Fannish 5: Most Surprising Moments in Any Canon

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These responses are totally dripping with SPOILERS so please click carefully!

Highlander

"Comes a Horseman"/"Revelation 6:8," when you find out that Methos was one of the "Four Horsemen" and used to go around killing people for fun. It wasn't a surprise in terms of Methos as a character--it actually is one of those wonderful character developments that totally fits in retrospect and you can't believe you never knew it before--but the surprise was the way the show dealt with it. Highlander was mostly a ridiculously simplistic show with a black-and-white morality in which the perfect flawless hero vanquished wicked cackling villains. But this episode actually went with ambiguity, and shades of grey, and the potential for redemption and forgiveness. And Methos actually didn't die--he had to live with what he'd done and his "thousands regrets." For a brief period there, Highlander was actually a moving and thought-provoking show. (Alas, it didn't last. *scrubs away memories of ... pretty much everything that came after*)

Doctor Who

I'm kind of torn between two here. The first is the Doctor's reaction to defeating the Master in "Last of the Time Lords." From my many years as a viewer of television, I was expecting, you know, judgment and punishment for the villain. Instead the Doctor tried to adopt him! And when Lucy took the Master's punishment into her own hands, the Doctor's reaction floored me. How often do we ever see a hero break down and sob over his enemy's death? What surprised me was both that the Doctor was this capable of forgiveness and compassion, and that the Doctor was this emotionally fucked up that he could cling to an unrepentant murderer--and that the show would go to a place so complex and ambiguous.

The second surprise is that Rose Tyler never gave up on what she wanted out of life--adventure and travel and the man she loved. I was expecting "Doomsday" to end with her wussing out and settling for a "normal life," safety and security and her supposed "obligations" to her clinging mother. Instead Rose chose her own future and fought for it to the end. She didn't get exactly what she wanted, but she never gave up. It was pretty much the opposite of Joss Whedon and his "heroes really want to settle down and be noooooooormal" nonsense.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Spike refusing to sell out Dawn in "Intervention." Even after "Fool for Love," I was a skeptic regarding the possibility of Spike's redemption. I just didn't think, after the whole Angel/Angelus thing, that they'd ever portray a soulless vampire as anything other than selfish and, ultimately, evil. But then Spike stood up to Glory to protect Dawn. He was ready to die, with no Scoobies watching and no apparent prospect of rescue, so it couldn't be an act to gain credit with Buffy--he actually did have the capacity to love and to make a selfless choice. That was a wonderful surprise, and is what drew me into online fandom in the first place. (The second biggest surprise would be that Buffy kissed him in "Once More, with Feeling"; once again I really didn't think they'd ever go that far with a soulless vampire!) Of course it all went to hell in the end and I can't even watch the last two seasons of that show without gagging, but at the time it was nice.

The Lymond Chronicles

Good lord. That Dunnett went there in Pawn in Frankincense. She gave her hero probably the most difficult choice a human being could face, and she didn't give him a narrative out. It's pretty much the inevitable culmination of the story thus far, but you spend the whole time hoping there's a way out, and there just isn't. It's brutal, and Dunnett doesn't flinch from the consequences. I think that a lesser author either would've given Lymond a way to save the children, or to sacrifice himself instead, or would have hinted that one child was a "bad seed" to make the reader feel better about its death, or would at least have glossed over the consequences and not spent the entire next book with an emotionally shattered hero. This way, as painful as it is, it's as deeply powerful and moving as it can be, and it raises so many incredible questions about morality and responsibility that I feel like I'm still just beginning to delve into its implications.

A Song of Ice and Fire

Dude. The Red Wedding. Need I say more? Most of these other surprises were at authors making braver, more complex story choices that I expected. This one is just plain old "Holy fuck I can't believe he just did that!" shock. All the foreshadowing set up Robb Stark's doom, but I still didn't realize that it would happen so horrifically, that so many of his followers would also die, and most of all that Cat would die. She was a lead POV from the beginning! And with Arya almost there. Ned Stark's death was a surprise too--it's what got me hooked, made me realize that this wasn't your typical fantasy story--but the Red Wedding was just beyond anything I expected from GRRM even three books in. (And, of course, after throwing the book across the room, I grabbed it immediately and devoured the rest with twice the passion.)

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