Retconning: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

[titan1978]

I guess one of the things I liked about it wa the other alters were treated much more seriously than Niki.  It went more for tragedy than camp.  And when I was a kid I lived for Niki Smith.  But I see the problems too.

 

Wasn’t Victor there when Viki went to heaven?  And didn’t Dorian kill him on camera?  Lots of retcons to unpack in one set of characters.

 

 

[Khan]

 

Agree.

 

True.  What was done WAS done.  But that didn't mean Michael Malone and Susan Bedsow Horgan needed to go back and say Victor Lord raped his own daughter just because Robin Strasser tipped them off about how inaccurate past regimes had been about Viki's illness.  Because, as I saw it, the story was about Viki finally nailing Dorian for Victor's murder, and not about her going ten more rounds with Niki and her new "friends."

 

Yes, he was -- although, thanks to all the retcons and such, we could probably dismiss Viki's several round trips to Heaven as mere fantasies.

 

Robin Strasser SAYS she watched the actual scenes where Nancy Pinkerton's Dorian withheld Victor's heart medication, causing him to suffer that fatal attack.  From everything that I've read, too, it seems that it did happen on-camera.  But, thanks to ABC, the footage is long gone; and I think that's how Malone and Bedsow Horgan were able to get away with saying it was Viki, as "Tommy," because there's nothing around to dispute them.

[SoapDope]

Y&R....when Steve Burton was not clicking with the audience, JFP decided to cram him down viewers throats by having Nikki have a cult baby (Steve) with Paul and gave it up for adoption. WHAT ???????????? Nikki was married to Greg during that storyline and there was NO BABY. 

[amybrickwallace]

Here's another bad and illogical retcon - Georgia aka Chelsea Brady (DAYS).

[Khan]

 

Yep.

 

ATWT: Rose being retconned into Lily's long-lost twin sister.  Am I wrong, or did they say that Iva didn't remember giving birth to twins?  And wouldn't you know, too, Y&R would do the very same thing to make Mariah a permanent fixture in Sharon's life?

 

 

Ah, yes.  The "swamp baby" who magically survived being born (again, in the swamp), like, six months premature.

 

But, you know, I will give credit to then-HW's Paula Cwikly and Peter Brash for retconning Bo into being Zack's father.  I still remember when DAYS asked its viewers to decide whether John or Stefano should be the baby daddy.  Man, talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

[amybrickwallace]

 

Not to mention already a teenager when they found her 5 or 6 years after her birth. 

Please register in order to view this content

[Soapsuds]

Yep and ridiculous that Iva wouldn't have remembered.

[Khan]

 

Thanks, SS!

Please register in order to view this content

[P.J.]

 

Eureka. That name...

Please register in order to view this content

[Paul Raven]

Y&R

Phillip fakes his death.

 

Katherine had a child she never mentioned, who  at first appears to be Jill but turns out to be Tucker,who discovers he has a son,who turns out to be Devon.

 

Jill finds out she was adopted,which Liz had never mentioned.Her father turns out to be Neil Fenmore, despite the fact that they are roughly the same age.

[Khan]

 

Ugh.  They rewrite history, bring back a character we saw die on-screen AND have him come out of the closet, and for what?  That twist did nothing for the show that was positive -- and the funny thing is, he's no longer dead, but he STILL isn't on the show anymore.

[amybrickwallace]

Exactly...what was the point?

[YRBB]

 

Ah, but Alison's molestation was in the basement. Originality!

[JellicleCat]

 

I don't think Bridget's paternity was a retcon. I have some vague memory that Sheila (and Mike) tampered with the blood samples during the paternity test.

 

One good and one bad retcon both concerns the Spencer family on B&B:
*The good one was that Caroline had a twin, Karen who had been kidnapped as a baby. It didn't really contradict anything on the show and it also made Bill's overprotective behavior towards Caroline even more believable. Having gone through the pain of losing a child it would only be natural that he would be even more attached to the one he had left.

*The bad one concerns the current Bill, whose whole existence is a retcon. It made absolutely no sense to create a never-before-heard-of son to Bill Sr. So much emphasis was put upon his relationship with his daughter Caroline in the early years of the show. She was everything to him, and I doubt that would have been the case if he had had a son and heir.

[Vee]

 

My mistake!

 

 

Granted I only started properly watching it in '93, but we saw it differently. That story and its roots to long history fascinated me as a kid, and this is where new eyes come in - not more valid ones, but detached from anything but I guess a naturalistic perspective.

 

Even from the beginning, as a new viewer I sensed something was off - the surface context and official story for a new viewer was, Viki deified her dead, rich, mysterious father and she and the whole town insisted Dorian was to blame for everything and now Viki was going to finally prove it. Something felt very wrong about that assumption. I didn't buy it. Why did she so obsess over her powerful, mysterious father full of secrets? I thought something more was going on, something much deeper. I knew part of the answer but didn't really mentally articulate it as I was pretty young. And I didn't really know anything about Viki's DID stories until the day Tommy threw Dorian down the stairs, which I did not expect and which scared the shít out of me because I thought Viki had lost her mind.

 

I couldn't articulate it. But Dorian taking the blame for Viki because Viki's father raped her? Yes, I'd felt something like that was coming. I thought it was always there. I also don't think there could ever have been a satisfying version of the story where Viki sets out to nail Dorian, does so and that's the end.