The Expanse (ENT)

[Durandal_1707]

Enterprise had three things to do.

Meet the Tellarites
Meet the Andorians
Fight the Romulans

Veering off from that course in the first place is what put it off track.

Enterprise came to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and it was alllllll out of kickass.

[ifly6]

Enterprise had three things to do.

Meet the Tellarites
Meet the Andorians
Fight the Romulans

Veering off from that course in the first place is what put it off track.

Meeting the Klingons and not touching off 20 years of war was another really big canon mistake.

It certainly took quite a while until season 4 until they finally turned about and got around to writing better scripts and interesting story arcs.

[Nessus]

The reason I say that prequels are pointless is that they are. They do not advance the story, they just provide context. They answer questions and close gaps in the audiences understanding of the material, and to me that makes the story less interesting. It is fun to me when I do not know all about a character and see aspects of them revealed and explored as a story advances and allow my own imagination to fill in whatever blank spaces that happen to appear.

By this logic, sequels would retroactively render their own predecessors pointless.

How did Khan end up on Ceti-Alpha V in the first place? Guess it's pointless to think about, since all we really need to know is in the film.

The point of a prequel isn't to fill in trivia for another work. It's to tell a story. While it's true that putting such trivia before the story is a mark of a badly written prequel, it isn't the definition of a prequel. In an ideal storytelling situation, the whole prequel/sequel thing is just an external description of which work was created first in the real world. In internal story and lore terms, each story should ideally stand on it's own, and be interesting in it's own right: which work came first in the real world should be arbitrary. By the same token, if these works are well made, it should be similarly arbitrary to a viewer watching them out of order whether they're dealing with a original and prequel or an original and sequel.

Imagine you're kid who grew up watching TNG, but through some streak of coincidence never saw any of TOS until much later. What would the difference between TOS's relationship to and TNG, and ENT's relationship to TOS be to such a person?

If you met someone who's seen"Aliens" and liked it, but hasn't seen "Alien" yet, would you discourage them from doing so on the grounds that it would be "pointless"?

[Rocketboy1313]

By this logic, sequels would retroactively render their own predecessors pointless.

No. Writing a sequel does not transform the original film into a prequel.

Are we all going to be mincing definitions on this?

When I say I find prequels pointless it is in the instances that they are used in our culture. When they are written after the fact to go back and give answers to questions nobody was asking, and often in ways that make continuity weird or broken.

If your story requires more background information in order to have context to move forward, feel free to give it, but don't pretend giving a needed explanation of what is happening is the same as going back 10, 20, 50, or 100 years and writing a whole story that doesn't advance anything or grow the story beyond the initial idea.

[Nessus]

We aren't mincing the definition. You are. You're applying a "no true Scotsman" by restricting your personal definition of "prequel" to include only those prequels that do specifically and primarily that.

That's not the common definition of a prequel. That's merely one of the numerous ways a prequel can be mishandled.

[Rocketboy1313]

An original property does not retroactively become a prequel because it gets a sequel.
And I am going to say that most people would agree with what I am proposing as common parlance. Instead of continuing a story they are making something that predates the original and does nothing to add to it.
"Alien" is not a prequel to "Aliens", "Prometheus" is a prequel.
"A New Hope" is not a prequel. "Rogue One" is a prequel.
"Space Seed" is not a prequel to "Wrath of Khan". "Enterprise" is a prequel.
"The Thing" 2011 is a prequel.

The sequences that take place in the past in "Godfather part II" are not a prequel in any meaningful sense of that word, because they are there to provide contrast to the actual story of that is happening, which is the sequel to "The Godfather".

If you want to stick to the most literal definition of the word prequel, which means any story that takes place before an existing work, which would make all historical fiction prequels by default, fine I am sure there are plenty of prequels that have some merit. But what prequel has come to mean in popular culture is what I am describing. Going back to some unexplored offhandedly mentioned event from the franchise and showing what happened. They don't add anything, they just dispel mystery. And when those making them attempt to add things, they always undercut or warp what was established in the original.

I am "no true Scotsman"-ing this shit. Because what I am pointing to is what people are complaining about when something is a prequel.

[Durandal_1707]

Well, the thing is that no reference I can find agrees with your definition. Merriam-Webster, Oxford, Cambridge, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com... none of them institute this requirement of yours (Cambridge comes closest, saying it "tell[s] you what happened before the events in the first film", but that's still not requiring that it explain anything). Most of the sources agree that it's simply a work set in an earlier time period that the preceding work. Yes, that would make historical fiction prequels; they're essentially doing the same thing, just setting their events in an earlier time period of a real universe rather than a fictional one.

And yes, many prequels are not as good as the original, just as many sequels are not as good as the original. Sturgeon's Law and all that. But some are great.

[Nessus]

An original property does not retroactively become a prequel because it gets a sequel.

Aaaah, but that's not the point I was making. You're getting too hopped up, it's making you skip over important stuff in your rush to rebut.

I said that a good original/sequel combo is functionally identical to a good prequel/original if you remove the real world context of which was created first.

Thus, if an original can survive having a sequel that matches it in quality, and does not require viewing/reading of the original, this is proof-of-concept for a prequel to stand on its own beside the original in exactly the same way.

Corollary: the exact same factors that can allow a sequel to stand on it's own while still having connections to the original also allow a prequel to stand on it's own.

I am "no true Scotsman"-ing this shit. Because what I am pointing to is what people are complaining about when something is a prequel.

Dude, you keep explicitly saying "X example is not a prequel because it doesn't do that thing I hate, even thought it fits all other criteria", and "prequels are defined as prequels by doing the thing I hate".

And no, stacking a false consensus atop that doesn't fix it.

For the record, I agree with you that many of the prequels you list are bad prequels that try to explain things that never required explaining. However, not all of them are bad prequels BECAUSE they do this.

"The Thing" definitely is. What happened to the Norwegian camp isn't just something that didn't need to be seen/explained, it was something that directly relied on the sense of mystery and provoking the viewer's imagination to run riot for it's impact in the original film, and showing what actually happened deflates that effect. This movie is also bad for many other reasons as well: it's technically possible it could have been good in it's own right had it been done very differently, but no matter what, it was going to come at a cost to the original just by existing.

Rogue One, however, is not. It's not just you: no one else cares how the plans got stolen either. Rogue One wasn't about the plans, it was about Jayne Erso and her gang. And the movie succeeds or fails based on how good (or not) THAT story was. How Leia got the plans was never a mystery, never had any weight, and was never relevant to ANH, so there's nothing there to damage.

And sure, it's irrelevant to the core films, but I mean, do you really care why the people in any given heist movie need the money (or whatever it is) they're stealing? Isn't anyone who REALLY cares what's in Marcellus Wallace's briefcase missing the entire point of Pulp Fiction? Would it make a damn bit of difference if Pulp fiction were a prequel to an earlier movie where the contents of the briefcase were important to saving the world? Sure, it'd remove that one little bit of mystique, but the rest of the film would still be the same, for good or ill.

Lets say Tarantino makes a prequel about, say Zed's motorcycle. Some big awesome "Red Violin"-esque story about all the drama this motorcycle has seen as it gets passed from owner to owner before arriving at Zed. Everyone thinks it's brilliant. Oscars for everyone and all that. But then some guy stands up on some forum and says 'this movie is pointless. No one cares where Zed got his motorcycle, it adds nothing to Pulp Fiction". Everyone just stares at him and goes "That... that wasn't the point, dude".

That's what Rouge One was going for. Didn't get there, as I understand it, but it did no damage by trying.

If you wanna argue Star Wars Prequels, there's THE prequels. Which aren't good, but the reasons for that nothing to do with knowing where Annakin's gonna be in the end. As you yourself point out: if knowing where things will end is what ruins things, then that would ruin historical dramas too.

[Admiral X]

The only problem I have with any prequels is that usually they tend to be rather poorly made, and part of that comes in retconning what was previously established. For example, the part in Rogue One that shows them struggling to get a physical copy of the Death Star plans aboard the blockade runner when in the original movie the plans were said to have been transmitted to that ship.

[StrangeDevice]

God, this is a strange one to look at from a writing perspective. Enterprise could have been superb even with the lacklustre storylines, if the characterisation had been there. I think they hit the right note character-wise when they decided that Scott Bakula wasn't Jack Bauer in space, but instead the everyman who was just trying to do the right thing. Someone who helped to found the Federation not because he was destined to, but because it seemed the most reasonable course of action in an increasingly hostile universe. Giving him a sense of doubt was a pretty nice step to healing his character. We even got some growth come Season 4's Vulcan arc.

It might just be me, but I don't think Enterprise really got off the ground until "Anomaly". It makes a really good pilot actually, you go in cold with no knowledge about the Xindi or their mission at all and slowly, over the course of a few episodes, it's unfurled until we get the AU in "Twilight" that shows what's ultimately at stake. Course, I'd have preferred if they'd gone the route of mid-Season 4 from the start with the Andorian, Tellurite and Romulan encounters. I think they just managed to get it all down pat in "Terra Prime", it's probably one of the most solid episodes of the show with a curiously 1960s tint to it. Space cannon on Mars taken over by radicals? Sounds exactly like a spy show from the period.

And to deal with the prequelitis? Simple. Get your script editor and your main stable of writers to do a bit of research with reference guides. Failing that, classify and redact Enterprise's mission logs so later captains wouldn't have access to them.