Prequel Problems: Introduction

[Thande]

Time Travel episodes/plot lines in Kong running franchises frequently hit some of the same snags as prequels and suggest a franchise running low on ideas.

If they're self-referential time-travel specifically, yes.

 

[Gary Oswald]

If they're self-referential time-travel specifically, yes.

I personally never minded 'lets go back into the past and look everyone had already met' stuff like Night Watch and In The Beginning but yeah they're essentially prequels in effect.

See the contradictions in TNG visiting the 1990s and it's a post nuclear hell hole vs voyager visiting the 1990s and it's OTL.

 

[Alex Richards]

I personally never minded 'lets go back into the past and look everyone had already met' stuff like Night Watch and In The Beginning but yeah they're essentially prequels in effect.

See the contradictions in TNG visiting the 1990s and it's a post nuclear hell hole vs voyager visiting the 1990s and it's OTL.

Night Watch works I think because it's kind of implied that the past has been altered it's just that it's been altered in a sufficiently small way that it can kind of jump itself back onto the original line.

 

[Ciclavex]

I personally never minded 'lets go back into the past and look everyone had already met' stuff like Night Watch and In The Beginning but yeah they're essentially prequels in effect.

See the contradictions in TNG visiting the 1990s and it's a post nuclear hell hole vs voyager visiting the 1990s and it's OTL.

TNG’s post-nuclear hellhole visit was to the 2070s; which does seem to contradict the later TNG narrative that First Contact was in the 2060s, but, then, it’s easy to imagine that meeting the Vulcans and inventing the Warp Drive did not immediately make the entire planet a paradise.

VOY’s seeming contradiction in its time travel adventure was with TOS’ assertion that a large-scale war across significant parts of Eurasia with genetically modified supermen took place in the 1990s and there seemed to be no sign of it in 1990s L.A., which, one, VOY’s time travel was after a change in their timeline had already happened in the 1960s that they were going to try to figure out and repair it, and, two, even if that shouldn’t have averted the Eugenics Wars, it is also entirely believable for there to have been a large-scale war across significant parts of Eurasia with genetically modified supermen in the 1990s and for Los Angeles to appear completely unaffected.

EDIT: Time travel‘s still pretty dangerous though for a storyteller in this sense, because even when you don’t contradict yourself you might seem to and that might turn some people off. Though, like you, a lot of people also won’t mind. Even though in practice Star Trek does self-contradict in a number of ways, in the vast majority of cases nobody minds — no one who isn’t a raving misogynist is really defending TOS proclaiming that women can’t serve as starship captains and so thus denouncing that ENT and DSC have female starship captains chronologically earlier.

 

[M_Kresal]

TNG’s post-nuclear hellhole visit was to the 2070s; which does seem to contradict the later TNG narrative that First Contact was in the 2060s, but, then, it’s easy to imagine that meeting the Vulcans and inventing the Warp Drive did not immediately make the entire planet a paradise.

VOY’s seeming contradiction in its time travel adventure was with TOS’ assertion that a large-scale war across significant parts of Eurasia with genetically modified supermen took place in the 1990s and there seemed to be no sign of it in 1990s L.A., which, one, VOY’s time travel was after a change in their timeline had already happened in the 1960s that they were going to try to figure out and repair it, and, two, even if that shouldn’t have averted the Eugenics Wars, it is also entirely believable for there to have been a large-scale war across significant parts of Eurasia with genetically modified supermen in the 1990s and for Los Angeles to appear completely unaffected.

EDIT: Time travel‘s still pretty dangerous though for a storyteller in this sense, because even when you don’t contradict yourself you might seem to and that might turn some people off. Though, like you, a lot of people also won’t mind. Even though in practice Star Trek does self-contradict in a number of ways, in the vast majority of cases nobody minds — no one who isn’t a raving misogynist is really defending TOS proclaiming that women can’t serve as starship captains and so thus denouncing that ENT and DSC have female starship captains chronologically earlier.

The contradictions in the VOY two-parter (which ironically featured the DY-100 as a model on the villains desk) was part of what prompted Greg Cox's Eugenics War duology. In short: a Trek techno-thriller and a secret history of the 1970s-1990s with Cox having the Eugenics Wars taking place as shadowy conflicts influencing real-world events. An approach that worked a hell of a lot better than the Titan Khan comic that came out after Into Darkness dropped, which went into flat out AH as well as explaining

Spoiler

how you ended up with Khan looking like Cumberbatch

which was frankly the best thing about the comic as it was a misfire otherwise IMHO.

As for the women captains, and really outside the canon, Star Trek Continues did an entire episode on that apparent contradiction.