On paper, sequels are the best idea ever.
A good original story gives us a fun plot and setting and introduces us to a vibrant cast of characters.
In a perfect world, a sequel gives us more of the stuff we love,
and shows us our heroes and villains in even more depth and detail than before—
new threats, new situations, new opportunities for character development,
more of the things we already love.
But while that's the theory, in practice, sequels can be very... hit or miss.
Some of them do all that good stuff and more.
Others can make us retroactively question if the original was even that good to begin with.
Turns out, it's not that easy to follow up on happily ever after.
Now, before we go any further, we do need to do one bit of categorization.
There are two categorically different kinds of sequels:
continuation sequels and next generation sequels.
Continuation sequels follow shortly after the original.
There might be a year or two between them, but the main cast is basically the same.
Note that this is not the same thing as one long story broken into parts.
Some stories are too long to publish in one go,
like Lord of the Rings, and since it's just one long narrative with breakpoints,
its later parts are not strictly sequels by this definition,
since they were planned from the beginning.
On the other hand, A New Hope was originally just called Star Wars,
and George Lucas didn't start out with any plans to make a part 2, so technically,
The Empire Strikes Back IS a continuation sequel.
This can also happen in serialized shows or comics that keep getting renewed past the point the writers planned.
The best continuation sequels feel like they were planned all along.
Meanwhile, next generation sequels take place years or decades after the original story,
and feature a new main cast of bankable young people,
while the cast of the original usually end up serving as mentor figures to the new generation.
Some next generation sequels feature none of the original characters,
in which case, it's less of a sequel and more of another story in the same universe.
The Star Wars sequel trilogy is a next generation sequel featuring some of the original cast,
while, ironically, Star Trek: The Next Generation has almost no crossover with its predecessor series
and is functionally its own thing.
Starting off with continuation sequels, they've got a bit of an interesting problem.
Most of the time, they're a direct follow-up to a story that wasn't built to have a follow-up.
The original story was typically self-contained with a satisfying conclusion.
The main characters solved whatever problem they had,
beat whatever villain was causing them trouble,
and chilled out for something approximating a happily ever after.
The story ended—that's what an ending is.
So why and how is there a sequel?
Now, this is not actually a very complicated question to answer... you'd think.
Basically, there are three main approaches.
Option 1: Psych!
That happy ending didn't actually fix anything.
The bad guy's back, the threats have returned, and the heroes have to do it all over again.
This is the easiest answer and, unfortunately, it's also the worst.
It retroactively spoils some of the original story.
That victory we celebrated wasn't actually a victory at all.
And the worst part is, while this story is set up for the heroes to win all over again,
maybe even more spectacularly this time,
it's not gonna have anywhere near the same impact
because not only have we done this song and dance before,
you've already told the audience that this win can't be trusted.
Sometimes, this shows up in a minor way, even in sequels that are otherwise new and original,
specifically with how they handle the romantic subplots.
Some writers are, like, allergic to writing couples in happy and stable relationships,
so if part 1 has the love interests getting together as part of the grand finale happy ending,
part 2 might introduce them broken up or otherwise on the rocks.
Bonus points if the sequel introduces a new character to play romantic rival with the heroes.
Because EVERYBODY loves conflict, right?
Let's just put conflict EVERYWHERE!
If SOME conflict is good, ALL conflict has to be GREAT!
Sorry if you were expecting a satisfying character arc for these bozos,
because this story is "Oops! All Conflict" I guess!
Option 2 is somewhat better.
You don't undo the original victory, but you create a new threat for your heroes to deal with
that bears a suspicious resemblance to the first one... but more threatening.
This isn't quite as easy as the cop-out solution, but it's pretty easy.
While the antagonist may be new, the structure of the conflict will be very similar to the original,
because the antagonist is structurally similar to the original threat.
Sure, you blew up the first Death Star, but now we're building a new one,
and you have to do one additional thing in order to blow this one up.
I hope you liked stopping that tech-themed, hero-hating supervillain that lured you in with promises of restoring your glory days,
because this time, you need to do it while wrangling a stay-at-home dad!
Did you like fighting off that time-traveling robot assassin?
Have fun fighting off the new one— it shapeshifts this time!
While this is a decent setting for character development, the overall plot isn't likely to have many surprises.
It's not bad, and we've gotten plenty of very respectable stories out of it,
but it doesn't shake things up as much as it could.
If anything, it's generally gonna feel like the first story is playing out again,
but this time, all the characters have leveled up.
Luke is a full-fledged space wizard,
Sarah Connor's been hittin' the gym,
this time we have the bad guy from season 1 on our side, et cetera, et cetera.
Again! Definitely not bad!
But as all subsequent Terminator sequels and every villain after the Frieza Saga will attest,
it's hard to make it work more than once.
Option 3. This is the hard one, and also the most interesting one.
Don't undo anything, and don't retread anything.
Leave what was wrapped up wrapped up and move on to new ground,
like a completely new antagonist exposed during the events of the first story,
a character arc that builds on the resolution of the original.
While this is the best and most creative option,
it can be tricky to justify conflict in a post-happy ending world.
Instead of continuing a resolved conflict from the first part,
finding a new source of conflict still grounded in the original plot or, at least, not directly contradicting it,
requires some creativity on the part of the creator.
Some sequels handle this by introducing a new antagonist who is created or unleashed
by the events of the original story.
Maybe thanks to their heroic origin story,
the hero has popped up on the radar of a prophecy nemesis who's now gunning for them.
Or by solving the first problem,
you accidentally pop the top off a sealed evil in a can and now they're off wreaking havoc.
Or maybe when the hero gained control of their unorthodox powers in the first story,
it didn't stop with the happily ever after,
and their abilities keep growing and causing more problems,
or opening up more questions about how they work.
Or maybe, now that the hero's in a good place, they're starting to unravel mysteries of their past
that were nothing more than footnotes in the original story.
I was very surprised to find that Frozen II, of all movies,
did this very well, marking the first time in history
that a direct sequel to a Disney Princess movie cleared the hot garbage threshold.
And because I like my channel where it is,
I won't be using footage for this bit, so enjoy the drawings.
Frozen II takes the happy ending established in the first movie—sisters reunited,
Elsa's magic under control, et cetera—
and expands on it very slightly to make a starting point for the second movie:
sisters a bit unhealthily codependent, Elsa's powers starting to grow in weird ways,
Elsa too reckless with her newfound personal freedom,
Anna extremely worried about Elsa running off again and getting into trouble.
When Elsa's magic accidentally awakens four pissed off elemental spirits,
they go on a journey of self-discovery to fix it and save the kingdom.
By the end, the sisters have uncovered the generations-old conspiracy
that angered the spirits in the first place,
discovered the secret story of how their parents first met,
and also traumatically relive how their parents died
searching for answers about Elsa's powers.
Elsa has functionally become a god, and also temporarily died,
and Anna has been through the absolute wringer,
what with the dead parents/abandoned my sister/dead sister/dead snowman quadruple threat,
and, consequently, stepped up to develop the emotional maturity, personal responsibility,
and big picture perspective required to rule as queen.
Meanwhile, Elsa has fully come into her own as what is functionally a goddess
and completed a two-movie character arc
that started with her as a self-imposed prisoner trapped by her fear,
middled with her still somewhat trapped by her responsibilities as queen,
and ended with her completely free and at peace with herself for the first time ever.
It's a sequel good enough that it retroactively makes the climactic happy ending of the first movie
feel like a narrative midpoint.
Sure, Anna and Elsa are happy at the end of Frozen,
but Anna's still a klutzy goofball who's just happy to have her sister back,
and Elsa thinks not accidentally injuring anyone is the extent of her power.
Anna's not ready to be queen, and Elsa hasn't fully come into her own.
It's a happy ending on its own,
but the sequel actually makes it seem retroactively incomplete, which is damn impressive!
This is also how Steven Universe handled its movie and following epilogue series.
After the whole plot got wrapped up at the end of Season 5,
a two-year time skip aged up our protagonist,
the movie gave us a new antagonist who only knows to go after Steven because of the big
"The plot's all fixed now" message he broadcast to the galaxy,
and the epilogue series seems to mostly be covering the emotional consequences of Steven singlehandedly
fixing everyone's problems for five straight seasons.
While everyone else is doing pretty well and enjoying their happily ever afters,
Steven is developing some pretty serious complexes about being needed,
since he spent his formative years being everyone's emotional support and shoulder to cry on,
and now he doesn't know how to handle a world where the people he loves don't need him
to fix their problems.
This is a really interesting angle on the very concept of a happily ever after,
and kind of a devastating takedown of the "kid hero fixes everything" trope.
At the time of recording, the final ten epiodes of Steven Universe: Future haven't been released yet,
but um... I'm excited.
On a related note, the MCU is built on a foundation of evolving characters through sequels.
When Avengers puts Tony through the emotional wringer,
following movies make it clear he's developed PTSD from the experience.
Cap's defrosting in the modern world at the end of First Avenger sets up all his future "man out of time" arcs,
including how devoted he is to saving his similarly time-displaced Bucky,
the only other person on Earth who can understand what he's going through.
Now, whether they actually follow through on these juicy character developments
is entirely dependent on how the director is feeling that day.
But to their credit, they did build on the previous movies to inform the sequels,
and it produces a fairly coherent overarching character arc for the main cast.
But while that about covers continuation sequels,
next generation sequels have a few very unique problems
that make them even harder to write than regular ones.
For instance, have you ever really liked a hero,
and then they show up again in a new generation sequel all old and stuff,
but for some reason, they're just disappointing?
Sometimes, the problem is that they haven't changed at all.
Their character never really developed beyond their most marketable version,
only now they're also crusty and old and not doing their own stunts.
And sometimes, the problem is that this character we liked changed in a way that made us not like them anymore.
I don't know why writers love having their kid heroes grow up to be terrible parents,
but I'm getting pretty sick of it.
Anyway, point is, when you bring a hero back for a next generation sequel,
there are a lot of ways to do it badly.
Now, sometimes, when a character gets time-skipped a few decades
and comes back old and cool to mentor a new generation of heroes,
it actually works pretty well.
These are usually the instances when the character's undergone some development
and the character they've become makes sense as an extension for the character they were
without being disappointing.
For a good example, I love the way they handled old Bruce Wayne in Batman Beyond.
He's had to retire from Batmanning due to his health failing and, compared to his younger self,
he's much angrier and a lot more ruthless than he used to be.
Since he's not a frontline badass anymore,
he compensates by doing a lot more sleuthing and detective work,
and serves as the guy in the chair to the new Batman, who, in contrast,
is rather less serious and composed than young Bruce used to be.
Old Bruce has quite literally seen it all.
He's completely unfazed by everything short of the Joker coming back from the dead,
and even without being able to punch every problem until it goes away,
he's more than experienced enough to find other solutions to basically everything.
They actually get a point of direct comparison when a time travel crossover
puts young Batman and old Bruce in the same room.
And while young Batman still has all the badass punchy skills,
old Bruce outclasses him in experience and raw scariness.
His best line in the episode?
-I can't believe I was ever that green.
This is how you interrogate someone.
RED: -They're clearly the same person,
but what old Bruce lacks in peak physical condition,
he makes up for in decades of experience being Batman.
Now, the reason why old Bruce works so well is because we don't have to do much work
to fill out the intervening decades and figure out how he got to where he is.
The premise is very simple and very easy to understand:
years of punching crime in the face took their toll, and when his health started failing,
he couldn't be Batman anymore.
We even see some intermediate attempts he made to keep himself going;
exoskeletons and powered armor to make up for his weakening body.
The only confusing part at first is why exactly he's alone at the start of the series,
since the Batman we knew always had a couple sidekicks rattling around,
but this gets explained later and doesn't detract from the story before then.
So old Bruce took a character we were familiar with,
added one major development—old age—
and naturally progressed from there into a character who retains
all of his most important qualities without stagnating.
This is why he works really well.
But there's a lot more time-skipped heroes that don't work well at all,
so now that I've set the bar, let's look at some examples that fail to clear it.
So: the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
All other controversy aside,
all three members of our original trio make appearances in these movies, but...
well, it got a bit dubious.
Leia was probably handled the best.
When we left her at the end of the original trilogy,
she was in a sweet relationship with Han and had just helped save the galaxy.
Sometime in the intervening space decades, a brand new evil empire rose from the ashes of the old one,
and Leia, who stayed in politics, struck out on her own to found a new Rebellion.
Unfortunately, this is around the time her son turned evil, and she and Han split up because of it.
And, sidenote, I am so tired of writers splitting up great relationships for the sake of time skip drama.
It's not creative! It's not fun!
It just retroactively makes the relationship seem pointless!
Why do you do this??
Anyway, when we meet Leia in the new trilogy,
she's General Organa, leader of the new Rebellion, and all-around badass.
And while she was always pretty self-reliant in the original trilogy,
this is a pretty cool upgrade, and it totally makes sense
that someone who started working as a covert political spy for the Rebellion as a teenager
probably wasn't gonna sit by and let a brand new evil empire take over the galaxy again.
It's just pretty disappointing that the writers apparently used up all the character development writing her backstory,
because Han did nothing until his son turned evil, at which point,
he abandoned Leia and went back to smuggling,
and that is the only thing he did for the rest of his life.
So... remember all that character development he had
about giving up his scoundrelly ways to become a real hero?
Apparently nobody else does!
And Luke actually has it worse!
Apparently, Mr. Paragon Hero, Savior of the Whole Dang Galaxy,
most noted for his tendency to never give up on family members, even if they're super evil,
made a cursory attempt to revive the Jedi Order, and then when his nephew turned evil and killed everybody,
he gave up forever and ran off to a distant planet to sulk for the rest of his life.
Like, I get that they wanted to give Luke a character arc about rediscovering his hope for the future of the Jedi,
but Luke WAS supposed to be the future of the Jedi!
He's the dang return of the Jedi!
It genuinely does not make sense to take his character and turn him into a generic jaded, reluctant mentor.
I mean, you're telling me Luke Skywalker,
who fought relentlessly to redeem his father after he turned to the Dark Side,
slaughtered the Jedi, and joined ranks with an evil space wizard,
didn't have it in him to give it another shot when his nephew did the exact same thing?!
Now, while this annoys me to no end, I do understand why this happens,
and it's a problem of pacing.
See, when you're writing a story about a bunch of heroes doing stuff, things happen pretty quickly.
Characters act and react, plot twists do their thing...
This is how things work in plot time.
But when you're not in plot time, you're in downtime.
Downtime is what happens when the camera is off the plot.
It's the offscreen stuff, the backstory, the context, the time skips.
And the pacing on downtime is a lot slower than the main plot,
because it's described in much broader strokes.
This plays a big role in time skip sequels,
but it shows up more frequently in backstories and prequels,
so let's jump over there for a minute.
Before the story begins, the heroes are living in the downtime.
It's their backstory.
Luke does basically nothing for the first 18 years of his life
because his story at this point is farm boy.
Han is another good example,
because we got a quick rundown of his downtime backstory in the original trilogy
—smuggler, friends with Chewie, did the Kessel Run—
and then Solo came along to flesh out his backstory, and, in adapting downtime to plot time,
also added, like, 15 other things!
The density of events and character development in plot time is much higher than downtime,
and when you're trying to adapt downtime into plot time,
the end result often doesn't resemble the original.
Jumping genres for a minute, Magneto is another good example of this split.
When he shows up in the first X-Men movie, we glean that he survived the Holocaust as a child,
came to the reasonable conclusion that humans are terrible,
and became a supervillain advocating for mutant supremacy.
This is pretty simple, and fills out an implied several decades of his life with
"doesn't trust humans, uses powers for evil."
When you start retroactively filling in the details for these backstories,
what was once downtime becomes a lot more detailed.
Also, the X-Men prequel movies are so enamored with Magneto's complex relationship with heroism
that they accidentally used up all his character development
decades before he's supposed to be the villain we see in the original movies.
My favorite retcon was in X-Men: Apocalypse,
when they'd already developed him far enough from his origin
that they felt the need to give him a second tragic villain origin story,
and gave him a new family just so they could kill it.
He ends that movie a full-on hero, by the way.
I love it when villain origins write themselves into a corner and make the bad guys way too sympathetic.
Anyway, the point is, both these examples demonstrate what happens when a writer tries to turn downtime into plot time.
They end up having to do a lot of work to fill in the details and spice up the pacing,
and the story that results often doesn't really resemble the downtime that was originally described.
And the opposite is also true when you start doing sequels.
Following up plot time with downtime feels extremely weird, because if you're not careful,
the characters end up doing almost nothing compared to what we're used to from them.
Now, filling out downtime with a prequel can be tricky enough, but to write a next gen sequel,
you have to append a whole time skip of downtime to the end of the original story,
and the problem is, if we're used to seeing these characters act in plot time,
they can seem incredibly passive when we zoom out and fill out decades of their life with downtime.
A character who did two dozen very important things in the space of one year in the story
who then does maybe three things in the following two decades of time-skip downtime
will feel implicitly out of character, because they're not doing enough.
Leia's version works because "found and lead a new Rebellion" and "having your son turn evil" are both fairly eventful,
and we get the impression she's being doing a lot in the intervening decades.
She's quite different in a lot of ways.
But Luke and Han are a problem, because you get the impression that, once Ben turned evil,
neither of them did anything for 30 years!
And this wouldn't frustrate us if we didn't have the original trilogy to compare it to!
But unfortunately, we already know these characters and we know how they're supposed to act.
If we had nothing but the sequel trilogy and we meet this badass mentor lady called General Organa
and she's like, "Oh, yes, my space wizard brother could help,
but he is in self-imposed exile because my son turned evil and killed his students, and you must seek him out,"
we'd be like, "Ah! That's a reasonable origin for a reluctant mentor."
But unfortunately, that's Luke Skywalker!
We already know who he is and how he's supposed to act!
Not to mention that the character they turned him into is basically just Yoda but without the sense of humor,
and we've already seen that!
This is also one of the frustrations I had with Legend of Korra.
While we don't get much of the original gang,
the little we see makes it seem like after the whole "saving the world" thing,
they basically founded one city and then called it a day.
Toph is straight up pulling a Yoda and living in a swamp,
and Katara's only role in the show is Korra's waterbending teacher.
I don't know, man. I just expected more.
And where the hell is Sokka??
Now, obviously, it's hard to strike a balance in a next gen sequel,
because you don't want your old heroes to overshadow the new ones,
but you also don't want the old heroes to seem pointless or unnecessary, or worst of all, out of character.
And while you certainly don't have to fill out the entire time skip with everything this character did,
it's best to make sure that the character you get at the end is recognizable as the character you had in the beginning
while still having changed somewhat in the intervening years.
Luke was changed too much in ways that didn't make sense, and ended up nearly unrecognizable.
Han didn't change at all, and actually rolled back all his original character development.
Leia changed enough that we were happy to see her doing so well,
but not so much that we couldn't see the resemblance to her younger self anymore.
This is kind of a Goldilocks zone of post-time skip character development.
Uh, okay. So, uh... sequels can be great on paper, but the execution can be surprisingly tricky to pull off;
continuation sequels can be hard to justify;
next gen sequels have the added hurdle of convincingly aging up your original heroes;
uh, a well-done sequel can retroactively make the original story feel like
it was always meant to be part 1 of many,
but a badly done sequel can make you retroactively hate the original by spoiling its victories or happy ending;
pacing is very different between downtime and plot time, but they're not totally incongruous—
you've just gotta make sure to line them up properly,
otherwise, your characters might feel weirdly passive during the skips. Eh...
I'm really grateful to the Star Wars sequels for making such a good bad example
for so many things.
Uh... so... yeah!