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Worst character derailments
- Thread starter R0b1n
- Start date
I actually brought this up yesterday, but changing Sallah and Marcus from intelligent men to bumbling bafoons in Last Crusade never sat well with me.
Andy Bernard from The Office. I get that Ed Helms had to shoot another Hangover, but boy did they completely destroy the character in trying to write him out for a couple of weeks.
Yeah. Sallah's wasnt tooooo bad but what they did to Marcus was appalling. He was basically Indy's peer in the first film and they changed him to a laughing stock in The Last Crusade.
Memory may be a bit fuzzy, but Char in the Gundam series went from this smooth yet scheming rogue trying to find better albeit still questionable ways for humanity to progress into space, into this straight up maniacal Bond villain who planned to drop an asteroid onto Earth.
I like how you spoiler tag a name of a person but don't even say what series you are talking about.
Yeah, someone once argued that you only see Marcus for a few scenes in Raiders so we can't see if he was always a bumbling bafoons or not, but I don't buy it.
OP
OP
Starbuck in season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. She just goes so far off the deep end to being completely miserable and unenjoyable. However, I get what they were going for, and it did set up Starbuck season 4 to be great once again.
Except Sansa for some reason, who was a bumbling idiot before and is now somehow considered...super....smart?
For me it's a combination of that and the fact that running around in the field is clearly something that's waaaay outside his comfort zone.
Sallah in Crusade was totally fine.
Gul Dukat
His storyline came to a natural end during Waltz of season 6 but he was such a great character they did not want to get rid of him. Instead they have this whole plot in season 7 of him being a Pah-wraith cultist, seducing Kai Winn and general villainy. It was out of character and the reasoning for the turn boiled down to "well he had a mental breakdown so anything could happen". Though he probably pulled off the Pah-wraith cultist role better than anyone else in the cast it still definitely lowered the character as a whole.
Gul Dukat
His storyline came to a natural end during Waltz of season 6 but he was such a great character they did not want to get rid of him. Instead they have this whole plot in season 7 of him being a Pah-wraith cultist, seducing Kai Winn and general villainy. It was out of character and the reasoning for the turn boiled down to "well he had a mental breakdown so anything could happen". Though he probably pulled off the Pah-wraith cultist role better than anyone else in the cast it still definitely lowered the character as a whole.
It was worse when Moore did it a second time with Baltar.
OP
OP
I'm tempted to pick up HiC again just to see what happens to Wally, but it'll probably just make me angry
Jamie Madrox aka the Multiple Man.
Throughout Peter David's second X-Factor run (from 2005) Jamie is basically the main character of the book and goes through a ton of shit, some fairly traumatic. Yet by the end he gets what is basically the closest you can possibly get to an ending for a non-cape character, retiring on a farm with his wife and has a kid on the way. Legitimately one of the most satisfying character endings you're going to see in an American comic book.
...so of course, fast-forward a few years and he gets killed off to raise the stakes of a shitty post-Secret Wars X-Men event. But the hitch is that he died in a different location than the place he retired to, so the obvious way to bring him back is to be like surprise! the Jamie Prime and his wife are still happily retired and only his duplicates were killed. Even poor Peter David brought that up, presumably pissed that they did what is really his character so dirty.
Then last year we got the Multiple Man mini by Matthew Rosenberg, where the plot tries to be a little too clever for it's own good, but tl;dr there's a new Jamie Prime who's actually a dupe of a dupe of the original Jamie that survived in a bunker since before the events of X-Factor even began! Keep in mind this makes absolutely no sense at all, as it's established that if the original Jamie is dead the dupes also eventually die, but whatever.
So the original Multiple Man, the one that went through the entirety of the run that turned into a legitimate character is permanently dead and has been replaced by a clone! And none of the X-Men or even his wife have any issue with this. Seriously his wife is like "it's fun learning my husband again" while interacting with a clone that had literally never met her and didn't go through any of the stuff that brought them together in the first place! And Matthew Rosenberg really wants us to believe that it's the same character, despite the fact that it's explicitly pointed out in X-Factor how the life experiences of Jamie dupes can turn them into different people, meaning there is no possible way that this new Jamie should be anything like the old one.
Throughout Peter David's second X-Factor run (from 2005) Jamie is basically the main character of the book and goes through a ton of shit, some fairly traumatic. Yet by the end he gets what is basically the closest you can possibly get to an ending for a non-cape character, retiring on a farm with his wife and has a kid on the way. Legitimately one of the most satisfying character endings you're going to see in an American comic book.
...so of course, fast-forward a few years and he gets killed off to raise the stakes of a shitty post-Secret Wars X-Men event. But the hitch is that he died in a different location than the place he retired to, so the obvious way to bring him back is to be like surprise! the Jamie Prime and his wife are still happily retired and only his duplicates were killed. Even poor Peter David brought that up, presumably pissed that they did what is really his character so dirty.
Then last year we got the Multiple Man mini by Matthew Rosenberg, where the plot tries to be a little too clever for it's own good, but tl;dr there's a new Jamie Prime who's actually a dupe of a dupe of the original Jamie that survived in a bunker since before the events of X-Factor even began! Keep in mind this makes absolutely no sense at all, as it's established that if the original Jamie is dead the dupes also eventually die, but whatever.
So the original Multiple Man, the one that went through the entirety of the run that turned into a legitimate character is permanently dead and has been replaced by a clone! And none of the X-Men or even his wife have any issue with this. Seriously his wife is like "it's fun learning my husband again" while interacting with a clone that had literally never met her and didn't go through any of the stuff that brought them together in the first place! And Matthew Rosenberg really wants us to believe that it's the same character, despite the fact that it's explicitly pointed out in X-Factor how the life experiences of Jamie dupes can turn them into different people, meaning there is no possible way that this new Jamie should be anything like the old one.
Doctor Who Series 8, they tried to make the new Doctor too edgy 'look how different he is from 11' they did the same thing even worse with 6th Doctor in the 80s.
Finn has this really interesting backstory to explore but forget about that, he's a janitor who broke his lifelong mental conditioning just because.
In tie-in promo material he was a top of his class sharpshooter but in the movies: just a janitor who faces off with his former commander with zero emotional resonance behind it
I can't think of another character that was set up to be really cool but got regulated to the uninteresting b-plot so fast
In tie-in promo material he was a top of his class sharpshooter but in the movies: just a janitor who faces off with his former commander with zero emotional resonance behind it
I can't think of another character that was set up to be really cool but got regulated to the uninteresting b-plot so fast
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Soldiers get janitorial duties all the time, why is this so hard to grasp?
That's a good one. His character was probably the most interesting new idea in TFA but went absolutely nowhere. More than a shame.
I wrote a lot more words than janitor and my point is clear enough for you to understand.
Karen Traviss' Glasslands trilogy is an amazing study in character assassination, especially regarding Halsey.
You mean two. Han was sleepwalking through the entirety of ROTJ.
Castiel in Supernatural, Ripley in the Alien franchise, literally everyone in Dexter, Piper in OITNB
Wait, what happened to Wally? We just got him back a couple years ago and things seemed great.
Well, he might have suffered a breakdown and went on a killing spree.
