Way to introduce buzzkill

I'm a moderate fan of "Star Trek". I'm not a raging Trekkie (sorry, Trekker) but I enjoy the show. I'm partial to the original series from 1966, myself ("TOS" to purists) though I've enjoyed the mid-seasons of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and even a bit of "Deep Space 9".

I have opinions on "Voyager" and "Enterprise" that are not entirely (or even remotely) complimentary.

That said, I found myself momentarily jazzed to hear that there was a new TV series in the works. I even watched the teaser for "Star Trek: Discovery" and found myself a bit excited.

Then I found out it's a prequel. Not just a prequel, but a prequel to TOS.

And now the buzz is gone. The interest faded to naught. I find it hard to imagine how I could give less of a shit about this show.

Why? Prequel.

Prequels are generally lazy crap to try to milk money out of tried-and-true stories. If I were to be totally honest, I'd have to say I have the same utter lack-of-interest for the upcoming Star Wars spinoff, Rogue One. I don't really care about filling in the blanks in past narratives. Not to the degree that I'm going to see some huge dramatic presentation.

Prequels suffer from one major flaw: they lack dramatic tension. In "Discovery", we know the Federation is going to come out on top of any conflict because we've seen Kirk and company do his thing. If they don't, it's an alternate timeline and that means time-travel lazy sci-fi writing. Yawn. Been there.

For Rogue One we already know the rebels get the plans to the Death Star. I don't give two shits about new alphabet-spaceships used by the Rebellion in an effort to sell more toys. I don't care that they have some rag-tag band of cliches to stand in the Empire's path. I already know the Death Star gets built, blows up Alderran, and gets a proton torpedo enema courtesy of Luke Skywalker.

It's depressing to see so much time and energy dedicated to playing in safe sandboxes when there's so much interesting storytelling out there. Sigh.