Troperville
Help us survive. All donations are anonymous on the wiki and unacknowledged, as we don't wish to create a hierarchy among Tropers.
Editing
Tools
|
|
|
|
Well, they all said your show was Too Good To Last. You fended off Executive Meddling, and stayed true to your original vision of the series.
Of course, you got cancelled, but that's to be expected. Fortunately, you had plenty of warning and were able to do a Grand Finale. It was a huge spectacle, full of guest stars and special effects and you tied up all the loose ends so that everyone could go home happy with a sense of closure. Nothing left to do now but record the DVD commentary track and sell the props on eBay.
Wait, what's that? The network just called. The fans, bless their hearts, launched the biggest letter-writing campaign ever, and the ratings on the finale were through the roof. They've decided to renew you for another season!
Oh no. What are you going to do now? You killed off Lord Voldemort, got the castways off the mysterious island, got Voyager back to the Alpha Quadrant, sank the Bismarck, resolved all the sexual tension and saved the galaxy. There's nowhere else for the story to go.
But, hey, let's not let that stop you. After all, you got yourself another season. Other producers would kill for a chance like this. Well, Fonzie, you'd better put on your water skiis; it's time to Jump The Shark.
The Post Script Season is what happens when a show is renewed after it's resolved its plot arc. You end up with a season, maybe two, where the show is forced to try out a whole new premise. This seldom goes well. In the first place, you've got to shoehorn these existing characters into a new premise that doesn't quite fit them. Expect Character Derailment. Secondly, you've already had a Grand Finale, and it's going to be hard to top that. You've already shot your dramatic wad. No wonder fans of other media get just a bit of dissonant feelings when they hear about how you threw away a perfectly good ending just because you wanted more.
A form of Retool. Results in Plot Leveling. Compare Trilogy Creep.
Examples:
- Babylon 5 was originally plotted to a five-season arc. When the PTEN syndication network crumbled around it and the show was not renewed for a fifth season, the fourth season storyline was reworked to complete the entire arc. The show was subsequently granted a fifth season, but with almost all of its major plot threads resolved, the fifth season that resulted was much weaker, composed of a lot of stories that had been cut from earlier seasons as they weren't as strong.
- Fortunately, there was enough warning that they managed to save the Grand Finale until the end of the 5th season, and provide a more proper build up to it.
- This isn't entirely accurate. As originally planned, Season 4 would have ended with the episode "Intersections in Real Time" in which Sheridan is being held prisoner by Clark's forces. What actually happened was that "Intersections in Real Time" ended up as the fifth-last episode of the season, and the events which would have wrapped up the main arc of overthrowing President Clark and retaking Earth in early season 5 were squashed into the three episodes "Between the Darkness and the Light", "Endgame" and "Rising Star", followed by the Grand Finale "Sleeping in Light". The story arcs in Season 5 were indeed originally planned for Season 5, but the reason why it was generally weaker than previous seasons was because the developments intended for the season's beginning which were most pertinent to the series as a whole had already been shown in Season 4.
- Earth Final Conflict neatly resolved its entire premise in the penultimate season, wiping out the entire species responsible for the action of the plot. As a result, an entirely new random alien race had to be introduced to keep the plot afloat.
- Blakes Seven ended its third season with the destruction of the Liberator and the (apparent) death of the Big Bad. When the fourth season opened, they had to take the show in a radically different direction to compensate for the changes.
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer killed off its titular character in the fifth season. While this did not actually undermine the premise, the power of the Grand Finale proved impossible to match, and the following season was incredibly lackluster by comparison.
- Not to mention the horribly disjointed uninspired second half of the final (seventh) season. The less said about it the better.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 ended its seventh season by resolving its entire premise, so the eighth season had to begin with a Reset Button, the shifting of the setting five hundred years into the future, and the introduction of a new antagonist. It survived for three more seasons, mostly because the plot of the series was never much more than a Framing Device for the slapstick and snark.
- The X Files faced retool after retool as they tried to wring a few more seasons out after the feature film. The seventh season is particularly guilty of premature closure. It "explained" the conspiracy arc, killed off nearly all the Syndicate antagonists, and perhaps most significantly, resolved the long-running mystery of Mulder's missing sister. Anything after this point falls well and truly into fans' very broad Dis Continuity margin.
- Remington Steele married off Laura and Steele, as the show's cancellation looked certain and Pierce Brosnan had been offered the role of James Bond. However, because Brosnan got the Bond role, NBC decided to renew the show, bringing it back for a very lame half-season which lacked all of the charm of the preceding seasons and effectively scuttling Brosnan's big movie break. Brosnan didn't end up playing Bond for over a decade.
- Sledge Hammer nuked its town in the first season finale, not expecting renewal. With the renewal, the second season was set "five years earlier", with all ongoing plotlines continuing uninterrupted.
- Though it had already lasted about ten seasons, Seventh Heaven in 2006 arguably counts, as it got renewed on the basis of the ratings for its Grand Finale.
- Super Dimension Fortress Macross: When the series was extended by several episodes in the middle of production, the writers added a Postscript Story Arc set After The End.
- Power Rangers was originally a completed series at a mere 40 episodes, with a conclusion similar to Zyu Ranger's (the Japanese basis for the first season) where Rita Repulsa was re-captured and thrown back into space in her dumpster after the defeat of Cyclopsis. However, the explosion in merchandise sales early into the series convinced Saban to pay Toei to film more footage to extend the first season to 60 episodes, as well as enter a contract for adapting whole future seasons. Traces of the original series finale are evident in the VERY choppy Command Center scene at the end of the aired version of "Doomsday Part 2."
- Battlestar Galactica, despite having left its plot arc unresolved at the time of its cancellation, was upon its renewal a year later retooled into Galactica 1980 with disastrous results.
- Similarly, an untimely writer's strike in the final season of the reimagined series forced the creators to bring the plot to a good stopping point halfway through the season, cramming in major plot points and revelations right and left. A Postscript Half Season is in the works for 2009.
- Actually, the writer's strike didn't affect the new BSG at all. The Sci-Fi Channel had announced long before the strike that Season 4 would be split in half, with half the eps aired in 2008 and the other half in 2009, so the producers didn't change or alter anything.
- After an unprecedented (at the time) letter-writing campaign saved Star Trek The Original Series from cancellation, fans were "rewarded" with a third season containing many of the show's weakest and/or goofiest episodes (even by the standards of the series), including the infamous Spock's Brain
 as season premiere. Since the series was always purely episodic, the usual reasons for a lackluster Post Script Season don't apply; instead, the blame goes to creator Roddenberry pretty much abandoning his duties since the show was moved to a Friday... er, Saturday Night Death Slot.
- Stargate SG-1 had this happen twice: The finale at the end of Season 7 was written as a Grand Finale, as the creators wasn't sure the show was going to be picked up, and so was written as a segue into the Spin Off. However, Season 8 was picked up, and at at the end it was again unclear whether the series would continue, so the end of the season was once again devised to close the book on the series: Both major galactic threats were taken away (interestingly, before the Grand Finale), and then the series ended with a return to the storyline of the Motion Picture, involving time-traveling to ancient Egypt. The show was then picked up again, and through a Re Tool had a mostly different cast and a new Big Bad in season 9 and 10 (at which point, the series has actually been cancelled).
- It continues in two made-for-DVD add-on movies to its tenth season, and also kinda sorta in Stargate Atlantis, as some of the SG-1 actors were added to the Atlantis cast.
- Sea Quest DSV also had this happen twice. It was not known if the show would be renewed, so at the end of the first season, they destroyed the Sea Quest. The show was picked up, so there was a Re Tool and a new Sea Quest was constructed. Then at the end of the second season, facing a similar situation, the Sea Quest was transported to another planet and then destroyed. The show was picked up, so it was renamed Sea Quest 2032 and moved ten years into the future. Partway into season three, it was Cut Short.
- Justice League Unlimited finished its plot arc in its second season, ending with an epilogue to the entire DC Animated Universe, set after Batman Beyond. The series went on for one more season, however, with an entirely different storyline involving Luthor and Grodd forming the Legion of Doom; however, unlike many other examples on this list, it managed to maintain its high quality until the end. The series' creators have stated that they made every season finale a possible Grand Finale, since they never knew whether or not they would get another season.
- Teen Titans also got renewed for one additional season (season five) that year. The suprise of this development could be seen in that the three-part finale for season four was titled simply "The End".
- Kim Possible's Season 4 is another rare but undeniable Post Script Season success. With its Grand Finale and the Official Couple now officially going out, the creators have made note how hard they had to work to make sure the show didn't do any shark jumping.
- Only Fools And Horses: The British sitcom about two poor wheeler-dealer street-market trader brothers ended after 8 years with the Trotter brothers finding an antique watch in their garage, and becoming millionaires at last. The three episode finale, where the Trotters are finally shown in luxury penthouses and expensive sports cars, was shown over Christmas 1996 and attracted massive viewing figures for The BBC. On the strength of this popularity they convinced writer John Sullivan to reprise the characters for three more Christmas Episodes over the next six years. Having the Trotters lose their fortune in a stock market crash and return to their original lifestyle, the specials were panned by critics and viewers alike, and no more have been produced since 2003.
- For those who took Latin in high school, one can't help but wonder if the writers of the Cambridge Latin Course textbook thought they wouldn't get their contracts renewed after Book I. Vesuvius blows and everybody dies, Caecilius dying onscreen and his son's fate left in question... until next semester. Also, Book IV had a lot of filler arcs, don't you think? Who cares about Those Two Guys at Bath and random weddings? Get back to Salvius and his evil!
- Megaman X5 ended the Megaman X story and left Zero Killed Off For Real. Capcom produced a sequel anyway, without Keiji Inafune's involvement. X6's mostly pointless story tried to combine all 3 of X5's endings, used one of the worst Ass Pulls ever to bring Zero back, and demoted Big Bad Sigma to Anticlimax Boss status. It even included a robot shark for easy jumping purposes. Dis Continuity was inevitable.
- The less said of Axl, and the 2 further sequels, the better.
- Doesn't anyone like Axl? Dang it.
- There's also the fact that X5 was supposed to lead up to the Zero series.
- Halo 3 suffered from a variation on this. The developers have been very frank in saying that a need to meet a publisher-enforced deadline for Halo 2 not only deprived them of much-needed game polishing time and various chunks of gameplay, but forced them to cut off the game's actual ending. They had to come up with a way to pad out a game's third act into an entire new, console-selling, killer-app extravagansa. They didn't do a bad job gameplay-wise, but the storyline suffered from the resolution of most of the plot points in the previous title.
- The last (fifth) season of Angel The Series was arguably a Post Script Season, albeit one that was foreshadowed in the last minutes of the final episode of the fourth season. The huge story arc of the third and fourth seasons had come to a close. The fifth season not only had a completely different setting (the evil law firm Wolfram & Hart), several characters were retooled (Gunn had lawyer knowledge mystically implanted in his head, Fred was killed and replaced by the ancient demon Illyria who inhabited her body), Wesley and Cordelia also didn't survive the final season, everyone except Angel had their memories of Connor erased and replaced by a false past, and Spike from Buffy The Vampire Slayer was added as as regular cast member even though he had had his redemptive sacrificial death scene during the final episode of Buffy. Not to mention that the fifth season ended on an unresolved Cliffhanger with slim chances of survival for the remaining characters. Presumably the series' creator Joss Whedon intended this as a gesture of defiance to the networks.
- What you say here is not really fair. The whole Illyria thing happens two-thirds into the season, and the Wesley thing happens in the last episode. Although I agree the show's nature changed, I just do not think this is a bad thing. And after all the things you said, remember that Joss managed to continue the story in the comic book Angel: After the Fall.
- GaoGaiGar had an OVA which retconned the titular mecha's original purpose of construction from "fighting the Zonders" to "fighting the new A God Am I villain we just came up with". It actually went a lot better than it sounds, largely owing to sheer force of over-the-top-itude.
- GUNNM: Last Order might be seen as that, because when road accident forced Yukito Kishiro to Wrap It Up, he tacked a Happy Ending onto the series and left it for half a decade, until he returned to it in Last Order. However, as the Postscript Season is at this moment even longer than the original series, and it completely disregarded said happy ending, it is more like a cross between the sequel and the Revival now.
- 'Prison Break' suffered from this, after the first two seasons were done, all the main plot points were tied up and the bittersweet ending finished. Then they got a third season and had to continue from Michael's escape from sona, which originally was a 'viewer decides whether he eventually gets out or not and what he does after that' ending. The resulting season was noticeably lower quality than the other two.
- 'Red Dwarf' suffered from this as well. Dissatisfied with the sixth season and feeling that he'd said all he wanted to on the show, co-writer Rob Grant departed the show. His writing partner Doug Naylor wanted to carry on, but the momentum of production was broken for three years by one of the leading stars of the show going though a court case. When the show eventually came back, it had a bigger budget (mostly spent on appalling CGI), new (generally inexperienced) co-writers and was no longer filmed in front of a live studio audience, whilst the Season 6 cliffhanger was handwaved away in a burst of technobabble in the first episode. Season 7 was promptly panned by critics and fans alike. An only marginally better eighth season did not help reverse the show's fortunes, and despite strong ratings and another cliffhanger ending it disappeared from TV altogether.
|
|
