Time Trek

Posted on January 7, 2016 by Neil Shyminsky

Writing for The Establishment, The Hooded Utilitarian’s own Noah Berlatsky recently penned a devastating critique of one of the special snowflakes of science fiction: Star Trek’s “The City on the Edge of Forever” (1967). Even if you’re not a trekkie, or didn’t watch The Original Series (TOS), you’re familiar with the trope that the plot relies on. Berlatsky tersely characterize the episode as “an elaborate exercise in justifying violence and would-you-kill-baby-Hitler ethics.” That is, in order to save the present, someone who did something evil must die in the past. To the extent that Trek offers a twist on that trope, it’s that the person who must die, Edith Keeler, is actually good.

That amplifies the emotional stakes, sure, though at the cost of the plot and drama, since we know this story can only have one possible ending. And that ambivalence – in Kirk, in the audience – does nothing to undermine the self-evident logic of the trope: the ends of time-travel will justify even the most otherwise unconscionable means.

It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. The “kill baby Hitler” trope, also known here on the interwebs as the “Set Right What Once Went Wrong” trope (SRWOWW), is ubiquitous among science fiction serials. (So much so that the 80s saw both a TV series and film franchise about this exact plot-device: Quantum Leap and Back to the Future, respectively.) So, too, are variations on it, most of which fall into one of the following categories – exercises in hubris where the results actually make things worse, fixed time loop universes where change is either impossible or semi-fixed, ironic iterations where the would-be assassins actually cause the event they’re trying to stop,and scenarios where the effects of any changes remain unknown or unknowable. To touch just the tip of the iceberg.

What allows Kirk and Spock to act with moral certainty, despite the seeming immorality of the individual act itself, is a feature that’s unique to science fiction and time-travel stories more generally: perfect knowledge of the past and its relationship to the future, of cause and effect.

[I write “unique” because this is not the same as the claim that we have access to perfect foresight and knowledge of what will happen in the future. Even when the Bush administration claimed to know that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that he would use against his enemies – which he didn’t and thus wouldn’t, as it turned out – they could never be absolutely certain. And this is why the trope is particularly insidious and the distinction between the fictional and the real is particularly important: when we invoke the logic of SRWOWW – we know this thing will happen and so we must do this other thing to prevent it – in real life, we erase that difference. We start to believe that we, like Spock, have access to perfect knowledge and awareness of the future. Spoiler: we don’t.]

This perfect knowledge? It’s artistically and politically irresponsible. It also saps the story of a great deal of tension. It’s just pain lazy. But it should be remarkably easy to fix.

Imagine if, rather than perfect knowledge of 1) the event that would change history, and 2) its effects in the future, Kirk and Spock only knew one of these things? Or perhaps neither? If Kirk and Spock know that Keeler should – from their perspective, anyway – have died but can’t know whether the world will be better or worse for it, their decision becomes considerably harder. In fact, it problematizes the kneejerk use of the modal “should”. Even if she died in their past, why does it follow that must die in this one? And could the world, in fact, be a better place for her presence?

Likewise, if they know that the future has changed in some significant way but can only guess at the cause of that change, their mission becomes a detective story that possibly reaches no concrete conclusions, only descending into a far more ambiguous morality tale if and when they figure it out. If and when they think they’ve figured it out, that is. Knowing that they can’t be certain, how confident must they be in order to justify the murder of an innocent person? And for that matter, must she die?

This got me thinking: given the love for this episode, we might assume that Star Trek would follow its formula and logic in the future. But did they? And if they didn’t, did they manage to improve on it? What follows are some reflections on what I deem to be the most creative and thoughtful exercises in time-travel logic and ethics from each of The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space Nine (DS9), and Voyager (VOY). And the first post-TOS time-travel story, for what will be some obvious reasons.

TNG – Yesterday’s Enterprise (3×15)

The Next Generation’s first time-travel episode, originally pitched with “The City on the Edge of Forever” in mind as its inspiration, is probably the series’ – if not all of post-TOS Trek’s – most infamous and best-loved time-travel story. It’s been cited by Roberto Orci as an inspiration for the rebooted Star Trek and repeatedly voted one of, if not the best, episodes of TNG. People like it, is what I’m saying.

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” has a pretty simple premise, but one that’s surprisingly hard to explain. The previous iteration of the Enterprise, from 22 years in the past, ends up in the present when it passes through a rift in space-time. As a result, the present immediately changes – the Federation is at war with the Klingons, and they’re losing. Only Guinan knows that something has changed, and even though she can’t explain why, she must convince Picard to send the Enterprise of the past to their deaths in the past.

Our first example of SRWOWW in TNG, and it provides a small twist on the model provided by “Edge of Forever.” Do we know of both the specific event that will “fix” the timeline and the effect that it’ll produce? We do, yes, because we’ve been watching the show for 3 years and we know this isn’t right. That much is pretty straightforward.

But the characters? They don’t. Sure, Guinan has some awareness that something is wrong, and that skirts uncomfortably close to a reading of the regular timeline as a timeline of destiny. But Guinan can’t explain why and the decision becomes simply a calculated risk. Maybe the Enterprise C can make a bigger difference in the past than the present. Maybe the C will survive the battle in the past. Maybe it’s even worth sacrificing the Enterprise D, given the way the war with the Klingons is going. Maybe.

I’m stretching, though. We know what Picard needs to do, and we know what’ll happen if he does it. That’s a sort of dramatic irony, I suppose, but not as different from “Edge of Forever” as it first seemed.

TNG – Tapestry (6×15)

There were plenty of episodes with time-travellers, time-loops, and temporal anomalies between “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and “Tapestry”, but none where the crew was forced into any serious ethical dilemmas. “Tapestry” begins with Picard’s ostensible death, the captain having been shot in the chest and, as a result, his artificial heart exploded. Q gives Picard the chance to re-live and change the past, thus avoiding the bar-fight that damages his fight and saving his life in the present.

Things don’t work out the way Picard hopes, though. It turns out that the fight was a defining moment of his life – the loose thread that unravels the tapestry of the episode’s title – and so the pacifist Picard leads a totally undistinguished life. Dejected and disgusted with himself, Picard tells Q that he would prefer to die as the man he was, rather than live out his life as a timid and unremarkable astrophysicist.

Like “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, “Tapestry” offers a small twist on the SRWOWW model – Picard knows what must be done, but he doesn’t know what it will change. That the alternative life is unbearably dull is a surprise, but Picard doesn’t hesitate to reverse his decision. As it turns out, of course, he didn’t actually die.

It’s an easy choice, from a story-telling and audience perspective, for Picard to restore the universe as we know it. We know this to be the correct timeline, the real one. The one where Picard doesn’t fight? Simply put, it’s wrong. And given how Picard stipulated to Q that nothing could change except for his own life, it doesn’t just feel wrong – it feels artificial.

But should it have been an easy decision? The resolution leaves me with an uneasy feeling. Picard decides that living an average life is, essentially, not worth living. He chooses death and a short but exceptional life over, well, something more like our own lives. Is being unexceptional really so bad? It would seem so, yes.

DS9 – Visionary (3×17)

This isn’t DS9’s first time-travel story – that title belongs to “Past Tense” (3×11/12), a social justice story where the time-travel element is set-dressing, rather than central to the conceit. But “Visionary” is probably Star Trek’s most fascinating and thoughtful time-travel episode, though the actual time-travel that’s involved is rather modest by comparison to the other stories in this list.

Radiation poisoning keeps sending Chief O’Brien several hours into the future. While at first just peculiar, this turns out to be very fortuitous, since it allows him to prevent both his own death and the destruction of the station. The plot is an elaborate detective story, with the crew of DS9 trying to figure out why O’Brien is shifting in time and how to stop it (and then restart it) even as they use his knowledge of the future to change it. In an added wrinkle, their actions to change the past also shifts the goalposts, as O’Brien’s time jumps reveal an altered but no less problematic future.

In a unique twist on SRWOWW, given that every other iteration to this point saw reality restored to what it once was, the iteration of O’Brien that we’ve been following this whole time dies from radiation poisoning in his final jump to the future. Knowing that he won’t survive the return trip to the past, this O’Brien sends his alternate-future-self – who is likely to otherwise die in a Romulan attack on the station – back to prevent his own timeline from being formed. In doing so, he’ll both replace and erase the “original” O’Brien, who remains in the about-to-be-erased future. It’s a mouthful to explain, but trust me: this is mad, disconcerting, and moving stuff.

In the final act, after Doctor Bashir alone has realized that the wrong O’Brien came back, this “new” O’Brien confesses that he feels like he’s living another man’s life. Bashir disagrees, arguing that he’s the same man but with just a few extra memories. It’s a subtly unsettling resolution. But why should it be? Bashir’s technically right, but doesn’t O’Brien’s point simply feel somehow more valid? It’s ultimately a very small detail, but it’s one that lingers.

VOY – Relativity (5×24)

The Voyager crew dabbled in time-travel almost immediately, considering a trip 20 years into the past in the entirely unconvincing “Eye of the Needle” (1×07). It didn’t get much better from there, unfortunately, though it would get much, much more confusing.

Relativity is a mess, both with respect to plot and time-travel logic. It seems to be using DS9’s “Visionary” as a model – Seven is being moved in and out of the timestream in order to save Voyager from a sort of time-bomb of unknown origin. These same travels are gradually killing her, somehow, but this is really the least confusing detail in the story. The surprise reveal of the villain, a future version of the same 29th Century timeship captain, Braxton, that sends Seven on this mission in the first place, is more baffling than it is alarming.

The episode does do something brand new, by adding the bizarre new concept to “reintegration” to the Star Trek universe. Rather than wiping a timeline completely so that, for instance, Braxton or Seven don’t simply forget certain events but have literally never lived them, we’re told that these versions who have now never existed and exist only outside the timestream will be reintegrated with their current selves. They’ll be combined with the person who properly belongs to the new/restored timeline. This other version of the character, once blissfully unaware, will be combined with and/or remember what the out-of-timeline character has done. Why? How? Huh? It’s an unnecessary and silly detail, and it also cheapens earlier episodes like “Visionary”, which discomfort our assumptions of belonging to a place and time, and even our own sense of uniqueness, without completing obliterating them.

“Relativity” is also a bit too self-conscious and precious. The villainous future future captain is making his second appearance on VOY, which also happens to be the second episode where he’s gone mad and declares Janeway his mortal enemy. There are also numerous, half-joking references to Janeway and the ship’s repeated travels through time and changes to the timestream. Time-travel, like encounters with the Borg, is getting awfully familiar and gimmicky at this point in VOY’s tenure, and the creators know it.

By the time the finale of VOY, “Endgame” (7×25), rolled around, time-travel in this series had become both ubiquitous and virtually meaningless. The finale appeared to follow no coherent set of time-travel rules, and knowledge of the future was seemingly employed entirely as a vehicle to tie-up every loose end and make Voyager’s win over a previously unbeatable enemy seem somehow possible. Fittingly, I suppose, in VOY’s finale a future Admiral Janeway traveled back in that episode to kill her own Baby Hitler – the Borg Queen. No questions or ethical dilemmas, here. And not even the over-rated gravitas of “Edge of Forever”. If Star Trek did learn anything from that episode, they also soon forgot it.

Spider-Man vs. Ted Cruz vs. Spock vs. Barack Obama

Posted on August 3, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I had considered Senator Cruz my least-likely-to-vote-for Presidential candidate ever, until Donald Trump robbed him of the title. Worse, I recently learned from his New York Times Magazine interview that the Tea Party favorite and I share at least one interest/obsession: superheroes. Not only did the former “unpopular nerd” describe himself as “a Spider-Man guy,” but he named his company Cruz Enterprises after Iron Man’s Stark Enterprises—a quirkiness that hovers in the sweet spot between adorable and psychotic.

Cruz might be horrified to learn that his arch-nemesis Barack Obama (Cruz likened him to Darth Vader in one of his filibustering rants) is a Spider-Man guy too. When Entertainment Weekly asked the then Presidential candidate to name his favorite superhero in 2008, the Illinois Senator chose both Spider-Man and Batman. Why? Because, Obama said, “they have some inner turmoil. They get knocked around a little bit.”

President Obama has spent his two terms getting knocked around by Republican-controlled congresses, but, like his comic book role models, he’s won many a battle “against insurmountable odds.” That’s how John McCain described Batman, the superhero the former Republican candidate championed when asked the same question.

The standard answer is Superman. When Darren Garnick and his nine-year-old son, Ari, asked the 2012 Republican primary candidates, “If you could be any superhero in the world, who would you be and why?” Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Herman Cain all went with the Man of Steel (check-out the six-minute documentary Republicans in Tights for the delightful details). Rick Santorum shook things up with Mr. Incredible, the super-dad from The Incredibles (which, unlike Mr. Santorum, is finally getting a sequel). Only Ron Paul, the only candidate older than comic books, snubbed the nine-year-old interviewer.

McCain was born in 1936, same year as Detective Comics, but most candidates (including Hillary Clinton, who has yet to be asked her superheroic preference) were born in the Golden Age of the 40s. Obama was the lone wolf, born in 1961, the year the Fantastic Four launched themselves to the moon and Marvel Comics into pop supremacy. But now Ted Cruz has him beat. Not that his birth year, 1970, is an auspicious one for superheroes. The comic book industry was in decline, and Vietnam-influenced antiheroes were flooding the market along with a new breed of horror titles.

Cruz’s birth also marks the first year without Star Trek. A fact that doesn’t stop him from preferring Captain Kirk over The Next Generation’s Captain Picard. Why? Because, he told The New York Times, Kirk is “working class,” and Picard an “aristocrat.” That actually makes Cruz a fan of President Obama’s superhero team. Obama’s other reason for endorsing the “Spider Man/Batman model” (his term) was his dislike for Superman’s lazy privilege: “The guys who have too many powers — like Superman — that always made me think they weren’t really earning their superhero status. It’s a little too easy.”

It also turns out that Obama wouldn’t vote for either Kirk or Picard. He’s a Spock guy. When he met Leonard Nimoy during a 2007 campaign event, he greeted him with the Vulcan salute. When the actor died earlier this year, the President eulogized him:

“Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy. Leonard was a lifelong lover of the arts and humanities, a supporter of the sciences, generous with his talent and his time. And of course, Leonard was Spock. Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed, the center of Star Trek’s optimistic, inclusive vision of humanity’s future.

“I loved Spock.”

Cruz isn’t quite so generous about the arts and humanities, but he does like NASA. When he became chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Space, and Competitiveness, he announced his desire to expand the U.S. space program—even though he had to laud Democratic President Kennedy in the process. Ensign Chekhov, however, will not be invited aboard the new Enterprise. According to Cruz, NASA’s partnership with the former Evil Empire, Russia, on the International Space Station could “stunt our capacity to reach new heights and share innovations with free people everywhere.”

That’s not as bold as Newt Gingrich’s pandering promise to place astronauts on Mars by 2020 (he was speaking to laid-off NASA employees at the time), but it’s still unclear how the budget-slashing Cruz would finance his space exploration. Perhaps a joint public-private venture with Stark Enterprises? Or is this a job for Superman? Or super-businessman Lex Luthor? Even most comic book readers forget that Lex won the 2000 Presidential race (a fact since rebooted out of existence several times by DC Comics).

A Cruz-Trump White House isn’t more far-fetched, right?

Chess for Androids and Evil Geniuses

Posted on November 26, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

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David Levy won the Scottish Chess Championship in 1968 and then wagered the world no computer could beat him. “The idea of an electronic world champion,” he boasted, “belongs only in the pages of a science fiction book.”

The machines rallied against him, but Chaos, Ribbit, MacHack, even the Soviets’ reigning computer champ, Kaissa, were no match for a human mind. When Levy defeated Northwestern University’s Chess 4.7 (he’d beat 4.5 the year before), he declared: “my opponent in this match was very, very much stronger than I had thought possible when I started the bet. Now nothing would surprise me (very much).”

Levy upped the bet with a $1,000. Omni Magazine threw in another $4,000 , and Deep Thought scooped it up in 1989. When Garry Kasparov faced the upgrade Deep Blue, Levy predicted the grandmaster would sweep the match 6-0. “I’m positive,” said Levy, “I’d stake my life on it.”

Kasparov won 4-2, then lost the rematch to the first electronic world champion. Kasparov likened the computer’s countermoves to the hand of God: “I met something that I couldn’t explain. People turn to religion to explain things like that.”

In Terminator mythology, this is how the world ends. Boot up the chess-playing Turk and a few inevitable moves later Skynet is nuking the planet. But back in 1968, chess was still just a game. Dr. Doom responded to Levy’s challenge with Prime Mover, a program that used agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as pawns. When Doom moved onto other nefarious activities, the bored Prime Mover rocketed out of Doom’s Latverian castle to seek players in outer space. Grandmaster, a God-like “galactic gambling addict,” responded for a three-game match in Giant-Size Defenders No. 3 (which I plucked off of a rotating, 7-Eleven comic stand when I was nine).

“Data-analysis-indicates-you-will-be-defeated,” boasts the machine.

“Your analysis is in error then, my worthy opponent,” Grandmaster retorts.

“Negative. I-am-the-Prime-Mover. Error-is-impossible. All-probability-permutations-E/M/G-Earth-Mastery-Game-cross-checked. In-each-you-lose.”

Oh, that’s right, they’re playing for—what else?—world domination. Prime Mover promised each of his alien chessmen a “governorship of some sector of the earth,” while Grandmaster wants a “permanent stable of gladiators” selectively bred from Earth’s superpowered heroes.

The crew of the starship Enterprise faced a similar fate against some other galactic gambling addicts in 1968 too. The Gamesters of Triskelion were just glowing colored brains on tiny pedestals, but they couldn’t resist Kirk’s winner-take-all wager. Combatants fought with Vulcan lirpas, but all those three-dimensional chess games Kirk played against Spock must have helped too.

In fact, Gene Roddenberry wrote his writing staff a 1968 memo demanding even more chess: “Let’s also get back to more of the colorful aspects of our Vulcan. For example — the continuing joke of his chess games with Kirk in which Spock invariably loses because of Kirk’s humanly illogical moves. Spock guesses correctly what Kirk should do but Kirk invariably makes a ‘wrong’ move which defeats Spock.”

Roddenberry’s game analysis reveals two things: 1) the creator of Star Trek didn’t play much chess, and 2) emotionless logic scares people. Every third episode, Kirk destroys a planet-enslaving supercomputer, usually by revealing its illogic and so causing it to self-destruct. Prime Mover fares no better when the Grandmaster’s Defenders win 2 of their 3 matches.

“This-cannot-be. You-cheated-you-cheated-you-cheated-you-SQUORK-”

Prime Mover knocks over the chessboard, final evidence of humanly illogical emotion conquering even a machine “programmed never lo lose.”

According to Dr. Who lore, Time Lords invented chess, but when the Doctor plays a game against the upgraded Cybermen, emotion is his weakness too. Will he save his companions (those nefarious robots have linked their lives to each playing piece) or obey the dictates of inhuman logic and sacrifice individual lives to win the larger game? Spock always sides with logic and loses, but Neil Gaiman (he wrote the episode “Nightmare in Silver”) knows more about chess than Roddenberry. The sentimental Doctor has only one choice.

He cheats.

But Ron Weasley doesn’t have that option in the first Harry Potter novel. He, Hermione, and Harry take the places of “a knight, a bishop, and a castle” in order to cross a life-sized chessboard. When a piece is lost, its opponent “smashed him to the floor and dragged him off the board, where he lay quite still, facedown” (which is slightly better than being smashed to pebbles in the film version). Eventually Ron relies on his inner Spock-like inhumanness to win: “it’s the only way . . . I’ve got to be taken.”

“NO!” Harry and Hermione shouted.

“That’s chess!” snapped Ron. “You’ve got to make some sacrifices!”

It’s a hard lesson to learn. My son is upstairs right now scribbling inside the booklet of chess puzzles his tutor assigned him. Most require some sort of counter-intuitive sacrifice, a large piece in exchange for not a piece of greater or even equal value but a game-winning position. Chess legend Paul Morphy designed one of the most famous puzzles when he was ten. Cameron wears it on a t-shirt. If you let go of your emotional attachment to your rook, your piddly little pawn will step up and win the game.

Cameron asked for lessons after winning his fifth K-8 chess tournament. His first teacher was a young guy and former national scholastic champ who focused on openings. His current is white-bearded and (Cameron noted) prefers endgames. When my wife dropped Cameron off for his first lesson, she wasn’t sure she should leave her son in such an eccentrically unkempt house, down such an isolated, wooded side road, with a stranger whose social awkwardness could be inching toward serial killer.

He and Cam hit it off fine. Chess was their bridge, the social glue. Cam’s sax teacher recommended the guy—which also explained the otherwise creepily long fingernails. He plays classical guitar. Add mathematics and hieroglyphics to his areas of expertise, and you’ve got a contender for world champ of reclusive super-geniuses.

Did Roddenberry fear all those world-dominating supercomputers for the same reasons? When he rebooted Star Trek for Next Generation, he replaced his Vulcan with an android. Geniuses are “evil” because all that computer-like intellect must require some counter-intuitive sacrifice, a pummeling of their wrong-headed but human-hearted errors. Terminator premiered during the mid-80s techno craze, when even the eminently analog Neil Young and Jethro Tull sacrificed their signature sounds for the robotic lure of drum machines and vocoders. It was like Skynet had already won.

Cameron’s chess coach wants him to think like a machine too. He should process chess patterns like his mother’s face, he says. You don’t consciously analyze features until deducing an overall identity. Looking and recognizing are simultaneous. The simile (Mom = checkmate) may sound a bit Vulcan, but the idea is true of any learned skills. Reading these word patterns requires no conscious effort either.

But I’m terrible at chess patterns. Chess Titans, the program that came with the laptop I’m typing on, tells me I’ve won only 32% of the Level 5 games I’ve played against it. My stats halved to 15% and then 8% when I ventured higher. Apparently Kasparov and his cronies have developed “anti-computer” tactics to deal with such Prime Movers, but my human illogic loses again and again. Perhaps a purely logical creature would click down to Level 4 and reap a 64% success rate. But my dogged humanity keeps me plugging away.

Humans are gluttons for punishment. We can’t help it. We’re addicts for hard-won lessons. Meanwhile, one Ron Weasley on mechanical horseback can still pummel me to pebbles. Cameron can too. But not consistently. Our current human grandmasters are holding their Skynet offspring at a draw too. The highly human Magnus Carlson (he’s twenty-two and models shirtless in fashion magazines) won the World Championship last week. His “unpredictable style of play,” one ad brags, “embodies the spirit of unconventional thinking.” And that’s all it takes to save humanity.
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Star Trek into Zero Darkness Thirty

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

J. J. Abrams is not bashful about 9/11. He blew up the Vulcan home world in his 2009 Stark Trek reboot and said afterwards he was aiming for the World Trade Center. The sequel, Stark Trek Into Darkness, literally spells it out with a 9/11 dedication in the ending credits. Not that anyone was going to miss the parallels. An enormous, hijacked spaceship takes a suicidal plunge into a 20th century-looking cityscape and levels a block of skyscrapers? I think we’ve seen this episode before.

I admit I was startled, teetering on repulsed, to see such extreme 9/11 imagery employed for mere box office fun. And the movie really is fun. Osama Bin Laden is played by Stark Trek uber-villain Khan, who’s played by—no, not the Corinthian leather guy in the white, Fantasy Island suit, but Benedict Cumberbatch, who BBC fans already adore as their most recent Sherlock (in addition to commandeering a starship, Benedict dethroned Basil Rathbone for most flamboyantly named Holmes actor).

Cumberbatch also plays Adolf Hitler. In Star Trek mythology, Khan is the abortive product of the so-called Eugenics Wars of the 1990s. Here on our Earth, we call that World War II. The Nazis were exterminating unfit races in the service of a cleaner, ubermensch-friendly gene pool. Cumberbatch’s Khan even boasts a strain of Dalek (a latent BBC gene presumably) and so wants to expand his extermination program to a universal scale.

I’ve written elsewhere (“Heirs of Slytherin the Virginia State House”) how eugenics keeps providing Hollywood with 21^st century supervillains, including most recently Voldemort, Magneto, Red Skull, and the Lizard. In my theater, Khan was scheming a room over from Iron Man 3, where evil genius Aldrich Killian upgrades himself and his minions into the “new iteration of human evolution.” But Abrams is less interested in the war of the fittest than the War on Terror.

It turns out our C.I.A. drones are fueled, literally, by more of those evil supermen. The military brass want Kirk to fire them at a targeted terrorist. No trial, no jury, just a remote control execution, what the U.S. authorizes daily in the Middle East. Obviously Spock objects. And soon we learn a rogue admiral is undermining the very principles that America—I mean, the Federation—was founded on.

The Enterprise was always a Cold War vehicle, so there’s some whiplash in the political retooling. The admiral is Peter Frederick Weller, reprising his equally treasonous role from season five of 24 (a franchise Fox is planning to reboot too). Weller wants to safeguard us against wars to come, but the real threat is the lure of vengeance. Even a liberal-blooded half-Vulcan can long to beat the murderer of his best friend into uber-pulp. But that won’t bring him back to life. Only the DNA-fit blood of a still-living superman can do that. So listen to your girlfriend, and keep your phasers on stun.

Despite the striking plot parallels, I doubt Star Trek Into Darkness is going to stir the same waters as Zero Dark Thirty. Which is too bad. More people have already seen it. Science fiction is an especially apt vehicle for allegory—though also one easily ignored (I’m still astonished how season 3 of Battlestar Galactica, an overt representation of the U.S. occupation of Iraq told from the sympathetic POV of human suicide bombers against their literally inhuman oppressors, all but escaped political analysis). American consumers prefer their entertainment entertaining, not thought-provoking. A fact Mr. Abrams fully embraces. His Star Treks are satisfying romps, spiced with just enough current events to create a pleasing patina of relevance.

The reboot of Khan is first and foremost a reboot of Khan. It even prompted my wife and son and I to look up the original episode on Hulu. For all its talk of selective breeding, the 1967 “Space Seed” is, I was surprised to find, anything but eugenically correct. Ricardo Montalbán is Mexican, a mixed ethnicity any self-respecting eugenicists would have stamped as unfit. And he plays an Indian, the warlord of a continent far far below the standards of Aryan supremacy. Eugenicists wanted to weed out not just the East, but Eastern Europe, those migrating degenerates endangering the genes that produce the likes of, say, Benedict Cumberbatch.

I don’t object to Gene Roddenberry scrambling the history books, not any more than I do Mr. Cumberbatch finding lucrative employment (Sherlock Holmes was exterminated after The Hobbit abducted his Watson, Martin Freeman). He and Zachary Quinot’s Spock (remember his villainous days on Heroes?) are ideal opponents, two super-muscled brainiacs ready to kill each other for their loved ones. Nimoy’s Spock makes a cameo too (Abrams, thankfully, does not re-explain the not-quite-a-reboot reboot premise), reminding us that noble principles (I vow never to interfere with your timeline) are plot fodder when it’s William Shatner’s doppelganger on the line.

So, yes, vanquish the supermen of evils past, put the pesky military in its Constitutional place, and let’s get this five-year mission underway. To boldly go (fifty years later, and we’re still splitting that damn infinitive) where we apparently can’t help ourselves from going again and again and again.

Wiki Trek: “That Which Survives”

Posted on September 11, 2009 by Tom Crippen

I forgot entirely about this one. It’s a harmless episode: Lee Meriwether wants to touch Kirk’s shoulder and he hides behind Sulu and McCoy. Lee Meriwether advances, Sulu and McCoy step up to her, a united front, and Kirk stands behind them. The effect is a bit like the fairtytale-theater shows I saw now and then as a kid: adults gathered on stage to do something that resembled kids playing, and to do it without identifiable scenery. An intimate effect results; it’s pleasant. I like quiet, undemonstrative ways of passing the time

She’s an android representing the dead commander of a space ship/base left long ago by aliens. Three androids in all, all of the lady captain. The ship/base’s automatic system causes the androids to try to kill intruders (which they do just by touching). Or so I think, since the plot just doesn’t really come thru for me. The upshot: the lady captain is not to blame, and the men toast her memory as her prerecorded taped message (a matte blur against the wall) explains what has been going on and how no harm was meant.

D. C. Fontana wrote the outline. Maybe it made more sense early on. But J.M. Lucas wrote the final, and I liked his stuff okay. He produced “Piece” and wrote/directed “Elaan.”

Labored snippiness. The ep is divided between the landing party’s doings and the vigil of the anxious team up on the Enterprise. The ship scenes become painful. As with so much of old Trek, the intended humor of the dialogue comes across as simple meanness. Spock apparently is the kind of boss who will respond to a perfectly clear but figurative remark by laboriously informing the subordinate that his/her remark, taken literally, does not make sense, then adding that one must not waste time. This happens again and again; the script can’t think of anything else for the characters to do. And Spock is incapable of speaking quickly, so you have plenty of time to sit there and wait for his pointless, time-wasting rebuke to trundle past. It’s maddening.

Then there’s Kirk and his snippiness toward Sulu, though Shatner does it very well: the murmured “Mr. Sulu” when he hands off Sulu’s tricorder to him after a rebuke. (I think that during the shoot Koenig was off in the midwest doing a play, which is why Sulu goes down with the landing party, mentions a meteorite in Siberia, and gets put down all the time by Kirk.)

Don’t be an Asian guy. More support for my theory that being an Asian man is the most thankless task on television: Sulu feminized, scrambling back from Lee Meriwether and squealing.

The ep features yet another nothing crisis, this time not an approaching meteorite or space plague but the impending explosion of the Enterprise. Still, there’s the reward of seeing the look on Doohan’s face when Scotty has to make that last decision and go ahead with fixing the Jefferies tube in whatever highly risky way Spock just recommended. I agree that all the second-rank regs could have done more than they were given (except Takei—acting just was not his thing), but Doohan could have done the most.

Production notes. From Mem Alpha:

In addition to the standard planet set, Matt Jefferies designed a “rocker plate” set within the set that gave the illusion of a “real” quake. Evidence of this new “rocker stage” can by the movement of the individual “plates” on the stage, followed by sequence of the landing party stepping off it onto the main stage and resting on their hands and knees …

The bypass valve room that Watkins enters consists of re-used pieces of the Yonada control room from “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky“. The control panel was re-used from the Vians torture chamber in “The Empath“.

A new access tube was created to show where the matter-antimatter reaction chamber was. Designed by Matt Jefferies, it had sliding doors accessing the crawlway. …

Spock’s calculation device was a reused of the remote control prop created for “Spock’s Brain“.”

The central chamber which housed the outpost‘s central brain was created especially for this episode. Designed by Jefferies, … the central chamber contained a “frosted 2^D cube – rotating lights inside.””

Sulu mentions the Hortas of Janus VI from “The Devil in the Dark“. “

That last one went right by me. I think it’s a real stride for continuity because it’s gratuitous. Writers have to remember that phasers can fire on stun and that Vulcans don’t show emotion. But whoever threw in the horta did so for the hell of it, just because continuity is fun. That’s when the habit really starts to entrench itself.

(The makeup around the eyes could be a wall painting; the lashes are like a sculpture … sorry, that sounds a bit like a Troy McClure. Anyway, I think Trek did this to its heroines’ eye makeup a lot more in the third season; at least I’ve started it noticing just recently.)

Lee Meriwether, b. 1935 in LA. I thought she was fine. She’s given absolute dumbass s.f. exposition dialogue and has to deliver it w/ an android affect, a deadly combination. But she gets thru okay. Says she was a reg on Time Tunnel, so maybe that had toughened her up.

Won Miss America in 1955, married 1958, divorced 1974; two girls b. 1960, 1963. IMDB lists 43 screen appearances as “Self,” starting w/ Miss America, 84 as an actor, starting in 1954 with The Philco Television Playhouse, 3 eps., but picking up in 1958, an appearance on The Millionaire, then Bilko, etc. Around her Trek ep, the Time Tunnels, two Batmans (not counting her movie appearance), Land of the Giants, Mannix, The Name of the Game, six eps of Mission: Impossible because Barbara Bain had left. Since the 1990s her main work has been 38 eps of a soap, All My Children, plus some movie roles here and there.

Hey, meat! Old Max Kirkland in the Police Academy movies, and a blueshirt who died like a redshirt.

Arthur Batanides, b. 1922 in Tacoma, Wash. IMDB lists 122 acting jobs. His first was for a tv show called Out There in 1951; his last was Police Academy 6 (1989). Wiki says he was the police sergeant in a 1959 crime show called Johnny Midnight. Around his Trek ep he was doing Death Valley Days, Run Buddy Run, The Man from UNCLE, Time Tunnel, The Green Hornet, Lost in Space, Cimarron Strip, I Spy (5 eps as “Rocco), Wild Wild West (4 eps), Gomer Pyle USMC (3 eps but not the same character), The Mod Squad, “Tony” in The Maltese Bippy, and so on.

… Accidental Family. What a great title for a mid-60s tv series. From The Brady Bunch on, you could imagine the premise. But pre-Brady — what the hell?

Sulu’s replacement. She gets a lot of lines, actually. She’s Spock’s feed for much of the tense helming that must be done because of the forces unleashed by the Lee Meriwether androids. In “The Paradise Syndrome” she helps dress the Indian princess and tells her to buck up. Her character’s name in this one is Rahda. IMDB says she was in The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968) as “Indian Squaw” and the series Korg: 70,000 B.C. as Mara (1974). That’s it, that’s the list.

Harvard grad. Dr. M’Benga played by Booker Bradshaw, b. 1940 (or ’41) in Virginia. Wiki says, “an American record producer, film and TV actor, and Motown executive.” In the 1970 his IMDB credits are mainly for writing tv scripts (did a Columbo, a McMillan and Wife, a Jeffersons, a Rockford, credits on 4 eps of Richard Pryor’s 1977 variety show, bunch of others). Cartoon voice work in the ’80s. Career started in 1960s with “Prince Nicholas” in a Girl from UNCLE (1966), 2 eps as “Dr. B’Dula” on Tarzan, then 2 eps as Dr. M’Benga on Trek, tailed out in early ’70s. Howard Brunswick in Coffy (1973), Lucas (militant, I guess) in The Strawberry Statement (1970).

Wordless, beautiful redshirt. Brad Forrest, birth year unknown. He did “Which” in 1968 and an episode of Man in Space (“Dateline: Moon”) in 1960. That’s it.

Hogan’s Heroes reg. “He is perhaps best known for playing Sgt. Richard Baker during the final season of the television series Hogan’s Heroes.” Kenneth Washington, b. 1946, IMDB lists 26 acting jobs, couple as a kidm, then picks up in 1966 with “Man” in a I Dream of Jeannie, “Corporal” in My Three Sons, a policeman in Dragnet 1967. Did his Trek episode in the same period he was doing about a half dozen eps of Adam-12 as “Officer Miller,” eventually his 24 eps on Hogan’s Heroes, the ’70/71 season, and after that things dwindle: “Guard” on 2 Rockford eps in 1977, etc.

Wiki Trek: “Wink of an Eye”

Posted on September 10, 2009 by Tom Crippen

Another of the 4 eps that I’m missing. Involved a sort of Julius Schwartz s.f. idea, but one that Mem Alpha says had already shown up on a Wild Wild West ep back when Gene L. Coon produced that show; Coon also did the outline for “Wink,” part of his batch of contractually obliged script work done after he left Trek. The ep idea: people moving so very fast that they can’t be seen, and the movement isn’t running or push-ups, it’s vibrating. The ep uses the idea as justification to claim that an entire civilization could exist and be invisible to us, perceived only as an occasional buzzing sound like that of an unseen insect. I would guess that this notion takes the idea further than Wild Wild West did. In other words, “Wink” is another third-season ep with a premise that’s pretty advanced and complicated for tv s.f. of the time.

But I get all this from synposes. The ep itself is clean gone out of my mind. It appears to have been another arrogant-advanced-race set-up, with a queen interested in Kirk.

From Mem Alpha:

At the beginning of the episode, Scotty is shown on the bridge recording a log while other dialogue is played over this scene. The footage is reused from “The Empath“. This is evident because Scotty wears a very different hairstyle, and another woman takes the place of Uhura

… only one set, a fountain, which was designed by Matt Jefferies.

The environmental engineering room, also designed by Jefferies, was a redress of the briefing room set.

The Scalosian weapon, also designed by Jefferies, was made from lathe-turned aluminum, and measured approximately 6 ¾” in length. … The weapon made a sound identical to Klingon disruptors and the Ardana torture device in “The Cloud Minders“.

This was Andrea Weaver‘s last episode as women’s costumer. She went on to join another Desilu production, Mission: Impossible.

The queen, b. 1930, in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Married Darren McGavin year after “Wink,” stayed married. IMDB lists 85 acting jobs; start: ep of The Gray Ghost (1957), end: 2 eps of Love Boat (1980). Around the time of “Wink,” parts in Laredo, Mr. Terrific, Felony Squad, The Wild Wild West, Hondo (5 eps, recurring role), The Big Valley, The Name of the Game (which had an ep titled “Shine On, Shine On, Jesse Gil”), Get Smart, The Outsider, Love American Style.

Epicene alien, b. 1922 in NYC; orig name: Herb Evers. Dropped out of high school, went into army, then became actor. Took a long time to get anywhere, never did anything too big, but he worked steadily for years. Quite a looker. IMDB lists 109 acting jobs, starting with extra work in Guadalcanal Diary (1943), ending with “Lou the Editor” in Basket Case 2 (1990). Was getting tv work thru most of the ’80s, primetime mystery/crime dramas for old folks. Around time of “Wink” he was quite busy, doing guest shots on Bonanza, The Invaders, Three for Danger, Tarzan, Run for Your Life, Judd for the Defense, Capt. Coleman in The Green Berets, The Wild Wild West, It Takes a Thief, The Mod Squad, a recurring part on The Guns of Will Sonnett (as Walter Brennan’s son).

Look at this guy! B. 1922 in Sandness, Norway. He was in Stargate (Prof. Longford) and Titanic (Olaf Dahl), the fire commissioner in Ghostbusters II, did a St. Elsewhere ep (Dr. Sven Hosltrum), “Hotel Travel Clerk” in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966). Imdb lists 80 acting jobs, starting with 2 a two-parter for GE True (1962, so he was 39 or 40), ending with a part (Sven Halleus) in some kind of wacky comedy called Formosa (2005). Around “Wink,” he was doing The Invaders, The Outcasts, Bonanza, Guns of Will Sonnett, “Digger” in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, 3 eps of Mission: Impossible in minor roles.

Dead redshirt, no birth year. “He was so young!” Kirk says, because the guy’s character has to age really fast and die. IMDB lists a dozen acting jobs. “Wink” was his first, followed by Medical Center a couple of years later, then a dribble of parts: Room 222, Mod Squad, Adam-12, nothing big. In 1974 he played J. Edgar Hoover’s special friend, Melvin Purvis, for a TV movie about Pretty Boy Floyd. “Second Warrior” in an ep of Battlestar Galactica (1978). Last role: Mike O’Malley in a movie called Raw Force (1982).

Stunt redshirt, no birth year. Eddie Hice, Mel Apha says he’s “a stuntman, stunt coordinator and second unit director whose work includes films such as all of the four Planet of the Apes films,” plus lots else. IMDB lists acting jobs that start in 1959 (two eps of The Texan) and end in Hard to Hold (1984, he was “Waiter”). Stunts start with a Get Smart in 1965 and end in 2007 with the film Georgia Rule. Around “Wink” his stunts were mainly for films, including Countdown, Bonnie and Cyde and MASH. Acting he had 3 eps of Get Smart (“Blindfolded Accountant”). In 1970 a part in a movie called The Girl in the Leather Suit, part was “Red Beard”—bet he was some menacing young hipster hanging out in vicinity of the girl in the suit.

Unknown aliens. She’s a looker, though maybe her face is too long for tv. The poor guy is being humiliated by costume and wig.

Wiki Trek: “Plato’s Stepchildren”

Posted on September 9, 2009 by Tom Crippen

This is another of the four episodes I’m missing. Saw it last summer but not this summer, so I’m going from memory and the relevant Web sites.

Another ancient Greek temple found in outer space? All right, I guess that stuff is okay. As long as the plot doesn’t have too many wide-open structural faults and people don’t just stand around and let their mouths run with no result. This ep has a lot of horsing around induced by telekinesis, so I guess that helped move the show along

A good line for Spock in one of his McCoy banter sessions: “I have noted that the healthy release of emotion is frequently unhealthy for those closest to you.”

… A 1967 NBC musical special called Movin‘ with Nancy, starring Nancy Sinatra. Mem Alpha mentions the program because on it she kissed Sammy Davis hello, making for the first interracial kiss on U.S. tv. Kirk and Uhura were second.

Mem Alpha says:

… both Shatner and Nichols claim in Star Trek Memories that NBC exerted pressure to forbid lip contact, and to use a clever camera technique to conceal the “separation.” If you look closely at the image, you can tell that the actors’ lips are not touching, the angle only makes it look like they might be slightly touching.

MemAlp: “Leonard Nimoy composed ‘Maiden Wine,’ the song that he performs in this episode.”

Michael Dunn, b. 1934 in Shattuck, Okla., “during the Dust Bowl drought,” Wiki says. Orig name: Gary Neil Miller. He had a high IQ and a dynamic personality. He entered the University of Michigan just before he turned 17, then transferred to University of Miami, where he became an all-around campus star (check out the Wiki account, it’s interesting). At 23 he became an actor in New York theater but soon moved on to Hollywood.

Dunn made a career of dramatic roles, received a Tony nom for Best Supporting in 1964, an Oscar nom for Best Supporting in 1965. These were for performances in highbrow vehicles, adaptations of Carson McCullers and Katherine Anne Porter. When somebody needed to make a visual statement about the condition of mankind, Dunn was right there and ready to go. So again with “Plato’s Stepchildren,” I guess, given the ep’s statement about human dignity and what it means for a human to be worth something.

IMBD lists a lot of mid-’60 guest shots: Get Smart, etc. Most notable are his 10 eps with Wild Wild West as a villain, Dr. Miguelito Loveless. (Some enthusiastic discussion of his performance at the blog The College Crowd Digs Me. Warning: I took my Dunn photos from this post, so it may look a bit familiar. Still, there’s also a clip of Dunn doing one of his Loveless scenes.)

The actor died at age 38. Per Wiki, rumors of alcoholism were contradicted by autopsy reports, nothing to back up suicide rumors either. His lungs had trouble functioning because of the shape forced on his body by the condition that had made him a dwarf.

The Kirk/Uhura kiss—I really don’t remember it. Mainly I was embarrassed by the presence of the dwarf, a dumb reflex I have. The actor did fine and the character played a big role in the story, though he also had to put up with Kirk’s speech about how even short people are respected by the Federation. There’s a lot of gratitude on the character’s part: “That’s the first time anyone’s thought of my life before his own.”

The mean man, b. 1923 in Jacksonville, Ill. Wiki says he played a lot of villains. IMDB lists 113 parts. Start: tv show Lights Out in 1950; finish: “Reporter” in George Wallace, a 1997 tv movie. Around the time of his Trek role he was doing Gunsmoke, 26 eps as a reg on The Monroes, Dragnet ’67, Family Affair, Bracken’s World, Daniel Boone.

The mean lady, b. 1937. This is Barbara Babock again, so see the post here.

Only known appearance. Ted Scott, no birth year, as giggling flunky.

Attending fop. Derek Partridge, no birth year. IMDB lists 25 roles. Start: two eps of Studio 4 in 1962 (“Stamboul Train” and “Flight into Danger”); finish: “Doctor” in a Murder, She Wrote in 1989.

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