What went wrong with Star Trek
I've been a big fan of the original series of Star Trek ever since childhood. Even now, I catch it on TV when I get the chance, even though I've seen all episodes several times (with the exception of "Space Seed," which, strangely, was the one episode my local TV station would never, ever show when I was a kid.) On the other hand, I watched Star Trek: the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Enterprise for a while, but lost interest long before the ends of their runs. (Voyager I hated from the start.)
In my opinion, the problem is that the people making the new Star Trek series never quite managed to grasp the fact that what made the original series so special was its sense of intellectual adventure. What scenes from TOS stick out most clearly in my memory? Spock cursing himself for a fool, because he forgot to use his tricorder to record the centuries of history being revealed by a time portal. Or later in the same episode, when Spock, stranded in the 1930's, used vacuum tubes to repair his broken tricorder. Scotty draining people's phasers into the fuel tanks of a downed shuttle, trying to get enough power for orbit.
Roughly speaking, there are four kinds of intellectual adventure. Either it's about using your brain to get out of a jam, or using your brain to play a joke on someone, or cooking up an elaborately cerebral way to make money, or finding a treasure whose value is cerebral rather than monetary. In Apollo 13, when an engineer dumps a pile of detritus on a table and says, "This is what's inside the command module- now figure out how to turn it into an adapter for the air filters," that's intellectual adventure. In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Feynman used his brain to make adventures for himself. In The Mad Scientists' Club, a group of adolescents played elaborate scientific pranks on the citizens of their small midwestern town- and the book, while obscure, secures a permanent place in the hearts of its fans. The engineers from The Eudaemonic Pie tried to beat the casinos by building a computer that could predict where a roulette ball would land. Finding King Solomon's Mines is regular adventure. Finding the Library of Alexandria is intellectual adventure.
Part of the key to intellectual adventure is that the audience has to be able to understand what's going on. That's what makes ST:NG so tiresome. On the old series, Spock repaired his tricorder with vacuum tubes. On ST:NG, Geordi just blathers about reconfiguring the warp coil. Imagine if the air-filter scene in Apollo 13 had been replaced with engineers jabbering about how they have to retro-oxidize the samarium-231 ortho-nebulizer. Or what if Feynman's practical jokes had all involved finding eigenfunctions of the n-topic quark manifold? Nobody would care. And that's why I don't care about ST:NG.
Of course, the writers of ST:NG did have a vague sense that they needed to be intellectual. That's why we had endless trial episodes, typically involving a relatively bloodless discussion of some philosophical point. Even worse, the philosophical debates would be so heavily skewed towards one side or another as to destroy any curiosity on the part of the audience. (What fan is going to say that yes, Data is just a robot, and can be killed with impunity?) Even worse, their philosophical stances would flip-flop wildly, depending on the demands of the episode. In one episode the Prime Directive is so sacred that Wesley's life has to be sacrificed for it. In another, the Enterprise crew finds cloning so offensive that they upend a society of clones by forcing them to have sex with unwashed rural hicks.
I can't help but feel that the writers of ST:NG were conflicted on the question of how intellectual the show would be. The show declared itself- at times quite explicitly- to be more intellectual than the old series. When Kirk battled a being with godlike power, he would gamble the Enterprise on a hand-to-hand duel. When Picard battled a being with godlike power, he poured himself a cup of tea and sipped it in his armchair while he quietly waited for death. Excuse me? Who the hell wants to watch an old man wait for death? And yet, the writers seemed to have no faith in the intelligence of the audience. Otherwise, why would they resort, week after week, to the deus ex machina of reconfiguring the warp coil? And in the end, we got neither intellectualism nor adventure.
The generally anti-intellectual attitude of ST:NG led to all kinds of silliness, repeated week after week. Once Geordi and Data beamed down to a planet and found alien technology which surpassed anything available to Starfleet. Did they take it back to the Enterprise for study? No, of course not. It's not like they're explorers or anything. No, they just made some appreciative noises, and then moved on to the next shiny object. Time and again, the Enterprise crew would find something that, in theory, should completely change their society, and yet it would completely disappear with no trace once it had served its purpose in the plot.
This found its silliest expression in the Disposable Deus Ex Machina. For example, in one episode, Dr. Pulaski and a number of other members of the crew got infected with a virus that made them age quickly. In the end, they fixed the problem by using the transporter to revert their bodies back to the way they were before they got old. Got that? They didn't solve the problem by coming up with a cure for the virus. They solved the problem by coming up with a cure for aging. For centuries, people have tried to find a way to stop aging- and Dr. Pulaski does it in a few days during a race against senility. Not that it makes any difference. Apparently no one in the ST:NG universe wants longevity anymore, because never again in any subsequent episode of that or any other Trek series did anyone mention that aging had been abolished.
It makes a kind of weird sense, in a way. Between 1870 and 1970, we went from covered wagons to men on the moon. What technological advances and societal changes have taken place in the 100 years between ST:TOS and ST:NG? Faster warpdrive, smaller communicators, and plusher spaceships. When even their explorers have no curiosity,
can you blame them for having a stagnant society?
Where has all this led? It led to Star Trek: Enterprise, in which all presense of intellectualism has been abandoned in favor of tepid gunfights and cheesy T&A. I imagine that the producers decided that if people didn't like the "intellectualism" of ST:NG, then the audience must just not be that cerebral. But if they would just try presenting problems with real solutions, instead of bombarding us with treknobabble, or show the characters displaying any interest whatsoever in exploring the universe, instead of using exploratory missions to comets as an opportunity to make snowmen...
In my opinion, the problem is that the people making the new Star Trek series never quite managed to grasp the fact that what made the original series so special was its sense of intellectual adventure. What scenes from TOS stick out most clearly in my memory? Spock cursing himself for a fool, because he forgot to use his tricorder to record the centuries of history being revealed by a time portal. Or later in the same episode, when Spock, stranded in the 1930's, used vacuum tubes to repair his broken tricorder. Scotty draining people's phasers into the fuel tanks of a downed shuttle, trying to get enough power for orbit.
Roughly speaking, there are four kinds of intellectual adventure. Either it's about using your brain to get out of a jam, or using your brain to play a joke on someone, or cooking up an elaborately cerebral way to make money, or finding a treasure whose value is cerebral rather than monetary. In Apollo 13, when an engineer dumps a pile of detritus on a table and says, "This is what's inside the command module- now figure out how to turn it into an adapter for the air filters," that's intellectual adventure. In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Feynman used his brain to make adventures for himself. In The Mad Scientists' Club, a group of adolescents played elaborate scientific pranks on the citizens of their small midwestern town- and the book, while obscure, secures a permanent place in the hearts of its fans. The engineers from The Eudaemonic Pie tried to beat the casinos by building a computer that could predict where a roulette ball would land. Finding King Solomon's Mines is regular adventure. Finding the Library of Alexandria is intellectual adventure.
Part of the key to intellectual adventure is that the audience has to be able to understand what's going on. That's what makes ST:NG so tiresome. On the old series, Spock repaired his tricorder with vacuum tubes. On ST:NG, Geordi just blathers about reconfiguring the warp coil. Imagine if the air-filter scene in Apollo 13 had been replaced with engineers jabbering about how they have to retro-oxidize the samarium-231 ortho-nebulizer. Or what if Feynman's practical jokes had all involved finding eigenfunctions of the n-topic quark manifold? Nobody would care. And that's why I don't care about ST:NG.
Of course, the writers of ST:NG did have a vague sense that they needed to be intellectual. That's why we had endless trial episodes, typically involving a relatively bloodless discussion of some philosophical point. Even worse, the philosophical debates would be so heavily skewed towards one side or another as to destroy any curiosity on the part of the audience. (What fan is going to say that yes, Data is just a robot, and can be killed with impunity?) Even worse, their philosophical stances would flip-flop wildly, depending on the demands of the episode. In one episode the Prime Directive is so sacred that Wesley's life has to be sacrificed for it. In another, the Enterprise crew finds cloning so offensive that they upend a society of clones by forcing them to have sex with unwashed rural hicks.
I can't help but feel that the writers of ST:NG were conflicted on the question of how intellectual the show would be. The show declared itself- at times quite explicitly- to be more intellectual than the old series. When Kirk battled a being with godlike power, he would gamble the Enterprise on a hand-to-hand duel. When Picard battled a being with godlike power, he poured himself a cup of tea and sipped it in his armchair while he quietly waited for death. Excuse me? Who the hell wants to watch an old man wait for death? And yet, the writers seemed to have no faith in the intelligence of the audience. Otherwise, why would they resort, week after week, to the deus ex machina of reconfiguring the warp coil? And in the end, we got neither intellectualism nor adventure.
The generally anti-intellectual attitude of ST:NG led to all kinds of silliness, repeated week after week. Once Geordi and Data beamed down to a planet and found alien technology which surpassed anything available to Starfleet. Did they take it back to the Enterprise for study? No, of course not. It's not like they're explorers or anything. No, they just made some appreciative noises, and then moved on to the next shiny object. Time and again, the Enterprise crew would find something that, in theory, should completely change their society, and yet it would completely disappear with no trace once it had served its purpose in the plot.
This found its silliest expression in the Disposable Deus Ex Machina. For example, in one episode, Dr. Pulaski and a number of other members of the crew got infected with a virus that made them age quickly. In the end, they fixed the problem by using the transporter to revert their bodies back to the way they were before they got old. Got that? They didn't solve the problem by coming up with a cure for the virus. They solved the problem by coming up with a cure for aging. For centuries, people have tried to find a way to stop aging- and Dr. Pulaski does it in a few days during a race against senility. Not that it makes any difference. Apparently no one in the ST:NG universe wants longevity anymore, because never again in any subsequent episode of that or any other Trek series did anyone mention that aging had been abolished.
It makes a kind of weird sense, in a way. Between 1870 and 1970, we went from covered wagons to men on the moon. What technological advances and societal changes have taken place in the 100 years between ST:TOS and ST:NG? Faster warpdrive, smaller communicators, and plusher spaceships. When even their explorers have no curiosity,
can you blame them for having a stagnant society?
Where has all this led? It led to Star Trek: Enterprise, in which all presense of intellectualism has been abandoned in favor of tepid gunfights and cheesy T&A. I imagine that the producers decided that if people didn't like the "intellectualism" of ST:NG, then the audience must just not be that cerebral. But if they would just try presenting problems with real solutions, instead of bombarding us with treknobabble, or show the characters displaying any interest whatsoever in exploring the universe, instead of using exploratory missions to comets as an opportunity to make snowmen...
posted by Wintermute at 11:08 PM
1 Comments:
I like ST:DS9(because of the Cardassians and the Bajorans...very cool juxtaposition) and some parts of Enterprise(when it wasn't focusing on T'Pol's fake boobies and botoxed fishlips).
The original ST and TNG have become too dated for me. The Original's props, wardrobe and makeup is so bad!
Voyager tried hard to be politically correct and it was a bore.
No wonder the best writers of the later Treks(especially DS9) are now on Battle Star Galactica. You have to get ugly, stinky, bloodly and imperfect.
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