the prequel problem

This is the opening of a project which is based less on an argument and more on a vague question: how do prequels acknowledge and negotiate the weirdness of their temporality?

Basically, a sequel makes perfect temporal sense: a text which created later extradiegetically^[1] hosts a narrative which follows diegetically. Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, began airing twenty years after Star Trek: The Original Series and the narrative of the former begins a hundred years after the narrative of the latter. The temporalities match. The extradiegetic and diegetic timelines of Deep Space Nine and Voyager align even more perfectly: DS9 began five years after TNG, and VOY two years after that, both in terms of air dates and narrative orientation.

And then comes Enterprise, which began airing in 2001 and the narrative of which begins a century before TOS. This introduces a dissonance between what the text tells the audience about its temporal position and what the audience knows to be true, a dissonance which I cannot imagine describing better than Alessandro Barchiesi does in his "Future Reflexive: Two Modes of Allusion and Ovid's Heroides":^[2]

But what happens when the older tradition enters a new text as a view of the future? The idea that the characters can have a future that has already been written down is much less natural, and calls for constant negotiation between author and reader. A certain alignment is now broken. The literary tradition—a source of power, control, and anxiety, a perfect analogy for the past in everyone’s life—is now displaced, and a potential for irony opens up. Unless the characters are gifted with a second sight, the effect approaches what we usually call dramatic irony: the information that the author shares with the audience tends to create a sort of complicity between them directed against the characters.

—334 (emphasis mine)

Barchiesi deals beautifully with the effect of the phenomenon on Ovid's Heroides, but I am fascinated by the way that this dynamic functions in other texts. Currently, I am particularly focused on the way that Star Trek negotiates non-linear temporality in its prequels. In my opinion, ENT does this with a particular brilliance,^[3] but Discovery and Strange New Worlds have their moments too.^[4]

Star Trek lends itself particularly well to interesting temporalities for a variety of reasons. The first, of course, is the genre: it's sci-fi and in particular the sort of sci-fi that features the sort of thing that I tag in my notes as "time nonsense": its text features both time travel and prophecy. Another reason is that it's a long-running franchise, the sort of thing that can support a seemingly endless variety of sequels and prequels and digressions. Additionally, in comparison to its only rival for longevity and sheer production, Doctor Who, it is more wide-ranging, broken up into discrete series rather than having one core narrative following one indisputable main character, occasionally supported by (mostly short-lived) spin-offs.^[5]

Overall, the body of Star Trek shows and movies,^[6] taken as a whole, is a text perhaps uniquely well suited for this sort of analysis, and I'm looking forward to getting into it.