So I just finished watching the final season of The Shield, which was great BTW. I watched all 7 seasons in a couple month span which is why some of the plotlines that disappeared are more jarring to me than people who watched the show over the course of years.
Anyway, in that show one of the cops, Julian, starts of the series as a closeted homosexual. He struggles with hiding this from the rest of the dept and throughout the first couple of seasons it is a regular part of the story. He goes so far as to get married to hide his natural tendencies and the last thing you hear about this plotline was that the was trying to get his wife pregnant. That was the end of it and for the last few seasons it was never mentioned again. The whole thing just disappeared. This was strange because it was such a big part of that character that it was jarring when it was as if it never happened. I was expecting it to rear it’s head again in the final episodes but it never did.
Have there been other shows that dropped a major plotline like this halfway through the series without any closure?
Well the revival of Battlestar Galactica did incorporate Boxey. He was in the miniseries. A bunch of scenes were filmed with him for the first season and a subplot about him becoming an artful dodger black market type was developed. There were also plans for him, Boomer (fully aware of her Cylon heritage), and Tyrol to form a family unit. Thankfully this was all dropped, he appeared in two brief scenes that entire season, and was never mentioned again in any way shape or form.
Regarding Julian on The Sheild, we’re watching it now and there was a reference to it in a recent episode we just watched (either season 5 or 6, not sure which). Julian is questioning a guy about some hate crimes he’d committed (guy was snapping rat traps on guy’s penises at gloryholes) and everything Julian was saying to the guy you could take as him saying about himself.
Also, one of the gloryhole witnesses gives Julian a look of recognition and surprise when they see each other at the Barn.
I’ve heard that there are similar references to Julian’s closeted homosexuality near the end of the series.
I don’t recall the “Angel of Death” story arc in “ER” being resolved. Dr. Corday had come under investigation because several of her patients had died. It ended up, as I recall, she found the person she thought was responsible, but I don’t think it was an actual confirmation. Carter is also mentioned as having a sister in Season 1, who is never mentioned again, only a brother who died in childhood from leukemia.
I think in first season of “Silk Stockings,” Mitzi Kapture’s character had been diagnosed with an aneurysm that might go critical at any time, but that device was later abandoned.
In the 1960s series “The Invaders,” some–but not all–of the Invaders could be indentified because their pinky could not bend, so it always stuck out. That device was used sporadically, typically among B-level Invaders. The guest star Invaders were better advanced, and never had that affliction.
But in the latter episodes apparently the lower-grade human forms could bend their pinkies.
Also in Battlestar Galactica, there was the infamous “glowy spine when Cylons have sex” which I believe the writers said they wished they could go back and erase.
In the season in which he was killed (or maybe the season before…) Warrick, from the original CSI, mentioned a new wife he had. They mentioned her once or twice…then never saw or spoke of her again.
From watching House this season you’d think he went into the loony bin for being an asshole, not for seeing imaginary dead people who tried to get him to kill somebody.
When Dennis Farina came to Law & Order after Jerry Orbach left, he was always dressed to the nines and in his first episode he carried a wad of cash as big as a fist. Was he on the take? Were we meant to think he was on the take? It’s hard to watch the reruns on TNT in order though, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen his last episode. Was his standard of living ever explained, and how did his character leave the show?
In Season 2 of “Heroes”, Peter teleports himself and new GF Caitlin to a future timeline where a killer virus has wiped out most of humankind. Peter then accidentally teleports back to the present but leaves Caitlin in the future; eventually Hiro destroys the virus, but Peter never goes back for Caitlin. I don’t think she was ever mentioned again.
I believe that the series creator, Shawn Ryan, said that once they had reached the stage where Julian was still conflicted but nonetheless married and trying to have children, they simply felt that was as far as they wanted to go with that particular story line. It wasn’t really the case that that particular story was ‘dropped’, so much as they felt it had been resolved and concluded, and they didn’t have anything more to say about it. They had followed Julian’s journey from episode 1 to his decision to try the ‘married with children’ option, and felt that was enough.
I can’t remember whether I saw this among the boxed set ‘Extras’ interviews, or read it online somewhere.
In the first season of ST TNG the Ferengi were supposed to be a great adversary to the Federation replacing the Klingons. They were portrayed as greedy trolls no one could take seriously as threats and that aspect of the original concept was dropped.
Does the Russian from the Pine Barrens in “The Sopranos” fit? A lot of people waited and waited to find out whatever happened to that character but it was never addressed.
Since they successfully destroyed the virus in the present, wouldn’t that have erased the apocalyptic timeline entirely, or at least made it inaccessible to time-travelling Peter? Kind of like how, in BTTF 2, Marty can’t go to 2015 and stop Biff from stealing the sports almanac, because he’d arrive in a different 2015 where that never happened. (Did someone say “geeky as heck”?)
Still, losing someone you love in a hellish alternate world is a pretty horrible thing to happen to someone, so Peter could have at least moped about it a little.
Alot of stuff originally planned regarding the Borg got dropped for various reasons. They were supposed to be linked to those neural parasites infiltrating Starfleet Command in season one. They were also originally supposed to be an insectoid species, but that was dropped for budget reasons (though the hive concept retained). Also the finale episode of season 1, The Neutral Zone (with the 3 frozen people from the 20th century) was supposed to be the first part of a two part episode. The second part (season 2’s premiere) would reveal that it was the Borg who were behind all those outposts vanishing. A writer’s strike derailed those plans.