As I write this the ST:TNG episode that introduced the Borg is playing (on BBC America, which is apparently stands for “Star Trek Marathon Channel” in British.) And I was thinking of how generalized and decentralized the Borg were emphasized as being, yet were later retconned to have a “queen.” This led me to think of The Silence in Doctor Who being retconned from a creepy alien species that had been dwelling among and manipulating humanity for thousands of years to a bunch of priests sent back in time to screw with the Doctor.
So, what are your most annoying retcons that make an interesting idea much worse?
Han shot first, the retcon to change that was poorly executed, unnecessary, and attempted to fundamentally change a classic character.
I’m not sure what you’re calling a retcon there, there wasn’t a change in the story. In the initial story they didn’t say where the Silence came from and it was later revealed, but that’s not a change in continuity. It was obvious in the initial story that time travel had to be involved because the Silence weren’t around when any of the previous eleven doctors poked around in Earth history.
Worst? Well, depends upon what you mean by “worst.”
If by worst you mean “most poorly executed effort to explain an inconsistency”, I’d have to go with the bit about Darth Vader not having “betrayed and murdered” Luke’s father. But there wasn’t much Lucas could do about it, since the original story line was completely incompatible with the brilliant decision to make Luke into Vader’s son.
If by worst you mean “most execrably executed effort to explain an inconsistency”, I’d have to go with the effort in “Enterprise” to explain the Klingons appearances in TOS. I mean, seriously. That was just ludicrous. What a waste of episodes.
DC comics decision to reboot a Superman who had no history as a Superboy resulted in a problem with the Legion of Superheroes, whose mythos was inextricably linked to Superboy. They decided that Superboy came from a “pocket universe” created by the Time Trapper and that every interaction between Superboy and the LSH, back to the group’s premiere, was with the guy from said “pocket universe”. Then they actually killed that Superboy off.
Kind of ironic actually, given that a lot of folks give up reading Superboy when they realize, since he grows up to be Superman, that nothing permanent can happen to him.
Yes. Precisely. I always felt, from the time the question first arose (after the filming of the movie Star Trek), that the best way to handle it was to treat it as a non-issue. After all, we all know the reason had to do with the cost of making them look different back then.
Actually, the answer is simple: TV in the 60s didn’t have good enough resolution to show their faces properly. Better technology made it more obvious.
Oh, and Han Solo did make the Kessel run in 12 parsecs. Parsecs may be a measure of distance in our galaxy, but Star Wars takes place in a galaxy long ago and far away, and their measurement system uses “parsec” as a measurement of time.
Or it could still be a measure of distance, and Han found a shortcut no one else was crazy enough to use or a freak wormhole that drastically shortened the distance for him.
I see the poster, but have not seen the movie and don’t recognize all the symbols. Can you spoil it for me and tell me how the movie says Xenomorphs came about?
I really, really hate the retconning they did in the recent film The Thing – the 2011 film. It’s made as a prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter film The Thing, and is intended to fit seamlessly in with that film, except that they took the clear indications from the earlier film and completely changed them, which I found particularly annoying. So the frozen/burned “thing” in the form of a person in the process of splitting into two parts was changed into something completely different. They did that multiple times, but the biggest and most ridiculous change was making the destruction of the ship really recent – less than a day before the beginning of the 1982 film, whereas the intent was that (as in the 1951 film and the original Campbell story) was that an attempt to burn the ice with thermite resulted in the destruction of the ship, something which the 1982 film implies happened well before the Thing woke up and wrought havoc on the camp. The 2011 film has the ship intact and "underground (actually under ice) and destroyed by a thermite grenade blast immediately before the end. So how does the 1982 film show them watching a film of the Norwegians cutting it out of the ice with thermite and burning the whole thing? And why does the site of the ship look much more than a day old and well cooled-off in the 1982 film? The timing doesn’t work.
Most utterly unbelievable, but forgiven because of the great story lines that resulted: Darth Maul somehow surviving being chopped in half at the end of Phantom Menace and becoming an antagonist in the animated Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels series.
For an in-continuity retcon (if that makes any sense), The Spider-Marriage.
It’s a bit hard to explain if you don’t already know about it, but the short version is that some Marvel editors never could wrap their heads around Spider-man and kept trying to “fix” the character, which always meant changing him back to whatever he was when the editor in question was 16. One such editor demanded they get rid of his marriage, which was handled in-continuity as Spider-man literally selling his marriage to the devil*.
