10 TV Finales That Messed With Your Brain
9. Mork And Mindy - ‘Gotta Run’
Famous for starting the career of the legendary Robin Williams, Mork & Mindy spun off the titular alien oddball’s guest spot on fifties nostalgia fest Happy Days to bring US audiences of the late seventies and early eighties the fish-out-of-water adventures of the happy-go-lucky Mork and his long-suffering human bestie Mindy.
By the fourth season, the formula had grown incredibly stale and the writing was on the wall, leading us to the three part climax ‘Gotta Run’ and legitimately the weirdest ever ending to a cheesy multi-camera sitcom.
By now married with a kid, the pair are befriended by Kalnik, another alien who’s also married to an earthling named Tracy, but eventually suspect his true intentions and find he’s there to kill them both. Tracy is revealed to be a bomb (!) and explodes, destroying Mindy’s home and sending them on the run.
To escape the assassin, the family vanish into a time vortex but don’t arrive where they’re supposed to. The final shot is a prehistoric cave painting showing the two of them standing, gazing at the sunset.
Without a season five renewal, that would have been the last anyone saw of the show, so post-cancellation, quick-thinking producers rejigged the broadcast order to have an innocuous, formulaic episode round off the series, never explaining what had happened or how things got back to normal again. Which, of course, made things so much worse.