Criticult.Com

Last post I promised you - inspired by my reading someone else's blog - elaboration on what I once predicted were the things that would kill Star Trek. Now that they have come to pass and we are again on the thresh hold of an unholy reanimation of the decayed old franchise, I give to you, the things I hate about Star Trek. This is by no means a complete list and I will add to it as I see fit.

Particularly if the upcoming movie reboot is as dreadful as I think it will be.

1. Anybody remember how the Enterprise was always the only ship within five hundred light years whenever something happened? This always ensured they would go into every situation alone and without backup. I know I know – they were on a five year mission in uncharted space – but it became a lazy contrivance the show leaned on one too many times across each incarnation of the show. For all that high minded talk of the Prime Directive our heroes were rarely in a position where they felt they actually had to follow it because the nearest help was always on the other side of the galaxy.
2. Speaking of the Enterprise, has anyone ever noticed how many times the ship was successfully hijacked? How many times did Kirk, Picard, Janeway, Sisko, Tom Dick or Harry lose control of their command and have to go commando on board their own ship to get it back? Not only is it apparently a piece of cake to commandeer a Star Fleet vessel, there don’t seem to be any repercussions for the crew that lets it happen.
3. Then again, this may be why it is so damn hard for minorities to get anywhere on that show. You’re telling me Sulu was the best helmsman in the fleet but it took him twenty five years to make Captain? Last time we saw Uhura she was doing the same thing she was back in 1967 – sitting around answering the phone. Sure they made Chekov first officer of the Reliant, and as soon as they made the Brother in charge of the ship kill himself poor Pavel's Gypsy ass is back in his old seat next to Sulu, working the turn signals again. So much for all that racial equality. And don’t bother reminding me about Sisko. They finally put a Brother in charge and he's the most boring schmuck they could find. I don't know about you but I am thinking Affirmative Action is alive and well in the 24th Century. And Richard Daystrom, the black man who invented the Duotronic computer? Yeah, he also almost blew up the Enterprise, went insane and was locked away in Space Prison. A Brutha can’t get a break even on the other side of the galaxy. Damn.
4. But never mind the minorities, there was always the one Fish-Out-of-Water Character™ on the show who was bizarrely different from the rest of the crew but warmly endearing because all he or she wanted to do was be just…like…us. Spock was the first one, but he wasn’t weird enough so eventually they gave us Data the Self Conscious Android, Odo the Obsessive Compulsive Shape Shifter, the neurotic Holo-Doctor from Voyager, Seven of Nine the Super Hot Cyborg, and perhaps the most odious of them all – Jar-Jar Neelix and his elf-like little girlfriend Kes. Barf. What is it with all these aliens who are perpetually unable to be proud of what they are that they want to be like us? And what’s up with the crew always letting them think that way? What’s so great about being human, anyway? Just so you can pay lip service to the uniqueness of every other race in the galaxy but never let them forget how different they are from you by constantly bringing it up? What are we, a race of politically correct galactic rednecks who speak about equality when it's convenient but can’t resist the occasional inference that you just don’t quite measure up? Why not remind Data that there’s no need for him to be human because he can bench press a thousand pounds, has an IQ of 1200 and according to Tasha Yar, is hung like a racehorse? He's actually better than we are! Because the way to control someone you view as inferior is to keep them neurotic by never letting them suspect that you might view them as an equal.
5. The transporter! It beams you up, it slices, it dices, it gets the writers out of tight spots that pen and paper just can’t handle; it does everything! What started as one of the coolest ideas in science fiction eventually became a do it yourself cure-all-plot-hole-spackle that usually functioned at the expense of creativity. Someone’s contracted a deadly disease? No problem, just run them through the transporter and it will magically restore them to a previous quantum state. Someone’s being held hostage on an enemy vessel with shields up? Don’t worry, just phase the transporter with the shield rotation cycle and magically rescue them. Chief Engineer Scotty is dead? No he’s not; he ‘suspended’ himself in the transporter beam at the last minute so that he could be conveniently resurrected by the guy who has his job today! Just watch how it slices through this tomato even after cutting through 100 aluminum cans! Unfortunately it also splits people into good and evil twins, sometimes accidentally sends people back in time and like most of the technology in Star Trek, only works like it’s supposed to when the plot requires it to. If anything on the real U.S.S. Enterprise was as unpredictable and gimpy as the transporter the Navy would yank it off the ship immediately.
6. This brings me to the way the potency of the weapons they use on Star Trek depend entirely on the plot. Sometimes one photon torpedo will blast a ship to smithereens – other times it takes two dozen. Sometimes the ship’s phasers could knock a dime off a Romulan’s ass half a light year away. Other times they can’t hit shit. Sometimes a photon torpedo is enough to kill a powerful God-like alien such as the one in Star Trek V: The One That Never Happened, but Captain Kirk is able to survive the blast by just diving behind a nearby rock. I’m just saying, the only thing he suffered was a dirty uniform.
7. Speaking of uniforms, why is it necessary for Star Fleet to change uniforms so often? The US Army have worn more or less the same thing since the fifties but Star Fleet changes duds every 22 episodes. Remember the pajamas the characters wore in season one of Next Generation? They never stopped tinkering with them all the way through Deep Space Nine and Voyager. First they were one piece, then they were two, then there were no collars, then there were, then the stripe went this way, then it went that way, then the buttons were over here, then they were over there. Pleats, no pleats, poly-cotton blend, Rayon...everyone on one show dressed slightly different from everyone on another show. Listen, I’m no idiot. They’re just trying to periodically add some spice to the series, the way they periodically have to blow up the Enterprise and replace it with a slicker looking version, or whip out the old 'kill off but not really kill off a character because he ducked into a time vortex at the last minute and will return next season' trick. It’s just that when you resort to goofy little tricks at the expense of creative story telling to keep the show fresh you use up your creative capital pretty quickly.
8. Time travel. Enough. With. The. Time. Travel. Apparently for some reason the cast of one Star Trek series or another were present at almost every historical event of any importance in the past 500 years. Whether through actual time travel or through some other form of trickery that technically qualifies as time travel our heroes have: Narrowly averted nuclear war with the Soviets, tangled with the Nazis, matched wits with someone who I am pretty sure was supposed to be Bill Gates, gone ten rounds with Genghis Khan, spent a day in Sherlock Holmes' shoes, saved the whales, lent Jack London money to start his writing career, helped invent warp drive, the transporter and the phaser, met their own evil twins about twelve times, hung out with Mark Twain, Abe Lincoln, Robin Hood and his not-so-merry men...uh...invented fire, paper and the wheel...and then hung around to watch the Earth cool just for kicks. Hey look – some of the very best Star Trek episodes (and I am talking about four, five maybe out of the hundreds of total episodes of all the shows) were time travel episodes, but many more of the less memorable ones were as well. I am not saying that a science fiction show shouldn’t examine things like time travel on occasion. But for a series that prides itself on being (arguably, remotely) scientifically relevant you would think they’d at least give a nod to the fact that time travel (unless you're Doctor Who) just isn’t something that conveniently happens to you all the time. And sorry – I am just not willing to accept, even on a fictional level – that everyone who has ever served on a ship called Enterprise all know each other. No wonder the carrier Enterprise was the most decorated ship in World War II. Because Mister Spock was aboard!
9. All the moralizing. Look, I understand that Star Trek – at least at the beginning – was from the high brow school of science fiction, despite the go-go boots and girls’ asses hanging out of their uniforms. Most of the stories were allegorical in nature, meant to make us think about complex subjects by simplifying and humanizing them. However not only has Star Trek pumped the well dry on its own formula it’s been aped by every other science fiction franchise in existence. Trek has almost become a victim of its own success. I’m not necessarily suggesting they need to abandon all the trademarks of their storytelling – or maybe I am. Gene Roddenberry certainly didn’t invent allegory, nor was he the first science fiction writer to think about it or to bring it to television. But for this sort of adult storytelling to be a part of a science fiction oriented adventure series was unique. The problem is that we’ve seen it all before. Black and white allegory is so transparent – let’s drop the formula and think in broader terms. It probably wouldn’t have hurt the show to experiment with longer story arcs, and being more flexible with its episodic format. But by the time Next Generation rolled around, Roddenberry had far more latitude than he had when NBC was calling the shots and the show’s pedantic moralizing became even heavier handed. The Enterprise became a country club in space manned by a crew of self important Space Liberals. And there they went, rocketing through the galaxy with their clean cut families in tow, sipping Chardonnay and quoting Shakespeare, lecturing to other cultures about the superiority of their way of life:
   
   

“We too were once backward, foolish savages such as you. But we abandoned our warlike ways and learned that our differences are what truly make us one. We coalesced into a perfect Socialist collective that no longer cherishes violence, uses money, sees color, or recognizes people as individuals. Technology is our God and we are yours. Aspire to join us and yea, verily when I return to my gleaming city in the sky I will consider your application from on high.”

Yeah, you hear yourself laughing. You know it’s true. You can almost close your eyes and hear Patrick Stewart bellowing at some lumpy headed alien ambassador before dematerializing back into the ether with a flourish. I can get a sermon at church, or from Michael Moore. I like my science fiction on the brainy side but do try and exercise some subtlety, kay?

10. Every planet they visit is populated by 30 people and looks suspiciously like Southern California. Yeah, they’re on a budget. This would be why on Stargate SG-1 every planet in the galaxy looks like Washington State. I’m just telling you I’ve noticed.

11. Every alien race just looks like the guy from the soap commercials with some putty on his forehead. Again I know – there’s a budget. Once again I’m just telling you I’m wise to it.

12. The Disease of the Week episode, where some or all of the crew is infected by a rare alien microbe for which there is no cure, but the Doctor nonetheless manages to spontaneously invent one, just in time for the last commercial.

13. All the villains have been neutered. Remember the Klingons? Yeah well they’re like pets now. They growl from time to time but they know who has the kibble. And the Borg, one of the most ingeniously diabolical sci-fi villains ever? Yeah they were ruined in First Contact. What was once an unstoppable, immortal collective of soulless cyborg worker bees with no command hierarchy to outwit became just another gang of ordinary thugs with an ordinary moustache twirling ham running the show. Sorry, I meant ‘ordinary’ hip swinging tart in a bat-suit. It turns out that the Borg aren’t exactly a collective, strictly speaking. They have a Queen Bee who’s just as good at mind numbing academic discourse as Picard. Of course, she’s not smart enough to realize that her insane Rube Goldberg plan to destroy humanity by keeping us from meeting the Vulcans is pointless and overly complex. All the stupid bitch had to do was drop off a couple of drones in 1860 wait a couple of days, come back and make robot Abraham Lincoln kneel before Zod.

14. The techno-babble. What do I mean by that, you say? O, you know how when power to the warp core suddenly drops thirty five percent due to a plasma rupture in the EPS conduits adjacent to Jeffries tube 32 or a spike in zeta-chronoton particle emissions overloads the shields and forces a temporary power shunt from life support. Then of course, there’s the old transporter malfunction caused by a failure in the polymer integrity of the dorsal buffer probe that overloaded the Heisenberg compensator. Huh? Look, I imagine that some of the conversations aboard a real naval vessel are equally confusing to the lay person so I don’t necessarily have a problem with them trying to replicate that – to an extent. But all too often minute after minute of screen time is taken up with this nonsense in place of any sort of meaningful story momentum. I really wondered sometimes whether or not it was sometimes said in meetings:

“Look, at this point we’re about thirty minutes into a forty minute episode. Just kill five with some bullshit about running an interior baseline diagnostic on the isolinear input generator, we can put in a commercial here, Doctor Crusher cures the disease in five, commercial, Picard gives a speech about how this proves humans have overcome their violent ways to work together for the benefit of all and…roll credits."

15. It would appear that no art, literature, music or any other form of entertainment will be in use for the next 400 years. Ever notice how everyone on Star Trek is obsessed with Shakespeare, Mozart, or generally people and things from the 20th Century? Doesn't anybody watch whatever the hell is on television in the 24th Century? Did Khan take away all the books when he took over the world? Are the Dallas Cowboys no longer around? Were there no brilliant scientists on Earth after Einstein and Stephen Hawking - and that drunken asshole from First Contact? What the hell is wrong with these people?
16. Wesley Fucking Crusher. Enough said.
    

I could go on, but you get the idea. Star Trek is an old tea bag that’s been used 50 times. The product is just watered down, tired and worn out. Remember what I said earlier about the Bond movies? You remember how each one had a megalomaniacal super villain with the island fortress and an evil sidekick with the freakish physical deformity? It got to the point where anybody who had seen one could probably write one, and the average Star Trek episode – or movie – was no exception.

My suggestion back in 1996 was that since Next Generation had run two years longer than it probably should have, Generations had been 90 minutes of pointless dreck and the bastard monstrosity that was First Contact had removed what little credibility remained from the franchise, it was time to just let it go. Give it a rest for a few years to be sure, but I was okay just letting Star Trek go away with what dignity it had left before it overstayed its welcome to the point that Paramount itself had to put a bullet in it. Well here we are 12 years later, and I think almost everyone can agree that my dire prediction has come true and I am here to tell you it was even more horrific than I’d imagined.

Is there hope for the franchise? I really don’t think so. The upcoming Star Trek ‘reboot’ includes an old cast member (Leonard Nimoy), a time travel story partially lifted from an episode of the original series and a ubiquitous, overexposed director who is the first guy that gets called whenever Judd Apatow isn’t available.

Oh great, we couldn’t just have a reboot with an original story, concept and actors, No, we have to continue carrying 40 years of baggage along with it just to please the dwindling number of obsessive compulsive nerds who can’t let go of the original show.

It’s the exact…same…way the last iteration of Star Trek began in 1987. But don’t listen to me. What could possibly go wrong? Flame me if you want Trekkies, but it happened before and it will happen again - and there's nobody to blame but yourself. I saw the light and tried to warn other fans but you didn't want to listen. Star Trek died because it failed to change and adapt - because fan's refused to let it! Star Trek always had to stay the same - the stories, the cast, everything. No matter how boring, cheesy, old or fat anything or anyone about it got, you wanted the status quo.

Well that's fine, that's the way you wanted it. Just remember that things which fail to change and adapt eventually outlive their usefulness and become extinct. There's a reason the word 'dinosaur' is an adjective as well as a noun.

And Star Trek, unless a lot of things change - beginning with the fans - is the biggest lizard going in the world of science fiction. Live long and prosper kids, for you have killed Star Trek, and it will do neither.

Get it? That's from episode #30!

Oh shit, I did it again.

Labels: Star Trek