On sequels

I love the new Dr. Who.

I know I'm a little behind the times, the Brits are winding up their second season, but the first was only just released on DVD and I only just borrowed the set from my rabid-fanatic sister.

Sometimes I forget that my rabid-fanatic sister and I come from the same gene pool. Then something like this comes along, and I remember.

No, but really. I love the new Dr. Who. I didn't dare hope it would be as good as it is.

And this is the really great thing: not only does it not disappoint-- and there was a lot of room for disappointment-- not only does it stay true to the old show and carry on faithfully where the old one left off... but it's good. Really good. You just want to keep watching it. At least if you're me. It's not just the old show revisited; it's alive, it's rooted and growing, it's a real show in its own right. It's terribly exciting.

And that's what a good sequel needs to be. I used to be much more conservative about sequels. I wanted them to stay tied to the original, without going much beyond the bounds of what the original established. But that's no way to write a story. For a sequel to be great, it needs to make the characters and history from the original story grow beyond what they were. It needs to be organic, it needs to be true to what was established, but then it needs to go further.

Here's another great sequel: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. And it's great for the same reason. It's not afraid to plow new ground. All three of its main characters (as well as two secondary characters) develop new qualities and new struggles... but the seeds of each quality and struggle were there in the first movie.

In a bad sequel, the characters face new problems, but they handle them in the exact same way. In a very bad sequel, characters go completely off the wall and do things utterly discordant with their earlier selves. But in a great sequel, characters face problems and situations that they can't handle in the old way, and the ways they find to handle them reveal new things about them-- to themselves and to us.

What Elizabeth does at the end of Pirates II ranks as one of my favorite character moments of all time. It's completely unexpected and shocking, and yet completely true to what she's been before. And it opens up vast new prospects on who she is and what she's capable of. I'm very excited to see what happens with her in the next movie... it's got so much potential, and I'm reasonably confident in Ted and Terry to write it out.

So yay for good sequels. And yay for the seven remaining Dr. Who episodes I have waiting for me at home.