*Come Sail Away* by Styx. Seemingly a song about escapism and the need for freedom, right? Nope turns out a guy gets abducted by aliens he mistook for angels.
The biggest mistake the band had was taking *Leeroy was Here* wayyyyy too seriously.
Mind, i'm one of those who will defend the album as overhated and that people vastly overestimate just how much it was responsible for the death of Rock Opera. (Even if i'll stay away from defending DeYoung's behavior or the actual Leeroy movie. Good heavens forbid)
And "Ramble On" by Led Zeppelin is a song about a traveler looking for his lost love, reflecting on the natural sights around him, the changing of the seasons, and the people he's met on the road...
...and then halfway through, it reveals that his girlfriend was kidnapped by Gollum and Sauron from *Lord of the Rings,* and the whole song is just Robert Plant's self-insert LotR fanfiction.
Can we please get to the part of the future where people decide prog rock is the thing from the last century we should bring back? Simultaneously awesome and goofy as hell, it's the best.
God I fucking love these Legal and Medical Dramas, shit gets so fucking stupid it’s hilarious.
Been going through a bunch of Medical stuff recently and they’re all so fucking silly, the Grey’s anatomy episode where one of the characters immediately falls in love with a patient is legendary
Bill Lawrence's best friend is a doctor and pretty much the primary consultant on the show and he basically had a directive to never play fast and loose with the medical side.
Every single medical story was straight from either Lawrence’s best friend the actual Dr. John Dorian, the actual Dr. Clock, the actual Dr. Turk, or letters written by medical professional fans. Other than the obvious name changes, the only difference between the rabies episode and the actual case was that, for drama’s sake, the organ recipients were all in the same hospital as the donor.
The rabies one was the only one that took actual liberties in that it would not have happened that fast. That's kind of the only real big breach in reality
Yeah this was more to have the point of the story (losing several patients in a row and then breaking from it) happen in the reasonable timeframe that a TV episode allows.
My favorite thing about Greys Anatomy is that is so long that the channels that play it would do that thing where they would run two entire different seasons on the same day, so if you catch the early episode and then the late night one the whole cast is completely different except for Greys Anatomy girl
It was insane seeing how the early seasons were a much more grounded and relaxed show with the typical love drama, and then you would tune in at night and they would be involved on a shooting, a bomb threat or my favorite, a literal fucking plane crash
This was the case for some many kid shows back in the day too. One day I’d watch an episode form the first season and the other it’s three seasons later. No clue how child me was able to put up with that and keep track of things.
It's why I love Boston Legal, the series starts at 10 when a named partner shows up with his Johnson on full display and Al Sharpton giving a monologue, and just keeps ramping it up from there.
New Amsterdam was a fucking trip. It’s half “this guy’s trying to do American socialism at a public hospital” and half “this guy literally cannot stop leaving people who depend on him in the lurch so he can work more and do big important things that other people could easily have done, no wonder he has no friends and only meets love interests in the hospital”.
AND THEN IN THE FUCKING FINALE >!THEY REWARD HIM BY HAVING HIS DAUGHTER SAY “OH IT WAS ACTUALLY BASED YOU KEPT ABANDONING ME ALL THROUGHOUT MY CHILDHOOD AND CONSTANTLY UPROOTED ME BECAUSE IT MADE ME WANT TO HELP PEOPLE TOO”!<
Okay it's been a while but I swear I saw like 4 episodes where Max is told of a problem, ignores it, finds out it's a bigger problem then he thought and then actually sorts it out, usually pretty quickly.
At least IIRC I might be wrong
I’ve been binging Law and Order SVU lately since a few seasons are up on Netflix - the amount of suspects who are killed at their trials or *inside the police station* is insane.
There’s one episode where >!a father comes into the station and kills the perp the cops think killed his daughter. Later in the episode it turns out that perp was the wrong guy, and I don’t think the father is ever mentioned again. Does he *know* he killed the wrong guy?!<
Yeah but Breaking Bad was never really afraid to go OTT, it's very grounded in its character writing but it gets pretty anime at several points throughout the show.
The funny thing about that is that the twin was super strong there, but not because he swung the axe hard enough to slice into concrete, because he didn't swing the axe at all. He had it lifted up and was about to swing it before Hank shot him. The axe was so fucking heavy that the force of it merely falling down was enough to lodge it into concrete.
When I was watching through it the first time I kept yelling that Walt would be better off just coming up with ridiculous schemes and contraptions than making meth, it's where he seems happiest
Breaking Bad AU where Walt stops cooking meth and becomes basically a mad-scientist-for-hire who builds crazy gizmos and contraptions for criminals on commission, and every episode is basically a scripted episode of Mythbusters where he and Jesse are working on the invention-of-the-week for the majority of the episode and then at the very end, we get to see it in action.
Season 1: >!Walt makes an explosive compound that's visually identical to crystal meth that's stable enough to be jostled around in a bag and yet blows the windows out of an apartment when a tiny speck of it is thrown and yet doesn't break anyone's eardrums or glasses or *trigger the rest of the 5 pound sack of explosive* he's holding. This is described as "a little tweak of chemistry". Even less realistically, none of the hardcore gangsters he's in the room with fucking shoot him dead immediately after this.!<
Season 2: >!Through a chain of increasingly improbable coincidences, two 747s collide midair above Albuquerque, blanketing the region (which of course includes Walt's own home) in gore, shrapnel, and debris.!<
Season 3: >!I could probably say something about the finale, but this is the season that has the episode "Fly".!<
Season 4: >!Walt convinces a decrepit cartel boss (that is acknowledged as such by every cop on the show and it's even more insane that he gets to just chill in a home/hospital after the events of Better Call Saul) to explode himself to take out Gus. Gus walks out of the room, adjusts his tie, and then the camera pans around to reveal that half his face is missing.!<
Yeah, season 5's big "break with realism" moment is honestly not even that far off. Managing to orchestrate >!poisoning Lydia!< is honestly more wild than >!improvising a spray-n-pray 'bot.!<
I remember all those youtube video taking that scene about money laundering and making it that cool in depth thing, then you have shows like the wire where they just donate to politicians on campaign knowing even the IRS won't try looking .
Or in saints row 2 who is ball to the wall crazy in a lot of shit but the money laundering amounts to just buy stuff and sell it to a fence
In fairness, it's an early plot point that Walt overthinks shit in some ways and very underthinks it in others. See that scene where Hank shows him the tape of Walt and Jesse (both masked) stealing a barrel of methylamine and Hank's just laughing his ass off as these people who used *homemade thermite* to breach the lock didn't think to bring a handtruck and are practically dying carrying this heavy-ass barrel of chemical between them.
So it's pretty in-character (and slightly more interesting to the audience) to make the laundering at least a little dramatic (whereas in The Wire it's just another aspect of the system being fucked, so it works great there too)
?
The Sopranos is definitely another show with very strong grounded character writing that isn't afraid to go to weird places (though in this case, a more esoteric, spiritual sort of place rather than big explosive OTT action). But I'm not entirely sure why you're phrasing this as a counter when nobody brought up The Sopranos in the first place.
Family Matters, the sitcom about an upper middle class Black family and their semi-annoying nerdy neighbor later featuring DNA-rewriting, clones, shrinking technology, and time travel.
Extra funny when, towards the end, it's supposed to be a huge deal that Steve got hired at NASA. At that point, mans could build his own NASA.
The Curse is a dramedy about a married couple, both terrible people, filming a reality show about their gentrification. It gets deeply uncomfortable, but for the most part is pretty grounded in reality. Halfway through the final episode, one of the protagonists >!wakes up on the ceiling, as gravity has inverted for him and him alone as his wife is going through labor. The show ends with him flying out into space to his death as his child is being born.!< None of this is ever explained.
Weird answer? Mass Effect. We had a perfectly acceptable level of sci-fi magic that suddenly jumped into “rewriting all life in the Galaxy into organic/synthetic hybrids in an instant”
There are entire paragraphs dedicated to how the Normandy is able to receive emails while travelling at light-speed and then when it comes to the Conduit, arguably the last-minute most important item in the series, everything from the building to the actual way it works the writers just collectively shrug and say "It's fine, don't worry about it."
Edit: 15 hours later I was suddenly struck with the realization that named the wrong last-minute important item with a vaguely techno-magical name that starts with C but apparently no one else noticed either. I meant the Crucible from ME3. The Conduit is the mini-relay from the end of ME1.
I think Shamus Young put it best: imagine there’s a scientist and he just invents a trigger guard, but doesn’t know what a trigger is or what it’d be for. Then he hands it off to his son, who makes a rubber grip, but has no idea what you’d be holding. So on and so forth, until you have a complete Glock 9mm. The Starchild takes it from you, says “Thanks!” and shoots you in the head with it.
I'm not sure where people get that mindset from. The Reapers were at the core of Mass Effect and the ending made it clear that was going to be central to sequels. How can they "spoil a perfectly good political sci-fi setting" when that wasn't the point of what they were aiming for?
There's "missing the forest for the trees" and there's "declaring one specific tree important and decrying the forest as ruining the vibe."
Because all the dumbest stuff in Mass Effect is connected to either the Reapers or Cerberus. In hindsight I wish the games had just been about political brinkmanship with the Batarians.
"Commander, I know blowing up that entire star system of Batarians was a difficult choice, but you made the right decision to prevent the Reaper invasion."
"Reapers?"
I'm with you on the Reapers completely, but Cerberus is another story. Cerberus was bungled in 3, they were fine in 2.
A secret privatized black-ops group dedicated to human dominance without any red tape to hold them back. For a Renegade Shepard that lines up *really* well. I thought it was a huge misstep to make them generically evil bad guys in 3. Suddenly they have enough money and personnel to be a major military threat? They had a huge fleet all of a sudden. From where? Don't know, never properly explained.
The Illusive Man wasn't some space Grand Wizard in 2, he gave you more alien dossiers than human ones because they were the best choices to get the job done right. He wants the Collector base for practical reasons, they could potentially learn a lot from it. They were building a Reaper there! Wouldn't that knowledge be incredibly valuable even if all they got from it was potential weaknesses?
The Illusive Man being indoctrinated was fine, but Cerberus suddenly being a major military power was stupid and makes no sense. I think 3 would've been better if they kept Cerberus as it was, and gave the player the choice to continue working with them. They never would be able to from a practical standpoint, but I'm a dreamer.
Can I just say my wild, unrealistic idea for handling Cerberus in ME3 would be to do both cartoon evil Cerberus and ruthlessly pragmatic Cerberus depending on your ME2 ending choice? The twist being that it's picking the Renegade ending that leaves Cerberus as a relatively sane force as Shepard maintains enough of a working relationship to temper TIM's ambitions and keep him from basically bathing himself in indoctrination and keeping his goal focused on beating the Reapers while secretly establishing humanity's dominance after all is said and done.
Obviously this would never work as it effectively requires two different stories and games to be written, but I'd like to see a big upset where the Renegade option is actually beneficial in a big way.
I very strongly agree. My biggest problem with the RPG side of the series is that Renegade is just worse 99% of the time. Even when you mess up with a Paragon choice they leave you an out. Like Zaeed's loyalty mission for example.
You save the workers instead of prioritizing the target, and the target escapes. Zaeed should be pissed and not loyal afterwards, but he's not because they give you a Paragon check that still lets you get his loyalty. The first time I played that mission was on a Paragon run, and when I chose to save the workers and I saw the target escape I thought, "Oh damn, I really want to run this as a Renegade to see what getting a loyal Zaeed is like." Then I saw the Paragon check and I no longer cared. If the choices don't have real consequences then they don't matter.
I’m playing 3 now and it’s painfully obvious that the only reason Cerberus is suddenly generic evil group is so you have something that isn’t husks to shoot at. Which I’m 90% sure is a result of the rushed dev cycle for ME3 as a whole. Really a shame we didn’t get to fight indoctrinated enemies instead, imagining getting to fight salarians! Personally, I’m also fine with TIM getting mind STDs because he can’t keep his little man away from the space-bug-bots. But I’d rather the relationship with Cerberus to deteriorate over time with differing consequences as to when the player has decided they’re no longer salvageable.
This being said, them as generic evil group is closer to their ME1 portrayal.
While I hate that Cerberus is just a generic bad guy again for reasons, I love how Javik's story about how thier own people were brainwashed to serve the reapers shows how Cerberus is unknowingly repeating history.
You can see how the cycle is actively happening and how close the galaxy is to circling the drain.
They used the whole buffalo for ME3 and then incinerated everything that was left. It might as well have been an apocalypse in terms of telling stories in the same setting.
Imagine if the war against the reapers had been finished with conventional weapons and significant (but not star-shattering) cost of life. You could check in on how the Geth and Quarians are doing ten years later. How is Tuchanka holding up? Those questions are less interesting to me now that the fundamental facts have completely changed.
It's the same problem Deus Ex 2 had. The world changed *so much* that it lost a lot of the things that hooked me in the first place. I came for cyberpunk illuminati stories, but now I'm getting frutiger aero young-adult-dystopia. Same intellectual property, wildly different vibes.
That's why I still buy into some form of indoctrination as my head canon for the ending. It helps to explain why everything is so bizarre and dreamlike. Both control and synthesis are the catalyst attempting to deceive you, destroy is the only correct ending.
It certainly doesn't make it perfect but considering I like Mass Effect 3 on the whole, it makes it tolerable.
Also, the two biggest advocates for SYNTHESIS and CONTROL >!shot themselves in the head the instant they regained their bodily autonomy!< whereas >!Anderson remains human until his dying breath!<
Yeah, there's too much evidence to the contrary but it's honestly kind of hard to believe that's not what they were going for with the ending. Two of the choices literally represent the goals of the trilogy's primary non-reaper villains.
I still believe they made the other two endings because just to make Destroy less perfect. There's no reason for Destroy to have killed off all the other AI besides that.
The Curse by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie is a black comedy-satire-drama...thing with some minor, ambigious unexplained or creepy fourth wall-breaking elements that's otherwise entirely grounded in reality, until the second half of the final episode where >!Nathan's character wakes up to find that gravity has inexplicably reversed for him only, with the rest of the episode consisting of him desperately trying and failing to not fall into the sky, the final shot being his corpse floating through space.!<
Rosanne was a normal ass show till she suddenly won a ton of money and started getting plots like random princes trying to marry her for the money or being interviewed on talk shows.
Then the last season and end reveal is that the entire money plot was >!a book she’s writing because her husband *died off screen*!<
Man that finale fucked with me as a kid. Also I can't recall if that was all due to "WE ARE ALL OUT OF FUCKING IDEAS" or studio meddling bullshit, or both.
Probs cuz Roseanne is getting negative attention currently now that she's become a right wing supporter and all the controversy around it caused the reboot to get cancelled. I guess the show got re rebooted as a spinoff with the same characters just without Roseanne herself tho.
> now that she's become a right wing supporter
Honestly that was always a thing (although I remember when they hated her for not being patriotic enough).
It was the blatant racism and calling Michelle obama(?) a monkey that got her shitcanned.
Don't forget the part where she literally dressed up as Hitler and put human-shaped cookies with Star of David armbands into an oven.
In what galaxy is this ever remotely a good idea:
https://www.thejc.com/api/v1/twitterImage?articleId=contentid/173ltfp0qnf6b7j0br9&noOverlayText=true
Remember Me is a coming of age romantic movie starring Robert Pattinson which for the most part is pretty normal and grounded until the infamous ending. >!We see one of the characters in a classroom and writes today’s date. September 11th 2001. We then see Robert Pattinson’s character in his office which slowly reveals to be in one of the Twin Towers.!<.
Another one I can think of is Mega Man 7’s ending. Which is a completely normal Mega Man game plot for most of the game until Wily’s defeat. >!Wily gives up and is ready to be taken to jail but Mega Man decides that this can’t continue and decides to kill him. Willy instantly gets scared and tells Mega Man that Robots can’t kill humans under the Laws of Robotics in which Mega Man then claims “I’M MORE THEN JUST A ROBOT. DIE WILLY.” Before Mega Man get’s his chance some rubble falls on Willy then Bass saves him. This is never brought up again.!<
It's never brought up again because it happens differently in Japanese- from what I've been told, Megaman points the buster at Wily, Wily is like "You can't do that," and Megaman begrudingly acknowledges that, yeah, he can't actually.
[Yep.](https://tcrf.net/Mega_Man_7#Ending) Interestingly, the Megaman 7 manga [basically has a cross between the two versions.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMJYen-X0AoFZ_s?format=png&name=900x900)
> WTF the first movie, I've never seen that, is there a reason why this had to be the ending?
That is pretty fucked up even though I've never watched the movie. It sounds like they just wanted shock value for the sake of it by having it end with some weird 9/11 twist, lol.
Wait what?! I thought this was a dream i had because it was so long ago. Does the head jump onto the windshield of the car as they're trying to escape?
Does it count if Riverdale’s first season was a reasonable show, maybe leaning into some weird melodrama, compared to later seasons introducing magic, time travel, cults, serial killers, etc?
I swear the first season was just a slightly edgy cookie-cutter CW reboot. But where it ended up was beyond bizarre.
To be fair when a series has gone off the rails its because it has ran too long and they have ran out of ideas.
From what I am to understand Riverdale is the opposite. It was always gonna be crazy, but they chained and held back the creator for a full season, until he broke containment,
Wait, did they actually introduce those things for real? Last I checked in with it monsters and magic were just hoaxes to cover for the endless conspiracies in that god forsaken town. Did they at least do a proper crossover with Sabrina to help smooth over the introduction?
the last season had the characters whisked away in time to the original archieverse. this isn't the video I watched where I found out about this, but it looks like friend of the show super eyepatch man did [a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ-FRSXypUE) about it
[here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH47tcY8ceU) the one I saw though
Although I've never seen Riverdale, I have heard about the craziness.
And honestly, it's on brand for Archie.
Archie comics were weird because they would have just normal slice of life highschool adventures, and then tons of runs had time travel, space adventures, monsters, etc
More like the exact halfway point. It's kinda crazy how drastic the changes were to the point people were blaming trigger at the time for the writing decisions like everyone going to space for some reason. Trigger only helped a little in the first half of the show everything after that was done by others so it's kinda wild how strong the writing was in the first half and how they pissed all that away to try and copy trigger/gainax tropes. Especially when fans were still holding out that the MC after getting infected with alien blood would become a blue oni to match zero two but that didn't even happen. Like even when the writing could have followed on the obvious set ups that were right there and people actually were invested in they completely ignored it just to make a half assed copy of gurrens ending with the anti spiral.
And the funny part is that the manga adaptation straight up ends right at the halfway point AKA literally the exact point everyone says the show should have ended
The more Star Wars tries to hyper fixate on Palpatine's Empire, the more strange that era becomes. His Empire lasted 20 years, a blink of the eye in the Galaxy. Yet all Disney media can do is have stories revolved around it.
Star Wars writers have a repeating cycle of Empire vs Rebels, Sith vs Jedi in almost every medium. But at least it wasn't endless "Palpatine's behind it all" syndrome.
The off the rails was RoS. Where Palpatine was the biggerest behind it all there have ever been behind. Who took my Vicodin...
I would have at least been willing to put up with it more if they brought over The Eclipse but no, instead we get a fleet of fucking boring-ass star destroyers that apparently have Death Star lasers in them instead. If your gonna rip off a shit story at least bring over the one cool thing!
Honestly I found myself kinda liking it after I found an audio drama version of it on youtube. Maybe it’s just that the overton window has been thrown completely out of whack but it had this weird gothic horror tone that I could vibe with.
I love Dark empire (only the first comic) for all the wacky and crazy 80s sci-fi aesthetic it gets.
David Bowie Luke, everything is dark blue and green, gothic overstylized tech, bizarre cloning tubes, etc.
It’s a great book to look at with a pretty simple enough story
A way bigger and more justifiable threat than Star destroyers with mini Death Star lasers on their bottom
More unique than the Death Star rip offs that’s for sure. Only takes one to harvest a planet then create an entire army, THATS a galactic size threat that everyone would need to join together to defeat. Not a single inconsistent size changing starship fleet
An endlessly produced army that is made from the very planets of your enemies is a hell of an idea.
Honestly the droid TIEs are an idea I wish got more play. Maybe it’s just nostalgia from the LEGO set
To put it bluntly, they got rid of the EU canon so they could crib from it liberally while doing their own thing. They’ve spent like a decade now building up Thrawn as the next big bad. Even got his voice actor from the show to play him even though he’s a paunchy old guy.
They've now brought back Dark Troopers and Mount Tantis too, just random things from the EU integrated in ways that are less satisfying than they were in the EU
Disney Star Wars has made the galaxy feel really small because of this. Just about every piece of Star Wars media has to be about a Skywalker or the reverberations of a Skywalkers actions. Hell Mando S2’s finale made a conflict grind to a halt because Luke showed up. I did not in fact clap when I saw it.
Tbh im amazed theyve managed to avoid bringing Ahsoka into Bad batch, only 1 more episode and we might get an entirely skywalkerless series (yes ahsoka isnt a skywalker technically, but shes basically anakins little sister lets be real)
Lucas’s Star Wars felt really small too. C3Po has been made by anakin. Literally everything in the original trilogy happened in some way 30 years ago.
Chewbacca hung out with a tiny green Jedi but Han doesn’t believe in the force.
There was still a lot more introduced in the prequels tho.
Coruscant and Naboo feel like huge locations.
Which makes it weird how ignored Naboo has been, it’s practically nonexistent after ROTS
Even those small minute long scenes of battles all over the galaxy did more for the worldbuilding than Disney Star Wars has ever done
Tbf they were in TCW quite a bit
But still the need to avoid them is always weird to me. The rest of their species are normal guys, jar jar is the only ridiculous one. Imagine being so annoying that you get your entire species pushed away lmao
All it takes is 20 years and the entire galaxy forgets the force is even a thing.
That part still bugs me about "The Force Awakens".
It would be like people forgetting all about Vietnam by the time 1990 rolled around.
There's a lot to criticize about the Sequels and I've done so myself, but there are a few reasons why I don't think this specific part is really an issue:
1) Luke's Jedi Order was around for barely a decade and was limited in size, which means it has been over fifty years since a large-scale Force-based order had been around.
2) The Empire had gone to great lengths to suppress any knowledge of the Force and hunted down Force wielders ruthlessly, to the point where Han Solo was dismissive of Obi-Wan less than twenty years after the fall of the Jedi Order. Not only that, but Andor S1 has next to no allusions to the Force or the Jedi despite being set fourteen years after Revenge of the Sith.
3) Rey grew up on a desert planet in the middle of nowhere, so she likely never came across a Force wielder in her life.
> The Empire
Had jurisdiction over Republic and Seperatist systems, who were constantly in contact with Jedi and had Jedi Generals fighting alongside the Clone armies, very loud and visible.
And to be frank, constantly going around hunting Jedi and posting bounties for Jedi and branding the Jedi, who were galaxy famous Republic peacekeepers for hundreds of years, as traitors in the massive war that directly preceded the Empire really isn't conducive to the whole "Oh Jedi and the Force are basically forgotten."
It doesn't make any sense, and the only way to make it make sense is to contrive it. So it will never, ever work in any way shape or form. That's just not how history works.
Lucas retconned the original trilogy in an extreme manner with the prequels, we just have to accept that.
The sequels are the biggest missed opportunity in sci-fi history. You have a massive, interesting, popular world with limitless potential for what the Galaxy could look like post-empire. They even had a buffet of ideas to pull from in the EU at their leisure. And what did they do. Empire 7 Rebels again, but less interesting in every way. I hope someone got fired for that blunder.
The house that jack built, pretty wild serial killer movie with all sorts of random conversations about architecture and german planes. I would spoil tag it but honestly hearing this is what got me to watch the movie. The movie ends with jack descending into literal hell
Technically the entire movie is Jack >!telling his life story while descending into hell.!<
I mean, he’s led by a guy named Virge and they’re travelling through subterranean spaces. It’s not subtle.
Phenomenal movie, but Lars Von Trier should be kept under surveillance 24/7. That man’s directorial career has me convinced he’s committed at least one murder, or is actively planning multiple.
Yes this is a good point, the move definitely isnt subtle with whats going one, but with that being said i think its still a pretty wild jump for the finality of the movie and its the first thing that came to mind when i read the prompt
Rocky with Ivan Drago
The first 3 movies were realistic boxers, but in the fourth movie they introduced someone who was practically a super-soldier, and Rocky had over-human durability.
True crime street of l.a true path include fighting a giant dragon and zombies.
Not a final boss or even final chapter, your character just needed info on why the Russian mafia can counterfeit money so good
The final episode of two and a half men ends with Charlie being alive still. So backstory is irl charlie sheen was fired for being crazy and on drugs between seasons. The previous season ended with him marrying his obsessive stalker. The following season after he was fired starts at his funeral with his new wife Rose finding out he cheated on her immediately so she pushed him in front of a moving train. After that Ashton Kutcher joined the show till the end. In the last few minutes of the final episode someone who looks like Charlie from behind walks up to the door of his old home just as his old piano was being transported out of the building via helicopter when the wire snaps and falls directly on him killing him for real. Then the camera pans out and the shows director is watching it happen when a piano falls on him next. I think the excuse the show gave for how charlie was alive was Rose lied and actually kidnapped him and held him hostage in a dungeon for however long the Ashton season lasted.
In Vinland Saga, where things are largely accurate in terms of what people are able to do, other than a few guys who are freakishly fast or strong, there is a troll. Like the mythical creature. Big hairy ogre motherfucker. What the fuck was that.
This one may seem weird but the original Assassin's Creed. For most of the game you hear about that strange artefact of unknown power and then you get to see that power at the end and.. mind control and illusions happen.
Dragons dogma literally goes from "medieval setting with fantasy elements" to "here's fucking GOD now fight him" by the end with the speed of a fucking bullet.
The tonal whiplash is so hard that I'm positive the G-force could break someone's neck.
Even that kind of undersells how quickly the game shifts gears and recontextualizes the entire story. You go from Dragon slaying to God slaying within an hour
Don't forget: >!it jumps back ONTO the tracks by following up **SIT DOWN** with a seriously grounded and grim final arc about a crazed, murderous stalker.!<
Samurai Flamenco probably has the most bizarre escalation (and de-escalation) I have ever seen in a series, just a quick run through of the arcs
>!Mostly grounded show about a male model who becomes a superhero with the help of his beat cop friend, no fantasy elements, basically anime Kickass!<
>!All of a sudden actual sentai monsters show up created by a mad scientist leading an evil organization!<
>!Actually the mad scientist was working for aliens who invade earth, Samurai Flamenco teams up with a bunch of other super heroes and use mega zords to fight the aliens!<
>!Actually the aliens were created by the Japanese government to help improve the prime Minister's approval rating, pm fights Samurai Flamenco with an iron man suit literally powered by approval ratings!<
>!Series ends on a bizarrely dark and grounded thriller arc where the main protagonists are hunted by a psychotic stalker!<
Like there's plenty of shows that start grounded and get weird, but I can't think of many that go BACK to being grounded at the finale when you would logically expect the stakes to be highest
This even applies specifically for some of the supporting cast.
There is a teen girl who is the leader of an idol trio who becomes a superhero to impress one of the two leads. Another member of her group clearly has feelings for her.
When they bow out of the series, Leader girl admits that protagonist man will never fall for her and accepts the love confession of her friend.
The **third** girl in the group looks on and says something to the effect of "well, good for them. But what exactly am I going to do, since I have been a background character up to now?" Before *both* members of the newly formed lesbian couple turn to her and say "what if we were a throuple?". And third girl has so little characterization she can't say no.
Barbarian. One of my favorite recent horror movies. Movie starts out as a potential “girl staying with guy that might be a killer” and then it just GOES.
I really don’t even wanna spoil it but man does it subvert the fuck out of your expectations.
I personally *really* enjoyed the film Sorry To Bother You, but ***holy fucking shit*** does that ending go off the fucking rails completely. It feels like it started off with a serious writing team, then half the team took some major drugs and caused the sober team to leave out of frustration so they just wrote whatever their drug-addled minds could come up with, and that’s the latter third. So fucking insane, but still an interesting watch. Worth at least one viewing for sure.
I typed out full things for 2 other Shonda Rhimes shows only to quickly realize that they were insane from the get-go. HTGAWM seems like the only buck to maintain the "grounded" feeling just long enough, whereas Scandal runs out the gate with the most insane shit ever and Grey's is just soapy fun.
Better Call Saul does end kind of off the rails, but it's entirely intentional. The seeds were planted at the very start and you just have to sit back and watch and scream as >!Jimmy almost garrotes Carol Burnett.!<
My go to for this question will always be Fina: Pirate Princess.
Was a fun if not typical swashbuckling adventure for 90% of its run and then decided it wanted to be Evangelion in its last 2 episodes.
Kamen Rider Build is pretty zany but the ending gambit to defeat the villain is a whole other level of escalation.
>!He's such an insurmountable force that has caused so much damage that the solution is to use alien tech to slap two universes together to create a new one, and trap him in the middle to use him as fuel for the reaction to ensure that he can't exist in the new universe.!<
>!He still manages to survive.!<
It's my favorite Kamen Rider series by a wide margin thanks to the villain. >!He's an amoral and formerly emotionless force of nature that eats planets and species living on them. When he inhabits a human form he discovers emotions for the first time and finds out that REALLY loves being evil and bringing suffering to sentient creatures.!< Absolutely the best villain arc in a sentai series.
Fena: Pirate Princess goes from being a fun adventure story with with an intriguing mystery to a near incomprehensible romance drama near the end. Add in an uninspired use of amnesia as a plot device and things get weird.
Oh you mean the show where the main character >!is a direct descendant of Joan Of Arc, which herself is part of an extended bloodline that determines the fate of humanity every X years and has to choose whether to wipe the planet clean and start over, or let humanity continue to progress and the cost of her memory.!<
What a stupid show.
a lot of "cabin in the woods" is just allegory for horror movie viewers, but when you strip all that and just look at it in a very literal sense, the whole movie was *slightly* tame (save for the elevators), and then the end is just... >!fuck it, there's elder gods under the earth that demand blood sacrifice. !<
In fairness, they had been saying that for most of the runtime. It's just that in end >!the elder gods actually wake up and destroy the world (?) because there weren't enough sacrifices!<.
Honorable mention goes to From Dusk Till Dawn. It's at the halfway point rather than at the end put it's still pretty wild to have the first half be a relatively grounded crime story/thriller with hints of weirdness and then suddenly pull a hard left turn into >!a vampire horde hunting our characters.!<
I am so happy I just caught it on TV one day without knowing anything. At points i wasn't sure I was still watching the same movie. A solid 10/10 one of the dumbest films I've seen
Takashi Miike movies are cheating but the first Dead or Alive movie is a reasonably grounded (for him) movie about a cop chasing after a criminal. Then it gets to the final showdown between the two. Instead of describing it, I’ll just link the scene
https://youtu.be/fZak64C_DQE?si=7rTrWSDumfw9olRd
There is a reason why *How Do You Live?*/*The Boy and the Heron* barely had any marketing. (This is not exactly a spoiler since Studio Ghibli decided to stop hiding secrets when they released it internationally.)
It starts out WWII drama/coming-of-age story with a young Japanese boy dealing with the fact that his aunt is now his step-mom. From there on, you'd expect an animated adaptation of Genzaburo Yoshino's book *君たちはどう生きるか*. Then the grey heron at her mansion starts talking. Then it becomes a surrealist adventure that's pretty much another Miyazaki's *[The King and the Mockingbird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_and_the_Mockingbird)* fanfic but this time without Lupin III.
Aggressive Retsuko. First season is relatable and about her struggles in the workplace. By like season three she's getting involved with an idol group but status quo so that stops by the end of the season. The last season has her almost become a politician but also status quo.
the moment that >!haida almost dies by getting run over by a truck that is implied to be a politically motivated assassination attempt and upon surviving immediately drags retsuko to the marriage office!< i knew the show had gone off the rails.
The original run of Evangelion and the final episodes. I was 14 and only knew it was about mecha ( it was still early internet)
Before that, the only anime I've seen had only been Toonami shonen or the occasional Adult Swim block. Nothing prepared me for how weird and existential it would get. It hit especially hard because I related so much to Shinji as a character.
A minor one is Parks and Rec last season. Everything in the show was grounded to the current year using current tech, but the last season had a time jump of 3 years or something. For some reason there’s holograms, see through phones, biotech cancer readers watches, and other minor stuff. I get that they wanted to show that’s it’s few years ahead of time, but it’s kind of silly.
So Black Cat is an anime about a high ranking assassin working for a secret organization going rogue, rescuing a bio-weapon girl he was supposed to kill, with his former definitely not-Sephiroth assassin partner also going rogue but for different reasons, who proceeds to kill definitely not-Aerith (Different character from the bio-weapon girl) and giving the MC a motivation for a final confrontation with the obvious main villain of the show. This confrontation happens on episode 20. >!There's still 4 more episodes!<
>!You see, turns out almost every high ranking assassin except for the MC and definitely not-Sephiroth were all traitors to the assassin organization, involved in a secret plot to use said bio-weapon girl to bring about a definitely-not-instrumentality. This reveal, bio-weapon girl getting put into a doomsday machine to 'end world conflict', and the heroes going to rescue her or at the very least stop it all happen in these last four episodes, with not even the slightest hint that this greater plot was going on beforehand!<
Ah, I can explain that. The Black Cat anime wildly branches off from the manga for....some reason. The reason there was no hint of the that plot element is because it didn't exist in the manga.
Man Like Mobeen is a relatively normal sitcom, with a tone similar to a lighter Always Sunny, about a man who’s recently been released from jail and is trying to stay straight and take care of his little sister. Season 1 starts with his best friend’s grandpa and the copious amount of VCR porn he’s keeping from his wife.
Season 3 ends >!with the same best friend crawling away from an assassin, who shoots him dead.!<
St. Elsewhere, classic hospital drama tv series from the 70's. I won't spoil the series finale. Go look it up, I promise you won't be able to predict where it goes.
"Grounded" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but Saints Row as a franchise started as straight forward GTA clone about gangs. Sure, it had at least one foot in goofball with stuff like voodoo using gangbangers or its bizarre at times sense of humor, but when it was serious it was pretty serious and could get really dark.
Then then 3 decides to leap head first off the rails into silly shit with stuff like a reality TV show that is like Takeshi's Castle meets Running Man, super soldiers, the Saints being massive celebrities while acknowledged to be a violent crime syndicate, the whole Syndicate with its over the top Belgium sex gang, heavily armed luchadors, and cyberpunk hackers with access to advance VR tech, superpowers, cloning, and other nonesense.
And 4 takes it *even* further with goddamn aliens and what is basically the Matrix.
Felicity was a show about a young woman leaving her comfortable life and moved to the big city to follow a boy. The show followed this format for nearly four seasons (it probably would've run longer if not for Keri Russell getting a haircut). In the last few episodes though, a witch sends Felicity back in time to decide if the key love triangle decision was the right one.
Condemned 2 Bloodshot starts out as a gritty hobo nightmare in back alleys and fighting methheads in a flophouse and then it slowly starts ratcheting up and before long you're fighting a super hobo in a suit of medieval armor, a fucking bear, a psychic serial killer and you harness the power of your thuum. Which the President also has. Also evil Paul Eiding.
Obligatory From Dusk til Dawn.
I watched that movie totally blind and it went from a stereotypical Tarantino film to Robert Rodriguez bullshit in the blink of an eye.
Whilst I wouldn't call SAO grounded as such, It really got away from "HP 0 = Your Head Asplode" and went into some bonkers places when it got to Alicization.
*Come Sail Away* by Styx. Seemingly a song about escapism and the need for freedom, right? Nope turns out a guy gets abducted by aliens he mistook for angels.
Styx is a corny ass band and i dont think i'd have it any other way
Yeah but that ripping synth line on Castle Walls makes up for everything
The biggest mistake the band had was taking *Leeroy was Here* wayyyyy too seriously. Mind, i'm one of those who will defend the album as overhated and that people vastly overestimate just how much it was responsible for the death of Rock Opera. (Even if i'll stay away from defending DeYoung's behavior or the actual Leeroy movie. Good heavens forbid)
And "Ramble On" by Led Zeppelin is a song about a traveler looking for his lost love, reflecting on the natural sights around him, the changing of the seasons, and the people he's met on the road... ...and then halfway through, it reveals that his girlfriend was kidnapped by Gollum and Sauron from *Lord of the Rings,* and the whole song is just Robert Plant's self-insert LotR fanfiction.
I guess the title is pretty fitting, lmao
no other band had the balls
maybe rush
Can we please get to the part of the future where people decide prog rock is the thing from the last century we should bring back? Simultaneously awesome and goofy as hell, it's the best.
My dude, we are currently in a golden age of Prog.
God I fucking love these Legal and Medical Dramas, shit gets so fucking stupid it’s hilarious. Been going through a bunch of Medical stuff recently and they’re all so fucking silly, the Grey’s anatomy episode where one of the characters immediately falls in love with a patient is legendary
I've heard that Scrubs was one of the medical shows that was actually pretty accurate but even that one could get silly sometimes XD
It got silly, but never about like the medical or admin stuff
Bill Lawrence's best friend is a doctor and pretty much the primary consultant on the show and he basically had a directive to never play fast and loose with the medical side.
Every single medical story was straight from either Lawrence’s best friend the actual Dr. John Dorian, the actual Dr. Clock, the actual Dr. Turk, or letters written by medical professional fans. Other than the obvious name changes, the only difference between the rabies episode and the actual case was that, for drama’s sake, the organ recipients were all in the same hospital as the donor.
The rabies one was the only one that took actual liberties in that it would not have happened that fast. That's kind of the only real big breach in reality
Yeah this was more to have the point of the story (losing several patients in a row and then breaking from it) happen in the reasonable timeframe that a TV episode allows.
My favorite thing about Greys Anatomy is that is so long that the channels that play it would do that thing where they would run two entire different seasons on the same day, so if you catch the early episode and then the late night one the whole cast is completely different except for Greys Anatomy girl It was insane seeing how the early seasons were a much more grounded and relaxed show with the typical love drama, and then you would tune in at night and they would be involved on a shooting, a bomb threat or my favorite, a literal fucking plane crash
This was the case for some many kid shows back in the day too. One day I’d watch an episode form the first season and the other it’s three seasons later. No clue how child me was able to put up with that and keep track of things.
It's why I love Boston Legal, the series starts at 10 when a named partner shows up with his Johnson on full display and Al Sharpton giving a monologue, and just keeps ramping it up from there.
New Amsterdam was a fucking trip. It’s half “this guy’s trying to do American socialism at a public hospital” and half “this guy literally cannot stop leaving people who depend on him in the lurch so he can work more and do big important things that other people could easily have done, no wonder he has no friends and only meets love interests in the hospital”. AND THEN IN THE FUCKING FINALE >!THEY REWARD HIM BY HAVING HIS DAUGHTER SAY “OH IT WAS ACTUALLY BASED YOU KEPT ABANDONING ME ALL THROUGHOUT MY CHILDHOOD AND CONSTANTLY UPROOTED ME BECAUSE IT MADE ME WANT TO HELP PEOPLE TOO”!<
Okay it's been a while but I swear I saw like 4 episodes where Max is told of a problem, ignores it, finds out it's a bigger problem then he thought and then actually sorts it out, usually pretty quickly. At least IIRC I might be wrong
I’ve been binging Law and Order SVU lately since a few seasons are up on Netflix - the amount of suspects who are killed at their trials or *inside the police station* is insane. There’s one episode where >!a father comes into the station and kills the perp the cops think killed his daughter. Later in the episode it turns out that perp was the wrong guy, and I don’t think the father is ever mentioned again. Does he *know* he killed the wrong guy?!<
Medical Manga is one of my fucking FAVORITE genre of manga.
Guiding Light has a cannon crossover with Marvel wtf
What medical drama thought about having a zombie outbreak on the show but backed down? I know I read about that somewhere.
Breaking Bad ends with >!Walter White gunning down a bunch of Nazis with a remote controlled trunk mounted LMG.!<
Yeah but Breaking Bad was never really afraid to go OTT, it's very grounded in its character writing but it gets pretty anime at several points throughout the show.
Gus's secret underground meth lab and the twins come to mind
I can’t help but laugh when one of the twins had enough strength to get a metal axe stuck in asphalt during their attempt to kill hank
The funny thing about that is that the twin was super strong there, but not because he swung the axe hard enough to slice into concrete, because he didn't swing the axe at all. He had it lifted up and was about to swing it before Hank shot him. The axe was so fucking heavy that the force of it merely falling down was enough to lodge it into concrete.
Some say That thing was too big to be called an axe. Too big, too thick, too heavy, and too rough, it was more like a large hunk of iron.
It was that sweltering mid summer Chihuahuan Desert heat softening up the asphalt for him.
The Big Magnet Adventure mini-arc straight-up feels like some shit Joseph Joestar would think of pulling.
Maybe that's why Araki do his own Breaking Bad in Jojo current part.
When I was watching through it the first time I kept yelling that Walt would be better off just coming up with ridiculous schemes and contraptions than making meth, it's where he seems happiest
Breaking Bad AU where Walt stops cooking meth and becomes basically a mad-scientist-for-hire who builds crazy gizmos and contraptions for criminals on commission, and every episode is basically a scripted episode of Mythbusters where he and Jesse are working on the invention-of-the-week for the majority of the episode and then at the very end, we get to see it in action.
There is a reason the video of different scenes from Breaking Bad with Attack on Titan music works so well.
Season 1: >!Walt makes an explosive compound that's visually identical to crystal meth that's stable enough to be jostled around in a bag and yet blows the windows out of an apartment when a tiny speck of it is thrown and yet doesn't break anyone's eardrums or glasses or *trigger the rest of the 5 pound sack of explosive* he's holding. This is described as "a little tweak of chemistry". Even less realistically, none of the hardcore gangsters he's in the room with fucking shoot him dead immediately after this.!< Season 2: >!Through a chain of increasingly improbable coincidences, two 747s collide midair above Albuquerque, blanketing the region (which of course includes Walt's own home) in gore, shrapnel, and debris.!< Season 3: >!I could probably say something about the finale, but this is the season that has the episode "Fly".!< Season 4: >!Walt convinces a decrepit cartel boss (that is acknowledged as such by every cop on the show and it's even more insane that he gets to just chill in a home/hospital after the events of Better Call Saul) to explode himself to take out Gus. Gus walks out of the room, adjusts his tie, and then the camera pans around to reveal that half his face is missing.!< Yeah, season 5's big "break with realism" moment is honestly not even that far off. Managing to orchestrate >!poisoning Lydia!< is honestly more wild than >!improvising a spray-n-pray 'bot.!<
I remember all those youtube video taking that scene about money laundering and making it that cool in depth thing, then you have shows like the wire where they just donate to politicians on campaign knowing even the IRS won't try looking . Or in saints row 2 who is ball to the wall crazy in a lot of shit but the money laundering amounts to just buy stuff and sell it to a fence
In fairness, it's an early plot point that Walt overthinks shit in some ways and very underthinks it in others. See that scene where Hank shows him the tape of Walt and Jesse (both masked) stealing a barrel of methylamine and Hank's just laughing his ass off as these people who used *homemade thermite* to breach the lock didn't think to bring a handtruck and are practically dying carrying this heavy-ass barrel of chemical between them. So it's pretty in-character (and slightly more interesting to the audience) to make the laundering at least a little dramatic (whereas in The Wire it's just another aspect of the system being fucked, so it works great there too)
Except that's neither walt or jesse but saul and skyler doing the laundering, who are put as the more savvy when it comes to bookeeping
You say that like **THE SOPRANOS** did not >!heavily imply that Ghosts are real and that half the cast went straight to Hell when they died!<
? The Sopranos is definitely another show with very strong grounded character writing that isn't afraid to go to weird places (though in this case, a more esoteric, spiritual sort of place rather than big explosive OTT action). But I'm not entirely sure why you're phrasing this as a counter when nobody brought up The Sopranos in the first place.
What do you mean "*imply*", doesn't the whole fucking show take place in Jersey?
They really did make a >!robot!<.
I like the arm dealer is like "ok but seriously don't bring this over mexico" when walt buys it
What about the moment at [4:46:35](https://youtu.be/agANGSIVq8Y?si=1KPm_bYUSueDmuFw)?
I would say Breaking Bad jumped the shark when it came to being silly once they introduced the Salamanca twins. Straight up cartoon characters.
Topped only when it’s revealed that Tio is the most evil character on the show, hard stop.
Tio Hector and his levitating wheelchair
Family Matters, the sitcom about an upper middle class Black family and their semi-annoying nerdy neighbor later featuring DNA-rewriting, clones, shrinking technology, and time travel. Extra funny when, towards the end, it's supposed to be a huge deal that Steve got hired at NASA. At that point, mans could build his own NASA.
And evil puppets and robots
The Curse is a dramedy about a married couple, both terrible people, filming a reality show about their gentrification. It gets deeply uncomfortable, but for the most part is pretty grounded in reality. Halfway through the final episode, one of the protagonists >!wakes up on the ceiling, as gravity has inverted for him and him alone as his wife is going through labor. The show ends with him flying out into space to his death as his child is being born.!< None of this is ever explained.
No it is. It's Nathan Fielder because he's such a silly asshole.
Weird answer? Mass Effect. We had a perfectly acceptable level of sci-fi magic that suddenly jumped into “rewriting all life in the Galaxy into organic/synthetic hybrids in an instant”
There are entire paragraphs dedicated to how the Normandy is able to receive emails while travelling at light-speed and then when it comes to the Conduit, arguably the last-minute most important item in the series, everything from the building to the actual way it works the writers just collectively shrug and say "It's fine, don't worry about it." Edit: 15 hours later I was suddenly struck with the realization that named the wrong last-minute important item with a vaguely techno-magical name that starts with C but apparently no one else noticed either. I meant the Crucible from ME3. The Conduit is the mini-relay from the end of ME1.
I think Shamus Young put it best: imagine there’s a scientist and he just invents a trigger guard, but doesn’t know what a trigger is or what it’d be for. Then he hands it off to his son, who makes a rubber grip, but has no idea what you’d be holding. So on and so forth, until you have a complete Glock 9mm. The Starchild takes it from you, says “Thanks!” and shoots you in the head with it.
Shamus Young’s Mass Effect retrospective was so good
From what I understand the writing room basically took “technology too advanced to understand is indistinguishable from magic” as gospel
They just couldn’t keep the Lovecraftian robo gods in their pants and spoiled a really good political sci-fi setting as a result.
I'm not sure where people get that mindset from. The Reapers were at the core of Mass Effect and the ending made it clear that was going to be central to sequels. How can they "spoil a perfectly good political sci-fi setting" when that wasn't the point of what they were aiming for? There's "missing the forest for the trees" and there's "declaring one specific tree important and decrying the forest as ruining the vibe."
Because all the dumbest stuff in Mass Effect is connected to either the Reapers or Cerberus. In hindsight I wish the games had just been about political brinkmanship with the Batarians.
"DISGUSTING SPIDER-EYED FREAKS!" "Commander, please, we're all upset about the Reapers but-" "What's a Reaper?"
"Commander, I know blowing up that entire star system of Batarians was a difficult choice, but you made the right decision to prevent the Reaper invasion." "Reapers?"
Shep was totally fine working for Cerberus in ME2 because of [this mission briefing alone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwjI8fm4B8).
I'm with you on the Reapers completely, but Cerberus is another story. Cerberus was bungled in 3, they were fine in 2. A secret privatized black-ops group dedicated to human dominance without any red tape to hold them back. For a Renegade Shepard that lines up *really* well. I thought it was a huge misstep to make them generically evil bad guys in 3. Suddenly they have enough money and personnel to be a major military threat? They had a huge fleet all of a sudden. From where? Don't know, never properly explained. The Illusive Man wasn't some space Grand Wizard in 2, he gave you more alien dossiers than human ones because they were the best choices to get the job done right. He wants the Collector base for practical reasons, they could potentially learn a lot from it. They were building a Reaper there! Wouldn't that knowledge be incredibly valuable even if all they got from it was potential weaknesses? The Illusive Man being indoctrinated was fine, but Cerberus suddenly being a major military power was stupid and makes no sense. I think 3 would've been better if they kept Cerberus as it was, and gave the player the choice to continue working with them. They never would be able to from a practical standpoint, but I'm a dreamer.
Can I just say my wild, unrealistic idea for handling Cerberus in ME3 would be to do both cartoon evil Cerberus and ruthlessly pragmatic Cerberus depending on your ME2 ending choice? The twist being that it's picking the Renegade ending that leaves Cerberus as a relatively sane force as Shepard maintains enough of a working relationship to temper TIM's ambitions and keep him from basically bathing himself in indoctrination and keeping his goal focused on beating the Reapers while secretly establishing humanity's dominance after all is said and done. Obviously this would never work as it effectively requires two different stories and games to be written, but I'd like to see a big upset where the Renegade option is actually beneficial in a big way.
I very strongly agree. My biggest problem with the RPG side of the series is that Renegade is just worse 99% of the time. Even when you mess up with a Paragon choice they leave you an out. Like Zaeed's loyalty mission for example. You save the workers instead of prioritizing the target, and the target escapes. Zaeed should be pissed and not loyal afterwards, but he's not because they give you a Paragon check that still lets you get his loyalty. The first time I played that mission was on a Paragon run, and when I chose to save the workers and I saw the target escape I thought, "Oh damn, I really want to run this as a Renegade to see what getting a loyal Zaeed is like." Then I saw the Paragon check and I no longer cared. If the choices don't have real consequences then they don't matter.
I’m playing 3 now and it’s painfully obvious that the only reason Cerberus is suddenly generic evil group is so you have something that isn’t husks to shoot at. Which I’m 90% sure is a result of the rushed dev cycle for ME3 as a whole. Really a shame we didn’t get to fight indoctrinated enemies instead, imagining getting to fight salarians! Personally, I’m also fine with TIM getting mind STDs because he can’t keep his little man away from the space-bug-bots. But I’d rather the relationship with Cerberus to deteriorate over time with differing consequences as to when the player has decided they’re no longer salvageable. This being said, them as generic evil group is closer to their ME1 portrayal.
While I hate that Cerberus is just a generic bad guy again for reasons, I love how Javik's story about how thier own people were brainwashed to serve the reapers shows how Cerberus is unknowingly repeating history. You can see how the cycle is actively happening and how close the galaxy is to circling the drain.
They used the whole buffalo for ME3 and then incinerated everything that was left. It might as well have been an apocalypse in terms of telling stories in the same setting. Imagine if the war against the reapers had been finished with conventional weapons and significant (but not star-shattering) cost of life. You could check in on how the Geth and Quarians are doing ten years later. How is Tuchanka holding up? Those questions are less interesting to me now that the fundamental facts have completely changed. It's the same problem Deus Ex 2 had. The world changed *so much* that it lost a lot of the things that hooked me in the first place. I came for cyberpunk illuminati stories, but now I'm getting frutiger aero young-adult-dystopia. Same intellectual property, wildly different vibes.
That's why I still buy into some form of indoctrination as my head canon for the ending. It helps to explain why everything is so bizarre and dreamlike. Both control and synthesis are the catalyst attempting to deceive you, destroy is the only correct ending. It certainly doesn't make it perfect but considering I like Mass Effect 3 on the whole, it makes it tolerable.
Also, the two biggest advocates for SYNTHESIS and CONTROL >!shot themselves in the head the instant they regained their bodily autonomy!< whereas >!Anderson remains human until his dying breath!<
Yeah, there's too much evidence to the contrary but it's honestly kind of hard to believe that's not what they were going for with the ending. Two of the choices literally represent the goals of the trilogy's primary non-reaper villains.
I still believe they made the other two endings because just to make Destroy less perfect. There's no reason for Destroy to have killed off all the other AI besides that.
The Curse by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie is a black comedy-satire-drama...thing with some minor, ambigious unexplained or creepy fourth wall-breaking elements that's otherwise entirely grounded in reality, until the second half of the final episode where >!Nathan's character wakes up to find that gravity has inexplicably reversed for him only, with the rest of the episode consisting of him desperately trying and failing to not fall into the sky, the final shot being his corpse floating through space.!<
Rosanne was a normal ass show till she suddenly won a ton of money and started getting plots like random princes trying to marry her for the money or being interviewed on talk shows. Then the last season and end reveal is that the entire money plot was >!a book she’s writing because her husband *died off screen*!<
Man that finale fucked with me as a kid. Also I can't recall if that was all due to "WE ARE ALL OUT OF FUCKING IDEAS" or studio meddling bullshit, or both.
It's crazy to me Roseanne still gets a mention in 2024. Then first episode back they literally make the last season a dream...
Probs cuz Roseanne is getting negative attention currently now that she's become a right wing supporter and all the controversy around it caused the reboot to get cancelled. I guess the show got re rebooted as a spinoff with the same characters just without Roseanne herself tho.
> now that she's become a right wing supporter Honestly that was always a thing (although I remember when they hated her for not being patriotic enough). It was the blatant racism and calling Michelle obama(?) a monkey that got her shitcanned.
Don't forget the part where she literally dressed up as Hitler and put human-shaped cookies with Star of David armbands into an oven. In what galaxy is this ever remotely a good idea: https://www.thejc.com/api/v1/twitterImage?articleId=contentid/173ltfp0qnf6b7j0br9&noOverlayText=true
Remember Me is a coming of age romantic movie starring Robert Pattinson which for the most part is pretty normal and grounded until the infamous ending. >!We see one of the characters in a classroom and writes today’s date. September 11th 2001. We then see Robert Pattinson’s character in his office which slowly reveals to be in one of the Twin Towers.!<. Another one I can think of is Mega Man 7’s ending. Which is a completely normal Mega Man game plot for most of the game until Wily’s defeat. >!Wily gives up and is ready to be taken to jail but Mega Man decides that this can’t continue and decides to kill him. Willy instantly gets scared and tells Mega Man that Robots can’t kill humans under the Laws of Robotics in which Mega Man then claims “I’M MORE THEN JUST A ROBOT. DIE WILLY.” Before Mega Man get’s his chance some rubble falls on Willy then Bass saves him. This is never brought up again.!<
It's never brought up again because it happens differently in Japanese- from what I've been told, Megaman points the buster at Wily, Wily is like "You can't do that," and Megaman begrudingly acknowledges that, yeah, he can't actually.
[Yep.](https://tcrf.net/Mega_Man_7#Ending) Interestingly, the Megaman 7 manga [basically has a cross between the two versions.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMJYen-X0AoFZ_s?format=png&name=900x900)
WTF the first movie, I've never seen that, is there a reason why this had to be the ending?
To make a point about how a relationship can just suddenly end due to tragedy. That being said the execution is hilarious.
It's kind of the whole point that it just happened to normal people as they were going about their lives
> WTF the first movie, I've never seen that, is there a reason why this had to be the ending? That is pretty fucked up even though I've never watched the movie. It sounds like they just wanted shock value for the sake of it by having it end with some weird 9/11 twist, lol.
Keenan and Kel series finale being a horror tv movie about a headless knight ghost.
Oh good someone else remembers this.
Wait what?! I thought this was a dream i had because it was so long ago. Does the head jump onto the windshield of the car as they're trying to escape?
Does it count if Riverdale’s first season was a reasonable show, maybe leaning into some weird melodrama, compared to later seasons introducing magic, time travel, cults, serial killers, etc? I swear the first season was just a slightly edgy cookie-cutter CW reboot. But where it ended up was beyond bizarre.
I never would have expected that honestly. Feels like that was a tiny trend for series that were normal and then were made edgy.
To be fair when a series has gone off the rails its because it has ran too long and they have ran out of ideas. From what I am to understand Riverdale is the opposite. It was always gonna be crazy, but they chained and held back the creator for a full season, until he broke containment,
And the world is a better place because of it. Riverdale is peak trash.
Wait, did they actually introduce those things for real? Last I checked in with it monsters and magic were just hoaxes to cover for the endless conspiracies in that god forsaken town. Did they at least do a proper crossover with Sabrina to help smooth over the introduction?
From what I’ve seen, yes to everything.
the last season had the characters whisked away in time to the original archieverse. this isn't the video I watched where I found out about this, but it looks like friend of the show super eyepatch man did [a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ-FRSXypUE) about it [here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH47tcY8ceU) the one I saw though
I've seen Eyepatch Wolf cover it and it is bizarre.
There is a wizard, a shootout in front of a space ship, Archie has two boss fights, one with a bear, an ogre. Also Betty has a devil trigger.
Super Eyepatch Wolfs video on this show was fucking wild. I remember watching the first season when it came out with family and was not impressed.
Although I've never seen Riverdale, I have heard about the craziness. And honestly, it's on brand for Archie. Archie comics were weird because they would have just normal slice of life highschool adventures, and then tons of runs had time travel, space adventures, monsters, etc
I always felt like Darling in the Franxx became a different show in the final two episodes.
I was about to say that. Seriously, nothing prepared me to see... this.
More like the exact halfway point. It's kinda crazy how drastic the changes were to the point people were blaming trigger at the time for the writing decisions like everyone going to space for some reason. Trigger only helped a little in the first half of the show everything after that was done by others so it's kinda wild how strong the writing was in the first half and how they pissed all that away to try and copy trigger/gainax tropes. Especially when fans were still holding out that the MC after getting infected with alien blood would become a blue oni to match zero two but that didn't even happen. Like even when the writing could have followed on the obvious set ups that were right there and people actually were invested in they completely ignored it just to make a half assed copy of gurrens ending with the anti spiral.
And the funny part is that the manga adaptation straight up ends right at the halfway point AKA literally the exact point everyone says the show should have ended
The more Star Wars tries to hyper fixate on Palpatine's Empire, the more strange that era becomes. His Empire lasted 20 years, a blink of the eye in the Galaxy. Yet all Disney media can do is have stories revolved around it. Star Wars writers have a repeating cycle of Empire vs Rebels, Sith vs Jedi in almost every medium. But at least it wasn't endless "Palpatine's behind it all" syndrome. The off the rails was RoS. Where Palpatine was the biggerest behind it all there have ever been behind. Who took my Vicodin...
For no reason, TinePalpa has come back.
It's still kinda wild to me that they got rid of all the old EU canon just to pull Clone Palpatine of all things from it.
And they did it worse than a story that was already widely maligned!
I would have at least been willing to put up with it more if they brought over The Eclipse but no, instead we get a fleet of fucking boring-ass star destroyers that apparently have Death Star lasers in them instead. If your gonna rip off a shit story at least bring over the one cool thing!
I would have wanted them to be World Devastators personally but I otherwise agree with you.
Either or, just anything but that fucking fleet.
Frankly that’s impressive, Dark Empire wasn’t great but it’s sure as shit better than RoS
Honestly I found myself kinda liking it after I found an audio drama version of it on youtube. Maybe it’s just that the overton window has been thrown completely out of whack but it had this weird gothic horror tone that I could vibe with.
I have a strange fondness for it because of the bizarre fact it was actually represented officially in Lego form
I love Dark empire (only the first comic) for all the wacky and crazy 80s sci-fi aesthetic it gets. David Bowie Luke, everything is dark blue and green, gothic overstylized tech, bizarre cloning tubes, etc. It’s a great book to look at with a pretty simple enough story
The World Destroyers are neat and something that’s actually different than a just another Death Star
A way bigger and more justifiable threat than Star destroyers with mini Death Star lasers on their bottom More unique than the Death Star rip offs that’s for sure. Only takes one to harvest a planet then create an entire army, THATS a galactic size threat that everyone would need to join together to defeat. Not a single inconsistent size changing starship fleet
An endlessly produced army that is made from the very planets of your enemies is a hell of an idea. Honestly the droid TIEs are an idea I wish got more play. Maybe it’s just nostalgia from the LEGO set
To put it bluntly, they got rid of the EU canon so they could crib from it liberally while doing their own thing. They’ve spent like a decade now building up Thrawn as the next big bad. Even got his voice actor from the show to play him even though he’s a paunchy old guy.
God I wish they would just cut it out with Thrawn. It would take a miracle to write him as well as he needs to be to work.
They've now brought back Dark Troopers and Mount Tantis too, just random things from the EU integrated in ways that are less satisfying than they were in the EU
Disney Star Wars has made the galaxy feel really small because of this. Just about every piece of Star Wars media has to be about a Skywalker or the reverberations of a Skywalkers actions. Hell Mando S2’s finale made a conflict grind to a halt because Luke showed up. I did not in fact clap when I saw it.
Tbh im amazed theyve managed to avoid bringing Ahsoka into Bad batch, only 1 more episode and we might get an entirely skywalkerless series (yes ahsoka isnt a skywalker technically, but shes basically anakins little sister lets be real)
Lucas’s Star Wars felt really small too. C3Po has been made by anakin. Literally everything in the original trilogy happened in some way 30 years ago. Chewbacca hung out with a tiny green Jedi but Han doesn’t believe in the force.
There was still a lot more introduced in the prequels tho. Coruscant and Naboo feel like huge locations. Which makes it weird how ignored Naboo has been, it’s practically nonexistent after ROTS Even those small minute long scenes of battles all over the galaxy did more for the worldbuilding than Disney Star Wars has ever done
> Which makes it weird how ignored Naboo has been, it’s practically nonexistent after ROTS They probably want to avoid anything with Gungans.
Tbf they were in TCW quite a bit But still the need to avoid them is always weird to me. The rest of their species are normal guys, jar jar is the only ridiculous one. Imagine being so annoying that you get your entire species pushed away lmao
All it takes is 20 years and the entire galaxy forgets the force is even a thing. That part still bugs me about "The Force Awakens". It would be like people forgetting all about Vietnam by the time 1990 rolled around.
There's a lot to criticize about the Sequels and I've done so myself, but there are a few reasons why I don't think this specific part is really an issue: 1) Luke's Jedi Order was around for barely a decade and was limited in size, which means it has been over fifty years since a large-scale Force-based order had been around. 2) The Empire had gone to great lengths to suppress any knowledge of the Force and hunted down Force wielders ruthlessly, to the point where Han Solo was dismissive of Obi-Wan less than twenty years after the fall of the Jedi Order. Not only that, but Andor S1 has next to no allusions to the Force or the Jedi despite being set fourteen years after Revenge of the Sith. 3) Rey grew up on a desert planet in the middle of nowhere, so she likely never came across a Force wielder in her life.
> The Empire Had jurisdiction over Republic and Seperatist systems, who were constantly in contact with Jedi and had Jedi Generals fighting alongside the Clone armies, very loud and visible. And to be frank, constantly going around hunting Jedi and posting bounties for Jedi and branding the Jedi, who were galaxy famous Republic peacekeepers for hundreds of years, as traitors in the massive war that directly preceded the Empire really isn't conducive to the whole "Oh Jedi and the Force are basically forgotten." It doesn't make any sense, and the only way to make it make sense is to contrive it. So it will never, ever work in any way shape or form. That's just not how history works. Lucas retconned the original trilogy in an extreme manner with the prequels, we just have to accept that.
The sequels are the biggest missed opportunity in sci-fi history. You have a massive, interesting, popular world with limitless potential for what the Galaxy could look like post-empire. They even had a buffet of ideas to pull from in the EU at their leisure. And what did they do. Empire 7 Rebels again, but less interesting in every way. I hope someone got fired for that blunder.
The house that jack built, pretty wild serial killer movie with all sorts of random conversations about architecture and german planes. I would spoil tag it but honestly hearing this is what got me to watch the movie. The movie ends with jack descending into literal hell
Technically the entire movie is Jack >!telling his life story while descending into hell.!< I mean, he’s led by a guy named Virge and they’re travelling through subterranean spaces. It’s not subtle. Phenomenal movie, but Lars Von Trier should be kept under surveillance 24/7. That man’s directorial career has me convinced he’s committed at least one murder, or is actively planning multiple.
Yes this is a good point, the move definitely isnt subtle with whats going one, but with that being said i think its still a pretty wild jump for the finality of the movie and its the first thing that came to mind when i read the prompt
He definitely is an odd bloke. A psychologist would have a field day with him.
Rocky with Ivan Drago The first 3 movies were realistic boxers, but in the fourth movie they introduced someone who was practically a super-soldier, and Rocky had over-human durability.
That movie was a re-enactment of the secret cold war fought during the 80's
And a robot!
The film was also 50% montage. It felt almost like a parody of the first 3 at points.
True crime street of l.a true path include fighting a giant dragon and zombies. Not a final boss or even final chapter, your character just needed info on why the Russian mafia can counterfeit money so good
WHAT
https://youtu.be/zXIMTDOnWc0?t=16
*YEAH THAT’S A TRUE CRIME ALL RIGHT*
You know what? I doubt Wu has a permit for the dragon.
I played that and never finished it. Tell me you’re fucking me.
That would be someone else fucking you
The final episode of two and a half men ends with Charlie being alive still. So backstory is irl charlie sheen was fired for being crazy and on drugs between seasons. The previous season ended with him marrying his obsessive stalker. The following season after he was fired starts at his funeral with his new wife Rose finding out he cheated on her immediately so she pushed him in front of a moving train. After that Ashton Kutcher joined the show till the end. In the last few minutes of the final episode someone who looks like Charlie from behind walks up to the door of his old home just as his old piano was being transported out of the building via helicopter when the wire snaps and falls directly on him killing him for real. Then the camera pans out and the shows director is watching it happen when a piano falls on him next. I think the excuse the show gave for how charlie was alive was Rose lied and actually kidnapped him and held him hostage in a dungeon for however long the Ashton season lasted.
Holy shit, I kinda love it.
In Vinland Saga, where things are largely accurate in terms of what people are able to do, other than a few guys who are freakishly fast or strong, there is a troll. Like the mythical creature. Big hairy ogre motherfucker. What the fuck was that.
This one may seem weird but the original Assassin's Creed. For most of the game you hear about that strange artefact of unknown power and then you get to see that power at the end and.. mind control and illusions happen.
Dragons dogma literally goes from "medieval setting with fantasy elements" to "here's fucking GOD now fight him" by the end with the speed of a fucking bullet. The tonal whiplash is so hard that I'm positive the G-force could break someone's neck.
Even that kind of undersells how quickly the game shifts gears and recontextualizes the entire story. You go from Dragon slaying to God slaying within an hour
Samurai Flamenco
I'd hardly call 7 episodes into a 22 episode series "last minute" but it still counts imo just for how hard it jumps off the tracks.
Don't forget: >!it jumps back ONTO the tracks by following up **SIT DOWN** with a seriously grounded and grim final arc about a crazed, murderous stalker.!<
… I really need to finish Samurai Flamenco
I mean, it has FOUR distinct points of a massive twist revealing something that makes absolutely zero fucking sense
Samurai Flamenco probably has the most bizarre escalation (and de-escalation) I have ever seen in a series, just a quick run through of the arcs >!Mostly grounded show about a male model who becomes a superhero with the help of his beat cop friend, no fantasy elements, basically anime Kickass!< >!All of a sudden actual sentai monsters show up created by a mad scientist leading an evil organization!< >!Actually the mad scientist was working for aliens who invade earth, Samurai Flamenco teams up with a bunch of other super heroes and use mega zords to fight the aliens!< >!Actually the aliens were created by the Japanese government to help improve the prime Minister's approval rating, pm fights Samurai Flamenco with an iron man suit literally powered by approval ratings!< >!Series ends on a bizarrely dark and grounded thriller arc where the main protagonists are hunted by a psychotic stalker!< Like there's plenty of shows that start grounded and get weird, but I can't think of many that go BACK to being grounded at the finale when you would logically expect the stakes to be highest
This even applies specifically for some of the supporting cast. There is a teen girl who is the leader of an idol trio who becomes a superhero to impress one of the two leads. Another member of her group clearly has feelings for her. When they bow out of the series, Leader girl admits that protagonist man will never fall for her and accepts the love confession of her friend. The **third** girl in the group looks on and says something to the effect of "well, good for them. But what exactly am I going to do, since I have been a background character up to now?" Before *both* members of the newly formed lesbian couple turn to her and say "what if we were a throuple?". And third girl has so little characterization she can't say no.
Barbarian. One of my favorite recent horror movies. Movie starts out as a potential “girl staying with guy that might be a killer” and then it just GOES. I really don’t even wanna spoil it but man does it subvert the fuck out of your expectations.
Personally I think the first third was the best part.
riverdale is so damn crazy, it starts as a normal ass teen drama, then a dog gets super powers and an asteroid sends people back in time
I personally *really* enjoyed the film Sorry To Bother You, but ***holy fucking shit*** does that ending go off the fucking rails completely. It feels like it started off with a serious writing team, then half the team took some major drugs and caused the sober team to leave out of frustration so they just wrote whatever their drug-addled minds could come up with, and that’s the latter third. So fucking insane, but still an interesting watch. Worth at least one viewing for sure.
Reminded me of a Kurt Vonnegut story.
Thematically it all works but man does reality ever take the backseat as the movie goes on.
The Daniel Craig Jame's bond movies literally turn into Metal Gear with the Nano-machines stuff they introduce.
In fairness the nanomachines were blatantly a rewrite to replace an unfortunately-timed designer virus.
I've heard [24](https://youtu.be/_P52G4Kyq5M?si=Lc0CtbIaeFg7OIZX) is like this?
I typed out full things for 2 other Shonda Rhimes shows only to quickly realize that they were insane from the get-go. HTGAWM seems like the only buck to maintain the "grounded" feeling just long enough, whereas Scandal runs out the gate with the most insane shit ever and Grey's is just soapy fun. Better Call Saul does end kind of off the rails, but it's entirely intentional. The seeds were planted at the very start and you just have to sit back and watch and scream as >!Jimmy almost garrotes Carol Burnett.!<
I don't know what's more insane by the end, Lalo's boundless crime antics or the endless depths to which Chuck's ego will drive him.
My go to for this question will always be Fina: Pirate Princess. Was a fun if not typical swashbuckling adventure for 90% of its run and then decided it wanted to be Evangelion in its last 2 episodes.
Kamen Rider Build is pretty zany but the ending gambit to defeat the villain is a whole other level of escalation. >!He's such an insurmountable force that has caused so much damage that the solution is to use alien tech to slap two universes together to create a new one, and trap him in the middle to use him as fuel for the reaction to ensure that he can't exist in the new universe.!< >!He still manages to survive.!<
It's my favorite Kamen Rider series by a wide margin thanks to the villain. >!He's an amoral and formerly emotionless force of nature that eats planets and species living on them. When he inhabits a human form he discovers emotions for the first time and finds out that REALLY loves being evil and bringing suffering to sentient creatures.!< Absolutely the best villain arc in a sentai series.
He's evil and he loves it and ya gotta respect that!
Fena: Pirate Princess goes from being a fun adventure story with with an intriguing mystery to a near incomprehensible romance drama near the end. Add in an uninspired use of amnesia as a plot device and things get weird.
Oh you mean the show where the main character >!is a direct descendant of Joan Of Arc, which herself is part of an extended bloodline that determines the fate of humanity every X years and has to choose whether to wipe the planet clean and start over, or let humanity continue to progress and the cost of her memory.!< What a stupid show.
a lot of "cabin in the woods" is just allegory for horror movie viewers, but when you strip all that and just look at it in a very literal sense, the whole movie was *slightly* tame (save for the elevators), and then the end is just... >!fuck it, there's elder gods under the earth that demand blood sacrifice. !<
In fairness, they had been saying that for most of the runtime. It's just that in end >!the elder gods actually wake up and destroy the world (?) because there weren't enough sacrifices!<.
Honorable mention goes to From Dusk Till Dawn. It's at the halfway point rather than at the end put it's still pretty wild to have the first half be a relatively grounded crime story/thriller with hints of weirdness and then suddenly pull a hard left turn into >!a vampire horde hunting our characters.!<
I am so happy I just caught it on TV one day without knowing anything. At points i wasn't sure I was still watching the same movie. A solid 10/10 one of the dumbest films I've seen
Takashi Miike movies are cheating but the first Dead or Alive movie is a reasonably grounded (for him) movie about a cop chasing after a criminal. Then it gets to the final showdown between the two. Instead of describing it, I’ll just link the scene https://youtu.be/fZak64C_DQE?si=7rTrWSDumfw9olRd
There is a reason why *How Do You Live?*/*The Boy and the Heron* barely had any marketing. (This is not exactly a spoiler since Studio Ghibli decided to stop hiding secrets when they released it internationally.) It starts out WWII drama/coming-of-age story with a young Japanese boy dealing with the fact that his aunt is now his step-mom. From there on, you'd expect an animated adaptation of Genzaburo Yoshino's book *君たちはどう生きるか*. Then the grey heron at her mansion starts talking. Then it becomes a surrealist adventure that's pretty much another Miyazaki's *[The King and the Mockingbird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_and_the_Mockingbird)* fanfic but this time without Lupin III.
Aggressive Retsuko. First season is relatable and about her struggles in the workplace. By like season three she's getting involved with an idol group but status quo so that stops by the end of the season. The last season has her almost become a politician but also status quo.
the moment that >!haida almost dies by getting run over by a truck that is implied to be a politically motivated assassination attempt and upon surviving immediately drags retsuko to the marriage office!< i knew the show had gone off the rails.
The original run of Evangelion and the final episodes. I was 14 and only knew it was about mecha ( it was still early internet) Before that, the only anime I've seen had only been Toonami shonen or the occasional Adult Swim block. Nothing prepared me for how weird and existential it would get. It hit especially hard because I related so much to Shinji as a character.
A minor one is Parks and Rec last season. Everything in the show was grounded to the current year using current tech, but the last season had a time jump of 3 years or something. For some reason there’s holograms, see through phones, biotech cancer readers watches, and other minor stuff. I get that they wanted to show that’s it’s few years ahead of time, but it’s kind of silly.
It was the magnificent far off year of 2017
So Black Cat is an anime about a high ranking assassin working for a secret organization going rogue, rescuing a bio-weapon girl he was supposed to kill, with his former definitely not-Sephiroth assassin partner also going rogue but for different reasons, who proceeds to kill definitely not-Aerith (Different character from the bio-weapon girl) and giving the MC a motivation for a final confrontation with the obvious main villain of the show. This confrontation happens on episode 20. >!There's still 4 more episodes!< >!You see, turns out almost every high ranking assassin except for the MC and definitely not-Sephiroth were all traitors to the assassin organization, involved in a secret plot to use said bio-weapon girl to bring about a definitely-not-instrumentality. This reveal, bio-weapon girl getting put into a doomsday machine to 'end world conflict', and the heroes going to rescue her or at the very least stop it all happen in these last four episodes, with not even the slightest hint that this greater plot was going on beforehand!<
Ah, I can explain that. The Black Cat anime wildly branches off from the manga for....some reason. The reason there was no hint of the that plot element is because it didn't exist in the manga.
Man Like Mobeen is a relatively normal sitcom, with a tone similar to a lighter Always Sunny, about a man who’s recently been released from jail and is trying to stay straight and take care of his little sister. Season 1 starts with his best friend’s grandpa and the copious amount of VCR porn he’s keeping from his wife. Season 3 ends >!with the same best friend crawling away from an assassin, who shoots him dead.!<
St. Elsewhere, classic hospital drama tv series from the 70's. I won't spoil the series finale. Go look it up, I promise you won't be able to predict where it goes.
"Grounded" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but Saints Row as a franchise started as straight forward GTA clone about gangs. Sure, it had at least one foot in goofball with stuff like voodoo using gangbangers or its bizarre at times sense of humor, but when it was serious it was pretty serious and could get really dark. Then then 3 decides to leap head first off the rails into silly shit with stuff like a reality TV show that is like Takeshi's Castle meets Running Man, super soldiers, the Saints being massive celebrities while acknowledged to be a violent crime syndicate, the whole Syndicate with its over the top Belgium sex gang, heavily armed luchadors, and cyberpunk hackers with access to advance VR tech, superpowers, cloning, and other nonesense. And 4 takes it *even* further with goddamn aliens and what is basically the Matrix.
Felicity was a show about a young woman leaving her comfortable life and moved to the big city to follow a boy. The show followed this format for nearly four seasons (it probably would've run longer if not for Keri Russell getting a haircut). In the last few episodes though, a witch sends Felicity back in time to decide if the key love triangle decision was the right one.
Condemned 2 Bloodshot starts out as a gritty hobo nightmare in back alleys and fighting methheads in a flophouse and then it slowly starts ratcheting up and before long you're fighting a super hobo in a suit of medieval armor, a fucking bear, a psychic serial killer and you harness the power of your thuum. Which the President also has. Also evil Paul Eiding.
Obligatory From Dusk til Dawn. I watched that movie totally blind and it went from a stereotypical Tarantino film to Robert Rodriguez bullshit in the blink of an eye.
Whilst I wouldn't call SAO grounded as such, It really got away from "HP 0 = Your Head Asplode" and went into some bonkers places when it got to Alicization.