9 Great TV Characters Underused In Their Show's Final Season
Not everyone gets a nice goodbye in the last season.
By the time the final season of a TV Show rolls around, fans find themselves more attached to the cast than ever. After all, spending multiple seasons following the same characters' adventures and growth makes them feel almost like real people, and a final season means saying goodbye to those people forever.
While many shows take advantage of this sentimentality and give their stars as much focus as ever for the final season, others barely use some of their best characters, despite having only a few episodes left with them. This can often be frustrating to watch, since these great characters who fans have grown to love and care for don't have much to do this season and won't get to make it up with more lines in the next, since there will never be another. Even when they appear in some capacity, their screen time always feels lacking.
Here are 9 Great TV Characters Underused in Their Show's Final Season.
This list will not include characters written out before the final season, such as Pierce and Troy from Community, or who those who only cameo in the final season, such as Shirley from Community or Michael, Kelly, and Ryan from the Office. Instead, it will focus on characters with somewhat large roles in their final seasons, albeit smaller roles than usual.
9. Claire Temple - Luke Cage
Fans of the Marvel Netflix Universe owe a great deal to Claire Temple. She appeared in five of the six television series, helped assemble the Defenders (that sounds kinda wrong), and stitched up Matt Murdock more times than we can count, even though she only appears in a handful of Daredevil episodes.
Clarie plays the largest role in Luke Cage. Throughout the first season, she acts as Luke's ally, nurse, and love interest, receiving more development and screen time than any of her other MCU Netflix appearances. Claire wandered from show to show like a TV nomad, but Luke Cage felt like her home.
However, she barely appears in Luke Cage's second and final season. Actress Rosario Dawson was demoted from series regular to "special guest star" status for the first three episodes, her only appearances of the season. In the third episode, Wig Out, Luke and Claire break up, and she leaves Luke Cage, and the Marvel Netflix Universe, for good.
The final line of Luke Cage is the title character turning down an opportunity to see Claire again. For a character who has saved every single Defender, Clarie deserved better.