On The Tube: Continuity
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| Title: | On The Tube: Continuity |
| Creator: | Doranna Durgin |
| Date(s): | March 1992 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | multifandom |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
On The Tube: Continuity is a 1992 essay by Doranna Durgin.
It was published in A Writers' Exchange #2.
The Essay
Continuity: that thing that Star Trek is so good at and Quantum Leap avoids entirely. When it's well done, we hardly notice it - but when a series has continuity disaster, fan writers can find themselves struggling in a bog of contradictions. Quantum Leap is this year's favorite scapegoat, especially after a season premiere that left viewers reeling, wondering about bodies and auras and wives and time traveling hospital PJs. What a mess! With a show like this it's hard to know where to start, but maybe I can help lay a foundation for your decisions.
In some cases, the conflicts aren't all that crucial. If Magnum's mother is named Catherine and Martha, then the easiest way to handle it is by avoiding all mention of his mother. True, if you're writing a family-based story, this approach won't work, but the point is, don't go begging for trouble. This obvious solution is easy to lose in the tangle of your character's history and the process of deciding how to handle the plot situations you've created. If you can avoid dealing with the continuity problems without affecting your story, do it.
It's a little harder to deal with noisier contradictions: the facts that follow the characters around, as opposed to something that comes up only when the character gets into an airplane. For instance, somewhere in mid-series, MacGyver aged five years overnight, when the producers decided to jump the character's age up to match the actor's.
And then there's Quantum Leap, and the various theories about whose body and whose aura is where. If you're writing a QL story, you can hardly avoid tripping over this problem.
Or how about Airwolf, which in three seasons went from a machine that only one man could handle to a nifty chopper that your average throttle jockey could hop in and flyaway? (Grrrr...makes you want to give a certain producer a good thrashing, doesn't it?) When you come up against one of these discrepancies, you're going to have to make a choice, although it's one your readers might only get hints at, for it works better if you don't hit them over the head with it. Plant seeds, remember? A quiet word about Sam becoming accustomed to arms that reach his knees will be a lot more successful than, "Sam was in a monkey body and it felt strange."
Whatever choices you make, the most important thing is to be consistent. This is where fan writers can do a better job than the (so-called) professionals - don't give us Sam wearing a helmet fitted to his monkey host in the same story you give us Sam accomplishing things physically impossible for that monkey-even if they did it. Either he is or he isn't. Whichever premise for whatever continuity problem you choose to embrace, make it part of that universe, at least for that story - although once I make a decision like that, I carry it through any subsequent stories as well.
Sometimes, when a series just refuses to make sense, when they offer up an amazing number of serious girlfriends/boyfriends from the past, or give a character far too many specialties for one lifetime (both my favorite two examples are guilty on this score), then you have to put your foot down-and in doing so, you may be straying into alternate universe territory. As far as I'm concerned, all for the better - if it means your work is going to make more sense than if you stuck by the muddled rules. But you should be aware that technically, you are writing an alternate universe story, albeit not one radically divergent from the official version. And you should also be aware that making decisions about continuity is not an excuse to write alternate universe stuff without labeling it so. If you contradict established series events and facts, it's alternate universe. Period.
Continuity problems are always going to plague fan writers, who often care much more about their favorite universes than those who create them once a week. Make your decisions and stand your ground; plant your seeds quietly. You'll find you won't get all tangled up in those continuity discrepancies - and neither will your readers.