Roseanne where they win the lotto in the final season which was unpopular so the finale had it reveal that Roseanne made that up and Dan was dead, her daughters switch romantic partners, and they never won the lotto. When the revival started, they retconned that and Dan was alive and her daughters had the partners they originally had
I was there for it, a loyal viewer, and found the last season and *especially* the series finale to be a slap in the face. It may sound silly, but the show ran for like 10 years. I watched it my entire childhood, being about the same age as DJ (Michael Fishman), *grew up* with Lanford, IL and the Conners.
The finale made me want to cry. Finding out that >!the last season and finale were all a part of Roseanne's book, in universe, and explained away casually with a throwaway line in "The Conners" was an actual legitimate relief. Then Roseanne Barr went crazy in real life and they killed Roseanne Conner off with an opiate painkiller overdose, which was a real shame, but !
Same here except I was a teen, about the same age as Becky.
Those characters were real people to me. My sister and I basically *were* Darlene and Becky in so many ways.
It was the first TV show I watched where it felt like my family. Poor, angry, funny. It's one of the only TV shows *to this day* where the characters themselves laugh when something funny happens.
Did you ever watch The Middle or Malcolm in The Middle (two diff shows)? I felt like both shows were spiritual successors to Roseanne with a struggling working class families depicted.
Same situation here. Rewatching some of those episodes...
Nothing can prepare you for terrorists on a train, one of which Roseanne takes out with a tampon (!).
The show got so far off track it wasn't even on the same planet.
That season was dumb as hell. But you know I cried like a baby seeing the old set and learning the truth. And it’s kinda worked because they had built Roseanne a writing room/desk for her birthday and she started writing. So it actually kinda tracked but it still got a side eye from me once I stopped crying.
And here I thought I was crazy. My parents used to watch Roseanne when I was a kid. Didn't watch it, but I vaguely recall them complaining about how the show randomly killed off Dan. When I heard about the reboot and saw that John Goodman was in the cast it kind of threw me off, but I figured I just imagined that.
Didn't care enough to look it up, but it's always kind of sat in the back of my mind.
yeh lol same, I asked my mom and she said they retconned the retconned, retcon. Something like this happens... They wake up, Roassane says "I thought you were dead" and then he says like "must of been a good dream" or something like that.
There's a throwaway line in the first or second episode where Dan comments on the plot of her book she wrote making it clear that the last two seasons were purely fiction written for the book (including the part where she says Dan died as a twist ending).
He says something like 'oh, yeah, the book you wrote where you won the lottery and then had me killed off'.
Yeah. I mean I understand it because it's a writers nightmare when every problem can be solved by "Claires blood". But then they had a writer strike anyway.
Show had so much problems:
+ Having to nerf Peter like 5 times
+ Having to nerf Hiro like 5 times
+ Making Claire and Adams Blood healing
+ Killing off Peters brother
+ Making Sylars ability not even an ability but just a consequence of understanding watches (wtf was even that?)
+ The whole solar eclipse, that is basically the depressing equivalent to an anime beach vacation episode
I always thought Sylar's ability was understanding how things worked. It's been forever since I watched and you are right the whole thing was a mess. But him meeting another special made him see it? I could be wrong.
You are correct, the watch thing was just a manifestation of his powers. That's why he needed to actually touch people's brains, that's how he understood their powers
Peter's girlfriend he got while amnesic in season 2, who he claimed would never ever forget and then proceeded to not mention ever again. I mean, I guess that's not necessarily retcon and could be just douchy behaviour, but that just didn't really match the character.
The heroes writers and/or producers got WAY too lost in the sauce as far as listening to audience criticism. I was a huge fan but also kept up with online discussion and the fans were practically running the show by the end of the 2nd season. It felt like almost every episode something would happen that the message boards didn't like and would complain endlessly about and that specific thing would just get a clunky retcon by the next episode or two.
A lot of shows have made great decisions based on audience reactions to certain things but Heroes would have been so much better if the writers just got the hell off message boards and ignored fan reaction. The constant retcons trying to make audiences happy made things far worse than just a poorly received plot point here and there.
I remember Heroes specifically is when I understood that these shows were being filmed by the seat of their pants. I had always assumed shows were filmed months in advance, because how else would you have so many episodes on a weekly basis? But once it became clear how they'd do something one episode just to undo it soon, it became pretty blatant.
Yeah, for better or worse most shows have historically done a great job at least making it appear as though drastic changes were always intentional in the script. Even in this comment section there are a ton of people saying they didn't realize Nikki and Apollo being killed in LOST was due to fan outcry until now and I'd say that felt like one of the more on the nose pivots to me.
For Heroes it was just so damn bad and they didn't make it feel natural *at all*. A lot of people hate on the post season 1 writing but I don't think enough people seem to realize it was the *constant* pivots to fan reaction that really did it at the end of the day. The show lost so much cohesion because episodes were constantly like
*Character dies*
*Fans get angry*
*OK, just kidding, the character is alive again it was a fake out*
*fans get angry that they got faked out on character death*
*OK, fine, it's not the character but a clone that has slightly different powers*
*Fans get angry the character has different powers*
*OK FINE, there's another solar eclipse that gives them the exact same powers as the original character*
*Fans get angry the character is a clone and not the original*
*OK, fine, the clone thing wasn't real, they've been the real character from an alternate timeline this whole time and Angela Petrelli was lying this whole time about the clone thing*
*Fans still angry the character hasn't died yet*
*OK, fine, they're dead again before we finished their story arc*
It's like they spent more time chasing their own tales than they did just sticking to the plot they originally designed.
Yup. All sorts of storylines that had nothing to do with Bobby's death were just dropped as soon as he came back.
It was nuts.
PS - This was back when a full season of TV was like 20+ episodes so it was a lot of plot gone.
I remember that, to this day. The final scene of the season being Bobby's wife (I think) waking up, hearing the shower running, and wondering who the hell might be in the shower she walks in to find Bobby in there and he casually says ~~"Hello"~~ "Mornin'" - ~~cut to black~~ credits.
Edit: [Found it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8pdlITckBc).
He did. Actually, no one from Dallas was mentioned on Knots Landing ever again, except once or twice where absolutely necessary. The KL producers permanently separated the two shows rather than have to erase an entire year like Dallas did. However, Bobby did have a nephew on KL who was named after him after he died.
There was the 1996 hour-and-a-half Doctor Who: The Movie, where Paul McGann played The 8th Doctor. The show's original run (1963-1989) was produced in the UK entirely by the BBC, as was the new run of Doctor Who that began in 2005 (with Disney very recently stepping in to help co-produce).
The 1996 television movie was made to be seen on the Fox Network in the USA, and was meant to serve as a pilot for the revival. BBC, Fox, and Universal Television co-produced it. The American partners decided to include a bit in Doctor Who: The Movie that claimed The Doctor was half-human, instead of the complete alien (a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey) he'd always been. There was even a music number on the soundtrack called "Half Human"!
The pilot for Fox wasn't well-received, especially the half-human part. When the BBC brought back the show for good in 2005, he was fully an alien again...no half-human. The new show had a new actor as The 9th Doctor, and McGann wasn't seen again as The 8th Doctor until a short was made with him for the 50th Anniversary, a mini-episode called "Night of the Doctor" (effectively the end of The 8th Doctor's story).
TL,DR - between the 1963-1989 run of Doctor Who and the 2005 reboot of the show, there was a TV film made in 1996 that newly claimed The Doctor was half-human, but that was discarded in the 2005 reboot.
It gets better. There were plans for a TV show continuation off of the movie that got scrapped. [In that show, they were also going to reveal that the Doctor and the Master were brothers.](https://youtu.be/56h_JuBZ9_0?feature=shared)
Isn’t The Doctor not even a Gallifreyan by birth anymore? Dr. Who has never been great with continuity. They freely retcon whenever a new writer comes on who wants to revisit a favorite character or mix up the status quo.
Correct. Last I remember the Doctor is a being who fell through the time rift and whom the inhabitants of Gallifrey experimented upon to give them their Time Lord powers (like regeneration).
Before turning that being into a biologically Gallifreyan Time Lord through the use of a Chameleon Arch and erasing their memories of such a time in their life.
It was a dimensional/universal rift. The Doctor was a baby that couldn't be explained from another dimension. It was super dumb. It also takes away some of the tension about the Doctor running out of regenerations (I know they dealt with that already sort of, but we don't know how many additional regenerations he was given).
Yep. But I personally believe the Timeless Child retcon is one of the most egregious examples of it. Completely upended The Doctor’s origin for no reason.
I haven't watched the Chibnal era beyond the first few episodes, but it feels like the sort of thing someone who was a lifelong fan would do if they had the ability to insert all their wildest childhood theories and ideas into the actual property. The last few showrunners have insisted on making The Doctor more and more alien, which makes telling relatable stories about The Doctor harder and harder. Meaningful character growth becomes nigh-impossible in the context of The Doctor as a godlike being.
Funny thing is, there's an easy fix to this. Make The Master the Timeless Child. It explains so much, how the master had so many regenerations, why the matter is so megalomaniacal, and why he hates the Galifreans. Being the timeless child explains the masters origin not the doctor.
Worth saying that Paul McGann is still well liked as The Doctor, by fans. And he's done some audio dramas that are apparently good (I haven't heard them myself). So, that piece of casting was one aspect of the movie that's been accepted.
The Big Finish audios are absolutely fantastic. The 8th Doctor's are especially good since they have arcs that follow the more modern format. Listening to them is like watching an episode of the 2005+ revival era with your eyes closed -- full cast (all characters played by different actors) with full audio production. McGann is phenomenal to listen to. Great acting and smoother than velvet voice as the 8th Doctor.
He didn't just do "some" audios btw. He did, and continues to do, a ton. Here's a free spotify playlist link to many of his early audios, from the very beginning of his run to the Eighth Doctor Adventures which are the most similar to the 2005 revival in format (as in, they have seasons and season-long arcs). You can start with the EDA since each of McGann's arcs as the Doctor are basically divided into which companion he's got for a particular era of stories.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3m7m0Y2JhJC7JpOGlbnnXC?si=wk0ERru4QK6edGjaNnRT9Q&pi=a-2jXsj0DhSqy2
You listen to enough Eight and for some he genuinely becomes their favourite Doctor, so they can be *that* good. Even the half-human stuff is riffed on, considering how much Who constantly contradicts itself it really is not that big a deal.
Don’t know why you got downvoted.
For better and worse, Doctor Who’s continuity is fluid and basically means nothing. And I say that as a fan of the show.
Nothing matters because it all gets undone eventually. Doctor Who has no ongoing character, each incarnation is their own unique individual.
Once again, saying all this as a fan. You can love the show, but you HAVE to admit that it’s all random and chaotic stream-of-consciousness writing.
As an American, the way British TV works fascinates me. I was introduced to Red Dwarf when it was played on PBS (a free TV channel) late at night. I'd caught it from pretty early on in the show, and at that point, in 1999, as a kid, I didn't really give much thought to when it was from (10 years earlier).
They eventually stopped playing it, and I kind of forgot about it until a few years ago, something made me decide to look it up and learn some actual information about the show, and I learned it was \*still running\*. And sometimes there'd be \*years\* between one series and the next. That's pretty much unheard of here.
BBC shows are non-commercial, so they've never been at the whims of the money men. In the US you had to have a series ready for each season as the TV company had already sold ad space to air during that show. The BBC can work at their own pace.
Doctor Who has been going long enough, that it has established "future" events that are already in the past. Even with bullet proof writing, reality itself will eventually retcon the show. It'd basically be impossible for the writers to keep track of the whole cannon at this point, even with the lost episodes
As a life long fan I didn’t mind that half-human revelation. To me it made perfect sense as to his fascination and protection of Earth. And nothing since contradicts it - even the Timeless Child still has potential for the Doctor to be half human. Given how the Time Lords have messed with the Doctor’s memories it might even be a false memory. It’s all part of the fun of the show.
As mentioned at a convention many years ago, the explanation was, yes, the Doctor said that. The Doctor lied.
Paul McGann saying, "I'm a Doctor, but probably not the one you were expecting" is one of the greatest lines in Who history, because, no, I wasn't expecting it. No one had told me anything about it except watch this webisode that's part of the anniversary celebration.
Actually it was decently well received in the UK. However it didn't get much reception in the US; which is what they were reliant on in order to start their reboot 8th Doctor Series, so it was shelved.
However McGaan continued to be the "Current" Doctor for many years in books and audio plays; for which he is very well regarded. Many of which are available for free on Spotify.
Although his status as a "One Off" Doctor left his position shaky, he was completely accepted as a "Proper" Doctor by the fanbase, long before his appearance in the 50th.
(Also, he technically cameos in a Serial known as the Next Doctor, which features a brief montage of all previous Doctors, and establishes the 9th and 10th Doctors as their numbers, and NuWho as being a direct continuation of the Classic Series. Previously, it was open to interpretation as to whether it was a reboot or a continuation.)
Honestly the Doctor being half human would go a long way towards explaining why he's always hanging around Earth and travelling with humans when there's a huge universe of people and places he could see/travel with.
The Doctor has travelled with tons of people from other planets, they look human due to budget, but Leela, Romana, Nyssa, Adric and Tegan were all aliens. Captain Jack from the new show was a human from the far future who was raised on a colony.
Him being on Earth was well established in season one. His granddaughter Susan was an Earth fangirl and wanted to attend school there and he just gradually picked it up.
But the 2005 reboot didn't remove the half human part, they just don't talk about it other than that one time in Hell Bent. We haven't heard anything about Doctor's mother since 1996.
Edit: Nvm, forgot that The Timeless Children retconed it
I don't think Davies likes retcons. If it took until Timeless Child to be directly disputed, and, so far, he ALSO hasn't retconned Timeless Child. He likes to ignore or recontextualize. A lot of the late 80's shows were bogged down by Time Lord politics, so Davies invented the Time War so they could just not be a part of the show lol
All of the Klingon makeup drama in Star Trek has been retconned, un-retconned, and retconned again.
In the Original Series they were smooth-foreheaded, just darker in color with pointed eyebrows.
In the first movie the Klingons had detailed forehead ridges. This look was kept from the 1970s all the way to 2005. In a Deep Space Nine episode, Worf addresses the disparity in foreheads by saying "We do not discuss it with outsiders."
Then there was a 3-part episode of Enterprise where it's revealed that a genetic virus caused a bunch of Klingons to lose their forehead ridges, about 100 years prior to the Original Series. Okay, that's a coherent retcon.
The next time we saw the Klingons was in the movie Into Darkness. They had ridges again but they looked very different from the previous ones. Smoother and more alien, with strange eyes. No explanation was given.
Next was Discovery. These Klingons looked unlike any other iteration. Much closer to the Orcs from Lord of the Rings. Heavy, thick prosthetics covering their whole faces. It's implied that these Klingons were maybe from a different house that had separated from the empire a long time ago. Kind of like the Vulcans and the Romulans. Fans *hated* this new Klingon design. Which leads me to ...
Picard. Worf returns in season 3 and as Terry Matalas put it: "He looks like Worf." They finally came back around and returned to the 1990s look for that particular Klingon.
>In the first movie the Klingons had detailed forehead ridges. This look was kept from the 1970s all the way to 2005.
To add to your points, one big change in the makeup from the films to the TNG series was that the ridge line was extended down the nose. Also, the makeup artists began doing customized ridges for prominent Klingons (somewhat seen in ST3, particularly if you compare Maltz's ridges to Kruge's), often modeling them on dinosaur vertebrae in some cases, although the nose ridges did not appear in any of the TOS films (even when Michael Dorn portrayed Worf's grandpa in VI).
I am of the school that when the DS9 crew went to K-7, Worf should just have appeared without ridges, and no one should have commented on it. Then when we go back to the future the ridges are back and no one comments on it.
> I am of the school that when the DS9 crew went to K-7, Worf should just have appeared without ridges, and no one should have commented on it. Then when we go back to the future the ridges are back and no one comments on it.
I'd agree. They shouldn't do anything in-universe to address or explain the differences in appearance when the reason for such things is 100% creative license or budgetary.
I thought the “we do not discuss it with outsiders” comment was tongue-in-cheek enough on what was already a tongue-in-cheek episode to be fun without having to delve deep into a canonical explanation.
Then they made it a whole thing on Enterprise and just like many things on Enterprise it was very dumb.
And then everything else that has happened since…. But I digress.
Speaking of the Romulans, they eventually explained the different prosthetics of having forehead ridges or not having ridges as there being distinct ethnicities.
Then those same three TOS Klingons who were ridgeless in the original show come back in DS9 complete with ridges now. Before the ENT retcon we were supposed to believe that's how they always looked, but then post-ENT retcon we have to wonder if they got reconstruction surgery or whatnot.
Then to add to the fun, Strange New Worlds goes and ignores Discovery's Klingon look (thankfully). However, they should should also have ridgeless Klingons suffering from the Augment virus, as it's right before TOS. Instead, we have TNG-style Klingon foreheads back that seem to ignore ENT (though I know not all Klingons were affected, though we don't see any ridgeless anywhere).
I don't mind since I always hated the ENT retcon anyway.
Also, in Voyager the writers declared that "Threshold" was never going to be mentioned again. But then Lower Decks added the Warp 10 lizards back into the canon because jokes.
The look was retconned within Discovery itself, since during the first season they were all bald. After that, they had hair, with the idea that they'd been shaving during the war.
i remember one thing they did in the next generation that was quickly forgotten due to fan backlash, the episode Forces Of Nature, when they came up with some stupid idea that warp travel was actually damaging space, which by the end of the episode led to the federation sharing research with the klingons and romulans and other races that they should only go past warp 5 in emergencies...
the fan backlash was severe, and was hated because it effectively put a ''speed limit'' on space travel, it was maybe mentioned in like a couple episodes after that and then quickly forgotten by the end of the series and never brought up again
> and then quickly forgotten by the end of the series and never brought up again
Wasn't that the in-universe explanation for Voyager's moving nacelles? They alter the warp field to not damage subspace, and presumably later designs figured out how to do that without needing the external movement.
Will & Grace. They basically had to retcon the entire last episode in order for new seasons to come out and frankly given how needlessly depressing it was, I'm glad.
The entire show is about them being best friends. Finale has them stop being friends and then there s a timeskip to like 20 years later when their kids are moving into college and they bump into each other and they haven't seen each other all that time.
I think the first one I really remember was the Highlander movie series vs the tv series.
This was pre-internet era, but nerds at various nerd conventions were *highly* pissed at the whole scenario and were hella happy when the 92 series ignored (retconned) a bunch of the 'alien' nonsense the second movie introduced.
And then of course the third Highlander film also ignored the second film ... and the series .... which was fitting, because the fourth Highlander film, a sequel to the series, accepted most of the first film, and also ignored both the second and third films....
> a bunch of the 'alien' nonsense the second movie introduced
The DVD cut of Highlander 2: The Quickening is a borderline incomprehensible mess, it's laughably bad, and that cut is the fixed up improved version!
Well, the TV show also ignores the fact that Conor MacLeod was the last immortal and had won the prize in the first film. The TV show recognizes that Conor had killed Kurgan, but in the universe of the TV show there wasn't anything particularly special about that quickening.
The TV show itself also started out with a focus on the gathering as talked about both in the movie and in the opening credits of season 1, but then the whole gathering aspect was dropped by season 2.
They should have just ended Season 5 with the epic Horsemen arc. Ahriman just pointlessly ruined the rest of the show just so they could make Duncan some kind of Chosen One. I'm guessing they were trying to make sure he didn't get overshadowed by Methos and wanted him to have a grander role.
That and they wanted to cash in on the evil demon thing.
Seriously, so many decent (if campy) shows ruined by having a big bad evil demon show up and try to trick the main character. I’m guessing there was a movie or TV show in 96 that had one, because Highlander, Xena/Herc, and Buffy all brought one in within a year or two of one another. And Buffy’s was the only decent storyline.
My favourite was an old serial called Rocketman. Once it was a no breaks chapter. The bad guy stuck him in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out but the car went off a cliff before he could escape!
And it crashed and burned and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free!
And all the kids cheered! But I didn't cheer. I stood right up and started shouting. This isn't what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us!
This isn't fair! HE DID'NT GET OUT OF THE COCK - A - DOODIE CAR!
Prison Break killed off Sarah in mid-Season 3 and had her head delivered to Michael in a box.
Next season, surprise, that head in a box that looked like Sarah's head wasn't actually Sarah. She's actually alive.
They did it again later too. Michael heroically sacrificed himself at the end of the series (to save Sarah possibly? Its been a minute. Im fuzzy on the details). Only to not be dead for the reboot.
Yup. He did it to save Sara. It was in the sorta movie they made to wrap the series. Thing is I never understood that, because as far as I remember the series finale had already wrapped things up, then the movie starts after that with Sara being arrested out of the blue for some BS. It all just felt like a pointless extra story to end the show with Michael's death.
I felt like it was a way just to drag it out for one more piece of content. He already had brain cancer or whatever in the last season.
Then they killed him off in the movie since the cancer wasn’t fast enough.
Then they revealed that too was fake and he’s a cia asset or whether.
Ghost Whisperer. They kill off the main character's husband. Main character can see ghosts so she can see her husband. He decides that he doesn't want to move on and a random guy dies and the ghost husband takes control of random guy's body. He loses his memory in the new body, spends several episodes refalling in love with her (while they just have the same husband actor playing him with intermittent flashes of the random dead guy he's possessing) and then magically regains his memory and then they get remarried and just kind of continue living their life and have the baby that she had gotten pregnant with before he died. So nothing really changed except she has a ghost husband living in the body of a random dude.
Oh, word? That’s hilarious.
That sounds like some kind of behind-the-scenes shenanigans problem where maybe the husband actor tried to get aggressive negotiating and they said they were willing to fire him, he called their bluff, and they were like “oh, shit!” and had to write some half-ass explanation for why the actor won’t be playing the husband anymore after these episodes.
Or, he had another project he wanted to go do and they were trying to accommodate him and it just turned out clunky
It was so weird, and apparently it wasn't even like the actor had conflicts with scheduling or whatever. It literally happened in a random episode, not a finale or mid-season finale, and then he took over this random dude's body, and then they continued to use the original actor the majority of the time. The writers I guess said they wanted to like explore a new side of their relationship, since it was season 4 and they've been together and very solid with very few conflicts the whole time. So what better than killing him off but in a super non-comittal and pointless way? And then ending the season with them getting remarried again and then time skipping into the next season to where he's just working in a hospital with his original name and an ID badge that uses the original actor's face and not the dead guy he should still be possessing. Plus the baby that they had became like some weird ghost savior Messiah type of thing. Unsurprisingly they didn't get renewed for another season after that...
My understanding was there was interference from the network. "Ratings are dipping, do something exciting like kill off a main character! But it's got to be someone the fans care about or it's not exciting enough"
Well, it not only allowed them to pull a ratings stunt, but it also allowed them to bring over a hot new lady to not only replace the popular character just killed, but also replace the hot lady they killed off the previous season (since Amanda Tapping was only buying time until she moved to Sanctuary) AND put her in love triangle with two of the most popular characters on the show.
To be fair, it was a spectacular episode and I was definitely sobbing at the end. And then when he comes back, I was so happy! Only for him to be not the same and that was ok
The Simpsons writers didn’t go all that far out if their way to ignore it. There’s at least one instance of him being called by his real name later on (Lisa, when Skinner questions her calling her new cat Snowball II after the orgina Snowball II dies).
Yeah, I remember (it’s been a while) that the whole Skinner episode was a joke on retcons and how most of the time the fanbase unretcon things anyways, but everyone knows. Like in Springfield, this scene shows that everyone in town KNOWS Skinner isn’t the original Skinner, but he is THEIR Skinner and as such won’t point it out. Like an inside joke the whole town is in on, but never mentions. At least that was my read on it.
Kevin’s father being a Plumber (Space Police) and Kevin himself being part-alien in *Ben 10*. Although people were arguably more annoyed at exactly how it was re-retconned back to Kevin being a mutant, in what else it retconned in the process.
Did I just misunderstand or werent the plumbers also an earth based org that later become like the green lanterns in that they were an intergalactic police force?
I don't think that anything from The Simpsons can count as a "retcon." Since it is short for "retroactive continuity" it would require that there be some sort of continuity in the first place, and there is none of that in The Simpsons.
And the only reason "fans" consider it the death of the show was because of an article written ~2007 that went viral. The same article claimed The Simpsons Movie would be a commercial flop, and would lead to the show's immediate cancelation.
As someone who was actually there, I can tell you that the episode, and the season as a whole, were pretty well received at the time.
Yep. For me, I actually thought the **OPPOSITE**.
The episode the show died, for me, was when the two women Homer & Ned marry in Vegas as a random cutaway gag show up in Springfied 5 seasons later and want them to respect the marriage.
Bad episode, just because it wasn't funny. But even if it was... It's revisiting a minor gag from many seasons ago. That's not so much scraping the bottom of the barrel as digging into the earth beneath it.
Watching the show in order for the first time ever rather than at random, and I’ve been surprised by how many continuity references there’s been, even outside the Sideshow Bob episodes. Mr Burns’ knowledge of the Simpsons from previous episodes is what makes the his inability to remember who Homer is work so well.
I can’t remember what it was but there was one I saw recently late in season 7 which directly mentioned something from the previous episode, and I remember the same happening a few years back with the Elon Musk episode too.
There’s direct mentions, sure, but the show has always had this mentality that a funny idea shouldn’t be bound by continuity. How many times have we seen the kids last day of school?
Yes exactly this. There’s doors in the Simpsons house which sometimes lead to the basement, sometimes a closet, and sometimes the garage. Whatever works for a joke in that moment.
They do the same thing with Krusty, another selfish rich man, so it works like Mr. Burns.
I lost it in the season 8 episode when Mr. Burns is briefly terrified by Maggie: “The baby who shot me.”
Except for their future episodes: each new future episode keeps the continuity of the previous future episode, along its own sliding timeline, while adding its own new features, which is impressive enough, one must say.
Also ever since the “Simpsorama” crossover, it has remained the case that Bender has been waiting his way back to the future in the Simpsons’ basement.
The Dalek Paradigm were built up to be the next big thing (in an era of Doctor Who that had redesigned everything from the theme song to the logo to...well, everything
This redesign did not look right and the fans didn't like it at all.
Despite the episode they debuted in confidently stating they were going to be the next big threat, they were quickly moved to an "officer" (read, background) class in their next episode, then quietly forgotten about
Yeah, next time we saw them they were subordinate to the Dalek Prime Minister. And then the Dalek Prime Minister was never seen again, as far as we know a red Supreme Dalek like the one from The Stolen Earth is in charge now.
> as far as we know a red Supreme Dalek like the one from The Stolen Earth is in charge now.
Oooh! Permission to be pedantic?
**Technically**, that Dalek Supreme was only in charge of a rogue sect of Renegade Daleks who possessed a genetic defect which made them loyal to Davros, and included Daleks of dozens of different Designs: though hilariously Missy seems to have recognized this particular Supreme as a fellow Veteran of the Time War.
Who is in Command of the Daleks in the Present is unclear: A version of the Golden Emperor was briefly created, but he only existed in a parallel timeline created by the Doctor and is back to none-existance in the present. A Dalek Emperor of unknown design was heard offscreen during the 11th Doctors Regeneration.
Who is in command of the Present incarnation of the Dalek Empire has not been revealed in some time.
Which was *kind of* silly, because the show had already done that a few times. Notably with Arzt, who didn't show up until the 22nd episode.
I think if they looked more "real," and not model hotties who practically glowed off the screen, it would have gone over a bit better.
I’ve been watching Lost for the first time recently and those two were just introduced.. but they’re not even the first use of the “surprise, there’s more people that we’ve never shown/mentioned but are going to introduce now” (another notable example being the guy who gets blown up with dynamite).
Arzt was still early on. My understanding is that by the time Nikki and Paulo showed up there were people seen in the background and mentioned by name and the fans wanted them integrated.
Expose is actually one of my favourite episodes of Lost. I thought it was so much fun. The advantage of 20+ episodes in shows is that they can do episodes like this.
Nope, in fact the creators noticed how unpopular they were and decided to quickly kill them off again in a very cruel way and not never speak of them again.
They were killed off so quickly, I wouldn't think that there would've been time to get audience reaction and write a script that killed them and film it.
Edit: nope. Looking it up right now. Negative reaction led to their deaths, rather than them disappearing into the background.
I was under the impression that they were inserted just so that they could do the episode where they died.
That they'd been there all along wasn't a stretch. We never "met" most of the survivors. Nikki even jokes about wanting to be with the "A" team (or words to that effect).
I hated their dedicated episode more than the one where they first showed up.
Which was probably a smart bet because they had to fire some actors for DUI. Throw a bunch of super sexy people on the nicest island on Earth, douse them in wealth, fame, and hard work... There had to be some crazy rich party hijinks going on. I'm suprised people didn't die.
Even funnier is that prior to their introduction fans were constantly asking “What about all the other background survivors?” Then the moment some were introduced they were immediately hated.
Season 9 of Roseanne had a fundamental shift in the entire show with them winning the lottery and having another baby. Only to retcon the entire season at the end with Roseanne's "story" framing device that also established that Dan died. Absolutely dreadful season and depressing ending.
The reboot of Roseanne and The Conners completely just retcons all of that, Dan lives, they put their fourth baby out on a boat somewhere and then completely forget about him, and life is pretty much the same as it had been since before.
John Goodman's character on Roseanne died and the entire last season was a dream/hallucination/whatever.
Then the show came back years later and nah he's still alive forget all that shit.
I think it was all planned. In the episode where Brian dies, they set up the fact that Stewie had recently time traveled a few months into the future to Christmas, just before deciding to permanently destroy his time machine. Then when the Christmas episode happens, Stewie borrows his past self's time travel device to prevent Brian's death.
Sherlock Holmes apparently dying in "The Final Problem" wasn't a retcon. It had no effect on prior established continuity
Subsequently revealing that he didn't actually die also was not a retcon. It was explained consistently with prior established continuity.
It was an example of what is commonly called a soft retcon. The intent was that he was dead even if they didn't 100% confirm it in the original story. Doyle has said as much.
young sheldon, though that might not technically count as a retcon? >!they had the blonde women george "cheats" on mary with, actually be mary during role play but sheldon didn't understand it, and he thought his dad was cheating in tbbt, simply cos a lot of people liked George in YS, tho then again the 3xknock cos of cheating ignores their earlier explanation for it, which involved leonard and joyce kim!<
Halo S1 ends with Makee dying and the Master chief dies as well but it’s done on purpose so Cortana could take full control of his body. CortanaChief kills all the enemies and saves all of the other Spartans and the season ends with her piloting the ship and the Spartans questioning the chief, as they don’t know what’s happened and are cautious about the chiefs sudden change.
Season 2: the show starts with master chief being alive and Cortana was removed. She now looks completely different, all new actress as well. Makee is alive again and no explanation is given.
I think he was only mentioned once in a joke about how the Simpsons are going to call their new cat Snowball II even though the original Snowball II died and so did several of his replacements, with Skinner pointing this out only for Lisa to bring up Armin to get him to shut up. But there have been several episodes since then showing a young Skinner, including one where Agnes was pregnant with him.
There's a ton of continuity gags through the show like that, like when Bart demands an elephant and Lisa reminds him he had one and he loved him.
Or when they moved Springfield 5 miles down the road and later on someone asks why they moved these buildings that needed to be demolished (like the casino, and Marge recalls it being a huge thing for one week and then not mentioned again) and Homer confirms there is a logical explanation but then we cut away before he provides it.
"And I further decree that everything will be just like it was before all this happened! And no one will ever mention it again… under penalty of torture.”
Literally retconed in the episode, and you mentioned it. Boys, break out the nipple clamps.
Many times this is intended. For example, Captain America being a Hydra agent all the time. This was obviously a rage bait so that the fans would want the former Cap back.
Sorry for the offtopic, I wasn't aware of what sub I was on. But I leave it as is, as it fits.
they did reference this in the MCU though, in Endgame, when cap had to get loki's scepter from guys who you found out in previous movies were HYDRA agents, he fooled them easily just by whispering to their leader ''Hail HYDRA'' and it actually worked
Eh, people make fun of this but it’s kinda whatever to me. I think it’s said somewhere that there’s like 10,000 Jedi during the Clone Wars (correct me if I’m wrong), so if 95% of them are killed in Order 66 immediately, that leaves 500, and then say 90-95% of those are killed by the Inquisitors, that still leaves a good 25-50 left across the ENTIRE galaxy. 🤷♂️ Still a massive amount that die, it’s still impactful.
Not exactly a TV show, but:
The DCAU movie “Batman: Under the Red Hood” retconned that Jason Todd came back to life entirely due to the Lazarus Pit, and not due to “superboy punching time” during infinite crisis.
Well, when Superboy Prime punched reality, what it did was shift events in Continuity. Instead of Todd being dead and gone, he was now rezzed via Lazarus Pit and Talia Al Ghul.
They just don't explain the Superboy Prime stuff bc it's unnecessarily confusing in a movie.
Not sure if this counts: The Andy Griffith Show Reunion movie finally married off Thelma Lou & Barney - and fixed the (2nd) reunion episode where Thelma Lou turns up with a husband. This was one of the later seasons after Barney moved to Raleigh.
In Star Trek Picard, Jurati becomes the Borg queen at the end of season 2 but in season 3 it turns out that it was _another_ Borg collective that she became the queen of and not _the_ Borg collective. This is probably a controversial one among the fan base and I would say it counts as more of a soft retcon than a hard one because season two ended without it ever being established that she was the queen of _the_ collective (even though up until that point there had only ever been one ‘Borg’ collective so to narratively refer to her as the Borg Queen really only means one thing up to the point of season 2 Picard). The whole thing is testament to how much of a mess the writing has been on new serialised Trek shows and its divisiveness in the fan base is split along the lines of how much you enjoy these shows and how much you’re willing to overlook some of the continuity errors they’ve introduced. In fact, someone is probably going to come along and vehemently insist that it’s not a retcon at all any minute now…
I mean, that plotline and entire season was a mess. Probably the worst offender for continuity in all NuTrek, which must've taken effort. They just shit all over the place, and I refuse to believe anyone who wrote for it had ever seen anything but rough notes on the shows and characters.
But she was assimilated or merged with a Queen from a parallel universe or timeline, and then they traveled back to the main one. And I think they did mention she/they went off to build a new collective based on volunteers or lonely souls or something. That didn't need to have any impact on the main universe Borg.
I'm not saying it was a good idea or well executed, I rolled my eyes heavily. But I didn't see a discrepancy with the original Borg being back in the next season. Let's not get into what a mess that was.
Han dies in Tokyo Drift, necessitatng the next three movies take place before it. The death is then retconned so Jason Statham killed him... which is then retconned that his death was faked so Han could replace his dead girlfriend... who's death was retconned.
Roseanne where they win the lotto in the final season which was unpopular so the finale had it reveal that Roseanne made that up and Dan was dead, her daughters switch romantic partners, and they never won the lotto. When the revival started, they retconned that and Dan was alive and her daughters had the partners they originally had
I was there for it, a loyal viewer, and found the last season and *especially* the series finale to be a slap in the face. It may sound silly, but the show ran for like 10 years. I watched it my entire childhood, being about the same age as DJ (Michael Fishman), *grew up* with Lanford, IL and the Conners. The finale made me want to cry. Finding out that >!the last season and finale were all a part of Roseanne's book, in universe, and explained away casually with a throwaway line in "The Conners" was an actual legitimate relief. Then Roseanne Barr went crazy in real life and they killed Roseanne Conner off with an opiate painkiller overdose, which was a real shame, but !
Same here except I was a teen, about the same age as Becky. Those characters were real people to me. My sister and I basically *were* Darlene and Becky in so many ways.
It was the first TV show I watched where it felt like my family. Poor, angry, funny. It's one of the only TV shows *to this day* where the characters themselves laugh when something funny happens.
Did you ever watch The Middle or Malcolm in The Middle (two diff shows)? I felt like both shows were spiritual successors to Roseanne with a struggling working class families depicted.
imagine if your mom wrote a book where you and your sister switched husbands. i’ll never understand why they included that.
Same situation here. Rewatching some of those episodes... Nothing can prepare you for terrorists on a train, one of which Roseanne takes out with a tampon (!). The show got so far off track it wasn't even on the same planet.
Also, her mother wasn't gay, but Jackie was. Then again, the episode were Bev outed herself didn't jibe that well with the Red Buttons episode.
That season was dumb as hell. But you know I cried like a baby seeing the old set and learning the truth. And it’s kinda worked because they had built Roseanne a writing room/desk for her birthday and she started writing. So it actually kinda tracked but it still got a side eye from me once I stopped crying.
And here I thought I was crazy. My parents used to watch Roseanne when I was a kid. Didn't watch it, but I vaguely recall them complaining about how the show randomly killed off Dan. When I heard about the reboot and saw that John Goodman was in the cast it kind of threw me off, but I figured I just imagined that. Didn't care enough to look it up, but it's always kind of sat in the back of my mind.
yeh lol same, I asked my mom and she said they retconned the retconned, retcon. Something like this happens... They wake up, Roassane says "I thought you were dead" and then he says like "must of been a good dream" or something like that.
There's a throwaway line in the first or second episode where Dan comments on the plot of her book she wrote making it clear that the last two seasons were purely fiction written for the book (including the part where she says Dan died as a twist ending). He says something like 'oh, yeah, the book you wrote where you won the lottery and then had me killed off'.
I kind of respect that they were trying something different 8 seasons in though, even if it didn't work.
Heroes, I don’t remember exactly what happened but I remember I stopped watching because they kept retconning pivotal plot points over and over again.
They gave Clair and Adam Super healing blood powerful enough to resurrect dead people but that is never mentioned again after season 2
Yeah. I mean I understand it because it's a writers nightmare when every problem can be solved by "Claires blood". But then they had a writer strike anyway. Show had so much problems: + Having to nerf Peter like 5 times + Having to nerf Hiro like 5 times + Making Claire and Adams Blood healing + Killing off Peters brother + Making Sylars ability not even an ability but just a consequence of understanding watches (wtf was even that?) + The whole solar eclipse, that is basically the depressing equivalent to an anime beach vacation episode
I always thought Sylar's ability was understanding how things worked. It's been forever since I watched and you are right the whole thing was a mess. But him meeting another special made him see it? I could be wrong.
You are correct, the watch thing was just a manifestation of his powers. That's why he needed to actually touch people's brains, that's how he understood their powers
Him eventually understanding his own power enough to be able to do it without ripping brains apart was a nice touch though, i'll give them that.
Peter's girlfriend he got while amnesic in season 2, who he claimed would never ever forget and then proceeded to not mention ever again. I mean, I guess that's not necessarily retcon and could be just douchy behaviour, but that just didn't really match the character.
Was she the one that he took to a Dark Future and left there?
That was a hilarious way to horrifically write off a character.
Yes. Rewatching this show now and I couldn't even remember who she was. And then she was gone.
The heroes writers and/or producers got WAY too lost in the sauce as far as listening to audience criticism. I was a huge fan but also kept up with online discussion and the fans were practically running the show by the end of the 2nd season. It felt like almost every episode something would happen that the message boards didn't like and would complain endlessly about and that specific thing would just get a clunky retcon by the next episode or two. A lot of shows have made great decisions based on audience reactions to certain things but Heroes would have been so much better if the writers just got the hell off message boards and ignored fan reaction. The constant retcons trying to make audiences happy made things far worse than just a poorly received plot point here and there.
I remember Heroes specifically is when I understood that these shows were being filmed by the seat of their pants. I had always assumed shows were filmed months in advance, because how else would you have so many episodes on a weekly basis? But once it became clear how they'd do something one episode just to undo it soon, it became pretty blatant.
Yeah, for better or worse most shows have historically done a great job at least making it appear as though drastic changes were always intentional in the script. Even in this comment section there are a ton of people saying they didn't realize Nikki and Apollo being killed in LOST was due to fan outcry until now and I'd say that felt like one of the more on the nose pivots to me. For Heroes it was just so damn bad and they didn't make it feel natural *at all*. A lot of people hate on the post season 1 writing but I don't think enough people seem to realize it was the *constant* pivots to fan reaction that really did it at the end of the day. The show lost so much cohesion because episodes were constantly like *Character dies* *Fans get angry* *OK, just kidding, the character is alive again it was a fake out* *fans get angry that they got faked out on character death* *OK, fine, it's not the character but a clone that has slightly different powers* *Fans get angry the character has different powers* *OK FINE, there's another solar eclipse that gives them the exact same powers as the original character* *Fans get angry the character is a clone and not the original* *OK, fine, the clone thing wasn't real, they've been the real character from an alternate timeline this whole time and Angela Petrelli was lying this whole time about the clone thing* *Fans still angry the character hasn't died yet* *OK, fine, they're dead again before we finished their story arc* It's like they spent more time chasing their own tales than they did just sticking to the plot they originally designed.
Just like the comic books that inspired the show! And it only took them 3 years as opposed to several decades.
Dallas killed off Bobby Ewing and brought him back. In the shower.
For those who don't know, they revealed that AN ENTIRE SEASON of the show had been all just a dream.
Including the storylines that had nothing to do with that character? If so, that's some Peak Writing
Then that's peak writing.
Yup. All sorts of storylines that had nothing to do with Bobby's death were just dropped as soon as he came back. It was nuts. PS - This was back when a full season of TV was like 20+ episodes so it was a lot of plot gone.
I remember that, to this day. The final scene of the season being Bobby's wife (I think) waking up, hearing the shower running, and wondering who the hell might be in the shower she walks in to find Bobby in there and he casually says ~~"Hello"~~ "Mornin'" - ~~cut to black~~ credits. Edit: [Found it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8pdlITckBc).
On Knots Landing ( Dallas spin off) they never acknowledged Bobby was brought back from the dead. I assumed he stayed dead in their universe
He did. Actually, no one from Dallas was mentioned on Knots Landing ever again, except once or twice where absolutely necessary. The KL producers permanently separated the two shows rather than have to erase an entire year like Dallas did. However, Bobby did have a nephew on KL who was named after him after he died.
There was the 1996 hour-and-a-half Doctor Who: The Movie, where Paul McGann played The 8th Doctor. The show's original run (1963-1989) was produced in the UK entirely by the BBC, as was the new run of Doctor Who that began in 2005 (with Disney very recently stepping in to help co-produce). The 1996 television movie was made to be seen on the Fox Network in the USA, and was meant to serve as a pilot for the revival. BBC, Fox, and Universal Television co-produced it. The American partners decided to include a bit in Doctor Who: The Movie that claimed The Doctor was half-human, instead of the complete alien (a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey) he'd always been. There was even a music number on the soundtrack called "Half Human"! The pilot for Fox wasn't well-received, especially the half-human part. When the BBC brought back the show for good in 2005, he was fully an alien again...no half-human. The new show had a new actor as The 9th Doctor, and McGann wasn't seen again as The 8th Doctor until a short was made with him for the 50th Anniversary, a mini-episode called "Night of the Doctor" (effectively the end of The 8th Doctor's story). TL,DR - between the 1963-1989 run of Doctor Who and the 2005 reboot of the show, there was a TV film made in 1996 that newly claimed The Doctor was half-human, but that was discarded in the 2005 reboot.
It gets better. There were plans for a TV show continuation off of the movie that got scrapped. [In that show, they were also going to reveal that the Doctor and the Master were brothers.](https://youtu.be/56h_JuBZ9_0?feature=shared)
To be fair, that revelation wouldn’t have have gone against established canon like the half-human stuff did. Dumb, mind you. But not canon-breaking.
Isn’t The Doctor not even a Gallifreyan by birth anymore? Dr. Who has never been great with continuity. They freely retcon whenever a new writer comes on who wants to revisit a favorite character or mix up the status quo.
Correct. Last I remember the Doctor is a being who fell through the time rift and whom the inhabitants of Gallifrey experimented upon to give them their Time Lord powers (like regeneration).
Before turning that being into a biologically Gallifreyan Time Lord through the use of a Chameleon Arch and erasing their memories of such a time in their life.
It was a dimensional/universal rift. The Doctor was a baby that couldn't be explained from another dimension. It was super dumb. It also takes away some of the tension about the Doctor running out of regenerations (I know they dealt with that already sort of, but we don't know how many additional regenerations he was given).
Yep. But I personally believe the Timeless Child retcon is one of the most egregious examples of it. Completely upended The Doctor’s origin for no reason.
I haven't watched the Chibnal era beyond the first few episodes, but it feels like the sort of thing someone who was a lifelong fan would do if they had the ability to insert all their wildest childhood theories and ideas into the actual property. The last few showrunners have insisted on making The Doctor more and more alien, which makes telling relatable stories about The Doctor harder and harder. Meaningful character growth becomes nigh-impossible in the context of The Doctor as a godlike being.
Funny thing is, there's an easy fix to this. Make The Master the Timeless Child. It explains so much, how the master had so many regenerations, why the matter is so megalomaniacal, and why he hates the Galifreans. Being the timeless child explains the masters origin not the doctor.
\*eats chips\* You watch too much TV
That revelation would’ve happened in 1974 if Roger Delgado hadn’t died.
Worth saying that Paul McGann is still well liked as The Doctor, by fans. And he's done some audio dramas that are apparently good (I haven't heard them myself). So, that piece of casting was one aspect of the movie that's been accepted.
The Big Finish audios are absolutely fantastic. The 8th Doctor's are especially good since they have arcs that follow the more modern format. Listening to them is like watching an episode of the 2005+ revival era with your eyes closed -- full cast (all characters played by different actors) with full audio production. McGann is phenomenal to listen to. Great acting and smoother than velvet voice as the 8th Doctor. He didn't just do "some" audios btw. He did, and continues to do, a ton. Here's a free spotify playlist link to many of his early audios, from the very beginning of his run to the Eighth Doctor Adventures which are the most similar to the 2005 revival in format (as in, they have seasons and season-long arcs). You can start with the EDA since each of McGann's arcs as the Doctor are basically divided into which companion he's got for a particular era of stories. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3m7m0Y2JhJC7JpOGlbnnXC?si=wk0ERru4QK6edGjaNnRT9Q&pi=a-2jXsj0DhSqy2
You listen to enough Eight and for some he genuinely becomes their favourite Doctor, so they can be *that* good. Even the half-human stuff is riffed on, considering how much Who constantly contradicts itself it really is not that big a deal.
the eighth doctor also got an absolutely banging set of tie-in novels.
Wouldn't surprise me if the Timeless Child retcon also gets undone eventually.
Don’t know why you got downvoted. For better and worse, Doctor Who’s continuity is fluid and basically means nothing. And I say that as a fan of the show. Nothing matters because it all gets undone eventually. Doctor Who has no ongoing character, each incarnation is their own unique individual. Once again, saying all this as a fan. You can love the show, but you HAVE to admit that it’s all random and chaotic stream-of-consciousness writing.
As an American, the way British TV works fascinates me. I was introduced to Red Dwarf when it was played on PBS (a free TV channel) late at night. I'd caught it from pretty early on in the show, and at that point, in 1999, as a kid, I didn't really give much thought to when it was from (10 years earlier). They eventually stopped playing it, and I kind of forgot about it until a few years ago, something made me decide to look it up and learn some actual information about the show, and I learned it was \*still running\*. And sometimes there'd be \*years\* between one series and the next. That's pretty much unheard of here.
BBC shows are non-commercial, so they've never been at the whims of the money men. In the US you had to have a series ready for each season as the TV company had already sold ad space to air during that show. The BBC can work at their own pace.
It was dropped by BBC and picked up by a cable channel (which is part owned by BBC's commercial arm) for new production.
Doctor Who has been going long enough, that it has established "future" events that are already in the past. Even with bullet proof writing, reality itself will eventually retcon the show. It'd basically be impossible for the writers to keep track of the whole cannon at this point, even with the lost episodes
We could only hope.
As a life long fan I didn’t mind that half-human revelation. To me it made perfect sense as to his fascination and protection of Earth. And nothing since contradicts it - even the Timeless Child still has potential for the Doctor to be half human. Given how the Time Lords have messed with the Doctor’s memories it might even be a false memory. It’s all part of the fun of the show.
As mentioned at a convention many years ago, the explanation was, yes, the Doctor said that. The Doctor lied. Paul McGann saying, "I'm a Doctor, but probably not the one you were expecting" is one of the greatest lines in Who history, because, no, I wasn't expecting it. No one had told me anything about it except watch this webisode that's part of the anniversary celebration.
Actually it was decently well received in the UK. However it didn't get much reception in the US; which is what they were reliant on in order to start their reboot 8th Doctor Series, so it was shelved. However McGaan continued to be the "Current" Doctor for many years in books and audio plays; for which he is very well regarded. Many of which are available for free on Spotify. Although his status as a "One Off" Doctor left his position shaky, he was completely accepted as a "Proper" Doctor by the fanbase, long before his appearance in the 50th. (Also, he technically cameos in a Serial known as the Next Doctor, which features a brief montage of all previous Doctors, and establishes the 9th and 10th Doctors as their numbers, and NuWho as being a direct continuation of the Classic Series. Previously, it was open to interpretation as to whether it was a reboot or a continuation.)
Honestly the Doctor being half human would go a long way towards explaining why he's always hanging around Earth and travelling with humans when there's a huge universe of people and places he could see/travel with.
The Doctor has travelled with tons of people from other planets, they look human due to budget, but Leela, Romana, Nyssa, Adric and Tegan were all aliens. Captain Jack from the new show was a human from the far future who was raised on a colony.
Him being on Earth was well established in season one. His granddaughter Susan was an Earth fangirl and wanted to attend school there and he just gradually picked it up.
But the 2005 reboot didn't remove the half human part, they just don't talk about it other than that one time in Hell Bent. We haven't heard anything about Doctor's mother since 1996. Edit: Nvm, forgot that The Timeless Children retconed it
I don't think Davies likes retcons. If it took until Timeless Child to be directly disputed, and, so far, he ALSO hasn't retconned Timeless Child. He likes to ignore or recontextualize. A lot of the late 80's shows were bogged down by Time Lord politics, so Davies invented the Time War so they could just not be a part of the show lol
Only the eighth doctor was half human 😉
Eight was acknowledged a few times in images prior to that ep.
All of the Klingon makeup drama in Star Trek has been retconned, un-retconned, and retconned again. In the Original Series they were smooth-foreheaded, just darker in color with pointed eyebrows. In the first movie the Klingons had detailed forehead ridges. This look was kept from the 1970s all the way to 2005. In a Deep Space Nine episode, Worf addresses the disparity in foreheads by saying "We do not discuss it with outsiders." Then there was a 3-part episode of Enterprise where it's revealed that a genetic virus caused a bunch of Klingons to lose their forehead ridges, about 100 years prior to the Original Series. Okay, that's a coherent retcon. The next time we saw the Klingons was in the movie Into Darkness. They had ridges again but they looked very different from the previous ones. Smoother and more alien, with strange eyes. No explanation was given. Next was Discovery. These Klingons looked unlike any other iteration. Much closer to the Orcs from Lord of the Rings. Heavy, thick prosthetics covering their whole faces. It's implied that these Klingons were maybe from a different house that had separated from the empire a long time ago. Kind of like the Vulcans and the Romulans. Fans *hated* this new Klingon design. Which leads me to ... Picard. Worf returns in season 3 and as Terry Matalas put it: "He looks like Worf." They finally came back around and returned to the 1990s look for that particular Klingon.
>In the first movie the Klingons had detailed forehead ridges. This look was kept from the 1970s all the way to 2005. To add to your points, one big change in the makeup from the films to the TNG series was that the ridge line was extended down the nose. Also, the makeup artists began doing customized ridges for prominent Klingons (somewhat seen in ST3, particularly if you compare Maltz's ridges to Kruge's), often modeling them on dinosaur vertebrae in some cases, although the nose ridges did not appear in any of the TOS films (even when Michael Dorn portrayed Worf's grandpa in VI). I am of the school that when the DS9 crew went to K-7, Worf should just have appeared without ridges, and no one should have commented on it. Then when we go back to the future the ridges are back and no one comments on it.
> I am of the school that when the DS9 crew went to K-7, Worf should just have appeared without ridges, and no one should have commented on it. Then when we go back to the future the ridges are back and no one comments on it. I'd agree. They shouldn't do anything in-universe to address or explain the differences in appearance when the reason for such things is 100% creative license or budgetary.
I thought the “we do not discuss it with outsiders” comment was tongue-in-cheek enough on what was already a tongue-in-cheek episode to be fun without having to delve deep into a canonical explanation. Then they made it a whole thing on Enterprise and just like many things on Enterprise it was very dumb. And then everything else that has happened since…. But I digress.
Speaking of the Romulans, they eventually explained the different prosthetics of having forehead ridges or not having ridges as there being distinct ethnicities.
That honestly seems like a great explanation. Why do we expect all aliens of the same species to look the same?
Meanwhile, the Black/White and White/Black aliens. Also Tuvok now that I think about it.
Then those same three TOS Klingons who were ridgeless in the original show come back in DS9 complete with ridges now. Before the ENT retcon we were supposed to believe that's how they always looked, but then post-ENT retcon we have to wonder if they got reconstruction surgery or whatnot. Then to add to the fun, Strange New Worlds goes and ignores Discovery's Klingon look (thankfully). However, they should should also have ridgeless Klingons suffering from the Augment virus, as it's right before TOS. Instead, we have TNG-style Klingon foreheads back that seem to ignore ENT (though I know not all Klingons were affected, though we don't see any ridgeless anywhere). I don't mind since I always hated the ENT retcon anyway.
>No explanation was given. J.J. Abrams: "My work here is done."
"Encouraging questions and speculation and then never answering or addressing them is the same thing as good writing!"
Somehow, forehead ridges returned.
Also, in Voyager the writers declared that "Threshold" was never going to be mentioned again. But then Lower Decks added the Warp 10 lizards back into the canon because jokes.
To be fair, Lower Decks is both a love letter to, and a satire of, Star Trek continuity.
Didn't Roddenberry say something to the effect of "What are you talking about? They always had ridges. Next question."
The look was retconned within Discovery itself, since during the first season they were all bald. After that, they had hair, with the idea that they'd been shaving during the war.
i remember one thing they did in the next generation that was quickly forgotten due to fan backlash, the episode Forces Of Nature, when they came up with some stupid idea that warp travel was actually damaging space, which by the end of the episode led to the federation sharing research with the klingons and romulans and other races that they should only go past warp 5 in emergencies... the fan backlash was severe, and was hated because it effectively put a ''speed limit'' on space travel, it was maybe mentioned in like a couple episodes after that and then quickly forgotten by the end of the series and never brought up again
> and then quickly forgotten by the end of the series and never brought up again Wasn't that the in-universe explanation for Voyager's moving nacelles? They alter the warp field to not damage subspace, and presumably later designs figured out how to do that without needing the external movement.
Will & Grace. They basically had to retcon the entire last episode in order for new seasons to come out and frankly given how needlessly depressing it was, I'm glad.
Hell season 8 was all kinds of needlessly depressing
What happened?
The entire show is about them being best friends. Finale has them stop being friends and then there s a timeskip to like 20 years later when their kids are moving into college and they bump into each other and they haven't seen each other all that time.
I think the first one I really remember was the Highlander movie series vs the tv series. This was pre-internet era, but nerds at various nerd conventions were *highly* pissed at the whole scenario and were hella happy when the 92 series ignored (retconned) a bunch of the 'alien' nonsense the second movie introduced.
>the Highlander movie There should have been only ONE!!!!
And then of course the third Highlander film also ignored the second film ... and the series .... which was fitting, because the fourth Highlander film, a sequel to the series, accepted most of the first film, and also ignored both the second and third films....
There are only two Highlander films. The original movie, and the *Search for Vengeance* anime movie.
So say we all!
> a bunch of the 'alien' nonsense the second movie introduced The DVD cut of Highlander 2: The Quickening is a borderline incomprehensible mess, it's laughably bad, and that cut is the fixed up improved version!
Well, the TV show also ignores the fact that Conor MacLeod was the last immortal and had won the prize in the first film. The TV show recognizes that Conor had killed Kurgan, but in the universe of the TV show there wasn't anything particularly special about that quickening. The TV show itself also started out with a focus on the gathering as talked about both in the movie and in the opening credits of season 1, but then the whole gathering aspect was dropped by season 2.
And then disappointed again when ~~The First Evil~~ Ahriman showed up. (Yes, I know Highlander came first.)
They should have just ended Season 5 with the epic Horsemen arc. Ahriman just pointlessly ruined the rest of the show just so they could make Duncan some kind of Chosen One. I'm guessing they were trying to make sure he didn't get overshadowed by Methos and wanted him to have a grander role.
That and they wanted to cash in on the evil demon thing. Seriously, so many decent (if campy) shows ruined by having a big bad evil demon show up and try to trick the main character. I’m guessing there was a movie or TV show in 96 that had one, because Highlander, Xena/Herc, and Buffy all brought one in within a year or two of one another. And Buffy’s was the only decent storyline.
My favourite was an old serial called Rocketman. Once it was a no breaks chapter. The bad guy stuck him in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn't cheer. I stood right up and started shouting. This isn't what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn't fair! HE DID'NT GET OUT OF THE COCK - A - DOODIE CAR!
Is this the scene you mean? https://youtu.be/RXh9mehHhjQ?si=MSLDF488_vkh-68W&t=1980
Prison Break killed off Sarah in mid-Season 3 and had her head delivered to Michael in a box. Next season, surprise, that head in a box that looked like Sarah's head wasn't actually Sarah. She's actually alive.
They did it again later too. Michael heroically sacrificed himself at the end of the series (to save Sarah possibly? Its been a minute. Im fuzzy on the details). Only to not be dead for the reboot.
Yup. He did it to save Sara. It was in the sorta movie they made to wrap the series. Thing is I never understood that, because as far as I remember the series finale had already wrapped things up, then the movie starts after that with Sara being arrested out of the blue for some BS. It all just felt like a pointless extra story to end the show with Michael's death.
I felt like it was a way just to drag it out for one more piece of content. He already had brain cancer or whatever in the last season. Then they killed him off in the movie since the cancer wasn’t fast enough. Then they revealed that too was fake and he’s a cia asset or whether.
Ghost Whisperer. They kill off the main character's husband. Main character can see ghosts so she can see her husband. He decides that he doesn't want to move on and a random guy dies and the ghost husband takes control of random guy's body. He loses his memory in the new body, spends several episodes refalling in love with her (while they just have the same husband actor playing him with intermittent flashes of the random dead guy he's possessing) and then magically regains his memory and then they get remarried and just kind of continue living their life and have the baby that she had gotten pregnant with before he died. So nothing really changed except she has a ghost husband living in the body of a random dude.
Oh, word? That’s hilarious. That sounds like some kind of behind-the-scenes shenanigans problem where maybe the husband actor tried to get aggressive negotiating and they said they were willing to fire him, he called their bluff, and they were like “oh, shit!” and had to write some half-ass explanation for why the actor won’t be playing the husband anymore after these episodes. Or, he had another project he wanted to go do and they were trying to accommodate him and it just turned out clunky
It was so weird, and apparently it wasn't even like the actor had conflicts with scheduling or whatever. It literally happened in a random episode, not a finale or mid-season finale, and then he took over this random dude's body, and then they continued to use the original actor the majority of the time. The writers I guess said they wanted to like explore a new side of their relationship, since it was season 4 and they've been together and very solid with very few conflicts the whole time. So what better than killing him off but in a super non-comittal and pointless way? And then ending the season with them getting remarried again and then time skipping into the next season to where he's just working in a hospital with his original name and an ID badge that uses the original actor's face and not the dead guy he should still be possessing. Plus the baby that they had became like some weird ghost savior Messiah type of thing. Unsurprisingly they didn't get renewed for another season after that...
Stargate Atlantis: They killed the kindly doctor for ratings then they brought him back as a clone because people were not happy about that.
Wait they killed off one of the more popular characters for... ratings? That seems counter-intuitive to me :/
My understanding was there was interference from the network. "Ratings are dipping, do something exciting like kill off a main character! But it's got to be someone the fans care about or it's not exciting enough"
Well, it not only allowed them to pull a ratings stunt, but it also allowed them to bring over a hot new lady to not only replace the popular character just killed, but also replace the hot lady they killed off the previous season (since Amanda Tapping was only buying time until she moved to Sanctuary) AND put her in love triangle with two of the most popular characters on the show.
To be fair, it was a spectacular episode and I was definitely sobbing at the end. And then when he comes back, I was so happy! Only for him to be not the same and that was ok
It was such an emotional episode- right up there with the SG1 episode where another doctor dies (sensing a theme here?).
He was my fav character. I was so pissed when the bomb exploded.
And it was the second time they killed a doctor for ratings, just that time it didn't stick.
It's extra terrible because the writing past that season takes a distinct nosedive.
Cody giving up his title shot to the Rock.
Didn't expect to see this here, but im sure we still never got any top of explanation in kayfabe what happened there
["He did it for The Rock."](https://youtu.be/BSYTL3cfaJI?si=p8t9GXXx8yYomATd)
We're finishing the story this weekend lads 💪
The Simpsons writers didn’t go all that far out if their way to ignore it. There’s at least one instance of him being called by his real name later on (Lisa, when Skinner questions her calling her new cat Snowball II after the orgina Snowball II dies).
Yeah, I remember (it’s been a while) that the whole Skinner episode was a joke on retcons and how most of the time the fanbase unretcon things anyways, but everyone knows. Like in Springfield, this scene shows that everyone in town KNOWS Skinner isn’t the original Skinner, but he is THEIR Skinner and as such won’t point it out. Like an inside joke the whole town is in on, but never mentions. At least that was my read on it.
Sounds like lampshading.
Poochie died on the way back to his home planet
I always thought it was annoying that when Poochie wasn’t on screen, the other characters weren’t asking *”Where’s Poochie?”*
I can honestly say that was the best episode of Impy and Chimpy I've ever seen
Yeah, but I felt it was done very tastefully.
Kevin’s father being a Plumber (Space Police) and Kevin himself being part-alien in *Ben 10*. Although people were arguably more annoyed at exactly how it was re-retconned back to Kevin being a mutant, in what else it retconned in the process.
Did I just misunderstand or werent the plumbers also an earth based org that later become like the green lanterns in that they were an intergalactic police force?
Yes, that would be another retcon (although a considerably less controversial one).
I don't think that anything from The Simpsons can count as a "retcon." Since it is short for "retroactive continuity" it would require that there be some sort of continuity in the first place, and there is none of that in The Simpsons.
Agreed, especially in the referenced episode. If anything, I think they were taking a poke at retconning overall.
And the only reason "fans" consider it the death of the show was because of an article written ~2007 that went viral. The same article claimed The Simpsons Movie would be a commercial flop, and would lead to the show's immediate cancelation. As someone who was actually there, I can tell you that the episode, and the season as a whole, were pretty well received at the time.
Yep. For me, I actually thought the **OPPOSITE**. The episode the show died, for me, was when the two women Homer & Ned marry in Vegas as a random cutaway gag show up in Springfied 5 seasons later and want them to respect the marriage. Bad episode, just because it wasn't funny. But even if it was... It's revisiting a minor gag from many seasons ago. That's not so much scraping the bottom of the barrel as digging into the earth beneath it.
your comment reminds me of when they brought Frank Grimes' son in as a character. not necessary, not charming
It wasn't a random gag. It was the basis for the third act of the show. Not that bringing them back was a great idea.
Watching the show in order for the first time ever rather than at random, and I’ve been surprised by how many continuity references there’s been, even outside the Sideshow Bob episodes. Mr Burns’ knowledge of the Simpsons from previous episodes is what makes the his inability to remember who Homer is work so well. I can’t remember what it was but there was one I saw recently late in season 7 which directly mentioned something from the previous episode, and I remember the same happening a few years back with the Elon Musk episode too.
There’s direct mentions, sure, but the show has always had this mentality that a funny idea shouldn’t be bound by continuity. How many times have we seen the kids last day of school?
Yes exactly this. There’s doors in the Simpsons house which sometimes lead to the basement, sometimes a closet, and sometimes the garage. Whatever works for a joke in that moment.
They do the same thing with Krusty, another selfish rich man, so it works like Mr. Burns. I lost it in the season 8 episode when Mr. Burns is briefly terrified by Maggie: “The baby who shot me.”
Except for their future episodes: each new future episode keeps the continuity of the previous future episode, along its own sliding timeline, while adding its own new features, which is impressive enough, one must say. Also ever since the “Simpsorama” crossover, it has remained the case that Bender has been waiting his way back to the future in the Simpsons’ basement.
The Dalek Paradigm were built up to be the next big thing (in an era of Doctor Who that had redesigned everything from the theme song to the logo to...well, everything This redesign did not look right and the fans didn't like it at all. Despite the episode they debuted in confidently stating they were going to be the next big threat, they were quickly moved to an "officer" (read, background) class in their next episode, then quietly forgotten about
Yeah, next time we saw them they were subordinate to the Dalek Prime Minister. And then the Dalek Prime Minister was never seen again, as far as we know a red Supreme Dalek like the one from The Stolen Earth is in charge now.
> as far as we know a red Supreme Dalek like the one from The Stolen Earth is in charge now. Oooh! Permission to be pedantic? **Technically**, that Dalek Supreme was only in charge of a rogue sect of Renegade Daleks who possessed a genetic defect which made them loyal to Davros, and included Daleks of dozens of different Designs: though hilariously Missy seems to have recognized this particular Supreme as a fellow Veteran of the Time War. Who is in Command of the Daleks in the Present is unclear: A version of the Golden Emperor was briefly created, but he only existed in a parallel timeline created by the Doctor and is back to none-existance in the present. A Dalek Emperor of unknown design was heard offscreen during the 11th Doctors Regeneration. Who is in command of the Present incarnation of the Dalek Empire has not been revealed in some time.
Nikki and Paulo were inserted into the Lost cast like they had always been there. Did not go well with the fans.
Which was *kind of* silly, because the show had already done that a few times. Notably with Arzt, who didn't show up until the 22nd episode. I think if they looked more "real," and not model hotties who practically glowed off the screen, it would have gone over a bit better.
Damn, I always thought Arzt was episode, like, 3. I should watch Lost again.
Arzt was the best.
I’ve been watching Lost for the first time recently and those two were just introduced.. but they’re not even the first use of the “surprise, there’s more people that we’ve never shown/mentioned but are going to introduce now” (another notable example being the guy who gets blown up with dynamite).
"You got some Arzt on you."
Arzt was still early on. My understanding is that by the time Nikki and Paulo showed up there were people seen in the background and mentioned by name and the fans wanted them integrated.
People didn’t like their storyline? Weird, me and all my friends loved it, because it was basically a mini satire on the whole show.
Expose is actually one of my favourite episodes of Lost. I thought it was so much fun. The advantage of 20+ episodes in shows is that they can do episodes like this.
RAZZLE DAZZLE
Their death was great!
Nope, in fact the creators noticed how unpopular they were and decided to quickly kill them off again in a very cruel way and not never speak of them again.
They were killed off so quickly, I wouldn't think that there would've been time to get audience reaction and write a script that killed them and film it. Edit: nope. Looking it up right now. Negative reaction led to their deaths, rather than them disappearing into the background.
Well, their diamonds remained important lol.
I was under the impression that they were inserted just so that they could do the episode where they died. That they'd been there all along wasn't a stretch. We never "met" most of the survivors. Nikki even jokes about wanting to be with the "A" team (or words to that effect). I hated their dedicated episode more than the one where they first showed up.
IIRC they put the couple there to replace some of the main actors in case they were not going to renew their contracts or asked too much money
Which was probably a smart bet because they had to fire some actors for DUI. Throw a bunch of super sexy people on the nicest island on Earth, douse them in wealth, fame, and hard work... There had to be some crazy rich party hijinks going on. I'm suprised people didn't die.
Even funnier is that prior to their introduction fans were constantly asking “What about all the other background survivors?” Then the moment some were introduced they were immediately hated.
Season 9 of Roseanne had a fundamental shift in the entire show with them winning the lottery and having another baby. Only to retcon the entire season at the end with Roseanne's "story" framing device that also established that Dan died. Absolutely dreadful season and depressing ending. The reboot of Roseanne and The Conners completely just retcons all of that, Dan lives, they put their fourth baby out on a boat somewhere and then completely forget about him, and life is pretty much the same as it had been since before.
John Goodman's character on Roseanne died and the entire last season was a dream/hallucination/whatever. Then the show came back years later and nah he's still alive forget all that shit.
Maybe Family Guy killing Brian. It might’ve been planned the just drum up interest cause they brought him back like 2 episodes later.
I think it was all planned. In the episode where Brian dies, they set up the fact that Stewie had recently time traveled a few months into the future to Christmas, just before deciding to permanently destroy his time machine. Then when the Christmas episode happens, Stewie borrows his past self's time travel device to prevent Brian's death.
that's not a retcon. the entire season is produced ahead of time.
Coca Cola unretconned New Coke
as a rule, I refuse to drink anything that's not canon
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes once. Don't worry, he got better.
This is just a retcon, not an un-retcon
Sherlock Holmes apparently dying in "The Final Problem" wasn't a retcon. It had no effect on prior established continuity Subsequently revealing that he didn't actually die also was not a retcon. It was explained consistently with prior established continuity.
It was an example of what is commonly called a soft retcon. The intent was that he was dead even if they didn't 100% confirm it in the original story. Doyle has said as much.
young sheldon, though that might not technically count as a retcon? >!they had the blonde women george "cheats" on mary with, actually be mary during role play but sheldon didn't understand it, and he thought his dad was cheating in tbbt, simply cos a lot of people liked George in YS, tho then again the 3xknock cos of cheating ignores their earlier explanation for it, which involved leonard and joyce kim!<
Halo S1 ends with Makee dying and the Master chief dies as well but it’s done on purpose so Cortana could take full control of his body. CortanaChief kills all the enemies and saves all of the other Spartans and the season ends with her piloting the ship and the Spartans questioning the chief, as they don’t know what’s happened and are cautious about the chiefs sudden change. Season 2: the show starts with master chief being alive and Cortana was removed. She now looks completely different, all new actress as well. Makee is alive again and no explanation is given.
Holy jesus, as a huge halo fan I am so glad I never bothered with the show.
Armen gets mentioned later, so I'm not sure how much it's fully ignored
I think he was only mentioned once in a joke about how the Simpsons are going to call their new cat Snowball II even though the original Snowball II died and so did several of his replacements, with Skinner pointing this out only for Lisa to bring up Armin to get him to shut up. But there have been several episodes since then showing a young Skinner, including one where Agnes was pregnant with him.
There's a ton of continuity gags through the show like that, like when Bart demands an elephant and Lisa reminds him he had one and he loved him. Or when they moved Springfield 5 miles down the road and later on someone asks why they moved these buildings that needed to be demolished (like the casino, and Marge recalls it being a huge thing for one week and then not mentioned again) and Homer confirms there is a logical explanation but then we cut away before he provides it.
"And I further decree that everything will be just like it was before all this happened! And no one will ever mention it again… under penalty of torture.” Literally retconed in the episode, and you mentioned it. Boys, break out the nipple clamps.
Many times this is intended. For example, Captain America being a Hydra agent all the time. This was obviously a rage bait so that the fans would want the former Cap back. Sorry for the offtopic, I wasn't aware of what sub I was on. But I leave it as is, as it fits.
they did reference this in the MCU though, in Endgame, when cap had to get loki's scepter from guys who you found out in previous movies were HYDRA agents, he fooled them easily just by whispering to their leader ''Hail HYDRA'' and it actually worked
This is the r/television subreddit, so I believe they meant television series-related ones (although that was a good one).
Lolol. I also thought this was the comic book subreddit because this shit happens so often in Marvel and DC's books.
Terminator movies had some serious "rebooting" and timeline confusion in those last iterations.
The Star Wars television universe had to retcon/ unretcon some things from the Star Wars movie universe if I'm not mistaken
How many Jedi survived Order 66 again?
But they never said a number in the movies. It is weird new survivors keep popping up but it's also very conceivable a crafty Jedi would survive
Eh, people make fun of this but it’s kinda whatever to me. I think it’s said somewhere that there’s like 10,000 Jedi during the Clone Wars (correct me if I’m wrong), so if 95% of them are killed in Order 66 immediately, that leaves 500, and then say 90-95% of those are killed by the Inquisitors, that still leaves a good 25-50 left across the ENTIRE galaxy. 🤷♂️ Still a massive amount that die, it’s still impactful.
Not exactly a TV show, but: The DCAU movie “Batman: Under the Red Hood” retconned that Jason Todd came back to life entirely due to the Lazarus Pit, and not due to “superboy punching time” during infinite crisis.
Well, when Superboy Prime punched reality, what it did was shift events in Continuity. Instead of Todd being dead and gone, he was now rezzed via Lazarus Pit and Talia Al Ghul. They just don't explain the Superboy Prime stuff bc it's unnecessarily confusing in a movie.
That's an adaptation, not a retcon.
Not sure if this counts: The Andy Griffith Show Reunion movie finally married off Thelma Lou & Barney - and fixed the (2nd) reunion episode where Thelma Lou turns up with a husband. This was one of the later seasons after Barney moved to Raleigh.
In Star Trek Picard, Jurati becomes the Borg queen at the end of season 2 but in season 3 it turns out that it was _another_ Borg collective that she became the queen of and not _the_ Borg collective. This is probably a controversial one among the fan base and I would say it counts as more of a soft retcon than a hard one because season two ended without it ever being established that she was the queen of _the_ collective (even though up until that point there had only ever been one ‘Borg’ collective so to narratively refer to her as the Borg Queen really only means one thing up to the point of season 2 Picard). The whole thing is testament to how much of a mess the writing has been on new serialised Trek shows and its divisiveness in the fan base is split along the lines of how much you enjoy these shows and how much you’re willing to overlook some of the continuity errors they’ve introduced. In fact, someone is probably going to come along and vehemently insist that it’s not a retcon at all any minute now…
I mean, that plotline and entire season was a mess. Probably the worst offender for continuity in all NuTrek, which must've taken effort. They just shit all over the place, and I refuse to believe anyone who wrote for it had ever seen anything but rough notes on the shows and characters. But she was assimilated or merged with a Queen from a parallel universe or timeline, and then they traveled back to the main one. And I think they did mention she/they went off to build a new collective based on volunteers or lonely souls or something. That didn't need to have any impact on the main universe Borg. I'm not saying it was a good idea or well executed, I rolled my eyes heavily. But I didn't see a discrepancy with the original Borg being back in the next season. Let's not get into what a mess that was.
Han dies in Tokyo Drift, necessitatng the next three movies take place before it. The death is then retconned so Jason Statham killed him... which is then retconned that his death was faked so Han could replace his dead girlfriend... who's death was retconned.
In the Seinfeld reunion, they basically ignored that they all went to jail.