Just registered on this forum. Not sure how many users are still active as I can see many of the posts are about ten years old.
Background: I am from the UK and got into Moonlighting in 1987. The first episode I saw was Witness for the Execution, that aired on BBC 2 on 16 February 1987 when I was 15 years old.
On 13 June 1989, Lunar Eclipse was shown in the UK. A month on from its US screening, and with no internet in those days, I had no idea how it ended but somehow I expected a happy ending with Maddie and David getting back together. I video-taped the episode to watch again, so I could soften the blow of Moonlighting ending.
As everyone else has said, the episode was a huge disappointment. It shouldn't have ended like this. Sure, breaking the fourth wall was in keeping with the show's format, but previously it had been done for laughs. This time it wasn't funny at all. When David said it was a weird unfunny dream sequence, he certainly wasn't wrong.
As I had recorded the episode, I re-watched it several times after it aired. 18 years later I bought the entire series on DVD (the US Region 1, as Region 2 hadn't been released at that point). I watched the entire series, many episodes of which I'd never seen before. Lunar Eclipse was as I remembered it.
Last year I started watching them all again, the first time since 2007. As the series got towards the end, I was waiting longer and longer between episodes. The earlier seasons, I would often watch an episode each evening. For the fifth season, a month could pass between episodes. I kept putting Lunar Eclipse off... partly because I remembered it but also because I didn't want the series to end!
Watching it again, 28 years on from the first time I saw it, brought it all back. The sense of loss, the disappointment, the anger. I was 17 again, as though the major life events since, hadn't happened. As in 1989, I found myself thinking about it a lot the next day. How could a TV series still have this effect on me?
As much as I dislike the episode, I also have to commend it for having this effect on me. No other series ending has. That song, "We'll Be Together Again", I'd never heard before that episode. Since I watched the last episode again on Wednesday, it's been in my head. I can't necessarily forgive the writers for ending the show this way, but the fact that it still gets to me all these years later must mean something. It might be one of the worst endings ever, but it's stayed with me.