Through a Mirror, Darkly: Thoughts on Star Trek: Discovery's First Season

Well, folks, what is there to be done about Star Trek: Discovery?  Four months ago, writing about the season's first few episodes, I said that there were things about the show I really liked, and things I really disliked, but that it would probably take me until the end of the season to decide where I stood on the matter of the whole.  But here we are, nearly a week after the finale, and I'm no closer to a conclusion.  Neither, it seems, is the rest of fandom, which often feels like it's watching and reacting to several different shows.  And no one, no matter their opinion, seems very clear on what Discovery is.  Is it a bold reinvention of the franchise for the Peak TV era, or a shallow action-adventure whose ambitions often outstrip its capacity to execute them?  Is it the spiritual successor of the reboot movies, reveling in Star Trek tropes and fanservice without understanding the franchise's meaning, or is it a genuine attempt to grapple with the core ideas of Star Trek fifty years after its inception?  Is it, in short, Star Trek?

I don't know the answer to this question, and what's worse, I'm not even sure how to begin answering it.  Part of the problem--and also, I think, the reason that so many viewers and reviewers have had such wildly divergent reactions to this show--is that Discovery tries to do so many different things in its first season that it's hard to know how to begin assessing it.  So let's start with a plot summary.  Set about a decade before the original Star Trek, Discovery centers on Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), an up-and-coming young Starfleet officer on the cusp of being named to her own command.  Raised by Vulcans^[1] after the death of her parents, Burnham sees herself as a completely rational person, but (like most actual Vulcans on Star Trek) she turns out to be more driven by her emotions than she's willing to admit.  When a routine mission on her ship, the Shenzhou, becomes the Federation's first contact with the Klingons in decades, Burnham advises her captain, Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) to fire first.  When Georgiou refuses, Burnham commits mutiny in order to protect her ship from what she sees as an incurably violent, bloodthirsty species.  This ends up devolving into a battle in which Georgiou is killed, the Shenzhou is destroyed, and the Federation and Klingon Empire are left at war.  Burnham, meanwhile, is stripped of her rank and sent to prison.

That's all in the first two episodes.  When we catch up with Burnham again, the war has been raging for several months, and her prison transport is picked up by the Discovery, a science vessel retasked to the development of technology critical to the war.  Discovery's captain, the rule-breaking, charismatic Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) recruits Burnham to his crew, arguing that she can help alleviate her guilt and the damage she caused by helping him to research a new propulsion system that could shift the tide of battle.  Working with engineer Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and eager cadet Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman), Burnham helps to develop a "spore drive", which rides a network of fungal blooms that span the multiverse, allowing Discovery to travel in the blink of an eye.  Along the way, the show visits with two ambitious young Klingons, Voq and L'Rell (Mary Chieffo), who dream of uniting their society under a single political and ideological banner; introduces security officer Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif), who was imprisoned and tortured by the Klingons, and who develops a romantic relationship with Burnham after he joins Discovery's crew; and pays an extended visit to the infamous mirror universe, where Georgiou's evil double turns out to be the emperor of the fascistic, xenophobic Terran Empire.

As I said, a lot of different things to try to accomplish in a single season.  And, in almost every case, Discovery's execution of these ideas has serious and specific problems.  Which means that it's hard to talk about my criticisms of the show without coming off more negative than I actually ended up feeling about it.  Before we get to that, then, let's talk about a few of the things I liked about Discovery, especially the ways in which it deviates from the Star Trek template that I initially found dismaying but which ultimately felt right.  I liked that the show takes a while--nearly half the season--to assemble its core crew, giving individual characters, and even Discovery itself, their own proper introduction rather than just plopping them all together at once.  I liked--after some initial reservation--the fact that the show is so locked into Burnham's point of view, which made it feel like a very different sort of story while still remaining recognizably Star Trek-ish.  I liked how, especially in the first half of the season, the show combines the needs of continuous storytelling with fairly well-structured, and even, in some cases, self-contained episodes.  I even liked the weirdness of the technology, which has been so derided in some quarters.  "The ship runs on mushrooms" sounds pretty silly, but if you think about it, a "mycelium network" along which a spaceship can travel in an instant is not actually a more ridiculous idea than a warp drive, and there's something to be said for expanding our idea of what SFnal science looks like beyond physics and into biology and zoology.^[2]

Most of all, I liked Burnham, who feels layered and multifaceted in a way that I associate with the best Star Trek characters, a fully-rounded person who tries to approach every turn in her life with generosity and an open mind.  In my first write-up of the show, I called her

a wonderful blend of intellect and temper, calm reasoning and self-destructive urges. The badass/fuckup combination that failed so catastrophically with NuKirk works wonderfully here, mainly because the writing and the performance combine to create the impression that Michael is always thinking, always questioning, genuinely curious about her surroundings and genuinely thoughtful in her choices--even the bad ones. If she's not quite the Hornblower-esque figure that the original Kirk was, she's a fascinating modern variation on it--not least for being a black woman.

I stand by all this, and over the course of the season I continued to enjoy how Discovery used Burnham.  The show recognizes that the only thing to be done with a character as furiously competent--and yet as prone to boneheaded decisions--as Burnham is to keep piling challenges in their path.  Some of these challenges are emotional--grappling with guilt over her betrayal of Georgiou and her responsibility for her death; facing up to the fact of having failed for the first time in her life; falling in love with Tyler--while others are practical--in the mirror universe, Burnham goes undercover as her double in order to secure information necessary for Discovery's return home.  And it's always a pleasure to watch her grapple with them, with a combination of determination, intellect, and vulnerability.  No matter how messy or flawed the rest of the show ends up, the fact that Discovery is Burnham's story means that there's always something true and worth watching at its center, and it's this, more than anything else, that makes me feel that there might be a good show lurking here.^[3]

But then there are those flaws, and the problem with them is not so much that the things that are bad about Discovery outweighs the things that are good, as how they reveal the limitations of the show's understanding of Star Trek, and of its ambitions within the franchise.  Take, for example, the show's handling of Klingons.  It would be one thing for Discovery to so thoroughly reinvent this foundational Star Trek race, right down to redesigning their makeup in a way that makes it difficult for the actors to emote (which is exacerbated by the choice to saddle them with lines in phonetic Klingon rather than English), if there was a stronger sense of what the show was trying to achieve with this.  But after an entire season that featured the Klingons heavily and included two major Klingon characters, I still have no idea what Discovery wants me to think about them.

A big part of the problem is that Discovery's story about Klingons often feels more like a story about Burnham.  She starts the season hating them and seeing them as irredeemably violent and bloodthirsty (with some justification, since she witnessed Klingons killing her parents as a child), and ends the season realizing that while there's still a great deal about their culture she can't respect, these are nevertheless people living their lives, and deserving of the basic rights that entails.  This is fine--if a little basic--as character arcs go.  But most Star Trek fans will have gone into Discovery knowing the Klingons much better than Burnham, and for us, what the show chooses to do with them feels shallow and unconvincing.

Co-creator Alex Kurtzman (yes, that Alex Kurtzman) has spoken about his desire to develop the Klingons as more than a violent Other, but this is something that was already done by The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, with far greater nuance and complexity than Discovery manages.  The Klingons who show up on Discovery, in comparison, feel rigid and joyless.  There's none of the warmth, humor, or depth of character that even minor Klingon characters on previous Star Trek shows demonstrated as a matter of course.  Weirdly, hardly any of them bring up honor or its importance to their worldview.

This might work if Discovery's purpose was to dismantle the romanticized view of the Klingons that some fans have developed (though, again, this is something that Deep Space Nine did twenty years ago, and much better).  But what it offers instead is effectively a validation of Burnham's view--Klingons as a monolithically violent culture with few redeeming qualities.  It's as if Discovery's purpose with the Klingons is to say "even people whose culture is inherently violent deserve basic compassion", but this is a great deal less thought-provoking than the show clearly believes, not to mention not very applicable to the real world.^[4]

And if that seems like too much of an old school fannish complaint, too rooted in my familiarity with the franchise--which is, after all, trying to reinvent itself, and perhaps attract a new audience--then how about the way Discovery uses plot twists?  There are two major ones in the first season.  In quick succession, it's revealed that Ash Tyler is actually the Klingon Voq, physically transformed and brainwashed into believing that he is human, and that Lorca is actually his mirror universe counterpart, who escaped into our universe after a failed coup attempt against Emperor Georgiou.  There's a level on which both of these twists have thematic weight.  Tyler's horrified realization of what was done to him is a rare depiction of a male character coping with violation and its aftermath (and it also challenges Burnham to accept that she could have loved a Klingon), while the revelation of Lorca's identity makes sense of the increasingly uncomfortable way in which he pushes past Starfleet norms over the course of the season (it also explains why he recruits Burnham, since in the mirror universe the two were lovers).  But the aftermath in both cases is truncated--the Voq personality dies soon after it's introduced, leaving Tyler back in control of a human-looking body, and Burnham and Emperor Georgiou kill the imposter Lorca within an episode of his unmasking--and gives the impression that these twists existed for no reason other than themselves.  Taken together, they create the sense that the season--perhaps the show as a whole--has no weight or substance.

It certainly doesn't help that when those twists are swept away and the time finally comes for Discovery to make an argument for itself as more than just an action story, as a part of the Star Trek narrative, it makes such a hash of things.  Returning from the mirror universe sans the fake Lorca (but with Emperor Georgiou in tow, because apparently being a Nazi cannibal isn't enough to get Michael Burnham to leave you to die if you look like her dead mentor), Discovery finds itself nine months in its future, with the war against the Klingons nearly lost.  Georgiou offers her expertise as a wartime consigliere, arguing that the Federation is constitutionally unsuited to an all-out war for its survival.  She offers to guide Discovery to the Klingon homeworld in what is meant to be a strike on military targets, but behind their backs she turns out to have made a more sinister deal with the remaining Starfleet brass, to detonate a supervolcano under the planet's surface and render it uninhabitable.  When Burnham and the Discovery crew learn about this plan, they refuse their orders.  Burnham makes a deal with L'Rell, giving her the supervolcano detonator so she can use it to claim leadership of the Empire and end the war.^[5]

This isn't bad, exactly, and the moment where Burnham and the Discovery crew learn about the plan and reject it out of hand is genuinely moving precisely because there's no doubt or debate.  It is simply obvious to the entire crew that this is not who they are and that they must find another way.  But it's also very neat--the one mutiny at the beginning of the season in which Burnham rejects Starfleet values in order to protect Federation lives paralleled by another mutiny at the end of the season in which Discovery refuses to destroy the Klingon race in order to save their own.  One might even say glib.  As Zach Handlen writes in his review of the finale, you can very clearly imagine Discovery's writers deciding on this clever structure, making a half-assed attempt to write a middle story that would actually earn it, and then giving up with the job half-done.

Much like its handling of the Klingons, Discovery's attempt to examine what the Federation means and how it functions under pressure is interesting in theory.  This is, after all, a utopian vision invented fifty years ago by a man who was possibly a rapist, which takes as its template a society that in the real world was rooted in imperialism and exploitation, whose self-image as benevolent and free was at least in part a fantasy designed to paper over oppression.  There absolutely is room, and perhaps even a necessity, to take a serious look at that utopia, especially in this current moment, as we watch the liberal democracy that inspired Gene Roddenberry to imagine the Federation devour itself from the inside out.  But what Discovery ends up delivering is, again, a combination of things done better by Star Trek shows in the 80s and 90s, and original ideas that are extremely shallow and poorly handled.

Lorca is a prime example.  For most of the season he poses a serious challenge to the viewers, not just in how he conducts himself, constantly pushing against Federation values and norms, but in the way that he nevertheless gains the crew's loyalty for his intelligence, his determination, and his ability to think his way out of problems.  This didn't exactly make me happy, but what I wanted was for the show to face this uncomfortable contradiction head-on, to have Burnham recognize the fact that the man she's following is betraying the ideals they've both sworn to uphold.  Revealing that Lorca is actually from the mirror universe does away with all that complexity.  It makes him--and, more importantly, the other characters' loyalty to him--something that can easily be squared away and dismissed.  An episode after his death, it's easy to forget that he ever existed (which, among other things, feels like a waste of Isaacs's fine, magnetic performance).

What's even more problematic about the attempted genocide storyline is how it reveals the shallowness of Discovery's idea of Star Trek.  Like the reboot movies before it, Discovery seems to think that the most--perhaps the only--interesting question to ask within the Star Trek universe is "should we have a Federation?"  Does it, for example, make a civilization weak to live in peace and prosperity?  And what happens when such a society meets an existential threat?  Does it give up its values and civil liberties in order to survive?^[6]  But the thing is, this is literally the most boring, basic question one can ask about Star Trek.  The real challenges posed by a society like the Federation aren't questions of if, but of how.  How do you create a truly just, fair, equal society?  How do you balance freedom of conscience and opinion with your core values of tolerance and peace?  How do you prevent the exploitation of those who are weaker than you?  How do you help people outside your society, and do you have the right to encourage them to be more like you?

It's been close to twenty years since any work with Star Trek in the title even tried to address these questions, and in some ways Discovery feels like it's going backwards.  Even as it prides itself on honoring Federation values in its big moments, it misses their complete violation in its small ones.  When Burnham arrives on Discovery in a group of other prisoners--who are apparently being press-ganged to work in dilithium mines--they're greeted by security chief Landry (Rekha Sharma), who remarks that "I see we're unloading all kinds of garbage today".  When Lorca and Tyler are held prisoner by the Klingons and mount an escape, they leave behind a fellow Federation citizen who had been informing on them to their captors, even though he begs to be taken along.^[7] Worst of all, only two episodes before Discovery's crew refuses to blow up Qo'noS, they blow up the Imperial City-Ship in the mirror universe, with probably tens of thousands of people on board, without anyone even mentioning the subject of collateral damage.  At best, this is sloppy writing.  At worst, it's an indication that Discovery's writers have only the faintest, broadest understanding of what Federation values are.  That whenever they're not writing a story that is explicitly about Federation values, they default to some kind of space opera standard where heroic characters shoot first, think only of themselves, and don't care what kind of society they live in.

At the same time, there are moments where it feels like Discovery does know what it means to be Star Trek, where it remembers that this franchise isn't just--much less primarily--about big moments of sacrifice, but about small moments of decency and kindness.  It's Burnham fighting for the space animal that Discovery has been using as a navigator in the mycelium network, which is suffering from the ordeal.  It's Saru (Doug Jones), Burnham's former crewmate on the Shenzhou, who resents her for Georgiou's death, but still shows her kindness and hospitality when she arrives on Discovery, because she's a disgraced prisoner whose life sucks at that moment.  It's Tilly sitting next to Tyler in the mess hall after the Voq personality is exposed and removed, reminding him and the other officers that he deserves their compassion.  And it's also Tilly, in a later scene, putting herself between Tyler and Burnham, who isn't ready to talk to him about their relationship.  It's Admiral Cornwall (Jane Brooke) bonding with L'Rell over their shared courage and toughness, without losing sight of the things that set them apart.  It's Tyler joining in with a bunch of blustering Klingons as they play a gambling game, and finding joy in his hybrid nature for the first time.  Most of all, it's Captain Georgiou hearing Burnham's reasoned, logical argument for why she should attack the Klingons, and saying simply: "Starfleet doesn't fire first".

As a lot of people have noted, Star Trek shows have a history of starting out quite wobbly.  Discovery has enough good points that in theory it too could pull off the transformation that Deep Space Nine or The Next Generation achieved in their second and third seasons, and become a truly top notch series and a worthy addition to the franchise.  On the other hand, that kind of improvement doesn't tend to happen in the era of Peak TV.  It requires more episodic storytelling, fewer overarching storylines, and a willingness to play around that most modern TV shows don't have, and which Discovery hasn't really demonstrated.  Put another way, to ask whether Discovery could become a good show is really to ask what it is that currently makes it bad.  Is it simply a matter of execution, or is it that the people making it don't really know what they're trying to accomplish, and what the significance of the universe they're working in is?  I have sufficient respect for the bones of the show--for Burnham, and the other characters, and the moments where they feel like Starfleet officers--that I'm willing to stick around in hope, but I really don't know yet whether that hope has any basis in reality.

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[1] Raised, in fact, by Sarek (James Frain), which is just one of those things about Discovery--like the prequel setting--that you have to sigh and accept as the price of admission.  On the whole, Discovery is pretty good about not wallowing in fanservice, including in how it uses Sarek.  But there are moments--chiefly the season's closing scene--where its obvious lack of faith in itself as its own story is genuinely embarrassing. ↩

[2] Also, the mycelium network is one of the few instances in which Discovery does any meaningful kind of worldbuilding, expanding the boundaries of the existing Star Trek universe.  Even allowing for the fact that the show's story focuses on war and not exploration, there's something awfully limited and narrow about how it draws its world, as if its writers were afraid to go past the edges of the map they'd inherited.  But with the network, they give their universe a new dimension, even if they're going to have to do some fancy footwork to explain why no subsequent Star Trek show ever used or mentioned this technology. ↩

[3] For a contrasting perspective on Burnham, see Angelica Jade Bastién at the Vulture, who argues that the constant piling of challenges on Burnham's shoulders is emblematic of the "she can take it" attitude towards black women in pop culture.  I don't agree with her take--Burnham feels a lot less acted-upon to me--but I have to admit that she's given me a lot to think about.  I do, however, absolutely agree with Bastién's frustration with Discovery handling of gay themes.  The show's production crowed for months about featuring televised Star Trek's first gay couple in the form of Stamets and his partner Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) only to kill Culber part way into the season.  Given how unforgivably long it's taken this franchise to give the LGBT community its due in this supposedly egalitarian future, this was a slap in the face, and no amount of mealy-mouthed promises that Culber will return in some form (so far he's appeared as a sort of ghost who haunts the mycelium network, which apparently justifies Stamets having almost no emotional reaction to the death of the man he loved) can make up for it. ↩

[4] This isn't the only place where Discovery's seeming ignorance of Star Trek shows past the original series can feel frustrating--I had to hold myself back from making this entire essay merely a list of things the show attempts, and which Deep Space Nine did better back in the 90s.  I will, however, note that mirror universe Georgiou is basically the Intendant, right down to the bondage gear and evil bisexuality.  But while Deep Space Nine at least started out by taking a serious look at the Intendant's moral depravity--like the fact that she sexually abused enslaved people--Discovery very quickly ends up where the later DS9 mirror universe episodes did, treating Emperor Georgiou as a fun, camp villain.  There's obviously a lot of fun to be had watching Michelle Yeoh play a remorseless thug, but coming only a single episode after this Georgiou waxes nostalgic about depopulating Betazed, or cavalierly consumes the brains of sentient aliens, the tonal whiplash is a little hard to take. ↩

[5] Further to my thoughts above about Discovery's weird take on the Klingons, it should go without saying that a Klingon threatening to blow up Qo'noS unless they're made Emperor would be seen as completely without honor, and thus not a fit leader.  And from a purely practical standpoint, there's no way L'Rell can hold on to power with only this single, apocalyptic threat to back up her reign.  But at that point there's only ten minutes left in the season so you just go with it. ↩

[6] Not to keep harping on this, but this is also a question that Deep Space Nine dealt with, at much greater depth and complexity, in 1996.  And it wasn't even one of the better Deep Space Nine stories.  Just watch Deep Space Nine, is what I'm saying. ↩

[7] Obviously, as it turns out neither Lorca nor Tyler are Starfleet officers, but at that point they both think the other is (and Tyler still believes that he is one as well), so there's no justification for them betraying their putative oath so severely.  Also, no one who hears the story later on seems to think there was anything wrong with their actions. ↩

Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2017 Edition

I've been doing these fall TV reviews for more than a decade, and every year they feel less relevant, as either a guide to shows that people might like to watch or a commentary on the state of TV.  It's not that I believe that network TV is no longer capable of producing worthwhile, exciting fare--after all, my favorite show currently airing, whose second season is somehow managing to top even its stellar first one, is a network sitcom.  But pretty much everything the networks have trotted out this fall, good and bad, has felt inessential, like retreads of old ideas and trends that aren't really worth taking the time to talk about.  My focus in this post, then, is on the one thing that makes this fall unusual--the fact that in the space of a month, we've seen the premieres of four different SF shows.  Not all of them are good, but their subject matter means that all of them are sufficiently far from the standard network template that I can find something to say about them.

• The Orville - By now you've probably heard that Seth MacFarlane's new space-set show is not, as you might expect from its description, appearance, and MacFarlane's involvement, a parody of Star Trek, but an hour-long adventure show that is entirely earnest in its use of Star Trek's tropes and conventions.  This, however, doesn't even come close to capturing the strangeness, and the awkwardness, of what MacFarlane has produced with The Orville.  Watching it feels like what I imagine it would be like if you could follow along and watch--but never participate--in someone else's not-very-sophisticated but extremely well-funded Star Trek LARP.  As a television show, The Orville is bad--the storytelling is slow and dull, the dialogue is stilted and full of infodumps (which none of the actors know how to deliver), the characters are barely there--but one feels almost embarrassed to point this out, as if by doing so you're interrupting someone else's fun.  In all my years of watching way too much TV, I have never encountered a show that gave off so pronounced an impression of being completely uninterested in me or any other member of the audience, of existing solely so that its creator--MacFarlane, as Ed Mercer, the newly-minted captain of the titular ship--could cosplay in his favorite fictional universe.
  
  As a Star Trek fan myself, this is an impulse that I might be expected to sympathize with.  But one of the very first things The Orville reveals, once you get past the strangeness of its project, is how shallow MacFarlane's take on Star Trek actually is.  Oh, the look is all there--the costumes, cityscapes, and spaceships all look exactly like what you'd get if you took the aesthetic of The Next Generation and updated it to keep up with 2017 fashions and production values--and the terms are all easily recognizable--instead of the Federation you've got the Union; instead of Klingons you've got a species whose name I didn't even bother to learn, but who cares, they're Klingons.  And in interviews, MacFarlane has spoken about his desire to return to the "optimistic" type of space exploration stories that Star Trek specialized in.  But the actual stories showing up on screen contain none of the depth or wit that made Star Trek actually good, and the prevailing emotion in the show is less optimism than blandness.  Star Trek has a reputation for being sterile, for ignoring the real messiness of human life and relationships in its zeal to depict a future in which so many (but by no means all) of the sources of human misery had been eliminated.  Leaving aside for a moment whether that's an accurate perception, The Orville's solution to this alleged problem only reveals what a depth of emotion there was in the series it takes off from, and how insufficient MacFarlane's "modernized" take on it is.  The characters on The Orville aren't messy and human; they're shallow and immature.  And not even in fun ways--if the show were more strongly comedic, it might be possible to forgive the fact that its characterization comes down to having the cast speak in 21st century slang and make ever-so-slightly risque jokes.  But given its earnest tone, the thinness of its stories and character arcs is simply unforgivable.
  
  Instead of relying on humor, The Orville cadges storylines from both its obvious inspiration and real life--the second episode borrows from several top-notch Star Trek episodes when it reveals the existence of an alien zoo where sentient species are kept as displays; the third episode revolves around a female baby born to an all-male species, whose parents want to give her gender reassignment surgery.  But the handling of these ideas is invariably shallow, dull, and terrified of controversy--in the third episode, MacFarlane and his writers somehow manage to go a whole hour without ever mentioning the existence of intersex humans, much less suggesting that in The Orville's idealized future, such people might be considered unremarkable.  A similar shallowness afflicts the characters' relationships, the most important one of which is between Ed and his ex-wife, Kelly (Adrianne Palicki, who deserves so much better than this), who cheated on him and is now trying to make amends by helping to put his career, derailed by their divorce, back on track by serving as his second-in-command.  It's tempting to roll your eyes at such a hoary premise, but it might have been better if The Orville were wall-to-wall ex-wife jokes.  Instead, it plays the relationship between Ed and Kelly mostly straight, and in so doing draws attention to the fact that neither one of them behaves like anything resembling a human being, much less one wracked by the kind of deep feelings you'd expect the breakdown of a marriage following infidelity to arouse.  There's the slightest uptick in drama in the third episode, when we witness the conflict between the alien parents who disagree over whether to "conform" their female child, but still not at the level of getting us to care about these people, one of whom is a series regular.  I can almost sympathize with MacFarlane's desire to have another show like Star Trek on the air, but he's so bad at making a version of Star Trek that realizes why that show was special that he might as well not have bothered.
  
  
• Star Trek: Discovery - An additional reason to resent the existence of The Orville is that it has exposed a surprisingly wide seam in Star Trek fandom who, like MacFarlane, seem to think that Star Trek's appeal begins and ends with nostalgia.  These are the people who tend to slag off the most recent addition to the actual Star Trek canon, Discovery, while claiming that The Orville represents "real" Star Trek.  Which is probably making me a lot more partial to Discovery than the show currently deserves.  Taken on its own merits, Discovery is a frustrating but fascinating mix of good and bad, Trek and not-Trek.  But what I appreciate about it is that, even in its worst moments, there is a palpable sense that the people creating it are trying to move Star Trek forward, both as an idea and a work of television.  Not everything they're doing works, and given how withholding the show's storytelling is, even four episodes in, it'll probably take me until the end of the season to decide where I come down on it.  But the idea that it is necessary to grow and change in order to keep telling a story about the infinite possibilities of the future is the most quintessentially Star Trek thing imaginable, so in that sense at least, Discovery is on the right track.
  
  Perhaps the most disorienting--and at the moment, un-Star Trek-like--thing about Discovery is that it's the story of a person, not a ship or a place.  Heroine Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) quickly goes from rising star in the Starfleet ranks to mutineer to a press-ganged crewmember on the titular ship, whose captain, Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) is conducting a mysterious and probably ill-fated experiment in new propulsion systems, and whose ship is filled with secrets and mysteries.  It's not how Star Trek is supposed to work--the ship is always supposed to be home; the crew, even if they disagree, are always supposed to be allies--and, especially for fans traumatized by the recent movies' tendency to throw every idea and principle that made Star Trek what it was out the window in service of a generic action plot and an unearned hero narrative, it's a worrying decision.  What keeps me feeling hopeful about Discovery is mainly Michael herself, who is a wonderful blend of intellect and temper, calm reasoning and self-destructive urges.  The badass/fuckup combination that failed so catastrophically with NuKirk works wonderfully here, mainly because the writing and the performance combine to create the impression that Michael is always thinking, always questioning, genuinely curious about her surroundings and genuinely thoughtful in her choices--even the bad ones.  If she's not quite the Hornblower-esque figure that the original Kirk was, she's a fascinating modern variation on it--not least for being a black woman.
  
  The rest of the Discovery crew are still being revealed, but there's a similar complexity to some of the ones we've already met.  Commander Saru (Doug Jones), a member of an alien race who are congenitally fearful and pessimistic, but who is also decent and kind; Lieutenant Stamets (Anthony Rapp), a scientist who is caught between elation and disgust that the military are fast-tracking his project; Cadet Tilly (Mary Wiseman), Michael's roommate who appears to have some sort of anxiety disorder, but who is also ambitious, and willing to learn even from an unlikely source like Michael.  They all feel like people with their own points of view, and more importantly for a Star Trek context, like people who are used to looking at the universe like a puzzle, not an obstacle course.  There are other aspects of the show that feel more conventional, more like the action-adventure direction that the movies took--Lorca and the suggestion that he's a villain; his mean-tempered chief of security Commander Landry (Rekha Sharma); most of all, the show's take on the Klingons, who have so much less personality and individuality than they did in The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager.  As I've said, I probably won't know how I feel about Discovery until at least the end of the first season.  But what I do know is that there isn't another character like Michael Burnham on TV right now, nor another story that gives her the opportunity to be a badass, a scientist, and a political thinker.  That, to me, feels like Star Trek.
  
  
• The Gifted - Fox's second X-Men series is a great deal less trippy and surreal than Legion, but has essentially the same premise--mutants fleeing for their lives and freedom from sinister government agencies.  The more conventional style and structure allows The Gifted to be more political, though I'm reserving judgment on how successfully.  In a world where draconian laws allow the government to detain and intern mutants, a middle class couple discover that their children have abilities, and go on the run, teaming up with the mutant underground.  The twist is that the family's father, Reed Strucker (Stephen Moyer) is a lawyer for the government whose job is to criminalize and prosecute mutants.  In fairness, The Gifted seems aware of the inherent problems of focusing its story about oppression on a former oppressor, who only realizes his actions were wrong when they affect his own family.  Already in the first episode there is evidence of subtle criticism of Reed and his wife Kate (Amy Acker, once again being unimaginatively asked to play weepy and overwhelmed), who are the kind of people who pride themselves on being decent and law-abiding, but who, when push comes to shove, genuinely don't seem to believe that the laws should apply to them.  An early scene sees Reed demand severe treatment of students who have bullied his son by, ironically enough, bullying one of his teachers, and when the scary Sentinel Services come to take away the Strucker children after an incident at their school, Kate, who had previously told Reed that he is "keeping us safe" from mutants, flatly denies that the government has any right to take her kids.
  
  It's still possible that The Gifted means for us to see this behavior as uncomplicatedly heroic, and not to notice the Struckers' privileged habits of thought (though the second episode sees Kate being confronted with the fact that she didn't care about how badly mutants were being mistreated until she realized her children were mutants).  But an additional way in which the show addresses its potential problems is by not focusing exclusively on Reed and Kate.  Equal time is given to the Strucker children, Lauren and Andy (Natalie Alyn Lind and Percy Hynes White), who have a nice big sister-little brother rapport, and who clearly don't entirely trust their parents--one of the best scenes in the pilot comes when Lauren reveals that she's been hiding her mutant abilities for three years because she didn't know how Reed and Kate would react.  The mutant underground are also given their own storyline, and though I could wish that the show were told more strongly from their point of view (not least because the underground is a great deal more diverse than the lily-white Strucker family), it doesn't treat them as a means to Reed's ends, nor as helpless victims who need him to save them.  A lot depends on how The Gifted will develop its story going forward--there's a lot of potential for the show to be a story about a racist who Learns Better, and by this point we should all be able to look around and see that it doesn't work that way.  But if the show continues to challenge Reed and Kate on their privilege, and to develop the storylines of the kids and the other mutants, it might end up having something interesting to say about its extremely familiar premise.
  
  
• Marvel's Inhumans - There's probably nothing I can say at this stage that will add to the torrent of scorn that has rained down on Marvel TV's latest effort.  The only thing I can say is that it's all deserved.  Inhumans is a genuinely awful show: poorly written, indifferently acted, and with almost no characters that anyone could care about or be interested in.  What I will say is that I was a little surprised by this failure.  Scott Buck's last tour of duty with Marvel, Iron Fist, was pretty bad in its own right (though, amazingly, still better than Inhumans), but the one thing it got right was the twisted 1% family drama of the Meachums, Danny Rand's business partners.  Given that the one thing I kept hearing about the Inhumans was that they were a superpowered Dynasty, Buck seemed like the perfect fit.  And yet for some reason, he seems to have misplaced the instincts he had for that kind of soap opera storytelling when it came time to write Inhumans, trying to sell the show as a straightforward story of good versus evil, even as the actual characters and premise he presents completely fail to earn those designations.
  
  Inhumans is set in the secret city of Attilan on the Moon, where the part-alien title characters live in a society governed by a rigid caste system.  At puberty, young Inhumans are exposed to Terrigen Mist, which either transforms them and gives them powers, or leaves them human.  The latter group are then sent to toil in the mines, while the former live like kings--literally, as our heroes Black Bolt and Medusa (Anson Mount and Serinda Swan) rule over Attilan along with the rest of the royal family.  The obvious perversity of this arrangement is recognized only by Black Bolt's brother, Maximus (Iwan Rheon), who orchestrates a palace coup and gains the people's support by promising them new living space on Earth.  In other words, at the very least Inhumans should be a twisty tale of intrigue and double-crosses where no one is purely good or bad (though frankly, the only reason not to be completely on Maximus's side is that he keeps killing people who get in his way).  Instead, the show presents Black Bolt, Medusa, and their supporters as completely in the right, and Maximus's actions as completely evil, and leaves no space for the kind of political machinations its premise clearly demands.
  
  Of the cast, only Rheon and Swan seem to realize that they should be playing entitled, arrogant aristocrats, whose appeal comes not from being likable but from total self-possession.  Even they, however, can't do much with the story or characters they've been given.  The show fares much worse with Black Bolt, who can't speak because his voice has terrible concussive properties.  Seemingly no thought has been given to how to convey the personality of a completely silent character, and so Maximus's accusation that Black Bolt is passive and unwilling to plan for the future end up carrying a lot of weight, further cementing the feeling that neither he nor his family deserve to win this particular game of thrones.  One imagines that, like The Gifted, the arc of this story will be for the "good" Inhuman characters to take the opportunity of having been humbled in order to Learn Better and then remake Inhuman society into a more equal place.  But, even if the execution so far were not so very bad, that feels like a waste of a good premise.  There's nothing wrong with a twisty soap opera, and the world of Marvel is obviously a rich setting for one.  Not everything needs to be about heroes and villains.

Recent Movie Roundup 23

The first few days of 2017 have been rather interesting, as some tweets of mine went unexpectedly viral and sparked an interesting conversation about how Hollywood perceives the behavior, and fantasy life, of male versus female characters (you can read the whole thing here).  But that feels like a distraction from the exciting news that there are finally films in movie theaters that I want to see.  For some reason Israeli film distributors have broken their habit of waiting until February to bring out the year's Oscar hopefuls, and of course there are the year-ending genre movies.  I didn't like all of these films, but I certainly enjoyed the experience of looking forward to them.

• Moana - Disney's latest attempt to reinvent the princess movie takes two novel approaches: drawing on Polynesian folklore and mythology for its story, and recruiting Hamilton wunderkind Lin-Manuel Miranda to write the film's songs.  Heroine Moana (Auli'l Cravalho) is torn between her duties as the daughter of the village chief and her desire to roam the seas, but finds herself able to gratify both desires when she's tasked with restoring the heart of creation goddess Te Fiti, aided by Maui (Dwayne Johnson), the demigod who originally stole it.  The plot is thus a picaresque, in which Moana and Maui encounter various dangers and challenges on their journey to Te Fiti, during which they also bond and help each other overcome their hang-ups.  It's a similar structure to Tangled--still, to my mind, the best of the modern princess movies--but Moana lacks that film's multiple intersecting plot strands and broad cast of characters, and ends up feeling simpler and more straightforward.  What it does have is genuinely stunning animation, especially where it draws on the scenery of the Pacific islands and the iconography of Polynesian cultures, and some excellent songs by Miranda, which pay homage to both the Disney and musical theater traditions while still retaining entirely their own flavor--I'm particularly fond of a scene in which Moana and Maui encounter a giant, jewel-encrusted lobster (Jemaine Clement), who sings a David Bowie-inspired glam-rock ballad, and then complains that no one likes him as much as The Little Mermaid's Sebastian.  But pretty much every song here is excellent and memorable in its own right.
  
  Even more importantly, the fact that Moana is a story about its heroine rediscovering her people's heritage of exploring and ocean-voyaging feels especially significant in one of Disney's rare POC-starring vehicles, and lends a particular poignance to what is ultimately a fairly conventional follow-your-heart-and-be-true-to-yourself message.  Nevertheless, it's hard not to compare the relative simplicity of that message, and of Moana's story, to recent non-princess Disney projects like Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6, and Zootopia, and feel that Disney is aiming low by merely refreshing this template with different world cultures.  Girls--and non-white girls especially--deserve stories as inventive and complex as the ones being offered to boys, and Disney might serve them better if it put heroines like Moana (and her heritage) in those stories instead of sticking to the tried-and-true conventions of the princess movie.
  
  
• The Lobster - Yorgos Lanthimos's Cannes-winning sensation has a delightfully out-there premise--it takes place in a world in which the single are corralled into a resort where they have 45 days to find a partner, or they will turned into a an animal--and one of the many wonderful things about it is that it plays it completely straight.  Our hero, David (Colin Farrell), checks into the resort after his wife leaves him, but when a putative romance goes horribly wrong, he runs away to join a group of singleton rebels who live out in the woods, amongst whom romance is strictly forbidden.  This becomes a problem when David falls passionately in love with one of the rebels, played by Rachel Weisz.  The Lobster is, first and foremost, an uproariously funny movie, not just because of how straight it plays its ridiculous premise, but because of how it develops it with even more absurd details.  A major criteria for romantic happiness at the resort is that partners have compatible physical abnormalities, so David, who is short-sighted, is constantly on the lookout for a woman whose vision is similarly impaired, and seems genuinely to believe that he could never be happy with anyone whose vision is better or worse than his.  The rebels, meanwhile, inform David that they only dance to techno music, so that no one can dance with each other and thus potentially commit a romantic infraction.  And though the film never discusses its central fantastic concept, throughout its events the characters are joined by various exotic animals--peacocks and dromedaries and porcupines--who are clearly transformed rejects from the resort, and whom no one comments on or pays attention to.  The sheer audacity of the film's conceit, and the fact that it is developed so well and with such imagination, carries you through most of it without stopping to wonder what the point of it all is (as does the delight of constantly finding top-tier actors in such a strange project: as well as Farrell and Weisz, the cast includes Olivia Colman, John C. Reilly, Ben Whishaw, and Léa Seydoux).  So when that point arrives, it cuts like a knife: the sudden realization that in a society that places absurd, arbitrary restrictions on what romance can look like, actual love is all but impossible.
  
  
• Star Trek Beyond - The third in J.J. Abrams's revamped-and-not-at-all-improved Star Trek series both benefits and suffers from its connection to its two predecessors.  Benefits, because compared to the utterly lamentable Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness, the fact that Beyond is merely tedious and predictable is enough to make it seem like something resembling a good movie, especially when you consider that Abrams has been replaced in the director's seat by Justin Lin, who at least knows how to stage an action scene as if he cares, even if none of the ones here are particularly memorable or exciting.  And suffers, because Beyond, which co-writers Simon Pegg and Doug Jung clearly envisioned as an attempt to bring the new Star Trek back in line with the franchise's roots, depends for this task on the previous two movies having established certain characters and relationships to be broadly in line with what they were in the original series and movies, which means that it's relying on a foundation that hasn't been laid, and which in some cases blatantly contradicts what Beyond wants it to be.  William Shatner's Jim Kirk, for example, could (and in fact did) shoulder a storyline in which he becomes disenchanted with the Enterprise's mission of exploration and peaceful diplomacy, and considers leaving his command.  The same can't be said of Chris Pine's Kirk, who never seemed interested in Starfleet for anything beyond the gratification of being judged worthy to captain a starship, and who despite that judgment continues to be genuinely awful at all of the things that make a good Starfleet captain--as demonstrated by Beyond's opening scene, in which he hopelessly botches what should have been a straightforward diplomatic mission due to what looks like a simple lack of preparation.  The fact that Beyond constructs itself around this crisis is not, as the film clearly believes, a meaningful exploration of mid-life ennui, but yet another reminder that it has never been clear just why we should accept this Kirk as a hero--since he doesn't want to be one, and is in fact quite bad at it.
  
  By the same token, the scenes between Zachary Quinto's Spock and Karl Urban's McCoy seem to expect us to assume a long, rancorous-but-ultimately-respectful friendship between the two characters which this version of Star Trek, and these actors, have never actually done the work of establishing.  Beyond's screenplay makes a smart choice when it splits up the main cast into small groupings, each with their own storyline, after the Enterprise is attacked and destroyed over a mysterious planet (in yet another case of the reboot movies borrowing a major plot point from the original movies and not knowing what to do with it; it's not just that the Enterprise's destruction in Beyond lacks the resonance it had in The Search for Spock; this is a movie that can't even achieve the emotional heights of Generations).  Some of these storylines, such as Uhura and Sulu taking command of the surviving crewmembers, or Scotty bonding with a feral but plucky castaway (Sophia Boutella, in a role that would be more enjoyable if it did not feel so out of place in the Star Trek universe, original or reboot), work well enough on their own.  But when the time comes to tie them all together, it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that Beyond's story relies on us believing in the cohesion of its crew, and their faith in their captain, in a way that is simply unsupported by any of the films in the reboot universe, including this one.
  
  Beyond clearly has pretensions of engaging with Star Trek's core philosophy, but like its predecessors it runs aground on the fact that no one involved with the film has any idea what that philosophy is.  Characters spout words like "unity", "diplomacy", and "cooperation", but they seem bored even as they do so.  In a particularly tone-deaf scene, the film's villain, Krall (Idris Elba), explains to Uhura that its peaceful ways have made the Federation weak, and that conflict is needed for any species to thrive.  One might have expected that a Uhura, as a black woman, would be uniquely positioned to point out that the Federation's peace and harmony are hard-won treasures that humans only achieved after millennia of war, oppression, and genocide (a fact that is made all the more pressing when we learn Krall's true origin).  But that would require anyone involved with this movie to actually understand why peace and cooperation are good, desirable things, and it's clear that no one does.  Instead, the film treats Kirk's embrace of these ideals as a kind of favor he's doing to the universe, and then ends, as all the reboot films have done, with a single hero beating up on a single villain in order to save the day.  For all its pretensions of returning to its roots, Star Trek Beyond is still the same reboot Star Trek--utterly unclear on what made this franchise worthwhile, and completely incapable of staking out a claim for its own relevance.
  
  
• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - Disney's first standalone in the Star Wars universe is very clearly an attempt to transform that franchise into something very like the MCU--a shared universe in which it is possible to tell stories in many different registers, genres, and scopes.  Whether or not the Star Wars setting can support that kind of expansion, however, remains to be seen, even after Rogue One, because the problems of this movie have a lot more to do with the perennial sloppiness in how Hollywood (and Disney in particular) constructs its action-adventure stories, than in the specifics of this particular story.  Rogue One's first half is quite promising, giving us a glimpse of the inner workings of the Rebellion, and of its internal rifts and disputes.  We get to see the psychological toll of constantly living on the knife's edge, not knowing who to trust since anyone could be an Imperial spy, fighting amongst different factions of the Rebellion over the correct tactics, making morally compromising decisions for the greater good, and above all, living in the constant awareness that it might all be for nothing, and that the Rebellion could so easily fail in the face of an enemy as powerful and implacable as the Empire.
  
  All of this creates the expectation of a tense heist/espionage story, as our heroes try to outsmart a much more powerful, organized opponent in order to retrieve the Death Star plans that will jumpstart the plot of A New Hope--something along the lines of a million WWII movies.  Instead, Rogue One plumps for a generic extravaganza of explosions and special effects, as our heroes launch a frontal assault against an Imperial records facility that doesn't make a great deal of sense, and completely squanders the bleak, paranoid tone of the film's first half.  It's not the first time I've gotten the sense that Disney's live-action division is weakest in its script department, and particularly those scripts that depend on something slightly more intelligent than fights and explosions (this has also been a problem of some recent MCU movies, chiefly Ant-Man and Civil War).  And unlike The Force Awakens before it, Rogue One can't shake off its script problems by relying on charming, engaging characters.  Heroine Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is meant to be the film's beating heart, as the daughter of the scientist who designed the Death Star, and the person who convinces a rag-tag team of resistance operatives that a mission to retrieve the plans is worth the risk.  But Jones's polite, underpowered performance makes it impossible to believe that this is a woman who has been living on her own since she was sixteen, much less someone who could inspire the grizzled, morally compromised soldiers of the Rebellion to have hope in the impossible.  (It's genuinely depressing to recall that Jones's chief competitor for the part of Jyn was Tatiana Maslany, who would surely have made a meal of this dark, gender-swapped Han Solo type.)  Diego Luna, as the film's male lead, resistance spy Cassian Andor, has a great deal more presence than Jones, but his character arc is yoked to hers, requiring us to believe that she spurs a moral awakening in him, which I never did.
  
  Far more successful are the film's supporting characters: Riz Ahmed as the fidgety but quietly heroic Imperial pilot Bodhi Rook, looking for redemption on Jyn's mission; Forest Whitaker as the semi-deranged, paranoid leader of a breakaway group from the Rebellion; most of all, Donnie Yen and Wen Jiang as former Jedi monks and probable married couple Chirrut Îmwe and Baze Malbus, who squabble and watch each others' backs in equal measure. None of them, however, get enough space in the story to make up for Jyn's dullness, Cassian's muddled character arc, or the script's sloppiness.  Rogue One thus ends up being very promising in parts, and very disappointing in its whole.  If Disney wants to turn Star Wars into something like the MCU, it will have to stick to the more breezy, adventure-based genres, where unconvincing scripts and boring characters have less of a chance to register.
  
  
• La La Land - The best compliment I can pay Damien Chazelle's throwback musical is that while I was watching it, I found its candy-colored world, in which characters repeatedly break out in rhapsodies to Los Angeles, Hollywood, and the dream of it making it there, a little cute and overdone.  And then when the credits rolled, I realized that I didn't want to step out of that world, with its melancholy, romantic tone, and its haunting musical refrains that I've kept on humming long after leaving the movie theater.  When I say that, though, I'm talking more about the film's background--its loving, gorgeously-lit views of LA landmarks and vistas, or the way it captures the strangeness of that city, and of its dream industry, and makes something charming out of a world that we've been trained to think of as cynical and exploitative.  I was a great deal less charmed by the film's main story, the romance that develops between aspiring actress Mia (Emma Stone) and jazz pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) as they both try to get their big break.  In the films that La La Land riffs off--everything from Singin' in the Rain to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg--we accept that the lovers exist in their own world that bends itself to accommodate their love story.  But either Chazelle isn't quite able to believably create a world like that, or (more likely) the film's modern-day setting makes it impossible for me to believe in it.  So the fact that Mia and Sebastian frequently engage in obnoxious, self-absorbed behavior--everything from standing up in a movie theater while the film is running, to constantly blowing off their loved ones because they can't be bothered to remember their appointments--made it really difficult to root for their happy ending.
  
  I was, however, a great deal more interested in Mia and Sebastian's professional travails--she's trudging from one unsuccessful audition to another and wondering if she might simply not be good enough to make it, and he dreams of playing "pure" jazz at his own club, but is forced to take gigs at restaurants and house parties to make ends meet.  I'm a sucker for stories that depict art as work, and artists as people who are working towards the perfection of their craft--trying to find their unique voice, and then struggling to find an audience for that voice.  But the failure mode of stories like that is to depict "real" artists as people who are constantly saying no to opportunities (or who regret saying yes to them) because the work on offer isn't pure enough, and who thus spend their life waiting for the perfect opportunity to come along rather than taking any chance to develop their craft and do the work they love.  La La Land falls into that trap rather frequently, chiefly in a subplot in which Sebastian joins a band led by John Legend, who combines old-school jazz with modern hip-hop sounds, to Sebastian's obvious dismay and disapproval.  (There is also, obviously, a huge problem with a storyline in which a white man is the sole keeper of jazz's true soul, while a black man degrades it by combining it with a modern black musical style.)  But in fairness to the film, it doesn't live in that mode--Mia, for example, makes the valid point that while she likes the music that Sebastian is playing, it's not worth it if doing so makes him miserable.  In the end, it's hard to tell where La La Land falls on the selling out/doing work wherever you can find it question--perhaps because the film's fundamental romanticism means that both Mia and Sebastian end up achieving more of their dreams than actual people in their situation would probably get to.  And it is that romanticism that stays with you when the film ends, and which makes its whole worthwhile despite my problems with its parts.

Star Trek Into Darkness

It's only the middle of June, but if there is, this year, another moment of unintentional comedy as richly hilarious as the putative climax of J.J. Abrams's Star Trek Into Darkness, I will be very surprised.  Going into the movie, I didn't expect that I'd find it funny.  Abrams's 2009 reboot of the Star Trek franchise left me genuinely outraged, and its sequel seemed to promise more of the same.  Perhaps because the film has opened so late in Israel, however, I've had the time to realize that more of the same isn't so bad.  It means that I knew what to expect (and what to steel myself against): a barely coherent plot, some fun but ridiculous action scenes, an approach to the original series and its appeal that runs the gamut from incomprehension to outright contempt, a vehement need to undermine and dismantle Vulcans despite the fact that the two films' best character, Zachary Quinto's Spock, is one, a borderline erotic fixation with Chris Pine's Kirk despite the writers' (and, I am beginning to suspect, the actor's) inability to imbue him with anything resembling gravitas, authority, or indeed a basic competence at his job, and a lot of lens flares.  Going in so forewarned, it was easier to appreciate the humor in a film that bills itself as a reinvention and modernization of a venerable but antiquated franchise, but turns out to have so little of its own to say that it resorts to slavish recreations of its source material's high points.

My ability to take Into Darkness a lot less seriously than I did its predecessor (which might still be a little more seriously than it deserves) is bolstered by the difference in the two film's reception.  Where Star Trek's success was taken as an indication that Abrams had restored the franchise to relevance (by, it was grumbled by me and people like me, stripping it of everything that made it what it was) four years later we can see that that hasn't been the case.  As successful as the reboot was, it did not confer upon Star Trek the kind of cultural currency that Christopher Nolan's Batman films, or the Marvel superhero movies, have delivered for their source material, and at least from where I'm standing, the film doesn't seem to have amassed the kind of fandom that those franchises have developed, made up of people who only know their world and characters from the movies.  Four years ago we were all so stunned by a film with Star Trek in its title opening at the top of the box office chart that we seemed to come to a collective agreement not to say what was plainly obvious--that far from revitalizing the franchise, Abrams was merely writing Star Wars fanfic in another show's universe because he didn't think he'd ever get hold of the real thing.  Now that he has, Into Darkness feels like an afterthought--a fact that is reflected in the film's lukewarm critical and financial reception.  Whatever the future holds for Star Trek, J.J. Abrams and his "vision" are probably not going to be a part of it, which makes it easier to view Into Darkness dispassionately, and makes its blunders--and nowhere does the film blunder more heavily than when it tries to pay homage to its source material--seem more funny than outrageous. 

Into Darkness is a remake--sometimes a straight one, and sometimes a mirror image--of Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan.  If you have any familiarity with that movie, you'll know right away what a dubious proposition that is.  Though arguably the best of the original series films, The Wrath of Khan is, fundamentally and unalterably, a film about old men--Kirk, who after a lifetime of joyously breaking the rules is finally realizing that even when you get away with it, you don't really get away with it, and that no matter who many times you cheat death it'll always be waiting for you just where you least expect it; Spock, who has spent his life in the shadow of a perpetual child; and Khan, so incapable of accepting that his superior nature did not guarantee him the bright future he set out on at the end of "Space Seed" that he chooses to blame, and take revenge on, the whole universe.  It's a film about old soldiers, who have nothing in their lives except revenge and duty, perhaps because they've never been able to truly love anything else, and perhaps because age, and time, and death, have taken everything else away.

If Abrams's Star Trek films were the best they could possibly be, they wouldn't have been able to tackle this story, not with their cast of fresh-faced youngsters who never miss an opportunity to mention that their adventures are just beginning.  But of course, Abrams's films are not the best they could be, and instead of trying to make the story of The Wrath of Khan its own and suit it to its setting, Into Darkness veers between slavish, lifeless fan-service--the predictable "Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!" is intended as a crowning moment of pathos but comes off, as I wrote at the beginning of this review, as simply ridiculous--and, when it tries to strike out on its own, utter thematic incoherence.  Kirk starts the film being told that he needs to learn humility, as the older Kirk did in The Wrath of Khan.  But in fact there is no such lesson in Into Darkness.  Instead, and just as in Star Trek, it's everyone around Kirk who has to learn that, despite his lack of experience, his self-confessed incompetence, his complete lack of interest in showing leadership or encouraging teamwork, his conviction that being a captain means running off on your own and expecting everyone under your command to back your play--despite, in short, being utterly unsuited for the job, Kirk is not only the stuff that great captains are made of, but has an inalienable right to the captain's chair.  In The Wrath of Khan, Kirk learns humility when he puts his ship into a situation that can only be gotten out of by his best friend laying down his life; in Into Darkness, it's Kirk who lays down his life, thus proving that he has no need for humility, and that his flaws as a captain don't matter because he Really Cares.  (Not to worry: the next film won't be The Search for Kirk.  His death is rolled back in a way that is so heavily signposted that it's only through Quinto's best efforts that Kirk's self-sacrifice has even the slightest bit of emotional effect.)

Into Darkness's broader themes are equally muddled.  At different points, it has Kirk express disdain for Federation values (as he did in Star Trek), defend them against those who would militarize Starfleet and foment war with the Klingons (something that Kirk, as established until that point, might reasonably have been expected to be in favor of), and lecture others about how it's important not to relinquish our cherished beliefs in the face of evil, with little in the way of an arc to support these shifts except for a 9/11 allegory that would have seemed trite and over-obvious in 2004.  (Not helping matters is the fact that the film seems rather vague on what Federation values actually are--this is a movie that very forcefully informs us that killing a suspected terrorist without trial is wrong, but doesn't expect us to have any problem with Kirk or Spock beating that suspected terrorist after he's surrendered or been incapacitated.)  Similarly confusing is the film's choice to draw a parallel between Kirk and Khan by giving them the same motivation--protecting the people under their command--since it appears completely ignorant of how deep that parallel runs, and what its implications are.  The way that Khan sees himself, as a superior being who by rights shouldn't be bound by conventions and the laws of other people, is exactly the way that Abrams's Star Trek films want us to see Kirk, so if Khan and Kirk have the same motivation, why is one of them the bad guy and the other the hero? 

For a while it seems as if the film itself is reaching for the same conclusion, since in its middle segments Khan is actually a sympathetic figure.  His terrorist attacks on Earth turn out to have been at the behest of the film's other villain, who was holding Khan's people hostage.  He helps Kirk save the Enterprise, and it's Kirk who betrays Khan once that goal is achieved, not the other way around (though Khan turns out to have been ready for betrayal and responds to it ruthlessly).  The reboot format has given Abrams the opportunity to play with some of the franchise's holy cows; just as the first act of Star Trek seemed to suggest that the film might end with Spock as captain of the Enterprise and Kirk as his first officer, during the middle segments of Into Darkness it seems likely that Khan will end the film as Kirk's ally or at least a chaotic neutral, allowed to make his own future as he was at the end of "Space Seed."  But just like Star Trek, Into Darkness views the letter of the franchise as far more important than its spirit.  The canonical order is restored precisely because the representative of canon, Leonard Nimoy's old Spock, demands it.  No sooner has he told his young counterpart that Khan is evil than Khan obliges, suddenly announcing an intent to eradicate all "inferior" life that had gone completely unmentioned until fifteen minutes from the film's end.  (Aside from the opportunity to play with the canon, making Khan an ally might have gone some way towards explaining the unconvincing prevarications, and finally outright lies, about who the film's villain would be.  As it stands, I'm somewhat persuaded by this argument, that the filmmakers declared Khan's identity a spoiler--despite having released trailer upon trailer that virtually crowed it--because they wanted to forestall the outrage over having cast the lily-white Benedict Cumberbatch as a character called Khan Noonien Singh.)

Even the things that work about Into Darkness--as in Star Trek, the actors, the characters, and their relationships--are warped by its hagiographic take on Kirk.  It's fun to watch Pine, Quinto, and Zoe Saldana's Uhura snipe at each other and emerge as the rebooted franchise's equivalent of the Kirk-Spock-McCoy trio (though again, their college kid antics only reinforce the sense that these characters would be much more believable as junior officers on their first assignment out of the Academy than they are as the senior staff of Starfleet's flagship).  But the emphasis the film places on Kirk's need for Spock to admit that they are friends--a motivation so powerful that there's a compelling reading of the film in which he steps into the irradiated reactor chamber merely in order to secure a declaration of emotional attachment, which is in fact what he gets--finally has the effect of making the trio seem like they're in a three-way relationship in which Uhura is by far the least important member.  More successful are the film's attempt to give Uhura a more prominent role in the plot, and along with her, Simon Pegg's Scotty and John Cho's Sulu.  (Anton Yelchin's Chekov remains a bad accent in search of a personality.)  There's never been anything to say against the casting of the reboot's main crew, but this only serves to make Into Darkness's fascination with Kirk seems less plausible--why are we paying attention to this whiny, daddy-issues-riddled man-child when there are all these more interesting characters (who are played by better actors) in the background?

Into Darkness ends with the Enterprise embarking on the five year mission that gave the original series its impetus.  The sudden shift to exploration feels unearned in a series that has had so little time for the concept in its first two installments, but nevertheless it's hard not to feel a little hopeful at its even being mentioned.  With Abrams gone over to Star Wars (and possibly, hopefully, taking Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman with him), is it possible that the next film in the rebooted franchise will be Star Trek in more than just name?  That it will try to capture the essence of the series, and not just deliver hollow recreations of its greatest hits?  That it will finally allow its lead character to start growing towards the man we know Kirk to be?  I know, it's not very likely--as much as I like to blame Abrams for everything, the fact is that his version of Star Trek is merely a particularly ham-fisted expression of preoccupations that can be found all over Hollywood's blockbuster movies--a craving for Great Men, a disdain for intellect, vulnerability, and empathy, a need for lead characters to be cool that is so powerful that it drowns out any trait that might actually earn these characters that epithet.  And the truth is, I can live with the Star Trek films being little more than unintentional comedy.  But deep down, I am still a Star Trek fan, and I would dearly love for that series to once again be about boldly going where no one has gone before.

Let's See What's Out There: Table of Contents

For your convenience, a link post for my series revisiting Star Trek: The Next Generation.

1. Introduction


2. To Boldly Stay - How The Next Generation changes its focus from exploration to politics


3. "Optimism, Captain!" - On Star Trek's most contentious quality


4. Keep Flying - The tragedy of Picard


5. Odds & Ends - A few more thoughts on the characters and the actors who played them

Let's See What's Out There, Part V: Odds & Ends

Some thoughts about actors and characters.

• As I wrote in the previous entry, one of the pleasures of returning to The Next Generation as an adult was rediscovering, and learning to fully appreciate, Patrick Stewart's performance as Picard.  The rest of the cast, however, proved a less pleasant surprise.  Whether it's because the show was considered a bad employment risk when it first started casting, or because Gene Roddenberry and the other producers just had bad taste, The Next Generation's starting lineup leaves much to be desired.  Jonathan Frakes has turned out to be a good director and producer, but his acting is hammy and overdone, and he's frequently stretched even by the material the first season throws at him.  It's almost amusing to watch the show try to pit him against Q in "Hide and Q," the trickster character's second appearance--one imagines the writers planning a series of episodes in which Q interacts with each of the cast in their turn, then realizing how inert the pairing of Frakes and John de Lancie is, especially when compared to de Lancie's crackle against Stewart, and making Q Picard's antagonist for the rest of the series.  Gates McFadden is a comedienne, and there are episodes and moments in which the show uses her well in this capacity--the occasional humorous scene, but also episodes like "Remember Me" and "Attached" in which she's allowed to be cranky and sarcastic.  But for the most part Crusher's role is a dramatic one.  She's the staunch humanist whose belief in the sanctity of life trumps the most cherished Federation values--the Prime Directive in "Symbiosis," or the need to respect other cultures' values in "The Enemy" and "Ethics."  McFadden is lost trying to convey the gravitas and depth of conviction that this role requires.
  
  McFadden is also a good example of a phenomenon that occurs more and more often as the series's success translates into prestige and a higher production budget, in which the main cast is outclassed by recurring or guest actors.  In the second season a contract dispute led McFadden to leave the show temporarily, and Crusher's role as ship's doctor was filled by Diana Muldaur's Katherine Pulaski.  I was pretty young when I watched the second season, so my memories of it and of Pulaski, going into this rewatch, were rather hazy; and like, I suspect, a lot of fans, I imprinted on The Next Generation's cast as it was in the show's middle seasons, with Crusher as ship's doctor.  I thus wasn't particularly eager to rediscover Pulaski, and it was a surprise, a delight, and, once I remembered how little time she had on the show, a bittersweet pleasure to realize that Muldaur is every inch the actress that McFadden wasn't.  She effortlessly brings across the stubborn self-assurance of a person who can pit their cherished principles against Picard's or Worf's, and refuse to budge in either case.  There's something very McCoy-ish about Pulaski (right down to her casual bigotry towards Data), a down-to-earth, no-nonsense quality that suits her role on the ship very well.  When Crusher and her breathy overacting returned in the third season, and especially in episodes where her role was to stick by her guns and represent the humanist point of view, it was impossible not to wish that Pulaski were there in her place.  Similarly, one might compare Denise Crosby's performance with Michelle Forbes's five seasons later.  They're playing essentially the same character--an orphaned young woman raised outside the Federation in troubled circumstances, who escapes to Starfleet--but where Crosby's Tasha Yar is shouty and unconvincing, Forbes completely sells Ro Laren as tough, damaged, both driven and undone by anger.
  
  As the show's writing improved, the writers also got better at playing to the cast's strengths, and to their stronger castmembers.  This means that Brent Spiner, who, with the exception of "Datalore," is used mostly as comic relief in the first season, and Michael Dorn, who was originally only a recurring character, both of whom turn out to be versatile, charismatic actors, get more and better stories as the show grows.  Less fortunate are LeVar Burton and Marina Sirtis.  Geordi LaForge turned out to be The Next Generation's O'Brien--a character I had remembered liking and enjoying, but who turned out, upon a second viewing, to be one-note and not very ably portrayed.  Burton is given so little to do with Geordi, however--after the first season, in which he's a young bridge officer learning the ropes of command, he loses that story to Wesley and spends the rest of the series spouting the week's helping of technobabble--that it's hard to gauge whether the problem is with him or the writing.  Sirtis, meanwhile, is a game performer who handles all the abuse the show flings at her--episodes like "The Price" and "Man of the People," not to mention whole stretches of doing nothing but sighing and rolling her eyes during the Lwaxana Troi episodes--with enough dignity and good humor to make me think that with better writing at her back, Troi could have been a breakout character to rival Worf.  What's interesting about Troi is how imperfect she is.  Against the other Starfleet characters' thoughtless courage and effortless selflessness, Troi is whiny, and her kindness is frequently undercut by a strong streak of self-centeredness.  Both of these qualities manifest themselves when Troi is challenged or taken out of her comfort zone, as does her underlying strength.  It's a combination that had a lot of potential, as the brilliant "Face of the Enemy" demonstrates, but one that the writers didn't quite know how to write for (or, to take a less charitable tack, didn't know how to write for in a beautiful woman).  Troi is thus shunted off to the side or relegated to romantic storylines.
  
  (For completeness's sake, Wil Wheaton was a cute kid who grew up into an average-looking adult and a poor actor.  But The Next Generation is hardly the only television show to run into this problem with its child actors, so I'm willing to give the show a pass in this case.)


• A few more thoughts on Geordi.  Wesley was supposed to be The Next Generation's gateway character, and for me he was--I wanted to pilot the ship and save the day just like him.  Those who came to the show a little older than myself developed the disdain for Wesley with which the fandom has by now become synonymous, and would have been more likely to identify with Geordi.  Like O'Brien on Deep Space Nine, he's the everyman character--not a special snowflake like Data or Worf, not a paragon of virtue like Picard and Riker, and not a woman, which as we all know invalidates Crusher and Troi from being audience identification figures.  He's the guy you can imagine meeting for a friendly drink without feeling completely outclassed and intimidated.  Star Trek, already a franchise that tended to skew towards niceness, was thus deeply invested in keeping Geordi likable, which I think is a big part of the reason his character stagnates.  The fact is that once you take a closer look at Geordi, there is clearly something not quite right about him.  He's a guy who gets along better with machines than with people, and not just because he's an engineer and very nearly a cyborg.  His best friend is an android.  He's the first member of the crew to bond with Hugh in "I, Borg."  He falls in love with a computer program in "Booby Trap."  In that same episode, and later in "Transfigurations," Geordi is shown to be shy and awkward in social situations (though a friendly alien cures him of the worst of his shyness in the latter episode).  He's much better at connecting with people, and with his own emotions, by using technology as a buffer--when he watches the title character's log entries in "Aquiel," or when he says goodbye to his recently-deceased mother while remote-controlling a repair drone in "Interface."
  
  There's obviously a story to be told here, and it's one that the show ignores even as it piles on the evidence for its existence.  Though it's obvious that maintaining Geordi's nice guy cred is a big part of the reason, I also think The Next Generation's resistance to the notion of artificial life (as already discussed in the case of Data) is a factor.  When the real Leah Brahms shows up in "Galaxy's Child" and disappoints Geordi by not being the woman of his dreams (and, of course, by being married), the show argues that Geordi's problem is that he can't separate the fantasy from the real woman, who is under no obligation to cater to his wishes and desires.  While there's no denying that Geordi has some creepy hang-ups about women that the show, in keeping with its conception of him as a geeky, nice guy, is all too willing to forgive ("Galaxy's Child" ultimately comes down on the side of his friendship with Leah, and in the "All Good Things…" future they are married), there's a more interesting possibility that the episode leaves unexplored--that the Leah from "Booby Trap" is not just an idealized version of the one from "Galaxy's Child" but a completely different person, one who is perhaps worth loving in her own right.  By the time Voyager comes along, holographic people, and their romantic entanglements with those of the flesh and blood variety, are par for the course, but such as story is a little too risque for The Next Generation, as are almost all the stories suggested by Geordi's affinity for machinery.  Possibly LeVar Burton couldn't have handled these stories--even when he's given the chance to emote in "Interface" he comes off as stiff and shallow--but it might have been nice to see him try.


• Geordi isn't, of course, The Next Generation's only geek identification character, but against his competence and almost-coolness, the show pits the neurotic, awkward, stammering Barclay.  His introductory episode, "Hollow Pursuits," is another example of the show failing to acknowledge the creepiness of the story it's telling, and for much the same reason as in Geordi's case.  Barclay's reaction to professional and social frustration is to fashion, and sink into, elaborate fantasies in which he places caricatured versions of the main cast so that he can enact violent vengeance against the ones who intimidate him and give free rein to his lust for Troi and Crusher.  This is very disturbing, but the show treats it as an unfortunate foible, as the main cast band together to help Barclay overcome his problems.  The reason, clearly, is that Barclay is an audience stand-in (and that in the pre-internet era it was not yet considered cool and funny to cruelly mock your fans by representing them as pathetic and sometimes villainous characters on your show).  The next Barclay story, "The Nth Degree," finds him still functioning as the cast's special project, still so unprepared for power and independence that the gift of super-intelligence turns him into a threat to the ship.  So it's a relief when "Realm of Fear" shows us a Barclay who is clearly growing sick and tired of being treated with kid gloves, and of how indulgent the senior staff are of his neuroses and phobias.  The story sees him rejecting Geordi and Troi's patience and understanding, their willingness to accommodate his fears.  Instead Barclay examines his phobic reaction to the episode's events and tries to dismantle his fears, in the process realizing that they are rooted in reality and saving the day.  It's not quite a character arc, but it's a more attractive portrait of a geek than the one in "Hollow Pursuits"--not as someone who needs to be protected from reality, but as someone who finally realizes that being shy and awkward is no justification for not behaving like a grown-up.

And that, I think, is that.  As promised, less verbiage than the Deep Space Nine posts, but I hope not significantly less worthy of your time.  My next project will probably be to watch Voyager--the first time through though I've seen the odd episode here and there.  Look for it some time in the future, and thanks for reading along.

Let's See What's Out There, Part IV: Keep Flying

"I should have done this a long time ago."

Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation, "All Good Things…", 1994

I think it's safe to say that if it hadn't been for Patrick Stewart, there would be no modern Trek, and we would still think of the franchise as a cult TV series from decades ago that spawned a couple of movies and, in the late 80s, a short-lived spin-off.  In The Next Generation's first season, Stewart is the only member of the cast with both acting chops and the opportunity to use them, and he makes Picard, and the show, his own, elevating the cheesy material and blatant speechifying.  In his hands, Picard's wanderlust, his geekish enthusiasm, his commanding presence, and his deeply held and frequently expressed convictions, become genuine and heartfelt.  Stewart brings Picard to life--that fascinating, complicated mixture of whimsy and stolidness, humor and gravitas, thoughtful diplomacy and indomitable will.  There is a popular theory that the show improved so dramatically in its second and third seasons because Stewart kept acting above the material the writers provided him with, and whether or not that's actually true, the fact that The Next Generation ever achieves the magic of slipping into the world of Trek and making it its own, becoming part of a grand storytelling tradition rather than just a bunch of bad actors traipsing about in ugly spandex, is largely down to that one man and his performance.

It's easy to lose sight of Picard's complexity when you watch the later Star Trek films, which reconfigure him as a shoot first, ask questions later action hero.  Part of me thinks this transformation happened as a sop to Stewart's vanity, was maybe even instigated by him, and if that's the case then I suppose that after all he did for the franchise he's entitled to have his ego stroked--after all, it's not as if Insurrection or Nemesis were ever going to be masterpieces.  But it's worth keeping in mind that this is not who Picard was, that the real character was a great deal more complicated--a man defined, in fact, by his contradictions.  In "Samaritan Snare" Picard tells Wesley about the incident that caused him to require an artificial heart (the significance of which, for a man so invested in controlling his emotions, is surely obvious), in which, as a young cadet, he picked a fight with three Naussicans twice his size.  Picard tells the story as one of a hard lesson well learned, a punishment for his arrogance and devil-may-care attitude, an experience that taught him to buckle down, as well as a bit of humility.  But in "Tapestry," when Q gives Picard the chance to undo the fight altogether, to become that more humble, more serious man he thinks he needed to be ahead of schedule, the result is a small, grey life as a mid-ranking science officer.  The lesson of "Tapestry" is that it takes the two men--the adventurer who laughs in the face of danger, and the thoughtful, reserved nerd, who on their own are just a silly child and a stodgy old man--to make Jean Luc Picard.

Of all his contradictions, perhaps none defines Picard as much as his conflicting desires for adventure and a more quiet, ordinary life.  As the series opens he's chosen the former, and a lot of Next Generation episodes revolve around Picard considering the roads he chose not to take on his path to a stellar career in Starfleet--the lover he abandoned in "We'll Always Have Paris," the career he might have had as an archeologist in "The Chase."  But as the show draws on The Next Generation seems determined to shake Picard's conviction of having made the right choice.  In my posts about Deep Space Nine I wrote that that show's deliberately mundane tone allowed its writers to inflict losses--of lovers, children, homes, jobs, and sense of self--on its characters that in a more dramatic story might have seemed over the top, and The Next Generation takes the same approach with Picard.  He starts the series gruffly telling Riker that he has no room for children in his life.  Seven years later, in Generations, he's weeping for the children he'll never have.  Along the way, there is much loss.  He seems to discover a son in "Bloodlines," only to learn that he has no claim on him.  He bonds with a child in "Suddenly Human" but must give him away.  He falls in love in "Lessons" but is forced to give that love up for the sake of his duty (the same might be said of "The Perfect Mate").  In "The Inner Light" Picard, after a long struggle, surrenders to the kind of life he has always sought to escape.  He becomes a loving husband and a doting father and grandfather, living a small life in a small village.  And just as he's grown not only to accept but to love this life, it is snatched away from him, leaving nothing behind but memories and a single keepsake.  Perhaps worst of all, Picard forms relationships that place him in the role of mentor and surrogate father with Wesley Crusher and Ro Laren, whom he shepherds on their Starfleet careers, but both of these "children" choose to leave Starfleet, and thus to sever their ties with Picard.

Wesley and Ro leave Starfleet for largely the same reasons.  "Journey's End," Wesley's farewell episode, is terrible, an early harbinger of Ronald D. Moore's penchant for prioritizing real-world references over the integrity of his world, in which Native Americans--in space!--are still suffering the effects of European colonization in the 24th century.  Ro's goodbye, "Preemptive Strike," meanwhile, despite some mawkish plot points, is one of the few strong episodes in the seventh season (Michelle Forbes and Wil Wheaton's respective talents play a part in the episodes' relative quality as well).  But in both stories, Wesley and Ro are disillusioned by Starfleet's actions and its policies--relocating settlers on the Cardassian border and hunting down the Maquis who attack Cardassian settlements on that same border.  That Picard sides with Starfleet, however reluctantly--he is conflicted about relocating the colonists and sympathizes with the Maquis, but in both cases ultimately decides that preventing war with the Cardassians is the greater good--shatters his bond with his two protégés, permanently in Ro's case, ambiguously in Wesley's (it is one of "Journey's End"'s many flaws that it doesn't give the two anything like a proper farewell but also isn't willing to cap their relationship on the negative note that "Preemptive Strike" ends on). 

This is interesting because, though in its early years Picard stands for the Federation as much as he stands for The Next Generation, there is a sense as the show draws on that Picard and the Federation are falling out of step.  In "Too Short a Season" Picard discovers that a Starfleet admiral traded arms to aliens in exchange for Federation hostages, and prolonged a costly civil war.  In this first season story, the tone of the episode makes it clear that what the admiral has done is beyond the pale.  Later seasons return to the well of the shady admiral who betrays Federation principles and is exposed by Picard, but each time the story repeats his staunchness seems less convincing.  When the admiral in "Ensign Ro" agrees to break Federation neutrality in the Bajoran-Cardassian conflict in order to appease the Cardassians, or Riker's former commanding officer violates a treaty with the Romulans that prohibits the Federation from developing illegal cloaking technology in "The Pegasus," it's hard not to wonder whether Picard is the only honest senior officer in Starfleet--and if so, what that says about Starfleet.  There's a compelling reading of late Next Generation in which Picard is regarded by his fellow officers and the Federation's top brass as an increasingly out of touch throwback, a moralist who won't recognize the difficult realities of the political situation in the quadrant, and who insists on clinging to his ideals come hell of high water, and regardless of what his principled actions, such as exposing the forbidden cloaked ship to the Romulans at the end of "The Pegasus," cost the Federation.  (Insurrection, in which the Federation council is so shattered by the Dominion war that they conspire with a race of arms dealers and bioweapon manufacturers to displace an entire people, only for Picard to commit mutiny against them, really only makes sense if you apply this reading to the show.)

In this take on The Next Generation, the Enterprise is a fool's paradise that keeps flying about to diplomatic missions and scientific studies, even as the events of Deep Space Nine unfold and the rest of the galaxy burns.  This is probably taking it too far, but it's hard not to watch "Journey's End" and "Preemptive Strike" without concluding that for Wesley and Ro, Picard is Starfleet and the Federation.  They would love to serve in his fleet, on his ship, in furtherance of his ideals, but when they get a taste of the real thing (and when Picard falls in line with that reality) they recoil.  Nor are these the only occasions on which Picard's Enterprise is held up as an ideal.  In "Ménage à Troi," Wesley is stunned to realize that there's no guarantee he'll be returning to the Enterprise when he graduates from Starfleet academy, and the ship's convivial atmosphere is what halts Riker's previously-meteoric career in its path.  The Next Generation got a lot of guff over the years for keeping the ship's senior staff static for so long, in contravention of the reality of most military bodies (and most workplaces, for that matter).  Though this stagnation was obviously driven by the producers' fiat and 80s TV mentality, within the show it seemed believable that no one on the Enterprise wanted to move on, because they were all too happy and too comfortable where they were, in a working environment that suited them all to a T (by all accounts the cast felt this way as well).

Which is why "All Good Things…" is such a perfect cap to the series.  Despite a plot that hinges on the destruction of the human race, that's not where the story's emotional core is to be found.  "All Good Things…" is an episode about the Enterprise crew.  It switches between three time periods that describe that crew's lifecycle--the present, in which the Enterprise is an ideal working environment, all its parts moving together in perfect synchronization; the past, when the crew is just on the verge of coming together; and the future, when it's all come apart.  Which is what happens in any workplace, of course.  Even if you're lucky enough to find a job you like with people you enjoy working with, sooner or later someone will leave, or die; close friends will quarrel or drift apart; others will try to transmute their camaraderie into more intimate relationships, with mixed results.  And if by some chance you manage to hang on through all those changes, eventually you'll get to be too old and feeble to do the work.  This is the great tragedy of The Next Generation, and of Picard's life--in lieu of the family he'll never have, he forms one with his crew, but it is ephemeral and doomed.  The series ends with that famous, lovely scene of Picard joining the other officers at the poker table, reaffirming their unity in the face of the knowledge--now more certain than ever--that its days are numbered.  In its gentle sadness, its deceptively light tone, and its inherent contradictions, this is the perfect ending to The Next Generation.  One of these days, the crew will be dispersed.  The Enterprise will be put in mothballs.  Starfleet will complete its transformation into a body that none of them particularly want to serve in.  But for now, their voyages continue.