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Prequels sometimes get a bad rap, partly because the viewer
knows how things will turn out in the long run. However, I've
been watching 'Better Call Saul' and forgot that one of the
central characters isn't in 'Breaking Bad', so I went through
the usual surprise when they were written out.
It
occurs to me that the prequel idea could be refreshed if a
series is written which merely appears to be a prequel. It's
never explicitly described as such and has precursors of the
situation and some of the same characters. For perhaps half
of a season, it jogs along as if it's working towards the series
it's assumed to lead into. Then it starts to stretch things a
little - major events start to occur which become
increasingly hard to reconcile with what happens in the other
series. Finally, something utterly devastating happens, like
the death of the character who is central to the series, and
the series enters a parallel timeline with these alterations
until it ends up overlapping with the time of the later series
and things play out very differently.
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I like the idea, but in the limit people generally call this a
"reboot". |
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It's supposed to be deceptive in the way a reboot isn't.
Thanks. |
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This reminds me of the "dream season" of Dallas.
Apparently they killed off a popular character and ratings
plummeted. So they retconned the entire season as the
dream of another character.
It's deceptive from the other end, and by accident - but it
feels like it's in the same family of ideas. |
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I'm not sure if you don't actively push it as a prequel the
audience won't just consider it as a reboot on some level,
which would spoil it a little. |
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Oh yes, that's a good point [Loris]. Oddly, the most
difficult bit of doing this would probably be how to trail it.
It could be a bit like 'Alien Nation' 's movie trailer where
the voiceover says "but there's something about them we
don't know", thereby playing on the audience's
preconceptions about aliens and then subverting them in
the film, but as to the details, dunno, have to think about
that a lot. |
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I think the most difficult thing, if you wanted to do it this
way, would be to gradually move
away from the presumed conclusion without the audience
realising. A straightforward break is jarring and will have
people wtfing left, right and centre. Instead, I thinks, the
right way to do this is to (a) not make it clear in the
marketing that this is a prequel (b) drop hints that it is a
prequel through the first couple of episodes so that by
episode three everyone is pretty sure (ideally, smugly so)
that it is a prequel and then (c) very gently turn away from
the prequel-trajectory in a way that causes unease or
confusion, edging towards the point of penny-droppage
over the back half of the "season". |
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I think maybe you'd run for some time completely in sync,
then introduce a few deliberate but subtle continuity
errors... just enough to get the obsessive fanboys riled up.
You apologise for these mistakes. Maybe you have a writer
fired as a scapegoat (they're in on it, of course.)
Then very gradually over time these build up, and you again
apologise and claim that you have to maintain consistency
within the series. |
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Right up to the series finale, everything is still apparently
on track, but then you go full Inglourious Basterds, and
completely break continuity. It should be obvious in
retrospect that all the continuity errors were clues. |
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