What Happened to the Mouse?: Difference between revisions

** The Wicked Witch of the West mentions as she sends out the flying monkeys that she is "sending a little bug to take the fight out of them." This was a reference to the [[Cut Song]] "The Jitterbug", which would have followed that scene.

** Miss Gulch is presumably still going to come back for Toto. Her dream counterpart was defeated, but she wasn't.

* In ''[[It Came from Outer Space]] 2'' a blob engulfs various terrestrial life forms, starting with a coyote, and sends alien copies of each one out into the world. At the end, {{spoiler|the blob turns back into a spaceship and flies off}}, leaving all the humans it engulfed behind... but what happened to the coyote?

* Cult film ''[[The Doom Generation]]'' has a disproportionate number of these. Multiple characters vow revenge on the protagonists after mistaking one of them for a former lover, but only two of them ever show up again. The FBI is shown holding a briefing about the protagonists' involvement in a murder-suicide, but they never show up again. It's a weird movie.

* In the movie ''Daddy's Girl'', near the middle Jody murders her mom's friend Rachel and her death goes unmentioned for the rest of the movie.

* ''[[Puppet Master (film)|Puppet Master]] I'' had an oriental puppet in the beginning that was placed in the box by Andre Toulon along with the other puppets, hidden away safely. He was never seen again. {{spoiler|This also goes to the maid of the Gallaghers. Despite being revived and guarding an exit, she suddenly just disappears out of shot and is never noted again.}}

** Don't forget Percy Weasley, Ron's older brother. He was in the first film, but disappears until the 5th where he has a non-speaking role. In the books, he and his father are having a fight for the duration, which explains his absence, but in the movies, nothing is mentioned about it. He's just gone (and his father never even mentions him again).

*** Well, he finished school. So as long as he doesn't become teacher it is only natural to not see him through most of the movies. And as for the times when they are not in school, he could be working.

* In ''[[The Little Rascals|Our Gang Follies of 1936]]'', we never find out what happened to the Flory Dory Girl Sixtet, the missing act of the show that Spanky and the gang had to fill in for.

* ''[[Miracle Mile]]'', a [[Romantic Comedy]] set during a nuclear war, is told entirely from the perspective of the protagonist, Harry, which means we never find out anything that happens outside his presence. Early on Harry is with a group of people trying to escape the city before it goes kablooie, but once he's separated from them we never find out what happened to them. The most extreme example involves a car thief who helps Harry early in the film then goes off to rescue his sister. The thief reappears later in the movie {{spoiler|carrying his dead sister while suffering from a gunshot wound himself. He dies before revealing what happened to him}}.

* ''[[The Mask (film)|The Mask]]''. Peggy Brandt, who seems to disappear from the main action towards the end. {{spoiler|In a deleted scene, we saw her death: Dorian Tyrell caught her trying to sneak off with her money, at which point he threw her into a newspaper machine. This being "The Mask," her death was cartoonish: an "extra edition" came out of the machine, printed in red ink. Peggy's visibly pained face was on the front page, along with the accompanying headline.}}

* ''[[The Shawshank Redemption]]'': [[Complete Monster|Elmo Blatch]], the man who really killed Andy Dufresne's wife and her lover, [[Karma Houdini|is never spoken of again after Tommy's story.]] According to the story, Blatch was doing time for a lesser crime (robbery), so he's probably out again, and considering his amusement at how Andy took the fall, [[Fridge Horror|what's stopping him from doing the same sort of thing to others?]]

** This is changed from the way events happen in the book. In the book, instead of what happens to him in the film, Tommy is offered a place in a medium-security prison, in exchange for never mentioning Blatch again. When Andy confronts the warden about it, the warden says no one knows where Blatch is. When Andy tries to press the matter, the warden threatens him, which leads to their confrontation (much is made of this battle of wills in the last quarter of the film).

* ''[[Hugo]]'' never got his notebook back and it's never mentioned after a while. Did George burn it after all or what?

* In Guy Ritchie's ''[[Sherlock Holmes (film)|Sherlock Holmes]]'' the very end {{spoiler|features Moriarty stealing a wireless-control-mechanism (at least thirty years before its time). Holmes alludes to this as important, but it is not even given a passing mention in the sequel.}}

* In the film of ''[[The 13th Warrior|The Thirteenth Warrior]]'', the King's son is set up to be a secondary antagonist. One of the thirteen warriors even kills one of his henchmen in a duel as a psychological ploy. However after angrily leaving the scene of the duel he's not seen or referenced again.

* In the original British printing of ''[[Good Omens]]'', it is never revealed what happened to Warlock the false antichrist after he is taken to the fields of Meggido by the forces of hell and revealed as a sham. For the American edition the authors added about 700 extra words revealing that he is alive and well, understandably perplexed by his experiences, and heading back to America thanks to some reality-manipulation by Adam.

* In the ''[[Sword of Truth]]'' series, Richard's two hulking bodyguards Ulic and Egan disappear from the narrative entirely after ''Temple of the Winds'', and no reference is made to where they are, or what they're doing. Their sudden and conspicuous return to the plot in ''Confessor'' seems to suggest Goodkind actually forgot about them entirely.

** This happens with a lot of minor characters/villains/etc. throughout the series. Goodkind tends to bring in stuff strictly to serve as a plot device or [[MacGuffin]], and then forget about it after it's served its purpose, or dismiss it with only a cursory mention.

* Several ''[[Warcraft]]'' [[Expanded Universe]] novels mention princess Calia Menethil, the older sister of [[Big Bad]] prince (and now Lich King) Arthas Menethil. Calia's fate has never been revealed; in each book, she simply drops out of sight and is never mentioned again. She is the subject of several [[Epileptic Trees]] in fan circles.

* Steven Erikson's ''[[Malazan Book of the Fallen]]'' series is also noteworthy: a full list of characters who appeared briefly and then vanished would be quite long, but chief among them is Tattersail and her reincarnated form, Silverfox, who vanished along with several thousand kickass undead warriors in Book 3. Apparently their story will eventually be told by Erikson's co-writer, Ian Esslemont, several years down the road. Maybe.

* One of the many things wrong with ''[[The Legend of Rah and the Muggles]]'' by Nancy Stouffer is the sheer number of mouse plots in the story. The mother of the twin protagonists, having been recently widowed at the start of the story, enters a very heavy flirtation with the palace butler before shipping her kids off to save them from impending doom; what becomes of the mom and the butler, we never know. Later, the twins are deeply involved in the search for a specific treasure chest; when it's found, the bad twin insists on claiming it, to which the good twin consents. Not only is it never mentioned again, but the reader never even finds out what was ''in'' the chest that was so important.

* In [[Raymond Chandler]]'s first Philip Marlowe novel ''[[The Big Sleep (Literature)|The Big Sleep]]'', all of the various murders and crimes are explained, except that of the Sternwoods' chauffeur, Owen Taylor. During filming of the [[The Big Sleep (film)|1946 film adaptation]], director Howard Hawks and screenwriters William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman sent a cable to Chandler, who later told a friend in a letter: "They sent me a wire... asking me, and dammit I didn't know either."

* Reiko from James Michener's ''Hawaii'' simply disappears toward the end. She's a secondary character with an interesting plotline, but after {{spoiler|her husband dies}} she's never heard from again, leaving the reader to wonder whether she ever accomplished her thwarted dreams.

* In ''Musashi'', a novel based on the life of [[Miyamoto Musashi]], the title character learns that his sister has been arrested as a ploy to lure him out of hiding. He's about to play right into the officers' hands when he's stopped by the kindly priest Takuan, who then imprisons Musashi himself for three years so he can study the classics and become a more thoughtful person. The story promptly forgets all about his sister, except for a brief mention at the end that she's moved to another region and is happily married, with no mention of how she got out of jail.

* Dan Simmons' ''Ilium/Olympos'' cycle. What happened to that mice colony? What happened to that humongous tentacled brain? Where did Caliban go? Did moravecs manage to get rid of those 768 black holes? Can the remaining firmaries be turned on or not? Why didn't anyone care for more than seven years? Who the hell was Quiet and did (s)he actually do anything? Has the quantum stability problem been solved? If yes, then how? Aaargh, so many questions...

* The sheer amount of detail in the ''[[Harry Potter (novel)|Harry Potter]]'' books leads to a number of these, too. Harry pulls a cracker and out come, among other things, several live mice. But mice are not throw-aways like the other things in the cracker. Neither Harry nor anyone else is ever mentioned as keeping pet mice. Harry muses that Mrs. Norris got to them.

** Ludo Bagman is forced to flee from goblins at the end of ''Goblet of Fire''. He is never seen or heard of again.

** It is mentioned. During the period where she's living in the hut and dazed, she experiences a particularly bad night which results in a huge bloodstain on the floor.

* In [[Robert E. Howard]]'s [[Conan the Barbarian]] story "[[Black Colossus]]", the princess is in command because her brother the king is being held captive and might be either ransomed or handed over to their enemies. While discussing what to do, the ''first'' point brought up is whether to enlarge the offer of ransom; only then do they discuss the attacking army, and that, partly because the captor won't take them seriously while they might be overrun. But they deal with the army, and the captive king is never even addressed again.

* In the [[Tortall Universe]], it was because of this trope that author [[Tamora Pierce]] eventually wrote a short story about what happened to the tree that became man as a result of the mage Numair turning his [[Evil Counterpart]] into a tree in the second book of the Immortals quartet.

* Early on in the [[Vorkosigan Saga]] novel ''The Vor Game'', Miles is assigned to Kyril Island as the new Weather Officer. The officer he is replacing has been there so long that he has developed a "nose" for predicting the weather, especially the deadly wah-wahs, which is far more accurate than the available equipment. Miles is briefly terrified that everyone else will notice a sudden drop in the accuracy of reporting when he takes over, but soon has a major confrontation with the commanding officer and is transferred off the island. Presumably the poor patsy who replaces him will be no better at predicting the weather than Miles, but the island is mentioned just once more in a later novel, a decade later in book time, and it's implied that nothing has changed there.

* In the first [[Maximum Ride]] book, the main characters (who are winged humans, part bird, part human, created by some [[Mad Scientists]]) have gone years without seeing another genetic experiment like them. When they get to a secret facility in New York, they find several expiriments caged up. Naturally, they set them free. You'd think they'd want to talk to them or interact with them, maybe help them find a safe place, but it never goes anywhere. Over 5 books later, said experiments don't even get a passing mention, they're never thought of again, so it's a plot thread that went nowhere and contributed nothing to the story.

** ''[[Maximum Ride]]'' suffers from this a ''lot''. The second book also has the group finding two kids in the woods. While Angel reads their minds enough to know that they aren't experiments, she can tell that they aren't normal kids. The kids use a tracking device to lead people from Itex to the group, and the most that's found out is that they were kidnapped solely for that purpose, and that they would be left to be eaten by something if they failed. The group leaves them in the woods to be recaptured by the company, and they're never thought of again. The third book has an entire facility full of successful experiments, including clones of Max (introduced in the book prior and herself having fallen into this trope until that point), Nudge, and Angel. It's never revealed what happened to the experiments after the facility is captured, and again the group never thinks anything of it. Meanwhile, Fang starts a worldwide revolution via the children that read his blog. You'd think that something like that would get a mention in the next book, but it might as well have not happened for all the aftermath there was.

* In book four of the ''[[Inheritance Cycle]]'' Eragon and Arya wind up captured by a group of evil priests. A young novitiate appears and agrees to help them escape. He fails and winds up unconcious, while the more competent Angela comes to the rescue. Eragon insists that they take their would-be rescuer's comatose body with them as they escape the cathedral, however after this the boy is promptly dropped off in an alley and never mentioned again.

* [[Alice in Wonderland|Why is a raven like a writing desk?]] was left unsolved by [[Lewis Carroll]]...

** It has been speculated by a commentary on the book that Benvolio's line "That is the truth or let Benvolio die" is significant, given that he lied and said Tybalt started the fight with Mercutio (when it was the other way around). It is unlikely, however, that he was actually killed, so his disappearance remains a mystery.

*** At least one revision done long after Shakespeare died had one of the nobles at the end of the play announce that Benvolio was also dead. They still fail to mention how.

* In the epilogue to ''[[Angels in America]]'', we see Prior, Belize, Louis, and Joe's mother are all pretty chummy with each other five years after the events of the play, but Joe seems to be pretty much forgotten. Maybe he went to Washington?

* ''[[Macbeth]]''. The witches disappear about halfway through the story and [[Karma Houdini|never get their comeuppance.]] Then there's the matter of what happened to Fleance, although audiences at the time would have understood he was to eventually become king.

* ''[[Cyrano De Bergerac]]'': Did Viscount de Valvert survived his [[Sword Fight]] with Cyrano at Act I Scene IV or not? The last we see about him was that his friends carried him after his defeat, and after a little mention by Roxane at Act II Scene IV, we never heard of him again.

* ''[[The Taming of the Shrew]]'' starts out as a play-within-a-play; a lord and his servants trick a drunken peasant named Christopher Sly into thinking that ''he's'' the lord by dressing him up and waiting on him, telling him that he's been mad for years. They all sit down to watch a play about Katerina and Petruchio...and then they don't show up again. One ending has Sly waking up, convinced that he dreamed the whole thing and eager to try the trick of "taming a shrew" out on his own wife; however, many scholars think that it was added later and that Shakespeare never wrote it.

* Similarly, Adam, beloved [[Old Retainer]] and sidekick of Orlando in ''[[As You Like It]]'', disappears after they arrive in Arden. Since Adam is elderly and nearly starves to death on the journey, some productions imply that he died; scholars speculate that the actor who played him may have needed to double as someone important during the second half of the show. (Whatever Shakespeare's intention was, Adam [[Death by Adaptation|doesn't die in the source material]].)

* Watching the original play version of ''[[Peter Pan]]'', you might wonder, "What happened to that rich cake Hook was going to kill the Lost Boys with"? There are several answers to this question:

** The ''Dark Hunters'' guidebook mentions that Shadow Stealer is currently coming back from a mission and is ready to face his "master", the Shadowed One. It was deemed an irrelevant [[Narrative Filigree]] and never touched upon again.

** The same happened to Aphibax's secret mission to track the events on the island of Voya Nui.

** The book also mentioned that Roodaka had become the ruler of her island and will probably train her people to form an army. What became of it: Nothing, as her island was destroyed by [[Kaiju]], and her status was never touched upon.

** What more, the book revealed the Mana-Ko, formerly believed to be beastial guardians of the [[Big Bad]], were actually secret double agents for the Order (good guys), and would be called into war. The war did happen, but they were never mentioned again.

** Of course, ex-admiral Breya ''is'' made of "political antimatter", as a figure of some status and renown (especially given how loudly Xinchub's attempt to frame her up in the aftermath of Gatekeepers war crashed)... {{spoiler|so the next time she and her cyborg husband appear at an office where Breya's mom stuffed her on condition she will stop hanging around Toughs.}}

* ''[[Sonichu]]'' in spades. The author's wild-running attention span has caused him to start and drop so many plots and characters, it isn't even funny.

 

== Web Original ==

[[Category:Continuity Tropes]]

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