by Christopher Hall
When this article is published, it will be close to – perhaps on – the 39th anniversary of one of the most audacious moments in television history: Bobby Ewing’s return to Dallas. The character, played by Patrick Duffy, had been a popular foil for his evil brother JR, played by Larry Hagman on the primetime soap, but Duffy’s seven-year contract with the show had expired, and he wanted out. His character had been given a heroic death at the end of the eighth season, and that seemed to be that. But ratings for the ninth season slipped, Duffy wanted back in, and death in television, being merely a displaced name for an episodic predicament, is subject to narrative salves. So, on May 16, 1986, Bobby would return, not as a hidden twin or a stranger of certain odd resemblance, but as Bobby himself; his wife, Pam, awakes in bed, hears a noise in the bathroom and investigates, and upon opening the shower door, reveals Bobby alive and well. She had in fact dreamed the death, and, indeed, the entirety of the ninth season.
This imposition on the audience’s credibility (though rarely done with such chutzpah) has occurred often enough in television and other media (comic books in particular, which is where the term originated) to have earned a name: retroactive continuity. Continuity refers to our sense that events should proceed in logical sequence, but the retroactive element insists that a key and unexpected change has occurred which alters or nullifies some previous sequence. Something deeply out of expected continuity has happened in the narrative, which means that our interpretation of previous events must be completely changed, or, in this case, obliterated. You watched season nine, but it didn’t happen. Schrodinger’s Bobby Ewing: we saw him die, worked through the consequences of that for a season of television, and yet here he is lathering up in the shower.
Retroactive continuity – or retcon, retconning – is a kludge, an act of “repair” done to a narrative to ease the consequences of what is usually some external, often commercial, pressure. Its literate cousin is peripeteia, the moment of sudden reversal, the turning point, the more specific version of which is anagnorisis, the recognition, the new knowledge that changes our understanding of everything. The archetypical example of this is in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, when the terrible knowledge that he is the father-killing, mother-schtupping abomination causing the plague in his city dawns on the title character.
What happened to Bobby Ewing in Dallas was clumsy to the point of loutishness, and the worst thing about it was what it implied about the audience: that it might roll its eyes, but there was a reasonable certainty it would keep right on watching. (The series lasted another 5 years after Bobby’s return.) The moment of anagnorisis in Oedipus Rex is, in contrast, narrative perfection; the story could end no other way. (It no doubt helped, of course, that the Greek audience already knew the ending.)
The revelation here is not one possibility among others, it is rather the relentless truth to which all things inevitably tend, despite the hero’s struggle against it. It is implicit to the narrative; it comes from inside, not out. Retroactive continuity is most often the product of a creative process that is constantly compromised by the collaborative nature of the project; actors and writers change, producers and editors make their demands, the events of a season ago, or in an early book in the series, etc., now seem inapt, or not answering to the needs of the audience – needs more vociferously expressed nowadays than ever before. The literary turning point, in obvious contrast, is the product of solitary genius, incorruptible and indivisible, and is met with an “a-ha!” rather than a tut.
(But not all retcons are bad, and not all anagnorisis is satisfying. When comic book legend Alan Moore was asked to take on the horror/creature-feature themed character Swamp Thing in the 1980s, his retcon of the creature’s origin story revitalised the narrative – even though it was an obvious late addition to the story. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a very literate retcon. And we’ve all experienced when moments of revelation, despite being well-planned for, fall flat. The movies of M. Night Shyamalan show a progressive decline from the satisfying twist in The Sixth Sense to the dull thuds of his later attempts to exercise – exorcise? – what had become his restrictive narrative brand. Of course, one of the biggest, most impactful retcons of all – The New Testament – is an anagnorisis or a retcon according to one’s preferred heresy.)
If anagnorisis has been the subject of reams of academic study, the retcon has been nearly ignored. The only book-length study of the phenomenon I’ve been able to locate is the 2021 book Retcon Game: Retroactive Continuity and the Hyperlinking of America by Andrew J. Friedenthal. Friedenthal is rather sanguine about the nature and function of the retcon: “Because of the growing ubiquity of retroactive continuity within our popular media, Americans have grown more comfortable with accepting that narratives are inherently unstable and multimodal, a realization that has a vast impact on how individuals curate and process information” (pg. 9). Can such a broad and consequential impact actually be derived from the retcon – and is it inevitably a positive thing? I’m not sure, but one idea here is well-taken, which is that retconning does say something important about the way we’ve come to treat narrative, as a matter not of authorial authority but one that involves a greater degree of audience participation.
Friedenthal sees retconning as a matter of freedom, but there is an even further degree of freedom to be obtained. Consider what I called a “perfect” turning point earlier. We know, after all, that one can be as much of a murderous, sexual abomination as one wants to be, and it still isn’t going to cause a plague (I am perhaps being a little too loose with the “we” here – some would still have us believe female promiscuity causes earthquakes, after all). Plagues are caused by viruses and bacteria; even if the ancient Greeks didn’t know that, perhaps they understood on some visceral level that not every bad event is caused by the anger of the gods. Perhaps the real anagnorisis is not when Oedipus understands he is the source of the plague, but rather when the audience understands that he remains self-centered enough to think he is the source. Our tragic moment of revelation becomes a farce if there are healers somewhere in the background quietly suggesting that the sick be isolated and that investigation be made into possible tainted water or food amid all the silly royal family drama. Oedipus’s final act, that of a violent man inflicting his final violence upon himself, is the blinding of the already blind.
This kind of personal retcon has acquired the name headcanon. (The OED’s earliest use of the word, on Twitter, is from 2008.) It is to install one’s own turning points and moments of recognition into a narrative, authors and intention be damned. If you don’t like the interpretation of those events you feel the narrative is pushing you into, just craft another interpretation. In response to the grand commercial narrative properties that have dominated much of the media in the 21st century – think Star Wars, A Game of Thrones, the Marvel Cinematic Universe – headcanons abound, and few people consider themselves constricted by the strictures of the actual story, well-constructed or not. Was there an obvious retcon (say, the one concerning main character Rey’s parentage between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker) that you want to ignore or revise? Do so, and no doubt you’ll find many eager compatriots and adversaries to bandy with you online. This may be the actual end of the story Friedenthal was trying to tell, a boisterous chaos of narrative choice.
Questions of physics aside, do we live in a multiverse of narrative now? The most consequential consumer choice in the 21st century is the choice of worldview, of the story you believe you and everyone around you is playing out. The decline of the metanarrative forecast by Lyotard all the way back in 1979 has advanced from the grand narratives of liberalism and Marxism to something like Star Wars. There are any number of people wanting to sell us these narratives, but (outside the most insane variations) our choice must be made within a sea of older narratives – events which have already been organised, with their turning points and their kludges and so on. We create our own points and make them fit within what came before. Whether we recognise these turning points, both in our narratives and, perhaps more importantly, the narratives of others, as the perfectly fitting, perfectly explanatory moments that make all past moments slide easily into the present scheme, or as semi-functional sutures created from inelegant expediency, says much about our attitude towards both the stories and the people who hold on to them. How often have I heard some diagnosis of the current polycrisis which strikes me as exactly right and another as an absurd, overdetermined imposition on reality?
I can’t tell if the decline of overall, universal narrative is something to be mourned or celebrated. Friedenthal briefly considers the bluntest, most dangerous retcon of all, the politically motivated historical revision. Stalin makes the commissar vanish, and there’s a trip to the Gulag waiting for you if you happen to insist that he, in fact, existed. Even in the more benign versions of “shared narrative” which, it has been assumed, form the bedrock of a functional society, there is some sense of coercion. But the absolute mutability of narrative cannot bring much comfort the other way. Stories are supposed to tell us something, something we either didn’t know or don’t recognise that we know. And some things, simply put, ought to be imposed. The core of the wisdom of narrative is that it is something passed down, inherited. But what is the point of inheriting wisdom if I’m just going to play an extended version of choose-you-own-adventure with it? Sometimes a story tells us something uncomfortable enough to make us want it not to be so – but it must be so. We shouldn’t all be Nahum Tates writing our happy endings for King Lear. The dominance of headcanon is perhaps one of the final territories which consumerism, and the ethics of the choices we make which are so often not real choices, has entered: into the very stories of our world and our lives within it.
At any rate, it is past time I get to the actual point of this article: my headcanon concerning Bobby Ewing’s return. When Pam opens the shower, she sees and recognises her husband but also sees that it is not her husband. You don’t simply dismiss a year or so of your life as a dream, especially not one so vividly portrayed in 1980’s full-colour glory. No, it wasn’t a dream, and this is some kind of ghost or revenant standing before her – but there’s nothing to be done about it. She and everyone else will have to proceed pretending that they do not see through Bobby. In every scene he’s in in the seasons that follow, you can see an unease in the other characters’ eyes – it’s there if you look for it – because they also know what’s really going on. They remember season nine. But Pam’s dream that was not a dream has now infected everything, and reality is blending away into something stranger. Yes, there’s a sadness there – you may start to feel it yourself – coming out in exactly the places where you wouldn’t expect it.
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