Reach deep into your fanboy/fangirl soul and find the one plot point you most want to change. From Star Trek to the Brady Bunch, from midichlorines to Andrew Keaton.
For me I would erase the death of David Marcus in Star Trek III
I liked him. I connected him. And before Enterprise, before Voyager, even before Deep Space 9 I had envisioned a series around a young James T. Kirk struggling to deal with the fact that he’s named after one of the Federations most famous captains. Struggling with all the expectations that would come with carrying that name. Which is an idea that would work best if said James T. Kirk was the grandson of the original, perhaps named so after the Enterprise-B incident? Surnames being a little more freely used in the future. Poor David.
I actually don’t mind the idea of midichlorians; after however many thousands of years it makes sense that the Jedi’s had managed to quantify force power. I’d imagine that we’d have figured out how to do the same if priests and the like had the powers of biblical figures :).
I wish he’s done it as some sort of energy field measurement rather than a cell count though.
As for bits of canon I’d like to change – I’d erase the rape scene from the Thomas Covenant chronicals. My mum bought the book for me when I was younger, and many people have told me how good it is, but I can’t stomach reading a book where the hero is a rapist. I never read past that scene.
I can understand the logic behind it, but if I was somehow whisked off to a magic fairy land I’d find some other way of proving to myself it wasn’t real.
Perhaps more a change in narrative style than plot, but I would take out the last 2 minutes in the Usual Suspects-- after the cop looks around and realized that he thinks he’s been had, and before Spacy does the zippo thing and gets in the car with Kobayashi. I liked it better when we were wondering. I like my endings ambiguous.
And there’s so much to change about the last Twin Peaks episode I don’t know where to start.
Eliminating the Prime Directive from Star Trek would have also eliminated a lot of dialog like
“Captain, this will violate the Prime Directive.”
“Yes, but we must do it to save this society.”
The Prime Directive would have been a lot more interesting if even one of the Captains had simply said “Sorry, Prime Directive says we can’t help you.” and spent the next 54 minutes going off to another story.
And of course, the real bummer is that the one captain that wasn’t bound by the PD, didn’t act when he had the chance. When the main species (Velokians?) of a planet were dying and the Doctor could have cured them, Archer chose to stand by and let them die (and so that another species could develop and become the dominant species on the planet.)
Ditto Mighty Maximino ditto! And most of the B5 movies and the two abortive attempts at post-B5 series as well. End it at Season 4. Oh well. The first season of ST:TNG and ST-DS9 I could do without was well. . . .