5 Insane but Plausible Ways Your Favorite TV Shows Could End

5 The Walking Dead: Rick Survives His Coma Because He's a Walker

In a world where dead people are reborn as mindless, flesh-eating zombies, the biggest reality stretch comes in the Walking Dead's first episode. Rick, the main not-zombie, wakes up in an abandoned hospital after a long coma. When we say "abandoned," we don't mean "everyone went home for the night save for one drunk at the switchboard" -- we mean it was fucking abandoned. Everyone's dead or undead, and it's been this way for at least two months.

So how the fuck did Rick survive? He sat there for weeks, unmolested by zombies, like a BLT in a force field. Furthermore, his IV couldn't have lasted more than a few hours, meaning he somehow went months sans food or water. Not only should he be starved, delirious, and brain-dead, he should be dead, period.

Unless ... he's actually not a not-zombie. According to multiple fans on multiple forums and subreddits, Rick has the virus that turns perfectly good corpses into walkers, and it totally turned him into one. He actually died days into his water-free coma, because George Romero invading your universe doesn't mean basic science suddenly ceases to be.

Since those with the virus become zombified as soon as they die (bite or no bite), it's feasible that Rick's coma significantly weakened the virus -- just not enough to cancel out his resurrection. So he awoke undead and (presumably) immortal, but with his mind and humanity still intact.

Because it's either this or the entire show is a dream. And that, as is the case with every other fictional world that fans theorize as "all a dream," would be really fucking stupid.

We've warned you before about the evil nature of babies, but Family Guy's Stewie is a case unto himself. Often, his bitter rants, murderous monologues, and popinjay proclivities go unnoticed by the adults of Quahog, who merely see him as a bundle of football-shaped joy.

After years of debate over whether anybody can understand Stewie or if they do and simply ignore him, redditor iFornication theorized thusly: Stewie is a normal baby, and everything on the show is seen through his eyes. Mr. and Mrs. Fornication must be so proud.

Stewie's observing how adults act and live, but since he's only a year old his observations are rather skewed. He sees Peter as a buffoon because, as a working father who doesn't see his child much, Peter's always acting silly and goofy in an attempt to bond with him. Lois, meanwhile, comes across as stern and strict because she stays home all day and is the primary disciplinarian -- Stewie also sees her at her worst on a regular basis. Brian the dog talks only because Stewie imagines it. The constant pop culture breaks occur because babies can't differentiate between fiction and reality, meaning Stewie thinks it's all real, sort of like Bobby's World with domestic abuse jokes.

But we're not done with Fox, because The Simpsons also has a crazy fan theory attached to it. Only it's not so much a fan as it is the show's executive producer. Al Jean recently tweeted how he would like the show to end if only he were in charge:

It's less "end" and more "loop for all eternity." So, to everyone who bitches that The Simpsons should've ended 15 years ago, welcome to Hell. And while we're on the topic ...

3 American Horror Story: The Show Takes Place Entirely in Hell

In American Horror Story, every season tells a different story that stands on its own and has nothing to do with the other seasons, aside from casting many of the same actors and plots that read like dogless, R-rated Scooby-Doo episodes. You could easily start at Season 3 without consulting Wikipedia for backstory every 10 seconds.

According to redditor Scootersmith and blogger Jacq in the Box, however, the seasons are intertwined, and in the most macabre of manners: these characters are in Hell, and each season is a Dante-esque circle of punishment for the characters' sins: lust for Season 1, abuse in Season 2, and racism for Season 3. It's the same actors every time because the sinners they portray have no interest in repenting, therefore they are doomed to suffer time and again.

The whole Dante's Inferno angle becomes even sharper when you consider the Big Bads for each season. In Inferno, there are "guardians" that stand watch over each circle of punishment, and AHS follows suit. In the first season you have Rubber Man, a gimp-suit-clad psychotic who enjoys violent murder almost as much as he does kinky sex ...

Then there's Season 2's Bloody Face, a murderous psychiatrist who skins women alive and wears their head-flesh over his:

And Season 3 gives us the Minotaur, a murdered slave transformed by voodoo into a violent minotaur.

The upcoming season will feature an evil clown called Twisty, who at least promises to break the tradition of saddling AHS bogeymen with the most generic names imaginable. And if this theory holds true, expect five more seasons of hellish allegories, followed by 20 kinder and gentler seasons that absolutely nobody will give a shit about.

2 House of Cards: Frank Talks to Us Because We're His Memoirs

Throughout House of Cards -- easily one of the five most riveting shows ever made about the 5th Congressional District of South Carolina -- we're treated to Kevin Spacey talking to the camera, seemingly directly to us, the audience, and explaining ... well, everything. It initially looks like something straight out of Lazy Exposition for Dummies.

Or, according to a theory proposed by Redditor gravityplanx, he's not talking to us, his goldfish, or anything with a pulse -- he's dictating his memoirs. Long after he's gone, he wants everyone to know exactly what devious tricks and schemes he pulled to ascend from anonymity to the goddamn presidency and how aspiring psychopaths of the future can do so as well.

"But he's not writing anything! He's just yapping!" you say. To which we respond: speech recognition software, tape recorder, whatever. It makes perfect sense -- he's far too busy manipulating lobbyists and banging his secret service detail to sit down and pore over his typos. Much easier to just gab at the machine and get on with his country-conquering day.

Still not convinced? Check the episode titles:

1 Mad Men: Don Draper Is D.B. Cooper

In addition to three-martini lunches and sexism so overt even MRA assholes think the writers have issues, Mad Men is known for two major things: an obsession with aviation and flying, and the opening credits, in which a silhouette who looks like main character Don Draper seemingly plummets to his death.

There are multiple fan theories as to what this might all mean come finale time. One, proposed by Jen Carlson of Gothamist, speculates that Draper's rival, Ted Chaough, will die in the crash of Mohawk Airlines Flight 411. Mohawk is one of Don's clients on the show, so why wouldn't one of the execs buy into his own hype and travel with the safest airline on Earth?

But for true Mad Men madness, Medium's Lindsey Green has the theory for you: Draper jumps out of a plane with hundreds of thousands of dollars and is never seen again. In short, he becomes D.B. Cooper. You know: the guy who jumped out of a plane with hundreds of thousands of dollars and was never seen again.

To most of the show's characters, Don Draper is a complete mystery -- nobody really knows who he is or where he came from. Shit, that's not even his real name (he was born Dick Whitman, so if he ever wants to try porn, there's his in). Plus, Cooper's infamous planejacking occurred in 1971, about the time that Draper's world would start to fall apart thanks to women's lib and mean old cancer making it difficult to sell cigarettes as a mere taste sensation. So him hopping a jet airliner, abandoning everything but his cash, and assuming yet a third identity is hardly a stretch at all.

As far as the name goes: "D" is for Don, and "B. Cooper" could be a reference to "Bert Cooper," Don's old boss who dies and whose last appearance is a jarring, hallucinated song-and-dance sequence about the moon landing.

Jason Iannone is a columnist, editor, layout person, and interviewer for Cracked. He is a random nobody on Facebook and Twitter.

For more televisual titillation, see How to Fix 'The Walking Dead' in One Easy Step and 5 'Breaking Bad' Actors Whose Early Roles Now Look Hilarious.