"The gleaming cities of Earth...

...Where peace reigns, and hatred has no home."

These are the last lines of the episode "Muse" from the series "Star Trek: Voyager." The episode is characteristic of the series as a whole.


Voyager is not the most popular series in the Star Trek franchise. Like some of the other series – maybe all of them – it started out rather weak, and with characters that were not particularly well developed. But I have seen the series twice now and I think that once the series got rid of the character Kes and brought Seven of Nine into the story, about halfway through, it got a lot better. Sure, there are some fairly dumb and typically dumb stories, but there is some very good science fiction as well.


The episode "Muse" is an example of how serious television, if the creators take it seriously themselves,  can give writers and directors and actors space do all sorts of interesting stuff. The existence of Netflix shows us how some series work very well as they build on previous strengths.
 The characters of Voyager are very good examples of this. They aren't brilliantly done, but they are increasingly good as things progress. The character of the doctor by Robert Picardo and Seven of Nine by Jeri Ryan come to mind. In both cases, incomplete human beings turn into something else as they mature, and as is repeatedly emphasized by the development of the series as a whole, they have to be accepted by the flesh and blood human beings as equals. I think Ryan, whom many people think got the job sheerly on the basis of astonishing physical beauty, had a very tough assignment here and did it very well.

In the case of "Muse" we see an alien culture that seems to have developed to an era similar to archaic Greece. A local poet rescues one of the members of the Starfleet expedition and uses her story to create a drama far away better than anything that has existed in his culture before. It's not really a very believable story when it comes down to it  but it does make you think about how astonishing the effect of early Greek drama must've been. Classicists know this, but how often has this been explored on TV or in any other popular genre of fiction?

The quote I used for a title for this post indicates a final characteristic worth noting. It is spoken by the poet of the alien culture who has visualized Earth as the home of peace and perfection. According to the series, he's absolutely right. The 24th century according to the writers of the series is a time when the most optimistic dreams we have for our future have come true. Sometimes that optimism seems a bit overdone, but I would say that the whole dramatic interest of the series is that it argues that even when peace and concord have come to Earth, there will still be plenty of problems in applying all our best ideas to real-life situations.

Does Star Trek: the Original Series belong on this blog?

Alas, that's what I'm thinking about these days.

This year I am teaching much the same courses as I've been teaching for the last four years. My teaching, thinking about basic facts and concepts that should be presented to my students, is a major source for much of my blogging. Then there are current events. Right now I find little to inspire original thought in the news. I don't have such respect for my own opinions as to think that my readers will be interested in hearing me go on about American politics, Canadian politics, or even Middle Eastern politics. I find all these developing stories to be stalled in patterns that I have either talked about before or are just as obvious to interested readers as they are to me. I am not interested in being another political ranter, not unless I have a really good rant to trot out.

Similarly, I don't have much new to say about chivalry or deeds of arms right now. I should have a book out this spring on Charny's Men at Arms, and I continue to work on the Chronicle of the Good Duke Louis of Bourbon, but I'm at the stage where I really can't offer up new material from either  source.

I am working away on various projects but I am not reading really interesting material of the right size and complexity to be described in a blog entry. My thoughts recently tend to be suitable for a Facebook post. Namely, a couple of sentences of reaction linked to an article that has something to do with current events.

Which leaves me with my TV watching habits, especially my use of Netflix to look over and reevaluate some of the more interesting popular phenomena of my lifetime. One of these, one of the most important really given its great popularity, is Star Trek. What does Star Trek tell us about the last half-century?

I have put a little bit of this material in the blog already, in part because I was pleasantly surprised by how good average and above average television series are when seen through Netflix, without commercial interruption, and at a pace set by the viewer – who if he or she is really interested will not wait a week to see the next episode of the series that really appeals.

So what about Star Trek? As I expected Star Trek: the Next Generation was really entertaining when seen through Netflix. I was rather surprised to see that Deep Space 9 was far better when viewed rapidly than it was in its original presentation, which caused me to give up on it early in its second season. I was very impressed by most of what I saw on my recent viewing.

So what about the original series? My memory of the original series is that it was not really very good. I was only about 15 when it came on, but I'd already read a lot of high-quality science fiction in print, and I thought that the TV show was not really giving the best selection of science-fiction ideas available. The series was better than most of what was on TV, but most of what was on TV was pretty lame.

Part of me wondered why the series had such a tremendous impact. I knew plenty of people who really loved it.

Well, re-watching the first season of the original series has confirmed me in these opinions:

It was pretty lame.

At least, the first half of the first season was really leaden. The characters are poorly drawn and poorly presented.

A good half of that season focused on exactly one idea, which is not really much of a science fictional idea as much as a horror genre idea. That idea is that universe is filled with things that look like human beings that are actually monsters; or alternatively things that started out as human beings have turned into monsters, sometimes only moral monsters. There's a lot of betrayal and menace in those early episodes, and they're not really very good episodes otherwise.

But about halfway through that first season, what people have loved about this series begins to emerge. By that I mean the characters and the interactions between the characters on the ship and particularly on the bridge of the ship start making you really care about what goes on with them.

What really surprised me was that I liked the first season James T Kirk. I have always been someone who put James T Kirk down as a borderline maniac whose prominence in Starfleet reveals a weakness in their whole system, especially the recruiting efforts.. My image of Kirk is a rather smug character who relies on his physical charisma (which did not really speak to me) to get his way. But the first season Kirk is not really like that. He's trimmer, fitter, handsomer and – can't believe I'm saying this – more intelligent and more philosophical than he was later on in the series or in the movies. He says a lot of things are actually smart. He looks smarter than Spock!

Is there any historical point to be made from this material? Well, I do now have a more sympathetic view of the popular influence of the series. And if any of you are watching the old Star Trek, you might keep an eye out for the awe and discomfort that the characters have for anything to do with computerization.

Wit and wisdom from Deep Space 9

Quark, a merchant and a predatory capitalist criticizes the chivalry of his time:

Do you know what I like about Klingon stories?… Nothing! Lots of people die and nobody makes any profit!

Visiting a future via Star Trek: The Next Generation

It's heresy around my house to say it, but I doubt I could watch the original Star Trek  series all the way through.  It was just not good  enough science fiction even the first time around.  Furthermore I have a very limited tolerance for James T. Kirk/William Shatner.  The fact that Kirk was given the Federation's best starship and allowed to keep its command says something rather alarming about the Federation.

ST:TNG, on the other hand, though it started out rather weak, was good enough in my memory to give a second chance. I have now been through TNG a second time, and I quite enjoyed it.

It still was not great science fiction.  The superscience explanations of the technologies, of the threats to the Enterprise or other good guys, of the solutions to those threats were either gruesomely bad or laughable, depending on my mood.  Another ST series, I forget which, wore out the phrase "reverse[d] polarity."  In TNG, "interference," which prevented rescues or self-defense or timely reaction to some threat, explained everything.

 Action/adventure plots were usually just as lame. So many preventable  disasters so easily avoided if only the command staff had used common sense or had sensible security protocols!  Here comes a mysterious alien ship that refuses to open communication! PUT THOSE DAMNED SHIELDS UP! (Blam! Too late!)

Then there are some of the odd unexplained features of the largely unseen future society of the  Federation.  Real ST fans have thoroughly explored the question of whether the Federation uses money (the evidence is contradictory).  But it is certainly noteworthy that commerce is shown as a marginal and unworthy activity, indulged in by lowlifes.  One wonders about how non-Starfleet Federation citizens get from planet to planet.  Are there passenger ships (we see none)?  If there are, can you buy a ticket?  How much would a passage cost? Or do only people with Starfleet connections travel the stars, hitchhiking on Starfleet ships (we see that a lot) or use shuttlecraft size transport?

Is Starfleet a vastly privileged aristocracy resting on a subject population?  Is it the 18th -century in space, minus the slave trade and distant plantations? (A dish of tea, captain?   Earl Grey, hot?)

On the other hand, there were some really good aspects to the series.

When the show tackled ethical questions that sprang from real science fiction premises,  it often, maybe more often than not, did a really good job.  The episode where the Enterprise crew decides not to weaponize a Borg drone but to treat him like an individual rather than a walking computer virus -- thus giving up an opportunity to destroy the hostile and very dangerous Borg -- was one of the best ST episodes ever. Whether anyone could be that ethical is another matter, but they sure did not duck the issues.

Another thing that the real fans have debated is the mixed record TNG had on gender issues.  Certainly the complete lack of gay people makes the future society look kind of old-fashioned.  But what does one expect  from an American prime-time show from the 80s and 90s?  It is quite remarkable, however, that in most societies depicted, women and men were treated as equals in intellectual and institutional authority. I remarked to my wife as we watched that ST:TNG must have had more good parts for middle-aged women than any other show of the time.  And that is no small thing, indicative  of a real commitment to incorporating male/female equality as a basic feature of that fictional society.

Word

On speaking Klingon, or for that matter redoing A Christmas Carol in that language:

"Outsiders think it's weird," says Lawrence Schoen, founder and director of the K[lingon] L[anguage] I[nstitute]. "But it's no different than walking into a sports bar where everyone knows the score of the third game of the 1982 World Series."