Enough politics! Time for geekery!
Yes, the new trailer for Star Trek makes me want to see it. Just the music does! Plus, come on, there’s a call-out to Vasquez Rocks about 3/4 of the way through.
I’m with the geeks who are a little nervous about the time travel angle, because that concept was responsible for some of the most corrosively stupid stories and ideas in the show’s previous TV history. Brannon Braga, out with thee!
Rebooting is fine with me, though. Just call it Star Trek 2.0, forget everything that’s gone before. Some of it was good, some wasn’t, none of it is harmed by a complete do-over.
In fact, a do-over clears a lot of narrative storytelling crud out of the intellectual property. As far as shared-universe serial fictions go, Star Trek is not one of the more coherent or consistent out there.
If a reboot, the question is, which way do you go? It looks just from all the fragments and pieces of information out there that J.J. Abrams has decided that the core of the property is the characters coupled with a bit of optimistic space opera. I think that’s basically right.
If you decided instead that you wanted to really work out the idea of the United Federation of Planets, explore the concept of the Prime Directive, and all that jazz, then you don’t really want what Abrams is bringing. But neither do you want what Star Trek has been to date, because all of those ideas as developed by Roddenberry and his successors were painfully stunted, dramatically hollow, unsatisfying. What you want is basically Iain Banks’ Culture novels (I’m not the first to point this out, mind you). But Banks’ novels, much as I love them, are pretty cerebral: it’s hard to imagine any of them being the foundation for a popular film or television series.
So if you go with the familiar characters, surrounded by some of their technological fetish-objects and a bit of mumbo-jumbo about Starfleet and tolerance and the final frontier, you still have an interesting problem, and I’ll be curious to see how Abrams handles it.
The basic Kirk-Spock-McCoy triad still is a serviceable dramatic engine. The man of action who has to mediate between the man of reason and the man of feeling. Simple, sometimes crude, but entertaining and a pretty good generator of stories. Once you overcome Roddenberry’s crippling ideal that perfect people in the perfect future don’t have internal conflicts, this lets you set these three characters against each other while also getting them to cooperate in lots of situations and permutations.
But what to do with the secondary characters? You can do what the later Star Trek shows did and distribute the triad’s characteristics among them in various ways that echo the central dramatic engine. (As opposed to what the original show did with them, which was more or less nothing in the case of Sulu or Uhura.) Or you can try to give them their own distinctive schtick, which is what sort of happened by accident to Scotty. (Though notably shows built around Scotty as a dramatic character were among the worst of the original show, because he’s got nothing going for him in dramatic terms, and therefore the only thing to do with him is give him a really bad romantic problem or something of that sort.)
Judging from the trailer, it looks like Sulu might be “Secondary Man of Action”. Scotty, given the casting, looks like he’ll still be doing amusing schtick, basically as comic relief.
Uhura? I kind of hope she doesn’t just end up being the new Ensign Janice Rand. If there’s one character whose job should suggest something about her character, it’s Uhura. If she’s the communication specialist, make her the person who knows the most about aliens, who specializes in mediating between conflicting characters, who is technically expert in modes and technologies of communication. Rather than being a switchboard operator, which is how the original show treated her.
The one Enterprise character who was an improvement on her conceptual predecessors was Hoshi Sato. Therein lies a good role model for Uhura.
(Mayweather could have been, but they never went that direction.)
“If there???? one character whose job should suggest something about her character, it???? Uhura. If she???? the communication specialist, make her the person who knows the most about aliens, who specializes in mediating between conflicting characters, who is technically expert in modes and technologies of communication. Rather than being a switchboard operator, which is how the original show treated her.”
… which is nonetheless superior to being Deanna Troi, which sadly is what you’re describing.
Once you’ve got the rationalist scientist and the feeling healer, you don’t need any more personality-and-profession matches. It’s better to take even the occasional painfully obvious expectations-reversal like Geordi the blind helmsman, rather than endless painfully obvious expectations-fulfilling roles like Worf the security officer.
I guess I’m going to have to read Iain Banks, because what I see here is pretty much the boring stuff, as far as I’m concerned. Character-driven action movies are a dime a dozen (Roddenberry originally conceived of Star Trek as a space western; that they transcended that on many ocassions is testament to something great; this sounds like reversion to the mean), and the deus ex machina technology stuff was pretty tired after the first James Bond series, much less a generation of “ST:NG” subspace handwaving. Time travel stories almost always offend me as a historian and as a reader, because they get causality wrong and introduce elements of predestination.
I prefer it when technology has limits and the characters have ideas and the problems require more than strafing runs and handwaving. I have a bad feeling about this.
I’m pleased with the reboot. After Enterprise basically accomplished the Herculean task of wrapping up all continuity, the best thing to do is start over.
I think you’re being a bit hard on Roddenberry with his perfect people in a perfect future. The worst of his excesses didn’t come till the early seasons of TNG, when he’d started to believe the bunkus that people were peddling about his amazing vision. When he decided that he was speaking to the ages with his brilliant philosophy we got some of the worst weaknesses of TNG.
Oh, Jonathan, wasn’t the most charming part of TNG the way that in the end everything could be solved either by tachyons or reversing the polarity? Seriously, one of the things from which I get the greatest delight in Star Trek is the nonsense science. Granted, the nonsense science isn’t *supposed* to be funny, but that also gives it charm.
Yeah, I agree that Roddenberry’s approach only became really painful after he started to believe all the people telling him he was some great visionary rather than a guy who was making a TV show.
Didn’t George Lucas suffer from the same problem? I remember reading somewhere that up until the summer of ’77, Lucas himself understood Star Wars as simply a throwback pulpy space adventure. All the visionary / mythmaking stuff was grafted on several months later, when Joseph Campbell showed up at the party.
Well, a Banks Culture series would be pretty cool in its way. Reading the novels definitely shows you just how threadbare and boring the conventional Star Trek treatment of the Prime Directive is, since Banks takes the question of how and whether a technologically and economically “advanced” galactic civilization should engage or interfere with a non-starfaring, less advanced society, and spins all sorts of interesting moral and narrative dilemmas out of that question.
The guy playing Sulu says that it was very important to him to be able to have a role that was masculine and physical, since young Asian guys in mainstream movies tend to get typecast as bookish nerds.
Also:
??If there???? one character whose job should suggest something about her character, it???? Uhura. If she???? the communication specialist, make her the person who knows the most about aliens, who specializes in mediating between conflicting characters, who is technically expert in modes and technologies of communication. Rather than being a switchboard operator, which is how the original show treated her.??
?? which is nonetheless superior to being Deanna Troi, which sadly is what you??re describing.
The problem with Deanna Troi is that it felt like *such* a close profession/personality match. It was this ’90s idea that if you’re an expert on psychology you must also be a natural therapist whose sole calling in life is to non-judgmentally understand all living things and lovingly seek to nurture them into health. It was actually really, really annoying that someone who was on the command crew of what was, all the BS aside, a warship frequently confronting incredible threats to the survival of civilization itself was seemingly morally committed to being wishy-washy, that we had to keep on getting the “Should I bail out my teammates even if it means betraying the trust of this complete stranger?” plot.
So not that. Hopefully we can move past that and show that being an expert on mediation and communication — and a female one, at that — doesn’t mean you’re incapable of taking sides, making judgments, having morals or a spine.
Especially because that was so central to old-school Uhura’s character — that when they bothered to use her, they used her as a voice of reason, a common-sensical person acting as an anchor for the rest of the crew’s often lofty and unrealistic ideals.
Yes, that is an annoying “mom” stereotype that gets foisted on female characters, but making it tied into her field of expertise and having it be her specific role on the crew — that would be good. Having her seek to understand all alien points of view, not out of a spiritual call to universal understanding, but because it is the *practical thing to do to not get killed*, would be nice. Having her be the one familiar enough with the vast differences between cultures and languages and the immense potential for things to go wrong when worlds collide, not as a voice of empathetic mush but as a voice of prudence, and caution — that could be pretty sweet. Warning Spock that he doesn’t understand everything, warning McCoy that his ethics don’t apply everywhere, warning Kirk that his intuition won’t save him — because aliens are scary and weird and dangerous, and the person who seeks to understand aliens the most is the one who *most understands* how scary and dangerous walking into a foreign culture either with wide-open arms or threatening clenched fists can be.
That’s my $0.02, anyway.