4. Quantum Leap
Quantum Leap was one of the coolest shows of its time, following Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) as he leapt through time into the bodies of various people, making hilarious overuse of the phrase, "Oh boy". The focus of Sam's travels throughout the show were to find a way home, hoping that eventually he would stop quantum-leaping and just wind up where he started. This would make sense in order to give fans an emotive, satisfying finale, but perhaps in the interest of staying true to the ludicrous, far-flung concept, the randomness of the quantum leap doesn't just magically provide a solution. That's right, Sam never returns home, though he does learn how to harness and control his leaping to tell the wife of Al - his hologramatic buddy - that he is, in fact still alive. We then fade to black, and a title card simply tells us that Sam never got home. A title scrawl explaining the end to us feels like a bad video game that ran out of money close to the finish line; was there not enough in the budget to shoot a scene that conveyed this to us in a less clinical, flippant way? Fans who had stayed glued to their sets for years were basically shafted in this threadbare finale.