The moment a mediocre thing becomes good, usually when it stops imitating and commits to its own premise.
Named for Riker's beard in the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The deliberate inverse of jumping the shark, and a useful reminder that the trajectory can go either way.
In practice
- A product with three mediocre releases finds its identity in the fourth by dropping the features that were imitating a competitor.
- A band's fourth album is the one that sounds like them, because the first three sounded like their influences.
- Standing
- The deliberate inverse of jumping the shark.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- Proverbs that recur across cultures