Series- whether books, television or movies- which got you hooked but then the author/writers made a plot turn that you either didn’t like, or which forestalled a direction you’d have wanted to see played out.
My entry is the “Lords of Creation” series by S.M. Stirling, which posits a Venus and Mars long ago terraformed by aliens. I liked both books but I felt that the ending of In the Courts of the Crimson Kings introduced too radical a plot change. I felt that there was plot line enough for at least another book without introducing interstellar gates. For instance, it would have been fun to have a third book devoted to a “War of the Worlds”: the Eastbloc, pissed that an American is now the consort of the Empress of Mars and paranoid about the alien technology recently recovered, builds a huge Orion-type nuclear pulse ship, sends an army to Mars and attempts to dictate terms to the Tollamune- including demanding that she divorce her husband. The Eastbloc quickly discovers that pissing off a planetary Sorceress/Empress is not a good idea.
I think the spoiler you mention is inevitable, given that both books were pointing very strongly to an active alien intelligence that was behind the terraformed planets.
For me, I was thinking the X Files. I thought the episode where the lady with the alien-killing virus was taken by the aliens should have been the end of the alien arc. Her virus should have killed them off, starting a season-long civil war among the cabal that ends with all but one of them killed, who is then killed by Mulder. Mulder and Scully retire from the FBI and the season after has Scully working as an ME in Florida, where Mulder works for a tabloid newspaper and they get together to investigate strange occurences.
Can I mention Buffy Season 6? I thought it had tons of potential and wasted a lot of it. I would have liked to have seen the season arc be about the battle between good and evil, but instead of externalized demons the “battle” is within the souls of Zander and Willow. The external enemies are still the Nerd Squad, which is still utterly ineffective.
Zander’s family life is much more in evidence. Zander’s father has made his own and his family’s life Hell on Earth. Zander’s greatest fear is that he is becoming his father. His struggle throughout the series is about the very mundane evils that poison lives every day–contempt, abuse, alchoholism, etc.
Willow’s struggle is similar to what was portrayed except with less suck. Specifically, magic is not addictive like crack. On the other hand, it is addictive like any other power. Willow gradually tries to fix more and more things with magic, until she becomes a tyrant, beautiful and terrible, and all love her and despair…ahem.
In Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, I really wish King had not
written himself into the story as a central figure. And I wish he hadn’t tried to weave so many of his past novels and characters into The Dark Tower series. Sure, he’s often tossed little nuggets from older stories into his newer books. But he went waaaayyy overboard with this in the last couple of DT books.
The first four books were great and left me aching in anticipation in the 3-4 years between their releases. Then the last three books just seemed rushed and uninspired. What a huge disappointment.
Granted, but it should have been reserved for the last book out of 3-5. Just off the top of my head, there’s the War of the Worlds I mentioned, a lunar adventure would have been possible (subselenian, like Wells’ First Men in the Moon), freefloating life in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn and life under the ice of their moons, though that would depart rather from the Burroughsian inspiration of the first two novels. Stirling came up with a cute concept here and IMHO we weren’t done playing in the local solar system.
Along those lines, my biggest complaint was Jennifer’s story. It just didn’t seem…right. And IIRC, it kind of just pops up out of nowhere during the third book.
Stephen R. Lawhead’s Trilogies consistently disappoint. He is always so focused on it being a three book series that he throws a hail mary pass in the very end of the last book, when he really should take some more time to develop characters and finesse the situations.
Oh GOD yes. (Well, the books, I didn’t even know there was a TV serious, for which I am grateful.) There I am, reading, la la la, moderately entertaining fantasy series, hm hm hm, la la–what the FUCK? When did Terry Goodkind start channeling the ghost of Ayn Rand? Horrible, horrible. I couldn’t even pick up the next book, although I head it is dedicated to, of all organizations, the CIA. Who the hell dedicates a fantasy series to the CIA? That’s just insane.
Although, in fairness, I don’t know that it went in a bad direction overall . . .
But the first book features Kylara Vatta disgraced cadet from a military academy, who was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, courtesy of Vatta Trading Company. She gets set up with an old, slow trade ship being sent for salvage and a bunch of family retainers to keep an eye on her, and adventures ensue.
In the second book of the series, the universe explodes*. The rest of the series features Kylara and family (and friends) trying to put the universe back together.
But I think it would have been interesting to watch Kylara’s adventures if the world hadn’t exploded.
*OK, it’s not like there was a supernova or something, just human interference with the government and the communication systems, and certain big businesses, but . . .
In Interview With the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice built a really cool fantasy/horror world.
Then, in Queen of the Damned, she tries to come up with a scientific explanation for vampirism.
I like science when I am reading hard science fiction. In fantasy fiction, just wave your arms and say, “It’s magic”. BS pseudoscience just ruins the atmosphere.
It’s not impossible to mix genres, but it is rarely done well.
I would’ve liked to have seen Star Trek: Phase II, the original rebooting the series would have taken had the first Star Trek motrion picture never been made, and the second series started then. It would’ve been vastly different from the universe we have now.
I was also disappointed with the way Alien Nation went. That was potentially a very powerful idea and setup. The original premise was that the Newcomers/Slags had NO culture – they were manufactured beings, used as slaves. I wanted to see what they’d come up with to fill that vacuum. But the series and movies kept discovering more of a background culture as time went by, and it seemed that these weren’t cultureless drones.
The New Galactica: “Everyone is a Cylon” I hatethe fact Ron Moore took that direction, he had no plan just making it up as he went along.
In addition the magical visions of the president, the “it happened before, it will happen again” mumbo jumbo.
ST-DS9 The whole emphasis on the magical prophets nonsense with Sisko succumbing to it. The prophets making the Dominion fleet just disappear in the wormhole (Yuck) talk about Ex- Deus-Machina, literally.
I hate magic woo-woo stuff why can’t there be serious hard core SF with out the magic!
There’s a series of perhaps eight books by David Wingrove in a Chung Kuo series:
The first couple of books were fascinating and wonderful, creating a consistent universe dominated by ancient Chinese thought. But the last book brought in a total deus-ex-machina, with no prior hint or suggestion that such a thing was possible: turns out to have all been set in a “parallel universe” and one of the characters invents a dimensional-transporter that can carry all the surviving major characters to OUR universe, whew! so everything is normal. 'Twas a total cop-out ending, that infuriated me (I gave away all eight volumes in hardcover that I had carefully collected because the first few were so good.)
I do not recommend that anyone read the series; stick to the first two or three volumes and pretend the rest doesn’t exist.
