And I am sure that Vulcans will travel to New Vulcan for pon farr. It’s not about the place but about the blood bond.

I am glad you brought up Crisis on Infinite Earths because I think that was the worst possible solution to the storytelling problem that DC was in in the late 80s and early 90s. Their 1960s solution was better: you know how Hawkman and Flash fought in World War II? well, that happened in a different reality, which we’re calling Earth-Two; Hawkman and Flash got started in the 1950s on Earth-One; presumably they’ll start later on some other Earth in the future. Flash on Earth-Two is Jay Garrick, who loves Joan; Flash on Earth-One is Barry Allen, who loves Iris. Crisis basically said, Flash never fought in World War Two, so forget what you once knew. The parallel universe concept honored history; the Crisis concept encouraged rewriting and destroying it. I only wish DC had rebooted (or sidebooted, if you prefer).

No, there is no Gary or Finnegan or Ruth in New Movie Trek. (Earth-JJ?) That means there’s room for some genuine thought about the inadequacies of the Federation and Starfleet, as well as room for some storytelling suspense. If we see the Doomsday Machine on screen, we can’t assume that we know what will happen or how they’ll defeat it. Does this McCoy have a daughter named Joanna? He doesn’t have to. As long as he stays a doctor, not entirely at ease with the idea of roaming through space, and a supporter of emotion over logic, he’ll still be McCoy.

Added bonus: this minimizes the unprofessional behavior. Spock suddenly reassigning his former star student to comply with her wishes is less objectionable than reassigning his girlfriend. Still problematic, though.

The best example of a Star Trek that works to establish absolute continuity would of course be Enterprise, which strangely seems to vie with DS9 for being my favorite of the franchise. That, though, was finished and wrapped up with the Klingon foreheads explained, Orion slave girls, and the foundation of the UFP. There was nowhere to go but start over.

I don’t either, and like I said, they didn’t do anything particularly coherent with that moment. I just thought it was kind of cool, and as my crunchiness has evolved in the years since, it’s only growner cooler in my memory. To connect it with the original point of the thread, though, you could see the Marquis as a group who originally rebelled against being “wisely” moved about by the Federation’s big power deals with the Cardassians, but then came to attract a host of others who wanted to get away from what they perceived as the Federation’s bureaucratic reach. There’s an element of searching for “myth” or “meaning” in all that, a meaning that you discover on your own, rather than through the Federation’s time-tested, no-doubt-frequently-evaluated colonization plans. (I seem to recall a TNG episode which had one of the colonies caught up in the argument over resettlement being a Native American one, and they refused to relocate at first, because their ancestors had chosen the planet to settle on through a vision quest. There’s some meaning for you!)

Qua frontier settlers, I guess they necessarily had more of a taste for the local and home-grown– or else they wouldn’t have been settlers in the first place. But the Federation was in the active business of planting settlements and colonies on every habitable planet; it was hardly an unheardof idiosyncrasy to go set up shop on a new world.

The “without outside aid” thing strikes me as a post-hoc rationalization– sour grapes. “We didn’t want that monthly shipment of Federation supplies anyways.”

One of my favorite moments with the Marquis–in fact, probably my very favorite moment, which of course DS9 was just too incompetent to actually do anything with–was when Eddington, finally exposed as a Marquis traitor, has been captured by Sisko, who is transporting him somewhere, and takes a moment to explain to Sisko how virtuous it is to strike free of the Federation, start over again without any outside aid on a distant planet, and have to learn how to grow tomatoes (or whatever it was), and how much better they tasted that replicated food. Sisko responds something to the effect of, “yeah, but you don’t have Raktjino!” Which really just kind of sums up the whole localist/globalist, communitarian/liberal divide right there.

But I’m not sure what that’s worth. Salon’s Andrew O’Heir argues for the original series:

Even if some of its flaws look more glaring 30-odd years later, I think the original “Star Trek” still has a passion and vitality that partly stem from its cheapness; the threadbare sets and effects created a coherent, suggestive atmosphere, and forced your attention onto the storytelling and the characters. It stands out, even after all this time, as something unique in television history. Of course “Star Trek” can never be the cultural lodestone it once was. Having spawned four official follow-up series, 11 feature films (and counting) and countless non-canonical works — if you haven’t heard about K/S porn or the immense and disputatious fanfic universe, I’m not helping you — and inspired an entire genre of serial intergalactic futurism from “Space: 1999” to “Babylon 5” to “Battlestar Galactica,” the novelty of Gene Roddenberry’s creation has pretty well worn off.

In the middle of the Cold War, Roddenberry imagined a radical-progressive, Enlightenment-fueled vision of the human future, one in which the conflict between capitalism and communism had been long transcended, along with other earthbound forms of racial, ethnic or religious strife. Strikingly, there is no religious or mystical dimension to the “Star Trek” universe at all, at least until much later in its development.

Writing in the NYTimes David Hadjou argues that TOS was designed to exploit existing back-lot sets:

??Star Trek?? was shot for Desilu Productions, on the lot its founders, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, bought from RKO Radio Pictures, the prolific studio that had made ??King Kong,?? ??Citizen Kane,?? the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals and countless B pictures like ??I Walked With a Zombie.?? In time, the series moved to Paramount and if it seemed as though Kirk and his crew were venturing from old movie to old movie, Roddenberry and his crew were traveling literally from old-movie set to old-movie set.

??The majority of story premises …can be accomplished on such common studio back lot locales and sets such as Early 1900 Street, Oriental Village, Cowtown, Border Fort, Victorian Drawing Room, Forest and Streamside,?? wrote Roddenberry in his original pitch. ??Interiors and exteriors temporarily available after an ??Egyptian?? motion picture, a ??horror?? epic, or even an unusual telefilm, could be used to meet the needs of a number of story premises.??

The creative re-use of studio sets may have begun as a way to keep costs down. But the show made a kind of loopy pastiche pulp art by appropriating, referencing and recombining ideas from film history, going imaginatively ? and, yes, even boldly ? where many had gone before.

Ideas and ideals vs. inexpensive production & recycling of cliches, which is it? It’s not a fatal opposition; you can have both. But still, it’s a different combo than big budget and space opera.

I suppose it’s also possible that in the 23rd century all the various computer systems actually do talk to each other, so all Pike had to do was feed Kirk’s “genius-level” test scores into the academy admissions system and get him some kind of provisional entry?

Though the new film does actually “re-industrialize” things every so slightly: ship construction now takes place on the ground and looks a lot grittier, there’s a huge goddamn hole in the ground in the middle of Iowa which presumably took some kind of labor, and the Engineering section of both the Kelvin and the Enterprise looks a shitload grittier and more industrial than TOS, not to mention TNG, where the Engineering section looks like the atrium in a 24th Century mall.

Now that I’m thinking about Federation society, by the way, didn’t this film strike a REALLY weird note about Starfleet recruitment? In the past, there’s been an implication that getting into Starfleet is roughly like getting into West Point AND Harvard, that it’s extremely selective and difficult and involves a lot of tests. But now we have Pike flying around picking up recruits as he goes. Either that implies a kind of nepotism, that Pike is able to just waive the application procedures if he’s in the mood to do so, or that Starfleet is actually kind of hard-up for recruits and they’re out touring the boondocks trying to drum up some enlistment.