Fascinating plot developments.....that are dropped.

Cafe Society
81

Doctor Who revival 2005

The new show is in the same continuity as the old one, but time has passed between them. Something that happened between them off screen was a terrible “time war” that wiped out both the Daleks and Timelords except for various stragglers like the Doctor. In fact when we meet back up with him in Rose he is a very changed character, presumably damaged mentally by combat in the time war.

In 6 seasons we have never seen this time war, we get lots of cryptic hints about it though like names(The Nightmare Child etc) and events. We eventually see a small flashback near the very end of the war but its minor.

I’d actually like to see this damn thing, and kinda hope they do it in a special or something for the 50th anniversary.

Doctor Who in general, we get lots of hints about the Doctor’s maybe messed up psychology and how he feels being the last Timelord etc etc. I wish the show would just go full bore and explore what makes him tick and how he feels.

82

Not struggling, he was quite successful (which just makes the vanishing plot line more strange, of course).

83

There were several in the series BIG LOVE. Two that come to mind (with Open Spoilers if you haven’t seen the series):

Sissy Spacek was brought in as a two-faced lobbyist in a long plotline in which she played both sides of the casino gambling industry- simultaneously lobbying to legalize it and to keep it from happening. She was portrayed as ruthless and tough as nails and the entire season built to a showdown twixt her and Bill that just- ended. He confronted her with her double dealing, she threatened him, and- that was it, no payoff. You assumed that such a cunning character, played by an Oscar winner, was going to become the show’s chief villain but… nope.

Another season ends in a silly soap operatic plot with Bill and his family all being kidnapped by a maniacally deranged messianic cult leader, Hollis Green, and his primary wife, Brother Selma. This is a cult in the series that has committed murder and attempted murder and manslaughter throughout the southwest, they have kidnapped innocent children to punish parents they have a beef with, they have branded people (literally, with branding irons) and tortured them in numerous ways, and even Hollis’s brother-in-law and super-rich and no-stranger-to-getting-his-hands-bloody rival cultleader is afraid of them because they’re not just ruthless they are crazy and think their work is by definition divinely sanctioned. These folks don’t play in other words.
So, at the end of the season they’ve kidnapped Bill and several members of his family (wives, kids, parents), imprisoned them in an ostrich pen, and are preparing to execute them when Bill’s mother, Lois, manages to grab a machete and in one whack, as cleanly and smoothly and with as little upper arm force as if it were a light saber, she hacks Hollis’s arm off at the shoulder. His cult, including his crazy wife Brother Selma and his other wives and children, all stand around and watch as the Henrickson clan leaves with far less interference than the von Trapps leave Austria, because it’s decided they can’t both get Hollis to a hospital AND go after them.
Now, in reality, the Greens would likely have mown them all down with machine guns right there, and THEN done whatever needed doing for their patriarch. Since they don’t, you assume there is a major showdown coming between them and Clan Henrickson, especially when you learn later that Hollis died.
Nope, just dropped. Apparently the Green cult was “all they did was mutilate our Chief Prophet and Revelator, an immortal Apostle (which he had claimed) and head of God’s church on Earth, and really, who hasn’t done something bad in their life?” Just dropped. Particularly maddening as Sandy Martin who played Brother Selma was one of the greatest characters on the show.

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Backing up several years, Queer as Folk (the U.S. version) had several of these. One big one that comes to mind:

The character of Emmett, a penniless late 20-something club boy, fell into a romance with an extremely rich old man (probably 70ish) who died a short time into their relationship. The old man left Emmett $10 million in his will- completely unbeknownst to Emmett- and of course Em, who really did love the old man, went on a spending spree and bought expensive gifts for his friends and for himself.
Unfortunately the old man’s estranged family, led by his ex-wife, challenged his will, claiming undue influence and elder abuse and the like, and somehow freeze Emmett’s bank accounts. (Can they even do that in real life?) Emmett retains a lawyer (one of the show’s main characters) and the old man’s family offers him an out of court settlement of $2 million if he will swear under oath he never had a homosexual relationship with the old man. Emmett refuses, gives back the trinkets he has bought and his friends give back the gifts he gave so he can turn them over to his family.

I kept thinking they would pick this plot up eventually or at least mention it again. Emmett’s character, you would think at least, would have an excellent shot at winning any litigation: the old man wasn’t like Anna Nicole’s sugar daddy (though I always thought she deserved money also) but was in clear mind, reasonably healthy (obviously had a heart problem but prior to his fatal heart attack he was mobile and not dependent on oxygen or anything like), and there was no reason at all to think he was mentally ill. If I had a shot at $10 million, it would pretty much dominate my life and conversation, and yet on the show it is never mentioned again.

84

I’m not a regular watcher of the series but I thought the idea was that the other characters found out McGee was a successful author on the side and hadn’t talked about it. If so, it makes sense it didn’t become a regular plot issue. McGee hadn’t talked about his writing career before and he had no reason to talk about it afterwards. And the other characters didn’t have an ongoing reason to bring it up once the initial period when they found out was past.

85

As far as I know, the Doctor ended the Time War both by blowing up Gallifrey and by shutting the whole of the War off in its own loop of time. So he can’t go back there. It could be shown in flashbacks, I suppose, but they’re generally not big on that.

86

I was watching the episode where he describes it that way recently and was struck by the inconsistency, because initially its said that the war is time locked and the planet destroyed, but later Gallifrey comes back - as though the planet were just locked away all tidy. It should have been destroyed, or at the very least crawling with Daleks.

87

Apparently this was just before Gallifrey was destroyed.

My favorite fanwank of the Doctor’s past is that the Doctor and his family became shunted off into mutually exclusive timelines: if the Doctor exists they don’t, and vice-versa. So they aren’t even really “dead” as such- just absolutely inaccessible forever.

88

That’s not a dropped plot development, though - it’s been a consistent part of his characterization through the show’s run. Not providing more detail on it (a smart call, I think) isn’t the same as the show just pretending it never happened.

89

You have a point. I like superheroes, it just takes me out of the story a bit when I see humans fighting vampires, and actually landing punches.

I like this explanation, I didn’t really think about it like that. Of course the original Slayer-creators’ world would have been small.

You’d think that turning a slayer would be a bigger thrill or triumph than just killing them.

90

My fanwank here is that vampires are very wary about creating a vampire more powerful than themselves. Vampires want minions, not masters. This is why so many vampires are idiots and losers. They got turned because some other vampire thought they’d be easy to control.

Then those vampires decide to make their own minions out of people even stupider than they are, and those minions make more minions, and those minions make minions, and then one of them turns Harmony.

Two reasons. One, so far as we know, there’s no one currently living in the Buffyverse who’s powerful enough to cast the spell. Willow cast it once, but it appears she was only able to do so through divine intervention. She’s probably powerful enough to do it now, but there’s another problem with the spell:

It’s simply an awful thing to do to someone. It’s not just a spell, it’s a curse. It’s designed to inflict suffering, and with the way souls work in the Buffyverse, it inflicts that suffering on an innocent person. The show has explicitly shown that when a vampire turns a human, the human’s soul is replaced by a demonic spirit. The curse simply stuffs the human soul back into the body (presumably dragging it back from its proper afterlife, which is something Willow’s probably not anxious to do to someone again) and stuffs it back into its body with all the first-person memories of the horrible things it did when the demon soul was in the driver’s seat.

91

Hell Angel was forcibly re ensouled, Spike CHOSE to become ensouled, and sure he struggled but he was eventually able to control his violent vampiric urges by force of will.

Every single vampire Buffy kills is a potential Spike.:dubious:

That psychiatrist vamp despite being “newborn” and therefore less in control of his violent urges was able to resist for an entire episode just because he found Buffy interesting.

92

I don’t remember anything about newborns on Buffy. Sure you’re not mixing it up with Twilight?

93

I wouldn’t bet my life on it but I seem to recall dialogue somewhere in either Buffy or Angel about newly sired vampires being more out of control and hungry/violent/beast like.

I have never read a Twilight book or seen one of the movies other than in passing.

94

In the movie Alien Nation, James Caan’s partner is murdered at the beginning of the film by an alien during a robbery. In the short-lived TV series, they initiate a plot line that his partner was killed by a sniper at the robbery because he was onto something else involving some powerful bad guy, and the robbery offered a convenient cover, hiding his assassination. I thought that was rather neat, and looked forward to how they’d develop it.

It was never brought up again.

95

It’s a pretty common vampire trope. It was mentioned on Buffy (to Angel by Darla, I believe) and it’s a plot point in Twilight. It shows up in the Joe Pitt Casebooks in a neat twist. The character…

doesn’t drink any blood for weeks because she thinks she died and that she’s in Hell. The other vamps are so impressed, she more or less becomes their leader.

But like all tropes, it gets ignored from time to time (like in Conversations With Dead People).

96

Speaking of Star Trek again, in TNG, there was one episode where high ranking members of Starfleet was being infected and controlled by these worm things. At the end of the episode, they killed the queen, but ominously, they said more were coming. I read years later that using these worms and the CGI was too expensive and they ended up turning those aliens into the Borg instead. I loved how it ended up eventually, but I really wish we had heard more of the worms