A series finale is always sort of an identity crisis. The whole purpose of a television series is to keep going, to continue laying eggs made of advertising and merchandising gold. So when a show is not renewed the writers have to suddenly wrap up what they've been working so hard to drag out. That's why series finales are so often unsatisfying...because by nature they do not have the same structure, objective or spirit as the show you love. Pilots are usually crappy for the same reason: Identity crisis. TV shows, unlike movies, are just not designed to have a beginning or end.
It's a shame the miniseries (a format often used in anime) has never caught on in this country. A miniseries combines the virtues of narrative depth — freedom to explore subplots and side characters — and a completely mapped story arc. Futurama split the difference in its final season, producing four feature length films chopped up into half hour episodes. It was a bold experiment, most successful in Bender's Big Score and The Beast with a Billion Backs, that proved the creators were sitting on ideas bigger than 22 minutes can contain. The show brimmed with incomparable creativity for four years — a monumental love letter to science fiction.
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