: Make the stakes more personal for your protagonist(s). The stakes can be smaller than those involved the previous episodes without feeling anticlimactic if your characters would feel their loss

@Shanna875

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Make the stakes more personal for your protagonist(s).

The stakes can be smaller than those involved the previous episodes without feeling anticlimactic if your characters would feel their loss more personally. They've saved the world, now they have to save their friends, etc.

Example: Babylon 5, season 4. Half way through the season, the protagonists face down and stop a pair of over-powered alien races whose conflict had boiled over resulting in them starting to destroy entire planets; races which both seemed individually so powerful that they would be unstoppable previously. The stakes were the destruction of dozens of populated worlds, with many hundreds of billions of lives in the balance.

Then, they set off to remove the corrupt government of Earth. The stakes are the freedom of a handful of billions. Mathematically, it seems to be smaller stakes. But the characters have a personal connection to the stakes at a more fundamental level, so we can believe that it's just as import to them that they do it, and that makes us care whether they win or lose just as much, and perhaps even more.

(Babylon 5 season 5 is an object lesson in how not to do it, but that's a different story...)

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