What would Picard do? Not go after a child singing Christmas carols with a stick, that's for sure.
Monday, December 26, 2005
A Star Trek Carol
by William S. Kowinski
As far as I recall (and fans of the various series’ can correct me on this), Christmas figured in a Star Trek story only once: in the feature film, Star Trek: Generations. When he arrives in the Nexus, Jean Luc Picard immediately begins to live a fantasy of family life. With the look of the house and how everyone in his family is dressed, it is an idealized Victorian England Christmas. I always thought this came directly from the fact that during TNG’s first run, Patrick Stewart was appearing now and again in a one-man show of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, set in pretty much the same Victorian era.
He hasn’t done it in recent years, but this December Patrick Stewart performed it again in London. Though he performed it off and on since 1988, including runs in the United States during his Jean Luc Picard 1990s, I’ve never seen it.
But some years ago I received the audio cassettes as a Christmas gift, and the coincidence of learning he was doing it again in London, watching the Peter Ackroyd bio of Dickens on PBS, and spending extra time in bed due to a cold, all conspired in inspiring me to listen to it again.
by William S. Kowinski
As far as I recall (and fans of the various series’ can correct me on this), Christmas figured in a Star Trek story only once: in the feature film, Star Trek: Generations. When he arrives in the Nexus, Jean Luc Picard immediately begins to live a fantasy of family life. With the look of the house and how everyone in his family is dressed, it is an idealized Victorian England Christmas. I always thought this came directly from the fact that during TNG’s first run, Patrick Stewart was appearing now and again in a one-man show of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, set in pretty much the same Victorian era.
He hasn’t done it in recent years, but this December Patrick Stewart performed it again in London. Though he performed it off and on since 1988, including runs in the United States during his Jean Luc Picard 1990s, I’ve never seen it.
But some years ago I received the audio cassettes as a Christmas gift, and the coincidence of learning he was doing it again in London, watching the Peter Ackroyd bio of Dickens on PBS, and spending extra time in bed due to a cold, all conspired in inspiring me to listen to it again.
Listening to the audio tapes then inspired me to dig up my taped-from-TV video of his 1999 TV movie version, a full production with other actors, movie sets and visual effects. I watched it on Christmas day.
With its sequences of the ghosts taking Scrooge on a tour of Christmas past, present and future, it is not far in form from a holodeck story on TNG. In fact, the episode “Tapestry,” in which Q takes Picard back to his Academy days to change one fateful day, and then forward to the consequences of the change, evolved from a story idea called “Q Carol,” a direct reference to the Dickens’ story. (So writes Larry Nemecek in the STNG Companion.)
Both Stewart’s stage version and the film version ( with music by Stephen Warbuck, who would win the Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love released the previous year) adhere very closely to Dickens’ book. So the Dickens’ point of view, often obscured in other productions, is very clear in this one. It conveys a very Star Trek-compatible message.
For instance, the first ghost to visit Scrooge is that of his dead partner in the counting-house, Jacob Marley. Marley must drag heavy chains of regret because of his misspent life. He cries out:
Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!"
"But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.
"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
With its sequences of the ghosts taking Scrooge on a tour of Christmas past, present and future, it is not far in form from a holodeck story on TNG. In fact, the episode “Tapestry,” in which Q takes Picard back to his Academy days to change one fateful day, and then forward to the consequences of the change, evolved from a story idea called “Q Carol,” a direct reference to the Dickens’ story. (So writes Larry Nemecek in the STNG Companion.)
Both Stewart’s stage version and the film version ( with music by Stephen Warbuck, who would win the Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love released the previous year) adhere very closely to Dickens’ book. So the Dickens’ point of view, often obscured in other productions, is very clear in this one. It conveys a very Star Trek-compatible message.
For instance, the first ghost to visit Scrooge is that of his dead partner in the counting-house, Jacob Marley. Marley must drag heavy chains of regret because of his misspent life. He cries out:
Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!"
"But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.
"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
“The common welfare was my business” is the essence of Dickens’ message to his fellow Londoners, where many lived in unspeakable poverty in a heavily polluted city (in Dickens, the London fog was not romantic—it was more like smog laden with disease.)
But since Scrooge is such a monster at the beginning of the story, Stewart got the opportunity to play a person behaving badly that he didn’t get on Star Trek. It is also a full part (even when he’s restricted to playing only Scrooge in the film) that showed Scrooge as sullen and mean, then frightened, humbled but still trying to retain control in his encounters with the ghosts, and then his second chance transformation and its aftermath. Stewart is more than adequate to the challenge each step of the way. His performance is a triumph.
More than a decade earlier, George C. Scott did a TV movie version of the story, and put his stamp on Scrooge’s transformation upon waking up on Christmas morning with his sudden, gleeful jumping up and down on his bed, when he realizes he has been given the chance to redeem himself. Stewart managed an even better effect in this crucial scene: he begins to choke, the choking sounds accelerate, and suddenly it turn into laughter. Scrooge had not laughed in so long it was physically wrenching to get one out. It’s not only an inspired idea, Stewart made it work beautifully.
But equally impressive is his attitude when he shows up for Christmas dinner at his nephew’s house, after this transformation. Though he’s been ebullient in the street, wishing a Merry Christmas to everyone he passes, when he gets to his nephew’s house he is suddenly shy and embarrassed. He slides into the dining room as if expecting to be rejected. It’s a terrific moment.
Dickens may seem a bit simplistic to us now, or even not realistic, because his selfish rich are mean and penny-pinching, whereas the rich of our era go in for conspicuous consumption and high times. But in linking virtue with healthy high spirits and family affections, Christmas charity with making merry on Christmas, Dickens is making a case for a good society in which social responsibility and the pursuit of happiness go hand in hand. It is a general theory of love. And not so different from Jean-Luc Picard’s Star Trek century.
But since Scrooge is such a monster at the beginning of the story, Stewart got the opportunity to play a person behaving badly that he didn’t get on Star Trek. It is also a full part (even when he’s restricted to playing only Scrooge in the film) that showed Scrooge as sullen and mean, then frightened, humbled but still trying to retain control in his encounters with the ghosts, and then his second chance transformation and its aftermath. Stewart is more than adequate to the challenge each step of the way. His performance is a triumph.
More than a decade earlier, George C. Scott did a TV movie version of the story, and put his stamp on Scrooge’s transformation upon waking up on Christmas morning with his sudden, gleeful jumping up and down on his bed, when he realizes he has been given the chance to redeem himself. Stewart managed an even better effect in this crucial scene: he begins to choke, the choking sounds accelerate, and suddenly it turn into laughter. Scrooge had not laughed in so long it was physically wrenching to get one out. It’s not only an inspired idea, Stewart made it work beautifully.
But equally impressive is his attitude when he shows up for Christmas dinner at his nephew’s house, after this transformation. Though he’s been ebullient in the street, wishing a Merry Christmas to everyone he passes, when he gets to his nephew’s house he is suddenly shy and embarrassed. He slides into the dining room as if expecting to be rejected. It’s a terrific moment.
Dickens may seem a bit simplistic to us now, or even not realistic, because his selfish rich are mean and penny-pinching, whereas the rich of our era go in for conspicuous consumption and high times. But in linking virtue with healthy high spirits and family affections, Christmas charity with making merry on Christmas, Dickens is making a case for a good society in which social responsibility and the pursuit of happiness go hand in hand. It is a general theory of love. And not so different from Jean-Luc Picard’s Star Trek century.
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