9 TV Shows That Left Huge Unanswered Questions Behind
Unresolved issues from series recent and classic.
Ending a TV show on the right note is notoriously tricky. When a movie botches its conclusion, the fans are left feeling like they've wasted two hours of their lives, but where the small screen is concerned, it's significantly longer than that.
This inevitably means showrunners and networks incur the wrath of irate fans if their grand finale is anything less than stellar, though the old 'can't please everyone' adage definitely applies here.
There are many things to consider when bringing the curtain down on a series. Should certain characters die? Does the conclusion need to be neat and tidy, or is there room for ambiguity? And is it worth leaving the door open for a reunion down the line?
Some TV shows have ended on a cliffhanger that was never resolved, likely because a cancellation order wasn't foreseen, while others doled out an open-ended finale and left the fans to draw their own conclusions. Moreover, there are series which have ended definitely, on their own terms, yet still left a dangling plot thread behind.
Here are the unanswered questions that TV series both recent and classic have allowed to linger indefinitely.
9. The Sopranos: Was Tony Whacked?
There were many possible endgames for The Sopranos. Would Tony end up dead, behind bars, or on the run? All of these scenarios were teased during the show's stellar six-season run, but the only thing creator David Chase chose to assassinate in the grand finale was TV conventions.
Rather than ending in the traditional sense, the gangster show left viewers in the dark... literally, abruptly hitting them with a black screen and forcing them to draw their own conclusions (once they'd checked the wires on the cable box).
Whatever your opinion of Chase's decision to go avant-garde right at the death, Tony Soprano's ultimate fate goes down in TV history as an unresolved issue, because there is no definitive version of what happens next. Sure, people have written lengthy essays on the subject, and the most likely conclusion is that he was shot in the back of the head in that diner, but the debate can never truly be laid to rest.
Chase insists that all the information you need is there in that final, subtle scene, and if you take a forensic deep dive into every frame, there's compelling evidence that Tony was indeed whacked, but there will always be those who can never accept a major character is dead unless they see the corpse.