Worst retcons

Cafe Society
21

The Doctor constructed his own time machine, which his grand-daughter dubbed a “TARDIS.” They are unwillingly separated from their people and long to return to their homeworld due to being exiled.

Wait no, the Doctor’s people (known as Time Lords) are a godlike race of beings who all drive around in TARDISes. The Doctor stole a TARDIS and went gallivanting around the universe because he was bored with life on his homeworld. This was a grave crime, as Time Lords live by a strict code of non-interference.

EXCEPT when the Time Lords do wish to interfere in universal affairs, for which they have an agent – the Doctor – to do their bidding (even if he’s a reluctant agent.)

But then again…Time Lord society is a pompous, bloated bunch of self-satisfied buffoons who are completely out of touch with universal affairs. For that matter, the Doctor himself barely scraped through the Time Lord Academy, graduating in the bottom third of his class.

Wait, no! The Doctor is not just a Time Lord, far more than that! In fact, he’s one of the PREMIERE Time Lords…peer to Omega and Rassilon. He left Gallifrey in order to hide one of the Time Lord’s deadliest weapons – the Hand of Omega – and secreted it in the vicinity of Coal Hill School, circa 1963.

Which is weird, because…he’s half-human, on his mother’s side.

And then he’s the last of the Time Lords – the rest of his people and his homeworld were wiped out in a universal war with the Daleks.* He’s now a lonely God, known and feared throughout the universe for his might.

Well, not THAT lonely. The Master survived, and oh yeah…Gallifrey and all the Time Lords survived. They’re just stuck in a perpetual timeloop.

Oh did we say perpetual timeloop? We meant they were shunted off through a CVE to an E-space universe. Same difference though, they’re still lost forever, and the Doctor will never be able to communicate with them again.

Except through the Crack in Time.

And oh yeah…when he goes back and visits Gallifrey.

22

Spock being not only brought back to life but to the exact same age he was before in ST3: Search for Spock. My understanding is that Nimoy wanted to officially kill the character off for reals/for keeps/for good at the end of Khan, but he was just made offers he couldn’t refuse.
We got ST4: The One With the Whales out of it, which was arguably the best of the original cast’s movies, and they worked in his Swiss Cheese mind, but you had to do a lot of ignoring for it to make sense.

23

The whole katra thing always bothered the hell out of me. Wait – so all Vulcans can be immortal if they want? Or at least their minds can be (and if they’re lucky like Spock, they can put it in a new body)?

It just works hell with the whole Star Trek universe. Things were better when the Vulcans didn’t have near god-like capabilities, but were just one alien race among many.

The whole Star Trek universe would have evolved differently if Paramount hadn’t let Nimoy direct – then his character would’ve stayed dead, and no weird Vulcan metaphysics would have developed. Although not having ST IV would be a pretty high price to pay – it was one of the best ST movies.

Or if, instead of the first ST movie being made they actually had gone ahead with a new series. Star Trek Phase II. Like TOS, it would’ve featured episodes written by noted SF writers (Theodore Sturgeon, Alan Dean Foster, Norman Spinrad) (The later ST: Next Generation didn’t do this), and the ideas and conceptions would’ve carried the Star TRek mythos into completely different directions

24

I hate to stick up for the prequels, but “unnecessary” seems a little harsh; I figure the idea was, imagine Qui-Gon Jinn facing down Yoda and Samuel L. Jackson and the rest of them – and while they’re all saying the little slave kid is too old to undergo the Jedi training, here’s Qui-Gon saying, naw, see, this boy – he’s got potential.

The whole trilogy hangs on this. The whole saga hangs on this. When people ask why someone who maybe shouldn’t have gotten Jedi training got it – over the objections of folks who frown on that, and who kept saying they didn’t really trust him, and who were right – we need to know why Qui-Gon thought the kid had so much potential.

Imagine it the other way around: Qui-Gon just has a position on the matter, and the folks who outrank him have concrete evidence that it’s a bad idea. Does it then happen under their auspices? I kinda doubt it. But the way it played out, with them really just having a position and him having concrete evidence that the kid had off-the-charts potential?

Yeah, you can grudgingly go with that story.

25

“wibbily wobbly, timey wimey” explains everything :wink:

26

Not film/TV, but if any character has been successively retconned more times than Honor Harrington, I don’t know who it is. Even The Doctor.

I gave up after the third or fourth book rewriting her personal history and giving her ever-greater genetics and powers. I understand it got worse.

27

:o I really liked The Thing prequel, that plot-hole flew over my head.

28

nm.

29

Exactly. I can imagine Frasier and Martin having a rip-roaring battle over some small thing that just snow-balled (perhaps Lilith?), ending with Frasier storming out of Seattle saying Martin was dead to him and he was going back to Harvard and never coming back.

Face it, Martin could be just as pig-headed as Frasier, and probably more likely to let loose when he was younger and uninjured, more in command of his own life.

And then things just froze over until Frasier had to go back to Seattle. For all he was a psychiatrist, Frasier had a lot of unexplored personal hang-ups, and ignoring his family for several years seemed quite in character.

30

This makes perfect sense to me.

But, am I missing something in the canon? Did Lucas try to retcon this comment in subsequent movies?

31

in the movies? not that I’m aware of.

in the pen-and-paper RPG system, they explained it as a trade route that passed between a crapton of black holes. He took a straighter path than anybody thought possible.

32

I guess we’ll see in one year and eleven months, won’t we? I mean, there’s no way the Han Solo prequel will omit the Kessel Run - hell, it’ll probably be the climax of the film

33

Not sure that was such a bad thing. The Borg were likened to bees in a hive, and a hive has a queen.

34

What’s weird about this is that everyone writing about it completely failed to get that Lucas explicitly wrote that Han was trying to pass one over on the local yokels, and Obi-Wan flat out knew what he was going. (Luke wasn’t impressed for other reasons.)

35

OK, here goes.

There was a race of muscular bluish Spacemen (fig. 1), one of which came to Earth and drank something that turned him into some goo (fig. 2) which seeded all DNA on Earth, essentially creating humans (fig. 3), (and everything else, I guess, or not, don’t really remember).

Some time later humans found the Spacemen’s planet (I will spare you the how/why/whats here) and found the goo (fig. 2) and it infested one of the characters, turning him into a goo-man monster (fig. 4).

Another character drank a small amount of goo and impregnated his girlfriend (before he became goo-man, IIRC, but it was goo-man sperm I think), which very quickly grew into a squid-baby (fig. 5).

After the squid-baby was birthed, a Spaceman (having forcefully been woken up and gotten really angry for some reason, memories are sketchy here - IIRC there was a flute involved), showed up and the squid-baby face-hugged it.

After another speedy gestation period, the Xenomorph (fig. 6) chest-burst out of the Spaceman’s belly, and I would presume made its way to LV-426 somehow.

36

Yeah, but Lucas is notorious for telling an average of 187.3 different versions of the origin of every detail of the Star Wars movies.

37

Can we just ignore everything involving professional wrestling? Every organization seems to have any number of storylines that suddenly stop and are then treated as if they never existed (examples: WWE’s McMahons Divorce / HHH & Stephanie Marriage Problems; TNA’s Aces & Eights).

I’m a little surprised nobody mentioned the classic “old school” retcon: Chuck Cunningham from Happy Days.
For some reason, the one that bugs me the most: on King of the Hill, some characters (e.g. Luanne) age, while others (Bobby and his classmates) don’t.

38

This one is actually demonstrable from the original screenplay, though.

39

Originally after the “parsec” line in the first movie, the simplest explanation was that parsec was a measure of time, not distance, in the SW universe. But Lucas had to go and ruin that in AOTC when that 4-armed buddy of Obi-Wan’s in the diner described the Kamino system as being some number of parsecs away. Parsec got another mention in TFA as when Rey mentions Han made the Kessel run in only 14 parsecs and then he corrects her.

40

This explanation never made much sense to me. It would be like Han was saying “I ran a marathon in only 20 miles!”