From Star Trek, with Love

A few years back, we cut way back on our cable subscription. This was a cost cutting measure, but it was also a recognition that when we do watch television, we’re usually watching a streaming service. Nowadays, we only get the local networks, the Weather Channel, TBS, and a few oddball networks that our service graciously throws in as appreciation for the fact that we didn’t dump them entirely. We don’t watch these much and the only reason we kept cable at all was that getting the local stuff with an antenna is dicey and we didn’t want to get hit unawares by a tornado. However, one of those thrown in eccentricities has reacquainted me with an early infatuation of mine, Star Trek. Six nights a week from 7:00 to midnight local time, the H&I network shows old episodes of all five series (excluding the more recent two series currently on CBS pay per view). It’s been fun on a level that transcends simple nostalgia.

For those of you that haven’t seen Star Trek before or are suffering from soap opera style amnesia from an unfortunate car accident, here are synopses for each series (for the purposes of an attempt at brevity, I’m mostly ignoring the movies and the pay per view programs).

Star Trek (TOS)

Length: 3 seasons (1966-1969), sort of. There was a pilot movie in 1964 that was interesting, if somewhat plodding. The series is very different. The only crossover character was Spock, who is also very different in the series.

Description in brief: The first ever space western. The series centered around three characters, Captain Kirk (William Shatner), First Officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and Doctor McCoy (DeForest Kelley). Shatner takes a lot of guff for overacting the captain role, but really all three actors were quite good.

Captain: James T. Kirk (number 2 ranked captain in the Flyover ranking).

Best secondary character: Probably a good definition of acting hell would be having a job as a secondary character in TOS. Almost no episodes were developed for any characters other than Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and occasionally Chief Engineer Scott. Yeoman Rand was a little interesting, but actress Grace Lee Whitney got fired after one season. I suppose Sulu (George Takei) would be my choice. Takei was probably the best actor of the bunch.

Best Episode: Watching it for the first time in a long time, I was surprised at how wonderful the series really was. For the first two seasons, the writing and acting were excellent, so there are a LOT of good choices. Back when I first saw the series (around age ten), I always liked The Doomsday Machine, but having had a chance to go through the episodes in my dotage, I think the best episode might be City on the Edge of Forever, written by science fiction superstar Harlan Ellison. The acting (including guest star Joan Collins) is outstanding and the plot is terrific. Ellison himself hated it because it went through extensive editing before it was shot. I’ll probably suffer a horrible fate for speaking ill of the dead (Ellison died a couple of years ago), but Ellison was arrogant as hell and, in this instance, totally mistaken. I’ve read the original script. The edits made the story better.

Three final points:

1. I hadn’t realized this as a 10 year old, but there’s A LOT of sex on TOS. Kirk is constantly seducing or being seduced by some scantily clad alien, and even the emotionally suppressed Spock gets to have a couple of relationships. They weren’t too subtle about it either. There were at least a couple of episodes showing Kirk hopping out of bed after the act. Many of you might be too young to remember this, but sex was a taboo topic on 60s television. I expect that Star Trek featured more sex than any other show of that period.

2. The special effects haven’t aged well and didn’t really age very well past the first year after the series was canceled (2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1969), but for television, the special effects were better than any previous science fiction series and were better than any series that followed it through the 1970s. Just compare it to any 70s series (take a gander at Space: 1999, if you need a substitute for epicac) and I think you’ll agree. Really, special effects in 80s science fiction weren’t very good until The Next Generation.

3. Ah, season three. I hate to end this love note on a downer, but here we are. In the first two seasons (particularly the second season), many of the writers attempted to inject some humor into the series. I thought the humor actually made the shows more endearing, but series creator Gene Roddenberry thought otherwise. The story goes that he informed his writers that there was entirely too much fun stuff going on and the series took a much darker turn. I suppose this could have been a good thing, but it’s like everyone (writers, directors, actors, etc.) suddenly quit trying. NBC considered canceling the series after season two, but fans engaged in a huge write-in campaign in support of the series and managed to save it. Season three was like everyone involved in the series decided to spit in the face of their fans. In hindsight, it was pretty shameful.

Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG)

Length: 7 seasons (1987-1994).

Description in brief: Well, it’s a lot less of a space western than the original series. Lots more space exploration and new enemies. The Borg, especially, were really interesting. For the first season, Roddenberry tried to prove that you could have a successful series without actual conflict or character development. After the first season, Roddenberry was booted out and the show immediately got better.

Captain: Jean Luc Picard (number 3 ranked captain in the Flyover ranking). The character of the Captain played a much larger role in the overall success of the program than Kirk did in the original series. Fortunately, Patrick Stewart is a heckuva good actor, the best actor of any major character in any Star Trek series.

Best secondary character: TNG did a much better job of developing their secondary characters, so it’s not an easy choice. I went back and forth between Data (Brent Spiner) and Worf (Michael Dorn). I’d pick Worf. His character development throughout the series is wonderful to behold and Dorn deserves a lot of credit for that.

Best Episode: My favorite episode is Chain of Command, a two part episode in season six, which features Stewart at his acting best. A good rule of thumb for episode quality is that if the episode features Stewart, it’s going to be outstanding. If the episode features Spiner or Dorn, it’s going to be very good. If the episode features Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes), it’s going to be terrible.

Three final points:

1. To give you an idea of the overall arc of the series, the first season is truly awful, to the point of making you wonder how the series ever survived its first year. Seasons two through six are consistently good. Season seven is inconsistent. Some of the episodes are great, some are unwatchable. Just my opinion, but the series ended exactly when it needed to.

2. I don’t think you can overemphasize how important it was to get rid of Roddenberry. He was clearly a creative genius and we wouldn’t have any Star Trek without him. Until you see it, you can’t imagine how bad the first season was.

3. I hesitate to bring this up, because everyone who writes about TNG discusses this, but the holodeck is the cheapest plot device in television history. If you were a writer for TNG and you were stumped for a story, all you had to do was write a holodeck story. I’m not sure if a civilization that’s advanced enough to invent a holodeck wouldn’t destroy all of the holodecks and then destroy any drawings for the holodeck. Apart from the fact that it’s unbelievably dangerous to operate, it’s also highly addictive to the extent that nobody would ever get anything done waiting for their next holodeck fix. I should add that some of the holodeck episodes are pretty good (and some are pretty terrible), but I just can’t imagine they would actually allow one on a starship.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DSN)

Length: 7 seasons (1993-1999).

Description in brief: Unlike the previous two series, Deep Space Nine is set on a space station, so there is far less exploration going on. The Federation establishes a station next to a planet that has only recently overcome occupation by the evil Cardassians (as opposed to the somewhat less than evil Kardashians). The story, which may or may not be true, is that the creators actually stole the idea of a space station/entertainment complex from J. Michael Straczinski, who was in the process of creating Babylon 5.

Captain: Benjamin Sisko (number 1 ranked captain on the Flyover ranking). Sisko (portrayed wonderfully by Avery Brooks) is the first badass captain. He is often a morally ambiguous, and on at least two occasions, morally evil captain. Having such a complex captain after the more straightforward Captains Kirk and Picard was refreshing.

Best secondary character: Take your pick. DSN did the best job of developing secondary characters of any of the Star Trek family. My own picks would be Odo (Rene Auberjonois) and Quark (Armin Shimerman). I think they are perhaps the best frenemies in television history.

Best Episode: Favor the Bold. The best battle episode of any Star Trek series.

Three final points:

1. On the controversy over whether DSN or Babylon 5 is the better series, I am firmly planted on the fence. The two series have many similarities, so it’s easy to understand why fans argue about it. I think seasons two through four of Babylon 5 are some of the best science fiction ever shown on television. DSN was more consistently good. All seven seasons are high quality, except for:

2. The series finale is terrible. They tried to make it a modified tribute episode where they killed off Sisko without actually killing him. I can’t really explain it and I think you’d have to see it to truly understand. But please, don’t see it. Trust me on this. They almost managed to destroy seven solid years of storytelling in one hour.

3. I’ve been told by “she who must be obeyed” to include this comment, but she didn’t have to try too hard to convince me because I agree with her. DSN has the best theme song and opening credits of any Star Trek series. The way the music crescendos just as the station appears is really well done.

Star Trek: Voyager

Length: 7 seasons (1995-2001).

Description in brief: While hunting down Maquis rebels, Starship Voyager and a Maquis ship get sucked through a wormhole and wind up a long way from home in an unexplored region of the galaxy. The two combatants must join forces to survive.

Captain: Kathryn Janeway (number 4 ranked captain). After venturing into more complex character studies with Benjamin Sisko, the creators of this series decided to fall back to a more two-dimensional captain similar to what they had in the first two series. Kate Mulgrew is fine as the captain, but the character is just intensely unlikeable.

Best secondary character: They tried REALLY HARD to do character development for the secondary characters, but it never really worked until Seven of Nine (played by Jeri Ryan) finally appeared in season four. It seemed like her appearance improved the development of all the other characters, most especially Commander Chakotay (Robert Beltran) and Ensign Kim (Garrett Wong). And she was pretty hot in that cat suit they had her in.

Best Episode: I dunno. This was probably my least favorite series of the bunch, so it was a hard pick. Scorpion, the season three/four cliffhanger episode is pretty good. Unlike DSN, the series finale is pretty good. In the finale, we find out that old Janeway is far more interesting than young Janeway.

Three final points:

1. The writers really fell in love with episodes where one or more members of the crew were stranded somewhere, unable to get back to or even find their ship. There was even one episode where the entire crew got stranded on a primitive planet. You see that a lot with murder mystery television series. Writers fall in love with a plot devise and never seem to develop the courage or imagination to move past it. Almost every episode will involve a “locked door” mystery or a “time paradox” mystery. The writers did finally get past their obsession in later seasons (maybe another thing we can thank Seven of Nine for), but it took far too long.

2. In hindsight, I’m probably being too harsh about Voyager. The first season was bad, but it wasn’t as bad as TNG‘s first season and, like TNG, it got steadily better.

3. I don’t really have much else to add about Voyager, so I’m going to throw in this comment here. I’ve always been intrigued about the religious aspects of the Star Trek universe, or lack thereof. I guess it’s not surprising since Roddenberry was an atheist and I don’t suppose any of the other creators were particularly religious. In the original series, there are hints at religion. We know there’s a chapel of some sort on the ship and there are other allusions that some vague understanding of Christianity has survived through the centuries. By the time TNG rolls around, all of that is gone and humans are all portrayed as atheistic humanists. When religion is discussed it is always portrayed in a negative light. The most religious characters are the Klingons and we eventually learn that their religion is a sham. Religion is explored more in DSN and occasionally is shown positively as it relates to the Bajorans. Kira Nerys is truly religious and truly faithful to her beliefs. She struggles with the moral ambiguity of the atrocities she had to perform to defeat the Cardassian occupiers of her planet. A few of the other Bajorans are portrayed positively, but the religious establishment at Bajor is portrayed as hopelessly corrupt.

I bring this up here because religion is probably mentioned in Voyager less than any other series. You would have thought that, given their predicament, some of the crew might have had sought consolation in religious practices. Might have made for some interesting story lines. Opportunity lost, I guess.

Star Trek: Enterprise

Length: 4 seasons (2001-2005).

Description in brief: This is a prequel to TOS and follows earth’s first attempts to explore the universe.

Captain: Jonathan Archer (number 5 ranked captain). I hate to be harsh here. Scott Bakula is a fine actor (and a former Kansas Jayhawk). He just never quite fits in this role.

Best secondary character: That’s an easy choice. Jolene Blalock as Sub-commander T’Pol is really good. The rest of the characters never really develop, although Dominic Keating as Lt. Malcolm Reed is pretty good.

Best Episode: I’m going mostly on memory here, since Enterprise doesn’t come on until 11:00, which is well past this guy’s bedtime. I suppose I’d go with In a Mirror, Darkly, which explores an alternate universe where the good guys are all bad guys. I would imagine this universe would have gotten another episode or two, had the series not been canceled.

Three final points:

1. Like DSN, the series finale is just awful. For some reason, they decided to tie it TNG and steal some of the characters from that series. The end result is you are left wondering if the whole series was just a holodeck simulation from TNG. The holodeck. The gift that just keeps on giving!

2. For the opening credits, the series creators decided to go with a folk song approach to the theme music. The song is pretty good, but it does get a little tiresome the more you hear it. The background images for the opening credits that document the history of exploration are pretty cool.

3. It wasn’t bad, but it deserved to be canceled. Except for T’Pol, all of the characters were two-dimensional. Trip Tucker’s death in the series finale would have been a relief if the series had continued. As it was, it was too late.

I’ve no interest in doing the CBS streaming service, so I haven’t seen the new Star Trek series. Trekkies generally seem to hate it. As for Star Trek: Picard, I have seen snippets. It seems… weird. Can’t quite put a finger on it. I saw a YouTube review that just savaged it, but it’s hard to imagine that Patrick Stewart can’t find a way to save it from mediocrity.

I think I’ll just stick with the reruns.

The Sci Fi Five

This year, we’ve got two brand, spanking new science fiction shows on the four bigger noncable networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC).  The Orville premiered about a month ago on Fox and Star Trek: Discovery showed up last weekend on CBS.  That’s unusual.  I can’t remember the last time we’ve had two prime time major network sci fi shows on the air at the same time.  In fact, I can’t remember the last time CBS had any science fiction series.  Perhaps that’s why I’ve been thinking about the sci fi shows I’ve really enjoyed over the years.  I’ve been reading science fiction since almost the time I learned to read (“See Dick run. See Jane determine that Dick is an android cylon and blast him with her phaser.”)  I’ve been watching science fiction on television since I was old enough to sneak past my parents to watch Star Trek.  For reasons that I can’t remember, it was prohibited in our household.

Based on what I’ve seen so far with the new shows, I’d say The Orville is pretty good, albeit a little disappointing, and I still haven’t watched Star Trek: Discovery.  The early reviews are scary bad so I might miss it.  This confluence of events got me reminiscing about all the other sci fi series I’ve seen over the years, and you know I love to put together a list, so I put together a list.  This is the top five list of the sci fi shows I’ve enjoyed the most over the years.

But as with all of my lists, we have to establish some ground rules.  First, it’s got to be a show I’ve seen.  I’ve heard some great things (and some bad things) about Westworld, but I haven’t seen it, so it’s off. That rule is a bit of a hindrance since I cut the cable on the SciFi channel about four years ago.  Second, no superheroes, so no Supergirl or Agents of Shield or a host of other shows of that genre, whatever it is.  Also, no shows that would fit more comfortably into the fantasy genre.  Finally, if there was much doubt about whether it qualified for science fiction, I left it off the list.  I don’t know what genre category Mr. Robot falls into, but I don’t think it’s sci fi.  The Twilight Zone was the hardest one to decide on, since many, if not most, of it’s shows had strong science fiction elements.  I couldn’t really decide, so I flipped a coin and it lost.

So, without further ado and in no real order, since the order would change depending on which day of the week you asked, here we go.

Babylon 5 – Yeah, the first season was a little weak, and the last season was undecipherable.  But those three seasons in between, oh boy!  Some of the best stuff on television, regardless of genre.  Some of the writing was almost Shakespearean in quality.  I recently saw a video on YouTube that listed the video creator’s top 10 best episodes of Babylon 5.  The list was good and I don’t think I’d change much on it, but it was interesting that it didn’t include the episode Z’ha’dum from season three.  I wouldn’t have included it either, but the episode did have one of the most dramatic moments in any science fiction series ever (“Jump! Jump now!”) and also had one of the most memorable soliloquies in science fiction history coming from the character G’Kar (the best quote: “There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of a soul that has lost its way.”).

Firefly – I don’t know what happened either, although I’ve read a lot of theories.  Fox apparently opened up the bank vault to convince Joss Whedon, fresh off of his success with “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel,” to do this series on their network and then did everything they could to sabotage the series once they got it.  Still, for its only season, the show had great writing and the cast really had some special chemistry.  The movie Serenity acted as a nice unofficial second season.  I guess there are still rumors it could come back, although I doubt that they could ever recapture what made it enjoyable in the first place.

Star Trek: Deep Space 9 – I struggled with how to handle the whole Star Trek thing.  Each series has its fans except, possibly, the new series on CBS.  What I finally decided to do was pick what I thought was the best series of the bunch (TOS, TNG, DS9, STV, and Enterprise) and rate it and leave the rest of them off.  That’s unfair to the rest of them, especially The Next Generation, which really should be on the list somewhere, but I wanted to keep the list to five.  Otherwise, I’d be writing this post for weeks.

I opted for DS9, because I thought it had the best captain and the characters were all well developed and really interesting.  Odo and Quark have possibly the best respect/hate relationship in science fiction history.

The Expanse – My wife and I binge-watched this series a few weeks ago.  There is always a temptation to overvalue the things you’ve seen most recently, but I don’t think I’m doing that here.  It’s just really good.  It’s based on a series of novels and stories by James S. A. Corey (yeah, I know it’s a pseudonym, but if the writers want to hide their identities, who am I to argue) and it’s a gritty, interesting show.  It also has the distinction of being the most plausible series on the list.

Doctor Who – Probably not as good as some of the shows I left off the list, but you can’t argue with longevity.

I left off some shows that I really wanted to include, but I had to draw a line somewhere.  Probably the show that came closest to making the list was The X-Files, which barely made it over that sci fi/not sci fi line I was talking about earlier.  I also thought about Stargate: SG1, which was the most amusing show I considered and Farscape, which gets credit for being an interesting, fairly original idea.  Battlestar Galactica (the 2004 version, not the 1980 version, which I’m pretty sure won’t be on anyone’s good list) would have made the list, if it had stayed anywhere near as good as it was in the first season.  It didn’t.

Boldy Going into Oblivion

This past week, CBS announced that they are going to take another shot at reviving the Star Trek universe with a new series.  The network will use the new Star Trek to try to break into the lucrative streaming video market that Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon have used to make a killing financially.  I wish I could say I have mixed feelings about this venture, but that would imply that when I look into my crystal ball, I can seem some positives coming out of this.  This just reeks of being a terrible idea.  Couldn’t the creative folks in Hollywood come with something original (e.g., Breaking Bad or The Wire) or, failing that, maybe go steal some ideas from contemporary writers (e.g., Game of Thrones or Longmire)?  Instead, they’ve decided to drag this decaying carcass of a story line out for another resurrection.  I can’t wait.  The rumors are that they are going to use the series to look at contemporary cultural issues through the lens of science fiction.  They’d try that every now and again in all of the previous series.  Almost all of those particular shows were awful (although there were exceptions).  Maybe this will work out and be great.  Oh, who am I kidding?  This is going to be brutal.

Over the years, I’ve done a little reading on other people’s opinions about Star Trek and if there is one hard rule for writing about this topic, it is that you must at some point lay down your own cred on the subject.  No getting around it, I am a fan of Star Trek.  I’ve seen every episode of TOS (or, The Original Series for you sad people that are not fans) at least six times and I’ve probably seen some of the episodes over a dozen times.  I’m probably up to about twenty times now with The Trouble with Tribbles and The Doomsday Machine.  I’ve followed Star Trek through five different television series and what seems like about a dozen movies (oh, wait, it turns out it’s exactly a dozen).  While this may be a bit obsessive, you just can’t put a value on all the important and enriching things I’ve learned through the years as a result of my fandom.  For instance the average person out there has no idea what a quatloo is or what really happened to Zefram Cochrane.  Such knowledge certainly gives me a leg up on the rest of humanity, but over the years I’ve learned to mask my superiority with false humility.

That being said, I’m not a FAN of Star Trek, which is a little like saying I’m only borderline psychotic.  I’ve never been to a Star Trek convention.  I don’t have any boxed DVD sets of any of the series, nor do I have any plans of purchasing one for as long as I can hold off senility.  I’ve never dressed up in a Star Trek costume or even as a Star Trek alien (My current supervisor at work once dressed up as Lursa the Klingon for a Halloween party in college.  It took two hours to do the makeup). Years before William Shatner told his fans to “Get a life,” I’d pretty much gotten a life.  I was thrilled in 1987 when the Star Trek: The Next Generation came out, but I’ve probably not seen any of those episodes more than three times and that number goes down with each succeeding series.  I missed almost every episode of the last two seasons of Enterprise because it was starting to become, at least for me, boring and repetitive.

Not being completely Obsessive-Compulsive about Star Trek doesn’t mean that it didn’t influence my life or that I don’t have a lot of wonderful, Star Trek-based memories.  TOS was great fun and my first real immersion into science fiction.  In hindsight, the acting wasn’t always great and the special effects weren’t particularly special even for the 1960’s.  But, man, the concept captured the imagination and the writing was often outstanding.  And NBC, the network that was airing the show, hated it.  They spent the entire three years it was on the air trying to find some way to cancel it, finally succeeding in 1969.  In truth, by that point the show had probably run its course as that last season wasn’t very good, but it left millions of fans, mostly teenagers and younger, desperately starving for more.

It would be almost twenty years before television would take a shot at trying to sate that desire and the results were, at first, completely unsatisfactory.  That first season of TNG was varying shades of awful.  It was indicative of how desperate people of my generation were for good science fiction in general and Star Trek in particular that most of us stuck with it through the first season.  Not everybody did.  By the end of the season, the ratings were tanking.  The story I’ve heard is that Gene Roddenberry, the creative force behind the original Star Trek, had decided over the years that TOS had gotten too violent, too interested in the frequent run-ins with the Klingons and Romulans.  The first season of TNG reflected his philosophy, but in the process he also drained a good portion of the conflict from the story.  As any good storyteller will tell you, conflict is crucial to a good story.  You have to have opposing forces or philosophies, usually of relatively equal strength, butting heads to determine which is superior or, at least, whether they can coexist in some meaningful way.  TNG initially had conflict, but it was conflict devoid of any real power or meaning to the viewer and as storytelling, it stunk.  By season two, Roddenberry was sacked and the storytelling got better in a big hurry.  TNG lasted seven seasons.  Seasons two through six were very good.  Season seven was pretty hit-and-miss, indicating that maybe the writers were losing interest.

There followed Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  I confess that I am pretty unique among Star Trek fans in that I really liked DS9.  I thought Avery Brooks made a great captain.  I also thought that the frenemy relationship between Quark and Odo worked really well.  DS9 also ran for seven seasons and was followed by Star Trek: Voyager and that’s when the Star Trek universe finally fell off a cliff.  The premise of having a crew who’s members don’t particularly like each other having to work together to return home after being thrown into an entirely different sector of the universe, seemed like a good one.  Unlike the previous series, the writing was mediocre and characters were all portrayed as insufferable whiners.  In looking up information about the series, I was shocked to see that it too lasted for seven years.  In dog years that’s almost 50, which is what it seemed like at times.

The last series, Star Trek: Enterprise, was set some 100 years before TOS.  It never really worked for me.  Scott Bakula is a good actor and I’m not just saying that because he went to the University of Kansas.  But he was pretty badly miscast as Captain Archer.  Some of the rest of the cast was pretty good, especially Jolene Blalock as T’Pol.  I just couldn’t get attached to it and, as I mentioned, I mostly gave up after the first two season.  It’s my understanding that it improved a lot by season four, although it ruined most of that by featuring the worst series finale in human history at the end of that season.  In 2005, the Star Trek universe finally went dark for the first time in 18 years.

I’m not going into the movies at all.  Like every long-running cinematic series from Bond to Rocky, some of the movies are very good, some just blah, and some are gut-wrenchingly awful.  My opinion about individual movies probably won’t agree with yours.

And now CBS is going to jump into the fray, apparently sometime in 2017.  One can’t form much of an opinion based on press releases, but at this point, it would seem that CBS doesn’t yet have a premise or a setting or a script or a cast or even a good idea of what Stardate they will be using.  Apart from that, this project really seems to be rolling!  Perhaps, this was simply the brainchild of some CBS exec high on marijuana (for medicinal purposes only, I’m sure) who will get fired after the network ratings tank later this year.  I suspect that there’s a pretty good chance it will never happen.

Probably not good enough.