So while it doesn't all need to be spelled out, even if they wanted to go along with the route of landing on our actual Earth 150k years ago, they should have leaned into the clear problem in landing on prehistoric Earth, with early modern humans wandering around. That just doesn't make sense. It shouldn't make sense to folks on the ships either, and they should have questioned loudly why there are humans walking around on a planet really far away from their own. If this was the place that their own species truly evolved, if they had left it, or what. We have a fossil record, and while convergent evolution is incredible, it doesn't lead to what we saw. Not without some staggering level of intervention, anyway. Not without nanomachines from Cylon hybrids making offspring viable or somesuch. That they didn't seem to question it and just said "lol let's get to banging" was disappointing.
So my pitch for even minimal rewrites would be more interaction with visions, ancient texts, Cylon beliefs, or whatever - some mix of all of them - to explicitly hint that some Cylon God, or some group of the Lords of Kobol (which should be hinted at being Cylons! Or somehow spoken to by Cylon Angels or something) was spreading humanity around, or was brought from actual-Earth to other places.
Much longer rewrite (option 2) would be making the destroyed Earth actually be our Earth, and the planet with prehistoric humans they land on be some other planet entirely. Ancient Egypt level of technology and social organization, and the humans and Cylons descend as humble gods, trying to help guide their future to avoid their own mistakes. Angel Six and Baltar could have the same discussion they had at the end, just over the montage of the BSG crew and others trying to use scraps of tech to inspire and educate folks. Less "eschew technology, become prehistoric", and more "we done fucked up, let's become flawed prophets so our descendants can avoid the same things."
Spoilers
I like shows that have hyper competent characters. It's a fun trope. One of the things that set HoC from the rest (Breaking bad comes to mind) was that both the male lead and his wife knew exactly what they were, what they were doing, and worked together.
Rather than just having him be betrayed/have issues because his wife doesn't know what he's doing, they came up with equally competent opponents for Frank to deal with, and it worked really really well.
Then S3 hits and we've got the "ahh but what if she is too power hungry plot/disagrees with him" which mostly feels like flailing and goes almost no where. Oddly, the only episodes I like from S3 are the ones where Frank and Claire are on the same page working as the ultimate sociopath team. And turns out, those are the only ones directed by the show runner of S1/2 (who did all the episodes in those seasons).
So mostly...just let him do that, and nix that entire pointless plot line. There's some interesting material to draw from the original British show, but that show so quickly went from a breath of fresh air to a total train wreck (and then uh...tripled down on that later, although I jumped ship before that)
MLP: FiM. However, such an improved ending would require rewriting the final three (or four) seasons so the episodes have any overall continuity instead of occasional continuity dumps. As written, it works better as a Harry Potter epilogue: a tribute to the writers and VAs who spent a decade on the show that it best ignored by the fans.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer should have ended with the Season 5 finale 'The Gift'. Seasons 6 & 7 didn't improve the show.
That episode was the perfect ending for the show: Buffy sacrifices herself to save her sister and the world. That is her gift to give. The show ends on the right note.
And then the show got resurrected. And so did Buffy. In the first few episodes of Season 6, Buffy wonders if she came back right. No, she didn't. At least, the show didn't. Season 6 was too dark, and Season 7 diluted the Slayer's legacy and destroyed the whole Slayer mythos. The only bright spot in those final two seasons was the musical episode, and, as great as that episode was, I'm not sure it's enough to make up for everything else that happened.
Buffy should have ended with the right finale, at the end of Season 5.
I don’t know if movie-turned-tv-saga counts, but it was really disappointing to me that Vegeta did not kill Freeza at the end of the Dragon Ball Super Resurrection F movie/saga.
You have (I’m guessing) the most popular character and he’s never been the final hero, and bringing back the villain for him that wiped out his entire race is the perfect time to do that and show the his character growth in that time…and it just winds up being a Goku win again. Really the whole ending of it was just weird and let downy
I give the later dragon ball stuff a lot of leeway, and basically just go in with a “shut off the brain and let 10 year old you cheer on Goku and the gang” kind of thing, but ending of that one was just suuuuuuper meh
Would have much rather it ended with Freeze being an actual threat that Vegeta is able to defeat, but would have even been fine if he was still a pushover and gave time to Vegeta’s character growth instead before defeating him. Instead it all just falls so flat
I’m potentially the only person heavily invested in this show, but I was deeply disappointed by the ending of Castle.
I loved everything about Kate (Stana Katic). She was a compelling and complex character, her backstory story was incredibly tragic and interesting, and the romantic tension they built up with Richard (Nathan Fillion) over four seasons is the best I’ve ever seen.
Once they broke that romantic tension though, the show understandably struggled to maintain the same level of intrigue. That’s not its biggest failing though, as I think there was enough momentum behind the characters and plot to carry it. But the final seasons became a nonsensical train wreck.
Behind the scenes, there was apparently conflict amongst the cast and crew, which I can confidently say bled into the narrative. The final episode, due to cancellation, is so unsatisfying and contrived that I’ve only watched it the one time. Those first four seasons were pure magic though, particularly season four, and I’ll continue to rewatch them for years to come. I think the story could’ve more or less ended there, though there’s a few loose ends that would need to be tied up.
How would you salvage the disaster conclusion of GoT?
Make Bran’s heel turn explicit.
The pieces are there, perhaps more clearly in the books than in the show, but it really needed to be made more obvious that the entity that returned from beyond the Wall was not Bran Stark, but Bloodraven possessing his body, much like Bran possessed Hodor.
And just as Varamyr tried to possess Thistle in the books. That attempt was unsuccessful because Varamyr was not as gifted as Bran, and Thistle, as a fierce spearwife, was far more independent and strong-willed than sweet-natured, gentle and trusting Hodor—but nonetheless Varamyr’s attempt at a human Second Life establishes that it’s a possibility for powerful wargs. And Bloodraven was the most powerful warg of all. QED, His last act in his original body was tricking Bran into letting him in, becoming the unwitting host for his Second Life.
Bran refers to himself as the Three-Eyed Raven and corrects Meera Reed that he’s not Bran anymore, not really—but those little hints were not enough. Most viewers overlooked them or didn’t grasp their significance, which makes S8 impossible to rationalize otherwise.
But if we start with the premise that “Bran” is no longer the sweet kid he used to be, that that character is effectively dead or at least in a horrific “locked-in” state, unable to control the actions of his own body (as we saw from Hodor’s horror whenever Bran took him) then it all starts to make sense.
Bloodraven (AKA Brynden Rivers) was a notoriously unscrupulous, power-hungry tyrant that ended the Blackfyre Rebellions by destroying the credit of the Throne. (He promised safe passage to a Blackfyre claimant and then executed him so Aegon V could be crowned. Thus Aegon V’s first act as king was banishing Bloodraven to the Wall to restore the good name of the Realm.)
Bloodraven held many titles during his life and wielded enormous power, but he’s perhaps most famous for his role as Master of Whisperers, using his warging ability to spy on everyone in Westeros using animals, especially ravens. Thus the old riddle: How many eyes does Bloodraven have? A thousand (the ravens) and one (his one surviving eye after he lost the other in battle.)
And after Bloodraven went to the Wall, rising to the rank of Lord Commander, ranging far into the True North and eventually undergoing the process we saw Bran go through in the series, becoming the Three-Eyed Raven—what did he do? Continue to spy on all of Westeros, only now in the past as well. Whether human or supernatural, Bloodraven has always had the same MO: espionage and manipulation.
But he could not wield power from under a tree. And so he lures Bran Stark to him with the false promise that he can help him walk again, he manipulates the dreams of Jojen Reed and lets him die all to serve that end—so that he can possess a new young body, thereby cheating death yet again so he can go south and set in motion a chain of events that ends with him ruling Westeros—but not from the shadows this time, not as a Small Council member pulling strings, but out in the open, as king himself. It’s been his ambition for years before the series proper even began.
Everything that happens in S8 is the product of Bloodraven’s manipulations. He needed various claimants to the Throne to take themselves out, and he pushed them, working on their insecurities, their character flaws which he’s studied in detail, lying beneath that tree all those years, plotting, so he knew exactly which secrets to reveal, which ideas to plant, which buttons to push, to make all his rivals fall apart.
Because Bran Stark has no credible claim to anything, except Lord of Winterfell, which Bloodraven explicitly rejects! His ambitions are far loftier. I can’t be the lord of anything, he says. But he becomes Lord of the Six Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm—because everyone was exactly where they needed to be, like pieces carefully arranged on a cyvasse board.
The only way Bloodraven is seating his crippled ass on that Throne is via another Great Council ruling, much like the one he manipulated decades ago to crown Aegon V king and wipe out the last of the Blackfyres.
This is what he does, he is the ultimate schemer, putting all the others we’ve watched during the series to shame—Baelish, Varys, Pycelle? No, Brynden was the original magnificent bastard, the grandaddy of them all.
Viewing S8 through this lens, we see why Jon had to be informed of his true parentage, why Dany reacted with such paranoia and fear, why Jon then turned to his sisters for support and guidance, why Sansa’s doubts about Dany’s stability were thus confirmed, and so why she offered Tyrion her brother as a better alternative. Why Tyrion then shared the secret with one of his few remaining friends, looking for advice, and why Varys then turned around and used that information as he always has done, trying to secure the best outcome for the Realm.
It’s a domino effect, one step leading to the other, but it’s all instigated by Bran insisting that Sam tell Jon the truth about Rhaegar and Lyanna. Without that revelation, much of the plot of S8 does not happen.
And if we accept Bloodraven at his word when he tells Jon he was exactly where he was supposed to be, then Bloodraven foresaw the Fall of King’s Landing.
That is to say, he knew Dany’s mental breakdown would inevitably result in the genocide of half a million people, and he carried his plan out anyway. That was an acceptable loss, so long as the net result was his election as king.
In other words, GoT ends with the bad guy winning after all, which is very much in line with the series as a whole, where the most ambitious schemers profit while the good and noble are cut down long before their time.
The ending isn’t completely nihilistic—Sansa still rules an independent North, in theory free from Bran’s nefarious influence—but as Bran’s actor himself put it, the rest of Westeros is now effectively a surveillance state. Bloodraven has become Big Brother.
Ted Mosby and Robin Sherbatski do not belong together.
In fact, they should both never settle down.
Ted is an idealistic, neurotic, completely disfunctional romantic. In a way, he is worst than Barney because at least Barney honest with himself. He's an asshole, and he's okay with it. Ted? Well, he is also an asshole, but he really thinks he's always just a fool in love. If Ted Mosby found the perfect woman, he would be so miserable, he would find a way to fuck it up.
Maybe there's someone out there that Ted Mosby deserves, but no one deserves Ted Mosby.
Ted is an idealistic, neurotic, completely disfunctional romantic. In a way, he is worst than Barney because at least Barney is honest with himself. He's an asshole, and he's okay with it. Ted? Well, he is also an asshole, but he really thinks he's always just a fool in love.
If Ted Mosby found the perfect woman, he would be so miserable, he would find a way to fuck it up. No will ever be enough for him.
Maybe there's someone out there that Ted Mosby deserves, but no one deserves Ted Mosby.
So, here's my rewrite: Ted Mosby fucks up with the umbrella girl. Maybe he says her name wrong at the wedding (like Ross). Maybe Victoria the Baker shows up and cheers umbrella girl with her. And the Victoria runs away again, he loses both, and tries his luck with Robin, who rejects him. They remain great friends, no one knows him more than her. In the final scene, they're older, and Ted tries to convince her that this new "senior" girl is really the one and this time is different. Robin breaks the front on a close shot, and smiles at the camera. We all know what she's thinking. THE END.
Honestly I'm going to be waiting for AI to advance to the point that you can basically re-do a show ending with a prompt and fine tune it as you go, and it'll generate as many seasons after the fact as you want.
I'll still stand by the prediction that 20-30 years from there will be AI media generators in different flavors that will generate movies and shows based on prompts, people will be sharing prompts and seeds, and sites will have most popular prompt lists as part of their service.
Like that's what our kids or grandkids will be watching and sharing.
All that will be needed is a a generator trained on something like Game of Thrones and other fantasy works, then basically prompt it to remove the last season, and write 2-3 more seasons.
AI isn't there yet, it's not there yet by a long shot, but once we get a few major leaps forward in quantum computing, there will be a massive interest in AI that is far more advanced than it is today.
Not so much a rewrite, but I would end Arrested Development after the third season. I think the ending of Michael and his son leaving the family was much much better than the mess we got after Netflix picked it up.
Just because this always comes up in these types of threads: the ending of LOST might not have been mind-blowing, but it made perfect sense and was far better than the internet would have you believe. The island was real, they weren't in purgatory, and the ending in the church is just them all meeting up in "heaven" after they each lived out their lives.
LOST holds up VERY well today being binged...maybe even better than when it aired.
This is maybe an unpopular opinion but I don't mind about 95% of the finale of How I Met Your Mother. I know some folks hate that the mother died but there are so many clues throughout the show that she's not alive at the moment the story is being told to his kids. The things that really blow are Barney and Robin getting divorced, Barney reverting to sleeping around and Ted going after Robin again. The show had made the point that they weren't a good fit about 100 times, only to do a heel turn in the last five minutes. That's what really sucks. But you can pretty much lop off that epilogue and still have a very good finale.
Quantum Leap: Sam Beckett made it home. I get that you want to do the adventures continue thing, but throw the guy a bone. Maybe end the show completely cribbing from The Egg from Andy Weir, where Sam eventually becomes everyone who has ever been and becomes someone who guides the next generation of leapers, or turns that down to help Al, but it's a dick move to bounce him around forever.
Firefly seems like the poster child for a prematurely canceled, but other than Buffy, it seems like Joss Whedon never got to finish anything (e.g. Dollhouse). Serenity was not nearly the ending that series deserved.
To be clear, I think the Firefly class ship has sailed on this opportunity, and at this point, I would not like to see a reboot.
things I would add in later seasons (spoilers)
I feel like the cast had the perfect chemistry for people to end up together and actually stay together, vs the usual soap opera / sitcom "will they, won't they" drama.
The ending of Chuck:
Spoiler
I don't like how Sarah got mind wiped and whether she got her memories back was probably a no but a little bit up in the air. I would want 2 or three episodes of getting memories back and a happy ever after.Star Trek: Voyager
We spend 7 years bonding with a crew and set on a mission of getting home. The final episode is a high stakes drama of then making a final push, and they can see home in sight, and it cuts to credits.
Each character spent so much time yearning for home that we deserved a chance to see what that looked like for them. Even a short montage without any dialogue would have been better than the emptiness were left with.
HIMYM. For starters, the episode How Your Mother Met Me. This is from a write-up I did about a month or so after the finale...
the whole concept of the HIMYM, at least i believe, dealt with Butterfly Effect, Chaos Theory, causality, etc. How seemingly 1 small event could significantly change the course of peoples lives. in the premiere they touch on it when Ted mentioned meeting Robin, because that one moment set into motion a chain of events that permanently altered all their lives. I wont go into detail about the show in general, but 2 episodes encapsulate this concept better than any other way Id be able to explain. Lucky Penny, and Right Place Right Time.
"Lucky Penny" Ted is late for a plane to goto a dream job interview in chicago, but misses his plane because he had a court date. He and Robin reflect backwards as to why he had the court date and with each piece reassigning the blame to someone else until they finally trace it back to 1 tiny incident; Ted picking up a Lucky Penny he found on the subway. Ted's Penny > Sells it to a collector across town with Robin > while walking back find a wedding dress sale > Robin and Lilly camp out for the sale all night > Robin too tired to go home so crashes at Ted's > walks in on Marshall rubbing his chaffed nipples from marathon training > Marshall slips, breaks his toe and cannot run > Barney offers to run in Marhsall's place & finishes, then takes the subway home > Barney's legs stop working and can't get off the subway > Ted jumps the turn-style to get Barney but is arrested. Had Ted not picked up that penny, that series of events would not have occurred, he would have taken his interview, maybe gotten the job and relocated to Chicago, "And i never would've met your mother".
"Right Place Right Time". 4 separate events. Ted gets a design job, Robin get's sick from Ted's favorite bagel place, Barney's 200th partner, Marshall's addiction to charts and graphs. Ted needs to take a break from designing Rib Town, so he goes off to get a bagel, but since his favorite place now carries the plague he turns left instead of right. while on route he has to give a crazy homeless dude $1 as part of a payment plan to buy back Marshall's business charts he threw away. He stops to look at a magazine of Barney's 200th girl he had sex with. As a result, he is stopped at an intersection when it begins to rain and meets Stella and Tony; the first time he's interacted with them since she left him at the alter. this kicked off another series of events which lead to Tony getting Ted the professor of architecture job at Columbia (and we know where things went from there).
Now back to my original point. Tracy has been known to be present in a couple scenarios in Ted's journey thus far. The St. Paddy's party, his class, walking along the street when he's in the bar, the near-miss in Cindy's apartment. With my understanding of the base concepts of this show, i figured HYMMM would have been a similar series of journeys and stories told from Tracy's point of view with similar near misses and how they potentially both could have had a direct/indirect impact on each other steering their paths ever so closer to each other; thing back to Platonish where Barney is out picking up girls, hits on Tracy and she gives him a good talking to which leads to him writing the final play and proposing to Robin. Like that.
My preference for HYMMM would have been she's living the high life in New York with her gang, and the decisions she makes are somewhat interchangeable with Ted's, but there are key moments.
Tracy directly or indirectly leads to Robin and her friends [Pilot] having the breakup party at MacLaren's instead of another bar (saw her getting thrown out, making a scene, or perhaps just by recommendation). Robin Meets Ted...
She drops the Lucky Penny, which kicks off the chain of events with Ted missing the interview for his dream job
She's at the St Patrick's club and tips off Guareedo that someone is mooching off their tab. The punch knocked Ted off from being tilted (also umbrella)
She was responsible for either that particular taxi Ted got into (she had the previous one?) or the car that hit the taxi which sent Ted to the hospital [Miracles]
She got Schleagel sick from Schleagels Bagels, which turned him in the ultimate direction of Stella and Tony.
That's just select few, but there was opportunity to expand further, and reach back into Ted's history of things he or another part of his gang did, no matter how minute or trivial, and have those moments impact her in a way which helped change her course. She was the final catalyst which had set into motion the events which directly lead to the proposal and wedding where she and Ted would ultimately meet.
...instead...HYMMM opens with her friend crossing paths with Barney and Ted in the pilot. Then her long time boyfriend abruptly dies on her 21st birthday. Yes he was perfect for her in so many ways. But she spent the next 2-3 years doing nothing. Sitting on the couch, being a hermit, paints. Her roommate finally convinces her to go out one night (St Paddy's) where she stands in the back and does nothing except meet Naked Man waste of a cameo if you ask me). Then she does nothing for another 2 years until that Econ class where she admires a quick quirk of Ted, bails out thinking she's in the wrong class but cross paths with Ted as he's leaving to the right class. Then another year of doing nothing where she meets up with the devil and starts dating her first boyfriend since max. she has no feelings for him because he doesn't appreciate her quirks, but he apparently loves her enough *to ask her to marry him and spend the rest of their lives with each other. To which she turns down and walks away. Even at that moment i felt kinda bad for the guy because if she had her doubts that's something she should've at least talked about instead of leading him on and dating him out of convenience. But instead, she leaves him to go play the wedding, where she meets the person she's gonna spend the rest of her short life with.
IMHO that episode removed so much depth from her character. they had the opportunity intertwine their stories so tightly with each other where it was their destiny to meet each other they just didn't know. Instead, we got a completely separate story where they were relatively close to each other a couple times, she dated someone because it was convenient for her but she obviously didn't reciprocate the feelings and turned down his marriage proposal, because she felt her dead boyfriend Max didn't approve or wasn't ready to let each other go, but meets someone the next day and BOOM instant soulmates. this flattened out her character removing most of the potential depth she could've had. Now, had they given it more time (not the 3.5 minutes of finale screen time she got, and excluding her implied 3 second sick=death scene) they could have really expanded her character instead of just placing her in these moments like Robots vs Wrestlers.
tl;dr Tracy sat around for about 6 years not getting the death of Max, dates a guy but doesn't love him back, he proposes to her but can't come to terms with dead bf max, until the next day when she meets Ted.
About Dexer:
Spoiler:
Make it end 5 minutes earlier and you get a
greatsomewhat acceptable ending.Dexter disappears with Debra's body in the storm, while Harrison and Hannah go away together. While not perfect you tie all the loose ending, keeping it vague enought that the viewer can fill the gaps in what may or may not happen next.
And most of all, no lumberjack ending...
For Game of Thrones, I think the worst part is that the ending felt really rushed. The final season should have perhaps been three.
Season 8 could have been devoted to just the Battle of Winterfell. Make it take place over the course of a year, rather than a single night. The White Walkers lay siege to Winterfell. We see the characters struggle through the different factions all living within the fortress. The Dothraki would most definitely get stir crazy. Perhaps a lot of fights would break out between them and the Northmen, or the Unsullied.
People would have to be so cautious about the dead. Grandpa passes away in the middle of the night, wakes up as a white walker, kills the rest of his family and suddenly we have Zombie Seal Team Six inside of Winterfell.
John would have the chance to continue to grow into the leader of men he is destined to be. He and Dany are growing apart. She's getting crazy. Her dragons are growing hungry. They need a lot of food and it's harder to come by in the long winter. The dragons are also maybe pulling shifts circling the fortress burning a fire moat around the walls to keep the walkers at bay. Stressed out and on the brink of starvation maybe they fight each other. It could be a super tense moment and would lead to a much more sensible death to one of the dragons than what we actually got from season 8.
I'm not sure how I'd do the rest of the ending, but we'd have the battle in King's landing be more than just an episode or two. Maybe that would be a whole season as well. Though that would probably be too tiring. A whole season of warfare would probably be fine, but two, back to back might be too much.
Then in the end once the battle is won it would feel deserved. Maybe Arya takes the face of a white walker and spends months living behind enemy lines. She can still have the cool knife drop call back kill scene, but instead of just the single scene of her sneaking around the library like Metal Gear, it's going to be a scene, or several in every episode.
Carnivàle - a final season to explore what happens to Ben and Sofie's child at the point where the holy and infernal bloodlines mix. Heck, the child could technically become both avatars in a single person based on the in-show mythology at the point where it ended.
Star Trek Picard
Spoilers
Babylon 5
Spoilers...
Drop the awful refugee telepath subplot from Season 5. Expand Season 4 to fill the space.The end of the Second Shadow War (The Battle of Coriana VI) should really be the Season 4 finale instead of just Ep. 6. All the mopping up and aftermath should be in Season 5.
I.e.: I'd just like to have seen it paced more as it was originally intended!
The Expanse.
while season 4 til 6 have bigger problems than just the (rushed) ending that are not easily fixed. The ending of the series in season 6 was underwhelming.
For almost two seasons, we have Marcos building up a fleet for the belters, made out of all kinds of combat ships, including martians one. Everything in these seasons feels like a built-up to an amazing space battle between an allied fleet of the combined UN and (remaining) Martian ships and those of Marcos. Only for the combat to never take place.
It's almost literally 'poof' and Marcos' ships are gone. I would change the ending to the big space fight.
Samurai Jack was initially a show about a Samurai who gets sent to the future by a demon named Aku. He spends every episode trying to help people out in the hellscape world of the future while looking for a way back to the past.
The last season has what I feel is an unnecessary focus on finally getting Jack laid. I would rewrite the last season so that all the stuff with Ashi gets condensed down to like 2 episodes. After Jack returns to the past, Ashi dies and Jack realizes that by going back in time he changed the timeline and erased everyone in the future.
Jack resolves to find a way to return to the future and restore his friends. Back in the past, Jack is no longer ageless and begins growing old as usual, but while this happens, Jack begins traveling the world searching for another portal through time. Eventually Jack finds The Guardian from the original show, and fights him again, now as an old man.
After defeating him, Jack is able to use the time portal to go back to the first episode where Aku sent him to the future in the first place, and tunnel though the portal Aku opens to get back to the future we see throughout most of the show. Jack then rallies the people of the future to lead the attack on Aku that we see earlier in the season, and after he sees the other Jack return to the past, Jack confronts Aku on the future and defeats him there as well.
Then Jack reopens the Guardians time portal and establishes a link between the future and Jack's time so they don't get erased.
Battlestar Galactica. The reboot that started in 2004.
Spoilers!
Plenty of folks complain about the ending going the spiritual route: I don't mind that, since it was explicitly part of the story from the start (re: Head Six and monotheism versus the polytheism of the humans).
What I wanted was for the writers to lean more heavily into that: but that this "God" of the Cylons was some incredible hyper-dimensional supercomputer trying to engineer humanity and Machine life to be peaceful. For violence not to continue in the cycles we've seen through history. Which...it might actually be the case, given the tease at the very end where Angel Baltar says "You know it doesn't like that name", in reference to Angel Six calling "it" God.
So while it doesn't all need to be spelled out, even if they wanted to go along with the route of landing on our actual Earth 150k years ago, they should have leaned into the clear problem in landing on prehistoric Earth, with early modern humans wandering around. That just doesn't make sense. It shouldn't make sense to folks on the ships either, and they should have questioned loudly why there are humans walking around on a planet really far away from their own. If this was the place that their own species truly evolved, if they had left it, or what. We have a fossil record, and while convergent evolution is incredible, it doesn't lead to what we saw. Not without some staggering level of intervention, anyway. Not without nanomachines from Cylon hybrids making offspring viable or somesuch. That they didn't seem to question it and just said "lol let's get to banging" was disappointing.
So my pitch for even minimal rewrites would be more interaction with visions, ancient texts, Cylon beliefs, or whatever - some mix of all of them - to explicitly hint that some Cylon God, or some group of the Lords of Kobol (which should be hinted at being Cylons! Or somehow spoken to by Cylon Angels or something) was spreading humanity around, or was brought from actual-Earth to other places.
Much longer rewrite (option 2) would be making the destroyed Earth actually be our Earth, and the planet with prehistoric humans they land on be some other planet entirely. Ancient Egypt level of technology and social organization, and the humans and Cylons descend as humble gods, trying to help guide their future to avoid their own mistakes. Angel Six and Baltar could have the same discussion they had at the end, just over the montage of the BSG crew and others trying to use scraps of tech to inspire and educate folks. Less "eschew technology, become prehistoric", and more "we done fucked up, let's become flawed prophets so our descendants can avoid the same things."
House of cards, season 3 and onward-
Spoilers
I like shows that have hyper competent characters. It's a fun trope. One of the things that set HoC from the rest (Breaking bad comes to mind) was that both the male lead and his wife knew exactly what they were, what they were doing, and worked together.Rather than just having him be betrayed/have issues because his wife doesn't know what he's doing, they came up with equally competent opponents for Frank to deal with, and it worked really really well.
Then S3 hits and we've got the "ahh but what if she is too power hungry plot/disagrees with him" which mostly feels like flailing and goes almost no where. Oddly, the only episodes I like from S3 are the ones where Frank and Claire are on the same page working as the ultimate sociopath team. And turns out, those are the only ones directed by the show runner of S1/2 (who did all the episodes in those seasons).
So mostly...just let him do that, and nix that entire pointless plot line. There's some interesting material to draw from the original British show, but that show so quickly went from a breath of fresh air to a total train wreck (and then uh...tripled down on that later, although I jumped ship before that)
MLP: FiM. However, such an improved ending would require rewriting the final three (or four) seasons so the episodes have any overall continuity instead of occasional continuity dumps. As written, it works better as a Harry Potter epilogue: a tribute to the writers and VAs who spent a decade on the show that it best ignored by the fans.
I don't have a recommended ending but I would have liked to see endings for Duckman and My Name is Earl. They deserved it
Not a rewrite as such but the ending of The Shawshank Redemption.
Spoiler
I would have been perfectly happy with it ending with Red on that bus as a free man.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer should have ended with the Season 5 finale 'The Gift'. Seasons 6 & 7 didn't improve the show.
That episode was the perfect ending for the show: Buffy sacrifices herself to save her sister and the world. That is her gift to give. The show ends on the right note.
And then the show got resurrected. And so did Buffy. In the first few episodes of Season 6, Buffy wonders if she came back right. No, she didn't. At least, the show didn't. Season 6 was too dark, and Season 7 diluted the Slayer's legacy and destroyed the whole Slayer mythos. The only bright spot in those final two seasons was the musical episode, and, as great as that episode was, I'm not sure it's enough to make up for everything else that happened.
Buffy should have ended with the right finale, at the end of Season 5.
I don’t know if movie-turned-tv-saga counts, but it was really disappointing to me that Vegeta did not kill Freeza at the end of the Dragon Ball Super Resurrection F movie/saga.
You have (I’m guessing) the most popular character and he’s never been the final hero, and bringing back the villain for him that wiped out his entire race is the perfect time to do that and show the his character growth in that time…and it just winds up being a Goku win again. Really the whole ending of it was just weird and let downy
I give the later dragon ball stuff a lot of leeway, and basically just go in with a “shut off the brain and let 10 year old you cheer on Goku and the gang” kind of thing, but ending of that one was just suuuuuuper meh
Would have much rather it ended with Freeze being an actual threat that Vegeta is able to defeat, but would have even been fine if he was still a pushover and gave time to Vegeta’s character growth instead before defeating him. Instead it all just falls so flat
I’m potentially the only person heavily invested in this show, but I was deeply disappointed by the ending of Castle.
I loved everything about Kate (Stana Katic). She was a compelling and complex character, her backstory story was incredibly tragic and interesting, and the romantic tension they built up with Richard (Nathan Fillion) over four seasons is the best I’ve ever seen.
Once they broke that romantic tension though, the show understandably struggled to maintain the same level of intrigue. That’s not its biggest failing though, as I think there was enough momentum behind the characters and plot to carry it. But the final seasons became a nonsensical train wreck.
Behind the scenes, there was apparently conflict amongst the cast and crew, which I can confidently say bled into the narrative. The final episode, due to cancellation, is so unsatisfying and contrived that I’ve only watched it the one time. Those first four seasons were pure magic though, particularly season four, and I’ll continue to rewatch them for years to come. I think the story could’ve more or less ended there, though there’s a few loose ends that would need to be tied up.
Supernatural: I would end it at Season 5 as it was originally intended. Everything after that felt tacked on and superfluous...because it was.
Make Bran’s heel turn explicit.
The pieces are there, perhaps more clearly in the books than in the show, but it really needed to be made more obvious that the entity that returned from beyond the Wall was not Bran Stark, but Bloodraven possessing his body, much like Bran possessed Hodor.
And just as Varamyr tried to possess Thistle in the books. That attempt was unsuccessful because Varamyr was not as gifted as Bran, and Thistle, as a fierce spearwife, was far more independent and strong-willed than sweet-natured, gentle and trusting Hodor—but nonetheless Varamyr’s attempt at a human Second Life establishes that it’s a possibility for powerful wargs. And Bloodraven was the most powerful warg of all. QED, His last act in his original body was tricking Bran into letting him in, becoming the unwitting host for his Second Life.
Bran refers to himself as the Three-Eyed Raven and corrects Meera Reed that he’s not Bran anymore, not really—but those little hints were not enough. Most viewers overlooked them or didn’t grasp their significance, which makes S8 impossible to rationalize otherwise.
But if we start with the premise that “Bran” is no longer the sweet kid he used to be, that that character is effectively dead or at least in a horrific “locked-in” state, unable to control the actions of his own body (as we saw from Hodor’s horror whenever Bran took him) then it all starts to make sense.
Bloodraven (AKA Brynden Rivers) was a notoriously unscrupulous, power-hungry tyrant that ended the Blackfyre Rebellions by destroying the credit of the Throne. (He promised safe passage to a Blackfyre claimant and then executed him so Aegon V could be crowned. Thus Aegon V’s first act as king was banishing Bloodraven to the Wall to restore the good name of the Realm.)
Bloodraven held many titles during his life and wielded enormous power, but he’s perhaps most famous for his role as Master of Whisperers, using his warging ability to spy on everyone in Westeros using animals, especially ravens. Thus the old riddle: How many eyes does Bloodraven have? A thousand (the ravens) and one (his one surviving eye after he lost the other in battle.)
And after Bloodraven went to the Wall, rising to the rank of Lord Commander, ranging far into the True North and eventually undergoing the process we saw Bran go through in the series, becoming the Three-Eyed Raven—what did he do? Continue to spy on all of Westeros, only now in the past as well. Whether human or supernatural, Bloodraven has always had the same MO: espionage and manipulation.
But he could not wield power from under a tree. And so he lures Bran Stark to him with the false promise that he can help him walk again, he manipulates the dreams of Jojen Reed and lets him die all to serve that end—so that he can possess a new young body, thereby cheating death yet again so he can go south and set in motion a chain of events that ends with him ruling Westeros—but not from the shadows this time, not as a Small Council member pulling strings, but out in the open, as king himself. It’s been his ambition for years before the series proper even began.
Everything that happens in S8 is the product of Bloodraven’s manipulations. He needed various claimants to the Throne to take themselves out, and he pushed them, working on their insecurities, their character flaws which he’s studied in detail, lying beneath that tree all those years, plotting, so he knew exactly which secrets to reveal, which ideas to plant, which buttons to push, to make all his rivals fall apart.
Because Bran Stark has no credible claim to anything, except Lord of Winterfell, which Bloodraven explicitly rejects! His ambitions are far loftier. I can’t be the lord of anything, he says. But he becomes Lord of the Six Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm—because everyone was exactly where they needed to be, like pieces carefully arranged on a cyvasse board.
The only way Bloodraven is seating his crippled ass on that Throne is via another Great Council ruling, much like the one he manipulated decades ago to crown Aegon V king and wipe out the last of the Blackfyres.
This is what he does, he is the ultimate schemer, putting all the others we’ve watched during the series to shame—Baelish, Varys, Pycelle? No, Brynden was the original magnificent bastard, the grandaddy of them all.
Viewing S8 through this lens, we see why Jon had to be informed of his true parentage, why Dany reacted with such paranoia and fear, why Jon then turned to his sisters for support and guidance, why Sansa’s doubts about Dany’s stability were thus confirmed, and so why she offered Tyrion her brother as a better alternative. Why Tyrion then shared the secret with one of his few remaining friends, looking for advice, and why Varys then turned around and used that information as he always has done, trying to secure the best outcome for the Realm.
It’s a domino effect, one step leading to the other, but it’s all instigated by Bran insisting that Sam tell Jon the truth about Rhaegar and Lyanna. Without that revelation, much of the plot of S8 does not happen.
And if we accept Bloodraven at his word when he tells Jon he was exactly where he was supposed to be, then Bloodraven foresaw the Fall of King’s Landing.
That is to say, he knew Dany’s mental breakdown would inevitably result in the genocide of half a million people, and he carried his plan out anyway. That was an acceptable loss, so long as the net result was his election as king.
In other words, GoT ends with the bad guy winning after all, which is very much in line with the series as a whole, where the most ambitious schemers profit while the good and noble are cut down long before their time.
The ending isn’t completely nihilistic—Sansa still rules an independent North, in theory free from Bran’s nefarious influence—but as Bran’s actor himself put it, the rest of Westeros is now effectively a surveillance state. Bloodraven has become Big Brother.
In the spirit of the-editing-room.com:
SHE-HULK S01E09 - PROPER ENDING
ELONGATED MUSKRAT injects the serum and JESSICA HULK turns to the camera.
JESSICA HULK
Are you feeling this? 'Cause I'm not.
JESSICA then looks back at ELONGATED just in time to see him DIE HORRIBLY.
ELONGATED MUSKRAT
I-I can feel it working!
(dies)
CROWD OF RETREAT ATTENDEES
(panics and flees into the night)
JESSICA HULK
Wait! Come back! I need deets so I can sue you all!
BLONSKI
Oh that's not a problem, I've got credit card receipts for all of them.
JESSICA works with MATT DAREDEVIL to SUE the CROWD of antags BEYOND RECOGNITION.
END.
Ted Mosby and Robin Sherbatski do not belong together.
In fact, they should both never settle down.
Ted is an idealistic, neurotic, completely disfunctional romantic. In a way, he is worst than Barney because at least Barney honest with himself. He's an asshole, and he's okay with it. Ted? Well, he is also an asshole, but he really thinks he's always just a fool in love. If Ted Mosby found the perfect woman, he would be so miserable, he would find a way to fuck it up.
Maybe there's someone out there that Ted Mosby deserves, but no one deserves Ted Mosby.
How I Met Your Mother.
Ted Mosby should have ended up alone.
Ted is an idealistic, neurotic, completely disfunctional romantic. In a way, he is worst than Barney because at least Barney is honest with himself. He's an asshole, and he's okay with it. Ted? Well, he is also an asshole, but he really thinks he's always just a fool in love.
If Ted Mosby found the perfect woman, he would be so miserable, he would find a way to fuck it up. No will ever be enough for him.
Maybe there's someone out there that Ted Mosby deserves, but no one deserves Ted Mosby.
So, here's my rewrite: Ted Mosby fucks up with the umbrella girl. Maybe he says her name wrong at the wedding (like Ross). Maybe Victoria the Baker shows up and cheers umbrella girl with her. And the Victoria runs away again, he loses both, and tries his luck with Robin, who rejects him. They remain great friends, no one knows him more than her. In the final scene, they're older, and Ted tries to convince her that this new "senior" girl is really the one and this time is different. Robin breaks the front on a close shot, and smiles at the camera. We all know what she's thinking. THE END.
Honestly I'm going to be waiting for AI to advance to the point that you can basically re-do a show ending with a prompt and fine tune it as you go, and it'll generate as many seasons after the fact as you want.
I'll still stand by the prediction that 20-30 years from there will be AI media generators in different flavors that will generate movies and shows based on prompts, people will be sharing prompts and seeds, and sites will have most popular prompt lists as part of their service.
Like that's what our kids or grandkids will be watching and sharing.
All that will be needed is a a generator trained on something like Game of Thrones and other fantasy works, then basically prompt it to remove the last season, and write 2-3 more seasons.
AI isn't there yet, it's not there yet by a long shot, but once we get a few major leaps forward in quantum computing, there will be a massive interest in AI that is far more advanced than it is today.