THE INCREDIBLES & The "Obvious Sequel" | Ends & Odds: The Perpetual Analysis

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:09]"He leaned back, looked at the room, the walls  of shelves, shelves built in the middle.

[00:00:15]"All full of books. Thing was, he thought,  thing was, he hardly ever read very much.

[00:00:21]"He had learned to read, but it wasn't  something he spent much time practicing..." "The Incredibles" is a 2004 animated superhero  movie about a family of folks with powers and a tight little thematic piece about  legacy, about relevance and celebrity, and about the commodification of morality  through the streamlining of what it means to wield power with responsibility.

[00:01:44]Though, as an 8-year-old, this movie was about super strength and super speed and super stretchiness, super disappearing, and super... becoming... the devil?

[00:01:57]More than anything though, I remember  the ending of that film--the final moments, in fact, in which, after the main conflict was resolved, the villain of the story beaten, and the status quo reasonably reestablished, we are presented with a scene of the rise of a new villain.

[00:02:11]"Behold: The Underminer!"

[00:02:15]The film ends as the family bands together to begin a fight that the audience would just not see.

[00:02:23]Now, at my ripe old age of 29, I have since interpreted the purpose of that scene.

[00:02:29]It feels meant to pay off the thematics of the standalone film itself-- to consolidate the setups about a fractured family marred by conflicts rooted in legacy, relevance, authority, and moral strain posed by the film's antagonist.

[00:02:42]The heroes are now together. The villain is vanquished. The family is stronger.

[00:02:45]And they are prepared to take on together what they could not alone.

[00:02:50]The 'Underminer' is just one of infinite future challenges to that thematic conclusion-- something we do not reasonably need to see.

[00:02:57]The implication being:  "the story is over, because the lesson is learned."

[00:03:05]But once again, as an 8-year-old, all I  could think of was, "When are we getting that "Incredibles: Underminer" sequel?

[00:03:14]"Because that  was 'clearly not the end.'"

[00:03:23]Although "The Incredibles" was not the first film I had ever seen that tagged its ending with, let's say, "interpretive corporate implications", it was my first experience with a shifting expectation for what I now refer to as "the perpetual narrative."

[00:03:37]I call them this because, these types of stories encompass a wide range of media that are difficult to consolidate in a fine-toothed way.

[00:03:45]Comics, television, books, games, and,  possibly among the most culturally aggressive, film, have all experienced a larger and larger  saturation of perpetuity in ever-expanding stories, through countless modes of revisitation to  one thought to be complete.

[00:04:01]This is perhaps most egregiously done by major motion picture studios.

[00:04:05]You have your sequels, your remakes, your alternate universe retellings, your non-diagetic reboots, your diagetic reboots, your prequels, your spin-offs, your legacy films, your commentary  films, and even your eventual fan works... Wow... how did... that... get in there...?

[00:04:21]And I found myself often carrying my experience over from "The Incredibles" to other solo works I had seen, specifically movies that never got sequels or perhaps didn't garner an audience large enough to justify a commercial continuation in their narratives, or, simply, a work that was never  meant to continue-- was conceived instead as a standalone, wraparound, story.

[00:04:43]Popular culture had already, for decades, been experiencing its fair share of cinematic perpetual narratives.

[00:04:49]Sequels were massive, remakes were beginning to rise in popularity, and by 2012, "shared universe" storytelling had finally become a winning formula for these production companies.

[00:04:59]The culture itself was undoubtedly shifting.

[00:05:02]Nowadays, popular stories, even the decent ones, are, more often than not, almost always ongoing......which, I will admit, feels right, in a way.

[00:05:14]I often speak on art as an approximation of our lives.

[00:05:17]And obviously, as we grow, or change, or learn, or even stay the same, we frequently end up having more to say than we did initially.

[00:05:27]The time capsule of one particular event or emotion cannot often contain the massive tapestries of an ongoing life.

[00:05:28]So, in concept, the perpetual narrative work of art feels like a companion to our lives--ever progressing as we do.

[00:05:37]I will watch a "Spider-Man" film in my youth, then a different "Spider-Man" a decade later, and another in even less time, and eventually, even those convictions will be consolidated.

[00:05:53]It therefore feels as if *I* have been consolidated, as well.

[00:05:57]"Look at how far I've come from my Sam  Raimi "Spider-Man" days... "This must be growth.

[00:06:02]"It's a b̵̙͚̱͎͍̂̏r̶̞͙̰̲̤̈́̈́ą̷̝̣̱́ͅņ̶̱̺̖̝̄d̴̛̦͍̔̄͆ ̵̨̃̔̾͝ň̵̛̹͔͈̱̟̚ȩ̷̛͉̯̑̂̓̚ẇ̵̼ ̵̨̭̂͜d̵͓̫͉̱̙̚a̴͕͑͑́̈́y̶̤̯̮͌̉̍͌.̶̺̩̜͉̀͠" Despite this seemingly irrefutable truth about the fundamental functions of stories in relation to our lives, I have found myself progressively opposed to the idea that perpetual narratives are akin to a companion.

[00:06:16]Rather, they feel more to me akin to... a ghost, and that, most stories beyond the first are more in line with a haunting than a catharsis.

[00:06:26]As I notice more and more the growing cultural expectations for the perpetual narrative to encourage audiences to treat movies like TV, like homework, or like a part rather than a whole, I worry that art analysis in the popular spheres is becoming, over time, less and less equipped to engage... with grief.

[00:06:47]"Finally, one evening when he had finished  the book, he took it back to the library."