Addendum:
Star Trek: Why DS9's Original Ending Would Have Been A Mistake (screenrant.com)
On surface level, the original ending idea is still powerful-- but the article explains the greater ramifications, which I'll opine on regarding a brief quote summary below:
I agree with Rick Berman saying 'no' to that, as "
it was just a dream" has always been a copout for lazy scripting - or, rather, it makes lazy scripting easier to do, especially
unintentionally and/or unwittingly. Even though it's not
always a copout, even if the audience reacts to it and think it might be the case, but I digress (the first time of many, moo-ha-ha-ha...)
Ditto for that 1978 Superman flick, or certainly Donner's original intention before Lester was brought in, but even then, they still kept the scene where reversing time to prevent events from happening. The result is obvious - it is a cheat, if not face-slap (like what you'd see in about 8 zillion home videos made by kids that do zoom-cuts to phrases they think are important), to the characters and/or the audience for the storytelling experience and the adventure and drama involved. (Time travel by spinning the planet in the opposite direction aside wouldn't work out that way and gravity would result in a much larger mess aside*, Superman no longer has to worry about not being there in time, the audience - once snapping out of it - asks "Why'd we get all wound up about that, then?")
* Here's a loose mini-documentary that shows (but not tells, hehe) what happens when you slow down the planet's spin, a prerequisite for having it spin the other way:
Nope, wouldn't have time reversed, but there'd be quite the mess...
The funniest part is, if Donner had his vision intact, Superman had his redemption bit in the middle of the movie but the time travel aspect would undo it all. But due to cost and time concerns; the earth-reversal was moved to the end of the first movie... one unintentional happenstance as the result of an unitnentional happenstance, which led to other unin-- but that's another franchise, so anyhoo, it's back to the main trope stuff:
Of course, there's also - among several shows -
Dallas and
Roseanne that used the same trope for major plotting developments - fans certainly loathed the latter when the makers decided all of Roseanne's TV series after the episode where Roseanne got the writing room (read: all of seasons 3 through season 10's final episode) was just the character's fever dream tale...
Or Was It a Dream? - TV Tropes
Take That, Audience! - TV Tropes (and/or many of the subcategories therein)
etc
Granted, a one-off episode using the trope or an equivalent (mirror universe, et al) does allow established characters to be given a different slant, which actors understandably love to do since it's a breath of fresh air**, but undoing major plot developments with this trope? It's like a puzzle; someone put the cube's color panels into a random configuration and now a new writer has to come in and put things back together in a cohesive order again.
** especially if they get to act all evil and such. "Living Witness" (VOY) does a fresh take on this scenario as well, in a way that isn't the same sort of "lazy writing" that many "it was but a dream" episodes/scenarios end up feeling... not bad, VOY, not bad at all... especially as DS9 did the mirror universe way too often and arguably made it a trope of its own, too...
