Sometimes it is what we don’t know about a story/fictional universe that gives it it’s charm. Unfortunately, sometimes the creators just can’t resist taking the story in a direction it was never meant to go, revealing “secrets” which, once revealed, never live up to the mystery in which they had previously been shrouded. The sad fact is, once the creators give us these “answers” they can never take them back. Once they’ve ruined it, it can’t be unruined. Here are some IMHO examples:
(This post contains Spoilers for Star Wars, Futurama, The Muppets, Upright Citizen’s Brigade.)
The Demystification of the Force: Probably the best example. All the fanboys howled over this one, and I have to agree it was really lame. The Force used to be a mystic spiritual connection with the universe achieved through discipline and understanding. We were fascinated by it precisely because we would never fully comprehend it. “Bah!” says Lucas, “It’s my universe, there’s nothing about it I can’t explain in full!” So, he gives us Mitichlorians. Now the Force has basically been reduced to a fungus. Lame.
The Demystification of Leela: In Futurama we always knew Leela as an alien who had been abandoned on Earth as a baby, never to discover any others of her kind. This gave some great layers to the character: her tough self-reliance and resilience as well as her loneliness and vulnerability all due to her struggles for identity and search for understanding. Then in the episode Leela’s Homeworld we find that Leela is nothing but a mutant from below the surface who had all this time been “passing” as an alien. Lame.
The Demystification of Gonzo: For over 25 years Gonzo, of the Muppets, had always been described as being a “Whatever”. No one ever had clear idea what Gonzo was and Gonzo was FINE WITH THAT! That’s what made him so singular. He was never going to fit neatly into anyone else strictly defined categories for anything and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. He was a true individual who needed no explanation. Then, in Muppets from Space (the worst of the Muppet movies), suddenly Gonzo is really sad and lonely and wishes there were others like him and he’s oh so distraught over questions of his origins and wishing for a place where he belongs. Surprise, surprise: Yes! There is a neat convenient explanation for Gonzo’s identity! He’s an alien and there are lots more like him and they left him on Earth by accident and have come back to show him who he truly is. Lame.
The Demystification of the Tite Brothers: On the Upright Citizens Brigade series, there were the recurring characters the Tite Brothers. Although sometimes we saw Tite Brothers posters or T-shirts, we never saw them and never knew anything more about them than that they were an international pop sensation. Then at the end of the first season we are treated to a Tite Brothers concert. Just the two Tite Brothers jumping up and down on trampolines saying “titties!”. The pop sensation that had been built up to such extreme magnitude in our imaginations was greatly diminished. Lame.
Any examples of your own? Comments on examples listed?
Going by the commitment to continuity that the show had (such as Nibbler’s shadow in the first episode that wasn’t paid off or even noticible unless you were looking for it until season 5) I doubt that it was a story that was “taken in a direction it wasn’t meant to go.”
That said, I don’t think it was lame regardless. The episode where it was all exposed was a very touching one (it’s my mum’s favourite :)) and it didn’t come off as bogus. What’s more, in the Futurama future mutants are illegal and not allowed to come up to the surface for any reason. Unfortunately the reveal of what Leela really was came only a few episodes before the series was cancelled but had it continued there are a whole wealth of story possibilities, such as Leela realising that she really is the only one eyed person around, the fact that she’s now got to hide her non-alieness or risk some sort of banishment, or even how her future children may turn out.
The plotline of her being the only known alien in her race wasn’t really explored anyway, I can only think of the one episode where she meets Alkazar that went into it in any depth. Any other time it was explored it was more about her being an orphan or not fitting in, and while she’s no longer an orphan she still doesn’t fit in and looks weird. Though why everyone finds a one eyed woman stranger than a gay energy being they never explain!
(goddamn it, why can’t I be this verbose when I’m writing uni essays???)
I’m with Silentgoldfish. Leela’s ancestry was the kind of mystery that was meant to be solved, eventually. Then they solved it, and did it very well (and yes, it was planned that way, you can see her parents in background shots of earlier mutant episodes). This is unlike the Force or Gonzo, which were background mysticism/weirdness, not obviously meant to be ever resolved, and done rather badly when they got around to it.
Heck, Leela’s background was only barely a mystery. She thought she knew exactly what she was, she just didnb’t know where the rest of them were.
This is why Hannibal is such a crappy book. Hannibal Lecter works way, way better when you don’t see so damned much of him. I have this argument with people all the time. He’s so banal once the story’s from his perspective! And that bit about his sister and all - god, what a waste of a brilliant character.
I’ll third the disagreement with Leela’s origin belonging in this thread. I thought it made her character much more interesting and poignant. Although the show didn’t last long enough for it to play out fully, they changed the central motivation of her character from being someone who was perenially alone (an orphan from an unknown alien species) to someone with a family and a culture, but one that is shunned and hated by society at large. This is a much more interesting background for her. There are tons of aliens on the show that you only ever see one of: there’s only one mutant on the show trying to pass in above-ground human society. In addition to that, it gives Fry’s character more depth, as the only “normal” human who doesn’t care about her origins.
I also laughed my ass off when they finally showed the Tite Brothers, so I guess I disagree with that one, too.
And I don’t really give a shit about Gonzo.
But I’m with you 100% on the midichlorians!
For my own addition to this thread, I’m going to go with the episode of Buffy where they showed the origins of the Slayers. It was a cool episode, one of the best of the last season (not that that’s much of a trick), but it also cast all the Slayers as victims, which was directly contrary to the main theme of the show for the previous six years. Not to mention it served as the introduction to the “men are evil” sub-theme that ran throughout the last season, which I also had problems with.
Thats one reason I do not like sequels or prequels. They almost always try to explain things or answer questions that I prefer not being answered. You already covered the best example with Star Wars and the force nonsense.
My example is Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I liked the original ending where you don’t see the interrior of the space craft. Unfortunately, adding those shots at the end took away some of the mystery and awe of the movie.
Highlander. “We’re mystical, immortal beings, with incomparable powers, style, and fashion sense. We live forever and can’t be killed unless you cut our heads off.”
But men are evil! Evil to the core! Or perhaps it’s just the ones I date.
Anyhoo, I think the “Slayer as victim” motif was sort of in the series all along, starting as early as “Prophecy Girl.” I’m set to go back to my crappy temp job in about 20 seconds so I’ll expand on this more later if anyone’s interested (and perhaps even if no one is).
Sometimes keeping things in a story murky makes it more effective. One of the first things I thought of when I read this thread is this Teemings article about how subsequent sequels might ruin The Ring by explaining too much of what was going on. Since the second film is due next year, I hope they avoid the mistakes of the examples cited in these posts.
In the pilot episode, you can see Nibbler’s shadow underneath the desk right before Fry falls into the stasis chamber which means that the whole storyline involving time travel from the later season was planned, even in the beginning.
My suggestion: The Borg. They were originally a soulless amalgam of cybernetic creatures that cared about nothing but knowledge and technology but they got progressively more normal with each showing until, finally, in the later seasons of Voyager, they were just like any other race except that they had lasers for eyes and forks for hands.
Oh yeah, I remember either reading about that somewhere or heard it on the commentary track. If not the latter, was that confirmed to be purposeful and not some fan’s creation (akin to the face on mars, or satan’s face in smoke, etc)?
In the fantasy genre, mystification usually is preferable to knowing the whole truth, even w/r/t politics and history. Set-piece, barren, sparse settings usually work better both in film and writing.
That’s why I didn’t want to read The Silmarillion. I thought that for sure it would ruin everything for me! And indeed, the West wasn’t quite as awe-inspiring as before, a teeny tiny smidgen less. But the amazing history behind the Era of the Ring Wars was worth a little banality! And some of the ideas are actually MORE awe-inspiring than I had imagined!
But only Tolkein could pull that off: usually you come off better leaving your audience dazzled.
I’m not really a fan of the show despite having seen a good portion of the episodes but after reading about the shadow, I kept an eye out for it when I saw the pilot again and it is most definitely there. You just have to know to look for it.
How 'bout the second season of Witchblade*? One of the major things that made Nottingham cool was that he rarely spoke. You knew he was a badass, you knew there were Issues. Big Issues. But you only got a glimpse of what was going on inside that noggin of his every once in a while.
Second season, you couldn’t shut the guy up, and he just wasn’t cool any more.
Here’s some screencaps from the pilot episode. Check out the second picture down on the left. The shadow there is pretty clearly Nibbler, or at least one of his species. That eyestalk is pretty distinctive, and seems unlikely to have been animated “by accident.” The pictures on the right side are from one of the Anthology of Interest episodes, where we see a “what-if” scene where Fry didn’t get frozen.
I’ll second the origins of the Slayer in Buffy s7, not only because I think it’s stupid for the reasons Miller mentioned, but also because of the implications it has for what Buffy and Willow do at the end of the season. Of course, that’s just one of several thousand issues I have with season seven, so it doesn’t really stand ou that much.
I opened this thread thinking of Hannibal. The worst part about the demystification of Lecter’s character was that in *The Silence of the Lambs * (I think, could’ve been Red Dragon, doesn’t matter), a character explicitly states that Lecter never talks to anyone about his possible motivations because if anyone ever figured out WHY he did what he did, they’d lose interest in him and no one would bother with him anymore. Um, bingo. *Hannibal * was an awful book, but kind of a fun movie.
This doesn’t really fit as well as most of the examples. But here it is anyway. On Rugrats, not only did we not know what the babies would be like when they grew up, we didn’t even need to think about it. As far as anyone could see, they were just going to be babies forever. But now there’s a spin-off called “All Grown Up” or “All Growed Up” or something, where they’re about 13 or so.