Some TV plot twists were so bafflingly bad, or horrifyingly dark, that I’m still in denial about them. There have been somegreat twists in TV history, like the flash-forward reveal inLostor the Bad Place reveal inThe Good Place. But that hasn’t always been the case;some twists went too far, or just didn’t make sense.
10Dan Humphrey Is Gossip Girl
The Big Reveal Didn’t Make Sense
By the timeGossip Girlcame to an end, the story had been twisted into so many loops and contradictions thatit wouldn’t really make total sense for anyone to be Gossip Girl. But even taking that into account, the revelation that it was Dan all along was really underwhelming.
If you go back and rewatch the series knowing thatDan is Gossip Girl, it doesn’t line up at all. He looks surprised when he reads Gossip Girl posts, even when he’s alone. As Gossip Girl, he shares intimate details about his own sister. He didn’t recognize Olivia Burke, even though Gossip Girl had posted about her. It didn’t make any sense.
9Nina Myers Is The CTU Mole
Nina Myers was introduced as one ofJack Bauer’s closest allies in24. He trusted her unconditionally after she’d helped him save his family from a kidnapper, and they had a long history with each other. But near the end of season 1, Nina is revealed to be a double agent gathering information for a German terrorist syndicate.
Throughout seasons 2 and 3, Nina continued to pop up as a villain. But as much as the show tried to force her into the role of an antagonist,it was never as believable as when she was an ally. As Jack points out, Nina doesn’t believe in anything; she’s just evil for evil’s sake, which is how the least interesting villains are written.
8Gemma Murders Tara
This One Felt Out Of Character
Gemma Teller Morrow was known to do some pretty reprehensible things inSons of Anarchy, but it was usually for the greater good of the club. So, when she murdered Tara in a fit of rage, it felt out of character. Gemma and Tara had always had their differences, but it was the typical mother/daughter-in-law stuff.
The reason Gemma killed Tara is that she’d heard that Tara might have possibly made a deal with the feds to put Jax in prison. But she didn’t even have those suspicions confirmed before murdering her.It’s not like Gemma to act this impulsively and this destructively, and that mistake followed her for the rest of the series.
7Lalo Salamanca Murders Howard Hamlin
Howard Didn’t Deserve His Grim Fate
Jimmy McGill’s two worlds came crashing together in the midseason finale ofBetter Call Saul’s final year. After Jimmy and Kim pull off a series of pranks to ruin Howard Hamlin’s reputation, Howard comes over to confront them about it. Then, during the confrontation, the notorious Lalo Salamanca marches into the apartment.
As Howard tries to recuse himself, Lalo callously shoots him in the head like it’s nothing. Howard didn’t even deserve the prank war; he definitely didn’t deserve to get murdered as collateral damage.The season had been a lightheartedThe Sting-style caper up to that point, but it led to one of the most shocking and disturbing twists I’ve ever witnessed.
6Glenn’s Fake-Out Death
Going into its sixth season,The Walking Deadwas one of the best shows on TV. But by the end of the season, it had fallen into a slump from which it would never recover. One of the most confounding turns in the season wasGlenn’s fake-out death. We were led to believe that Glenn was devoured by zombies under a dumpster.
And then, a few episodes later, he emerged from the dumpster unscathed and returned to Alexandria.This seemed like a really cheap gimmick for the show to use— especially since they were planning to kill off Glenn for real at the end of the season. This little dalliance of emotional manipulation was the beginning of the end forThe Walking Dead.
5Principal Skinner Is An Impostor
When The Simpsons Jumped The Shark
InThe Simpsonsseason 9, episode 2, “The Principal and the Pauper,” a man arrives at Springfield Elementary claiming to be the real Seymour Skinner, and Skinner admits that he’s an impostor.His real name is Armin Tamzarian. He was a law-breaking greaser who got sent to Vietnam and stole his commanding officer’s identity.
The writers ofThe Simpsonsseriously underestimated their audience’s emotional attachment to Principal Skinner.We’d spent nine years getting to know him, watching his relationship with his mother and his rivalry with Bart develop. The show itself seems to be in denial about this twist, because it’s only ever come up as a self-aware joke.
4Dexter Morgan Abandons His Family To Become A Lumberjack
One Of The Worst TV Endings Of All Time
I try to ignore howDexterended, becausethe show’s final scene made me regret investing eight long yearsin this twisted crime thriller. Atthe end ofDexter, Dexter Morgan dumps his sister in the ocean, disappears into a thunderstorm, abandons his family, and moves to the middle of nowhere to become a lumberjack.
That final shot of mountain-man Dexter is one of the most crushing disappointments in TV history. Dexter had spent the entire series endeavoring to become more than just a murderous vigilante and build a more stable family than the one he came from. And then, in the last few minutes of the series, he ditched all that.
3Walter White Poisoned Brock
I Don’t Want To Believe Walt Could Be That Monstrous
This was a doozy of a twist, but I’m still in denial about it. On the tail end ofBreaking Bad’s fourth season,Walter White’s feud with Gus Fring reaches a boiling pointwhere one of them will have to kill the other. When Jesse’s girlfriend’s young son Brock is poisoned, Jesse immediately suspects Walt.
Walt manages to convince Jesse that Gus poisoned Brock in an elaborate scheme to get Jesse to kill Walt, which convinces him to get onboard with Walt’s plot to kill Gus. But the final moments of the episode show thatWalt did, in fact, poison Brockto manipulate Jesse. It’s an ingenious twist, but I don’t want to believe Walt is that monstrous.
How I Met Your Mother Ended On A Very Dark Note
How I Met Your Motherfans spent almost a decade waiting to see how Ted Mosby would meet the mother of his children. And, by some miracle, the show managed to pull it off.Cristin Milioti was perfectly cast, she fit seamlessly into the ensemble, and her love story with Ted was irresistibly romantic.
But the writers still managed to mess up the ending. The final episode revealed that the mother had been dead the whole time. After the show had spent an entire season turning the mother into a beloved character,this felt like a betrayal, and a needlessly tragic conclusion to a sitcom. It’s best to just pretend it didn’t happen.
How To Ruin A Character Arc
In the early years ofGame of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen was one of the show’s breakout characters. Viewers around the world were captivated by her empowering arc from exiled princess to dragon mom to powerful ruler. Then, in the final season,the writers tanked that arc by randomly turning Dany into a mass murderer.
InGame of Thrones’ final season, she became the “Mad Queen” and massacred innocent civilians. This dark turn might’ve worked if the writers took a few more episodes to set it up, but they didn’t bother to flesh out George R.R. Martin’s bullet-point story outline, so the journey from point A to point B feels rushed and incongruous.
