You think there's some pithy comment here? Well, you're—
"ARE YOU KIDDING?! THIS IS HOW OUR SHOW ENDS?!"
— The last words of the entire cast, Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo
You say you want a resolution? Well, you know, we all want to see the end. But when you talk about a conclusion, you know that you can count this work out: a work intentionally ends unresolved, the Story Arcs are unconcluded, and you can believe whatever you want about what happens next.note
When the main plot is resolved but other threads aren't, that's a different trope: Left Hanging. If the story ends right before a big fight scene it's a Bolivian Army Ending. When the lack of ending is passed off as being a good reward, it's A Winner Is You. If the ending leaves the characters ready to continue their usual exploits, it's And the Adventure Continues. If the writer ends the story in a way where the viewer or reader must decide by his own interpretation how it ended, it's an Ambiguous Ending. This trope may be combined with Negative Continuity, if the last episode's problems simply disappear. But when a big story arc is dismissed with a handwave, it's an Aborted Arc.
If external factors end the story, it is Cut Short: see Cancellation or Died During Production. If the author's comments about the ending are similarly ambiguous, it's the Shrug of God. Compare End-of-Series Awareness, No Romantic Resolution, Dead Fic (in fanfiction), Offscreen Inertia, The Resolution Will Not Be Identified, Drop the Cow, Endless Game and Non Standard Game Over.
Occasionally the story picks up later with a Remake or Spin-Off. If this is to build tension for a sequel, it's a Cliffhanger. If not, expect a pissed off fanbase, in which case a Continuation Fic may pick up where the official story left off.
As with all Ending Tropes, there will be unmarked spoilers ahead. Consider yourself warned.
Example Subpages:
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Films — Live-Action
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Music
- Video Games
- Western Animation
Other Examples:
open/close all folders
Advertising
- Enforced in the I Saw Your Willy PSA, which ends with Alex still embarrassed and not knowing what to do about his Internet humiliation, to drive home the point that sharing the wrong thing online can be a disaster.
Asian Animation
- The Season 3 premiere of Crazy Candies, "Have a Class", is about the employees of the local baozi dumpling restaurant, the Bao House, learning from Uncle Twinkie that their restaurant is losing customers because of the lack of variety in their menu and being taught to make other food items besides baozi dumplings to get business back again. While its plot point of the teacher threatening to send his students to the moon if they don't behave themselves is resolved when Mr. Seed interrupts the class and gets the moon pod launch punishment, the restaurant menu plot point that started the episode is never resolved, as it cuts to the end credits after Mr. Seed gets sent to the moon and we never see if they learn how to make a hamburger properly.
Comic Strips
- Calvin and Hobbes:
- One Sunday strip has Calvin ask his dad to tell him a story with him and Hobbes in it. Dad proceeds to recap Calvin's day up until noon (with an obvious sarcastic slant to it), and when Calvin complains that he doesn't continue on Dad explains that the story has no end, for Calvin and Hobbes will go out and write more of it the next day. Calvin's satisfied with that answer.
- The first Camping Episode story arc didn't have a conclusion, and just ends on a strip where Calvin and Hobbes attempt to roast hot dogs over a campfire only to burn them, and then in the next strip they are suddenly back home in their own backyard with no explanation or resolution. This can be partly be chalked up to Early-Installment Weirdness, because every subsequent camping trip showed the family packing up to go home (it also had the family staying in a cabin, rather than tents as was the norm in all camping trips afterwards).
- Dykes to Watch Out For: the last strip, apparently per author Alison Bechdel's intentions, was just another episode that didn't wrap anything up or even allude to its own finality. There have since been a few one-off strips published here and there over the years.
- For a long time, it looked like Little Orphan Annie would not only end like this, but on a cruel cliffhanger. When the strip was officially cancelled on March 10th, 2010, Annie was in Guatemala with her kidnapper, the terrorist leader the "Butcher of the Balkans". Warbucks has no idea where she is, or even that she's still alive, and the Butcher tells Annie that he neither will let her go nor kill her — for fear of being captured and because he will not kill a child despite his many political killings — and adds that she has a new life now with him. The final panel of the strip reads "And this is where we leave our Annie. For Now—" However the story restarted with a glimmer of hope in 2013 in another strip, Dick Tracy, where Warbucks enlisted the detective's help to find her. Eventually, Annie was located after a letter from her came up, revealing her location and the Butcher's true identity. A final Belated Happy Ending wrapped Annie's story up on October 12th of the same year. (She has since appeared as a guest star in the strip on occasion.
- Retail ends with a mass resignation of the main staff in the face of Grumbel's bankruptcy. The actual final strip shows a nameless mall worker taking down the Grumbel's sign while the space advertises that a Dollar Admiral would be coming soon, leaving the fates of most of the characters unresolvednote .
Fan Works
- Ash's Return ends mid-word.
- Christian Humber Reloaded ends with the main character having just defeated the president, and ends up naming his new form "Chaos Hunter Form." While this is the end of the most recent conflict, it seems to be where the author stopped writing the story, rather than a proper ending.
- Coveralls, a fanfic of The X-Files written by an AI, ends on an unresolved "to be continued".
- The Great Starship Battle ends with a future incarnation of the Doctor, strongly implied to be the Valeyard, destroying the Borg Cube. However, numerous plot threads and the fates of all the other characters are left unresolved.* Done in the purposeful literary sense with In the Service: the character the story was following has completed his arc, even if the war that forms the background for the story isn't over.
- legolas by laura: It ends in mid-sentence.
- My Dream Is Yours ends with Orchid, Orson and Oren all still uncured of Dream-Transfer-itis, with Orson in particular becoming a new victim.
- My Immortal ends with Ebony about to try to kill Voldemort with Avada Kedavra, with no indication as to whether she'll succeed or fail.
- My Little Pony: The Mentally Advanced Series ends with Twilight enlisting Spike, Rainbow Dash, and Applejack in helping her come up with ideas for a friendship report. Mostly just take thats to the premises of later episodes. But unlike other examples, Greg, the series creator officially reveals that he's cancelling the series to move on to other things through text at the end of said episode.
- This
Pokémon spoof. Just when the Pokémon are about to butt heads in their final strikes, the video cuts to the cast singing the theme song and we never see the outcome.
- Quarter-Life: Halfway To Destruction ends with an unknown villain ambushing Gordon Freeman, followed by the author telling the reader to decide what happens next, thanking them for reading, and begging them to buy his book.
- What Have You Done ends quite abruptly with most of the characters inside the chamber of the Elements of Harmony, when the Elements have rejected their bearers for "abandoning" Twilight, with Changelings swarming outside. To drive it home, the last line is the titular question. The sequel is meant to pick up this thread, but it was not yet conceived during the outlining of the original, which has this trope in full effect.
Films — Animation
- Toy Story 2: In-universe. Due to a rise in space toy popularity, Woody's Round-Up was cancelled on a major cliffhanger with Woody and Bullseye leaping over the Grand Canyon while Jessie and Stinky Pete were trapped in a mine with a stick of dynamite about to blow. Or so Stinky Pete claims. Attentive viewers will learn that he was lying, and the cliffhanger was resolved after all.
Gamebooks
- The Jewels of Nabooti of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, took this to its Logical Extreme: there were a series of choices that made an infinite loop.
- The Cretan Chronicles trilogy, after going through three excruciatingly difficult adventures, ends with the player's hero, Altheus, reaching a Downer Ending where his homeland is destroyed. The story then states that Altheus' daughter with Ariadnne, hundreds of miles away, is prepping to go on a quest to seek her father, and the adventure ends at that point.
- Sometimes appears in the Give Yourself Goosebumps series. An extreme example of this is one decision in Night in Werewolf Woods. You could hit a button labeled "Stop" which literally ends the story then and there.
Mythology and Religion
- The Egyptian myth of "The Doomed Prince", dating back to the 18th Dynasty, written in hieratic text, probably had an ending originally, but it may never be known, as the scroll with that part was destroyed before the rest could be deciphered. The story is one where the King of Egypt prays for a son, as his wife seems barren; the gods grant his wish, and his wife finally bears him a son. However, the day the prince is born, he is visited by the goddess Hathor at birth in her guise as the Fates, who prophesies that he will die by a snake, crocodile, or dog. After living a sheltered, lonely life due to his father who tries to protect him, the prince finds out about the prophecy, and decides he'd rather face it with dignity. He later wins the love of a princess, and with her help is able to kill a snake that attacks him in his sleep. Then, however, the dog he raised from a puppy attacks him, and he flees, only to be ambushed by a crocodile — who offers to spare him in exchange for his help in a fight against a water demon. This, however, is where it breaks off. (Most scholars believe it probably had a happy ending with a Screw Destiny or Prophecy Twist theme somewhere at the end, with the hero and the princess living Happily Ever After.)
- The Bible has several examples.
- The Book of Jonah ends with God asking Jonah "Shouldn't you be concerned for that great city [Nineveh]?" While this question may serve as the moral of the story, Jonah's reply is lost to posterity.
- In the New Testament, the book of Acts doesn't really have an ending. The outcome of Paul's trial before Caesar, which he was still awaiting at the end of Acts, is disputed among scholars to this day.
- The earliest surviving manuscripts of Mark end not with the resurrected Christ's appearance to his disciples, but with a mysterious, unnamed man telling Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James, and Salome that Jesus has risen, and that they should tell the apostles and go see him for themselves; however, they don't tell anyone, because they're afraid. The End. Indeed, in the original Greek of those manuscripts, the last verse arguably breaks off in mid-sentence with the word "for," an unusual construction.
- The last parts of Book of Judges points out Israel's moral decay and need for a king.
Pinball
- KAZe's Necronomicon has an Excuse Plot of a monk studying the legendary Tome of Eldritch Lore. In the epilogue, the monk simply finishes the book and closes it.
- Time Cruise has an Excuse Plot about Telepathic Spacemen and Time Travel, none of which is ever resolved.
- In WHO dunnit (1995), each case begins on the evening when Victoria and Butler return to Tony's Palace, where Trixie and Bruno are working. The randomly-generated murders mean anything can happen, and the reasons why are left to the player's interpretation.
Print Media
- MAD Magazine's parody of Hill Street Blues deliberately does this.
- A magazine in the 1960s for members of the National Education Association (NEA) played this trope straight. Each issue included an open-ended story that was designed for students to write and/or discuss possible resolutions.
- In Zillions, a recurring comic strip called "Daze of Our Lives" is a parody of soap operas and focuses on a cast of teenagers, usually ends on a cliffhanger(for example, one girl gets confronted by a boy she'd been avoiding) or a difficult choice (one boy has to choose whether to buy new clothes for school or go to the amusement park with his friends), with the narrator inviting readers to decide what happens next.
Radio
- For The Brewing Network most shows that ended simply stopped being made with no announcement it was happening. Only twice has the ending been acknowledged in the last episode- Lunch Meet and Shinerunner. The Jamil Show, Homebrewed Chef, Bikes + Beer (though they only made two episodes), and unless their absence is temporary due to covid Hop and Brew School, and Sour Hour all stopped with nothing said about it.
- Episodes of The Goon Show almost never had real endings, but sometimes they made it completely obvious, such as:
Greenslade: What do you think, dear listeners? Were they standing on Rockall? Or was it Napoleon's piano? Send your suggestions to anybody but us.
- They did end some episodes, but that was mainly through careful application of rapidly descending livestock.
- The last regular episode ended with a brief announcement: "That was it - the last of them." The 1972 reunion show "The Last Goon Show of All" ended just as inconclusively as a regular episode.
- The first The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978) radio drama was 6 episodes long, and had a definite ending on ancient Earth. When fans clamored for more, Adams had to invent all sorts of hoops to jump through so that he could un-end the story. He made sure that the second 6-episode radio drama did not have a definitive ending, and left all sorts of dangling loose ends for when the third radio drama got written. Further sequels were created posthumously.
Roleplay
- Survival of the Fittest V2 ends with Danya gives this big evil speech and Bryan Calvert attacks Danya, and nothing else happens. As of v4, people still don't know what happened after that. There was supposed to be a part two, but at this rate we'll never know other than Danya and Wilson got out of the situation alive. A final end may or may not be upcoming.
Theater
- Luigi Pirandello's Absolutely! (Perhaps) tells the story of a family who become fascinated by their new neighbors, as one of two completely different scandalous stories is true depending on the true identity of one of them. At the end, this person finally appears but refuses to tell them who she is because their attempts to find out have been so intrusive. She leaves with "I am... whoever you believe me to be." The one member of the family who wasn't interested in the mystery at all then turns to the audience and says "Are you satisfied?" before laughing hysterically as the curtain comes down.
- At the end of Laura Marks' Bethany, after signing the lease, Crystal breaks down in tears, takes a drink from the sink, then stands center stage looking up. Cue the mysterious strobe lights, droning music, and flash to black, followed by the curtain call.
- UMO Ensemble's adaptation of Les Chants de Maldoror ends with the cast announcing "New arrival!" just as at the start of the play, but it fades to black right there, without us finding out who or what the "new arrival" is.
- The script for Deathtrap has a coda involving two minor characters, but some productions seem to feel it's better to do an abrupt blackout just as soon as Clifford, who has been fatally shot with an arrow, pulls the arrow out and stabs Sidney with it. Given that all three main characters are dead or dying, it does sort of make sense to stop there.
- John Patrick Shanley's Doubt never tells you either what happened to Donald Muller or whether or not Father Flynn was guilty. The original Sister Aloysius, Cherry Jones, said that the first act was the play itself and the second act was the discussion amongst the audience afterward.
- According the IMDB, the only people who know are John Patrick Shanley and the actors who have played Father Flynn. Good luck getting one of them to tell you.
- The musical Drood, based on the unfinished mystery by Charles Dickens, lets the audience vote on the ending. Also bringing in a healthy dose of No Fourth Wall.
- Eurydice ends without resolution as Orpheus arrives in the Underworld, newly dead, and can't read the letter Eurydice left for him.
- Bertolt Brecht's play, The Good Person of Szechwan ends abruptly, without solving any of the conflicts. An actor steps out, and asks the audience to find a resolution.
- The libretto for the opera Moses und Aron concludes the story with a third act, but Arnold Schoenberg never composed any music for it, perhaps feeling that the theological conflict between the title characters was unresolvable.
- Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot doesn't end, it simply seems to... repeat.
Estragon: Well, shall we go?
Vladimir: Yes, let's go.
(They do not move.)
Toys
- Many LEGO lines unfortunately met this fate:
- The Slizer line of Technic toys was unceremoniously wrapped up shortly after its twelfth kit was released, without resolving either of the two plot points it had been given: the rise of the mutant Slizers and the final duel between Blaster and Millennia/Millennium.
- LEGO Alpha Team concluded Mission Deep Freeze with a climactic final battle between Big Bad Evil Ogel and Sixth Ranger Zed. However, as soon as the battle begins, the magazine comic ends and is never continued. This was to set up a fan writing contest to wrap up the story, but although the winners' names were published in a later issue, the actual submissions were not.
- LEGO Exo-Force came to an abrupt end during its third year. While the first two years had full in-depth storylines told through comics and books, the third year merely set up the conflict and then ended on a cliffhanger, leaving it up to fans to decide how it ended.
Visual Novels
- In ClockUp's Euphoria:
- If you choose more than one girl to enter the "Keyhole" rooms to have sex with Takato, in the end the characters escape from the white room complex and discover they are very near of their school. Takato and Kanae go to search help and... roll credits.
- Some bad endings end like this, like the ones with Rika. Takato just falls unconscious in the middle of the action and the credits roll, without resolution to the situation.
- In Cooking Companions, if the player says they're not at least 18 years old when the game starts, then the story abruptly stops before you can check out the basement and experience the more horrifying elements.
- In Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, the Coffin Ending is the exact same as the True Ending, except it abruptly ends before you make it to the final room because the characters get stuck at the coffin. You need to see the Safe Ending in order to get the passcode to open it and rescue Snake.
- Remember11 is not only infamous for having no ending, it also "ends" on a Cliffhanger with many plot points left unsolved, leading to much Wild Mass Guessing.
- The original Japanese computer versions of Snatcher end with the Snatcher menace still a threat and the Junker agency left without its Chief after he's killed and replaced by a double. The ending can be seen as a Cliffhanger to the sequel, but it was actually intended to be a cut-off point for the third and final act, which was left out due to time constraints. The proposed ending would later be included in the CD-ROM remakes of the game.
Web Animation
- Battle for Dream Island Again abruptly ends after the final part of episode 5, without an actual conclusion. Some say this is because Cary and Michael Huang were blocked out of their Adsense account for several years which gave them profits from displayed advertisements. IDFB does continue from where BFDIA ended, but the entire story is dropped come BFB. At least, until the very end of BFB.
- Episode 5B of BFDIA also doesn't technically have an ending, although that is partially due to it being a Formula-Breaking Episode to begin with.
- Bunnykill: Word of God is that even if he hadn't canceled the series, the "Episode 5 saga" was never going to get a resolution.
- This is the way Double King ends. The Double King obtains the crown of Agatha, Matriarch of Death and runs away with it, falling into the void outside the planet. Cut to credits.
- The last episode of Girl Chan In Paradise ends on a cliffhanger, where Kenstar is about to use his secret bloodline technique against Swirly Glasses after he reveals himself as "Captain Taisho Bushido Blaster Buster #1". That was back in 2010, and since then Word of God is that the show is on indefinite hiatus.
- Super Mario Bros. Z's final episode was only a few minutes long as opposed to many of the others in the series and right before a climactic battle no less! As a result, several events never got resolved that were established in previous episodes. This is all due to the creator's refusal to continue working with sprite animation, although the ending credits suggest otherwise.
Webcomics
- Achewood had an arc that involved Ray becoming possessed whenever a note was played on a mystical banjo. The last strip in the arc had Ray telling Pat to say good things about his penis as Pat called him while being dragged down the sidewalk by the banjo come to life, which was followed by a hiatus when Chris Onstad's daughter was born. When the strip resumed, the banjo was never mentioned again, although Onstad does promise that before Achewood ever comes to a close, we'll find out what happens to the banjo.
- Ansem Retort stopped updating during what seemed to be the climax of Season 8.
- The 'Flower Knight' side story Drowtales, which ends with the titular knight going off into the world to get revenge on the creature that killed his family and kingdom. If he got his revenge, or died is never revealed, because no one knows.
- While Exploitation Now did conclude the main plotline of Jordan and the organization she was fighting against, the comic ends just a few pages after the final battle without addressing what happens after.
- The last page of Killroy and Tina looks like the end of the latest chapter. Then nothing. Then six months later, Justin Pierce started up The Non-Adventures of Wonderella and that was that. What makes this example egregious is that the bottom of the last non-Filler page said "To Be Continued".
- MS Paint Adventures:
- Jailbreak was originally Cut Short in favor of other works but eventually got an ending several years later. To wit, it ends with a pony falling asleep in an elf's bed and all the other characters still trapped, stranded, or otherwise in conflict.
- Bard Quest was Cut Short for the same reasons, so the last panel shows the main party meeting a wizard in the middle of wading through a swamp. They show up again in Problem Sleuth, having not budged an inch in the meantime.
- In The Order of the Stick, the "Blood Runs in the Family" Story Arc ends with such a complicated twist on this that it's hard to label it as any recognized form of Playing with a Trope. It's sort of invoked by Elan to defeat his Genre Savvy father who wanted him to either join him in ruling his Empire or to kill him so he'd live on in legend. Elan eventually abandons him in the desert, after countering his efforts to force the plot to do what he wanted, and the Order gets on with the main plot. However, while the villain of the story thinks of this as No Ending, it's only because he's Wrong Genre Savvy in thinking the main plot has to be what he thinks it is. The actual conflict of this storyline was that he seemed to have an iron grip of the story with unflappable Genre Savviness and a Xanatos Gambit that made him impossible to defeat, so his having an impotent Villainous Breakdown over the fact that the story isn't doing what he wants it to is a perfect resolution for that story.
Tarquin: THIS IS A TERRIBLE ENDING!!!
- RPG World had a particularly horrendous non-end. The characters reach the final boss, begin fighting the final boss, and then... nothing. As it turns out, the creator just plain got tired of working on the comic and axed it until the Fully Absorbed Finale in OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes.
- Velia Dear ended on a cliffhanger concerning Velia and her dying mother, asking the audience what they thought should happen... to no real avail, as the story was never continued.
- Parodied in one arc of xkcd that was riffing on Firefly. Two characters prepare for all-out combat, then "Final battle canceled by FOX."
- You Say It First ended in what seemed at the time more of a chapter wrap-up than a finale, wrapping up most of the last chapter's plotlines neatly and Brisbane and Kimberly turning in for the night.
Web Original
- The Green Wanderer doesn't end with Marrox finally succumbing to his illness, nor does it confirm or deny that Marrox succeeding in redeeming himself. Instead, it ends with Marrox and a goblin named Dollik talking for a while, before they say that "it's a nice day today."
- H! Flash. 51 chapters, the last few of which definitely feel like they're leading to some closure, and this is how it ends? With a piece of fluff from nowhere? What about all of the plot threads? What about Yummi-chan and her weird agenda? They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot...
- Improfanfic is notorious for this, due to various factors. Among the things that can kill an Impro dead:
- A writer's part is simply too difficult to follow up on, and future writers skip rather than try to tackle it.
- A series of skips and a complete lack of signups when the queue runs dry more or less torpedoes the fic.
- The admin for a given story just stops caring, doesn't prod writers, doesn't run queue signups, and probably leaves IFF entirely.
- The story is in "ending mode" with a fixed final queue, and the last author never bothers writing the last chapter. (This most famously happened to m.t.c.f.f. ULTRA, the original flagship of IFF, which still has not been ended a decade later, and still lists an author who abandoned writing the finale as the final author.) - Most plotlines in NationStates end this way, as posters become uninterested or disconnected and move on to other things. It'll be a cold day in the Rejected Realms, as it were, when you see an actual epilogue. The good ones have sequels, though, so it's not as much of a problem as you might think.
Web Videos
- Most videos in the Ace Attorney according to an AI series end without a clear ending, but #2 and #4 stand out. Those episodes end with court being temporarily adjourned without a verdict being handed down, and are never continued.
- Bed Time Stories Youtube Channel: The episode "Highways of Horror - Novis et Tenebris" is the first in the series to not close with a narration detailing whether or not the creatures and entities encountered by the witnesses were real or not, with the Early Access version stating in the comments that since it's a video about a repeated topic, there was little reason to do so. The video instead ends with the artist's rendition of the strange creature that drove the witness into a depression that resulted in him committing suicide.
- "The Glitch", by Corridor Digital, ends with a fake "plugin failed" image.
- Criticized: The film ends with Arthur assaulting Darian a second time. It's unknown if Darian convinced Arthur he couldn't give a 4 star review because it would be suspicious for him to change his rating from 0 to 4, if Darian was made to go back and change the rating again, or if Arthur killed him.
- The Game Grumps frequently don't bother finishing games, not even counting the many one-offs they've done, often with no explanation or indication that they knew at the time that they wouldn't be coming back to them. The Sonic 2006 LP stands out, though, both for being over 90% complete when it was abandoned (they only had Silver's last boss fight and the final chapter to go) and for the reason it was prematurely ended (Jon quitting the channel entirely to focus on his own show).
- JonTron ends most of his videos either with one of these or a Gainax Ending. The Home Alone game review, for example, starts with Jon sleeping for a month after inhaling noxious fumes after trying to cook nuts on a stove to find that his bird starved to death and the only way to bring him back is to find a good Home Alone game to appease the ghost of Macaulay Culkin (who's not dead). When he finally finds a halfway decent one, he comes back to try and get ghost!Culkin to reappear, only for Jon to realize "Shit, I hallucinated that, didn't I?" End video. Jon even lampshades this in his Bubsy review. "Jon doesn't know how to end videos."
- Red vs. Blue: The season 13 finale ends with the Blood Gulch Crew, aboard Hargrove's ship, having just shut down the Mantises laying siege to the people of Chorus. Tucker has donned The Meta's armor and the rest of the gang have armed themselves with the various other weapons in Hargrove's trophy room. The ship full of mercenaries are about to breach the door and Church enters Bullet Time and records one final message to his friends, saying that The Meta's armor can get them through this fight, but he'll have to use up what processing power he has left to run the suit, and that he'll be gone by the end of the fight. The screen fades to black just before the mercs enter the room, season 14 is an anthology season, and season 15 picks up right onto the next main story arc.
- The Spoony Experiment: Spoony pulls this off while he was reviewing a game based on the Dirty Harry series, as the video cuts to black just when Spoony is about to tell what would happen in the second level. (The first level ended just as abruptly, to be noted.) Even more appropriate, before the cut you could hear the exact same song that played during the certain more famous occurrence of this trope.
- SuperMarioLogan:
- The episode, "Chef Poo Poo's Kitchen Disaster!" has the titular character making a mess in the kitchen while serving as a substitute for Chef Pee Pee. However, Bowser's mother, Margaret ends the episode by asking if anyone wants to take her clothes off, and the mess hasn't been cleaned up yet.
- "Cody's Sister!" ends with Junior and Joseph angrily suggesting to end the video after finding out that Cody's sister, Katy already has a girlfriend, a "limited edition, never been opened, 50th anniversary, summertime" Barbie doll. They don't even say goodbye to her before she leaves for Wisconsin, and she's still staying at their house.
- "The Cat in the Hat" ends with the titular character's head exploding from trying to think of a rhyme for "Orange", and Junior wondering who's going to clean up the mess the Cat made. Cody points out to Junior that the Cat usually cleans up his messes after he makes them, but since the Cat's dead, he can't do that. He then asks Junior when he's going to Military School, and the episode promptly ends without any resolution to either the mess being cleaned up or Junior being punished.
- In the Third Rate Gamer's review of Yoshi's Island, he parodies The Sopranos' use of this trope in its final episode.
Third Rate Gamer: This game is dumber than that last episode of The Sopranos where they— [Smash to Black]
- Ultra Fast Pony sometimes does this:
- The episode "Making Babies", has the Cutie Mark Crusaders learning how to turn adults into babies and promptly do just that to The Mane Six. The episode then follows the now regressed ponies through several short skits before abruptly ending with no real resolution or explanation for how they're back to normal by the next episode.
- In "Time", Twilight is visited by somepony that looks just like her and claims to be her from the future, but suspiciously doesn't know information about her past self that she should by all rights know, making her claim of being future! Twilight questionable. But before this can really go anywhere, she is pulled back to wherever it was she came from and nothing in the episode is really resolved.
