Transformers. Is “energon” a crystal, a liquid, or something more nebulous? Are Primus and Unicron one being? Did the Quintessons create the Transformers? Where do the Go-Bots fit in?
And don’t get me started on the Allspark vs. Vector Sigma…
I don’t know if anime is allowed, but Dragon Ball Z is pretty bad.
Golden Girls.
How many siblings did they all have?!?
Heroes.
The first half of the first season was so good. The second half was ok. Every subsequent season gave the impression that it was handed off to a different writer every week, and that those writers hated each other.
They changed the rules constantly, except when they just ignored the rules.
The main character collects new powers as the show goes on, but he never uses them. He just completely forgets that he has them. Kind of like the time he completely forgets he has a girlfriend and never mourns her, mentions her, or even acknowledges that he lost her somewhere in an alternate timeline or something.
That’s not much better than the villain. The entire first season is about stopping him from doing a specific thing, because a time traveler has foreseen that it’ll result in the world ending. Season two opens with him doing that thing, and everything is fine. He has at least three heel-face turns, which are immediately undone when the next writer is up to bat.
One good character undergoes a terrible transformation and murders a bunch of people, but the next season he’s suddenly good and everyone forgot. Again.
Constant retcons. This character is actually that character’s secret brother! This one lady who died was actually triplets! It adds nothing to the story and makes no sense, but there it is!
(I’m not joking either. Secret triplets.)
They did a reboot of the show a few years later and did the exact same thing.
The comic might be better for that, when it gets away from the show.
I remember season 1 having a lot of potential, then there was a writer’s strike that impacted season 2. Must have been piece mealed together from non union writers, and it showed.
My understanding is that the creator wanted each season to follow a new set of characters, with season 2 being the previous generation that founded the organization that horn rimmed glasses guy worked for. But the network said no, and made him slap together a direct follow up. That was already an uphill battle before the writer’s strike.
Kind of unrelated, but season 1 was also supposed to end with all the various characters converging in an epic battle avengers style, but they were over budget and the network weren’t willing to give them more, so instead we got the poochy ending.
Homer Simpson has forgotten he knows music at least 2 times.
Other than that, I’ve heard Lost is bad, very bad.
Homer should never have been written to have the ability to play an instrument. It doesn’t fit with his character at all. Like, not at all at all.
In recent episodes, the middle aged adults are all millennials but the old folks all fought in WWII. There’s apparently no in between.
Oh phuck, I wanted to say Lost, but I figured nobody would get it…
Wait, what? I know that Lost’s ending was controversial, but this is the first time I’ve heard that it’s not internally consistent. It’s whacky, but it’s SciFi. Do you know any examples of what isn’t internally consistent?
You’re correct. There are things that don’t connect, but there’s not like a ton of internal contradictions.
That’s mostly just because it never explains anything up until the last few episodes when it’s all “Oh, uh… it’s all about god and heaven and hell and stuff I guess!”
I watched the whole show. I didn’t notice any glaring issues. It’s confusing but it’s supposed to be.
I said I heard. I haven’t watched it.
Supernatural eventually just made it a running gag that things changed when they felt like it.
Far from the worst but my funniest example comes from my favourite show. In the first season of Stargate SG-1, they introduced an alien weapon which would go on to become a staple of the series, the Zat Gun. One shot stuns, two shots kill, and three shots… Disintegrates?!
Yeah, it’s so stupidly powerful that the writers pretty much immediately realized the mistake and the show kinda just conveniently forgets that was established in the first season, except for like three other times in the entire ten season run.
Even the first two shots became very nebulous over time.
Edited to add, the disintegration effect is even mocked in-world in a very meta way in later seasons.
They wanted a phaser but couldn’t call it a vaporize setting.
But they didn’t completely abandon it. Disintegration gets used a handful more times when they remember it and it helps them wave away plot holes. Like in the episode where they end up in the 60s they disintegrate a box. A box!
Two boxes stacked against each other, in fact. Sitting in a truck.
The truck does not disintigrate.
Futurama freely makes shit up. They’ll invent new math theorems to make a body-swap episode work, but if their cool new backstory for Bender contradicts canon, they do not give a dang.
It’s not the worst plot hole, because it doesn’t affect the extremely episodic show. They’re just willfully apathetic toward consistency.
If I’m being honest with myself, Star Trek.
All of it.
Trek isn’t amazingly bad, but it’s definitely got low points.
I won’t say it’s the worst, but King of the Hill had a habit of contracting itself. Especially when it came to Peggy’s family.
Ok but keep in mind I’m speaking to the televised order of release.
Firefly.
They released the series out of order so the very first episode already had you deep into the story without establishing anything or anyone. Once you streamed it or watched it on dvd it made more sense. Plus the choose not to air some episodes at all which also introduced plot points and by not airing those you ruin consistency.
And I’ll add, the series is fantastic and serenity was a very nice bow to the short lived series. Highly recommend if you haven’t seen it.
“They”, here, is fox, and not the show’s creators.
I could say the same for Babylon 5. The original airing of the show was entirely out of order. One of the common things you’d notice is how every othet episode, the crew had different uniforms. They were only supposed to change uniforms once per season.
Days of Our Lives
Lol my mom used to watched Days of Our Lives religiously. The funniest part to me was when people had kids. There was never much of a story in people raising babies, so they would age kids really rapidly. Like, someone had a baby. Next season the baby is 5 years old, next season they were 12, next season they’d be an older teen and then soon they’d be adults having kids of their own.
Teletubbies
