Top 5 Favorite: Couples

The Doomed: The Depressing Endings of the Couples I Wanted So Much to Make It.

I think that I’m cursed, because if I root for a couple it is like they HAVE to break-up, or someone has to die, or something. So this list isn’t nearly all of the unsuccessful romances I have witnessed and mourned over the years, but it is a sample of the ones I find particularly unfair.

Willow Rosenberg and Oz, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
In all fairness, every couple in the Buffy/Angel-world ended in a way that ranged from terrible (Xander and Cordelia) to tragic (Wesley and Fred), and I feel so sorry for all of them (except for Riley, because he was kind of lame, and my sister will kill me if I express any sympathy for him, she really hated him). For me the one that really hurt was Willow and Oz, because after all their cuteness (he first notices her when she is dressed as an Eskimo!), Willow couldn’t forgive Oz for the same thing that he forgave her for. As a viewer I would like to just have the finality of death (character or series) rather than the lingering disappointment of an inglorious end to a wonderful relationship full of wit and mutual respect. On the other hand, maybe I shouldn’t be so sad, since Tara was the love of Willow’s life, but I would counter that as a couple Willow and Tara were very deeply in love, but boring, while Willow and Oz were both in love and fun.


Daria Morgendorffer and Tom Sloan, Daria
Don’t you dare try and tell me that Daria is just a cartoon, because I shed legitimate tears every single time I watch the series finale and Daria breaks up with Tom. They might be 2-dimesnional, but Daria and Tom were the intellectually matched and temperamentally complementary couple that rarely (Loch Ness Monster-type rare) happens in high school. Tom brought Daria out of her shell a bit, patiently persuading her into interacting with the world, and Daria curtailed Tom’s potential for pretension, keeping him honest and grounded. Therefore I find it even more distressing that they break-up for entirely legitimate reasons (they are going different colleges), because I can’t even block the sadness with righteous indignation over the logic. Like Veronica and Logan (see below), I believe after college Daria and Tom got back together, got married, and had attractive and sarcastic babies.


Chris and Jal, Skins
I have to tell you that Chris dies in the second to final episode of Series 2, and in the next Jal aborts their baby. You should know up front, the spear you see hurts less as they say. The majority of Chris and Jal’s relationship takes place in one episode (Series 2, Episode 5, “Chris”) in which rather a lot of time passes, so in that one episode they not only get together, but Chris cheats on Jal with his ex Angie (skank), and Jal finds out that she is pregnant but doesn’t tell Chris about it when she takes him back. Given all this you might question my judgment for putting them on this list, but trust me that in the short time that Chris and Jal have together the love of each makes the other a better person: Jal give Chris both the encouragement he needs to take responsibility for himself and the forgiveness he needs when he fails, while Chris breaks through Jal's family-disappointment-induced isolation and pessimism. Chris’s storyboard of Jal’s importance to him is both sincere and endearing, Jal’s agony over her pregnancy and subsequent choice is terribly compounded by first her fear of loosing Chris and then his death, Chris’s private tears after Jal tells him that she intends to terminate her pregnancy are a heartbreaking expression of how much he loves her, and Jal’s honest and hope-filled eulogy at Chris’s funeral demonstrates how much she has changed. Chris and Jal are the kind of couple about which people would say, “it is better to have loved and lost.”


Veronica Mars and Logan Echolls, Veronica Mars
This is a perspective thing. In my heart, someday in the future of Neptune California Veronica and Logan find their way back to each other. As far as actually produced television episodes tell us, the last we see of LoVe was a longing look passing between the two as he apologizes for beating the crizap out of her current boyfriend Piz in the name of defending her honor. I should take my terminology from the source itself. Logan describes their relationship better than I could: epic.


Kara “Starbuck” Thrace and Lee “Apollo” Adama, Battlestar Galactica
Similar to Buffy/Angel, BSG seemed to be littered with broken-hearts and battered connections, and the human/not-human question diminished the already fairly low odds for a happy ending: Roslin takes her last breath resting her head on Bill’s shoulder; Cally and the Chief were a mutually abusive mess before she got tossed out of the airlock by Tory; and “dysfunctional” doesn’t even begin to describe Tigh and Ellen. Therefore, I can’t say that I was surprised that Kara died for the second time in the series finale. Furthermore, the simple fact is that Lee and Kara really never had any chance (their first kiss took place while her fiancé, his brother, was passed out drunk on the couch), so it would have been somewhat disingenuous for them to have the same future as Helo and Athena, but I still wanted that for them. Despite his perpetual identity crisis and her un-paralleled self-destruction, Lee and Kara remained devoted and caring to one another; friends in a way that neither was with their spouse, able to empathize or admonish as the situation called for.

The TV Girl