Before I started watching Star Trek, I had heard about it on the Big Bang Theory. The way it was talked about, I was expecting a franchise with very airtight and complex lore. In reality, it’s kind of a muddled mess. And really, it’s better the creators don’t worry too much about continuity, why let continuity get in the way of a good story? It doesn’t make sense that half the cast of the original series had encountered Trelane before but in the end, does it really matter?
Anyway, fans of big franchises who keep track of all the lore and act as though it’s all consistent, put way more thought into continuity than the creators.
The creator of Alien Earth said something like he doesn’t care about lore and that he’s not going to limit himself to what Prometheus and the other Alien movies said. And I’m happy for that, some IPs are better as just interpretations of the same universe that strict historical accounts where everything have to check out.
Exactly, good for him. Storytelling isn’t religion, your new story isn’t supposed to cause a schism. What you choose to carry forward (or not) from a pre-existing body of work can be really meaningful on its own. Like some versions of Terminator treat time travel as a way to show that you can change the future (hopeful) and some of them do the hackneyed bit about fate conspiring to force an outcome (deliberately rehashing the copyrightable nouns of the franchise for cheap nostalgia).
Then why tie yourself to a franchise? Just make your story and not be a part of that franchise.
My thesis is that storytelling as a whole is about ideas and themes more than it is about particular nouns. I reject the idea that so much weight should be given to the components of storytelling that can be made into intellectual property. And sometimes you do want to tell a story that uses a compellingly iconic thing; Giger’s xenomorph is an incredibly compelling creature that resonates across decades because it has so much psychological weight. If you tried to tell an Alien story with anything else people would notice and ask “why didn’t they just make an Alien film?” and if the answer is “because they had interesting ideas that couldn’t be incorporated into the exact continuity of a dozen different films made across four decades”, that to me is a poor reason not to tell a good story.