Star Trek birthday musings

Getting ready for Star Trek's 50th birthday.  And I'm having a busy week, so more video.  These are excerpts from the History channel's 50 Years Of Star Trek; Nimoy clips.

The Prime Directive

Today I found a great video dealing with the complicated nature of the Prime Directive.  I was going to research and find other things, but this video seems to cover all the necessary ground.  It's great food for the Star Trek fans' thought.

Star Trek TNG Justice

Another bad episode.  It's hard to pick a starting point, so I'll just go with the obvious.

Star Trek TOS The Apple

Star Trek TNG Justice

Yes, another rehash of TOS.  Encountering a child-like race controlled by a god that is in fact some sort of machine or in this case a space station.  Right down to everyone having platinum blond hair and strapping, tanned bodies.

The instruments are also similar to a TOS episode, The Way To Eden,

but maybe not as much.

So, it's a free love, orgy planet.  Just what everyone wanted in the 60's when they made The Apple.  More of that teenage obsession with sex.  I like sex too; a lot even.  Maybe its just after growing up that these representations seems embarrassingly childish.  (And impractical... what do these people do all day?) Roddenberry wanted less clothes as well.  The designers couldn't make the clothes any skimpier without them falling off.  That's a fact I read when researching it.  But it all seems to fall in line with the ideas of utopia that they envisioned.

The writing followed suite by delving into the sexual practices of alien races like Klingons.  And though it was useful to point out that Klingon sex was more violent than regular sex, it was dialogue that was intended simply as humorous at the time.  It was delivered in a low-brow, immature fashion like the rest from this season.  Titillating for teenagers and perverts.  However, I need to point out two things about Worf in this episode.  First is a gaff that they didn't often make on this show and that was Worf asking where Rome was.  Later it is revealed that he was raised on Earth, but it goes to show you that they were still ignoring this character.  Just the muscle; not overly bright.  It resmebles racist pigeonholing of early cinema.  He's the token Klingon of the group.  He claims to require a Klingon woman for love which is distinguished from just plain sex, indicating that he "keeps to his own kind" as well.  I'm sure they didn't consciously intend this, but liberal racism is well documented, so it's always in the back of  liberal minds even though genuine racism is pretty much non existent now, as opposed to the racism liberals generate to divide the country.  At least they forgot that thing about needing a Klingon woman for love as well, since as you'll notice, Worf was never involved with a (100%) Klingon woman.
 And keeping with the theme of childishness, Wesley is front and center with a kindergartner's view on lying, which adds to the hatred of the character that I expanded on last week.  But therein is the difference between the two episodes.  In The Apple the Enterprise was just caught in a tractor beam, in this one the "god" machine has a more interactive role with the inhabitants, which leads to the heart of the storyline.

The episode is primarily an examination of the "Prime Directive" as are a lot of Star Trek episodes.  The Prime Directive is a multifaceted tool used in the show.  Sometimes the debate makes for good philosophical and political discussion. But, this episode was making a secondary point about religions and religious people being naive and underdeveloped races.  Like most first season episodes, it's touched on again later in a less simplistic form, but it's always portrayed as noble if the interference on the part of the Federation takes the form of them explaining to religious people that God isn't real.

PICARD: ... Why are they so certain it's a god?
DATA: Any sufficiently advanced life form would appear to others to be that, sir.

It's an early assault on religion in general and Christianity in particular... just take the obvious into account... Edo-Eden.  Even The Apple-Forbidden Fruit.
I never understand the need to attack Christianity and in this episode it doesn't even make sense.  The speech Picard makes at the end about laws not being absolute are actually an idea based in the Bible, but athiests don't want to believe that because they just assume that the Bible teaches that everyone is executed and/or going to Hell if they're not perfect and put even one toe out of line, as Wesley does in this episode.  It's just getting so old and tired.  And this isn't even the worst episode for this theme.
All of this aside, it's kind of uneven and confusing even if you're not pondering the religious implications.  I can't help but wonder what they were even doing on this planet.  They must have knowledge of space travel because they accept them as visitors to their world and yet, the woman seems surprised at being on a spaceship and everyone and everything in it to reiterate that she's part of a backwards culture that needs a God.  So, it's even a shaky episode for discussions over the Prime Directive as well. 
The only good thing I can articulate is at least the belief that God isn't real and if He is, He's just a machine or alien is consistent and eventually they relented from the these god-machines/aliens as always being portrayed as evil or irrational and this led to the wormhole aliens of DS9, where they actually took time to explore spirituality instead of condemning it outright.

Suck episode.  I'm adding the extra half star because it was a little better, at least, than The Naked Now.  At least they were trying to be serious in this one.

Star Trek TNG The Lonely Among Us

Ending the week with another review.  Partly because I grow weary of the episodes from the first season and I'm starting to get anxious to be rid of them and partly because I've not seen this one very often.
I'm not like other reviewers or fans in this sense.  I don't have any of them on DVD/Blu-Ray because I'm not married to a Trek fan and I don't see the sense in hoarding something away that I'm not going to watch because I have nobody to watch with.  (I watch T.V. and movies socially, not alone.)  I also don't do the Netflix thing which probably puts me in the minority now, but I'm sure I don't give a damn. I'm different and proud of it!

This episode was a little busy.  There were too many things going on.  First you had the two groups of aliens applying to be in the Federation.  A group of furry people and a reptilian race...(is this what they originally had in mind for Code of Honor?)

By the way, Marc Alaimo was the main furry guy.  I did not know that.  He, of course, was in many episodes of TNG and settled on DS9 as the inimitable Gul Dukat.  I really love this guy.
Unfortunately it's not an idea they took seriously.  In a later season they revisit this idea and fix it.  That happens quite a bit in TNG and I'll be referring back to this first season quite often when the improved stories start unfolding. It's just another example of the immature and cartoonish writing style of the first season.  It was enjoyable to watch the first time, but after the seasons went by and the they started dealing with the situations in a more adult fashion, it's just sad to look back on an episode like this.

 And lets not forget the smug preaching that goes on in these first seasons.  I want to get into the Star Trek notion of the kind of Utopia they envisioned that the future would hold, but not in this episode.  There's one coming up in either this or the next season that I can draw better examples from but I want to complain about this particular aspect since it's here... this notion that meat eating is evil and those who partake are barbarians.  I don't mind people who are vegetarians or vegans.  Whatever you do for your health and happiness is fine, but the omnivorous are repeatedly abused by these types to the point where it's become a cause.  And this scene is not merely speaking out against hunting, which although I approve of hunting I can almost see the point, but this scene is also trashing the notion of farming; keeping livestock.  Look I can see the point of health advocates who are touting the health benefits of a non-meat lifestyle, but the brow-beating that average people who eat just whatever tastes good in moderation is even more out of hand now than it was back then.  And I don't understand the ignorant denial of the fact that humans are part of the ecosystem and natural food chain.

Moving on, in addition to the federation applicants which were a comic subplot, we have the mysterious cloud with an entity that wants to take over people.  I'm sure they had the best of intentions with this part of the story, but, as with other ideas, it was a bit more than they were prepared to handle at the time inasmuch as the technical writing and explaining of how it's all supposed to work.

I know that once Picard beamed himself into space they explained it as him becoming energy, but it seemed a little thin, and I couldn't help wondering how he didn't die in the vacuum of space.  I guess he was one with the mysterious cloud.  It probably shouldn't have gotten that far to begin with.  He all but admits that he's possessed to Crusher and she still doesn't relieve him of duty until it's too late.  That's another small aspect corrected in later episodes.

But we do get to see Patrick Stewart behaving differently... stretching his acting muscles and showing that the Picard character is capable of a wider range of emotion if necessary and I really did love that part.

Then there's this guy... Singh.  I actually liked him.  If they'd not chosen Geordi to be the chief engineer I'd have like to have seen this guy again.  But he was the first red-shirt type casualty of the show. It didn't make sense in the flow of the show.  All other possessed characters were allowed to live and no reason is given for killing this guy except... well... the red-shirt syndrome.

This part with the console is a little silly as well.  Another example of the show growing beyond this sort of thing as the years progress and it's just hard to look at now.

However, this episode had a lot of important firsts.

A prediction of real life technology... the PADD.  It's just so cool that we now have computer tablets that are what they envisioned here.

First use of the dress uniforms which are actually believable after all that man-skirt nonsense.  And this is Tasha's only time in a dress uniform.

Most importantly this is Data's first brush with Holmes.  It's obvious they didn't know how popular this would become.

I rate this episode 2 1/2 of 5 stars.  It's better than two stars because of all the great firsts and Patrick Stewart's acting, but it's still a very frustrating episode.

Fan Fiction

I tend to bitch a lot about fan fiction.  It's not the fan fiction that bothers me, it's when they turn fan fiction into a rebooted franchise like the did with the new Star Trek movies.  The reason is that when people take the fan fic try to make it part of the original work to legitimize it, it waters down the original material, in my opinion.  Or it seems disrespectful. The expanded universes can damage a franchise like Star Wars as evidenced in the 7th movie.  I've blogged on both in the past, so I won't go on about it.

But I'm not angry at fan fiction itself.  A lot of it is very good.  And I was thinking of times when it is even necessary with the episode of TNG that I talked about this week.  I was thinking of the Traveler and how little was written about him though it's well documented.  And I was thinking about Wesley and how things could have been done better.  That is the basis for a lot of fan fiction - someone thinking they could do it better. (Which is why it belongs on its own plain of existence and not within the canons of the various fandoms, because not everyone has the same idea of "better.")  So I poked around a little to see if anything specific was written for Wesley, but didn't make a thorough investigation.  After all, I know Wesley could've been written better, but I can't personally think up better twists to his story.  Others have apparently and I'm glad of it.

I've mentioned in passing before that other movies have been made of older shows that are fan fiction based and that I was okay with them because they were existing separately from the original franchises.  Dark Shadows is an example.  I'd read some of the fan fiction that went along with Dark Shadows and I saw bits of it in that movie.  A lot of people always wanted to see Angelique and Barnabas together, even if it was only a one time thing.  I also saw the observations my husband and I would make coming to life as if someone else was thinking what we were thinking and it was so funny.  (Couldn't Barnabas just come and take over the house since it's rightfully his?  And he does just that.)  They were cruel to Roger and Julia, but it was obvious that whoever wrote it just wasn't a fan of the characters, so it was also just good fun.  What I loved most about it, and where I saw the respect that I've mentioned before, is in the costume design.  They went above and beyond to recreate the awful clothing from the series.  They didn't try to update or streamline any of it (except Michelle Pfeiffer's costumes.) It showed that there was love, real love, for what was.  That the people that made it probably sat and laughed at the old series in the same way I did.  Laughed because they loved seeing the awful fashions and campy effects.

I ended up liking Maleficent very much.  It was a twist on the old Sleeping Beauty story.  It was such a hard twist that it never could've been used as an update or passed off as a legitimate part of the original story. It was just creative writing by someone who noticed that the villain had no background and appeared to me mad for not being invited to a party.  The nods to the original Sleeping Beauty were wonderful, with the scene where Aurora receives blessings from the three fairies playing out almost word for word, until it was necessary to tweak it for the sake of the story in the movie.  They presented her the lopsided cake for her birthday that was a much beloved part of the animated film.  Such a brilliant touch!  It was nicely done.

I've even dabbled in "fan fiction" myself if that can be applied to cartoon shows.  I watched Heathcliff a little growing up.  I didn't like Heathcliff but I was intrigued by the other cats that got a side story from time to time.  I think they were called the Catillac Cats... Rif Raf, Mungo, Hector, Wordsworth, and Cleo.

I made a soap opera world where Rif Raf and Cleo are divorced with twin sixteen year old daughters.  R.R. is a mobster with Mungo as his right hand man and Cleo is a P.I. with Hector as a partner and boyfriend.  Wordswoth is a doctor and my storylines were mostly plagiarized from movies and science fiction that I'd seen.  I used to draw it as a kid.  I've taken it and transferred it to story form just as an exercise in creative writing, never to be seen by anyone since, as I said, the stories aren't terribly original.  I find it strange that this particular cartoon is what fueled my desire to invent an alternate universe when I'm a fan of things like Star Trek and Star Wars, but it just goes to show that fiction is a malleable outlet for a creative mind and fan fiction can be useful, healthy and fun in the appropriate venues.

Anyway, that's just my thoughts for today.

Mid week Musics

Busy today so I'm just posting some Star Trek music

First, The Inner Light.  It's just so cool that they composed an entire suite around it.

Next, this is cool.  This is four of the series themes in an orchestral composition, plus some from Wrath of Khan. 

This is the openings of all five series.  It's not all versions, though it does have 2 of TOS's.  There was another where the credits were blue, but I don't mind.  I also would've picked the version of DS9 from the first couple seasons because it wasn't as rushed and the trumpet was more pure, but it's still nice to have them all in one video.

And the music from Wrath of Khan.  I really did like this score.

The Shame of Wesley Crusher

Yesterday, I declared that I'm a "Wesley-hater" but that I wanted to clarify this statement.  

My first reaction was that he was a bad actor and the character sucked.  I held to that conclusion for a long time until I grew up a little and my own ability to critically think developed and now I realize that this isn't the case.  Wil Wheaton was not the problem.  He played the part exactly as and the only way anyone could've ever played that part.  It wasn't even the character of Wesley Crusher that was the main problem.  In fact, I've come to be much more forgiving of "Wesley episodes" and I even like most of them too.  I blame the writers and directors entirely now.  

Firstly, I think they wanted a kid on the Enterprise to show a different aspect of family in this version of Star Trek.  It's an avenue they couldn't really explore in TOS even though it was indicated that families were aboard.  However, as I was pointing out yesterday, their eyes appeared to be bigger than their stomachs when it came to a lot of ideas.  They wanted a kid so they got a kid and then they just didn't know what to do with him.  I think they wrote him to behave in a younger manner than he was.  The last time I felt like I was seeing this was in the movie The Labyrinth.  The Sarah character was much more innocent and naive than the age of the actress they chose.  The way her lines where whined with exaggerated expressions and motions put me in the mind of a child as opposed to a teenager and gave me the first impression that the puppets were better actors than she was.  The story was a sort of fairy tale and should've utilized a younger character like fairy tales of old did.  But obviously people would've been freaked out by Jareth wanting to seduce a girl that was more like 12 than someone who at least looked 18.   Anyway, that's the first wrong turn I noticed with Wesley.  He was 14 or 15 when the show started.  And I understand that they wanted him to be a "good boy" and a proper role model but they went too far by giving him no viable teenage flaws.  He always knew what the right thing to do was and he always did it with little or no prodding.  He had no bad attitude or mischievous tendencies whatsoever.  He was at genius level intelligence and even though his outlook was innocent like Sarah from Labyrinth, he was also somehow mature for his age and never conflicted with the other characters.  I've read testimony from people my age who said he was definitely an inspiration to study and go into scientific fields and that's truly and awesome thing.  But I'm kind of thinking there were more average teenagers out there like me who were math-stupid, had serious self-esteem issues, and went through the phase where we hated our parents and Wesley was someone that I know I just couldn't personally relate to.  (I'm 3 years younger than him, btw, for a reference point.)  

The thing is, this didn't really start until after the episode, "Where No One Has Gone Before."  He seemed pretty average in the pilot, though he's a smarty pants who gets run off by the captain.  That was a sensible thing to do with him.  In The Naked Now, he was behaving just as expected of an intoxicated, immature teenager, taking into account that he was a brainiac as well.  Okay, no problem there.  And then we have the episode with the Traveler.  The enigmatic alien who has special powers that can't be explained and sees something special in Wesley.  

The main quote I refer to is: 

And such musical genius as I saw in one of your ship's libraries, one called Mozart, who as a small child wrote astonishing symphonies, a genius who made music not only to be heard, but seen and felt beyond the understanding, the ability of others? Wesley is such a person, not with music, but with the equally lovely intricacies of time, energy, propulsion, and the instruments of this vessel, which allow all that to be played.

This set Wesley up to be a unique type of character.  What a build-up.  He's going to be something amazing.  He's going to be a "chosen one."  He's going to be... going to be... ... ... 

A straight "A" student?  (Sigh.) He'll be highly intelligent, but we can't really send his character away to the Academy too soon, so we have to find ways to keep him on the ship and make him the little super hero. He became a cliche for coming to the rescue when the grown-ups were botching it.  A sci-fi Hardy Boy.  I don't think this is what the Traveler had in mind.  His character shouldn't have just been growing throughout the run of the series - he should've been evolving.  But the writers weren't thinking like that yet.  That sort of transformative story went to Sisko in DS9.  Which was cool too, don't get me wrong.  But Wesley got hung out to dry just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He was nearly a kind of a throw-away character.  

I also have to mention that I hated his different youth uniforms.  There's no excuse for this, they just sucked.

What's really aggravating to me is that there was a lot of good material all around and I don't think anyone noticed it until closer to the end.  But they were so busy moving the bigger stories along to help DS9 gain traction and wrapping up the main characters (and I imagine Wheaton probably had other commitments because he wasn't in it steadily anymore) that Wesley was almost forgotten about.

Consider that all of the characters were kind of paired off.  Data and Geordi.  Beverly and Deanna.  Picard and Riker.  These characters worked off of each other, filling gaps in one another.  I wonder if anyone but me noticed that some of the best Wesley material was when he was with Picard?  

Picard could draw things out of Wesley that made him at least more interesting and at most could have really developed that character in earnest. 

But it was such a late start.  The show was in its twilight and they didn't have time to start another pair-off like that.

Also, someone had a brainwave and brought the Traveler back.  

He and Wesley saved his mother.  Wesley did the phasing thing too.  So, someone was thinking that more could be done with Wesley.  But, again, it was too little too late.

Wesley at Tactical in an alternate timeline.  Just another one of so many wasted opportunities to utilize him differently

.

Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, from Wesley: the model child and student comes Wesley with a huge chip on his shoulder for no apparent reason in his final episode.  

They wrote him out with the Traveler, which was the right thing to do, but it was so shallow and done with such sloppy haste in one episode.  One bad episode, as well.  The whole thing was an eye-roller from beginning to end.

  

 

And only at the end do they start touch upon the themes for his evolvement that they should've been starting to delve into back in season three at least.  They could've taken at least two episodes to build up an audience connection with both Wesley and the Traveler again.  To maybe attempt to do a little transformative work with him.  They wrote a better and more meaningful ending for Ensign Ro, for crying out loud!  Who I loved, don't misunderstand, but what about Wesley?  He was there from the beginning.  Wheaton put in a lot of time and his youth and his career since it's hard to find work after Star Trek unless you're a captain.  And all the Wesley character gets in the end is the standing of - he was either admired or hated with no middle ground.  And the misdirected hate of Wesley and Wil comes from the character being mishandled from the beginning.  It frustrates me.  He was a sacrifice to the process of honing and perfecting the story-telling abilities of the writers.  So maybe I both hate and love Wesley Crusher.  Or at least I pity him.  And I completely understand Wheaton's frustration with the Wesley haters.  And have a lot of respect for him.