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"Every question met with another question. Never an answer. Only 'why?'" — Mohinder Suresh, Heroes
Inability of viewers to trust that a new show will solve all the (in-show) mysteries it promises to. Named for Chris Carter, creator of The X Files, and the spectacular failure of said show to offer any sort of resolution or even continuity.
See also Kudzu Plot for the webcomics version of this trope.
Examples:
- Lost. At any given time, exactly half of its fanbase will believe that the show's creators are making the next Twin Peaks and have no idea what endgame they desire, while the other half will argue that the threads are finally coming together, and a satisfactory revelation is all but guaranteed. Both halves are almost certainly wrong.
- Now that ABC has signed a deal that extends Lost to definite endpoint in 2010 and there are a set number of episodes in between now and then, they can't possibly screw it up! Right? Right?
- This strip
 of Order Of The Stick takes a subtle jab at this.
- Suspected contributor to the failure of The Lone Gunmen
- Demonstrated failure of Twin Peaks. But really, what did they expect from David Lynch? Writer and committed Lynch fan David Foster Wallace opined in an essay that the second season of Twin Peaks was some of the best television he'd ever watched, in that it was some of the worst television he'd ever watched. If you watch it all in a row, it's pretty clear that it's one long nervous breakdown on the part of David Lynch as he realizes there's no way in hell he can fulfill any of the promises he made to the viewers with season one. The desperation is palpable. Executive Meddling was only the start of its problems.
- Perhaps the ultimate example is The Prisoner, which posed lots of ongoing questions — Who runs the Village? Why did Number Six resign? Who is Number One? — but ended with an utterly incomprehensible Grand Finale that answered none of them.
- Notable exception: Despite its arc-based, tangled, and often mysterious storylines, Heroes has (so far) gotten surprisingly little response along these lines. It would seem that the show's creators have figured out the ideal "answer/new question" ratio to keep the audience's trust while still maintaining the mystery. (Hint to prospective TV show creators: after the first few episodes, it's about one.) This may be changing with the second season.
- Now that the third season has started, it's safe to say that's gone out the window. To be fair, they are posing several new questions that seem to be answerable in the course of the season, as opposed to Lost. Not to mention that, though the second season was cut short by a writer's strike, the team still managed to wrap up the season and leave very few unanswered questions, the one big one being "Who shot Nathan?"
- Another exception: Babylon 5, another arc-based Sci Fi show, also managed this quite well. There are many mysteries, but the characters realize they're mysteries and work towards finding answers to them. Like Heroes, it often had an answer/new question ratio of one, with nearly every big reveal episode also introducing new questions based on that reveal. e.g. "What happened to Sinclair at the Battle of the Line?" was answered reasonably quickly, but it really just replaced the question with "Why was Sinclair captured, scanned, mindwiped, and put back in his ship at the Battle of the Line?".
- Babylon 5's spin-off Crusade, however, didn't manage so well. It spent half a season creating mysteries to solve later in its planned five year arc, and then got canceled. Whoops.
- Webcomic example: El Goonish Shive appears to be heading towards this; there are questions from the first couple of years that appear to have been ignored for the sake of adding more mysteries. Not helped by the fact that one storyline, wherein more or less the entire cast changed genders for a party took the greater part of a year to be spit out. This, combined with the update schedule changing from "weekly" to "M-W-F" to "whenever" didn't help. Although it is back to a M-W-F schedule there are more dangling plot threads then ever, there are at least eleven unresolved as the time of this edit.
- Literary Example: Robert Jordan's Doorstopper series The Wheel Of Time spent so many books getting more and more complicated, that it seemed impossible for anyone to ever wrap everything up. Jordan himself stated that he would conclude the series with book 12 "whether it's 15,000 pages, Tor has to invent a new binding system, or it comes with its own library cart," since it was very unlikely that he could write a coherent thirteenth book. Robert Jordan's death shortly before finishing the last book sure isn't going to help matters — Brandon Sanderson, the writer tapped to finish the series in Jordan's stead, has revealed that the only partially-completed Book 12 is already longer than many of Sanderson's solo efforts.
- Anime examples: Neon Genesis Evangelion and The Big O. The Big O never got to complete the overall story that was planned, but it's hard to believe that it really would have suddenly started explaining all the bizarre events and cryptic utterances that were being built up continuously over the first 26 episodes; NGE, meanwhile, led to enough speculation, supplemental material and enough Mind Screwing confusion to fill 175 pages of Wikipedia articles.
- Webcomic example: Megatokyo. Ever since the original writer left, the comic (and its update schedule) has slowed down, alternating between adding more and more generic Anime-trope subplots and focusing more and more on the Author Avatar main character and his random Japanese voice actress's relationship rather than finishing up previous story mentions. This carried on for so long that people were honestly shocked when the latest chapter suddenly revisited the zombie invasion and began to drop enormous clues as to the true nature and powers of Epileptic Tree-bait Miho.
- Also by Chris Carter, Millennium is a good example of this. The show got increasingly bizarre and difficult to follow as it went on, and the end of the third season (the last one filmed, and for good reason) provided no closure at all. Each season had a different show runner(s), each with a very different idea of what the show should be and no one from above willing to set boundaries.
- The 2000 Battlestar Galactica series seems to be falling to this, to the point that the tagline used in trailers for the fourth season is "All will be revealed." So far, not so much. Several new questions have been raised, though. The Fifth of the Final Five?
- Not to mention that from the beginning we've been told that the Cylons have a plan, but the last few seasons have made clear that they (and the writers) are just making it up as they go.
- Indeed the 'They have a plan' bit has been dropped from each episode's opening as of late as it has become clear that while the Cylons did have plans, several in fact, they have been totally thrown out the window as events in the series have developed and now no side has a firm plan and is just reacting to the chaos that has emerged, particularly with the Enemy Civil War among the Cylons. Whoever it is that has a plan (and something has clearly been manipulating events, as acknowledged by the characters), it isn't a plan the Cylons can claim as theirs alone.
- Harry Potter. Before the last book came out, fans were already commenting that it would have to be a thousand pages long to answer all the questions J.K. Rowling had promised it would.
- Many of the plot elements from the first season of lonelygirl15 seem to have been completely forgotten. Cassie, anyone?
- KateModern is much more successful in this regard, but still left a few threads hanging at the end.
- Averted by Veronica Mars. Rob Thomas stuck to keeping season-long mysteries exactly a season long. Perhaps in a Take That to Twin Peaks, he said viewers would know who killed Lilly Kane at the end of Season 1. And he stuck to it!
- Sluggy Freelance, by Pete Abrams, suffers from this. Abrams has spent the past ten years building up an elaborate plot with multiple subthreads and Loads And Loads Of Characters. Given the sheer volume of plot and the style of the webcomic, it would take years of strips to resolve all the dangling plot threads to the audience's satisfaction. It also doesn't help that, in an attempt to avert Cerebus Syndrome, Abrams deliberately writes in long story arcs of comics that are more or less pure humor. The current arc is a good example: An extended parody of World Of Warcraft with no obvious connection to any other major aspect of the plot. It probably makes for a better comic, but it also makes readers wonder if the plot is ever going to be resolved.
- We're getting there with Burn Notice. The second season ended teasing the same reveal it teased at the end of the first, and we still don't know much of anything about who "burned" Michael or why. It's entertaining enough watching Michael smack around drug dealers and loan sharks, but we could use just a little information here.
- Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler deliberately exploited this.
- Sort of inverted in Avatar The Last Airbender. Most fans were absolutely confident that the writers would neatly resolve all the loose ends, especially the ones they made great big deals out of. But at the end of it all where is Zuko's mommy?
- Sequel Hook? Or is that just wishful thinking?
- Word Of God says that finding Ursa deserved its own story, so... maybe.
- Many of the plot elements related to the Spider-Totem introduced by J Michael Straczynski during his run on Spider-Man from 2001 to 2007 gave readers a lot of doubletalk and mystical mumbo-jumbo, but very little in the way of concrete resolution, like exactly why Peter had to "evolve", why one cosmic entity wanted to bring him back from the dead while another thought he should stay deceased, the mysterious entities that resurrected Mysterio and Miss Arrow and what they wanted with Peter, etc. None of this was ever really explained.
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