The Ending Changes Everything: Difference between revisions

See also [[Unreliable Narrator]]. Less straightforward than [[All Just a Dream]], and usually more confusing than [[Or Was It a Dream?]]. Compare [[Through the Eyes of Madness]], which is a [[Mind Screw]] with similar effects (we can't be sure how much of what we're seeing is true) but accomplished in a different way. May be connected to a [[Kansas City Shuffle]] by one of the characters.

'''''SPOILERS AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!'''''

** The most frustrating part is that it isn't definitive either way; whether any of it is fake or real.

*** [[Word of God|The director himself has said]] the ending is meant to be ambiguous.

* In ''After.Life'' [[Liam Neeson]] plays a mortician named Elliot who claims to have the ability to [[Psychopomp|speak to the dead]]. Throughout the movie, he talks to the main character (who is dead) in hopes of getting her to move on with her life. It turns out in the end that he was lying the whole time and that the main character was alive the whole time. However, there have been foreshadowing for ''both'' options on whether he was lying or not. With lots of those moments pointing towards the former. [[Complete Monster|And one large hint that he]] [[Karma Houdini|has been doing it for a long time]].

* In ''[[Shutter Island]]'', we learn at the end that the protagonist isn't a cop anymore; just a delusional mental patient. Everyone he's met, including his partner, has been playing along in the hope that it'll let him get over it and the apparent conspiracy was all in his mind. Not only that, but he killed his wife; it was this incident that caused his psychotic break and he's been blocking it out.

** Another episode ends with the perp(?) delivering this [[Mind Screw|immortal line]] - "I swear to God it's the truth... even if it never happened."<ref>Which, it should be noted, is a [[Shout-Out]] to ''[[One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest]]''.</ref>

* ''[[Nowhere Man]]'', an early UPN drama, was about a man who was [[Unperson|UnPersoned]] over a compromising photograph of U.S. Soldiers executing Third World peasants. He traveled the country trying to unravel the conspiracy that was behind his erasure and reclaim his old life. After twenty-odd episodes of [[Mind Screw]] and conflicting explanations about why the photo was important, the finale closed with [[The Reveal]] that his old life never existed. He was really a government agent that had been captured by the conspiracy and implanted with false memories, and his entire cross-country odyssey had been a test of how much of the lie he would believe. This may have been intended to lead into a second season, but it was never produced.

* The final episode of ''[[Roseanne]]'', in which {{spoiler|it's revealed that all of the show's characters are simply altered versions of the real people in Roseanne's life.}}

** And further that {{spoiler|a number of key events and facts were altered... including that the 'real' Roseanne's husband ''died'' of the heart attack Dan survived.}}

* Derren Brown's ''The Seance'' is about a seance involving 12 medical students who committed suicide. The volunteers "make contact" with a young woman named Jane, complete with video and evidence confirming the things stated by the volunteer-turned medium. At the end, Derren explains some of what happened, asks the volunteers to wait, and walks outside. {{spoiler|He reaches "Jane" in the van, perfectly alive, and calls her inside to meet the volunteers.}} The only thing missing is a rimshot. A good deal of Brown's specials have something like this.

* Parodied on ''[[Saturday Night Live]]'' with Kevin Spacey as host (in an obvious reference to the end of [[The Usual Suspects]]). Andy Samberg was late to rehearsals and Spacey starts to give him a verbal beating, only for Samberg to relate a long and complicated story that explains his tardiness including meeting up with [[Radiohead]] and having to confront one of those human statues who wore gold paint. Spacey forgives him and lets him go, only to turn around and see elements of the story on his back wall. Radiohead came from a mannequin head on top of a radio and the gold painted human statue was a picture of Spacey with his Oscar. It then went a step further, showing an entire line of items and symbols that spells out an entire sentence Pictionary-style.

* The [[Milestone Celebration|100th Episode]] of ''[[The Big Bang Theory]]'' plays this way. The episode starts off with an homage to the pilot with Leonard seeing Penny across [[Girl Next Door|the hallway]] and instinctively asks her out, being almost two years since they broke up. Most of the episode was then about the various pitfalls reinforcing why they had such a hard time dating in the first place, with Leonard admitting every scenario for them inside his head ends badly and Penny telling him he overthinks things. The episode then jumps back to the first scene in the hallway, the episode being him contemplating whether her should ask her out again. Despite the "bad ending" he imagined he decided to do it anyway and the episode ends by contrasting real life with his imagination, proving that his imagined scenario may not be the end outcome.