10 Sci-Fi TV Shows You Can Quit Before The End

Sci-Fi TV Show Endings That Failed - Heroes, Lost, Supernatural, X-Files & More.

By Alastair Greenwell /

Sometimes it's best to quit when you're ahead, to go out on a high note, to leave the stage when everyone thinks you're the best thing going. Sometimes it's best not to stretch yourself out for so long that you become a parody of yourself. A lot of shows managed to drag themselves over the finish line and then, for some reason, keep on going. Some shows didn't even realise that they'd crossed the best ending point some time ago and that they were best not to have gone on as long as they ultimately did.

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This doesn't mean that these shows are altogether bad, of course. It means that they just needed a bit of selective trimming, a bit of audience alteration. While it's in production, the executives, the producers and the showrunners of series will determine what goes into a show. But when it's on your screen, the viewer has the ultimate control over what parts of the show you watch, imbued within their remote control.

So, here are ten such sci-fi, fantasy, and general genre shows that you really don't need to watch until the end.

10. Star Trek: Enterprise

Star Trek: Enterprise was a show that didn't get a lot of love to start off with. It stumbled through its first two largely forgettable seasons with only a few nods to anything interesting, then decided to finally kick it up a notch for the last episode of its second year. The third season saw the well-thought-out Xindi War arc, and the fourth season focussed on actually being a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series (who'd have thought!).

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The fourth season covered such Trek-tastic features like the reason some Klingons have smooth foreheads in The Original Series, the forming of the Federation and the beginnings of the first Earth-Romulan War, and the evolution of the Vulcans. All of these stellar plots seemed to be happily ticking along until the show's abrupt cancellation in 2005.

And thus These Are the Voyages series finale was hastily scripted and put into production. The final episode of the series provides not just a ten-year time jump for the main crew, but also a 200-year time jump - as the narrative frame of the episode is Commander Riker and Deanna Troi watching the events in the holodeck of the Enterprise D.

Don't watch the last episode. Leave it at the second-to-last one, Terra Prime. Archer's speech to the gathered delegates may not have been as grand as the actual founding of the Federation that we were hoping for, but it served the same purpose.

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