Narrow Storytelling
I recently found some words about what it is that bothers me about the majority of current media. I actually don't mind sequels per se, nor do I mind reworks or reboots of already-existing work.
However, what bothers me is narrow storytelling.
Let me explain this with the example of the objectively best series ever, Star Trek. Star Trek is a collection of movies and series which usually follow the adventures of one Star Ship - e.g. the Starship Enterprise. It's an old franchise, and it ended for quite some time in the early 2000s before being picked up again. That series is a great showcase for what I mean.
At the time where the older episodes were produced, it was common to keep an episode self-contained. Every main character was guaranteed to survive, because at the end of the episode everything has to be the same as before. Episodes were often pitched with very few - sometimes one - sentence, and then authors would build an entire episode around that pitch.
This lead to the typical "Monster of the Week" format, which was very common also in other contemporary shows, such as The X-Files. The heroes would be faced with a brand-new situation, would overcome the villains of the episode in a heroic way and be on their merry way. Next episode, all was forgotten.
For Star Trek, which is fundamentally about exploring uncharted territory, this results in a sense of wideness, of wonder. Space is full of mysteries and novelties, everything is new and exciting.
But things move on, and for very good reason. It's unrealistic that a main character suffers a major trauma and forgets about it an episode later, and it's interesting to see things evolve and change across multiple episodes. Deep Space Nine, one of the later series in the Star Trek universe, introduced multiple story arcs, and it has been fantastic.
Then, we discovered that it can be fun, too, to break the pattern and circle back to other episodes. One of the episodes created for the 30 year anniversary of Star Trek had the crew of Deep Space Nine do some time travel into one of the most beloved (and slightly goofy) episode of the original Enterprise series. That new episode was fun. Probably the most important moment for the sake of this blog post is the following scene:
We see part of the original episode from the 60s. William Shatner, the actor of the famous Captain Kirk, sits atop of a pile of Alien Hamsters (aka the Tribble), and while he talks, new hamsters keep raining down on him in a very slow trickle. But we also see new scenes, seamlessly integrated into that, which show that it's actually the time travellers who are, unbeknownst to them as well as Kirk, carelessly throwing hamsters to the side and thus through a chute in Kirk's direction.
That was awesome, new, and also a turning point.
Because it serves as foreshadowing of what we see in Star Trek, and other media, all the time now: Nothing is really new, everything is connected to everything else, it's like that Scooby Doo Mask Reveal meme, only that below the mask we always find something that has already been there.
And this makes the storytelling narrow. Space is no longer wide, because everything we see is related to what we already know, it's a tiny hyperconnected Ball of Yarn. The first of the newer Star Trek series features a character named Michael Burnham, who has to be the half-sister of a significant character of a previous series, Spock. Lower Decks, an animated Star Trek spin-off, derives all the fun from parodying things that already have been done before. Into Darkness, one of the newer Star Trek movies, is basically a retelling of Wrath of Khan, one of the earlier successful movies.
Since that aforementioned ball of yarn is so small, everyone entangled in it is absolutely forbidden to leave. As a consequence, closure basically does no longer exist. No villain is ever overcome forever any more, there has to be a sequel. Characters are not allowed to retire in grace, they need to carry their burden on and on, the universe revolves around them for eternity. We all know that no matter how definitive it seems that a villain has been overcome, it will come back eventually.
Probably the best example for this in the Star Trek franchise is the case of Jean-Luc Picard, one of the captains of one of the ships. During the series, he once was captured by a robot race, the Borg, turned into a robot himself and later rescued and turned back. The way story telling was back in the day, he reappeared at the beginning of the next episode as if nothing had happened, which was really not good story-telling.
A few years later, along came the Star Trek film "First Contact", which revolves around the traumatic elements of this transformation, and neatly resolves this plot. For good? No, because in one of the newer series, Star Trek: Picard, the character of the captain is returning, and going through his trauma once again. Yes, he resolves it again, but we all know that should the business case be there, there would be another retelling of the same story, with the same trauma.
Because the universe is mostly empty, and all that is left is a handful of characters with another handful of traits, and nothing else.
I wish this would change.