In article <
anim8rfsk-9AD7E...@news.easynews.com>,
They had two or three episodes with the new Beauty in the can, so they
stitched an ending together from those. We saw the bad guy killed off
with a single shot, and some sort of baptismal ceremony by all the
people underground. In syndication, the story is more complicated, and
the ceremony comes an episode or two after the one in which the bad guy
is shot but presumably not killed because, for God's sake, it's only a
single shot and this is TV.
> QL had that entire last boring episode in God's Bar. That wasn't
> intended as a finale?
It was, but there was still some chance that NBC would pick up QL for
another season. The gimmick would have been that, during the following
season, Sam and Al would leap together into adventures. That's why
Al's picture is there and is engulfed by the leap effect. When the
show was cancelled, they faded the leap effect to black and created two
or three slates to tell the viewer that Al and his first wife stayed
together, while Sam never returned home.
> > There are many more examples of series that arrogantly gave us a
> > cliffhanger when they knew they were done. Lois & Clark comes
> > instantly to mind.
>
> As awful as L&C had become ... I'm not sure they knew they were done.
> Who would have believed that ABC wanted to be rid of the show so badly
> they'd pay a huge penalty to jettison it?
Yeah, they knew, and they said so on CompuServe and some other places
at the time, even while they were telling us about who the baby was
supposed to be -- a fourth- or fifth-generation descendant of
Superman's, IIRC. They purposefully didn't fix the ending; they were
being sulky about the cancellation. They themselves suggested an
ending with a freeze frame on the couple just before the doorbell
rings, with a slow zoom into Lois and the sound of a fetal heartbeat on
the soundtrack.