The Chris Carter Effect: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

''If the fans decide that the writing team will never resolve its plots, then they will probably stop following the work.''

** Season One: Michael Westen is burned at the beginning, and the cliffhanger ending has the people who burned him finally contacting him. Season Two: Michael begins working for the people who burned him because he has no other choice, but at the end of the season he rains hell down on them, framing and killing several of them, and then meets Management and gets them off his back for a while. Season Three: Without Management protecting him Michael is vulnerable to old foes and new "allies," which at the end of the season results in him having to get back in touch with them to prevent bad things from happening. Season Four: Michael is working for the people who burned him again, except they've put on a kinder, gentler face, but he still works towards bringing them down {{spoiler|and when he is somewhat successful he is welcomed back by the US government.}} Seems like a reasonable time frame, especially considering {{spoiler|most burned spies would likely never get back "in" once a burn notice on them has been issued, and their fate would more likely be similar to that of Victor's in the second season.}} Season Five: We find out the last person in the organization, a psychologist who blackmails Michael into deleting files. Michael spent five seasons getting back in only to make it at the very point where he is compromised and should be burned.

* ''[[Desperate Housewives]]'' features a single ongoing mystery for every season which is solved in the season finale. There's widespread suspicion among the fanbase that the solution to season four's mystery was changed halfway through after Marc Cherry decided he wanted to keep Dana Delany (one of his favorite actresses and the original choice for regular character Bree) on the show.

** The "Final Five Cylons" debacle, which dominated the show since season 3 began. Realizing that the gradual reveal of the promised "Twelve Cylon models" was boring, the writers broke their own established rules by making major recurring characters Cylons who logically couldn't be. One of them was married and had fathered a child; the cardinal rule about Cylons until then was that they're sterile. They handwaved it off by ham-fistedly retconning that his wife had an affair (after they dropped a bridge on her). To make it worse, they had already revealed that one of the Cylons was "Model Number Eight", and 8 + 5 = 13, not 12. They had to invent a backstory that there used to be a Number Seven model, but he got killed. The BSG writers didn't just apply [[Magic A Is Magic A]] to their work in the end; they fell back onto "divine intervention" to explain plot twists which, if you analyzed them objectively, didn't add up.

** The "Death of Starbuck" ruse: in the first two seasons, the writers often boasted that they respected the intelligence of their audience and didn't walk them through plot points. At the end of season 3, with ratings dropping and the writers running out of ideas, they pretended to kill off Starbuck. Even in real life, the writers and cast were ordered to act like Katie Sackhoff left the show. The episode she was killed in bizarrely and obviously set up new plot points for her. She wasn't randomly shot or captured; she randomly flew into a storm due to a newly revealed religious plotline. It was confusing even then. Starbuck's "dramatic surprise return" was therefore predictable; writers who once said that they respected the audience's intelligence were now stooping to comic book deaths, though they insisted that this was a stroke of genius. All of this was supposedly related to Starbuck's "destiny," but they never fully explained (even in the finale) why Starbuck had to die and literally be resurrected by the Gods to lead the Fleet to Earth.