10 TV Plotlines You Forgot Were Completely Abandoned
2. Lister's Pregnancy (Red Dwarf)
Red Dwarf was a pretty hilarious sci-fi spoof full of absolutely insane plot developments. That was especially true at the end of Season 2, when male character Lister is actually impregnated by a female version of himself from an alternative universe. Yeah, don't even ask. Supposedly the writers were going to spend the season 3 premiere tying this up, but the script turned out both unfunny and arguably a bit sexist, so they dropped that whole idea. How were they going to wrap up the Season 2 ending then? They don't, really.
Okay, technically the pregnancy storyline is resolved, but it's in a Star Wars style opening crawl which flies by so quickly it's literally impossible to read without freeze framing, something that wasn't exactly easy to do in 1989. The crawl explains that Lister gave birth to twin boys, but they had highly accelerated birth rates and turned 18 within three days. Because of that, Lister returns them to their original universe, and that's that.
The average viewer would have no way of reading the crawl, though, and so for all intents and purposes, the Lister pregnancy arc had no conclusion at all. It's one of the rare examples where a storyline is kind of wrapped up, but only in a secret way that most viewers probably couldn't access.