Cosmic Deadline: Difference between revisions

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* Various [[Yoshiyuki Tomino]] series tend to end like this, mainly because his earlier series kept getting [[Cut Short]]. Especially egregious for [[Space Runaway Ideon]], which ends on a text summary. [[The Movie]] covered the events of the summary, [[Kill'Em All|and,]] [[Downer Ending|well...]]

* The ending of the original ''[[Gunnm]]'' due to the fact that Yukito Kishiro wrote it on what he thought would be his deathbed. When he recovered he revived the series as ''Last Order'', which mostly ignores the final volume of the original.

* The first two rounds of ''[[Flame of Recca]]'s'' [[Tournament Arc]] are at a glacial pace: each fight takes 2 or 3 episodes to resolve, a bunch of unimportant minor characters get long flashbacks to their backstories, etc. Suddenly, the heroes are winning matches by default when the minor characters withdraw from the tournament, Recca goes through a super-accelerated [[Training ~~From~~ Hell]] to gain the power he needs to fight the [[Big Bad]]—clearly the show was cancelled abruptly and the creative team only had a half-dozen episodes to wrap-up the plot.

* The first two rounds of ''[[Flame of Recca]]'s'' [[Tournament Arc]] are at a glacial pace: each fight takes 2 or 3 episodes to resolve, a bunch of unimportant minor characters get long flashbacks to their backstories, etc. Suddenly, the heroes are winning matches by default when the minor characters withdraw from the tournament, Recca goes through a super-accelerated [[Training from Hell]] to gain the power he needs to fight the [[Big Bad]]—clearly the show was cancelled abruptly and the creative team only had a half-dozen episodes to wrap-up the plot.

* ''[[Street Fighter II]] V'' was supposed to last 50 or so episodes, but due to low ratings, it was truncated to only 29 episodes. Because of this, M. Bison comes out from out of nowhere during the Spain arc with no foreshadowing and a lot of different sub-plots begin to occur at the same time (Ken and Chun-Li are kidnapped and taken to M. Bison's base; Guile and Charlie are hired by Ken's father to rescue him; M. Bison sends out Zangief to kidnap Ryu; and Balrog hires Cammy to assassinate Chun-Li's father, which results in a confrontation between Cammy and Fei-Long when Chun-Li's father ends up in a coma).

* In the type of Contests held in the ''[[Pokémon (anime)|Pokémon]]'' anime, Coordinators need 5 Ribbons to enter the [[Tournament Arc|Grand Festival]]. The Contest the main character has to enter in order to win her last requisite Ribbon always happens to be the last official Contest before the Festival happens, giving her an urgency to win that Contest or else she has to wait for another Grand Festival next season. Keep in mind that this kind of situation happens ''twice'' to May (once in Hoenn, the other in Kanto). In the former, she almost crosses the [[Despair Event Horizon]] when the group was stranded on an island a day before the last Contest, and in the latter, one of her rivals, Harley, is trying to sabotage May's efforts in the Contest inexplicably for this very reason. The other Coordinator protagonist that succeeds May, Dawn, manages to avert this, since she wins her last Ribbon long before the Grand Festival for her season begins.

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** Exposition is heaped on the viewer. Massive numbers of characters are killed {{spoiler|and by massive, I mean the entire population of earth.}} Motivations for main villains are only just revealed here, and many are too vague to make out without looking things up in a wiki. Regardless of what you think of the film's quality, it's undeniable very messy.

* ''[[Senki Zesshou Symphogear]]''. The episode count was halved around the time it started airing. End result: The [[Drak Magical Girl]]'s [[Heel Face Turn]] proceeds ludicrously quickly, the [[Big Bad]]'s nature and plan comes out of nowhere, and there's little to no explanation for the nature of the magical stuff.

* Due to a desperate race between the publisher and [[Ken Akamatsu]] for the copyrights, ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'' ended up concluding the [[Myth Arc]] [[Gecko Ending|with all the abruptness]] of a [[Torch the Franchise and Run|rocket car hitting a brick wall]] right around the time the characters were seven eighths of the way through the fights at the [[Disc One Final Dungeon|Gravekeeper's Palace]]. The following quests (including the one to defeat the [[Big Bad]]) took place entirely offscreen, and what few of the innumerable dangling plot threads were actually given anything resembling resolution was in an unsatisfyingly brief and vague [[Where Are They Now? Epilogue]] montage.

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* The last two books of ''[[The Dark Tower]]'' sped things up intensively, and characters ''finally'' got started on solving problems present from the third book. Interestingly, the last three books in that series were written shortly after Stephen King himself almost died (this fact became a plot point). Apparently, he suddenly realised he wouldn't live forever, and made an intense effort to finish the series before another car hit him. Among fans, the results are controversial.

* In many of his early novels (particularly the "juveniles"), [[Robert A. Heinlein]] would wrap up the plot in a page or two, often leaving the story unresolved. As noted in the description, this was probably due to word count/length limitations.

* Some of the books in Steven Erikson's ''[[Malazan Book of the Fallen]]'' become veritable blood baths near the end as the story comes full circle and doomed characters are killed off. ''Midnight Tides'' and ''Reaper's Gale'' are the most bloody examples.

* The whole ''[[Harry Potter]]'' series. We only learn what Horcruxes are in Book 6 (out of 7). As a result, while only two Horcruxes have been found and destroyed by the end of book 6, the heroes must find and destroy four of them over the course of ONE book. ''[[Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows|Deathly Hallows]]'' then continues this trend: After too many pages detailing a camping trip and other hairsbreadth escapes, suddenly the Trio arrives at {{spoiler|Hogwarts}} and {{spoiler|Horcruxes are destroyed lickety-split (even ''offscreen'')}}, ''truckloads'' of important, nay, essential information is revealed, and the plot relevant (or irrelevant) deaths start cropping up all over the place.

* This occurred often in the early ''[[Discworld]]'' books, with a plot being set up in the first 200 pages, and then resolved in five.

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** In [[Mistborn|The Well of Ascension]], Vin and Elend threaten Straff Venture by burning [[Limit Break|duralumin]] and [[Emotion Bomb|brass]] at him.

** In [[Mistborn|The Hero of Ages]], [[Physical God|Ruin]] kills [[Physical God|Preservation]].

** In [[The Stormlight Archive|The Way Of Kings]], Sadeas betrays Dalinar and abandons him to die.

* [[The ~~Nights~~ Dawn Trilogy|Night's Dawn]] ends in between 50 and 100 pages, after taking more than ''3000'' to get to that point.

* [[The Night's Dawn Trilogy|Night's Dawn]] ends in between 50 and 100 pages, after taking more than ''3000'' to get to that point.

* All of Richard Hooker and William Butterworth's ''M*A*S*H Goes to...'' sequels are subject to this, more pronouncedly as the series continues. The books have six to ten plots and subplots that get more and more convoluted and intertwined until roughly page 170. Then suddenly ''everything is resolved'' (happily for the protagonists and the young lovers, of course) in the space of 10 to 15 pages.

* Many of the books in [[The Wheel of Time]] series have far more plot in the last 50 to 100 pages than they do in the several hundred it takes to get to that point.

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* Arguably, ''[[Firefly]]/Serenity''. The show was canceled without any resolution to the plot, so the major would-have-been-a-two-season-long-[[Arc]] (according to [[Word of God]]) [[The Resolution Will Not Be Televised|got tied up over the course of a movie barely longer than the pilot episode]].

* Ditto ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' and ''[[The Ark of Truth]]''. The really screwy thing here is that SG-1 had several season finales that could have easily served as series finales, each with increasing amounts of closure for the series (including ''ending the conflict that ran throughout the whole series''), and then they cancel it mid-plot.

* Joss Whedon has really fallen foul of this one. Besides the ''[[Firefly]]'' example above, both ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' and its spinoff, ''[[Angel]]'' fell victim to this.

** ''Buffy'' was supposed to have another season at least to help tie up various character threads including Willow's feelings about magic and Dawn's feelings about being the key, but Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy) wanted to quit the show to work on her movie career so Dawn's plot was all but dropped and Willow was shoe-horned into a new relationship and her uneasiness about magic [[Just for Pun|magically]] healed.

** ''Angel'' on the other hand was cancelled by the network early into its 5th season but was allowed to finish out the year, meaning the writers had to hurry to let Angel defeat the series long [[Big Bad|big bads]] Wolfram & Hart as well as tie up romantic loose ends like finding Angel a new werewolf girlfriend and pairing off Wesley and Fred (who also died in a plot that would have been a much longer arc otherwise). The shanshu plot thread was dropped as well, [[Running Gag|magically]]

*** Subverted in the Angel episode Awakening (which aired in the middle of the fourth season), in which the breakneck happy ending is at last revealed to be a mind screw, an illusion designed to give Angel a damning moment of perfect happiness. Incidentally, the episode is quite a stunning display of the writing staffs' skills, showing how, no matter how knotty and overheated the narrative has become, it can be satisfyingly resolved anytime at the drop of a hat.

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* This arguably worked out for the best for ''[[Point Pleasant]]''. When it became evident that the show was going to be cancelled the writers started rushing to resolve things, and the results were actually kind of thrilling. Prior to this the show had featured demon-sponsored dance-off with the characters facing the horror of...a disco ball coming unscrewed.

* The second season of ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'' suffered from this. The writers' strike hit halfway through production of the season, and the writers were basically forced to end the season in about half an episode, instead of another 11 or so. This caused several plot lines, which eventually would have been woven into the main thread, to be left completely hanging, most notable being Peter stranding Caitlin in a horrifying alternate future, never to escape according to [[Word of God]].

* This is also incredibly apparent in the last few episodes of [[Dead Like Me]], which had been canceled.

* This happened to a 1999 Brazilian drama named ''Brida'', a loose adaptation of a novel by Paulo Coelho. Most of the network's employees went on strike because of ''really late'' paychecks, [[Captain Obvious|including the actors]]. So what did the writers do? The 52nd episode ended with [[Where Are They Now? Epilogue|narration summarizing everything that would happen in the ending with matching character shots.]]

* In season 5 of ''[[Lost]]'', the flaming arrow attack on the camp slaughters every [[Red Shirt|minor background character]] because the show was due to end in season 6 and they needed to be gotten rid of before then

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* ''[[Legacy of Kain]]: Soul Reaver'' ends very abruptly as a result of the deadline its developers were under. The finished game contains foreshadowing to the chopped out bits, which were eventually worked into the later titles in heavily modified forms. This is probably one of the few instances where a Cosmic Deadline actually ''[[Tropes Are Not Bad|benefited]]'' a series as a whole: The original ending effectively closed off the series to any more sequels, with Raziel wiping out the vampires and restoring the Pillars finally. While the cliffhanger was infuriating to many, the resulting plotline was well worth it.

* ''[[Xenogears]]'' had its budget killed off and schedule moved forward significantly around the halfway point of development. As a result, the game ended up adopting the infamous "interview chairs" design in order to dump a metric ton of exposition in what felt like a forced manner.

* ''[[Kingdom Hearts]] II'': Naturally, the Big Bad Organisation XIII have to be killed off before the end of the story. But they could have come up with a better way to clean up the last few members than having Sora come across a room with a locked door that will only open if all the members are dead, and have the room equipped with convenient portals that teleport him directly to the remaining members.

* Square-Enix is prone to this -- ''[[Final Fantasy IX]]'''s [[The Very Definitely Final Dungeon|Very Definitely Final Dungeon]] goes past 'trippy' and into 'incomprehensible,' introducing 'the source of all life' with no build-up, followed by famed [[Giant Space Flea From Nowhere]] with vague motivations, Necron.

* The ''[[Devil May Cry]]'' games (at least the first one) because the bosses keep running away to try again later, so you end up fighting most of them for their third and final round right near the end. ''Onimusha 2'' did the same thing.

* ''[[Tales of the Abyss]]'' has this, with the recurring bosses you've been fighting for 60 hours suddenly going from "you beat me, I'd better retreat" to "you beat me, blarg I am dead" all at once.

** Though one character who dies ''onscreen'' comes back later with [[Unexplained Recovery|no explanation whatsoever]].

* ''[[Star Wars]] [[Knights of the Old Republic]] II'' got hit with this ''hard,'' it had the most non-endingest of non-endings ever witnessed. Fortunately, The Sith Lord Restoration project aims to fix most of this problem.

* ''[[Xenosaga]] Episode III'' is written as if the creators sat there with a checklist of every major plot thread that needed to be resolved by the end. However, considering that the series was originally going to be longer, its understandable.

** Especially when you consider the rate at which the villains collect the Vessels of Anima; one is collected early on, another presumably just after, cut ahead a long timr, and the rest are collected within the span of two or three hours. There are ''twelve'' of them in total. Naturally, the villains can't take the four being used by the heroes for obvious reasons, but ''still''.

* ''[[Fallout|Fallout 3's]]'' main plot is a serious offender - after hunting for a series of loose plotlines, everything is suddenly resolved with one fight that would be epic, if the player could actually participate beyond taking potshots at the few enemies who survive the overbearing might of your allies.

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[[Category:Pacing Problems]]

[[Category:Ending Tropes]]

[[Category:~~Cosmic Deadline~~]]

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