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Chris: But mom, what's dad gonna do about a job? Lois: Well Chris, you remember that episode of The Honeymooners where Ralph lost his job but at the end he didn't get it back? Peter: Oh yeah, that always bugged the crap outta me. What was up with that? [roll credits]
Similar to the Reset Button, except that the writers make no attempt to get rid of the plotline's ramifications by story's end. Instead, things are back to normal by the start of the next episode with no explanation.
Repeated use of Snapback may, for good or bad, cause Negative Continuity. For use of Snap Backs from a character's ( non)- developmental point of view, see Aesop Amnesia.
Compare I Got Better. See also Continuity Reboot and Status Quo is God.
Examples:
Anime
- The plotlines of Urusei Yatsura frequently devolve into total chaos — accompanied by either massive property damage or a run-from-the-lynch-mob chase scene — but the chaos is always resolved offscreen between episodes.
- The other half of the plots end up with something apparently permanent happening to Ataru: getting split into two exact clones, or getting trapped in an alternate dimension, or getting his house overrun with mirror-demons, just to name a few. All of these consequences always end offscreen by the next chapter.
- Ranma ˝. Twice in the series Ranma learns advanced and absolutely devastating martial arts techniques — the Hiryuu Shoten Ha and the Moko Takabisha — but when their plotlines are over we never see them again. (Well, not until the Ranma movies...) In the manga, however, he continues to make use of the techniques, probably because drawing a tornado or energy blast that takes up one panel to half a page is much easier than animating them.
- To be fair, they didn't actually show up in the stories after they were first introduced in the manga all that often either. Most of the stories where Ranma went up against major-league opponents, and was thusly required to use them, came out after the anime was cancelled.
- The series also had plenty of romance-related snapbacks, usually whenever it looked like someone might finally make some romantic headway, or Ranma might drift away from Akane Tendo.
- Itoshiki apparently dies in one episode of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei and runs away after being unable to figure out if he is really himself in another. He's back next episode without explanation.
- He actually is killed by his female "admirers" in the class in the middle of one episode in Zan, and is alive in the next scene. Maybe it never happened? Maybe he just got better? Does it matter?
- Of course, this is Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei we're talking about.
- The Team Rocket trio gets this in Pokémon, arguably in every episode that ends with them blasting off again, but three notable instances early on in the series stand out: 1) Attack of the Prehistoric Pokémon in which they are last shown sealed inside a cave with the aforementioned Pokémon, who were previously implied to be aggressive predators. 2) Abra and the Psychic Showdown, in which Jessie and James are left paralyzed for the entirety of the episode after an encounter with Sabrina's doll, and 3) Viva Las Lapras, in which Team Rocket is arrested at the end, in one of the few times in the entire series (the previous time it happened had a scene where they dug out of prison). Cassidy and Butch have gone to jail several times, but it's usually stated that Giovanni springs for their release, something he's unlikely to do for Jessie and James.
- Mugen, Jin, and Fuu die in one episode of Samurai Champloo. This episode is never mentioned again and the characters are alive again in the next episode. This is never explained.
- One early filler episode of Fairy Tail has Natsu, Loke, Gray, Lucy, Erza, and Happy all swap bodies, then learn they have half an hour to reverse the spell before the effects become permanent. With Levy's help they figure out how to undo the spell in the last minute, but there's only time to return Lucy and Gray to normal, and Levy accidentally swaps the whole rest of the guild while she's doing this. The episode promptly ends, and everything is back to normal the next time, in spite of them referencing it in a non-filler episode later.
- In a chapter of Franken Fran, Officer Kuhou is surgically transformed into a Cute Monster Girl. A few chapters later, she is seen as a human again, with no explanation about how she was turned back.
- The character Officer Kuhou in that and later stories maybe a clone, she stated she self that she doesn't know if she is the original in chapter 21 page 13.
Officer Kuhou: I Remember! Am I Real!? Am I A Clone!?,
Franken Fran: calm down, calm down. Its all the same.
Comic Books
- Grant Morrison's run on JLA is rather infamous for its rather extreme snapbacks. Premised on the idea of the JLA being an allegory for a pantheon of gods, it was decided that the JLA (being made up of seven of the heaviest of the heavy-hitters in the DCU; Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, & Martian Manhunter) would only tackle huge, often literally world-shattering events. Threats included but were not limited to: an assault on Earth (okay, San Francisco) by renegade angels from Heaven, a war between two nigh-omnipotent djinn that threw the Earth and moon around like basketballs, not one but two mass invasions by White Martians, and (as a grand finale) a massive galaxy-killing superweapon that was defeated by granting temporary superpowers to THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF EARTH. The snapback from that final arc (awesome though it is) is enough to give you whiplash.
- What needs to be explained? The entire human race had Superman level powers so they could fix the damage they'd caused then their powers disappeared. The heroes had already contained the major conflicts and Maggeddon hadn't actually reached earth yet. His only influence was heightening aggression.
- The Donald Duck & Co universe is notorious for this. No matter how extreme the events in a story, they're nearly always somehow undone at the end and never referred to in any later tale. The protagonists may be run out of town, Duckburg may be the victim of a natural disaster, or astronomers may discover that behind our Moon there is a smaller moon of pure gold, but when the next story starts, all of the events have been magically undone. The most obvious example is Uncle Scrooge's money bin, which is completely destroyed countless times. Some things seem to be unalterable, though — while Scrooge may lose his money bin, the Beagle Boys never seem to be able to steal his money (except, ironically, in their very first appearance).
Film
- The first Transformers film has Bumblebee regaining his ability to speak. In the next two, he's again talking in sound bytes without explanation. Also, the films keep ending with a very public battle between a ton of robots that no Weirdness Censor could possibly cover up, and yet the Transformers are back to being a secret only conspiracy theorists believe in by the next film.
Literature
Live-Action TV
- Both played straight and subverted on NBC's Medium: while every episode, and indeed the entire premise of the show, is about how Alison has significant dreams, every time she wakes up from a dream and is upset, her husband Joe tells her to go back to sleep, because it was "just a dream". However, in the episode where their youngest daughter Marie requires glasses, she does indeed wear them again the next episode.
- MST3K often does the Snap Back within the episode itself. One episode had Mike turned into a small, ventriloquist dummy-esque robot in the second host segment due to the effects of a wormhole the SOL was traveling through, and stayed that way until the next commercial break. Right after the break, he returns to normal with no more explanation than "I'm back!"
- Of course, the most common example of Snap Back on MST3K was Frank getting killed by Dr. Forrester. In every case, he was back in the next episode, looking none the worse for wear. When Frank left the show, Dr. F sang a touching song called "Who Will I Kill?", and in an episode of Cinematic Titanic, Frank lampshades it by saying blithely, "In my experience, you can die and then come right back in the next episode."
- Star Trek: Spock steals the secret of the Romulan cloaking device, but the Federation never develops their own or learns how to counter it until the time of the next series. In a later Re Vision, it is explained that Starfleet has a treaty with the Romulans forbidding them from developing cloaking technology.
- Surely it would be quicker to mention the times that Star Trek DIDN'T do this? Big character events, like Miles O'Brien mentally living through a 20-year prison sentence, or Picard recovering from Cardassian torture, or pretty much any time any new phenomenon/discovery/ technology is integral to the plot, are completely forgotten and everything is back to the status quo by next episode. Even the death of Kirk's son went completely unmentioned for two movies. The one notable exception to this would be Picard's assimilation by the Borg, which returned repeatedly to haunt him over the years.
- Also, Tasha Yar. For a while. But not that long a while.
- Tasha is one of the hardest aversions in television, especially given how little consequence her death was to the plot of the episode. She was remembered and mentioned in several episodes including the series finale. It seems to have had the greastest impact on Data who briefly had a "relationship" with her in the second episode, something he references during First Contact after the series finale (though he didn't reference her by name, only in terms of how long it had been since the last time he'd been physically intimate.)
- A strange example: "Isaac and Ishmael", the third season opener to The West Wing, was prepared as a Very Special Episode reacting to the 9/11 attacks. During the opening sequence, the actors, out of character, outright state that the episode is "a storytelling aberration", and that the audience should not try to fit it into the series Story Arc. The episode falls right in the middle of a Cliff Hanger, and series continuity proceeds directly from the preceding episode, "Two Cathedrals", to the next, "Manchester". While later episodes imply that the events of the episode are not, strictly speaking, non-canonical, they emphatically do not occur at any specific point in the series continuity.
- On Saved by the Bell, Zach Morris works to understand a girl and her father who are very stand-offish in a Two-Part Episode. As it turns out, they're homeless and live in Bayside after it closes each day. There's a bit of a Tear Jerker conclusion when Zach allows both of them to live in his house...whereupon they are never seen nor mentioned by anyone again.
- In the final episode of Series 1 of the The IT Crowd, Jen sleeps with Moss, Roy sleeps with Moss's then-girlfriend (who also happens to look just like Roy's mother), and Richmond sleeps with the head of the company, Denholm Reynholm. Everything is back to normal at the start of Series 2.
- Several character, but especially Baltar, in the new Battlestar Galactica series. Multiple early episodes end with him being convinced he is an instrument of God, while he's dismissive of the notion again at the start of the next episode.
- On Seinfeld, Jerry and Elaine attempt to maintain a sexual relationship in addition to their friendship. This naturally backfires, and the end of the episode appears to be Jerry and Elaine's friendship reaching an abrupt end. By the next episode, it's like nothing ever happened.
- This is due to Larry David thinking it would be the series finale. He'd always been against hooking Jerry and Elaine up, and only did it as a present to the execs on his way out. When the show was unexpectedly renewed, everyone agreed it was best to just sweep everything under the rug.
- On iCarly, Sam spends an episode doing a Girliness Upgrade because she's worried guys (and Pete, specifically) don't like her because she's too much of a tomboy. In the end, Sam has to give in to that tomboyish side to protect Carly from a bully. Pete and her end up walking out together because he likes a girl who can kick butt. He's never heard of again.
- In the second episode of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, after Liz goes crazy and tries to kill everyone, she is given a lobotomy to remove her Psychic Powers. The next episode, she still has her psychic abilities, like nothing happened. Not that the show strives for continuity...
Video Games
- At the end of Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst, you see a picture of the cleansed and cheerful Ravenhearst Manor. At the start of "Return To Ravenhearst", not only is it back to being a creepy, trash-filled house loaded with bizarre door locks, but it's been that way long enough for the local town council to have condemned the building.
Web Comics
- Goats used this trope to allow the comic to continue after frustrated aliens annihilated the Earth on a whim, killing or destroying everything relevant to the comic's canon. However, when the Earth conveniently returns after a week of guest comics, the characters remember everything (in the first comic after the Earth's destruction, a character asks, "Remember that time the Earth was destroyed?") making it either a lampshaded or subverted trope, depending on how you look at it.
- Penny Arcade does this a lot, but in a particularly notable storyline, one of the two protagonists accidentally kills his wife using a technique he learned from a video game, and goes on to win $20,000,000 in a lawsuit. The Snap Back is described in the protagonist's own words thusly: "Money's gone. In my grief, I paid a mad scientist twenty million for a cybernetic replica of my dead wife. It was my wish that it look, feel, and behave just as she did." The next panel keeps it from qualifying as the Reset Button, as said replica is simply a bucket on roller skates, and his wife does indeed return without explanation.
- They almost never use continuity. Jokes and character traits, as well as characters can repeat, but they even once cancelled the final strip of a 3-part arc for fear of creating continuity. 3-part arcs are the longest anyone gets one Penny Arcade that aren't called Twilo, Casp or the Cardboard Tube Samurai.
- Bob the Angry Flower is mostly a series of one-shots with very weak continuity. Since Bob is both powerful and amoral, it could be no other way. But one of the books includes a UN Field Guide to Bob and his various weapons and devices, which lampshades the lack of continuity and justifies it as the diligent efforts of the government. (Never let Bob near the button that blows up the Earth, since we barely managed to put it back together and ressurrect everybody last time.)
- Subverted and lampshaded during the transition betweenThe Apple of Discord (a joke-a-day comic that had been heavy on Snap Back) to the spinoff comic, Apple Valley (an ongoing story comic with little-to-no Snap Back that grew out of Ao D) . Several characters go out drinking, only to wake up several states away from home with no idea where they are or how to get home. Thinking the 'joke' done, they wait around for the comic to return to normal, and are horrified when it doesn't and they realize they now have to walk home.
- On +EV, Harold won a lot of money and lost it again, lost weight and gained it again... and so on.
Web Original
- In The Motley Two, one of these happened some time in the past, due to unknown temporal chicanery. Subverted In the effects do not go unnoticed by the general populace.
Western Animation
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