7 TV Shows That Suddenly Dropped Major Plot Threads

2. Buffy The Vampire Slayer Accidentally Flips Off Its Entire Fandom

20th Century Fox Television

In the season six episode Normal Again, after being stabbed by a demon, Buffy keeps hallucinating that she's in a mental hospital, because hallucination Buffy was hallucinating that she was a vampire slayer. In simpler terms, it was a world where she was real but the show wasn't. Or something.

As the demon poisoning takes hold, Buffy thinks killing everyone in her Sunnydale life will make her, well, "normal again" in the hospital, where she'll get back her absentee father and now-deceased mother. She's stopped, and eventually drinks and antidote, and that's that. Except the episode was edited to end on a scene where mental hospital Buffy goes completely catatonic.

Regardless of whatever the intention of the producers was, a whole hell of a lot of the audience came away thinking that, by ending on that hospital scene and not Buffy in Sunnydale, the episode strongly implied that yes, Buffy's life as we knew it was something she was hallucinating at a mental hospital in Los Angeles. No matter how the writers addressed this in interviews, if you just watched the show, you were left with the impression that in the show's universe, what we had invested in for years "wasn't real."

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Formerly the site manager of Cageside Seats and the WWE Team Leader at Bleacher Report, David Bixenspan has been writing professionally about WWE, UFC, and other pop culture since 2009. He's currently WhatCulture's U.S. Editor and also serves as the lead writer of Figure Four Weekly and a monthly contributor to Fighting Spirit Magazine.