I was watching a musical that pulled a series of fake-out endings towards the end of the show. At first it was a relatively depressing story about some children, but then the epilogue showed a happy ending. Then moments later it was revealed that the entire thing had been a dream of the main character, rendering both the despair and happy endings as mere figments of imagination. I thought about the metanarrative of how either “endings” would have been preferable to the one that we got.