A Narrative in X Parts

Roberto Orci is not exactly a household name. His collaborative partner, J.J. Abrams, is dramatically more well-known, but if you’re a fan of science-fiction, you’re likely a fan of Orci’s work: Fringe, Cowboys & Aliens, and of course, Star Trek. Specifically he wrote (with Alex Kurtzman) the 2009 Trek reboot.

I was in the minority that found the film severely lacking, but I did at least appreciate its attempt to link the brand new Star Trek universe with the extremely deep, existing canon of the previous films and television series. The premise, more or less, involved Spock and a gaggle of evil Romulans¹ being thrown back in time and thus changing history. This new timeline exists in parallel with the existing Star Trek universe, giving Abrams and company the chance to revamp the classic characters while still nodding their head reverentially to Trek as it had been developed.

For some, this was the one glaring problem in Star Trek.² They didn’t object so much to the premise, but the way in which it was handled. While it is explained in the film, more or less, it’s actually fleshed out more completely in a series of prequel comics, collected and sold as a trade paperback under the title, Star Trek: Countdown.

If you’d never read that comic, you’d be forgiven for thinking the villainous Nero character a little thinly-drawn. Virtually all of his character development and back story was either on the cutting room floor, or in the comic.

Why, these people ask, would they make a movie with serious gaps in the story that can only be filled in by going and reading a comic book? A story in a single medium, even if it exists in a larger universe of stories that cross multiple media, should stand on its own. Nobody should be required to cross-reference some other creative work to be able to fully understand that single story. Thus the failing of Star Trek to fully develop and explain its central villain and initial premise within the film itself is unforgivable. However entertaining the comic is,³ it should be supplemental, not essential, to the film.

All of which brings us back to Mr. Orci, who spoke a few days ago on the upcoming video game being developed around the Star Trek reboot. The game’s not due out until next year, but Orci and his partners in the Star Trek film are apparently involved in developing its story, with an eye to making it part of the new canon:

So one of the reasons we were excited to participate in this game is that we wanted it to be very much something that can fit in between the two movies… we would like to think that the game and everything that we do in between to be as close to canon as you can get because it’s actually being taken into consideration with where the movies are.

Anyone who had a problem with the way the prequel comic book was handled is probably a little worried about that quote from Orci. Are you going to have to play this video game to fully understand and appreciate the next film?

Their argument, so far as it goes, is hard to quibble with. You shouldn’t be lost inside of a film, or a novel, or a video game, or a comic book, or a TV show. Even if there’s a larger universe at play, the single-medium/single-story you’re currently consuming should provide adequate guide posts and narrative development to stand on its own.

Take Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Was it an especially delicious experience for those fans who’d watched the original series and seen the character of Khan debut in a single episode two decades earlier? Absolutely. If you’d never seen that episode, did the film make perfect sense to you? Yes, it did. That’s a textbook film, and if you’re looking for a better example of how to handle a story from a larger franchise, you’re unlikely to find one.

Yet, I can’t help but be excited by developments like the Star Trek video game. I absolutely love “worlds.” By worlds, I mean highly developed, rich, complicated narrative universes in which myriad stories can be told. Star Trek began with a fairly basic, some might say pedestrian, science-fiction premise. I liked it, but I never really loved it until the third TV series, Deep Space Nine. It was there that a host of alien species, complete with histories, political interplay, and twisting plots collided with plenty of gray shades to keep the characters interesting.

The original Star Trek centered around three men (Kirk, Spock, and Bones) with a half-dozen supporting bit players. The Next Generation expanded the diversity and roles somewhat, but it remained a small group of mostly humans warping from one planet to the next, wrapping up their stories in an hour (occasionally two). Deep Space Nine had its one-off episodes, but it quickly developed an evolving drama with stories that didn’t ultimately wrap up until the very end of the show.⁴

By that point, the Star Trek franchise had already spawned hours of television, hundreds of novels, comic books, and an above average volume of film sequels. There was plenty of narrative sprawl to work with, to the franchise’s credit. If you wanted to, you could get lost in the intrigues of Federation starships and Klingon birds of prey for days or weeks. Yet Star Trek didn’t start out aspiring to that kind of narrative complexity; it just sort of ended up that way.

Other science-fiction franchises have been a bit more ambitious. Whatever Star Wars looked like when it first rolled around George Lucas’ head,⁵ he did see, pretty quickly, an expanding mythology, one that ultimately would play out in two more films, a prequel trilogy, books, comics, video games, an animated TV series, and plenty more still to come.⁶

Then there are the soap opera series, that start out with a very clear expectation on the part of their audience. You will commit. You will miss nothing, for if you skip an hour or two, you will be utterly lost. The reboot of Battlestar Galactica fell into this category, and it was engrossing. Nobody was going to drop in on the show in season three without picking up the DVD box sets of seasons one and two. Lost was practically byzantine, even to those who’d stuck with it from day one.⁷

These are great worlds to get lost in, and for fans, it’s always a case of the more the merrier, but they don’t exactly count as cross-media storytelling. For the most part, they’ve never really aspired to anything more than a single medium, single format for the core story. Everything else, whether it’s a novel or a video game, has been ancillary to that. Take it or leave it, because it doesn’t really matter to the TV show or the film trilogy.

I can see why many fans would prefer it that way. Not every TV-viewer is going to be enthralled at spending $60 for a video game, and there’s still, sadly, a whole class of people who look down their nose at comic books. That these same people still shell out every time a superhero flies onto the silver screen is rich indeed, but they don’t seem interested in reconciling the dissonance in their cultural taste.

Yet I’ve always been more interested in those narrative enterprises that sought to incorporate various mediums and demanded a level of investment on the part of their audience. I actually don’t think this has anything to do with complex stories. A film franchise can construct a pretty successful and complex narrative without crossing mediums (see Christopher Nolan’s Batman films or Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations). Rather, I appreciate that each medium does something different, and it can serve a story to play to those strengths, rather than limit yourself to the parameters of a single platform.

Video games are unique in their level of interactivity. Reading isn’t entirely passive, at least not in the way that film or television viewing is, but no medium requires user-involvement to the degree that video games do. That doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the conventions of classical storytelling, but it does lend itself to a level of immersion that can help carry a larger narrative experience. As Kevin Shortt, a story designer at game developer Ubisoft said on this subject:

The unique challenge is that games are an interactive medium. Interactivity is what makes it possible for games to contain an exciting world with all kinds of unexplored territory. But it also can be destructive to the rhythms of a story. And a strong story demands good rhythm and pacing. [full story]

In much the same way, a novel can help expose the internal monologues of the characters much more efficiently than a film or TV series can. Big budget films can bring a level of production value and grand visual spectacle that is hard to match in other mediums. If a storyteller sets out, from the beginning, to weave a story into all of these formats, because they feel there’s a compelling creative reason to do so, what’s the harm in that?

After the success of The Matrix, a sequel was an obvious choice. Yet they went one better. Not only did they conceive a two-film single story line, but they layered in a video game that took place within the folds of those two films and a series of animated shorts that further expanded the narrative.⁸ The films were designed to stand on their own (though not one without the other). You didn’t need to play the video game or watch the animated shorts, but if you really wanted to experience the story the Wachowskis were trying to tell, then you definitely needed to go whole hog.

A more recent example is the adaptation of The Dark Tower, a series of novels written by Stephen King. A team lead by Ron Howard are seeking to turn the books not into a single movie, or even a series of movies a la Harry Potter. Nope, they’re plan involves three feature films and two TV series, all linked to each other.⁹ The X-Files made a feature film once that was supposed to be situated between two seasons of the show, so it’s not unprecedented, but it’s more than a little rare to see such an ambitious, cross-media project conceived from the very beginning.

It’s rarer still to see storytellers bring totally divergent mediums together. The Wachowskis went with short-form animation and video games to pair with their films, but you didn’t see novels or comic books as part of that menu. The Dark Tower already is a series of novels, and this would be an adaptation, so those don’t count. As ambitious as Ron Howard & Co.’s plan is, it’s still just movies and TV shows. After Buffy the Vampire Slayer wrapped up it’s TV run, it released an entire season in comic book form, but that was a response to the cancellation, not a pre-planned attempt to tell part of the story in a more appropriate medium.

And that’s a bit of a shame. How often have you seen a film adaptation of a great novel or video game franchise and thought, “That needed a little more room to work in.” Usually we shrug our shoulders and think, “Well they should’ve made it a TV show instead.” But that’s not the only option. As Ron Howard has said of The Dark Tower, “We can use the intimacy of television when that’s appropriate, and the scope and scale of the big screen with the bigger fantasy ideas.” In other words, a story can exist across mediums, and utilize the strengths of them all to the advantage of the story.

Which brings me to my latest hobbyhorse, Mass Effect. This series achieves, for me, the perfect ideal of cross-media storytelling. It’s a trilogy of video games, an iPhone mini-game, a series of novels, comic books and graphic novels, and a collection of codexes.¹⁰ There’s a film in production, but I’ll leave that out for now, since it’s unclear it if will be a straight adaptation of the video games (I hope not), or a unique story set in the larger Mass Effect universe (I hope so), or a story that exists to deepen or build upon some aspect of the video game trilogy (I really hope so).

All of that is great, but it’s not what makes Mass Effect’s approach to storytelling interesting to me. What Mass Effect achieves is an ability to enter its story from a variety of points. That’s different from say, the Lord of the Rings films or even The Matrix franchise. You simply cannot watch the Return of the King if you haven’t seen the first two films from Peter Jackson or read the book. To do so would leave you utterly lost. Who are all of these characters?

In the case of The Matrix, good luck watching the second film without seeing the first, and forget about watching the third film all by its lonesome. It’s hard to imagine anyone playing the Enter the Matrix video game without previous exposure to the Wachowski’s world. The Animatrix shorts can sort of stand on their own, but they don’t mean much without connecting them back into the films.

Mass Effect will ultimately guide you back to the video game trilogy. Yes, that is the spine of the franchise, though I could imagine, several years from now when they’re releasing Mass Effect 5 or 6, when this is no longer the case. But I’m not being hyperbolic when I say you could pick up the first novel from Drew Karpyshyn, having never played the games, and immediately become engrossed. You could fall in love with the world of Mass Effect right then and there, and even if you never played the games, you could still be a fan.

I personally found myself playing Mass Effect 2, having never played the original game.¹¹ I was greeted by an interactive comic to explain the necessary back story, but I could’ve played the game and not been entirely lost if I’d skipped this primer. While still playing the game, I picked up the Mass Effect: Redemption graphic novel, which serves as a prequel to one of the missions in the game. It also helps explain a small part of how your character ends up where he does in the beginning of Mass Effect 2. I have friends who didn’t read the graphic novel until after they’d played the whole game. We experienced the narrative in a very different way from each other, totally out of order, but none of us really lost anything in the translation.

After almost completely finishing the game, another person directed me to an iPhone game, Mass Effect Galaxy. I wouldn’t recommend this for purchase, but I looked up the storyline and found myself reading the adventures of two of the main characters in Mass Effect 2. I was suddenly reminded of a bit of dialogue early on that alluded to a history, possibly romantic, between the two characters. I hadn’t thought much of it, but here it was, unfolding in a video game I could play on my phone.

It’s one thing to build a largely linear narrative, simply expecting the audience to hop from one medium to another in some pre-selected order. It’s another thing entirely to craft an interlocked narrative around a variety of distinctive mediums while still allowing the audience to come into the world in whatever order they choose, without losing anything. Mass Effect has achieved that, and it makes me more than a little sad that more franchises don’t even try, much less achieve the goal.

You could argue the pieces aren’t really essential to the whole, and I suppose they’re not if you’re just looking at the video games, but that strikes me as a fairly narrow way of looking at things. The creators of Mass Effect have made an effort to tell an engrossing story, and they’ve done it using the conventions of a handful of mediums. If you played the games, liked the world, and found the story interesting, why wouldn’t you want to experience all the details? That’s the whole point of narrative worlds, as opposed to single stories. There’s lots of narrative, almost all of it interlocking to form a rich tapestry. At some point, what’s essential largely depends on how broad or limited your perspective is.

I know there are those who will cock their eyebrow at this kind of endeavor. I have been guilty of shaking my head and turning away from a story, simply because I didn’t feel like putting in the time and investment to get through it all. When I missed Battlestar Galactica early on, I shrugged my shoulders and didn’t bother trying. I knew you had to be there from the beginning. I didn’t know if I wanted to invest the time when I could see how many hours were involved. I didn’t even approach it until the series had ended, and that was just one TV show.

It’s understandable why some people would see a series of films, TV shows, comics, and novels and think, “That’s going to be hard to pull off. Am I going to have to consume every part to understand the whole, or worse, be let down in the end?”

Yet as with all things, execution is the key. If a story is rich and engrossing, full of detail and narrative tension, drawing you along and entertaining you every step of the way, is it really going to feel like too much effort? And if the story is dull, poorly constructed, lacking in rich details, then even one film is going to seem like you’ve been cheated out of your very valuable time.

Don’t write off a narrative simply because it’s chosen to aim for an ambitious, complex, cross-media method of storytelling. So long as the storytellers are upfront about what they’re doing, why not take as much of a good thing as you possibly can?