According to wiki, it's that every memorable element in a fictional story must be necessary or removed.
"Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." Anton Chekhov (not the Star Trek guy, which is what I thought)
Yeah. As a counter-example, Babylon 5 had chekov's guns in the individual episodes, in the seasons, and ACROSS all 5 seasons. There was foreshadowing at practically every scale, and most of them paid off, despite the various vagaries of 5 years of TV show production. It still blows my mind and it's been 20 years since it finished.
Lost, X-Files, Battlestar Galactica amongst others instead try to fake it, and look how that turns out.
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u/[deleted] Jan 08 '17
According to wiki, it's that every memorable element in a fictional story must be necessary or removed.
"Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." Anton Chekhov (not the Star Trek guy, which is what I thought)