Shows With The Most Disappointing Finales Ever

What's the longest relationship you've ever been in?

Mine was nine years. No, not with a person—with Ted Mosby. Every Monday night, religiously. Through breakups (mine and his), career changes (also mine and his), and that one devastating period where I genuinely believed a yellow umbrella was the height of romantic symbolism. I invested nearly a decade of my life waiting to meet this bloody mother, only to have her killed off in the finale like some narrative inconvenience. It truly, truly sucked.

And I wasn't alone in my rage. Over 20,000 people signed a petition demanding they reshoot the thing. Twenty. Thousand. People so furious they took time out of their day to digitally scream into the void.

Because here's the thing about terrible finales: they don't just disappoint, they retroactively poison everything that came before. That brilliant Season 4 episode you rewatched five times? Tainted. The inside jokes you shared with friends for years? Hollow. It's like finding out your favorite restaurant has been serving you cardboard the whole time.

The internet has made this phenomenon deliciously worse. We're no longer passive viewers quietly grumbling to our mates. We're detectives, theorists, and prosecutors armed with screenshots, Rotten Tomatoes scores, and the righteous fury of the collectively betrayed. When a finale fails now, it fails loudly—trending hashtags, viral TikToks, YouTube video essays longer than the actual episode.

And these are the absolute worst offenders.

Stranger Things

The backlash was nuclear. Rotten Tomatoes scores plummeted from the 70s to 56% by the finale. The penultimate episode became the lowest-rated in the entire series on IMDb—a 5.4, lower even than the universally panned "The Lost Sister" from Season 2. Fans were so convinced Netflix had secretly altered the finale after test screenings that they birthed "Conformity Gate," a full-blown conspiracy theory. Some viewers still believe there's a secret ninth episode locked in a vault somewhere that will fix everything.

Here's what actually went wrong: The Duffer Brothers admitted in their behind-the-scenes documentary that they started filming without a finished script for the finale. They went into production not knowing how their own show would end. When writer Paul Dichter suggested including Demogorgons in the final battle, calling it "crazy" if there was nothing there, his feedback was ignored. The final confrontation featured exactly zero of the iconic monsters fans expected.

The production was a mess. Fans tore apart the cheap green screen work, the overlit "Netflix look," and CGI that multiple people compared to a 25-year-old Linkin Park music video. One Reddit user captured the frustration: "The overuse of depth of field to blur the background on almost every scene... hardly any practical effects even when it could have been done. Not even going to mention the horrible exposition-heavy dialogue where they explain what they are doing every 20 seconds."

The mythology collapsed. Vecna's defeat came via kids with flare guns and slingshots—somehow these worked on the cosmic Big Bad when guns couldn't hurt Demogorgons. The show that once made every death matter suddenly refused to kill anyone significant. Multiple fake-out deaths drained all tension. And the penultimate episode's much-criticized Will coming-out scene felt mistimed—a character moment interrupting the urgency of preparing for battle, with Vecna never having exploited that fear anyway.

Fans even spotted Reddit and ChatGPT tabs open on the Duffers' laptops during the documentary, sparking accusations they'd crowdsourced the ending. The director had to defend them against claims they used AI to write the finale.

Game of Thrones

The numbers don't lie: 1.9 million people signed a petition titled "Remake Game of Thrones Season 8 With Competent Writers." Nearly two million signatures.

The problem wasn't what happened but how fast it happened. Daenerys Targaryen's descent into madness was telegraphed—the show had been planting seeds for seasons. But the final stretch treated her snap like a box to be ticked rather than a transformation to witness. One Reddit user noted she locked up her dragons after they roasted a single child in earlier seasons, but in the finale "doesn't give a hoot about anyone." The emotional journey was skipped entirely. As one fan put it: she went from saying "I am not here to be the queen of the ashes" to committing genocide in King's Landing within two episodes.

The writing betrayed its own characters. Tyrion, established as brilliant for seven seasons, became what one Redditor called "borderline annoying... no moments as charismatic or engaging as before." Varys, the master conspirator, fumbled basic plotting. Arya told Jon she "knows a killer when she sees one"—immediately after Daenerys murdered countless people in plain sight. The line was so unnecessary fans couldn't believe their ears.

The execution was rushed. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss admitted they hoped for a "50/50" split on reception but were shocked by the negativity. They blamed "network effects"—how social media amplified criticism into a domino effect they hadn't anticipated. The final episode pulled 6.8 on IMDb (Season 8, Episode 5 got 6.6—the series' lowest ever). What stung most was how the show that once thrived on political nuance and consequence abandoned its own grammar. Characters stopped behaving like people and started hitting plot points.

And don't even get me started on Bran.

How I Met Your Mother

The finale spent an entire season—22 episodes—making viewers invest in Barney and Robin's wedding weekend, only to dissolve their marriage in minutes of screen time. Then Tracy, the Mother we'd waited nine years to meet, was revealed to have died six years before Future Ted started telling the story. Within the same episode. Cristin Milioti, who played Tracy, said she "burst into tears" when she learned her character's fate.

The real knife twist: Tracy wasn't killed for dramatic closure—she was killed to resurrect Ted and Robin's relationship, which the show itself had spent years proving didn't work. As one analysis noted, Ted wanted kids and Robin couldn't have them (and didn't want them). The "solution" was using Tracy as what critics called "narrative scaffolding"—a vehicle to give Ted the family he wanted, then conveniently removing her so he could return to Robin.

One Looper piece captured it perfectly: "Through Tracy's death, the writers render the mother useless, as she only exists to tell someone else's story." The finale reduced a beloved character to a plot device. Meanwhile, Barney's character arc—seasons of growth away from meaningless hookups—was demolished as he immediately returned to his old ways post-divorce.

The alternate ending on the DVD, which cut all mention of Tracy's death and kept her alive, became what many fans consider the "real" finale. It ends at the train station where Ted meets Tracy, with Future Ted simply saying the journey to her "wasn't actually that hard."

Lost

Lost trained an entire generation to be television detectives. Every whisper, every number sequence, every symbol felt like a breadcrumb in a solvable mystery. Then the finale revealed: it wasn't a mystery box. It was a meditation on death and letting go.

For many, this was emotionally satisfying. For the theory-crafters who'd spent six years dissecting every frame, it felt like betrayal. As one Reddit user wrote immediately after: "I feel the ending was a cowardly way to avoid all unanswered questions." Another: "What an incredibly vague way to end a show."

The creators knew they were walking into a minefield. Carlton Cuse admitted there was "no way to answer all the open questions that existed across the prior 119 episodes." They tried with "Across the Sea," explaining Jacob and the Man in Black's origins—it was considered one of the worst episodes of the final season. Turns out fans didn't actually want all the answers, they just thought they did.

But the spiritual ending—the flash-sideways purgatory twist—left massive questions untouched. What were Widmore's "rules"? What happened to Christian's body? Why was Walt special? What was "the sickness"? Why were polar bears on the island—and while the Dharma Initiative explanation exists, it felt tangential to the Season 1 mystery it once seemed to be.

House of Cards

Remove Kevin Spacey and the show didn't just lose its star—it lost its spine. When sexual misconduct allegations surfaced in October 2017, Netflix fired Spacey mid-production. The showrunners had to scramble to retool scripts that were meant to center on Frank and Claire's battle for the White House.

The solution: kill Frank offscreen between seasons, then spend the entire final season making his death the central mystery. It was the worst of both worlds—Frank was simultaneously gone and omnipresent. As one critic noted, "it still made no sense" to focus the finale on Frank's fate when it "only drew more attention to Spacey's absence."

Reviews were brutal. The A.V. Club gave the finale a C-, Entertainment Weekly a D. Vox gave it one-and-a-half stars out of five, saying the season "saved the worst for last." Christopher Hooton wrote that Frank "left behind not only a power vacuum but an entertainment one," while Jack Seale bluntly stated: "We still need to talk about Kevin. It's impossible not to miss Spacey's presence."