While a great plot twist can elevate a sci-fi show, these particular plot revelations were way too obvious to leave anyone stunned. Even great shows can sometimes feature surprisingly tired twists. Much like there are otherwise great movies whose endings are predictable, many shows can end up telegraphing their big story revelations too early and undercut their effectiveness as a result. This doesn’t always ruin a series, although it can leave viewers frustrated with these specific plot lines.
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Although Black Mirror, Westworld, and Stranger Things may all have plenty of fans, each of these sci-fi shows featured at least one twist that viewers could see coming from a mile away. This might not have ruined the overall reputation or legacy of any of the titles listed here, but it did leave fans feeling like the shows could have done more to cover up where their stories were heading, so things weren’t quite so predictable for anyone familiar with the genre.
Black Mirror
The dystopian anthology series Black Mirror features some of the darkest twist endings in TV history, and the show’s first two seasons on Britain’s Channel 4 were uniquely infamous for making the grim twists of The Outer Limits seem downright mild. After the twist endings to classic outings like “White Bear” and “White Christmas” left fans emotionally devastated, Netflix’s first season of Black Mirror, 2016’s season 3, knew it needed to up the ante. Episode 4, “Shut Up and Dance,” achieved this with one of the show’s nastiest twists, but the preceding outing was less impressive.
In episode 2, “Playtest,” Wyatt Russell’s troubled American Cooper gets a chance to playtest an ambitious virtual reality game that targets the user’s real-life fears and brings them to life in the game. What follows is a trippy, nightmarish ordeal where Cooper must face all of his worst fears, while the viewers are left with the niggling feeling that all of this may be for naught. After all, what if something went haywire in the playtest, and the entire simulation is just Cooper’s dying dream? No prizes for guessing the bleak, but painfully obvious twist ending to this one.
Westworld
Based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name, which was previously adapted as a movie in 1973, Westworld focuses on a futuristic Wild West theme park where android “Hosts” allow human “Guests” to act out their most violent and depraved fantasies on these supposedly unfeeling beings. The ambitious HBO show’s time-shifting storytelling means that viewers follow many of the same characters years apart, thus setting up some brilliant twists from the cleverly constructed series.
However, not all of Westworld’s twists are as effective as they ought to be. Jimmi Simpson’s sweet, well-meaning William is the most good-hearted of the show’s early “Guests,” and one of the only characters to take issue with the mistreatment of the androids. As such, it would be pretty surprising and subversive if he eventually, in the future timeline, turned out to be Ed Harris’ sadistic Man in Black, a longtime patron of the park who is vile, violent, and eager to uncover its secrets. Westworld took its time getting to this revelation, but most of the audience were a lot quicker on the uptake than the show.
Stranger Things
Stranger Things season 3’s tonal shift was immediately striking, as the show grew much more cartoony and over-the-top in its third outing. While there is a lot to like in Stranger Things season 3, such as Dacre Montgomery’s turn as its central villain Billy, this outing of the show still felt goofier than its predecessors and lacked the subtlety and humanity of the darker, more grounded seasons 1 and 2. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the character of David Harbour’s Sheriff Hopper. In season 1, Hopper was a grieving father who got caught up in a conspiracy far bigger than him and feared for his life.
By season 3, he had transformed into a sitcom dad cum ‘80s action hero who was more comfortable mowing down Soviet spies with a machine gun than talking to his adopted daughter about her feelings. This boorish Hopper suddenly seemed much more unpleasant and pushy, which made it pretty obvious that the series was setting up a redemptive heroic sacrifice for him. What was even more glaringly obvious was the fact that Stranger Things was not about to kill off its leading man after only three seasons, which made his season 4 return less of a twist and more of a foregone conclusion.
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