The Star Trek: Discovery Halftime Summation Part I: CBS All Access

Since Star Trek: Discovery premiered back in September, lots of people have been recapping and analyzing each episode as it comes out. (I highly recommend the recaps Andi from the Women at Warp podcast has been doing--you can find them here) I really admire people who can turn out thoughtful and funny material on a weekly schedule. I wish I was one of them, but I'm not. So rather than analyze every single episode, I thought I'd use the midseason break to look back at the show so far and discuss a few different aspects of it.

When I was a kid, some of my favorite toys were Lego sets like this one:

It can be fun to follow the instructions and build the thing pictured on the front of the box, but maybe the best thing about Legos is putting the pieces together in new and interesting ways. Now, imagine you had a friend who yelled at you whenever you used the pieces of your Lego set to build anything other than the picture on the box. That's what a noisy minority of Star Trek fans are like.

In 1987 they were furious at Gene Roddenberry for rebooting the franchise with a new cast and a different tone. They didn't want a new series with 1980s sensibilities; they wanted a continuation of the Original Series with the old familiar cast. And in 2017 they're furious with the producers of Star Trek: Discovery for rebooting the franchise with a new cast and a different tone. They don't want a new series tailored to 21st century audiences, they want a continuation of the Next Generation-era Star Trek that Rick Berman produced until it became so boring and repetitive that everybody stopped watching it.

Right now somebody's saying "But I never stopped watching it!" Yeah, and a few people bought M.C. Hammer albums after 1991, too. Just not enough to matter. Having your preferences ignored by a huge multimedia conglomerate might hurt your feelings, but there it is.

Many of these angry fans have focused their ire on CBS's decision to put Discovery on the CBS All Access streaming platform. I've read many of their arguments on the subject, and they all boil down to this:

Perhaps you think I'm being unfair. So I've prepared a Q&A based on actual statements I've seen online since the day we learned that Discovery would be exclusive to CBS All Access.

Q: Star Trek has never been behind a paywall before. It's not fair. 

A: From 1979 - 1986 the only new Star Trek productions were movies. Movie theaters charge admission. There was a literal wall between you and Star Trek that you had to pay money to get past.

Q: No, you idiot! I mean televised Star Trek has never been behind a paywall before! 

A: That's because the last Star Trek show went off the air in 2005. Streaming services weren't a thing then. 

Q: Premium cable channels were, but Paramount didn't put Enterprise on Showtime. 

A: That's because their business plan at the time was to use Star Trek to prop up UPN. (I didn't say it was a good plan.) 

Q: But fans in Europe get to watch Discovery on Netflix! And in Canada it's airing on a cable channel! 

A: How very perceptive of you to notice that things are different in other countries.

Q: But CBS is extorting the fans by charging them to watch Star Trek! 

A: Charging a market-comparable price for a product people want isn't extortion. It's capitalism. 

Q: It's a matter of principle! I'm philosophically opposed to paying for Star Trek!

A: What's that I see on your Facebook wall? It's a picture of your huge collection of Star Trek merchandise worth thousands of dollars! If you're willing to drop $5,000 on a replica phaser rifle, is a $5.99 subscription really the hill you want to die on?

I could go on, but you get the idea. The people who are still mad about CBS All Access are the same folks who believe that the right to free Star Trek was why George Washington fought Nazi T-Rexes in the Civil War. Streaming services are a big deal now. CBS saw how Netflix, Hulu, and HBO used original programming to lure subscribers, and they wanted a piece of that. The promise of new Star Trek was the best way to get it. As my high school economics teacher used to say, nobody is in business because they love you.

I believe All Access is the best place for Discovery. Network TV is very much a quantity-over-quality business. We'd get a longer season if the show was on broadcast TV (26 episodes instead of 15) but given the more hectic schedule and tighter budget, not all of those episodes would be good. And there's no way the show would be as lavishly-produced. The last genre show to air on CBS was the first season of Supergirl, and by the seventh episode they were pulling out the old "superhero loses their powers" trope to save money. And because CBS is mainly the network that senior citizens watch NCIS on, Supergirl's ratings weren't high enough to justify its cost and it got moved to the CW.

Now take a show like Star Trek that has more special effects than a superhero show, and everything you see on screen has to be built from scratch. It wouldn't have done any better in the ratings than Supergirl, and it wouldn't work on the CW because too much of the cast is over 30. So it would've been deemed an expensive failure by the CBS suits, cancelled, and we'd go another decade or so with no new Star Trek.  But on All Access, it can be the most popular show on the platform. And we can get 15 really good episodes per season produced at near-feature-film quality.

Ah, but what about those episodes? Are they really good? I'll start to tackle that question in my next post.

The Internet Pessimism Dysfunction

There are two surefire ways to get attacked on the Internet. The first one is to be a woman. Whereas a man can tweet "I had a bagel for breakfast" and everyone will just ignore it, when a woman does the same thing several men will take it as an invitation to make crude sexual comments, and perhaps send her a picture of their personal region. And God forbid if a woman should express an opinion, like "The bagel I had for breakfast was delicious." In addition to the crude sexual comments, her statement will attract the attention of self-important guys who will proceed to mansplain to her that bagels aren't nutritious, and they're not really delicious, she only thinks they are because of her small female brain, and if she wanted to be really smart like them she'd eat whatever they eat for breakfast.

The other way to get attacked on the Internet is to express optimism about something the Internet has already decided will be bad before anyone's even seen it, like the latest DC cinematic universe movie. What the Internet really likes to do is decide in advance that something will be bad, list all the reasons why it'll be bad, and then after it comes out pronounce it to be bad for those reasons even if the finished movie, TV show, or video game doesn't reflect them. Why is the Internet like this? Like many things, it's someone else's fault. Specifically, this guy's:

No, not former NBA player John Salley, but the guy he's holding very uncomfortably by the crotch: everybody's pal George Lucas. Now, George Lucas is an objectively good human being. He donates generously to charity. He says he wants to be remembered, not as a great filmmaker, but as a good father. But he's responsible for a lot of this Internet meanness, because he spent the back end of the 1990s making a experimental little indie movie. You know the one I mean:

In 1999 everyone was hyped for The Phantom Menace. Heck, I spent all of 1999 under a cloud of ever-worsening depression and even I was excited. We all knew it would be the greatest movie of all time. Darth Maul would be the scariest villain ever, there was something called a "pod race" that was sure to be the most amazing and exciting sequence ever seen on film, and we'd get to see young Anakin Skywalker before he became Darth Vader! That Jar-Jar character looked he might be mildly annoying, but he couldn't be any worse than the Ewoks, right? The Internet was in its infancy then, but nobody on message boards and newsgroups even considered the possibility that Episode I would be bad. That seemed farfetched and crazy, like, I don't know, Donald Trump becoming President!

And then the movie was released. And it was . . . not good. although it took most of us a while to realize it. But by the end of 1999 we had to confront the hard truth that the movie we'd spent years hyping ourselves up for and extolling the virtues of was just not that great. George Lucas was the High Priest of Geekdom, and he'd made us look like gushing idiots in front of everybody.

I really believe that the failure of Star Wars: Episode I was a formative event in the culture of the Internet. Sure, every fanbase has always had a lunatic fringe that proactively hated things before they came out; in the early '80s a group of angry Star Trek fans took out an ad in Daily Variety threatening to boycott Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to protest the death of Mr. Spock. But those folks were always just that--a lunatic fringe. These days, they seem to be the dominant voice in many fandoms. Anyone who dares to express optimism for something these people have proactively decided to hate: the Justice League movie, Star Trek: Discovery, risks being shouted down. 

If you could time travel back to May of 1999, I think you'd see find these same folks enthusiastically camped out in line for The Phantom Menace giddily clutching their plastic lightsabers. I think that the failure of that first Star Wars prequel (and its two siblings) to live up to peoples' hopes and dreams turned some of them into irredeemable cynics. Now it's almost impossible to make a new Superman or Star Trek without attracting an army of proactive Internet haters because these people care about those properties a lot more than they care to admit. They want to like them, but they got burned by The Phantom Menace. And so they proactively hate on them, imagining this makes them look like wise Internet sages who are immune to slick Hollywood marketing.

Sometimes I wonder if some corners of the Internet might be a little kinder if The Phantom Menace had been the magnum opus we all thought it would be during those first few months of 1999. Maybe not. But we'll never know.

Gene Roddenberry Is Not Here

A while back we were treated to an anecdote from the set of Star Trek: Discovery. It seems they were filming a tense space battle scene, and actor Jason Isaacs ad-libbed "For God's sake!" at the end of a line. When the take was over, writer Kristen Beyer told him that he couldn't say "for God's sake" because in Gene Roddenberry's vision of the 23rd century everyone is an atheist. A few days after the story broke one of the executive producers, Gretchen Berg, contradicted her and cast doubt on whether the initial incident even happened.

Whether or not the story is true, it got me thinking about Gene Roddenberry and the very long shadow he continues to cast over Star Trek. Every time a new iteration of Star Trek comes out, the people behind it make the traditional statement that they're trying to Honor Gene's Vision. They have to say this; if they didn't, angry Trekkies would attack them with plastic bat'leths. But, 26 years after his death, what does honoring Gene Roddenberry's vision even mean?

I'm thinking of a story I heard about one of The Next Generation's most critically-beloved episodes, "Family". It's the second episode of the fourth season, and it comes right after the epic two-parter in which Captain Picard is captured and assimilated by the Borg. Rather than having Picard and the crew of the Enterprise jump right back into action like nothing ever happened, the writers wanted to take some time to show Picard recovering from his ordeal. The result was a wonderful character-driven story that was a nice change of pace after the high-stakes sci-fi action that dominated the season opener. Most people agree that "Family" is one of The Next Generation's finest episodes. But Roddenberry hated it. When the script was in development, he complained that it lacked any physical peril for the ship or characters, and he objected to Captain Picard and his brother not getting along. (Because in Roddenberry's 24th century, humans never disagree with each other, only with hostile aliens, and even then the disagreements are always the hostile aliens' fault and never the perfect enlightened humans'.)

Twenty-three years after the series finale, much of The Next Generation's storytelling seems very dated; episodic A-plot/B-plot scripting that takes very few chances and is always careful to maintain the show's status quo no matter how many outrageous plot gymnastics it takes to do so. "Family" is one of the few scripts they did that could totally work as an episode of 21st-century television. And it's precisely the things that make it work as modern TV that Gene Roddenberry objected to.

"But Dave," you say, "surely if Roddenberry had lived his opinions would've mellowed."

But we can't know that. Because he didn't live. The business of TV production has changed dramatically since Gene passed away in 1991. It's fruitless to try to read the mind of a guy who's been dead 26 years and decide which aspects of a modern TV show he might approve or disapprove of. Gene Roddenberry's ideas about what constituted good Star Trek changed and shifted almost constantly during his lifetime. The one thing that stayed consistent was his belief that the Starfleet characters always viewed violence as a last resort, and would never whip out a phaser and zap an alien creature just because it seemed threatening or gross-looking.

So, if Discovery gives us violent "hero" characters who want to wipe out the Klingons because they look funny, and presents that in a way that makes it clear that the audience is supposed to like and root for these people, then I'll be the first one to say "this is not Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek". But I won't pick through every episode with a proverbial pair of tweezers just to hold things up and say "Gene Roddenberry would never approve of this tricorder sound effect, or that spaceship design, or this line of dialogue that I'm taking out of context so I can get angry on the Internet about it."

It's impossible to know exactly how Gene would react to Discovery. Because Gene Roddenberry is not here anymore.

As of this writing, the show premieres in six days.Watch it if you want. If you don't like it, fine. But let your reasons be your own; don't try to give your personal opinions some greater legitimacy by projecting them onto a dead guy you probably never even met.

Feel The Flow . . . There It Goes

Speaking as one of the people who fell in love with EPCOT Center in its 1980s glory days, Universe of Energy was . . . well, it had dinosaurs, I'll give it that. And one thing that hasn't changed since Mr. T was President is that 6-year-olds of all ages love dinosaurs.

Mr. T was the President, right? Or was that a dream I had when I took too much NyQuil that one time?

But I'm not going to sit here and pretend that Universe of Energy was my favorite. Heck, I can't remember the pre-Ellen version of the ride even though I went on it several times. Even watching the ride-through portion of Martin Smith's excellent video tribute didn't jog my memory, but it did leave me with some thoughts.

The original Universe of Energy was maybe the quintessential EPCOT Center attraction in that it used peak WED imagineering to convey the corporate sponsor's message that the challenges of the future were being met and overcome thanks to the selfless efforts of the corporate sponsor. It was designed to lure the audience in with the promise of seeing awesome dinosaurs (which was an enormously big deal in a pre-Jurassic Park world) and then pump them full of knowledge about energy production before sending them off with a rousing musical light show. The audience would stroll back out into the Florida sunshine flush with an optimistic awareness about the energy challenges of the future and a desire to learn more at CommuniCore's Energy Exchange exhibit.

Unfortunately, Universe of Energy was also the Tim Duncan of theme park attractions: it was technically brilliant but not all that entertaining to watch. And so, in 1996 it was given the Michael Eisner treatment: an infusion of humor and celebrities. The new show had the same basic message as the original, but now it was delivered in a fun, breezy manner by Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Jeopardy!

I'm not going to make the joke you're thinking. This is a G-rated blog and I'm going to keep it that way.

The new show was 90% more fun than the original, but it was also 90% less grand. The filmed portions of the original show were especially tailored to the pavilion's enormous screens, whereas the filmed portions of Ellen's Energy Adventure work almost as well on a regular TV. And the 1996 refurb stripped out the one-of-a-kind Radok block screen in the preshow area and replaced it with a more standard movie screen. Less moving parts, cheaper to maintain. It's funny how the Walt Disney Company under Michael Eisner grew more miserly even as it became increasingly wealthier.

Ellen's Energy Adventure lasted long enough for its two celebrity hosts to fade out of relevance, then back into it. But the information it contained didn't age as well. Alternative energy sources are replacing fossil fuels, even as the global warming caused by all those decades of burning hydrocarbons starts to wreak serious havoc on the planet. We can knock the decisions Michael Eisner made when he ran Disney, but at least his iteration of the company attempted to retain EPCOT's basic themes. Under Bob Iger, the company is all franchises, all the time. It's safe to say that from now until the rising oceans erase Florida from the map, we'll never see another EPCOT attraction that isn't tied to Marvel, Lucasfilm, or Pixar.

The guys who ran the E. Cardon Walker/Ron Miller version of the Walt Disney Company may have been so square and buttoned-down they made Mitt Romney look like Flavor Flav, but they felt a responsibility to use the power of the Disney brand for more than just entertainment. They had the courage to bet the company on a huge expensive theme park full of stuff that wasn't what people wanted, but what they ought to have. It's a shame that spirit is in short supply at Disney today, but it was always an anomaly in corporate America. It was probably never going to last forever. So, although I found the parts of Universe of Energy that did not contain Animatronic dinosaurs rather unmemorable, I'm glad the place existed and that I got to see it.

And I'm sorry it's gone. The clean energy revolution, at least, continues.

My Discovery Dilemma

From the moment Star Trek: Discovery was announced, a small (but very loud) group of fundamentalist Star Trek fans have making angry noises about it, mainly because they fear it'll disrupt their cherished Star Trek "canon". For these people, it doesn't matter if a Star Trek production tells a fun and interesting story with compelling characters unless it strictly adheres to all the picky details of the Star Trek universe that have been established over 50 years of TV episodes and movies. Typically, I've been somewhat dismissive of these people.

The new #StarTrekDiscovery trailer has me even more excited for it. Bite me, canon Nazis.

— David Landon (@futureprobe1982) July 22, 2017

But I have to say I agree with one point that some of them are making: that Star Trek is supposed to be about optimistic space exploration, but the only show on the fall schedule that seems to be doing that is Seth McFarlane's The Orville. Judging from the new trailer and cast interviews from ComicCon, Discovery seems mainly to be about war with the Klingons. So why can't Star Trek be about space exploration again? There's actually a good reason.

The Star Trek universe is too crowded.

Maybe you're saying: "Wait a minute, Dave. The Milky Way galaxy is astonishingly big! There's no way it could ever be 'too crowded'!" And you're right. The real Milky Way is almost incomprehensibly huge, with billions upon billions of stars separated by staggeringly vast distances. But Star Trek isn't set in the real Milky Way galaxy. Star Trek's version of our galaxy is surrounded by an "energy barrier" the color of Pepto-Bismol, and in the center there's not a supermassive black hole, but a planet housing the giant disembodied head of George Murdock cosplaying as the Cowardly Lion:

Star Trek's galaxy is also about as densely-populated as Mumbai. At some point during The Next Generation era they decided that the Federation and most of the familiar Star Trek alien races and empires were in the "Alpha Quadrant" of the galaxy .(Yes, I know that technically the Klingon and Romulan empires are supposed to be in the Beta Quadrant, but judging by nothing but the dialogue we hear on the shows, they're in the Alpha Quadrant with everyone else) Deep Space Nine's wormhole went to the "Gamma Quadrant", which is mostly taken up by the two-millennia-old Dominion, and when Voyager was thrown into the "Delta Quadrant" they met up with Kazon and Vidiians and Hirogen but mostly the Borg, who have been around for untold centuries and are sure to have conquered/wiped out most of that quadrant. It's hard to do any real exploring in Star Trek prequel series like Enterprise or Discovery, because they're just going places we've already seen in other shows. And if you try to do a sequel series about the adventures of the Enterprise-H in the 25th century, then fans will just complain if you don't spend a whole bunch of time checking up on the current goings-on of the Klingons and the Borg and the Cardassians, and you can't go into "unexplored" space without brushing up against the outer fringes of the Borg or Dominion empires.

And anyway, what would be the point? In one episode of Voyager, we meet up with a 29th century version of Starfleet that's flying around in timeships. Timeships! So what's the point of any of this when we know that half a millennium after Captain Picard, Starfleet and the Federation still exist and can apparently move back and forth through time as easily as you and I can walk to the fridge to get a Coke? Is it any wonder that fans of a TV show about a group of space explorers in the future are more excited about The Orville? It's set in a wide-open, unexplored galaxy that isn't bogged down by five decades of continuity and questionable writing.

If you want a really good sense of what Star Trek used to be once upon a time, check out the first 8 or 10 episodes of The Original Series. The "rules" of the Star Trek universe hadn't been set in stone yet. There's no mention of Starfleet or the Federation, no Klingons, and not even a glimpse of Earth. Our people are way out on the edge of a very lonely frontier. The planets we visit are mostly desolate, windswept places, home only to small groups of miners, scientists, or archaeologists sifting through the ruins of a long-dead civilization. There's no zipping back and forth to Earth like future productions would do; we're too far out in space for that. The Star Trek universe is new and pregnant with possibility.

So, how do we return to that? I can only think of one way: give Star Trek the Battlestar Galactica treatment--a hard reboot. Make a clean break with the past, and reimagine Trek from top to bottom. Yes, the hardcore fundamentalist fans will throw a gigantic baby tantrum, but there honestly aren't enough of them to matter.

I'm not saying Discovery is a total loss here, or that it's going to be bad. I haven't seen it yet. But at some pont, it'll end. The J.J. Abrams film series will end, too, (or maybe it already has), and eventually Star Trek will lay fallow for a few years. When it comes back, I hope the people in charge have the guts to start clean.

The Change Repulsion

Here's a fun thing to do:

1. Find someone who's a fan of something that's been around for a long time: a superhero or a film franchise or popular theme park.
2. "Innocently" suggest making a small change to a long-standing element of the thing, something that would make it more appealing to mass audiences.
3. Sit back and watch the fireworks.

Fans hate it when the corporate overlords of a thing they like change it to better appeal to the average person who is not currently a fan of the thing. For example, Superman fans threw a fit in 2011 when DC rebooted the character in the comics and gave him a new costume without the red trunks. (Which were inspired by old-timey circus strongmen) They changed a lot of other stuff about the character, too, but the absent red trunks were the thing disaffected fans complained most bitterly about.

Right now a very vocal segment of Star Trek fandom is throwing daily Internet tantrums because the new show Star Trek: Discovery, which is supposed to be set 10 years before the adventures of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, looks like a show produced in 2017 and not 1967. These people are threatening to throw earth-shattering Internet tantrums and boycott Discovery (a move that could cost CBS tens of dollars) unless it seamlessly integrates itself with a 50-year-old low-budget TV show that had this in it:

On another corner of the Internet, some Disney theme park fans are losing their minds over plans to make changes to another 50-year-old thing, Pirates of the Caribbean (the ride, not the movies). The Disneyland original, as well as the ones patterned after it in Florida and Paris, contains a scene where the pirates, in the midst of sacking a Caribbean village, are auctioning off its women as brides. This has long been considered one of the ride's more memorable scenes, mainly because of the prominently-featured buxom redheaded female Animatronic and the chorus of drunken pirates shouting "We wants the readhead!"

So, what could the Disney Imagineers be replacing this scene with that would cause such an uproar among fans? Maybe a set of Guardians of the Galaxy Animatronics having a dance party to the music of the 1980s? Or perhaps a scene from the Star Wars Holiday Special with Chewbacca's family celebrating Life Day while Bea Arthur serenades them? Let's take a look at the concept art and see what kind of thematically-inappropriate commercialized garbage the evil Disney corporate pencil-pushers are inflicting on their loyal fans:

Yeah. Instead of auctioning off human beings, now the pirates are auctioning off stuff. Heck, they even kept the famous redhead so the fanboys who enjoyed staring at her animatronic bosoms will still be able to do that instead of going out into the real word and learning to develop mature human relationships. The new scene fits in so well with the rest of the ride that the 99.9% of Disney theme park visitors won't even notice that anything's changed. Obviously, this is a completely harmless alteration that removes an icky scene of implied sexual slavery while preserving Pirates of the Caribbean's overall character and feel.

So naturally, an Internet petition against the change has gotten more than 25,000 signatures. Whether these represent 25,000 individual people or much fewer people with a lot of spare time, I don't know.

I've seen lots of arguments on social media for and against this change, but in the end the folks who are against it are pretty much the same as the fundamentalist fans who got angry when Superman stopped wearing his underwear on the outside of his pants. They don't like change. It makes them feel bad when the corporate owners of a thing they love make changes to it to appeal to an audience who's not them. It hurts their feelings because they're forced to confront the unpleasant truth that, however long and deep their love is for an object of their fannish devotion, it really belongs to a huge impersonal corporation and not to them. It can be painful, even make a person feel betrayed.

I'm not unsympathetic. In fact, let me share something: my favorite thing in all of Disney World is the part of the Jungle Cruise when you're inside the abandoned temple. The sounds of the park outside fade away, and you're surrounded by this little pocket of Original Disney World that's remained untouched for over 45 years. In those few moments I can imagine that it's 30-plus years ago, and outside the world I lived in as a kid is still there, and no one I love has died, and all the other mental and emotional wounds big and small that you accumulate over a lifetime haven't happened yet. I haven't been to the Magic Kingdom in years and have no plans to go back, but it's kind of nice to know that little piece of a simpler, happier past is still there. One day, it won't be. Disney will plunk some garish, out-of-place thing in there to promote whatever new thing they want people to buy and I'll have lost a lifeline back to fondly-remembered people and times.

So yeah, I know what it's like when a faceless corporation takes away something that tethers you back to a time you wish you hadn't had to leave. But when that thing is a depiction of human trafficking, of implied sexual slavery, then you've got to let it go. Because the alternative is to defend those things, to say they're not that bad. And is that who you want to be? When you look in the mirror, do you want to see someone who would make excuses for trivializing one of the most horrific things that humans do to one another?

Maybe that's not how you see it. Fine. We'll agree to disagree. But I'm too old to get worked up into a spittle-emitting rage over entertainment anymore. And if we all decided to be that way, social media might be a slightly calmer place.