Prequels have a well-deserved reputation for being bad, to the point that even devoted fans will often groan when they hear that their favorite story is getting a prequel installment. More often than not, prequels answer questions no one was asking, completely muck up the timeline, or are just boring. Even when a prequel is good, there are usually little things that feel off. Sure, it’s not technically a retcon that Leia went on a thrilling adventure with Obi-Wan when she was ten. Nothing in the original trilogy outright says they didn’t do that! But we all know that wasn’t the implication.
This pattern isn’t random chance. Prequels are an especially challenging type of story to write, and many authors simply aren’t prepared for the extra difficulties. On the bright side, the reasons for this are easily condensed into a single list, so at least we know what we’re dealing with.
1. Fates Are Predetermined
Any time you use a recognizable person, place, or thing* in a prequel, your options are immediately restricted. This is most obvious with characters. We know nothing too bad can happen to Moiraine or Lan in the Wheel of Time prequel novel New Spring, because they need to be alive and in possession of all their limbs when Eye of the World starts.
The same dynamic applies to important factions, items, towns – almost anything. Anakin’s lightsaber can’t be lost in the prequel trilogy; Luke needs to get it in A New Hope.* We know Earth won’t be destroyed by the Xindi in Enterprise’s third season, because then the TNG characters would have nowhere to get sage advice from Boothby the plain-talking gardener!
If something happens that does appear to break the established timeline, that both confuses the audience and raises the specter of a contrived plot device to cover everything up. The later Star Trek shows can’t have Discovery‘s spore drive hanging around. It would ruin the entire plot of Voyager, since they could just use it to jump home. Likewise, it goes beyond any suspension of disbelief that Spock has had a super-famous sister this whole time and she was never mentioned.
To explain all that, Discovery’s writers send half the cast to the future at the end of season two, then gather everyone else in a room and make them pinky swear not to mention anything that contradicts the timeline. Suuuuuure.
This obviously reduces tension. If we know things are going to turn out okay, we won’t have any reason to worry about the outcome. The ending is unavoidably spoiled as a function of being a prequel. Less obviously, this also reduces satisfaction. Audiences like to be surprised at a story’s end, and there’s only so much surprise a prequel can deliver.
2. Character Arcs Are Redundant
Some of the most compelling characters are those who go through major changes by the story’s end. They gain wisdom, confidence, or a better moral compass, and we love them for it. Such arcs are often what makes a character compelling enough to tempt authors into writing a prequel about them in the first place.
That’s when the trap is sprung: audiences almost always love the version of a character that exists after the arc’s development, not before.* Any prequel will be about a version of the character that people don’t like as much. Depending on the character, they may not even make a good protagonist.
This is a core problem with the film Solo. In A New Hope, Han goes from a selfish jerk to someone who actually cares about his friends and the rebellion. Solo takes place before that arc, so the writers had three options, none of them good.
- Han could have just been a selfish jerk the whole movie, which would make him pretty hard to cheer for.
- His arc could have been about becoming a selfish jerk, so by the end, he’s ready for his New Hope arc. That might work, but it would be a real downer by Star Wars standards.
- He could just be the nicer Han already. This is the one they actually chose. By the end of Solo, Han is giving away his valuable cargo to the rebels, so I guess he won’t have anything to learn when he meets up with Luke and the droids.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (SNW) has the same problem with Spock. While it’s not always consistent, Spock’s character arcs have pretty much always been focused around his emotions, but SNW supposedly takes place before all that. Logically, this version of Spock should be even colder and less personable than his Original Series counterpart.* Instead, SNW’s Spock has even more emotional development than other versions we’ve seen, including a full-fledged love life.
It’s obvious why the writers made that choice: a completely emotionless Spock would be incredibly boring! That’s the contradiction of prequels that focus on younger versions of existing characters.
3. Setting Elements Are Missing
For many stories, cool worldbuilding elements like advanced tech or powerful magic are a big part of the appeal. Special elemental techniques like metalbending and bloodbending are big crowd-pleasers for fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and what Star Wars story would be complete without Force ghosts? Fans will definitely want to see those in any prequel story.
Except that can’t happen, as all of those things are quite recent inventions. Toph figures out metalbending at the end of season two, and the characters don’t even encounter bloodbending until season three. Meanwhile, Revenge of the Sith establishes that a deceased Qui-Gon Jinn has just figured out how to project his image from the great beyond.* Any story taking place before those time periods either can’t have the setting elements in question or needs some kind of explanation for why no one will know about them later. Any such explanation is likely to be contrived.
When storytellers act like this problem doesn’t exist, it invariably creates dissonance. One of Star Trek’s setting conceits is that all the Federation’s technology has advanced over the decades, and if you go back much further than Star Trek: The Original Series, you lose stuff like viewscreens, shields, phasers, and transporters.
Naturally, when it was time to make Enterprise, the writers weren’t interested in losing those important Star Trek staples, so Archer and his crew still have all of them. Mostly. Instead of raising shields, they “polarize the hull plating,” which is so identical that I’m fairly sure they just ran a find-and-replace on the script. They even talk about the hull plating being “offline,” which isn’t usually how one talks about armor, but what do I know?
At this point, it’s hard to see what the benefit was to making Enterprise a prequel at all, since barely anything is different. It’s the choice between a rock and a hard place, with bad results either way. The first option risks cutting out exactly what people like most about a setting, while the second makes the world feel static and unchanging.
4. Plots Are Constrained by Backstory
As a story goes on, writers usually add twists and turns to keep things interesting, often changing their plans over time. This can create some inconsistencies in the backstory, but it isn’t normally a huge problem. The audience’s attention is on the present, and they often won’t notice the mistakes as long as nothing draws attention to them.
You know what draws attention to backstory inconsistencies like nothing else? A prequel story! This is one of the reasons that fixing the Star Wars prequels is so difficult: No matter what you do, they have to end with everyone in their starting positions for New Hope. That’s really difficult to explain, especially after Vader’s “I am your father” reveal. If they were trying to hide Luke, why would they leave him with his only living relatives, without even changing his name? Surely the Empire would have checked there at some point, even if they weren’t specifically looking for Luke. For that matter, why is Yoda camped out on Dagobah instead of helping the rebellion? And if the Jedi are so powerful, how did just two Sith defeat a whole organization of them?
Star Wars is hardly the only franchise with this problem. Star Trek makes a big deal about how before the episode Balance of Terror, no one in the Federation knew what a Romulan looked like despite fighting a brutal war with them. This is so we can have the big reveal that Romulans look like Vulcans, and it works okay in the moment, but falls apart under scrutiny. How could the Federation* have waged an entire war without ever learning what Romulans looked like? Did they never search the wreckage of enemy ships or ask neutral species for information?
Despite those issues, both Enterprise and Strange New Worlds have felt obligated to adhere to the established backstory. SNW’s writers handwave it, which is probably the best course open to them, but it still feels unlikely. Enterprise goes the other way, concocting a complex plot involving a drone ship piloted by a captured Andorian telepath.* This does technically explain why Starfleet wouldn’t have found any Romulan bodies, but not why they couldn’t have gotten the same information by starting a group chat with nearby species. It’s also extremely contrived, like the Romulans are basing their tactics on what will best line up with the canon rather than what will make them win.
This is assuming there’s even enough dramatic potential to support a satisfying plot. We were probably lucky that Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance got canceled when it did, because the only ending that could have matched the preexisting canon would be all the Gelfling getting wiped out, which is a much sadder ending than the show wanted. Sometimes, the backstory just doesn’t make good story material because that isn’t what it was designed to do! If that’s where the most interesting story was, the writers would have started there in the first place.
5. Canon Is a Major Draw
The flippant solution to the first four problems is to just not care about any inconsistencies and forge ahead regardless. Fiction is all made up, and there aren’t any canon police coming to arrest us, so who cares? Just change anything you want, and damn the plot holes!
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Consistency between different installments is a big part of what draws people to continuous stories in the first place. This is why the Marvel Cinematic Universe is generally better regarded than the Star Wars sequel trilogy. The MCU certainly has inconsistencies, but nothing like the world-shattering dissonance that runs between JJ Abrams’s and Rian Johnson’s Star Wars films.
Intentionally changing canon is always a cost-benefit analysis. Sometimes, the benefit is obviously worth the cost. Just about every Star Trek show and movie made after 1969 has chosen to ignore the Original Series dialogue about how women aren’t allowed to be captains, and rightly so. This retcon might cause a little confusion, but that’s a small price to pay for a setting that isn’t overtly hostile to women.
In other cases, the benefit is obviously not worth its cost. Retconning Obi-Wan’s teacher from Yoda to Qui-Gon Jinn netted The Phantom Menace exactly zero benefit, as you could cut Qui-Gon from the film and barely have to change anything else. But most of the time, the results won’t be so obvious, and retcons have to be decided on a case-by-case basis.
The problem with prequels is that they have to make this choice at nearly every turn. The only way to avoid it is to set the prequel in an unexplored section of the backstory so the author has more freedom, which is what Amazon appears to be doing with its Lord of the Rings TV show. But that means there are fewer elements with existing attachment to draw audiences in, which is half the point of writing a prequel in the first place!
Likewise, audiences can get annoyed when it feels like a prequel is trying to have things both ways: counting on everyone to already be familiar with established canon while also changing it on a whim.* Strange New Worlds really hopes you know who Sybok is; otherwise, one of its big name drops won’t mean anything. It also has Spock and T’Pring in a loving relationship, despite that clearly not being the case in the Original Series. Is this an intentional retcon, or is there going to be some contorted reasoning for why they have to pretend to barely know each other later? It’s impossible to know for sure, but it’s irritating either way.
It is, of course, still possible for a prequel to be good despite all the issues I’ve outlined. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Strange New Worlds are both excellent shows, some of the best content their respective franchises have seen in years. But prequels will always be an uphill battle compared to writing a sequel or a brand-new story, and it’s important for writers to understand what they’re signing up for. Maybe that way, we’ll have fewer stories that obsess over younger versions of beloved characters when no one is really interested.
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I think the one thing prequels can do well is show us characters we are familiar with and thought we knew, but in a completely different context. It may even reveal all sorts of surprising things about their character. Imagine if Han Solo had started his movie as a rich kid at law school, then everything went wrong, it would have made a great story.
That actually would have been interesting. He’d have lost his money and position somehow and would have had to learn to be a spaceship captain and how to deal with the underworld as a smuggler.
Hans Solo: The Elementary School Years.
Prince Leila: The Finishing School Years
Luke Skywalker: A Day in the Life of a Moisture Farmer.
How about subverting this all by doing a prequel story and then taking it into a different direction than the original story? Have a timeline bifurcation. Alternative fictional history.
You know, the Kelvin Star Trek movies get a lot of crap, but apart from enjoying Star Trek 11 and Star Trek Beyond as movies in their own right (doing a rehash of Wrath of Khan was a really tired choice, though), I really liked the alternative timeline choice! It was a smart way for the moviemakers to eat their cake and have it too. Not a complete reboot which had nothing to do (except borrowing concepts and characters) with what had come before, but not constrained by existing canon either the way new entries in a huge franchise normally are.
One other problem w/ prequels:
They explain mysteries that may have been better left unexplained, like when Enterprise explained what happened w/ Klingons during that era
The explanation can almost NEVER be as much fun as the mystery!
Something something midichlorians
I will never accept midichlorians actually having anything to do with the Force as anything other than an in-universe silly fairytale people tell to their children to explain why midichlorian count is higher on those who are more Force-sensitive (which in reality is just a happy coincidence).
Totally agree, and a good reason why is El Santo’s take from 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting on the Star Wars Prequels:
“Then, on a related note, we have these movies’ determination to answer— generally to the detriment of the series— questions nobody was asking, while simultaneously contradicting what little solid data the originals presented about the past. Take the Emperor’s face, for example. I guarantee you nobody ever saw the Emperor march down that gangplank for the first time in Return of the Jedi and thought, “Huh. I wonder how he got to be so ugly?” We all just assumed he looked like that because he was so old and so evil that he was effectively his own Portrait of Dorian Gray and moved on. And you know what? That was good enough. More than that, it was better than any explanation for the old bastard’s appearance that might have been offered. And it was way better than being told, as we are in Revenge of the Sith, that he accidentally turned himself into rancid cottage cheese when a blast of his Force lightning bounced off of Mace Windu’s light saber and hit him in the face— not least because it didn’t prompt us to ask why Force lightning never turns anybody else into rancid cottage cheese.”
Wow. Never expected to meet another 1000 Hours fan in the wild!
Or live up to the comedy of Worf telling O’Brien and Bashir (I think it was them) that it’s not something they talk about.
I well and truly believe the only prequel that works as a story is Better Call Saul. Because most of what it’s doing isn’t explaining mysteries from the original, but adding deep veins of subtext to the original story. The story leans into that feeling of “predetermination” by showing that it shouldn’t have had to be this way, seeing all the potential avenues that could have led away from the final results of Breaking Bad. And making it all the more tragic when that fate ultimately comes about.
Focusing on a side character with very little depth and fleshing him out with a rich backstory and a cast of his own was definitely the best way to go. I think that it is definitely the best way to go if you’re looking for a prequel, but ultimately it’s a model very few stories would choose to follow.
Fates are predetermined? Perhaps…perhaps. Your choice of “New Spring” was good and confirms your point. When I read it, I found little tension. I liked the origin-of-characters information, but except for that…meh.
However, I think that failure is because of the writing. Or, rather, the writer. I offer a counterexample that, while not precisely a prequel, deals with the same problem: The Day of the Jackal (1971, Frederick Forsyth).
MASSIVE SPOILERS FOLLOW for Day of the Jackal
The novel was rejected a bunch of times because it is about an assassin hired to kill Charles de Gaulle, the president of France. As everyone (probably) knows, de Gaulle was never assassinated. So some publishers rejected the novel; they thought the premise unworkable. Too bad for them. It went on to become a bestseller (I know, I know, no guarantee of anything, that) and still sells well today. When I read it (soon after it came out, sigh) I was glued to the page. All the way until the end I was wondering “Is the assassin going to succeed?” In spite of the fact that I knew full well that de Gaulle had died a natural death just a couple of years before. Not shot. Not assassinated.
So, could New Spring have generated that same tension? If Forsyth could do it, I bet Jordan could have. But he didn’t. By the way, the 1973 film of Jackal with Edward Fox is also great and captures that tension and doubt. (The 1997 film, The Jackal, sadly, is merely silly and stupid.)
Well, there’s a few things that could be at work here.
1. If a prequel story is well written enough, it can have tension *despite* everything being predetermined. The entries on this list are simply extra difficulties, they don’t make success impossible.
2. Real life history is actually less of a limit on what can happen than previously established fictional canon. The novel is already breaking with history by introducing a fiction assassination, so who’s to say how it’ll turn out? It could always be an alt-history story like Inglorious Bastards.
3. I’m not sure if the novel does this, but such a story could also build tension over what will happen to the assassin rather than de Gaulle. If we care about the assassin, then uncertainty over his fate will generate tension.
#3: Oh, heavens, yes! The core of the novel is the Jackal’s preparation and plan vs. the “wily” French detective who is searching for him. de Gaulle is almost incidental. (Except, of course, for being the target!) I seem to remember myself rooting for both the detective and the Jackal.
So, excellent point.
With visual media you also have the issue of the prequels looking more advanced than the original because they were made years or decades later. Star Trek is notorious for this problem. Every series that was set before the OG looks a lot more advanced than the original generation because the budget is more generous and special effects and make up techniques have really improved since the 1960s. The Star Wars prequels also have this issue but it seems less jarring in movies than television for some reason.
Fate/zero is a rare example of a prequel which far surpasses the original. It has a couple of clever ways it manages the “fates are predetermined” problem: one is by having the cast be largely new characters so you genuinely have no idea what will happen to them, and the other is by having the status quo of the beginning be so radically different from what you expect that you’re constantly in suspense about how on earth they’re going to untie this knot.
Fate/Zero also had the advantage of having been set during a time when much of what happened was left ambiguous and allowed the writers to write new characters and events easily. Also, the OG VN was terribly written and ruined many mythological characters like Gilgamesh, who is the equivalent of an evil scrooge in a Christmas crossover setting.
In Zero, we didn’t know who Iskander and Lancelot were, and that allowed them to be unique. Not unlike them were Kiritsugu and Kirei, who were very mysterious before, so again they expanded on a story with very little to contradict, except making Saber worse than she was before.
“Look, guys, Obi-Wan and Baby Leia are in mortal danger!”
“Okay, sure, but we already know they survive…”
“Um…just forget about that for a minute, okay?!”
They might stub their toe real bad! That would be tense, right?
Solo was an especially bad offender, because Han as a character doesn’t seem to care much about his own past anyway, so why should I? What would have been more interesting would be an anthology movie about previous owners of the Falcon – sure we’d know the ship can’t be destroyed, but that doesn’t rule out dark fates for its crew.
If they still adhered to the old EU, then the owner before Han would have been Lando, of course. That could have made for an interesting story to see how he got this cushy job at Cloud City.
I like to describe the Solo movie as “A good Star Wars film no one asked for nor needed.” Taken by itself, I enjoyed it as it showed a different part of Star Wars we hadn’t seen yet. It planted the seed of Han becoming a better person but let it open for him to slide back and makes his redemption arc more believable IMHO.
One other problem with prequels is sometimes they have to keep what happened secret for “reasons” to avoid the question, “Why didn’t the OG characters just look up what happened before?” We saw this in Enterprise when the Borg were recovered from the arctic. In Star Wars it takes the form of the Old Republic stories taking place centuries before the movies so there are no cross-over characters, just planets to avoid destroying. Everything else can be justified by saying so much time had passed to make the changes logical.
Great article! Was just talking about this with my dad recently (about the most recent star trek stuff of which he is not a fan but mildly hopeful for improvement) it also feels like for some stuff (like star trek) prequels seem especially unnecessary? Like it’s a series about progress and making discoveries and moving forward. Obsessing over the past seems kind of against the spirit of that.
The way to go is to plan in advance and plant enough “noodle incidents” and mysterious characters to make a prequel worth.
My MC’s parents don’t appear on the book, but are talked about enough to catch the reader attention, and while the final outcome of one of them is stated in the book, all the backstory is just hinted. There is also an “evil in a can” that could make a good antagonist to past heroes in the timeline, as it is “now” trapped but that don’t mean that everyone trying to trap it would be successful. Even the prosthetic leg of the MC’s “uncle” can lead to a prequel.
The downside to this approach is that a lot of the time, the mystery is far more alluring than any explanation could be.
A downside opposite to what? making a precuel to sell toys?
With enough planning even if a mystery don’t have an epic explanation, the rest of the plot should stand on its own. Writers will never beat readers imagination.