What Was Your Name Again? A List of Forgotten Fictional Characters

Sometimes, a fictional character just doesn't work out, and the author realizes they need to rewrite their character, or cut them out entirely, or simply forgets that they exist. This blog post is dedicated to those characters. 

10. Charlie's Sisters - It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

The season 16 episode of "Always Sunny" where it is revealed that Charlie has two sisters confused a lot of people. However, the creators of the show maintain that Charlie always had sisters and people just forgot about them.

In the season 1 episode "Charlie Got Molested," Charlie's family has an intervention that introduces us to his Uncle Jack and also features two young women in the background. In season 16's "Frank Shoots Every Member of the Gang," Charlie reunites with his sisters. This seems to completely come out of the blue as the sisters have not been mentioned since, and Charlie's mom seems very focused on a family consisting only of herself, Charlie, and her brother, Uncle Jack. It's a safe guess that the creators completely forgot Charlie had sisters, were rewatching their show for the podcast they now do about it, and remembered that they exist, so now Bunny and Candy are back in the picture. 

9. Half the Cast - Sex Education

What do you do when half of your characters quit a show after season 3 and you were planning to have a season 4? 

Well, in this case, I'm guessing they knew well in advance that several lead actors were leaving, and just rapidly rewrote the ending to season 3. I won't give away too many spoilers, but I'm just incredibly curious as to how this played out. I just looked up the 7 (!) actors that resigned after season 3, and only one of them lists another project they were going on to star in. Losing half the cast is part of why season 4 was so sloppy (oh yeah, [insert character's name here] goes to a different school now), even if we did have a few great moments from Emma Mackey, who was cast in the movie Barbie strictly because people were talking online about how she looks like Margot Robbie, but when they brought her onset they realized they don't look that much alike and cut her scene. Best of luck to you in the future, Emma.

8. Queen Amidala - Star Wars

"Whenever you notice something like this, the Force did it."

Let me let The Simpsons explain:

This inclusion is based on a single line, but I find it hard to believe one of the greatest sci-fi franchises, with one of the most frightening fanbases, could slip up this bad. In the movie Return of the Jedi, Princess Leia says that she remembers her mother, and that she was beautiful, and sad. In the prequel that came out several years later, Revenge of the Sith, we see that Queen Amidala died in childbirth while having Luke and Leia. Leia could not possibly have remembered her mother. 

I looked up some online threads that contended Leia remembered her mother due to the Force, but why would Luke not remember her? The Force was stronger with him than it was with Leia. I'm going to back out of this before I get into a fight I'm not really equipped for, but it feels like the prequel filmmakers ... kind of forgot something.

I mean, no, they didn't. The Force did it.

7. Eddie's Sister - The Dark Tower series

To be fair, Stephen King spent decades writing these books. And I read most of them in a spree.

But he totally forgot one of his character's names.

Eddie is the junkie with a heart of gold we meet in the second book, The Drawing of the Three. He was supposed to be played by Aaron Paul in the movie adaptation, but, hey, I did a whole podcast episode about that, it didn't happen.

Eddie's sister, Gloria, got hit by a car as a child, which fractured his family and led to him and his brother becoming drug addicts. This was brought up often in the earlier books in the series.

Then Stephen King took a break.

And then he finally got back to it, and there's another flashback where Eddie is thinking about his sister and reflecting on how "Selena never stood a chance."

I remember reading this scene and being like, what, really? You could have gone back to any of your previously published books and found out what her name was, but ... you know what ... it ends in the letter "A" and that's fine. He wrote the last three books at some kind of fever pitch, with the Hamilton-esque energy of someone who writes like he's running out of time. Like someone who just got hit by a car. And decides to make that part of the books, as well. No time to look up kid's name. No one will notice, right?

6. Libby - Lost

There are a lot of unsolved mysteries in Lost, but for me one of the biggest ones is what they were planning to do with Libby. (SPOILERS AHEAD!) Libby was a psychiatrist who seemed committed to helping everyone on the island, but especially Hurley, who had previously been in a mental hospital. Hurley was a fan favorite so Libby quickly became a fan favorite as well when the two started a relationship. Then, in a flashback scene at the end of one episode, we see that Libby was in the mental hospital at the same time that Hurley was. Not as a doctor ... but as a patient. I remember being stunned by that stinger ending.

And ... they just never return to that. Libby is very abruptly, randomly killed. The character Michael (best known for yelling "WAAAALLLLLT" a lot) had just shot Ana Lucia, and Libby had just walked in to get blankets for a picnic with Hurley and witnessed it, so he shot her too. 

There are a whole lot of rumors about why they killed Libby when her plot was just starting to thicken. One is that both Ana Lucia and Libby were fired from the show because both actresses got DUIs, but I don't think you get fired from a show for a DUI unless you're on, like, Sesame Street or something, and the writers state that they had planned both characters' deaths well in advance of the DUIs. I'm not sure if I buy that, though. And that brings me to the next theory. That they weren't going to kill Libby, but everyone hated Ana Lucia, so they had to kill another character for the episode to have emotional impact, and Libby was just ... the easiest character for them to forget about.

As a side note, I actually liked Ana Lucia for the same reason a lot of people hated her - she slept with Sawyer, and I thought the insufferable Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle might finally end. I wish I could say it's the most ridiculous love triangle Evangeline Lilly has ever been the center of, considering it involves her and Sawyer being locked in a cage together at one point and forced to eat animal crackers and having sex so that Jack can watch (is that when the show jumped the shark?) but it's not, because it's a complete tie with the Hobbit movies, where Evangeline is forced to choose between the typically emotionless Legolas (Orlando Bloom really needed work I guess) and a dwarf who introduces himself to her by telling her to put her hand down his pants. Yikes. 

What was I talking about again? Oh, yeah. Libby. Gone too soon, always still a mystery, one of many the Lost writers decided to sweep under the rug.

Believe it or not, I loved this show.

5. The Hulk - Marvel Comics

I'm going to have the least to say about this one because I've never seen any Hulk movies or read the comics, but I heard about this and I just think it's a funny story. Apparently, the Hulk's alter ego name was originally "Bruce Banner," but Stan Lee kind of forgot about that and started calling him "Bob Banner." It's a good thing that comic book nerds would not pick up on little details like that and start to riot, right? No such luck, so the issue was resolved by saying his name was officially "Robert Bruce Banner."

I mean, I know there are some people who go by their middle names, my grandfather for one, but I don't know that I've met too many that alternate between first and middle name, unless they are characters in a domestic thriller. Which I read a lot of. ("What? Marie is actually Sally Marie, who I was mean to in high school? No wonder she applied to be my nanny so she could steal my husband!") Is that what's going on here? Is Marvel Comics a domestic thriller? Should I read it?

4. Lisa's Friends - The Simpsons

Bart constantly has friends, but when Lisa gets a friend or love interest, it's usually contained to one episode. Sometimes, the characters continue to be used in the background in group scenes. But sometimes, they even mess that up. Janey, for instance, is sometimes shown in Lisa's class and sometimes in Bart's. Did Janey get skipped ahead? Speaking of characters who got skipped ahead, do you remember the character Allison who Lisa became best friends with in season 6? She still shows up in crowd scenes all the time, but she's obviously not Lisa's friend, because in the next season a main plot point is that Lisa does not have a single friend. I mean, I get they probably couldn't book Winona Ryder multiple times, but how does Lisa lose so many friends? The one who had horses, the one who was a Republican ... I guess those don't count because they were pretty clearly one-episode characters, but that doesn't apply to Janey. There are a lot of young boys in Springfield who get to be fleshed out (Martin Prince even has a whole episode, which is pretty bad) but really all we have as far as girls are Sherri and Terri (they're twins ... that's really all there is to them, they're twins) and, when the writers need Lisa to have a friend for plot reasons, Janey gets dropped in. One can only assume that Lisa drives people away with her smartest-person-in-the-room attitude, moral superiority, and jazz obsession, which are things that endear her to us on the show but probably would seem very off-putting in real life.

3. Meg's Friends - Family Guy

Speaking of cartoon sisters who have friends only when the plot requires it! Meg has three recurring friends, Patty, Ruth, and Esther. They've been on the show for decades now, but are so unmemorable that in the episode "Girl Internetted," where Meg's YouTube channel inspires people to gain weight, they show up and say to Meg, "Hi, we're your friends, Patty, Ruth, and Esther! If anyone remembered who we are, they'd be shocked to find out how fat we've gotten."

The writers also apparently forgot. Patty is the favorite of the trio, and even kind of gets her own episode when Brian attempts to date her, but she mentions at one point she has two moms who are lesbians. A few seasons later, we see her parents, and they're not two moms, they're a heterosexual little people couple. Ruth is shown once to be politically outspoken, once to have a thing for Meg's mom, and apparently got her tongue ripped out in the episode that's a parody of Taken, but none of those things are ever referenced again. And Esther ... virtually never talks. She's the second most silent character on Family Guy after Roberta Brown, who has never had a line. She's there in all the scenes with the Brown family, but never says anything, it's pretty weird. 

This show has made fun of itself for not having enough female characters. Both in the "Cinderella" parody, where Stewie is one of the stepsisters, and in the "Friends" parody, when Lois is recounting her 1990's days with her roommates, "Bonnie and ... other Bonnie!" The thing is, the female characters are there ... just largely forgotten.

2. The Entire Flanders Family - The Simpsons

Remember when I said the Simpsons couldn't remember how old Janey is? Well, hold on to your butts. We're about to get into the Flanders family.

And, I'm not one of those Simpsons *****es who thinks that everything should be frozen in the same year, like Marge and Homer still should have been in high school together in the 70's. I want this show to last forever and continue to be relevant, and I love that Homer and Marge are millennials now. 

But that's not what this is about. It's the complete confusion about how the Flanders know the Simpsons, their kids' ages in relation to Bart and Lisa, and whether the kids actually go to Springfield Elementary and if so what class they would be in.

In an early season, we see a flashback episode of the Simpsons moving to the neighborhood to make way for baby Lisa, with Flanders and an already very much born Todd singing "We welcome you to the neighborhood" and that's them meeting them for the first time.  (Lisa wasn't born yet, but both of the Flandereses were.) But then, in later seasons, there are flashbacks where we see Marge and Homer having been friends with Ned and Maude before the former were married, and, the episode that really shakes up my soda, the one where we find out Homer delivered Todd Flanders. And that's supposed to be a very special Christmas episode, not a one-off. And, Lisa had been born in that episode. Having Todd's middle name be "Homer" seems like a kick in the face to all the seasons that came before, and it's one episode that makes me realize where Simpsons jerks are coming from.

I mean, Flanders at one point revealed he is 60 years old, and that at the time did not jive with him having Beatnik parents, but the show has gone on long enough that it works now. But what of the ages of the children? Rod is the most forgotten Flanders, but we see him celebrating his tenth birthday in one episode, which is confusing because we always assume Todd, the shorter and much more featured one, is the same age as Bart (10). He's paired up with Bart multiple times, including their mini-golf competition and teaming up to save the lemon tree from Shelbyville. In the episode where the fictional news program "Rock Bottom" does a fast reel of everything that they've gotten wrong over the years, one of the headlines that flies by is "Todd is actually the older Flanders."

Basically, Ned, Maude, and their two sons have become blank characters that could be fitted into any slot based on what the plot requires, because the writers never picked a lane with which characters were born when and how Homer actually knows Flanders. Is he an unfortunate neighbor, or is he a lifelong friend? The flashback episodes between the Simpsons and the Flanders are always pretty messy. There are some characters that maybe ... you just shouldn't try to flesh out. More about that in my next entry.

1. Larry the Barfly - The Simpsons

Some characters should be fleshed out, and some shouldn't. There are characters you forget existed for 30 years, and then remember that the character exists, decide he is "beloved," and do the only logical thing and kill him off.

Let me backtrack a little. Homer's got his drinking buddies. There's Barney, who they haven't really tried to flesh out other than the couple of seasons he was sober, and then decided that didn't work and undid it. There's Carl, who got two episodes based on what I'm assuming was supposed to be a throwaway line early in the show, "This reminds me of my Icelandic boyhood." There are two episodes devoted to Carl coming to terms with being Icelandic, adopted, and Black, and not knowing what his identity is. They worked well. There's Moe, the bartender. Fleshing him out never works very well. He's just a scumbag, let him be that. And there's Lenny, who has no personality, intelligence, or ... anything other than he works at the power plant, drinks beer, and is in love with Carl. (Trust me.) And, if you ever try to give Lenny any character depth, Simpsons writers, I will come after you. This man exists to be a throwaway gag and always should be.

But, there's occasionally another Barfly in Moe's Tavern, and his name is Larry. He's been there since season 1, and only spoken in 3 episodes, but has been in almost every crowd scene. In one episode, they accidentally put 2 Larrys in the crowd. That's how invested the writers were in Larry.

But what if ... they remembered that he existed again ... and could do an advertising campaign saying they were going to kill off a beloved Simpsons character in next week's episode?

That is what dominated my Twitter feed in the week preceding Larry's demise, where we find out that he was a "beloved" character and considered Homer, Lenny, and Carl to be his best friends. The Simpsons has a history of going for unearned grief. In the episode Round Springfield, which was going to be their Emmy bid, they were going to kill off Marge's mother but decided instead to kill off Bleeding Gums Murphy, who was barely even a character. But much more of a character than Larry the Barfly. And, of course, the way they teased Maude Flanders' death by saying a beloved character was going to die this week. They even kind of mocked themselves for that when her eulogy mentioned she wasn't one of the most memorable characters and didn't have any catch phrases or anything. Still, more of a character than Larry.

But, now, when I rewatch old episodes, I always notice Larry, whereas I never really would have before. And it makes me a little sad that they did kill off one of their standby, um, character designs. Because I have to accept I'll be saying goodbye to more familiar faces in The Simpsons as the voice actors retire.

Anyway. That's my list of forgotten characters. But now, through my words, they live on.