# Examples of canon violations **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [September 20, 2008, 12:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388 "2008-09-20T00:53:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/81 "2008-09-23T21:15:15Z")
> [@pepperlandgirl](#): > > Don’t forget the other vamps Angelus sired–Penn and James. Both of them were very human. Penn was a serial killer in Angelus’ mold, but he was working out his father-issues, and he was genuinely hurt that Angelus “abandoned” him. In fact, pretty much Angelus’ entire family was genuinely shocked/hurt that “Daddy” left them. James was _so in love_ with his lover, Elizabeth, that he couldn’t exist without her. One could argue that his love for Elizabeth was more intense than Spike’s love for Drusilla. Actually I think James was just a bigger loser. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/82 "2008-09-23T21:15:27Z")
> [@Lightnin](#): > > In the original **Knight Rider** series, Michael Knight’s evil twin brother was introduced- played, of course, by The Hoff, with a goatee to demonstrate that he was evil. > > However, the very first episode had established that Michael Knight, when he was hired by Knight Industries, had undergone extensive plastic surgery so that nobody would recognize him as the cop he’d been before. > > Presumably, his brother ALSO underwent the same plastic surgery so they’d still be twin brothers. > > According to an interview I read many years ago, the writers’ excuse was, “We didn’t think anyone was paying attention, anyway.” You talking about Garthe? He wasn’t the twin brother of Michael Long (i.e. the police officer who was shot in the face and underwent extensive plastic surgery and was “reborn” as Michael Knight). As I understand it, Wilton Knight, the somewhat eccentric and dead-in-the-pilot-episode CEO of Knight Industries had Long’s face altered so he would look like Garth, Wilton’s estranged bad-apple serving-three-consecutive-life-sentences-in-an-African-prison son. Why Michael’s and Garth’s _voices_ are the same, I dunno. ---
**Author:** ![cher3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/da6949/32.png) [@cher3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cher3)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/83 "2008-09-23T21:15:51Z")
> [@Kythereia](#): > > In Terry Pratchett’s **Jingo** , Vimes is complaining to Carrot about all the new people in the City Watch he doesn’t recognize. One of them is Reg Shoe, who gets a page and a half of Vimes griping about how he’s a zombie. > > Six books later, in **Night Watch** , it turns out that Reg Shoe participated in a major heartwrenching event in Vimes’s past life (the Glorious Revolution, Ankh-Morpork’s mini-civil war) when Vimes was just a rookie on the force, and that his zombification turns out to be a particularly poignant–and memorable–plot point. Oops? I just started re-reading _Jingo_. Another questionable thing is where Carrot is teaching organizing the city’s young hellions into football teams and the scene ends with him telling the kids that Angua may come and teach them the “campfire howl.” In at least some later books Angua’s werewolfhood was treated as a big secret to the general public. ---
**Author:** ![pepperlandgirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f17d59/32.png) [@pepperlandgirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pepperlandgirl)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/84 "2008-09-23T21:19:04Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > Actually I think James was just a bigger loser. Well, James was a big loser. (Incidentally, what was it with Angelus and pretty boys? James, Penn, Spike, Wesley…) I missed the edit window–but I forgot Holden is Spike’s doing. Of course, Holden had a piece of Spike’s soul, which complicates the whole discussion further. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/85 "2008-09-23T21:19:44Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > You talking about Garthe? He wasn’t the twin brother of Michael Long (i.e. the police officer who was shot in the face and underwent extensive plastic surgery and was “reborn” as Michael Knight). As I understand it, Wilton Knight, the somewhat eccentric and dead-in-the-pilot-episode CEO of Knight Industries had Long’s face altered so he would look like Garth, Wilton’s estranged bad-apple serving-three-consecutive-life-sentences-in-an-African-prison son. > > Why Michael’s and Garth’s _voices_ are the same, I dunno. Everybody knows Knight Industries has access to Cylon technology scavenged from Galactica: 1980. They clearly used that tech to reconfigure Michael Long’s voice, on the orders of Wilton, who, just asclearly, was a wackjob repressing homosexual longings for his son. Sort of a homosexual and generationally-reversed Oedipus complex. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/86 "2008-09-23T21:20:31Z")
In the episode of _Futurama_ where [Zoidberg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoidberg) goes into must/rut/pon-farr and goes back to Decapod 10 to mate, it turns out his people mate once, lay eggs, and die. But in another ep we see flashbacks of little Zoidberg catching crap from his parents – how would he even have **met** them? In a _Red Dwarf_ episode, Rimmer takes an escape pod to flee danger, gets marooned on a habitable world, and uses on-board equipment to clone himself – even though he is a hologram and lacks any of his own DNA samples; a problem touched on in another episode where they come across an abandoned gene-changing machine and Rimmer hopes to use it to make himself a body (he finally finds a 3-million-year-old flake of his own dandruff, and the Cat sneezes on it). ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/87 "2008-09-23T21:23:57Z")
> [@pepperlandgirl](#): > > Well, James was a big loser. (Incidentally, what was it with Angelus and pretty boys? James, Penn, Spike, Wesley…) > > I missed the edit window–but I forgot Holden is Spike’s doing. Of course, Holden had a piece of Spike’s soul, which complicates the whole discussion further. Wesley? I can’t recall a lot of Angelus-Wesley interaction. Even in Angel S5, his focus was on the BuffyVerse’s baddest badass only so long as it took to escape. (And YES, I am saying that Wesley was badder than Angel, Buffy, & Faith. They just have the advantage of super-strength.) Once Angelus was free, he didn’t give Wes another thought. ---
**Author:** ![pepperlandgirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f17d59/32.png) [@pepperlandgirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pepperlandgirl)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/88 "2008-09-23T21:36:34Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > Wesley? I can’t recall a lot of Angelus-Wesley interaction. Even in Angel S5, his focus was on the BuffyVerse’s baddest badass only so long as it took to escape. (And YES, I am saying that Wesley was badder than Angel, Buffy, & Faith. They just have the advantage of super-strength.) Once Angelus was free, he didn’t give Wes another thought. Well, I was thinking of Wesley more in terms of Angel(us)'s need to be surrounded by a “family.” William/Spike and Wesley had some similarities and I think there’s a sort of pattern there once you factor in Penn, James, and Lawon but…that’s really neither here nor there. Even so, Angelus was not unaware of Wesley’s considerable charms and in S4, Angelus used sexually charged words to get to Wesley the way Angelus used sexually charged language to get to William in S5. ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/89 "2008-09-23T21:41:48Z")
> [@cher3](#): > > I just started re-reading _Jingo_. Another questionable thing is where Carrot is teaching organizing the city’s young hellions into football teams and the scene ends with him telling the kids that Angua may come and teach them the “campfire howl.” In at least some later books Angua’s werewolfhood was treated as a big secret to the general public. Couldn’t the kids have just thought that Angua was a pretty lady who was good at making animal noises? In later books it’s pretty well known that there is a werewolf on the Watch, but Angua isn’t “out” and a lot of citizens assume it’s Nobby. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/90 "2008-09-23T21:42:44Z")
> [@pepperlandgirl](#): > > Well, I was thinking of Wesley more in terms of Angel(us)'s need to be surrounded by a “family.” William/Spike and Wesley had some similarities and I think there’s a sort of pattern there once you factor in Penn, James, and Lawon but…that’s really neither here nor there. Even so, Angelus was not unaware of Wesley’s considerable charms and in S4, Angelus used sexually charged words to get to Wesley the way Angelus used sexually charged language to get to William in S5. Yes, but in that case he was manipulating Wes for a purpose, not for fun. I will agree that \*\*Angel \*\*& Wesley has a unique relationship, but the emotional connection there came more from Wesley than from Angel. For Angel, Wesley was the FangGanger he trusted most on a technical level. But the ones he LOVED were Cordelia & Fred. ---
**Author:** ![Scupper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b9bd4f/32.png) [@Scupper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scupper)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/91 "2008-09-23T21:48:16Z")
> [@kaylasdad99](#): > > I’m not bothering with _The Clone Wars_, but I have seen some advertising for the series that seems to suggest Anakin Skywalker had been assigned a Padawan. Was he qualified for that? Wasn’t it his resentment over being kept unqualified for it that played a significant role in his being ripe for turning by Palatine? > > I’m also not bothering with _The Force Unleashed_. But Vader having an apprentice strikes me as even more implausible than Anakin. I believe Anakin became a full-fledged Jedi Knight sometime between \*Attack of the Clones \*and _Revenge of the Sith_. The tension in \*Revenge \*comes not from his being held back from Jedi Knighthood, but rather from the unwillingness of the Jedi Council to accept his appointment to said council by Palpatine. In _Unleashed_, Vader’s apprentice is a \*\*secret \*\*from the Emperor – Vader eventually hopes to assassinate him with his apprentice’s aid. But, of course, it’s actually all part of the _Emperor’s_ plan. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/92 "2008-09-23T22:06:40Z")
> [@pepperlandgirl](#): > > The more I think about this, the more I think that in the Buffyverse, a vampire makes a person evil because they take the basic personality core of the person and corrupt it into something horrible. A self-indulgent, partying pretty boy who’s got some brains and a fair amount of frustrated imagination becomes Angelus. A sensitive poet who only wants love and acceptance becomes Spike, etc. I like to think of this as the Jello mold theory of souls. An individuals personality is the mold: their motivations, fears, desires, etc. The soul is the Jello, and determines how they act on the above. When someone is turned into a vampire, their human soul is replaced by a demon spirit: all the yummy strawberry Jello is scooped out, and is replaced by something terrible and evil, like pork-flavored Jello. The personality still determines the shape of the vampire, but the soul determines the flavor. And sometimes, the mold doesn’t get properly washed out before it gets filled with pork Jello, and you get vampires who still have some trace of actual humanity mixed in with all the evil, which is how you end up with vamps like Spike, or the bespectacled vampire who helped resurrect the Judge. ---
**Author:** ![Lightnin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lightnin/32/180_2.png) [@Lightnin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lightnin)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/93 "2008-09-23T22:09:11Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > You talking about Garthe? He wasn’t the twin brother of Michael Long (i.e. the police officer who was shot in the face and underwent extensive plastic surgery and was “reborn” as Michael Knight). As I understand it, Wilton Knight, the somewhat eccentric and dead-in-the-pilot-episode CEO of Knight Industries had Long’s face altered so he would look like Garth, Wilton’s estranged bad-apple serving-three-consecutive-life-sentences-in-an-African-prison son. > > Why Michael’s and Garth’s _voices_ are the same, I dunno. That’s just… weird. I clearly remember reading an article in which the writer(s) said, basically, “Yeah, we didn’t think anyone would notice.” Clearly, I did too much LDS in the sixties. ---
**Author:** ![cmkeller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmkeller/32/118_2.png) [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/94 "2008-09-23T22:47:30Z")
BrainGlutton: > [@](#): > > In the episode of Futurama where Zoidberg goes into must/rut/pon-farr and goes back to Decapod 10 to mate, it turns out his people mate once, lay eggs, and die. But in another ep we see flashbacks of little Zoidberg catching crap from his parents – how would he even have met them? Were those explicitly said to be his biological parents? I’d just assume they were child-rearers in whatever mass orphanage the children of his people are raised in. Or foster parents, if they go for the more individualized touch. ---
**Author:** ![Kalea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b487fb/32.png) [@Kalea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kalea)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/95 "2008-09-23T23:10:17Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > In a _Red Dwarf_ episode, Rimmer takes an escape pod to flee danger, gets marooned on a habitable world, and uses on-board equipment to clone himself – even though he is a hologram and lacks any of his own DNA samples; a problem touched on in another episode where they come across an abandoned gene-changing machine and Rimmer hopes to use it to make himself a body (he finally finds a 3-million-year-old flake of his own dandruff, and the Cat sneezes on it). By the time _Rimmerworld_ occurs, Rimmer has his hard-light drive. It is established in _Legion_ that he can touch and feel, eat and drink. He may well be able to provide a DNA sample. Alternately, we don’t know how the cloning equipment works - it may be able to read the data from his light bee to receive his DNA code for cloning purposes. ---
**Author:** ![Avarie537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/48db29/32.png) [@Avarie537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Avarie537)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 11:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/96 "2008-09-23T23:32:29Z")
> [@Lightnin](#): > > That’s just… weird. I clearly remember reading an article in which the writer(s) said, basically, “Yeah, we didn’t think anyone would notice.” > > Clearly, I did too much **LDS** in the sixties. Damned Mormons! ---
**Author:** ![pepperlandgirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f17d59/32.png) [@pepperlandgirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pepperlandgirl)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2008, 12:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388/97 "2008-09-24T00:04:57Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > I like to think of this as the Jello mold theory of souls. An individuals personality is the mold: their motivations, fears, desires, etc. The soul is the Jello, and determines how they act on the above. When someone is turned into a vampire, their human soul is replaced by a demon spirit: all the yummy strawberry Jello is scooped out, and is replaced by something terrible and evil, like pork-flavored Jello. The personality still determines the shape of the vampire, but the soul determines the flavor. > > And sometimes, the mold doesn’t get properly washed out before it gets filled with pork Jello, and you get vampires who still have some trace of actual humanity mixed in with all the evil, which is how you end up with vamps like Spike, or the bespectacled vampire who helped resurrect the Judge. I like that theory. I might steal it and use it uncredited 😉 😃 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/examples-of-canon-violations/464388.md?page=4)