KIBO'S "STAR TREK" ESSAY
Yesterday Ben Allard asked whether I like "Star Trek", so I figure it's time for my obligatory position paper on whether I, as a nerd, like "Star Trek", with fully justified arguments and lots of footnotes so I can present this paper at the biggest "Star Trek" convention in the world -- "The Internet".
I definitely like the original '60s "Star Trek". Sure, it was kind of naive and simplistic at times, but it had really likable characters, a very dramatic visual (and musical) style, and most importantly, stuff happened most of the time. The characters may have tried to solve most of their problems by punching people or blowing stuff up, but they didn't just sit around waiting for stuff to happen.
Plus the aspects of the show which were actually bad were bad in a manner which tended to make the show unintentionally funny, as opposed to the sorts of badness that make other shows boring. For instance, Kirk was clearly an arrogant, misogynistic jerk (he tended to seduce women and then punch them in the face -- remember when he kissed the nice lady and socked her in the jaw in "Gamesters of Triskelion"? Or when he decided not to tell the woman in "Wink of an Eye" that he had discovered a cure for her illness?) and various other characters were ethnic stereotypes that were played for camp (Scotty's drinking, Chekov's insistence the Russians invented everything, etc.)
The original "Star Trek" was en enjoyable romp about 3/4 of the time (some of the episodes were rather dull, but most were always a good adventure whether or not you watch specifically for the kitsch factor.) They remain enjoyable even if you've seen them a few times because they operate on a couple different levels -- you can view them as good light-weight science fiction adventures, or you can view them as "Batman"-esque camp.
I was a heck of a Trekkie when I was about ten. And that is NOT the reason I own so many solid red and solid blue shirts. I just like primary colors, dammit! And black pants. "Star Trek" has nothing to do with my personal preference to dress exactly like a "Star Trek" character. It's not actually a "Star Trek" uniform if it doesn't have the little sticker on the chest. Unless of course you're an evil twin created by the Transporter, because they don't have the little sticker either, but they still count as being "Star Trek" characters and I swear I am NOT my evil twin.
"Star Trek: The Next Generation" was much blander -- it lacked the visual (and musical) drama, looking more like these people were flying through space in a suburban living room or something. And it lacked most of the intentional and unintentional camp of the original (except for the odd scene where they let Brent Spiner or Michael Dorn be funny for a moment.) I didn't like the first two seasons at all (there was a sense they didn't yet know how to write any of the characters or full up a whole hour without serious padding and lots of recaps) and the final (seventh) season was atrocious (after they ran out of ideas and started filming the slush pile) but seasons three though six were mostly enjoyable, if not as goofy or action-oriented as the original series.
On the original show, they solved their problems by actually doing stuff: Shoot that, punch him, seduce her. On "The Next Generation", they solved their problems through technology. Because most problems could be solved by pushing the appropriate buttons, this means there had to be a ton of padding in most episodes, where the characters either dithered about their stilted ethical dilemmas, or else were just too wimpy to even think of trying to solve the problem. Like so:
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DATA
Captain, the ship is on fire.
PICARD
I see. Any suggestions?
DATA
Uh...
RIKER
Duh...
WORF
Hmm...
TROI
Captain, I am sensing... umm...
DATA
Captain, I will check whether the ship is still on fire.
PICARD
Okay, and then if it is, we'll schedule a meeting to determine what to do about the fire.
WESLEY
Why don't we just put it out with the fire extinguishers?
PICARD
WHO LET THE BOY TRY TO TELL ME HOW TO RUN MY SHIP?
RIKER
Shut up, Wesley! Sir, as his mentor, I apologize for him being a genius.
WESLEY
But, sir, we must have fire extinguishers. This is the 23rd century.
GEORDI
Captain, the phase flow induction coil matrix of the primary warp manifold has caused a subspace inversion of the multi-phasic tetrion stream in the forward lateral EPS conduit, leading to a breach of the phozon doop-de-woop chuzzlewit pop-o-matic.
PICARD
What does that mean?
GEORDI
It means we can't use the fire extinguishers for fifty-five minutes.
PICARD
I see.
GEORDI
Also they won't work if any of us goes through a doorway between now and then. And Worf and Troi have to have a dream where they turn into Antony and Cleopatra.
PICARD
Very well. Make it so. Implement Waiting Plan Gamma J Twenty-Seven Omega Omicron Three Alpha. Troi, activate dream sequence.Every time they use the Holodeck it tries to MURDER them. EVERY TIME. And the idiots keep going in. They even put on fancy period costumes so the big computer can murder them while they play dress-up.
In this particular futuristic Utopia, there are few personal conflicts and no crime or mental illness because all "genetic abnormalities" have been eradicated and everyone's attitude is adjusted at birth. And they spend all their time inside this really sterile-looking plastic spaceship. The only views out the windows are of outer space. And the only framed pictures on the walls are of outer space. There is no television in this future. There are no movies. There are no team sports. There is not even any money. These people are bored out of their minds because all they can do is play cards without wagering (they actually play poker without betting, just to kill time) or they can read one of the four books on the Enterprise. Ever wonder why they all quote Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes and Dickens, even the Vulcans and Klingons? It's because all books written after 1940 were destroyed in the Great Recycling of 2037. So everyone on the ship has already read the ship's copy of "Hamlet" and is so bored that they're hurling themselves into the whirling knives of the Holodeck just to have some sort of interesting experience. And when they can't get into the Holodeck, they go to the ship's bar and get drunk. Except it's special alcohol-free "synthahol" that lets them get drunk but not very drunk. On "The Next Generation", they spend a lot of their time trying to get drunk, except when they're trapped in the Holodeck.
And the paucity of imagination shows in that they only use the Holodeck to recreate past eras. They never use it to make something like, oh, science fiction. If you had a room that could magically make any environment, wouldn't you make weird fantasy landscapes where anything could happen, instead of faithfully recreating bygone days?
"Next Generation" did a bunch of good episodes during its middle years (I particularly like the one where Wesley accidentally traps his mother in a parallel Universe where not only is she the only one on the ship, but due to a design flaw the Enterprise doesn't fit in the Universe) but overall it's so emasculated compared to the "Let's go DO something!" attitude of the original show that it's usually hard to watch the same episode more than once.
I would have liked more emphasis on the minor characters, because they had actual human flaws that made them interesting. Barclay was neurotic (and the only one smart enough to be afraid of the Transporter), Ro was pushy and uncooperative, and Wesley could have been much more interesting if they'd actually tried to think about what sort of problems an unusually bright adolescent might face, especially when trapped on a spaceship with a bunch of total stiffs. My favorite "Next Generation" character was a sarcastic Vulcan cadet who showed up in one episode ("Lower Decks") which must have been intended solely to introduce some interesting new characters for a potential spinoff. Ro was one of those, too, unfortunately the actress didn't participate in the spinoff that DID happen...
The spinoff was "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine", where they attempted to make it more interesting and less sanitized by returning money (and crime and intrigue and personal conflict) to the "Star Trek" universe. However, the show rapidly converged on a knockoff of "Babylon 5", but while "Babylon 5" had at least an outline of a story arc plotted out for it in advance, "Deep Space Nine" was more like a soap opera where you could see them thinking, "Well, what ELSE can we have happen?" and it just rambled on week after week without much of an overall plan.
They did a few good episodes too, but I found most episodes pretty boring. At least after the first few seasons they stopped making the resolution of every problem revolve around the fact that they had one crew member who could morph.
After that came "Star Trek: Voyager", which was essentially the same as the final (slush pile) season of "The Next Generation", only even more hackneyed. They got trapped in the Holodeck in more ludicrous ways, and they overcame the ever-more-invincible Borg through convenient loopholes every time. Some of the early seasons (of the seven, although the first three seasons happened the same year) had truly awful writing. For instance, here's my summary of the first-season episode "Twisted":
Tuvok reports that they ship has encountered an unusual
"phenomenon... phenomenon... phenomenon" and everyone is
really scared because it's making him repeat himself.
Then Neelix bakes a blue birthday cake and everyone gets
lost in the ship's corridor because the phenomenon is
switching the stickers on all the doors, and Neelix disappears
between scenes, and everyone gets trapped in the Holodeck
where a French hooker tries to seduce the Doctor, and
the captain goes crawling through an air duct but the
phenomenon makes her arm get really long and she starts
talking backwards, so Tuvok concludes that the only
logical thing to do is to "do nothing", and there's a
scene of them all sitting around doing nothing, and then
everything's fine, The End.
I didn't make that up. I COULDN'T make that up.
That could've been a "Space: 1999" episode, with its mixture of garbled stuff happening for no reason and an ending where the magical evil unidentified force just GOES AWAY. Although most "Voyager" episodes weren't that bad (especially the later ones, which had more action) I feel that "Voyager" contained the very worst episodes of any "Star Trek" TV series. A couple were good, but they were far outweighed by the extreme badness of the many bad ones.
And most baffling was the final season (allegedly the seventh, although the show was really only on the air for about five years) where every episode revolved around them using this giant digital camera prop. There were loving close-ups of this toy camera sitting on tables. Every plot required them to take a futuristic photograph of something with this futuristic camera, which is just like the digital cameras I own except three times bigger. I've always wondered precisely what the deal was with this "holo-imager" prop. Were they planning to sell clunky over-sized toy cameras?
Finally, we come to the present series, "Enterprise", which doesn't have "Star Trek" in the title because the show is intended as This Isn't Your Father's "Star Trek". They did something admirable in jettisoning most of the twenty-plus seasons of backstory (much of it contradictory) accumulated on the four previous shows and trying to start from scratch in a new style with different rules. The visual style of the new show is excellent (the lighting is moody, the sets aren't fake-looking) and the cast is good as always but the writing... the writing... well, I can barely even call it writing. The characters are absolute idiots, sent out to explore deep space in Earth's only big spaceship without having been given any sort of briefing or training to tell them stuff like "When you land on an alien planet, don't test the atmosphere by opening your helmet, and then certainly don't go off and eat random local plants." On "Enterprise", life is a serious of random encounters that happen periodically, either leading to super-cheap offscreen space battles (much like the original series) or the captain having to rub up against the Vulcan woman because they're tied up, or they have to rub decontamination gel down the front of each other's underwear, or something.
And after the first six episodes, one of the producers said in an interview that because they'd already used up their whole year's budget, the remaining episodes would take place mostly in the ship. For instance, one recent episode was 1/4 concerned with the ship being attacked by an unidentified offscreen spaceship and the remaining 3/4 was people wondering what the British guy's favorite flavor was so they can bake him a birthday cake (again, I'm not making this up) so most of the episode was people secretly trying to find out if the British guy liked chocolate or vanilla, and then they guessed pineapple and it turns out that he does indeed like pineapple cakes.
Notice I didn't mention the awful, awful, AWFUL theme song. This is because the show has an awful, awful, AWFUL theme song which isn't worth mentioning, because it's AWFUL. And I don't mean "awe-ful" like a Bach organ piece, I mean "awful" like "If I could only have one piece of music when I get stranded on an island, I want it to be the exact opposite of this one!"
"Enterprise" will presumably have a second season next year. I hope it will be better. It couldn't get much worse, unless they just spend all their time saying "Pineapple! Phenomenon! Pineapple! Phenomenon!" while sticking their hands down each other's underwear. Kirk would NEVER have done that! He only made out with women for LEGITIMATE, PLOT-DRIVEN reasons!
I won't analyze the various "Star Trek" movies, which are special cases (especially the ones that were released with pieces missing -- that would be #1, #5, #7, and #9) except to say that I did enjoy some of them, particularly the new director's cut of the introspective and beautiful #1, the hammy low-budget melodrama and submarine battle in #2, the wacky sitcom adventure of #4, the silly straightforward action-adventure of #6 and #8.
So to sum up:
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"Star Trek" (original series) Almost always very good.
"Star Trek: The Next Generation" Usually good.
"Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" Boring.
"Star Trek: Voyager" Bad.
"Enterprise" Ecch.
I mean not to "dis" anyone,
