About two weeks ago, someone very important to me moved away. I helped him pack his things into a car much too small to fit four years of college life. On his last night, a group of us sat around on stained couches and shared our favorite memories of him. Except me. Because I hate goodbyes. The next morning, before he drove away in his filled-to-the-brim Range Rover, I kept most of what I wanted to say to myself as we hugged and waved.
I’ve never done too well with goodbyes. And as with most things in my life, I think that probably has something to do with my love of television. You see, us TV obsessers never do too well with closure. We’re spoiled. When we find a new show to settle down with, we (usually) get to be a part of that world and spend time with those characters for years.
I’ve watched a lot of series finales over the years and feel pretty comfortable declaring that they’re mostly garbage. Particularly in the world of broadcast television, so long as a show is making enough money, the show keeps on getting made, even when it should probably be put to rest. In these cases, by the time we get to the end, the writers have squeezed every drop of blood out of the series that we’re left with something hollow and sagging that looks nothing like the show you fell in love with.
“Alias,” for instance, devolved into an entirely different show after its third season (I would say “never forget those season-four zombies,” but you should actually definitely forget about them because what?) If you are one of those people who stopped watching “Battlestar Galactica” during its final season, I don’t blame you. In fact, don’t force yourself to finish it. It’s not a polarizing finale like that of “Lost” or “The X-Files” — it’s just straight-up bad.
Most days, I pretend seasons six and seven of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” never even happened. Of course, that would mean we never would have gotten “Once More With Feeling” or “Tabula Rasa” or “Selfless,” the rare but treasured gems buried among trash like “Doublemeat Palace” and “First Date” (another thing you should erase from your TV memory: “Special Guest Star Ashanti”). Maybe it would have been worth drudging through all that hell if the series finale had recaptured the heart and soul of the series. But it didn’t. Instead, it validates an abusive relationship (Spike/Buffy) and spends way too much time on the season’s most boring plot device (the Potentials). Worst of all, Anya dies, and the entire Scooby Gang spends about two seconds being sad about it until they start patting themselves on the backs for saving the world. I’m still mad at Joss Whedon for that one. Season five’s finale “The Gift” should have been the series finale. I’ll stand by that opinion to my grave.
Do you even remember what happened in the “Gilmore Girls” finale? Lorelai kissed Luke and Rory decided to follow the Obama campaign. It was 2007, I was 14 years old, and I was so disappointed in the remarkably average ending to the series that backdropped my after-school snack time for seven years that I turned off my TV and stormed upstairs to air my grievances on the message boards, because that’s what you did in the pre-Twitter days.
Flash forward to today. As I wrote that paragraph, I shared my very strong feelings with my friend Alex and he looked at me like I was a monster. Before I know it, we’re watching a scene from the finale. Richard tells Lorelai what an amazing mother and person she is and suddenly I’m sobbing in Mighty Good. What? Where were these feels seven years ago? Why can I so distinctly remember slumping away from that finale so unsatisfied?
Well, the obvious answer is that I’m a different person now. I’m weeks away from graduating, and watching Rory say goodbye to all the people she loves so she can start the next phase of her life hits way too close to home. TV doesn’t exist in a vacuum; when we watch, we bring in parts of ourselves and our lives that affect the way we interpret and receive what we see on screen.
But even though the “Gilmore Girls” series finale has more emotional power over me now than it did seven years ago, I still found myself snapping, “yeah, but that Lorelai-Luke kiss is still so anticlimactic,” at Alex as I wiped away my tears and remembered I’m supposed to hate this episode.
Yes, the “Gilmore Girls” series finale is anticlimactic. Of course it is. The only shows that don’t have anticlimactic finales are the ones that are canceled before the writers get to write a true finale. Well, and “Angel” ’s “Not Fade Away,” which somehow manages to end on an up-beat but also with a sense of finality, and I’m not really sure how it strikes such a magical balance; I’d be tempted to say Joss Whedon is a wizard, but again, see: the “Buffy” finale. Series finales are anticlimactic because they’re not climaxes; they’re resolutions. There’s a reason why penultimate episodes are almost always going to be better than finales: They’re the exciting buildup and the finale is the slow exhale. I gave “30 Rock” ’s finale an A+, but “A Goon’s Deed in a Weary World” is a better episode.
So, yeah, even the finales I love never leave me wholly satisfied. Everyone loves the “Friday Night Lights” finale, but WHERE WAS SMASH WILLIAMS, HUH? Sure, there are about a million logistical reasons the writers probably couldn’t bring back Smash — many of which were probably out of their control. But how can I be logical about the television industry and all its moving parts at a time like this?! When I’m emotionally fragile, logic and reason pack up their bags, and few things make me as emotionally fragile as a series finale.
Because series finales are goodbyes and goodbyes are always going to suck. There’s no such thing as a perfect goodbye. You’re always going to want more time. You’re always going to wish you had done something differently. This is my last television column for The Michigan Daily and I know I have about a hundred more columns in me, and, yes, most of them would probably include the words “feminist,” “the CW” and “witches” because those are indeed my favorite things to write about. I never wrote that column about “H2O: Just Add Water.” I never wrote about how my dad learned English from American television when he emigrated from India or how he used to say phrases like “I can’t do it, captain” and “beam me up, Scotty” so often when I was growing up that I thought they were just regular American idioms and not references to a TV show. That one probably would have been called “Kayla Upadhyaya: TV is in my DNA” and, as usual, I would have pissed off my editors by writing 500 words over the limit.
So, if this column is my series finale, I hope it’s like the “Clarissa Explains it All” finale, in which Clarissa writes her very last article for the school paper and everyone is sad but then she dedicates the article to The Future, which is I guess what I dedicate this column to, too. But this column is probably more like that “Gilmore Girls” finale; it’s not my best work, it could be better, but it’ll possibly make me cry in seven years when I revisit it.
I apologize in advance to everyone who I have to say goodbye to in a few weeks. I got a taste of what it’s going to be like two weeks ago, and I can tell you, it’s definitely going to suck, and it’s definitely not going to satisfy. It’s going to feel like your favorite TV show is coming to an end. And maybe those two characters who you were always rooting for don’t end up together. And maybe not everyone gets a happy ending. But looking back, you’re going to remember your favorite episodes and not that painful goodbye.
OK, I might be a little too married to this metaphor. But so long as we’re lost deep within it, I’ll keep it going by calling the post-grad part of my life my spinoff series. I’m off to Los Angeles to try to be a professional Funny Lady, whatever that means, and to hopefully eventually create my own TV series that ends up at the top of everyone’s “10 Shows With the Best Series Finales” lists.
But it probably won’t. Because I’m terrible at goodbyes. So don’t make me say it, please.