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  • Andor is probably the last Stars War that I'll watch unless they come out with another one that learns from it. DS9 took Star Treks seriously and the result was a show that has relevant ideas 30 years later. Until Andor, none of the Stars Wars I've seen have taken the universe seriously. They've expanded on it in unnecessary detail and obsessed over that detail, but intellectually they've all felt flat and liberal. Andor spends three episodes showing the Death Star through Foucault and you get one brief shot of it after a full film-length of watching how a gear is made using slave labour. That dialectical materialist analysis of the empire is so much more interesting than any battle or Jedi scene across the whole canon.

    • I really liked the Acolyte. Not necessarily for its acting but it leaned into the idea that dark side and light side are not so different and the Jedi can cause a lot of suffering by sticking their noses where they don't belong. Also, there are force users that don't fit neatly into those two categories and just want to do their own thing.

      Sadly, we won't see a second season, because some "fans" on the internet got mad that women, people of color and - very shocking - queer people exist in the Star Wars universe.

  • Aliens ended the franchise. Slightly different answer, nothing occurred between the release of Predator and Prey.

  • Babylon 5 ended with season 4 and the excellent shadow war arch.

  • There's a lot of horror franchises that shouldn't've been more than a single film. Off the top of my head: Hellraiser, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Blair Witch, and Black Christmas.

    Only Fools and Horses shoulda ended on the episode where they finally strike it rich. None of the episodes after that justify bringing it back.

  • I know your question is worded for movies and shows but I have one example from the world of video games that still makes me sad. Final Fantasy died shortly after X, maybe X-2. XII if you really want to stretch things. After that, they were too focused on "modernizing" gameplay. I just want something with a colorful world, quirky characters and turn-based combat that's more about finding the right strategy for a boss than reflexes.

    I guess XIV is nice in its own way but as an MMORPG I see it more as a spin-off than as a part of the main series. The VII remakes tickle some nostalgia neurons but would have been better without their real-time combat. XIII, XV and XVI were just meh. If you really want to make me happy, make a faithful remake of VIII with modern graphics, rebalanced but otherwise faithful gameplay and a few more scenes in the last act that answer a few questions that the community has been trying to answer for 25 years.

    • If we're including video games im gonna say mass effect. I didn't give 2 enough of a chance because at the end of ME1 the entire known universe bands together to defeat a single big-bad ship and it's a fully annihilating battle where the good guys barely scrape by. Then thousands of the big-bads turn up at once and the credits roll. Its a devastating ending that really drives home the central themes.

      Then in ME2 your guy(orgirl) just wakes up in hospital after the battle? No chance. I just couldn't get past it long enough to give it a chance. I still have them and I know I should but...

      • Interesting take and totally understandable though that's not quite what happens in the plot:

        • The battle for the Citadel at the end of ME1 wasn't the entire known universe banding together by far. What we see is a couple of ships that happened to be nearby because at that point, most of the universe still doesn't believe the reapers even exist.
        • After the battle, the reapers don't show up at the Citadel but at the edge of the galaxy. They are still months to years away from eradicating the Alliance. Yes, they have a whole lot of firepower but taking down thousands of planets full of enemies who now know what's coming takes a lot longer than an attack on a single space station where nobody was prepared for an attack.
        • At the beginning of ME2, Shepard doesn't just wake up at the hospital after the battle you saw in ME1. During a later battle/patrol (?), the Normandy gets ambushed and completely destroyed. Shepard dies and their corpse drifts through space. Cerberus (who were only briefly mentioned in a side quest in ME1) manage to retieve the body and use an experimental technology to bring them back to life (it's implied that they basically built a Shepard-shaped cyborg who has access to at least some of ME1 Shepard's memories). The goal is to have a well-respected figurehead who can assemble a squad to take down some critical Reaper infrastructure.

  • Season one of Twin Peaks. Never should have been a season two. I'm ambivalent about Fire Walk With Me. Season 3 was a nice touch.

  • The Gunslinger by Steven King.

    He wrote some dark and towerry other books, but they're unrelated fan fiction

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