Category Archives: Television

It’s misty and stormy, and other words that are not also stage names for strippers

Remember when you had some huge project due in middle school, and you really didn’t want to do it, so you just kept putting it off? Then, when you finally get to work on it, it’s actually more fun than you thought it would be and you wonder why you didn’t want to work on it in the first place?

Welcome to me, working on The Last Outpost. Yes, the episode is still tedious and the Ferengi are so fucking lame if they were horses we’d have to put them down, but once I decided to just relax and not worry about making the damn thing something it’s incapable of being, I found some amusing bits.

BEHOLD:

Picard asks Troi is she’s sensing anything from the Ferengi ship. That’s good, since it’s kind of her whole job and everything. She says she’s sensing nothing, so maybe they can block their thoughts and emotions. That’s bad.

Data says that we don’t know that much about the Ferengi, which is bad, but we do know a few things about them that seem to be reliable, which is good. Data says the Frogurt is also cursed.

Riker tells Data to just get on with it already, so Data says Ferengi are like Yankee traders from 18th century America. This indicates that, in the 24th century, the traditional practice of using 400 year-old comparisons is still in vogue, like when you’re stuck in traffic on the freeway, and say, “Man, this is just like Vasco de Gama trying to go around the Cape of Good Hope!”

And…

Tasha, Worf, Geordi, Data, and Riker all head to the transporter room, where the writers try to make us believe they’ll be in real danger on the planet, but we know it’s pretty safe when they beam down, unaccompanied by even a single Red Shirt.

The planet looks really cool, and it’s one of the first times we can see the difference in budgets and technologies available to the original series and the Next Generation. It’s misty and stormy, and other words that are not also stage names for strippers. We discover that energy in the atmosphere has messed up the transporter’s coordinates, and Riker’s been beamed down alone. He quickly finds Data, who again uses the word “intriguing” to describe things. He keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.

Riker and Data scout around, and find Geordi suspended upside down when – oh! here come the Ferengi! Holy shit! The evil Ferengi! They’re finally here, in person! We can see more than just their moderately scary faces, and they are…uh…short. And bouncy. And they wave their hands over their heads a lot. And they don’t like loud noises. And they carry whips…and wear Ugg boots. Um. Wow. How…intriguing.

Oh, and one more bit, which – I’m not going to lie to you, Marge – was the part I had the most fun writing, for reasons which will reveal themselves momentarily:

Back on the Enterprise, we discover that, like the script, things have gone from bad to worse. The lights are out, the ship’s heating is nearly gone, and Picard has had the remaining power rerouted to the family decks, where he asks Doctor Crusher how Wesley is doing.

Now, listen, fan fiction writers: It’s not because Picard is actually Wesley’s father, as many of you will argue on Usenet over the coming seven years; it’s because Picard knows that Wesley could totally figure a way out of this, and he’s right. Off the top of my head, I can suggest that Wesley would generate some sort of Enterprise-enveloping control field with one of his science projects, using an electro plasma system energy converter, to reverse the polarity of the Navigational Deflector to emit an inverse tachyon pulse through a subspace beacon, while rerouting the power from the impulse engines through the Okuda conduits to the forward sensor array’s antimatter pod, using the auxiliary fusion generator to turn the power back on and save the day.

Sadly, we learn that Dr. Crusher left Wesley in their quarters to stare death in the face alone, without even the benefit of a sedative. Picard reassures her that leaving Wesley alone and fully conscious was great parenting, because he has the right to “meet death awake.” Legions of Trekkies agree, then curse Picard for getting their hopes up.

It truly is one of the most tedious episodes of the first season, but I realized while working on the rewrite that I’d somehow managed to spread some funny bits fairly evenly throughout the synopsis, so even though it’s not slap-your-knee funny, it’s not boring, which was my primary concern.

I don’t include many bits that aren’t in the synopsis, so here’s part The Bottom Line:

TNG’s struggle to find its way continues with this episode. Obviously, it fails spectacularly with its introduction of the Ferengi, who were intended to replace the Klingons as a terrifying and worthy adversary to the Federation, but were a total joke until Armin Shimmerman brought Quark to life on DS9, and repaired much – but not all – of the damage.

However, If you take away how outrageously lame the Ferengi are, this episode has some cool elements to it. The planet looks great, and the effects that lead to the revealing of the Portal, its point of view about itself, and its interaction with Riker are straight out of classic Star Trek. In fact, the entire story of the titular last outpost would have been a very strong one, had the Ferengi not been so weak and laughable. Imagine, for example, the relationship between Kirk and the Romulan Commander in Balance of Terror, and put them into this situation, where they are forced to cooperate.

See? It’s not all jokes and snark. I manage to sneak some semi- thoughtful stuff in there between the facepalms.

When I send this to Andrew, I’m done with the bulk of the work on this book. All that’s left is transcribing some interviews I did with friends from the show so I can include a few of their thoughts (I’m not saying who I talked to, nyahh nyahh) and then I have to put everything together in one big tile and read it all, looking for jokes or phrases that I repeated and areas in the behind the scenes stuff where I can add additional material.

Yep, this is dangerously close to being finished.

“if you treat her right, she’ll always bring you home.”

On Twitter yesterday, I said, "And now, a useless fact, brought to you by 'I need a break from rewriting Encounter At Farpoint': I loved Mike Tyson's Punchout on NES."

I was flooded with replies that were variations of "WTF? Rewriting Encounter at Farpoint? Why?" I can see how, lacking context, it would appear that I'm actually rewriting the script, instead of the entry that's going into Memories of the Future.

Whoops. My bad. My efforts to clarify my error lead only to further confusion, so I just stopped talking about it, confident that the Internet would quickly turn its attention to something else. I was not disappointed.

Anyway, as if being sick for five days didn't suck up enough of my time, work on Memories of the Future has brought everything else in my creative life to a complete halt. I'm not complaining, because it's been a lot of fun, but holy shit The Last Outpost and Encounter at Farpoint are just killing me. It turns out that there are "so bad they're good" episodes in season one (Justice and Naked Now, for example) that are a lot of fun to write about, but The Last Outpost is so bad it's just … bad. It's an incredible challenge to find humor in it, and I have a new appreciation for what the crew at MST3K did for so many years with some truly horrible films.

Encounter at Farpoint, which I've been working on exclusively for a little over a week now, isn't the best, but it's certainly not the worst. However, it has given me a new appreciation for the challenges inherent to writing a pilot. A pilot's main purpose is to set up the series, and introduce the characters and the world to the audience. There's a lot at stake, because the pilot also has to convince the audience that the show (or in my case, my book) is going to be worth their time.

It's kind of poetic justice that the entry that starts my book, which is one of the most important for me to get just right, is based on an episode that I mock pretty mercilessly for struggling so hard to get it just right. Just like with a pilot, the stakes are really high: It's really important to me that the entry for Farpoint lets the reader know right away that this book is going to be a mixture of memories and insights, wrapped up in a tasty candy shell of snarky humor … and it's not nearly as easy to do that with Farpoint as it is with Hide and Q. There's a ton of pressure to knock this one into the seats, and it makes silencing the ever-present internal voices of dissent more difficult than it usually is. I got some good advice from a good friend today, though, that I'm attempting to embrace. He said that when you're doing creative things, it's really easy to over think it and talk yourself out of doing things, because nothing is as safe as not taking the creative risk at all. He said that we creative people have to push past that, and take the chances over and over again, because even if things don't work out the way we hope, we'll learn something from the process. I guess it's sort of like Gretzky saying that you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

Well, here's some of the stuff I've been working on lately. It's from Farpoint part one, right after the Enterprise runs into Q's giant computer graphics net thing:

Well, now the Enterprise has a problem: fight, or run away? Lieutenant Commander Bedemere wants to build a large wooden rabbit, but Picard decides that the best way to protect his crew is to do a little of both. He’ll take the ship to maximum warp speed, drive it away from the mysterious net, and separate the saucer section from the stardrive section, because this isn’t your mommy’s Enterprise, bitches. This spaceship comes apart, just like that TIE fighter you got for Christmas in 1979.

All the families head up into the saucer section, which will be commanded by Lt. Worf. (Did we mention that there are families aboard the Enterprise D? Yeah, turns out that there are, because Starfleet did this study and realized that space herpes – also known as Kirk’s Syndrome – spreads considerably slower if its officers have their spouses and children on board their ship. Also, who wouldn't want to drag their entire family with them out into the potentially dangerous and totally unexplored mass of the galaxy? I know, right?!) Meanwhile Picard takes Tasha, Data, and Troi with him into the stardrive section, where he assumes control of the battle bridge, and makes plans for a sexy party, complete with a precious spandex sailor suit.

The mysterious net turns into a mysterious shiny ball that chases the Enterpise at mysteriously fast speeds. After a mysterious minute, Picard orders the emergency saucer separation, a process which, though untested at warp speed and therefore theoretically deadly and dangerous, is made kind of silly by our knowledge as the audience that it's obviously going to work. It doesn’t reach Star Trek: The Motion Picture levels of excess, but it sure comes close, especially when the saucer section pulls away, and the stardrive section makes an actual burning-rubber-hot-rod-racing sound as it turns past the camera and heads back to face off against Q.

Once they get there, Picard surrenders (hey, he isFrench!) and Q transports the crew to a late-21st-century courtroom, where the cast of Time Bandits prepares to watch them stand trial for "the multiple and grievous savageries of the species."

Well, this should be interesting . . . except it really isn't. It's page after page of Q and Picard arguing about mankind. Q says we’re a bunch of assholes, and Picard says that we’re actually pretty awesome once you get to know us. It's not as preachy as some future episodes will be, but it could get to its point much more quickly than it does, and it delays what the audience really wants: getting into far-out situations involving robots and magic powers while solving real life problems. Eventually, even Q gets bored with the scene, and sends them all back to the battle bridge after declaring that the fate of humanity rests on how Picard handles his encounter at Farpoint. Oh? Is that all? Listen, Q, I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but in Starfleet, we're pretty awesome once you get to know us. We save the universe and fuck the green alien chick twice before breakfast, every day. We’ve got this one, dude.

I'm not entirely satisfied, but it's almost there. I wrote the Farpoint posts for TV Squad after I'd already done like 8 or 9 other entries, and there was a real sense of fatigue in them when I grabbed the originals. I took all of the "omg this is so lame just get on with it" stuff out, because that isn't the tone I want for the whole book, and I didn't want someone who starts reading it to think that this is going to be Wil Slags Star Trek for 50,000 words, because it's not that at all. I still need to find more funny in these two specific episodes, but I think I may just have to accept that Farpoint and The Last Outpost aren't going to be as entertaining as some of the other entries in the book. I have to remember not to let perfect be the enemy of good.

talk about your dream of horses

I’m so close to letting Memories of the Future Volume One leave the nest, I’m already starting to miss the taste of partially-digested bugs in my throat.

So far, I’ve shared parts that are from the recaps, but the other half of each entry is more analysis and reflection on each episode, and that’s what I think makes this book special. Anyone can tell jokes about the show, but there are only nine of us in the world who can talk about what it was like to be regular cast members. This is from Datalore, which I loved when I was a kid, but is just riddled with plot holes I couldn’t see twenty years ago:

The pitch was awesome: “We find Data’s evil twin brother, who he never knew he had, and hilarity ensues.” Sure, there’s nothing original about the evil twin story, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be told again in an interesting way, especially with a cool character like Data, played by a great character actor like Brent Spiner, supported by a brilliant dramatic actor like Patrick Stewart. How could they screw up this story this badly?

I think it comes down to lazy writing that has things happen because they’re supposed to happen, rather than having them happen organically. The characters are credulous when they should be skeptical, the audience isn’t surprised by anything after the second act, and there are story problems that should have never gotten past the first draft.

Personally, I hated the way they handled Wesley in this episode. He’s already on his way to becoming a hated character, and the writers cranked it up to Warp 11. It was stupid of them to have Picard give him an adult responsibility and then dismissively treat him like a child when he carried it out. It undermines both of the characters—how is the audience supposed to take either of them seriously? Maybe the idea was that Wesley would prove Picard wrong, with a big payoff at the end when Picard apologies or something and their relationship grows as a result. But all we get is one line in the cargo bay when Picard says, “Can you return to duty?” Really? That’s it? How about, “Hey, can you kiss my ass, Captain? How does that work for you? I was right about everything, bitch!”

Erm, sorry.

It’s not all bad, of course. The art direction in this episode is some of the best we’ve seen so far. When Dr. Crusher works with Argyle to put Lore together, it’s one of the first times we got to see some really awesome technology on the Enterprise. Sure, we’d seen some spiffy visual effects in other episodes, but this was the first time we got to see just how advanced the Enterprise-D was.

I went to the Nebula Awards dinner on Saturday night, where I got to present the award for best script.

I wanted some kind of introduction, so a few minutes before I walked up to the podium, I came up with this:

“Everyone I know who is successful reads books. Everyone I know who is successful and interesting reads science fiction and fantasy. As a parent, you can imagine how important it is to me that my kids read science fiction and fantasy, so I’ve used television and movies as a gateway drug.

“The nominees for Best Script are…”

I’m not going to lie: I felt pretty good about that, especially considering that I came up with it pretty much on the fly.

The whole evening was really cool. Because it wasn’t awesome enough to be in the same room as Larry Niven, Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman, and other authors who I felt unworthy to even look at, much less speak to, Anne and I got to sit with David Gerrold.

Fun fact: David wrote and sold The Trouble with Tribbles when he was 19. Anne asked him how he had the courage to do that, and David told her, “Because nobody told me I couldn’t.” That’s so awesome, and everyone who is creative should commit that to memory.

We were talking about all kinds of writerly stuff, and I mentioned to David that I was working on this book. As I started to describe it to him, I could see that he wasn’t into it, but was too polite to tell me why.

After a minute, he said, “You have to be careful with your tell-all book, because –”

“Ah, that’s why he wasn’t into it.” I thought.

“It’s not a tell-all book. I hate those things,” I said. “It’s more like you’re flipping through your high school yearbook with your friends.”

I called on all my improv skills and held an imaginary book in my hands.

“It’s like, ‘Hey! I remember this, and I remember that, and did you know that this funny thing happened there, and … oh god … I can’t believe I thought that was cool…'”

His face lit up. “That sounds like a book I’d like to read.”

I’ve talked to a few of my friends from the show about their memories from season one, and they’ve shared amusing and insightful memories with me that I think readers are going to really enjoy. It may push the release back a little bit, but I’m going to try to talk with David, too, because he was there from the very beginning. Did you know that he suggested me for the role of Wesley? If he hadn’t done that, I don’t know that I’d have ever worn a pumpkin-colored sweater.

Despite that, though, I’m extremely grateful to David for convincing Bob Justman and Gene Roddenberry to take a chance on me.

it’s all inside the wrist. it’s all inside the way you time it.

Some more Memories of the Future edits, for your (and my) amusement.

Here’s the original:

After a bit of exploring, they find themselves in the lab of Data’s creator, Dr. Noonian Soong. Riker, Geordi, and Tasha all join forces to be sort of an Exposition Voltron, informing the audience that Noonian Soong was the Earth’s foremost neuroscientist, until he tried to build Asimov’s positronic brain and failed. Everyone thought he did the walk of shame off the planet, but it turns out he just moved to Omicron Theta to continue his work until he got it right. (Coincidentally, on Omicron Gamma, there’s a group of former Microsoft employees still working on an MP3 player).

And here’s the rewrite, which I must tell you, made me giggle more than it probably should have:

They make their way to the exact spot where Data was discovered: it’s sort of a hollowed out area beneath a bunch of rocks, where Data tells them he was found wearing nothing more than a layer of dust. Before anyone can make a saucy reference about “The Naked Now” to Tasha, Geordi’s VISOR reveals that the rocks aren’t naturally hollow, and the “wall” opens up, revealing a twisty maze of passages, all alike.

After a bit of exploring, they find themselves in the lab of Data’s creator, Dr. Noonian Soong. Riker, Geordi, and Tasha all join forces to be sort of an Exposition Voltron:

Riker: Noonian Soong was Earth’s foremost neuroscientist, until he tried to build Asimov’s positronic brain…

Tasha: Everyone thought he did the walk of shame off the planet, but it turns out he just moved to Omicron Theta to continue his work until he got it right.

Geordi: And I’ll form the head!

And this is essentially unchanged from the original, but it still makes me happy:

Data flees to Sickbay where he meets up with Dr. Crusher and shows her his on/off switch—or, as he describes it, “an android alarm clock.”

Then he smirks, and asks hopefully, “Is that amusing?”

Dr. Crusher slowly shakes her head “no.” It’s the first genuinely laugh-out-loud moment of the episode, and the last time we’ll be laughing with “Datalore” instead of at it.

After a brief encounter with soon-to-be-ex-Chief Engineer Argyle, Dr. Crusher promises Data that she’ll keep the existence of his mysterious off switch to herself. Data asks her if she would want people to know about her off switch, if she had one. She laughs, and nervously glances at a bottle of Jägermeister in her office.

I got my first glimpse of the cover comps earlier this week. I think it’s going to be awesome.

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