These are dark times, friends.

California's on fire, again, and seemingly always will be. The economy is allegedly doing well, but the numbers on our paychecks remain stagnant. No one in the White House knows how to change the president's Twitter password. It has been 13 whole months since we last saw a new "Game of Thrones" episode.

And now, our beloved MoviePass is as good as dead. Let's call it advanced life support, with deep-pocketed investors providing infusions of cash to stop the whole thing from flatlining for good.

For most of us, MoviePass came into our lives in the last year, after the service dropped the price to $9.95 a month. For less than two-thirds the cost of a single movie ticket at The Grove, you could see as many movies you wanted. You logged in with the app and you swiped a special red debit card magically loaded with the total price of the ticket.

It cost the movie theater nothing, it cost you practically nothing, and it cost the rich guys pouring equity into MoviePass literally millions of dollars. Extracting maximum value by seeing as many movies as possible was practically a political act for the #resistance set.

See, here was the basic problem with going to the movies prior to MoviePass: Movies are expensive, and TV is very good.

It's not news that millennials are poor (mostly). A night at the movies for two people in L.A. is around $30 for tickets and another $5 for parking. Throw in concessions and a round of drinks, and you're practically dropping a Benjamin for a couple of hours of entertainment. Netflix and Hulu each cost less than one movie ticket for access to an unlimited amount of some of the best television shows of all time, with the added bonus of not having to put on pants or leave the house.

Of all the movies I MoviePass'd in the last nine months, only "Black Panther" deserved to come out on top in that equation. (OK, the movie where Cher does ABBA karaoke would also have been worth paying sticker price.) And I saw a lot of movies. For the first time ever, I watched the Oscars having actually seen most of the nominated films. I saw documentaries, indie movies and horror flicks -- all categories I would have previously waited six whole weeks to rent for $1 from the Redbox at Ralph's.

Yes, MoviePass had its problems. It could take weeks for cards to arrive, and some people (me included) had problems getting their card to work once it did. A trip to see "A Quiet Place" turned out to be an ineligible screening, despite what the app told me, which is how I ended up experiencing John Cena butt-chugging a beer instead. This past weekend, the service blocked the new "Mission Impossible" entirely and imposed its version of surge pricing onto everything else.

Before that, it had stopped working entirely one day because the company was flat broke.

MoviePass' original plan for turning a profit was to eventually sell data from subscribers, or possibly set up some kind of revenue-sharing deal for a chunk of ticket and concession sales. At one point, the CEO theorized that it would be like a gym membership, and they’d make money off the subscribers who somehow forgot that they could see any new release in a theater whenever they wanted. Obviously, none of that happened. Imagine if Uber's business model was to reimburse cabs at full cost, and the value proposition was that they'd sell the cabs data on where the passengers were going.

It was patently ludicrous that either theaters or studios would start paying MoviePass when they were making money hand over fist from the app. The company was forced to do a 1-to-250 reverse stock split to avoid dropping off the Nasdaq entirely. On Monday, it announced a 50% price hike.

In MoviePass' defense, lots of startups are bad ideas, and plenty of them operate under the "get customers now, figure out how to make money later" model. (Uber has burned through $10 billion and is still not, uh, "revenue-positive" in the traditional sense.) MoviePass was a great idea, for customers. We loved it. We loved it too much, actually, in that we loved it to death.

If this were a movie, a wealthy benefactor would swoop in and rescue MoviePass for the masses. Unfortunately, Elon Musk already said no.

MoviePass has been the only good thing about 2018, which has otherwise been an unrelenting hellscape of grim headlines. (I realize 2018 isn't over yet, but I'm not holding out hope for the second half.)

But unless it gets the corporate equivalent of a double lung transplant, the MoviePass party appears to be ending. And if it does come back, the service won’t be — can’t be — the impossibly great deal we early adopters knew and loved. So rest in peace, sweet MoviePass. You were too good — and too entirely, overwhelmingly, comedically unprofitable — for this world.