a lot of great episodes are let down by their endings to an extent that all the good from before is overshadowed. The quintessecential example for me is Frontier in Space, which is great up until the final few minutes where the central conflict is forgotten about so we can lead into Planet of the Daleks, leaving a lot of Frontier in Space unresolved.
Some lesser examples that don’t really ruin the stories but are still bad, is like the um “joke” at the end of Love and Monsters, of at the end of the Almost People where they kill ganger Amy despite spending the previous 90 minutes arguing that gangers are people worthy of life
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To be fair to Frontier in Space, that was a production issue where Letts was unhappy with the wobbly orange Ogron-eating monster and so had to minimise it’s appearances which resulted in the ending, including Delgado’s final scenes for the show, having to be edited rather haphazardly.
I don’t think any ending can ‘overshadow’ a story I have enjoyed though. I think the joke at the end of Love & Monsters was a bad choice but I still really like the story. I might roll my eyes a bit but, ultimately, in most cases it’s just a creative decision I don’t like.
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I think the problems with Love & Monsters’ ending extend beyond the bad joke, I think really the whole ending is mostly just pretty boring and even setting aside the joke the decision to bring Ursula back in the concrete slab and play that as somehow better than dying honestly baffles me.
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Well, you know, I liked Kerblam! before the messaging issues, and a lot of those could have been fixed with a different ending.
I’d also suggest the Doctor deciding to prevent Britain’s Golden Age by taking down Harriet Jones at the end of The Christmas Invasion (and I particularly don’t like how he did it, too), thereby paving the way for Saxon as Prime Minister instead. Of course, I’m trying to think whether I’d actually consider that an otherwise good story…
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If you’re interested in novelizations, I just read Kerblam’s the other day and I think it manages to stick the landing a bit better than the episode did
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My answer is definitely Power of Three. Really great setup and lots of fun stuff happening and then an awful rushed nothing of an ending.
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Reading the novelizations of the Chibnall era in general sounds like a good idea, since feeling like the episode script needed another pass is pretty common for those episodes for me.
I’d actually love to read a version of Orphan 55 that’d do it justice…
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Again that’s because of production issues - Steven Berkoff was an absolute pain and horrendously unprofessional by all accounts and they had to make do with what they could salvage from the shoot.
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yeah, thats fair, I think refering to the bad joke is mostly just shorthand for the whole ending
ooof yeah definitely agree about Kerblam
Hmmm, I don’t know about overshadowing, but a lot of the 60s serials (especially the Hartnell ones) are concluded very quickly, almost in the middle of the resolution, which kind of annoys me. Although I understand the rationale behind that, I prefer my endings to be slightly more prolonged.
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“Can You Hear Me?”. A wonderful concept, so delightfully weird, and actually frightening antagonists, only to be beaten in seconds by something that came out of nowhere. It should’ve been a two parter… It even had the perfect setup. They were about to turn Earth into a living nightmare. A perfect opportunity for a Martha Jones year that never was style episode, while navigating the Earth with all of humanity’s nightmares come to life and ruled by two callous gods. Such a perfect opportunity for what could have been such a cool concept, that was wasted along with the intriguing villains.
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Honestly, I would not have been able to be invested in that episode had it existed 
I just don’t enjoy episodes like Last of the Time Lords or The Lie of the Land because I always know it’s just going to go right back to status quo at the end, and it does, which I find really frustrating lol. But I see your point! I enjoy that episode as it is but I did feel Rakaya was slightly underwhelming.
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Nightshade. Either make it Ace’s exit story, or let her be the one to decide to leave in the TARDIS again, rather than making the Doctor literally kidnap her away from the ending she chose, an then leaving any emotional resolution to that for a future book… except it’s never actually picked up on??
That ending is fully non-canon in my mind lol.
The rest of the book? Brilliant.
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I’m going to say The Flux, if that whole series can be considered a single storyline.
The first four episodes were absolutely amazing!
Then the last 2 episodes were so bad it ruined the whole thing for me 
everything was just left mostly unresolved, “Time” as a baddie was never explored, the Doctor’s past never looked at, Tecteun dispatched rather unceremoniously, the universe left mostly destroyed. Make it make sense 
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Have to admit, I’d really like Big Finish to do a whole “missing seasons” thing and give us an audio version of the season that was cancelled in favor of Flux…
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A big part of Flux and the Timeless Child plot in general is that everywhere that the Doctor might get answers is ripped away from her. Gallifrey is destroyed, she’s pulled out of her timeline, Karvanista can’t tell her anything, etc. Tecteun is the last person who can really give her the answers she’s looking for and just before she might be able to she too is ripped away. So the Doctor eventually has to choose between the risk of who she might be if she opens the watch or making peace with not knowing her past
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Yeah exactly. A big criticism that I have of the chibnall era despite being a big defender of it is that it introduced a lot of really interesting and compelling concepts and plots but almost never gave them a satisfying resolution?? Especially when it came to the emotional impact + resolution of the doctor confronting Tecteun and her past but yeah, having that ripped away almost immediately uGH i’m so smad
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Would LOVE for big finish to expand and improve upon 13’s era like they did with 6 like can you IMAGINE 
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Exactly!! Flux started out so incredible but it was almost immediately obvious that Chibnall was Once Again trying to stuff way too many plots/concepts/characters into the limited time he had so ended up failing to wrap any of them up satisfactorily. While I had great fun watching each ep and going full clown shoes tinfoil hat conspiracy mode with fellow expanded universe fans about obscure lore that Flux had a lot of similarity with (lungbarrow, anchoring of the thread, the other etc.), there was always a growing dread as the end drew near and I just Knew none of this was going to really stick the landing.
TL;DR
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