It was conceptualized as a miniseries and not really intended to go beyond the first season. They didn't write it to have a plot post season one so it goes off the rails quickly as they tried to capture the original essence that made it popular while winging it on the story. Hell they didn't even originally write it to have as many episodes in the first season as they ended up having and iirc they even considered just making a movie instead

Season 5 is, you guessed it, another prison. This time in the middle east.

Talks of a reboot/relaunch are being thrown around rn

It's so sad! So much potential and then. That.

I actually think that seasons 3&4 ruined the previous seasons. The issues presented in the later seasons were all present before then, but weren’t as obvious.

Shaka, when the walls fell.

The Expanse (books, never finished the show) went really hard on this. It was difficult for me to finish because it was all just people being dumb for more than 100k pages with aliens thrown in for no reason.

When it was still new I watched the first season then quickly got bored of the second. Around episode 3. I said to myself "I'm going to start the last episode of this season and if they're still on this fucking farm then I am never fucking watching it again"

And it was so.

NO idea why everyone else seemed to feel differently about it.

I think S3 of Westworld was enjoyable and had a lot of good ideas, even if it was a tad disconnected from the original island they were from.

But, S4 just went too far. I was still kind of okay with the sudden shift at the second half, because the progression did sort of make sense. But, that whole arc after that was just overreach and too many god-like characters in the mix.

I can't believe they planned on having another season after that. How do you change the world to that degree and figure out some other season to solve all of the plot threads?

The whole writing process stunk of season-to-season short-term bullshit, without an overarching start-to-finish plan for the whole series. This is why Mr. Robot excels and Westworld didn't.

I wanted to come here to say Westworld. I never managed to finish the last season, I just lost complete interest in it. Great first season though and the second was also still enjoyable.

I've seen (and loved) the first season fairly recently, but after hearing so many people saying that the show went off the rails I decided early on that I was only gonna watch the one.

Would you say I'm missing out?

Had to scroll way too long to see this answer. It's the first one that came to my mind.

Can't disagree more. I do think the clear conflicts between HBO and the executive producers (there's entire scenes in S4 dedicated to a meta-FU to the corporate demand for telling the violence story and not the maze in field story) led to a more disjointed later seasons than planned.

But rewatching S1 it's clear that the twist at the end of S4 was planned from the very start, which is just wild, and probably the biggest temporal misdirection in the history of film and TV — fitting from Jonathan Nolan, but still unexpected.

And then if you go and see the original Westworld film, the degree to which they were already starting off with such a different take can be even more appreciated. It goes from a film about a robot rebellion where the robots can talk but literally no one ever asks why it's happening or even talks to the robot at all to a series of "if you can't tell the difference does it matter?"

S2 has terrible pacing and I do think there are various issues with how S3-S4 progresses in certain arcs, but the broad plot was very clearly planned from the start in hindsight, but HBO had it out for them (look at how quickly after the cancellation the series wasn't even available on HBO's streaming properties), and unfortunately they didn't get the S5 to reveal just how much had been layered in earlier on.

Most folks who are familiar with it know it by its first incarnation, where Lassie is a farm dog who spends her days with the farm boy named Little Timmy.

That's the second incarnation. Before Timmy, lassie belonged to a slightly older kid named Jeff. Then one day Jeff's parents randomly decided to drop everything and move to England. They couldn't bring lassie with them for some reason so they gave her to Timmys family. I assume Jeff died about 10 minutes after he got off the plane with no lassie to save him from his own misadventures.

Roseanne really went off the rails more than her show did.

Not a big fan of them getting rid of Jerry O'Connell and replacing him with an alternate universe version of himself, but his other self was pretty interesting enough, I guess.

I will die on the hill that this is the single show from the 90s that is most deserving of a reboot/reimagining or even a continuation would be satisfying. Though if they made it back home these days they'd still think it was a parallel Earth.

I still hate that show for making me sit through 7 seasons or whatever of cliffhangers and then answer none of them

My favorite abandoned plot was Michael's son. Weird kid that has weird things happen around him, like multiple birds killing themselves by flying into the windows of whatever building he's in.

Then puberty hit that poor child actor like a sack of bricks, and the show runners just decided to write him out and never bring up that plot again.

I mean, it played out like a lot of action focused anime:

• Step 1: Come up with an interesting concept (big human eating monsters)
• Step 2: ??? (maybe a training arc)
• Step 3: Fight God

You mean to tell me that the machine that turned him into Stephan wasn't real?

Ask Chief O'Brien...

And, speaking of Star Trek:
3rd season of Enterprise: WTF?

I'll be there in 15 minutes.

Watch, as Kiefer Sutherland ages 7 years in just one week!

I love how they had so many moles every season. Worst vetting ever

NCUTI AND whittaker, although its more to blame on the showrunner. Whittaker especially had problems with how the show was being run. ncuti was a weaker show than even whittakers runs. Rani, missy, masters all had such better storylines.

ive watched 1-3 probably two dozen times. ive won pub quizes about AD. season 4, yes we all know.. i actually prefer the remix as i never liked staying with one character for an entire episode.

i do not really remember season 5

This assumes they had a plot or purpose to stray from to begin with.

Between the non-nonsensical plot twists, and occasionally running with ideas that coincidentally cropped up in fan forums only the year before, it was pretty clear the writers barely knew more than the audience. Then it came time to end the series, but since they didn't have a long-range plan, it was clumsy, didn't resolve all the loose ends, and was generally kind of bad. So they soft-rebooted it for one more season, whose ending was even worse.

Totally agree and I love it for that, the shit that happens in that show is wild.

I'd argue that Community simply took a couple of episodes before it found its rails.

Yeah, it kinda fell prey to Shonen-itis. Power-scaling in this genre requires a steady and firm hand to keep the show on a slow burn, without having to jump to "Super-Sayian 4 God Kaio-Ken x10" shenanigans.

I will say that the show still has some golden moments. The "stinky food battle" had some of the best reactions and visuals.

Did you know they rebooted reboot?

It was live action for some reason, and the live action people became computer animated for some reason.

And for reasons I can't understand that show exists! Isn't life interesting and whimsical?