5 TV Shows That Lost the Plot When Everyone Started Teleporting

5 Game of Thrones

If you were watching Game of Thrones when its final season aired, you remember the bafflement from viewers as characters zoomed instantly across distances that used to take whole seasons to traverse. 

The final season focuses on just a couple locations, most notably King’s Landing in the south and Winterfell in the north. We see characters hop on a horse at the end of one episode and show up at the other in the next. At the start of the show, this journey took a month. It took a month if you were a king and had the way cleared for you and servants carrying your supplies, and if you didn’t, it could take multiple seasons for you to manage the same distance.

A more disorienting example of fast travel happens in Season Seven. A band of adventurers are trapped on a rock in a lake, while one of them runs for help. He has to cover some 25 miles on foot. He then sends a message on a bird, which travels 2,000 miles, and then someone must travel the 2,000-mile return journey (or 2,025-mile return journey) on a dragon. Fans who plotted this out note that this is all technically possible if we assume the guys are trapped there for a couple days, but it’s hard to feel that time pass when the show whizzes through this during a fraction of an episode. 

You might remember all that, if you have pained memories of how Game of Thrones ended. But do you remember how, back when show was great, people groused about how slow it was? “Jaime and Brienne are spending the whole season just trekking in the woods,” viewers complained. “Arya and the Hound are spending multiple seasons on their own trek. Just hurry up and get on with it! We want to see dragons fighting zombies!” 

Only later would they realize those slow journeys weren’t a flaw. That was how the show balanced action with character development and paced the story back when it was working best. 

4 Lost

Lost similarly sent characters on long treks among the trees in early seasons. Sometimes, it was unclear just what distances they were covering. In the first season, one engaging plot had two characters spending each day at a hidden spot, digging out some metal structure without telling anyone else. By the next season, this is a major location many characters routinely visit, so the show reveals it’s only 10 minutes away from the beach where everyone else is. This makes some of those earlier scenes of secrecy look absurd in retrospect. 

Still, the show went on sending its characters on long treks, and it could take half the season to travel from one end of the island to the other — and this was back in the days when a season meant 24 episodes. By the final season, characters were still going from one of these sites to another, but you could now count on them managing it in a single episode. Though this might suit the quicker pace of the plot, the writers realized the show couldn’t be nonstop action, so it gave characters downtime unrelated to trekking. Frustratingly, this meant characters sitting back and playing poker or tic-tac-toe.

This was another series where viewers bemoaned all the early stretches of episodes where character slowly made their way from one location to another, not understanding how this was better than the alternative. One quote from a viewer became a meme among fans. “I got sick of it,” he said. “At that point, I felt like I had watched them wandering in a line through the forests, a bit sweaty, for the thousandth time. I thought, ‘I can’t watch this anymore.’ Then out of the bushes came a black cloud, which grabbed a Black man and threw him to the ground, and I thought, ‘I definitely can’t watch this anymore.’”

That wasn’t just any viewer, though. That was Alan Dale, who played Charles Widmore on the show. Lucky for him, they kept him on right up until the last few episodes, long after he stopped watching, 

3 The Walking Dead

With The Walking Dead, early complaints didn’t so much call out the characters for endless trekking as for never going anywhere at all. The second season, thanks in part to a constrained budget, took place entirely on one farm. Some viewers are convinced the show improved after this. Others look back and see the majority of the series as an endless cycle of the characters discovering new settlements are evil, while the first two seasons remain the only good ones.

For four and a half seasons, The Walking Dead characters hung around on the outskirts of Atlanta. Even as they did wander a little and discover some new group of survivors, they never moved far. Then came Season Five and a midseason hiatus. When the show returned and checked back in with the gang, they’d just completed an odyssey and were now right outside Washington, D.C.

That journey apparently went off without a hitch. Up till now, they hadn’t been able to go scavenge a pharmacy without someone losing an arm to zombies, but these 550 miles were completely uneventful.

This seemed crazy enough at the time. But was nothing compared to the show’s spin-off, where Daryl wakes up one day and discovers he’s washed ashore in France and doesn’t know why. 

2 Heroes

The first season of Heroes tracks a bunch of different characters as they go on independent journeys that end with them all meeting. As with so many series, it had viewers itching for them to get to the actual climax (which NBC could barely afford to film). Then came later seasons, which offered new such climaxes every few episodes but weren’t nearly as interesting.

Also, later seasons had teleportation. Literal teleportation. One character at the start had control over time and space, a second character got that power from him and they later went on to zip around the globe and move other characters around as necessary. Still other characters had their own versions of this power, including super speed. 

This is one more example of how characters undergoing long journeys, delaying our gratification, can make for compelling entertainment. That said, there’s surely a way to give superheroes season-long arcs without physical distance being the challenge they must overcome. We’re pretty sure some superhero stories over the past 20 years demonstrate this. 

Perhaps Heroes will figure that out in the revival. No, we don’t mean the last revival. We mean the upcoming revival. The last revival (Heroes: Reborn) is as old now as the first season of the original show was when the last revival came out. 

1 The Rings of Power

The characters in this show didn’t gain teleportation as the series progressed. They had it from the very start, zooming from one part of Middle-earth to another, on foot and off-screen, using the power of Map. 

That’s how you knew this show stood no chance at greatness. Still, when you start from this, there’s nowhere to go but up. 

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