On a famous recent episode of Law and Order the character ADA Serena Southerlyn was fired and asked “Is this because I’m a lesbian?”, a shocker because it was the first time her orientation had ever been mentioned. (I don’t think most of the characters on Law & Order have ever been shown wearing T-shirts and jeans, let alone in intimate quarters.)
On ER the character of Carrie Weaver came out not quite as suddenly as Southerlyn. She also casually dropped, after nine seasons, the ailment that requires her cane (a specific congenital hip displacement).
Also on ER, when the character of intern Malucci (Erik Palladino) was fired, he pleaded with Weaver not to because “I have a kid”, again the first time this had ever been mentioned. (This was partly because it’s the first time they ever seemed to do anything with that character.)
Taxi wasn’t as long running when they had this episode, but it was a shock when Alex revealed he had a grown daughter. There were later references to her during the series.
What are some other times that writers drop a bombshell you never knew about a long running character?
The next-to-last episode of “Cheers”, when Sam removes his hair-piece in front of Carla.
At that point, Ted Danson the actor was pretty open about wearing a toupee as Sam (he even showed up at major awards show sans the rug), but the character was supposed to be genuinely hairy on top.
One of the later episodes of BattleTech (did ANYONE but me watch that show?) revealed that Franklin (the shady Draconian fellow who is seemingly allways trying to get a one-up on everyone else) is in fact an heir to the throne of the Draconian Combine, his mother having been killed in order to hide this fact from pretty much everyone (including him; in this ep he gets kidnapped by people wanting to place him on the throne)
I think Exo Squad had an episode later on that revealed that Lieutenant Marsh had been having an affair with a redshirt-type character who had died within about a minute of showing up on the show.
Actually, the very first episode (titled “Like Father, Like Daughter”) ended with the cabbies taking turns driving Alex down to Miami for a brief airport meeting with his estranged daughter Cathy who was flying from Brazil (where Alex’s ex-wife lived) to a university in Portugal. Talia Balsam played her and would reappear two years later when Cathy got married.
“It’s pronounced EEVelyn!” - NewsRadio
I don’t think that really counts, as Dawn was not so much ‘revealed’ to exist after four years, but actually didn’t exist, and everyone around her is subject to a spell that makes them incorrectly believe she existed previously.
But, as for Buffy, during the episode in which she hallucinated about an alternate reality in which she was a schizophrenic who merely imagined Sunnydale, she did relate the previously unknown information that, prior to the first episode, she told her parents about being the Slayer, and they had her briefly committed for it.
Unless they changed it from the source material, you’re right and it is Draconis Combine.
About that series…I’d always thought it looked kind of silly, and even though I was always a big fan of the source material I never watched it. Is it worth the time?
Worf’s mate K’Ehleyr (sp?) appeared rather abruptly in Star Trek: TNG. Not that I’m complaining. I love Suzie Plakson, and I wish they’d made K’Ehleyr into a regular cast member.
Well, given my ability to remember names, yeah, it probably was Draconis Combine.
As for the cartoon, it’s an excellent example of an early-90’s pre-anime American plot-driven cartoon. If you liked Exo-Squad or Wing-Commander Academy, you’d probably like this (they use the same sound effects, and I’m pretty sure they were all done by the same studio). Unlike either of those shows though, this one also featured some pretty nifty (especially for a saturday-morning cartoon back in something like 1994 or 1995) CGI segments.
I’ve never read the novels or played any of the games (board, computer, or otherwise) so I can’t comment to the relative quality of the show, but I rather liked it. And since the whole show is only about 12 or 14 episodes long, it’s not like it’s a huge time commitment to check it out
I have been told that a couple of the Battletech mech designs (like the MadCat, IIRC) originated with the cartoon, but otherwise it apparantly stays off to the side of any of the major Battletech plots.
But yeah, back to out-of-the-blue plot developments, an episode of Babylon 5 prominently features a revolver that Garibaldi inherited from his grandmother (she was a police officer on Earth, IIRC) which never shows up on the show ever again.
Also, the fact that Captain Sheridan had been married not once but twice before meeting Delenn didn’t come up until the 5th season of the show.
:smack: I didn’t realize that was the first episode of Taxi.
It was revealed in a later episode that Jim was from an extremely rich family.
Two things revealed on Northern Exposure that I loved were the fact that Eve (whose husband described her as “the poster child for the American Pharmaceutical Association”) was both an heiress and a Christian Scientist, and that Maurice had a ladie’s shoe fetish. (He also had a grown Korean son he didn’t know about, but that was a revelation to the character as well- to the show’s great credit they remembered this in later episodes and made reference to his son and grandchildren, as they did with Hollins’ horrible grown illegitimate daughter).
In either the last season or next-to-the-last season of Roseanne, we find out Dan used to be in a band with what’s-his-face from Blues Traveler, and he gave up all his dreams of being a musician to get married.
A Roseanne lesbian three-fer: Nancy was formerly married to Arnie then started dating women (but eventually started dating men again too); Roseanne’s mother came out; and in the finale it was revealed that it wasn’t actually Rosanne’s mother who was gay but her sister. She changed things around for her stories.
That show built in backstory like that fairly often. For example, the revelation that Jackie and Rosanne were battered as children by their fathers.
It’s unclear from the episode whether she told them she was the Slayer or just about vampires.
Either way, not to go all tangential or anything, I hate this one. It completely negates Joyce from S2. You’re Joyce. Your 14 year old daughter was committed for a couple of weeks because she was having delusions about vampires (or being a super-hero, whichever). She burns down a school building in one city and upon moving to another city you almost immediately start having to wash blood out of her clothes, she has all sorts of unexplained injuries, she’s sneaking out of the house at night, etc. and all you can think to do is ground her? At the very least Buffy should’ve been in therapy.
Just last week on Monk, we learned that Natalie is from a very well-to-do family; she’s a toothpaste heiress. All this time we’ve been lead to believe she’s a very blue-collar working-class girl. She was a bartender (or waitress in a bar) when she started working for Monk, and widowed, and sort of always on the verge of being broke. She’s always had a bit of an “edge,” not at all what you’d expect from someone who grew up leading a very priviledged lifestyle to be like.
