Sci-Fi Shocks you Never Saw Coming

[takemeout_totheblack]

I imagine VOY Threshold was more akin to septic shock, but a shock nonetheless

Another one for me would be the shockingly noble sacrifice of Talyn and Crais in Farscape. Talyn and Crais both went down doing what they loved, berating deserving people and blowing shit up respectively.

[Cowl]

Buffy - Tara getting shot. The subsequent off-the-rails Willow is equally brilliant.

Probably the most pointless episode of the lot. On the one hand I was in favor of the elimination of Tara's character (not that Willow could have been salvaged at that point), but the execution left much to be desired. Some hand-me-down bad guy with a gun, with a tacky moral lesson to boot. That entire season was terrible, as I recall.

Andromeda - Series finale... Dylan: "I won... the end". Excuse me... what the fuck ?

Bigger shock is that someone actually managed to sit through the entire series.

Voyager - Threshold

The entire Voyager series was an unending sequence of "Die! Die! Die already!". This show would have been so much better without Paris. I would have preferred him in his slug form.

[open_sketchbook]

When Eridan wwigged the fuck out and got his murder on, I basically just stared slack-jawed at the screen for a few minutes. Homestuck has a lot of crazy twists, but this one was particularly hard-hitting.

[Dread Not]

Admiral Adama getting shot in the head at the end of season 1. OK, he didn't die, but you didn't know untill the next season.

I've only ever saw that once when it first aired but I don't think he gets shot in the head. Adama not only surviving but being capable of continuing to command the fleet after suffering the kind of brain damage a head shot inflicts would be pretty absurd.

Also, with examples like Buffy and Supernatural are we now including fantasy as well?

Anywho, I'll add myself to the pile of people who were shocked with Wash's death.

The queen impaling Bishop at the end of Aliens.

I’ve been watching series 6 of Doctor Who which so far has some pretty good twists. The little girl being a Time Lord/Lady and Amy being a doppelganger were pretty clever, but most of the twists I’ve seen concerning River in the following episodes have been rather lame. Though I suppose I was shocked by them all in one way or another.

Children of Earth is all I’ve seen of Torchwood but I knew they had recently killed off two of their five main characters, so I was quite shocked when they lost another member. The way they resolved the series wasn’t very well explained if you ask me, but it was also quite shocking.

Shodan's reveal in System Shock 2.

I was quite shocked (pardon the pun) in inFamous 2 when it was revealed that the RFI would kill all of the conduits and it becomes a choice between killing the conduits and letting everyone else in the world die.

Eli Vance's death at the end of Episode 2.

The revelation that Portal and Half-Life take place in the same universe.

[Thanas]

The reveal of Mystique as Xavier's adopted sister in X-men first class.

[OmegaChief]

When Eridan wwigged the fuck out and got his murder on, I basically just stared slack-jawed at the screen for a few minutes. Homestuck has a lot of crazy twists, but this one was particularly hard-hitting.

If we're going the homestuck route, I nominate what happens when the Tumour plan comes to fruition happens, or the second intermission in its entritey.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Adama (and he was a Commander at the time, not an Admiral) was shot twice in the chest.

[Batman]

I certainly didn't expect River Song to turn out to be Melody Pond. If anything I expected her to be the Doctor's daughter (who if memory serves is still unaccounted for).

[Eternal_Freedom]

I certainly didn't expect River Song to turn out to be Melody Pond. If anything I expected her to be the Doctor's daughter (who if memory serves is still unaccounted for).

Given how River thinks of him, that would be a...disturbing revelation.

[Batman]

For a given value of disturbing at any rate, and if that had turned out to be the angle they played I would fully have expected that to be a major issue.

[The Yosemite Bear]

oooh time incest....

worse we get into the end of the 13 regeneration cycle and call in Georgia Moffet to take over the Tardis for three years....

[Batman]

Food for thought-a good bit of the incest taboo comes down to the inadvisability of in-family breeding for biological reasons. Would that actually apply to Time Lords and their offspring? If River had been the Doctor's daughter, she'd have gone through several regenerations by the time she first meets him. Is she still biologically the same person? And do the Time Lords have that taboo in the first place, given that modern day technology (i.e. contraceptives) can largely minimize the biological angle already?

[Eternal_Freedom]

To be brutally honest, it's not something I choose to think about while watching Doctor Who. The part of my brain that thinks about weird shit is generally more concerned with how the Dalek's would fare in a war with the Sontarans or the Necrons and shit like that, not whether the Time Lords have an incest taboo.

[Batman]

You've been with this place long enough that you should know that sooner or later, the sex aspect pops up everywhere.
Besides, you were the one who mentioned it first. I was merely going off eventual-River's ability to regenerate in 'Day of the Moon' indicating that she may be Time Lord stock (as opposed to a completely biologically human child becoming Time Lord by being sired on a TARDIS for some reason).

[The Yosemite Bear]

no some timelord probably crossed thier own timestream and knocked themseves up in a different regeneration...

sibce we already meet ups between different regenerations, and the doctor's wife states genderbending is possible between regeneration

[Eternal_Freedom]

Doctor Who does transgenderism and incest. Try explaining THAT to your kids...

On the other hand, if a Time Lord goes back and shags his opposite-gender earlier incarnation, does that count as incest or masturbation?

And Batman, you're right damnit. I should have known better. Oh well, might as well jump in with both feet

[jollyreaper]

Real deaths in Robotech. Mainly because it was the first cartoon that was ever more than a cartoon for me. Yeah, here's smurfs, gummy bears, other lame crap. Ignore any cartoons based off of girl toys. Now here's something even better than Transformers and holy shit, Roy died?! Dropped my spoon in the Cheerios when that happened. And then Ben Dixon died. And through all that Min-Mei lived. Must have been 8 or so at the time.

Afrer my dad told me about how the jokes I wasn't getting in Looney Toons were all about old timey Hollywood stars, I went through a phase of thinking most toons were based on real life people. I then misunderstood some jokes about the Beatles and thought Min-Mei was based on Yoko Ono.

[TheFeniX]

The ending of Futurama: Jurassic Bark. Yes, I know it was retconned, but fuck you Groening. Also, finding out Lela was a Mutant, rather than an alien, was a shock.

In the original Matrix, I thought Trinity and her crew were the bad guys for a good stretch of the film. The way she effortlessly slaughtered, with little emotion, those police officers was unnerving. Even when Hugo Weaving was busting Reeves balls in the interrogation room, I figured he was just some "Dirty Harry" type cop doing everything he could to bring these criminals to justice. I think playing "Shadowrun" for many years colored my perception a bit much. I figured the entire red/blue pill was some kind of con they were playing.

I don't know if the old "Dinosaurs" comedy series was sci-fi. I do know the last episode was pretty shocking and fucking bleak though. Same for "Alf."

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Most of the story-line quests are forgettable. But on Belsavis (The Republic Prison Planet), there's a pretty shitty realization during the quests. Namely, that it's a generational prison (if you were born from 2 prisoners, you have an implied automatic life sentence). The Senator tries to justify this with a straight face. The "good" solution is to give the victims of this injustice their own plot of land on the planet that isn't run by the prison. They still cannot leave.

The Alien Queen spearing Bishop near the end of Aliens.

[CaptHawkeye]

In the original Matrix, I thought Trinity and her crew were the bad guys for a good stretch of the film. The way she effortlessly slaughtered, with little emotion, those police officers was unnerving. Even when Hugo Weaving was busting Reeves balls in the interrogation room, I figured he was just some "Dirty Harry" type cop doing everything he could to bring these criminals to justice. I think playing "Shadowrun" for many years colored my perception a bit much. I figured the entire red/blue pill was some kind of con they were playing.

I had always hoped it would be revealed that the machines were controlled by humans. Who were passing it off as AI-hegemony over mankind on Earth, which would explain why the machines needed humans for energy when they could just as easily make nuclear reactors or something.

[wautd]

Having recently finished Gaunt's Ghost - The Armour of Contempt: Spoiler

Caffran's death

The Alien Queen spearing Bishop near the end of Aliens.

Aye, good one as well.

[Skgoa]

I certainly didn't expect River Song to turn out to be Melody Pond. If anything I expected her to be the Doctor's daughter (who if memory serves is still unaccounted for).

this. though by the end of th episode, I had figured it out. still, all the little clues that Moffat had sprinkled in during the season only clicked minutes before the reveal, so I guess it counts.

[JME2]

Since Serenity has been mentioned a few times, the revelation that the Alliance created the Reavers.

I hadn't seen the show when I saw the films, so I didn't know anything about the 'verse and thus accepted the theory Jayne posits early in the film. It was a shock to me, but more-so to the friends I saw it with who had watched the show.

[Atlan]

Real deaths in Robotech. Mainly because it was the first cartoon that was ever more than a cartoon for me. Yeah, here's smurfs, gummy bears, other lame crap. Ignore any cartoons based off of girl toys. Now here's something even better than Transformers and holy shit, Roy died?! Dropped my spoon in the Cheerios when that happened. And then Ben Dixon died. And through all that Min-Mei lived. Must have been 8 or so at the time.

Oh hell yeah. And Roy didn't just die, he died pointlessly. Get shot, get to the hospital, get tired of waiting for a doctor to show up, go home, bleed to death on the couch playing the guitar, to be found by your girlfriend.

[Manus Celer Dei]

Real deaths in Robotech. Mainly because it was the first cartoon that was ever more than a cartoon for me. Yeah, here's smurfs, gummy bears, other lame crap. Ignore any cartoons based off of girl toys. Now here's something even better than Transformers and holy shit, Roy died?! Dropped my spoon in the Cheerios when that happened. And then Ben Dixon died. And through all that Min-Mei lived. Must have been 8 or so at the time.

Oh hell yeah. And Roy didn't just die, he died pointlessly. Get shot, get to the hospital, get tired of waiting for a doctor to show up, go home, bleed to death on the couch playing the guitar, to be found by your girlfriend.

The way this is pariodied in Macross Frontier is great, as well. Spoiler

After being wounded in a mission, the Focker-archetype character is implied to have bled out later on...then the scene cuts to a hospital room and someone comments "Wow, it would've been really emotional if he died!"

Shoji Kawamori is basically king of trolling his own fanbase.

[FaxModem1]

Fallout 3, while it should have been obvious, Spoiler

the death of James

struck me really hard. I don't know why, but I got rather attached to the character.