Prequels

After recently rekindling my love for the TV series Sex And The City, I discovered there was a prequel series created called The Carrie Diaries.  I wasn't sure what to expect from the series, when I read the synopsis it simply said it follows the events in the life of Carrie Bradshaw in her teenage years.  I was pleasantly surprised when I watched the series from start to finish to discover I quite liked it.  This post isn't a review of the series however, instead the fact that I was surprised I would like the series made me stop to question why - was it just doubt that I held over the setting or the premise of the series, or was it something else.

In life we live in the present, we look to the future, and we sometimes get lost in our past.  Through it all however, our past is usually the one thing we can actually be certain of, because it is written and unchanging.  Our future is yet to be written and depends entirely on our present and the actions we take.  When you watch a prequel however, all of this gets turned on its head.  Instead of the future being the unknown, you know exactly how things end up. 

In the case of The Carrie Diaries the events and conclusions of Sex And The City are set, they have already been written and played out.  You know exactly where Carrie will end up, but that doesn't mean you know everything about her.  Watching the series back, I was constantly anticipating breaks with canon, and there were a few but they were mostly minor and things which a creative writer could easily patch up if they ever made a third season of the series.  As for the rest of the story which stays true to canon, the lack of detail the main series and movies had gone into in regard to Carrie's younger life left the writers with quite a bit of creative freedom.  There were many stories they wrote and many more they could still write.

I've never actually written a prequel to anything.  When I write works of fiction I tend to stick to linear progressions of time.  I've elaborated on the past of characters before but referencing someone's past and actually depicting it are two very different things.  I've often contemplated that question people often ask - "Would you want to know how and when you will die?" - and my answer has for the most part always swayed towards "No" mainly for the lessons learned from the tale of Cassandra, and the worry over whether the events would come to pass because of your actions, or indeed inactions.  If someone handed you a book that told you your entire life story from birth to death would you read it?  Maybe the reason we can't see the future is because it would torment us.

What prequels seem to demonstrate however is the fact that the entertainment we get from these stories and the intrigue that captures our attention and our imagination is ultimately centred around the journey, not the destination.  With a prequel you already know the destination, and beyond the first few scenes you already know the start point, the story that is told focuses on the space in between the two.  Maybe the reason we often have low expectations or even negative expectations for prequels is because they are the most true to life parts of the stories that captivate us.  They don't hold that intrigue of how things end up, just like life, however grim it is to admit we all know we all end up in the same place at the end, it's a fate none of us can escape.  Life is about the journey and its highs and lows and that's what a prequel is about too. 

Perhaps if you apply the same observations of life to prequels you could say the reason we expect them to be crap is because we like to believe where we are now is a better place than we were.  That our presents represent the higher standard we associate with the main series, and our pasts which seem less impressive by comparison represent the prequels - maybe we want to hold onto the belief that the future is always better than the past so desperately that it warps our perceptions to make us believe it should be.