Trapped By Mountain Lions / Live-Action TV

• 24:
  • The Trope Namer is Kim's bizarre subplot in Season 2, in which she encounters a cougar in an event that Makes Just as Much Sense in Context,^note (Kim's only actually trapped by the cougar for about five minutes of screentime spread out across two episodes; however, this sets up what's widely agreed as the low point of the season, namely her becoming the unwitting prisoner of a lovesick survivalist. This in turn leads to an almost-as-derided subplot where she gets caught in a convenience store hold-up, though that one's at least vaguely related to the overall storyline, depicting the start of the civil unrest that lasts through the remainder of the season) which has almost no overlap with the main plot of Jack tracking down a nuclear bomb that's set to blow up Los Angeles, and exists mainly because Elisha Cuthbert was contracted to appear in every episode of the season, even though the writers had no idea how to involve her in the main story. This was so derided that it was brought up in Cuthbert's next series, Happy Endings.
    Penny: What if you were, like, stuck in a trap in the woods and, like, a cougar was trying to eat you? Would you date?
    Alex: That's insane. Why would that even happen?
    Penny: I have no idea, forget that. 'Cause maybe your dad is the head of some elite counter-terrorist unit and he has 24 hours to—I don't know! The point is, would you date?
  • The first season was originally going to have Teri Bauer falling asleep for a few episodes (thanks to the show's Real Time format), since her storyline ended once she escaped from the terrorists that had captured her. However, the producers demanded that she stay in the show and so she ended up contracting amnesia and walking around not doing much for a few hours instead.
  • Jack's heroin addiction is given a lot of focus in the first half of season 3 without having any real impact on the plot, before being unceremoniously dropped halfway through.
  • Season 5 turns this on its head when a seemingly pointless subplot involving Lynn's drug addict sister ends up causing his keycard to fall into enemy hands, which in turn allows them to attack CTU.
  • Season 6's story arc regarding Morris' alcoholism has similarly been identified as pointless by some fans.
  • Dana being blackmailed by her redneck ex-boyfriend in the first half of Season 8 has nothing to do with anything, and makes her being The Mole seem like a complete Ass Pull since if she was Evil All Along, she clearly would have just killed him instead of giving in to so many of his demands.
  • The Indian adaptation has one in the first season itself. Because Kim's story is split between Kiran and Veer, we have Veer needlessly fooling around escorting an unknown girl home, getting lynched by drug traders, caught in a drug bust and starting a fight in captivity, only to be released with help from his military school major- when he becomes relevant to the plot.
• Angel's season 2 episode "Dear Boy" counts if the viewer has already watched the parent show. It features a couple of flashbacks to when Angelus sired Drusilla - that don't actually have anything to do with the episode's main plot. Of course for people who only watched Angel, the flashbacks are there to foreshadow that Drusilla would later appear on the show.
• Arrow has Ollie's sister Thea (who's halfway between a Canon Foreigner and a Related in the Adaptation version of Mia Dearden) seeming rather irrelevant early on, thanks to none of her loved ones wanting to get her involved in plot-relevant business. While she interacts with the rest of the cast more than such examples, her appearances are usually scenes having nothing to do with the rest of the story, in which she gets bailed out of something by Ollie and then gives him a speech that basically amounts to "My lifestyle is all your fault for having been trapped on a deserted island for years, then having the gall to have a life outside me once you got back." Thea did get some hefty Character Development when she had to work alongside Laurel, a storyline that also introduced Roy Harper (Oliver's future sidekick), but she's still distanced from the main plot, and is a ways away from joining in her bro's line of work.
  • No longer the case as of Season 3. At the beginning of the season she is revealed to have become an Action Girl during her time with her dad, Malcolm Merlyn. Then it is revealed in the midseason finale "The Climb," that she was brainwashed into killing Sara in the Season premiere. In Season 3 Episode 13, "Canaries," Oliver reveals to her that he is the Arrow and responds with nothing but gratitude at the lives he saved. In the next episode she learns that she was brainwashed into killing Sara. By the end of Season when Roy has left Starling City, she has joined her brother's line of work by embracing the identity of Speedy, thus leaving this trope once and for all.
• Although lauded for its dense plot, Babylon 5 has several major, galaxy-wide A-Plots interspersed with B-Plots; while they might be of great consequence to a specific character, they are trivial in the scheme of things. Chicago native Dr. Franklin resigns from his post as head physician in wartime to go on an Australian rite of passage? (The "Walkabout".) Though conveniently not on Earth; in the bowels of Brown Sector, which is teeming with hobos and lowlifes, where he predictably gets stabbed almost to death. After attempting to break up a gang brawl. While unarmed. Even Franklin criticizes Franklin for his involvement in this plot.
• In Bates Motel, once Dylan stops living with Norman and Norma and moves out on his own he becomes far less important. He has his own subplot about running a pot farm, and connecting with his long lost dad, and later he hooks up with Emma, another superfluous character, but all of it has tangential connection to the main story of Norman Slowly Slipping Into Evil.
• Better Call Saul can come off a bit like this. The show is as much about Jimmy McGill's descent into Saul Goodman as it is Mike Ehrmantraut's rise to Gus Fring's enforcer. Although both plots are well-received, they also rarely interact with each other until season 5, when Lalo Salamanca becomes a threat that ties together the two plot threads.
• Breaking Bad: Skyler's affair with Ted feels like this initially, seemingly being just an escape, between having to hide the truth about the situation from Junior, Hank and Marie, and dealing with Walt's increasingly erratic behavior. And then she gives Ted all of Walt's money...
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Exploited in an A Day in the Limelight "The Zeppo" following Xander as he finds himself in a comical series of completely unrelated misadventures while his friends are off literally preventing the apocalypse and fighting the greatest battle of their lives. The episode title is a reference to Zeppo of The Marx Brothers, who was used as a foil for his brothers, despite being regarded as the funniest in real life.
• The "New Cap City" storyline of Caprica was accused of this, being less interesting than other plotlines that were stalled at the time and home to some strange Fridge Logic as well. However, some interesting ideas were introduced- such as "New Cap City" being a Black Box of unknown purpose- and Tamara and Joseph received significant Character Development. It might have proved to be more important later on if the show hadn't been canceled.
• In Chuck especially in the later seasons any Buy More employees subplot is at serious risk of falling into this. While sometimes they tie back to the main plot in an interesting manner or manage to stand on their own, often they're just there, because the show's always been set in Buy More and so they have to have Buy More subplots. One example is that week's Greta being stalked by Jeff and Lester. Morgan tells them off, they don't stop, she threatens them, Morgan has to intervene, she tells him that their operation is unprofessional. Casey steps in to defend Morgan, giving their relationship a tiny bit of development that could have been gained by any other method, and she leaves. Jeff and Lester's behavior doesn't affect the main characters. Greta's presence has nothing to do with the main plot—it's pretty much just an excuse to have Adam Baldwin tell Summer Glau that he doesn't care what crew she's been on before.
• In Colony, there is Will's efforts to ingratiate himself with the collaborators in the hopes of getting his son back, Katie's efforts to ingratiate herself with the resistance in order to keep them from killing Will... and then there's Maddie trying to ingratiate herself with a cultural minister in order to get insulin for her son.
• Daredevil (2015) season 2 has a lengthy case of this. Once Elektra is introduced, Matt moves into her plot line, leaving Karen and Foggy to keep the Punisher storyline going. But there's very little interaction between the two plotlines, outside of Madame Gao (retroactively as of Iron Fist (2017)) and a retroactive one through Wilson Fisk, causing this trope.
• Dexter:
  • In the fourth and fifth seasons, Angel Batista and Maria LaGuerta's romance has absolutely nothing to do with the show's main arc, and many viewers find the banality overwhelming. The same goes for Deb and Quinn's romance in Season 5 and 6, which mostly just distracted from Deb's own development.
  • Season 8 was particularly criticized for this, with subplots focusing on Quinn's (failed) attempts at becoming a Sergeant and an odd amount of time spent on Masuka's daughter.
• Doctor Who was forced to use a lot of Padding in earlier seasons, a lot of which can come off as this:
  • "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" has a filler episode which, instead of focusing on Barbara's plan to destroy the Daleks, mostly followed Susan making her way through a sewer pipe and getting attacked by alligators played by some rather ropey stock footage, and Ian fighting a rather unconvincing rubber suit monster which is supposedly a Dalek pet, comes from nowhere and is never seen again (especially annoying when what makes Daleks so effective is that they have never looked like people in rubber suits).
  • The early Peter Davison stories occasionally suffered from this. Having populated the TARDIS with the trio of Adric, Nyssa and Tegan, it was obvious that most of the script authors then struggled to find useful things for these people to do. Adric perhaps came out worse out of this situation, changing from a mathematical genius when first introduced the season before to one that spent large amounts of most episodes assaulting a buffet table.
  • The second half of "Spyfall" has series companions Yaz, Graham and Ryan on the run from one of the episode's villains; they don't manage to affect the A-plot in any way, just survive until the Doctor shows up to save them.
• The Bryce-Keiko subplot on FlashForward. Although it had one or two heartwarming moments, the bottom line was that it was a subplot about the main character's estranged wife's coworker (who also has terminal cancer, which is rarely mentioned) and his futile search for the Girl Of His Dreams who lives in Japan, but then she leaves to find him, and they continue to have a series of near-misses in LA, eventually leading to Bryce having a relationship with the main character's daughter's babysitter while Keiko works in an auto shop and then gets arrested by the INS. Then in the season finale, they finally meet, at the exact moment prophesied by the flashforwards, meaning they needn't have bothered spending months looking for each other. And then the show got cancelled. The subplot is clearly an artifact of a version of the show with a more widespread, interconnected cast a la Lost and a less-focused plot. Except that it sticks out like a sore thumb when it was the only unconnected subplot, while the rest of the show was about the FBI investigation and related conspiracies.
• In Season 1 of Gotham, Fish Mooney is abducted by the villainous Dollmaker after a failed assassination attempt. No other major characters show up in this segment, and it doesn’t even seem to have much of an effect on Mooney, who isn’t even a major character to begin with.
• Thanks to the 2008 writer's strike, the second series of Heroes was massively shortened and ended up having several plotlines that never tied to the main plot: Maya and Alejandro Herrera smuggling Sylar to the US^note Maya was apparently supposed to be instrumental to dealing with the virus, among other things., Claire's relocation and meeting West, Micah living with Monica in foster care, and Bennett's standalone plot. Even Peter's amnesia while stuck in Ireland never fully tied to the main story. Tim Kring had to write a public apology for how unfinished Season 2 was.
• There are a couple of episodes of House ("Wilson" and "5 to 9") where the focus is on a member of the supporting cast. We occasionally see The Team in isolated snippets where the episode's viewpoint character happens across them, usually doing something nonsensical and potentially lethal to a patient, with the implication being that all of House's cases look like this trope to people who aren't on The Team.
• Pretty much all of the Gibby only sub-plots in Season 4 of iCarly. One example being his attempt to get a $5 bill out of a tree.
• From Season 2 onwards, most of the scenes in Kyle XY which do not concern the eponymous protagonist or the central plot-line can come across as this. When Kyle is frequently being hunted down by a MegaCorp and developing his mental abilities, it can seem a little strange when he receives less screen time than the other main characters' love lives.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The Harfoots subplot has next to nothing to do with the main plot, while the other subplots are tied together in the finale episode of Season 1. The Harfoots are the only characters who are completely isolated from the rest. They are followed and attacked by The Dweller and her fellow Sauron worshippers, who end up mistaking The Stranger for Sauron, but this still has no bearing on the main plot, except for the Harfoots and the viewers learning that The Stranger is one of the Istari, possibly Gandalf himself.
• Lost has this sometimes, from little-importance Flashbacks, to on-island subplots that don't contribute to the overall narrative (Sawyer crossing a jungle to kill a tree frog comes to mind). Part of the problem may have been that, for the first three seasons, the flashbacks were used in every episode. While there was initially a lot of praise for the flashbacks as a storytelling device, as the series progressed, some fans began to grow weary of the flashbacks, which tended to become less important to the character arcs over time and/or would repeat certain ideas.
  • Though largely avoided in Seasons 4 and 5, there is one instance where this is used subversively. In "Ji Yeon", there are Flash Forwards to Sun giving birth, along with concurrent flashes to Jin rushing to buy a toy and get to the hospital while avoiding comical setbacks. It's edited to make it seem, at first glance, like the two stories are concurrent; only at the end is it revealed that Jin's story was an irrelevant and inconsequential anecdote from many years earlier. His flashback was included specifically to mislead the viewer and disguise that, at the time of Sun giving birth, he had been left behind and is presumed dead.
  • To some fans, the flash-sideways. Sometimes (most blatantly in "Recon") they just recycled plot threads from years ago. They also, by the halfway point of the season, had yet to cross over with the main plots or have any clear relevance to them. Just one hint from the premiere that they mean anything. And they take up as much of each episode as flashbacks or flash-forwards did, while not resolving any questions or developing any characters outside of the ones in its own arc. They could potentially be viewed as Padding in-universe as well. Since the finale reveals that the main characters are having all of these flash-forwards as daydreams while waiting in purgatory for everyone of the original group to die so they can move on to the afterlife together, all of this screen-time is really just the characters engaging in activities to pass the time.
• The Tudors: Sir Thomas Wyatt is a main character for the first two series of the show, and interacts regularly with the other main characters, and asks about and discusses current plot events with them. He has next to no impact on them himself, however, either in terms of acting or being acted upon. Wyatt lampshades this, noting that despite not really doing anything politically, he is appointed to the King's Privy Council.
  • The closest Wyatt comes to genuinely playing a part in the plot is when he is one of five arrested for committing adultery with Anne Boleyn. Unlike the other four (who have been set up by the King and Cromwell to bring down Anne), Wyatt actually is guilty - nevertheless, he is the only one not found so. Again, Wyatt lampshades the ridiculous nature of this.
• In the final season of The Shield, there's a subplot about Sgt. Danny Sofer gradually losing her gung-ho desire to be a street cop, and wanting to settle down with a desk job and her new baby. This would ordinarily be a fine end to her character, but meanwhile Vic, Shane, Ronnie, and Aceveda are all busy scheming and manipulating international drug cartels, federal law enforcement, and each other to escape their fates. It comes off as incredibly small-time by comparison.
• Kate from Robin Hood had several of these. She was always getting captured or injured, but special notice has to be made of the episode Something Worth Fighting For. In it, Isabella manages to plant one half of a broken locket in Robin's belongings, leading Kate to believe that Robin is cheating on her. She bursts into tears and runs back to her mother, wangsting all the while about how she thought she loved him. No one cared. What makes this really grating is that this is the second to last episode of the entire series, and most of it is wasted on the Romantic Plot Tumor, to the point where a beloved character's death scene is completely short-changed. It's technically meant to be part of the general theme that the outlaws are being torn apart right before the big battle, but what the writers don't realize is that the outlaws are better off without Kate. When she does return after realizing that she's been tricked, she doesn't actually accomplish anything except sabotage a peaceful protest that Tuck and Little John are staging, and then stand around telling the more competent characters to "hurry up".
• Sons of Anarchy has this with Gemma (and, to a lesser extent, Tara) in Season 3. They into a series of largely self-contained misadventures that don't relate to the main plotline of the season, Abel's abduction.
• Once Upon a Time:
  • Season 2 has Regina brainwashing Belle and giving her false memories. It was easily resolved by the finale and had no bearing on the main plot.
  • Season 3's "The New Neverland" features a rather tacked-on flashback sequence set during Snow and Charming's honeymoon - where Snow decided to hunt down Medusa to use against Regina. They don't learn a plot-relevant Aesop as a result of the quest and it's already a Foregone Conclusion that Regina won't get turned to stone.
  • "Breaking Glass" has a rather pointless subplot about Snow and Charming going out hunting for Will Scarlett after he breaks out of jail. Snow finds Will and assumes Charming let him out as a way of giving her a confidence boost. She later finds out that this isn't the case and nothing more is said on the matter.
  • Likewise Belle's romance with Will in Season 4 comes out of nowhere, has no bearing on the plot and in the finale Belle says that she doesn't love him. Her story with Gold could have been exactly the same had she not been seeing Will.
• True Blood's third season suffers a bit from this with many characters being disconnected from the main plot and having nothing to do and even more infuriating is that at the end of the season none of the subplots are tied up in the slightest and seemingly hinting at new Mountain Lion traps for the future including Andy's sudden dependence on V. Ultimately, by the beginning season 4, a few of these are revealed to have been subtle build up to the season's main plot. However, a few- namely the aforementioned V dependency, Sam's storyline involving his brother (which ultimately dove tails into an equally extraneous and yet to be resolved love triangle with his shifter girlfriend and her werewolf baby daddy) and Jason's subplot with werepanthers in Hot Shot- have all been resolved or dropped without ever really affecting the main plot in any meaningful way.
• In the fourth season finale of Merlin Morgana takes over Camelot (again) and proceeds to do absolutely nothing of importance. Having locked the knights in the dungeons, she forces Gwaine to fight her mercenaries for bread to feed his imprisoned friends, resulting in a completely plot-less sequence of scenes that add absolutely nothing to the more important activities that are occuring outside Camelot.
• The episode of The Worst Witch "Monkey Business" has the caretaker Mr Blossom trying to deal with fungus growing in the castle using some kind of extreme spray. This plot point is not relevant to any other part of the episode. While he does foreshadow that Enid has brought a monkey to school, it is Mildred who lets it out and Mr Blossom has nothing to do with anything else in the episode.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Theon's subplot in season 3, in which he pops up in several episodes simply to be tortured some more, with no forward progress being made in his story until the season finale, and even then that didn't involve him at all but his sister. This is because in the source material the character is entirely off-screen, but the show-runners had to give the actor something to do. This resulted in a new low of gratuitous, even tedious torture, even for a show like Game of Thrones.
  • However the worst storyline is generally agreed to be the Dorne subplot in Season 5. The cause was the same: one popular character in the source material wasn't doing much, while another's plot had been cut (Bronn was playing an off-screen role in the King's Landing plot, while Jaime's Riverlands plot was axed before being shoehorned into Season 6), so the show-runners had to give them something to do, concocting a caper-rescue-buddy-cop adventure which turned out to be utterly pointless. This is the same plotline that featured the "Sand Snakes" - originally hyped as strong, formidable female characters they turned out to largely be used for sex-appeal with some of the most ridiculous dialogue in the series.
  • The show almost had another Sand Snakes "Trapped by Mountain Lions" story in Season 6, but managed to avoid it. The Sand Snakes show up in the first episode to assassinate the Prince of Dorne and plunge the kingdom into open rebellion, and then disappear completely until literally the final minutes of the season finale. The negative fan reaction could be the reason why, early in season 7, most of the Sand Snakes are unceremoniously murdered by Euron Greyjoy. Ellaria and Tyene survive and are taken hostage, only for Cersei to poison Tyene and make Ellaria watch her die, and they are never mentioned again.
  • Averted with the absence of Bran in season 5; we were spared seeing him Trapped By White Walkers.
• On Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Bulk and Skull's antics could sometimes feel this way - while the Power Rangers are fighting the Monster of the Week, they're doing something completely separate from the plot. For example, in the four-parter "Ninja Quest," the Power Rangers are searching for new powers and fighting the new villain Rito Revolto, while Bulk and Skull are training with the Angel Gove junior police department. Other times, they were busy trying to find out the identities of the Power Rangers, engaging in antics that never even brought them close to the Rangers. Mostly, they were pretty transparently just there for comic relief, though.
  • Power Rangers Ninja Steel has this in spades with the new comedic duo, Victor and Monty, who like their predecessors aren't even friends with the rangers and as such rarely come into contact with the A-plot whatsoever, even as victims of the Monster of the Week.
• In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, this is part of the divisiveness among fans about the character of Vic Fontaine, a sentient hologram that takes the form of a 60's Vegas lounge singer. With the Dominion War and the fate of the entire galaxy and trillions of people resting on the main character's shoulders, many fans found themselves increasingly frustrated with how often the important War arc would be diverted into a pointless subplot involving Vic, often just to have him sing a swing number; twelve of them, in full, over less than two seasons, to be precise. This was also particularly jarring as characters began to frequent Vic's lounge more than Quark's bar, the real bar that they would have had to pass through in order to get into the holosuite. They even throw in some Character Shilling, with an episode where Sisko gets chided for not wanting to hang out at Vic's Lounge.
• In Royal Pains, Evan is not a doctor, and thus each episode usually has him doing something that is completely unrelated to the episode at hand. In earlier seasons, sometimes these subplots involved him wooing some new potential client for HankMed, and sometimes whoever he was interacting with would require medical attention from Hank and/or Divya. But after he married Paige, their subplots usually involved their constant marital issues.
• Although Downton Abbey is full of subplots that involve a massive number of characters, stories involving Denker and Spratt often fall into this category. As the servants of the Dowager Countess they seldom leave her home or interact with anyone but each other, and as such their stories feel completely inconsequential to the greater ensemble cast.
• Cleverly subverted in The Flash (2014). In the first few episodes of season 2 a subplot is introduced involving Iris' mother Francine arriving in Central City. It doesn't get a lot of focus and seems irrelevant next to the main story arc involving Zoom sending an army of supervillains after Team Flash... until it's revealed Francine had a son while she was away; Wally West, the boy who's destined to become the Flash's sidekick. Thus the seemingly unimportant story has major consequences for the cast.
• The Punisher (2017):
  • Subverted with the storyline of Lewis Wilson, an ex-Army veteran with a bad case of PTSD. The storyline is virtually unrelated to the ongoing storyline of Frank hunting down the people who killed his family, other than Lewis being in Curtis Hoyle's support group and Billy Russo later turning Lewis down for a job at Anvil on Curtis's request. Then in episode 10, the events that unfold as Frank arrives at the hotel to stop Lewis as he conducts an assassination attempt on Karen Page and Senator Ori leads to Frank and Dinah Madani learning that Russo is a traitor (the former) and killed Sam Stein (the latter).
  • Incidentally, outside of the car chase during the gun bust and Frank pulling her from her car afterwards, Dinah Madani's storyline has almost no interaction with Frank's storyline until the hotel episode.
• Jessica Jones (2015) season 2 falls into this with Jeri Hogarth's ALS diagnosis and her efforts to find a cure. Compared to season 1, where her divorce subplot eventually tied into the main plot (when she tried to use Kilgrave to make Wendy agree to more amicable terms, indirectly causing the deaths of Wendy and Hope), season 2 does it the other way around, where the main plot is more of a launchpad that initially propels her subplot.
• The 1990 Christmas Episode of One Foot in the Grave has a sub-plot about a boy missing his father, in which none of the regular characters are involved as anything more than observers, and which is resolved by a Deus ex Machina.
• In season three of Riverdale, the ensemble's protagonist turned lead, Archie Andrews spends most of the season helplessly trapped far away in a series of ridiculously tragic plots. His absence affects much of the other plots back at home.
• The Walking Dead has several examples, and all of them, interestingly, revolve around story arcs that are largely not adapted from the source material.
  • Season 2’s first half is devoted to the search for the missing Sophia, and while the arc is not without some acclaimed episodes or moments, many felt it dragged on way too long and the static location of the Greene family farm also helped make it boring. Sophia turns out to have been Dead All Along as the kicker, causing division on whether or not it was a waste of time.
  • Season 5’s Grady Memorial Hospital arc does adapt a few elements of the comic’s Woodbury arc that were not covered in the show’s equivalent, but it doesn’t do much in the long run since it only kills off Beth, whose death was poorly received as shock value, and replaces her with Noah, a minor character who dies a few episodes later anyway, making the arc even more pointless.
  • The Scavengers, introduced in Season 7, exist mostly just to haggle Rick for what they want until he is forced to comply with their demands. Even after they prove to be untrustworthy, he keeps coming back to them and none of it goes anywhere since all but Jadis/Anne are killed by Simon. Anne at least gets some plot relevance later, but the amount of time wasted with the Scavengers is generally something fans like to pretend didn’t happen.
  • The Reaper arc in Season 11. While the Reapers get an intimidating introduction, only a handful of them are fleshed out and that handful mostly consists of psychopathic bullies who the audience is transparently supposed to root for their demise. This lack of fleshing out also sours any goodwill towards their one sympathetic member, since we are not shown any reason why she would ever regard them as the good guys and thus don’t feel sorry for her when her cohorts fall in battle. The Reaper arc starts because the group desperately needs food, a concern that ends up being nullified once the Commonwealth arrives with food - at the end of the same episode that the Reapers were defeated in, no less. Some viewers have speculated that the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the Reaper arc, which mostly took place in open countryside and with less characters/actors on set; as the Commonwealth arc doesn’t get started in earnest until Part 2 of the season, by which time the world had begun to emerge more safely from the pandemic.
• Many episodes of Full House will feature a plot line that has nothing to do with the "main" storyline or, at worse, poorly crammed into the A-plot to justify a particular reaction. Because of the many characters in the show, this was often used to justify giving an "equal" amount of screen time, but the meandering plots were best left alone.
  • "Shape Up" has Stephanie trying to learn how to play recorder, only to continually be bad at it no matter how much she practices. Uncle Jesse later tries to fix it—and it turns out that there's a wad of gum stuck inside of it. That's it, it feel more like a Cold Open than an actual plot. The weird thing is is that Stephanie had a plenty fulfilling role in the episode after being sworn to secrecy about DJ's crash diet.
  • In another episode, Stephanie gives Michelle some old tap shoes and teaches her "Tea for Two," prompting Michelle to perform the routine non-stop at the top of her lungs. Stephanie goes crazy from the constant music, steals the shoes back, and buries them in the yard, where Comet finds them. Again, that's the "resolution" of the storyline.
  • It's particularly egregious in "Silence is Not Golden," a Very Special Episode that features a classmate of Stephanie's who is being physically abused. The writing is surprisingly solid for the show, and the issue is presented realistically. Unfortunately, the writers felt the need to add a subplot where Michelle calls a toll number to get daily jokes without Danny's permission, prompting him to punish her by making her go to bed early. The stories cross over when Michelle gripes about the punishment, and Stephanie shouts that there are people who have much bigger problems. It's certainly true, but it cheapens the plot.
• Ava's storyline in prison from season 5 of Justified, in addition to being mostly setup for season 6, felt like this.
• The Icelandic Story Arc in Vikings which features Floki and a bunch of mostly very poorly developed characters that all turned up in season 5 (except one). The Iceland Arc has nothing to do with the main plot and has been one of the least liked arcs in the show. What makes it especially jarring is that it meet this fate because the show changed the motive of the settlers from the sagas where king Harald's tyrannic rule was the reason Iceland was settled.
• In Orphan Black's third season, Alison's arc involves her and Donnie running for the school trustee election. This eventually escalates into them becoming drug dealers involved with Portuguese gangsters, and ends with Helena murdering said gangsters. None of this has anything to do with the main clone-conspiracy arc that the other characters are dealing with, and the few times Alison join them doesn't affect her own storyline. The only thing preventing it from being completely superfluous is that the consequences of the drug operation is used against them in the next season.
• Twin Peaks:
  • In the back half of Season 2, James and to a lesser extent Donna suffer from this. James gets framed for murder by the Marsh siblings, two entirely new characters who have no connection to Twin Peaks except living a few towns over, and then of course Donna tries to get him out of it, which means that, for the episodes this subplot runs, all of James's screentime and almost all of Donna's is spent outside of town, not at all connected to the show's actual plot or the other characters. This plot is eventually used to write James out—but James had already decided to leave town before the Marshes waylaid him, making this a lot of screentime spent on what was ultimately a redundancy.
  • Audrey also has this; the Horne family drama and her romance with John Justice Wheeler occupy 99% her time and also do not bear on the main plot. (Not coincidentally, both of these irrelevant subplots happen at the same time, in the episodes immediately following the reveal of who killed Laura Palmer. The writers had not planned, or wanted, to answer that question so early, and so the lynchpin holding the whole cast together was suddenly gone, with nothing ready to replace it.)
• On the Gamera vs. Zigra episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, there's a completely irrelevant scene in the movie about a restaurant owner trying to get ahold of a particular kind of fish for a fancy dinner. This despite the fact that Japan is being attacked by giant monsters. When this scene is interrupted by some actual plot development, it's msted this way:
  Crow: Fish Argument Theater will be back, but first this scene from Plot Convenience Playhouse!
• In Season 2 of Doom Patrol, Cyborg returns home to Detroit and spends much of his time there pursuing an ultimately doomed romance with Roni, a young woman who turns out to be a former superpowered mercenary. While it plays a significant role in his personal development, making him question his Black-and-White Morality, the only time it is relevant to the larger season arc is when he and Roni return to Doom Manor in hopes of having the Chief fix Roni's failing implants. Thankfully, Season 3 does a course correction - Roni goes back to a life of crime, Vic is forced to leave Detroit because he prevented her from being arrested, and thus he rejoins Doom Patrol and is heavily involved in the season's main arc.

---