I much prefer reboot for this. Retcon is a broader term that can include pretending a storyline never happen but usually involves adding something to “the past” that’s contradicted by “the present.”
It was probably both. The Tamzarian episode pissed off a lot of people. Fans hated it, and it sounds like Harry Shearer (Skinner) and Matt Groening didn’t like it either. Which is too bad, because if you overlook the “fake Skinner” part of that episode, I think it has a lot to recommend it.
Well, if you believe remarks by John Barrowman & a certain guest star about the first episode of Torchwood Season 2! *** HERE BE SPOILERS! Don’t Click the Shiny Red Button! ***
(Torchwood’s second season begins in the UK January 16th. And on BBCamerica–about two weeks later.)
What does ‘retcon’ stand for?
Retroactive-?
Retroactive continuity.
They’re not incompetent. They’re recklessly irresponsible. They do their jobs quite well, when they’re not shagging aliens or using their technology in wildly inappropriate ways.
Certainly an awful lot of them but I think that one was the worst offender. Wasn’t there another huge reset button episode toward the end where an old Janeway goes back though a magic (Borg?) time portal and puts everything right?
Oo, and the one where they go undercover to save an alien planet from a massive nuclear explosion only to find it is their actions that actually did/will/had triggered it, and fixed everything by not doing something or other.
And the one where they have to go back to 90s LA to stop some Bill Gates stlye technocrat from using technology from a (future) federation time ship.
And the one where the whole crew is brain washed into working as technicians on a alien…
I guess you have a point.
Is there really a character called Annorax in that one? Annorax?
My favorite example would be the animated series named, appropriately enough, ReBoot. The entire world of MainFrame is literally rebooted in the third season to repair the damage from a viral infection, and everything is reset back to the original conditions of the first season… except for one character who now exists as older and younger versions of himself.
It’s, uh, kinda hard to explain.
They did that with the series “V” (the one with the izard aliens disguised as humans, not the Vendetta stuff). There was “Martin” played by Frank Ashmore. He was a sympathetic alien, part of the 5th Column, helping to free the humans.
He got killed off. Fans were pissed. So suddenly there was “Phillip” (also played by Frank Ashmore) who was Martin’s brother from the alien homeworld. And apparenlty the aliens decided would look good if they set up his human suit to look exactly like Martin’s human suit so that he looked exactly like Martin (ehy, maybe his lizard self was so much of a twin). And like Martin, he was a bit of a softie and like the humans after all so he was really a good guy.
Seems like the “dream sequence”. A new plot is explored, new characters come in, old ones die off. Rating plummet. Key character “awakes” - “twas just a dream”.
I guess there’s also the option of simply never mentioning something again. Like in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” when they had a whole episode about how the use of warp drive was damaging the fabric of space, ending with a Starfleet-wide moratorium on going over Warp Factor 5, if I recall. At the time, I wondered how that would affect future stories; apparently they just decided it didn’t really happen.
Yup. But he was obsessed with time not trains. I guess anorak doesn’t have the same connotations over there. He was played by the guy who was the head baddie in Robocop, in the end the whole rollback/reset seemed to be triggered when…
Janeway rams what is left of Voyager into the alien time weapon/ship so undoing all of Anoraks’ meddling. Way way back, our man Anoraks decides to go and have tea with the missus instead of continuing work designing the Ultimate Time Weapon of Doom. So logically, destroying the time weapon means that 200 years ago Anoraks decides to quit work early. Presumably he drops the Ultimate Time Weapon of Doom project at this point and doesn’t just start up again after supper?
And every body lived happily ever after/before. Even Anorax.
In the soaps it’s called “just another day.” No, Stavos wasn’t really dead, just a frozen popsicle. No, Eve & Julian’s child didn’t really die at birth, but he’s a hermaphrodite blackmailer. No, Luke didn’t really rape Laura, since they are now a super couple. Yes, Erica did have an abortion, but the fetus was put into the doctor’s infertile wife.
He might have been named for Monsieur Arronax, out of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea; or then again, maybe not.
They later mentioned, in passing, that Federation warp drives could be tweaked to avoid the problem, and Intrepid-class ships such as Voyager were specifically designed to not damage the fabric of space. But you’re right, they did drop that potentially huge environmental problem pretty darn quick.
Also, I’d say “reset” in answer to the OP. Something similar happened in the last ST:TNG movie, Nemesis, in which they discover B4, an android who looks just like Data. Data downloads all of his memories into B4 and, when he (needlessly, IMHO) sacrifices himself, it’s strongly implied that B4 will become just like Data. And hey, they’re even played by the same actor! How conveeeeenient.
Actually, the end of the Skinner situation was a joke on the idea of how sitcoms are often set up, where each episode is independent. It was hilarious and a wink at the audience. Only the extremely humor challenged could get upset by it.
On the weak example there’s always the “It was all a dream” ending, most notably in The Wizard of Oz (though you don’t often think of it there).
It’s not a retcon. An example of a retcon is when someone’s long lost best friend shows up out of nowhere. He’s never been mentioned before in the whole series, but now he’s the best friend and always has been the best friend, and continues to be the best friend in future episodes.
In a retcon the storyline of the last episode isn’t junked and forgotten and never spoken of again, but rather some new ongoing story element is introduced as if it had always been that way.
A reboot isn’t the right word either, since a reboot is just junking past continuity entirely and starting over. The Marvel Ultimates is an example of a reboot, so is Crisis on Infinite Earths, or Batman Begins.
A reset is a better term, and this happens all the time in TV and comic books, since the trouble with episodic fiction is that if the characters change too much you can’t tell the same stories with them, yet telling interesting stories where the characters don’t grow or change or learn anything is difficult. So Captain Picard can be kidnapped by the Borg and turned into Locutus, but at the end of the episode he’s restored to his original state, and merely has to spend one episode next season getting over the trauma, and then it never has to be mentioned again.
I think I am a little confused about a retcon.
Okay, so…for example, on “Cheers,” Frasier told the bar gang that his father was dead, but on “Frasier” his dad is one of the main characters. When Sam Malone shows up to visit Frasier, he tells Martin (Frasier’s dad) that Frasier had said he was dead. Frasier replies that he was really mad at his dad that week, thus explaining it away. Is that a retcon?
Or in the book “Jurassic Park,” Ian Malcolm dies at the end. In “The Lost World,” it is discovered that they thought he was dead and it was reported as such, but actually he was alive and was later rescued. Is that a retcon?
Yeah, the Cheers/Frasier thing is an example of a retcon. In Cheers, Frasier’s dad was dead. Then when setting up the spinoff, they wanted to have the father character, so they decided to just contradict Cheers continuity, and explain the discrepancy away. It’s a weak retcon in the sense that it wasn’t an important part of Frasier’s character in Cheers that his father was dead, it was just something mentioned in passing.
More egregious retcons involve things like characters who die but are replaced by long-lost twins, or it’s explained that the character who died was really a long-lost twin of the real character, or whatever. Of course, characters who die in comic books but come back later and weren’t really dead is such an established part of the mythos that it’s not even considered a retcon when the villain who dies as his lair explodes somehow escaped at the last minute and reappears a few issues later, that’s just the way comic books work.
I think that was the first episode after the series premiere. They got into it immediately.