The Tomorrow People cheated me!

[Kooshmeister]

Warning! Long angry rant ahead!

Ever waited practically fifteen years for something only to have it not pan out? Well, as a kid, I watched the 90s revamp of The Tomorrow People. I vividly remember the story arc entitled "The Culex Experiment," which involved a mad scientist, Dr. Culex, creating a new breed of mosquito whose bite can put a person into a coma. Part 1 of the arc began with some random scientist being bitten by one of these mosquitoes while trying to escape from Culex. This act is witnessed by a Tomorrow Person, Kevin, who is also bitten to prevent him from talking.

Now, I know Kevin is supposed to be the audience's immediate concern. But even as a kid I tended to focus on the more minor characters, so I was worried about this other guy. And I began to become increasingly more worried when over the course of the next couple of episodes nothing whatsoever was mentioned of him. Unfortunately I missed the final episode of "The Culex Experiment," and so I've spent the past fifteen years or so occasionally thinking back to it and wondering... would the final episode reveal just who this guy was and what happened to him? My efforts to get a straight answer from fans proved utterly fruitless; I asked off and on ever since I got the Internet without any success, and I could find nothing whatsoever about him online anywhere. I figured my one hope was to actually see the episode for myself.

Just tonight, I was granted that opportunity. Someone on YouTube uploaded episodes from the 90s Tomorrow People, including all five parts of "The Culex Experiment." So imagine how disappointed I was when the fifth and final episode did not shed any new light on the issue for me. We never learn who he is, why Culex wanted to kill him, or why he was running away from her in the first place. Although other characters besides him and Kevin got bitten over the course of the episodes, and were given the antidote at the end, the scientist was inexplicably absent. It's like the writers literally forgot he even existed.

The worst part of it is, him getting stung is what set the whole story in motion for God's sake. To simply forgot about him and never explain who he was is just some damn sloppy writing, and ordinarily this wouldn't be such a huge deal for me, but I've waited so many years only to find out I was literally waiting for nothing. I'm not lying. I feel cheated.

[Kooshmeister]

Over 30 views and nobody's got anything to say about this? No one's got any similar stories? I have nobody's sympathies? Sheesh.

Forgive me for being a little rude, I'm just really disappointed no one seems to have had any similar experiences, or seems to appreciate the outright enormity of waiting that many years for what amounts to nothing.

[Derf]

I remember watching the 70s version of The Tomorrow People on Nickelodeon reruns. I didn't know there was a second version. I still laugh that the term "indigo children" has come back among the New Age crowd to mean kids born with extra psy powers. If I recall correctly, this show is the origin of that term. I checked Wikipedia, but it wasn't listed there, nor is the term readily findable on IMDB, so I'm probably misremembering. Either that or the New Age police have erased all references so that they don't look like even bigger twits than they already do. If I mysteriously disappear, I'll probably have been relegated to the lower karmic planes and only allowed to return when I get mellow and admit the awesomeness of healing crystals  .

The show was very low budget, so, while I feel your pain at never getting the payoff you wanted, I can't help but figure that the writer who came up with the plot line either forgot or left before things were resolved. Poor writing often accompanies low budget, so you have to just enjoy the better parts and not sweat the unresolved parts.

My guess is that the random scientist was . . .


Dr. Joseph Javorsky, a Russian scientist who eventually recovered from the mosquito bite, defected to the U.S., was irradiated, and began to hang around Yucca Flats terrorizing people by grunting and throwing rocks at, well, other rocks.

Okay, sorry, I have no clue  .

[Trevor]

 

I feel the same way about the tv series The Omega Factor and Sapphire & Steel ~ they just ended, no clearing up of hanging storyline threads, no final resolution. I waited for quite a few years for the next series of both but nothing ~ only later did I learn that there were no other series episodes made.

Even though I love both of these series, I would have liked to have had just one more series, just to see what happened to the characters, especially Ian Carlisle's Dr Roy Martindale character in TOF who is disgusted by what the Organization is doing and leaves, then is never seen again.

[BTB]

Well me  back here in Germany always wanted to see the finale of "der siebte Weg" a rather good mistery series for children over growing up I missed 3 times the chance for the finale, because always something urgent was happening which kept me from seeing it and even my friends were incapable of taping, then comes the internet and the ending is way lame. It is not the fact that I am now an adult but the mistery was better than the solution.

[DodgingGrunge]

When I had a TV (before I moved into a monstrously small, 10'x10' studio in CA, haha), I always seemed to have the opposite problem:  I'd be the only person in the known universe to have watched a given episode, an episode so uncharacteristic and amazing that people had no choice but to assume I was making it up entirely.

The best example that comes to mind is the cartoon show Inspector Gadget.  I probably saw this a decade ago, so my memory is a bit hazy, but essentially, Dr. Claw comes *really* close to destroying Gadget in some sort of liquid metal bath.  Penny and Brain actually have to lose their cover to save him, to which he asks, "Penny, Brain, what are you two doing here?"  They were able to shrug it off with an, "Uh..." and they all leave together, slowly disappearing at the end of the street.

True story, I swear.  And I'm the only person in the entire freakin' world who watched it, apparently.