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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2077 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 17, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I watched Dark this Lent and it made me wonder what series don't have a final season that doesn't struggle with the pacing.

Spoilers ahead

Everyone knows about AGoT season 8, no need to even mention it.

Breaking Bad is one of the highest-rated shows ever, but I really hated the pacing of the final season. The show has just spent two seasons dealing with Gustavo Fring, Walter White has evolved greatly as a character, but as a crime lord, he's back at square one again. But it's the final season already, so the plot shifts down two gears and accelerates greatly. By the season's midpoint and with the help of several montages, Walter White has found new associates, rebuilt his drug empire, eliminated everyone who stood in his way, earned a literal bed-sized pile of money and retired, just so we have enough episodes left for his inevitable downfall. I still have whiplash from it.

It's the same with Dark. The first season introduces time travel and scatters the cast between 2019 and 1986 and 1953. The second season introduces even more characters, adds 1920 and 2052 to the mix, along with a whole new parallel timeline in the cliffhanger without even starting to open the lineup of mystery boxes that would've made J.J. Abrams proud. Then, in the breadth of a single season, it adds one more jump into the past, shows the parallel timeline along with its parallel cast, its distaff counterpart to the main antagonist and her own goal, adds some quantum mechanics to save the protagonist, twice, and them hurriedly starts to open every remaining mystery box in a row without even explaining the logic behind them because it's running out of screen time and it still has to tell us, out of the blue, that both worlds are just the result of an experiment gone wrong and the protagonist has to go back in time in the real world to prevent them from being created altogether. The end. Don't think very hard why all these children from season 1 actually had to die.

So, is there a series that has the final season that doesn't feel either rushed or drawn out, that finishes exactly how and when it should?

  • The Shield, which is a better version of Breaking Bad (which imo got way too enamored with its lead for such a moralistic show). This is not to say that it was fun. I found it an incredibly stressful watch but the show had basically made tension its trademark circa Season 6 and never stopped so it was true to form.
  • Succession also knew to wrap itself up instead of overstaying (it was on the brink) in a way that feels true to the plot.
  • The Good Place expanded as far as it could go, had maybe one additional twist on the premise and then ended well.

I agree on the Shield. I think it came out just a bit too early to really benefit from being 'prestige TV'. Breaking Bad's popularity exploded in later seasons thanks to the growth of the internet and social media, but more than that it had the room to focus on Walt. The Shield was too long, bogged down with a lot of aimless plotlines; it felt like the production was still caught between making a serious character study, and a procedural cop show at times.

It was also on FX, which didn't help.

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