Tag: star trek

Star Trek: Discovery came back for Season Three, which just ended. But before dealing with that, I realized I never did a review of Season Two. Which is relevant because it not only sets up Season Three, but also an even more explicitly retro-Trek project with pre-logical Spock, Captain Pike and “Number One” in the soon-to-be-produced series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The fact that Strange New Worlds is a more logical version of retro-Trek than Discovery is one of the main lessons I took from watching Discovery Season 2.

Discovery Season 2 begins with the cliffhanger scene from the end of Season 1, where the ship came face-to-face with the USS Enterprise under Captain Pike. At this point, of course, Spock is already an officer on that ship, and Discovery established that Commander Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) is Spock’s adoptive sister. The first few episodes of Season 2 tease dramatic reunions – Burnham with Spock, Burnham with Tyler, the Discovery with the Enterprise and Stamets with Culber – that do not immediately occur. As it turns out, the Enterprise’s Captain Pike is assigned to the Discovery while his ship is undergoing repairs and Discovery is still waiting for an official captain assignment, and Pike has to tell Burnham that Spock has gone missing. This sets off an investigation by Burnham that reveals her own childhood trauma and rift with Spock, not to mention the old Trek plot device of time travel.

And as we know, time travel becomes the primary focus of the season arc, as Pike’s mission ends up working backwards to learn why a “Red Angel” is appearing at pivotal events.

As good as individual elements of the Season 2 storyline were, the whole thing just brought the problems demonstrated by Discovery Season 1 to a head. I had already mentioned one of them. Rather than create new Vulcan characters as producers did with Enterprise, producers linked Burnham’s background to none other than Sarek and Spock, which meant that comparisons with the original material were inevitable, especially in Season 2 as they made Captain Pike a central character while somehow de-emphasizing Spock.

Going back to the old characters actually worked for the Abrams movies, because the cast was able to make characters that stood on their own as people in a parallel universe but were clearly intended to evoke the concepts of the originals. This was especially true with Chris Pine, who pulled off the amazing trick of creating a character who is quintessentially James T. Kirk without being a bad William Shatner impression. Because let’s face it, no one can do a bad William Shatner impression like Bill Shatner.

The producers of Discovery weren’t as lucky. I already said I didn’t find James Frain convincing as Sarek, even though I think he’s a good actor. However this season, I was pretty impressed by Mia Kershner as his wife Amanda. The major find of this season, though, was Anson Mount as Christopher Pike. That character had really appeared only in the pilot episode “The Cage”, played by Jeffrey Hunter. (They presented a heavily made up Sean Kenney to play the maimed Pike in ‘The Menagerie’, the flashback episode made out of The Cage, to help cover the fact that Hunter refused to reprise the role after deciding not to continue after the pilot.) I liked Hunter’s version of the character. He seemed to have an edge. In the scene where he’s talking to the ship’s doctor, one gets the impression he’s a nearly burned-out military vet who has seen some shit. And in the scenes where the Talosians are trying to tempt him, he seems like he would be just as happy to retire to a ranch and raise horses.

Like most of the Discovery actors playing Original Series people, Anson Mount doesn’t really come across like the original actor, other than being the leading-man type. But in this case it works. Mount is sort of like Chris Evans in the Captain America movies: He doesn’t even try to play anything other than the True-Blue Hero, and he doesn’t need to, cause he’s so good at it. And the fact that he is obliged to see his horrible future but chooses to suffer it anyway in order to save the timeline gives Pike a sort of tragic perspective that Hunter’s character didn’t have.

As for Spock, Ethan Peck is a good actor and a pleasant presence, but he is just as much not-Leonard Nimoy as Mount is not-Jeffrey Hunter, and in this case it doesn’t work as well, because Nimoy had so much more time to put his stamp on the character, and Peck doesn’t embody Spock nearly as well as Zachary Quinto. I’m also not quite sure why, but Discovery Season 2 made the decision to make Spock more of a device than a pivotal figure, as opposed to Pike or Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) or even Tyler. It doesn’t help that he’s very not “Spock-like” in this story arc, even if there is a reason for that.

This contrast between what we have now and what the characters were is of course going to be a factor when Strange New Worlds comes out, but there is at least an attempt to emulate old-school Trek with the Enterprise crew (and uniforms) that deliberately sets them apart from the design of Discovery, and that only serves to confirm the fundamental dilemma of calling this a Star Trek show. It’s not really much of a dilemma if you are one of those old-school, politically incorrect types that never did like Discovery, but it’s a problem if you actually do like it.

And a lot of what it comes down to is this:

You couldn’t have had a character like Michael Burnham as a star character in the time of original Trek. And that’s not because the producers were lacking for “diversity” or political correctness: The progressive tone of the original series is overstated, but it was real. The pilot episode did have Majel Barrett as the executive officer. The show did give us Uhuru and Sulu. The original series cast several non-white actors, including the great William Marshall as Dr. Richard Daystrom, one of the pivotal figures in Federation science. And of course, the breakout star was a not-leading-man casting, Jewish actor playing a half-human alien.

The problem rather, was that “political correctness” worked the other way back then, and the network executives fought Gene Roddenberry and his crew over a lot of their barrier-breaking ideas. They rejected the pilot episode character (Number One) played by Barrett and barely embraced Spock, so that Barrett got demoted to playing Dr. McCoy’s nurse and Spock ended up being both Science Officer and XO. I have no doubt that Roddenberry, DC Fontana or one of the other writers could have created a character like Burnham, but given what Nichelle Nichols has described in the stress of playing Uhuru, who was only a support character, it’s pretty much impossible that networks in that time would have cast a black woman as the star of an action show.

Then there’s the fact that unlike Enterprise, Discovery never even tried to establish internal continuity with pre-Kirk Trek, with sick bay tech more advanced than Dr. McCoy’s, and a ‘spore drive’ that was probably not imaginable in the ’60s. To say nothing of the fact that they changed the Klingon makeup yet again.

Now, maybe with modern attitudes we can show the characters that original Trek clearly indicated could exist elsewhere in the Federation (just as we can now create aliens like Saru now that Trek has an effects budget above four digits), but we’re still left with the point that for an unfortunate real-world reason, Michael Burnham could not have been a pivotal figure in the history of the Enterprise and the Federation before Kirk, and therefore in order to preserve the Federation from Control (and to preserve what’s left of continuity), the best way Tyler, Spock and Pike can honor her life is to pretend she never existed and never speak of her again.

The main attraction of Discovery – ‘what if we could do old-school Trek, but with diverse characters and addressing situations we couldn’t have mentioned in the 1960s?’ – was also the show’s main weakness, because there’s a whole bunch of reasons why the Original Series didn’t have these elements, and pretending that you can take a modern premise and put it in a ‘historical’ setting doesn’t work, for the same reason it wouldn’t work if you did a remake of The Scarlet Pimpernel scripted by David Mamet and directed by Quentin Tarantino. (Though I would pay good money to watch the result.)

It basically goes back to the point I’d made in my other two reviews: In going back to established material, you are inevitably dealing with continuity issues, and it defeats the purpose of saying that Discovery is in the Original Series period when it goes out of its way to NOT feel like it. Eventually the show painted itself into a corner where the only way to resolve the setting issue was to remove Discovery from the timeline altogether – which is just what they did.

I really wanted to see Star Trek: Picard and Season 2 of Discovery, but didn’t want to pay for CBS All Access, so when they announced their 30-day free trial offer, I jumped on it.

To recap the pilot, Picard was haunted in his retirement not only by the death of Data but the deaths of Romulans that Picard failed to save after the implosion of their homeworld. But then he is approached by Dahj (Isa Briones), a girl who seems to be Data’s offspring, and who is hunted and eventually killed by Romulan agents. And in trying to find out exactly what is going on after the fact, Picard discovers that Dahj was created with a twin sister.

Picard’s main staff, Romulan refugees, tell him that the Tal Shiar intelligence agency is only a front for an even older and more sinister conspiracy called the Zhat Vash, which is specifically dedicated to the extermination of all synthetic life on the premise that it will inevitably destroy organics. This conspiracy has reached into the highest levels of Star Fleet Intelligence and turns out to be behind the android attack on Mars that led to the Federation ban on synthetic life.

So the episodes confirm that the Federation, once democratic and tolerant, has become creepy, prejudiced and crypto-fascist, because it’s been secretly under the influence of a defeated enemy which has always preferred to act with espionage and skullduggery.

I’m not sayin’, folks… I’m just sayin’.

Having already decided to find Dahj’s twin, Picard is required to find a ship and a crew and ends up with a party who are each dysfunctional in their own way: “Raffi” (Michelle Hurd) a former aide to Admiral Picard turned burned-out conspiracy theorist; Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) a young scientist who Picard interviewed for her android research but who is conflicted about helping him; Captain Rios (Santiago Cabrera), once a promising Starfleet officer who quit after witnessing his commander commit murder-suicide, and Elnor, a young Romulan warrior (Evan Evagora) whom Picard had befriended as a refugee but was abandoned when the Federation withdrew its support for Romulans. In the course of all this, Picard, after decades of diplomatic service, seems to have bought into his own hype; several times he thinks that his powers of reason and persuasion will save the day, and he usually gets shown otherwise.

Star Trek: Picard Season One is a story about a familiar hero in sunset, if not necessarily decline. I found it to be often moving, well-acted, and usually well-directed. (It stands to reason that the most fun episodes are the ones directed by Jonathan Frakes.) However, I didn’t think it was that well-written. For instance when Dr. Jurati shows up at Picard’s home at just the right time, it’s an obvious Romulan set-up, yet nobody seems to notice even after the set-up later becomes more obvious. It’s a bit pat that all the supporting characters (including Riker, Troi and Seven of Nine) all have traumas that trace directly to the current sociopolitical situation. And the scripts completely fail to address the conflict that sets the story rolling: If synthetics are being hunted by Romulans, and are banned by the Federation, and there turns out to be a whole planet of them where Dahj and Soji came from, why was it necessary to raise the twins on Earth as though they were Human?

This leads to a huge spoiler that I will have to go into because it is part of the whole premise of Season One and will reflect how things proceed with Picard in Season Two.

In the Next Generation series, the main theme of Commander Data’s story lines were his attempts to become more human (for lack of a better word). This was sometimes thwarted by prejudice against him as both an officer and a sentient being. There was at least one episode where a Federation scientist attempted to procure Data for scientific experiments, which required Picard and his crew to defend Data in court. And after Nemesis (where Data discovered his ‘B-4’ prototype and later died to save the Enterprise), it seems that B-4 was disassembled by Federation scientists and and some point after that a drone class of androids was created as a labor force. And after those androids destroyed the Mars colony, the Federation outright banned artificial life.

This is the spoiler: Dr. Soong’s descendant (Brent Spiner) found an isolated planet and used it to create an entire race of synthetics who mostly kept to themselves. Their first contact with the Federation was aborted when Rios’ captain killed the emissaries. And once Picard and Rios reach the homeworld, the androids discover that there is an entire “federation” of synthetics who are willing to exterminate all organic life to protect themselves. And in order to protect this planet from Romulan attack, the synthetics must weigh whether to summon this force, knowing that it would kill the Romulans and Federation alike and thus justify the Romulan fear.

This is the REAL spoiler: after Picard helps resolve the final confrontation, he succumbs to his previously diagnosed terminal illness. But the scientists on the planet download his brain patterns into an artificial body. And before he wakes up, Picard has a final goodbye with Commander Data, who was indeed downloaded through B-4, but who asks Picard to terminate his consciousness, having decided that life only has meaning if it is finite. (Just as well, frankly: all the gold makeup in the world can’t disguise the natural sag of Brent Spiner’s face.)

This denouement creates a certain symmetry (it also explains the digital title sequence), but there are also a couple of themes in Season One that it cuts across. One, the prejudice against synthetics would have been that much more a source of conflict if Picard himself is now an android, but now that the Federation has exposed the Romulan conspiracy in Starfleet, it’s announced in passing that the ban on synths is lifted. Not only that, the show seemed to lean heavily into the theme of age and death, with a certain parallel between character and actor: Patrick Stewart is not terminally ill, but the show is promoted as though it were Picard’s last adventure because it isn’t clear how many years Patrick Stewart has left, either. And even if Picard’s new body is basically the same as the old one minus the fatal abnormality, the fact that he has a second lease on life means that the central message of the finale – embracing mortality – is somewhat blunted.

But overall: Not bad. This series has presented a new cast of characters and reset the table on the “Prime” universe (as opposed to the setting history of Discovery or the parallel ‘Abramsverse’) so things could go in any number of directions with Star Trek: Picard Season Two. And if Patrick Stewart has to bow out, the producers could always shift focus to Cristobal Rios, The Most Interesting Captain in the Galaxy.

I forgot that YouTube was given a promotion to stream the premiere episode of Star Trek: Picard, which means I actually did get to watch it while still boycotting CBS All Access.

In this setting, which is in relative real time from the number of years that Star Trek: The Next Generation went off the air, the Federation is in a dark place. After the implosion of the Romulan sun (which unbeknownst to most people in the ‘Prime’ universe, actually created the Abramsverse), Admiral Jean-Luc Picard led a convoy to escort Romulan survivors to Mars, only to be suddenly attacked by a conspiracy of androids which destroyed much of the Romulan ships along with the Mars colony and Utopia Planitia shipyard. As a result, the manufacture of androids like the late Mr. Data is banned. Picard (Patrick Stewart) is haunted by the loss of Data (who actually died in Star Trek: Nemesis) and by the Mars fiasco, and has retired to live on his ancestral vineyard assisted by some of those Romulan refugees, writing historical analyses.

But when a young computer student in America is attacked by mysterious figures to keep her from “activating,” she experiences a psychic vision that draws her to France to seek Picard’s help. And what happens to her sets Picard on a quest to get to the bottom of a strange conspiracy. And in the last scene, where both Romulans and Humans are investigating a certain artifact, the conspiracy is very sinister indeed.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to succumb and subscribe to CBS All Access for this, but Star Trek: Picard is well worth the effort so far, combining the humanist values of Picard’s best TNG episodes with the skullduggery and intrigue that the setting has gone towards since Deep Space Nine.

At the last Star Trek convention in Las Vegas (where William Shatner was a featured guest) my sister and I went to one of the sales booths and bought the DVD that Shatner did on the production of Star Trek: The Next Generation, entitled “Chaos on the Bridge.” Shatner both wrote and directed this documentary, which runs an hour long, so one may wish to take it with some grains of salt. For the most part, he lets his subjects, the producers, writers and stars of TNG, do the talking. But Shatner, as he does, comes up with his own arc on a subject, and he sees the development of The Next Generation under original series creator Gene Roddenberry as a study in “the struggle for power.”

Paramount Studios, which owns Star Trek, had wanted to do a new series in that universe, while Roddenberry was in many respects out in the wilderness, not just because of the failure of his post-Trek projects in the early ’70s, but because of the “epic disaster” of Star Trek: The Motion Picture with the original cast. As original series writer David Gerrold puts it, “they gave him this Emeritus status, and he was a has-been.” At the same time, the various executives at Paramount who wanted the new series were simultaneously at odds with Roddenberry and convinced that they needed him to guide the new project. There are a lot of poker metaphors around this process of gamesmanship, which is also a recurring element in Next Generation.

While Shatner doesn’t really go into his Captain Kirk persona, fans of the first series will know that Roddenberry often placed Kirk as a symbol for himself, doing scripts where Kirk was split into his good and evil selves, artificially aged and otherwise forced to deal with internal challenges to his power and command. (Ironic, given that Trek fandom also gave us the phrase ‘Mary Sue.’) There’s a brief bit where someone points out that in his prime, Roddenberry saw himself as a womanizing, man-of-action type, and so made Kirk out to be that figure, but in the late 80s, when Next Generation was made, he saw himself more as the wise guide to his staff, and so made Captain Picard more in that role, the traditional executive who dispatched orders to the away team. This less active tone was a huge challenge to the writing staff in TNG’s first two seasons, as numerous people have pointed out, because without character tensions between flawed human beings (which were a huge feature of the Original Series) there wasn’t much to go on, especially since the violence of the original series was also de-emphasized. Maurice Hurley was brought in from the action-TV genre as a de facto showrunner, and he found Roddenberry’s utopian concept of the new Federation “wackadoodle” but nevertheless saw his job as trying to maintain the show’s loyalty to that vision. It was only when the show started to lean against that formula, and take up character-focused episodes under Rick Berman and Michael Piller, that the quality really started to pick up.

To simply make TNG in the first place, Paramount had to produce it in first-run syndication, which prior to cable and Netflix was the best option for a series independent of the networks. As a result it didn’t get a lot of respect, and a lot of things, and people, fell by the wayside. Denise Crosby has talked about how she ended up quitting the show out of frustration (after negotiations that Patrick Stewart likens to the Israeli-Palestinian talks), but she also amusingly points out that the support staff was so meager that “I used to go steal food off the set of Cheers.” What I didn’t know was that similar conflicts had led to the temporary removal of Gates McFadden as the ship’s doctor and her one-season replacement by Diana Muldaur. But producers pointed out that things didn’t gell with her on the set, and Muldaur, who had been on the original show, tells Shatner, “when I worked with you, we had scenes, it was all actors… by the time you got to Star Trek: The Next Generation, it was a vast technical world that had some characters placed in it.”

Such observations make this a fascinating piece to watch. However, while Shatner confines his study to the first three years of Next Generation, he doesn’t always do so in the most organized manner, and while the one-hour length means that there isn’t too much to process, it also may not be enough in some cases. For instance, Shatner really seems to hit it off with Jonathan Frakes, but he doesn’t appear in the documentary that much. Moreover, the theme of internal power struggle is often suggested but never really elaborated, perhaps because a lot of the participants are alive and agreed to talk. However while they are not explicit, the writers and other collaborators of Gene Roddenberry are quite clear that he was suffering both physical and mental decline in his final years, and prior to Next Generation needed to kick alcohol and other recreational drugs. In this respect, it’s sort of like Shatner’s opinions of other people that he’s worked with in the past and who are no longer here to tell their side of the story.

However, most of the principals of Star Trek: The Next Generation are still here, and their story is still well worth telling. Chaos on the Bridge presents a second act for both Gene Roddenberry and the universe he created, and the drama of the piece is that, with all the things that could have happened differently, it’s amazing that it happened at all.