157 replies to this topic

[AmberJamie]

In the land of television, there are storylines and plot threads that are created and then are dropped, left unfinished. Regardless of the reason, that this happens can be annoying.

For example, at the end of a CSI episode from season 8, Catherine was confronted by a man who was suspected of murder. Due to her and her team having arrested him, his past arrest for lewd exposure came out and he lost his girlfriend and job. He was mad as heck, told her off and threatened to kill himself in front of her one day. Now, the way the scene was shot, it was definitely a cliff-hanger. Yet, there has been no follow-up on that event since. Huh?

[cheryl1213]

Not quite the same, but a plot without the expected payoff...

I'm not a shipper but I was still disappointed by the Bones finale that promised there was a connection and it was not a dream or hallucination...yeah, a fiction piece is SO VERY different from those

Edited by cheryl1213, May 6, 2010 @ 1:34 PM.

[shego219]

Another plot that HAD a payoff but not one I expected was the pilot of my current favorite show, "Castle." I hadn't read a lot about it before it aired, so I assumed the copy-cat murders would be the over-arcing theme of the series. The idea that Castle had a serial stalker would have given him a better reason to stick around Beckett and the police force IMO. I love the light-heartedness of the show but this would have given it more underlying drama. IDK, I just wish it would have lasted more than one episode.

[cacophony]

Oh, I got one. Crossing Jordan. Okay, not exactly high art or anything but I watched it sometimes. I like Miguel Ferrer. So for what seemed like a thousand years, they were leading up to a sweet, romantic conclusion for Bug and Lily. She backs out of her wedding and goes for the big romantic meet-up with Bug at the lab. She asks him why he wasn't at the wedding and he says, "Because I couldn't watch you marry him." And that's... it? The show went on hiatus for several months then came back for a few episodes and was cancelled shortly thereafter. We never got to see the end of that story.

In conclusion, creator Tim Kring, I would like the time I invested in that story back please. As well as some time I spent watching Heroes after the first season but that's a separate topic.

[Eegah]

Ursa from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Mike and Bryan can complain all they want that Nickelodeon didn't give them enough time to resolve that subplot, but the straight fact is that season three was actually a half hour longer than seasons one and two. Given that the show gave a satisfactory conclusion to pretty much every single one of its other myriad subplots, that one really sticks out.

[DB in London]

Pretty much any season-long mystery from Desperate Housewives after the first. Season 5 was particularly bad - just complete shit. All of that just to get Mike and Susan back together? UGH

[raceguy120390]

Krycek, Skinner, and the nanobots. That is all.

[magicdog]

Ursa from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Mike and Bryan can complain all they want that Nickelodeon didn't give them enough time to resolve that subplot, but the straight fact is that season three was actually a half hour longer than seasons one and two. Given that the show gave a satisfactory conclusion to pretty much every single one of its other myriad subplots, that one really sticks out.

As a fellow Avatar fan, ITA!! If it's any consolation, a miniseries of some sort is in the works so we might finally get a resolution on Ursa.

I'm peeved at Charmed producers for suddenly dropping not just one but two storyline from Season 3:

The first was a mysterious guy named Micah whom the Halliwell sisters met in 17th century Virginia. He helps them hide from witch hunters (long story) and is killed by the bad guys. Then the girls return to the present and Prue meets "Mitch" who happens to be a dead ringer for Micah. Fast forward an ep or two and Prue is investigating Mitch's background and the village where Micah came from. They seemed to be headed in some sort of direction with this (one of the writers confirmed this at a convention sometime later) as to what Micah/Mitch mystery was. Was Mitch a descendent of Micah? Was Mitch really Micah brought back to life in the present? Was Prue supposed to have found her new true love since Andy's death two years earlier? Just dropped cold.

Then there's Cole's father's soul! Cole's father was killed by his mother (seen in flashback) and his soul imprisoned since (about 115 years). Cole took the job of going after the Charmed Ones in exchange for his father's soul. He succeeded in getting it, but he was told he would be unable to free his father. Then... nothing! Even after Cole was vanquished (twice!) the subject never came up again and viewers kept wondering if the sisters would come upon the soul and take things from there, but they didn't. It was like the writers had a cool storyline explaining Cole's actions (hired by demons to distract and ultimately destroy the Power of Three) throughout Season 3, but then forgot what to do once the prize was obtained.

[marxfan]

Joss Whedon is the King of Meaningless Plot Threads, IMO. Prime example? Dawn Summers.

So Buffy has a sister, even though she's never been mentioned before in the previous seasons. Ooookaaay, Mr. Whedon, we're game. We then find out, in a plot device ripped off from fucking Sailor Moon (seriously, why am I the only person bothered by this??) that Dawn is the Key to the Universe and that everybody's lives and memories have been altered accordingly in order for her to fit in and be protected. Dawn finds out she's the Key, becomes understandably emo about it. Then Glory finally captures Dawn, the fabric of time is torn open (or some such bull crap) and Buffy... sacrifices herself in order to save Dawn and the universe.

La la la, Season Sux, er, Six rolls around and Buffy is resurrected from the dead and Dawn is still there, but... is part of the gang now. It is mentioned all but twice that she isn't technically real, and was once the Key to the damned universe. So now we have this big honkin' elephant in the room for the remainder of the series. If anything, it's now the Poor Dawn is Upset About Stuff Show.

Uh, Joss? How 'bout wrapping up this incredibly clumsy storyline? You're supposed to be a professional, after all! You know, have Dawn be humbled by the fact that no one has to be nice to her because she isn't real? Maybe having her sacrifice herself to save Buffy in return? That would be big of her, since Buffy didn't have to off herself in the first damn place!

[SnarkySheep]

Ghost Whisperer had this big shebang the other season, where Melinda discovered she had this Evil Half Brother she'd never known existed, etc. etc.

The current season's almost over and...we haven't had as much as one single mention about the guy. I'm pretty sure he wouldn't just have dropped out of her family tree that easily...

[Eegah]

Quite a fun one for Sopranos fans: the Russian in the Pine Barrens.

Christopher and Paulie are sent to take care of a minor situation involving a Russian guy, who fights back and ends up getting a seemingly fatal injury for it. They put him in the trunk of their car and drive him to the Pine Barrens, where it turns out he's still alive and whacks them around a bit before escaping into the woods. Tony calls, having learned the man is actually a special forces agent trained to survive the harshest situations imaginable, and Paulie and Christopher are now tasked with making sure he doesn't return to tell anyone what happened. The Russian's trail in the snow abruptly ends, and Paulie and Christopher are left lost in the woods, where they have to spend the night before Tony finds them the next day. He asks them if they took care of the Russian, and Paulie says they did, wanting to get the hell out of there and never come back.

Apparently David Simon was actually surprised that anyone got the idea this episode was meant to be anything other than a complete standalone story, and we never hear anything else from the Russian for the rest of the show.

[CantThinkUpName]

Everything and anything ever on Smallville.

[Jilly Copper]

On Will and Grace, Jack spent several seasons trying to be an actor, despite the fact that he was clearly terrible at it (and focused more on looks and style than actual acting). Then, he enrolled in nursing school to impress a guy and it turned out he was quite good at it. So, we spent a rather extensive storyline watching Jack learn to do something where he excelled, could actually help people, seemed to be enjoying himself and was maturing. Then, in the episode where he was going to graduate, he gets up on the stage and announces . . . That he's going back to acting. WTF? I get that the writers were trying to show that Jack will follow his passion no matter what, but I felt like they either A.) Had no idea where else to go with this nurse storyline and gave up or B.) Just wanted to jerk us around.

Edited by Jilly Copper, May 7, 2010 @ 2:23 PM.

[cathychameleon]

Heroes has many, many examples of this - but the worst offender has got to be the Peter/Caitlin storyline from Season 2. Amnesiac Peter meets and falls in love with Caitlin. He and Caitlin travel to the future, in which a terrible disease has ravaged humanity. Caitlin is captured and Peter (unable to control his time travelling abilities) goes back to the present without her. He then tries to stop the terrible future from happening, which he does. But he never even mentions Caitlin again. Ever. I suppose the writers strike and the fact that Caitlin's character was generally disliked were contributing factors to the storyline being dropped, but at the very least they could have had a throwaway line to explain what happened to her. They just acted as if she had never existed.

[Split Ends]

Eegah, I liked that one, too. It's the only one I can ever think of that works in not having a payoff or becoming it's own story. It's nice to think that there was just something out there that could come back at any time and be a big problem, or not at all.

I would complain about General Hospital, but there's just too damn many. Counterfeit drugs, a rip-off of The Departed, I could go on forever....

[AtlanticVamp]

The 80's soap opera Capitol is the mother of "No Payoff" Syndrome.

Sloane Denning is off to marry King Ali in some make-believe country. Just as they've said their vows in a lavish ceremony, rebels break into the palace and kidnap Sloane and Ali. They're tied up and made to face a firing squad. Just as the countdown starts before the order to fire, a closeup of Sloane's face and---

---end of Series. Not "end scene". Not Season finale. END.

See, the show was cancelled and the writers were not given much notice, and were told to wrap it up quickly. This unanswered cliffhanger was the writers' middle finger to CBS. My mom was a huge CBS soap opera fan and I remember her screaming at the TV when that happened!

[magicdog]

Just as the countdown starts before the order to fire, a closeup of Sloane's face and---

---end of Series. Not "end scene". Not Season finale. END.

Reminds me of the Soap series finale - all the stories were left hanging:

Jessica Tate held by a South American rebel and faced a firing squad which fired on her (she did however turn up on Benson in spirit form claiming she wasn't dead, just in a coma!)

Chester Tate finds his nephew/biological son in bed with his second wife, and is about to kill them both in bed with a shotgun.

I'm sure there were other loose ends involving Mary Campbell and Burt (I remember the storyline of their baby possibly having been fathered by an alien but there was no confirmation by the end).

There was also Jody (played by Billy Crystal early on in his career) the gay son who turned straight, married, had a baby girl, then the mother decided to take off with the baby and hide for some reason.

[KedzieMatthews]

That 70's Show seemed to introduce a lot of SL's and characters that went absolutely nowhere: Laurie going to beauty school and then dropping off the face of the earth, Eric and Donna's fight over Donna's male friend, Hyde's sister Angie, Fez marrying Laurie to stay in the country, Charlie being introduced and then dying for no reason, Donna giving up on college, I could go on and on. That show really started to suck hard as time went on.

[magicdog]

Laurie going to beauty school and then dropping off the face of the earth

I think part of the problem with the Laurie character was the drug/alcohol problems Lisa Robin Kelly was having. She became so unstable, they cut her appearances drastically, then tried to fgigure out ways to bring her back, only for Kelly to mess up again and get booted ...again. I know they recast her character with another actress but by then Laurie was for the most part out of sight out of mind, so writers stopped caring.

[callie lee 29]

Charlie being introduced and then dying for no reason

I heard this was because people thought Charlie was too much like Eric, so they killed him off since they didn't want everyone to think they were trying to replace Eric (which they were). should have kept him, he was way less annoying than Randy.

[magicdog]

I heard this was because people thought Charlie was too much like Eric, so they killed him off since they didn't want everyone to think they were trying to replace Eric (which they were).

That had more to do with Bret Harrison's decision to leave when he got the lead in his own series , "The Loop"

[AtlanticVamp]

Whatever happened with Carol, Susan and Carol and Ross' kid Ben on Friends? After about midway through the series, you never hear from Carol and Susan, and Ben was hardly ever mentioned again.

[Jujyfruit]

As soon as I saw this thread, I immediately thought of Libby from Lost. She claimed to be a psychologist, but was actually a mental patient in the same hospital as Hurley. She also gave Desmond the boat that took him to the island. What a strange woman, what's the deal with her? Oh, we'll never know, since she's dead. What bugged me about this was the bigwigs of Lost explanation of "we felt Libby's story had been told." Told, my ass! You told us nothing! I realize they canned Cynthia Watros because of a DUI. I wish they'd just be honest about that and not give us this horse manure about her story being told. With Lost set to end in a couple of weeks I imagine there will be a lot more posts about that show in this thread, given how many things are still up in the air.

[magicdog]

The Pretender practically owns this thread.

I used to love this show - with an intriguing premise (super genius lives his entire life behind closed doors of a supposed think tank and is able to literally become anything he wants to be... a doctor, lawyer, pilot, Army Ranger, etc. and busts out to help the weak and abused), good cast, and a continuing mystery that covered almost everyone involved! The show was like an onion; the layers get peeled back only to get some answers but even more questions. This was good until the end of the series (and the two TV movies that followed) when we still didn't get a wrap up of the whole mystery.

First it's discovered the protagonist, Jarrod (Michael T. Weiss) was kidnapped as a young child by "The Centre" and began training as a pretender. Then he escapes and decides to find his family. He finds out he has a brother, Kyle (who was also a pretender but a lot less sympathetic towards mankind) and they team up to save a life only to have Kyle killed in cold blood shortly after! We needed much more time to get to know Kyle (who while with Jarrod was starting to become more caring about people and developing Jarrod's desire to help the helpless) and perhaps have him team up with Jarrod on the road together!

Then we find out Jarrod's parents weren't living together and were in hiding separately. Apparently there is also a sister that was born after Jarrod and Kyle were taken. We get a glimpse of his mother and the sister before they are whisked away into hiding again - and Jarrod doesn't even get to talk to them. We never see the daughter again - but there was a glimpse of mom again in one of the TV movies. Nomention if the sister could have been a potential pretender - was could just have been ordinary.


Jarrod has better luck finding his dad - only to have the reunion cut short because a clone of Jarrod had to be freed from a Centre safehouse. Since he "needed a father" (the clone is only about 12 years old), Jarrod arranged for his father to take the clone with him in his escape. Some seasons later, Jarrod's dad makes a reappearance but no mention is given of the clone or what dad did with him. In the series finale, Jarrod had to rescue his girlfriend who had been kidnapped. After she's rescued, we never see her again either nor the status of their relationship.

Then there's Jarrod's nemisis, Miss Parker. She's charged with bringing him back to The Centre. As she searches for Jarrod she finds mysteries of her own and that of her employers. One of which involved her mothers' death years earlier. She also goes digging around the building and finds another level of the building that had been abandoned for years. They find a nursery, toys, and a birthing room with shackles on the birthing chairs. While it paints a sinister picture, this find is essentially forgotten and not tackled in depth.


Then we learn her mother was killed (under the guise of suicide) years earlier planning to smuggle her daughter and other children the Centre was keeping for various purposes. Then we find out she didn't die when everyone thought she had! She'd gone into hiding and was pregnant with a baby that was a half brother to both Parker and Jarrod! She's killed sometime after giving birth. We see this child, named, "Ethan" briefly towards the end of the series finale, he appears for a few minutes in the first TV movie then never mentioned again! Miss Parker and Ethan (as well as their mother) is revealed to have an "Inner Sense" which is never quite explained (some sort of advanced intution I think).

Then there's another surprise... Miss Parker's father is not her father! Her supposed father (Mr. Parker) is actually her uncle! Her bio dad is Mr. Parker's brother who was going by the name, "Dr. William Raines" who worked at the Centre and was actively involved in the Pretender program. But why and how this came to be is never explained. The man she knew as her father married a much younger woman who had become pregant. She ultimately is left to die in childbirth though the baby survives - Mr. Parker takes the baby but we never hear anything further about it (or if he was being raised for something specific).

Then in the second TV movie, a supernatural twist is suddenly thrown in out of nowhere (concerning a scroll which may have been written by Satan himself!) and it was this scroll that lead to The Centre's creation by Parker's ancestors about a century earlier. We get stuck with yet another cliffhanger as the head of the Centre takes these scrolls, jumps out of a plane to his presumed death. The scrolls of evil survive.... supposedly with the prediction of Jarrod's destiny entwined within. There was never another movie to finish this ridiculous storyline and apparently no one thought to even finish the ones that had been long established.

Edited by magicdog, May 10, 2010 @ 2:27 PM.

[starbucksweetie]

Season 2 of 90210 (new version) also belongs in this thread. At the end of Season 1, Annie supposedly runs over a homeless man. The storyline gets dragged out to the end of Season 2, when she confesses. However, the audience doesn't even see her confess to her parents.

[GeoBQn]

In the Sliders episode "Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome," the group thinks they've finally reached their home world except for Quinn. It turns out not to be their home world, and at some point the Professor's double (call him Evil Professor) overpowered our Professor and started taking credit for inventing sliding technology. At the end when the group is about to slide into the next world, both Professors get into a fight. One Professor slides, while the other is left behind saying, "Oh my G-d." It's meant to make you wonder who slid, Professor or Evil Professor? So deliciously intriguing . . . and they never followed up on it. Creator Tracy Torme revealed which one it was in an interview years after the show was cancelled, but the show just dropped the idea so thoroughly that it didn't matter. The Evil Professor couldn't have faked his history with the group for that long before being discovered.

[Catlyn]

Dark Shadows: Victoria Winters is an orphan, with a mysterious benefactor. She goes to Collinswood to find out about her background... Nothing, it's totally dropped. Although there were hints that her real mother was Elizabeth Stoddard, the story line was completely dropped even before Barnabas came.

[espie]

Thomas & Sarah. One Sarah, two suitors, one fire, one gravestone that Sarah mourns at in the final scene... yet we never get to see the name on the stone. Sometimes I enjoy and respect "open-ended", write-your-own-ending situations, but this time I really needed to be assured beyond a shadow of doubt that Thomas was NOT the one in that grave. Why was Sarah alone? Where was... sorry, can't remember Other Suitor's name, didn't like him... if he wasn't in the grave? So they're telling me it HAD to be Other Suitor in the grave? Okay, then, where's Thomas?

Too many loose ends.

[AmberJamie]

Lost, in general.

Sure, it had a nice, emotional ending that showcased the relationships of the characters. However, IMO, if one is write a mystery, the mystery has to be solved in the end. And, there are too many mysteries that were not solved.

[Eegah]

That was the Chewbacca Defense of endings. Trying to blind us with emotional scenes so we're distracted from how nothing really means anything. Well, I'm not buying it. I've been saying for years the Lost writers had no idea what they were doing, and now everyone knows it.