The ending to
Digimon Adventure 02 springs to mind – overall, a decent series which at points took us to even darker and more interesting territory than the original, but the final moments were horribly rushed and ill-thought out. Clearly, they were in an awful hurry to get the present characters and scenarios wrapped up as quickly as possible so that they could move on and start anew with the upcoming
Tamers series, but that’s really no excuse for tossing any old crap together at the end, with little to no regard for how it actually meshes with everything that’s come before. Yes, that much-debated epilogue is the prime offender here, but I do have a handful of nitpicks with the concluding episodes in general. Among them:
Spoiler Below *) The notion of MaloMyotismon attempting to disable the Digi-Destined by trapping them within fantasies which enable them to indulge in their greatest desires and become oblivious to the reality of their situation is an interesting one for sure, but the reason given for the ultimate failure of this plan – that Davis has no greater dreams or desires beyond what he already has, and thus is immune – is pure unadulterated cop-out, and kind of difficult to swallow. I mean, given that so much had previously been made of Davis’s crush on Kari and his ambition to be a great footballer...granted, it was no doubt intended to send out a heart-warming message to kids about the importance of being thankful for what they have, but even kids deserve more credit than that.
*) Arukenimon and Mummymon were both killed off very cruelly and pointlessly.
*)....In fact, the only thing which I did really like about the final episode was Oikawa’s final character arc. I gotta admit, that was a pretty nice touch.
And now for that epilogue. Epilogues which take us twenty-odd years into the future and update us on what the characters are doing and introduce us to their children generally tend to be big enough cliché-magnets as it is, but the least that you should be able to expect is a bit of character consistency. Clearly that wasn't a top priority here:
Spoiler Below I know that a lot of people despise the epilogue for the pairings it suddenly lumps us with at end – Matt/Sora and Ken/Yolei – but to be honest it’s not so much the pairings which bother me as it is the freaking professions. With few exceptions, they were lame, trite and painfully inconsistent with the characterisations which had preceded them. Matt the musician becomes an astronaut (ugh), Sora the sports lover a fashion designer, and Yolei the ambitious, computer-savvy lady isn’t even given a profession at all, which is kind of a downer.