Lower Your Goddamn Stakes

 Not to just keep harping about Star Trek Discovery, but I want to talk about stakes in fiction. Major spoilers ahead. I consume a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, and so this is probably at least to some degree an issue unique to those genres, as well as probably a few associated ones, like action films, but like, the stakes in these stories should not always be super high. In season 1 of Star Trek Discovery, from the very start, the stakes are sky high. Burnham triggers a war with the Klingon Empire - or thinks she does, anyway. Technically the Klingons were spoiling for war and the show makes it pretty clear it would have happened no matter what, but her actions are the proximate cause and everyone blames her for it. However, as if these stakes are not high enough, they later on are thrown into the Mirror Universe, where if they are ever discovered they’ll likely be immediately killed since everyone is so violent and evil and fascist there, and THEN, we learn that in the Mirror Universe, they’ve been abusing the mycelial network and if they are allowed to continue, all life in the Universe will be destroyed.

Big bummer. Luckily they save the day, stop the Terran Empire, get back to universe prime, and then find out the Klingon War has been going badly, so now either they can face the Klingons destroying the Federation, or they can genocide the Klingons by blowing up Qo’NoS. So of course at the urging of fascist Georgieu the Federation chooses genocide, but Burnham at the last minute finds a diplomatic solution and the Federation is saved both from destruction and from committing a genocide.

But how will Season 2 top this? Fans always expect escalating stakes, goes the conventional wisdom, so for Season 2, we get a bunch of signals and some time travel and ultimately end up finding out that Control, an AI the Federation has been using for threat assessment is going to become sentient in the future and destroy all life in the Universe, again. So, the exact same stakes as last season, because they were already maxed out. Although this time it takes a lot more episodes and a lot more help to actually solve, so it does feel somewhat of a bigger deal, although it assuredly would have felt more serious had we not already had this problem last season.

We also see this problem in Pokemon. In the first two Pokemon games, the only real stakes are your personal Pokemon journey and desire to be the best. There is some Mafia Team Rocket side plot but that doesn’t matter - to you - so it doesn’t really matter. But starting with the third game, we got Team Magma and Team Aqua, both bent on causing world altering apocalypses. So then in Diamond and Pearl we get Team Galactic, who wants to usher in god Pokemon to remake the world even moreso. Pokemon clearly was already struggling with what to do, so Team Plasma is Black and White instead want to liberate all Pokemon, which was honestly a smart move, because while its fundamental to the game, its not on the same axis as world destruction… except its a ruse and they actually want to destroy the world. Its not really until Violet and Pearl that Pokémon manages to reframe their conflict around more reasonable stakes of your personal journey again although even there in the end game the stakes go sky high, but in general it feels like a needed course correction.

As noted, an obvious issue with raising the stakes so high is there is nowhere to go. You either need to course correct and reset the stakes, which can be jarring although is probably the best choice, or just keep finding more and more absurd ways to escalate them, which is tiresome and silly in all but the most unserious media. This can be solved, though, by simply 1) starting small. The first conflict introduced should, if anything, probably be a personal one for your main character, like a Pokemon journey. It lets you get to know them and care about them while allowing plenty of room to escalate stakes later if you need to. 2) Increasing them slowly. Put some obstacles in the way of that initial conflict, or grow it slightly wider, or introduce a related, slightly more serious conflict, but don’t jump all the way to world ending stakes immediately. Or honestly, at all unless this is Super hero media or the final season. 3) Vary them, sometimes de-escalating or even having conflict light, slice of light episodes in your story. That way readers won’t always expect escalation and you can set your own stakes as you go.

I’m just really tired of always being at the edge of my seat. It’s nice to just relax sometimes, okay? And that includes seeing characters do so. Star Trek in particular used to have a lot of down time in episodes where people just hung around letting us get to know them, and Discovery has no time for that, because the high stakes overarching plots mean everyone has to be go go going all the time. And the few times they do slow down and relax, it feels ridiculous, because shouldn’t they be dealing with the emergency death explosions happening everywhere? But if they just lowered the goddamn stakes and let things chill for a bit, and only raise them for big moments, then everything in the story would hit so much more better.