Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-29657114-20170222003316/@comment-995426-20170430031552

I told you: My head-canon isn't canon&mdash;it was Schrodinger's canon. If canon had an associated field of quantum mechanics, this is it. Now I view TV shows as having a slightly different canon from season to season, or even from episode to episode, because their fundamental canon can and does fundamentally change over time and between different writers&mdash;that's part of what makes Retcon a thing. So, TV shows don't always have one overarching canon&mdash;they have a canon of right now, which isn't necessarily the same vision they had earlier on. Almost none of them plan an entire series' plot from beginning to finish in advance.

The series Space Dandy deconstructed and parodied this to hilarious lengths, even very decisively killing off the main characters at the end of the very first episode, and having them alive in the next episode as if nothing had happened. Even the narrator at the end of the first episode said they'd be back next episode with no further explanation. Among the show's many nods to this, the (Japanese version) ending credits sequence alludes to quantum mechanics and parallel universes.

And really, though that show blatantly made it a main feature, I think it's still true of almost every TV show simply because showrunners keep changing their minds, shows sometimes last longer than two seasons, and yet the target audience can't be reliably expected to remember anything that happened more than two years before. As insulting as it may be, it's always commercially safer in the industry to assume Viewers are Morons than to assume Viewers are Geniuses.