When touchstone cultural stories are damaged by poor sequels, reboots, or postmodern ideological ‘updates for the modern age’ the inevitable defense comes against any attempted critique: “you can’t hurt the original. It will always exist.” At face value, this is true. The Lord of the Rings still sits on the shelf, untouched by Amazon’s Rings of Power. George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy still plays: admittedly only in an editorial tainted “Special Edition” form. These texts persist.
But this line of reasoning is incomplete, because stories do not live only as static artifacts. They live in continuity: they contain memory of the past, layers of meaning, and speak to the recipient of something particular. In short they are foundationally vehicles of communication and an inheritance from one mind to another.
What Follows Matters
The damage warded against by criticism of successor works isn’t to the original as it was received: it’s to the whole as it is passed to the future. There’s a crucial difference between a story that is complete and self-contained and one that is ongoing. If a story is part of a larger continuity (especially one that claims to resolve, reinterpret, or explain earlier parts) then what comes after can retroactively alter how the story is understood. Let’s take a look at some examples to explore just how continued storytelling can not just impact but lessen the story that came before.
Case 1: Star Wars: A Long Time Ago In A Myth (Now) Far Far Away
The original trilogy created a mythic structure of rebellion, redemption, and renewal. The prequels added depth and history (however flawed), which both undermined some parts of the story and strengthened others. But the sequels, particularly The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, attempted to deconstruct the saga.
Their effect? They retroactively reframed the meaning of Luke’s heroism, the victory over Palpatine, and the balance of the Force. What was once the culmination of sacrifice became a temporary reprieve before reset. Who were once heroes became uncommendable, even worthy of despite. All the momentum was lost and every victory undone: instead of progress we were given regress to set up new heroes with nothing to conserve and only excellence to supplant.
What was the original story about? If the answer changes, so does the story.
Endings matter. They give meaning to the beginning and middle. If you change the end, you change the interpretation of everything that came before. You can criticize the first chapter of a book or the first book of a trilogy, but you cannot commend it as a whole until the last chapter closes: because the conclusion can by itself reframe, redeem, or revile what came before. That’s what makes the Return of the Jedi so powerful, it redeems the history of Darth Vader and lifts Luke up as a paragon of forgiveness and finding humanity even in the darkest part of power and ambition.
Case 2: Game of Thrones When The End Betrays the Audience
The quintessential modern example of how an ending can redefine what came before is A Song of Ice and Fire. George R.R. Martin’s series was always morally muddy, often shockingly vile, and deeply uncomfortable. I never was able to recommend it easily. And yet I told people: this is a world of dark grays and blacks, where the rare glimpses of white shines all the brighter. Amid the cynicism and cruelty, there were flickers of loyalty, of honor, of sacrificial love that spoke to something more. The story seemed poised to say: even here, in the worst of worlds, light can break through.
Martin’s unfinished books leave that tension unresolved. The ending still unwritten: the balance not settled. There is still space for spring to come again, in truth as well as season: for meaning to emerge from brutality. The questions of destiny, justice, memory, and hope are still alive.
But the HBO series answered those questions—probably in the same way Martin was working toward and in doing so, it defined the shape of the story for the public imagination. Whatever Martin may still write: the door has been closed for most readers and viewers. The dominant interpretation is one of fatalistic nihilism. Winter came. Men died. Evil was overcome by chance. And we continue from there with what the Maesters say is “the best story.”
But it’s not the best story. This is a metanarrative lie rationalizing the unrealistic ending in realpolitik terms to bear the ascension of the Fisher King without recognizing the weight and forward looking promise that entails.
The glimmers of beauty, sacrifice, and transcendence were crushed under narrative expedience, tonal whiplash, and a final message that seemed to say: power corrupts all, hope is naïve, and history forgets. Ned was a fool and there is no redemption for sins.
Whether fans accept it or not, that ending now frames every reread and every rewatch. The show’s conclusion retroactively bleeds into the novels, casting light on shadows maybe Martin did place. But it extinguishes the idea that there might be true heroes, true sacrifices, or even true arcs of progress. Instead, it offers the anti-myth: every man either dies or lives long enough to become the villain. Aragorn may be a fine ranger, but he would have made a terrible king.
And that’s the real betrayal: not just of narrative, but of moral imagination. A Song of Ice and Fire hinted at truth, twisted and obscured, yes, but still present. The show’s ending replaced those echoes of truth and beauty with a fundamental lie: that there is no meaning, only motion. That love cannot overcome power. That the long winter is inevitably coming.
In doing so, it darkened not only its own fictional world, but also the mythic tradition it drew from and even the real world it was speaking to.
Case 3: His Dark Materials The War on Heaven
When I first read The Golden Compass in my youth, I fell into a carefully laid trap. I was enchanted by Philip Pullman’s imaginative world of armored bears, shimmering portals, and daemons that seemed like innocuous Platonic manifestations. The tone was mysterious, magical, and clever. I sensed hints of trouble in paradise: an unambiguously wrong Church, consorting with daemons, and a planned war against heaven but I assumed these were points of conflict or at least ambiguous. After all, Lyra’s father was cold and unloving, his ambition to raise an army against Heaven grotesque. Surely the story would steer toward redemption, not rebellion. Lyra: our window into the story didn’t seem aligned with the Church or her father’s goals.
As I read The Subtle Knife, my wonder deepened. Here was a modern story in the legacy of The Chronicles of Narnia: intelligent, symbolically rich, philosophically playful. It felt like a grown-up version of a childhood wonder-story struggling with loss, ambiguity, and depth. I was still under the spell.
And then I read The Amber Spyglass.
That was the moment the veil lifted. The trilogy was not just an adventure playing with theological themes: it was a polemic. Not a mere critique of clerical corruption or religious hypocrisy but an open rebellion against God as God. The war against Heaven was not a mistake, not a tragedy, not a desperate error—it was supposed to be good. Pullman’s god is portrayed as decrepit, false, and dying. The liberation of the universe requires His death not self-sacrificially on a cross, but in the midst of battle, whimpering and moaning under His own impotent weight as He is betrayed and mockingly reviled.
Once that becomes clear, the earlier books can’t help but be recontextualized entirely. The beauty of Pullman’s world becomes sinister as it always was. The wonder becomes weaponized. Paradise is not merely lost but is intentionally destroyed. The reader is asked to cheer as it burns.
There is no walking back from that precipice. Once you see the bones beneath the skin, the spell breaks. Was I blind not to notice the intention of the story from the start? Probably. It wasn’t entirely hiding the ball, but it was playfully ambiguous. It wanted me to participate innocently in its rebellion. The Amber Spyglass didn’t merely end the story. It revealed it. And what it revealed was not the triumph of truth or the vindication of conscience. It was the celebration of rebellion. Of autonomy unbound by love, ungoverned by law. And that’s the point.
The Conclusion Mattered
It redefined everything that came before. What seemed like a modern myth was, in the end, a lie. Not the fulfillment of Narnian longing, but its deliberate inversion. The glimpses of wonder were not breadcrumbs toward transcendence, but siren songs luring the reader into cosmic treason.
Pullman’s world, like his Authority, pretended toward divinity but in the end, both collapsed into dust. Every story, in the end, points toward something: toward what it believes is worthy of love, of reverence, of imitation. In that sense, every story worships something.
And this one worships nothing and invites you to worship it too.
Case 4: Wheel of Time Myth Shepherded Through Flawed Stewardship
The Wheel of Time here is a useful example not of betrayal, but of the precarious balance required to preserve a story’s mythic and moral coherence. Robert Jordan constructed an epic that drew deliberately on the cycles of real-world myth and history, reworking religious archetypes and moral systems into a fantasy framework. At its best, it wasn’t just imitating myth: it was engaging it forwards and backward, both prefiguring and expressing our myths in its history and present but also mythologizing present and past real-world history that had not yet faded into its own myth. I describe it as a flawed masterpiece with little to compare with its breadth of ambition. Tragically Robert Jordan was unable to complete the weave he started and his death left the story unresolved. Pregnant with intention and promised resolution. The story could go many different ways; like A Song of Ice and Fire it could aim for subversion. Like His Dark Materials it could demolish the very foundations of myth that it stood upon for any meaning at all. But it was incomplete: the answer was withheld.
In what can only be described as a miracle of publishing providence Brandon Sanderson was tasked with a nearly impossible job: finish the sprawling, incomplete epic with thousands of character threads and mythological undertones not his own. Even more miraculous the conclusion actually worked, but it was tenuous. He executed much of it well, particularly the mechanical elements like plot and action pacing but struggled with certain characters, tonal fidelity and thematic subtlety (not that Jordan was himself always a master of subtlety).
Nowhere is this more evident than in his treatment of Mat Cauthon. Jordan’s Mat was a roguish trickster-hero shaped by mythic archetypes: half Cú Chulainn, half Loki with a side of his own brand of reluctant hero and the clearest connection to past through the memories he has of his own past lives. He was a deeply layered symbol of fate, irony, and unwanted destiny. Sanderson’s Mat veered too far into comic relief and quippy detachment, forgetting the character behind the trappings and flattening his arc into something more mundane than mythic. Other characters suffered similar drift.
Most crucially, Sanderson did not fully engage with the series’ central conceit: that the Wheel is not just cyclical time, but a mythological and philosophical structure echoing the myths and histories of our own world while pointing beyond them. The books are not merely escapist, they are revelatory myth, and that vision was never fully embraced in the final volumes.
By the end of the series, Rand al’Thor is less a man and more a myth incarnate. His final arc of sacrifice without death, rejection of power, and post-victory anonymity draw directly from Christological motifs. He dies without dying, defeats the Dark One not by destruction but by rejection of domination, and leaves the world to live as a quiet redeemer.
This was not Sanderson’s invention. The image of Rand coming in full manifestation of embraced Ta’veren glory: the fields blooming behind him is Jordan’s, pulled almost directly from his notes. It shines with a shard of truth, perhaps even what Lewis called the “good dreams” of paganism: human stories unconsciously grasping at divine reality and it, even wrapped in the more mundane mechanical trappings of merely ending the story, make the whole work complete and more importantly significant.
In one sense, the humanism of the ending, the idea that the Creator does not descend or even communicate with his creations, that the Dark One is not slain but bound again by choice awaiting another release, and that peace must be stewarded by mortals is not a betrayal, but a culmination. The story affirms human responsibility, yes, but through a sacrificial, transcendent figure who images divine hope and the underlying structure of the myth promises that this is not the true ending. The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass: look to dawn, on the third day: I am coming.
So what happened? The final scenes, especially Rand’s, work on a symbolic and theological level further even than Jordan’s intent. But the tone, character arcs, and mythic underpinnings were often handled inconsistently (not that Jordan wasn’t himself prone to such wanderings). The danger in this case wasn’t subversion or sabotage but dilution.
And that brings us back to the argument: Endings matter because they tell us what the story meant. Even when drawn directly from the author’s notes, a story can still be weakened if its voice or vision is not fully understood by the one concluding it. It can drift. Even in the hands of it’s first maker.
The Wheel of Time ending doesn’t destroy the series. But it does illustrate how fragile a story’s wholeness is when its final meaning depends on faithful stewardship not just of facts and events, but of myth, tone, and truth.
Case 5: Star Trek To Boldly Undo What Man Has Done Before
Does that mean that continuity and storytelling cannot bear internal contrast? Can a story not develop through different eras of reflection, evolving in how it is expressed and imagined?
Star Trek began as a vision of hope. Gene Roddenberry’s original series was boldly optimistic not just in aesthetics or technology, but in moral imagination. It portrayed a future in which humanity had overcome its tribalism, greed, and brutality not by erasing individuality, but by elevating it. The United Federation of Planets was more than just a setting; it was a symbol of what might be possible if humans chose wisdom, cooperation, and exploration over conquest and fear.
The Next Generation deepened that vision. Under Captain Picard, Starfleet became a vessel not merely for adventure, but for diplomacy, restraint, and principle. Moral dilemmas were faced not with force, but with philosophical reflection. The show portrayed a civilization confident in its ideals yet constantly testing them. It wasn’t utopian because it had arrived at perfection it was utopian because it was always reaching for it.
Then came Deep Space Nine, which dared to complicate that vision. It introduced darkness: corruption, war, religious strife. But it used these trials as abrasion to sand out the rough edges of the Federation’s ideals, and by extension, our own. The Federation was tested, even to the point of breaking, but the essential question remained: how do we live by our ideals when they cost us something? Deep Space Nine asked whether utopia could survive contact with reality and answered yes, but only if it was defended both physically and intellectually, even in the face of violence, imperfection, and competing moral visions.
Voyager returned to the episodic, exploratory format of the original series but often without the same philosophical weight. Its emphasis on progressive representation was handled with a heavy hand resulting in moments of near-comical idealism. The integration of Maquis rebels and Starfleet officers, for example, resolved itself with implausible ease. Deep ideological tensions were subordinated to episodic harmony, and characters who should have resisted assimilation quietly donned Starfleet uniforms without protest.
Enterprise, by contrast, aimed to lay the groundwork for the Federation itself. It sought to explore the raw, unformed values that would one day shape Starfleet. But in doing so, it too often wandered into convoluted territory.
Both shows were bogged down at times by time-travel arcs and high-concept cosmology that strained continuity rather than enriching it.
And yet, even at their weakest, they remained tethered to the framework. The Federation still meant something. Starfleet still stood for principle. These shows operated within the moral architecture they inherited even as they occasionally shook its beams.
Then came Discovery and Picard.
These are not merely flawed entries. They are redefinitions alternating the tone, structure, and metaphysics of the whole. Discovery replaced the clarity of Federation ideals with opaque power structures, retcon-heavy timelines, and emotional bombast. Picard, perhaps more tragically, turned its once-principled captain into a man disillusioned with the very system he once embodied. The Federation is recast as cynical and bureaucratically callous. Starfleet, no longer a vessel of reason and aspiration, becomes just another tool of shadowy interests and cultural decay.
These aren’t just “bad shows.” They aren’t even just “dark shows.” They invert the entire meaning of the mythos.
The tragedy of Star Trek’s recent output is not that it tackles hard subjects, Deep Space Nine did that with brilliance, but that it does so from within a world that has abandoned its own moral gravity. There is no center anymore. No Prime Directive that means something. No Federation that reflects the human ideal. What was once aspirational has become self-parody or worse, self-hatred. The light that once illuminated the darkness has been diffused into nothing. We have drifted too far from the star that once shone at the center.
And that’s what matters: when a story’s future redefines its past, it changes what that past meant. You can no longer watch the old shows in innocence. The Federation is no longer the dream. It is the prelude to inevitable corruption. We didn’t live up to the ideal and by implication, we never could. The story has not continued. It has curdled.
Star Trek, like America, perhaps did not need to end. But it needed custodians, not deconstructors. Its slow fall shows that even without malice, a failure to revere what came before is enough to undo everything.
Stories Can Be Broken from the Start
We’ve spent much of this reflection on endings. How a story concludes determines what it meant, what it stood for, and what it leaves behind. But beginnings matter just as much. The foundation a story is built upon defines the emotional and moral logic that will shape the entire connected universe. Change that foundation, and you don’t just alter the details you redefine the meaning of everything that follows.
We see this clearly in Star Wars. I remember clearly before the prequels, the Clone Wars lived in my imagination as a vast, mythic tragedy, an era of fading light, noble sacrifice, and the downfall of great heroes. Anakin Skywalker’s fall felt enormous because its outlines were undefined but weighty, archetypal, tragic. I was only 14 when Attack of the Clones came out but I still feel the loss of that imagination as what I had invested with mythic intention and grown in my imagination was uprooted and overwritten with what the prequels gave us: a Jedi Order that was bureaucratic, emotionally stunted, and often wrong. The Clone Wars became not a noble catastrophe, but a confused military campaign driven by bad decisions and political negligence. The effect? Luke’s redemption of Vader now feels less like the return of a fallen knight and more like a mercy extended to a man broken by an institution that was never wise to begin with.
That shift didn’t just affect how we see the past, it redefined the future. The foundation was altered, and so the meaning of the whole structure bent with it.But with Star Wars it didn’t quite break there.
And so we come to the crux of it all and turn to the father of fantasy and champion for mythological storytelling himself: we come to Tolkien and reflect upon Middle Earth.
Case 6: The Lord of the Rings: A World Recast in Flawed Mithril
Before confronting the greater failure, we should pause briefly to consider the lesser one. The Hobbit films do not betray Tolkien’s world, they merely strain it. What began as a whimsical children’s tale is inflated into a CGI-laden war epic, burdened with the expectation of echoing The Lord of the Rings. The result is uneven, sometimes inspired, sometimes absurd.
There are good bones here. The story remains partially faithful, arguably even in line with the kind of imaginative retcon Tolkien himself might have attempted had he lived longer: reworking The Hobbit to harmonize more fully with the deeper mythic gravity of The Lord of the Rings. It’s not unthinkable that he would have expanded the backstory of the dwarves, the exile and politics of Erebor, or more carefully traced Gandalf’s absences to his concern over Dol Guldur and the necromancer rising in the South.
There is a vision here of a children’s tale grown up; filled with personal politics, shadow, and world-spanning resonance. And yet the execution buckles under the weight of this expansion. The pacing falters. The tone wobbles and the story, in its attempt to mirror the grandeur of The Lord of the Rings (Rivendell, elven forests, perilous mountains, a final confrontation at a distant peak) ends up feeling like an echo of an echo. Familiar in shape, but less resonant in meaning.
Still, it is not without merit. Martin Freeman gives us an inspired Bilbo fully realized: nervous, honest, and unexpectedly brave. Smaug is rendered with breathtaking menace. The dwarves sing. Beorn laughs a deep and hearty laugh. The world is still there, even if flickering through a modern computer-generated filter that Tolkien would doubtless despise.
It is also, undeniably, a mixed bag. Levitating Legolas, dwarves on battle-pigs, Thranduil astride a war-moose, and other meme-worthy missteps remind us just how far the tone can stray. But for all its indulgence, The Hobbit trilogy does not break the original novel or even the Lord of the Rings films.
It is a flawed adaptation. But the spirit, though smothered, is not extinguished.
Even in its incomplete state, The Rings of Power reveals itself as something other than a flawed adaptation: it is a redefinition. And not a careful one.
To its credit, it contains moments of aesthetic brilliance: sweeping, meticulously crafted sets, luminous cinematography, and a hauntingly beautiful score by Bear McCreary. There is clear love in parts of its making and even deep knowledge of facts and deep lore. But that love and understanding does not extend to the source material’s moral or metaphysical heart.
The tone swings wildly between overwrought solemnity and plastic artificiality. I don’t object to elevated, stylized dialogue; Tolkien himself wrote speeches full of grandeur. Theoden on the Pelennor, Éomer over his sister’s broken body are not “realistic” conversations, but mythic utterances and I can clearly see that they were trying to realize this style on film. But mythic tone demands mythic clarity. It cannot be propped up by lines like “Do you know why a ship floats and a stone cannot? Because the stone sees only downward” or “Sometimes to find the light, we must first touch the darkness” The style is adopted without the skill or soul to sustain it.
But far worse than inconsistent execution is the confusion of purpose. The story they are trying to tell is not worth telling. Not in this way. This is not a reinterpretation of Tolkien for a modern age: it is a replacement of Tolkien’s vision with a different vision entirely. Which would be fine in its own world, but not as an officially sanctioned prequal.
Take the “problem of the orcs.” Tolkien knew it was a moral tension, he gestured at it in letters, but never resolved it, because to answer it falsely would rupture the framework and unravel the whole. If orcs are fully redeemable, then the great wars are unjust. If they are wholly monstrous, then mercy and pity lose their power. So Tolkien left it alone because he couldn’t fully reconcile it.
But The Rings of Power leans firmly into this tension and attempts to split the difference. Orcs are both sympathetic victims who just want a home, and blood-spattered monsters to be killed without remorse. The show wants to evoke horror and provoke compassion but without moral reckoning. It tries to have its cake and eat it too. The result is confusion, not nuance.
The same confusion infects the portrayal of Sauron and Galadriel. The show toys with the idea of a redemptive Sauron (a bold narrative move, if properly rooted in Tolkien’s own framework of fall and repentance) but instead of grounding this in theological depth or tragic dignity, it turns into romantic tension and half-truths. In the heat of the pivotal moment Sauron speaks truth plainly, and Galadriel lies. The scene that should evoke spiritual crisis plays instead like a spurned lovers’ quarrel.
Worse still, the very foundations of the legendarium are recast. Mithril is no longer a poetic symbol of light and endurance; it becomes the product of a silly myth about an elf and a balrog fusing a Silmaril into the earth, and more disastrously, a kind of spiritual battery necessary to stave off elvish decay. Gil-Galad’s fading becomes not a mythic echo of the long defeat, but a plot device justifying the forging of the Rings as a kind of metaphysical medicine. The show insists on explaining the magic, mechanizing the myth and so undoing it.
And what of Númenor? We were promised a slow moral fall from noble purpose to prideful ruin. Instead, we are given shallow political allegory with immigration fears and populist manipulation. Lazy reflections of our own headlines. There is no exploration of the true Númenórean sickness: the longing for immortality and the bitterness of exile from the divine. The island sinks, but the soul was never there to begin with.
This would all be tolerable (infuriating, but tolerable) if it did not strike at the heart of what Tolkien’s world means.
The Rings of Power imagines a Middle-earth governed by dualism and mechanics. The Valar become fallible administrators. Orcs become oppressed workers. Sauron becomes a man. Grace is gone. Providence is absent. Eru is nowhere to be seen.
If the foundations are laid in this story. If this is the Second Age. Then The Lord of the Rings is redefined. The fall of Sauron is no longer the fall of a rebellious angel, but a lover scorned. The forging and gifting of the Rings is no longer a temptation of pride, but a pragmatic workaround for spiritual entropy. Frodo’s pity for Gollum becomes absurd or irrelevant. The eucatastrophe is stripped of its divine resonance and becomes coincidence.
And that is why it matters. The ending is changed by the beginning. The soul of the story is displaced.
Tolkien himself knew the danger. In his abandoned sequel, The New Shadow, he imagined a future Gondor where peace decays into cultic darkness, where the children of the heroes forget their fathers’ sacrifices: refusing their inheritance and evil returns not in glory, but in banality. He wrote a few pages. And then he stopped. “It was not worth doing,” he said. He understood that the wrong continuation could unravel the meaning of what came before. He had already brought the world to its eucatastrophic end. Tolkien wasn’t just the maker of a world. He was its custodian.
When a Story Is Never Allowed to End, It Cannot Mean
This is the crisis of our cultural age: the story is never allowed to end. And when the story cannot end, it cannot mean. Every time we reopen a finished arc or resurrect a villain, rewrite a motive or shift a moral we risk not only contradiction, but dissolution. Meaning becomes mutable. Myth becomes mere content. The continuity stretches, and stretches, until it breaks “not with a bang, but with a whimper.”
The cost is not just narrative coherence. It is moral weight. When victory is temporary, sacrifice is performative. When evil is misunderstood, good becomes suspect. When myth is reduced to mechanism, all wonder is lost.
We should care because stories matter not as isolated entertainments, but as living wholes and as conduits of truth from one mind to another.
We should care because endings shape meaning. Because beginnings set the moral terms for what a story can become. Because inheritance is a gift, and a story handed down must be received with reverence to the communication of other that it actually is, not rewritten with arrogance presuming the supremacy of recency and presuming the conclusion that nothing means anything in the end.
You don’t hate The Rings of Power or The Last Jedi or The Wheel of Time series because they aren’t as good as the original. You hate them because they try to tell a story whose soul they don’t merely misunderstand but that they actively repudiate..
As recipients of such stories it is part of our duty as stewards to reject bad story: to call out narratives that breach the bounds of truth or violate the premise of the larger whole. Not just as passive consumers but as active custodians of the inheritance of literary excellence that has been passed down to us so that we can in turn hand off what is excellent in our time to those who come after us.
