Game of Thrones. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

“That’s the end? That’s it? I can’t be!”

From thousands of loungerooms around the globe these were the disappointed reactions when Game of Thrones reached its final conclusion. After eight series, The Game of Thrones was over. The last three series were written,  not by the author of the books, but by the TV directors. There are many who say that was when the rot set in. The say it saw the show’s slow decline to what they believe was its totally underwhelming conclusion.

A friend of mine describes Game of Thrones as “Fighting, Feasting and Effing. He does not say effing. He says a word that starts with F and rhymes with trucking, however, this a family blog so I’ll leave you to work it out.

After all that feasting, fighting, extremely closely intertwined, energetic, enthusiastic,  bodily encounters over eight years, it finally ended. Cersie and her incestuous lover brother, were dead, as was Daenerys and a heap of other starring characters. There was a default, broken King Bran, in Westeros. The heroic Jon Snow, banished  and depressed, riding slowly into some northern forest. Arya standing at the bow of a ship, sailing west of Westeros into totally unchartered waters. End of story. Surely not! Sadly, it is.

Of course Game of Thrones is not the first TV series, or film, for that matter, that has left fans feeling cheated of a better ending. Everyone will have their own nominations for stories that could have ended better.

Like the ending of the film, Gone With The Wind, for instance. After the audience wallows in stormy seas of tossed emotions, warfare, love, hostility and great dollops of angst for nearly four hours, the film finally has Rhett Butler carry Scarlett O’Hara, protesting ever so slightly, up the stairs and into bed. 

After a night of passion, Scarlett awakes with a very satisfied smile on her face and an empty space beside in in the bed. Rhett is out of bed, busily packing. Scarlett is devasted when Rhett tell her that he is tired of her games and he is heading off to find if Grace and Charm still exist.

“But, Rhett, where shall I go? What shall I do?” That was Scarlett’s major problem. Always thinking of herself.

“Frankly, my Dear, I don’t give a damn,” Rhett says famously as he strides off into the morning fog.

While the audience is grappling with that less than fond farewell scene, Scarlett stumbles back into the house and collapses on those stairs. Then she lets us know that the whole saga has only just begun. She says she will go back to Tara. There she will make her plans to win Rhett back. She will start planning tomorrow, when everything will start to get better.                                                                                                                                                                                               

“After all,” she says with glowing optimism, “tomorrow is another day.

A lot of people, including my mother and a roomful of my aunties, all thought it could have finished whole lot better than with the hope that things will be better, tomorrow.

Another popular TV shows whose finish did not delight the fans was the British Sci-Fi drama, Blakes 7. It ran from 1978 till 1981. In some ways it was a corny, low budget affair that had  Commander Blake and his seven little helpers zooming around in deep space doing what Robin Hood and his Merry Men and The Dirty Dozen did in vastly different contexts. Blake did his good works saving the inter galactic civilisations from cruelty and death in his tinny looking alfoil space craft. He and his brave helpers zapped the baddies with what seemed like plastic toy, ray guns.

Of course, not everybody liked it. Australia’s favourite critic, Clive James said Blakes7 was “classically awful”. Clive was particularly upset that there was no apostrophe in the title.

Despite Clive’s criticisms, each week, millions of people, including me, tuned in to Blakes 7. We all loved it. It was a bit like those thirty-minute Batman shows of the sixties. They were phoney, but they were funny.

Then, we were all watching the latest episode when, without warning, Blake is accused of being a traitor. His number one assistant, the charismatic Avon, thinks it’s true and zaps Blake with his plastic-coated ray gun. Other members of Blakes 7 are upset andin the Federation Police are called in. 

In the final scene, Avon and Blake’s mates, with guns drawn and smiles on their faces, go out to face the Federation Police and are presumably all zapped to disintegration. Another game over!

There was no prior warning that this was to be Blake’s final episode. Nobody, as far as I know, ever made any statements about the series final and its controversial ending. I think there was a possibility that the actors portraying Blake and a couple of other key players wanted to get out of the series. so the writers just wiped out the lot of them.

Which brings me to one of the funniest comedy TV series of all time. Hancock’s Half Hour, featuring the incredibly funny, but always lugubrious and depressed, Tony Hancock. I think the show underwent a name change at some time and was cut to 25 minutes. But it was always achingly funny. 

Unfortunately, Tony Hancock was a depressed individual. Despite enjoying huge popularity and success in Britain and Australia, Tony Hancock took his own life in Sydney in the early 1980s. A tragic end for one who had brought so much laughter to others.

It was not the Hancock’s Half Hour series that came to an unsatisfying ending. However, a classic episode titled, “The Bowman’s”, demonstrated how writers can use tragic circumstances to end a series in a most unsatisfactory way.

The Bowman’s was a not so subtle parody of a long running BBC radio show titled, The Archers. Bowman, Archers. Geddit?

In the Bowmans, Tony Hancock plays Joshua Merriweather, a country bumpkin in a small village dominated by the Bowman family. Joshua annoys his fellow actors. They find his egotism, buffoonery and blatant over acting so distasteful that they prevail on the writers to have him killed off. And he is, despite the loudt protestations from Joshua.

Joshua’s character is so popular with the listeners, however,  that tens of thousands of letters arrive at the BBC demanding that he be brought back. The producers are forced to agree. They decide

to bring back Joshua as his long-lost twin brother, also named Joshua. Realising he has the producers at his mercy, Joshua says that he will only agree to return to the series if he can write that episode. They agree.

And so the scene opens with Joshua’s long-lost twin, also named Joshua Merriweather, returning to the village. Rushing out to greet him across an open field are the Bowmans. All of the Bowmans. 

Joshua greets each of them by name, shouting out his helloes across the open field

Suddenly. “Stop. Stop,” yells Joshua quite unenthusiastically. Too late. The Bowmans keep racing forward and they all fall down along forgotten mineshaft. Every Bowman dies.

Well, that brought the TV  Bowmans to a sudden, sad ending. Joshua Merriweather tried to get the producers to start a new series called The Merriweather’s. They declined. And so ended one of the funniest, saddest endings to a fictitious TV show in the history of entertainment.  Another gem from fabulous Tony Hancock.

Naturally, everyone will have their own examples of shows that ended unsatisfactorily. Seinfeld, The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire and so on. It seems Game of Thrones will head the list for some time.

Perhaps we expect to much. I mean, shows must stop sometime. 

Well, maybe not The Bold and the Beautiful. That show will go on and on and on. Brooke has  married every male character at least once and some of them twice. It is rumoured that she has also wed a couple of the show’s cameramen.

The Bold and the beautiful will go on and on and on. In the fullness of time, Brooke will marry one of her grandsons. When that marriage fails, because of Brooke’s infidelity, she will then marry one of her granddaughters. But that will just be the beginning!

As far as all other TV series go, we should recall TS Eliot’s poem, The Hollowmen. This poem refers to post World War 1 society, of men who are spiritually dead, who cannot transform their desires into fulfilment, their thoughts into actions. They lead unfulfilling lives. 

Eventually, Eliot says,                                                                                                                        

This is the way the world ends, 
Not with a bang but with a whimper.                                                                                                                                                                       

If the world ends with a whimper, we should not be too upset if our favourite TV series ended pretty much the same way.