Sorry to disagree, and thanks for following up on my post above, but Superman Returns was a major dispopintment for me.

Anyone else?

There IS no ‘real’ story. Star Trek is a show, a series of movies. It’s not history. Nobody is forcing anyone to see it. All anyone on the production team has ever asked is for an open mind, which is in short supply on this board it seems. If you haven’t even seen the film and hate it already, then you’ve already made up your mind….so save your breath and don’t bother going. Nobody here is going to sign their soul over to Paramount, we’re simply being patient, mature and open minded. If we hate the film ‘after’ we’ve seen it….so be it. I have my reservations, but I’m not going to waste my time and energy hating something just because it challenges the fictional history of a show I grew up with. If the movie is true to the characters, entertains and manages to embody Trek in a modern way…then what’s the problem? If it doesn’t, well…feel free to complain then. Until May, 2009, chill the heck out.

I can stand the rest of the changes, but plot contrivances like this are just too hard to buy.

And yet that hasn’t stopped a whole lot of excellent storytelling, both large-scale and small-scale. I am arguing, flat-out, that what you’re claiming to be an impediment…isn’t.

“The problem for a prequel writer is to have to fit in with everything already pre-ordained, not just life and death.”

Sure, but when you’re dealing with a situation in which relatively little has been pre-ordained, such as the backstories of the TOS characters, it’d not terribly restrictive, even while staying consistent.

“Far below life and death- they can’t promote a character, remove them, or introduce a new permanent character for instance- nor could anyone e.g. marry, or have a child, or be scarred, or undergo any experience that alters their personality.”

New ongoing characters could be introduced, as long as it’s not done in such a way that their absence in a later story isn’t explainable. Again using Trek and the current film as an example, there’s so much room for that that it isn’t even worth worrying about. As for the rest, again, if you want to diverge from what’s been established, why go back to those characters? Create new ones.

“Take Picard’s “Inner Light” experience. That informed future writing; he could always play the flute after that. Were it written as a prequel, it could not be that character changing experience.”

Part of my problem with “The Inner Light” was that aside from the flute, he seemed to take nothing else with him from the experience (or, really, not so much a problem with the episode as with the fact that little of it was carried forward). But that’s a whole other discussion. ;)

With a prequel, though, it could indeed be a character-changing experience, if one is willing to speculate that the character was somehow different in the past, and explore how the character became the person that we know. e.g., again in the current film, the posit is that Jim Kirk was somehow different as a young man, and he went through experiences that will lead him to be the starship captain we know. It’s really only a matter of telling the story in such a way that the change, and the experiences that lead to it, are believable. It becomes a way of exploring and informing the character.

“Everything must be as it was before. That is an immense constriction.”

Not necessarily. It’s all about the story being told and what it means to the characters. I read stories set during the original five-year mission all the time, and the good ones are not harmed at all by that setting.

“The issue of characters “who have to be here next time” takes us to the issue of suspension of disbelief. We all watch weekly series for instance knowing that the hero won’t die, but that’s “extra-universal” knowledge, not “intra-universal”. We willing conspire in ignoring that extra-universal reality, for the in-universe story. The problem with a prequel in canon is that the certainty invades the intra-universal space.”

Why? It’s exactly the same thing. The audience knows full-well that it’s a story set before something else, but we enjoy it *for the story being told*. Now, if I am interpreting you correctly, you’re not much of a fan of prequels, and that’s fair enough, but I’m not really seeing how this is successfully translating to why prequels in continuity aren’t viable.

To borrow another example, would you argue that the forthcoming “The Hobbit” film is going to be beyond suspension of disbelief, because we know full-well that Bilbo Baggins survives to be eleventy-one years old during the events of “Lord of the Rings”? (Yes, I know full-well that the book The Hobbit was written first, but much of the audience may only have seen the “Lord of the Rings” films, and thus for them, “The Hobbit” is a prequel.)

“We are asked to doubly conspire, and that’s not part of the usual deal. We aren’t just asked to suspend our knowledge of the outside (real) world; we’re asked to suspend our knowledge of the internal story world as well. To give an example; in a BSG movie that was a flashback, there was a “tense” sequence wherein it looked as if Starbuck would be forced to sacrifice her life. Except there was no tension, because we’d already seen later episodes where she was very much alive. The intra-universe knowledge defuses the story’s tension.”

I had other problems with “Razor”, but that didn’t bother me. I was more than interested enough in seeing how they got out of the fix, and the read I got from most other folks who’d seen the film was pretty much similar. Some liked the overall film more than I did, and some less, but simply knowing that a character in a tight spot survived wasn’t much of an issue.

I think the sheer number of stories out there that take existing situations and explore how they came to be is testament that most viewers and readers aren’t bothered by knowing on some level what will happen, as long as the story being told *at the time* is sufficiently compelling.

Thus, while I understand the argument you’re making, it fails for me because it relies on premises that I’m not buying into. I think we’re coming at the whole thing from different axioms.

The issue of characters “who have to be here next time” takes us to the issue of suspension of disbelief. We all watch weekly series for instance knowing that the hero won’t die, but that’s “extra-universal” knowledge, not “intra-universal”. We willing conspire in ignoring that extra-universal reality, for the in-universe story. The problem with a prequel in canon is that the certainty invades the intra-universal space. We are asked to doubly conspire, and that’s not part of the usual deal. We aren’t just asked to suspend our knowledge of the outside (real) world; we’re asked to suspend our knowledge of the internal story world as well. To give an example; in a BSG movie that was a flashback, there was a “tense” sequence wherein it looked as if Starbuck would be forced to sacrifice her life. Except there was no tension, because we’d already seen later episodes where she was very much alive. The intra-universe knowledge defuses the story’s tension.