10 TV Show Scenes With INSANE Implications

The great benefit of TV shows over film is the comparatively gigantic storytelling canvas they're afforded, allowing creatives to tell deeper stories with a huge cast of characters the audience comes to know intimately.

But with such a potentially rich storytelling tapestry across many seasons, shows also have to be very careful with what they show and tell, because putting a single foot wrong can cause the entire house of cards to collapse.

Given that most popular TV shows are gigantic machines powered by a room full of writers, perfect consistency is basically impossible, and sometimes writers bring ideas to the table that end up having wider implications far beyond the immediate.

And that's absolutely the case with these 10 scenes from hit TV series, each of which made some completely wild suggestions despite how abruptly they were brushed off or even flat-out ignored by the show itself.

If you stop and think about what these scenes are saying for even just a minute, it's clear that they would've had a tectonic impact on each show's world and the characters residing within it...

Despite being one of the grittiest and most uncompromisingly bleak depictions of prison life in TV history, HBO's Oz introduced a storyline in its fourth season so ridiculous as to border on sci-fi.

In an attempt to battle overcrowding at Oswald State Correctional Facility, the top brass organise an experiment, whereby inmates with longer sentences can agree to take a drug which accelerates the physical ageing process in exchange for shorter prison sentences.

The storyline proved wildly unpopular with fans, who felt it was too ridiculous and outlandish for a show documenting the realities of incarceration in the United States.

As such, the pill subplot was abruptly dropped by the fifth season, no matter that such a drug's mere existence would've had some serious ramifications in the wider sphere.

First and foremost, a pill capable of rapidly expediting the ageing process would almost certainly end up in the hands of more nefarious parties in the outside world.

But more optimistically, it would also tell us a lot more about the nature of ageing and, as a result, potentially make it easier for anti-ageing drugs to also be developed.

For reasons both good and bad, the ageing pill would've been a huge deal, yet Oz strangely paints it as a relatively ordinary, contained experiment.