The Sense of an Ending
Some last episode titles.
This one’s from December 2023. As ever, if you want to read these things in a more timely fashion you might want to try pressing this button…
All Good Things... Last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The phrase is used by Captain Picard’s nemesis/boyfriend Q in dialogue, but that feels like a sort of back formation. It’s there so that we autocomplete it with “come to an end”, to tell us that the voyage is over.1 Which might be why it’s one of the earliest finales I can recall watching as a finale.
Oddly enough the voyage wasn’t over at all. Even ignoring the fact one spin-off was already running, another would shortly start, and there have been approximately 247 other Star Trek shows since – the result, let’s be honest, as much of TNG’s success as that of the original series – this exact cast would be back in a movie before 1994 was out. They’d already started filming it.
End: The final episode of The Good Wife. Full marks for brevity; zero out of 10 for wit and style.
Actually, the show did something with its episode titles that may or may not be considered clever. Every episode in season 1 has a one-word title; every episode in season 2 a two-word one; and so on. Alas, after season 4 they started counting down again, which strikes me as cowardly – what, you don’t think you can find a poetic and intriguing seven-word comment about a measly 22 scripts a year? – but we are where we are.
Everybody Dies: The final episode of House, M.D. The title is perfect because it’s a pun on House’s mantra for the whole show, “Everybody lies”, and also because, oh, well, no spoilers.
Confused me by being the last episode of season 8, rather than season 7, which for some reason is the standard length of US TV dramas (hence The Good Wife’s nifty title trick). The last episode of season 7 is called Moving On, which makes sense as it’s the one in which Dr Cuddy, the hospital administrator with whom House has spent the last seven years in a love/hate/occasionally actual relationship, leaves the hospital: this gives the last season a sort of “Y’know, the Beatles! John, Klaus, George and Ringo!” air to it.
Tomorrow: The last episode, and indeed last word, of The West Wing: a name chosen to look forward to a new presidency (if you’re Jed Bartlett’s fictional America) or to life without having to deal with this shit any more (if you’re the fictional Jed Bartlett).
When I added The West Wing to the list of shows-I-quite-like I’d write about in this section, I’d assumed it had a different title which appears in most Aaron Sorkin shows, because I’d forgotten that a) he hadn’t been running the series for three years by this point and b) he’d already used it at the end of season one. In fact he used it rather a lot. It’s:
What Kind of Day Has It Been: The name of the final episodes of The West Wing season 1, Sports Night season 1, The Newsroom season 3 (the finale) and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip season 1 (also the finale, though I don’t think in that case that was deliberate).
I’ve been thinking about this title for 23 years now and I still can’t work out why Sorkin ever became so attached to it. This 2014 piece on Vulture outlines the events of all four of those days, explains what kind they have been, and comes to precisely no conclusion about why the writer keeps reusing this title that doesn’t tell us a single f*cking thing other than that this is an Aaron Sorkin script.
What kind of day has it been? Irritating, Aaron, that’s what kind. Stop sitting on the fence and bloody tell us.
Made In America: The Sopranos finale. As well as being a pun on the idea mafiosi are “made men”, it’s also an ironic wink to the idea that organised crime is a twisted mirror of the American dream. (I’ve not been able to confirm this, but some bits of the internet suggest “Made in America” was nearly the name of the entire show.)
When it first aired in June 2007, though, nobody cared what the episode was called. They were too busy arguing about what its final moments meant – even though creator David Chase said it was incredibly obvious and seemed baffled that people didn’t get it. (I’m not spoiling it here, don’t worry.) It did lead to this magnificent Onion story, complete with photoshop, though.
Sleeping in Light: Like vast numbers of other Babylon 5 episode titles, this one sounds incredibly portentous while actually not telling us very much at all. (Oh, someone dies. But might not die! But they were very loved!! Portentously.)
Other notably “ooooooh!” Babylon 5 episode titles include “The Gathering” (the pilot) and “Midnight on the Firing Line” (episode 1); later in the series we get “And the Sky Full of Stars”, “Signs and Portents”, “A Voice in the Wilderness” and “Passing Through Gethsemane”. To show you how often they did this: all but the last of these is from season one. I absolutely lapped this shit up when I was 17.
The Last One: The Friends finale. I had to look this up, having dropped out somewhere around season 4. Shocked and disappointed to learn it’s not “The One where It’s All Over” or “The One where We Are Finally Done With This Twee Shit” or something. Also the change in pattern offends my low-key OCD.
Chosen: The Buffy… finale is another one I had to look up, even though I was definitely still watching. Preceded by End of Days which is more appropriately apocalyptic, but since the running joke that Sunnydale had an apocalypse every few weeks had been running for several years by this point, you wouldn’t expect them to go with that for the very end. Instead, “Chosen” feels weirdly double edged since – as I recall – the main plot point is that loads of girls become slayers in it? It’s sort of “Girl power!” thing about how ANYONE can be like Buffy (even though actually a lot of people still can’t even within the context of the show). Hmm. What were they trying to say?
Anyway! That was the end of season 7. Season 8 of Buffy was a comic. So, I just learned are seasons 9 to 11, although weirdly Joss Whedon doesn’t seem to be nearly as involved as he once was? Hmm, wonder what that’s all about.
-30-: The name of the last episode of The Wire comes from an archaic US journalism term, meaning “this is the end of the story”. Fits nicely, in so far as the last season of the show was about journalism, and also this is the end of a fairly journalistic drama story written by a former reporter, David Simon.
I’d got it into my head that “-30-” came from an earlier term, “XXX” – think about it – but according to this 2007 piece from American Journalism Review nobody actually knows. It grew out of the need for there to be something, in the age before computers, to tell the production team “This is everything, there is not a missing page or more to come” – but other theories include “It’s something to do with Morse Code”, “It’s something to do with Bengali”, and “It’s something to do with the time newspaper offices close”. It did cause some problems in 2007, when the New York Times reported that a trial was scheduled for February 30, though.
Time on our Hands: In the final episode of Only Fools & Horses, Del, Rodney and Uncle Albert discover they’ve been sitting on an antique watch worth millions, since before the start of the series. Once they finally, finally become millionaires, they’re bored out of their mind. It’s a double meaning. Clever, see?
(Yes, that was the last episode. Any memories you may have that they made more episodes later in which the Trotters lose their money and end up back where they started, thus undoing the perfect ending for a trio of early noughties Christmas specials which aren’t actually funny, are the product of a deranged imagination and should not be trusted.)
Felina: The last episode of Breaking Bad. Turns out to be a deliberate misspelling of “Feleena”, a character in the song El Paso by Marty Robbins, to make it an anagram of “finale”. The song is heard in the episode and tells of a character in a similar situation to anti-hero Walter White.
I devoured that show at the time, but afterwards it made me feel kind of gross and hollow – not unlike, I imagine, the comedown from crystal meth – and somehow the story about the title of its ending just annoys me even more. Christ.
There is no last episode of Doctor Who, and hopefully (shut up Jasper) never will be. But for the record, the last story of the original series was called Survival. This was both a thematically resonant title for a story about might vs right in politics and nature, but I suspect it was chosen at least partly because it was a horribly ironic way to end a long-running series.
It had been pitched with a different title entirely, though. Just occasionally I mourn for the fact there was nearly a Doctor Who story named Cat Flap.
Also, while we’re down here, buy my book:
Soon available in North American!
It’s also arguably a description of the contents – “look, at all the good things! Including flashbacks to characters who’ve been dead for ages!” – but I’m not so sold on that.