Great Story Ideas Done Or Ended Poorly

[Forsaken Lover]

The Matrix:

I like Reloaded, and some parts of Revolutions, but Revolutions as a whole is terrible and ends terribly.

It was clear they just didn't have anything really planned out. I'm 99% positive the first film was supposed to be standalone.


Metal Gear Solid:



^ the only redeeming thing about MGS4.

[Wolf Kanno]

Anything Kazuhige Nojima has written for Squenix, they all have such good potential but he finds a way to smurf up every story he has exclusively written the plot for.

Soul Taker was a cool story about demons and some wicked symbolism and design, then the author decided to make the story about space aliens.

Escaflowne was a great series about political intrigue and giant robot knights battling until the whole thing got derailed by the revelation that the story is really suppose to be about Sir Isaac Newton's search for Atlantis and his obsession with Fate.

Sliders was an intriguing series that was sadly cursed with inept writers.

[Big D]

Gonna get some Star Trek all up in this thread.

Voyager and Enterprise both had great concepts, and could have become timeless classics of the TV sci-fi genre.

Instead, Voyager quickly found its groove of comfortable blandness, and rarely had the courage to stray from its stale template. It ended on a particularly whimper-tastic note with an utterly forgettable, utterly predictable finale.

Then there's Enterprise, which had a pretty terrible first couple of seasons before becoming really quite awesome for its latter half. The season three turn-around in quality was too late in coming, though, and the show was cancelled abruptly during its fourth season. Instead of a decent ending, though, we got a god-awful hour of Riker and Troi pretending to be eleven years younger than they really were, with the actual cast of Enterprise reduced to interactive holograms in the background of a Next Generation episode from the early '90s. In terms of writing, story and tone, Enterprise's penultimate multi-part episode would've made a much more satisfying conclusion, even though a cynic might describe he plot as "Earth versus Robocop & the Moon Bigots on Mars".

[Greatermaximus]

Define 'great'? The trick is to guess the 'bias' of the reader. In an equal universe any idea should work.