Why I like Enterprise's much-maligned Xindi story

The Xindi story line of Enterprise is a surprisingly nuanced response to 9/11 and subsequent events, tackling such questions as, is it okay to respond out of vengeance, or only self defense? Are there some moral absolutes that can’t be broken, even to save millions of lives? In war, how do we weigh the lives of the enemy against our own? How good does intelligence have to be to justify killing, or even starting a war? Is killing to prevent possible, even probable future killing defensible? Who decides, the military, the politicians, the citizens? How do people who have seen and done terrible things in the line of duty move on with their lives? And it’s not preachy or facile – it really digs into the grey areas.

A Star Trek Morality Primer

What are the lessons Star Trek teaches us? Does Star Trek have a clear moral compass? Is it consistent, or does it evolve over time? Did you really expect me to have the answers? Of course not.

Instead, I offer these series-by-series nuggets:

TOS:  Do the right thing. However, the right thing will change from week to week, depending on who wrote the script.

TAS: The universe is confusing. Just go with it. Nothing lasts longer than 24 minutes anyway.

TNG: If you do the right thing, all will be well, because those are the rules.

DS9: Out here on the frontier, the rules are fungible. Do the best you can. Mostly just try not to start a war or a religion. But if you do, you’d better prevail. At both.

VOY: One for all and all for getting home.

ENT: Doing the right thing will generally get you absolutely nowhere, but pay it lip service from time to time because your series has an inferiority complex.

DSC: Doing the right thing will seriously mess you up, because streaming TV is dark 'n gritty.

PIC (speculative): The rules are back, but in a more neutral color palette.

Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to recognize that, at times, Star Trek really does deliver some profound insights with intelligence and subtlety. And sometimes, it's more like this:

Slingshot around the sun: International Star Trek Convention 1975

Let's travel back in time to 1975, to the other NYC Star Trek con that happened that year. This one was at the Americana Hotel, not that you'd know from the program, the cover of which is pictured above. (You can see the program from the competing con here.) Apparently, there was a schism among the con runners that resulted in two separate events. Of course, I knew nothing about it at the time, being just 13 and all. I was just happy to have more Star Trek. But you can read about it here.

Anyway, this program is notable for a comic that was apparently trying to emulate the underground comics of the day by being vaguely psychedelic and pretty incoherent. The title, Star Truckin', was obviously a reference to Robert Crumb's Keep on Truckin'. Beyond that, I can't tell you what the fuck is going on.

There are also the usual publicity stills, plus the names of everyone involved (but weirdly, no dates or any other useful historical information). Guests included Shatner, Doohan, and Koenig, as well as Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison. You could certainly do a lot worse.

Mexican Jewelry Trek

While reading up on vintage Mexican jewelry, as one does, I encountered the work of Sigi Pineda and was struck by one particular form he uses again and again, which strongly suggests the iconic Starfleet insignia. Pineda’s work, dating to the mid-1950s, was designed first. These are some examples of his jewelry, which could easily adorn a Starfleet uniform, and wall hangings, which would look at home on any Starfleet admiral’s office wall.

It’s generally believed that William Ware Theiss, Star Trek’s original costume designer, derived the insignia from the red chevron of the NASA logo, designed in 1959, but it’s impossible to ignore the similarity to Pineda’s work. Was Theiss aware of these sleek, midcentury-modern designs? Maybe they had just entered the general gestalt, or perhaps it’s all just an uncanny coincidence. Theiss is gone, and we’ll never know.

Slingshot around the sun: Star Trek Convention 1975, New York

When I was a wee Trekkie, I was lucky enough to attend seven New York Star Trek conventions from 1974 to 1977. Sadly, I didn't save the program from the very first one, but I did save the rest. I've been meaning to digitize them for ages, but it never rose to the top of my to-do list -- until now. It just took a nudge from my orthopedic surgeon (i.e. I'm laid up after foot surgery).

This is the program from the con held Feb. 14-17 at New York's Commodore Hotel, called (drumroll please) ... Star Trek Convention. Yup. Just what it says on the tin. Guests included Gene Roddenberry, William Shatner, George Takei, Isaac Asimov, David Gerrold, and more.

This program (like all the others from back in the day) is packed with publicity stills and behind-the-scenes candids. Back in those prehistoric, pre-internet times, these were like gold and made the programs treasured souvenirs. Also of interest to fandom historians (if such exist): listings of zines and fan clubs. There's also a recap of the previous year's con from superfan Joan Winston. Enjoy!

A word about Michael

Now that I've had time to poke around the responses to the Disco S2 finale, I want to respond to one line of criticism I've seen. There are some who feel the finale does Michael a disservice, since her existence, and Discovery’s, are made secret. I think that's an unfairly selective reading, given the accumulated weight of events and the way her story plays out:

•  Her achievements are recognized and celebrated by everyone who has personally experienced them.
• She turns out to have been the moving force of the entire, season-long story arc --  the person through whose agency every other event occurs. 
• Michael is accompanied into the future by people who willingly sacrifice their 23rd-century lives out of personal loyalty to her.
• Michael's relationships consistently humanize the story for us, and...
• Michael's relationships are two-way streets. 

That last point is very important, and relates to another criticism I've seen: that Michael's role fulfills the trope of the female black character who carries the emotional burdens of others. But Michael gets as good as she gives; others carry burdens that make it possible for her to grow and achieve. Unlike those who feel that Spock and Pike steal the show from Michael, I find that, to a large degree, they carry a lot of water for her. Michael pieces Spock back together, but he does exactly the same for her. And, while Pike's sojourn on Discovery helps him come to terms with his past (sitting out the Klingon war) and his future (his TOS destiny), it is through his insistent belief in the message of the Red Angel that Michael fulfills her destiny. It's Michael in whom he's been placing his faith all along, a fact that comes as no surprise by the time it's made explicit, because we've watched him come to know her and believe in her week by week. 

By the time we get to the end of the season, Michael, having confronted her sense of abandonment and despair and grappled with the reappearance of a dead parent, has overcome a Hamlet-like funk (which I suppose makes Spock Ophelia) and is ready to take center stage and bring the story to its heroic conclusion. She can do that because the people around her have supported her along the way. It's too big a stretch to say that, from a narrative point of view, Michael is being denied the recognition or the centrality due the hero. Her erasure and that of Discovery are necessitated by a convoluted story half a century in the making, and were inevitable from the start.

Where Michael's story is weakest in S2 is in her failure to connect with the series' regular characters, especially Tyler and Tilly, with both of whom she's supposed to have a special bond. That, I do attribute to the presence of Spock and Pike. They're the ones with whom Michael forges the deepest bonds this season. I'm not saying it was a bad choice to bring them into this story. They lift Discovery out of the weird, negative place Lorca left it (both the ship and the show). They take away the bad aftertaste of dysfunction and mistrust. But their presence comes at a price, and other characters pay it. That, too, is down to Michael's central role. It's an ensemble cast, but Michael is its heart, and everyone needs time with her. 

My sense is that the writers manage one exception, Saru, whose episode early in the season, as sketchy as it is, sets up an interesting dynamic for him going forward. Tyler doesn't fare as well; I have no idea what his journey has been about this season, other than working for the wrong guys, hanging around in the background a lot, and not really dealing with the massive shit he remains saddled with from S1. Tilly seems to have landed in comic-relief land as everyone's goofy, brilliant kid sister; her relationship with Michael advances not at all.

S2 has other problems, too. As in S1, we're given an intriguing antagonist, Control, who could have represented a deep, philosophical problem -- something about the moral danger of an unwitting act of creation, maybe? -- but...doesn't. Meanwhile, the deep, philosophical problem left over from S1, in the person of Mirror Georgiou (Do we all embody the potential for good and evil, or is there some inherently different nature in each? Can evil be redeemed? What role does forgiveness play, if any?), fades into frustrating ambiguity and cliched fetishwear.

I think from the outset, Disco intended to move its central characters out of TOS continuity; there’s no other explanation for the big canon issues raised by the spore drive tech from day one. But in the meantime, Disco juices the TOS time frame with a more inclusive, enlightened group of characters who should have been there from the start. I have my doubts about the leap to the future -- I can live without Voyager redux -- but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. I think what the show needs more than anything else is to avoid bringing on any more major, single-season characters, so the regulars finally get a chance to take and hold center stage. All of them.

The Circle of Trek

First, the news: An animated Star Trek series is coming to Nickelodeon. Cool!

And now, a long, seemingly pointless story. The dots will be connected by the end. Promise.

A couple of days ago, I stumbled across this MeTV list of forgotten, mostly short-lived 1970s sci fi shows. To me, it was like unearthing buried treasure. That’s my TV generation, and I do dearly love me some cheesy sci fi. In this glorious age of YouTube, most of this stuff is readily available, so I randomly picked one to watch: a live-action Saturday-morning kids’ show from Filmation called Ark II. It's about some young scientists and a talking chimp (no, really), all of whom have biblical names (even the chimp), driving a futuristic RV called -- surprise! -- Ark II around a post-apocalyptic Paramount Ranch…ummm, I mean, Earth…to bring salvation…ummm, I mean, science…to a humanity that has reverted to primitive, ignorant lawlessness. It was reeeeally something. Like much of the TV of its day, it's a bizarre combination of entertaining ideas, social commentary, cheesy writing, bad acting, cheap production values, and some choices that do not hold up well after 40 years (like guest star Jonathan Harris (aka Dr. Smith) doing a dreadful Irish accent as the adult leader of a group of vagrant boys, many black, who call him...I kid you not...Master Fagin).

So anyway, my friend Chris (god bless Chris, he’s into pop-culture nostalgia even more than I am) comments that he thinks the futuristic RV was made for the George Peppard sci fi movie Damnation Alley, to which I respond, "Apparently not," because by then I’d watched the behind-the-scenes Ark II documentary made for the DVD release (NB: I have no life), where I learned that they actually built the vehicle for this series (and that it kept falling apart and was nearly undrivable).

So then – stay with me – my friend Cory pipes in with, “Wasn't there an RV-themed SF movie with John Saxon and Lurch? Was it Planet Earth with the Dinks?”

Now THIS is where it really starts to get interesting, because all kinds of bells go off in my head.

Cory is correct. Not only that: Planet Earth was a Gene Roddenberry TV movie/series pilot, a reworking of an earlier pilot he did, Genesis II. Both were set on post-apocalyptic Earth and dealt with the decline and rebirth of civilization. This is how Wikipedia describes Genesis II: “The film, which opens with the line, ‘My name is Dylan Hunt. My story begins the day on which I died,’ is the story of a 20th-century man thrown forward in time to a post-apocalyptic future, by an accident in suspended animation.” And Planet Earth "was the second attempt by Roddenberry to create a weekly series set on a post-apocalyptic future Earth. The previous pilot was Genesis II, and it featured many of the concepts and characters later redeveloped and mostly recast in Planet Earth.”

I have to rewatch to see if there was a futuristic RV in either or both. It’s been decades since I’ve seen them. In fact, I think the only time I’ve ever seen Planet Earth in its entirety was in a screening at a Star Trek convention sometime in the mid-1970s, when I was about 13 or 14. Everything about the experience weirded me out. Not only had Gene Roddenberry made something other than Star Trek (somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that that was possible), but he’d made this thing about a bleak future where women oppressed men by keeping them drugged, which, I suppose, in hindsight, was meant to be some kind of feminist statement made via relatable role reversal, but to me back then just seemed ultra-creepy and misogynistic. At least, that’s my recollection some 40 years later. (Seems like my memory is pretty good. From Wikipedia: “The pilot focused on gender relations from an early 1970s perspective. Dylan Hunt, confronted with a post-apocalyptic matriarchal society, muses, ‘Women's lib? Or women's lib gone mad?’”) Be that as it may, it was pure Roddenberry, moralizing on a contemporary issue in the context of a futuristic sci fi setting.

Anyhow, it certainly seems likely that Roddenberry’s two pilots inspired the kid-friendly, dumbed-down, talking-chimp-inclusive, morality-play-of-the-week Ark II. After all, it’s not like post-apocalyptic sci fi was common on TV. And the dates line up: Genesis II was 1973, Planet Earth was 1974, and Ark II was 1976. The similarities in the heavy-handed biblical titles between Genesis II and Ark II are surely not coincidental, either. And of course, the influence of Star Trek itself is apparent, in everything from the costume design to the cast diversity (a white man, an Asian woman, a Latino teen, and, of course, a chimp) to the thinly veiled social commentary. To seal the deal, Filmation, which produced Ark II, also produced Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-1974).

Which brings me back to where I started: the announcement of a new Star Trek animated series, to be produced by CBS’ Eye Animation Productions, Secret Hideout, and of course -- Roddenberry Entertainment.

So what's it going to be like? Here’s a description from Indiewire: “The series will feature CG animation and follow the adventures of a group of lawless teens who discover a derelict Starfleet ship. Faced with such temptation, these young rebels will use the ship and along the way, learn life lessons and search for meaning and salvation.”

So basically, Ark II with a spaceship instead of a futuristic RV? (Cue music: “It's the circle of life,
And it moves us all…”)

And...hang on...didn't Discovery just get thrown into the distant future? Will there be some Federation-style civilization rebuilding? Hmm...

See, I told you I’d connect the dots.

Compare the opening of Planet Earth:

to the very similar opening of Ark II:

both cousins to the traditional Star Trek opening we know so well (here from TAS), about finding new civilizations rather than rebuilding an old one: