Marooned in the Undying Lands

Not too long ago, we lived at Francis Fukayama’s “End of History.”

It’s difficult to convey to younger SFF fans —
say those under the age of 40 — the degree to
which fears of Soviet domination once preoccupied
the public imagination, or the degree to which many
were convinced that democracy had
triumphed once and for all. 
(Image via CNN)

As risible or foolish as the idea seems now, in the early 1990s there was a near-consensus within the chattering classes that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union had ushered in the final triumph of American-style liberal democracy. According to those who subscribed to this theory, the Last Great Battle had been fought — and won. Social evolution had completed its mission; we had arrived at its pinnacle. The story of history had reached its resolution and now all that was left was to sail into the west.

With the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, it seems redundant to say that the Cold War was no Last Great Battle, and of course there was no White Ship and no Undying Lands.

There’s an obvious malaise to the idea that we have nothing left to achieve, or evolve into. If history is over, all that’s left is stagnation and of stasis. If the Last Great Battle has been fought, there are no more stories left to tell.

This idea of finality is ingrained into much of now-mainstream popular culture. Over the past few years, too many major SFF media franchises are stagnating in a post-eschatological malaise, seemingly afraid to venture into truly new territories. With little narrative momentum left, they seem marooned in the Undying Lands. They want their Last Great Battle, but don't have the integrity to accept the implied End of History.

It’s easy to think of examples: Star Wars, The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Babylon 5, and more. In each, the evil empire has been defeated, good has triumphed, and history has ended.

Franchises with some degree of narrative integrity allow the story to be over in a dignified manner, and to avoid attempts to monetize the goodwill and nostalgia of fans. However, some are compelled by the mandates of corporate profit-seeking to endlessly create new instalments in their narrative universe — and have all struggled to define what’s next.

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings may have been
released after 9/11, but principal filming on all
three movies had all occurred from 1999 to 2000.
It is the product of an End-Of-History mindset.
(Image via Entertainment Weekly)

One approach that several franchises have taken to avoid the End of History hurting revenues is to plumb the mythologies of their narrative universe through a series of prequels. Unsurprisingly, the relevance of these works diminishes over time and can even dilute the original narrative. For example, the Last Great Battle of Westeros in the television series Game of Thrones neither lived up to the hype nor left room for grand adventures afterwards. This has left HBO with little more than prequels on its production roster.

This is not a new phenomenon. John Christopher returned to his Tripods Trilogy — which ends with a Last Great Battle — to write a prequel in 1988. Once Katniss Everdeen had won her Last Great Battle, all that was left was a Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Battlestar Galactica went back to Caprica. And of Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, the less said the better.

Possibly the apotheosis of this trend has been Amazon Prime’s How Galadriel Got Her Groove Back The Rings of Power, a prequel of little interest to anyone other than the most hard-core fans.

But prequelization isn’t the only way that franchises attempt to deal with the End of History problem. The early years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are generally regarded as creatively their most successful — in large part because they were building up to a universe-shaping showdown with their ultimate foe Thanos in Avengers: Endgame. To their credit, the decision makers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have largely avoided the siren’s call of nostalgic prequelization, instead trying to continue as if the Last Great Battle hasn’t changed anything. The results have been mixed.

In the 1990s, no popular narrative embraced Francis Fukuyama’s ideas as wholeheartedly as Star Trek did; The Next Generation presented the American-analogue United Federation of Planets as the pinnacle of civilization; want had been conquered, social problems resolved, and now Jean-Luc and friends would act as emissaries of an idealized human society. But in a post-End-of-History world, this vision of Star Trek no longer makes sense. Since then with the possible exception of Deep Space Nine, the franchise has struggled to advance a coherent vision of what comes next; between stuck-in-the-past prequels (Enterprise, Strange New Worlds) nostalgic revisiting of past lore (Picard, Lower Decks) the franchise has often been treading water. 

The theory of an “End of History” has an obvious appeal; people tend to understand the world through a framework of narrative … and that all stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Perhaps it’s time to allow some of these franchises a dignified ending.

Going Back To The Same Well

The Best Dramatic Presentation (short form) ballot seems to indicate that Hugo nominators are a group that like to go back to the same well, year after year. This year’s shortlist, in fact, may represent the nadir of this trend.

The final episode of She-Ra and the Princess of
Power earned the show its first Hugo nomination.
(Image via she-raandtheprincessesofpower.fandom.com)

Consider that between the six finalists there are representative entries from the three of the screen franchises most-often represented on Hugo ballots: Doctor Who (six wins out of 35 nominations) Star Wars (three wins out of ten nominations) and The Good Place (three wins out of six nominations). Of the entire ballot, only the She-Ra and the Princess of Power episode “Heart” represents a franchise that has never won a Hugo Award.

To be fair, many of the entries on this shortlist are excellent representatives of their respective fictional universes. “Gaugamela” from The Expanse plays with tension without descending into melodrama; an extraordinary hour of science fiction television. “The Jedi” from Mandalorian tells a mostly self-contained story exceedingly well, all while teeing up the narrative arc for the rest of the season. While not as carefully structured as the other nominated episode from Mandalorian, “The Rescue” provides the payoff that longtime fans likely want. And the funny, charming, and genuinely surprising “Fugitive of the Judoon” might be the finest episode of the Chibnall era of Doctor Who.

As has been widely noted across the Anglosphere, there has been an increasing reliance among media corporations to lean on their franchises instead of developing new content. It is simply a safer bet for movie and television executives to invest in iterations of existing intellectual property instead of trying something new. To some degree, it’s disheartening to see that at least the majority of those nominating for the short-form dramatic Hugo are reinforcing this corporate risk aversion. It might be noted that only once in the past decade has there been a Dramatic Presentation Short Form shortlist on which a majority of nominees were from franchises that had not previously won the award.

Last year there were several excellent science fiction and fantasy television shows that might have benefited from the attention offered by a Hugo nod.

The Robbie Amell post-cyberpunk comedy Upload, the oddly compelling Japanese series Alice in Borderland, Alex Garland's meticulously planned out Silicon Valley fable DEVS, and the intricate and beautiful German time travel epic Dark come to mind.

Critically acclaimed SF horror Lovecraft County
creator Misha Green was blindsided by the decision
to cancel the program. It deserved a Hugo nod, 
as well as a second season.
(Image via NBCNews.com)

The abrupt cancellations of Lovecraft County, I Am Not Okay With This, Zoe’s Extraordinary Playlist and Tales From The Loop (among others) seem to indicate that even the best-reviewed original (non-franchise) content is now in constant jeopardy. If we want to enjoy a mass-media landscape that continues to produce diverse, nuanced, and engaging stories, it will take concerted collective effort to ensure that such stories thrive. Hugo nods (and Emmy nods) may not be enough to secure a place for such works, but we’d argue they are at least a part of the solution.

It is interesting to note that in the prose fiction categories, Hugo nominators have long shown an aversion to recognizing licensed franchise works. It seems that the voting public is averse to recognizing such works — even critically acclaimed, fan beloved, and bestselling works such as Diane Duane’s Star Trek novel My Enemy, My Ally, and Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars novel Heir To The Empire. This is not a complaint on our part; we are entirely supportive of this unwritten rule to avoid franchize fiction in the prose categories, but it seems odd that other Hugo categories now embrace this sort of profit-chasing multimedia universe.

This year’s short-form dramatic Hugo ballot is one of the better ones in recent memory, with works that are at least mostly enjoyable delves into established (and perhaps somewhat tired) universes. If the nominees were all we watched this year, we’d be left wishing for new worlds to explore.

The Phoenix Farce

Jean Luc Picard didn’t have the decency to wait the traditional three days before rising up out of the grave.

The quick-and-easy revival of the Enterprise captain is emblematic of a trend in pop culture — particularly in science fiction and fantasy — in which all-too-many significant characters are “killed off” one moment and then resurrected the next.

It’s a lazy writing technique that undermines dramatic tension, cheapens character moments, and

Fun fact, if you start playing the song
“Back to Life” by Soul 2 Soul
when Picard dies, he will be resurrected
before the song ends. We timed it.
(Image via StarTrek.com)  

impoverishes the emotional experience of narratives. For us, it was one of the biggest disappointments in an otherwise pretty decent season of Star Trek.

Picard is dead for fewer than three and a half minutes of screen time. He literally spends more time saying that he will lay down his life for a cause than he spends being dead. Why should viewers get emotionally invested in Picard putting his life on the line when his life costs him nothing?

Although the finale of Star Trek: Picard’s first season provides a case example of this trend, we’d like to be clear that his pointless death and meaningless resurrection is by far not the most underwhelming. Even within the past few years of Star Trek, we’d note Dr. Hugh Culber’s resurrection in Star Trek: Discovery, and Kirk’s resurrection in Star Trek: Into Darkness.

This latter example offers an interesting comparison between resurrections of fictional characters, and what makes some more egregious than others. Into Darkness is a soft remake of The Wrath of Khan, and follows many of the same character moments: a reactor overloading, and a beloved protagonist sacrificing themselves for the greater good. In the case of The Wrath of Khan, it’s Spock who gives his life for the greater good, while in Into Darkness, it’s James Kirk. In both cases, the character who dies gets a prolonged death scene, and an emotional farewell. The narrative asks audiences to grieve for the character’s demise.

But post-mortem, these stories diverge. Within the same movie, after just a few minutes of grieving,

Somehow, while The Wrath of Khan
is considered one of the great Star Trek
movies, Into Darkness is often regarded
as one of the lesser ones.
(Screen capture via Youtube)

Kirk is injected with ‘super blood,’ and is healed almost instantaneously. He’s back on his feet and able to go toe to toe with Khan. End of story.

Compare this with what happened in the earlier movie — Spock stays dead. And when (years later) he’s brought back to life, it’s only through adversity and sacrifice that his friends manage to revive him. When Spock is resurrected, he continues to suffer adverse effects of the trauma. In essence, Spock’s sacrifice is a sacrifice because he actually gave something up.

This is not to suggest that Spock’s resurrection in The Search For Spock is good, but rather that it is a less anemic use of a resurrection plot device than Kirk’s. The ‘Genesis Planet’ may be no less risible a contrivance than ‘Super Blood,’ but the amount of effort and turmoil caused by Spock’s death means that his sacrifice has narrative weight.

In essence, the differences between the two stories highlight the fact that that death without consequence is empty.

This phenomenon is not limited to Star Trek. In movies and television, Spider-Man, Superman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Babylon 5 captain John Sherridan, Ellen Ripley, Agent Phil Coulson, and Harry Potter have all died and come back to life with essentially little consequence.

It gets absurd when you consider that X-Men comic book mainstay Jean Grey has been killed and resurrected numerous occasions; two "official" deaths, three more fake-out deaths …

Why bother with killing off a character if their rebirth is expected by audiences? In part we suspect that characters are killed off in order to imbue a story with meaning — and we naturally associate death as a serious and consequential event in the narratives of our lives. But the significance of death is not in the event itself, but rather in the consequences.

The Death of Superman is a good case study of how resurrection stories often fall flat. Retailers assumed Superman's resurrection would be as big or bigger than his death and over-ordered copies of Adventures of Superman #500, the much-hyped issue in which he returned. To this day the issue in which he dies sells for about $20, but the issue with his resurrection is in the quarter bin of most comic stores.

Death sells, but resurrection doesn't. There is drama in death, after all, everyone without exception has to experience it eventually. But (Easter Sunday and generations of its normative cultural expectations aside) resurrection is not something we empathize with. The experience is alien to us.

Abhay Khosla once observed that in recent years the big superhero crossover had become a pagan ritual where a super hero’s life is given up as a blood sacrifice in the hopes their death will bring prosperity to the comics. It’s like Shirley Jackon’s ‘The Lottery’, except you can often predict who will have the ticket by analyzing sales data trends.

Viewers rarely want to say farewell to a beloved character, and rights holders never want to release a

Did any of us really expect Spider-Man:
Far From Home to be set in Hades?
(Image via Twitter)  

profitable intellectual asset. Excessively long copyright terms on pop culture icons and the hegemony of franchise culture leads to strong incentives for the corporations that control the rights to these characters to ensure that stories about those characters are in perpetual production.

Spider-Man was never going to stay dead — in fact, even when he “dies” on-screen in Avengers: Infinity War, studios had already announced the movie Spider-Man: Far From Home. For moviemakers to expect his demise to resonate is manipulative, cynical, and insulting to audiences. They expect us to grieve for a character we know isn’t actually gone.

The superficial treatment of death means that our heroes live in a consequence-free environment.

This trend is so pervasive that when fan-favourite protagonist Ned Stark dies in the first season of Game of Thrones (and the book on which the show is based), his death is shocking in its finality. While later seasons may have undermined this consequence-rich storytelling, the show stands out for having the guts to let the dead stay dead.

Stories resonate most when they reflect and engage with human emotional states, including grief. When death is meaningless, and resurrection is easy, these stories become little more than shallow wish-fulfillment fantasies.

IDIC and the art of franchise maintenance

Many of us have spent a lot of time, money, and emotional energy watching, reading, digesting, reflecting and arguing about, and consuming science fiction media. Over the past 30 years, some of those stories have become increasingly consolidated into franchises and shared universes. But when we become invested in a franchise, are we continuing to see a return on our investment? 

Let’s talk about the sunk-cost error.

When you're down 50,000 credits at
the Royale, you just assume that your
luck is eventually going to turn.
(Image via MemoryAlpha.com)

It’s a cognitive error in which people refuse to abandon something that isn’t providing a return on investment. You can see it in stock markets, in policy debates, in relationships, in gambling, in consumerism.The investor is loathe to leave the stock, idea, person, or material object because their emotional attachment to the money, time, and effort they’ve already invested outweighs any logic to leave.

The sunk-cost error is arguably happening with a few key science fiction franchises: fans are escalating their commitment to mediocre derivatives of once creative and innovative narratives. The obvious example is a certain class of Star Trek fans.

If you’ve spent 32 hours watching the complete original series of Star Trek, an additional 144 hours watching all of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, shelled out money for several movies, and bought the complete collection of Mego Star Trek Model Starships … well then it gets more and more difficult to acknowledge that the vast majority of late-period Star Trek isn’t very good. 

The more invested we are in a franchise, the more difficult it is to accept when our relationship with the corporation that owns that franchise is no longer healthy. We aren’t getting creative output commiserate with our investment of time and money, but the emotional draw of new offerings is too

The commodore is called 'Paris'! It's a
reference to Tom Paris from Voyager!
Only real fans like me would get that
reference! This movie is made for me!
(Image via StarTrek.com)

strong to ignore. 

Separately, but related, the corporations that own franchises like Star Trek are trying to please shareholders by investing in low risk projects. Of course, the best chance at good returns is to go back to the same group of loyal fans. Pandering to profit without alienating an aging fan base leaves little room for innovation. 

Ironically, it’s often the risk taking projects — narratives that challenge audiences or speak to larger truths — that built the fan base in the first place.

While all commercial artistic endeavours (books, films, television) are on some level created in the hopes that there will be remuneration for the work, franchises are so valuable that the primary goal is to maintain the franchise. 

This type of franchise maintenance has several hallmarks: lack of creative ambition, meaningless callbacks to previous iterations, aversion to innovation, and emotionally hollow feel-good resolutions to conflict.

A perfect example of these hallmarks can be found in the recent J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies that saw a younger, hipper cast take on the mantle of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

Remember when James T. Kirk dies
in Star Trek: Into Darkness? No?
Emotionally hollow deux et machina
saves him in one of the biggest cop-outs
in the long history of Star Trek.
(Image via MemoryAlpha.com)

The movies have been commercial successes, with the 2009 installment of the series raking in almost $400 million in box office receipts, and the 2013 follow up Into Darkness exceeding that tally. 

But viewers are offered weak tea philosophy and recycled plots. Fans are engaged primarily through call-back mechanisms that would mean nothing if the narrative were bereft of its franchise.

Shoehorning Leonard Nimoy’s Spock into the J.J. Abrams movies adds almost nothing to the plot. It’s a cheap and empty way to appeal to fans who have sunk time and effort into decades of the franchise. 

In Into Darkness, when the primary antagonist John Harriman says that his real name is Khan Noonien Singh, it’s presented as a major revelation — but in fact it means little within the narrative. The only reason an audience member would react to this is that they’re steeped in the lore of the franchise. 

Sadly, these stories can become victims of their own success as readers and viewers imagine what happens next, what happened before, and who else lives in that science fictional universe. 

What was once a narrative becomes a canon. 

What was once a story becomes a franchise. And franchises are dependent on fans continuing emotional attachment, but sadly not dependent on telling engaging stories.

It's difficult to let go of a beloved franchise. But maybe it's time to let it lie fallow for a while.