Strange Old Worlds

 On September 8, 1966 the first season of the Star Trek series began.  It explored strange new worlds in the galaxy of imagination as well as in television storytelling.  But 57 years later, I wonder if it is truly exploring anything more than its own mythology.  Star Trek today seems more and more to be about itself.

 The new Star Trek shows display excellent writing, acting, directing and visual effects.  It produces entertaining television. The current series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds seems to have tried to recapture that original innocence, with its premise, its stand-alone episodes and that thrilling variation on the original opening with updated imagery. But most episodes seem to explore mostly the styles of presenting the established (if visually updated) Star Trek universe—comedy, horror, mixing animation with live action, musical comedy.  Star Trek now seems to comments on itself more than any outside world, real or imagined, including the self-consciousness of Lower Decks.

 Discovery tried to push the envelope at times, and bravely explores diversity and the internal life of a starship in a different way, though its obsession with feelings feels excessive at times (in my weaker moments I’ve referred to Captain Burnham as Captain Emo.) While season 4 in particular pushed Star Trek forward, even in this series, Star Trek mythology generated lots of story.

 It’s not that these shows lack values or significant content. And it's not that decades and hundreds of Star Trek stories should be ignored. But maybe the emphasis seems different.  Strange new worlds aren't primary.  At best the new shows are about the characters and their relationships and interactions within the canonical Star Trek mythology.  They seem to be less about exploring the previously unknown, or involved with testing our assumptions against what is found out there.  Character-driven drama with technobabble is not all of what Star Trek started out to be.

 Maybe it’s at least partly inevitable.  When Star Trek began, nothing like it had been done on television before.  The series invented its story universe with every episode, and so every episode was exploring the unknown.  Perhaps it’s impossible to get back that innocence.

 For a lot has happened in 57 years.  Back when it began, Star Trek’s content was shaped more directly by generations of science fiction and not quite two decades of television drama.

  Science fiction that followed Jules Verne speculated on new technologies and what might be found on other planets, both imagined from the basis of known fact and science.  The science fiction that followed H.G. Wells used imagined technologies, phenomena and forms of life as metaphors to illuminate aspects of human life. (This is how Margaret Atwood divides it, and it’s a good starting point.)

 Following either progenitor, s/f writers also explored highly speculative science with cosmological and philosophical implications—everything from alternative archeology and anthropology (some of which has turned out to have some basis in fact) to implications of quantum physics and the additions and alterations over the years suggested by new astronomical and sub-atomic data.

Just as the Star Trek series adapted technologies and protocols seen in earlier sci-fi movies and television shows, the stories followed both Verne and Wells in speculating on a possible future while telling metaphorical tales, some of which applied to urgent contemporary social and political questions.

  While some of these stories came from science fiction writers, a great many were created by veteran television writers, sometimes re-purposing plots found everywhere, from ancient drama and classic fiction to TV westerns and Captain Video.  This was television drama, but westerns and other shows also often told morality tales, and so did Star Trek.

 Yet as the first full-hour network drama set in the far future, Star Trek was also open-ended: everything was possible in locations in time and space where no one had gone before. 

 But seeds of the current situation were also sown back then.  Gene Roddenberry believed that for a series with continuing characters set in the strange new worlds of the future, the show had to create and maintain a self-consistent story universe.

  So besides envisioning the basic template of as diverse a crew as he could get away with (or perhaps as diverse as anyone could imagine existing in a few centuries), as well as assembling talented collaborators and working carefully on how the series would look, GR did what Wells and other designers of alternative worlds knew to do: he made rules.  

Every week would bring a new story, but the technologies would have the same capabilities and work the same way week after week.  There was a chain of command aboard the Enterprise, and a set a standard procedures.  As much as possible for a starship warping through the galaxy, the Enterprise was grounded.

 As writers introduced new planets and new aliens, later writers had to honor the basics of those planets and characters if they used them in subsequent stories.  (There were periods of adjustment but once the template was found—for Klingons, say—it remained consistent.) Events in one story might inform later stories, until a kind of backstory was created for the main characters and Star Trek as a whole.

 Some of the “rules” were set forth in the Star Trek Writer’s Guide, which was revised as the series went on (I have before me the third revision: 31 typed and mimeographed pages dated April 17, 1967.)  It provides character background, technology and capabilities.  Believability in action is stressed, but also meaning, the metaphorical layer.

 The rules were needed because each episode had a different writer and director.  That’s also why actors playing the major roles became caretakers of their characters and what they did and how they did it.  Together they created the Star Trek universe.

 That universe expanded with new crews in a new century, beginning with The Next Generation. A rich storytelling universe supported hundreds of stories for five main crews and sets of characters, over nearly 40 years. 

In the meantime, the Star Trek universe generated other stories, principally in a series of novels.  Though officially permitted by whatever entity owned Star Trek at the time, these novels often went their own ways in terms of story and characters.  It was I believe in connection with the novels that the concept of “canon” was first introduced.  “Canon” was meant to denote all the aspects of the “real” Star Trek universe, at first defined as everything in the television and motion picture stories (but not the novels.)

 Canon is an interesting concept, and today it is a powerful one. While the dictionary defines it as a general law or principle, its second definition is a collection of sacred books regarded as genuine.  The Star Trek rules and guidelines (commonly called its Bible), along with that long history of story, had become canon law.

 Those of us raised as Catholics recognize canon law as the fundamentals of the institution of the Roman Catholic Church. Violations of canon were serious stuff, heavily sinful.  Canon was zealously guarded by Church hierarchy. Violating canon was heresy, punished by excommunication (an early version of being blocked,unfriended or ghosted—in other words, excluded and exiled.)  Canon today seems to have become a real factor in what stories are told.

 But the hierarchy in charge of Star Trek is not the only arbiter.  Star Trek’s relationship to the corporate entities that made the shows was always complicated. According to GR, he was constantly fighting against corporate control.  That control seems to have become more pronounced at the end of the Berman era.  Today Star Trek is seen as a valuable “franchise,” and the changes in corporate ownership in recent years has been dizzying.  The switch to streaming is still fluid, as evidenced by recent cancellations and the abrupt changes in access to the catalog. 

 But there is another factor strongly in play, with roots in the original series era.  With GR’s connivance, fans organized to write letters demanding that the original series be renewed after the first and second seasons.  After the original series left the air, fans organized Star Trek conventions.  There had been science fiction conventions where some attendees wore costumes, but there had been nothing the size and specific focus of those Star Trek conventions in the 1970s forward.  With the letter campaigns and especially the conventions, the phenomenon of fandom was born—not just for Star Trek, but for everyone.

 Fandom then acquired new tools for expression. Mostly through the bulletin boards on sites devoted to Star Trek, the Internet started to have influence, especially in the final years of Star Trek: Enterprise and the Star Trek: Nemesis feature film.  The negativity on the Internet, together with low ratings and box office failure, ended in the demise of the Rick Berman era in 2005, and the lineage from Gene Roddenberry through Berman was broken.

 By the time of the J.J. Abrams features, social media was prominent.  Abrams and then the creators of Star Trek: Discovery and other television shows paid closer attention to social media, made producers and stars more accessible, and saw conventions as potent promotional opportunities.

 Meanwhile, fandom (which may be defined as a subset of the more diverse universe of Star Trek fans) was becoming more aware of the business side of Star Trek.  Online discussions were at least as likely to be about production costs and box office as possible meanings in Star Trek stories.  Corporate, producers and fandom were growing more aware of each other, and engaging more directly.

 Today fandom is a real force in Star Trek and its storytelling.  In particular, fandom engages in questions of canon.  Variations are closely debated, and though some are accepted, others are condemned. Star Trek canon is not enforced only by a corporate Vatican but by a hyper-informed and vigilant fandom. This process is not all destructive, but it is consequential.  

All these past Star Trek stories, with their basic consistencies and through-lines, form a kind of mythology, and fandom is deeply engaged with that mythology, its familiar characters and events. Thanks to social media and the structures of the entertainment business today, Star Trek producers cannot afford to offend fandom too much.  They depend on fans who operate in social media, and vote by means of streaming subscriptions.  In this context, it’s all fan service.

 Gene Roddenberry respected fans and interacted with them at conventions.  But he was very direct and firm that fans would not dictate Star Trek content.  Today fandom may not write the stories, but it is one factor that may be limiting the storytelling. 

 These seem to me to be the chief factors leading to my impression that today’s Star Trek is less about exploring strange new worlds or ideas and their implications, and more about itself and its own mythology.

 The apparent emphasis on character interaction over situation and ideas may be another important factor. Taken together, the character emphasis and the self-referencing tendency may help to explain my impression that current Star Trek gives much lower priority than in its formative years to really engaging with urgent concerns of today’s world by means of exploring strange new worlds.  In sometimes awkward but sometimes revelatory ways, that’s what the original series and TNG did.  That to a great extent is what inspired Star Trek fans in the first place.

 Today’s Star Trek shows have revisited and expanded on issues that past Star Trek stories explored, for a new audience. They have dealt to some degree with certain implications of technology, though they seem oddly obsessed with cloning.  

But more powerful technology is no longer the chief source of urgent problems, if it ever was. Many of our concerns and our understanding of the world have changed in 57 years.  We are much more aware of the roles of ecological factors and non-human life, as we are faced with the challenges of climate distortion and the imminent possibility of mass extinctions.  We are more aware than ever of the dire consequences of a planet ruled by a few extremely wealthy individuals and corporations, with everyone else scrambling in uncertainty and insecurity. 

 Engaging in such questions as race, the arms race and the nuclear age, cultural differences and such larger questions as a more complex reading of human nature, Star Trek formed its character: the essence, the soul of Star Trek.  The commitment to retain that character by today’s Star Trek creators as well as viewers is heartening.  It was the motivation for many over the years to become devoted Star Trek fans (whether or not they became vocal members of fandom.)  But that commitment loses its power if it becomes the rote of canon.  It has to be actualized.

  Perhaps I’m wrong about the current shows. My perspective is derived from watching Star Trek for all of those 57 years.  That does not make me (in today’s terms) the target demographic, to say the least.  Perhaps newer viewers see the same kinds of explorations, and feel themselves changed by them as we once did.

 But consider this possibility: at its best, Star Trek once engaged with the strange new worlds that illuminate our world—the world that television drama largely refused to examine. These were the urgent public problems and mysteries that most vexed us as viewers. Now Star Trek seems to live in the no-longer-strange old world of its own mythos.  Mythologies can be defining and healthy, generating new stories and insights, but they can also become stultifying and irrelevant, until eventually they consume themselves.

Picard3: Many Happy Returns

The final season of Star Trek: Picard has been widely and deservedly praised as a triumph.  It certainly seemed to be the most self-assured of the three seasons.  Producer, writer and director Terry Matalas infused this new form of the 10 episode series with elements of the old movie serials, complete with cliffhanger endings.  But he also provided a couple of episodes that ended in temporary resolution, so the audience could catch its breath. This series had some pacing—difficult in a (roughly) ten hour movie chopped up into ten pieces a week apart.  Matalas pulls together all the strands of the story in a finale that is complete and satisfying.  (It is described beautifully, for example, by Jim Moorhouse at Trekcore.)

 I still maintain that despite intentions to aim this series towards adults, it’s inevitably going to get younger viewers, f-bombs and all.  Still, while several moments of violence were shocking, they were within conventional bounds and unlikely to be traumatic.

 Matalas said his goal was to provide the Next Generation characters with the send-off that their last feature didn’t give them—partly because they didn’t know it was their last feature.  That was Star Trek Nemesis in 2002, written by John Logan, who impressed the cast with his fanboy knowledge of Star Trek, and directed by Stuart Baird who impressed them with his willful ignorance.  Logan apparently had a thing for Counselor Troi, with unfortunate results.  This time, Matalas focused on Doctor Crusher, in a very different way and with much better effect.

 Gates McFadden has been a real soldier for Star Trek, gamely decorating the movies with little to do, while thoughtfully articulating the Star Trek ethos whenever asked. If you believe a little scene in Jeff Greenwald’s book Future Perfect in which Brannon Braga dismisses her phone message suggestion for First Contact, she didn’t get a lot of respect from the higher ups.  Yet elsewhere in that book she’s very articulate about the core—the soul—of Star Trek.  She seems to have been an underused resource, and it’s great to see her character given so much substance and power in this series.

 All the acting is outstanding in this third series, in general and within this context: actors who haven’t played the character in 20 years finding the differences they can play that still work within the characters they established, and first-time actors, especially Ed Speelers, creating convincing characters that fit.  Jonathan Frakes, who hasn’t acted much in recent years, comes across relaxed and genuine as a seasoned, sassier Riker.

  

 Brent Spiner has tour de force moments as the new Data, while Patrick Stewart, Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd of the Picard cast from prior seasons have exceptional moments as well. Scenes between Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden, and between Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis, are rightly lauded for their economy and power. 

It was great to hear the voices of Majel Roddenberry and Walter Koenig in Star Trek again, as well as classic Star Trek musical themes, and—well, there’s a YouTube video that shows emotional fan response to the bridge crew on the Enterprise-D—the (next to) final big reveal that the series managed to keep a surprise. 

Much has been made of the “conflict” between these familiar characters as they were introduced in this series, as different from the past when they didn’t conflict.  It’s worth going a little deeper into that.

 For not all “conflict” is the same. In a drama (especially melodrama), conflict among characters usually means real opposition and intent to do harm, with at least one character driven by suspicion, ambition, envy, jealousy, vengeance, desire, fear etc.; racial/ethnic/gender/class hostility or just personal animosity.  These characters often engage in deceit, intimidation, subterfuge and scheming against others, if not overt violence. Characters actively or passively do harm through manipulation, bullying, subversion, or any number of other destructive behaviors, often driven by unexamined and unconscious forces.

  None of that applies to the TNG characters in these episodes, even though they made different choices responding to different experiences over the years of their separation, and even if during the episodes they engage in disagreements that they may not have actively pursued before (or then again, they may have). 

The kinds of conflict seen in Picard were seen in the TNG series, including marital or other relationship troubles (though perhaps not so often among the senior officers.)  Wherever conflicts at the level of problems occurred, they were solved the same way: through recognizing them and talking them out.  That happens again in this year of Picard.

 The Roddenberry-mandated lack of the first kinds of conflict among the main characters in Star Trek was meaningful: it said that in the future, a diverse group of individuals will have achieved the degree of self-awareness to step back from their own emotions and see their actions or feelings from a different perspective, and they will have the concepts and vocabulary to engage in solving these problems.  And by the 24^th century, they will have a ship’s counselor to help them through these processes. (If there was no conflict between or within members of the crew, the counselor would be unnecessary.)

 For example, one of the major conflicts of Star Trek: First Contact was Captain Picard’s obsession with hurting the Borg that distorted his judgment and behavior.  It was internal conflict, but it took a literary parallel to give him the perspective to see it. But he did see it, and changed.

 What’s necessary for these conflicts to be resolved is self-respect and respecting others.  From the original series onward, the evident fact that people on Star Trek treated each other with respect was one element that attracted fans who did not see people respecting them or each other in their real lives. As Dave Marinaccio discovered when he was researching his book All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Watching Star Trek, this revelation actually changed lives.

 The TNG characters had a long history of respecting each other so that they trusted each other absolutely, and that made it possible for problems arising from divergent choices to be resolved in Picard. (Parenthetically, had these characters not respected each other for seven years, I wonder if the actors playing them would have become as close for as long as they did?)

 There was another reason for Star Trek characters to treat each other with respect in the Roddenberry canon: they needed to work together in service of a larger whole: the ship, Starfleet, the Federation and ultimately all life in the galaxy.  Even aboard a ship of exploration and peace, the Enterprise crew had to guide their actions according to the integrity of others and the welfare of the whole.  That was their sworn priority.

 And this isn’t just a matter of math, of the needs of the many.  It’s about defining and then defending the whole and its integrity—that which ultimately we are part of.  In the fictional 23^rd and 24^th and 25^th centuries of starships and life among the stars, it is the galaxy.  For us in the 21^st century it is the Earth.  We have the power to help heal the Earth we have unknowingly been destroying.  But now we know, even though the harm still goes on, and we know it is self-destruction.  At the same time, we learn something new every day from science or other branches of knowledge that it is the integrity of the whole that supports us.  Addressing the global threat needs to be our priority.

 The final episode of Picard3 had moments of adventure movie ebullience: the reaction to Doctor Crusher’s sharpshooting, Data using the Force to find the Borg target.  But it was brilliant also in showing the price these characters were willing to pay to defend the whole.

 Ever since the filmmakers of the 70s became old enough to be parents (and to get divorced), defending the family became the unquestioned prime motivation in movies, including science fiction. Several major villains in Star Trek movies were avenging the deaths of their wives.  Yet Counselor Troi had to decide to sacrifice her husband, Doctor Crusher her son. Picard’s journey had taken him unexpectedly to find completion as a father, and he was willing to sacrifice himself for that, but not at the cost of the whole. 

Saving the galaxy may be a kind of Star Trek cliché (“I take it the odds are against us and the situation is grim,” said Nexus Kirk in Generations,) a kind of cosmic MacGuffin.  But slowing things down to suggest the real costs and consequences re-centers Star Trek on an element of what it is about and why it was different. 

 At the same time, the story in this third series suggests consequences of the Federation’s questionable past decisions, specifically from the DS9 and Voyager eras.  This series confirmed that (as portrayed in post-9/11 Star Trek novels) the Federation engaged in torture. I was glad to hear Picard say that the Dominion War was a "travesty." The consequences depicted here have their real world counterparts in the modern history of terrorism and war, as elsewhere in history.  Even in the 90s, as the Star Trek saga started to sprawl, its stories driven not by those who had seen war but who had seen a lot of war movies, it began to lose focus.  The overwhelmingly positive response to this season suggests that the TOS and particularly the TNG era are still the heart and soul of Star Trek.

That Star Trek deals with our contemporary issues doesn't mean it replicates the contemporary world in one-to-one correspondences.  Quite the opposite: it shows consequences, and it offers alternatives.  Star Trek similarly can comment on war and conflict by illustrating the skills of peace and conflict resolution.

(However, a little sly commentary on our society is also part of the Trek tradition--and I wonder if there wasn't some of that in the ability of the Borg to turn the young into zombies by connecting them to a central control--maybe like a viral technology we already know, via the phones everyone bows to and holds up to their faces all the time?  And that they needed the old people with their skepticism, individuality and old technology?  Nothing that blatant, of course.)

 Critics (including some writers for Trek) complained that the Roddenberry rules concerning conflict and human nature aren’t realistic, perhaps forgetting that Star Trek posits faster than light travel to meet up with dozens of alien civilizations comprised of people who look like us with some added facial appliances, and are so similar that we can exchange recipes and interbreed. 

 Is all that more realistic than people using skills, heart and consciousness to solve problems? This is science fiction—a believable branch of fantasy, wonder tales, allegory and myth that operates on a different level to open minds to new possibilities—such as what a more hopeful future might necessarily look like. 

 At this, no Star Trek has done better than The Next Generation.  Picard3 was less conceptual than character-driven, but it supported the Star Trek vision through these characters, and especially through the continuity as well as the changes in the characters with history enacted over scores of stories and hundreds of hours.  Revisiting these characters as they are decades later, with their history, was unique.  So far...

Star Trek's Greatest Failure

As the hype for the new season of various Star Trek TV shows accelerates, I don’t want to let the last season pass without comment, particularly what I regard as the greatest failure of the year, which may well turn out to be Star Trek's greatest failure, period.

 The first season of  Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was in most respects an invigorating triumph.  The second season of Star Trek: Picard featured wonderful acting, production and scene writing and dialogue.  But both series involved the 21^st century on Earth, to a lesser or greater extent.  Both had the opportunity to add relevant information to the little that has been established about this century.  The importance of what they said or didn’t say happens to be greater than ever, for the simple fact that we are living on Earth in the 21^st century.  These programs are being made and exhibited in that 21^st century.  And we face problems that threaten our present and the future.

 In the all-important opening episode of Strange New Worlds, Captain Pike tried to dissuade the citizens of an alien culture from using weapons of mass destruction on a catastrophic level. He did so by illustrating a brief history of Earth’s 21^st century.  Pike mentions the Eugenics War and the horrific destruction of World War III, both part of the established “future history” of the Star Trek universe. But he began by referring to the “second Civil War” breaking out (presumably in the U.S.),  accompanied by images of the actual assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.  This was new, bold and extremely relevant.

 Yet in even a brief catalog of challenges to the Earth in the 21^st century, he did not mention the climate crisis—a stunning omission, particularly after the obvious effects the world has suffered in recent years. There is little doubt that climate distortion and disruption will be the single most consequential factor in the lives of human beings, at least by the second half of this century.

 Moreover, if there is a World War III, effects of climate distortion are likely to be principal causes.  For at least the past decade, the Pentagon has regarded the climate crisis as the greatest security threat on the planet.  A committee that included civilian experts published a report saying so.

 Climate distortion effects don’t just constitute a potential threat to the peace, but is already a major factor in ongoing wars (including in Ukraine) and conflicts (including civil wars and political disturbances) of the recent past. Droughts, lack of food, and mass migrations resulting from climate distortions have been and are major factors in warfare in Africa and elsewhere.  These are growing factors in political around the world, especially as they contribute to the hostilities surrounding immigration in many countries. They play a role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with its food and energy resources, just as the climate crisis underlies anxieties reflected in U.S. political warfare.

  Put simply, climate distortion is the most likely potential cause of a World War III.  Yet we remain willfully blind to this element of the crisis, let alone the more obvious violence of weather and growing tragedies resulting from climate distortion, such as the poisoning of the oceans and climate’s contributions to onrushing extinctions.  Star Trek had an opportunity to at least show an unmet climate crisis as the threat that it is. Given Trek’s credibility and its vast popular audience, it might have brought this home.

 Strange New Worlds presented the 21^st century only in a few minutes of images. But Star Trek: Picard spent a major part of its second season in the 21^st century. Though some climate distortion effects were in the background, the climate crisis was never directly referenced.

 In this mystifying omission, Star Trek is hardly alone.According to a recent survey, less that 3% of TV shows and films shown between 2016 and 2020 mentioned the climate crisis, or any of the key words associated with it. Whether it is perceived corporate pressure or squeamishness in the writers room, our storytellers are sticking their heads in the increasingly hot sand.

  Star Trek’s own tradition of identifying crucial issues in its stories holds this saga to a higher standard.  Star Trek continues to champion diversity, individuality within community, service and ethical behavior.  But it has failed to address a vital issue that we in the audience, approaching the end of the first quarter of the 21^st century, are experiencing through violent storms, intense firestorms, more extreme and longer heat waves, persistent droughts, depleted wildlife, rising sea level and other less obvious strains and manifestations. It gave itself the opportunity to do so by revisiting the 21^st century. It failed to do so. 

Some sort of environmental crisis is apparently behind the action in Star Trek: Picard’s 21^st century, though Picard’s mission is to see that a spaceship bound for the moon Europa succeeds, piloted by a Picard ancestor.  When Picard returns to his present (2401, the beginning of the 25^th century), he learns from Guinan that an alien microbe discovered on this voyage was later developed to save Earth’s oceans.  This is as close as the narrative gets to addressing 21^st century environmental crises, though its “happily-ever-after” feeling neglects to deal with the otherwise established fact that World War III begins shortly after that Europa mission.

 Apart from suggesting another technological miracle that functions as a deus ex machina to save humanity, the climate crisis and the ongoing mass extinction event are not seriously addressed.  They aren’t even named. 

 Yet it is increasingly clear that unless the 21^st century successfully addresses the causes and effects of the climate crisis, as well as the related mass extinction event, it is unlikely that our civilization will have a future.

 Other TV shows and movies have begun to incorporate climate crisis issues, and there are apparently some  in development or slated for the near future that do address the climate crisis future. Such stories have power to reach people emotionally, to connect them (surveys show that Americans feel their climate crisis concerns are not shared as widely as they are) and to lead to action, to motivate career choices and commitments by the young (as Star Trek has often done.) With its emphasis on a diversity of minds and hearts working together to solve problems, and because of its tradition of modeling a better future that is part of its soul, Star Trek would seem to be a natural storytelling universe in which to address the climate crisis.

Star Trek has dealt with important issues through metaphor and allegory (arguably including the climate crisis, in the TNG episode "Force of Nature"), but these Star Trek shows this past season gave themselves the golden opportunity to potentially make a difference in the real world by dealing with these transcendent realities of our 21st century as they threaten the future.  They failed to make it so.  

On Picard: Pretty Much My Last Word

I've finally gone back to see the last four episodes of Star Trek: Picard's first season, including a re-view of the first four episodes and the last one.  I will on no account ever watch the fifth episode again, and the sixth seemed dominated by my least favorite elements, so I skipped it.  Though I didn't intend to write any more about this series, I was persuaded to do so.

I remain impressed by the quality of the acting, and for the most part of the writing and direction.  Patrick Stewart and (in multiple roles) Brent Spiner were classic, and Jeri Ryan brought an effective new personality to Seven of Nine (importing flavors of the character she played on the Bosch series.)  The new actors had to contend with the fragmentation of the story-telling and the fitful writing, especially if Patrick Stewart's experience in not knowing that Picard would die in the final episode generally meant the actors didn't know the full arc of their characters when they started.

 Those that ended up as the new crew also ended up as appealing and differentiated characters, particularly Michelle Hurd as Raffi, though it's not clear to me how they all got there.  The series narrative approach strikes me as more novelistic, and takes some getting used to.  Maybe viewers younger than me get it faster.  Or there were just too many new characters and not enough time.

Though the moral questions confronting individual characters are worthy and dramatic, I don't think that, even at best, the story advances the Star Trek saga very much.  Star Trek VI is perhaps the most specific of many examples that cover much the same territory about fears of the Other, and Generations made the case for mortality as defining what's human (although this series takes it further, to a point that seems dubious to me--but that's a broader philosophical question.) Questions that arise from artificial life forms were dramatized in both the Next Generation and Voyager series.  And to me other such questions were dealt with more artfully in the Spielberg/Kubrick feature film, A.I.

The episode with the Rikers was a high point, less fan service than a concise and convincing portrait of this aging couple, and their tragedy that resulted from the Federation's synthetics ban.  At the same time, their daughter (played beautifully by Lulu Wilson) represented youthful hope.

There were elements of the finale that didn't pass the smell test for me, such as Soji's sudden total identification with the synths, to the point of pleading with Picard to see things from "our" point of view, as they were about to wipe out intelligent biological life, when she had consciously been a non-human synth for about five minutes.   Her villainous doppelganger, like the Romulan sister and brother, was cartoonishly evil.  (But then so is Donald Trump, so maybe that was the point.) The synths we saw on their planet were generally as lively as manikins, and seemed about as smart.

The finale itself seemed rushed, while earlier episodes seemed overly elaborated, even granted the character moments.  But this gets into a broader point of where this series falls in television history, and in Star Trek.

Star Trek: The Next Generation was born into a world of television in which cable channels were starting to be influential with original programming, but which was still dominated by the three broadcast networks.

 The original series Star Trek got its second and bigger life through syndication (often on small UHF stations with weaker signals that themselves got new and bigger life when they were included on cable systems.) The Next Generation was produced to go directly to syndication, and its success (including a prime time Emmy nomination for Best Dramatic Series) helped change television.

Now television fiction has gone through cable to streaming services, which have developed their own forms and preferences.  The 8 to 12 episode series, sometimes released all at once, has become something of a standard.  Dramatic shows are less often a series of separate stories in a common story universe and continuous time-line, than a single season-long story told in fragments.  The model in many ways for fiction in a fictional and fantastic world became Game of Thrones, with fiction in a purportedly realistic world modeled after, for example,  House of Cards.

 To maintain interest and create buzz, character and plot developments are often sensational and extreme.  There might be a kind of winking quality to this, a "meta" fiction vibe that exploits the most simplistic techniques for effect while simultaneously inviting the audience to laugh ironically at it all--and tweet about it as they watch.

I might isolate two elements of this new television world as they apply to Picard. The first element is the new relationship of fans to the storytelling, represented by the new term, "fan service."

The new dramas depend on buzz that is maintained on social media and through websites, more or less the equivalent of continuous fan magazines. "Tentpole" movies are marketed in a similar way, with creators interacting with fans.  While Gene Roddenberry encouraged and even organized fan expression and interaction during Star Trek's network run and afterwards, he drew a stern line at fans being able to dictate or directly influence story and storytelling. He turned back any such demands with no room for doubt.

To its credit, Star Trek: Picard does little of this.  Perhaps the story gets contorted a bit to include favorite characters, but mostly they add a lot to story and the characters. The continuing chemistry among the Next Generation actors is both well-served and inspiring.  However, bringing back beloved characters just to kill them off (elegantly and not really for major characters, cruelly and distastefully for minor characters) might even be seen as some kind of revenge on the concept of fan service.

The second element is the language and depiction of violence. The broadcast networks controlled and still control these, while cable and especially streaming services are largely free of restrictions. In the past at least, the broadcast networks were partly responding to features of the laws governing signals over the "public airwaves" versus the cable and Internet, which are treated as unregulated private property.  They also had commercial sponsors sensitive to public upset.

In the original Star Trek series, Gene Roddenberry chafed under the restrictions of network drama, including active network censorship.  But his greatest concern was commercial censorship--in the example he often gave (apocryphal or not), characters in a western were not permitted to "ford" a river if the sponsor was Chevrolet.  His approach to language however was to avoid slang and expressions of the time that could become dated, and were not credible in the mouths of characters in the 23rd or 24th century.

Similarly, given GR's vision for the Federation and Starfleet,  the use of 20th or 21st century profanity is not credible, at least in most instances that appear in Picard.  The head of Starfleet has exactly two scenes in the series, with maybe three lines each time--and yet she drops the F-Bomb both times.  While I laughed, I was also taken out of the scene, and the whole sequence became a joke.  I could not take her seriously as head of Starfleet.  As a background speaker starts to say in Star Trek VI, just because you can do a thing, doesn't mean you must.

That goes more than double for the graphic violence, particularly in episode 5.  Perhaps the slasher aesthetic, the Game of Thrones syndrome, softens this for contemporary audiences, but to me it seems at best a lapse of taste, and exactly the opposite experience I expect from Star Trek.  As I've written previously, children who assumed this was the Star Trek they knew could have actually been traumatized by this violence.  I pretty much was myself, also because I didn't expect it in a Star Trek production.  (A similar situation to the violence that opened the fifth episode recurs in the finale, but it is handled much differently.  Was that so hard?)

This kind of violence and language has a particular ramification.  One result of both network standards and GR's vision of the future Federation was that Star Trek was a show that children could watch, as well as adults.  This was true even when Next Generation was not as directly controlled, since it was produced independently.

This became a cherished characteristic of Star Trek: not only that children could watch it--and then watch it again as adolescents and adults, seeing new things within it each time--but that families could watch it together.  Star Trek became something which parents introduced to their children, and they in turn introduced to their children.

But today's television environment is intentionally fractured, and programs are specialized.  This has become the trend within the "tentpole" "franchises," or storytelling universes, like Star Wars and Star Trek. Even when Star Trek had three new series running at the same time, the audience--a general audience-- was broadly speaking the same for all of them. Today's Star Trek television shows are fairly rigidly divided into the action-adventure of Discovery, the adult drama of Picard, and now the comedy of Lower Decks.  Picard is now and forever an adults-only space.  And that's more than a pity.

I would suggest a further implication of all this that seems to me expressed by the Picard series, especially when combined with some internal Star Trek history.

Two things changed the Star Trek universe: the Dominion war in Deep Space Nine, and 9/11.  It has never changed back, nor gone forward.

In an effort to darken the Star Trek universe and introduce more (or easier) dramatic conflict, writers chafing under GR's vision for Starfleet and the Federation went back to old war movies for their continuing story of the Dominion War.  Like those war movies, these stories weren't realistic, but pushed adrenaline buttons with hatred, intrigue and revenge.  Gene Roddenberry, Gene Coons and other writers and participants who had actually been in World War II and Korea, who knew the reality that no drama could fully express, had a far different vision for the stories they wanted to tell. They told the stories that made Star Trek different, and that gave this storytelling universe its character.

The alien terrorist attack on Earth in Enterprise

Then just as the new series Star Trek Enterprise was about to take Star Trek back to the wonder of discovery and exploration, two passenger airliners hijacked by terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, another crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth was brought down into a Pennsylvania field by a revolt of passengers.  This was the day forever known as 9-11, and Enterprise immediately changed its emphasis to fictionalize such a situation.

It was not a temporary adjustment.  Even after Enterprise stopped production, Star Trek novels continued to obsess over terrorism, covert operatives and--reflecting the new U.S. policy--torture.  One Next Generation novel actually had Picard's Enterprise (and Counselor Troi!) torturing prisoners for information--an explicit rejection of one of the series' most famous episodes.

The J.J. Abrams films continued the mood, with an increasingly militarized Starfleet, complete with Nazi-style uniforms.  All of this tended to reshape GR's Star Trek universe until new Star Trek had little in common with it but the names and technologies.

In terms of the soul of Star Trek, this comes back to the essential point: the Star Trek future was at its best a model, a beacon of hope, a thought experiment that said, what if society consciously institutionalized the best human qualities, while guarding against its worst?  What if we actually learned from centuries of bloody mistakes, so it was in some sense not all in vain?  What would that look like?

What it did look like was unlike anything else on television or at the movies.  But now the Star Trek universe seems to me all but identical with other mostly dystopic portrayals of the future, especially the cycles of war and chaos in the Star Wars universe.   It is true that the moral questions in Picard are vastly more sophisticated--but those decisions confront individuals, the basis of most drama.  It's valid and worthy drama. But the universe is mostly wrong.

In this story universe, the Federation is so panicked that it turns away from anything synthetic after a single horrible outcome, with a fanatical rigor such that even medicine is affected. It abandons the Romulans, insuring that they will again be enemies, having learned nothing from the Treaty of Versailles after World War I (or, in the opposite way, from the Marshall Plan after World War II.)

Starfleet is so stupid that its head of security is a Romulan general, a spy and the fanatical head of a Romulan cult within its secret police. As presented in this series, it's cartoonish.  That she passes herself off as Vulcan is interesting, but undeveloped.

 It may seem also a reflection of contemporary reality, when the most transparently buffoonish people run governments. Or when everyone is so easily manipulated, even as the synthetics are convinced by a ploy (colluding in the killing of one to instantly motivate the others to kill every biological intelligence in the universe) that wouldn't pass muster in a Horatio Hornblower novel about warfare in the early 19th century.

But grant historical precedent to the ease of this deception. That history doesn't have to repeat itself was precisely the message--or the model-- in many if not most Star Trek episodes of the GR era.

Yes, Star Trek always reflected issues of the contemporary moment. But it confronted those issues within the 23rd or 24th century context of the Federation and Starfleet. How do they handle what we can't handle?  Instead, this Federation and Starfleet only tell us that humanity hasn't learned anything.  Not much of a future to aspire to.

In the finale of Star Trek: Picard's first season, Starfleet rides to the rescue anyway, and our new Picard crew warps off to new adventures, each of them changed, apparently in a changed universe.  Maybe the future is better.

On Picard: Not the Last Word

Not that anyone is waiting for my follow-up, but I did leave my response to the first season of Star Trek: Picard at its midpoint.  The reason I haven't posted is that I haven't seen the following episodes, and by now it's clear to me that it will probably be awhile before I do.

That's because of where I saw it going in that fifth episode combined with everything I've read about the rest of the story.  Though it's clearly unfair to judge a series by the opinions of others, everything I know about the story makes me very receptive to the sentiments expressed, for example, in Stephen Kelly's piece in the Guardian titled "Star Trek Picard is the dark reboot that boldly goes where nobody wanted it to."  

Kelly puts his finger on an overriding issue, which I wonder if post-Roddenberry era Star Trek creators really understand: "Yet the idea that the grittiness of shows such as Picard makes it mature and relevant, while the ethos of yesteryear Star Trek is now naive or too old-fashioned to survive, feels misjudged. The hope, optimism and sincerity of the original 60s series was in itself a radical act: a way of portraying the future as it should be (a multiracial cast in a time of civil rights struggle; peace and cooperation in a time of nuclear terror), rather than merely wallowing in things as they were."

The objection isn't to the depiction of darkness, or of troubled characters.  It is partly on the dominance of darkness, partly on how it is depicted, and partly on what seems to be missing, some of which is fundamental to Star Trek.  But I might test my doubts by seeing these episodes if I was drawn to the story.  While I recognize Michael Chabon's particular interest in the golem (a theme in his novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) and its fictional descendants,  I don't share that enthusiasm.  New Trek's obsession with "synthetics"--perhaps the least credible creations in the Star Trek universe, apart perhaps from Romulans with Roman names--leaves me completely cold, and frustrated.  There are so many more important and relevant--even crucial-- themes to explore.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  All I wanted to say here is that what I've read about the story has left me profoundly disconsolate.  Maybe someday I'll end up appreciating this series.  But right now I'm not yet ready to risk disappointment even in parts of this series I was looking forward to, notably the episode with the Rikers.  In the grips of coronavirus lockdown, things are just too weird now to invite more disillusion.

However, I do intend to resume posting here with essays on Star Trek: Insurrection and Star Trek: Nemesis, and explorations of the soul of the Next Generation, the series.

Star Trek's End? (With Update)

Just as I can't un-see what I saw in the fifth episode of Star Trek: Picard, I wonder if the damage it has done to the Star Trek universe can ever be undone.

The episode opens with the most graphic violence in the Star Trek saga, by far.  It was the worst moment I have experienced in watching television for a half century.

But that wasn't all.  There was further shock-inducing violence.  There were fine moments and performances.  Michelle Hurd played an affecting scene as Raffi. Jeri Ryan played Seven of Nine with a new wit and panache, more like a character I saw her play since her Star Trek days, on the Bosch series.  She presented an ethical dilemma, and her scenes with Picard were excellent.  Though she engaged in violence that was less graphic, it was still shocking. It's not just that she vaporized her antagonist, but that she casually killed a number of others in the process.

And then the final act of wanton violence, in the twist, when the character that seemed to embody the audience's innocence--a kind of Wesley character--turns out not only to be a deceptive double agent but commits the cruel murder of a former lover, and watches him suffer and die, as we do.  And that was pretty much the end of it for me.

People die in science fiction, but the manner of death as well as the reason for their deaths are important.  This is but one aspect of this episode that seems to attack the very nature of Star Trek as a television and movie saga.  The other is the now unremitting bleakness of the future it portrays, the apparent moral corruption of Starfleet and the effective collapse of the Federation.

I was in the first audience for Star Trek in the 1960s.  The times had elements of hope and adventure, but they were also very bleak, and we felt the assault and despair, every single day.  We were just a few years from the day in 1962 when I went to school feeling that I might not come home, on the most dangerous day of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  But the possibility of thermonuclear fire and fallout were also part of everyday life, and had been since early childhood, including the Duck and Cover drills of first grade.

It was a time not only of political strife but of political violence. I was in school when my hero, President Kennedy, was shot and killed, and I saw the gunning down of his alleged assassin on live television.  Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy--my hope for the immediate future--were killed within weeks of each other in 1968.  In between several other leaders were shot and most were killed.  In addition, there was racial violence, and several times there were entire areas of American cities that burned.

Above all there was the despair of the Vietnam War.  Leaders were lying, and my contemporaries were dying.  Taken by force of law into the armed forces, their lives were never to be the same.  More of us suffered trauma, disability and death than any generation since.

The point of this summary is to suggest that these times we are experiencing right now are not the only bleak times, though I won't try to make comparisons.  The 60s was when Star Trek began--and while it told stories involving then-current moral and political issues, it depicted a better future.

It did so during the political, economic and moral traumas of the 1970s, 80s and 90s.  And there was plenty of despair to go around in those decades as well.

Star Trek was a beacon of hope to so many because it modeled that better future--not just the technology but the behavior, the culture of Starfleet and the Federation. As such it was also a guide for how people could live their own lives in the present.  There is plenty to document all of this.  Despite the bleak times, Star Trek showed how things could be better--and people could be better.

This is essentially, more than any other one aspect, the soul of Star Trek.  Crucially, it was also part of the experience of watching Star Trek.  One of many unique qualities of the Gene Roddenberry Star Trek (from the original series through Enterprise, and the first ten movies) was that it entertained and inspired viewers of all ages, from children to their grandparents.  Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation in particular were rare instances of shows that several generations of a family could watch, together.  

I can't comment on Star Trek: Discovery because I've seen very little of it.  But clearly this is no longer the case with Star Trek: Picard.  If I lost sleep over what I saw, I assume that even children of today could be damaged by seeing it.  I don't see a family watching this together.

I could let Discovery go by, and be watched by contemporary audiences used to this kind of television (the manipulation and contrivances, shock for effect, etc. that I've seen in the few episodes I watched of other popular sagas.)  Eventually I made peace with the Abrams movies, and what I didn't like about them.  For they were all the products of creators unrelated to the GR Star Trek.  They were of little relevance to me, but they didn't disturb the prior Star Trek TV and movies, which also remained the bedrock for many if not most Star Trek fans.

But I cautiously and somewhat skeptically looked forward to watching Star Trek: Picard, because of confidence in some of the people involved, especially those who carried with them the knowledge of that earlier Star Trek era.  Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes were of course a big part of it.

I was heartened as well as challenged by the first four episodes.  So I let myself look forward to Thursdays and a new episode of Picard. That ended with episode five.  A day after seeing it, I still feel that the nature of that violence, and the entire tenor of this episode, undermines the Star Trek universe.  It makes it hard even to see Star Trek's past in the same way.  If this is the future that follows all that we saw, what was the point?  The future is bleaker than ever.  Humanity has failed.  This may reflect what many of us feel about things at this historical moment, but except for individual commitments, it is no model.

Maybe that's the point.  But I repeat: Star Trek did not chiefly reflect the bleakness of the 1960s.  It modeled a possible future that gave some focus to the present, and some escape to a better world.  Many people watched it like they watched The West Wing during the Bush years, and some people--including me--watched Madame Secretary during these horrific years.

Of course there is dramatic justification for everything in episode five.  But for me Star Trek: Picard has become more 2020 television than Star Trek, and I will treat it as such.  I have no idea what the big secret is at the heart of this story, and I now no longer care enough to watch each episode as it becomes available. It's not worth it. My trust in this series and the people creating it is on hold.

More to the point, I will no longer innocently watch these upcoming episodes.  I will read the plot summaries after they air.  If I'm sufficiently interested, I'll watch them after the series concludes.

I gather from the day-after reviews and comments I've read online that this is a minority if not unique view.  People seem more upset that the same actor wasn't used for a couple of the returning characters than the violence of their demise.  So I'm also not confident that even spoilers will alert me to similar scenes in future episodes.  But for me this crossed a line that may not be able to be uncrossed, whatever happens in the rest of the series.  And it colors all of Star Trek with darkness, perhaps fatally.

Update: On his Instagram, Showrunner Michael Chabon responded to similar critiques of this episode, notably on its violence. His response was reproduced by various sites including Trek Movie here.

In my post here, I perhaps overdramatized the effect of this episode on Star Trek as a whole, and perhaps lacked patience in seeing how Starfleet and the Federation come out in this story, which is the first and only story so far to be set in its time period after the last TNG movie, apart from the setup in Abrams' first movie.

But otherwise I stand by this post, especially my interpretation of Star Trek's history and soul.  I continue to feel strongly that the specific violence that opened this episode is a lasting scar on Star Trek storytelling, as well as a bewildering failure of taste.  I am aware of Chabon's skill as a fiction writer.  I've followed his career since his first novel, and a little before that--as I taught briefly in the same University of Pittsburgh writing program in which he was a student, though I believe my time was a few years after his. I found his at times convoluted response on this episode to be reasonable but somewhat troubling in terms of Star Trek. In any case I have read summaries of the sixth episode but have not watched it.  I don't plan to change that procedure before the series ends.

Star Trek Picard: Understanding Darkness

After two episodes, the dimensions of Star Trek: Picard success so far are clearer.  The first episode was not only widely watched, it was the most watched program in the short history of CBS All Access streaming.  And not only was the first episode well-received by critics, it scored an amazing 95% approval rating on the most monitored Rotten Tomatoes site.

The show has certainly brought interest back to Star Trek, and with that interest, a number of misconceptions are revealed.  For example, that all elements of the future portrayed in past Trek--including the Federation and Starfleet--were positive and "optimistic."

A GQ interviewer reflected this in a question to writer, executive producer and first season showrunner Michael Chabon: "Was there a conscious effort to include the sense of old-school optimism that’s so integral to Star Trek?"

Chabon, who knows his Trek, answered: "I think that optimism is an easily misunderstood term. There’s this misconception that Star Trek was always sunshine and roses. But its optimism was hard-won. It was always fairly clear-eyed about the darkness in the human soul. The potential for violence, for greed, for criminality, for hatred. All of that felt very much present from the very first episode of Star Trek in ‘66. It’s just that people are working their asses off to overcome it, and it’s a constant effort. It’s always there, even in the episode titles: “The Enemy Within.” “The Turnabout Intruder.” That dark side of human nature is always waiting to emerge again. So, is that optimism? It is optimism, but it’s a very sober optimism that understands darkness. It’s a deliberate, conscious optimism that goes hand-in-hand with the kind of clear-eyed vision that allows you to reflect the times that you’re living in."

The darkness in this show reflects the darkness of our time, of literally the days we are seeing these episodes, in at least a few aspects. There is one notable expression of that darkness, if "the synths" are seen as metaphors for migrant and immigrant populations, or any other Others. (It's more than foreshadowed that the ultimate Others, the Borg, are going to have a more complex role in this story.)  But being aware of the darkness, knowing it when you see it, and doing something about it are the keys. By seeing through Picard's eyes, we can see the darkness contrary to the soul of Star Trek.  I'm certainly staying tuned.

Meanwhile, I'm working on my First Contact review.  It should be up soon.

Star Trek: Picard--It's A Hit!

The first episode of Star Trek: Picard has already won widespread praise from critics and fans.  Patrick Stewart's performance is almost universally lauded. Some suggest the series is the most successful Trek since the 2009 Star Trek feature film.  Others go further back, to the 1996 feature, Star Trek: First Contact.

In honor of the new series, I plan to complete my retro-reviews of the first 10 Star Trek features (the "Trekalog"), and the next film on the list happens to be First Contact. 

That film, and the two that follow, constitute the last times we saw Jean-Luc Picard.  The first episode of the new series contains several echoes of First Contact and subsequent movies as well as Star Trek: The Next Generation series episodes. So these reviews may shed light on the new series as well.

So watch this space.