The following contains spoilers through the full runs of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly/"Serenity", Forever Knight, Beauty and the Beast, M*A*S*H, Alien Nation, Farscape, Quantum Leap, Slings & Arrows, Blake's 7, "The Lord of the Rings," the midseason finale of Battlestar Galactica, "Doctor Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog," the original Star Wars trilogy, the "Toy Story" films, Torchwood "Exit Wounds," and The Sarah Jane Adventures "The Lost Boy." Spoilerphobes, avert your eyes.

So, how about that Joss Whedon?

If, young fanthing, you've been in a cave for the past two weeks, you may have missed the internet cult phenomenon of "Doctor Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog." If you have, you should rectify this as soon as possible, if for no other reason than to meet the Bad Horse Trio, who are the funniest damn thing to hit the Internet since I Can Has Cheezburger. Just don't watch the last act.

The work of Joss Whedon was originally characterized by the use of smart, hip dialogue and refreshing views on gender roles. (Sort of like Aaron Sorkin, only written for a younger audience, discussing fewer politics, and having taken a women's studies course.) While those particular traits haven't been lost, they occasionally get overshadowed by facets of his work which are highlighted by their frequency. Joss Whedon is king of the down ending, and I for one am tired of it.

This isn't Whedon's fault. If anything, it’s ours.

Pop quiz: what's the best Star Wars movie?

If you didn't immediately answer "Empire," you just outed yourself as not a "real fan" of the SW universe. "But," you protest, "I've been a fan since the original days! I wrapped my hair in little buns on my head and wore a white dress trick-or-treating! And I like the original movie / Jedi better!" Then I smile and pat the seat beside me, because you and I shall be great friends, even though the majority of the obsessed part of the fandom thinks we're crazy. The SW fandom as a whole looked at "Empire" and remembered the emotional chords struck as Boba Fett fly away with carbonite!Han while amputee!Luke and dismantled!C3PO stood with brokenhearted-but-spunky!Leia watching the Falcon leave, and they said, "This is good stuff, Maynard." And they've been looking for that same feeling ever since.

I can't blame them. (Dude, I would be what I most hate, because I am ALL ABOUT trying to recapture the emotional note that turned me from interested viewer to drooling fangirl.) Bleak endings are good for cheap drama. They're what graduate students compose for their creative writing courses, while dressing in black and drinking bad coffee, and they think they're capturing the truth of the human condition as they (and their characters) bleed on the page.

Little kids hate down endings. Young adults in or just out of college thrive on them, because they think it makes them deeper. (see emo kids) And certainly, anyone who's spent time studying Shakespeare and other dramatists knows that tragedy can be a fine art. The problem comes in when tragedy becomes a shortcut to emotional manipulation rather than an honest exploration of character. Shorter: "Shit happens" may be an accurate assessment of life, but it's not the only assessment.

Tragedy is cathartic only if there is a place to find hope, either within the text or outside it in one's life. As a friend pointed out to me today, people who embrace tragic stories as the only real thing worth watching are also people who tend not to have had real tragedy in their own lives. Fans and other audience members who leave the theater or turn off the telly only to find that the real world is a big pile of suck are not going to enjoy getting an unrelenting pile of suck from that same media. There has to be a break. "Empire" is great because "Jedi" followed it. The traumatic last episode of Alien Nation was followed ( … eventually) by the lovely ending of "Dark Horizon." Farscape, famous for killing off characters many, many times per season, apparently killed off John and Aeryn in the finale, but the producers fought tooth and nail to make "The Peacekeeper Wars" so they could finish the story. Even the finale of Forever Knight was directed to subvert the wishes of the episode's writer and give the fans an "out" for the fate of Natalie.

Bleak for the sake of bleakness, destruction for the sake of upping the tragedy, these things are the tools of the emo hack. Bleakness and destruction that come naturally as consequences of the characters' actions at least makes sense. An example: the second season of Torchwood ended on a depressing note. Two members of the team were dead, leaving Jack and the survivors to rebuild from scratch again. Owen's departure made sense (notwithstanding the whole "nuclear reactors don't work that way" nitpick) because the character's story arc had come to an end. He'd grown from a bitter, self-centered little prick to a zombie with a new lease on death and a greater appreciation of the people in his life. Also, there was only so much they were going to be able to do with two immortal guys that hadn't already been done on Angel. Tosh's death was used for the purpose of delivering an unexpected emotional blow to the characters and audience and to ramp up the tragedy. Body count for the sake of body count, and thus, not as meaningful as the loss of this character ought to have been.

Battlestar Galactica has made itself a household name by taking bleak outcome after bleak outcome and stringing them together with a plot. Let’s start with the nuclear annihilation of the majority of the human race. (Well, okay, let's start with airlocking a human diplomat and the still-freaksome babysnap scene, but the nuking is still the primary plot point). The new President has found survivors? Great, except she'll have to leave most of them behind to die because they don't have FTL drives. Escaping the Cyclons? Great, but they keep losing ships on the first few jumps and end up having to blow up one of their own transports just in case. And so on, through resettling and getting invaded again, and love triangles that fizzle, and then they find Earth! That's been nuked. BSG is depressing as hell. Which is why the writers also work the happy when they can. They've lost over a thousand people, but there's a new baby born. They've lost friends and they've stretched their fragile alliance with the rogue Cylons to the snapping point, but Roslin and Adama finally figure out what they mean to each other. Spots of joy punctuate the overindulgent sorrow. (Whether that makes the journey worth it to individual fans is a matter of personal taste.)

When fans complain about the unrelenting darkness of a particular series or movie, there's always someone who shoots back that said fans just want a sunny bunny happy Disney ending, with the implication that happy endings are unworthy of truly intellectual minds. Well, let's take a look at a Disney ending. Let's pick a Disney film, oh one with an Oscar nomination for best screenplay for kicks. "Toy Story." Good film, right? And looking at the credits, one of the names on the screenplay is very familiar indeed. Huh. Now, the theme of the movie is one accessible to both kids and adults: jealousy at not being the star anymore and learning to be friends with someone you kind of want to hate. Good message. There's some violence against the toys, and some scary scenes involving a pit bull, but nobody dies to prove how cool and grown-up the movie is. "Toy Story" changed the landscape of modern animation (for better or worse) and it's still considered one of the best things Disney's ever done.

If you want to complain about happy endings, complain about the tacked-on endings. Complain about hasty matchmaking between characters who would be happiest going their separate ways. Complain about Evil Overlord syndrome causing the oughta-be-impossible situation to be resolved in time for Act Five. Complain about Batman, against all logic and reason, giving a group of murderers, thieves, renegades and traitors a five-minute head start. (SHUT UP. I'M STILL BITTER.) Those aren't happy endings, those are writing errors made canon, and yeah, Disney has more than its share of the blame.

So what's wrong with sad endings? What's wrong with showing the occasional downer among the glee? Isn't that more realistic? Well, the answer is "Nothing, if that's what you want." Me, I want to be entertained in my entertainment. I want to tune into my favorite science fiction epic and see a better world than the one I've got now, and if that means starting with a dystopia and working forward, I'm okay with that. Struggle is good, and heroism from unexpected places is a lovely story. I still claim that Sam Gamgee was the hero of LotR, and certainly the final triumph over Sauron wouldn't have resonated so well and so long among fantasy fans had the journey not been difficult. (Also, I'd have killed to have seen the Cleansing of the Shire on the big screen, because wow.) Again, tragedy works when there's something to balance it and make the losses worth the gain.

Angel worked as a down ending. I read a post that recontextualized the series (for me; lots of other people may have already been on this page already) as being about grace, showing Angel's journey and his actions as coming not from a quest for salvation and redemption but simply out of his understanding that these things were right. The deeds he committed as Angelus were monstrous, and a just universe would see him punished, and he showed up on the side of the light anyway because that's what he had to do. With a premise like that, the series ending fits: Hell being unleashed on L.A., friends dead or dying, no hope, and still he went into the fight. Consistent with character, consistent with theme, telling the story that needed to be told, it worked. (Also see Blake's 7.)

Endings don't have to be dark, depressing and disastrous to be realistic. Slings & Arrows had a realistic ending that worked: the cast and crew scattered to the winds, Charles dead, Richard devolved into a shell of a human being. But the down wasn't bleak. Geoffrey was fired and Ellen lost the house, but they were getting married and starting over in charge of their own theatre company. Anna was fired, but she ran off to become a counterrevolutionary, and the audience is left suspecting the junta will not last long against her mad filing skillz. Frank and Cyril got to open a flower shop. Life goes on, and because it goes on, there's hope. M*A*S*H ended with the bittersweet parting of the cast, and meshed the joy of finally getting to go home with the angst of losing the friendships and bonds the characters had created with themselves and the audience. Quantum Leap closed quietly and sadly, with the fans caught between thinking the show had cheated the end, and believing it had ended exactly how it always had to.

Adding realism for the sake of "realism" (note: anyone who comes at me preaching realism in fandoms with spandex-clad superheroes who get their powers because the sun is the wrong color will get laughed at a lot) just alienates the audience who tuned in for the fun. Again, see "Doctor Horrible" wank. For a more historical example, look at CBS's Beauty and the Beast. It was written and advertised as a modern fairy tale, complete with magic, improbable coincidences, and True Love. Then the writers tried to make it more "realistic" (due to outside pressures such as the departure of the lead actress and disappointing ratings). They even billed the revamp as "The fairy tale is over," as they had the female lead brutally tortured and killed while the male lead went crazycakes, the baby was stolen, bodies littered the stage, etc etc. The fandom is still pissed, and it's been almost twenty years.

Realism is not about body count. It's not about which character you can damage, or whose backstory you can change to give him/her reasons to be the person we already know. It's not about ratcheting up drama or playing on emotions. It's about looking at life, looking at many lives if you can, and telling the story that's true. Its certainly not about "giving the audience what they need," much less what they want, because you, gentle reader and hopeful writer, have no fucking idea what your audience wants (except what they tell you) or really, honestly needs, and pretending you have that kind of knowledge makes you sound like a pretentious twit. It's about telling the story that needs to be told, the good and the bad, and if it's more of the latter, being nice enough to let your audience know before they get there that this might not be for them. You're not writing for them, anyway. You're writing for you.

I like The Sarah Jane Adventures. I like the cast, I like the writing, and I know that even when it's not up to par, I'm not going to tune in to find the cute young female lead has been viciously murdered. No, she's going to save the planet from a maniacal supercomputer. That's my kind of show. The folks who need grittier stuff can look elsewhere.  Try Torchwood, or Dollhouse.  The latter comes from a pedigree sure to kill off plenty of people for the sake of drama.  Enjoy!