Reject Franchises, Watch With No Context

“Do I have to have seen the other movie to get this one?”

“Is this explained somewhere else?”

“Should I know what this is?”

These are all questions fans of large franchises have had to ask themselves more and more. Star Wars, Marvel, and other popular IP have spread from the big screen to streaming and are getting more and more bloated with each project. There’s this feeling that to fully understand something you are interested in, it requires hours of watching things you’re not interested in.

And I am here to say, right now, that if you’re wondering whether you have to watch something else to fully understand a work: the answer is no.

You don’t have to, and if you can’t follow along without having seen or played an entirely different work, then the thing you're watching is bad and has failed in its job.

How Much Context Do You Really Need?

I got into Star Trek a few years ago thanks to my friend Anaum. Since Voyager was her favorite series, I started with that, and had no context as to the broader franchise. At no point did I feel like I missed out on anything by not having watched The Next Generation, even when Q or The Borg showed up.

Because the important part of that kind of broader context was the characters’ reactions. There’s an early episode where the crew manages to get in touch with a Romulan, a recurring antagonist in the franchise, and I had no idea why everyone was upset that they managed to contact a Romulan, but clearly, this was unideal, and he was hostile to them as well, so I could still understand the episode.

There’s an episode where The Doctor manages to get himself onto a ship in the Alpha Quadrant and meets his “younger brother,” the EMH Mark 2. The EMH2 says that “the Romulans have not joined sides in our war with the Dominion,” a phrase that meant nothing to me. Luckily, it meant nothing to The Doctor either, so I wasn’t really missing out.

Even Deep Space Nine, which I do think is thematically enhanced by having watched TNG beforehand, doesn’t actually require you to know what happened to understand the characters and arcs in that show.

Now, to be fair, those examples are from a simpler time.

Back when we had 22-episode seasons, things were meant to be somewhat self-contained and episodic, and the idea of a big interconnected franchise with different bits and movies where you must watch each entry to learn everything seemed like a waste of resources, so here’s a more recent example:

Nowadays, my Star Trek knowledge has expanded to include TNG and the first six seasons of DS9 (I’ll get started with season 7 once I stop being mad about Jadzia’s death). I haven’t seen any modern Trek, and I don’t have any real interest in it. But despite never having watched a single episode of Discovery, I followed along with the first episode of Starfleet Academy just fine (I even wrote a recap of it).

The biggest thing that I didn’t know about was “The Burn,” but I didn’t need to know what specifically it was. It was some big, bad thing that completely destabilized the utopia envisioned in TNG, and now things suck. Starfleet Academy opening back up is a sign of things starting to suck less.

It didn’t matter that I hadn’t seen Discovery; it didn’t matter that I hadn’t seen The Doctor’s previous appearance in Prodigy, because the most relevant things were “we lost our way, and now we’re trying to find it again,” which the first episode hammers in just fine.

Because if something is crucial to understanding the plot of a film or show, they will tell you about it, directly or indirectly. Keeping on Star Trek, DS9 has an episode that’s a direct sequel to a TNG episode wherein Riker had a clone, and they explain the situation to Gul Dukat and, by extension, anyone who hasn’t watched TNG, so those viewers wouldn't be lost.

The first time Q appears on Voyager, the ship goes into red alert, and they’re more serious than we’ve ever seen them. From that, a reasonable viewer can infer that, whatever is going on with this Q guy, he’s trouble.

Fiction has always used character reactions to fill in the blanks and serve as a cue to the audience about the significance of a certain event. If two characters had a bitter breakup, that’s going to be reflected in how they act ,whether there’s a prequel showing how they broke up or not.

New entries don’t (or at least shouldn’t) just plow ahead assuming you know everything, because that wouldn’t be profitable.

First of all, you simply can’t assume everyone remembers everything that happened.

Second of all, a broad interconnected franchise only works if there is an entry point. If a movie teases some interesting backstory or the viewer likes a character while still being a complete story on its own, then the viewer might be interested enough that they’ll go back and watch the other parts. If the first thing you watch isn’t good on its own, though, then that kills interest in the rest of the franchise and contributes to franchise fatigue.

A story is kind of like a Jenga tower. A viewer can be missing several pieces, but still have a standing tower. Some of those pieces are intentionally vague, while others might refer to an existing entry in the franchise.

There isn’t actually a difference between Hawkeye and Black Widow talking about Budapest in Avengers, and Loki being nervous when he hears thunder in the same movie from the perspective of an audience member who never watched Thor. It’s easy enough to piece together that something happened and that something was either good or bad based on the reaction.

To the extent this is an issue with the audience, it’s that audiences are too used to having everything explained in detail, which is how you get people saying Thanos should have had his own movie prior to Infinity War, even though he and the Infinity Stones are set up just fine in that film.

This isn’t all audiences, of course. If you look at something like the K-Pop Demon Hunters fandom, plenty of people were able to expand on the Saja Boys and Céline’s stories despite them not having enough screentime. But not having those backstories doesn’t make the film feel incomplete, because ultimately, the film is Rumi’s story.

Just embracing going in without context and accepting that you won’t understand everything immediately will help people enjoy a lot more work and make franchises less intimidating.

On the creator's side, backstory details, whether they’re an unexplained event or something with a whole movie, should supplement whatever the arc of the current movie is, but not be required. It doesn’t matter if I don’t know how two characters broke up if the arc of them getting back together is compelling. It doesn’t matter if I don’t know the details of the thing that made the setting suck if the way the characters deal with those circumstances is compelling.

Over-reliance on the audience doing the background reading means the story you are trying to tell right now is incomplete. It doesn’t have a full internal arc. Even if it’s part of a larger character arc, there should be a beginning, middle, and end for each individual entry.

Because ask any undergrad professor: no matter how much you tell them to, there’s always going to be someone who didn’t do the required reading.