Better Than I Remembered

TNG Season 2
We're currently making our way through season 2 of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I never liked season 2.  I have always disliked Dr. Pulaski, and for some reason, she dominates my memories of the whole season.  I think I was bothered by the way she treated Lt. Data, but I realize now that there is another reason: I'm weirdly loyal to Dr. Crusher (as I seem to be generally to all redheads).

I'm also a Cancer.

Now that I'm watching it all again, though, I think I misjudged the second season.  There are a lot of good episodes, and a lot of important stuff happens.  We learn a lot more about Worf, we learn a lot more about Data, and Picard is pursued by those twin terrors that continue to haunt him for the rest of the series: The Borg, and Lwaxana Troi.

Which is worse?  They're both unwelcome touch.

Mostly, though, I'm just so glad to be watching TNG.  Unlike the original series, which is all about one megalomaniac actor captain saving the day in increasingly improbable and sleazy ways, this show is about the whole bridge crew.  It's an ensemble cast, and it's much closer to the ideal of the Federation than its predecessor.  (On the other hand, you should hear Marina Sirtis tell "the costume story".)

And during all of this, we see in the news that Patrick Stewart is returning to TV as Jean-Luc Picard!  I could not be more excited to see what stories they have to tell about Picard years after the Enterprise.  He has long been a template of leadership to me, and as others have said before me, he's the captain we need today.

Although the exhibit that inspired this whole project closed earlier this year, our trek continues.  Engage!

Side-Trek: The Movies

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

My understanding was that the odd numbered movies were the bad ones. I’ve heard this common nerd knowledge repeated many a time among my circle of friends. So I had low expectations for this movie.

I was pleasantly surprised.

That beard is actually attached to his chest.

Now, first, I’ll confess that someone who watches Star Trek: The Motion Picture without first sitting through Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Animated Series might not be so favorably disposed. I spent the last year plus watching every single one of those 105 episodes, so the high production values of ST: tMP blew me away. Classy neutral Federation uniforms? Check. Wildly attractive slightly alien woman to fuel the wet dreams of the predominantly male fan base? Check. Lots of long, loving, lingering shots of the docked Enterprise? Check. This movie cemented the precedents for many Star Trek movie traditions that persist even now.

Shatner toned down the worst of his overacting tendencies, and there’s no love interest for him in this movie. His plot line centers around his drawn out pissing match with the Enterprise’s new commander and candidate for the Herrenrasse, Captain Decker. (Every Federation commander we’ve encountered to date looks like a 1950’s football captain, even in the cartoon.)

Rand-om cameo.

The plot of the movie is solid, even if littered with “alien” sex appeal vehicle Lt. Ilia in a long sleeved bathrobe so short, a stiff breeze aboard the Enterprise would’ve made this movie unsuitable for anyone under the age of 17.

Favorite moments: Bones, called out of retirement, showing up to the Enterprise in a deep V with a beard that any PNW hipster could wear with pride - AND - Janice Rand making a cameo in the early part of the movie! I didn’t forget you, Yeoman Janice. Welcome to the future. I s’pose the basketweave fez hairdo is no longer popular in the Federation twenty years later.


Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

This movie had the largest opening weekend to date when it was released in 1982. In general, people seemed to like it better than ST:tMP, though to my eyes they seem equally good movies.

I do appreciate that this movie deals heavily with Kirk coming to grips with his own aging. Early on, Kirk gets a pair of eye glasses from Bones as a birthday gift, along with a bottle of Romulan ale that I’m certain is blue raspberry Kool-Aid. For a laugh, check out Kirk’s interior decorating scheme:

The prime directive meets the second amendment.

This movie does have its genuinely scary moments. When Chekov and his expendable pal happen upon Khan (played by Ricardo Montablan, reprising his role from the Star Trek: The Original Series) and his fellow augments, there’s a skin-crawling scene in which space brain parasites burrow into their ears and make them into plot-enabling double agents for Khan, whose pectoral muscles are reportedly real, but seriously, where are his nipples? In his armpits?

Nipples were considered genetic imperfections.

This movie introduces Kirk’s ex-lover, a scientist named Carol Marcus, and his son, a hothead named David who looks and acts a lot like his dad. And then there’s Saavik, a Vulcan Federation cadet with a lot to prove, played by a pre-Cheers Kirstie Alley. There’s a lot going on.

The thing I find so frustrating about this movie is how flawed and boring Khan is. He is genetically engineered to be the perfect enemy, and yet he’s so annoyingly and predictably stupid in his revenge fixation. Plus, Ricardo Montablan is the only person in the movie who can out-overact Shatner. I’ve been saying “It is very cold in spaaaace” for weeks now.

The movie ends with a truly moving bromance goodbye for Kirk and Spock. It’s worth a watch, if you’re on the fence, but bring the popcorn.


Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

This one is poorly written, much too long, and travels the spectrum between boring and shabby. I think a fan edit is in order.

Oh, my.

Broad strokes: Spock put his spirit into McCoy’s body before he died, so the crew has to find Spock’s body and bring it on to Vulcan where his brain swap can be undone. Along the way Kirk’s son gets murdered, because we can’t have a hot young son of Kirk running around the Federation and competing with Shatner for babes.

Don’t even get me started on Christopher Lloyd’s bumbling and caricaturish Klingon villain.

Bright spots: First on-screen Targ! Sulu, Uhura, Scott and Chekov all get to shine as they steal the Enterprise for Mission: Save Spock. And we get to see Sulu’s sweet-ass leather cape!

Sidenote: Vulcan sex is super boring and seems to comprise of lightly touching each other’s fingers. We finally get to see a young Spock en flagrante and that’s it?


Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

If you’re looking for a Star Trek movie with the original cast that’s a fun, widely accessible scifi flick, here’s a great choice. This film, like Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, was directed by Leonard Nimoy. A hulking probe shows up at Earth and starts broadcasting humpback whalesong. The problem? All the Earth whales died centuries ago.

So of course Kirk and Spock logically derive that they need to go back in time and pick up some whales. So they slingshot around the sun to achieve this. Spock just rustles up the math on how to do it in his head, ‘cause Spock.

The entertainment value comes from seeing The Original Series crew playing around in 1986. Watching Chekov ask a cop in San Francisco for directions to the “nuclear wessels” is just good fun. And then there’s Kirk and Spock trying out 20th century cursing. Double dumb ass on you.

Contractually obligated romance at its best.

There’s a love interest for Kirk in this movie: a marine biologist named Dr. Gillian Taylor who’s 21 years younger than Kirk, and it shows. Turns out the part was initially promised to Eddie Murphy, a fan of the franchise whose star was rising. But there were concerns on both sides of that arrangement: Murphy wanted to play an alien, not a marine biology professor, and the Star Trek muckety mucks worried that Murphy would expose their franchise to ridicule. Thankfully, Shatner solved the problem by insisting that Kirk must have a love interest in this movie, since Kirk had suffered under a three-movie dry-spell. Enter Catherine Hicks’s 80’stastic lady mullet.

Kirk had lots of demands for this movie, beyond onscreen lust targets. He also demanded a bigger paycheck ($2.5 million) and the privilege of directing the next movie. I’m sure there’s a little “if Nimoy can do it, I can do it better” at work there. The frenemy status between Shatner and Nimoy deserves its own blog post.

I’m sure I won’t shatter anyone’s expectations when I say that the captain and crew of the Enterprise save the day, and alter the future by bringing some whales back with them. Huzzah, cue credits.

(But seriously, those whales most assuredly died after traveling 300 years into the future. The ocean salinity in 2286 is different, and oceans in which humpback whales have been long absent probably have an insufficient food chain. I give those whales a few weeks to live in 2286, tops.)

New Year, New Trek

We Finished Something!
We finally finished the final season of the original Star Trek.  The last season was better than the first two, on average, but still not great.  In particular, the final episode was a real stinker.  But let's not dwell on that.

Ancient Roman planet, Nazi planet, Chicago gangster planet,
Native American planet, and cowboy planet weren't enough.
Now there's Abe Lincoln planet, too.

There were actually several good episodes in season three: The Enterprise Incident, The Cloud Minders, and the poetically named Is There in Truth No Beauty? were all pretty decent.  If the whole show had been that good, it would have been much easier to watch.

But on New Year's Day 2018, we finished the first section of our trek, albeit a few months behind schedule.  That leads us to the next phase: Star Trek the Animated Series.

Trek In Toontown
Until we read about it in a museum, we had no idea there had ever been an animated series.  It is not generally considered Trek canon, but bits of the stories there have been referenced elsewhere in canon.  And I am so glad we made it part of our journey.

Prices and participation may vary.  Chekov not included.

We are already half-way through with the animated stuff.  It goes really quickly.  For one, the episodes are only half an hour.  For another, there are only 22 episodes in total.  The whole animated series takes about half as long as one season of the original series.

But that's only scratching the surface.

It turns out that, although the animated series is also hit-and-miss, it has a higher hit ratio than the original series.  And since it's kid-friendly, we don't have to keep cringing at the hyper-sexual captain.  All of the characters are voiced by the original cast members.  But my favorite part (and I'm not sure why this should be so) is that Shatner really tones done the overacting.  No weird cadence, no dramatic volume shifts, he just reads his lines.  It makes Kirk look like a much more reasonable and competent leader.

For some reason, Pavel Chekov isn't on the show, although there has been one episode so far written by Walter Koenig.  It's about Spock becoming a giant clone of himself in the service of an immortal monster.  More about that later.

Instead of Chekov, we get a tripedal alien named Arex.  He looks kind of like a really tall cousin of E.T., with three arms and three legs.  There's also a creepy cat-lady on the bridge, who is voiced by Majel Barrett and purrs a lot after her lines.

What?  The giant Spock thing?  Okay.  You've stuck with me this long, so here you go.

Giant Spock, looking menacingly at regular-sized everybody.

The giant Spock thing was bad.  It was nonsense.  And in the end (spoiler!) he stays a giant and telepathically transfers a copy of his mind back into his original tiny body, so now there are two Spocks.  And one is a giant, who is also effectively immortal.

It was so bad it was good.

Isn't It Ironic?
As bad as I felt the original series was, I really didn't get much ironic enjoyment out of it.  I kind of hated most of it.  But this... is different somehow.

I find that at worst, some episodes are a tad boring.  But some are actually pretty good, such as Yesteryear, in which Spock goes back in time to complete a time loop and prevent himself from dying as a boy.  It's hands-down better than anything on the original series.

And then... then there are episodes like The Magicks of Megas-Tu.

Satan.  On Star Trek.  In Space.

I will try to summarize to give you the full effect of the thing in one sentence.  The Enterprise goes to a place where magic is real, Spock draws a pentagram on the floor, Kirk has a magic fight with a pilgrim, and they rescue Satan from actual Salem witches, and their new friend Satan who is still actually Satan is always shirtless and ripped.

It's so bad, and I LOVE it.

Are you ready for some gifs?

This episode is just 24 minutes of stuff that beggars belief.

The Magicks of Megas-Tu: Gif-pocalypse

Aren't you glad this is a thing that exists?

Trek Literalism

If you've read any of my earlier posts, you've probably noticed that I am having a hard time enjoying the original Star Trek series.  Here's the short version: it often comes off sexist, the acting seems pretty cheesy, and some of the plots are completely and totally unbelievable.

There.  You're caught up.

It's this last point that most inspires today's topic: unbelievable plots.


Expectations
I expect certain things from sci-fi:  I expect it to be self-consistent, and I expect the plots to seem plausible.  The plots I dislike most in the original Trek are things like "hrm, an exact copy of Earth, well, let's not investigate that at all" or "look, a planet full of English-speaking humans with TV studios and guns, whose culture is coincidentally just like ancient Rome, that's normal" or "mobster planet, that makes sense, let's take it over and be mobsters, too".


Literalism vs Contextualism
As I was ranting about this to a friend, she stopped me and pointed out that I was a "Star Trek literalist".  Like biblical literalists, I have been refusing to interpret these stories in the context in which they were written.  If the Enterprise shows up to a mobster planet, then I think they are telling me that a mobster planet literally exists in the universe of Star Trek.

So the mobster episode, I guess, is a not really a story about a star ship that finds a mobster planet; it's a story about mobsters, which the writers had fun telling, and for which Star Trek was merely a venue.  I'm trying to be sympathetic to the fact that this show was being made by people, and sometimes, those people were just having fun and not trying to create an alternate universe of truths.


I Have A Context, Too
I've been trying to consider Star Trek more in context of its time and place.  What's considered sexist now was considered progressive 50 years ago.  (Even so, I still can't excuse the abusive dynamics of, for example, The Enemy Within.)  But it's still tough for me to contextualize the original series.

The world I was born in was markedly different from the world in which the original Trek was born.  And the world I live in now feels very different from the one I was born into.

Even over the past two or three years, I feel like the world around me is becoming more "woke".  Just look at a trans woman unseating the author of a bathroom bill, or the long list of people speaking out about abuse in Hollywood and the way public attention on the problem is having a positive effect.  So the gender and sex dynamics of the Trek of 50 years ago are hard to swallow, no matter how much I try to contextualize them.  But I digress.

As far as plots go, an important difference between the world I grew up in and the world in which Star Trek premiered is that I grew up watching sci-fi that was inspired by the immense fandom that the original Trek collected in syndication.  When it was new, the original series was exploring new territory for television, and there was nothing much to compare it to.  The audience at that time had nowhere near the expectations for it that nerds have for new shows today.

After Trekkies worldwide had spent 20 years picking over the bones of the original and rationalizing it into something resembling a literal narrative, Star Trek: The Next Generation was born.  Unlike the original, TNG debuted to an audience of nerds who had certain expectations.  I think this context made it more consistent and easier to digest from a literalist point view.  So perhaps I've always taken a literalist approach to sci-fi because I was raised on TNG and on other stories that mostly work when taken that way.  Maybe that viewpoint is a privilege of my own time and place.


Pushing Forward
As we push toward the end of season 3, I'm trying to be more forgiving of 50-year-old flaws.  I'm trying to lower my expectations a bit and meet the original Trek where it is.  (But I'm very, very much looking forward to starting TNG next year.)  Here's to the last 19 episodes!

Cheers!

A Piece of the Action

Status Report
It's week 34 of the Seven Year Trek.  We have managed to consume 47 episodes of the original Star Trek so far.  This means we're more than half-way done with TOS, but moving at about 70% of our intended pace.  Progress has been slow, largely due to low morale.  And morale is low because... Well, this is what we need to talk about.  We need to talk to you about "A Piece of the Action".

A Piece of the Action
Season 2, episode 17, entitled "A Piece of the Action".  I have seen some disgusting crud in my time, but "A Piece of the Action" takes the cake.  The Enterprise visits a planet entirely composed of 1920's Chicago gangsters.

All books on subjects related to
ancient Earth must use German
Gothic fonts per Federation law.

If this is news to you, take a moment to let that sink in.

The Lotians are, according to the episode, a highly intelligent but "impressionable" species whose culture may have been contaminated 100 years prior by contact with a Federation ship.  What apparently happens is that someone on that ship left behind a book called "Chicago Mobs of the Twenties".  In a gothic font.

So, we are supposed to believe that they found this book and utterly rewrote their entire society, including their technology, architecture, event their language and accents, to turn their entire planet into that thing they read about in that alien history book.

Even for Star Trek, this is completely unbelievable.

Koik!

So Kirk (pronouncing his name "Koik") forcibly takes over the ruling mob families and unites them into a peaceful... um... still mob planet.

According to historians, Gene Roddenberry wanted more comedy episodes after the success of "The Trouble with Tribbles" (which, incidentally, is only just okay).  Maybe this was comedy gold when it was filmed in 1967.  It's hard for me to say what was good 50 years ago.

Some of my favorite TNG episodes are comedies.  Will "A Fistful of Datas", itself already 25 years old, be this tired and painful for my son in 25 years?  Will I still think it's funny?  Will I still find the plot more or less believable?

This is more difficult than I realized

Status Update
We've made it through the end of season 1 and well into season 2 of the original Star Trek.  It is getting increasingly difficult to get excited about it, though.

Initially, I was writing about each week's episodes and getting into the details, but it's just too tedious.  Especially when I find myself wanting to write the same things every time:

• the dialog is often cheesy
• the acting is often bad
• the characters often do things that make no sense (including, but not limited to, flushing radioactive waste into the ship's ventilation system)
• military officers regularly act in ways completely inappropriate to military service
• we rarely meet any aliens, and those we do meet often look exactly like humans
• the majority of the "new life" we've encountered, we've destroyed
• the majority of women with speaking roles have slept with or are about to sleep with Kirk
• Kirk is basically portrayed as the Übermensch, and regularly:
• beats Spock at chess
• uses logic to convince computers to destroy themselves
• holds his own in fights against beings of super-human strength

The Dumb Spock Game

I have discovered a fun new game.  While you watch, imagine that Spock is not, in fact, brilliantly intelligent and computer-like.  Imagine instead that Spock, half-human and half-Vulcan, is actually of sub-par intelligence, even for humans.  He's very serious, though, and very proud of his Vulcan heritage, so everyone humors him.

When he gives incredible statistics out of nowhere, Kirk knows Spock is just making things up.  It's like when (just for fun) I ask my toddler what time it is, and he just says some random number he's heard.  We know that's not the actual time, and we know he's not basing it on anything at all, but it's cute and we don't discourage him.

This is how Kirk beats Spock at chess, and why he teases Spock about being too "logical".  This is why Spock's father is so disappointed in him.  Mentally, Spock is a toddler, and an embarrassment to all Vulcans.

Final Thoughts

I'll simply leave you with this: the most needlessly slow and awkward way Kirk could choose to sit.

Janice and Kirk

The Dagger in the Mind

The Enterprise brings aboard a Doctor Manette-type character; a smart man who’s been ruined by wrongful incarceration.  I enjoyed this one, though our poor Doctor Manette yells too much and it quickly gets annoying.  Also, in the future, flipping a switch in the wrong manner will instantly kill you.

The Corbomite Maneuver

Classic smart-aliens-are-testing-us-scenario, in which the Enterprise faces off against a spinning Windows icon and a menacing disco ball and everyone almost dies.  Uhura is suddenly wearing gold, not red.

The Menagerie, Pt. I & II

The classic human’s-been-captured-for-the-alien-zoo plot, played out over two episodes.  Spock pulls a hugely ballsy gambit to help a former coworker, and that adds lots of artificial drama to the storytelling.  The Federation has the technology to save the life of Captain Pike, who's been burned to a crisp and should be dead, but Future Medical Miracles! Unfortunately, future tech can't give us any communication from Pike other than one beep for yes, two beeps for no. Excellent appearance from Roddenberry’s wife, Majel Barrett.

"I recorded you breathing at night
and made it my new ringtone!"

The Conscience of the King

Kirk investigates a former butchering dictator posing as a Shakespearean actor.  The actor’s great; his manic daughter is a walking crazy girlfriend meme, and Kirk’s the honey pot, using the daughter to get to the father.  Sidenote: I always love hearing Uhura sing.  

Balance of Terror

We meet Romulans (Romans with spaceships) for the first time, who are disciplined military strategy geniuses.  Kirk is effortlessly better at war than they are (because of course he is).  Also, why are there Romans in space?  Like, how could these Romulans have patterned their entire culture around Earth’s Rome?  

Janice and Kirk

"My hairdo? It's just naturally
like this when I wake up."

Might I mention that these six episodes are the last with Yeoman Janice?  I’m told that someone at the studio didn’t like Grace Lee Whitney and she got fired, though no one is owning up to being the person who wanted her gone.  I didn’t have any real problem with Janice, but it was jarring to have her replaced with no explanation whatsoever after being an important secondary character since the beginning.  

Major hair respect, Janice.  I’ll miss that basketweave hair fez you’ve been wearing.  

Janice and Kirk have a weird relationship.  Kirk’s evil transporter double tried to rape her because his id has a major thing for her.  Janice straight up admits that she wants Kirk to look at her legs in the episode Miri, when she starts getting twitchy about Kirk flirting with a prepubescent girl.  It’s obvious that the writers are setting these two up as the archetypical  OTP-will-they-won’t-they-unresolved-sexual-tension-couple.  In this set of episodes, Janice brings Kirk meals unsolicited, puts a linen napkin in his lap, stands weirdly close to him on the bridge when she thinks everyone’s about to die in Balance of Terror, and makes herself oddly scarce when Kirk’s wooing the actor’s daughter.  

Janice seems to exist to help us empathize with the loneliness of Kirk’s command - it’s totally obvious to everyone that Janice and Kirk wanna tear each other’s clothes off, but he’s not allowed to, because he’s a swell captain, dedicated to the standards of Starfleet professionalism.  Except for when he rides the elevator shirtless. (Why?  Why, Kirk?  You couldn’t put on a shirt for walking around the ship?)

"As per a yeoman's duties, I'll perform
the daily sniffing of your uniform, sir."

Janice gets credit for being feisty - every time there’s a creepy misogynist stalking someone on the Enterprise, you can safely bet that Janice is the subject of their obsession, and she does usually speak up for herself: not that anyone takes her very seriously, even when she’s been assaulted.  Still, as a feminist watching Janice, I can’t help feeling like even her feistiness is dialed way, way down, to a level acceptable to the patriarchy, leaving her pliable and easy-going enough to play opposite a real man’s man.  

Janice and Kirk, alas, were not meant to be, but that’s awfully convenient for our old-fashioned red-blooded captain, who needs to encounter a different sexy lady every week.  Still, the way Kirk’s been mooning over Janice, you expect him to at least mention why she’s suddenly gone from the Enterprise.