destiny and the prequel

In my intro post, I talked a lot about the way that time goes wonky in prequels, and I briefly touched on the effect (that, as Barchiesi puts it, "the information that the author shares with the audience tends to create a sort of complicity between them directed against the characters"). But I wanted to give an example of the the texture of what I'm talking about, and I'm going to use my mom's favorite example: the TV show Endeavour.

Endeavour is a British TV show which serves as a prequel to the detective show Inspector Morse, with both shows sharing a titular character, Endeavour Morse. Morse begins the series as a young constable in 1960s Oxford; he is isolated from his family and colleagues, but is taken in by one of his superiors, Inspector Thursday, as a mentee. He develops a strong relationship with his mentor (not to mention significant romantic tension with his mentor's daughter).

My mom adores this show. She watched Inspector Morse and its spin-off, Lewis, but she really loved the self-indulgent nerdiness of Endeavour.^[1] But as the seasons wore on, she began to become incresingly uncomfortable with the premise of the show.

The emotional core of Endeavour centers on Morse's difficulty forming and maintaining relationships with those around him. This is fairly standard for this sort of show,^[2] but the problem is that Endeavour is a prequel, and the audience has met the middle-aged Morse, who is, to quote his actor's obituary, a "cognitive curmudgeon with his love of classical music, his vintage Jaguar and spates of melancholy."^[3] There is no way, then, that Morse can be successfully folded into the Thursday family or any other, because he has to end up as the man we meet in Inspector Morse: a lonely, abrasive genius with chronic pain, few social contacts, and an unhealthy relationship with alcohol.

My mom found the complicity Barchiesi describes painful, especially in the sense that it is directed against Morse in particular. She found it increasingly hard to watch him gaze longingly at Joan Thursday, knowing as he couldn't that his fate was already decided (and that it was decidedly undesirable).

Dramatic irony can be pleasurable: knowledge is fun, and priviledged knowledge can be even moreso. I will freely admit that I've always desperately wanted to see Oedipus the King, the peak of dramatic irony, played as more of a black comedy than a straight tragedy. But there can also be something deeply disquieting about it. There's a real tension between wanting the best for a character and knowing that they will not get it, especially when the text doesn't quite know what to do with that fact.^[4]

Anyway, so those are the stakes here. The fated-ness of a prequel lends itself very well to tragedy. What interests me about the Star Trek prequels is the way they largely seem to avoid that, and how they negotiate it when they don't.