When it comes time to wrap up a TV series, there are a lot of emotions in play. You want to send your viewers home with a feeling of closure — they’ve come to know and love these characters over however many seasons of watching, and saying goodbye is tough. Having the finale be “just another episode” isn’t an option. Creators need to push the emotional impact as high as they can and resolve any outstanding plotlines that viewers will undoubtedly complain about.

It’s hard to stick the landing. It’s even harder when you feel the bizarre need to deliver an emotional payload that maybe your show isn’t equipped to handle. Here are 11 shows that used their last episodes to really bum viewers out, no matter how out-of-sync that decision seemed in context. From global extinction to deeply disturbing dream sequences, these finales are seriously depressing.

Reboot

Beloved by 90s kids, Reboot was the world’s first attempt at a fully computer-generated kids show. The series told the tale of a digital world being assaulted by a humanoid virus named Megabyte and the defensive programs that kept the place running. Although the animation looks super primitive today, the show has a devoted fanbase that kept it going for four seasons. Unfortunately, the series came to a close with a brutal cliffhanger: a disguised Megabyte gets access to the War Room that controls the whole thing and unleashes predatory viruses to infect every program in operation, with the good guys helpless to stop him. Kind of a downer, but your aunt shouldn’t have downloaded that toolbar software. In fairness, season 3 did get pretty awesomely dark. And had an episode that paid homage to The Prisoner.

Little House on the Prairie

The TV adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s iconic books was one of America’s most beloved family entertainments, showing the Ingalls family carving out a life in the late 1800s. The show did deal with some relatively heavy subjects like racism and drug addiction, but overall it was as wholesome as a big chewy slice of white bread. That’s what makes the series finale, “The Last Farewell,” such a shocker. Aired as a TV-movie special, the plot involves a rapacious land baron named Nathan Lassiter buying up the Ingalls farm and all the land around it. Instead of moving away, the townspeople decide to just blow everything up, destroying nine seasons of bucolic memories in a massive conflagration.

One Foot in the Grave

Despite its grim title, British sitcom One Foot in the Grave was an amusing look at a married couple post-retirement. The show did fold in some notes of black comedy, including an unforgettable episode revolving around a frozen cat, but the finale, entitled “Things Aren’t Simple Any More,” twisted it into full-on despair. The show starts with protagonist Victor Meldrew being killed in the street by a hit and run driver, and over its running time depicts his widow swearing vengeance on whoever was responsible. When she finds out her husband’s killer is actually her new best friend, it’s heavily implied that she poisons her to death. Some pretty dark stuff going on here.

M.A.N.T.I.S.

Sam Raimi’s oddball 1994 series about a paralyzed scientist who uses an armored exoskeleton to fight crime was a trailblazer, giving the world the first ever African American superhero on TV. It was also a pretty bizarre series, especially in the second season where it went into some fantastical areas involving time travel, monsters and more. The show’s finale, “Ghost Of The Ice,” pit M.A.N.T.I.S. and his sidekick against an invisible dinosaur. Pretty silly, right? It is, until the show ends with the revelation that the no-see-um T. rex actually killed our hero, who blew both himself and his love interest up to stop the beast. The last scene is narrated by his apprentice, Robin Colcord, who tells the viewers how he buried the hero in an unmarked grave.

ALF

It’s hard to believe that one of the biggest sitcom stars of the mid-80s was a hairy puppet from the planet Melmac, but ALF was a phenomenon. The cat-eating alien hung out with the Tanner family for four seasons, but after it got moved from Monday to Sunday, ratings started to drop and the show got the cancellation notice. The series had established early on that the US government was looking for Alf. Their goal: take him into custody and perform vicious experiments on him, ending with his dissection. The last episode of the fourth season featured Alf actually getting captured and taken away, leaving fans with the impression that our alien friend was dead in a lab somewhere.

Soap

This 1977 primetime sitcom was way ahead of its time, a metafictional parody of overstuffed soap operas that pushed just about every envelope possible and was a frequent victim of ABC censorship. Despite all that, it ran for four insane seasons, with ludicrous plotlines including demonic possession, cults, identical twins, and lots and lots of adultery. That said, it still managed to keep things fairly lighthearted until it was time to wrap things up. The last episode ended with lead character Jessica Tate standing blindfolded in front of a firing squad in the fictional South American country of Malaguay, and as it cuts to black we hear the guns fire.

David the Gnome

Produced in Spain, this odd little pastoral cartoon got an American life on Nickelodeon when the fledgling network was desperate for cheap content to fill up its programming slots. David lived in the woods with his wife Lisa and worked with the beasts of the forest to solve a variety of problems over the course of 26 episodes. But the thing about David is that he was 399 years old, and gnomes only live to 400. In the show’s finale, David and Lisa know that their death is upon them, so they travel together up the Mountains of Beyond and pass into the next world, their bodies transforming into a pair of entwined apple trees.

Roseanne

The entire final season of Roseanne is a massive middle finger to the series, which gloried in the gritty reality of suburban American life. The family wins a $108 million lottery jackpot, changing their lives forever and kicking off a series of bizarre escapades. The final episode, “Into That Good Night,” added a final twist that sent fans into a tailspin. The whole season — nay, the whole series — was a work of fiction penned by the Roseanne character, and some of the biggest events (like Dan surviving his heart attack and, of course, the lottery wins) never happened. It was simultaneously bleak and insulting, a perplexing finish for a beloved TV show.

Quantum Leap

The driving force behind Dr. Sam Beckett’s journey through time and space in this seminal early 90s series was to return home to his wife and a normal life. In episode after episode, he changed history for the better, and viewers were led to believe that Sam’s hard work would eventually pay off with a “leap” back to his original body, but that was not to be, as the last episode of the fourth and final season made clear. After jumping into the body of a man at a bar and seeing his own reflection, Sam meets God, learns that he’s just one of many “leapers,” and saves some dudes from a mineshaft cave-in before being given the opportunity to finally return home. And then, in the most brutal indignity of all, a title card reveals to us that he never did. Ouch.

The Naked Truth

This dimly-remembered Tea Leoni sitcom lasted three seasons, but the producers decided they wanted to end it on the darkest note possible, with the impending death of nearly all the main characters. When Leoni’s tabloid reporter character wants to get a scoop on Barbra Streisand’s wedding, the only way to get to the scene is via hot air balloon, because TV is ridiculous. Normally this premise would be good for a few laughs, but in the episode the gasbag drifts off course and out to sea, with the passengers noting that they have no food or water and discussing their impending deaths. The series was taken off the air before this one was even broadcast, probably for good reason, but it’s on the DVD release.

Dinosaurs

It was kind of a foregone conclusion that something bad would happen to the Sinclair family on ABC’s Dinosaurs — after all, the Earth is populated by hairless apes, not walking reptiles. But the way the show went off the air in its fourth season was spectacularly bleak. In an episode titled “Changing Nature,” the Sinclairs came face to face with the fact that their world was changing, first with the sudden disappearance of the “bunch beetle,” made extinct by development over their natural breeding habitat. This sets of a chain of eco-disaster dominoes that ends with a new Ice Age that wipes out all dino life on the planet. The show’s final shot is a crane out from the Sinclair home, covered in snow, with everybody freezing to death inside.

You may remember when Will Smith flipped the switch of his Bel-Air home, but while that was sad, nothing is more bleak than being trapped at sea with no hope of rescue, awaiting your inevitable extinction by freezing to death, or ending your computer-generated series by having the bad guy win.