Then again, maybe their relationship would never have become physical, especially if Whedon had gone ahead with his plan to have Inara raped by space cannibals.

One of the main villains in Firefly is a "race" of insane, bloodthirsty humans called Reavers whose hobbies include sexual assault, feasting on human flesh, and making scarves out of their victims' intestines, though not always in that order. And, according to the show's executive producer, Whedon once considered doing an episode where this outer-space version of the Sawyer family kidnaps Inara and violently lives up to the first third of their reputation.

But before being taken by the Reavers, the ever-ready space escort injects herself with a drug that will kill anyone who comes into sexual contact with her, allowing the character to ultimately survive her horrific experience, at least physically. Or, to put it in a more accurate/horrible way: Inara was supposed to kill a ship full of crazed-out rapists with her vagina.

Fox
Because Whedon is a feminist, dammit!

Essentially, Jor-El is Superman's Superman, which is why you've never seen a movie where the climax consists of Jor-El committing brutal suicide with a piece of rock. Well, in 2002, J.J. Abrams tried to change that. Twelve years ago, the man who would go on to direct the Star Trek reboot and Star Wars: Episode VII wrote a draft for a horrible movie, working title: Superman: Flyby, in which Krypton never explodes. Instead, Superman is sent to Earth to protect him from a civil war led by Jor-El's brother, Kata-Zor, who eventually imprisons Jor-El and later attacks Earth, where his son Ty-Zor "kills" Superman, because apparently "Zorhead" is a very common insult on Krypton.

Now, usually death is like a mild case of stage fright for Superman: all it takes is a little pep talk for him to get over it, and the same thing was meant to happen in Flyby, with Jor-El delivering the anti-death speech that brings his son back to life. The problem was that, at the time, he was rotting in Kryptonian jail, leaving him with only one logical choice. Obviously he'd have to get in touch with the dying Clark in Kryptonian Heaven after slicing open his stomach with a rock he sharpened on the floor of his prison.

Jim Martin
"Just ... try to do it with a lot of hope and inspiration."

Moreover, Abrams didn't want this to happen off-camera. No, he envisioned long close-ups on Jor-El's pained face and the lake of blood pooling under him as he carves a picture of a middle finger aimed at Superman fans into his guts. Because, you see, it couldn't have been, say, Lois Lane's voice that brings Superman back to life due to ... that is ...

RealCG Animation Studio/iStock/Getty Images
"Bam! Lens flare in your face!"

However, this completely unnecessary death of one of the most inspiring characters in cinema history isn't the main reason why you should be happy this script never went to film. That honor belongs to a sequence early on in the movie where the Kents are changing baby Clark's diapers and are horrified to discover that Kryptonian poop is way smellier than human poop.

J.J. Abrams
You thought that I was kidding, didn't you? DIDN'T YOU?!

So forget a glorious, phoenix-like rebirth in a cascade of warm, bright light. Imagine every incarnation of the Doctor in the fetal position on the floor as his mind is flooded with nightmares until he breaks to the point that he has to be replaced with a new model.

Now, some might argue that it's possible the character does go through something like this every time he changes, and we just never see it. But, come on, is this really the face of a mental wreck with a mind eaten away by trauma and brain-bending psychedelic episodes?

BBC
I withdraw the question ...

He's the wide-eyed, innocent youth of America that looks up to Superman as a role model and strives to be a better person thanks to him, and doesn't that just make you so angry?! Oh, so Jimmy fucking Olsen thinks he's better than us just because he never got drunk and vomited all over a small child at a church fair? "Fuck that guy. I hope something horrible happens to him," you might be thinking, in which case you would have fit right in at DC Comics in the 1980s. Why? Because back then, the people working there hated Jimmy Olsen so much, they once planned to kill him off by giving him AIDS.

DC Comics
Hey, you can't argue that it wouldn't have made canonical sense.

Thirty years ago, people across America finally started to realize that, shit, AIDS exists and is scary as shit, so naturally big comic book companies wanted to inject current events into their storylines by having one of their characters come down with the disease. A vote was held at the DC office, and after they threw out the hundreds of counterfeit votes for Robin that writer Jim Starlin stuffed in the box (no, really, that actually happened) it was decided that Jimmy Olsen was the lucky winner. That's when someone remembered that the actor who portrays Olsen in the Superman movies is actually gay in real life (though that person was probably actually thinking of the actor in the old Superman TV series). In any case, this caused everyone in the office to stop believing that this idea could fly, and that was the end of that. Or was it?!

A couple of years later, the company revisited the idea in the worst way possible by creating a brand-new character called Extrano just so that they could infect him with HIV. And, of course, they made him a super gay Peruvian wizard, presumably to give people some valid fucking reasons to not respect comic books.

DC Comics
This. This was ALL the reasons.