Labouring The Point - Television Tropes & Idioms

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Labouring The Point

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alt title(s): Laboring The Point

Labouring The Point occurs when an author/writer/director adds several more plot points to the story to try to keep things interesting, even though the reader has already figured out how it's going to end. For all intents and purposes, it probably did end several pages/episodes ago, but there's always that one niggling thing the author wants to get out to complete the tale, pointlessness of the future events be damned.

Another, more subjective variant is when the story clearly isn't over, but the author has killed off a major character or fan favourite in the story already, or solved the mystery that concerned the reader most. The result is that the reader loses interest in anything else that happens after that ("Right, that's it, Alice is dead and I don't care what happened to Bob"). This is why many authors save character deaths for the end of their story.

May result from a poorly-timed Not So Fast Bucko moment, or from a director who simply decided to Leave The Camera Running.

Examples:

The second arc of Death Note after L's death is accused of this... Tsugumi Ohba wanted the story to have exactly One Hundred And Eight chapters, so on came the padding.
Ditto the second half of Fushigi Yuugi.
Subjective variant: Barbara Hambly's Knight of the Demon Queen dispensed with Jenny the witch and Morkeleb the dragon three quarters of the way through the story. They were the main characters in the first book of the series, despite other side characters taking on major roles later on. Readers that were really only interested in these two protagonists might well have found the real ending of the book rather boring and pointless as a result. The pair return though, in the next book.
Most viewers lost interest in Twin Peaks after the identity of the killer was revealed to the audience, even though the characters hadn't yet figured it out.
Orson Scott Card has written that he feels that the endings to his novels Ender's Game and Songmaster are too long and drawn out, continuing to cover various events even though the story is basically over. (This troper didn't particularly notice.)
The Scouring of the Shire from The Lord Of The Rings can feel like this. Granted, this is clearly one of the more subjective variants, often depending on whether the reader in question liked the book for in The Quest, the Return Of The King, The Heros Journey, or a combination of the above.
- This troper thinks it's a nice bonus story.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 subject Soultaker is pretty decent as far as films shown on the series go, but it really takes its time ending. The worst part is the continuous cuts to a closeup of a clock, long after it no longer matters what time it is.
Mike: "Oh, the clock doesn't figure at all! Stop showing the clock! You spent that nickel already."