Heroes.
The first half of the first season was so good. The second half was ok. Every subsequent season gave the impression that it was handed off to a different writer every week, and that those writers hated each other.
They changed the rules constantly, except when they just ignored the rules.
The main character collects new powers as the show goes on, but he never uses them. He just completely forgets that he has them. Kind of like the time he completely forgets he has a girlfriend and never mourns her, mentions her, or even acknowledges that he lost her somewhere in an alternate timeline or something.
That’s not much better than the villain. The entire first season is about stopping him from doing a specific thing, because a time traveler has foreseen that it’ll result in the world ending. Season two opens with him doing that thing, and everything is fine. He has at least three heel-face turns, which are immediately undone when the next writer is up to bat.
One good character undergoes a terrible transformation and murders a bunch of people, but the next season he’s suddenly good and everyone forgot. Again.
Constant retcons. This character is actually that character’s secret brother! This one lady who died was actually triplets! It adds nothing to the story and makes no sense, but there it is!
(I’m not joking either. Secret triplets.)
They did a reboot of the show a few years later and did the exact same thing.
Yeah, this show had potential, some cool ideas, but just couldn’t figure out what the fuck it was doing. No consistency or direction. I think a big part of what really sent it off the rails was the Writer’s strike in 2007. But it was already seeing plot issues well before that.
Feels like there were a lot of shows in the mid 2000s that were sold to the public entirely on The Hook™, a clear target or mystery that got you watching it. “Save the cheerleader, save the world.” “How I met your mother”. “What the fuck is going on this island? Is this like Purgatory or something?” “Guy gets terminal cancer, and decides to cook meth to make money for his family before he dies”. Some managed to pivot from that hook into a new hook or a compelling narrative. Some just kept moving the goal post or compounding the mystery. And some just got really boring or contrived after the initial stuggle resolved or the mysteries just never panned out to anything.
They did a reboot of the show a few years later and did the exact same thing.
I don’t think I’ve heard of this. wild googling
All I’m finding is an up and coming remake.
‘Heroes’ Reboot in Development From Creator Tim Kring - IMDb. A new “Heroes” reboot series is in development from creator Tim Kring, Variety has confirmed. The reboot, titled “Heroes: Eclipsed,” is set years after the events of the original superhero series, as new evolved humans are discovering their powers
“Heroes Reborn”
Heroes Reborn, 2015.
Cheers
I remember season 1 having a lot of potential, then there was a writer’s strike that impacted season 2. Must have been piece mealed together from non union writers, and it showed.
My understanding is that the creator wanted each season to follow a new set of characters, with season 2 being the previous generation that founded the organization that horn rimmed glasses guy worked for. But the network said no, and made him slap together a direct follow up. That was already an uphill battle before the writer’s strike.
Kind of unrelated, but season 1 was also supposed to end with all the various characters converging in an epic battle avengers style, but they were over budget and the network weren’t willing to give them more, so instead we got the poochy ending.
I thought the main character was only able to absorb one power at a time. Wouldn’t make it fit better?
They changed it to that in season 3, with no explanation. Probably because the writers couldn’t be bothered to actually watch the damn show to see what powers he’d had.
In season 1, he could use the powers of anyone he’d been near, but he had to be able to summon up the emotions that person had made him feel.
Ah okay. I need to rewatch it, been a while. Thanks
The comic might be better for that, when it gets away from the show.
Homer Simpson has forgotten he knows music at least 2 times.
Other than that, I’ve heard Lost is bad, very bad.
Wait, what? I know that Lost’s ending was controversial, but this is the first time I’ve heard that it’s not internally consistent. It’s whacky, but it’s SciFi. Do you know any examples of what isn’t internally consistent?
You’re correct. There are things that don’t connect, but there’s not like a ton of internal contradictions.
I watched the whole show. I didn’t notice any glaring issues. It’s confusing but it’s supposed to be.
I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t they actually manage to get off the island, back into the real world, only to have something “calling” them back and they need to go back?
If that was so and they were actually in an afterlife, was that real world not real or did they resurrect themselves for a while?
I’ve never rewatched it so I might be misremembering idk
The “official” answer I keep hearing is they’re only actually dead in the last episode, which makes everything about it cheap and tacky, so I reject that.
But there’s an alternate timeline shown where they never were on the island as well, iirc. And it’s all just weird. You can’t be internally inconsistent if there’s never any established consistency.
I enjoyed it like watching a train wreck in slow motion and getting to discuss it with people as it developed. But it clearly didn’t have enough of an impact on me to remember anything worth remembering except “Don’t tell me what I can’t do” and “You all everybody.”
so I reject that.
I mean yeah, cause it’s not consistent whatsoever, right?
That was my main issue with it iirc. That the major reveal at the end wasn’t internally consistent with the 7 seasons we had had. Especially because at that point, it was quite a significant portion of my actually independent thinking (as in you’re not a kid anymore just watching what’s on but actually choosing and watching whatever you like) life, so like you say, it felt cheap and tacky.
I don’t even remember those lines to be honest. I just remember the names of a few main characters like Locke and Sawyer, Jack and… the woman uhhh… I wanna say Kate? Spot on damn my memory isn’t as bad as I thought.
You can’t be internally inconsistent if there’s never any established consistency.
No but like we were led to believers there would be some consistency, and we just don’t know it yet. That was kinda the mystery that hooked people, no? Like pressing random numbers every now and then so… something doesn’t happen? I don’t even remember if that was ever properly explained.
It’s so intriguing but then they just pull the mat out from under you by saying “lol it wasn’t even a thing actually”.
I guess Lost just suffered from getting founded after it should’ve been cut. Let’s face it there’s several shows that I would’ve rather have be finished than Lost. Although if they never finished lost, I might feel differently, as then I’d think there was still a possibility of them making dense somehow.
That’s mostly just because it never explains anything up until the last few episodes when it’s all “Oh, uh… it’s all about god and heaven and hell and stuff I guess!”
I said I heard. I haven’t watched it.
In recent episodes, the middle aged adults are all millennials but the old folks all fought in WWII. There’s apparently no in between.
Homer should never have been written to have the ability to play an instrument. It doesn’t fit with his character at all. Like, not at all at all.
Oh phuck, I wanted to say Lost, but I figured nobody would get it…
Baywatch, especially when you take into account Baywatch: Nights where Hasslehoff works as a private eye and solves x-files.
Far from the worst but my funniest example comes from my favourite show. In the first season of Stargate SG-1, they introduced an alien weapon which would go on to become a staple of the series, the Zat Gun. One shot stuns, two shots kill, and three shots… Disintegrates?!
Yeah, it’s so stupidly powerful that the writers pretty much immediately realized the mistake and the show kinda just conveniently forgets that was established in the first season, except for like three other times in the entire ten season run.
Even the first two shots became very nebulous over time.
Edited to add, the disintegration effect is even mocked in-world in a very meta way in later seasons.
the disintegration effect is even mocked in-world in a very meta way in later seasons.
Their meta mocking themselves is where I learned the phrase “hang a lantern on it” exactly because the writers “hung a lantern” on how silly the zat was.
Also several of the actors talk about how they’re clearly penises. Like the first time they got their hand on one they went:
Also also, like 24 hours or so ago confirmed that new Stargate is being developed.
I won’t be giving Amazon a cent though.
Neither will I.
They wanted a phaser but couldn’t call it a vaporize setting.
But they didn’t completely abandon it. Disintegration gets used a handful more times when they remember it and it helps them wave away plot holes. Like in the episode where they end up in the 60s they disintegrate a box. A box!
Well, not quite. Iirc the disintegration effect came about last minute when the director decided he needed a way to remove the bodies, to explain why other jaffa wouldn’t see them and get suspicious.
It’s why in the Wormhole Xtreme episode, they mock that exact premise when
O’NeillMarty suggests it.Edited, corrected below!
he needed a way to remove the bodies, to explain why other jaffa wouldn’t see them and get suspicious.
Wasn’t it just about the practicality of having bodies laying around the set? That makes sense in-universe though, but at least in the mockumentary meta episode (200th?) they give that reason, to clear the extras to make room essentially.
Technically Martin is the one who suggests it…
Ah you’re right! I was thinking of a little bit later when O’Neill suggests the aliens are dead because they don’t wear camouflage.
Time for a rewatch, I’m getting rusty!
Two boxes stacked against each other, in fact. Sitting in a truck.
The truck does not disintigrate.
If I’m being honest with myself, Star Trek.
All of it.
The king of “galaxy-altering implications that are never spoken of again”
Trek isn’t amazingly bad, but it’s definitely got low points.
The lizard thing from Voyager. The ghost episode on TNG. Never ever following up on the events and galactic implications of “The Chase”
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Threshold officially never happened. They never passed Warp 10.
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Sub Rosa, it wasn’t a ghost.
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What implications? That Spock, Sela, B’elanna Torres-Paris, Miral Paris, K’Ehlyr, Alexander Rozhenko, and the one Klingon-Romulan colony exist? We’re all related here on Earth too. The ones you should worry about are the ones who created the planet “Miri” happened on.
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Rings of Power sure is up there.
Ok but keep in mind I’m speaking to the televised order of release.
Firefly.
They released the series out of order so the very first episode already had you deep into the story without establishing anything or anyone. Once you streamed it or watched it on dvd it made more sense. Plus the choose not to air some episodes at all which also introduced plot points and by not airing those you ruin consistency.
And I’ll add, the series is fantastic and serenity was a very nice bow to the short lived series. Highly recommend if you haven’t seen it.
“They”, here, is fox, and not the show’s creators.
I could say the same for Babylon 5. The original airing of the show was entirely out of order. One of the common things you’d notice is how every othet episode, the crew had different uniforms. They were only supposed to change uniforms once per season.
Supernatural eventually just made it a running gag that things changed when they felt like it.
At least they explained it with the ultimate enemy: “it makes the story better”.
Transformers. Is “energon” a crystal, a liquid, or something more nebulous? Are Primus and Unicron one being? Did the Quintessons create the Transformers? Where do the Go-Bots fit in?
And don’t get me started on the Allspark vs. Vector Sigma…
Oh hey Willis, good to see you on the fediverse. How’s the buffer doing?
The only buffer I have is the buffer on a transwarp probe.
I won’t say it’s the worst, but King of the Hill had a habit of contracting itself. Especially when it came to Peggy’s family.
Days of Our Lives
Lol my mom used to watched Days of Our Lives religiously. The funniest part to me was when people had kids. There was never much of a story in people raising babies, so they would age kids really rapidly. Like, someone had a baby. Next season the baby is 5 years old, next season they were 12, next season they’d be an older teen and then soon they’d be adults having kids of their own.
To be fair, that’s true of pretty much any soap opera.
Futurama freely makes shit up. They’ll invent new math theorems to make a body-swap episode work, but if their cool new backstory for Bender contradicts canon, they do not give a dang.
It’s not the worst plot hole, because it doesn’t affect the extremely episodic show. They’re just willfully apathetic toward consistency.
“I’m 40% consistency!”
-Bender
thunk thunk
1899 on Netflix.
Every episode had some big in-universe mechanic reveal which made pretty much every action taken by characters before that even MORE nonsensical.
It just kept getting worse and worse as events cascades into each other.
I always thought the problem with 1899 was that it was missold.
I wanted a genuine set in the early 20th century nautical mystery horror.
spoiler
Instead it was “it’s all just VR” and you discover that early on, and then you just flatout loses interest knowing the people in it can’t really get hurt or they’re not actually people.
After the first 3 episodes, this was my reaction to any choice any character ever made
Doctor Who. Or is that Dr. Who.
- He is sometimes a She.
- He is an alien of the race Time Lord. Except when he’s half-human.
- The most recent run was Season 2. Or Season 15. Or Series 41.
- The Doctor has reincarnated 15 times. Or 17. Or 18. Or 19. Or 20. Or 28.
- Continuity is just what the writer of the current episode remembers / is convenient.
- The only rule is: There is no such thing as canon.
…Spongebob?
I guess this is true of lots of western animation, but it’s particularly egregious. At least with the classic episodes.
…That’s not a rule though. As an example, DCAU and YJ keep a lot of shit straight, somehow.
SpongeBob is much older than Young Justice and DCAU. The format for cartoons back then was for them not to have any overarching plots/continiuities so that you can air them in any order. With the advent of streaming services this is no longer an issue since VOD doesn’t have the drawbacks of network television.
