Recently finished watching my Babylon 5 season 4 boxset and started reflecting that way back toward the end of the second season I made a prediction about where things were going which turned out to be largely wrong:
When Delenn mentions that all the old races had left aside from one she nods towards Kosh to indicate that she means the Vorlons. I took this to mean that Kosh was, in fact, the only Vorlon left and he and a couple of ships had been faking the whole Empire thing for the last 1000 years. I fully expected that this would be uncovered leaving the younger races without a guiding hand - meaning that they were going to have to take responsibility for themselves against an all powerful enemy.
Ever confidently think that you knew what was going to happen only to have the rug pulled out from under you?
In the first episode they introduced a new set of Scoobies for Dawn to pal around with. None of them were ever seen again. I believe one was referenced occasionally. I guess they were just a safety net for if they wanted to continue the series with Dawn as the main character.
They also wrote Anya out of the show beautifully only to have her pop up again and rejoin the Scoobies within one or two episodes.
Movie-wise, I was totally surprised by the end of My Best Friend’s Wedding I thought that it was certain that, like most romantic comedies, the romantic leads would end up together. I was very pleasantly surprised when Cameron Diaz ends up winning in the end.
IIRC, they were supposed to be recurring characters, but the storyline was dropped because of negative fan reaction. Which is wierd, because from what I could tell, the fan reaction to just about everything in season seven was pretty negative. I’m surprised the show didn’t end up being an hour of dead air randomly interspersed with shots of Spike with no shirt on.
I, too, totally blew the call on Anya. I thought the episode where she fights Buffy and becomes human was her last episode on the series. Would have been a much better ending for the character, too, instead of her getting killed off in the finale as “proof” that the fight they just had was really, really dangerous.
Through Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, there have been allusions to the deaths of two of Roland’s friends, usually just a sentence here or there. When he comes out and tells the entire scene in Wolves of the Calla, it’s less heroic (and quicker) than I’d thought.
I can only think of two romance stories at the moment . . .
In My Brilliant Career, I simply could not accept that the heroine (Judy Davis) does not end up with the hero guy (Sam Neill). It was a great movie, and from what I hear, the author of the book that inspired it was a lesbian (? my memory may fail me ?) but still—she should have ended up with Sam Neill, dammit!
Same goes for The Swan, with Grace Kelly, Alec Guiness and Louis Jourdan. I could not accept that Kelly’s character (a princess) didn’t end up with the smitten tutor, Jourdan. She ended up with Guiness (also royalty), which was more appropriate and less “messy” (plot-wise—I mean, seriously, how could she end up with the tutor Jourdan and not caused a major messy stir in the whole country?) but still. I felt so sorry for Jourdan’s character.
In any episode of Buffy, some nerdy warlocks develop a spell that lets them overcome the will of anyone they choose. The lead warlock’s ex-girlfriend, who has spurned him, is soon put under the spell, and shortly thereafter she’s wearing a French maid outfit and serving them all champagne. I thought this would be a chance for a nice, extended riff on nerdiness and submission/dominance, but she’s dead about three minutes after we first see her under the spell.
I thought season 5 of Angel would involve Spike being reborn as a human (Shanshu) and not remembering who he was. As his memory returns he begins to combat evil which often turns out to Wolfram and Hart (ie Angel and company). He finds some artifact that gives him power to be able to fight on par with the monsters. Angel knows that there is a new player in town but some sort of spell protects him. The season is then shown with Spike taking on evil and Angel taking on what he thinks is a demon who is causing trouble for him in town. It eventually comes into a head where they realize that they are fighting each other and the senior partners are controlling this. Angel becomes truly evil as Angel (not Angelus) when he realizes that Spike received what he considers his reward. Fighting ensues. I thought this was what the writers were setting up at the beginning of season 5, not Spike hanging out and cracking jokes just to annoy Angel.
Seeing the pilot episode of DS9 again recently reminded me: when I first saw it, I had expected Kai Opaka to be a more of a teacher to Sisko, guiding him along on his spirtual journey as Emissary. But she only shows up twice afterwards, in the first-season episode where she leaves Bajor, and then in a vision sequence in the 4th season.
Yes, I realize that. But Warren invented the Cerebral Dampener specifically so he could use it on his ex-girlfriend (and other girls) and have sex with them, without consent, aka, rape.
Yeah, that’s some funny shit. Hahahaha. I fail to see how anything humorous could have come out of that situation.
I wrote a review of the ep way back when, this is how I thought it should go:
The Road Not Taken
Have I ever told you about my disappointment in Joss Wheedon’s bad judgment for introducing a baby into his series “Angel,” an action-adventure show about hot young adults? Talk about jumping the shark! “Angel” did a full 2 1/2 gainer off the shark with that move. Never has a show so completely and utterly fucked up.
It was a bad idea and remains one, and maybe Wheedon will eventually pull a rabbit out of that hat, but even so I think the mistake has been too lengthy and stupid to be redeemable via any trick, however clever.
But Wheedon, whose crew on “Buffy” consistently produces some of the best written stuff on television or in the movies, is not out of bad ideas.
A major mistake of the “missed opportunity” variety occurred recently in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, another Wheedon vehicle. In the “Dead Things” episode, three geek wizards come up with a device that transforms women into slavegirls, completely devoid of will. They use it on a gal named Katrina and next thing you know she’s dressed in a French maid outfit and calling all of them “Master.” And it’s made very evident that Katrina will serve all of her masters in any way they ask.
Now, let’s review the situation. What are these guys? Geeks! And what does that mean? No pussy! And they’re teenaged geeks, just as full of sex hormones as any other guy at that age, which is to say, their brains don’t just CONTAIN sex hormones, they’re SWIMMING in them! Now they’ve got a gorgeous slavegirl within their power, a slavegirl who has no choice but to serve all the depraved masturbatory fantasies that they’ve been having in the absence of actual sex with another person. No activity OTHER than enjoying their slavegirl is on their minds.
These geeks are hypnotized by the scent of ripe, helpless pussy under their total domination. Alpha geek Warren gets her first, ordering her to get down on her knees and declare her love for him. (Did I mention that Warren once dated Katrina but it ended badly because of a female robot slavegirl he’d built? Warren’s got REAL control issues.)
Katrina does as ordered, looking quite fetching in her French maid costume, especially as her face is right at crotch level and her expression shows that she would be honored to find Warren’s cock in her mouth. But before she can be so honored, the conditioning created by the device breaks down (well, it IS network television after all, even if it’s UPN).
Katrina suddenly returns to normal and finds herself kneeling in front of Warren in a sexy maid costume. Once she remembers what’s been done to her, she starts doing some major screaming and yelling at her evil captors, calling them kidnappers and would-be rapists, which of course they are if you look at these things from a strictly rational viewpoint. Katrina trieds to leave but the beta geeks block her exit – or try to. Katrina kicks the beta geeks’ asses then scuffles with Warren, who conks over the head so hard that she dies.
What a stupid waste! A waste of a great, feisty female character and a wonderfully devised comic situtation. I have to agree with the Television Without Pity recapper who wrote, “The first feisty woman we get in a long time and she’s clubbed over the head like a baby seal.”
What they should have done is transform the whole situation into a running story arc, with the nonconsensual slavegirl situation humorously paralleling Buffy and Spike’s edgy bondage and dominance relationship. This is where I thought things were going when I first encountered the story. Imagine my surprise when, having gone to great lengths to set up the situation, in a very short time the gal is brutally conked over the head and dies.
The whole conking/death thing rang false on every note, too. The struggle that led to her death was hardly enough to kill her, but I can give them that point – if someone gets hit in just the wrong way in just the wrong place, it can kill them easily sometimes. We’ll call it a freak shot.
My real problem is that killing is way too heavy a crime for the comic-opera buffoons that are the geek wizards. In their earlier appearances in the series the geek wizards have been hapless idiots, building improbable devices designed to hurt or control Buffy, totally without success. Think of them as mildly evil Lone Gunmen. Having them transform into a bunch of brutal killers is all wrong. It rings false, completely false, as if the writers were so fucking eager to end the slavegirl subplot that they did it the quickest, easiest way they could.
My idea would have been to expand the comic possibilities of the situation by having Katrina, while physically in their power, forced to obey their every command, still able to express her low opinion of them. She must do as they say, but she can speak her mind about her opinion of what she’s doing, and about her opinion of them. Huge amounts of humor as the geeks find that their sex slave isn’t so much fun to order about when she has a sharp tongue. The only way they can deal with that is by gagging Katrina, or more to the point, ordering her to gag herself.
This could be a way to humorously explore the male sex fantasy of having complete control over a woman vs. the reality of doing so. (BTW, the fantasy of having a complete control over a woman is not strictly the provenance of geeks and bondage and dominance fans – most guys have enjoyed it. We know, we know – we’re not SUPPOSED to have such fantasies, but we all do.)
In the process, the geek wizards would become the most hated villains on television. The guys you love to hate, and what a ratings draw that would be.
Katrina soon realizes that the geek wizards are not whizbangs when it comes to social interaction and she starts sweet-talking them, with an eye to getting free by playing off their personalities against one another, a la Irving Wallace’s “The Fan Club.” Except that she doesn’t just escape from the geek wizards, she engineers a complete turnabout and becomes their leader, displacing Warren, because once free she holds the threat of exposing their kidnapping, rape and enslavement of her to the authorities. Plus the beta geeks are sweet on her. Warren, who’s exhibited definite sociopathic tendencies, dislikes her because she displaced him as leader, but can’t do much about it.
Katrina realizes that the geek wizards are the key to her personal empowerment, and under her leadership they are a lot more dangerous than they were, as she becomes a major opponent of the Slayer. She even helps the geek guys obtain new slavegirls to keep 'em happy and more under her power, and also relieving her of some of those tiresome duties – can be hard on the knees, y’know.
OR you could have the same scenario occur, except when Katrina turns the tables on her captors, she takes the opportunity to have a go at making real men out of them. (Real men may have fantasies about having complete control over a woman, but the ones who make it some woman’s nonconsensual reality definitely are NOT real men.) Which leads to her and the geek wizards ultimately becoming allies of the Slayer.
It’s all good, and it’s all a hell of a lot better than the half-assed job that was actually done, because we were actually willing to explore the slavegirl plotline on its own terms, instead of being so fucking afraid of it that we’re willing to kill an innocent character and play the other characters false just to end it.
Ok, first off, it’s Whedon. 1 E. Not two. Secondly, you obviously completely missed the point of introducing the baby into Angel, and the point of Angel by simply calling it an “action adventure show about hot young adults”, but whatever. Finally, your entire essay has nothing much to do with BtVS or what they were after on the show or their direction. You do realize it was all just a plot device so Buffy would think she killed somebody and the audience can see how deep her depression and self-loathing was, right? Remember Whedon’s mantra. It’s. All. About. Buffy.
At any rate, it looked like the creepy mind-control thing really sparked your imagination. If you truly feel it’s something that should have been explored, especially as a parellel to Spike/Buffy, write a fanfic! Make it epic! Post it online and get a bunch of feedback to stroke your ego! That’s what the rest of us do when our favorite plot lines and "what could have been"s fizzles out into rank disappointment…