For Jewish TV, look to...Australia?

The Australian period drama A Place to Call Home is one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of a TV program putting the Jewish identity of a main character front and center in a respectful, meaningful way. No, it doesn’t always get it right (including some butchery of the Hebrew language and inaccurate portrayals of Jewish rituals); and yes, it veers into cheesy-melodrama territory a fair bit (including much that is reminiscent of Downton Abbey in family dynamics and unlikely plot twists). But its protagonist, Sarah Nordmann, is a concentration camp survivor and former resistance fighter who is deeply committed to her faith. Her story of coming home to Australia after the war, coping with trauma and alienation, finding a place for herself in an often hostile, antisemitic community, and trying to maintain her Jewish identity in an interfaith relationship makes this show more Jewish than anything I’ve seen produced for American TV, which tends to stick to broad Jewish characterizations and vaguely Jewish-inflected humor. 

With all the Jews working in American film and television, why is it left for Australia, with its 0.4% Jewish population, to give us a popular drama that deals substantively with being a Jew?

Quick thoughts post Will You Take My Hand?

I liked the Disco season finale, I really did.

1. But the MU Georgiou story echos the problem I had with the Lorca story. I was sure there had to be more to him, because it made no sense that Starfleet would trust a guy who killed his own crew. I was sure there was some big mystery to be revealed about the Buran. But no. Not only did Starfleet go with that really poor plan, but even after their mistake is revealed, they figure handing Discovery to evil Georgiou is a good plan? Hmm.

2. I wonder if the Enterprise just left Talos IV? (Hello Alexander Courage!) Will Burnham become involved in the fallout from the events of The Cage, and will that explain why Spock doesn’t talk about her? Hmm. (Adding: According to Wikipedia, the timing doesn't line up; The Cage would have been two years earlier (or three, now that they've jumped ahead nine months?). But maybe that's wrong?)

3. Culber. Mycelial network. Terrraforming. Genesis. Green spore on Tilly. Resurrection? Hmm.

4. I absolutely can’t wait to see what’s next for Burnham, Saru, Tilly, and Stamets. A new captain? Possibly a Vulcan? Or has Prime Lorca been hanging out on Vulcan? Hmm.

5. I’m still pissed that Lorca was so summarily discarded. I'm not getting over that. It's a grudge and I'm nursing it.

Adding:

6. I'm not entirely comfortable with the fact that Starfleet just released a genocidal maniac. Can we not try people for war crimes committed in other universes? Someone get Samuel Cogley on that.

7. When Tilly announced she was very high, at least two generations of fans for whom watching Star Trek stoned was a rite of passage achieved a moment of perfect joy.

Is Disco Trek enough?

ADDING: For the record, now that season 1 is complete, I stand by this analysis.

NOTE: I write this just hours before the finale of Disco’s first season. It’s dicey to offer an overview before getting the complete story, but what the hell. I will happily revise and recant as needed.


There is an entire book to be written — more than one, probably — about how each iteration of Star Trek extends the vision of the original while correcting perceived shortcomings of previous versions. Discovery is certainly no different, but people are having a harder time seeing it as part of this pattern. That’s because it feels so different; by Star Trek standards, so dark. But what many seem to have forgotten is how very different TNG felt from TOS when it first appeared, and for exactly the opposite reason: It was maddeningly bright. I think it’s fair to cast Disco as the anti-TNG. And just as that series started at an extreme and eventually moved back toward the center, I’m sure Disco will, too.

When Roddenberry launched TNG, he made a rule: No conflict among the good guys. The results were obvious and immediate: bland, uninspired storytelling, as seen in what is now widely agreed to be its weak first couple of seasons. Roddenberry had reportedly developed a giant ego, what with the whole Great Bird of the Galaxy thing and the adoring fans and all; some say he misunderstood his own creation. I think that’s only partly true. Roddenberry was not wrong about people wanting to believe in a hopeful, optimistic future for humanity. But he was wrong about what his job was — not to create an actual future, but to create fiction that illustrates why such optimism matters. They’re actually not at all the same thing.

Utopias do not exist. They never have, and it’s probably safe to say they never will. For that reason, fictional utopias always smack of authorial arrogance. They proclaim for all to see, “Here’s a guy so full of himself that he thinks he’s got all the answers.” Perfection being impossible, all utopias read more like religious visions than practical blueprints, and TNG was no different. And of course, the more the author tries to portray a utopia, the more the cracks show. In TNG, female characters were reduced to embarrassing stereotypes (Tasha Yar and Deanna Troi). The way the corporate boardroom replaced the chain of command was cringe-inducingly naive. The show's idealistic vision of the perfect futuristic community meant that vulnerable civilians, including children, were schlepped into the cold vacuum of space to face all the hostile aliens, disasters, diseases, and other assorted threats of the unknown. In its simplicity, this utopian future was excruciatingly unconvincing. (Arguably, poor Wesley Crusher, the embodiment of everything that seemed juvenile about TNG, paid the price in fan hatred.)

And the jingoism. Good lord, the jingoism.

If we’re perfect and without conflict, then all the conflict has to come from elsewhere. All bad is without; most good is within. You can see the problem there. In TNG, Roddenberry’s secular, utopian vision inevitably and ironically starts to look exactly like what he’s railing against: cultural imperialsim and a sense of human supremacy (mitigated only slightly by the inclusion of aliens who are ultimately very much like us; Star Trek has always struggled with the fact that the Federation looks more like a human-led empire than a coalition of true equals).

What Roddenberry had forgotten — or more likely, never knew, but his TOS writers did — was that in storytelling, the negative space is crucial. There must be both yin and yang. Not only are we more keenly aware of what we perceive to be absent; we value it all the more for the lack of it. When crafting a tale designed to illustrate a moral compass, the tricky part is to give the audience enough positive input to make that compass clear, but enough negative input — space that has yet to be filled with the goodness we seek — to make us understand why it matters, and why the struggle to achieve it is worthwhile. TOS, for all its many flaws, did extraordinary things with that negative space. Its best stories demonstrated the heroes’ struggles to find the way forward without compromising their values, to battle their own demons and confront their own biases. Kirk is at first ready to kill Gorns and Hortas before realizing his error; Spock is forever tempted by the emotions he rejects; our heroes are shown to be not so different than Klingons through Organian eyes (or whatever Organians have). Not all endings are happy.

TNG started with no negative space — or more accurately, with all the negative space assigned to Them and all the positive space assigned to Us. Perfection is not a good look on the heroes of a supposedly progressive drama. (Aside: I think that it’s interesting how, in DS9, notable for being the first Trek sequel to commit to darker storytelling, Sisko is obsessed with baseball, a game weighted toward yin, its perfect form a no-hitter, in which what doesn’t happen is more important than what does. But I digress.)

Which brings us to Disco. In season 1, Disco is nearly all negative space, so much so that it’s disorienting. Burnham’s mutiny and the Battle at the Binary Stars set up a starting point of Star Trek values in near total collapse, and the culture aboard the Discovery is downright dystopian. We get the tiniest glimpse of positive space, and the moral compass that creates it, with Captain Georgiou, only to have it — and her — brutally cut down and eaten for breakfast (both metaphorically and, we eventually discover, literally).

Understandably, this was all too much for a lot of fans. I started the season as an avid defender of this choice because, frankly, I had so detested TNG’s flaws, and I welcomed a series that recognized them and was committed to doing it differently. Of course, there’s a danger in going too far in the other direction. If all that negative space — all that absence of morality — obscures the moral compass entirely, you enter nihilistic territory, the dark ’n edgy place of which contemporary storytellers are so fond. Everything is felt very viscerally in those kinds of stories because the threat level is always turned up to 11. But they’re grueling experiences precisely because they offer no hope of redemption and no promise of joy. The question is, did Disco wander too far into that territory? If so, those who say it’s not Star Trek are right.

I’d argue it didn’t. Those tiny glimpses of positive space, of Star Trek’s native moral imperative, are yanked away early in the story and then carefully, bit by bit, returned. There are acts that are clearly evil (including some that go for real shock value, like Tyler/Voq snapping Culber’s neck and Georgiou offering Burnham a ganglia “treat”), and there are acts that are ambiguous (nearly everything Lorca did, until his big reveal). But there is good, and we certainly know it when we see it. There is love (Stamets/Culber, Burnham/Tyler); there is joy (Burnham’s dance with Stamets); there is friendship (Tilly/Burnham); and there is growth (Captain Saru). And then there are the words in the title: Star Trek. When something has entered the cultural consciousness as much as Star Trek has, the name alone does an awful lot of heavy lifting. Invoke it, and you invoke half a century of storytelling that carries volumes of authority, for all its flaws. That accrual of meaning is why people revisit fictional universes and delight in creating new chapters there, both building up and chipping away at existing foundations. It’s not enough to expect the words “Star Trek” to constitute all of Disco’s positive space, but they carry an awful lot.

That said, I’m not sure the writers got the balance exactly right. As the season went on, I began to feel that they were rushing through the moments that should have provided clarity. For the sake of a breakneck pace and an overabundance of plot twists, they barreled through some story beats they should have paused on, and set up parallels that don’t seem to play out. The worst offender is the Lorca/Burnham parallel. Lorca’s arc bends from redemption to betrayal (having lost the Buran, he gets another chance with the Discovery, only to emerge as the ultimate traitor); Burnham’s, from betrayal to redemption (no explanation needed). But neither feels complete. I can’t help feeling that, at the end of it all, I don’t really understand why either character does what they do, so the significance of the parallel remains a mystery. (If the finale proves me wrong, I’ll be ecstatic.)

What’s more, too much of Disco’s self-awareness comes not from within the story, but from its creators talking about the story. What with the immediacy of the After Trek interviews and the extensive social media campaign, it’s been too easy to tell the audience what the creators are thinking rather than actually craft the story in a way that shows them. So when Harberts, Berg, Sullivan et al reassure us that they “get” Star Trek -- or Wilson Cruz assures us they haven't buried their gays -- you can’t help wondering if they themselves are not sure they’ve done enough to convince us in the story itself.

In however many years’ time, when Disco has aired its series finale, I’m going to revisit all this. Nowadays, the arc of serialized TV plots is long and designed for binging, and thank goodness for that. I’ll be very glad to find that the long game makes perfect sense of a first chapter that, for all its flaws, has hooked me.

The War Without, the War Within, the mystery of Michael's sin

There’s something I was really hoping Disco would examine more closely, but it’s not looking likely at this point. Burnham’s main motivation throughout the season has been her deep remorse for her mutiny, but she’s never been shown to have been wrong. I mean, clearly she was insubordinate, and wrong in that sense. But her purpose was to implement a controversial strategy in order to prevent a horrible conflict. The plan was morally gray, certainly, but it might have worked. We’ll never know. She was stopped, and the horrible conflict turned out to be even worse than anyone could have imagined.

Since then, the series has operated on the premise that most people, including Burnham, believe she is responsible for the massive loss of life at the Battle at the Binary Stars, and for the whole Klingon War in general. But the story really doesn’t support that. It sure looks like all of that would have happened whether Burnham had attacked Georgiou and tried to fire first or not. The huge weight of guilt on her is kind of baffling. I had assumed we’d circle back to this, because otherwise it’s just bad writing. But now that I’ve seen Lorca’s long and intriguing arc cut short so glibly, I’m not so sure.

If anything, Burnham's choice to return to the Prime Universe with Mirror Universe Georgiou in tow seems like a much worse idea than her original mutiny, and it's weirdly compounded by Cornwell's decision to...make Georgiou captain? Really? WHY? OK, so she has strategic value. She can't offer her guidance as a civilian advisor -- and under close guard, at that? Again, if this were half a dozen episodes ago, I'd think there was some really clever plotting going on, with a cool twist soon to be revealed. But the way things have gone, and with not much time left in the season, I have to assume that, at best, the resolution will be kinda cool but rushed, and at worst, it won't make any sense of these bizarre decisions.

Unless these decisions are rendered moot when the season ends with a reset, where the Discovery time-travels back to the point of Burnham's mutiny, but this time fires on the Klingons first and the war never happens. But the Klingon war is canon, so that doesn’t seem likely, and they'd still have to figure out what to do with MU Georgiou. (However they end the season, I still like my batshit theory that MU Georgiou will end up as the Lethe of "Dagger of the Mind," but what are the chances?)

Holosuite whitewashing

Just rewatched the DS9 S7 ep “Badda-bing Badda-bang.” There's this really awkward scene I guess they felt obliged to insert, in which Sisko says he objects to the Vic Fontaine holosuite program because of the way it whitewashes Vegas history, presenting a false version of the early 1960s in which black people are welcome in casinos. And I’m like, y’know, that’s an irrefutably correct point, but if they were going to make it, they'd have been better off just abandoning the whole story altogether. Because Kasidy’s rebuttal, that the holosuite program represents an idealized version of history the way it should have been, rather than the way it was, is really silly and lame, given that the entire story is about Mob violence and corruption. But rather than point that out, Sisko is like, OK, now that I've recited the disclaimer, count me in.

So obviously, it's not history the way it should have been, but rather contemporary TV paying lip service to, but then blatantly choosing to ignore, the obvious problems raised by inserting characters of color into the conventional time-travel (or in this case, fantasy time-travel) story. They're basically saying, "It's 1999, and we can no longer ignore the elephant in the room, but we haven't come up with a good way to explain it, and we aren't willing to give up this popular trope that provides us with so many easy-to-write episodes that we can shoot for little money on the back lot using whatever costumes and props we happen to have lying around, so we're going to hand-wave furiously and hope everyone thinks that's good enough."

It's exactly like that moment in the Doctor Who episode "The Shakespeare Code," when Ten takes Martha back to Elizabethan England. When she questions whether, as a black woman, she'll be "carted off as a slave," Ten, whose appearance is as white and male as can be, blithely replies, "Just walk about like you own the place. Works for me." Well alrighty then.

[EDITING TO ADD: It seems to me it should be possible to write time-travel stories that neither put characters of color in awkward or dangerous situations due to their race, nor demand the audience to just ignore this obvious issue. But how to do it? Racking my brains...this is a tough one...I dunno...I guess you could have them time travel to places where people look more like them? Crazy idea, I know. Do continents that are not Europe even have a past?]

Also, pet peeve of mine: period pieces about the 1950s and early 60s in which men do not remove their hats indoors. I don't care if it's a holosuite full of fake people who don't even notice the aliens with bumpy noses and misshapen foreheads. They would be programmed to notice men wearing hats indoors. Otherwise, what would be the POINT?