I don’t know why there are so many people who think that suggesting that it would somehow be clever if Murder, She Wrote ended by revealing that Jessica actually killed all of the people and framed all of the people who supposedly did it in each episode. Not only is this an obvious joke, it would be a truly terrible ending.

It is a comparatively minor objection, but this would require contradicting many of the episodes; it’s probably more than half in which the murderer confesses in the end. I suppose you could get around that by making it a science fiction show and giving Jessica mind control powers.

Which brings me to the real problem with this: it’s completely wrong for the genre. If the writers did this, it would just make Murder, She Wrote a comedy, or perhaps some sort of psychological horror show or something. What it would not be is a mystery show.

In this spirit, I’d like to propose a few similarly terrible final episodes for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

• Picard wakes up from surgery after being stabbed by the Tuskan Raider Nausicaan. He’s still a young ensign. He goes back to the bar and all of the main cast are patrons or servers. (Guinan is a dance hall girl wearing mostly huge pink feathers.)
• Picard wakes up from taking magic mushrooms in a native american ceremony and the rest of the cast are his fellow shamans. All of the dialog is in Navajo, with subtitles.
• Instead of the poker game, we then flash to a bunch of kids playing in the back yard of a late 1960s house, with the suggestion that they just watched an episode of the original and TNG has all been them playing pretend. One of the kids is named Beaver. Another is named Dennis.
• It is revealed that the entire show was actually the Star Trek fanfic of a prematurely balding teenager who looks kind of like Patrick Stewart, which he just finished reading to a hot girl who then flat-out rejects him the moment he’s done, and he commits suicide by drinking a mixture of crushed glass and wine.
• In the final episode, it is revealed that the main cast are all patients in a lunatic asylum in the 1980s, and Q is actually one of the nurses.
• We pull back from the final episode to see Lee Harvey Oswald in a chair with one of those things on his face holding his eyes open. It turns out that TNG was actually a torture device people wearing grey robes used to break down his will and make him complacent. We hear him saying, over and over, “I will kill President Kennedy.” This fades to black and Leonard Nemoy walks out and says, “And perhaps this was how the Illuminati killed JFK.”

Aren’t those all brilliant? Wouldn’t it have been so cool if they’d done those instead of what they actually did? Can there be a better way to end a long-running TV show than with a giant out-of-genre F.U. to the fans?

Yes, actually. There can be.

Admittedly, though, this still isn’t as bad as the people who blame superheroes for the actions of supervillains.