Ah well, perhaps you remember it better than me…I have a memory of an episode with an older lady who was supposed to be infected by the guys with the sewn-shut eyes and mouth with a virus that would kill the Greys. They were going to hand her over to them in an effort to kill them off.
Any Scifi series that suddenly includes magical, mystical mumbo jumbo; which is unfortunately, far too many to list.
One recent example I can think of that veered into this then retcon’d a correction is Ben 10. To give his sister something to do, they gave her magical powers from a spell book. Then they changed their explanation to say that she had powers because she (like others) is part alien and that real “magic” doesn’t exist. (Thank you!)
So I guess that’s not an OP Title example, but an example of something that wandered into the wrong territory and corrected itself.
For the OP purposes;
ST: Voyager. I’m already on public record for this one. It’s about the only thing that comes up if you google my name. They should have fulfilled the initial premise of loosening the straps a little and having more of a generational ship approach rather than maintaining the “shove a stick up the captain’s ass and insist on strict Federation discipline” bullshit.
Babylon 5.
I loved it when they were up against those weird shadow aliens in the spider ships. The storylines afterwards never lived up to the promise of that first season.
X-Files.
I totally agree with the poster above. The self-contained mysteries/monsters of the early shows were great. It then started taking itself too seriously with long convoluted plots about government conspiracies and aliens which never seemed to resolve but became ever more boring.
Star Trek:Enterprise 9/11 changed everything. Unfortunately, it also ruined ST:Enterprise in season 3.
I agree. I’m not one to say that there should be no overlap between science fiction and fantasy, but if a series is going to combine elements of both then that should be established early on.
I have a similar rule about time travel. If time travel is part of the original premise of the series then I have no problem with it. However, just because a series already has magic or advanced technology does not mean it’s okay to suddenly introduce time travel at some later date. This is a bad sign, and usually means the writers are either running out of ideas or have written themselves into a corner and can’t think of a better way to get out of it.
It may sound silly but let me include Scooby-Doo. Originally a very skeptical outlook that showed magic was bunk but then evolving stories where the ghosts and super natural happenings were real.
I’ve heard a quote making the rounds of Shaggy saying something like “remember when it always turned out to be a guy in a rubber mask?”
Well OK. I don’t completely agree, but I can see it as a legitimate gripe. But… I think the spirit of this thread is to say what you would have done instead, not just what you wouldn’t do. So… how would you have retooled BSG and DS9?
I kind of wish that after writing Ender’s Game, OSC had either stuck with the hard sci-fi theme or just stopped. Speaker for the Dead was so-so, but Xenocide and Children of the Mind were just feckin’ awful.
Huh? If Arya had reached the Red Wedding before it started, she would have been possibly captured, or, more likely, killed.
The Hound attacked her to keep her out of there for a reason!
-Joe
I thought the opposite. Maybe it was just my resolution coloring it, but I liked the Sheridan vs. Earth more than the Against the Shadows stuff.
-Joe
The ‘Aliens’ series after the movie Aliens. That story universe had so much potential as seen in the Dark Horse series of comics. I was so disappointed that Alien 3 and Alien 4 were basically just carbon-copies of the original film.
Aliens was what a sequel should be, take the original premise and build on it, not just make more of the same.
Personally I was hoping Alien 3 would be where the xenomorphs make it back to earth and start causing large scale havoc there.
I came in here just to say that: Every Eddings series should have been much shorter.
With that said, I preferred Tamuli to Elenium.
Aggh, yes, definitely. I had put those other two movies out of my head. Aliens 3 was the biggest Wasted Opportunity in the history of the movies.
Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series. I’ll just keep it short and say I wished she had not turned Anita from a woman who was reluctant to have sex with anyone, to someone who probably has had sex with goldfish by now. (I’ve stopped reading).
For an extremely recent book, Stephanie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn:
It felt too rushed. Too much going on. And I personally am still squicked by Jacob/Nessie.
And for an opposite, although others may disagree, I will be interested to see where the Mercy Thompson series goes after Mercy’s rape.
Susan
Some happiness might have been nice. Personally, I would have preferred it if he hadn’t killed off everyone who was in any way decent and/or interesting. Ok… Killing off the main character in the first book was an awesome twist. It really set the mood of the series, and established that he would do anything to write a good story, even kill off likeable characters. But… He killed off ALL the likeable characters. Leave us a few people to root for dammit! You killed the Hound but left Sansa alive? Fuck off GRRM.
The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb. Books about a royal assassin! Awesome! We got to see him growing up, see all his training. Way cool. Then… Nothing. He never kills anyone at all except some zombie like things. The one time he almost succeeds, he ends up being best buddies with the mark, and then the story just goes further and further from a book about an assassin, and degenerates into generic fantasy epic #11042.
It would have been nice if Thomas Covenant had stopped questioning if The Land was real somewhat earlier and just went with it.
The “Prophets” weren’t particularly magical were they? They were just worm-hole aliens, who existed independent from time. Their powers actually seemed pretty limited, unless someone was actually in the wormhole with them. Indeed the whole show was actually pretty atheistic, the whole Bajoran religion turned out to be based on just worshiping some nearby aliens. Granted some of the characters were religious, but there faith wasn’t really shown to be justified.
I actually agree about avoiding magic in Sci-Fi, I stopped watching Battlestar Galactica when it became focused on the Cylon religion instead of on the struggle of the fleet to survive. But I don’t think DS9 is a good example of this problem (Q, on the other hand…)
As for Song of Ice and Fire. I don’t really mind GRRM habit of killing his main characters, he usually creates new ones that are just as interesting (and then kills them). But I do wish that if he was going to keep killing characters off, he’d have some more defined central plot. Instead there’s a series of wars and struggles, some of which just sort of peter out. Without having a consistent set of characters to follow, or a central struggle to watch, his books are kinda becoming a bunch of loosely connected vignettes.
No, I said I wished she reached Riverrun (not The Twins) before the Red Wedding. So she can have a sappy reunion with her family and Catelyn could have died knowing that at least one of her children is still alive. Who knows, instead of going to Edmure’s wedding, maybe Arya could have stayed with Jeyne and the Blackfish or be sent as a ward to another one of their allies. Robb was going to send Catelyn to Seagard, he was savvy enough not to keep all his eggs in one basket.
Really, it’s for emotional fulfillment rather than a change in direction for good storyline reasons… like I said, on those rare moments when I’m feeling sentimental, I wish the Starks/Jon Snow had some happiness rather than piling on more grief and responsibility. But what I really want is for GRRM to hurry up and finish the series so that we can have the big emotional payoff at the end.
I kinda wish that China Mieville’s Iron Council had ended a little more happily. I know it’s not so cool to just wish everything would work out great for everyone, but I dunno… The end of Perdido Street Station was fitting, though sad, but I just thought that Iron Council could have been happier.
Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’ Dawn series. I only read the first book, which started out really well, set a nice stage with the necessary science fictiony stuff, before totally losing me in the last fifty or so pages. The enemy, it turns out,
is the dead, who can push through the veil, or some shit.
I completely lost interest.