Category: Television

I watched a couple episodes of the original Star Trek with Nolan last night, including Court Martial.

He’s not a big Star Trek fan. He prefers Battlestar Galactica — he calls it "gangster," which is teenager for "good" — and Firefly, but he watched it with me anyway.

Though he’s thankfully grown up in a world where it’s not out of the
ordinary for a woman to be a prosecutor, or a non-white man to be a
judge, I explained to him that it was a very big deal in 1967, and that allowed him appreciate the show on a new level.

Something we both noticed, though, that made us laugh and reaffirmed Nolan’s opinion that the original Star Trek "just looks kind of silly": according to Court Martial, the three buttons a captain always needs to have easily accessible when he’s sitting in command are: Yellow Alert, Red Alert, and Eject Pod.

We saw some other things that made us laugh and cringe, but people who fall over white barriers and crush plants shouldn’t cast stones at white paper labels on the captain’s chair, so that’s all I’m going to say about that.

After he went to sleep, I watched Arena. Though it was one of my favorites when I was a kid, I haven’t watched the entire episode for such a long time — I think it must be at least 15 years — that I’d completely forgotten about the entire first half of the episode, when they’re getting shelled by the Gorn at Cestus III, which was surprisingly violent and exciting. All I remembered was Kirk running around Vasquez Rocks while he fought the scary guy in the rubber suit, which was awesome and awesomer.

I’d also forgotten about Spock’s suggestion that maybe the Gorn were protecting themselves when they attacked the human outpost on Cestus III, and Kirk’s initial refusal to consider it. It was pretty brave to put the idea out that someone you automatically assume has evil intentions may have a very good reason — from their perspective — to think the same thing about you. A big part of American mythology is that we’re always the Good Guys who are incapable of doing anything evil or wrong, and I thought it was daring to suggest — on network television in 1967, no less — that maybe it’s not that simple.

Even though Star Trek frequently looks silly and cheesy, I think it says a lot about the writing and the stories that audiences have not just overlooked that, but embraced it, for the last 40 years. I’ve seen movies that spent more on special effects for one shot than Star Trek
spent in an entire season’s worth, but I didn’t care about the
characters, and the story didn’t stay with me for one minute after it
was over. We know it’s just a guy in a silly rubber suit, but when Kirk empathizes with him and doesn’t kill him, it’s still a powerful moment, and the message it sends about compassion and empathy is a powerful one that’s just as relevant now as it was then.

Happy Monday! (You’re twisting my melon, man . . .)

My Datalore review is at TV Squad:

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).

As I mentioned on Friday, this episode was a massive disappointment to me, because I had such fond memories of it as a child. I said, "I liked this episode a lot when it first aired, but watching it now,
all I can see are gigantic plot holes and inconsistencies that never
should have made it past the first draft." Well, I re-read the original script over the weekend, and it doesn’t suck nearly as much as the final episode does, and I honestly can’t figure out how they screwed it up so badly.

Well, actually, I have an idea: we shot several episodes in the first two years where the producers and writers were rewriting the script while we filmed it, and on some of those episodes we’d get new pages in the morning for a scene we were filming that afternoon, and then we’d get pages to replace those pages right after lunch. It’s incredibly hard to keep any sense of continuity when we don’t know what’s going to happen before and after the scene we’re working on, and it’s equally difficult to turn in nuanced and well-prepared performances when we’ve only had a few hours with the material (that we haven’t had much time to look at because we’re shooting other scenes.)  Despite this, I think the performances in Datalore are fine. In fact, Picard and Data’s scene in Picard’s ready room, where Data asks Picard to stop calling Lore "it" is a fantastic one, and shows depth from both actors that we hadn’t really seen, yet. So the problem with Datalore isn’t the acting. I’m biased, of course, but I believe now (and remember) that everyone did the very best they could with what they were given.

Maybe someone who was working on the show in a production capacity at the time — Diane Duane, I’m looking in your direction — can confirm or deny this, but it seems like there was fighting among the producers, and this episode got caught in the power struggle. I said this in fewer words in my bottom line:

The pitch was awesome: "We find Data’s evil twin brother, who he never
knew he had." 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.

When you’re getting lots of conflicting orders from different producers, and the big, ultimate boss (in this case, Gene) wants one particular thing to happen, I think you must end up writing like that, having things happen because they’re supposed to happen, which is why this episode has so many holes in it.

I have a deadline chasing me like a pissed off Big Daddy in Rapture,
but I’d love to hear your memories of this episode, or any comments you
have on this review. I’ll be checking in at TV Squad throughout the day, or until readers get bored and stop commenting.

Propel it!