I would argue there are some specific cases or criteria that makes this work well:
1) For comedic purposes (South Park having several examples) 2) To actually invoke the Descartes thought experiment (Inception) 3) Where a character experiences emotional growth or character development that persists to the next sequence of events (Angel having a prime example of this)
The first time I ever recalled observing this trope as a child was a re-run of Mickey's The Mad Doctor (1933 film), and it pissed me off. All that build-up, all that tension, all those rooms with obstacles and enemies, just for him to be still home having a nightmare. They just wanted to wrap the episode up as quickly and lazily as possible.
In fact, my English literature and grammar teacher hated this trope so much she would FAIL your essays and course-works if you dared to end it with the lines "They woke up, oh, it was all but a dream. The End."
Someone With a Computer
I would like to mention something about Super Mario Bros. 2: the game takes place in Subcon which, according to the enclosed instruction book, is the land of dreams. So technically, it is all just a dream, but it's kind of supposed to be; the only canonical way to go there is to dream. Can we please add that to the entry? I'm just a bit tired of people assuming the game is only a dream without recognizing this fact.
Edited by SenorCornholio
"Star Trek TNG 7x18 - Eye of the beholder" and the movie "Train of Life" should be added to this list.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Eye_of_the_Beholder_(episode)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_of_Life
This page starts with a bold spoiler warning, and most examples spoil something, so why do a few examples still have spoiler tags? Do any examples here still need to hide their spoilers?
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The page starts with an idiotic spoiler warning common to many pages about spoilery tropes, which completely fails to consider that not all spoilers in a work are connected to the one trope which is the subject of the page. It is completely unreasonable and just plain fucking stupid for all spoilers to ever go unmarked just for the sake of one plot element.
Removing...
- The Grand Finale of Seven Days pulled this one off, revealing that the entire show was a delusion of the main character, who started the show inside a mental institution.
Okay, I'm all kindsa confused. So far as I can tell, the show didn't have a Grand Finale. It ended with a standalone episode about a man on death row, and didn't reveal anything like that. The show doesn't seem to have ever been released on DVD, so that rules out an unaired finale. I don't know if maybe another episode ended this way or if the idea comes from a Word of God comment about how they would have ended the series if they'd had the chance, but from what I can see, it doesn't end on this note.
Edited by BritBllt "And for the first time in weeks, I felt the boredom go away!" Hide / Show Replies
A brief google search tells me that you're entirely correct. Looks like the episode I was thinking of was "Déjà Vu All Over Again", which I was sure ended with the implication that Backstep wasn't real and Frank was still in the institution. I probably assumed it was the last episode because I watched the series out of order in syndication.
You, know, that might be worth a new trope. Not Actually A Finale. I got the same surprise when I found out that "Future Schlock" wasn't the last episode of Rockos Modern Life- although in that case it was at least second-to-last.
See you in the discussion pages.
Hm, now I'm kinda curious about that episode - it sounds like a good one. :) The closest we've got is Series Fauxnale for when the creators backed out of their ending for another season, though Not Actually A Finale could be a trope of its own (Buffy has like three fakeout endings, one for Season 3 and leaving high school, one for season 5 and leaving the WB, and then that creepy "Normal Again" ending).
I'm also kinda wondering if we have something like Wake Up In The Asylum, where the hero suddenly wakes up in an institution and everyone tries to convince them the rest of the show's a delusion. Frank's been through it, Buffy's been through it, Riker and Sisko have been through it, Total Recall played with it and there's gotta be other examples too... a ha, found it, Cuckoo Nest. I'll go ahead and add Seven Days to that trope and vice versa, since it was definitely in the show.
"And for the first time in weeks, I felt the boredom go away!"
I think it should be added back with the simple correction that it wasn't the grand finale. After all the episode did leave off with the possibility that it was all just a dream.
Under the entry for Zelda, Link's Awakening we get this line
Therefore, the events of the game erase themselves once Link saves the day and the events become a dream but said events but have happened other wise existance would have collapsed.
This sentence makes no sense in the English language (especially after the second word 'but'). Since I haven't played this game I can't fix it. I don't know what the writer intended.
Should this trope be renamed "Newhart Twist" in honor of the show that pretty much pulled it off the best?
Who else hates it when this trope happens to a great story? I mean even Brian from Family Guy feels like it's a bit of a rip-off.
Edited by Glazed
Where would it fit if the story starts as Dreaming of Times Gone By (more specifically, Past-Life Memories) and the character initially dismisses the whole thing as a dream when they wake up until they meet other people who act very similar to people they met in dreams and start using skills they never learned but featured prominently in their dreams?
Edited by ElodieHiras