Characterization Marches On/Live-Action TV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Characterization Marches On in Live-Action TV include:

  • In early episodes of 30 Rock, Jenna was somewhat neurotic and flirty, but otherwise mostly normal. Now she's an over-the-top Attention Whore. When Jenna gets bumped from Late Night in favor of Tracy in an early episode, her response is to cry, saying that "I just feel like everything's always taken away from me." This would be pretty out of character for latter-seasons Jenna because (a) she wouldn't feel the need to justify her feelings as she would consider them to be justified by default, and (b) she would be more likely to respond to something like this by acting out rather than crying.
    • In the first season episode "Blind Date", it's revealed that Liz has won an Emmy. This is pretty unlikely based on later episodes.
  • John Cage was introduced in Ally McBeal's second episode as the slightly odd founding partner of Cage, Fish, & Associates who frequents prostitutes for the purposes of sex without romance (and is set to go before a judge for his latest dalliance, represented by a disgusted McBeal). A year and a half later this is mentioned in front of the by-then fleshed out quirky, mercurial, and lovable Cage (now McBeal best friend) and his stunned girlfriend; Cage's defense for this is that he hadn't "found his character yet".
  • Buster from Arrested Development has always has man-child tendencies, but when we are first introduced to him, his title is "Graduate Student" (we're told he's taken college classes about a bunch of random subjects), plus he has crippling panic attacks in the first couple episodes. These are the two standout character traits that he demonstrates in the pilot, yet both of them are dropped by about halfway through the first season, in favor of the insecure Man Child that he is remembered as. (Can you even imagine Buster being in a college class?)
  • In the pilot movie and first few episodes of Babylon 5, G'Kar was portrayed as an outright recurring villain, while Londo was the Plucky Comic Relief, and usually also the Unwitting Pawn of the Villain Of The Week. G'Kar was gradually made sympathetic enough that he could alternate between being a Magnificent Bastard and a Guile Hero, while Londo was eventually established as a Retired Badass and a practitioner of Obfuscating Stupidity.
    • Although this may have been more about the perspective of the viewpoint characters. In earlier episodes, the humans didn't see other sides to G'Kar and Londo because G'Kar and Londo didn't have any reason to show them. When they're not putting on political airs or on the wrong side of things, they start to get more fleshed out.
  • Battlestar Galactica: While Colonel Tigh's increased competence can be explained through story-related reasons, an early season 1 episode has him going to Roslin (whom he's known for no more than a month) to make sure Adama isn't putting the fleet in jeopardy over one missing pilot. By season 4, however, Tigh is known above all else for his borderline-absurd loyalty to his friends. Most people would agree it's worth it.
  • The Big Bang Theory has a good case of this. Sheldon started as a less assertive/more arrogant version of Leonard who was nervous around Penny and seemed to compete for her attention (at least regarding their white boards with math equations on them). The Tag at the end even had him comment with a great degree of social insight concerning Leonards chances with Penny. A couple of episodes in and he had evolved into the asexual narcissist with No Social Skills whom we all love to hate.
    • Penny changed as well -- the first episode establishes her as rather ditzy with low intelligence (she's a vegetarian who eats steak) and very randomly emotional as a contrast to the guys being science minded, but those elements faded as the show focused on her being a more normal person around the geeks. Penny's apparent change in personality can be attributed to being uncomfortable around the guys at first while trying to be nice and make a good impression nonetheless.
    • The creator himself said to just skip the first few episodes, it took them a while to figure out what they wanted to do with the characters. Specifically about episode 5, where Sheldon's complete ignorance of social issues and Penny's sly knowledge about it took hold.
  • Temperance Brennen from Bones starts off as sassy, sarcastic, and socially adept. It didn't take long for her to become the walking stereotype she is now, and flashbacks to earlier in the series completely ignore the way she behaved in the pilot.
    • In his first appearances, Sweets is a little creepy, and pulls some nasty tricks on the main cast--possibly because he was a Gormorgan red herring. Now, he's a trusted and dear friend of all the main characters.
  • In the later seasons of Boy Meets World, characters constantly refference how Corey and Topanga have been in love since preschool. This is odd to anyone who rewatches the first season in which Corey and Topanga profess to hate each other. This is retconned at one point when Corey claims he went through a phase of thinking "girls are icky".
    • Speaking of Topanga, middle school Topanga was a Cloudcuckoolander. High school Topanga may as well be a totally new character.
    • Lampshaded when Corey begs Topanga to hearken back to her Cloudcuckoolander habit of believing everything will always work out and be all right when his baby brother's life is in the balance. He eventually succeeds when she ends the episode drawing hearts on both their faces in lipstick and thanking him for reminding him it was okay to be idealistic.
  • Angel, Buffy and Darla in Buffy the Vampire Slayer had remarkably different personalities in the first few episodes; Angel was mysterious and kind of chipper (especially his first appearance), Buffy was a perky cheerleader and Darla was whiny. It wasn't until the episode "Angel" that they settled into the personalities they are better known for; Angel became brooding, Buffy was a kind of grim optimist and Darla had a distant, haunting persona (since she died in this episode, this is better seen when she returns from the dead in the show Angel).
    • Anya was also initially manipulative and infiltrated herself into Cordelia's social circle almost immediately. Later she developed a No Social Skills personality that left her unable to understand much of human interaction and claimed she had a Villains Never Lie attitude when she was a demon.
    • Willow's infatuation over Xander and love for Oz in early seasons seems somewhat odd given that she's a lesbian.
    • Harmony was an obnoxious but not particularly stupid Smug Snake in her earlier appearances before turning into the airheaded Harmless Villain she is known for. Being turned into a blood sucking demon just might have something to do with that: Other vampires lose their soul. Harmony lost her brain.
      • It's implied that Harmony was simply born to be the follower of a high school girl clique. After school she simply became lost, not knowing what to do with her life, willing to cling on onto any fad that presented itself (vampirism was the first thing to come by), but never being very good at it. In Angel she once even comments how she knew that her life would be over after high school, even though she didn't expect it to happen so literally. That said, in the comics spin-off, she finds a natural fit as a reality tv icon, and ends up making Buffy's life suck in all new ways.
    • Similarly on Angel Lilah Morgan doesn't develop into the uber-bitch role she's known for until season 2. The few season 1 episodes she's in have her personality remarkably different. Take "Five By Five" where she gets threatened by Faith. Season 2 Lilah certainly wouldn't have been intimidated.
  • Phoebe's boss Elise in Charmed was introduced as the boss from hell and the rest of the season 4 episodes reflect this. However all her following appearances on the show have her more friendly with Phoebe and the rest of her co-workers.
  • Like Dan Fielding of Night Court, Sam Malone of Cheers went from being a one-night stand king to a pathetic loser and borderline stalker. This may have had something to do with his losing the woman he finally fell in love with.
  • The first paintball episode of Community shows Chang as a badass gunslinger in the John Woo mode. By the time the second paintball war rolls around, he's suddenly a pathetic coward who never even picks up a gun.
    • Chang as a whole changed from a badass Sadist Teacher in the first season to a Butt Monkey in the second season. After getting fired from his teaching job at at the end of the first season, he enrolled in the school as a student and was suddenly the biggest loser in the world.
      • What? Chang was never a badass. He was always a pathetic, Jerkass Ted Baxter. It's just that he used to be one with power. In the first game, he was sent in when there where (it's implied) two people left, given authority by the Dean, given superior firepower, and allowed to cheat. In the second game, he was left to his own devices.
    • As with most Pilots, watching the pilot after watching the rest of the series allows for some striking contrasts -- however, possibly the character who's marched on most when compared to her pilot / season one self is Britta Perry. In the early episodes, she's often little more than the Straight Man Love Interest for Jeff Winger, with little indication of the wackier and more goofily neurotic character she would later become.
  • On CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Grissom is less of an introvert and stoic in season 1. He's even prone to bouts of anger, such as when Ecklie has a crime scene cleared before Grissom had a chance to re-visit it (prompting Grissom to slap a glass coffee pot out of Ecklie's hands). He shields himself more as the show goes on, for good in Season 3 when he starts to battle his hearing problem.
  • In the first season of Doctor Who, the First Doctor is an acerbic, prickly personality who gradually grows into a lovable eccentric over the later seasons. He even tries to abandon his companion on a hostile planet in The Daleks.
    • Even worse in his original story (An Unearthly Child) he was about to kill a helpless man with a rock before Chesterton stopped him.
    • It is occasionally implied, particularly in the spinoff media and at moments during the relaunched series, that it's the Doctor's companions that keep him grounded and a "force for good"; without them he'd have been as amoral as the Master, the Rani, and every other renegade Time Lord we've seen (as well as most non-renegade ones; see Trial of a Time Lord and The End of Time). In this regard, Hartnell's more sinister initial portrayal of the Doctor, before Ian and Barbara's influence had a chance to start sinking in, would be more regular character development.
    • Hartnell's Doctor also was very averse to interfering with history, even if lives were at stake. Recent incarnations have slightly softened up this rule. In-story, this was in part justified by the Time Lords being near-extinct and time being easily rewritable.
  • In Ellen, a friend named Audrey has the job of annoying the title character all the way through...except that in her early appearances, she does this by being extremely pessimistic, but at some point she flips and is depicted as being obnoxiously perky for the majority of the series.
  • Emmerdale's Ashley Thomas was, for the most part, a fairly likeable and well-intentioned country vicar, albeit with a few foibles, until he suddenly turned into a father-beater.
  • In Frasier, the characters of Frasier and Roz pretty much hit the ground running (with Kelsey Grammer in particular having had an unprecedented nine years of character prep), but Niles, Martin and Daphne change markedly over the course of the first season. Indeed, it isn't until arguably the episode "A Mid-Winter Night's Dream", towards the end of the first season, that Niles finally begins to acquire some depth.
    • For example, Niles was originally . . .well, there's a reason Replacement Flat Character used to be called The Niles: he was a Flanderized copy of the uptight, prissy, snobbish Frasier of Cheers. By season two, it was established that while he was more rigid and neurotic than Frasier, he was less arrogant and insensitive and acquired completely independent personality traits such as overeager cheer and insecure Woobieness, among other sharp difference between his and Frasier's personalities. Also, Daphne was far more innocent and more of a Cloudcuckoolander in the first season, as well as more stereotypically English, whereas she became more hot-tempered, snarky, and down to earth in later seasons' and Martin, who started out as something of a bitter, grumpy old has-been transmuted into a cheerful old slob who never let anything bother him. Most impressively, all these changes made the characters more nebulous rather than less, a rarity in sitcoms.
  • The first season of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air had Carlton Banks as a pompous Smug Snake rival to Will. Starting in season 2, after being a Butt Monkey and having emotional breakdowns, he became the lovable nerdy goofball we all know today. Likewise, in the first season, Hillary is portrayed as a shallow, spoiled, socialite and environmental activist. Since season two she became just shallow and spoiled.
  • In the pilot episode of Friends, Rachel comes across rather naive and coddled, since she was supposed to be getting married to an unattractive orthodontist just for a comfortable life. This doesn't fit well with strong implications later that she was quite the high school slut beforehand.
    • It's possible that was just a phase of her life where she swept her reputation under the carpet and pretended to be something she was not, hence leaving her fiancé at the altar and returning to her man-chasing ways in time for the start of the series.
    • Being a slut in high school in no way means she wasn't also a spoiled brat who knew absolutely nothing about the real world. She knew about sex, but not about having a job or paying her own bills.
    • Joey is a more clear example. In the first episode he has an average intelligence, and in later episodes he is presented as Book Dumb. It isn't until the next season that he becomes through Flanderizaton the absolute idiot he is known as.
  • In a first season Full House episode, the guys' mothers all descend on to the house to make sure they're running the house right, and thus the boys have to clean every nook and cranny in that house. Should be no problem for Danny Tanner, a man so obsessively clean he cleans his cleaning products, but in this episode he's not very happy at all about having to scrub up the place.
    • Jesse also suffered from a milder form of this. In early episodes, once or twice, he was shown enjoying sports on TV or playing something simple with the others (one episode had him betting on a basketball game with Joey). This is the same Jesse who would later have an entire episode dedicated to his inability to play Basketball.
      • Not to mention the fact that he wasn't always Greek and they changed his last name at John Stamos's request to better reflect the actor's own Greek heritage.
  • In the first few episodes of Gilmore Girls, Sookie is an ungodly klutz who lit her expensive stove on fire and nearly chops her own fingers off. By the mid-first season, this is gone.
    • Shades of this are seen throughout the first few seasons, but its not as exemplified like the first few episodes.
  • In her first few appearances in Glee Britanny's facial expressions give the impression that she's just as devious as her cheerleading cohorts it isn't until later episode that she ends up being The Ditz and the resident Cloudcuckoolander.
  • In the Gossip Girl pilot, Chuck was a psychotic who almost rapes Blair. Now, they have a sexual-tension filled relationship.
    • Actually, while Chuck does have a very... complicated relationship with Blair, the character he almost raped in the pilot is Jenny. And this was actually addressed recently, with Jenny saying she would never forgive him because how could she ever forget what he almost did to her that one night?, and with Chuck apologizing. Granted, characterization still marches on, for everyone, but especially for Chuck, so it's possibly even more disconcerting to see S2!Chuck (a sneaky, manipulative rat-bastard but certainly not an attempted rapist) apologize for something he did in the pilot that would now be completely out of character.
    • Actually, Chuck's not weird for just that reason in the pilot. There's also his rage issues and his lack of control, which is completely at odds with his careless, Manipulative Bastard personality of later episodes.
  • Mork from Ork in his first appearance on Happy Days was a far cry from the cute and cuddly innocent pacifist he became in the spinoff. His mission was to collect Richie as a specimen, and he would freeze people at the slightest provocation, not to mention his final trick to defeat The Fonz in the "hollytacker" would have been to put his two fingers together and make Arnold's Diner collapse (he mentions he has even killed a few people doing this before!). He was, for lack of a better term, a complete and utter dick. And for the spinoff to work, they pretty much had to change that.
    • Not to mention changing the fact that in the Happy Days episode, the whole Mork thing turned out to be All Just a Dream.
      • A final scene was added later for syndication where Mork reports to Orson about moving from the 1950s to the late 70s, the time setting of his new show.
  • In an early episode of How I Met Your Mother, Marshall tries to fight a guy who he thinks hit on Lily, and when he finds out he's gay, he's incredibly relieved, saying "I've never been in a fight before." Yet, by the fourth season, we found out that he and his brothers used to fight quite brutally and even has an Offscreen Moment of Awesome by beating violence-crazy barman Doug.
    • In another early episode we hear Robin lament she never played team-sports, saying she instead played singles tennis in high-school. In a later episode we find out she was in fact a member of a hockey team in her teens.
    • The characters' general personalities take a few episodes to really gel as well. Robin isn't nearly as quirky, brash, or hardnosed as she would become near the end of the season, Lily is a lot more gentle, Willow-y, and socially-conscious than she's known for, Marshall is kind of shy and quiet rather than being energetic and extroverted, and Barney's more of a sitcom-typical suave womanizer rather than the very specific form of over-the-top hedonism-overdosed character he developed into. Only Ted really hits the ground running right from the pilot.
  • Dr. George Huang's first appearance on Law and Order SVU is vaguely sinister, with his perv-stache and line delivery suggesting his interest in the criminal mind is a little creepy. Less than a season later, he got a full makeover, wears dapper suits, and is a sensible, trustworthy ally whom both Benson and Cabot have gone to for personal advice.
  • Dr. Zachary Smith of Lost in Space was originally going to just be the villain for the first few episodes and then get killed off. He was written as an evil, murderous man who would even kill children to get what he wanted. But the way Jonathan Harris portrayed him was so entertaining that he was spared and became part of the main cast as the Jerkass Large Ham Token Evil Teammate everyone knows and loves.
  • MacGyver used a gun in the pilot episode of his series. Another episode in the first season ("Countdown") says he served in Vietnam, which seems incredibly unlikely given the rest of the series.
    • They acknowledge that in a way. When they pair Mac up with the Phoenix Foundation in the second season, they also did an episode rewriting his meeting with Pete. In the first season, they're depicted as having met for the first time ever in a combat situation where upon they exchanged info and Pete recruited Mac to join his govt agency. In the second season, they meet for the first time ever in a US City. While running a cab for his buddy, Mac ferries an enemy agent. He notices them being followed, and accidentally foils Pete's sting. The creators state that this is because they wanted to quietly retcon his military service.
  • On M*A*S*H, Radar somehow went from a worldly prankster to a naïve farmboy embodying lily-white innocence, all while his actor approached middle age. In some early episodes, he can be seen drinking or smoking, but later episodes painted him as someone who wouldn't drink anything stronger than Grape Nehi and choked if he tried to smoke. He also seems to have regained his virginity at some point.
    • Let's not forget how Margaret Houlihan went from hypocritically strict Battleaxe Nurse to feminist heroine. It's pushed aside with some Character Development, but the show still tried to Retcon her into being a decent person all along and that everyone just didn't understand her enough.
      • Of course, this was a prime example of Writer on Board, as it reflected the makeup of the show's writing staff at the time of the portrayals. Originally, when the show began, the writers were all male, and were mainly interested in staying as true to the original book and film as possible. However, once Linda Bloodworth-Thomason was hired as the show's first female writer, she immediately began downplaying or even eliminating almost every single negative attribute of Margaret's. Of course, it's not really surprising that Ms. Bloodworth-Thomason would do this, given the fact that she later became famous on her own account as creator and executive producer of one of the most ultra-feminist programs on American television, Designing Women.
  • Uther from Merlin has always hated magic, but in the first few episodes he would react to it by steadfastly denying its presence; these days he takes the slightest hint of its presence and immediately becomes paranoid (even when there's a rational explanation).
    • Ensemble Darkhorse Sir Leon had a few appearances in the second season before becoming something of a series regular in season three; one of his first appearances involves him violently tearing apart Gaius's study in the search for evidence of magic. The sight of him smashing bottles and ripping down tapestries is completely at odds with the gentler character of later episodes.
  • The Muppet Sweetums first appeared in The Frog Prince as an ironically-named vicious frog-eating ogre serving the Big Bad. It's hard to imagine Sweetums in this role now -- from The Muppet Show onward, although still looking ferocious, the name has been wholly deserved.
  • The cinephile Tony from later seasons of NCIS would be appalled by the Tony of the first season, who misses several classic film references and who never saw Shane or The Maltese Falcon.
    • More glaringly, in the pilot of NCIS, Agent Tobias Fornell of the FBI doesn't recognize Gibbs as he enters Air Force One, to the point of being surprised when he learns 'those agents' were NCIS and not the local coroner. Later episodes establish that not only are Gibbs and Fornell old friends, Gibbs warned Fornell not to marry one of his ex-wives. This was a conscious decision rather than a mistake, the creators loved the chemistry between Gibbs and Fornell so much they decided to give them a past and make Fornell a recurring character.
    • According to later seasons, McGee was a Weebelos scout and retains outdoors skills from those days, which makes his falling victim to poison ivy in season 1 or 2 a little odd (but still hilarious).
  • In the earliest episodes of The New Adventures of Old Christine, Old Christine is initially portrayed as a little dippy, but a reasonably competent parent and business owner with a modicum of empathy towards others. Before long, she morphed into a completely ignorant, bi-polar narcissist who all but abandons day-to-day running of the gym to new partner Barb, and quite often doesn't even know where her own son is.
  • In the first season of Night Court, Dan Fielding starts out as a stuffy, pipe smoking prosecutor. By the second season, he became the sex obsessed lech and was that way for the rest of the series.
    • And even further, Dan went from being a Casanova in the second season to a perpetually disappointed Casanova Wannabe by the series' end.
  • The first few episodes have Summer from The OC as a vapid, party-girl who drops her unconscious friend off at her front door, but is changed to a more likable person after her character became part of the cast.
  • Kelly Kapoor in The Office was first a normal worker, created only to be a foil for Michael's racist jokes. Soon after she evolved into a bubbly and adolescent ditz, a very drastic change.
    • Thanks to an extreme hair and fashion change between season one and two, she also managed to look 20 years younger.
    • You could make a case that nearly every character that is not part of the lead quartet characters (Michael, Jim, Pam, Dwight) could fall here. Even Andy started out as an unsympathetic Dwight-esque antagonist, and now he's one of the most likeable characters on the show.
  • Kirsten from Party of Five was the show's only real normal character as a nanny for Owen in season 1. In season 2 a bit of a wacky side emerged, particularly when confronted by her annoying mother. This gets subverted hard in season 3 when she ends up suffering from depression.
  • Bulk and Skull, the Comic Relief of Power Rangers, originally started out as school bullies and they even got into fights with the rangers' alter-egos. As the show went on, this aspect of the duo was downplayed and they became more like class clowns that were capable of acts of heroism at times. They were eventually treated more like friends to the rangers and they even became junior police officers.
  • In the early Quantum Leap episode "How The Tess Was Won", Sam Beckett seemed a bit more, well, strangely misogynistic and Slap Slap Kiss in his pursuance of the tomboy Girl of the Week than he would in any other episode, especially once Donald Bellisario's liberal Writer on Board tendencies crept in. This could be justified in that the story is clearly inspired by The Taming of the Shrew, and in those cases, the Petruchio character rarely comes off well.
    • Further justified in that Sam would, occasionally, take on personality traits of the person he replaced.
  • In the first two episodes of Robin Hood, Marian advises Robin to let several prisoners hang so that he can "play the long game" and work the system from the inside out; on the other hand, Robin isn't prepared to let individuals die in favor of "the bigger picture". By season two, their standpoints have been completely switched around.
  • In Scrubs J.D.'s (and to a lesser extent Elliot's) personality quirks didn't really gel until the second season. A notable example is his switching from drinking beer to watered-down appletinis. (Although in the eighth season, he mentions that while he has had beer before, he simply prefers appletinis because they make him feel fancy.)
    • He also had sports memorabilia in his room. This is the guy who now thinks that basketballs come "three to a can".
      • This particular case of characterization is due to a Throw It In moment where Zach Braff mentioned to series creator Bill Lawrence that he knew almost nothing about sports. Lawrence, recognizing its comedic potential, made that part of J.D.'s personality.
    • In the early episode, Dr. Cox calls J.D. by his name a few times. After that, it's always "Newbie" or a girl's name. Although that has been broken on a few occassions. The 5th season episode "My Fallen Idol" had him use it in a touching moment while thanking him for his emotional support. Also, there are times when Cox has addressed J.D. by his surname "Dorian", but that's only when he's super pissed, or after J.D. leaves the hospital in season 8 and they become equals.
      • Another one with Dr. Cox that is big because of how prominent it is...the punchline of one episode is that he does, in fact, have friends, or at least a bunch of guys to watch the game with. When later episodes make a big deal about how he doesn't.
    • In the first several episodes the Janitor was a lot meaner, fairly humorless and never did anything except randomly clean and terrorize J.D. This is partially explained that the character wasn't meant to go beyond the first episode, and the entire first season was written as him possibly being just a projection of J.D.'s paranoia and self-loathing, he wasn't acknowledged by or interacted with any other character until the first episode of the second season. He became more Affably Evil and Cloudcuckoolander as the show went on (and Neil Flynn started improvising more and more), with his personality fully gelling as a man who desperately wants respect in the world but doesn't care if people like him.
    • In the second season Elliot was made to be unable to use dirty words, often making up funny euphemisms such as "bajingo" for "vagina". However in a few season 1 episodes she uses the words "penis" and "vagina" normally.
  • The early episodes of Seinfeld often have George advising a more naïve Jerry on the little particularities of life that are relevant to their situation. These roles would be reversed through most of the show's run. The four main characters (with the possible exception of Kramer) also developed into Comedic Sociopaths as the show found its voice: their early-season incarnations come across as far more sympathetic and self-aware than they do throughout most of the series.
    • Jason Alexander also had his own "click" moment similar to that of Leonard Nimoy: initially he thought George Costanza was based on Woody Allen and played him as such until one day he walked up to Larry David claiming to be unable to make heads or tails of one of George's antics seeing as "not only could this never happen but no human being would react like this". David explained it happened to him and this was how he reacted. It was then he realized George was David's Author Avatar all along.
  • Star Trek:
    • In early Star Trek: The Original Series episodes, Spock wasn't quite yet the emotionless Vulcan we all know him as and was even seen to smile a few times. However, the award for Most Out of Character Spock Scene From An Early Episode could only go to that scene from "The Cage" where the aliens snatch two female crew members and Spock shouts, "The women!" in a very emotional manner.
      • Note that in that episode (the original pilot), Spock hadn't been given his emotionless personality because that was meant to be part of Number One's character. The network was not comfortable with the idea of a cold, unemotional woman (let alone one with a measure of command authority), so the character was scrapped and the trait transferred to Spock.
      • Let's not forget the end of "The Enemy Within," where after Kirk's Evil Twin attempts to rape Yeoman Rand, Spock leeringly teases Rand about the duplicate's "interesting qualities," surely the most misogynistic moment in the entire Trek canon.
        • Which gets even Harsher in Hindsight when you know that an unnamed television executive made a sexual assault against the actress before she had to leave the show.
      • Leonard Nimoy has admitted that in early episodes he was mainly playing Spock as a military officer. In "The Corbomite Maneuver", there's a scene where the Enterprise is seized by a gigantic and apparently hostile vessel and Spock merely says "fascinating" (for the first time). Nimoy has cited this as the moment the character really "clicked" for him, although it still took a few more episodes for Spock to fully settle into his stoic characterization.
    • Data went through a similar period of uncertainty during the first (and to an extent, second) season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's not clear at first whether he's supposed to have emotions or not, as he grins awkwardly, gets drunk and subsequently seems to act on sexual desire, and often speaks in an oddly musical tone. The show only cemented its characters and premise in the third season, and that's when Data's famously emotionless and inquisitive personality really took hold.
      • In a first season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, Captain Picard has never heard of the ancient Tkon Empire, even though he's later established as an accomplished archaeologist.
    • In an early episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Odo realizes that Quark was lying to him because Quark told him Rom fixed the replicator, which he deduced was impossible because Rom is an idiot. But Rom is later established as a technical genius, who thoroughly impresses Chief O'Brien with his ability and efficiency. It would be considered just a character mistake, except Odo is firmly established as being very good at observation and "sizing people up."
      • "I've always been smart, brother. I just lacked self-confidence."
      • When Rom was first introduced, he was a completely unremarkable Ferengi with no outstanding (let alone endearing) qualities. If the early episodes didn't actually tell you it was Rom, you'd never know it was supposed to be the same character. (Indeed, he wasn't even named Rom until the second episode; in the pilot, he was credited as "Ferengi Pit Boss.")
        • Interestingly, when Nog has to confide to Sisko why he wanted to join Starfleet he explained that because the Ferengi are a Capitalist culture they aren't very kind socially to any Ferengi who lack any business skills, which includes his father. Rom suffered as a mere assistant to his brother until he finally branched out and became a uniformed Bajoran engineer, likely because of Nog doing something similar by joining Starfleet.
    • The Klingons weren't always the Proud Warrior Race they were in later series. On TOS, they could be quite deceitful, sometimes conducting espionage within the Federation ("The Trouble with Tribbles"). It was the Romulans who were the honorable warriors Starfleet faced ("Balance of Terror", "The Enterprise Incident"). But starting with TNG, these characteristics were firmly flipped between races, as Klingons became the race of proud warriors while the Romulans were established as a race of Smug Snakes.
  • In the pilot of Stargate SG-1, Jack O'Neill is seen looking through a telescope on his roof and seeming fascinated by the heavens. By the end of the first season, he was already The Watson with no interest in astronomy or any other kind of science. And from there he would only become more clueless about anything that didn't involve Stuff Blowing Up or being a Big Damn Hero.
    • They made several callbacks to Jack's knowledge of astronomy and telescopes over the course of the series. In Singularity, he was the one who gave the technical description of a black hole's accretion disk, before remembering that he was pretending not to know stuff like that, and he stays behind on the planet to run the telescope observing the black hole. In 1969, he's the one who goes to the observatory, to use the telescope to confirm that the times the general gave them were for solar flares.
    • In the very early episodes, Samantha Carter was a borderline Straw Feminist. She was still a feminist in later seasons, of course, but after the first few episodes she decided to shut up about it already and actually be helpful. Her early characterization is thus over-the-top and rather shallow compared to the character she was for most of the series. At several points they revisit the infamous "reproductive organs" speech from the first episode, and intentionally make it sound as awkward and silly as it really would be. In the director's cut of the premiere, they removed that line entirely.
  • When Robot Girl Cameron on The Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles first meets John Connor in the first episode she is able to act like a normal high school girl and completely fool him. Right after she reveals herself to be a terminator, she completely forgets how to act human around people for the rest of the series.
    • With good reason: other people who don't know about Terminators write her off as having Asperger's or some kind of psychological malady but if John had one inkling she was a Terminator before she saved his life and proved to be one of the good guys, he would have disappeared right away. When she displays emotions in later episodes, its always a sign that she's not herself.
  • In Whose Line Is It Anyway?, it can actually be quite surprising to see peoples early performances - Even Colin Mochrie and Ryan Stiles were pretty timid during their early performances. Granted you'd have to go very far back to the UK version to see how timid they got, but you can perhaps spot the biggest improvement in Kathy Greenwood. She seemed to sort of be there for some scenes during the show; but later on became quite good at personalities.
    • It's actually quite amazing when you see Ryan Stiles's first performances on the UK Version.
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