Best And Worst Episode Endings

There are more obvious ones, but first one that came to mind was Me², since I’m still impressed at how quickly and organically that whole episode seems to have come together. Closing the mystery and double Rimmer plot efficiently, Rimmer’s soul laid bare, and a tender bonding moment immediately destroyed because Lister’s got a great pun.

Interesting question, I’ll bite. Though I think this question would be asking which ending is the most memorable rather than ‘best’, unless that’s the criteria.

Best: Balance of Power, Better Than Life, Timeslides, White Hole, Gunmen of the Apocalypse, Out of Time (Personal Favourite), The Beginning

Worst: Dimension Jump (I don’t hate any tbh)

Best Honourable mention: The End (I’d have put it, but I’d only be doing so cause its classic and not out for my personal enjoyment), Rimmerworld (Hate the rest of the episode, but this always made me laugh)

Expect Entangled to receive several mentions down below, fingers-crossed we don’t get into another Irene E debate

I always quite liked the end of Justice, although I know a lot of people don’t. Lister’s over-enthusiastic explanation of the ideas underpinning the episode followed by a good slapstick gag feels like it puts a nice cap on things.

The end of Balance Of Power is good, even if it is immediately undermined by the next episode.

And the ending of Gunmen always puts a smile on my face.

Bad endings? It’s the inconclusive ones that bug me the most. DNA feels like it ends before resolving everything that it needs to, and Officer Rimmer just

I was about to get angry at you for DARING to claim that the ending to Justice was unsatisfying.

But then I realised I was getting it mixed up with Meltdown.

Tikka extended’s ending is good, but the lack of audience laughter makes it weird and sad.

Not as awkward as the front two-thirds of Starbug blasting forwards on those shitty little boosters.

It’s a napkin. Well, one of those little towels they warm up for after the meal. Apart from the fact it’s whiter than a shirt in a Daz advert, it’s in a little plastic sleeve. When was the last time you saw individual bread rolls in little plastic sleeves? When was the last time you saw a bread roll with a curry?

Napkin, it flattens out when he takes it out of the packet:

https://youtu.be/lQrWCIQ84Ao?t=4m32s

I’m in the ‘warm towel’ camp. Is that not the essence of the joke, that he’s so desperate to eat the curry that he’ll suck it off a towel?

Beyond A Joke’s ending is pretty lousy, I thought- the final Curry World scene feels like an unnecessary addition that just kills the momentum of the episode.

Not to pick nits, but… it’s an epilogue. It’s not supposed to contribute to “momentum”. I mean, yeah, it’s a crap ending, but still.

(Unless it absolutely rockets forwards, I can’t remember)

The ending of Fathers and Suns is kinda frustrating because i feel like Lister should have realized how to stop pree before he got shot out into space and then he came back through the scoop to save the day.

What we got instead was Lister being shot into space and then making it back onto the ship just to be like Ok what do we do now? and it just makes the whole being shot into space thing seem like just an excuse for some floating in space effects to be used on screen.

The tripping on the boxes and falling into the airlock in entangled almost defies the direction in which people would normally fall over. but then i suppose she did do everything wrong… but then that also feels like a poor excuse to make the ending work.

The tikka to ride extended ending isn’t great as its almost like it doesn’t know when it should end because there is no big gag to go off on.

Terrorform i have always felt that it fell flat with the final gag as it felt kinda obvious Rimmer, Lister and Cat would say “No” so it wasn’t a surprise.

Officer Rimmer doesn’t have the worst ending. It just doesn’t have one.

Timewave’s ending is perfect, by which I mean I mean it’s equal in quality to the 30 minutes that preceded it.

I think i have only seen Timewave all the way through the once but i believe it ends with Rimmer,Lister,cat and Kryten running away from the table because they criticised a picture.

Maybe he increasingly sees the plots as a platform for the comedy, and thinks people care more about the show finding time to be funny than about a satisfying plot resolution.

I agree that the balance seems to have shifted a bit, to the show’s detriment. I expect you could pick holes in the plot of any episode from any era, but it does feel like the Dave-era plots in particular are a bit less rounded and satisfying (with some exceptions, like Give & Take).

> I don’t know why Doug thinks it’s a good idea to keep doing it.

Probably because Dougs episodes usually are so jam packed with ideas the episode need to be compressed somehow.

Craig went through the whole old age make up thing for something that didn’t really make much impact to the story. infact i ain’t totally sure i understand what even happened there

The only was I could enjoy “Justice” is if I just imagined really hard that they saw Lister was ok and he was waving for help or something.

Don’t Dave … you’ll spend an hour scrubbing yourself clean.

I swore never to watch it again after I first watched the UKTV stream, then I did a few weeks later just to see if maybe it was a little better on second viewing. It wasn’t. I wanted to vomit.

>The fan reaction to VII/BtE may have convinced him of this, if I were going to try and armchair psychologise him

Well the early series did it just fine. infact if you compare Back to reality which had a moment of exposition at the end (which actually made sense) to Back to Earth where id argue the exposition feels abit messy, id say Doug is either more or less compensating or he feels he is improving on the show.

Explanation?