Anytime a long running show decides to do an episode about an established character that’s supposed to “completely change the way you see the character” by explaining a particular character tic or gimmick they have.
For example the cartoon Hey Arnold had an episode about Eugene, the resident klutz followed constantly by bad luck and is constantly getting injured in hilarious ways.
Well for some reason they devoted an entire episode to explaining that Eugene actually wasn’t unlucky, it was the main character Arnold who was unlucky but somehow Arnold’s unluckyness only affected Eugene and when Eugene leaves the city for a few days suddenly Arnold becomes the unlucky one for once.
Completely forgetting how in the previous 5 seasons Eugene routinely would get injured when Arnold was nowhere near him, even when Eugene was on an opposite continent from him.
I liked the episode of The Drew Carey Show where Drew finds out that every misfortune in his life has been orchestrated by three disgruntled strangers against whom he had accidentally committed minor offenses.
“I showed up to work drunk and you put it on my permanent record.”
“Yeah… you showed up to work drunk.”
“And you put it on my permanent record.”
“Are you drunk now?”
There was a cringy All in the Family wherein Lionel calls out Meathead on his phony social awareness, or something. It wasn’t particularly dumb, just generally uncomfortable.
Another Doctor Who episode: Our moon is actually a space whale egg. When it hatches, the space whale lays another egg and replaces the moon with an exact duplicate.
IIRC, there was a TNG episode that established that humans and a bunch of other races had been genetically manipulated by an extinct civilization to make them compatible, which is why human-Klingon and human-Betazoid and human-Romulan hybrids are all also possible.
That again goes back to TOS. The possibility of an ancient civilization planting humanoids throughout the Galaxy was discussed in “Return to Tomorrow” (second season) and “The Paradise Syndrome” (third season).
Maybe my least favorite Doctor Who episode. The Moffat years had a lot of low points, and that episode is like thre of them. I also enjoyed it in the moment, but “The Weding of River Song” is the most insane and stupid concept: all of history is happening at once, hence Churchill is still PM, dinosaurs roam London, and the clocks never move. Yet somehow people are aware of causality and can hold conversations. Not a thing in that episode holds up.
Even RTD could mess that up (though I am glad he’s coming back). The last season of Torchwood is based around A Big What-If Idea: “okay, nobody on Earth can die. What happens next?” So much ptential and they whiffed it terribly.
Granted, there’s lot of Doctor Who content that has no basis in scientific fact, and devoted fans overlook it because of the story and characters. The Doctor can punch a few buttons on a cell phone and make it capable of calling across light years and forward and back in time. That’s the equivalent of me taking an abacus and turning it to a supercomputer by shifting a few beads. That stuff is nonsense, but fun.
As long as the impossible is confined to a single gadget, that’s fine. The TARDIS is a gadget that contains infinite space, sure why not? But having a story where there’s a race of dogmen that are supposed to protect Earth suddenly appear, interlock all their ships around the planet, and then have them all simultaneously taken over by the Sontari without anybody detecting a massive invasion force, is too much. It’s like the writers had a contest to outdo the most outrageous suspension of disbelief to get laughs.
As I remember, that last season of Torchwood also had the advantage of a lavish budget, because of a co-production deal with the American Starz cable network. But the story itself didn’t work as well as it could have. On the other hand, the third season, the Children of Earth series, was I thought really effective.
I know the timeline is always being rewritten, but the whole notion of the protective dogmen is crazy because, why haven’t we heard of them before, in all the instances in which human lives are threatened?
That’s the peril of retroactive continuity shuffling: whenever I watch one of the Pertwee era UNIT stories, I can’t help but think, “While this ragtage group of commandos is chasing bubble wrap around London, the Torchwood crew are offscreen saving Cardiff from something or other. Wonder (ironically) why they’re never brought up?” But Chibnell took it way beyond plausibility.
