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!
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| Cheers! |
