Yes, two posts in one day. All because this got me thinking, and I needed some way to celebrate.
So... why do we have prequels at all? No, seriously, what do they bring to the table? From "Vader was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force" to "The Cylons were created by Man," anything and everything we need to know about a film or TV show's background has been given to us in plain, simple terms. (Note: Caprica > Star Wars Prequels.)
You already know who's going to be alive at the end.
The audience has got to care about your characters. As Joss Whedon finally found out on Dollhouse, people have a hard time getting invested in your characters if they think they're gonna die. Now, Whedon's problem was his penchant for killing fan-favorite characters. Prequels have a slightly different problem.
From the moment it became clear that his younger, whinier sidekick was Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn was a dead man walking. We all knew he was going to die. It was only a question of when. Same goes for literally every person who picks up a lightsaber who is not Anakin or Obi-Wan. Same goes for Padme. We were hoping that the same went for the cartoon rabbit. And we knew that Anakin was going to get dropped into a volcano and put inside a sci-fi gimp suit. So what happened in the Star Wars prequels that we didn't see coming?
While you're pondering that, consider Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. We know from fairly early on that a) Hugh Jackman's character is going to die, and b) that sometime prior to this, he's going to injure his leg very, very badly. Now I'll argue later on that The Prestige is the exception that proves the rule, but for now just consider the fact that you probably started wincing each time Jackman went down that trapdoor. In a nutshell, this is because The Prestige is one self-contained piece; the chronologically-scrambled narrative is here used as a means of foreshadowing. If each of the three acts of the film had been separate films, and those three films were not released in chronological order, it would have been a different story.
Now, Caprica does its best to subvert this. One, it is set more than 50 years before the events of BSG and features a cast of characters who never show up on BSG, plus one character who has the same name as a BSG character, presumably to mislead you into thinking they're the same so that when the character dies, you go "what the frak???"
Still, Caprica has to overcome the big massive hurdle of a fact that everybody will be dead in 57 years at the outset. Now, yes, everyone dies eventually, but it's hard to care about the characters and the society in Caprica since we'd spent four years on BSG getting over the fact that everyone our heroes knew back home were dead and gone. It's like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. Everyone's already dead, so why does any of it matter?
To its credit, not that it deserves much, Star Trek Enterprise is set way before the Kirk era, and there's not a young Kirk or Spock running around getting in the way. On paper, therefore, you'd think that Enterprise would have a better shot than either Caprica or The Phantom Menace.
You have to reduce the amount of cool technology.
Star Trek had shot its bolt on technological wizardry, and the sane thing to do in order to get a show that wasn't just about a bunch of techno-wizards in space solving all their problems with technobabble would be to do a prequel. But did it have to be so far back in time? The holodeck had, for better or worse, been a staple of Star Trek since 1987, and it suddenly disappeared. We were stuck following the adventures of a guy nobody had ever heard of before in a version of the Enterprise that was conspicuously absent from Picard's collection.
Hell, there are about 75 years between where the Original Series films end and where TNG picks up. We know virtually nothing about that time. You'd lose site-to-site transporting, holodecks, hyper-capable cloaking devices... and, the original show was very rarely about technobabble. So yeah, you'd still have shields, phasers, torpedoes, and that all-important magic-wand-shaped-like-a-deflector-dish. As long as you stayed away from Young Picard, I'd watch a Star Trek show set between TOS and TNG. (Okay, now I'm fantasizing about a Caprica-style Trek show featuring the creation of the holodeck.)
Ron Moore famously took a different approach, qutting Star Trek in general to make Battlestar Galactica, a show in which there are no deflector shields or techno-wizardry. But was that because he wanted to avoid technobabble, or because the Miniseries budget was already stretched to the breaking point? Caprica has oodles of fancy-pants magitech that was never so much as alluded to in BSG. Yeah, yeah, First Cylon War, whatever. (In Star Trek: Holodeck, there is no big calamity at the beginning of TNG to wipe out all our characters and technology. It'd be a hard task to navigate all the continuity and still be accesible to the average fan, but it could probably be done.)
Now in the Star Wars prequels, Lucas tries to have his techno-cake and eat it too. On the one hand, there are no Death Stars. Jedi Starfighters don't have hyperspace capability (gee, it would have been nice if this were a plot point, ever). There are some obvious "precursors" to tech in the classic trilogy, especially throughout Revenge of the Sith.
But on the other hand, despite the 20-year-gap between Sith and Hope, there really aren't that many changes. There's a Death Star, yes. They can now make fake flesh so that Mark Hamill doesn't have to wear a blue glove all the time... I mean, Luke can have a normal-looking hand. The changes are largely cosmetic, except for the Death Star, and don't really affect the story as a whole. How can a 20-year-old droid hack a state-of-the-art trash-compactor?
So, um, what I'm saying here is that the Star Wars prequels actually did a good job with the tech thing...
(The author has a sudden recollection of R2-D2's rocket thrusters.)
Frak.
"How we got here" is not as interesting as "what do we do now?"
Take the superhero genre for a second. Do you care how Thomas Wayne made that fortune that his son squandered on Bat-themed suits, cars, weapons, floodlights, etc? I don't. Or what Superman's dad was up to before Krypton did the big firework? Nah.
Likewise, I don't wanna know how Galactica got constructed or what life was like aboard it prior to the Cylon attack. We saw enough of that in the Miniseries. Not that what we did see was bad, mind you, but it served its purpose as part of a larger story. Here's a quick description of the BSG backstory: "A society a hella lot like ours gets flash-fried by our own robotic creations. The last survivors go on the run. Paranoia, intrigue, and fantastic character-driven storytelling ensue."
Star Trek Enterprise tries to show us what the creation of the Federation was like. Even George Lucas wasn't stupid enough to show us the formation of the Galactic Republic.
Stories should be self-contained. They should start at their beginning and end at their end.
I like that Battlestar even took the extra step of ensuring that there could be no continuation by destroying the Galactica in the finale. To me that sent a very clear message: "we're done here. We've said all we came to say. There will never be more. We promise not to wreck this for you with a sequel. (And if you really want one, just watch Blade Runner.)" It's an entirely self-contained story that doesn't need Caprica. Nor does it need Blood & Chrome. We know everything we need to know.
Now take someone who's notorious for not telling his stories in chronological order. Christopher Nolan has taken the chronologically-scrambled story and turned it into an art form. But note that, aside from his Batman films, which will be discussed in just a moment, each of his films are self-contained. It's true that they don't begin at their chronological beginning, but Nolan builds mystery and suspense by showing things to his audience out of order. The best example of this is, in my opinion, The Prestige. Now, I know I'm part of a pretty small minority when I say that The Prestige is my favorite Nolan film. But I love the fact that once you know Christian Bale is playing twins, it's a whole different story. You'd lose that element if you were given that information at the very beginning. In fact, part of the reason I love The Prestige so much is the fact that you can watch it twice and see a very different film the second time (I rooted for Hugh Jackman pretty much the entire way through the first time, and it was only on second viewing that one of Bale's characters became much more sympathetic).
But imagine if The Prestige only contained the second and third acts. That is, imagine if the story was told in chronological order beginning with Jackman's journey to Colorado and ending with Bale's reunion with his daughter. All you heard about their friendship and early rivalry would be related to you by the other characters. This might just about work, incidentally, though you'd lose a lot. And then later, somebody tried to make the first act into a prequel. Would that be marketable? Would that stand up on its own? I kind of doubt it.
Now the Batman films are a bit different, but they still have self-contained stories to them, with a beginning, middle, end, and in the case of The Dark Knight, an extra end. They're told in chronological order. But would Batman Begins really be a film that could have been made after The Dark Knight? I doubt it. What would be the point?
Why, in short, do filmmakers go backwards after the fact?
See, storytelling is an art. The storyteller has to decide which details to include and which ones to leave out. You're a lot more constrained in television, because every episode has to be 40 minutes and change (and there are a ton of deleted Battlestar scenes I wish had been re-integrated into the DVD episodes, but that's just me).
Star Trek: Holodeck
Now, let's return to my hypothetical idea about a Star Trek show set at roughly 2350 (about 15 years prior to TNG, because if memory serves, the holodeck was a relatively new piece of technology). It'd be set either on or close to Earth and be a character piece - incorporating elements of DS9 and Caprica. No character from TNG, DS9 or Voyager would show up and do anything important. (N.B: the 24th-century Trek shows all had this thing where one character from the previous show would turn up at the beginning in a glorified cameo. I'd be okay with that, so long as it was fleeting enough that it wouldn't lead to a plot hole on the other show.) The only thing that this show would pass on to its sucessors would be the holodeck.
See, the Dominion War isn't really on the same scale as the Nuking of the Colonies in Battlestar, so the whole "everybody's going to die" thing won't really be an issue. As far as cool technology, this would be a show about the creation of the holodeck, the coolest bit of Trek tech ever. I don't know that the holodeck has ever really been used to its full potential. It's been the focus of some comedy episodes on TNG and Voyager, and some "breather" episodes on DS9, and it played an important role in, ugh, Insurrection. The point is that there's a lot of untapped potential here.
There would have to be some conflict, obviously, but it would have to be minor and low-key, to the extent that future/past shows never have/had cause to mention it (something involving Section 31, that secret organization that was introduced on DS9, perhaps). It would in effect be a drama, which is something Trek has never really tried.
Could it work? Maybe, but not under the Star Trek label; drama fans wouldn't watch, and Trek fans would hate it. (Caprica had the same problem.)
So Paramount decided to revive its Trek franchise, but with a "prequel" that knocked everything else out of continuity. Brand recognition, a fresh start, and no continuity problems. Definitely the way to go.
So why do people still think they can make prequels?
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