Keith, they do that all the time in anime. We certainly complain about it here all the time, it often seems by the last few episodes of alot of shows that they clearly had no game plan when the series got the go-ahead, and they end up with a mess by the end of it. Then we get a few lines of dialog out of nowhere, and poof, all questions answered.
edit: Hell, they did this with Macross Frontier.