No one saw it coming. Did you?

The other day, my girlfriend Nicole and I watched the final few episodes of the Fox genre show Sleepy Hollow.  And I have to tell you, we’ve been hooked on that show since day one.

Yeah, a program about a reincarnated Ichabod Crane and a police lieutenant fighting supernatural demons in the Hudson Valley, along with Walter Bishop from Fringe and one of the comedians from Mad TV…  Makes perfect sense.

Anyway, the show is a great thrill ride of a program, and we can’t wait for next season to start.

Especially when the last fifteen minutes of the final episode…

Oh no.  I’m not spoiling it for you.  Suffice it to say that we had these shows on the DVR for a few days, and I was specifically avoiding any spoiler alerts.  You people who watch Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad and Dexter know exactly what I’m talking about.  You want to experience that “holy smokes how did they pull that one off” moment.

It’s tough these days to have one of those “no one saw it coming” moments.  Fans immediately rush to Twitter after they’ve seen an episode and announce that they’re in shock over what happened.  Yeah, maybe they’ll post the words “SPOILER ALERT” afterward.  Oh my God, Matthew Crawley died in a car accident.  Oh my God, Walter White dies at the end.  Trust me, if we had the internet and Twitter and Facebook back in the 1980’s, we’d have hashtags #MoldavianMassacre and #KristenshotJR all over the place.  Yeah, I could see it now.  #ApesBlewEarthUp  #DamnYouAllToHell

But when it’s done right – as it was on Sleepy Hollow – the surprise ending is absolutely amazing.

I’ve seen other attempts at surprise endings, and the few that actually work for me – the ones that make sense and turn what might be a humdrum product into a “holy crap this is an awesome move” include –

• The Thunderbolts.  The Thunderbolts were a superhero team – okay, yeah, there’s been superhero teams from the Justice League of America and the Avengers, all the way back to maybe the All-Winners Squad and the Invaders in World War II. But  the twist about the Thunderbolts – which was carefully concealed and only revealed in the final pages of the first issue of the comic book – was that the superhero team were actually villains in disguise.  This made the Thunderbolts comic book a tale of redemption as much as it was a tale of superheroes.  Wow.
• The Sixth Sense.  I blogged about this a couple of years ago, as part of my “Royale With Cheese Movie Club” of films that I never got around to seeing.  And although I knew the twist ending (I mean, come on, you can’t keep that kind of secret for twenty years until I finally watch the film), I saw how there were so many instances in the film itself where the clues were right there for you to see – and those same clues were there for you to misread the entire scenario.
• An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.  I remember actually seeing this film as part of a classroom audio-visual moment.  If you’ve never seen this film – it was actually repurposed as a Twilight Zone episode – a Civil War prisoner is to be hanged off the side of a bridge.  The rope breaks, he falls into the water and escapes, and with all the strength left in his body, he runs home… only to find…

Those moments – the anticipation that you’re watching something exciting or fascinating… and then the story changes and you’re thinking, “Damn I wasn’t expecting that.  Not anywhere in the least.”  Then you go back and you look for clues, look for things you might have missed, moments that screamed at you that the big twist was coming.

I’m sure you have some classic twist endings and “I didn’t see that moment coming” memories from your favorite books, TV shows, comics, movies, whatnot.

That’s why I have a comments section on this blog.

Feel free to play along.