Let's See What's Out There, Part III: "Optimism, Captain!"

Picard: In my century, we don't succumb to revenge. We have a more evolved sensibility.
Lily: Bullshit!

Star Trek: First Contact, 1996

My first forays onto the internet coincided with the height of my Star Trek fannishness, and one of the first websites I can recall checking regularly was a cache of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine reviews by Tim Lynch, who was writing weekly recaps + reviews long before it was the revolutionary, web 2.0 approach to writing about television (a helpful Wiki collects the reviews today). Looking back, it occurs to me that Lynch must have been the first reviewer I read for pleasure, and the source of some of my first inklings that reviewing was a worthy endeavor in its own right. I don't remember much of his actual writing, but the review that sticks in my mind is for the sixth season episode "The Chase," in which Picard's old archeology mentor bequeaths him research that points to a message concealed in the DNA of many of the humanoid species in the galaxy. The message, when decoded, turns out to be the revelation that all of these species were seeded on their home planets by a single parent race. Lynch, a scientist and teacher, was incensed at such an unscientific take on evolution, arguing that it bordered on supporting the theory of intelligent design. Though he's right about the fundamental inaccuracies of how "The Chase" portrays evolution and how they dovetail with creationist attempts to undermine the theory and its acceptance, watching the episode a second time it seemed obvious that its take on evolution was entirely in keeping with the series's general approach to this topic, an approach that is inextricably bound with original Star Trek and The Next Generation's most contentious and, these days, most maligned attribute, their optimism.

Evolution, in The Next Generation, is a purposeful, directional process, deliberately set in motion (sometimes, as in "The Chase," by a specific individual or group) and with a definite goal in mind. That's still a common misconception, but it was more prevalent in the 80s and 90s, and The Next Generation was not alone in interpreting "more evolved" not as better suited to its environment, but simply as better, more perfect. And, also like a lot of other stories in and out of genre, The Next Generation applied the concept of evolution to societies as well as species, sociology and politics as well as biology. Humanity's progress from our violent, greedy present to the 24th century's egalitarian, post-scarcity utopia is repeatedly described as the result of evolution, and other species encountered over the course of the series are described as being in the process of evolving towards this ideal form. When Riker visits a matriarchal society persecuting a group that has been agitating for men's rights in "Angel One," he argues that what is happening is not revolution but evolution. When the Ferengi are first encountered in "The Last Outpost," Riker explains to the representative of an ancient space empire that "I find them very much as we were a few hundred years ago … they may grow and learn"; evolution is not mentioned explicitly but it is strongly implied. "The Chase" itself is strongly bound up in notions of evolution as a social process. The purpose of the message hidden in the DNA of humanoids is to reveal their common ancestry and foster unity between them, and though the Klingon captain who learns this sneers at the notion of sharing ancestors with humans and Romulans, the episode ends with Picard and his Romulan counterpart exchanging a less chilly farewell than the current relations between their species would warrant, both obviously spurred to thoughts of peace by the discovery they've made.

You can't make evolution one of the central metaphors of your story without raising the specter of it going wrong, and a lot of Next Generation episodes involve the Enterprise visiting a social evolutionary dead end--the luddites and cloners in "Up the Long Ladder," the genetically engineered "Masterpiece Society." In both cases Picard shakes his head over the foolishness of trying to shape humanity on such misguided principles, but implicit in that reaction is the notion that it is principles that guide evolution--the evolution of societies, but perhaps also of species. The Next Generation never quite comes out and says this, but it strongly implies that it is not just human society that has evolved in the 400 years that separate the show from us, but human nature, that humans in the 24th century are fundamentally different from us--more moral, more tolerant, less violent. It's not until First Contact that we get a counter-example, in the scene quoted from at the head of this post, in which Lily concludes, and Picard ultimately confirms, that beneath his civilized exterior he still craves violence and vengeance. But First Contact is a very un-Star Trek-ish movie, and in the space of the show itself there is no human who surrenders to barbarity in the way that Picard very nearly does in that movie (perhaps the closest is Dr. Marr in "Silicon Avatar," when she kills the crystalline entity that killed her son).

The show's take on the future of human evolution is, similarly, guided by values rather than biology. In the episode "Transfigurations," the show strongly excoriates an alien species who are persecuting and exterminating a minority who are "evolving" into energy beings, but when Barclay becomes uplifted in "The Nth Degree," the reaction from the Enterprise's crew is fear and incomprehension. In other words, it's OK for evolution to fundamentally alter aliens, but humans had better stick to a familiar baseline. On the other hand, in "Home Soil," the Enterprise discovers sentient silicon-based life on a planet about to be terraformed. The aliens reject contact with the Federation on the grounds that we are too primitive, and tell us to come back in 300 years when, presumably, we will have outgrown our petty carbon-based prejudices. The aptly-titled third season episode "Evolution" tells a very similar story that also concludes that humans are not ready to be in contact with a non-humanoid lifeform (this time, Wesley's science experiment--by no means the first or only time that someone on the Enterprise uplifts an artificial being for fun or a good grade). At the end of "The Host," Crusher tells her Trill lover, now transplanted into a woman, that she can't handle that kind of change, a deficiency she ascribes to her species, not to herself: "Perhaps someday our ability to love will not be so limited."  So again, evolution, for humanity, is treated as a social rather than a biological process, and one whose "proper" form is guided by principles that just happen to coincide with Gene Roddenberry's hippie, California liberal values--tolerance, equality, non-violence, all that good stuff.

To say that this is problematic is to understate the issue quite considerably. Roddenberry's values are unobjectionable on the macro level, but one need only watch the series with a bit of distance to see how far from perfect its vision of 24th century society is. Geordi LaForge is the only black member of the Enterprise's senior staff, and gets the least development and the least stories dedicated to him (Michael Dorn is also black, but as all Klingons have the same skin tone regardless of their portrayer's race, I think it's safe to say that Worf is not a black Klingon). Crusher and Troi get only a bit more attention from the writers, but both just happen to be in nurturing, caretaking roles, and their stories often revolve around their love lives (it's interesting to watch the show become more aware of this in its later seasons and try to give both characters more to do on the ship, for example making them both bridge officers; the results are decidedly mixed--on the one hand, the magnificent Troi episode "Face of the Enemy" or Crusher saving the day in "Descent II", but on the other hand, the unmistakable take-away that there's nothing interesting or exciting about being a doctor or a ship's counselor, and by the time the later movies come along neither character's profession is of any importance, and they're both just waving phasers about). Then there are episodes like "The Outcast," clearly well-intentioned and, for their time, perhaps even progressive, but today what was intended as a statement in favor of gay rights comes across as homophobic--the episode clearly opposes persecuting homosexuals, but can't bring itself to come out in favor of being gay (right down to casting a woman in the role of Riker's androgynous lover). Or throwaway scenes like the one in "The Wounded" that make it clear that before they were married, Miles and Keiko O'Brien never lived together--perhaps never even spent the night together, since Keiko is making breakfast for Miles for the very first time. Like the cell phones besides which original Star Trek's communicators, so revolutionary in the 60s, seem bulky and of limited use, Roddenberry's allegedly advanced, egalitarian future society seems positively regressive when compared to the norms of your average TV show in 2011.

Even if we accept that Roddenberry had his heart in the right place but was still a product of his time (and had to appease his broadcasters and the court of public opinion), there are still the fundamental questions raised by his optimism--is it dramatically satisfying? Is it realistic? Is it moral? In "Time's Arrow II" Samuel Clemens is accidentally transported to the 24th century. A famous curmudgeon whom we'd seen, in the story's first half, railing about the fundamental wickedness of human nature, he's at first unable to believe that the peaceful, wealthy society he's arrived in is the whole truth of the future. Surely, he tells Troi, all this opulence is achieved on the backs of the poor? Even allowing for the dim view that we might take of Troi's claim to live in the perfect society--look at her outfit, for crying out loud--and for the things that a man of Clemens's era might not consider an improvement--look at her outfit, for crying out loud--the message is clear. Clemens is a stand-in for us, for any cynic who believes that humans are inherently evil and that the human race is doomed. The Next Generation, like Star Trek before it, is the story that tells us that no, humanity is going to overcome its problems and create something wonderful. That's a powerful statement even if you acknowledge the imperfection of Roddenberry's perfect society, but it's one that the genre has reacted very strongly against in the last twenty years. So strongly, in fact, that there's been a backlash against the backlash.

I think it's safe to dismiss the argument that you can't tell good stories about utopia--quite apart from the fact that The Next Generation was often a very good show, there's a persuasive argument to be made for Iain M. Banks's Culture being a more sophisticated, more developed version of the same concept as the Federation, and Banks has written some cracking stories in and about it. As for realism, I've probably said my piece about the trend of dark and gritty science fiction and its dubious claim to that trait. Like Roddenberry's utopian approach, it is rooted in truth without fully encompassing it, and seems to be driven more by its writers' preoccupations (and sometimes by fashion), than any attempt to realistically portray human nature. Whether or not either of these modes work is down to the writer in question, but I don't think that either one can lay a claim to realism--and this is not even to address the question of whether realism is an ideal, or even the ideal, to which a work of fiction should aspire. The real question, to my mind, is an ethical one. Is the kind of aspirational utopianism Roddenberry baked into Star Trek a moral good? Does it teach us to reach for the stars, or to smugly congratulate ourselves on being there already?

There is a great deal in The Next Generation that suggests the latter. Much as the Federation represents humanity's future it is also, and particularly in its dealings with the Romulans, intended as a stand-in for the US during the Cold War. In episodes like "The Enemy" or "Data's Day" the Federation behaves with scrupulous even-handedness and reacts with wounded dismay when the Romulans, the series's Soviet stand-ins, interpret its actions as underhanded or conniving. The parallels to Cold War-era notions of the two sides in the dispute are clear--the West is open, ethical, and law-abiding, while the Russians are distrustful, perceiving their own immorality in others. By presenting the Federation as the perfected, evolved version of the democratic US, The Next Generation reinforces its audience's image of themselves as being the good guys, leaving no room for the possibility that this image is at least partly a self-imposed delusion, or for an acknowledgment of the underhandedness that came from the West during the Cold War. More generally, by positing the Federation, with its obvious Western antecedents, as the end result of humanity's social evolution, The Next Generation engages in a level of cultural imperialism. Unlike the series's blindness to its own sexism or racism, this is something that feels baked into its utopian premise. You can imagine the Federation as a less blindingly white society, less gender-segregated, less heteronormative (and later Star Trek series went some way towards portraying it as such). It's impossible, however, to imagine it as less Western.

I've been using the Federation and humanity as interchangeable terms in this post, which is one of the things that threw me during my rewatch of The Next Generation, coming to it as I was with Deep Space Nine, whose cast was largely alien, as my last foray into Trek. Humans are not simply the majority on the Enterprise. They are so much of a majority that the presence of non-humans on the ship usually requires an explanation. Main castmembers who were not human usually had some connection to humanity that profoundly affected their lives. Troi was half-human, and her alienness was strongly downplayed, both through her appearance and her behavior. Worf was raised by humans, had spent his life trying to regain his Klingon heritage, and kept bumping up against what were to him the pernicious effects of human culture when trying to raise his part-human son. And then there's Data. Data is the most high-concept character in The Next Generation cast and, of the three main castmembers who can be said to have a character arc (the others being Picard and Worf) the one whose story seems to have been the most thought out at the series's outset. The premise of that story, as laid out in "Encounter at Farpoint," is that Data wants to be human. Not sentient, not feeling, but human. This is for the same reason that the Enterprise's crew is so overwhelmingly human--because humanity is The Next Generation's business. Just as the perfection of the Federation is intended as a demonstration of humanity's potential, Data's quest to be human sheds a light on what humanity actually is.

This has the effect of contorting Data's story in ways that seem particularly glaring today, with the concept of artificial intelligence and machine life having received a lot of interesting and sophisticated attention in genre, and in light of Deep Space Nine's more nuanced handling of its own outsider character, Odo. It's understandable that Data wants to be a person rather than a machine, but why does he want to be a feeling person--why does he aspire to the one thing that is obviously beyond his programming? Star Trek features aliens who are sentient but not emotional, and though Data raises the question in his diary entries in "Data's Day," or his conversation with Spock in "Unification II," he never truly explains why he's chosen to emulate humanity rather than Vulcans. In the later seasons of the show, there are episodes that edge around a recognition of the fact that Data's personality is bound up in his lack of emotions--"In Theory," in which he tries and spectacularly fails to engage in a romantic relationship, "Descent," in which the temptation of feeling emotion overrides his most cherished values. When he finally becomes capable of emotion in Generations, Data becomes a completely different person, and the fact that this was inevitable, and that much of what we valued about Data--his patience, his even temper, his generosity--was rooted in his lack of emotions is never acknowledged. To do so, and thus to admit that Data can be a person without having emotions, would also mean the show saying that he can be a person without being human.

This resistance to the notion of alien--truly alien, not humanoid with forehead ridges alien--sentience informs a lot of the episodes that try to discuss Data's rights. In "The Measure of a Man," Bruce Maddox, trying to argue that he should be allowed to dismantle Data against his will, asks whether, if the computer of the Enterprise were to refuse an upgrade, the court now discussing Data's case would allow it to do so. He means this as a rhetorical question, which of course it is, but not in the way he thinks. If the computer of the Enterprise possessed the self-awareness and will to understand the meaning of an upgrade and refuse it, its wishes would have to be respected. That neither Maddox, nor Picard, nor the judge recognize this simple truth is because they are hung up on hardware rather than software. To them, the issue isn't what kind of machine Data is, but the simple fact that he is a machine, and not human. This attitude persists in "Measure"'s follow-up episodes, "The Offspring" and "The Quality of Life."  Partly this is due to the trope being undeveloped--by the time Voyager comes along, the idea of an electronic person is a lot easier for both the writers and the audience to swallow (compare Voyager's Doctor, or even Deep Space Nine's Vic Fontaine, to Moriarty in "Elementary, Dear Data" and "Ship in a Bottle," where it is inconceivable that the sentient holodeck character might have a life, and a meaningful one, despite being, and knowing that he is, a hologram). A more important reason for the show's resistance to the notion of artificial sentience, however, is that the purpose of Data is not to explore the possibility of different forms of sentience, but to hold up a mirror to humanity, and a rather flattering one at that. Here is a super-intelligent, super-strong, virtually immortal creature, who repeatedly states that he would give up his many advantages to be more like us. As Odo is once told, "What higher flattery is there? 'I, who can be anything, choose to be like you.'" For Data to aspire to be human implies that humanity is pretty hot stuff.

Which brings us back to optimism, and to the notion at The Next Generation's core--that humans are, indeed, hot stuff, that we have great potential and are capable of great things. The very foundation of Star Trek, after all, is the notion that humanity will become a leader on the galactic stage, one of the most important and influential races in the quadrant and beyond it, and there are a lot of instances in The Next Generation in which humanity is described as exceptional. Sometimes this exceptionalism reaches absurd degrees, as in "When the Bough Breaks," when our attachment to our children is described as unusually strong, or the aliens in "Allegiance" who call morality "a very interesting human characteristic." There is, as these examples demonstrate, a pernicious side to The Next Generation's cheerleading of humanity, especially when one considers how homogeneous and Western-derived 24th century humanity is. But there's also something admirable. The fact is that Roddenberry allows himself to imagine something audacious and, especially in our present moment, almost impossible to believe--that it all turns out all right, that we make good, that we get it right. The sheer chutzpah of the act is impressive in itself, but I keep going back and forth about its moral implications. Is Roddenberry giving us hope for the future, or is he telling us that we're fine just the way we are? Does his work spur us to bigger and better things, or help us to ignore what's wrong in the here and now? The answer, obviously, will vary from one viewer to another, but I would dearly love to know what effect, if any, Star Trek had on the generation of people, like me, who took it down as our first introduction to SF TV--and what effect did the myriad works tearing down its optimistic premise had. Did it make us self-satisfied? Did they make us cynical?

In lieu of an answer to that last question, which I don't have, I'll close with one more episode. "Chain of Command II" came up quite a lot in conversation a few years ago, when torture was the hot button issue, both in real-world politics and the entertainment industry, and Jack Bauer was waterboarding and ripping out fingernails at the drop of a hat. So I thought that I was well-prepared for the episode when I sat down to watch it again a few months ago. It still took me completely by surprise. What I had somehow forgotten about "Chain of Command II" is that it is determinedly, unequivocally anti-torture. Not only in the sense that, unlike so many episodes of modern TV that try to raise a "tough question" by having the protagonists commit torture, here the torturer is the bad guy and the victim is Picard. And not only because the torture is shown to be brutal and cruel. "Chain of Command II" is anti-torture because it concludes that torture doesn't work. "[It] has never been a reliable means of extracting information. It is ultimately self-defeating as a means of control. And so one wonders why it is still practiced," Picard says to his torturer. In late 2010, with pop culture having almost uniformly accepted that torture is an effective and reliable means of information-gathering, which repeatedly enables heroic characters to save the day, this came as a genuine shock, but no more so than the answer the episode gives to Picard's final question. Picard never gives his Cardassian torturer any information, but he does break--famously, he sees five lights where there are four. This is necessary for the episode to have an effect--if Picard had held out, "Chain of Command II" would be a story about how much of a badass Jean Luc Picard is, not about how awful torture is--but it isn't necessary for the torturer. By the time he makes that last push against Picard's defenses, the one that finally tumbles them, his side has lost. Picard is about to be released. The torturer is, in fact, defying orders to clean Picard up and get him ready for transfer. There is no possible reason to keep torturing Picard except pride and cruelty. And that, the episode concludes, is what torture is ultimately for.

There is much of the hypocrisy and self-congratulation that underpin The Next Generation's optimism in "Chain of Command II"'s conclusion. The episode assumes that the Federation--which is to say the US--doesn't torture, which in the real world wasn't true even at the time. But it is also underpinned by the recognition that torture is wrong and that we should be above it, neither of which are things that are taken for granted anymore, in either entertainment or the public discourse. Perhaps that, if nothing else, is the value of The Next Generation's optimism, of its starry-eyed take on humanity's future--to remind us of the values we've lost, and of those that we've allowed ourselves to relinquish.

Let's See What's Out There, Part II: To Boldly Stay

"Anyone remember when we used to be explorers?"

Picard, Star Trek: Insurrection, 1998

The first season of The Next Generation is probably best thought of as the fourth season of original Star Trek, except set decades later and with an entirely different cast. To a certain extent, this was probably inevitable--any spin-off feels the gravitational pull of its original, and the twenty five years that separated Star Trek and The Next Generation, with their movies and tie-in novels and increasingly vocal fandom, would have turned the original series into a black hole. That Gene Roddenberry was at The Next Generation's helm surely only compounded the original show's influence, as he repurposed everything from character designs to costuming to scripts, left over from the original show or from the various abortive attempts to revive it, for use in the new show. But beyond the stylistic and tonal similarities, there is the fact that early Next Generation is, like its predecessor, a show about exploring the unknown. This seems obvious at first--boldly going, seeking out, and exploring are right there in the opening narration that every Star Trek fan knows by heart--but as the first season draws on it become apparent just how different its stories are from what The Next Generation, and eventually all of Star Trek, became, and how little exploration there was in the latter.

Picard is introduced to us as a great explorer--Crusher even refers to him as such in the series pilot, "Encounter at Farpoint"--who has given up the chance of a normal life in order to see things that no other human has seen. The Enterprise's mission is described as an extension of the original ship's, exploring the uncharted portions of the galaxy, and opportunities to do just that abound in the first season. When the Traveler whisks the Enterprise thousands of light years from known space in "Where No One Has Gone Before," Picard and Riker are positively giddy at the thought of exploring this region, and it's only due to their ironclad discipline as Starfleet officers that they forgo the opportunity. Aliens who are encountered in this season are often described in awestruck terms that seem more suited to fantasy--they are creatures of legend said to possess fantastic powers ("When the Bough Breaks") or secretive villains shrouded in mystery (the Romulans in "The Neutral Zone"). "We've only charted nineteen percent of our galaxy. The rest is out there, waiting for us," Wesley says in the early second season episode "The Dauphin," and that is what seems most strange and unfamiliar about early Next Generation--the sense that the galaxy is a vast and largely unexplored place, full of wonders yet to be discovered. This was, of course, original Star Trek's starting position, but it's one that the modern franchise, with its emphasis on the known and the familiar--on political disputes between established alien species and the role of the Federation on the galactic stage--moved away from. The galaxy in later Star Trek, and even in the later seasons of The Next Generation, is a much smaller place, whose rules are more clearly laid out.

You can spot the moment when original Trek-style Next Generation dies and gives way to what we think of today as Star Trek. It comes in the second season, in the episode "Q Who?" In the episode's early scenes, Geordi is trying to keep up with the enthusiasm of Sonya, one of his new ensigns. "Whatever is out here, we're going to be the first humans to see it," she tells him, almost vibrating with excitement. At the same time, Picard is getting into another argument with Q, who offers to act as the Enterprise's guide to the great unknown and, when rejected, petulantly flings the ships into a distant part of space, setting in motion humanity's first encounter with the Borg. By the time the episode ends, Sonya's enthusiasm has given way to horror at the Borg's casual slaughter of 18 Enterprise crewmembers, and Picard is begging Q to save the ship from destruction. The lesson Q is trying to teach Picard is that humanity isn't ready for what it's about to encounter as it ventures into unknown space--"It's not safe out there. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross, but it's not for the timid"--but the lesson that The Next Generation learns is not to venture at all. "Q Who?" sets up the Borg as an antagonist that will overshadow the series for the next season and a half, and by the time they have been dealt with, both the Klingons and the Romulans will have been developed as the major sources of story. The Enterprise encounters less and less unknown species, and spends more time visiting human colonies and scientific outposts, or rendering aid to species with whom it already has diplomatic contact.

In all fairness, the immediate effect of this shift on the show is that it tells the same kind of stories in a more effective way. If an alien species hasn't been heard from before--if, in all likelihood, they were invented for this very story--does it matter that the episode tells us that they're already known to the Federation and have diplomatic relations with it? The audience gets the same hit of newness they did before, even if the characters don't. There's certainly an argument to be made for dispensing with what, by the end of the first season, had already become a boilerplate in which Picard introduces the Federation to the aliens of the week, and getting to the more interesting meat of the story, in which an alien social custom causes consternation among the Enterprise crew, as in "The Outcast" and "Half a Life," or Picard's adherence to the Prime Directive forces him into a moral quandary, as in "Evolution" or "Homeward." It's also very difficult to come up with an interesting new alien culture, while also telling a story and introducing guest characters, in the space of 45 minutes--and a rather thankless task if that species is never to be heard from again. Even within the confines of its episodic storytelling, The Next Generation was more resonant, and more interesting, when it returned to the settings of the Klingon or Romulan empires, societies which it developed over the course of several episodes and seasons. The Klingons are, in fact, an interesting case. In the show's first and early second seasons, even after Denise Crosby's departure from the show moves Worf into a position of greater prominence, his race remains shrouded in secrecy. "I think perhaps it is best to be ignorant of certain elements of the Klingon psyche," Picard tells Troi at the beginning of "Where Silence Has Lease," fretting over Riker joining Worf in his training exercise (his fears are well-founded; overcome by bloodlust, Worf nearly attacks Riker), and in "Heart of Glory" he and the rest of the crew are befuddled by Klingon rituals. But in "A Matter of Honor," Riker joins of the crew of a Klingon ship and we see them from the inside, and Star Trek begins its decade-long love affair with this culture (some of the credit for this falls to Michael Dorn, whose ability to convey intelligence and humor from beneath his makeup and Worf's stolidness brought life to the character and no doubt encouraged the writers to explore his history and his race).

The Next Generation never becomes as inward-looking as its follow-up series, but as it deepens the Cold War analogy it draws using the Romulans, the show becomes more concerned with the Federation, its values and attributes, and its relations with a very small set of species. As the Star Trek franchise grows, it moves even further away from exploration. Deep Space Nine explicitly rejected the mobile setting of Star Trek and The Next Generation, and though its early seasons briefly flirted with the notion of exploring the gamma quadrant, such stories quickly gave way to ones about its specific region of space and the war that erupts over it. Voyager was a story about boldly going home. Enterprise paid lip service to the importance of exploration while resetting the franchise's time period to a point where the rough timeline of events was already known to the viewers, and much of what was strange to the characters was familiar to us (a reversal of post-"Q Who?" Next Generation's approach). The Next Generation movies, which span the three series, reflect these changes in the franchise. Generations is nearly an episode of the series, as much a cap to Picard's story as "All Good Things…" Insurrection, which begins with Picard telling his officers that in the wake of the war with the Dominion, the Federation is licking its wounds, consolidating itself, and turning away from exploration, and ends with his discovery that in their pursuit of greater security, the Federation's higher ups have betrayed its cherished values, is clearly of the Deep Space Nine era. Nemesis, which dispenses with any pretense of moral focus (Picard ignores the Prime Directive and gets into a shooting match with members a pre-warp society, and we discover that the Federation has happily tolerated the existence of a Romulan slave race) and revels in our heroes shooting at over the top antagonists, is an Enterprise film. (First Contact is not a Star Trek film in any meaningful way, more an action movie that happens to feature Star Trek characters.)

If you go by numbers, I'm not sure that the shift from exploration to Federation-centric stories was particularly good for Star Trek--against latter-day Next Generation and Deep Space Nine you have Voyager and Enterprise, not to mention the later movies. But it's clear that The Next Generation became a better show once it stepped back the emphasis on boldly going where no one has gone before. There's a part of me, however, that like Picard in Insurrection feels rueful for those days. Those words in opening credits, that for most of the show's run turn out to have been hollow, express a grand and worthy sentiment, a spirit of adventure that's worth celebrating, and that science fiction fans in particular should feel an affinity for. There's a joyfulness to Picard when he sees something new and different that reaches through the screen and grabs at your soul. A big part of that joy is lost when his stories come to revolve on keeping the peace between the Federation and the Romulans, or steering the Klingon empire towards an optimal resolution of its succession crises. One of the reactions I kept having during my rewatch of The Next Generation was that Gene Roddenberry had some lovely ideas that just didn't lend themselves to good drama. That's still my conclusion, but I also think those good intentions should be lauded. It may be unrealistic, but I'm nursing the hope that exploration-based Next Generation failed not because it was inherently undramatic but because of the limitations of the show's writers, and of the medium in the 80s. Perhaps an enterprising television writer might still make good TV out of the notion that though it might be scary and dangerous, it is bold, and exciting, and worthwhile, to see things that no other human has seen.

Let's See What's Out There, Part I: Introduction

"Seven years ago I said we'd be watching you, and we have been. Hoping your ape-like race would demonstrate some growth, give some indication that your minds have room for expansion. And what have we seen instead? You spending time worrying about Commander Riker's career. Listening to Counselor Troi's pedantic psychobabble. Indulging Data in his witless explorations of humanity. … It's time to put an end to your trek through the stars, to make room for other, more worthy species."

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

Reexamining my youthful SF TV loves has been a recurring theme on this blog, with decidedly mixed results. Babylon 5 was a profound disappointment. Deep Space Nine an unexpected delight. I held off on revisiting Star Trek: The Next Generation for a long time because I had the sneaking suspicion that it would fall on the former end of the scale, and because my attachment to it runs a lot deeper than to either of these shows. The Next Generation was my first fannish love, a childish rather than a teenage one, and one that was bound up in some of the major events of my life and the process of my growth into fandom. The first time I saw the show was on a visit to the States, just a few weeks before my tenth birthday. A month later, the first Gulf War erupted, and one of that war's consequences was that Israel, a nation that up until that point had held back the tides of the telecommunication revolution, opened itself up to twentieth century entertainment. We needed CNN to tell us what was happening in Iraq, and commercial TV to keep hundreds of thousands of scared children docile and distracted while the schools were shut down for the six weeks of the war. Over the next decade, commercial channels, cable and satellite TV, the internet, and the cellular revolution became fully integrated into Israeli society, and helped to revolutionize it, but in the early years of that revolution its significance, to me, was in how it affected my ability to access Star Trek: The Next Generation. Would my cable carrier drop the foreign channel that was airing the latest season? Could I convince my mother to buy a VCR to record the episodes that aired while I was at school? The Next Generation, to me, represents not only my childhood and my earliest forays into SF fandom, but the first steps along the path that has brought me here, to this blog and all the opportunities and friendships that have resulted from it. The possibility that I might return to the show and find what my hazy recollections strongly suggested would be a staid, stiff, preachy series with little but nostalgic associations to recommend it held me back, for a long time, from revisiting it.

Right now seems like a good time to reexamine The Next Generation, however. As I wrote in my contribution to an SF Signal Mind Meld just recently, the current lull in science fiction television, though obviously driven in large part by the growing popularity of fantasy, and urban fantasy in particular, also feels like the result of the field having finally exhausted the ways in which in it can react to Star Trek: The Next Generation. When I reviewed the new Star Trek film unfavorably, it was suggested several times that the concept of Star Trek I felt the film had betrayed was actually The Next Generation's take on the franchise. In hindsight I think that's probably true, but I also think I'm not alone in that. I'm not the only geek of my generation whose first introduction to SF TV and SF fandom came through The Next Generation, and who formed her impression of Star Trek--and of what SF TV should be--from that show. For twenty years, The Next Generation has been the springboard from which nearly every science fiction series has launched itself, first in imitation and later in opposition, but always with The Next Generation in their rearview mirror. In 2011, it seems as if we've reached the point where there is nothing more to say in response to either the show, its spin-offs, its imitators, and the shows that rebelled against it. The field is waiting for the next Gene Roddenberry to come up with its next dominant paradigm, and in that moment of silence it seemed appropriate to take a look at the series that set those tumultuous two decades in SF TV in motion.

I'd like to report that The Next Generation defied my fears and turned out to be just as thrilling and engrossing as it was when I was a kid, but I can't. On the other hand, the show isn't the nearly unmitigated disaster that Babylon 5 turned out to be when I rewatched it. There are moments--specific characters, or episodes, or scenes--that I genuinely enjoyed, and if you ignore the shakiness of the first two or three seasons (and the hit-and-miss, but mostly miss, final season) the series is well-made and well-written. In fact, what keeps me from loving The Next Generation is less any flaw in its execution and more the fact that it is so much of its time. When I wrote about Deep Space Nine, I called it a hybrid series. Its baseline is The Next Generation's 80s-style episodic, low-continuity storytelling, but as the 90s draw on and the shows around it start bucking against that model, Deep Space Nine also starts to experiment with it, though it never fully abandons the Trekish plasticity that so many other genre shows rejected. The Next Generation is fully on the other side of that divide. It's an 80s show, right down to the big hair, and stayed that way almost to its end, when you could sense the writers straining against the limitations of their own format to do some of the things that the cool kids were doing, and finally deciding that they needed a blank slate on which to tell that more complicated story. This didn't bother me as a child because it was all I knew--plot arcs meant a two-part episode or a season-ending cliffhanger, character continuity meant a very special episode that referenced the events of a previous very special episode, which had gone unmentioned in the interim--but I came of age around the same time as the television medium, and especially SF TV, did, and nowadays there's so much I expect from the television I watch that The Next Generation doesn't do that it was hard to get swept up in the show. 

The conclusion I ended up drawing about The Next Generation is not so much that it's a bad show, but that it isn't particularly interested in any of the things that I watch television, and particularly SFnal television, for. While it can't be said that the show does no worldbuilding--much of what we think of as the modern Trek universe comes from it, not from original Star Trek or the movies--it isn't the elaborate, lived-in construction of alien cultures that I've loved on shows as diverse as Farscape and Caprica. Rather, The Next Generation draws the broad strokes of its universe--the various alien races and their relationship to the Federation, cherished concepts like The Prime Directive, the types of technology available and their limitations--and leaves coloring within those lines to Deep Space Nine. There's little character development, almost no recurring characters or settings, and of course no plot arcs. The themes that interested me in Deep Space Nine--the clash of cultures and their cherished values, the challenge of multiculturalism, the impossibility of immersing oneself in an alien culture without becoming altered as a result--are completely absent here. I was therefore more interested in The Next Generation as the series that set the stage for Deep Space Nine and created the modern Star Trek universe than as a work in its own right. So this series of posts, which will not be as long or as detailed as my discussion of Deep Space Nine, will be about those things. More specifically, I want to talk about how the definition of Star Trek changes over the course of the series--because of Gene Roddenberry's death, because of the changing times, because of the other Star Trek series and films that emerge around it, and because of the changes in television itself.

Trek-Dump, Addenda

A few more interesting links and then I'm done with this movie, I swear.

• Adam Roberts hits it out of the park with his review.  The whole thing is quotable and also very funny, but this is the point that floored me, which hits on something that niggled at me throughout my viewing but which I wasn't able to put into words:
  

  Trek09 is a text so absolutely incapable of representing a collective—a functioning group, a society—that it strays into rank idiocy. It is teenage wish-fulfilment bang-zap-frot fantasy all the way through. But (and this, I’d say, is what people celebrating the Star Warsification of the Trek franchise in this film, are missing) precisely what made Trek so notable in the first place was its creation a communitarian world. Not an ensemble cast all vying for screen time; a knit-together group of people. The Star Wars universe is an open-ended, malleable space for individual adventure. The Trek universe is about having a place. It is, really, about belonging.
  
  So Trek09 grandly misses the point. My problem was not that Kirk, in this film, is a tool at the start and a tool at the end. He is, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that Star Fleet is so toolish: so completely, dysfunctionally unbelievable as an organisation. ... The Enterprise, as a group of individuals functioning together to crew a space ship, is—in this film, and for the first time in the Trek franchise—Not Fit For Purpose. It's a wholly unprofessional bunch of people squabbling and vying. It's dysfunctional.

  As I said in my review, Star Trek as a story is wholly oriented towards placing Jim Kirk in the place God intended for him, the captain's seat on the bridge of the Enterprise, but because of the dysfunction Adam notes the film's notion of what a captain is boils down to 'the guy who gets to tell everyone what to do.'  Kirk is never a leader.  His Enterprise functions not because of any action on his part but because he happens to have been lucky enough to end up with a band of under-qualified cadets who figure out, all on their own, how to work together.  I never got the sense that Kirk cared whether his crew got along or respected him so long as they enabled him to be captain, or that the film cared about any relationship that had more than two people in it.


• Nick Mamatas is an utter wronghead about the Star Trek franchise, but probably right on the money when it comes to this observation:
  

  And the J.J. Abrahms movie? Well, it's...not bad. Not great, but not bad. Actually, it isn't even a Star Trek movie. I swear to God, it's Galaxy Quest: The Motion Picture. There are inexplicably Willy Wonkaesque architectures for the characters to get stuck in, the captain and his alien buddies aren't really friends though they are somehow supposed to be, a monster is replaced by a bigger monster during a planetside interlude, the transporters don't seem to work right, the first captain is tortured by the villains (ooh, waterboarding!), and the end of the movie involves Spaceship A turning around and rushing Spaceship B. Plus the baddy snarls his lines five inches from the camera lens, a la a heel pro wrestler threatening to destroy Hulk Hogan on a Saturday morning. Just like Galaxy Quest. But not played for laughs.

• As with the presence of women, lots of people have talked about the lack of diversity in Star Fleet and on the Enterprise (I note that the film took the standard Trek approach of having a mainly white cast and a black admiral), but Rachel M. Brown really gets to the heart of the difference between emulation Star Trek's form and emulating its spirit:
  

  The point of Chekhov in the original was not that he had a funny accent. It was that he was a proud citizen of a country that, at time of airing, was America's # 1 enemy. The modern USA equivalent of Chekhov would not be Chekhov, but a crew member from Iraq or Afghanistan.

• A Fox News commentator takes Abrams's overturning of Roddenberry's message to its logical conclusion:
  

  The new "Star Trek" film shows Captain Kirk's Starship Enterprise making good use of photon torpedoes and force fields. So the question comes to mind: Would Israel be safer if it could shoot down enemy missiles and rockets with such photon torpedoes, or block them altogether with a force field? Of course it would.

• A report from a Q&A session with screenwriters Orci and Kurtzman, in which they try to justify the film's numerous plot holes.  The whole thing is quite delicious, but this is undoubtedly the money shot:
  

  In the minds of the creators, the focus of the plot is that Nero’s destruction of the timeline has altered history to the point that the all important friendship of Kirk and Spock is now threatened. If these two don’t come together, the fabric of space and time itself is endangered (as we have witnessed by the universe itself being saved countless times over the last 40 years). Kirk “coincidentally” running into Spock Prime is an example of fate itself trying to bring these two together. That’s how important it is.

  Also, apparently Kirk was only sleeping with Uhura's Orion roommate in order to gain access to the computers running the Kobayashi Maru scenario.  What a prince.

Trek-Dump

One of the ways in which this summer's testosterone-heavy action-adventure flicks are falling short of last summer's crop is that they're not generating nearly as much, or as diverse a range of, discussion.  I mean, The Dark Knight alone kept the internet going for weeks.  This year, the consensus establishes itself pretty quickly--by the end of its opening weekend, everyone knew that Watchmen was a faithful adaptation, but perhaps a little too faithful for its own good, and that was that.  When it comes to Star Trek, you've got a whole lot of people who liked it, and a few like me who didn't, but everyone seems to have pretty much the same reasons for their opinions.  Here, however, are a few posts that make interesting points or make them particularly well.

• Niall Harrison and I are pretty much opinion-twins when it comes to this film, which happens so rarely that it's noteworthy in and of itself.  He makes a surprisingly rare comparison between the film and New Who, which is something I wanted to touch on in my review but had neither the space nor, just yet, the coherent thoughts for.  After all, when it comes to Doctor Who, I'm exactly in the position of all the newly-minted Star Trek fans who have been brought to the franchise by the movie, and I think it's worth pondering just what, if any, are the differences between J.J. Abrams's reboot and Russell T. Davies's.  (See also in that same post: thoughts on Dollhouse, with which I'm less congruent--I'm not as certain as Niall that an interesting concept makes up for the show's serious failures in plotting--while still agreeing that it has potential and deserves time to find its footing.)


• There have been a lot of essays about the limited number of female characters in the film and their even more limited roles, but my favorite comes from Sady Doyle at the Guardian's Comment is Free (though as usual for a feminist article in the Guardian, you should probably avoid the actual comments).  This is also a good opportunity to mention Doyle's blog, Tiger Beatdown, a recent discovery which I've been greatly enjoying trawling through.  Her focus is mainly real world feminist issues, on which topic she is trenchant, intelligent, and extremely funny, but she also writes about pop culture from a feminist perspective, and I'm particularly fond of these posts about Dollhouse, Sense and Sensibility, and the similarities between Mean Girls and Mad Men.  The whole blog, though, is worth a look.


• Still on the topic of women in the film, Meghan McCarron asks "couldn't they have Starbucked somebody?"  To which my answer is, depends on who you mean by 'they.'  I can't really imagine the creative types in charge of this film taking a move as gutsy as this, nor their studio bosses allowing it.  More importantly, I'm not sure that Starbucking (and as annoying as I ultimately found the character I do like the idea of using her name to describe this action, even if the need for such a verb does reinforce my conviction that we've become a remake culture) would have suited this film.  With the exception of Kirk and Spock--who clearly never would have been considered for such a transformation--the rest of the Enterprise crew have rather limited roles in the film, and their characterization consists mainly of recalling established facts about them (Sulu fences, Scotty and Chekov have accents).  I don't think making Sulu female, for example, would have made a significant statement given how little we got to know the character.  On the other hand, I find myself wishing that some of the secondary, non-canonical roles had been played by women, and in particular I'm wondering why the parent Kirk lost on the Kelvin had to be his father instead of his mother.


• John Rogers, creator of the silly but utterly charming Leverage, writes about Kirk's character arc, or lack of same:
  

  He starts as an arrogant sonovabitch, and becomes a slightly more motivated arrogant sonovabitch. He does not learn to sacrifice, he does not learn to work well with others -- he takes over the goddam ship. He's right all the time, he never doubts he's right, and the only obstacle he occasionally faces is when other people aren't sharp enough to see how frikkin' awesome -- and right -- he is as quickly as they should.

  This is, obviously, a great deal more positive than I was about Kirk, but I do think that Rogers has hit on the essence of what the character was trying to be--the smug bastard who is all the more infuriating because he actually is the best guy for the job.  Unapologetic arrogance can be an extraordinarily appealing character trait, but only if it's warranted, and Kirk's assholish actions throughout the film are, to my mind, insurmountable obstacles to his claim for leadership.
  
  
• Two lists of introductory facts about Trek, ostensibly for new fans who have started writing fanfic, but at least some of these details seem to have escaped the attention of the filmmakers themselves.


• God bless Anthony Lane, whose New Yorker review of the film is typically sharp, funny, and merciless.  Despite the delicious snark, Lane ends up a great deal more positive about the film than I was, but before reaching that conclusion he gets a good dig in at the present craze for reboots and prequels
  

  In all narratives, there is a beauty to the merely given, as the narrator does us the honor of trusting that we will take it for granted. Conversely, there is something offensive in the implication that we might resent that pact, and, like plaintive children, demand to have everything explained. Shakespeare could have kicked off with a flashback in which the infant Hamlet is seen wailing with indecision as to which of Gertrude’s breasts he should latch onto, but would it really have helped us to grasp the dithering prince? Or, to update the question: I know it’s not great when your dad dies a total hero and leaves you orphaned at the same time, but did James T. Kirk have to grow up such a cocky son of a gun?

• This last one is for Hebrew readers: Raz Greenberg reviews the film for Fisheye, expertly capturing the site's distinctive style, and concludes that Abrams's Star Trek is an excellent Star Wars film which just happens to be set in the Star Trek universe.  There's certainly no denying that Kirk's journey, at least, follows Luke Skywalker's quite closely (though like most Star Wars imitations, Star Trek has taken the admittedly wise step of jettisoning Luke's personality and replacing it with Han's), though I think this is probably more an expression of the fact that the Star Wars story--fatherless boy with great destiny is urged by mentor figure to take his place in the universe, triumphs over adversity, defeats villain and wins glory--is still the template for the overwhelming majority of our blockbuster entertainment than a deliberate or even unconscious imitation.

Star Trek

You couldn't say that I've been looking forward to the new Star Trek film. When it was first suggested, the very concept of a reboot going back to the setting and cast of the original series conjured up images of extruded Hollywood product: conventionally attractive actors, the women skeletal and painstakingly permed, the men shiny and boyishly handsome, buckets of money poured into special effects that add up to a film that looks like every other special effects extravaganza of the last half-decade, a few callbacks and famous quotes to appease the diehard fans, and lots of pop music on the soundtrack. Then J.J. Abrams got the directing gig, and I threw my hands up and gave up on the whole endeavor. Abrams is not entirely talentless, and he's produced a few fine hours of television in Alias and Lost, but as a storyteller his palette is extraordinarily limited, and as a director he was responsible for Mission: Impossible III, a jangly, underwritten mess with not a shred of charm or wit for all its desperate attempts to court its audience with big explosions and kinetic, if conceptually leaden, action scenes.

So I was doubtful about the film, but mainly because it sounded like yet another generic action flick. The notion that Abrams and Transformers scribes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman were getting their filthy mitts on one of the cornerstones of my fannish life was less troublesome to me, mainly because I've never considered myself a particular fan of original series Trek. I like the characters well enough, but I know them mostly from tie-in books and the movies. I've seen very little of 60s Star Trek--a few episodes as a young child, when I found them trippy and enjoyable without really understanding what was going on, and a few more in my early teens, when I found them cheesy and shabby-looking, and promptly went back to my true Trekish love, The Next Generation. It was something of a jolt, therefore, to discover myself reacting to the deluge of enthusiastic reviews and squealing blog posts with a kneejerk sneer at their repeated insistence that Abrams had infused the franchise not only with new life and a sense of fun and adventure but with relevance. When Saxon Bullock said of Abrams, Orci and Kurtzman that they "[have] done what seemed like an impossibility. They've actually made Star Trek matter," I found myself turning, completely unwilling, into the butt of an Onion joke.

On one level, I do understand what Bullock and others like him are saying. The last Star Trek film grossed a measly $18M and was watched only by die-hard, and by that point rather embittered, fans, who promptly decried it as the travesty that it was. I know, because I was one of them. To have made a Star Trek film that not only breaks the box office, not only gains critical acclaim from fans and mainstream critics alike, but introduces Trek to a whole new generation of viewers and places the franchise back at the center of the pop culture maelstrom, is no mean feat. A cultural phenomenon lives only as long as it is loved, and Abrams's Star Trek has resuscitated the series long past the point where this seemed even remotely likely. So I do understand why people feel that Abrams is to be commended, and I freely admit that the financial and critical success of his film has taken me completely by surprise, but at the same time I find it almost galling that after 43 years, 29 seasons of television and ten feature films, Star Trek still needs to prove itself, to keep up with the times and stay relevant.

There are ways in which Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek mattered which Abrams's version could never have emulated, such as the first interracial kiss on TV, or a black woman playing a fleet officer (how many actors can say that they received personal praise for their work from Martin Luther King Jr.?), or the presence of Chekov on the Enterprise bridge at the height of the Cold War. There are ways in which Star Trek tried to matter, and which Abrams doesn't seem to have considered emulating, such as Roddenberry's original idea of a female XO. Most of all, Star Trek mattered because it was the foundation, the template, the touchstone, for American science fiction television for the next four decades. Even writers who have rebelled against everything it stood for have, in their own way, reinforced its primal position. At the risk of sounding like the dorkiest and most out of touch of fans, Star Trek doesn't need to be fun. It doesn't need to be watchable or even any good. It doesn't need to pander to the tastes of a twenty-first century audience and alter itself to suit their needs. It's Star Trek, the well from which everything else--the spin-offs, Babylon 5, Farscape, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and countless others--springs.

It seems to me that far from regaining the franchise's relevance, a film like Abrams's Star Trek relinquishes it. Casino Royale is a hell of a good film, but it reinvents James Bond on others' terms, and in so doing acknowledges that the Bond franchise, which once defined the concept, look and feel of espionage films, is now merely a follower, emulating newer and more innovative series. There's something sad about a once-vibrant cultural artifact becoming first venerable and then a forgotten relic, but not nearly as sad as not allowing that artifact to die a dignified death, and more importantly, not allowing its successors room to grow. Every generation comes up with its own stories, but ours seems content to slap new coats of paint on the old ones so that it can keep telling them again and again. I'd much rather boldly go where no one has gone before.

***

The above was written earlier this week, before I'd seen the new Star Trek film, and though I stand by my words they are missing the caveat that none of them would have mattered if the film were any good. Having seen it, I can confirm that Abrams's Star Trek is, indeed, fun and enjoyable. It is also, however, painfully, spectacularly dumb. Some films--Star Wars, Back to the Future, Iron Man--are dumb in a way that you don't really notice while you're watching them because you're too swept up in the adventure. It's only once you've left the theatre and the high of vicarious thrills and pleasure of having been immersed in a really fun bit of storytelling have worn off that you notice all the flaws and plot holes and inconsistencies. Star Trek's dumbness, on the other hand, is inescapable. It suffuses every scene, leaps off the screen and repeatedly rubs our faces in the patchiness of the film's plot and the dimness required of its characters. This doesn't make the film any less fun or enjoyable, but it does render it unengaging. Every time I found myself on the verge of surrendering to spectacle and pop corn adventure, something egregious would happen and I'd find myself slammed back in my seat, thinking 'my God, that was stupid.'

Star Trek's dumbness kicks in about ten minutes in and never lets up. The film's prologue is relatively dumbness-free, if only because we don't really understand what's going on, but once we segue to James Kirk taking a joyride in a vintage sports car, it's bye-bye brain cells. In fact, our first introduction to Kirk is so dumb that its dumbness extends to the meta-level. Within the story, it's dumb that Kirk is so intent on his thrills that he drives the car into a ravine, but it's even dumber that we're expected to believe the acrobatics with which he saves himself, and even dumber than that that this absurdly over the top stunt is supposed to endear the character to us rather than make him seem inhuman, and perhaps a little psychotic. And the dumbness keeps on coming. Starfleet command is so understaffed that cadets are pressed into service on all its ships. Pike names Kirk, a disgraced cadet, as his first officer. After acquitting himself admirably as acting captain, Spock misplaces his brain and orders the Enterprise away from the fray even though Earth hangs in the balance. Kirk just happens to be marooned within walking distance of the cave in which, after a not only dumb but bizarre interlude fighting CGI wampas, he just happens to find the equally marooned future Spock. The villain, Nero, a cut-rate imitation of Star Trek: Nemesis's Shinzon held together with tattoos and clichés, is dumbness personified. And as a final bit of dumbness, at the end of the film Kirk is made captain of the Enterprise before even properly graduating from the academy.

What makes Star Trek's dumbness so unendurable is that the film itself is often so joyless. Young Kirk's joyride ought to be the equivalent of Marty McFly strumming his electric guitar and getting launched across the room--stupid, but endearingly and believably childish. Instead, the actor is curiously emotionless, arrogant but not particularly happy at his illicit adventure or his narrow escape. Other action scenes are, similarly, well put together but perfunctory and predictable: Kirk is dangling from a precipice, so in a minute Sulu will rescue him; Kirk is threatened by a CGI beast, so someone's going to shoot it from off-screen. Most egregious is the climactic assault against Nero, which is painted as a last-ditch, Hail Mary effort even though it involves ramming Nero's ship with another ship carrying a container full of the film's McGuffin, red matter, a single drop of which is enough to implode a planet. There's not even a hint of last-minute, "what you fail to realize is that my ship is dragging mines!"-style cleverness to leaven the obviousness of this resolution.

The film does quite a bit better with its characters. The cast embody their inherited roles well, and though most of them aren't given much to do, just about everyone has a standout scene in which they are allowed to be, undeniably, the characters we know and love: Bones sneaking Kirk onto the Enterprise and making him sicker and sicker with his cures, Sulu keeping his slightly flustered cool as he fails to take the ship into warp, Chekov and his ridiculous accent repeatedly coming to the rescue, Uhura keeping her old job even as the plot invests it with added importance and keeps it, and her, from devolving into Gwen DeMarco-ish insignificance, and Scotty, well, all of the time, though I was especially fond of his comment about disintegrating Archer's dog (that said, surely most Enterprise survivors would have preferred that Scotty test his theory on the dickhead admiral himself). I like the concept, if not the execution, of the Spock/Uhura romance--a romance with Vulcans needs to be handled delicately, and Star Trek makes Enterprise's depiction of a similar relationship seem positively subtle in comparison.

The heart and soul of the film, though, are Kirk and Spock. Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto commit fully to their roles, and quickly come to inhabit Kirk's swagger and Spock's sharpness. But in its depiction of the growth of the characters' friendship, and their coming to assume their respective roles on the Enterprise bridge, Star Trek makes some rather curious and aggravating choices. My Kirk was first and foremost the one from the movies. The one who got old and fat, who paid the wages of his youthful womanizing with a son who wanted nothing to do with him, and of his meteoric career with an admiralty he loathed. This Kirk was shocked, simply flabbergasted, at no longer being that brash young man who could do no wrong, but in a way he never stopped being that person. Even dying he was full of wonder and a sense of adventure. The child who is the father of that man, who hasn't yet experienced loss and learned humility, is a less interesting character, and I was expecting to be a little put off by Star Trek's Kirk. But I was still thrown by the film's decision to make Kirk not only arrogant but a complete tool.

Abrams's Kirk is the kind of guy who won't stop trying to chat up a girl even after she's made it clear she's not interested, and who doesn't even have the decency to pretend that he's not interested in his officer's girlfriend. He's the guy who doesn't just tweak the parameters of the Kobayashi Maru simulation, but who sits through it, smirking like a kid who's figured out how to enable God mode on Halo 2, until it hands him his victory (and who, in keeping with the film's recurring theme of dumbness, expects to get away with this blatant cheat). Most of all, he's the guy who publicly humiliates a man by goading him with the memory of his recently murdered mother, so that he can strip him of his command. Kirk's character doesn't have a journey in the film. It's the rest of the world that has to journey from thinking him a screw-up to accepting his right go command, and the film validates his dickish behavior through the reaction of the crew and later Spock, who accept Kirk's superior claim to the captain's chair, through his promotion at the end of the film, and most of all through old Spock, who urges Kirk to bully his younger self so that they can take the roles God intended for them as alpha and beta males. Because heaven forbid the brainy, level-headed guy should be captain and the gutsy thrill-seeker should be the XO, even though that arrangement actually makes a lot more sense, and worked pretty well in seven seasons of The Next Generation, the first couple of years of Deep Space Nine, and the first half of this very movie.

In the end, I find that my main objection to J.J. Abrams's Star Trek isn't that he's changed too much but rather than he, Orci, and Kurtzman are continuing the trends that made the last days of Rick Berman and Brannon Braga's reign over the franchise so unbearable. As they did in Enterprise and to a lesser extent in Insurrection and Nemesis, Abrams abandons Gene Roddenberry's vision of the Federation as a force for peace and civilization, and valorizes strength of arms over intellect. Kirk's raw-knuckles fury, Pike tells us, is something the Federation is missing, and when Kirk offers a defeated Nero and his crew aid (an act he describes, with superior detachment, as very Federation) even Spock demurs. Most of all, Abrams continues Berman and Braga's policy of denigrating intellect by marginalizing and vilifying the Vulcans, whether by painting them as vain and bigoted, or by destroying their planet and relegating one of the founding races of the Federation to a rag-tag band of refugees, or by having both Sarek and his older self urge Spock to ignore logic, listen to his heart, and embrace Kirk's ethos of cheerful violence and bloody revenge.

After pointing out so many of its flaws, it'll probably seem strange for me to conclude by saying that Star Trek is still fun and enjoyable. Ultimately, the film is too inconsequential for me to stay angry at it. The frequent comparisons to Iron Man seem apt, though perhaps not for the reasons the people making them intended. Both films are entertaining bits of fluff elevated by good performances (though Pine and Quinto lack either the talent or the chutzpah to walk away with their film as Robert Downey Jr. did with his) but in no way deserving of the wildly overblown praise lavished on them. After the roller-coaster of heightened and lowered expectations, J.J. Abrams delivered exactly the film I thought he would--shiny, fast-paced, and desperately striving for a coolness it can never possess precisely because it wants it so badly. There are worse ways to spend a couple of hours, but far from restoring it, Star Trek is the last nail in the coffin of the franchise's relevance.

Back Through the Wormhole: Table of Contents

I've noticed several people linking to the series now that it's over, and to facilitate this, here is a link post.

1. Introduction


2. The Two DS9s - Did Deep Space Nine only get good in its later seasons?


3. The Menagerie - Alien races on the show


4. Looking for Ron Moore in All the Wrong Places - The obligatory Battlestar Galactica comparison


5. What Does God Need With a Space Station? - Deep Space Nine's treatment of religion


6. Ode to Kira - Just what it says


7. The Justice Trick - Odo and his troubled relationships with Kira and morality


8. Odds & Ends - A few more comments

Back Through the Wormhole, Part VIII: Odds & Ends

Believe it or not, after seven installments there's still stuff left to say about Deep Space Nine. Here are a few topics that didn't grow into full-fledged essays:

• It's an axiom of television writing that romance, and specifically romantic pursuit, is interesting, but established relationships, and most especially marriages, are boring. Perhaps because it was generally strongest when telling stories about the conventional and the mundane, on Deep Space Nine the reverse was true. Its romantic plotlines were usually obvious and uninspired (and occasionally offensive), but its depictions of long-term romantic relationships were winning and, yes, romantic.
  
  Dax and Worf come together in the most insipid of ways, and the fifth season episodes that focus on their courtship are tiresome and in some cases ("Let He Who is Without Sin") borderline unwatchable. Once they marry, however, the writing for their relationship achieves a whole new level. If previously there had been a sense that the romance between the two characters was overwhelming its participants, that they were being forced into standard romantic templates whether their personalities suited those templates or not (for instance, the wedding imperiled at the last minute in "You Are Cordially Invited"), the scenes and episodes that focus on them after their marriage truly seem to be about Worf and Dax, and the entity that they create together. The most obvious example is "Change of Heart," which for my money is the most romantic hour Deep Space Nine ever produced. Worf and Dax feel like themselves, and yet there's clearly something more to them, a togetherness which they are only beginning to explore and appreciate. In other episodes--the dinner scene in "Resurrection," the babysitting subplot in "Time's Orphan"--they are comfortable with one another, and that comfort extends to their interactions with others. It's clear that marriage agrees with them and that it makes them happy--which only makes it so much more tragic when Jadzia dies.
  
  Though the episodes focusing on Odo's unrequited love for Kira acknowledge the unsavory aspects of his obsession--his devastation and self-loathing when he finally owns up to his feelings in "Heart of Stone," his emotional collapse, jealous tantrum, and subsequent choice to cut himself even further off from his feelings when she becomes romantically involved with Shakaar in "Crossfire," his future self's choice to commit mass murder on her behalf in "Children of Time"--once the decision is made to put them together that unwholesomeness is ignored, even as the viewers' faces are rubbed in it. The consequences of Odo's betrayal during the Dominion occupation are swept away in a single scene in "You Are Cordially Invited"--a scene which we don't even get to see--and the episode in which Odo and Kira finally come together, "His Way," expects us to find it romantic that Odo would rather date a Kira doll than the real thing, and that this is what makes Kira realize she has feelings for him.
  
  Once Odo and Kira get together, however, their relationship is loving, supportive, and even sweet. I've spoken already about the effect that Kira's sophisticated morality has on Odo, but she also gets something out of the relationship. Odo's unswerving dedication and loyalty during the trying seventh season is practically a return to the deep friendship the characters shared in the show's earlier seasons, but with the added heft of intimacy and emotional openness. As early as "The Reckoning"--only one episode after their relationship begins--Odo is sufficiently respectful of Kira's desires, and of her right to make her own choices, that he argues against banishing the Prophet possessing her because he knows that she wants to be its vessel. This is a complete reversal of his attitude in "Children of Time," in which Kira was an object to be rescued, regardless or her feelings on the matter.
  
  Deep Space Nine, in other words, is really, really bad at courtship--I haven't even mentioned the embarrassingly paint-by-numbers manner ("We're just friends!" "Yes!" *smooch*) in which Ezri and Bashir are rushed into a relationship, in spite of there having been no indication of an attraction between them in any of their previous interactions--and really good at established relationships. Just about the only exception are Sisko and Kasidy Yates, and this is probably because their courtship is so normal. It's not an explosive romance between polar opposites like Worf and Dax, or a years-long unspoken infatuation that suddenly blossoms into true love like Odo and Kira. They're just two people, with no small amount of life behind them and serious commitments to both work and family, who fall in love and work hard to fit themselves into each other's lives. They date for several years, inasmuch as their demanding careers will allow them to, because neither one of them is willing to drop everything they care for just to be together (and in an episode like "For the Cause," both prioritize their ideals over their relationship), and finally discover that they've become a family, as committed to one another as they are to the other pillars of their existence. (Another reason that the Sisko-Kasidy courtship works so well is that Avery Brooks is so good at playing infatuation--he even makes the throwaway romance in "Second Sight" appealing. Just about the only thing more adorable than Avery Brooks playing a man in love is Avery Brooks playing with a baby, and the only thing more adorable than that is Michael Dorn, in full Klingon makeup, playing with a baby.)
  
  Deep Space Nine is also deeply respectful of marriage (just about the only show I can think of that outdoes it in this respect is the first season of Heroes, which started by imperiling most of its married couples in ways that invited the audience to root for their dissolution, and then turned around and bolstered nearly all of them). In "The House of Quark," O'Brien is concerned because Keiko has closed down the station's school and is clearly depressed and out of sorts. It's not unusual for O'Brien to be a devoted and concerned spouse--his and Keiko's relationship is the strongest and most committed in the series--but what makes the episode special is that characters outside the marriage recognize the danger to it and treat it with all due seriousness. Sisko immediately acquiesces to O'Brien's request that he allocate a cargo bay in which Keiko can create an arboretum. Bashir, who has never been married, and who in "Armageddon Game" told O'Brien that he doesn't think men with their careers should marry, is the one to point out that Keiko needs and deserves professional fulfillment just as much as Miles does, and that an arboretum won't achieve that goal. On the other hand, as the series progresses and as Miles's friendship with Bashir deepens, the O'Briens' marriage comes to seem more and more perfunctory. In "Hard Time," Keiko can't do much to help Miles other than wring her hands, and it's to Bashir, and not her, that Miles confesses his guilt (we never find out whether she learns of it). By the time the series ends, the relationship between the two men is practically a marriage in its own right.


• Since we've already mentioned same-sex relationships, let's talk about "Rejoined." I dreaded this episode during my rewatch, because Star Trek doesn't have a good history with homosexuality. Its good intentions usually lead to preachy, unsubtle pap like The Next Generation's "The Outcast," in which we learn that gay people just want to love each other, or Enterprise's "Stigma," which comes out against suppressing AIDS research as a way of attacking homosexuals--truly a blistering, timely statement in 2003. "Rejoined" is a better hour of television than either of these episodes, but ultimately it is no less confused and uninformed about its subject matter.
  
  The most important point in "Rejoined"'s favor is the matter of fact way in which it treats a romantic relationship between two women. When Jadzia says that she used to be married to Lenara Kahn, when Kira wonders why the two women can't resume their previous hosts' marriage, when Jadzia says that she loves Lenara, no one bats an eye. It's considered perfectly normal--in this episode, at least--for two women to love each other. The taboo against homosexuality is replaced with a Trill taboo against 'reassociation'--romantic relationships between joined Trills whose previous hosts were also involved. Instead of trying to argue that taboo away (as "The Outcast" did), "Rejoined" accepts its existence and depicts the different reactions of people faced with it. Some, like Jadzia, are brave and defiant. Others, like Lenara's brother and colleagues, accept it unthinkingly. Lenara is somewhere in between. She wants Jadzia but isn't willing to sacrifice everything to be with her. It's a refreshing acknowledgement that neither homosexuality nor homophobia are uniform and undifferentiated.
  
  The problem with reading "Rejoined" strictly as a statement against homophobia is that the Trill taboo actually makes a certain amount of sense. Whether or not the writers intended for us to have this reaction, there's something disturbing about the way that Jadzia is shunted aside once she and Lenara reconnect romantically. When Lenara and Jadzia say 'you' to one another, they're talking about, and becoming, their symbionts' long-dead hosts. They are living in the past and sublimating the people they are in the present. The resulting relationship feels unhealthy in a way that homosexual relationships clearly aren't. (There's a similarly creepy undertone when Worf, and later Bashir, become Ezri's lovers--in the former case because Worf clearly believes that he's getting Jadzia back, and in the latter because it's hard to believe that Bashir hasn't carried his feelings for Jadzia over to Ezri when he says that he's in love with her.)
  
  A more significant problem, however, is that the attitude that male, female or tentacled, we love who we love is, in its own way, puritanical, in that it leaves sex out of the equation. Jadzia, one of the most sexually adventurous characters in the series, who has been the lover of men and women as both men and women, is only ever seen associating romantically with men. Are we to understand that Torias Dax's emotional attraction to Nilani Kahn somehow overrides Jadzia's sexual preferences? There can be no preexisting physical attraction between these two women, who have never met one another before this episode, and yet there's clearly tension between them. That tension, however, is derived purely from the emotional connection. By arguing that it doesn't matter what gender your partner is, the episode comes close to arguing that sexual attraction has no component in romance. Coupled with the fact that this is the first and last time we see a same-sex couple on this show (the Intendant and her seraglio don't count), it's hard not to read the episode as saying that it's OK to hook up with someone of your own gender if you love them to a degree that overrides your better judgement or sexual orientation, but not simply as a matter of course.


• Since we've already mentioned the Intendant, let's talk about the mirror universe. By the time Deep Space Nine ended, the episodes set in this universe were clearly the writers' way of cutting loose, a chance for Avery Brooks to play space pirate and Nana Visitor to vamp in tight leather (it's also worth noting that Michael Dorn, as the Alliance's Regent, is a hell of a lot of fun in these episodes, in which he subverts Worf's dignity and gravitas in what is without a doubt one of the series's comedic highlights). After a while, these repetitions became tired, and by the time Ezri made out with Kira in "The Emperor's New Cloak" we could all see what the draw was supposed to be. So it was something of a surprise to return to "Crossover" and discover a dark and disturbing hour of television. I don't understand how I managed to miss this the first time around, but the Intendant is Dukat. Like him, she's a narcissist, a person completely without morality or conscience who nevertheless wants to be loved and revered as a saint. She claims to care about the human slaves, to be their friend and deplore their suffering. When they rebel, she chides herself for being too lenient, and laments the executions she orders. She is also, like Dukat, a sexual predator, and because she's a woman that quality is exaggerated and made prominent. In her subsequent appearances, the Intendant is reduced to a walking libido, and her more interesting parallels with Dukat are downplayed.
  
  It's unfortunate that Deep Space Nine failed to capitalize on the mirror universe's capacity to, well, hold up a dark mirror to its characters. "Crossover" is a scary parallel to the Cardassian occupation--its depiction of the suffering of the human slaves is as disquieting as the flashback scenes in "Necessary Evil"--and its follow-ups could have acted as similar commentaries on the series's events. The second mirror universe episode, "Through the Looking Glass," in which our Sisko is dispatched to prevent the mirror Jennifer from creating a weapon that will destroy the fledgling human rebellion, might almost have been trying to do just this. Jennifer's dilemma--to support her rebelling people or to try to prevent the loss of life their rebellion will inevitably cause--mirrors both the Bajorans' predicament during the occupation and the Maquis situation in the present day. Her arguments against Sisko's actions are almost word-for-word his arguments against his former friend who leaves Starfleet to join the Maquis (and like the Maquis, the rebels are hiding in the Badlands). In later sequels, the mirror universe episodes might have explored the challenges of creating a stable society after centuries of enslavement--which obviously parallels the situation on Bajor after the occupation--or introduced the Dominion into the mix. What we got instead were increasingly anemic adventure yarns.

And that, I believe, is that. It's a scary fact, but I've written more about Deep Space Nine in the last month than I've written about Battlestar Galactica in almost two and a half years. I suppose if there's a conclusion or a closing statement I'd like to leave you with it's that Deep Space Nine was a really, really good show, though obviously not without it's flaws, and that it should be a more important part of the conversation when discussing SF on TV, or the capabilities of television in general. Those of you who haven't seen it might want to give it a look. Those of you who watched it years ago might be surprised by what you find if you return to it. Thanks a lot for reading.