Reluctance to Move Forward in Narrative

 We're kind of in a glut of prequels, aren't we?

When Disney bought Lucasfilm, they announced a new trilogy of Star Wars movies, and we got them - a trio of films that tell stories a generation (or maybe a generation-and-a-half) past the events of the original trilogy.

The Star Wars sequels, as they've come to be called, were a mixed bag. The Force Awakens introduced fun new characters with a lot of potential while retreading very familiar plot beats. The Last Jedi subverted and undercut some of the expectations of Star Wars in a way that deeply polarized fans (and exposed a lot of racism and shittiness within the fanbase). And then the Rise of Skywalker managed to disappoint both those who wanted the more nuanced, adult interpretation of Star Wars and the people who just wanted more carefree adventure by being an act of utterly craven filmmaking.

Disney's tenure as stewards of Star Wars has been a mixed bag. The shining example, and the series that launched Disney+, was The Mandalorian, which was simultaneously like nothing we'd ever seen of Star Wars while also feeling perfectly in line with that universe. But The Mandalorian also suffered in the second season by becoming a launching pad for other shows and serving the franchise.

But The Mandalorian, also, took a step back, setting itself in the years shortly after Return of the Jedi, making it perhaps a sequel to the original series, but not treading on future grounds in the sequel era. The Book of Boba Fett (of which I watched the pilot and then decided against seeing more) was more or less a spinoff of the Mandalorian, and then the Obi-Wan Kenobi show, which I have not seen, is set between the prequels and original series.

We've seen a lot of franchises dip into the past for their spin-off stories. The Harry Potter series went back into the 1950s with the Fantastic Beasts movies (a series that has a protagonist utterly mismatched to the content of the story).

With Stranger Things coming to an end, but Netflix hoping to capitalize on its brand, there are talks of a spin-off, with some suggestion that there might be a younger Hopper in it, obviously implying it's a prequel.

Likewise, HBO is doing a Game of Thrones prequel series - something that I think could be too little too late after the final season of that show obliterated the public's considerable good will toward that world and series.

Amazon is promoting their "Rings of Power" series, which takes place in the distant past of Middle Earth, during the Second Age.

Now, I don't mean to say that prequels are an inherently bad thing: The Godfather Part II, which is half a prequel and half a sequel, is renowned as one of the best movies of all time. Better Caul Saul, which I must confess I haven't actually seen much of, is also thought by some to be better even than the original Breaking Bad - which is high praise.

I've also been enjoying Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is a spin-off of Discovery, itself something of a prequel to the original series, though not as distant one as Enterprise was.

But I do find it interesting that there's so much reluctance to take these existing IPs and move forward.

Sure, maybe it would be best if we just started creating wholly original stories and worlds. I'm very much in favor of that. But if we're to accept that branding is too powerful a force in Hollywood to avoid this kind of IP-extension, why is it that things are looking backward so much instead of forward?

Prequels carry with them some inherent problems. Stakes are inevitably lowered at least to an extent. Indeed, the Star Wars prequels, which were quite a rarity in 1999 when the Phantom Menace (marketed, in fact, mostly as "Episode One") came out, taught us a lot of those problems - knowing the fates of characters meant that the story struggled to surprise us, and the vague backstory as we had imagined it watching the original movies potentially, and for many of us did, outshine what we later saw on screen.

But sequels can also have their own issues. J. R. R. Tolkien actually began working on a sequel to Lord of the Rings, but abandoned the project because, cosmologically, evil had been defeated in a significant way - to suggest that Aragorn's reign and dynasty would allow evil to creep back into the world would undercut the happy ending of the original series.

Indeed, this was one of the big problems of the Star Wars sequel trilogy - by the Rise of Skywalker, learning that not only was the New Republic basically destroyed by the First Order, that Han and Leia's relationship fell apart and their kid turned evil, that Luke wound up washed up and depressed, but on top of that even Palpatine was somehow still alive despite being vaporized in the bowels of the second Death Star, it basically took everything that had been accomplished in the original series and threw it out the window.

This is, of course, a reason why sometimes, even if we love a series or IP, we need to let it end. But I also think that there's another element at play here:

In our own real world, we don't have a lot of optimism for the future. Climate change is already affecting us, and we can only expect its effects to get worse. On top of that, we're seeing a growing tolerance for authoritarianism. On top of that, we've spend the last two-plus years devastated by a genuine plague.

Things feel bleak, looking ahead, and so there is, I think, a desire instead to fall back to earlier times, even in narratives that aren't really beholden to the same timelines we find ourselves in.

Millennials like myself are struggling with the fact that so many milestones we expected to hit at certain ages remain out of grasp. My dad, at my age, was married, had a kid (with me coming in only a little over a year), owned a house, and was on track to become a tenured professor at a world-class university. Yeah, not me.

Just thinking about the future is stressful, imagining what kind of world we're even going to have ten, twenty years down the line.

There is something weirdly safe about the past - even if horrific things happened there, the total scope of them is now more or less understood. And likewise, prequels offer that same level of comfort - we know that some characters will survive, we know that some institutions will remain intact, even if we already know them to be doomed in some future story.

I think we're looking for some kind of reassurance, and the stability of predictability.

I don't know that art can totally change the outlook of a population - as devoted as I am to storytelling and art, I try to be realistic about its ultimate impact on people. But I do sometimes worry that there's a feedback loop. Might we feel more energized, more imaginative, if we began to look forward, rather than backward?

The End of Stranger Things 4 and Anticipation for the Final Season

 I just finished the finale of the fourth and penultimate season of Stranger Things. This season has been quite good - my favorite since the first one. I was talking with my sister about the show the other day and thinking about how the first season very much seems set up with the expectation that it would be the only one - there are a couple of plot hooks to carry things on, but mostly things are wrapped up relatively tidily.

Season four's ending is the sort of thing that clearly anticipates the finale of the series, and the elements at play here are big - big reveals, big moments, and big character arcs.

Let's get into spoiler territory:

Stranger Things 4

 Stranger Things came out of the blue. In 2016, while I was back east in Massachusetts visiting my parents, and my sister was there too, we watched this show that had seemed to receive no marketing at all from Netflix. I guess the streaming service didn't expect that this revisionist 80s sci-fi horror riff would draw much of an audience. The Duffer Brothers, who created and run the show, have talked about how their pitch was shot down because it was a show aimed at adults but starring mostly children.

However, in those children, you had a whole bunch of Gen Xers who grew up in that era and Millennials like me who grew up on the residual pop culture of the 80s who saw themselves in these pre-teens dealing with government conspiracy and cosmic horror.

A Stephen King-style story (with a lower body count) mixed with John Carpenter music and a little touch of Spielberg made for what turned out to be a really effective story.

Seasons two and three struggled, I think, to retain some of the magic of that first season. I think 2 is probably the weakest, including what feels like the obligatory episode that introduces a whole bunch of new characters and concepts that are so out of place that it feels like a different show and you get the sense it'll never be mentioned again (this being when Eleven runs away from home and joins up with a bunch of anarchist punks led by another survivor of Brenner's lab). The third season was a marked improvement, with, I think more solid themes and stakes, though a weird tonal choice to use rather cartoonish Soviets operating out of an American mall.

Season four, to me, is the strongest season since the first, largely by trying new things, including a different kind of villain, known initially as "Vecna," named after another classic D&D villain (in D&D, Vecna is a specific character who is the quintessential example of a "Lich," a powerful, undead, extremely intelligent, wizard that is more or less built to serve as the ultimate villain of a campaign).

While the creatures of the Upside Down in Stranger Things have been truly alien, and all apparently expressions of a singular intelligence (the Mind Flayer, also named after a D&D monster, though ironically this one being simply a type of monster and not a specific character,) Vecna is more human - literally performed by an actor in heavy prosthetics and make-up, and his behavior seems more akin to an 80s slasher villain like Freddie Kruger (incidentally, Robert Englund, who played Kruger in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, has a supporting role in one episode). So, there's a slasher killer invading peoples minds to destroy them from within, but he's also tied to the unfathomable and still very much unexplained Upside-Down (personally, I hope that we never get too much of an explanation about its nature).

Like the previous two seasons, the show divides the cast in a way that is still a little frustrating, but at the very least, the division of the cast is in bigger, fewer chunks. After the Byers moved away from Hawkins with Eleven after Hopper's apparent demise, Mike goes to visit them on Spring Break, though Nancy, despite doing the long-distance thing with Jonathan, decides to stay home.

As such, we have Mike, Eleven, Will, Jonathan, and Jonathan's new stoner friend Argyle forming one of the major "cast groups." This, I'll be honest, is maybe my least favorite one. Meanwhile, and spoiler alert if you haven't watched any of the trailers, Hopper is very much alive, and so we follow him in a Russian prison (or is it really just a prison?) while Joyce and Murray go on a mission to rescue him. Finally, the last cast "clique" has Dustin, Nancy, Lucas, Lucas' sister Erica, Steve, Robin, Max, and newcomer Eddie, who runs the high school's D&D club, known as the Hellfire Club.

This last group is the one that I find the most enjoyable, as it feels the most tied to the show's roots of young people having to solve enormous crises, but also gives us some of the most effective emotional beats, including a tremendous one centered around Max.

The season was released in two chunks - part two, which is just the last two episodes, came out only a few days ago. Episodes are longer, but with perhaps a few exceptions earlier in the season, it does not drag.

One thing of note is that, while the Soviets still play a role in this season, their presence I think works better now - it's a bit easier to imagine sketchy things happening in a secret prison in Siberia than with a bunch of Russian soldiers wearing uniforms in a secret base within the U.S.

I'm hoping the final season can at least match this one in quality, and hopefully put the cast together in Hawkins more.

With news of the new "Upside Down" production shingle Netflix has given the Duffer Brothers, I hope that Stranger Things is not milked totally dry of its charm, though given the way showbiz works these days, I can't be too confident it won't.

In any case, I'd say that if you're a fan of the show already and somehow haven't seen this season yet, you'll love it. If you found the last two seasons disappointing, try this one on for size.