Shadows of the Pure Story

I was watching Season One of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds again, in anticipation of the Season Two. Someone had mentioned some issues with the established Original Series canon and that was swimming around in my brain. I don't care all that much about canon, generally. In fact, unless you're a theologian or something, I will probably tune you out as soon as you say that word. Anyway, I found myself thinking through prequels and the changes they inevitably make to the storyline.

Strange New Worlds is about the Enterprise's travels before the Original Series. If you try to pretend you're watching a continuous series starting with Strange New Worlds, though, inconsistencies start to show up. There's the strictly visual parts, of course, like the way the various locations inside the ship look, that everybody seems to have much roomier quarters now than later, the different uniforms, and stuff like that. 

There are actual story issues too. Like, in "Amok Time," (original series) everyone is shocked that Spock is sort of married. Uhura and Chapel are both there, and they shouldn't be surprised at all. Chapel, especially, after "Spock Amok" (current series). Nobody seems to have heard of the Gorn in "Arena" (original series) and they show no recognition even when they see who Kirk is fighting. Lots of people talk about the Gorn throughout Strange New Worlds, though. You'd think someone might have said, "Hey, isn't that one of those guys who used to lay eggs in us all the time?"

I don't see these things as weaknesses, though, and I think I've figured out why.

Imagine telling stories as a sort of Plato's Cave scenario. Somewhere outside is the pure story, the story everyone is trying to tell. Neither the original episodes nor the prequel episodes are the pure story; they're just the closest their writers (and special effects people) are able to get to it. It's okay for minor inconsistencies to pop up as long as you're honestly trying to translate your part of the story, because it's impossible for any medium to convey the pure story; our stories are only shadows. 

I've been percolating the idea of a pure story behind the story for a while, because, in a slightly different form, it was the idea behind the next novel I want to do and, to a lesser extent, The Nameless Way. (I'm still working on The Nameless Way. I've just organized some notes about the other one in a Scrivener file so I can write down ideas  as I come up with them.)

Anyway, there was this space opera comic strip I did when I was eleven or so years old, just a grid on sheets of notebook paper. There's a considerable stack of those that I've somehow managed not to lose over the years. What I've been planning to do with those is study it like it's a bad translation of a great story, a transmission I was trying to relay, but couldn't get right. 

Obviously, that's not what happened, but the conceit takes some of the pressure off. I don't have to make up the story; I just have to translate it.

That's the idea, anyway. I've gotta finish The Nameless Way before I can go start something else, and, at the speed I've been going, who knows if I'll ever pull that off.

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Hippies in SciFi

Jack Kirby: Hippies are super-heroes.

Star Trek: Hippies are charming with a bizarre mixture of scary underhandedness and child-like naivete. 

Tolkien: Hippies (tree-herders instead of just tree-huggers) are serving the Dark Lord if they don't give it up and join the war effort. 

Star Wars: What he said. If you're happy, it's probably because you're evil. 

Farscape: What's a hippie? Is that one of Crichton's weird Earth-monsters?

Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Hippies make their living by selling drums made from the skin of peaceful aliens they've murdered.

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In Search of Spock Actors

I guess Ethan Peck won't really be Spock until he reboots In Search Of.

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Strange New Hell Yeah!

Discovery and Picard both tried to give us Star Trek with modern sensibilities. They didn't really succeed at either. The first part came off as self-indulgent and insincere. The second part came off more like parody than representation. Strange New Worlds gets it right.

I thought Star Trek -- any kind of Star Trek I cared about, anyway -- was gone for good. Strange New Worlds is proving me wrong. 

Let's start with the look. The original Star Trek was strikingly colorful. It wasn't just the uniforms; they'd splash walls in the background with bright colors. It looked like a comic book. You can say it was just to cover the cheap sets, but you'd be missing the point. Intent is beside the point. If you think it matters, you don't understand art at all. The point is that the original series had a unique style which has largely been abandoned. Until now. Strange New Worlds doesn't do what the original series did with the lights; modern audiences, myself included, would think that was silly. What it does do, though, is give us a delicious rainbow of bright candy colors. I could watch it in Hungarian and still sigh at the beauty of it.

And it's an episodic sci-fi show! FINALLY! Much as I loved Deep Space Nine, I don't need another long story-arc show. Even DS9 started out episodic, anyway. If arcs develop, and they probably will, I'll take them as they come. I'm just happy that we're starting out with fun, interesting science fiction stories that start, develop, and are resolved in one hour. 

And let's talk about those stories. So far we've had The First Contact story, The Godlike Alien story, and The Outbreak story. Classic sci-fi stuff when you boil it down to basic elements, but each one of those stories is its own original story. It's not like when The Next Generation copied the original series episode where everybody gets drunk and all they added was robot sex and a slightly different explanation. 

What we're getting in Strange New Worlds are new stories. As with any story, someone has written the log line before, but it's not the idea that matters; it's what you do with it. I was especially impressed by the most recent one, in which we're left wondering if maybe a cherished Star Trek law is actually a kind of bigotry. And they didn't do this in a "you liked that show because you're an idiot" way. They did it the way artists do it; by letting the details work themselves out. And they resolved the legal dilemmas in the Star Trek spirit, with humanity and mercy over reflexive judgement.

I'm not going to go into detail on the way the characters are written, but I love it.

So yeah, go watch Strange New Worlds. If you don't wanna subscribe, maybe wait until the season's over and pay for one month to binge it or something. I don't know. Do whatever works for you. If you like Star Trek, though, I think you'll really like this. 

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Lincoln Escapes

I dreamed last night that I met Omar and Bodie from The Wire while I was having a snack at Carnage. They took me to a Star Trek-themed miniature golf park that was part of the event. This was fine until the giant bronze Abraham Lincoln statue broke loose from its chair and started chasing us. It was faster than you'd think, and also throwing lightning bolts.

I had a bunch of other dreams about traveling in the mountains, but I guess Lincoln got my new buddies, because I didn't see them again.