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Harry Potter and the Absolute Worst Epilogue Ever

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I recently rewatched all the Harry Potter movies. All of them. Eight films, many hours, several regrettable snacks. The movies are fine. Some child acting is… well, let’s call it earnest. Hogwarts remains the only school where trauma therapy is not part of the curriculum. All normal.
And then the epilogue happens.

And everything collapses like a poorly cast spell.

I have always hated the epilogue. I hated it when I read it. I hated it even more when I first saw it. This time it almost sent me into a dissociative state. I had flashbacks. I questioned my life choices. I checked the clock to see how long I had left on Earth.
Look. Epilogues are rarely a good idea. They are the narrative equivalent of a director leaning into the audience to whisper, “I do not trust you to understand closure.” Most stories do not need them. Some stories survive them. But the Harry Potter epilogue is the first one that actively ruins everything around it. It is the worst epilogue in the history of bad epilogues.

And it brings absolutely nothing to the table. Nothing. What do we learn? That Harry Potter is an objectively terrible father when it comes to naming his children. That is it. That is the entire thematic content. Albus Severus. Really. That child will spend his entire life explaining that his name is not a medical condition.
In the book, you can at least imagine everyone aging gracefully. Warm lighting. Subtle wrinkles. Dignity. Possibility.

The movie, however, said no. The movie said, “Let us attach latex to twenty year olds and hope for the best.” It looks like the makeup team googled “old person” and then slapped rubber onto the actors the way toddlers apply stickers. Everyone appears to be aging via slow dehydration. The uncanny valley has rarely been this flat and dusty.

But the real crime is how aggressively pointless it all is. The actual ending of the story is perfect. Evil defeated. World rebuilt. Characters changed. Narrative complete. That is an ending. That is closure. That is the moment you fade to black and roll credits.

The epilogue then bursts through the door uninvited and announces, “Surprise. Everyone became parents. Please clap.” It is like watching a movie reach a beautiful emotional crescendo and then immediately cut to someone asking if you have eaten enough vegetables today.

And please do not tell me it “shows life goes on.” The entire story already shows that. Life going on is the default state of humanity. You do not need to force the characters into middle age with names that sound like rejected Victorian baby books.

This epilogue does not deepen the story. It does not enrich the characters. It does not even provide satisfying fan service. It is just there. Lumbering around. Confused. Wrinkled in all the wrong places.

So here is my position, stated plainly. The Harry Potter epilogue is unnecessary, thematically hollow, visually cursed, dramatically limp, aggressively unhelpful, and absolutely the gold standard of how not to end a story. If epilogues across history gathered for a conference, this one would be the keynote speaker. It would arrive early, spill its coffee, and still get lost on the way to the podium.

If future Blu ray releases quietly removed it, I would consider that a public service.

And yes, I skipped it on my rewatch. Even I have standards.

 

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Skip Intro: A Love Letter to TV Theme Songs

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There was a time, not even that long ago, when a TV theme song wasn’t optional. You didn’t skip the Buffy the Vampire Slayer intro. You endured it like a rite of passage. That first guitar riff hit and instantly told you exactly what kind of hour you were in for: monsters, heartbreak, snark, and teenagers making very questionable choices. The theme wasn’t just a song; it was the show looking you in the eyes and saying, “You ready? Good. Let’s go deal with supernatural puberty.”

Theme songs used to set the mood. The West Wing opened with those brass heavy, patriotic bars that basically told your brain to sit up straighter and think about democracy for a while. Babylon 5 updated its theme every season to reflect the story’s tone, from hope to war to political exhaustion. It was basically a musical weather report for the saga. Sometimes all you needed was the perfect fit, something instantly recognizable that told you everything you needed to know about the world you were stepping into.

And then streaming happened. The “Skip Intro” button arrived and erased decades of careful emotional calibration in one small, silently judgmental rectangle. Let’s be honest. We all press it. Even I, someone who rewatched Smallvillevoluntarily, am not above it. You binge enough episodes in a row and even the greatest theme song becomes a tiny speed bump between you and your next dopamine pellet.

Intros didn’t just get skipped. They started disappearing. They shrank. They got efficient. Some turned into three second sonic logos. Some shows dropped them entirely, like they suddenly decided overtures were embarrassing.

Which brings us to Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. I won’t dwell on it too long, but it is a great example of how not to handle musical inheritance. The original Thrones theme is iconic, practically global Pavlovian conditioning. But House of the Dragon didn’t reinterpret it or evolve it. They just used the same thing. Strong branding, maybe, but also a missed opportunity.

It is the musical equivalent of turning in last year’s homework again and hoping the teacher won’t notice. I noticed.

Compare that with Doctor Who, which has kept the same melody since 1963 while reinventing the instrumentation and emotional tone every few years. Each regeneration of the Doctor gets a regeneration of the theme. New face, new personality, new sonic identity, yet always recognizable. That is how you respect your past while creating something new.

Or look at Star Trek, which understands musical evolution better than most franchises in television history. TOS has its soaring optimism. TNG turns it into full symphonic grandeur. DS9 becomes stately. Voyager climbs hopefully toward the horizon. Even Discovery and Strange New Worlds attempt to recapture the magic, and while neither theme is as instantly hummable as the Jerry Goldsmith classics, at least they try to build something new. This excludes Enterprise, of course, which was a soft rock fever dream that I still believe was a social experiment that accidentally aired.

All of this circles back to the same point. A theme song is part of the storytelling. It is an emotional handshake. A tone setter. A tiny overture that says, “Here is the world you are about to enter. Let me tune your brain first.”

And while I completely understand the instinct to skip intros, because after hour three I too crave direct narrative injection, I still think something gets lost when we abandon them. Stories need transitions. They need thresholds. They need the music that opens the door.

So in the spirit of appreciating the craft we ignore with a single click, here are my personal Top 5 TV themes. These are the themes I never skip. And honestly, life is too short to pretend that does not mean anything.

My Top 5 TV Themes (in alphabetical order)

  • Batman: The Animated Series
    Shirley Walker’s orchestral noir masterpiece. Dramatic, gothic, instantly atmospheric. A cartoon theme that feels cinematic and slightly intimidating.
  • Band of Brothers
    Michael Kamen at his most restrained and devastating. A theme built on dignity, grief, and quiet heroism. It does not glorify war. It mourns its cost. One of the greatest TV themes ever written.
  • Farscape
    Chaotic, alien, percussion driven energy. A theme that does not invite you in so much as launch you into orbit. Nothing else in science fiction sounds remotely like this.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation
    Jerry Goldsmith’s musical definition of optimism. Soaring brass, a melody carved out of hope, and the emotional promise that humanity might be worth rooting for.
  • The West Wing
    Warm, idealistic, proudly earnest. A theme that makes you want to walk briskly down a hallway while talking about ethics. It still gives me goosebumps.

Ask me tomorrow and the list might shift, but these are the themes I will never skip. Some things deserve their sixty seconds of my life.

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Party on, Walter Benjamin: The Aura Is Dead, and We Killed It.

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Walter Benjamin

I first read Walter Benjamin’s Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit at university, and the idea that stayed with me is his notion of Aura. Benjamin wrote that a work of art has a presence, a uniqueness that comes from existing in a specific place and time. Reproduction destroys that. Once something can be endlessly copied, the original loses part of what made it special.

The easiest way to understand this is to think about the Mona Lisa. If you see it on your phone, have you really seen it? Probably not. To see it, you have to go to the Louvre, push through a wall of selfie sticks, and realize that it’s surprisingly small. But still, standing there, you feel it — the strange gravity of the original, the weight of being in front of the thing itself. That’s what Benjamin meant by aura.

Mechanical reproduction changed that forever. And yet it also made new kinds of art possible. Without it, we wouldn’t have cinema, and without cinema, we wouldn’t have movie stars. The paradox is that the aura that disappeared from the artwork reappeared in the actor. Movie stars became the carriers of aura: distant, flawless, unreachable.

Then the tools of reproduction multiplied again, and suddenly everyone could reproduce themselves. The mystery of the movie star turned into the familiarity of the content (I use the word derogatory) creator. Distance was replaced by access. Cary Grant never posted about his morning routine; modern actors have entire teams curating theirs.

Every now and then, though, something resembling the old aura flickers back to life. The Barbie and Oppenheimer double feature or Deadpool & Wolverine, created what you could call event aura or to use another term FOMO. People didn’t just go to see the movies; they went to be part of them. The films became social events, something you could miss if you stayed home. It wasn’t the same as standing before the Mona Lisa, but it was similar in spirit — a reminder that presence still matters.

Still, the exception proves the rule. For most films, audiences have learned to wait. Why buy a ticket when the movie will stream in four weeks? You can experience it on your couch, pause for snacks, and, if you’re a YouTuber, record your “first reaction” video — complete with thumbnail face — for an audience that also waited. It’s the modern version of pilgrimage without ever leaving the house.

And that, I think, is the uncomfortable truth: we helped build this. We, the audience, chose convenience over presence. We turned the communal act of moviegoing into a content pipeline. When we complain that movies feel hollow, part of that emptiness comes from how we consume them.

Maybe Wayne’s World saw it coming. Back in 1992, two basement slackers with a public-access show were a joke about the absurdity of amateur broadcasting. Now that format is the culture. Replace the basement with a ring light, and Wayne and Garth are early YouTubers — the accidental prophets of the algorithm age. Benjamin argued that reproduction erodes aura. He was right, but the twist is that we finished the job ourselves. We didn’t just lose the aura; we traded it for comfort, access, and replayability. We don’t stand in front of the Mona Lisa anymore — we scroll past her, waiting for the reaction video to drop.