Nerd here. Noel Murray of the AV Club had some shit to say about the endings of genre fiction in his piece on the last episode of Lost. Check it out:
Let’s talk about endings.
I was chatting with a fellow TV critic a couple of weeks ago and told her that when it comes to the majority of genre fiction, I like the first four-fifths of any story far more than the finish. I love detective fiction and policiers, but once Harry Bosch or whoever puts all the pieces together and stands gun-to-gun with the bad guy, my eyes tend to glaze. (It’s the same reason I stopped doing Sudoku puzzles after a while; once I did the hard work early on, the rest felt too much like accounting.) With dramas and comedies—especially those that are more slice-of-life—often the ending is all, and where the author chooses to punctuate is the ultimate indicator of what the story is all about. But fantasies, adventures… these types of stories frequently get their ideas out of the way early, to clear a space at the end for action.
