Oh, you nailed in your post why the baby story doesn't work in genre tv shows.
They don't know what to do with the kid
So true. Whedon certainly didn't. Baby Connor had to get transported to another dimension and come back whiny teen boy Connor. You really can't have kids and infants in adult sci-fantasy effectively. The original BattleStar Galatica tried...and gave up, Boxy started disappearing. In the new version, he's mentioned briefly, that's it. In Fringe? Apparently the baby pops out of existence? Farscape? They had the kid at the very end of the series. Oh and in the Marvel comics - specifically The X-Men? Baby Nathan - Scott and Maddie/Jean's kid? He gets sent to a future world and we don't see him again until he's in his 40s or 50s, sent back to the past. Comics handle it the same way Whedon did in Angel - the kid gets lost in another time-line or world, and comes back suddenly much older.
I think the only Sci-Fi tale that I saw pull it off was the Terminator series, but even in that - they ended up revisiting the tale after he'd grown into a teenager.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2012-01-18 10:53 pm (UTC)They don't know what to do with the kid
So true. Whedon certainly didn't. Baby Connor had to get transported to another dimension and come back whiny teen boy Connor. You really can't have kids and infants in adult sci-fantasy effectively. The original BattleStar Galatica tried...and gave up, Boxy started disappearing. In the new version, he's mentioned briefly, that's it. In Fringe? Apparently the baby pops out of existence? Farscape? They had the kid at the very end of the series.
Oh and in the Marvel comics - specifically The X-Men? Baby Nathan - Scott and Maddie/Jean's kid? He gets sent to a future world and we don't see him again until he's in his 40s or 50s, sent back to the past. Comics handle it the same way Whedon did in Angel - the kid gets lost in another time-line or world, and comes back suddenly much older.
I think the only Sci-Fi tale that I saw pull it off was the Terminator series, but even in that - they ended up revisiting the tale after he'd grown into a teenager.
The story trope just doesn't work that well.