De Lancie said he had no further Q projects in the works—no novel or audio (as the two “Q and Spock” dialogues he did with Leonard Nimoy.) His opinion is that Star Trek is over, at least for the foreseeable future. He is of the “they went to the well too often” school, suggesting that three series done by the same people had perhaps been too much.
In the printed program for that evening’s performance, Star Trek is barely mentioned in de Lancie’s credits, sandwiched between “The Closer” and “Legend” in a list of “numerous television shows.” Instead his film and theatre work, and particularly his performances with symphony orchestras were emphasized. In addition to performing with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra and Montreal Symphony, he has written and directed ten Symphonic Plays, and a concert series for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He is scheduled to direct several operas in Atlanta. He has kept his hand in the science fiction field as well. In addition to Alien Voices, he’s produced television specials for the Sci-Fi Channel.
As for the opening performance itself, it was staged with simplicity and strength, and the script provided vivid historical context. The production was dramatic while still being fair and reasonably faithful to the actual events. The set was comprised of simple tables and chairs on two levels. The actors read from scripts in hand. There was a director onstage who cued sound and light effects. You know, Q de Lancie! (Sorry, couldn’t help it.)
On this particular night, the trial judge was played by another Star Trek actor, Jerry Hardin, who spoke with the same accent he used playing Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain in TNG’s “Time’s Arrow,” although he looked more as he did in TNG’s “”When the Bough Breaks.”
De Lancie’s authoritative Q voice served him well, although Darrow doesn’t have particularly brilliant speeches. His big moment is the cross-examination of Bryan towards the end of the play. (Our local talent, Bo Banduci, did very well as the 14 year old who testified as to what his teacher had said about evolution. Banduci’s strong voice and assured performance matched up very well with de Lancie, who questioned him.)
My strongest impression was that this production revealed the unique strengths of staging a radio drama (or, at least, this particular one), and exposed an area of potential weakness. The strength is in adding the visual dimension to riveting oratory. There were two transcendent examples of this, both in the first act. The first was a speech delivered with consummate skill by Edward Asner. He had captivated the audience immediately, with his theatrical pronunciation of “evil-lution”---no doubt something that the theatrical Bryan would have done. But he didn’t have a real speech until well into the first act, but when he did, it was a dandy.
Then the first act ended with the most powerful oratory of the trial, delivered by neither Bryan nor Darrow, but by Dudley Malone, a defense attorney who had said little to that point. It was delivered in this production with spellbinding intensity and consummate skill by Steppenwolf Theatre Company actor Francis Guinan (any relation? He didn’t look El-Aurian). Bryan himself called it the greatest speech he ever heard.
But after the long first act ended with these verbal fireworks, the shorter second act seemed to lack its energy. Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan is the dramatic climax of the play and film version of “Inherit the Wind,” (also based on this trial, though with a stronger point of view) which emphasizes Bryan’s increasingly desperate defense of his belief in the more or less literal interpretation of the Bible as scientific fact. But on this night, in this production, it seemed to fall a little flat.
It may have been that de Lancie and Asner didn’t have their timing down yet. Maybe the writing wasn't as sharp, or maybe it was just me---I was tired. But it could also be a problem inherent in the form. Bryan’s breakdown, partly physical (he died a few days later) is more subtle than the oratory. Perhaps those in the first few rows who could see Asner’s face clearly, or hear the nuances in his soft tones, had a different experience. (I’m hoping to catch the radio broadcast of this performance on the campus station to hear this scene again, without trying to see it.) But this may be something that staged radio drama can’t do as well as either radio or fully produced stage or screen drama.
The issues of the Scopes trial and the continuing evolution debate touch upon concerns that are important in Star Trek, though in some sense Star Trek reconciles them: it represents science and soul.
But I suppose my greatest impression in experiencing this production and applying it to Star Trek is my gratitude that for most of its run on television and in film, Star Trek clearly came from this rich, complex, wondrous and profoundly human tradition of theatre and classic movie (and radio) storytelling, and not from video games.
Monday, October 17, 2005
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
On the Threshold of---?
He started out on a trek and now he’s on the threshold. But of what?
The 1950s? Maybe. That was the last time that alien invasions were so popular. Kicked off by the very profitable second movie version of the very first space invasion tale—H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” first published more than a century ago---all three commercial broadcast networks have stories about mysterious aliens. “Threshold” on CBS seems to be getting the best reviews, and of course it’s of interest to Star Trek fans because former Star Trek producer-writer Brannon Braga is one of the executive producers, and Brent Spiner (Data) is one of the on-screen regulars.
(Those aren’t the only Star Trek connections, by the way. Longtime Trekker Michael Sussman is a supervising producer, David Gautreaux—who was slated to be the new Vulcan, the Mr. Spock replacement on the original cast’s second Star Trek TV series, and got a small consolation part in TMP instead—has a recurring role.)
The threat of terrorism supposedly inspired this throwback genre, previously popular in movies in the early Cold War 1950s (see Cold War Cinema for details), when it was the threat of Communism and instant nuclear annihilation. Then the correspondence was more precise: bombers and missiles come without warning to destroy from the sky; so do space aliens. Nuclear bombs cause weird biological mutations; so you get movies about giant ants, locusts, spiders, etc—the land of the bug-eyed monster movie.
Now it’s more amorphous, but the fear is out there. If terrorism has faded a little, there’s hurricanes and the climate: Revenge of the Earth. (Even Spielberg’s space alien machines came up out of the ground this time.)
Certainly “Threshold” is different stylistically from those fifties films. The best of them may have had a fairly lengthy “reveal” (the process of realizing there’s a monster or aliens, then actually seeing it/them) but the main event was the battle or attempt to destroy them. Usually the first several tries fail and all seems lost until they hit on the thing that works (“Water! It doesn’t like water!”—which would be funnier if that wasn’t the solution in one of the more recent alien invasion films, M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs”. Suggesting, I thought at the time, that the tagline for “Signs II” should be “They’re Back---With Raincoats!”).
But a television series is a different sort of beast, and as pioneered by such recent miniseries as “Taken” and “The 4400,” the reveal can be extended forever, maybe even 100 episodes. “The X Files” did it for its entire run, although it meandered a lot into side issues.
Like the dynamic duo of “X-Files,” the stars are investigators (A New York Times story on Threshold by Dave Itzkoff said “with its emphasis on forensic investigations and the interpersonal dynamics of its cast,[it] could pass for another spinoff of CSI,” but you could also see CSI as a variation on X-Files which preceded it.)
Judging from the episode I saw (last week’s, the third episode; I forgot when the first was on, then taped the second but somehow taped over it before I saw it.), this group at least doesn’t have to deal with hostile employers. It’s also more like a CSI in the number of main characters, making it also…well, more like a Star Trek series. (With the mystery being where the romance(s) will be?)
While “Enterprise” had to strain to include the apparently mandatory sexiness, “Threshold” has gone the classy big network route: cast a woman lead who nobody will dare say is too beautiful for her job, and put her in—shall we say flattering?---clothes that women with her job might be unlikely to wear. And then add tasteful details, like the kidnap victim who just happens to be an attractive young woman, caught in her underwear. And so while we wonder about what sinister alien force is causing these weird men to dig a hole in her floor, she is always in the frame, writhing in her ropes. And so we are back in the fifties monster films---or at least, the posters for them.
But the story was credible, the writing (as well as the writhing) seemed pretty good, with some terrific touches that the acting ran with, like the guy who had been locked away in a mental institution for most of his life, wondering aloud what had happened to the bike he had as a boy—“they probably threw it away.” A startling human moment in all the alien police procedural plotting.
There already appear to be elements of the uncanny, of magic (technological or otherwise) in "Threshold" that a space alien story in the past probably couldn’t have gotten away with and still maintained enough dramatic credibility. All kinds of shows in the past decade or so---from the brazen anachronisms of the Hercules and Xenia shows, to the recent fashion in psychic detectives and intervening angels, as well as the aforementioned M. Night and his quasi-religious occultism—contribute to audience expectations that no longer depend on plausibility based on orthodox science.
Arguably, Star Trek prepared the way by providing the scientific plausibility that was necessary for its audience and the 1960s general audience, while introducing other elements: aliens with inexplicable powers, and for humanoids certain psychic abilities as natural, and finally accepted by science. So the technobabble that Braga disses, probably contributed to the fact that Threshold can seem to depend on contemporary science, but can also throw in some fantastic elements, and get away with them.
He started out on a trek and now he’s on the threshold. But of what?
The 1950s? Maybe. That was the last time that alien invasions were so popular. Kicked off by the very profitable second movie version of the very first space invasion tale—H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” first published more than a century ago---all three commercial broadcast networks have stories about mysterious aliens. “Threshold” on CBS seems to be getting the best reviews, and of course it’s of interest to Star Trek fans because former Star Trek producer-writer Brannon Braga is one of the executive producers, and Brent Spiner (Data) is one of the on-screen regulars.
(Those aren’t the only Star Trek connections, by the way. Longtime Trekker Michael Sussman is a supervising producer, David Gautreaux—who was slated to be the new Vulcan, the Mr. Spock replacement on the original cast’s second Star Trek TV series, and got a small consolation part in TMP instead—has a recurring role.)
The threat of terrorism supposedly inspired this throwback genre, previously popular in movies in the early Cold War 1950s (see Cold War Cinema for details), when it was the threat of Communism and instant nuclear annihilation. Then the correspondence was more precise: bombers and missiles come without warning to destroy from the sky; so do space aliens. Nuclear bombs cause weird biological mutations; so you get movies about giant ants, locusts, spiders, etc—the land of the bug-eyed monster movie.
Now it’s more amorphous, but the fear is out there. If terrorism has faded a little, there’s hurricanes and the climate: Revenge of the Earth. (Even Spielberg’s space alien machines came up out of the ground this time.)
Certainly “Threshold” is different stylistically from those fifties films. The best of them may have had a fairly lengthy “reveal” (the process of realizing there’s a monster or aliens, then actually seeing it/them) but the main event was the battle or attempt to destroy them. Usually the first several tries fail and all seems lost until they hit on the thing that works (“Water! It doesn’t like water!”—which would be funnier if that wasn’t the solution in one of the more recent alien invasion films, M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs”. Suggesting, I thought at the time, that the tagline for “Signs II” should be “They’re Back---With Raincoats!”).
But a television series is a different sort of beast, and as pioneered by such recent miniseries as “Taken” and “The 4400,” the reveal can be extended forever, maybe even 100 episodes. “The X Files” did it for its entire run, although it meandered a lot into side issues.
Like the dynamic duo of “X-Files,” the stars are investigators (A New York Times story on Threshold by Dave Itzkoff said “with its emphasis on forensic investigations and the interpersonal dynamics of its cast,[it] could pass for another spinoff of CSI,” but you could also see CSI as a variation on X-Files which preceded it.)
Judging from the episode I saw (last week’s, the third episode; I forgot when the first was on, then taped the second but somehow taped over it before I saw it.), this group at least doesn’t have to deal with hostile employers. It’s also more like a CSI in the number of main characters, making it also…well, more like a Star Trek series. (With the mystery being where the romance(s) will be?)
While “Enterprise” had to strain to include the apparently mandatory sexiness, “Threshold” has gone the classy big network route: cast a woman lead who nobody will dare say is too beautiful for her job, and put her in—shall we say flattering?---clothes that women with her job might be unlikely to wear. And then add tasteful details, like the kidnap victim who just happens to be an attractive young woman, caught in her underwear. And so while we wonder about what sinister alien force is causing these weird men to dig a hole in her floor, she is always in the frame, writhing in her ropes. And so we are back in the fifties monster films---or at least, the posters for them.
But the story was credible, the writing (as well as the writhing) seemed pretty good, with some terrific touches that the acting ran with, like the guy who had been locked away in a mental institution for most of his life, wondering aloud what had happened to the bike he had as a boy—“they probably threw it away.” A startling human moment in all the alien police procedural plotting.
There already appear to be elements of the uncanny, of magic (technological or otherwise) in "Threshold" that a space alien story in the past probably couldn’t have gotten away with and still maintained enough dramatic credibility. All kinds of shows in the past decade or so---from the brazen anachronisms of the Hercules and Xenia shows, to the recent fashion in psychic detectives and intervening angels, as well as the aforementioned M. Night and his quasi-religious occultism—contribute to audience expectations that no longer depend on plausibility based on orthodox science.
Arguably, Star Trek prepared the way by providing the scientific plausibility that was necessary for its audience and the 1960s general audience, while introducing other elements: aliens with inexplicable powers, and for humanoids certain psychic abilities as natural, and finally accepted by science. So the technobabble that Braga disses, probably contributed to the fact that Threshold can seem to depend on contemporary science, but can also throw in some fantastic elements, and get away with them.
So in the coming weeks and---the producers hope—years, the nature of the aliens, their invasion (already known to have traces in the past) and their intentions will be slowly, oh so slowly revealed. But you can pretty much bet they won’t turn out to be good guys. And though Braga tells reporters how Threshold will be different from Star Trek, it’s not the techno-babble vs. understandable science, or freedom from the restrictions of the Roddenberry ethic---it’s this basic element: the aliens will be evildoers who hate our freedom.
Star Trek started at the height of the Cold War, but at the threshold of the period that came to be known as the Thaw, when Americans and Russians began to acknowledge each other’s humanity. After several dangerous confrontations, particularly the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, President Kennedy made serious efforts to lessen tensions. He got Soviet Premier Khrushchev to agree to the first nuclear test ban treaty, and the thaw in the Cold War began. It didn’t last; by the 80s President Reagan was demonizing the Soviets again as the Evil Empire. But the Thaw had prepared the way: when the walls fell, Americans and Russians were more able and willing to overcome the last stereotypes and, among other things, go into space together.
One of Star Trek’s well-known contributions to the culture as well as the science fiction genre was to propose the somewhat novel notion that aliens weren’t necessarily evil invaders, that their mission might not be to exterminate people. (It wasn’t completely new, of course---even the aliens in a few of those space invader 50s movies turned out to be good guys, or at least Misunderstood.)
This insight (insisted on by men like Roddenberry and Gene Coon who had seen combat against the Enemy, and learned as soldiers often do that the actual people they are fighting are not so different) in turn helped Star Trek portray and communicate a hopeful view of future possibilities.
How Threshold will avoid contributing to a harmful xenophobia, in an America that is in many ways alienated from the rest of the world, remains to be seen. I just hope we aren’t on the threshold of another war and torture movie, with no point but to raise blood pressure and hence ratings. The real thing is bad enough.
Star Trek started at the height of the Cold War, but at the threshold of the period that came to be known as the Thaw, when Americans and Russians began to acknowledge each other’s humanity. After several dangerous confrontations, particularly the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, President Kennedy made serious efforts to lessen tensions. He got Soviet Premier Khrushchev to agree to the first nuclear test ban treaty, and the thaw in the Cold War began. It didn’t last; by the 80s President Reagan was demonizing the Soviets again as the Evil Empire. But the Thaw had prepared the way: when the walls fell, Americans and Russians were more able and willing to overcome the last stereotypes and, among other things, go into space together.
One of Star Trek’s well-known contributions to the culture as well as the science fiction genre was to propose the somewhat novel notion that aliens weren’t necessarily evil invaders, that their mission might not be to exterminate people. (It wasn’t completely new, of course---even the aliens in a few of those space invader 50s movies turned out to be good guys, or at least Misunderstood.)
This insight (insisted on by men like Roddenberry and Gene Coon who had seen combat against the Enemy, and learned as soldiers often do that the actual people they are fighting are not so different) in turn helped Star Trek portray and communicate a hopeful view of future possibilities.
How Threshold will avoid contributing to a harmful xenophobia, in an America that is in many ways alienated from the rest of the world, remains to be seen. I just hope we aren’t on the threshold of another war and torture movie, with no point but to raise blood pressure and hence ratings. The real thing is bad enough.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
You’d Do the Same For Me
Further Reflections on Star Trek and New Orleans
by William S. Kowinski
Thousands crowded in the sealed darkness of a gleaming domed enclosure, confined with little food or water, trapped in an extreme nightmare of violence, death, heat and excrement. Families marooned on baking slivers of interstate highway, or waving frantically from rooftops at blind helicopters passing by on fathomless missions. All surrounded by roiling waters of spilled oil, toxic chemicals, sewage, and decaying human remains.
Then even as rescue began, two- mile lines of ambulances waited to bring patients into the only working medical facility, in the passenger concourse of the New Orleans airport. There, as Dr. Mehmet Oz reported on a harrowing hour of Oprah, those who were too ill to be helped were moved to the makeshift morgue while still alive.
This cannot be America, everyone was saying. This cannot even be...civilization.
This was perhaps the most sobering of many shocking realizations. Beyond political responsibilities and human failings, beyond the truth or illusion of national self-image, even beyond the physical suffering and material deprivations, there was the sense that civilization itself had broken down.
If it had, whose fault would it be? The people who were improvising survival under unimaginable duress, some of whom interpreted the absence of rescuers and resources as attempts to ignore or even kill them? Or those who failed in their designated tasks as the representatives of civilization? Or perhaps even those who set the terms of this civilization?
When civilization breaks down, it's often said that we revert to a more primitive self, the implication being that savagery is our natural state. This is a view of humanity shared by some religions and certain interpreters of Darwinian evolution-two groups that don't believe much in each other, and who might be scandalized to think they share anything at all.
It's a curious paradox, that the nature of humanity and the nature of human civilization are considered so radically different, one hostile to the other. It is a view that supports and is supported by authoritarian rule: the king and court, those of noble blood, and the hierarchy of the church. Only they can define and enforce civilization; the rest is the savage mob.
Is human nature savage? It's a question that Star Trek addressed in many ways. We think of Captain Kirk, an authority figure and an anarchic troublemaker at the same time, who gloried in the human struggle, and yet also knew that part of the struggle was to bring instincts and consciousness into balance.
The Enterprise came up against aliens who were vastly more powerful than humans, and aliens who were much more primitive. At the far ends of this opposites were the advanced "energy beings"(spirits without bodies) and the primitive beings who were only physical, with undeveloped mental powers and apparently primitive spirituality. Humanity was a middle state, always struggling to keep the spirit and the body in balance. That balancing without denying the different parts results in a kind of harmony, music, a dance, which some believe defines what we mean by soul: that which harmonizes body and spirit, thought and emotion.
Star Trek had its own working definition of humanity, a statement of the soul in action, which was in its way a working definition of civilization.
continued after photo
Further Reflections on Star Trek and New Orleans
by William S. Kowinski
Thousands crowded in the sealed darkness of a gleaming domed enclosure, confined with little food or water, trapped in an extreme nightmare of violence, death, heat and excrement. Families marooned on baking slivers of interstate highway, or waving frantically from rooftops at blind helicopters passing by on fathomless missions. All surrounded by roiling waters of spilled oil, toxic chemicals, sewage, and decaying human remains.
Then even as rescue began, two- mile lines of ambulances waited to bring patients into the only working medical facility, in the passenger concourse of the New Orleans airport. There, as Dr. Mehmet Oz reported on a harrowing hour of Oprah, those who were too ill to be helped were moved to the makeshift morgue while still alive.
This cannot be America, everyone was saying. This cannot even be...civilization.
This was perhaps the most sobering of many shocking realizations. Beyond political responsibilities and human failings, beyond the truth or illusion of national self-image, even beyond the physical suffering and material deprivations, there was the sense that civilization itself had broken down.
If it had, whose fault would it be? The people who were improvising survival under unimaginable duress, some of whom interpreted the absence of rescuers and resources as attempts to ignore or even kill them? Or those who failed in their designated tasks as the representatives of civilization? Or perhaps even those who set the terms of this civilization?
When civilization breaks down, it's often said that we revert to a more primitive self, the implication being that savagery is our natural state. This is a view of humanity shared by some religions and certain interpreters of Darwinian evolution-two groups that don't believe much in each other, and who might be scandalized to think they share anything at all.
It's a curious paradox, that the nature of humanity and the nature of human civilization are considered so radically different, one hostile to the other. It is a view that supports and is supported by authoritarian rule: the king and court, those of noble blood, and the hierarchy of the church. Only they can define and enforce civilization; the rest is the savage mob.
Is human nature savage? It's a question that Star Trek addressed in many ways. We think of Captain Kirk, an authority figure and an anarchic troublemaker at the same time, who gloried in the human struggle, and yet also knew that part of the struggle was to bring instincts and consciousness into balance.
The Enterprise came up against aliens who were vastly more powerful than humans, and aliens who were much more primitive. At the far ends of this opposites were the advanced "energy beings"(spirits without bodies) and the primitive beings who were only physical, with undeveloped mental powers and apparently primitive spirituality. Humanity was a middle state, always struggling to keep the spirit and the body in balance. That balancing without denying the different parts results in a kind of harmony, music, a dance, which some believe defines what we mean by soul: that which harmonizes body and spirit, thought and emotion.
Star Trek had its own working definition of humanity, a statement of the soul in action, which was in its way a working definition of civilization.
continued after photo
The Cost of Soul
There's a phrase that's become very important to me. Although it's a common phrase, it struck me forcefully some years ago when someone said it to me. I've been thinking about it in connection with what's happened in New Orleans and the Katrina zone this past month, and not just the awful parts.
Because it's become important to me, I notice it when I hear others say it. In real life (right after 9/11, for instance) and in Star Trek.
The circumstances for me weren't very dramatic. I was in a booth at a neighborhood coffee bar, absorbed in reading and writing. I knocked a pen on the floor but kept reading for a minute. When I looked up, a man was handing the pen to me. He was a custodian for this place but he appeared to have been just passing by. I looked up at him, surprised, and thanked him. He was a black man, perhaps in his sixties. He just nodded and said quietly, "You'd do the same for me."
I think it was the way he said it, with a casual gravity, as though it was something he said regularly, but it also had the quality and weight of a personal mantra of some importance.
It wasn't the first time I'd heard it, of course, but this time it struck me immediately. And the more I thought about it, the more it's come to mean.
Now I see that it sums up entire philosophies and puts many book-length ethical treatises to shame. "You'd do the same for me" is nothing less than the basis of civil behavior, from courtesy to heroism. It is the basis of civilization, the impulse and ethic that speaks for the human soul.
It's a phrase of some importance in Star Trek, in at least two widely separated moments which nevertheless have a lot in common.
The first is towards the end of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Kirk and his crew have defied Starfleet, seen Kirk's son killed and the Enterprise destroyed, in their quest to rescue Spock from death, to literally put his soul back into his body. This has been accomplished, but the revived Spock is not yet whole, not yet "human."
Kirk has already faced Sarek, Spock's father. "Kirk, I thank you," Sarek says. "What you have done---"
"What I have done I had to do," Kirk says.
"But at what cost? Your ship, your son---"
"If I hadn't tried, the cost would have been my soul."
These were the stakes in this endeavor. Not the survival of earth or the population of some other planet, but one man's soul, the Captain's soul, and therefore, it was humanity defining itself through the hero.
Now Kirk faces Spock for the first time. He, too, asks why. "My father says you came back for me."
Kirk responds with a quick, almost throwaway phrase, yet Kirk is telling Spock something he once knew, what he once did (that got him killed in the first place), and who he once was. "You'd do the same for me," he says.
At that moment, it may not be true---Spock is not yet himself. Kirk is telling him who his friend Spock essentially is, who they are.
"You'd do the same for me" is a standard, and it is also a bargain, a contract. I felt this in my little encounter in the coffee bar. By saying it to me, that man was stating both his own moral standard and his faith that others share it in the delicate informal system of day-to-day civilization. In the simplicity of this statement, in its simple assumptions, he was educating me and challenging me to rise to this standard. It is in some ways an ultimate equality, and a testament of faith in human possibility and the human heart.
There's a phrase that's become very important to me. Although it's a common phrase, it struck me forcefully some years ago when someone said it to me. I've been thinking about it in connection with what's happened in New Orleans and the Katrina zone this past month, and not just the awful parts.
Because it's become important to me, I notice it when I hear others say it. In real life (right after 9/11, for instance) and in Star Trek.
The circumstances for me weren't very dramatic. I was in a booth at a neighborhood coffee bar, absorbed in reading and writing. I knocked a pen on the floor but kept reading for a minute. When I looked up, a man was handing the pen to me. He was a custodian for this place but he appeared to have been just passing by. I looked up at him, surprised, and thanked him. He was a black man, perhaps in his sixties. He just nodded and said quietly, "You'd do the same for me."
I think it was the way he said it, with a casual gravity, as though it was something he said regularly, but it also had the quality and weight of a personal mantra of some importance.
It wasn't the first time I'd heard it, of course, but this time it struck me immediately. And the more I thought about it, the more it's come to mean.
Now I see that it sums up entire philosophies and puts many book-length ethical treatises to shame. "You'd do the same for me" is nothing less than the basis of civil behavior, from courtesy to heroism. It is the basis of civilization, the impulse and ethic that speaks for the human soul.
It's a phrase of some importance in Star Trek, in at least two widely separated moments which nevertheless have a lot in common.
The first is towards the end of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Kirk and his crew have defied Starfleet, seen Kirk's son killed and the Enterprise destroyed, in their quest to rescue Spock from death, to literally put his soul back into his body. This has been accomplished, but the revived Spock is not yet whole, not yet "human."
Kirk has already faced Sarek, Spock's father. "Kirk, I thank you," Sarek says. "What you have done---"
"What I have done I had to do," Kirk says.
"But at what cost? Your ship, your son---"
"If I hadn't tried, the cost would have been my soul."
These were the stakes in this endeavor. Not the survival of earth or the population of some other planet, but one man's soul, the Captain's soul, and therefore, it was humanity defining itself through the hero.
Now Kirk faces Spock for the first time. He, too, asks why. "My father says you came back for me."
Kirk responds with a quick, almost throwaway phrase, yet Kirk is telling Spock something he once knew, what he once did (that got him killed in the first place), and who he once was. "You'd do the same for me," he says.
At that moment, it may not be true---Spock is not yet himself. Kirk is telling him who his friend Spock essentially is, who they are.
"You'd do the same for me" is a standard, and it is also a bargain, a contract. I felt this in my little encounter in the coffee bar. By saying it to me, that man was stating both his own moral standard and his faith that others share it in the delicate informal system of day-to-day civilization. In the simplicity of this statement, in its simple assumptions, he was educating me and challenging me to rise to this standard. It is in some ways an ultimate equality, and a testament of faith in human possibility and the human heart.
Q and You: the Social Contract
It arises in Star Trek again in the third season of The Next Generation, in the episode Deja Q. The immortal and omnipotent being Q has been stripped of his powers for tormenting other life forms, and one of those life forms pursues him aboard the Enterprise. At one point these tiny creatures have Q in a kind of energy field, and Data pulls him out of it, and is damaged in the process.
Like Spock, Q had been taken out of himself. He was in that state now, but unlike Spock, Q acted with the petulance rather than the innocence of a child. That drove the humor of the piece, but things aren't funny to Q while Data's existence is in question. "Data may have sacrificed himself for me. Why? Why would he risk his life for mine?"
"That is his special nature," Captain Picard replies. "He has learned the lessons of humanity well."
For Data, an android who has only his programming and intelligence to work with, this self-sacrificing behavior is the product of ethical thinking, translated into direct action. But Q is temporarily human, and he begins to reason ethically by engaging his imagination and his emotions.
"I ask myself if I would have done the same for him," Q says. "And I am forced to realize the answer is 'no.' I feel...I feel ashamed."
Of course, Q goes on to perform a selfless act, to sacrifice himself so that the Enterprise is spared, and is rewarded for it by having his powers returned. Immediately afterwards, he seems to revert to the same old Q---but in future stories, he's different. He helps Picard give up his regrets for his wild youth, and he helps Picard again when the Continuum tests humanity again in the series finale, "All Good Things."
Q is ashamed because he understands the essential human standard: that he should have been willing to do the same for Data.
Some see this as an attitude contrary to nature, that comes only with belief in a higher being, or only when punishment would result had he failed to act correctly. But humans as members of the animal "kingdom" are social animals. Our genes are not always so selfish. Our existence is so profoundly dependent on our group (family, tribe, culture, society) that the welfare of the whole is emotionally important.
Whether as part of this feeling or independently, we also have the ability to identify with others, to put ourselves in another's place, to have empathy. There are other feelings as well---feelings of tenderness based on a sense of beauty, for example---that contribute to what we call compassion (which means a passion or feeling for everything.)
It turns out that these sorts of feelings and behaviors are present in other animals as well as humans---it's just that, prejudiced by their theories to the contrary, human researchers failed to look for it. Animal societies are quite complex, yet science has insisted on experimenting with isolated individuals.
Yet "you'd do the same for me" is not exactly a statement of selflessness. While it reflects an ethic based on empathy and compassion, it doesn't require it. It combines a feeling of human kinship with a utilitarian deduction: we can't guarantee we will be helped in time of trouble, but if we support an ethic of helping others by our actions, our chances will be better.
It arises in Star Trek again in the third season of The Next Generation, in the episode Deja Q. The immortal and omnipotent being Q has been stripped of his powers for tormenting other life forms, and one of those life forms pursues him aboard the Enterprise. At one point these tiny creatures have Q in a kind of energy field, and Data pulls him out of it, and is damaged in the process.
Like Spock, Q had been taken out of himself. He was in that state now, but unlike Spock, Q acted with the petulance rather than the innocence of a child. That drove the humor of the piece, but things aren't funny to Q while Data's existence is in question. "Data may have sacrificed himself for me. Why? Why would he risk his life for mine?"
"That is his special nature," Captain Picard replies. "He has learned the lessons of humanity well."
For Data, an android who has only his programming and intelligence to work with, this self-sacrificing behavior is the product of ethical thinking, translated into direct action. But Q is temporarily human, and he begins to reason ethically by engaging his imagination and his emotions.
"I ask myself if I would have done the same for him," Q says. "And I am forced to realize the answer is 'no.' I feel...I feel ashamed."
Of course, Q goes on to perform a selfless act, to sacrifice himself so that the Enterprise is spared, and is rewarded for it by having his powers returned. Immediately afterwards, he seems to revert to the same old Q---but in future stories, he's different. He helps Picard give up his regrets for his wild youth, and he helps Picard again when the Continuum tests humanity again in the series finale, "All Good Things."
Q is ashamed because he understands the essential human standard: that he should have been willing to do the same for Data.
Some see this as an attitude contrary to nature, that comes only with belief in a higher being, or only when punishment would result had he failed to act correctly. But humans as members of the animal "kingdom" are social animals. Our genes are not always so selfish. Our existence is so profoundly dependent on our group (family, tribe, culture, society) that the welfare of the whole is emotionally important.
Whether as part of this feeling or independently, we also have the ability to identify with others, to put ourselves in another's place, to have empathy. There are other feelings as well---feelings of tenderness based on a sense of beauty, for example---that contribute to what we call compassion (which means a passion or feeling for everything.)
It turns out that these sorts of feelings and behaviors are present in other animals as well as humans---it's just that, prejudiced by their theories to the contrary, human researchers failed to look for it. Animal societies are quite complex, yet science has insisted on experimenting with isolated individuals.
Yet "you'd do the same for me" is not exactly a statement of selflessness. While it reflects an ethic based on empathy and compassion, it doesn't require it. It combines a feeling of human kinship with a utilitarian deduction: we can't guarantee we will be helped in time of trouble, but if we support an ethic of helping others by our actions, our chances will be better.
Expanding "We" Means More Help for "Me"
In a complex society, individual freedoms and opportunities depend on a shared sense that in the final analysis, we're all in this together. "You'd do the same for me" is the basic bargain of civilization, the confirmation of the faith in each other and in our institutions necessary to make it all work.
Civilization may be nothing more and nothing less than a society's commitment to particular values, reflected in its philosophies, institutions and actions, continually renewed and extended. It is finally expressed and confirmed by individual citizens and their associations.
The world saw our civilization break down in the Katrina zone, and we saw that, contrary to recent rhetoric, the failure of government can be catastrophic. But civilization reasserted itself, based on a principal civic value, which can't be expressed any better than in the phrase, "you'd do the same for me."
It turned out that people from all over the world were frantic to help the suffering strangers in New Orleans. They risked their lives rescuing people, they opened their homes to strangers. They sacrificed for others, as they worried about what might happen to them if disaster struck their city.
It is the basis for heroism, as in Star Trek, or as spoken by fireman in the aftermath of 9/11, explaining why he was starting a 24-hour shift digging through the rubble of the World Trade Center to search for fellow firefighters buried there. They were his brothers, he said, and "they'd do the same for me."
But in more modest, everyday ways it's the basis of hospitality and sharing in time of trouble that characterize traditional cultures all over the world. It is more subtle than the Golden Rule, for it carries expectation as well as personal responsibility. "You'd do the same for me" is a challenge in the form of a statement of faith.
We are challenged today in several ways by the ramifications of Katrina. As yet another horrific hurricane moved towards land, and cities with other dangers were reevaluating their preparations, the Mayor of San Francisco (vulnerable to an inevitable future earthquake) said that the lesson of Katrina was that we are all on our own.
Certainly we must all prepare to sustain ourselves in such circumstances, and certainly we have learned that the enormity of some disasters as well as the laxity of some officials, we can't trust entirely government or anyone else to come to our rescue. But surely the message of Katrina is also that we are all in this together. We will survive only if we help each other, not just in disasters that have happened, but in anticipating and preparing for them.
There is another, perhaps tougher lesson that some draw from what happened in New Orleans. Economist Paul Krugman reflected on the role of race in the disaster and in America generally. "Consider this: in the United States, unlike any other advanced country, many people fail to receive basic health care because they can't afford it. Lack of health insurance kills many more Americans each year than Katrina and 9/11 combined."
Why is that? What isn't access to health care a major political issue? "...one reason is that it isn't yet a crisis among middle-class, white Americans (although it's getting there.) Instead, the worst effects are falling on the poor and black..."
So why do Europeans extend universal healthcare to everyone in their country, and Americans do not? Krugman writes: "And who can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, "There but for the grace of God go I." A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, "Why should I be taxed to support those people?"
The thrust of Krugman's column is simply that somewhere behind the consciousness of white America, the "we" in "we're all in this together" doesn't include people of color. This is the basic problem of the alien that is central to Star Trek. We define ourselves in contrast to those who aren't us. We're constituted to be aware of anything that might be a threat, which includes any change in our environment, from a sudden movement or an unfamiliar sound to a stranger. They all engage instinctual reactions that are glandular before they are conscious. Difference excites---sometimes in a good way, but often in fear.
But humans have consciousness as well as instincts. We learn and even educate our reactions. Not long ago, racial prejudice was expected to disappear when everybody becomes middle class; that is, in ways important to Americans now, everybody would be basically the same. To a certain extent, this has happened, and various races are excepted according to their income and conformity to the upper middle class standards. But considering black people and poor people as “them” seems still present.
Yet even within white America there is much more knowledge and appreciation of others for their beauty, intelligence and style---and an appreciation of how much we have in common, yet how much richer we are by being different.
As humans, besides being afraid of difference we also crave it. We have learned to value the different ways of approaching the world represented in different cultures, just as we value the different skills and perspectives of individuals. This is another impulse that's become a social one, a basis for society: we like to have some idea of what might happen and alternatives to cope with any threats, or to take advantage of any opportunities. This is a human survival strategy.
We're back at the practical benefits of diversity, and the fundamental identity of our species, even of life itself. We share so much with so many. The basis of being able to live long and prosper together is "you'd do the same for me." Our heroes can take it to the limit with the ultimate self-sacrifice. But the rest of us can be courteous and thoughtful, look for what we have in common and provide the help we can when it's needed. There are plenty of real threats to deal with or avoid without inventing and creating dangers, or creating unnecessary us/them situations. We especially must be on guard against being manipulated into false us/them perspectives that really benefit a small group that's trying to accrue power and profit.
Sooner or later we come to understand that by expanding a sense of "we," we are multiplying the number of people who might help us when we need it, because they know we'd do the same for them. It's quite practical, and as things become more complex and perhaps more dire, it becomes more necessary.
In the Star Trek 22nd century, the "us" has expanded to include all humanity on earth, and in the 23rd century the "us" is expanding to include alien species. In our time, we can't go on pretending to share the identity of a country, a species and especially a civilization unless and until we expand our concept of "us" or "we" to match our reality. It's especially meaningful to me because those word were etched into my soul by hearing them from a black man. "You'd do the same for me" is our faith in civilization and each other. It's a faith we ought to spread, and not limit to the Star Trek future.
In a complex society, individual freedoms and opportunities depend on a shared sense that in the final analysis, we're all in this together. "You'd do the same for me" is the basic bargain of civilization, the confirmation of the faith in each other and in our institutions necessary to make it all work.
Civilization may be nothing more and nothing less than a society's commitment to particular values, reflected in its philosophies, institutions and actions, continually renewed and extended. It is finally expressed and confirmed by individual citizens and their associations.
The world saw our civilization break down in the Katrina zone, and we saw that, contrary to recent rhetoric, the failure of government can be catastrophic. But civilization reasserted itself, based on a principal civic value, which can't be expressed any better than in the phrase, "you'd do the same for me."
It turned out that people from all over the world were frantic to help the suffering strangers in New Orleans. They risked their lives rescuing people, they opened their homes to strangers. They sacrificed for others, as they worried about what might happen to them if disaster struck their city.
It is the basis for heroism, as in Star Trek, or as spoken by fireman in the aftermath of 9/11, explaining why he was starting a 24-hour shift digging through the rubble of the World Trade Center to search for fellow firefighters buried there. They were his brothers, he said, and "they'd do the same for me."
But in more modest, everyday ways it's the basis of hospitality and sharing in time of trouble that characterize traditional cultures all over the world. It is more subtle than the Golden Rule, for it carries expectation as well as personal responsibility. "You'd do the same for me" is a challenge in the form of a statement of faith.
We are challenged today in several ways by the ramifications of Katrina. As yet another horrific hurricane moved towards land, and cities with other dangers were reevaluating their preparations, the Mayor of San Francisco (vulnerable to an inevitable future earthquake) said that the lesson of Katrina was that we are all on our own.
Certainly we must all prepare to sustain ourselves in such circumstances, and certainly we have learned that the enormity of some disasters as well as the laxity of some officials, we can't trust entirely government or anyone else to come to our rescue. But surely the message of Katrina is also that we are all in this together. We will survive only if we help each other, not just in disasters that have happened, but in anticipating and preparing for them.
There is another, perhaps tougher lesson that some draw from what happened in New Orleans. Economist Paul Krugman reflected on the role of race in the disaster and in America generally. "Consider this: in the United States, unlike any other advanced country, many people fail to receive basic health care because they can't afford it. Lack of health insurance kills many more Americans each year than Katrina and 9/11 combined."
Why is that? What isn't access to health care a major political issue? "...one reason is that it isn't yet a crisis among middle-class, white Americans (although it's getting there.) Instead, the worst effects are falling on the poor and black..."
So why do Europeans extend universal healthcare to everyone in their country, and Americans do not? Krugman writes: "And who can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, "There but for the grace of God go I." A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, "Why should I be taxed to support those people?"
The thrust of Krugman's column is simply that somewhere behind the consciousness of white America, the "we" in "we're all in this together" doesn't include people of color. This is the basic problem of the alien that is central to Star Trek. We define ourselves in contrast to those who aren't us. We're constituted to be aware of anything that might be a threat, which includes any change in our environment, from a sudden movement or an unfamiliar sound to a stranger. They all engage instinctual reactions that are glandular before they are conscious. Difference excites---sometimes in a good way, but often in fear.
But humans have consciousness as well as instincts. We learn and even educate our reactions. Not long ago, racial prejudice was expected to disappear when everybody becomes middle class; that is, in ways important to Americans now, everybody would be basically the same. To a certain extent, this has happened, and various races are excepted according to their income and conformity to the upper middle class standards. But considering black people and poor people as “them” seems still present.
Yet even within white America there is much more knowledge and appreciation of others for their beauty, intelligence and style---and an appreciation of how much we have in common, yet how much richer we are by being different.
As humans, besides being afraid of difference we also crave it. We have learned to value the different ways of approaching the world represented in different cultures, just as we value the different skills and perspectives of individuals. This is another impulse that's become a social one, a basis for society: we like to have some idea of what might happen and alternatives to cope with any threats, or to take advantage of any opportunities. This is a human survival strategy.
We're back at the practical benefits of diversity, and the fundamental identity of our species, even of life itself. We share so much with so many. The basis of being able to live long and prosper together is "you'd do the same for me." Our heroes can take it to the limit with the ultimate self-sacrifice. But the rest of us can be courteous and thoughtful, look for what we have in common and provide the help we can when it's needed. There are plenty of real threats to deal with or avoid without inventing and creating dangers, or creating unnecessary us/them situations. We especially must be on guard against being manipulated into false us/them perspectives that really benefit a small group that's trying to accrue power and profit.
Sooner or later we come to understand that by expanding a sense of "we," we are multiplying the number of people who might help us when we need it, because they know we'd do the same for them. It's quite practical, and as things become more complex and perhaps more dire, it becomes more necessary.
In the Star Trek 22nd century, the "us" has expanded to include all humanity on earth, and in the 23rd century the "us" is expanding to include alien species. In our time, we can't go on pretending to share the identity of a country, a species and especially a civilization unless and until we expand our concept of "us" or "we" to match our reality. It's especially meaningful to me because those word were etched into my soul by hearing them from a black man. "You'd do the same for me" is our faith in civilization and each other. It's a faith we ought to spread, and not limit to the Star Trek future.
Monday, September 19, 2005
Thursday, September 15, 2005
R.I.P. Robert Wise
Legendary film director Robert Wise died on September 14, a few days after celebrating his ninety-first birthday. Wise directed "West Side Story," "The Sound of Music," and edited "Citizen Kane." He directed the science fiction classic, "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and of course, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture."
When Wise was able to complete TMP for the Special Edition DVD, with new effects, sound mix and a new edit of the movie, it finally lived up to its potential as another classic. I've said it before, but I'll repeat: a special theatrical release would be a fitting way to celebrate Star Trek's 40th anniversary.
The Los Angeles Times obituary of Robert Wise can be found here.
Legendary film director Robert Wise died on September 14, a few days after celebrating his ninety-first birthday. Wise directed "West Side Story," "The Sound of Music," and edited "Citizen Kane." He directed the science fiction classic, "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and of course, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture."
When Wise was able to complete TMP for the Special Edition DVD, with new effects, sound mix and a new edit of the movie, it finally lived up to its potential as another classic. I've said it before, but I'll repeat: a special theatrical release would be a fitting way to celebrate Star Trek's 40th anniversary.
The Los Angeles Times obituary of Robert Wise can be found here.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Star Trek: Dramatic Conclusions
by William S. Kowinski
Previously on Soul of Star Trek: When we watch Star Trek, we experience all aspects of it simultaneously. But when we try to explain what Star Trek essentially is, we can try to define each element, so we can appreciate what that element contributes to the whole.
In this mini-series about the soul of Star Trek, we began with a statement about its nature and its importance: that Star Trek is the best known contemporary vision of the future.
We considered the importance of views and visions of the future, particularly in the industrial age and in recent American history, and then specifically in the years when the original Star Trek series was being created and became popular. Why did Star Trek succeed as a vision of the future, when so many other visions didn't?
We looked for our first set of answers in terms of structure. We looked at Star Trek as a more complete vision of the future because it employs the fullness, humanity and complexity of story. Star Trek brings us into its future by telling stories of adventure. We looked at Star Trek as mythology, and saw that allegory was a tool for relating the future to the present.
So as we proceed to other structural elements and descriptions---Star Trek as drama, as television, and as science fiction---we enrich each new element with what we carry with us from earlier explorations. How is this vision of the future expressed? As story. What kind of story? Adventure, extended and raised to a mythology of the future, employing allegory as a way of giving us a perspective on our present and simultaneously portraying a possible future we'd like to live in.
But in a very real way, for the minutes we are watching, we are living in the Star Trek future. How does that happen? Why do we want to live there, and return there, and make that future our own?
And now, the conclusion...
by William S. Kowinski
Previously on Soul of Star Trek: When we watch Star Trek, we experience all aspects of it simultaneously. But when we try to explain what Star Trek essentially is, we can try to define each element, so we can appreciate what that element contributes to the whole.
In this mini-series about the soul of Star Trek, we began with a statement about its nature and its importance: that Star Trek is the best known contemporary vision of the future.
We considered the importance of views and visions of the future, particularly in the industrial age and in recent American history, and then specifically in the years when the original Star Trek series was being created and became popular. Why did Star Trek succeed as a vision of the future, when so many other visions didn't?
We looked for our first set of answers in terms of structure. We looked at Star Trek as a more complete vision of the future because it employs the fullness, humanity and complexity of story. Star Trek brings us into its future by telling stories of adventure. We looked at Star Trek as mythology, and saw that allegory was a tool for relating the future to the present.
So as we proceed to other structural elements and descriptions---Star Trek as drama, as television, and as science fiction---we enrich each new element with what we carry with us from earlier explorations. How is this vision of the future expressed? As story. What kind of story? Adventure, extended and raised to a mythology of the future, employing allegory as a way of giving us a perspective on our present and simultaneously portraying a possible future we'd like to live in.
But in a very real way, for the minutes we are watching, we are living in the Star Trek future. How does that happen? Why do we want to live there, and return there, and make that future our own?
And now, the conclusion...
The Star Trek West
Whatever visions Gene Roddenberry had of depicting a future, or of using allegory to comment on contemporary issues, he was first faced with a problem he knew very well. He had to come up with a premise for a very specific form of storytelling: the television drama series.
When GR was working on his proposal for Star Trek in early 1964, the television drama series was still young, but had established itself as pretty much what it is today.
Network television was only in its second decade then. It had begun by copying, borrowing and stealing formats (as well as characters, shows and stars) from radio, motion pictures and theatre, especially Vaudeville comedy.
Soap operas, comedies and adventure dramas were imported from radio. Drama consisted of plays that were written or adapted for the limitations of set and camera, and performed live. At first the movie studios would contribute only old cartoons and adventure serials, but eventually dramatic films of decent quality were regular features on network and local station schedules.
In the middle 1950s, there were anthology shows of mini-movie dramas, usually built around minor movie stars like Loretta Young or Dick Powell, but these series could also include comedy and even musical stories. Eventually television drama would define itself simply as not being comedy or musical.
As television technology got better, the measure of quality became how "real" the show looked. (In some sense, this meant how much TV looked like the movies, but since TV was also starting to broadcast news and actual events, it did begin to develop its own style of presenting "reality.")
Probably the breakthrough in the drama series was the so-called "adult western," which was the most popular primetime format in the late 1950s and early 1960s: Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Wagon Train; and the series GR wrote for the most--Have Gun, Will Travel. They were "adult" because they paid attention to character as well as shootouts, saloon brawls and long chases on horseback. Adults could identify with these characters: they had relationships and problems; they argued, worried and made mistakes. But of course, they were still larger than life heroes.
The stories were more believable, and more nuanced than good guys in white hats and bad guys in black. In other words, they were more like quality movie westerns-- more "High Noon" and "The Virginian" than Roy Rogers. This was really a new approach for TV westerns---even though we now think of early westerns like "The Lone Ranger" and "The Cisco Kid" as Saturday morning kid's shows, they had been on network evening schedules, even shown in prime time.
The adult westerns helped establish the format of one-hour filmed drama: continuing characters within a single premise, and usually set in one definite time and place. The characters and stories were now not very far from those in movies (which emptied out movie theatres for awhile) but it would soon become evident that the television drama series had some peculiar characteristics that made the form unique, not only in their time but in the history of drama.
Though Star Trek would exemplify some of these characteristics---and even help reveal the peculiar power of the TV drama series---this was not yet on the list of GR's concerns in 1964. At the proposal stage, he had to satisfy the new conventions of the format. Yet he was also going to do something daring---he was going to propose a new genre for the drama series to explore.
Whatever visions Gene Roddenberry had of depicting a future, or of using allegory to comment on contemporary issues, he was first faced with a problem he knew very well. He had to come up with a premise for a very specific form of storytelling: the television drama series.
When GR was working on his proposal for Star Trek in early 1964, the television drama series was still young, but had established itself as pretty much what it is today.
Network television was only in its second decade then. It had begun by copying, borrowing and stealing formats (as well as characters, shows and stars) from radio, motion pictures and theatre, especially Vaudeville comedy.
Soap operas, comedies and adventure dramas were imported from radio. Drama consisted of plays that were written or adapted for the limitations of set and camera, and performed live. At first the movie studios would contribute only old cartoons and adventure serials, but eventually dramatic films of decent quality were regular features on network and local station schedules.
In the middle 1950s, there were anthology shows of mini-movie dramas, usually built around minor movie stars like Loretta Young or Dick Powell, but these series could also include comedy and even musical stories. Eventually television drama would define itself simply as not being comedy or musical.
As television technology got better, the measure of quality became how "real" the show looked. (In some sense, this meant how much TV looked like the movies, but since TV was also starting to broadcast news and actual events, it did begin to develop its own style of presenting "reality.")
Probably the breakthrough in the drama series was the so-called "adult western," which was the most popular primetime format in the late 1950s and early 1960s: Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Wagon Train; and the series GR wrote for the most--Have Gun, Will Travel. They were "adult" because they paid attention to character as well as shootouts, saloon brawls and long chases on horseback. Adults could identify with these characters: they had relationships and problems; they argued, worried and made mistakes. But of course, they were still larger than life heroes.
The stories were more believable, and more nuanced than good guys in white hats and bad guys in black. In other words, they were more like quality movie westerns-- more "High Noon" and "The Virginian" than Roy Rogers. This was really a new approach for TV westerns---even though we now think of early westerns like "The Lone Ranger" and "The Cisco Kid" as Saturday morning kid's shows, they had been on network evening schedules, even shown in prime time.
The adult westerns helped establish the format of one-hour filmed drama: continuing characters within a single premise, and usually set in one definite time and place. The characters and stories were now not very far from those in movies (which emptied out movie theatres for awhile) but it would soon become evident that the television drama series had some peculiar characteristics that made the form unique, not only in their time but in the history of drama.
Though Star Trek would exemplify some of these characteristics---and even help reveal the peculiar power of the TV drama series---this was not yet on the list of GR's concerns in 1964. At the proposal stage, he had to satisfy the new conventions of the format. Yet he was also going to do something daring---he was going to propose a new genre for the drama series to explore.
The Next Big Thing
By the early 60s, the stranglehold adult westerns had on network schedules was loosening. There were popular police and detective, doctor and lawyer shows set in contemporary times. GR tried his hand at a lawyer show, with a pilot starring DeForest Kelley. So did William Shatner---apart from guest appearances on the popular series, "The Defenders," he starred as a crusading assistant district attorney in "For the People," which lasted several months on CBS in 1965.
GR did get a series of his own on the air, "The Lieutenant," a contemporary drama set on a Marine base (GR had used his military as well as his police experience in earlier shows he'd written for, such as syndicated series' on West Point and Annapolis.) But he found the "realism" of these shows was limited. Censorship and timidity kept stories within safe bounds, along with language and sexuality.
Though contemporary realistic dramas were successful, nothing had quite replaced the westerns. Some producers tried to find a premise for bringing a contemporary sense to exotic locales in a different time by adapting a genre in a different past. (Shatner was set to star in a series about Alexander the Great.)
GR had already figured out that he needed some distance from contemporary realism to get away with the kind of stories he wanted to tell. He'd seen stories dealing with moral issues in Saturday morning adventures for young audiences, and even contemporary political issues in the British-made series' like Robin Hood, which dealt with anti-Semitism as well as injustice towards the poor. It was no coincidence that these imports often were written by American screenwriters in exile, victims of the Hollywood Blacklist, which helped limit critical comment and social consciousness in TV and film.
But while other producers and writers were looking to the past for their premises, GR looked to the future. Science fiction could become the new western. And the future offered even better opportunities for dealing with meaningful contemporary issues, because you weren't tied to any sort of historical fact. To a certain degree, you could invent things about the past in a western. But in science fiction, you could invent an entire future.
GR had already tried his hand at science fiction stories for television, and he knew what he was up against. The overwhelming conventional view was that science fiction was too incredible; it was not realistic, it was crude, a little crazy, and only for kids. It was not believable, and could not therefore be television drama.
But GR thought he could make it credible and dramatic. He thought he could sell it, too. After all, there were some network executives looking for the New Western, just like fashion mavens today are looking for the New Black. There were so many possibilities---the universe is the limit. Even the conventions of movie and early television science fiction showed potential, at least in terms of pictures. You could invent a future that was great to look at, and with the networks interested in using color in prime time...
So why not make the idea completely explicit? Sell the future as a naval adventure on the new ocean of space (as JFK called it), with rockets instead of sailing ships. But really sell it as a western, except even better. They're out there where the skies are really not cloudy all day--- at the ultimate frontier---no, make that the final frontier...A Wagon Train to the Stars.
Eventually Desilu and then NBC bought it. And then the real problems began.
As a producer, GR had to face the reality of creating a future from scratch. Not the ideas, exactly. From the reading and watching he'd done before, and from reading and watching he did once he was really going to be doing this series, GR along with his collaborators could pick and choose, tweak and refine or turn completely around many concepts that science fiction writers and dramatists had put in print or on film or on the air, doubtless having adapted the ideas of earlier writers and dramatists. That's how storytelling works. It's how everything works.
By the early 60s, the stranglehold adult westerns had on network schedules was loosening. There were popular police and detective, doctor and lawyer shows set in contemporary times. GR tried his hand at a lawyer show, with a pilot starring DeForest Kelley. So did William Shatner---apart from guest appearances on the popular series, "The Defenders," he starred as a crusading assistant district attorney in "For the People," which lasted several months on CBS in 1965.
GR did get a series of his own on the air, "The Lieutenant," a contemporary drama set on a Marine base (GR had used his military as well as his police experience in earlier shows he'd written for, such as syndicated series' on West Point and Annapolis.) But he found the "realism" of these shows was limited. Censorship and timidity kept stories within safe bounds, along with language and sexuality.
Though contemporary realistic dramas were successful, nothing had quite replaced the westerns. Some producers tried to find a premise for bringing a contemporary sense to exotic locales in a different time by adapting a genre in a different past. (Shatner was set to star in a series about Alexander the Great.)
GR had already figured out that he needed some distance from contemporary realism to get away with the kind of stories he wanted to tell. He'd seen stories dealing with moral issues in Saturday morning adventures for young audiences, and even contemporary political issues in the British-made series' like Robin Hood, which dealt with anti-Semitism as well as injustice towards the poor. It was no coincidence that these imports often were written by American screenwriters in exile, victims of the Hollywood Blacklist, which helped limit critical comment and social consciousness in TV and film.
But while other producers and writers were looking to the past for their premises, GR looked to the future. Science fiction could become the new western. And the future offered even better opportunities for dealing with meaningful contemporary issues, because you weren't tied to any sort of historical fact. To a certain degree, you could invent things about the past in a western. But in science fiction, you could invent an entire future.
GR had already tried his hand at science fiction stories for television, and he knew what he was up against. The overwhelming conventional view was that science fiction was too incredible; it was not realistic, it was crude, a little crazy, and only for kids. It was not believable, and could not therefore be television drama.
But GR thought he could make it credible and dramatic. He thought he could sell it, too. After all, there were some network executives looking for the New Western, just like fashion mavens today are looking for the New Black. There were so many possibilities---the universe is the limit. Even the conventions of movie and early television science fiction showed potential, at least in terms of pictures. You could invent a future that was great to look at, and with the networks interested in using color in prime time...
So why not make the idea completely explicit? Sell the future as a naval adventure on the new ocean of space (as JFK called it), with rockets instead of sailing ships. But really sell it as a western, except even better. They're out there where the skies are really not cloudy all day--- at the ultimate frontier---no, make that the final frontier...A Wagon Train to the Stars.
Eventually Desilu and then NBC bought it. And then the real problems began.
As a producer, GR had to face the reality of creating a future from scratch. Not the ideas, exactly. From the reading and watching he'd done before, and from reading and watching he did once he was really going to be doing this series, GR along with his collaborators could pick and choose, tweak and refine or turn completely around many concepts that science fiction writers and dramatists had put in print or on film or on the air, doubtless having adapted the ideas of earlier writers and dramatists. That's how storytelling works. It's how everything works.
Believing in the Enterprise
Still, GR was not just making story---he was making drama. Drama is from a Greek word that means "action." In our terms, it basically means action you can see and hear. It means action that imitates the look and sound of the reality it is pretending to be, according to the conventions of the medium.
You believe (or suspend your disbelief) in the reality of a city street, for instance, according to the medium. If it's a stage play, an obviously fake streetlamp, a few facades of buildings will be enough---you know the reality is only suggested. If it's a TV show, there has to be more detail. If it's a movie, even more detail. A TV show might get away with a realistic looking street with a few buildings and some people, but no real sense there is a city around it. A movie has to give you the sense that the street is a real street in a real city, fully functioning and populated, with streets that lead to other streets, to the rest of the world.
A television series exists in a particular world, but that world has to be complete within itself. A series set in contemporary times just has to select from what exists: the kinds of clothes, tables, forks, lamps, cars, telephones and toothbrushes that are sold in one store or another. Westerns and other historical dramas can raid museums, old photographs and traditional conceptions to make their worlds.
But the future has to be invented, and built pretty much from scratch. Wherever the idea came from to take this really seriously, as an opportunity to build a plausible future, GR gave it life with a stubborn and ultimately creative consistency.
It makes sense on lots of levels to really think it through, and keep it consistent. First, it helps to counter one of the big objections to science fiction-that it's all fanciful and can't be taken seriously. For the fact that the clothes, tables, forks, lamps and communicators of the future don't yet exist is in a dramatic sense irrelevant. By creating those things, you create that future, and you have to create them, because this is drama. You have real people as actors, playing characters who need ways to keep warm and dry, and ways to ingest nourishment, get around and communicate. Once you build and show your future, and it works for those characters, that future becomes real.
From watching and reading science fiction, Roddenberry said years later, he had figured out what he would do if he ever got the chance to write it. "I'm going to try to make it as scientifically accurate as possible and write [these scripts] the way we wrote the old Playhouse 90." He wanted to treat the fantastic as if it were real, hoping that the double message of a wondrous reality would act like a magnet for the eyes and hearts of viewers.
For example, the space ship. "My feeling was that if you didn't believe in the spaceship," Roddenberry said,"---if you didn't believe you were in a vehicle traveling through space, a vehicle that made sense, whose layout and design made sense...then you wouldn't believe in the series."
For scientific accuracy, the Trek team consulted with scientists at RAND and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, involving technical matters at high and rarified levels, such as whether faster-than-light travel was possible, and if so, what principles might be involved in powering a craft through the immense distances between the stars.
But Roddenberry and other armed services veterans could bring their own experience with large ships and large aircraft in World War II to the concept of a large starship and crew. The Trek team thought carefully about how many people would be aboard, where they would sleep and how they would eat. They thought about how the bridge would work best, and who would be on it. Where would the ideal place for the captain to be?
All of this was fairly deep thinking for science fiction on film. But this was not a single movie, nor a before-the-feature movie serial or one-time television drama. This was a network dramatic series, and Roddenberry had been writing for those long enough to understand their basic requirements.
This basis of workable, recognizable reality that made sense had to extend to the people aboard the ship. The Trek team thought about the kind of people who would make it to the most important vessel in a future fleet. Roddenberry remembered the rigors of flight school in World War II-the many who washed out at each step in the process. Some anomalies of behavior were inevitable, but certain kinds of excesses or deficiencies just weren't credible-you wouldn't get to serve on a starship if you had them. So while certain character flaws might make dramatic conflict easier, relying on them might sink the sense of reality.
To further establish that sense of familiarity and continuity with the present, Roddenberry wanted to give the starship a name with a pedigree: first it was the Yorktown, and then the Enterprise. The various other naval analogies would further ground the series in reality, and besides personal experiences of the veterans on the team, Roddenberry had several years researching leadership and training while writing for the West Point TV series.
Some of the future technology could be extrapolated from the most advanced ideas of today. Roddenberry looked at instruments at North American's Advanced Space Research Center to get ideas, not only of what the Enterprise instruments might look like, but what they wouldn't be like, what would be obsolete. There would be some sort of "computer," which barely existed in the mid 1960s. What would computers be like-what would they do-- in 400 years?
Sometimes the answer would lie partly in science and partly in behavior: what would people in the future want their technology to do? In considering what a 23rd century sick bay would look like, you might start by thinking about what current technology medicine would want to improve. Assuming advanced ability to monitor an array of physical functions, what would be the most efficient way to do that, for both the patient and the physicians? The answer was the bio-bed with its clearly visible electronic monitors of heartrate and other basic functions., which didn't wait until the 23rd century to become a hospital commonplace.
That Star Trek took such pains to extrapolate from existing science and especially from the speculations at the far edge of certain sciences, is probably a factor in its longevity, as well as partially accounting for its fans among scientists, engineers and the technologically inclined.
Scientific plausibility is a slightly different thing, and here the instincts of a science fiction fan, as GR had been since childhood, combine with the prejudices of the age. The science fiction fan is interested in the science as part of the adventure. But the network executives and perhaps the skeptical viewer are more reassured than excited by scientific plausibility. Science has changed reality so thoroughly and so often, that anything that seems "scientific" is granted a certain (perhaps grudging) suspension of disbelief.
The basics of the Star Trek universe were created according to need and opportunity. Some were brilliant ideas that happened to work very well within the TV budget, and some---like the transporter, which negated the need for expensive shots of the spaceship landing on a different planet every week---were actually economical.
While GR got interested in what future technology might be, he also approached the future as a storyteller. So the future technology had to be plausible, even if no one really knew if it was possible, or how it could actually work. It's the difference between Dick Tracy's wrist radio, which was plausible even in the 1940s, and his invisible airplane, which wasn't.
It is this application of the imagination of a storyteller as well as a scientific imagination that made H.G. Wells' visions of the future much more wondrous and (as it turned out) much more accurate than that of so-called experts. It's the same combination that GR infused in Star Trek.
Plausible technology used consistently (warp ten is always warp ten, phasers do what it is established that they do) adds up to a believable future. The rule applies beyond technology, to the other elements of a complete future.
Thinking about the future that way wasn't just smart, it was almost mandatory. Because this is drama-a future that has to be shown, and the characters have to been seen living in it. Because this is television drama ---and it has to be the same future next week and the week after.
But at a certain point, or maybe it just happened gradually, GR must have realized that in creating a universe for his TV series, he was creating a future. Making it a better future only made sense---since it seemed clear that unless humanity improved, it was going to destroy itself and any future with it. But it was also an opportunity, to create a future worth living in.
Creating a universe for Star Trek’s stories turned out so well, that it became the basis for the evolving mythology of the future, which is Star Trek, and all that Star Trek has influenced in how people envision the future.
"Gene [Roddenberry] created a totally new universe," said Gene Coon who joined Star Trek as a writer and producer midway through the first year, and who himself came up with important elaborations on that universe. " He invented a starship, which works, by the way, and is a logical progression from what we know today. He created customs, morals, modes of speaking, a complete technology. We have a very rigid technology on the show. We know how fast we can go. We know what we use for fuel. We know what our weapons will do...He didn't create a show, he created a universe, and it works..."
Star Trek eventually became so well known for its self-consistent universe--- not only with technology but planets and societies, interplanetary institutions with their laws, rules and directives, alien races with histories and mythologies and even languages---that fans debate the fine points of violations, decry lack of "continuity," and speak like ecclesiastical scholars of what is "canon" law and what is not.
Still, GR was not just making story---he was making drama. Drama is from a Greek word that means "action." In our terms, it basically means action you can see and hear. It means action that imitates the look and sound of the reality it is pretending to be, according to the conventions of the medium.
You believe (or suspend your disbelief) in the reality of a city street, for instance, according to the medium. If it's a stage play, an obviously fake streetlamp, a few facades of buildings will be enough---you know the reality is only suggested. If it's a TV show, there has to be more detail. If it's a movie, even more detail. A TV show might get away with a realistic looking street with a few buildings and some people, but no real sense there is a city around it. A movie has to give you the sense that the street is a real street in a real city, fully functioning and populated, with streets that lead to other streets, to the rest of the world.
A television series exists in a particular world, but that world has to be complete within itself. A series set in contemporary times just has to select from what exists: the kinds of clothes, tables, forks, lamps, cars, telephones and toothbrushes that are sold in one store or another. Westerns and other historical dramas can raid museums, old photographs and traditional conceptions to make their worlds.
But the future has to be invented, and built pretty much from scratch. Wherever the idea came from to take this really seriously, as an opportunity to build a plausible future, GR gave it life with a stubborn and ultimately creative consistency.
It makes sense on lots of levels to really think it through, and keep it consistent. First, it helps to counter one of the big objections to science fiction-that it's all fanciful and can't be taken seriously. For the fact that the clothes, tables, forks, lamps and communicators of the future don't yet exist is in a dramatic sense irrelevant. By creating those things, you create that future, and you have to create them, because this is drama. You have real people as actors, playing characters who need ways to keep warm and dry, and ways to ingest nourishment, get around and communicate. Once you build and show your future, and it works for those characters, that future becomes real.
From watching and reading science fiction, Roddenberry said years later, he had figured out what he would do if he ever got the chance to write it. "I'm going to try to make it as scientifically accurate as possible and write [these scripts] the way we wrote the old Playhouse 90." He wanted to treat the fantastic as if it were real, hoping that the double message of a wondrous reality would act like a magnet for the eyes and hearts of viewers.
For example, the space ship. "My feeling was that if you didn't believe in the spaceship," Roddenberry said,"---if you didn't believe you were in a vehicle traveling through space, a vehicle that made sense, whose layout and design made sense...then you wouldn't believe in the series."
For scientific accuracy, the Trek team consulted with scientists at RAND and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, involving technical matters at high and rarified levels, such as whether faster-than-light travel was possible, and if so, what principles might be involved in powering a craft through the immense distances between the stars.
But Roddenberry and other armed services veterans could bring their own experience with large ships and large aircraft in World War II to the concept of a large starship and crew. The Trek team thought carefully about how many people would be aboard, where they would sleep and how they would eat. They thought about how the bridge would work best, and who would be on it. Where would the ideal place for the captain to be?
All of this was fairly deep thinking for science fiction on film. But this was not a single movie, nor a before-the-feature movie serial or one-time television drama. This was a network dramatic series, and Roddenberry had been writing for those long enough to understand their basic requirements.
This basis of workable, recognizable reality that made sense had to extend to the people aboard the ship. The Trek team thought about the kind of people who would make it to the most important vessel in a future fleet. Roddenberry remembered the rigors of flight school in World War II-the many who washed out at each step in the process. Some anomalies of behavior were inevitable, but certain kinds of excesses or deficiencies just weren't credible-you wouldn't get to serve on a starship if you had them. So while certain character flaws might make dramatic conflict easier, relying on them might sink the sense of reality.
To further establish that sense of familiarity and continuity with the present, Roddenberry wanted to give the starship a name with a pedigree: first it was the Yorktown, and then the Enterprise. The various other naval analogies would further ground the series in reality, and besides personal experiences of the veterans on the team, Roddenberry had several years researching leadership and training while writing for the West Point TV series.
Some of the future technology could be extrapolated from the most advanced ideas of today. Roddenberry looked at instruments at North American's Advanced Space Research Center to get ideas, not only of what the Enterprise instruments might look like, but what they wouldn't be like, what would be obsolete. There would be some sort of "computer," which barely existed in the mid 1960s. What would computers be like-what would they do-- in 400 years?
Sometimes the answer would lie partly in science and partly in behavior: what would people in the future want their technology to do? In considering what a 23rd century sick bay would look like, you might start by thinking about what current technology medicine would want to improve. Assuming advanced ability to monitor an array of physical functions, what would be the most efficient way to do that, for both the patient and the physicians? The answer was the bio-bed with its clearly visible electronic monitors of heartrate and other basic functions., which didn't wait until the 23rd century to become a hospital commonplace.
That Star Trek took such pains to extrapolate from existing science and especially from the speculations at the far edge of certain sciences, is probably a factor in its longevity, as well as partially accounting for its fans among scientists, engineers and the technologically inclined.
Scientific plausibility is a slightly different thing, and here the instincts of a science fiction fan, as GR had been since childhood, combine with the prejudices of the age. The science fiction fan is interested in the science as part of the adventure. But the network executives and perhaps the skeptical viewer are more reassured than excited by scientific plausibility. Science has changed reality so thoroughly and so often, that anything that seems "scientific" is granted a certain (perhaps grudging) suspension of disbelief.
The basics of the Star Trek universe were created according to need and opportunity. Some were brilliant ideas that happened to work very well within the TV budget, and some---like the transporter, which negated the need for expensive shots of the spaceship landing on a different planet every week---were actually economical.
While GR got interested in what future technology might be, he also approached the future as a storyteller. So the future technology had to be plausible, even if no one really knew if it was possible, or how it could actually work. It's the difference between Dick Tracy's wrist radio, which was plausible even in the 1940s, and his invisible airplane, which wasn't.
It is this application of the imagination of a storyteller as well as a scientific imagination that made H.G. Wells' visions of the future much more wondrous and (as it turned out) much more accurate than that of so-called experts. It's the same combination that GR infused in Star Trek.
Plausible technology used consistently (warp ten is always warp ten, phasers do what it is established that they do) adds up to a believable future. The rule applies beyond technology, to the other elements of a complete future.
Thinking about the future that way wasn't just smart, it was almost mandatory. Because this is drama-a future that has to be shown, and the characters have to been seen living in it. Because this is television drama ---and it has to be the same future next week and the week after.
But at a certain point, or maybe it just happened gradually, GR must have realized that in creating a universe for his TV series, he was creating a future. Making it a better future only made sense---since it seemed clear that unless humanity improved, it was going to destroy itself and any future with it. But it was also an opportunity, to create a future worth living in.
Creating a universe for Star Trek’s stories turned out so well, that it became the basis for the evolving mythology of the future, which is Star Trek, and all that Star Trek has influenced in how people envision the future.
"Gene [Roddenberry] created a totally new universe," said Gene Coon who joined Star Trek as a writer and producer midway through the first year, and who himself came up with important elaborations on that universe. " He invented a starship, which works, by the way, and is a logical progression from what we know today. He created customs, morals, modes of speaking, a complete technology. We have a very rigid technology on the show. We know how fast we can go. We know what we use for fuel. We know what our weapons will do...He didn't create a show, he created a universe, and it works..."
Star Trek eventually became so well known for its self-consistent universe--- not only with technology but planets and societies, interplanetary institutions with their laws, rules and directives, alien races with histories and mythologies and even languages---that fans debate the fine points of violations, decry lack of "continuity," and speak like ecclesiastical scholars of what is "canon" law and what is not.
The Magic Trick
GR not only was smart at re-creating the Wells approach to the future, he re-instituted the Wells rules of science fiction. Though he seems to have felt embattled about insisting on them, he did insist.
GR had probably first read Wells when he discovered the early s/f pulp magazines, like Amazing and Astounding and Science Wonder Stories in the 1930s, when they reprinted a lot of Wells. By the time he was working on Star Trek, he probably wasn't conscious of what he'd absorbed from Wells. But he could have just as easily absorbed Wells' approach through the other writers, and through the osmosis of reading and the practical feedback of writing.
But Wells articulated these rules with great clarity. Many of the strategies of what Roddenberry would later call the Believability Factor could be found in Wells. When seven of his science fiction novels were published together in a 1934 American edition, Wells wrote a preface explaining his method. Variations or different expressions of them were promulgated by contemporary s/f writers like Theodore Sturgeon.
First, there was the new fantastic element the story introduces, like a time machine, or invaders from Mars. Wells called it "the magic trick." The trick itself has to be at least plausible, and science provided the rationale. Wells called it "an ingenuous use of scientific patter...as near actual theory as possible."
It also helped if this element could be "explained in commonplace terms." So Wells could suggest that the time machine moves you through time like a railroad train moves you through space, or a balloon moves against gravitation and takes you into the air. He could describe what it looked like in familiar terms---nickel bars, quartz rods, ivory and brass--without needing to really say how a time machine would actually work.
But in addition to some intrinsic plausibility, the trick worked best if it is surrounded by other elements of the ordinary---by the familiar. You must "domesticate the impossible hypothesis," Wells wrote. It was also important to limit the number of magic tricks, Wells warned, or the whole reality would be called into question. "Nothing remains interesting when anything may happen."
Part of creating a credible world was also a key to science fiction's function: integrating the human into the science and the fiction by placing believable people in plausible if unprecedented circumstances.
"Then it becomes human," Wells wrote. "'How would you feel and what might not happen to you' is the typical question, if for instance...you became invisible?"
The intent finally is "to keep everything human and real...the whole interest becomes the interest of looking at human feelings and human ways, from the new angle that has been acquired."
This is crucial to a successful "Wagon Train to the Stars." But it is also a key to the function of a Gulliver's Travels in space---to creating the context for allegory and comment. Examining the human feelings is crucial to using the science fiction form to examine "contemporary political and social discussions," in the manner (writes Wells) of Jonathan Swift.
These principles had become integral to science fiction since Wells, and Roddenberry emphasized some of them in his initial proposal. There was the fantastic ("Space is a place of infinite variety and danger") but also the realism (the stories would "feature highly dramatic variations on recognizable things and themes.")
The Star Trek universe was self-consistent: that was a rule. It also became a vital element in how Star Trek grew into a mythology by accumulating so many different stories told by so many different storytellers. No one person could have created it, yet the mythology would not exist without the original design and intent, the rules that resulted from a vision and the limitations and opportunities of form, in a certain time and place. In a sense it was a self-organizing universe, but it also depended on being nourished from the outside by new knowledge and new talent.
But it wasn't simply the nature of science fiction that was Roddenberry's concern. He was making a television drama series. "Drama is people," he said. "Too much of science fiction is about gadgets and not about people."
Imagining the two together---the gadgets and the people-was the province of the best science fiction. Not everyone agrees that science fiction has anything useful to say about the future.. "From the point of view of futures studies, sc-fi is of little, or no, value," says the preface of What Futurists Believe published by the World Future Society.
But one of the futurists published in that book disagrees. In the introduction to his book, Profiles of the Future (read and admired by Gene Roddenberry while developing Star Trek), Arthur C. Clarke writes: "...I would now go so far as to claim that only readers or writers of science-fiction are really competent to discuss the possibilities of the future...A critical-the adjective is important-reading of science-fiction is essential training for anyone wishing to look more than ten years ahead. The facts of the future can hardly be imagined ab initio by those who are unfamiliar with the fantasies of the past."
The passion for the future, the curiosity about how humans fit into the universe, and about the relationships of humanity and technology, all would be important to Star Trek's stories and their continuing vitality and growth in ideas. The intent that became a tradition of absorbing stories into the integrity of the Star Trek universe, to inspire and nourish new stories, therefore also grew a mythology: a universe of stories.
GR not only was smart at re-creating the Wells approach to the future, he re-instituted the Wells rules of science fiction. Though he seems to have felt embattled about insisting on them, he did insist.
GR had probably first read Wells when he discovered the early s/f pulp magazines, like Amazing and Astounding and Science Wonder Stories in the 1930s, when they reprinted a lot of Wells. By the time he was working on Star Trek, he probably wasn't conscious of what he'd absorbed from Wells. But he could have just as easily absorbed Wells' approach through the other writers, and through the osmosis of reading and the practical feedback of writing.
But Wells articulated these rules with great clarity. Many of the strategies of what Roddenberry would later call the Believability Factor could be found in Wells. When seven of his science fiction novels were published together in a 1934 American edition, Wells wrote a preface explaining his method. Variations or different expressions of them were promulgated by contemporary s/f writers like Theodore Sturgeon.
First, there was the new fantastic element the story introduces, like a time machine, or invaders from Mars. Wells called it "the magic trick." The trick itself has to be at least plausible, and science provided the rationale. Wells called it "an ingenuous use of scientific patter...as near actual theory as possible."
It also helped if this element could be "explained in commonplace terms." So Wells could suggest that the time machine moves you through time like a railroad train moves you through space, or a balloon moves against gravitation and takes you into the air. He could describe what it looked like in familiar terms---nickel bars, quartz rods, ivory and brass--without needing to really say how a time machine would actually work.
But in addition to some intrinsic plausibility, the trick worked best if it is surrounded by other elements of the ordinary---by the familiar. You must "domesticate the impossible hypothesis," Wells wrote. It was also important to limit the number of magic tricks, Wells warned, or the whole reality would be called into question. "Nothing remains interesting when anything may happen."
Part of creating a credible world was also a key to science fiction's function: integrating the human into the science and the fiction by placing believable people in plausible if unprecedented circumstances.
"Then it becomes human," Wells wrote. "'How would you feel and what might not happen to you' is the typical question, if for instance...you became invisible?"
The intent finally is "to keep everything human and real...the whole interest becomes the interest of looking at human feelings and human ways, from the new angle that has been acquired."
This is crucial to a successful "Wagon Train to the Stars." But it is also a key to the function of a Gulliver's Travels in space---to creating the context for allegory and comment. Examining the human feelings is crucial to using the science fiction form to examine "contemporary political and social discussions," in the manner (writes Wells) of Jonathan Swift.
These principles had become integral to science fiction since Wells, and Roddenberry emphasized some of them in his initial proposal. There was the fantastic ("Space is a place of infinite variety and danger") but also the realism (the stories would "feature highly dramatic variations on recognizable things and themes.")
The Star Trek universe was self-consistent: that was a rule. It also became a vital element in how Star Trek grew into a mythology by accumulating so many different stories told by so many different storytellers. No one person could have created it, yet the mythology would not exist without the original design and intent, the rules that resulted from a vision and the limitations and opportunities of form, in a certain time and place. In a sense it was a self-organizing universe, but it also depended on being nourished from the outside by new knowledge and new talent.
But it wasn't simply the nature of science fiction that was Roddenberry's concern. He was making a television drama series. "Drama is people," he said. "Too much of science fiction is about gadgets and not about people."
Imagining the two together---the gadgets and the people-was the province of the best science fiction. Not everyone agrees that science fiction has anything useful to say about the future.. "From the point of view of futures studies, sc-fi is of little, or no, value," says the preface of What Futurists Believe published by the World Future Society.
But one of the futurists published in that book disagrees. In the introduction to his book, Profiles of the Future (read and admired by Gene Roddenberry while developing Star Trek), Arthur C. Clarke writes: "...I would now go so far as to claim that only readers or writers of science-fiction are really competent to discuss the possibilities of the future...A critical-the adjective is important-reading of science-fiction is essential training for anyone wishing to look more than ten years ahead. The facts of the future can hardly be imagined ab initio by those who are unfamiliar with the fantasies of the past."
The passion for the future, the curiosity about how humans fit into the universe, and about the relationships of humanity and technology, all would be important to Star Trek's stories and their continuing vitality and growth in ideas. The intent that became a tradition of absorbing stories into the integrity of the Star Trek universe, to inspire and nourish new stories, therefore also grew a mythology: a universe of stories.
From Captain Video to Captain Kirk
Science fiction had been part of television from the beginning: one of the very first successful series' was Captain Video, the 15-minute a day adventures of the intrepid Captain, his young Video Ranger and his spaceship.
When Saturday morning TV began programming for baby boomer kids, there was a parade of science fiction shows in the mid 1950s. But all the live-action s/f adventures with continuing characters were made principally for young viewers, like the early western shows.
Adults got anthology shows---early ones like Science Fiction Theater, and in the early 60s, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Neither of these was pure s/f, and though many of the stories (especially the better ones) commented on contemporary issues, most were like O Henry short stories, exploring a single premise with a twist at the end. When Star Trek started, no one had yet done for s/f what the adult westerns did for that genre---presented continuing characters and a continuing premise, with the more complex stories and more believable characters intended to attract the adult audience.
There's a lot more to be said about Star Trek as science fiction TV, but there's one feature that science fiction and television drama share in common that became important to Star Trek's storytelling.
Both science fiction and television drama were relatively new kinds of storytelling, but they both grew out of a rich tradition and earlier forms. Science fiction emerged as a genre of the novel in the mid to late nineteenth century-the newest of the fiction genres for popular audiences. Television as well was the new kid in drama. Partly because they were both the newest form, but also because of their natures, they were able to absorb, adapt, and reconstitute many of the kinds of stories that came before---in fact, many of the actual stories.
Star Trek obviously could absorb a lot from prior science fiction in every medium. Just as certain of its props were reconstituted leftovers from the movie "Forbidden Planet," so warp drive was much like that movie's "hyperdrive" (though like everything else in this list, there are multiple possible sources.)
Something like the transporter had appeared in Buck Rogers. There was a police arm of an otherwise peaceful federation of interstellar governments, United Planets, on the 1950s Saturday morning serial, Space Patrol, which was one of the first TV shows to originate in GR's LA.
GR drew ideas from Arthur C. Clarke's nonfiction and fiction. Besides raking through his magazine collection, Gene borrowed books from Sam Peebles by Isaac Asimov and the English science fiction author, Olaf Stapledon, who was the first to explore the story form of future history.
Peeples recalled that Roddenberry was particular taken with Heinlein's novel for young readers, Space Cadet. Late in his life, Roddenberry would recall it as a story of bonding among explorers, and he remembered its core ethic. "It deals with not only the problems of science---about space travel and technology and so on---but of the need we have to act in a conscious responsible manner with all this technology... It made a great impression on me."
Even the 1950s Saturday morning TV version appears to have been influential. "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet," had the distinction of appearing on all four broadcast TV networks (including the defunct Dumont) at one time or another, and for awhile appeared simultaneously on two. It also tried to create a self-consistent universe, with the help of a science advisor, the eminent rocket expert Willy Ley. The series pioneered special effects techniques, despite the fact that like most of these early sci fi shows, it was done live.
There were some similar results: Tom Corbett was a graduate of the "best school in the universe-Space Academy," who took an oath to "safeguard the freedom of space, protect the liberties of the planets and defend the cause of peace throughout the universe." It sounds a lot like Star Trek's Starfleet Academy.
Corbett served aboard the spaceship Polaris with a crew that---like the first crew of the Enterprise to hit the screen-- included a woman and an alien (the Venusian cadet, Astro). It was the 24th century, when all nations formed the Commonwealth of Earth, which had eliminated warfare and banned deadly weapons.
Then at the end of the last episode aired, the Polaris was ready to head off into space. "Where are we going?" a crewman asked. "Out," Tom Corbett replied. "Further than we've ever gone before!"
Science fiction had been part of television from the beginning: one of the very first successful series' was Captain Video, the 15-minute a day adventures of the intrepid Captain, his young Video Ranger and his spaceship.
When Saturday morning TV began programming for baby boomer kids, there was a parade of science fiction shows in the mid 1950s. But all the live-action s/f adventures with continuing characters were made principally for young viewers, like the early western shows.
Adults got anthology shows---early ones like Science Fiction Theater, and in the early 60s, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Neither of these was pure s/f, and though many of the stories (especially the better ones) commented on contemporary issues, most were like O Henry short stories, exploring a single premise with a twist at the end. When Star Trek started, no one had yet done for s/f what the adult westerns did for that genre---presented continuing characters and a continuing premise, with the more complex stories and more believable characters intended to attract the adult audience.
There's a lot more to be said about Star Trek as science fiction TV, but there's one feature that science fiction and television drama share in common that became important to Star Trek's storytelling.
Both science fiction and television drama were relatively new kinds of storytelling, but they both grew out of a rich tradition and earlier forms. Science fiction emerged as a genre of the novel in the mid to late nineteenth century-the newest of the fiction genres for popular audiences. Television as well was the new kid in drama. Partly because they were both the newest form, but also because of their natures, they were able to absorb, adapt, and reconstitute many of the kinds of stories that came before---in fact, many of the actual stories.
Star Trek obviously could absorb a lot from prior science fiction in every medium. Just as certain of its props were reconstituted leftovers from the movie "Forbidden Planet," so warp drive was much like that movie's "hyperdrive" (though like everything else in this list, there are multiple possible sources.)
Something like the transporter had appeared in Buck Rogers. There was a police arm of an otherwise peaceful federation of interstellar governments, United Planets, on the 1950s Saturday morning serial, Space Patrol, which was one of the first TV shows to originate in GR's LA.
GR drew ideas from Arthur C. Clarke's nonfiction and fiction. Besides raking through his magazine collection, Gene borrowed books from Sam Peebles by Isaac Asimov and the English science fiction author, Olaf Stapledon, who was the first to explore the story form of future history.
Peeples recalled that Roddenberry was particular taken with Heinlein's novel for young readers, Space Cadet. Late in his life, Roddenberry would recall it as a story of bonding among explorers, and he remembered its core ethic. "It deals with not only the problems of science---about space travel and technology and so on---but of the need we have to act in a conscious responsible manner with all this technology... It made a great impression on me."
Even the 1950s Saturday morning TV version appears to have been influential. "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet," had the distinction of appearing on all four broadcast TV networks (including the defunct Dumont) at one time or another, and for awhile appeared simultaneously on two. It also tried to create a self-consistent universe, with the help of a science advisor, the eminent rocket expert Willy Ley. The series pioneered special effects techniques, despite the fact that like most of these early sci fi shows, it was done live.
There were some similar results: Tom Corbett was a graduate of the "best school in the universe-Space Academy," who took an oath to "safeguard the freedom of space, protect the liberties of the planets and defend the cause of peace throughout the universe." It sounds a lot like Star Trek's Starfleet Academy.
Corbett served aboard the spaceship Polaris with a crew that---like the first crew of the Enterprise to hit the screen-- included a woman and an alien (the Venusian cadet, Astro). It was the 24th century, when all nations formed the Commonwealth of Earth, which had eliminated warfare and banned deadly weapons.
Then at the end of the last episode aired, the Polaris was ready to head off into space. "Where are we going?" a crewman asked. "Out," Tom Corbett replied. "Further than we've ever gone before!"
Stories of Stories
Star Trek took inspiration and stories not just from science fiction, but from everywhere. Even when H.G. Wells was writing his breakthrough s/f novels, he was using elements of the Gothic tale (which we'd now classify as Horror), the romance (he called his novels "scientific romances"), the exotic adventure story of Jules Verne and later H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, as well as the detective genre that Edgar Allen Poe had pioneered and Wells' friend, Arthur Conan Doyle, would make internationally popular.
Wells used techniques of the literary novel of his day so well that The Time Machine and his other early s/f novels won him the praise of literary greats like Henry James and Joseph Conrad. But he used even earlier forms, too; as a Russian contemporary and s/f writer noted, his stories had a lot in common with folk tales, complete with humble characters and something like magic. They also resembled fables and aspects of myth and history.
So by the time of Star Trek, part of s/f tradition was re-telling other kinds of stories in this new language and new form. This flexibility gave Star Trek's s/f great energy and possibility. It also came naturally to television writers, who were used to taking plots and characters from one kind of story and transposing them in another.
It wasn't just a matter of Star Trek's "planet of the week" re-imaginings of Greek gods and ancient Rome, Nazi Germany and Capone's Chicago. Even in the Next Generation era, there were re-tellings, adaptations and absorptions of everything from Shakespeare's Henry V, Tristan and Isolde and Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, to movies like The Manchurian Candidate, The Maltese Falcon and Robin Hood, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Key Largo and Auntie Mame. In its various incarnations, Star Trek has made at least 5 different versions of Moby Dick. In one of the classic original series episodes, which further inspired one of Star Trek's most popular features, Star Trek reworked an episode of Captain Video (both by the same writer)---in "Space Seed."
These forms---science fiction and television drama---were particularly good at adapting and synthesizing, to create new stories, to add to the universe of stories. But this is a natural part of storytelling, not only for writers but for actors and other co-creators. It was important for Brent Spiner to see the arc of Data as a Pinocchio story, a puppet becoming a boy, but he also looked to men who told stories through small physical gestures, like Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, for how he would play Data in a given action in a particular scene.
It is part of the wonder of story for the audience as well that they are experiencing something new, something unexpected, yet some part of it, some undercurrent of story, is familiar, reassuring. Stories are made from other stories, storytelling builds on storytelling. Something new, something of the future is added. But something recognizably human is always there.
It is this very feature of science fiction stories that helps make them more powerful, and in the largest sense, more accurate, in their visions of the future.
Art, science, everything: it's all made by choosing and synthesizing, and structuring the combination. Something new is made from many familiar elements, as well as the discoveries which are often re-discoveries. Storytelling is partly a product of its own rich history, and while that history may or may not be known consciously, it is often felt. We each have our own dreams, but we all know what dreaming is, and we can recognize ourselves in the dreams of others. We are each unique combinations, and we are all human.
Star Trek took inspiration and stories not just from science fiction, but from everywhere. Even when H.G. Wells was writing his breakthrough s/f novels, he was using elements of the Gothic tale (which we'd now classify as Horror), the romance (he called his novels "scientific romances"), the exotic adventure story of Jules Verne and later H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, as well as the detective genre that Edgar Allen Poe had pioneered and Wells' friend, Arthur Conan Doyle, would make internationally popular.
Wells used techniques of the literary novel of his day so well that The Time Machine and his other early s/f novels won him the praise of literary greats like Henry James and Joseph Conrad. But he used even earlier forms, too; as a Russian contemporary and s/f writer noted, his stories had a lot in common with folk tales, complete with humble characters and something like magic. They also resembled fables and aspects of myth and history.
So by the time of Star Trek, part of s/f tradition was re-telling other kinds of stories in this new language and new form. This flexibility gave Star Trek's s/f great energy and possibility. It also came naturally to television writers, who were used to taking plots and characters from one kind of story and transposing them in another.
It wasn't just a matter of Star Trek's "planet of the week" re-imaginings of Greek gods and ancient Rome, Nazi Germany and Capone's Chicago. Even in the Next Generation era, there were re-tellings, adaptations and absorptions of everything from Shakespeare's Henry V, Tristan and Isolde and Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, to movies like The Manchurian Candidate, The Maltese Falcon and Robin Hood, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Key Largo and Auntie Mame. In its various incarnations, Star Trek has made at least 5 different versions of Moby Dick. In one of the classic original series episodes, which further inspired one of Star Trek's most popular features, Star Trek reworked an episode of Captain Video (both by the same writer)---in "Space Seed."
These forms---science fiction and television drama---were particularly good at adapting and synthesizing, to create new stories, to add to the universe of stories. But this is a natural part of storytelling, not only for writers but for actors and other co-creators. It was important for Brent Spiner to see the arc of Data as a Pinocchio story, a puppet becoming a boy, but he also looked to men who told stories through small physical gestures, like Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, for how he would play Data in a given action in a particular scene.
It is part of the wonder of story for the audience as well that they are experiencing something new, something unexpected, yet some part of it, some undercurrent of story, is familiar, reassuring. Stories are made from other stories, storytelling builds on storytelling. Something new, something of the future is added. But something recognizably human is always there.
It is this very feature of science fiction stories that helps make them more powerful, and in the largest sense, more accurate, in their visions of the future.
Art, science, everything: it's all made by choosing and synthesizing, and structuring the combination. Something new is made from many familiar elements, as well as the discoveries which are often re-discoveries. Storytelling is partly a product of its own rich history, and while that history may or may not be known consciously, it is often felt. We each have our own dreams, but we all know what dreaming is, and we can recognize ourselves in the dreams of others. We are each unique combinations, and we are all human.
Turning on to the universe of stories
There are two other features of television drama that eventually became very important in how Star Trek became a mythology. The first is in how the audience experiences television drama.
Television is the most widely shared medium for stories in its time, as the novel was in the nineteenth century. Like reading, watching television can be a solitary experience. But like watching a play or a movie in a theatre, it can also be personal, but experienced in a group. Like stories on the radio, many people in a very large area typically experienced the same story at the same time. (This was before VCRs and cable TV, of course. There were just three commercial broadcast networks in the U.S.) So TV drama is a potent combination of all these storytelling media.
Then there is the special nature of the television drama series. The series presents different stories about the same characters in the same "world" every week. This creates a cumulative power and effect. Since a show was usually on at the same hour of the same day of the week, there was even an element of ritual involved in watching it.
I don't think it's appreciated enough how big a change it has been in human culture for such a quantity and variety of dramas-of acted-out stories-to be available in one's own home. A series of stories about the same characters and world available at the same time every week (and as evidenced first with Star Trek, when it went into syndication, by being able to inhabit that story world every day) is very powerful. The only historical analogies are to myth and religion, but even when they were numinous in daily lives, the gods and heroes were not acting out their adventures in the living room.
Then again, maybe they were. The gods and heroes of the past were as real to people of the past as any movie stars or TV heroes are today, and probably even more deeply felt as real and essential. But even these figures were creatures of story. They existed in story, and in the drama of ritual.
The television drama series is unique historically also in how it is created. All drama is collaborative: it simply takes people working together to put on a show, with a script, actors, costumes, sets, etc.
But the drama series presents different stories about mostly the same characters, over months and even years. The actors who play those characters are therefore very powerful creatively. Their power is made even greater by how a TV series is typically organized: directors, who are very powerful in single dramatic presentations in theatre and movies, are journeymen in TV. Producers stay with shows longer than directors and writers, but the lead actors are the most consistent element, and therefore they become the caretakers of consistency and integrity.
The integrity of Star Trek is one of its greatest characteristics. GR seemed to have communicated his vision so well to so many dedicated people, and he got them to believe in it so much that they became the caretakers of the integrity he established.
This seems to be partly because of the power and attractiveness of the vision. So many people involved in Star Trek over the years can articulate that vision so beautifully, from the well-known actors who played now-legendary characters to little-known film editors or musical composers for a TV episode, to a guest actor in a Star Trek movie.
But it also seems to be partly due to how GR related to people. Actors who went for what they thought was an audition found a man interested in their dreams and hopes, their life experiences, rather than their acting credits. He talked to them about his hopes for the series, and what the Star Trek future meant to him. He made them co-creators on the spot, and many have maintained and represented that vision.
By the nature of drama, actors make the characters partly their own, because they literally embody them. This is even more so in a weekly television drama series, when over time, and because of the relentless speed of production, the character takes on more of the actor's personality and characteristics. Even how the actor and the character blend varies from actor to actor.
William Shatner became Captain Kirk, partly from his conscious choices and conception of the role, and partly from his energy and personality, and (as Shatner has said) partly out of sheer fatigue: he couldn't spare the energy to pretend to be anyone else.
Leonard Nimoy became Mr. Spock by creating a character, beginning with a conception and some physical ideas, and refining and adding to them over the years (Nimoy invented the Vulcan neck pinch, and chose the gesture for the Vulcan hand greeting, as well as contributing many other nuances and Vulcan characteristics.) He also developed the character through playing scenes with the specific actors who played other key characters like Kirk and McCoy. He so intently inhabited the character,that Spock began to affect Nimoy. (His two books even contain dialogues between Spock and Nimoy.)
The actors talked with GR about their characters, some of them (like Nimoy and Nichelle Nichols) in great detail, helping to create a depth of "backstory" and understanding that the actor could bring to each moment on the screen. The actor's portrayal in turn influenced and inspired subsequent writers, so that the character and the actor become even more melded together.
Being co-creators and caretakers of the Star Trek vision was expressed in many ways, large and small. One of my favorites is the story about George Takei, when he was instructed by a new director in the third season to push a certain button. He refused: it was the wrong button for what he was supposed to be doing. The director thought he was being silly---he had the lighting set up, it looked good, just press the damn button!
"I can't," Takei said. "If I do that, I'll destroy the Enterprise!"
There are two other features of television drama that eventually became very important in how Star Trek became a mythology. The first is in how the audience experiences television drama.
Television is the most widely shared medium for stories in its time, as the novel was in the nineteenth century. Like reading, watching television can be a solitary experience. But like watching a play or a movie in a theatre, it can also be personal, but experienced in a group. Like stories on the radio, many people in a very large area typically experienced the same story at the same time. (This was before VCRs and cable TV, of course. There were just three commercial broadcast networks in the U.S.) So TV drama is a potent combination of all these storytelling media.
Then there is the special nature of the television drama series. The series presents different stories about the same characters in the same "world" every week. This creates a cumulative power and effect. Since a show was usually on at the same hour of the same day of the week, there was even an element of ritual involved in watching it.
I don't think it's appreciated enough how big a change it has been in human culture for such a quantity and variety of dramas-of acted-out stories-to be available in one's own home. A series of stories about the same characters and world available at the same time every week (and as evidenced first with Star Trek, when it went into syndication, by being able to inhabit that story world every day) is very powerful. The only historical analogies are to myth and religion, but even when they were numinous in daily lives, the gods and heroes were not acting out their adventures in the living room.
Then again, maybe they were. The gods and heroes of the past were as real to people of the past as any movie stars or TV heroes are today, and probably even more deeply felt as real and essential. But even these figures were creatures of story. They existed in story, and in the drama of ritual.
The television drama series is unique historically also in how it is created. All drama is collaborative: it simply takes people working together to put on a show, with a script, actors, costumes, sets, etc.
But the drama series presents different stories about mostly the same characters, over months and even years. The actors who play those characters are therefore very powerful creatively. Their power is made even greater by how a TV series is typically organized: directors, who are very powerful in single dramatic presentations in theatre and movies, are journeymen in TV. Producers stay with shows longer than directors and writers, but the lead actors are the most consistent element, and therefore they become the caretakers of consistency and integrity.
The integrity of Star Trek is one of its greatest characteristics. GR seemed to have communicated his vision so well to so many dedicated people, and he got them to believe in it so much that they became the caretakers of the integrity he established.
This seems to be partly because of the power and attractiveness of the vision. So many people involved in Star Trek over the years can articulate that vision so beautifully, from the well-known actors who played now-legendary characters to little-known film editors or musical composers for a TV episode, to a guest actor in a Star Trek movie.
But it also seems to be partly due to how GR related to people. Actors who went for what they thought was an audition found a man interested in their dreams and hopes, their life experiences, rather than their acting credits. He talked to them about his hopes for the series, and what the Star Trek future meant to him. He made them co-creators on the spot, and many have maintained and represented that vision.
By the nature of drama, actors make the characters partly their own, because they literally embody them. This is even more so in a weekly television drama series, when over time, and because of the relentless speed of production, the character takes on more of the actor's personality and characteristics. Even how the actor and the character blend varies from actor to actor.
William Shatner became Captain Kirk, partly from his conscious choices and conception of the role, and partly from his energy and personality, and (as Shatner has said) partly out of sheer fatigue: he couldn't spare the energy to pretend to be anyone else.
Leonard Nimoy became Mr. Spock by creating a character, beginning with a conception and some physical ideas, and refining and adding to them over the years (Nimoy invented the Vulcan neck pinch, and chose the gesture for the Vulcan hand greeting, as well as contributing many other nuances and Vulcan characteristics.) He also developed the character through playing scenes with the specific actors who played other key characters like Kirk and McCoy. He so intently inhabited the character,that Spock began to affect Nimoy. (His two books even contain dialogues between Spock and Nimoy.)
The actors talked with GR about their characters, some of them (like Nimoy and Nichelle Nichols) in great detail, helping to create a depth of "backstory" and understanding that the actor could bring to each moment on the screen. The actor's portrayal in turn influenced and inspired subsequent writers, so that the character and the actor become even more melded together.
Being co-creators and caretakers of the Star Trek vision was expressed in many ways, large and small. One of my favorites is the story about George Takei, when he was instructed by a new director in the third season to push a certain button. He refused: it was the wrong button for what he was supposed to be doing. The director thought he was being silly---he had the lighting set up, it looked good, just press the damn button!
"I can't," Takei said. "If I do that, I'll destroy the Enterprise!"
Back to the Future
In terms of time, science fiction takes us as far as we can imagine in one direction of human experience: the unknown future. But drama takes us back far into our past, farther than we can really imagine. We pretend we know what we were like in the past, but our imaginings are paltry: we envision our pre-history as the Flintstones, just the Honeymooners (or perhaps the Simpsons) with stone-wheeled cars. It isn't in our dramas we connect with the past, but in drama itself.
Drama---or theatre, performance---is our lifeline back to our earliest selves and societies, to religious ritual and frenzied festival, to mesmerizing storytellers and singers, dancers and shamans, back even to the stories we told each other of the hunt-and how we told them, with gestures and laughter, making faces and mimicking sounds--- as we walked across continents.
Star Trek has a peculiar relationship to this tradition. Actors learn their craft in various media, but it is particularly interesting how many Star Trek actors were trained for the stage, and had their formative experience in theatre. That Patrick Stewart was a Shakespearian actor first is well known, but so was William Shatner. James Doohan was an acclaimed acting teacher at Manhattan's prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse; Gates McFadden was accomplished in physical theatre. And as I write this, the actor who played Catherine Janeway is playing Katharine Hepburn on the stage, and the actor who was Captain Sisko is playing Othello.
Theatre training turned out to be very useful for bringing a sense of truth to strange characters: to grown men and women running around in pajamas and boots and waving ray guns, or aliens with lobsters on their foreheads. It helped them find the Shakespearian king in a starship Captain, or an Odysseus on the bridge of the Enterprise.
William Shatner has said that doing the original series was like mounting a Greek play every week, partly because of the nature of the stories, and partly because of the skimpy television budget: the sets got to be little more than stage sets for live theatre. There were a few props, a bit of scenery, and a lot of words, emotions, ideas and drama. It was always life and death, with the nature of humanity in question and the survival of a human soul---or the human soul---in the balance.
So we come full circle, back to drama, as a key element in Star Trek's mythological feel and presence. Only television series actors could accumulate such reality, give us so many colors in so many different stories, and thanks to the continuation of the original series and the Next Generation in the movies, a mythology over time, about time, in time. But because Star Trek could not afford to be typical television as much as other worldly theatre, it established a kind of storytelling that survived when the sets were more lavish and the effects more visual and special.
Now it is a mythology of three generations in three different centuries. It has been experienced by at least three generations of viewers; sometimes three generations of a single family experience it together.
They gather around the glow of the screen. But they could be gathering around the glow of an ancient fire, where the flickering shadows seem to dance the story the teller is singing. Soon some will all go to the sacred place and put on their robes and masks, their regalia. They will sing our songs, dance our dances, and tell our stories of the wondrous future.
In terms of time, science fiction takes us as far as we can imagine in one direction of human experience: the unknown future. But drama takes us back far into our past, farther than we can really imagine. We pretend we know what we were like in the past, but our imaginings are paltry: we envision our pre-history as the Flintstones, just the Honeymooners (or perhaps the Simpsons) with stone-wheeled cars. It isn't in our dramas we connect with the past, but in drama itself.
Drama---or theatre, performance---is our lifeline back to our earliest selves and societies, to religious ritual and frenzied festival, to mesmerizing storytellers and singers, dancers and shamans, back even to the stories we told each other of the hunt-and how we told them, with gestures and laughter, making faces and mimicking sounds--- as we walked across continents.
Star Trek has a peculiar relationship to this tradition. Actors learn their craft in various media, but it is particularly interesting how many Star Trek actors were trained for the stage, and had their formative experience in theatre. That Patrick Stewart was a Shakespearian actor first is well known, but so was William Shatner. James Doohan was an acclaimed acting teacher at Manhattan's prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse; Gates McFadden was accomplished in physical theatre. And as I write this, the actor who played Catherine Janeway is playing Katharine Hepburn on the stage, and the actor who was Captain Sisko is playing Othello.
Theatre training turned out to be very useful for bringing a sense of truth to strange characters: to grown men and women running around in pajamas and boots and waving ray guns, or aliens with lobsters on their foreheads. It helped them find the Shakespearian king in a starship Captain, or an Odysseus on the bridge of the Enterprise.
William Shatner has said that doing the original series was like mounting a Greek play every week, partly because of the nature of the stories, and partly because of the skimpy television budget: the sets got to be little more than stage sets for live theatre. There were a few props, a bit of scenery, and a lot of words, emotions, ideas and drama. It was always life and death, with the nature of humanity in question and the survival of a human soul---or the human soul---in the balance.
So we come full circle, back to drama, as a key element in Star Trek's mythological feel and presence. Only television series actors could accumulate such reality, give us so many colors in so many different stories, and thanks to the continuation of the original series and the Next Generation in the movies, a mythology over time, about time, in time. But because Star Trek could not afford to be typical television as much as other worldly theatre, it established a kind of storytelling that survived when the sets were more lavish and the effects more visual and special.
Now it is a mythology of three generations in three different centuries. It has been experienced by at least three generations of viewers; sometimes three generations of a single family experience it together.
They gather around the glow of the screen. But they could be gathering around the glow of an ancient fire, where the flickering shadows seem to dance the story the teller is singing. Soon some will all go to the sacred place and put on their robes and masks, their regalia. They will sing our songs, dance our dances, and tell our stories of the wondrous future.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Star Trek and New Orleans: What Bettering Ourselves Really Means
by William S. Kowinski
In the Star Trek universe, New Orleans is a vibrant city in the 24th century with strong ties to its past. Captain Benjamin Sisko, commander of Deep Space 9, grew up there, and for his first few weeks at Starfleet Academy, beamed back for dinner with his family there every night. Viewers saw him return there several times over the years to the Creole restaurant of his father, Joseph Sisko. The elder Sisko was a symbol not only of the continuity of family through the generations—from Joseph to Benjamin to Jake Sisko, Star Trek’s first three generation family—but his restaurant was a symbol of old values and culture that were still important, still necessary in the Star Trek future.
We are reminded of this not only by the recent death of Brock Peters, who played Joseph Sisko, but most of all by the incredible devastation in New Orleans during the last week of August 2005. At this moment, officials are trying to completely evacuate the city. They estimate it will be weeks or months before some of its residents can safely return (others have no homes left to return to), and years before the city can rebuild. Huge amounts of toxic industrial waste carried in the floodwaters may be very difficult and very expensive to eliminate. There is even some question whether the city will be habitable in the foreseeable future, and some have suggested it be totally abandoned.
Many people around the world are shocked by what the media is reporting about New Orleans and the other areas in several states where the powerful hurricane Katrina caused major destruction and death. The sheer power of the storm leveled entire areas of the cities it hit directly with the full force of its winds. Deaths were in the hundreds, and the counting has only begun.
For awhile, it seemed New Orleans was spared the worst because Katrina was not at its full strength and didn’t hit the whole city directly. But some of the levees gave way, that held back flood waters from the nearby lake as well as the ocean and the Mississippi river, and some 80% of the city was seriously flooded.
There had been enough warning for many people to leave the city before the hurricane struck. But many people—perhaps several hundred thousands---could not leave, because they couldn’t afford fares or didn’t have cars, and no provisions were made for evacuating them. Hospitals, nursing homes and other care facilities were not all evacuated, and there was no provision to evacuate people with physical disabilities and frail older people who lived in private homes.
By August 31 and September 1, the enormity of the catastrophe was becoming clearer. Hundreds and perhaps thousands had died in New Orleans by then. Those stranded in the city were without safe or adequate shelter, food and water. Toxic chemicals and human remains in the flood waters threatened outbreaks of serious diseases. Government response was slow, and planning had obviously been seriously inadequate. Anger, desperation, confusion and violence in New Orleans were reported and seen on television all over the world.
Many countries, and many organizations and individuals around the world offered assistance, and there are no doubt Star Trek organizations and Star Trek fans among them. The stories of individual courage, generosity and empathy are just beginning to be told. But a basic humanitarian impulse is not the only emotion likely to be evoked among Star Trek fans by this catastrophe.
text continues after photo
by William S. Kowinski
In the Star Trek universe, New Orleans is a vibrant city in the 24th century with strong ties to its past. Captain Benjamin Sisko, commander of Deep Space 9, grew up there, and for his first few weeks at Starfleet Academy, beamed back for dinner with his family there every night. Viewers saw him return there several times over the years to the Creole restaurant of his father, Joseph Sisko. The elder Sisko was a symbol not only of the continuity of family through the generations—from Joseph to Benjamin to Jake Sisko, Star Trek’s first three generation family—but his restaurant was a symbol of old values and culture that were still important, still necessary in the Star Trek future.
We are reminded of this not only by the recent death of Brock Peters, who played Joseph Sisko, but most of all by the incredible devastation in New Orleans during the last week of August 2005. At this moment, officials are trying to completely evacuate the city. They estimate it will be weeks or months before some of its residents can safely return (others have no homes left to return to), and years before the city can rebuild. Huge amounts of toxic industrial waste carried in the floodwaters may be very difficult and very expensive to eliminate. There is even some question whether the city will be habitable in the foreseeable future, and some have suggested it be totally abandoned.
Many people around the world are shocked by what the media is reporting about New Orleans and the other areas in several states where the powerful hurricane Katrina caused major destruction and death. The sheer power of the storm leveled entire areas of the cities it hit directly with the full force of its winds. Deaths were in the hundreds, and the counting has only begun.
For awhile, it seemed New Orleans was spared the worst because Katrina was not at its full strength and didn’t hit the whole city directly. But some of the levees gave way, that held back flood waters from the nearby lake as well as the ocean and the Mississippi river, and some 80% of the city was seriously flooded.
There had been enough warning for many people to leave the city before the hurricane struck. But many people—perhaps several hundred thousands---could not leave, because they couldn’t afford fares or didn’t have cars, and no provisions were made for evacuating them. Hospitals, nursing homes and other care facilities were not all evacuated, and there was no provision to evacuate people with physical disabilities and frail older people who lived in private homes.
By August 31 and September 1, the enormity of the catastrophe was becoming clearer. Hundreds and perhaps thousands had died in New Orleans by then. Those stranded in the city were without safe or adequate shelter, food and water. Toxic chemicals and human remains in the flood waters threatened outbreaks of serious diseases. Government response was slow, and planning had obviously been seriously inadequate. Anger, desperation, confusion and violence in New Orleans were reported and seen on television all over the world.
Many countries, and many organizations and individuals around the world offered assistance, and there are no doubt Star Trek organizations and Star Trek fans among them. The stories of individual courage, generosity and empathy are just beginning to be told. But a basic humanitarian impulse is not the only emotion likely to be evoked among Star Trek fans by this catastrophe.
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In the Star Trek future, the Federation and Starfleet recognize the common good as a guiding principle. The common good has several aspects. That which we hold in common, including our interrelationships, are part of it. We are dependent on each other, and on our community and our planet. The diners in Sisko’s restaurant eat because someone caught the fish from waters that were protected from pollution and other kinds of damage, even far away. People acting cooperatively got the fish from where it was caught eventually to the restaurant. Other food on one diner’s plate may come from many different places, and involve hundreds of people. Each process requires using infrastructure that everyone shares, like roads and water pipes. Each of those people are dependent on others for what they need---for daycare when they’re at work, for health care.
The common good is everyone’s good eventually. But the common good goes beyond interrelationships that benefit each of us directly. The common good means the good of the community, the society, the human family, and all of life. This is part of the value of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. Diversity means many talents and perspectives, many potentials and many skills, which makes us more capable and adaptable, and it makes life richer.
Diversity is a value of soul. In the Star Trek original series episode, "Is There in Truth No Beauty," Miranda’s parting words to Spock are: “The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity…” Spock completes the thought: “…and in the ways our differences combine to create meaning and beauty.”
There is no contradiction between diversity and individuality: in fact, they are the same principle. The meaning of diversity is to honor and benefit from diverse individualities, and to do so by getting beyond superficial prejudices, because of color, physical abilities and appearance, class, gender, etc. to the soul within, and the unique contributions of each.
Similarly, there is no contradiction in principle between the common good and the individual. The American Experiment has always been about valuing both, and finding ways to deal with the areas in which they might conflict, for example, through laws and the Bill of Rights.
There is no contradiction between private enterprise and government. There is only what’s appropriate for particular aspects of the common good. This was recognized in recent history in the US, although it has perhaps been forgotten here since at least the 1980s.
(The role of money in the Star Trek future is a somewhat separate question, though not in ours. But private enterprise in some sense must exist in the Star Trek 24th century, because Sisko’s restaurant appears to be much like a privately owned and operated restaurant today.)
Because the Federation values the common good in the Star Trek future, we would not expect them to provide for the privileged few but ignore the many, or especially to ignore the disadvantaged few. We would not expect them to neglect the good of the city the people hold in common. And if they did, Captain Kirk or Captain Picard or Captain Sisko would call them on it.
There are several theories being debated now concerning why planning and prevention for the New Orleans catastrophe were so poor, and why relief efforts have been so slow and meager so far. They also bear upon the Star Trek future, and what that future represents in how humans bettered themselves.
The common good is everyone’s good eventually. But the common good goes beyond interrelationships that benefit each of us directly. The common good means the good of the community, the society, the human family, and all of life. This is part of the value of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. Diversity means many talents and perspectives, many potentials and many skills, which makes us more capable and adaptable, and it makes life richer.
Diversity is a value of soul. In the Star Trek original series episode, "Is There in Truth No Beauty," Miranda’s parting words to Spock are: “The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity…” Spock completes the thought: “…and in the ways our differences combine to create meaning and beauty.”
There is no contradiction between diversity and individuality: in fact, they are the same principle. The meaning of diversity is to honor and benefit from diverse individualities, and to do so by getting beyond superficial prejudices, because of color, physical abilities and appearance, class, gender, etc. to the soul within, and the unique contributions of each.
Similarly, there is no contradiction in principle between the common good and the individual. The American Experiment has always been about valuing both, and finding ways to deal with the areas in which they might conflict, for example, through laws and the Bill of Rights.
There is no contradiction between private enterprise and government. There is only what’s appropriate for particular aspects of the common good. This was recognized in recent history in the US, although it has perhaps been forgotten here since at least the 1980s.
(The role of money in the Star Trek future is a somewhat separate question, though not in ours. But private enterprise in some sense must exist in the Star Trek 24th century, because Sisko’s restaurant appears to be much like a privately owned and operated restaurant today.)
Because the Federation values the common good in the Star Trek future, we would not expect them to provide for the privileged few but ignore the many, or especially to ignore the disadvantaged few. We would not expect them to neglect the good of the city the people hold in common. And if they did, Captain Kirk or Captain Picard or Captain Sisko would call them on it.
There are several theories being debated now concerning why planning and prevention for the New Orleans catastrophe were so poor, and why relief efforts have been so slow and meager so far. They also bear upon the Star Trek future, and what that future represents in how humans bettered themselves.
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