Sometimes one watches a television episode and is knocked out by the creative proposal that is on the screen. It doesn't happen as often as we think because ever since Sue Ellen shot J.R. Ewing in Dallas, the viewer has become immunized to the plot twists, which he digests more easily. But, now that Succession joins the select club of shocking episodes (in this case, both for what it shows and for the quality of the proposal), here is a compilation of television installments that shocked the public. There will, of course, be plenty of spoilers.
Lost was synonymous with script twists but none left the viewer's ass twisted as much as the finale of the third season. The series, which was structured between the plots that took place on the mysterious island and the flashbacks of the previous lives of its inhabitants, stood out by showing Jack (Matthew Fox) depressed, with a beard and addictions. Audiences assumed, of course, that they were watching a forgotten chapter of Jack's past. But then Kate (Evangeline Lily) appeared in those scenes set in another time plane, Jack told her "we have to go back" and we were speechless: we had seen the future and, not only had we confirmed that some survivors of the Oceanic flight- 815 had not managed to get off the island, but on top of that they were so traumatized that they wanted to return to it.
The second season of Alias was a gift that helped make J.J. Abrams as a creator of convoluted plots and unexpected twists. There was that fatal mother, Irina Derevko, played by Lena Olin; the series was reset with the end of the SD-6; Sydney discovered that her best friend had been replaced by a villain physically riveted to her; and the leading lady even had the ideal romantic ending of hers. So, when in the last scene Sydney woke up in Hong Kong and Vaughn (Michael Vartan) told her that she had been missing for two years, the audience was shocked. The series would never be as good as its second season, but the third season was crazy hilarious.
The episode Dramatics, your honor of The good wife had to be an ordinary episode, within the very high quality standards of the King couple series. What the viewer did not know was that the actor Josh Charles, who played Will Gardner, had asked to leave the series to focus on his family and that the Kings had asked him to stay a while longer, waiting to kill his character. in an episode that made rivers of ink flow in the United States.
In theory the public should be prepared. Succession had begun its television run with the possible death of Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the president of one of the largest corporations in the United States, and the title of the series indicated that the patriarch of the family had to be dethroned before to finish the series. But, as distracted as we were with the sale of Waystar Royco to a Swedish businessman (Alexander Skarsgard), we forgot that Logan could die. He did it in the most unexpected way: off camera, with Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) saying goodbye to his corpse via mobile phone. Jesse Armstrong wrote an exemplary episode about the loss of a loved one with whom you don't have a good relationship.
The death of Eddard Stark (Sean Bean) in the first season of Game of Thrones already served as a warning: no one was safe in the fantastic universe of G.R.R. Martin. But, of course, this did not mean that non-readers could expect the barbarity of the red wedding: instead of enjoying the alliance between Edmure Tully (Tobias Menzies) with one of the daughters of Walder Frey (David Bradley), he found himself with a massacre of main characters. Robb Stark (Richard Madden) was murdered as was his mother Catelyn (Michelle Fairley), who was slashed, and his wife Talisa (Oona Chaplin), who was pregnant and was stabbed in the belly.
House of Cards was a political thriller with two central characters: Kevin Spacey as Frank Underwood, a Democratic politician, and Zoe Barnes (Kate Rooney), an ambitious young journalist with whom he had a convenient relationship. Lie! In the second season, Underwood threw Zoe onto the subway tracks, eliminating the main character dynamic from the fiction and confirming that the protagonist was even more evil than the viewer could imagine.
Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) was more than used to facing evil creatures that tried to destroy her loved ones and the entire humanity but nothing had prepared her for the idea of natural death. One day she came to her house, she called her mother and found the corpse of Joyce (Kristine Sutherland) with her eyes open looking at the ceiling. Joss Whedon wrote and directed a powerful play about death, arbitrary, in the most original episode of all Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
There is no shortage of series finales that left the audience stunned but The Sopranos takes the cake. The Soprano family was in a cafeteria waiting to be served when a suspicious-looking person approached the table and…fade to black for eleven seconds. HBO subscribers even called their providers because they assumed the connection had gone down at the key moment and not that David Chase had redefined the open-ended concept.
The readers of Robert Kirkman's comics had warned by active and passive: prepare for the arrival of Negan. And, after a sixth season marked by the appearance of some ruthless men of one Negan, the villain made an appearance with the face of Jeffrey Dean Morgan. And what did he do? Using her spiked bat with her own name, Lucille, to smash the skull of one of Rick's men (Andrew Lincoln). It was the media climax of The Walking Dead and also the beginning of its decline. Hiding the victim's identity until the following season, especially after hearing her skull crack, was a somewhat dishonest creative decision.
