Light for a Cloudy Star Trek Future?

by William S. Kowinski

It’s been an eventful couple of weeks for Star Trek news---some hopeful, some disconcerting, some just confusing. Much of it suggests more questions than answers.

Some of the news seems to come from the gradually unfolding consequences of both the end of the Star Trek franchise as we’ve known it for some 20 years, and of the latest corporate changes for Paramount. In the world of Star Trek, Decipher, the company that published the Star Trek fan magazine since 2001, announced it was closing down its publishing and the Communicator with it.

Then Paramount announced its Digital Entertainment division was also shutting down, which put the future of the official site, Startrek.com in doubt.

Both moves seemed related to the splitting of Paramount and Viacom into two separate entities. With Paramount in charge of movies and Viacom in charge of television (and books), nobody seems to know who will be in charge of Star Trek, and its future movies and television, if any. (So far, there hasn’t been a disruption at Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, which does Star Trek books. They’re part of Viacom.)

Then came the startling news that Paramount is buying the studio Dreamworks SKG, which means among other things that Steven Speilberg will be making movies and developing projects for Paramount. His science fiction blockbuster of last summer, War of the Worlds, was a Paramount and Dreamworks co-production.

Like the rest of this news, the most that can be said now about the Paramount deal is that it could be good for Star Trek, or it could be bad. It could mean a more powerful and aggressive Paramount, with new producers and directors of some clout and taste, with experience in successful sci-fi features. Or it could mean that the Trek franchise gets lost amidst bigger deals and priorities.

There seems to be hope that the apparently bad news for the Communicator and Startrek.com will have a happier ending. Larry Nemecek, managing editor of the Communicator, is convinced his magazine will continue publishing, but is being affected by the Paramount/Viacom confusion. In the meantime, Eugene Roddenberry has indicated interest in Startrek.com.

What apparent good news there was had to do with the potential eleventh Star Trek feature film. Within a couple of days of each other, news stories quoted Patrick Stewart as revealing that he had been part of serious discussions about a new Trek film to be made a couple of years from now, and Bryan Singer (director of the first two X-Men films, and the upcoming Superman Returns) indicating his interest in directing the next Trek movie.

These two stories immediately reminded me of Leonard Nimoy saying that whenever Star Trek has looked absolutely dead, it always came back, stronger than ever. Since the hard fate and bad feelings of Star Trek Nemesis, it seemed the chances for a new movie were slipping away, and even if there was one, it certainly wouldn’t be another Next Generation film. Patrick Stewart in particular insisted that he was finished with playing Jean-Luc Picard.

So what does this mean? I don't really know, and I have no inside information. But I can tell you what my instincts suggest to me.

Back in the saddle again?

I ascribe a lot of credibility to Stewart’s statement. First, he seems to have said it to two reputable sources, and he was very positive and very definite about it. It also has the smell of credibility because I believe Stewart genuinely wants to make another Star Trek picture. His protestations about playing Picard again seemed like a reaction to Paramount’s evaluation of Nemesis at the box office, and probably to how he and the cast were treated. There was trouble brewing even before the picture hit the theatres, with Paramount’s surprise “A generation’s final journey begins” tag line.

And in the many months since, Stewart has spoken with affection for Star Trek and particularly his fellow cast members. He mentioned bursting into tears while rehearsing his final “farewell” scene with Jonathan Frakes as Riker, in Nemesis, and much later, crying uncontrollably when he channel surfed into a showing of Nemesis on television, because he missed his friends and their work together.

Contrary to the suggestion by some cynical fans, he wouldn’t be doing it so much for the money---or even for Star Trek---but to work with these dear friends again, in the world they created together. (Anybody who thinks Patrick Stewart works only for money might consider the 16 months he’s devoting to doing nothing much but acting for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s amazing series of the entire Shakespeare canon of plays.)

Bryan Singer’s expression of interest in directing a Trek movie, on the other hand, should be taken with a grain of salt. It could be interpreted as simply his own fantasy, and nothing new at that. Like any Trek fan, he has ideas of what he’d do with the next movie. But on the other hand it could be more than that, in which case, keep that salt to put on the popcorn.

Even though it may have been a purely speculative remark to a fan, this has to be taken a bit more seriously because of Singer’s relationship with Stewart (after Singer directed Stewart in the second X-Men film, Stewart got him a bit part in Nemesis---which Singer points out was on the Enterprise bridge during a battle---the kind of thing a fan would point out.)

But even if there’s not much chance of Singer actually making a Trek film, his interest could very well send a message to Paramount: hey, this A List director of franchise films is interested in making a Trek movie. Maybe it’s worth doing. Maybe other A List directors would be interested.

For instance, the one you just got under contract.

Could Spielberg at Paramount be good news for Trek XI?  

The idea of Steven Spielberg making the next Trek film may or may not be a good one for Trek, but it sure would get Paramount moving. Spielberg as producer might be even better.

And this high level interest would be welcome all around. Patrick Stewart refuses to overtly blame the director of Nemesis for its failure, but others in the cast haven’t been so shy. Several have been outspoken that director Stuart Baird didn’t compensate for his lack of knowledge of (or interest in) the Trek universe with sparkling storytelling and mesmerizing visual style. And there was the questionable selection of scenes, which Baird at least had a hand in. Even Stewart once suggested that the DVD for Nemesis should have an Actors’ rather than a Director’s Cut.

But what about the Trek XI we’ve been hearing about from Rick Berman? It’s supposed to be about the beginning of Star Trek, before the time of Enterprise, and have no one from previous casts in it. That would include, one assumes, Patrick Stewart.

Then there’s the little mystery of why Stewart decided to announce this now, when he said these meetings (with “money men” involved )took place something like four months ago. He hasn’t exactly been silent and invisible all that time.

My guess is that Berman’s Trek: the Beginning is dead. And maybe Berman and Stewart know this now, and so Stewart felt he could talk about that meeting four months ago.

I'm guessing as well that there have always been at least two approaches being discussed, though Berman and his regime may have been aware of only theirs. I recall rumors some months ago that Jonathan Frakes had met with people Paramount about the next movie. The speculation then was that he was being considered as director for Berman’s project. Maybe so. But maybe not. Maybe he was part of these other discussions.

If someone or ones with the power to push Paramount’s buttons decides that the problem with Nemesis was the director, the release date, whatever. And that Enterprise proved that a new Trek crew in a new Trek universe is riskier than using a universe and crew with proven popularity--- then this other project may be getting the upper hand.

And perhaps not only Stewart and Berman but the announced writer, Erik Jendreson, knows this now. In any event, he has recently signed on as writer and producer for a new television series, which would pretty much preclude his continuing participation in a Trek project.

My further guess is that it is not exclusively a Next Generation project, but is akin to John Logan’s idea for Trek XI that he talked about in an interview I unfortunately can no longer find, before Nemesis was released. If I recall correctly, he was proposing a lighter tone, and a story involving characters (and actors) from more than one Trek TV series. So this would involve Picard and other Next Gen characters, but not only them.

Jean Luc and Denny Crain Kirk?

Lots of people play the game of “what should the next Trek movie be?” I played it in some emails with Nick Sagan. I’m not going to tell you his ideas, because as a former Trek writer and producer, and the author of two terrific sci-fi novels and one more soon to come, he is in a much better position to actually sell his approach.

But I’ll tell you mine. It’s a premise and an approach, not yet a story. The premise is that some members of all the Enterprise crews suddenly disappear (not all of them—just the ones who agree to be in the picture.) They reappear on one of the Enterprises---perhaps Archer’s, perhaps Picard’s. They don’t know why. Until who should appear in their midst, but Q.

Next Gen movies have needed Q for some time, in my opinion, and he’s the perfect rationale for gathering available major Trek actors for this movie. (It would have been a perfect 40th anniversary premise, by the way.) Even DS9 and Voyager actors could be included---all of them have been on one Enterprise or another, even for transport or a tour.

The premise is that the universe is very confused, something major has happened to its very fabric, and even Q is confused. He tried to turn to Picard and his Enterprise to help him sort it out, but the space-time continuum is in such flux that he grabbed people from several Enterprises over several hundred years. Furthermore, he got some of them long after they retired (Captain Kirk, anyone?) and perhaps even some at a point in their lives before they served. Or, perhaps in the case of Kirk, they’re snatched from alternate timelines.

But the essence is Picard and Q solving the problem of what’s wrong with the universe, with the able assistance of Kirk, Archer and whoever. (In terms of casting, an additional beauty of this premise is that everybody doesn’t have to be in the whole movie. There could be surprises throughout.)

The approach to the story I would like to see does not involve the political emphasis of latter Trek, or big space battles that would turn Trek into another adjunct of video games, but a return to what was promised in Next Gen’s final episode.

Remember what Q said at the end? “That is the exploration that awaits you! Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence!”

I’m not talking about either psychobabble or technobabble. I mean an exciting, challenging story that involves concepts that arise from the latest ideas in quantum physics and related fields.

The truth is that for all its advanced technology, the Star Trek universe is basically Newtonian, with a lot of technobabble tap-dancing. Gene Roddenberry went for ideas and for nourishment to scientists as well as technicians, and it’s time that Star Trek went back to sources like that for new ideas.

So---where do I sign?

UPDATE 12/15/05: Ain't It Cool News and TrekWeb are reporting a story that apparently originated at Canmag.com that indeed the prequel story for the next film is dead, and that the new film is to feature Picard, Kirk and Archer. But the setting is to be the Mirror Universe, which is not an idea I find appealing at all. It was badly done on Enterprise and I wasn't fond of the DS9 attempts I saw either. (The original series episode worked but only as a self-contained allegory.)

Anyway, I hope this "news" didn't originate with this site, because it was all speculation and proposal here.

Mark Twain, whose Connecticut Yankee woke up in the future, finds himself aboard the 24th century Enterprise. "I guess the future turned out pretty well."

Looking for Star Trek, High and Low

(Along with the Beatles, Herman Melville and Harry Potter)

by William S. Kowinski

Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling has a fascinating new non-fictional but still scientific book called Shaping Things (M.I.T. Press), which should be of interest to anyone into design, the future and the interface of information technology and the stuff in our lives. Plus it’s very short.

This isn’t about Bruce Sterling, however. It’s been inspired by an “endintroduction” to his book by Peter Lunenfeld, editorial director of Mediawork, the outfit that puts out this series of little books. He starts off: “I was mulling over Shakespeare’s observation that the future is an ‘undiscovered country.’ No, that’s not true; I was watching late night cable and stumbled across one of those forgettable Star Trek films from the 1990s, with that phrase in the title.”

We’ll overlook the slight to the films, and mention that he was of course referring to Star Trek VI (which I’ve conveniently just posted an essay about, here.) Lunefeld goes on to say that then he “remembered that Shakespeare wasn’t referring to the future, he was referring to death. Actually, that’s not true either.” He looked up the phrase on the Internet, and got the “proper context from Hamlet” which he swears he actually did read, but long ago.

His conclusion, and presumably the reason for mentioning all this, was: “This mix of the high and the low, the dread and the absurd, constitutes the future, and that’s what this Mediawork pamphlet is about.”

It’s also an aspect of the future that Star Trek had a hand in creating, and that it embodies. Especially the “mix of the high and the low.” And that’s a very good and very necessary thing.

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Now back to the show...

Star Trek VI had Chagall, Sherlock Holmes, Cold War history,
Peter Pan and of course, Shakespeare in the original Klingon.

Lunefeld felt this was worth mentioning because for awhile now there’s been a cultural separation between what is perceived as popular art or entertainment, and what is ritually considered high art. The difference between pulp science fiction and Literature, say, or rock and classical music, TV drama and Greek drama, and…Star Trek and Shakespeare.

For example, a new biography of the Beatles was just published---it’s almost a thousand pages long, with a hundred pages of footnotes, a scholarly tome and, according to the New York Times review, very well written. The review authors expressed wonder at how things had changed since the early 1960s: “Rock 'n' roll was considered marginal and disposable; the way to learn about its practitioners was to scour fan magazines or pore over sparse album liner notes. When the Beatles began, it would have been unthinkable to read a well-written biography about rock 'n' roll performers that was as serious and thoroughly researched as an important book about Faulkner or Picasso or Mao. For better and for worse, the Beatles changed all that.”

So in its way did Star Trek. It was just a television drama, just science fiction, and dangerously close to a kids show--- the combination was about the lowest you could go. Star Trek became a serious part of the culture the same way the Beatles did---by becoming very popular and making a lot of money for a long time. But like the Beatles, in other ways as well.

(Before we get too far away from the Beatles biography, it’s worth saying that I’ve thought more than once how sorely we lack a really good biography of Gene Roddenberry by a trained biographer or journalist, not either a show business friend or a show business enemy. His authorized biography is respectable, while the other more scurrilous one basically repeats every grudge anyone had against him. There are lots of points of view in lots of books, but no means to figure out what’s what. Evaluating information objectively and placing it in an historical perspective in a biography like one on Faulkner or Picasso or the Beatles has yet to be accomplished.)

In "The Naked Time," George Takei used his
fencing lessons with the man who taught
Erroll Flynn in 'Robin Hood.'

Like the Beatles, Star Trek rebelled against various high art traditions while it absorbed and used elements of that tradition. In Star Trek’s case, it was the form and content of story.

In a general way, Star Trek was part of several storytelling traditions: literary (both the supposed low form of science fiction, and the higher forms of classical literature) and dramatic. Science fiction, which began (with H.G. Wells, at least) in the late 19th century era when literature in the form of the novel was a primary popular storytelling form, was in Wells’ hands (and those who followed him) a ready-made way to bring classic literary ideas into the present, and forward to the metaphorical future.

As television drama, Star Trek was in a long line of literary and dramatic adaptation, or theft. Crucial to its creators were the movies. Everyone from GR to Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner had movie palace matinee memories. When George Takei got to display his previously nonexistent swordsmanship in “The Naked Time” episode of the original series, he was thrilled because he loved Robin Hood---not from reading the stories but from the movies. (He loved the Erroll Flynn classic version and when he sought fencing lessons, he happened to wind up learning from the man who taught Flynn for that very movie, and who did Basil Rathbone’s sword-fighting in the film itself.)

From the original series episode, "Who Mourns
for Adonais?" about Apollo as the last Greek god.
The title is that of a poem by Shelley, mourning the
death of his friend, poet John Keats. It's worth a look.

So Star Trek took plots and ideas from everywhere, from a submarine movie to Joseph Conrad, from Captain Video to Shakespeare. Viewers even got a taste of what classic Greek theatre was like, because (as William Shatner said) the budgets were so small they were essentially putting on plays, but plays with meaning, like the Greeks did. Much of the cast in both the original series and TNG were theatre trained. If a writer suggested a classical allusion, they knew how to play it.

It truly was in the 60s, with the Beatles and other popular music, with Star Trek and a few other TV shows, that popular art and entertainment reinterpreted high art forms and narratives, and made them more accessible. Like those old Classic Comics books or movie versions, they also became conduits to the classics themselves. They made them relevant and easier to approach. They provided a kind of introduction. And the classics, in turn, illuminated aspects of a Star Trek story or a Beatles tune. Bob Dylan learned from an established (if notorious) poet like Allen Ginsberg, and Ginsberg recognized in him his successor.

In fact, ideas, encounters and engagements relevant to the times were more likely to be found in pop culture than in high art, and were accessible to more people, particularly the young.

Practitioners in forms old enough to be high art forms, like the novel, also became underground and popular successes dealing with ideas and issues that seized the imaginations of a popular or cult audience. A lot of young people got turned on to mystical and Eastern religious thought by J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac. Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing and others became both popular and cult. They also turned readers on to writers they admired and emulated.

There was so much energy in popular forms in the 60s—in music, movies and television as well as more experimental theatre, novels and poetry---that a fair number of young people who’d majored in English literature became pop culture commentators, rock critics, film and TV reviewers and pop journalists. Who also played in a band, or made super eight movies.

So the cross-fertilization became pretty natural, and pretty healthy. Thanks as well to wide availability of paperback books, old movies on TV and foreign and experimental films on campuses, people began to make their own explorations, perhaps to go where no one in their families or neighborhoods or high school had gone before.

You could start anywhere and get everywhere, as the cross-fertilization of popular and high art continued. Leading to situations like: my Moby Dick story.

Khan channelling Ahab--He tasks me, he tasks me but I will have him. 

I first encountered Moby Dick in high school, in a long dense passage about whales in our American Literature anthology. All we were supposed to know about it, though, was that the white whale was a symbol. Even though I was a literature major in college, I never had to read the whole book; I just had to know a little about Melville, and generally what the established critics said about Moby Dick. There were plenty of other books I had to read. I never got around to that one.

But sometime in the mid 1980s my curiosity was piqued and I found my paperback copy (because as a lit major it was more important to have the book than to have read it) and began reading. I was astonished. The language was rich and crazy, like Shakespeare disguised as a mad sailor telling strange sea tales.

Then I came upon a passage in which Ahab talks of chasing Moby Dick “around perdition’s flames,” and then his expression, “he’s tasks me,” and then the “I spit at thee” speech, and somehow it seemed I read it all before. Or heard it. And then I realized---it was Khan.

This may not be a surprise to you, but trust me, this was an authentic personal discovery. Apart from the common theme of obsession, at that point I knew of no connection between Moby Dick and Star Trek II, which I had only seen once or maybe twice in a movie theatre. (It wasn’t until I saw it on video that I noticed the copy of Moby Dick in Khan’s empty quarters---with the same cover as my paperback.)

Of course the irony wasn’t lost on me---instead of this literature major picking up a literary allusion in a popular movie, I’d spotted Melville plagiarizing from Star Trek. (It was a couple of years later, when I was definitely on a campaign to read all the really long novels I’d always meant to read but didn’t, that I spotted the name “Yoyodyne” in a novel by Thomas Pynchon---and immediately remembered it from one of my favorite recent movies, Buckaroo Banzai.)

This reverse derivation is a somewhat surreal but quite lovely experience, showing the vitality of both the popular and classical art in a two-way relationship across time. That so many young people now may be discovering, for instance, how many classical composers have stolen from John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith and the other composers of orchestral soundtracks, is a deeply cultural experience, and a very hopeful one for holding on to the threads of the best content and practices, from past to future.

This two-way relationship is pretty widespread by now. At the memorial for GR, Patrick Stewart (who quotes---actually misquotes—lines from Moby Dick in First Contact) mentioned that someone had written to Rick Berman to point out that Captain Picard reading a copy of the Homeric Hymns (at the end of the TNG episode, "Darmok") had probably made “more people curious about that literature than at any time since their creation!”

I can recall more than one discussion of the epic of Gilgamesh in a Star Trek forum, including some very moving summaries of the story. A few months work of TNG episodes and viewers could see entire scenes from Shakespeare acted, meet Mark Twain and Jack London in 19th century San Francisco, hear discussions of Jung and Euclid, see Data reenact Sherlock Holmes in Victorian London, and watch Einstein play poker with Newton and Stephen Hawking.

Star Trek was among the first to include some of the spirit and meaning from the classics, as well as bits and pieces and allusions. Now there are other conduits for elements and values derived from “high” culture, especially for the young. Like Star Wars, and Harry Potter.

This two-way transport is even easier these days, thanks to DVD, video cassettes and the Internet---practically the whole culture, high and low, is easily available, a lot of it for cheap or for free.

But people don't have to seek Star Trek out---it remains more frequently present on TV sets all over the world. Several generations have learned from these Star Trek stories by now, have confronted the same ethical questions and choices, asked the same important questions about mortality and meaning, the past and the future, that the best literature and drama, philosophy and science also address. And come to their own conclusions.

At the same time, Star Trek put them in the context of a romantic but believable future, when confronting these issues was part of this believable journey. The application of the past to the future would run through our present as we watched. Later, curiosity about the classical roots or source of some element of the story could lead to discoveries that enriched the episode or movie on the next encounter.

Star Trek has been a bridge to these ideas and to appreciating these works, since it began. That’s become more valuable and more important as time goes on, and our culture sinks into a dull morass, where intelligence is stereotyped, and curiosity is nearly extinct. That’s why I consider Star Trek fans among the true elite.

"Star Trek appeals to a higher denominator,” Harve Bennett once said. “ It appeals to the imagination, to the mind."

Star Wars and Harry Potter may be the champs of myth
these days but Star Trek had its moments, as in
the TNG episode, "Masks."

Distinctions between high and low cultural expressions have existed at various times and places in history, though not everywhere and not always. There’s a fascinating book by Lawrence W. Levine called Highbrow Lowbrow which details how there was little difference in much of the 18th and all of the 19th century, particularly in America, where Shakespeare and Dickens (writing in that new “popular” form called the novel) and Verdi’s and Mozart’s operas were as much a part of mass culture as jugglers, banjo players and music hall comedy.

When there is a distinction, it is usually based on money and social class, and sometimes on education. There remained some mixing in the 20th century, particularly based on tastes brought over by European immigrants: Italian peasants who loved opera, for instance, and Russians who worshipped ballet. But in some ways, the distinctions certainly became more rigid.

By now, however, in a way they’ve also reversed. Rich people are still more or less in charge of high art, like the symphonies their money partly supports, or the painting and sculpture only they can afford to buy (if only for the investment.) Yet anybody can tune into a classical radio station or get some idea of great paintings from reproductions, and the literary classics are among the cheapest paperbacks you can find. Thanks to DVDs, video stores, downloadable music, etc.--even literary classics online for free--a larger chunk of cultural expression is more easily accessible than ever before.

The problem isn’t so much access to high art, it’s the lack of respect for it. There’s less looking down on the low tastes for popular entertainment. Instead there’s more looking askance at what’s defined as high art. Popular culture is the culture. So it’s become up to popular culture to keep the best of great art alive.

The distinction between high and low has seldom been made by artists themselves. The great composers took liberally from folk melodies, classical artists stole from jazz, jazz artists stole from classical, and the Beatles absorbed from everybody. The same is true in all the arts. But these days, the balance has been distorted—high art absorbs low, but popular arts and entertainment, and even their audiences, keep their distance from the forms and content of high art.

Why is that? Money mostly, but this time not concentrated in the wealthy. The big bucks are in what’s defined as commercial entertainment, which is itself so closely allied to advertising that it is as much a form of advertising as it is a form of music, drama or literature. There is little to distinguish most television from the commercials.

The success of advertising and commercial culture depends on ignorance. Few products are sold anymore on the basis of meeting a need or because they’re good quality and value. Most advertising creates a phony need and suggests, falsely, that its product will meet it. Advertising depends on people falling for it. The dumber the customers are, the easier it is. By and large, television has to be as least as dumb as the commercials if the commercials are to look smart. And sooner or later, everything becomes television, just as every business becomes Hollywood.

Alice in Wonderland's guest appearance in "Shore Leave,"
Ted Sturgeon's story.

But the future depends on other qualities besides gullibility, short attention spans, jaded brains and senses, and psychological enslavement to what’s popular at the current moment---all of which are essential to the triumph of the will of advertising.

The future will only exist for individuals and for society if people are curious and adventurous in their minds and hearts, and if they esteem learning, knowledge, openness to the best new and old ideas and expressions, and above all to making up their own minds based on quality and quantity of information.

People who deride Star Trek fans as losers (because they are different) and conformists (because they are all the same) and especially as shallow people who pour way too much interest and faith in a relatively silly television show, just don’t get it. Star Trek fans often exercise more intellectual curiosity and openness, as well as sincere need to understand the larger contexts of their lives, and a heartfelt desire to live a good life, than many of their jaded critics do.

As someone from the lower middle class who was lucky to be born in a time and place where I could go to a college and study literature and philosophy and theatre, while being part of a new culture of movies and popular music and writing, I don’t dismiss any avenue of exploration that leads to great insights, expanded consciousness and the oceanic and subtle complexities of feeling inspired by great art, high and low.

What does it matter really if a Harvard professor or Star Trek II leads you to Moby Dick, as long as you get there? And why would anyone object to the shared memory of Moby Dick informing a psychological insight particularly instructive to us in our time, in the guise of Jean Luc Picard in the 24th century, being consumed by vengeance against the Borg?

It’s win-win, as far as I can see.

We need people with depth and character, if we’re to have any sort of future. And if we don’t get there, then we need a present where we reach with our hands and hearts and minds to the extent of our potential, so we at least live full lives. We must try our best not only to create a better world, but to be the kind of people who make it better right now, so we at least deserve a future.

Anyway, according to the big thinkers at MIT, Star Trek fans are way ahead.

NEW! Latest Entry in the Trekalog: Star Trek VI posted HERE

On the Lost Star Trek 40th Anniversary Book

I’ve just posted an essay on Star Trek VI, the latest in my “Trekalog” series on all ten films. It’s quite long, so I’ll keep this short.

I’ve decided to go public about some discussions I’ve had concerning Star Trek’s 40th anniversary. As most readers here know, I wrote an article for the New York Times published in August 2004, concerning prospects for Star Trek’s future. It had been edited for space, and I posted the full text here, which got this blog going.

At about the same time I started putting out feelers about writing a book for Star Trek's 40th anniversary in 2006. At first everyone was encouraging, including several people at Paramount, and Star Trek figures like Leonard Nimoy and (more recently) Eugene Roddenberry.

A few weeks after my Times piece appeared, Marco Palmieri at Pocket Books expressed interest, and I had a meeting with him and other editors there by telephone. They asked me to write up some ideas for such a book. Several seemed enthusiastic.

They cautioned me, however, that they weren’t sure Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster would okay any new nonfiction book on Star Trek, because nonfiction Trek books hadn’t been selling well recently.

I didn’t hear from them for awhile, but eventually I had one more phone conversation with Marco Palmieri. He told me that they had liked my ideas, and they wanted me to write the book. But as they feared, Pocket Books was saying no to publishing any such nonfiction Trek book. The only possibility then was if Paramount got interested enough to “support” the book by guaranteeing some of the cost.

That’s how things stood earlier this year: if a 40th anniversary book was to be published, I would be writing it. But unfortunately, there isn’t going to be one. I’ve sent a few emails since, but haven’t heard back, but I assume nothing has changed.

Of course, this is very disappointing. I was especially looking forward to working with the editors and others to put together a book of text and visuals to celebrate Star Trek by taking a step back and looking at it in a larger historical context than has been explored before. To celebrate its significance in its time, and for our time, and especially for the future.

Much of what I’ve written for this blog has been written with that book—or a book-- in mind. Response to what I’ve posted here has helped me define what I want to do and how best to do it.

At this point I still intend to write a book for the 40th anniversary, though it’s likely I’ll have to publish it myself, probably through one of the print-on-demand services (I reprinted my book originally published by Morrow, The Malling of America, through Xlibris). That way it would be available through all the major online booksellers.

But that will depend on how much time I can devote to it without outside resources. And it will be a different book. In some ways, more limited, because I won't have access or rights to Star Trek photos. But in other ways, I probably have more freedom in an unofficial book. You know, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"?

In the meantime, I’ll keep posting here when I can, and I’ll be looking for your responses to what I’m trying to do. I’ve been heartened and inspired by some of the generous comments I’ve received. (I’ve passed a bunch of them on to Pocket Books!) I hope you’ll support this 40th anniversary book project.

Michael Piller in 2000, receiving the
Gene Roddenberrry Award from
actor Anne Lockhart. Star Trek.com photo.

Keeper of the Flame
R.I.P. Michael Piller (1948-2005)

Riker and Shelby in Piller's famous third season
TNG episode, "The Best of Both Worlds I"

by William S. Kowinski

Legacy (Part One)

Michael Piller was an important creative force in TV and movie storytelling of 24th century Star Trek, and in many ways he was a conscience of Star Trek after Gene Roddenberry’s death. Judging from the testimonials from people who knew him that are appearing on TrekWeb and elsewhere, he also had GR’s dedication to story and his affinity for people. Michael Piller seemed to have been a great student and a great teacher and mentor.

Certainly his remarkable innovation of an open door policy for scripts added energy and years of creativity to The Next Generation.

But in reviewing the richness in his commentaries and interviews I’ve sampled today, I wonder how much more there is that we can learn from him, and others. In a commentary for Star Trek: Insurrection, he mentioned compiling all the script versions of that film, intending to publish them. To my knowledge, he never did.

It is unlikely that such a volume would be published commercially today. Paramount and Simon & Schuster (Pocket Books) have determined that non-fiction Star Trek isn’t profitable. (I’ll have more to say about that in a different connection soon.) With the ten “special edition” DVDs of Star Trek features complete, and the DVDs of all the 23rd and 24th century Star Trek television episodes issued, Paramount is unlikely to release any more filmed or taped material relating to them.

So perhaps it is time for a different kind of memorial to Michael Piller and the growing number of creative contributors to Star Trek who have passed away.

I would like to see some kind of public archive created of all the Star Trek material that hasn’t been released, and will never be released commercially. There must be many hours of interviews with Piller and others, perhaps filmed for various DVDs but not included. And for example, the commentaries that William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy did for original series episodes when they premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel, some of which have never been seen or heard.

There must be volumes of scripts and other writings done by those associated creatively with Star Trek, that will never be commercially published. Not to mention drawings, models and so on, as well as deleted scenes, alternate takes on tape and film.

The Internet offers new possibilities for providing access to people around the world. Probably there is no money to be made in all this, but there should be a method of ensuring access to scholars and fans.

Star Trek made a number of institutions and people a lot of money, and it became important to people who have made fortunes in different fields. They might be willing and even eager to create a Star Trek endowment, and help fund a nonprofit Star Trek foundation;to talk about a Star Trek museum, a Star Trek library and on-line archives, either as an independent entity or affiliated with another institution, such as the Museum of Broadcasting.

Maybe it’s time to talk about Star Trek fellowships, for people with the skills, talent and interest to research and prepare appropriate packages of visual, audio and print material. And interviewers to capture more memories and contributions from remaining Star Trek creators.

Perhaps this is the discussion that should be happening as Star Trek approaches its 40th anniversary. For it’s clear that whatever Star Trek becomes in the future, its past is becoming a closed book.

This proposal I believe is in the spirit of Michael Piller. He is one of the Star Trek creators in whose memory this could be done. Star Trek has an important legacy, and it can be kept alive.

Star Trek: Insurrection: Piller's script, trying to keep GR's vision alive 

Legacy (Part II)

In his commentaries and interviews, Michael Piller talked often of what he learned from Gene Roddenberry, in his first year as a writer and producer for The Next Generation, and Roddenberry’s last year as an active executive producer.

Piller said that in particular his goal in writing the script for Star Trek: Insurrection was to return Star Trek to the Roddenberry approach to the future. He felt he was “the keeper of the flame.”

Of those who came after Roddenberry, Piller often seemed to best understand GR’s Star Trek. Already that Star Trek is being forgotten and dismissed, yet the flame is still alive.

The advent of new “grittier” science fiction series and especially the three alien-threat shows now on the major broadcast networks have generated a lot of “we’re not Star Trek and boy are we glad” chatter.

It’s interesting how many feel they have to say they aren’t Star Trek. But in their attempts to separate themselves from the most successful science fiction saga in history, they wind up protesting too much.

They talk about how times have changed---how this is a more fearful time, people are more threatened, and it’s not an optimistic period as it was in Trek’s heyday. Either these people didn’t live through the Star Trek 1960s, or they did a little too much LDS. In 1966 and 1967 there was a war and a draft killing thousands; there were confrontations between police and students and other demonstrators both frequently and in huge numbers. There were riots in black ghettos each summer from 1964, in a dozen cities. Then they really exploded in 1968.

In 1968, there was more of everything, plus a Nobel Peace Prize winner and moral leader not only of African Americans and their allies but of the world, and the man who was on the way to becoming President, ending the war and reuniting the factions at each other’s throats not only in the streets but in American homes, both gunned down and killed within six weeks of each other.

Star Trek’s revival began as the trauma of Watergate was sinking into the background, but suspicion and cynicism were rising. The threat of nuclear war, of instant Armageddon with little or no warning, was always there, flaring into consciousness in the Cuban Missile crisis and again in the arms buildup of the Reagan (and Next Generation) 1980s. By the late 60s, and through the 70s and 80s, grave environmental threats and prospects of a polluted and ruined world were also known and had become part of everyday consciousness.

The spirit of hope that was expressed in Star Trek lived despite the times, not as some comfortable expression of them. True, there were more visionary and utopian ideas and fervent feeling than is evident today, and perhaps more innocence. There was the Apollo program, and the stunning view of the earth from the moon. But when Edward Kennedy spoke to the Democratic Convention after his brother Robert’s death, as Robert had after President Kennedy’s assassination, he asserted, “the hope still lives, and the dream will never die.” Not everyone believed him.

The truth is that while new shows may very well be creative, well-crafted and a contrast in style, their vision of the future (or of aliens) is less sophisticated than Star Trek’s. It is basically a vision of the past---both the past of science fiction/fantasy, the past of war movies and tales of intrigue, and the past of humankind.

The whole premise of GR’s Star Trek is that we had to outgrow this past if we were going to have an immediate future.

Few understood this better than Michael Piller, especially as he is quoted in his section of The Great Birds of the Galaxy:

“I think Gene’s view of the future serves an important purpose in a very difficult time of our lives and history. When our daily lives are filled with smog, gangs and drugs, it’s important to see that there is hope, that there are ways to solve our problems, that there is a future we can look forward to.”

“I’m sure there is a fine, wonderful series to be made out of Blade Runner, but I wouldn’t want to live there. I think it is terribly important on television that you provide an environment that people want to stay in.

“There are those who would violently disagree with me, but I would love to live in the 24th century that Gene Roddenberry has created. I also think it’s terribly important that family values on television come through, and that [our characters] represent the working environment, the family environment and living environment that we wish we would have. In a way it sets a role model for things we can accomplish.

“ I endorse it, I enjoy writing it, writers who have a difficult time with it complain that it’s hard to find conflict in characters who are perfect, who live in a perfect world. All I can say is that it is harder in that you can’t just drop back and say, ‘Okay, let’s do a drug story this week,’ but these are different people from different places. They approach problems in different ways.”

“We’re dealing with better humans here. We’ve evolved a little bit over the centuries, and so you’re not going to have a lot of pettiness. But I do think there’s room for genuine, honest conflict. For two people who like each other, who come from legitimate backgrounds and are honorable people, you still can have conflict.

“ There is room for conflict and there are ways to find it. It’s a little harder, but I also think it’s very important that we endorse this. It’s certainly the life I want to have.”

The evil but necessary Kirk. 

Star Trek: The Inner Ape and The Enemy Within

by William S. Kowinski


“The Enemy Within” is one of the foundation episodes of Star Trek. It premiered early in the first season of the original series, the fifth to be broadcast. It’s the “two Kirks” episode, the good Kirk and the bad Kirk split off from each other. Its treatment of human nature, of accommodating the dark side rather than denying it, has become integral to the Star Trek definition of what it means to be human.

The insights of this episode were given a new twist recently by a thesis contained in Our Inner Ape, a recent book by primatologist Frans de Waal. He contends that we actually have two inner apes---the heritage of two ape species with very different ways of dealing with the world.

The story and script for “The Enemy Within” were created by Richard Matheson, already an important science fiction and fantasy author, and a consummate professional as a movie and television episode scriptwriter. In 1966 he was probably best known as the author of the novel and screenplay for one of the better “radiation mutation” science fiction films of the 1950s, “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” directed by Jack Arnold, among the most imaginative and literate filmmakers of the period working in s/f and fantasy.

In addition to his scripts for genre series television, Matheson wrote the classic “Duel” for Steven Spielberg, and adapted “The Martian Chronicles” as a miniseries (prompting author Ray Bradbury to call him “one of the most important authors of the 20th century.”) He wrote the book and script for the 1998 movie, “What Dreams May Come,” and the script for “The Omega Man,” the second film adaptation of his novel, I Am Legend. He’s done the third adaptation of it for a movie scheduled for next year, currently with the novel’s title.

So let’s review the episode. This isn’t the “Mirror, Mirror” mirror universe bad Kirk/good Kirk, where the underlying theme was choice between two paths of conduct (as it was in Star Trek Nemesis, when Captain Picard confronts his clone.) In “The Enemy Within,” a transporter malfunction splits the Captain into two Kirks: a good one (intelligent, compassionate and brave and a very bad one (violent, all appetite and action, and obsessed with survival.)

Shatner plays the bad Kirk as an animal, crouching like an ape, delighted with sensory life. As soon as he gets off the transporter pad he runs his hands over the surfaces of the controls. He’s ecstatic to feel, and he wants more. He is governed by his appetites—heading for Dr. McCoy’s brandy, and then he sexually assaults Yeoman Rand before punching out a young male technician to make his escape.

The good Kirk is puzzled, he is drawn to stillness and contemplation. He can barely understand the evil propelling his double. When they meet, he advances with the certainty of reason. His evil twin cowers, then strikes out. Only Spock’s Vulcan neck pinch prevents him from killing the good Kirk with a phaser blast. (Nimoy invented the neck pinch in this episode, enlisting Shatner to demonstrate it to director Leo Penn, who used some imaginative shots to set the mood for this story. The script called for Spock to knock out the bad Kirk with the butt of his phaser. Nimoy felt Spock would find a more elegant way to disable an enemy.)

Rosalind Cash and Charleton Heston in Matheson's "Omega Man," to be remade for release in 2007.

Good Plus Evil

The simplistic idea of drama focuses on conflict, and the simplest as well as most comforting conflict is between the good guys and the bad guys, the good Force and the Dark Side. That all humans have both good and evil within them is often a theme or a subtext in more sophisticated dramatic storytelling. Critic Stephen Schiff sees it as the essential quality of Film Noir, for example. “No movie can rightly call itself noir unless it locates the nexus of weakness and evil in hero and villain alike,” he writes, “unless it convinces us that we are all capable of terrible deeds, that the fiend is merely the good guy turned inside out.”

If you’ve seen the new Sherlock Holmes TV movie, “ The Case of The Silk Stocking” (broadcast in the U.S. recently on PBS) Rupert Everett as Holmes has this noir flavor.

But this Star Trek episode extends the idea beyond this relationship of opposites. It begins to define how they relate, and how they need each other. As he observes the good Kirk becoming more indecisive, Spock proposes a theory with a barely controlled aggressiveness: Kirk is losing his force of will because his power of decision comes from his negative half.

Spock defines the bifurcation: “His negative side, which you call hostility, lust, violence, and his positive side, which earth people describe as compassion, love, tenderness.” Then he asks, “What is it makes one man an exceptional leader? We see indications that it is his negative side that makes him strong---that his evil side, if you will, properly controlled and disciplined, is vital to his strength.”

This is the apparently dispassionate analysis of the logical Vulcan. But he finishes with a cryptic comment that ends with a double meaning. “If I seem to be insensitive to what you’re going through,” Spock says to the good Kirk, “understand, it’s the way I am.”

Kirk faces losing his command unless his two sides can be reintegrated. Yet it sickens his good side to accept this. Later when he is alone with Dr. McCoy, he expresses it. “I have to take him back inside myself, I can’t survive without him. I don’t want to take him back! He’s a thoughtless, brutal animal! Yet it’s me! Me!”

Bones has brought them each a glass of brandy. “Jim, you’re no different than anyone else. We all have our darker side. We need it. It’s half of what we are. It’s not really ugly—it’s human. Yes, human. A lot of what he is makes you the man you are” McCoy is forced to agree with Spock, “Your strength of command lies mostly in him.”

“What do I have?” the good Kirk asks. “You have the goodness…” “Not enough!” “The intelligence, the logic---it appears your half has most of those, and perhaps that’s where man’s essential courage comes from. For, you see, he was afraid. You weren’t.”

This is another unusual and intriguing idea. We often think of courage as being physical, as “animal courage.” But McCoy suggests it is a product of consciousness.

Spock picks up this theme when he insists that the good Kirk must take the bad Kirk through the transporter, despite the risk that both may die. They learned of the splitting phenomenon when an animal beamed up from the surface also had a second, snarling self. When they tried to reintegrate them, the single animal returned dead. Spock insists the animal died of shock, frightened by the reintegration it couldn’t understand. “You have your intelligence controlling your fear.”

After McCoy insists this is only a theory, Spock pays off his earlier comment. When he said, “this is the way I am,” he meant his life dealing with two halves is "the way I am." “Being split in two is no theory with me, Doctor. I have a human half as well as an alien half, submerged, constantly at war with each other...I survive it because my intelligence wins out over both, makes them live together.”

The good Kirk takes the chance, and the transporter magic reintegrates the two halves into the single decisive but good captain, who saves Sulu and the other men who have been freezing to death on the planet below while all this was happening aboard the Enterprise.

The good Kirk: aghast at the truth of his dual nature.

The Thin Thread

One of the aspects of science fiction, and especially original series Star Trek, that makes its allegories so vivid is their innocence. The human encounter with strange new worlds is often an innocent encounter with a perennial human dilemma. In this case, our 23rd century spacefarers are reinventing insights of the early 20th century psychologists, particularly Carl Jung. (By the 24th century, Counselor Troi will have caught up on that reading.)

Jung adopted Freud’s theory of the relationship between the human consciousness and the human unconscious, though he modified it and made it a good deal richer. Jung’s idea of the unconscious included primitive ideas and feelings inherited from our animal natures, but a lot more than that.

Specifically he posited something he called the shadow, a part of the unconscious where the unwanted and unapproved parts of ourselves reside. They are usually what we’d call evil, but can also be good qualities that our society forces us to repress, like the impulse to give away all your money to a homeless person who somehow touches your heart at that moment.

As in this Star Trek episode, Jung suggests that our shadows are not only part of us, but necessary parts of us. (A good explanation of Jung’s ideas of the shadow, as well as suggestions for integrating it into our lives, is Robert A. Johnson’s short book --just over a hundred pages-- called Owning Your Own Shadow.)

What Spock and McCoy call “intelligence” in this episode, Jung calls “consciousness.” The human struggle is to integrate as much of the unconsciousness into consciousness as possible, while allowing the unconscious its integrity, and respecting its power. Many of the tools of consciousness Jung talked about—the concepts of projection, denial, and transference---are ways by which the individual monitors the often deceptive workings of the unconsciousness.

For Jung, this process is not just important to each individual---to understand the forces and workings of the unconscious is vital to our survival as societies and perhaps as a species. He was especially insistent about this in the 1950s, in the early atomic age. “The world hangs on a thin thread,” he said in a video interview. “That thread is the human psyche… We are the great danger. The psyche is the great danger.” But we know nothing about it, he added. Nobody gives credit to the idea that the psychic processes of the ordinary human have any importance. But, Jung maintained, the future of mankind depends very much on ordinary humans recognizing the shadow in themselves and in their societies.

Respecting the power of the unconscious and honoring its contribution while conscientiously applying consciousness and intelligence to guide behavior are central to Jung’s psychology and to this Star Trek episode. But recently a new perspective on these matters comes from another discipline---the study of fellow primates in the wild.

Kirk faces himself again, this time to comic effect, in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

The Animal Within

I’ve only seen Temple Grandin’s New York Times review of The Inner Ape and some online description by the author, although I have read some of Frans de Waal’s other work. De Waal is one of those who have been studying primate and other animal behavior without the limiting prejudices of earlier science. Scientists need a theory to guide them, but they can be so entranced by that theory that their observations are incomplete or inaccurate. For example, it was an axiom that humans are the only species to use tools, and so for generations scientists missed the evidence in front of their noses of many other species using tools.

They also became captivated by a particular interpretation of Darwinian evolution and the individual organism’s struggle for survival, later even more restricted to the single-minded behavior of the “selfish gene.” They devalued the role that the group plays in the lives of social species, such as primates.

So they missed obvious if somewhat subtle kinds of behavior that ran counter to their theories, especially of struggle. They missed, in particular, examples of altruism, empathy and conciliatory behavior, and important rituals of conflict avoidance and resolution. These turn out to be very important for animals whose health, mental and emotional stability, and survival depends on being an individual with roles and relationships in the group.

De Waal and others wrote about this in a volume De Waal co-edited called Natural Conflict Resolution. In The Inner Ape, he writes specifically about two ape species, the familiar chimpanzees and a species studied only recently, the bonobos.

In the wild, chimp society is a male-dominated hierarchy. They hunt for meat and will kill members of rival chimp bands, even chimps they’ve known for a long time, if they become members of another group. Male chimps sometimes kill infants sired by other males.

This was the template for most ideas about primates, and therefore about “primitive” humans and basic human nature before the social controls of civilization and reason. But that’s partly because nobody knew much about the bonobos.

The bonobos are nearly opposite to chimp society: matrilineal and peace-loving, they make love, not war. They are also skilled at conciliation and have been known to exhibit compassion, even for other species (a bonobo in a zoo was seen tending to an injured starling.) Within their species, they take care of frail elders rather than let them die or kill them when they can’t keep up.

The old model of human nature attributes our violence and extreme passions to our instincts and animal natures, while our conciliatory or altruistic behavior or even self-controlled behavior to the education and moral instruction---and the police controls--- of manmade institutions.

But De Waal’s two species shows that both sides of human behavior are part of our natural heritage. We are as close genetically to the bonobos as we are to the chimpanzees.

De Waal’s research also suggests, as does Jung and “The Enemy Within,” that both lines of this heritage are useful if not crucial to us. When Berlin was bombed in World War II, all the gentle bonobos in the zoo died of heart failure. All the chimps survived.

There is another aspect to de Waal’s research that bears on the Star Trek view of human nature. While we have both sides within us, we all have a natural ability to learn a better way. He writes of an experiment involving two species of monkeys, the aggressive rhesus and the gentler stumptails. Young rhesus monkeys raised in stumptail society picked up their more peaceful ways of settling disputes. They continued to use these skills even when returned to rhesus society.

It’s important to add that chimps, like many other species, also have a gentler side. Much of their group activity is grooming each other, playing and learning from each other. Since chimps have been trainable and even domesticated to a degree, they aren’t only violent.

The message of "The Enemy Within" is the same as the message of Jungian psychology: our dark side is essential to who we are. The message of de Waal’s book is that our nature is not only dark, but also consists of natural goodness, compassion, and a kind of moral responsibility.

What all three have in common is the message of choice. De Waal’s book suggests that if chimps can be taught a different way of dealing with conflict, so can we. As conscious beings, we have the power of decision. Once we accept our darker side---the shadow, the great unknown of the unconscious--- and the power it has over us, then we can choose. It’s not always easy, and it’s not successful every time, but we can keep at it.

Kirk recognizes this in another original series episode when he concedes that “we are killers---but we aren’t going to kill…today.” He is more explicit about the dynamic at the end of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, when he talks about what V’ger took from the merging of machine and human it so desperately wanted and needed: "I think we gave it the ability to create its own sense of purpose," Kirk says, "out of our own human weaknesses, and the drive that compels us to overcome them."

It's also important for us to remember our dual natures when we feel compelled to divide the world into the virtuous and the evildoers. Apart from the human habit of projecting elements of ourselves we are ashamed or afraid of and attributing them to the Other, the alien, the enemy without, we must recognize that we all share the potential for evil and for good. Star Trek carried this approach forward in various ways--for example, by giving aliens their reasons for doing what they were doing, or feelings and reactions we can recognize in ourselves.

Yes, there are evil acts, and everyone has a right to defend themselves against violence and subjugation. But only those who stand to gain from violence will refuse to look for underlying causes that might be addressed. The great breakthrough in U.S. Soviet relations arguably occurred when President Kennedy recognized the similiarities, and that "we are all mortal."

We don't have to apologize for the negative side of ourselves, because even it has positive effects: our appetites are part of our drive to survive, and our aggressive energy is part of our ability and momentum to strive, explore, solve problems, to focus our intuitions and knowledge to make decisions, to experiment, and even to shake things up with pranks and audacity. It also helps us marshal our physical energies for a purpose.

Yet recognizing the capacity for evil in ourselves is also a step towards compassion, just as recognizing the good in ourselves is a step towards honoring that compassion.

De Lancie as Q the prosecutor---now he's Darrow for the Defense... 

John de Lancie Gets A Hand (A Qticle)

A Qticle, get it? What’s wrong---too Qte?

Okay, let’s get serious. John de Lancie appeared on stage in the L.A. Theatre Works production of The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial for the first time, to a capacity crowd here in Arcata, CA. He played legendary attorney Clarence Darrow, who defended John Scopes in the famous 1925 trial concerning the teaching of evolution in schools. His antagonist was the acclaimed orator and presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, played by Edward Asner.

L.A. Theatre Works produces plays for audio: for live radio in its “The Play’s the Thing” series, and other productions for schools and libraries, all available on tapes and CDs. These productions range from audio versions of contemporary and classic plays to adaptations of famous novels (including its first production, a 14-hour version of the Sinclair Lewis novel, Babbitt) and docudramas. The very impressive catalog of its offerings can be found at its website.

Not only is this a tremendous cultural resource, but the audio format makes it easier for hard-to-schedule Hollywood actors to do great parts. They get to play characters other than cops and criminals, and we get to hear familiar voices interpreting the best drama and literature, and dramatizing the great issues of our time.

Star Trek actors are among them: Rene Auberjonis is heard in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Armin Shimerman in Twelve Angry Men, Paul Winfield in Ruby McCollum, Alice Krige in Ronald Harwood's Another Time, and Gates McFadden in Neil Simon’s Chapter Two. Gates is also in the almost all-Star Trek production of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, along with Leonard Nimoy, Brent Spiner, Wil Wheaton, Dwight Schultz and Armin Shimerman.

John de Lancie, who co-founded “Alien Voices” with Leonard Nimoy, and acted, wrote and directed several of its audio productions based on classic science fiction stories (including several others by Wells) is also heard in several Theatre Works plays.

I first saw de Lancie's impressively tall form and calm but focused gaze in one of the corridors outside the studio theatre on the Humboldt State University campus, where some members of the traveling company were assembling for an informal workshop with theatre students on the afternoon before their first performance. He was signing a hardback copy of a Q novel for a teenage boy accompanied by his father. It turned out to be more than a fan---he was a local resident named Bo Banduci who would be performing in the play itself. But he certainly was a fan, judging from the big smile he wore as he left.

John de Lancie (2005) startrek.com

De Lancie didn’t actually take part in the workshop (he looked in occasionally, but mostly prowled the corridors with his cell phone.) But those who did---including director Gordon Hunt, narrator Alley Mills (a classically trained actor and currently a volunteer caseworker for disaster relief at the American Red Cross, best known as Norma Arnold on The Wonder Years)—explained how this particular production came about.

Because the L.A. Theatre Works does some of its radio plays before a live audience, there was interest in touring such a production, so people could see what a radio play looked like. They discovered that their most requested recording from high school teachers throughout the nation was “The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial,” written by Peter Goodchild using the actual Scopes Trial transcripts. So, on the 80th anniversary of the original trial, an 18-week tour of 23 locales was organized, which will take this production to Nashville, Omaha and Fayetteville, Arkansas as well as Los Angeles and suburban Washington.

Some actors would come and go, so some audiences would be seeing Marsha Mason, Mike Farrell and—replacing John de Lancie as Darrow, James Cromwell: Zephran Cochrane for Q.

It would also be seen on the Penn State campus at University Park, just a few hours up the highway from Dover, PA, where another trial involving the teaching of evolution in schools was going on as we gathered to discuss this production.

The assembled participants stressed that the production was not one-sided. Certainly the teaching of science, and keeping religious views separate from science education, was the core issue. But they talked about the principles and the fears that Bryan represented---the idea that to him and others, Darwinian evolution symbolized the threat of a soulless society, without human values. In some venues, the production would be followed by discussions involving experts and prominent voices in that community.

After the workshop I talked briefly with director Gordon Hunt about actors and voices. He said that with all the emphasis on the visual, younger actors were not getting enough vocal training. Even theatrically trained actors often lack the skills to act with their voices.

This is an often-overlooked element in Star Trek’s success: distinctive and powerful voices, and actors who used them well. It’s part of Star Trek’s debt to theatre and even to radio.

I also talked with actor Kevin Kilner, who hopes to produce a documentary about this tour. We continued our conversation as they all left the studio theatre. Outside, as the vans pulled up to take them away, I noticed John de Lancie and Edward Asner standing together. I knew I had only a few minutes before they left, so I had to make a painful choice: do I talk to Lou Grant (Mondays at 10 will always be sacred because of him) or to Q?

It was you, dear readers, who decided it for me.

Spock v. Q---don't expect a new one!

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.

Congratulations to British playwright Harold Pinter for winning the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature. Patrick Stewart pictured here in Pinter's "The Caretaker."

Carla Gugino, star of "Threshold"

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.

Brent Spiner, seen here in "Enterprise," is one of the regulars on Braga's "Threshold."

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.