I always thought that the Tony Blundetto character felt a bit retconnish on “The Sopranos.” They bring him onto the show explaining that he’s Tony’s cousin and very close, almost like a brother to him, despite the fact that Tony’s never mentioned him. (He’s been in jail for many years and only gets out in season five.) Obviously, the writers can’t plan for every single character and sometimes they do have to introduce new ones (the old ones keep on dying), but this one just felt off to me. Like we’re supposed to suddenly embrace this guy as being so important to Tony when we’ve basically just met him.
Yeah, didn’t they also do this with the Sub-Zero character in Mortal Kombat? Fans liked him, so they wanted to make him good, so they kill the original Sub-Zero and his noble brother who has the same powers and can wear his costume shows up to take his place.
Way I remember it, he was initially a villain who thought Donovan killed his brother and was out for revenge. Took a few episodes to come around. And I also thought that the storyline was planned from the beginning, not a reaction to fans’ anger.
Reset Button.
“All that stuff? It was just a dream/simulation/fantasy-sequence/story-written-by-a-character/alternate-universe.”
Retcon.
“Here’s some explanatory stuff that reconciles the stuff we told you earlier with the new stuff.”
You can, however, utilize the reset button as a form of retcon:
“New stuff contradicts old stuff? That old stuff never ‘really’ happened at all! It was really just a dream/etc.”
Could be. It could also be called “Trying to write yourself out of a corner.” (I could be wrong, but when they showed the desk where Roseanne was writing wasn’t it literally in a corner of her basement?)
I would have argued that Picard’s being de-borgified was a rather weak version of a reset button, if at all; after all, hero gets kidnapped, hero gets rescued. Besides, they did spend the time discussing his getting over the trauma, and it did come back from time to time (“I, Borg,” for example).
I’m also not entirely sure that the time-travel episodes were reset buttons – after all, the whole point of the story is how to fix what went wrong.
To me, a reset button episode is one in which they could have dealt with the consequences, but it would have made for some inconvenience in story telling, so they say the hell with it and pull a rabbit out of their hat. Or they forget about it entirely (e.g. we have just acquired or witnessed some amazing technology/technique, which will be used one time and never spoken of again, despite how useful it might be).
Way back in the early years Mother Nature got angry at Dilbert and had a deer shoot him in the back and kill him. Unfortunately for Dogbert all that Dilbert left was a small device that contained a recipe for chili and to top it off the recipe sucked. Dogbert threw away the device and the genius trashman after examining the device realized that the device was really a cloner but it had an bug in it that caused to give a recipe for bad chili. So they put the cloner on a can of Dilbert’s garbage (the trashman is really smart) and then cloned Dilbert from his own garbage.
Scott Adams has said some story lines get way out of hand and eventually he wont know how to proceed so he’ll just end them. His example was some strips where Dogbert invented some evil giant walking cucumbers. Then he got stuck so he killed them all.
From what I understand (didn’t watch the show), the rape was not retconned out of existence. Luke was remorseful for a long time afterwards, and went to a lot of trouble to make amends. Laura forgave him because he earned her forgiveness, and they moved on. Not the same as having it not-happen.
Myabe it’s just cause I’m a database administrator who(has a lot of computer guys for friends), but I’ve always call this phenomenona “rollback” and everybody understands.