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Interquel

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The sequel just got PREQUELIER!

Timon: Waaaait, wait wait wait, hold on a second. Three? What's with the three? No, no, no, the three has got to go.
Pumba: Timon, you can't use Two! There's already been a Two!
Timon: Mmm, you've got a point there, big fella. It's not a sequel, anyway.
Pumba: Yeah, more like a Behind-the-scene-quel!
Timon: A what-a-who-quel?
Pumba: Oh, you know, an Inbetween-quel!
— The Lion King 1˝; teasernote .

Also called a Midquel, this can be one of two things: when a new entry in a series is a sequel to one existing entry, and a prequel to another, or when it takes place during a Time Skip in an earlier entry rather than continuing the story. This device is often used to expand a portion of the story only touched upon in other entries, or if more story is desired but there's no logical place for it either before the beginning or after the end. Happens a lot in Video Games, since story has only recently become a major part of design. A more cynical creator might use it to cash in on a franchise without having to advance the Story Arc. Not that we want to name names, or anything...

Some people differentiate the two terms, referring to an "Interquel" as an entry happening strictly between two previous ones of the Franchise (it is a Sequel for one and a Prequel for the other), with a Midquel taking place within a single work of the Franchise (it is more like a subsection). But continuity may be sometimes so convoluted (depending of whether it is an Immediate Sequel or not), that establishing a work is in-between two others is probably fine enough.

Compare Prequel, P.O.V. Sequel. Not to be confused with Simultaneous Arcs which is a story that takes place at the same time as another story, but focusing on different characters.

Examples

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    Anime and Manga 

    Comic Books 
  • All of the Firefly comics, apart from Float Out take place between the end of the series and The Movie.
  • The "Spike" comics take place near the end of the last season of Angel... sort of. They're not exactly canon, which is lampshaded.
  • The Arrival takes place between and during episodes of season 1 of Transformers Animated, except the last issue, Rise of Safeguard, which takes place between the third and seventh episodes of season two.
  • Disney used the term "inbetweenquels" for all the "B" (and in one case, "C") chapters of Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.
  • Some of the Gargoyles comics have references to the show's episodes, giving a rough idea of where the comics fall into the continuity.
  • Marvel Comics produced Amazing Fantasy #16-18 in the 1990s to bridge the gap between Spider-Man's debut in Amazing Fantasy #15 and The Amazing Spider-Man #1, where his adventures continued due to Amazing Fantasy being canceled.
  • Nightmares on Elm Street is set between the fifth and sixth Elm Street films, and gives a closure to most of the previous main characters.
  • In between Avatar: The Last Airbender and its Sequel Series The Legend of Korra are several comic book series, consisting of The Promise, The Search, Rebound and The Rift. All of them bring back characters who were Put on a Bus, explain what the main characters did after the original series ended, and overall tie both series together. Rebound is notable for not only giving Mai A Day in the Limelight, but also being an interquel within an interquel, as it takes place either in-between or alongside the plots of The Promise and The Search.
    • The original series also has comic stories of its own, that take place in between episodes of the actual show. Even though they aren't needed to understand the story, they do give important info about canonical characters and what happened to them before the end of the show, and expand on what said show couldn't elaborate on.
  • The Avengers World storyline "Before Time Ran Out" takes place between the eight month Time Skip the sets up "Time Runs Out", the lead-in to Secret Wars (2015)
  • Superman & Batman: Generations starts in 1939 and jumps forward a decade each chapter. Generations II starts in 1942 and jumps forward eleven years each chapter, interweaving with the earlier story.
  • Several of Marvel's post-Disney buyout Star Wars comics. Star Wars, Star Wars: Darth Vader and Star Wars: Princess Leia take place between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, with Star Wars: Lando between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, Star Wars: Kanan between Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Rebels, and Star Wars: Shattered Empire between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.
  • Marvel usually publishes prequel comics for their Marvel Cinematic Universe films. Barring the ones for films that are the first entries in their respective franchises, the comics usually serve as a bridge between the character's last cinematic appearance and their upcoming one.

    Fan Works 

    Film — Animated 
  • The Direct-to-Video installments of the An American Tail series can be viewed as interquels between the first and the second movie, as Fievel's family are still living in New York instead of the western frontier.
  • Batman: Gotham Knight is an Animated Anthology film consisting of six-interlocked short episodes that is (theoretically) set between the Batman Begins and The Dark Knight films of the The Dark Knight Saga.
  • BIONICLE 3: Web of Shadows takes place within the last ten minutes of the previous movie (which is itself a Prequel, making it an Interquel on two levels
  • Sequels to the Disney Animated Canon:
    • Most deliberately coined with the title The Lion King 1˝ — although ironically in TV Tropes terms, it's more of a P.O.V. Sequel.
      • With a touch of Point-Of-View prequel since some of it takes place before the movie (the section before Timon meets Pumbaa).
    • The two Beauty and the Beast direct-to-video titles, Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas and Belle's Magical World, are these, taking place during Belle's long stay in the Beast's castle in the original film, though the former is told in flashback by the castle residents on the first Christmas after the curse was broken. Considering Disney has done quite a few sequels set after the characters had their happily ever afters, this is most likely because they thought nobody would want a B&tB movie without a Beast and singing furniture in it. Which is a fair assement, seeing how many people prefer the Beast over his human form.
    • Bambi II is an interquel because it takes place right inbetween when Bambi's mom dies and when it instantly shifts to happy springtime songs. Apparently more than a few people thought the first movie was a little too quick in the mood change.
    • The same goes for The Fox and the Hound 2.
    • And Tarzan II.
    • Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch and its accompanying short film The Origin of Stitch both take place after the first movie and before The Series' Pilot Movie, Stitch! The Movie.
    • Tangled: The Series takes place between Tangled and its short film sequel Tangled Ever After.
  • At the end of Ice Age, there's a gag with Scrat being stuck in an ice cube. The film skips two thousand years to show how he eventually defrosts and loses his famous acorn for the umpteenth time. And yet, this lone scene means that technically, all the sequels should be considered as a Midquel series of the first film. However, the gag only makes sense in the context of the first film (as a continuation of the previous scene when he got stuck), so despite it is not impossible to imagine he got frozen twice, it is also necessary to take in account that sequels were not intended at the time, and considering the little importance of the character, who is just a running gag to fill ellipses, most viewers prefer to flatly ignore this detail.
  • The Madagascar franchise has two direct-to-DVD specials that take place in between the franchise's main movies; Merry Madagascar, and Madly Madagascar. The former takes place in between the first and second films, and the latter takes place in between the second and third films.

    Film — Live-Action 

    Literature 
  • The Chronicles of Narnia - The entirety of the fifth (or third) book, The Horse and His Boy, occurs in the middle of the Time Skip before the final chapter of the first (or second) book, The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe. The Pevensie siblings are twentysomething kings and queens, and they haven't returned to England and de-aged yet.
  • The Redwall series has a bunch of these, particularly for Martin's lifetime. He was one busy mouse.
  • Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman are currently releasing a new Dragonlance trilogy (The Lost Chronicles) that fill in the gaps between the books in the original Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy.
  • The eighth novel of The Dark Tower, The Wind Through the Keyhole takes place chronologically between the fourth and fifth novels of the series.
  • Because the books in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos (Dragaera) novels are not written in chronological order, the majority of them are interquels. Dragon deserves special mention, as due to its telling of multiple separate-but-related plots, it takes place both before and after the book Yendi.
  • Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series: The entire "Shadow" series (Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant) all take place alongside/in-between Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide. Ender in Exile then goes back and expands on the last chapter of Ender's Game.
  • The Alan Quatermain books by H. Rider Haggard. The first, King Solomon's Mines, introduces the character, already an old man; the second, Alan Quatermain, kills him off. Some of the other books in the series fall between them, although most tell of his younger days.
  • This trope is a major feature of the Deryni portion of Katherine Kurtz's works. Several short stories, the Heirs of Camber trilogy (published 1989-1994) and the Childe Morgan trilogy (first published in 2003 and still incomplete as of 2011) are set between the Camber trilogy (published 1976-1981) and The Chronicles of the Deryni trilogy (published 1970-1973).
  • Both volumes of Brian Lumley's aptly-titled Necroscope: The Lost Years take place during the timeskip between the second and third Necroscope books. Due to how he ended the series, his subsequent short stories and novellas have all been plugging into barely-there gaps too.
  • Robert Lynn Asprin's Myth Adventures series got one, Myth-ion Improbable, published in 2001 and set between the third and fourth books (released in 1982 and 1983, respectively). The previous book, published in 1995, had ended on a cliffhanger, and Asprin felt he needed to get used to writing the characters again before he could deal with the situation properly.
  • In a probably rare occurrence, The Han Solo Trilogy of the Star Wars Expanded Universe manages to be an interquel, an outerquel, and a prequel. The trilogy as a whole was a prequel to A New Hope as it ended just before Han met Luke and Obi-Wan. But there were already books that told of Han's adventures before A New Hope. The "Han Solo Trilogy" puts these older novels between the second and third new novels. So the third new novel is an interquel between the old novels and the movie and the trilogy is an outerquel to the older novels.
    • The Star Wars EU is packed with interquels, really. Timothy Zahn's The Thrawn Trilogy took place five years after Return of the Jedi; the New Republic was still fighting a defiant Empire, the Empire's capital world had been taken over, Han and Leia had married. When this trilogy jumpstarted the EU, and a lot of novels explored the years after that, others took on the intervening space. And there's always intervening space and new stories to tell.
    • Shadows of the Empire is worth noting as a multimedia interquel designed to have every tie-in a movie set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi would have - a Novelization, a video game, a six-issue comic book, a soundtrack, toys, trading cards - without the movie. There was even a trailer. About a decade afterwards, The Force Unleashed did the same thing between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, the primary difference being that the video game, rather than the novel, was the project's headliner.
    • Years after Galaxy of Fear was concluded, the story/homework assignment Death in the Slave Pits of Lorrd, or How I Spent My Inter-Term Break, was written to fill the gap between Army of Terror and The Brain Spiders.
  • The Dresden Files book Side Jobs contains several short stories and novellas that take place between one book and another, and quite conveniently tells the reader exactly where they fall in the series chronology.
  • All the Doctor Who Missing Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures are in the gaps between TV episodes. The final Eighth Doctor Adventures novel, The Gallifrey Chronicles, was released in June 2005, when the revival series and its New Series Adventures tie-in line with the Ninth Doctor had started.
  • The Mary Russell series, in O Jerusalem, goes back and explores what Holmes and Russell did while they were hiding out in Jerusalem in the middle of the first book.
  • More than a third of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels were written to slot between the existing stories, often expanding on NoodleIncidents or historical events that occurred geographically and temporally close to previous novels.
  • The first book in the Dragonriders of Pern series actually starts the chronologically latest arc (9th Pass). Everything since then has been an interquel between a chronologically earlier title and the 9th Pass.
  • A majority of the Warrior Cats Expanded Universe is made of interquels, many of which take place between The Original Series and The New Prophecy.
  • Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman is set 80 years after the second part of A Canticle for Leibowitz, but over five centuries before the third and final part.
  • The Honor Harrington series has been a briar patch of sequels and interquels since book 10, as a dramatic expansion of the plot led to the creation of not one but two subsidiary series that overlap with the main plot books, which themselves overlap each other- for instance, the thirteenth book begins about a month before the twelfth book ended, only catching up about a third of the way in. If one didn't get into the series before the expansion they'll have a hard time understanding it all.
  • Book four of Ranger's Apprentice has Will going back to Araluen, still Halt's apprentice. Book five skips about five years and sees Will getting his first assignment as a fully-fledged Ranger. John Flanagan said that while he was writing book six, he realised missed an entire story there, so he wrote book seven, which details Will's final months as an apprentice and his graduation. Book eight continues where six left off.
  • Mary Poppins in the Park contains stories set in between various chapters of the first three books.
  • Captain Blood: His Odyssey has a very satisfying final. Continuing after that would have diluted the effect. Not to mention a possible moral dilemma of Peter Blood going against his former friends. But readers wanted more Captain Blood, and Rafael Sabatini wrote 15 shorter stories set between the chapters of the original novel. Those were collected as Captain Blood Returns (retitled The Chronicles of Captain Blood in Britain) and The Fortunes of Captain Blood.
  • Lois McMaster Bujold has several times backtracked and filled the gaps between her earlier novels of Vorkosigan Saga. Given that Bujold originally hoped to skip decades and centuries between novels, but ended up chronicling the life of Miles, there had to be a lot to fill:
    • Barrayar (1991), set between her debut Shards of Honor and The Warrior's Apprentice (both 1986), shortly after Shards. Retconned several details mentioned in passing in The Warrior's Apprentice, but becoming important in post-Barrayar books.
    • Mountains of Mouring novella (1989), set shortly after The Warrior's Apprentice (1986). The scope of the story is so small, its events affect nothing and only get revisited once, in Memory (1997), which is choke full of continuity nods and callbacks. However, the story defines the subject of mutations and mutation phobia, a Barrayar's hat, which was rather hazy in earlier novels.
    • The Vor Game (1990), between The Warrior's Apprentice and Ethan of Athos (both 1986). The latter seemed to imply that the transition from Oseran Free Mercenary Fleet to the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet was easy and Naismith's authority wasn't challenged later. The Vor Game tells how far from the truth that is. Amazingly, nothing was retconned.
    • Cetaganda (1996), midway between The Vor Game (1990) and Ethan of Athos (1986). Drastically changed the nature of Barrayar's arch-enemy — Cetagandan Empire — profoundly affecting every subsequent book. Also explained Dendarii involvement in the events of Ethan of Athos.
    • Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (2013), between Diplomatic Immunity (2002) and Cryoburn (2010). Since Cryoburn is set far from Barrayar, it is plausible that the evens of Alliance are never mentioned.
  • Star Trek Expanded Universe:
  • The Palace Tiger takes place between chapters 27 and 28 of Ragtime in Simla. There is a time skip between chapters during which Sandilands goes from Simla to a steamship bound for France, and mentions in passing that he was sent to deal with 'an incident in the northwest' while aboard. The Palace Tiger covers that incident.
  • The Sherlock Holmes novella The Hound of the Baskervilles was written as an explicit Interquel as the author had ostensibly killed Holmes off in the short story "The Final Problem" but felt like revisiting the character. He revived Holmes for real in "The Empty House" three years later.
  • James Bond
    • John Gardner's last Bond novel COLD is divided into two parts, the first being set 1990, which is right after the ninth and before the tenth book of his, and has Bond learning about the eponymous organization. The second half of the novel is set right after the his previous non-novelization effort, SeaFire.
    • Trigger Mortis by Anthony Horowitz is set right after Goldfinger, placing it in the exact middle of Ian Fleming's original 14-book run.
    • Charlie Higson's last work in the Young Bond spin-off series was the short story "A Hard Man to Kill", which is set between the fourth and fifth books of his, as it details Bond's return from his adventure in Mexico.
  • Brotherband takes place in the same universe as Ranger's Apprentice. It takes place after book 4 (where Erak was elected Oberjarl), and before book 10 (where Hal's achievements are discussed).
  • The Year Of The Flood takes place in the same universe, and in the same time period, as Oryx and Crake, as does most of the third volume in this series, Madd Addam.
  • In Elizabeth Lowell's medieval romance trilogy, the first book, "Untamed", ends with the heroine announcing her pregnancy to her husband, and the epilogue features the birth of their son. However, in the two subsequent books, the character is still pregnant, meaning that they take place in the interval between the two chapters.
  • Due to retroactive connections and serializing vs finalized novels a significant portion of Isaac Asimov's output are in an ambiguous relation to this classification, but the two Foundation prequels, (Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation) and the Robots/Bailey sequel Robots and Empire fall here. The prequels were written after the series were explicitly connected to one another, and picked up on Robots plot thread while covering Seldon's struggles with psychohistory and Trantorian society. Robots and Empire were part of connecting the series, and served to show how the Bailey setting (non-radioactive Earth, interstellar society dominated by the robot-using Spacers) began to transition towards the radioactive Earth and complete absence of robot-use of the Empire (set prior to, during the rise of, and at the height of, Trantor's Galactic Empire) and Foundation series.
  • Tales From Watership Down is about two-thirds prequel and/or story within a story focusing on the adventures of rabbit folk hero El-ahrairah (sometimes using the Watership rabbits for a Framing Device, sometimes not) to one-third stories filling in the gap between the last full chapter of Watership Down and the Distant Finale epilogue.
  • Star Control: Interbellum takes place between the games Star Control II and the nonexistent Star Control 3.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Agent Carter takes place between Captain America: The First Avenger and the rest of the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
  • Two of the Babylon 5 movies, Thirdspace and The Lost Tales, are both interquels. Thirdspace takes place somewhere in the fourth season, and The Lost Tales takes place between the final season's penultimate episode and the series finale (mind you, there was an eighteen year Time Skip between the last two episodes).
  • Battlestar Galactica: Razor has an A plot which takes place between the Season Two episodes The Captain's Hand and Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I, a B plot that takes place between the time of the Miniseries pilot and the first eight-or-so episodes of Season One, and a C plot that takes place during the Cylon War.
  • Technically, every Power Rangers series between Power Rangers S.P.D. (taking place in the year 2025) and the actual year 2025 will be one of these.
  • A twenty-minute midquel released before season 6 of The Shield follows up on the events of the fifth-season finale. The Strike Team attends the funeral of their colleague, Curtis "Lem" Lemansky, and reflect on his time with the group.
  • Star Trek:
  • The Thorn Birds miniseries has a Time Skip after the birth of Dane, Meggie's son, till when he and his sister Justine are in their late teens. A 1996 miniseries titled, appropriately, The Thorn Birds: The Missing Years was meant to depict the events of those 19 years. The problem is, none of the original cast, save Richard Chamberlain, was present, and the storyline and characterizations were completely inconsistent with both the original miniseries and the book on which it was based.

    Multiple Media 

    Radio 
  • Torchwood: The Lost Files was set between series 2 of Torchwood and the miniseries Children of Earth except the last one since the team ceases to exist at the end of Children of Earth and wasn't reformed until Torchwood: Miracle Day. Also, this means that Ianto can be in it.
  • The Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and post-2005, Eighth Doctor Big Finish Doctor Who stories are set in the gap between episodes of the Doctor Who TV series that have already been chronicled. There's also a series of Fourth Doctor audio dramas produced by BBC Audio released from 2009 onwards.

    Video Games 

    Visual Novels 

    Webcomics 
  • Nebula has "Nix", a short story from Pluto's perspective. It takes places at some point between #10 (Black Hole first contacting Pluto) and #14 (Black Hole finally making her move).

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 

Alternative Title(s): Midquel, Inquel

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