Fair warning: spoilers.

Series finales are always bittersweet. It means that a beloved show is coming to an end but now we don’t have to suffer all of those emotional traumas. Generally, series finales tend to be great masterpieces that tie all loose ends. This year, on the other hand, we were presented with rushed and just down right disappointing series finales. It seemed like as each show ended, you’d hear someone on the Internet commenting, “well this beats [insert show that recently ended] for worst finale ever”

Dexter

I’m going to get this one out of the way. I have not watched this show, but I plan on watching it one day. I’m not going to go into why it was terrible in fear that it will ruin something from the first four seasons. That’s when you’re supposed to stop watching Dexter, right?

How I Met Your Mother

HIMYM was a show that was surprisingly witty and well written. With hundreds of inside jokes, it was like the audience was a part of the group. So when the finale drew close, it was difficult to imagine your life without these five people you felt like were your friends. The last season in general was still witty, just not as well thought out as it should have been. The final season was focused on the wedding between Robin and Barney. Majority of the ninth season was over the course of 72 hours that painstakingly built up to the wedding. Except, that marriage crashed and burned in the first 10 minutes of the series finale.

That’s not the only gripe fans have with the finale. The other is how nonchalantly The Mother was written off. It was foreshadowed a few times, but it could have been executed (no pun intended) a little better. It was something along the lines of “…and then when your mother died” and that was it; she was gone. So we just spent the past few months watching small snippets of the days before a wedding, but the titular Mother is written off without batting an eyelash? We see the group go their separate ways, Barney the womanizer has a daughter, and the kids are totally cool with their dad hooking up with their “Aunt Robin”. The final moment involving the kids was filmed back in 2005. So this finale was planned from the very beginning. And no where in that 9 years did anyone think of a better idea.

True Blood

This was one of those shows where you could tell the writers were running out of ideas; despite having a 13 book series as its source material. They strayed so far away from the Southern Vampire Mysteries that there was no way back for the finale. There was a quickie wedding, flashforwards within flashforwards, and the largest red herring in the history of television. If I were to describe the series finale, it would be Sookie’s house after Maryanne’s huge party from the season two finale: an utter mess

Where to start? So Vampire Bill is infected with the fatal Hep V virus and refused to drink the antidote from Sarah Newlin. For the last few episodes, Bill said that he starting to feel human again. In the last episode, Jessica noticed that he was starting to feel warmer and Sookie could read his thoughts. All signs were pointing to Bill not succumbing to Hep V, but becoming human. But no, Bill had to make Sookie kill him so that she could live a normal life without him. My main problem with this is that he died because breaking up is just not an option, apparently. They could have acknowledged that he’s becoming human and he could have sacrificed himself so that she wouldn’t end up like Sarah Newlin. Since Bill is a New York Times bestselling author, his sudden human transformation would not go unnoticed. Someone would eventually figure out that Sookie’s blood can turn vampires back into humans and she’d end up in a testing lab for the rest of her life. Bill was going to die anyway, it would make sense for him to die before the transformation to keep it a secret between him and Sookie. He’d still be giving her a normal life but now it’s not dependent on how much control Bill has over Sookie. Like, come on what year is it?

I don’t know why this year had so many terrible finales. Maybe it’s because the Breaking Bad finale was just so perfect that it ruined all other finales. Maybe we’re just bitter that shows are ending and this year’s fall lineup looks abysmal. Who knows?