Today, I’m asking you what is the biggest unresolved TV show plot point.
Pop Culture Theme Time is a feature where I put a question to you to see what you think about a particular theme. I might later revisit the theme for a future Drawing Crazy Patterns or Top Five.
My pal Wayne suggested this one. It’s a standard thing in serialized television that sometimes, there are plots that are introduced and are never resolved (plot danglers, they’re typically called). Now, excusing instances where a show was canceled on a cliffhanger, what do you think is the biggest unresolved TV show plot?
I’m going with the classic episode of The Sopranos, “Pine Barrens.” As I’ve talked about in a TV Legends Revealed, Terrence Winter kept pushing creator David Chase to resolve this one, but never got around to it. Again, there’s no NEED to resolve it, per se, but the fact that Paulie and Christopher take a Russian mob member to the woods to bury him, discover he is still alive, then try again to kill him, but and he escapes from them (leading to them possibly dying themselves in the frozen woods) and then we never see any follow-up is certainly significant, at least. The episode ends with Tony Soprano rescuing them, but telling them that if there’s any blowback from the guy’s bosses in the Russian mob, that Paulie will have to answer for it.
And it never came up one way or the other again.
Again, it didn’t NEED to be resolved, but it is still very notable that it wasn’t.
Okay, that’s my pick. How about you?
Thanks again to Wayne for the suggestion! Everyone, feel free to suggest future Pop Culture Theme Time topics to me at my new, much shorter e-mail, brian@poprefs.com!
What was the fate of Jack Bauer after he surrendered himself to the Russians at the end of season 9 of the 24 tv series?
A lot of times when this happens in TV shows, it is because the show got cancelled and/or a particular actor/actress/show writer left the series and the plot had to be dropped. I’ve tried to think of a few examples besides those.
The second season finale of “THE NANNY” ends on a cliffhanger with the Sheffield mansion being robbed by the same criminal who’d mugged Fran earlier in the episode. The third season begins and ignores this completely, and nothing is ever said or heard of it again.
The first season finale of “AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER” has Aang enter the spirit world and encounter the nefarious Koh The Face-Stealer, who vows they’ll have another meeting. Despite the heavy serialization of the show, Koh never appears again in the following seasons, or even in the sequel, “AVATAR: THE LEGEND OF KORRA,” despite the second season of that show dealing almost EXCLUSIVELY with spirits. The most fans got was a Flash game and a comic book story which featured Koh, even if he never technically appears in it.
An episode of the original “MACGUYVER” had Mac stumble onto a Neo-Nazi conspiracy to infiltrate the government. It ended with him finding a map of the West Coast and various agencies that had already been infiltrated. Nothing comes of it ever again, even though “MACGUYVER” always had time for episodes about third world dictators and/or Russian Soviets. My inner cynic suggests that the show’s producers didn’t want to risk pissing off viewers in “those states.”
And I’ll break my own rules for the series finale of “ALF.” It ends with the titular alien being abandoned by his Melmacian pals and swarmed by federal agents, who the series established would be intent on torturing and dissecting him for research purposes. There was a TV movie whipped up to resolve this…but it aired 6 years later, featured none of the cast aside for Alf himself, and as far as I know was never rebroadcast. It was released on VHS and DVD…but both are out of print (and usually cost $50+ bucks online from third party sellers). ALF has been in broadcast syndication, but that TV movie was never edited and added to it (as some TV shows do with syndication packages i.e. some syndication packages of “THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO” adding the TV movie sequel, “The Greatest American Heroine” as a 3 part finale), which means anyone watching the show on LAFF or MeTV will think it all ends with ALF being captured after all. Dang.
The series Reunion starts with a murder at a 25th (IIRC) high school reunion, then flashes back to graduation. Each episode takes place a year later, advancing the plot towards the reunion and filling in the clues … but it got canceled. The producers said it was impossible to wrap up because they hadn’t even introduced some key players yet.
I’ll go with almost 90% of the items in the TV show “Lost”
In Lost why were the Island Natives sterile and unable to have children? Why did 100% of the mothers die in child birth? Why did the same massive string of numbers occur in lotteries, hatch serial numbers, French emergency broad cast codes?
LOST is proudly the gold standard of unresolved plot points.
maybe War of the Worlds (1988-1990) – the last episode of the first series “The Angel of Death” saw a representative of another alien race arrive on Earth. At the end of the episode she left the planet with the intention of returning (which would have been a major event – note the enemy of your enemy isn’t always a friend).
She did not return in the second season (which was more focussed on jumping the shark)
I believe I read an interview in which it was said that the intent from the start was for the ending just to be an ominous note and there was never supposed to be a resolution.