It's always a little hard on me when a long running, somewhat tightly plotted science fiction series comes to an end. All too often, a smart, beautiful story gets summed up in the stupidest, tritest way possible. The story just feels like it ran out of gas, ran out of ideas. It can be a real scar on the story. You just know that no matter how good the work was to begin with, well, it's not leading anywhere pretty.
So lets look at a couple of examples of scifi stories that ended well and poorly.
The Dark Tower- For me, there is no more perfect instantiation of the "bad ending" form that The Dark Tower. I mean, there is some platonic shit going on with this one. The first book of the series, The Gun Slinger is one of the finest American novels, smart, dense, lovely in its strangeness, but by the seventh book, well, Dear Reader by the end the story is nothing more than a giant quivering mass of plot tumors.
The last books are just packed full of robots, teleporters, psychics, Very Special Appearances by the author himself, commentary on what it means to write a book like The Dark Tower, it just, it just wasn't about a lone hero setting out across the wilderness on a quest of questionable meaning. No, it was something else, something stupider.
And then the author ended the series in a way that provided as little resolution as possible.
<Spoiler Alert>
Infinite Time Loop. It just keeps happening. It never ends. Boo Stephen King, Boo. That's not a proper ending. And yes, I know that the situation was ever so slightly changed on the next rotation, and that leaves open the possibility of some real conclusion in the distant reaches of time, but seriously, that's not an ending. That's a cop out.
Y: The Last Man- Now, YTLM does it better. A lot better. Some how the series remained largely free of ridiculous late stage plot points. It even took the time to make fun of the ridiculous late stage plot point. Remember when those assassins tried to convince action girl 355 that the whole "death of all men" thing was really the Greek gods retribution for the Trojan War? Yeah, I liked 355 yelling at them about what a silly, asinine idea it was. Good stuff.
But the end, it really worked for me. All those little plot lines, ideas, and tensions that had been with the series in the beginning got tried up in pleasingly messy ways. We got to see the world that women had built after the deaths of almost all men. We got to see the ways that they continued the species. We got to see where the main character's relationships took them.
It wasn't just that we got to see cloning growing to meet the needs of civilization as a means of procreation, it was also that we got to see Yorick's daughter still being a little sad and angry with him. It was that we got to see old Yorick complaining about how all the monkey's were too well behaved. It was that Yorick never stopped trying to escape.
Just what the book deserved.
Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy- So Douglas Adams' masterpiece, the five part trilogy. Those books go around and around and around, and well, the fifth book gets the story to a place where the story can't easily go for another spin.
The characters have gone out, done their things over and over, trivia's been provided, ideas have been tossed around, the story doesn't have much else to do. The last book, Mostly Harmless, it's a surprisingly sad book. Arthur, the main character, has lost the person he loved, the person who made the universe make a little much-needed sense.
The book is grinding down to nothing. There's nothing left for the characters. It feels like the end. It's over.
But here's the thing. Like the much-loved FireFly, the story wasn't really over. Before his death, Douglas Adams began the process of writing a sixth book. I don't know much about that next book, you can't call it last because there might have been a seventh, an eighth, but it was almost real, a fish in the sea of possibility.
Knowing that that sixth book almost existed, I can't accept that Hitchhiker's Guide is really over. The world ended the series, not Adams. But, I don't know, we have a hope is resurrection. Death has been defeated. Maybe one day in the celestial future, maybe there I'll get to find out what happens to Arthur Dent next.
Hitchhiker's Guide is different from Dark Tower in that it does have a real ending, a good one, but then it still may go on. It's good.
But I haven't talked about the ending to BSG yet.
I'll get to it next time.
Author's Note: It looks like I accidently posted this blank before I had the chance to write it. Sorry about that.
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