They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot/Live-Action TV

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Examples of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot in Live-Action TV include:

Star Trek

• Star Trek: Voyager. The show was sold on the premise of Starfleet and Maquis personnel, who hate each other and have completely different organizational styles, being forced to work together to get back to the Alpha Quadrant. By the end of the first season, the tension is dropped and the show just becomes a standard Wagon Train to from the Stars.
  • Even more egregious was the weak resolution of the plot from the "Scorpion" 2-parter premiere. Voyager unwittingly runs headlong into a massive war: the Borg are getting their tails handed to them by a new, more powerful enemy force called "Species 8472" that exists in "fluidic space". The Voyager crew barely survives their first encounter with these aliens, and are forced to team up with the Borg (Starfleet's enemy up to this point in the franchise) to stop the growing alien threat. It could have had so much potential for overarching storylines - Voyager learning more about the threat as they develop new technologies and medicine to combat Species 8472, the Borg trying to reclaim their dominance against a superior threat, conflict between Janeway (who approved the truce) and the rest of the crew (who didn't believe it would work). Instead, the "war" is skipped, as Voyager destroys a handful of 8472 ships before fleeing, and in the next episode ("The Gift"), the ship is flung past Borg space by a Deus Ex Machina in the form of Kes, who ascends to a higher plane of existence.
• How about the time-travel stuff from Star Trek: Enterprise and Star Trek: Voyager? We find out that there's a huge war in the future with some ultimate enemy, and they use time travel to try to destroy the Federation. Or they could've done a whole series just about Captain Braxton and the Timeship Aeon.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine could have done a lt more with the Prophets and Pah-Wraiths than the simple "Prophets are good, Pah-Wraiths are evil" and the Pah-Wraiths' defeat a few minutes after being released. I wanted to see chroniton rifles being handed out, goddamnit!
• Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Relics". The Enterprise discovers a Dyson Sphere, a structure containing an area equivalent to hundreds of millions of planets. Inside are untold environments, species, civilizations, and adventures. Instead the Enterprise just flies away. No Star Trek: Sphere. What a waste.
  • Except...the star had already killed off all life in the sphere and was approaching the end of its lifetime. It was a major plot point when the Enterprise got trapped inside since the radiation was slowly killing everyone on the ship.
  • The two-part episode "Descent" was a sequel to "I Borg", and both featured Geordi and Borg drone Hugh aka Third of Five, but not together. They should've had at the very least one scene together, since Hugh had become resentful of what his previous encounter with the Enterprise crew had made him.
  • Also with Descent, the first part had the Borg change their MO and were out to kill anyone and everyone not Borg. Then at the end of the episode, Lore steps out of the shadows and in part two, the Borg are reduced to his Mooks.

Other Series

• For a brief time on the US version of The Office, Jim was promoted to be co-manager with Michael. When this setup was reverted by the company's new owners because it was a totally stupid idea, Michael decided to step down because the new company's generous commission program for salesmen paid more. However, the role reversal (Jim as manager, Michael as salesman) lasted for an episode before Michael realized he couldn't handle not being in charge anymore; many fans said they thought the new setup could have been milked for much more material.
  • And in the span of that single episode, the writers decided to focus on Michael (who had been seen acting as a salesman several times in the show before this point) rather than Jim, even though this was a perfect opportunity to have some payoff to the "Jim yearns for more from life deep-down" subplot that had been running since late in the second season.
  • Season 4 saw Ryan promoted to vice-president of the company after three seasons of being one of the show's biggest Butt Monkeys. Unfortunately, due to the 2007 writers' strike, the season was greatly shortened, and Ryan appears very little before he is finally fired in the season finale. Worse yet, Ryan's biggest contribution to the company, an automated website, was seen early on as a necessary asset for the company to remain relevant despite Michael, who wanted to cling to older and more traditional ways of doing business, finding it threatening. This struggle between old and new is never mentioned again after the third episode of the season, and the website is revealed in the finale to have been a failure.
• The first season of the '80s War of the Worlds TV show promised bigger and better developments that would be coming up in future seasons, including a traitorous alien named Quinn who was stuck in a human body since the original Martian invasion, the existence of the alien invaders slowly becoming known to more people, a backup force of aliens due to arrive in a couple years to help with conquest, and a superpowered being who helped the main characters in the finale, and promised to return in the future. They were plenty of stories left to tell, but the new producer on the series, Frank Mancuso Jr., switched the setting from the "current" '80s to a near post-apocalyptic future, where the aliens were completely different, the main characters are living in an underground tunnel, and the show finished off its second season without resolving any of the plotlines that were set up in its initial run.
• Several Kamen Rider series -- most notably the ones penned by Toshiki Inoue -- fall prey to this. Kamen Rider Kabuto in particular was incredible at setting up the framework of the plot but failed miserably when it came time to actually answer some of the questions it had posed. Though in its defence, a few key members of the cast had to drop out after filming had started due to illness or prior commitments, necessitating frantic rewrites of the plot.
  • It can't be worse than Kamen Rider Faiz. The concept -- a toku show where half the perspective is from the monsters -- was cool, and it did start off promisingly... but didn't really go anywhere, had ineffectual villains with weak plans (hey, let's go on killing sprees randomly hoping we'll get an Orphenoch out of it!), damn near an entire cast of Scrappies, and one of the few interesting characters, Yuka, being forgotten by the writers for thirty-odd episodes, brought back as a fawning love slave and then stuffed into the fridge. It could have been so much more...
  • Kamen Rider Kiva, another Inoue series, was hyped up as being horror-themed. Inoue kind of forgot about the "horror" part and gave us a retelling of Kamen Rider Faiz instead. Inoue must've either had a nervous breakdown or grown a brain tumor in 2002-03; it's the only thing that can explain why pre-2003 Inoue is still one of the most beloved writers in Toku (his Choujin Sentai Jetman and Kamen Rider Agito are widely considered the peaks of their franchises), but Inoue since 2003 is one of the most reviled writers in Toku (second only to Shouji Yonemura, who writes like a caricature of post-2002 Inoue).
    • Not to mention all the All There in the Manual information that could have thrown a curveball or two in Kiva that were left off.
  • And then we have Kamen Rider Decade, where all of the plot was set up in the first episode and ignored until the movie(s).
  • Kamen Rider Double tried to set up a plot that might have went cross-series into Kamen Rider OOO involving an organization originating in the former being interested in the MacGuffins of the latter. The problem being that the head writer for OOO had an I Work Alone complex (not that there's anything wrong with it) and nixed the idea.
    • Though considering that promos for the upcoming Fourze/OOO crossover movie show what looks like said organization...there might be hope yet for a proper return!
• The 100th episode of Married... with Children could have been yet another raunchy romp with the Bundys, but NO! It had to be a spin-off to a short-lived, unsuccessful sitcom called "Top of the Heap", with Al as the only member of the Bundy family to appear in that episode, though it does make up for it at the end when Al breaks into his friend's apartment and steals back the TV he lost in a boxing bet, which was mentioned earlier in the episode, then seemingly forgotten.
  • Executive Meddling was responsible for that. FOX had always hated the show and the controversy surrounding it. Even during its hey day, they were always trying to find new ways to cancel it, or at least phase it out. Most famously, the cast were the last to learn the show was canceled, having to find out about it in the news, and even then the show was not given a proper series finale.
• Midway through the second season of Lost, Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and Locke had a confrontation with the Others where the Others totally owned them. Unable to find Michael or Walt, they're forced by the Others to return to camp with their tails between their legs. Jack approaches Ana-Lucia and asks her to help him train the passengers into an army. That sounded really interesting, even though it would involve The Scrappy. What we got instead were two episodes in a row of Character Derailment, first of Charlie, then of Sawyer (with Charlie being derailed even further in the Sawyer episode), ending with Sawyer stealing and hoarding all the passengers' guns, causing Jack's dream army to be stillborn.
  • The Others successfully capturing Jack, Kate and Sawyer was very exciting, but not a lot happened with it until their escape. Sawyer and Kate broke rocks while Jack made friends with Juliet.
  • The "flash-sideways/afterlife universe" was an entire season that could have blown the roof off the show...had it amounted to more than what was shown at the end. All throughout the sixth season, there's an alternate timeline that has all of the characters (even ones who were killed in previous seasons) showing up, with Desmond trying to reunite them for an unknown purpose. As it happened, all this built up to a Base Breaker in the final episode involving the "flash-sideways" universe characters all being dead and it taking place in the first "stage" of the afterlife. Coupled with the island plot (where Jack has to reignite "the light of the island" before it...does something) and a healthy dose of Fridge Logic, it appears to have fractured the fanbase, who complained that the flash-sideways clips were a giant waste of time.
• In The Sarah Jane Adventures, near the beginning of the first season finale, a couple appeared on TV pleading for information about their missing Son who looked exactly like Luke: an Artificial Human who's happily been Sarah Jane's adopted son all his brief life. After a short but brilliant bit of character-focused emotional television it is revealed to be an elaborate plot to kidnap Luke. We're not sure whether to praise the BBC for touching upon a moral dilemma of that magnitude on children's TV, or criticise them for having the "real parents" quickly Jump Off The Slippery Slope. It was a still a good episode but some will always wonder what might have been.
• Ugly Betty: Some viewers felt that the writers didn't take Vanessa Williams' character forming a rival magazine very far. To wit, Williams takes away many of Mode's employees for her new mag (while using a virus to delete much of Mode's work on its current issue), forcing Betty and Daniel to scramble to put out their new issue, but the potential magazine rivalry comes to a premature end the very next episode when Williams doesn't get enough funding money to actually start it up, and a chance run-in with Betty White doesn't help her image either.
• Babylon 5‍'‍s Great Machine -- its prime purpose as a time travel portal was fulfilled in the middle of Season 3, but further uses were teased -- and it wound up being used as a communications relay for B5's information broadcast during the Shadow War, and nothing more. This was likely an unavoidable result of the drastic changes in the story arc at the end of Season 1, but still left a lot of viewers feeling cheated.
  • At the very least, when it came time to destroy the station in the final episode because it had become "a menace to navigation", they could have asked Draal to use the Machine to destroy it so that its debris would fall onto the otherwise uninhabited Epsilon 9, instead of turning it into an expanding cloud of shrapnel.
• There was an episode of Amazing Stories where a teenage kid finds out that he and his parents are all Aliens, and also that they all have to go back soon. Also, he has a friend he has to tell. Turns out, his friend has the same deal, and SHE'S going to the same planet too. The episode begins with the kid finding this out, and ends with him on the plane about to leave. In other words, we never see anything cool!
• Stargate Universe, episode 'Pain' - what if the hallucinogenic ticks were themselves a mass delusion?
  • By that notion, then any episode after that, would all be mass hallucinations/delusions of the group; which if we were to go by that standard would have meant that the series would have ended at that point.
• General Hospital recently acquired the acting talent of James Franco, who had volunteered to be on the show. His character is an artist who photographs crimes scenes. And what do they do with this interesting premise? Squander it on a 'Let's all worship St. Jason Morgan the Holy Hitman' plot.
• In My Name Is Earl, Randy married Catalita to keep her from being deported back to Mexico and he loved her so much since he met her. Turns out Catalita just considers this a green card marriage and does not love him and performs badly to ensure letting him down gently. When they consummate she is head over heels over how good Randy is in bed but Randy is turned off by her and ends with him just being friends with her. The staff no way picked up at potential plotlines for this and just ended it quickly and unsatisfyingly.
• In Entourage during the beginning of the seventh season you see Turtle running a carservice business with all of his employees being young attractive women only to see the business fall apart by the second episode of the season.
• Degrassi the Next Generation:the season 9 premiere had Peter getting addicted to Meth. What could've been a season-long struggle to stay clean and resist the temptation to use was wrapped up in the same episode. This is especially disappointing since Peter hasn't really done anything useful since season 7 besides date Mia and be Riley's supporting friend. Which is quite the Wall-banger since the writer's have turned him into one of the show's main characters. So yeah.
  • Speaking of Riley, there was his two-parter in season 9 that was finally suppose to have him come to terms about his sexuality. After a season and a half of establishing him as unable to reconcile his being a jock with being gay, it was thought that this episode would go into his family life and back-ground, similar to the other gay characters in the series. Instead, we never see his parents and we don't find out exactly why he's so self-loathing.
  • What about season 6 Sean? What could've been Sean dealing with the shooting was instead hijacked by the Sean/Emma/Peter love triangle. What could've been Sean clearing his name was turned into an homage to The Fast and the Furious. What could've been Sean facing hard time was told from Emma's perspective. What could've been Sean finding out that Jay framed Rick setting off the shooting was instead a case of My Girl Is Not a Slut.
• The back story to Quantum Leap is overloaded with fantastic plot devices - time travel, body swapping, an omniscient computer - which, with a few rare exceptions, were never really fully explored, with the vast majority of the episodes being straightforward Woobie of the Week stories. It wouldn't be so problematic if it weren't for how episodes focusing on the fantastic elements were invariably some of the finest in the series.
  • Season 3 ended with "Shock Theater" and an interesting cliffhanger: a freak lightning strike during a leap had switched Sam and Al. Al became a leaper lost in time, while Sam became a holographic observer back in his own time. Season 4's "The Leap Back" has fun showing a swiss-cheesed Al adapting to leaping, while hitting the emotional beats of Sam returning home, including to his wife. This could've been an opportunity to expand details about the Project and give Al more to do. Unfortunately, rather than play this out for at least a few episodes, everything is reversed back to the status quo before "The Leap Back" is over.
• Dollhouse was originally supposed to pull a left turn several seasons in and switch focus entirely to the post-apocalyptic future - all of the business in the present was just supposed to be a prelude. Unfortunately, Joss Whedon took too long to launch that plot, and the series ended before we got more than a couple of season finales out of it.
• A stunning cliffhanger happens during the fourth episode of the sixth season of 24. Jack Bauer has to deal with two life-changing events: the death of Curtis Manning (who he shot in cold blood to stop him from executing an important Middle Eastern diplomat), and, seconds after he breaks down when he realizes what he's done, a nuclear bomb going off in Valencia, California. Let's repeat: the worst-case scenario that Jack spent the entire fourth season trying to stop has just happened. There was so much potential for future storylines - how does Jack deal with the loss of life? Does he know if his daughter's alright? (After all, the last time she was mentioned, she was living in the exact area where the bomb detonated.) What about nuclear fallout over the L.A. area? Could Jack stop a terrorist threat on his own without the help of CTU? More importantly, would he want to? No, instead he helps rescue a guy who crashed his helicopter on top of a house while people run around screaming, goes back on his claim that he's done with CTU within ten minutes and then gets stuck in a complex subplot involving a duplicitous brother and father for most of the season, while the entire nuclear bomb aftermath is relegated to a scant few seconds of television coverage. Way to go, Fox, for derailing something that could have a crowning plotline for the entire series.
  • Mandy, "the killer lesbian assassin", was the show's Boba Fett - a character whose popularity was fueled by the fanbase's demand for her to return in some capacity. She starts out with an interesting premise at the beginning of the series, as she's an assassin with no scruples except getting out of the business with her lover. Said lover is killed, and Mandy says that she might be available for work in the future...leading up to the famous moment in the season 2 finale, where she returns after 40-plus episodes (a record for the series at the time) and attempts to assassinate President Palmer (which failed). Given that, you'd expect her to make more appearances to "finish the job", but the next time we see her, she's been pigeonholed into someone who sleeps with Anything That Moves, and whose only purpose is to take Tony hostage and negotiate for a Presidential pardon. Given more time for characterization, she could have been a more compelling character who would have carried a longer plot arc than the actress was actually given. Instead, Mandy is wasted like so many other characters - she certainly would have been a better fit for Palmer's assassin in season 5 than the nondescript white guy who gets no development whatsoever and dies at the end of the one episode he appears in.
  • At the end of the second season, Alexander Trepkos and a German arms dealer named Max are revealed to be the masterminds behind Peter Kingsley's attempted government coup (which Bauer stopped) and the events of the day (and, in a deleted scene, Nina Myers' employers, which would have linked the first and second seasons much more closely). Max explains to Trepkos that a "Plan B" is in motion and is set to start that day...but what that plan is was never elaborated on, nor does it come up again in any further season. Moreover, David Palmer explains in the third season premiere that the organization responsible for his assassination attempt were all arrested and put away in prison. Had Trepkos returned (and, say, taken the place of Alan Wilson, who was introduced with no prior foreshadowing whatsoever) as the main leader of the cabal in season 7, it could have linked the entire series as a whole - instead, Trepkos and Max's appearances amount to nothing more than wasted potential.
    • Actually, this went on to be the canonical plot line of 24: The Game, which was written by the 24 crew with the sole purpose of filling the gaps between seasons 2 and 3. however, due to the poor quality of the actual game, and the number of non-gamer fans of the show (of which there were plenty), this entire arc was missed by many.
    • And, despite this, only Max was mentioned in the games plot line, and the ACTUAL process of arresting the organisation was presumed to have happened afterwards.
• Supernatural spent four seasons building up to The Apocalypse, having the heroes repeatedly fail to stop it from happening. When it finally does happen, it really isn't all that bad.
  • To be fair, the actual Biblical apocalypse isn't that bad at the beginning either. Also, the forward time travel episode showed things would have gotten very, very bad if Sam gave in to Lucifer. Finally, near the end of the season the demons were just about to roll out the Croatoan virus to really get things rolling.
  • And then there's Season 7, wherein after recent major shake-ups Heaven and Hell all but completely drop off the radar, and Castiel's Season Six finale A God Am I or Dark Messiah transformation is resolved in one episode.
• Remember that time House could walk for two-and-a-half episodes at the beginning of season 3? And then how it never comes up again?
  • To be fair that was forced by a case of Real Life Writes the Plot as Hugh Laurie was developing serious back problems from using the cane so much and needed time away from it.
• In one episode of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, the Centurions are given sentience and free will. Their first act as sentient beings is to gun down the branch of the Cylon leadership that they are angry with, who just download to new bodies. There is one more scene where a Six says “please” to a Centurion after giving it an order, and the entire thing is never mentioned again. Considering all the parallels between the Human/Cylon history and the Cylon/Centurian relationship, this could have gone in many interesting directions.
  • The reveal of the Pegasus (and the subsequent half-season it stayed as part of the fleet) didn't amount to much in terms of plot development or drama. The events of the "Resurrection Ship" two-parter (namely, the Pegasus' actions prior to discovering the fleet) fall by the wayside, and most of the Pegasus crew members become background characters with no opinions or characterization whatsoever. The only real episodes to focus on anything Pegasus-related are "The Captain's Hand" (which had Lee become the ship's new commander) and "Black Market" (which was universally reviled by the fanbase). The absurd sequence of events leading to the Pegasus' destruction in the third season also didn't do anything to further the relationship between the Pegasus and Galactica crews, with most of the plotlines devoted to Helo/Athena, Starbuck and Baltar. The only thing of consequence to occur was Peter Laird's (the chief engineer of the Pegasus) death at the hands of Tom Zarek more than two seasons later.
• Robin Hood. How can you go wrong with a story about a loveable Charmer forming a Chaotic Good Nakama in the forest, stealing from the rich to give to the poor, and winning back the heart of his Childhood Sweetheart? Well, you could stuff Maid Marian in the fridge, turn your Hero in a complete Jerkass, throw your hunky Anti-Hero so far over the Moral Event Horizon that no one but the rabid Fan Girls cares what happens to him, introduce his interesting sister and then make her a crazy Designated Villain, ignore the whole "rob from the rich" deal in favor of turning the outlaws into extras, introduce a universally reviled Jerk Sue as Robin's new Love Interest, and then kill almost everyone else off.
  • Granted, the original legends often had a tragic end for the main characters, the key word being end. The writers here began their mass slaughter of the main characters halfway through the second season, negating most of the story arcs that they'd been building for the first twenty-six episodes and consequently floundering for ideas on what to replace them with. Why they didn't simply finish the stories they'd started is still a mystery.
• Wizards of Waverly Place's third season ends with the premise that the government finds out that the Russo's are wizards, setting up an interesting plot for the final season. Then came the first episode of season four... with Professor Crumbs revealing he set that up as a test... Curse you Crumbs!
• The short-lived sitcom George and Leo, starring Bob Newhart and Judd Hirsch (as well as a young Jason Bateman), did an episode that reunited the casts of its two stars' four previous series: The Bob Newhart Show, Newhart, Taxi, and Dear John. It should have been the greatest thing ever; unfortunately, poor writing made it one of the most disappointing.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer has Principal Snyder, who is Season 2 and the beginning of Season 3 is heavily implied to be in the loop and working for the Mayor. As the Mayor actually takes his well-prepared position as the Big Bad, however, Snyder is revealed to actually not be in the loop and, while working for the Mayor at times, he has no real clue as to what it is the Mayor wants accomplished.
  • "Beer Bad". The title alone tells you how blunt the episode's moral is going to be, but it doesn't give it an original, interesting spin that you associate with Buffy on it. The episode has some people turning into weird cavemen due to drinking a beer that was tampered with, and... yeah, it's pretty stupid. It's generally considered the weakest episode in the show's 144-episode run.
  • James Marsters: "I hated the chip, right? I thought it would be much more interesting to watch Spike try to be good to impress Buffy - and fail. Miserably. Every time. In a comedic way." Additionally, Marsters wanted Spike's feelings for Buffy to always remain one-sided. But then the writers made Buffy and Spike's romance a two-way thing, leading to an infamous scene where Spike tries to rape Buffy, which shook Marsters up so much that he now always asks if there's going to be a "rape scene" in anything he's acting in.
  • No mention yet of Marcie Ross? Anyone remember the eleventh episode "Out of Mind, Out of Sight"? Marcie was sent to a government training facility to study infiltration and assassination, and this is never brought up again. Think of the fascinating possibilities! This might be one of the biggest examples of this trope.
• The third season of Merlin. The two part opener sets up a fantastic scenario, in which Morgana has turned into a Well-Intentioned Extremist who has sworn to assassinate King Uther. Despite everyone knowing that there's a traitor within the walls of Camelot, only Merlin knows who it is. So much wonderful potential for suspense and drama, not to mention a tragic Character Arc for Morgana as she falls further into darkness at her misguided attempts to "save" Camelot. Pity all this was squandered by turning her into a one-dimensional villian (her Face Heel Turn happens entirely off-screen in the year that passed between seasons two and three) and completely ignoring the "who's the traitor?" Story Arc. Later in the season Morgana is successful in her bid to take over Camelot, forcing Arthur and the loyalists to hide out in the forest. What could have been a great series of episodes in which they scrouge for survival, gather up allies, and plan their counter-attacks is all squeezed into a two part finale.
  • Seriously, of the thirteen episodes, all you have to watch are the first two, the fifth and the final two. You'd skip a couple of new characters (Gwain, Elyan) and a few Plot Coupons (the vial of Avalon water), but you honestly wouldn't feel that you'd missed anything drastically important. It was the season of the pointless filler.
• Little House On the Prairie had an episode that dealt with the birth and death of Charles Ingalls Jr., an event that actually happened. Instead of giving the story the proper attention it deserved, the plot lasted one episode, compressing the story from pregnancy to several months after the birth (over a year) to a single episode.
• In the fifth and final season of Ally McBeal, Ally suddenly finds herself the guardian of a 10-year-old girl. This storyline could have taken the series to new places while fitting perfectly with the premise of the show - a lawyer balances her career with her search for love. Instead, the daughter character quickly devolved into nothing more than a roommate for Ally, hardly appearing in most episodes and having little impact on Ally's life.
  • Given that Miss McBeal is the Poster Child for It's All About Me, what did you expect?
• New Amsterdam tells the story of a 400-and-counting-year-old "young man" who has been living in New York since it was, well, New Amsterdam. In his long lifetime he has picked up all sorts of skills, has the ultimate inside knowledge of the city, has started (and abandoned) dozens of families, and has scores of descendents running around. From the title and the premise (and credits sequence), you'd think this was a show about New York and its history and the advantages (and disadvantages) of the main character having been around for so much (read: all) of it. ...Instead, it's on the whole a bog-standard Cop Show, except with flashbacks to explain how each episode's plot emotionally resonates with the main character.
• The Man from U.N.C.L.E., "The Double Affair". THRUSH plans to kidnap Napoleon Solo and replace him with an exact double via Magic Plastic Surgery and voice training. They also attempt to assassinate Illya Kuryakin, since Napoleon's partner and best friend will be able to see through the impersonation, but he survives and goes on the mission with the fake Napoleon. Cool, so we're going to get an episode with Illya as the hero. He'll see through the phony easily and rescue Napoleon, and there will probably be a dramatic Spot the Imposter scene. ...Instead, Illya does nothing except occasionally look suspicious at Napoleon's odd behavior. He even lets the double get away with killing an UNCLE agent. Napoleon escapes on his own. Apparently THRUSH overestimated The Power of Friendship.
  • Try "The Hula Doll Affair" for a bigger waste of plot. The premise has a pair of rival THRUSH executives in a story involving an explosive (inside the title doll) triggered by rising temperatures; in the right hands this could have been an intriguing blend of power plays and suspense. Unfortunately this was in season three, and the hands in question belong to Stanford Sherman who previously scripted "The Super-Colossal Affair" (of Kuryakin-and-the-skunk-bomb infamy) and "The Suburbia Affair," so comedy is the main priority - as the casting of Pat Harrington and Jan Murray as the executives should attest. Throw into the mix perennial Large Ham Patsy Kelly as their mother and their superior officer in THRUSH and it's facepalm central.
• In 2009, the producers of Neighbours decided it was time to bring the Ramsay family back to Ramsay Street. This would have been a great opportunity to address what had happened to some of the early characters after they'd left, and they had a fair few to choose from (Shane, Danny, Henry and his wife Bronwyn Davies, Gemma and her husband Adam Willis, maybe even Scott and Charlene). Instead, they gave us a blatant and insulting retcon, in which Max Ramsay and Anne Robinson (the wife of Max's best friend who had been dead for years when the show started), had an extramarital affair, producing a daughter who had been given up for adoption. The daughter, Jill, died in a hit and run shortly after being introduced, with her children moving into No. 24. Particularly annoying for fans who knew anything about the Robinson and Ramsay families backstories up until then - Max was infuriated by the discovery that Danny wasn't his son (in the first season of the show), while Jim Robinson almost left Anne when she chose to have a baby (Julie) that was a result of rape. There is no way this information could have been kept offscreen for 23 years.
• Doctor Who, "Let's Kill Hitler". Melody commandeers the TARDIS to go back in time and kill Hitler. They put Hitler in a cupboard to deal with the Teselecta... and he's never mentioned again.
  • "Big Bang Two" suffered from this as well. The previous episode had ended with entire armies of the Doctor's enemies, many of whom had never been on screen together let alone worked together, ascending on the Earth. Who's the antagonist in the next episode? A weakened stone Dalek.
• No episode of Quincy sacrificed storytelling to the altar of the Very Special Episode as much as "Whatever Happened To Morris Perlmutter?" The episode kicks off with a genuinely intriguing setup - a burglar shoots and kills an old woman in her own home, and is witnessed by the woman's sister - but this takes a backseat to the episode's title character, an actor and friend/colleague of the deceased who has difficulty with his lines, which might ruin his shot at starring in a live television play... suffice to say the climax doesn't feature the, you know, murderer but rather has Morris acting up a storm on live TV and being a triumph. Entertaining though it always is to watch Keenan Wynn (as Morris), having him in an episode where he plays something more fun for the viewer would have been nice. Once again, fans are left pining for an episode like "Deadly Arena," "...The Thigh Bone's Connected To The Knee Bone..." or "To Kill In Plain Sight."
• Shameless: In the American series' second season, Steve attempts to smuggle his wife's boyfriend into the country so that he can completely break off his involvement with her drug lord father. In the penultimate episode, he sacrifices his identity and most of his property so that he can be cut loose from the family. Since the series had built his arc around his decisions coming back to bite him in the ass (involving Lip in stealing a car allowed the cop to force him into leaving the country, becoming a drug smuggler to support his lifestyle causes him to be caught up in a drug lord's family) having Marco die during his transfer to the US and causing Steve's wife to get her father to sic his hitmen on Steve, and having Steve thus be killed off, would be an effective way to conclude his arc by taking the main concept of it to the farthest it could go. Not to mention, his being killed off would essentially finalize within Fiona's mind that her instincts and decisions regarding him were right.
  • Also, having Fiona's theft of money from a woman's purse be "justified," by having the woman being ungrateful and aggressive after Fi returned her purse, was a serious waste of an exploration of how Fi could drift further into moral ambiguity.
• Really, the entirety of Andromeda became one thanks to the infamous Executive Meddling. After a season of the crew trying to rebuild the Commonwealth because well, they could, the end of Season 1 introduced the seemingly unstoppable threat of the Magog Worldship. After a narrow escape with a prediction of 2-3 years until the thing was operational again and on the move to wipe out all life, the restoration of the Commonwealth became a much more desperate goal as the only chance of defeating the looming threat, which had the series seemingly geared toward an eventual Grand Finale where the unified forces of a restored Commonwealth would face down the Worldship in a final battle for civilization. Instead, the show's creator was ejected halfway through Season 2, a "new Commonwealth" was Handwaved into existence, the Worldship was defeated in the fourth season by Deus Ex Machina, and the characters spent the final season doing pretty much nothing.
• Dexter - In season 6 Dexter's regular Dead Person Conversations with Harry Morgan is temporarily replaced by his brother Brian Moser, the season 1 antagonist. This could have led to Dexter going from Anti-Hero to full scale Villain Protagonist, and addressing much of the constant Moral Dissonance inherent to the show in a significantly deeper way than the usual Hand Wave of "The Code of Harry". Instead it is abandoned very cheaply at the end of the following episode.

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