The Star Wars Universe Strip-Mining

As I write this there are two kinds of movies virtually guaranteed to make a billion trillion zillion dollars at the box office: Marvel Comics movies released by Disney, and Star Wars. But a funny thing is happening to Star Wars: the last movie (Solo) only made a billion trillion dollars as opposed to the expected billion trillion zillion. YouTube is full of people eager to look into a webcam and lecture at length about exactly why this is. Depending on who you listen to, the reasons are:

1. Dumb stupid Disney and dumb stupid Kathleen Kennedy aren't doing what "The Fans" want. ("The Fans" being defined as the person in the YouTube video and the ten people who subscribe to their channel.)
2. "Franchise fatigue" due to Disney releasing new Star Wars movies at a rapid clip, sometimes less than six months apart.

While I respect the right of the first group to like or dislike whatever they want, I wish they'd get over themselves and stop throwing Internet tantrums because a giant media conglomerate won't bow to their will. I somewhat agree with the second group, but "franchise fatigue" is not the whole story. As of this writing there are twice as many Marvel Studios films as there are Star Wars movies, and there's no signs that anyone is getting tired of them. So why does Star Wars seem to be losing steam? Here's my take:

It was never designed to be a continuing franchise.

You have to remember that when George Lucas started to develop Star Wars in the 1970s, he didn't set out to create a "cinematic universe" because movies didn't yet work that way. He was trying to make one movie. In the beginning he didn't have a firm idea for a story, so to jumpstart his creative process he made lists of characters and planets and their backstories to flesh out the setting for his swashbuckling space epic. He didn't do this with an eye toward setting up sequels; it was all part of the effort to make this one movie.

The seemingly-limitless backdrop of the Star Wars films is like a background painting:

The Yellow Brick Road looks like it leads to a whole world of story possibilities, but it's just a device to make a Hollywood soundstage look like the land of Oz. The depth is imaginary, and if you really went skipping down that path you'd bonk into a wall.

One of the reasons the Marvel films work so well is that they're based on comic books, and comics are by their very nature a continuing narrative. But with Star Wars, the seeming depth of the universe is an illusion created to make George Lucas's original movie and its two sequels look like they were happening in a real place. So a person (or international media conglomerate) looking to tell new Star Wars stories can basically take one of two approaches:

1. Make sequels to the original films, and expand the narrative by introducing new characters and situations.
2. Make prequels set in the years between the first two trilogies, or between the original trilogy and the second trilogy--basically, any point in the Star Wars timeline where you can have X-Wings and TIE fighters and stormtroopers and AT-ATs and all the fun toys that Star Wars fans love.

We've been down both of these roads with the Expanded Universe. First, we got sequels to the original trilogy. In the beginning, it was fun to get new adventures with Luke, Leia, and Han, but as the narrative moved farther into the future and the cast of supporting characters ballooned the stories started to lose that Star Wars flavor.

The tales set during the Original Trilogy were bad for a different reason--they strip-mined even the tiniest elements from the films in a desperate attempt to come up with new stories. Remember Darth Vader's glove? You don't? Well, it turns out it's called a "Mandalorian crushgaunt" and it has it's own backstory that you can read all about on Wookieepedia. Or what about IG-88, the robot bounty hunter who appeared on screen for like 20 seconds of The Empire Strikes Back? The Expanded Universe gave him a insane story wherein he developed a huge crush on Darth Vader and uploaded his mind into the second Death Star. Basically any object, person, or creature, that you see in the Original Trilogy was given its own ridiculously detailed backstory that connected it to everything else in the Star Wars universe. The franchise was on the verge of collapsing into a black hole of self-referentialism.

I'd hoped that Disney's decision to wipe the Expanded Universe slate clean would signal a different direction, but it's pretty obvious now that there is no different direction to go in. You either take the franchise into the future and let it morph into something that isn't quite Star Wars anymore, or you endlessly cannibalize the past.

The Franchise Immortality Conundrum

"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."

In the early 1970s, a young George Lucas started to develop a vague idea he had for a swashbuckling space-opera movie inspired by the Flash Gordon film serials from his childhood. One of the first things he did was try to purchase the rights to make a straight-up Flash Gordon movie. He failed, but later concluded it was for the best:

"I realized that Flash Gordon is like anything you do that's established," Lucas said. "That is, you start out being faithful to the original material, but eventually it gets in the way of the creativity . . . I decided at that point to do something more original." That "something more original", of course, was Star Wars, which went on to become the prototypical modern-day entertainment franchise.

All of this was on my mind the other day when I thought about Seth MacFarlane's The Orville, which recently got renewed for a third season. That show, of course, was inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation, a lot like Star Wars was inspired by Flash Gordon. And here's a factoid that'll shock you: Star Trek: The Next Generation's first season is about as far in our past as those old Flash Gordon serials were for George Lucas in the early '70s. But The Orville inhabits a much more uncomfortable space, because the thing it's inspired by (Star Trek) never went away. There have been four TV spinoffs and nine movies since The Next Generation premiered. And four more TV spinoffs are in various stages of production as I write this.

For fans like me this is great. I love Star Trek, so I should be over the moon at the news that CBS is cranking up the Star Trek TV factory that's lain dormant since Rick Berman's reign over the franchise sputtered to an end in 2005. And I kind of am. I'm definitely excited about the Picard show that premieres later this year. But more and more I wonder if the the refusal of our comfortable old entertainment franchises to die naturally is choking out the creation of exciting new things.

The Flash Gordon serials of George Lucas's childhood inspired him to create something new. The science fiction writings of Heinlein, Asimov, and Bradbury that Gene Roddenberry consumed as a kid were a factor in his creation of Star Trek. But what about a creative person today who was inspired by Star Wars or Star Trek or Marvel comics or Transformers during their childhood 25 to 30 years ago? The best-case scenario for them is to go to work in the massive corporate entertainment factories that churn out newly-repackaged versions of those things, because studios won't buy anything new. Because it doesn't sell. Because all people seem to want is the comfortable stuff they've seen before served up to them over and over and over again like identical McDonald's hamburgers.

I realize that complaining that the entertainment industry functions like a business is about as silly as acting surprised that my city's sewers contain lots of excrement and no Ninja Turtles. I suppose our only hope is that sometime before the inevitable collapse of our increasingly-unsustainable civilization, a lot of entertainment franchises will collapse under their own weight and create fertile soil for something new.

Anyway, Happy Friday.

The Discovery-Orville Transposition

From the beginning, Star Trek: Discovery alienated a small but very loud segment of the Star Trek fanbase: middle-aged men who obsess over "canon" with a near-religious fervor. Now, I'm not knocking anyone for disliking a TV show; if Discovery's not your thing that's perfectly okay and there are definitely fans of previous Treks who have decided to sit Discovery out. But there's a lunatic fringe that's angry at Disco for even existing, and you can usually find them online proclaiming that Seth MacFarlane's The Orville is the real Star Trek that "the fans" want.

The Orville is a good-enough show. It's so reminiscent of Next Generation-era Trek that I'm surprised CBS hasn't sued. But it's a Seth MacFarlane production, so of course there's plenty of toilet humor and modern pop culture references. Nevertheless, the "Orville-is-the-real-Trek" crowd seem happy to overlook that, presumably because it gives them their fix of episodic space exploration by a happy family of characters. (I'm sure their preference for The Orville over Discovery has nothing to do with the fact that the series lead is a white male.) And like I said, I'm not here to knock anyone's honest preferences.

But I do despise double standards. And it occurs to me that some of the same people who extol The Orville as the spiritual successor to Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek are happy to overlook the ways that show falls short of the Trek ideal, even as they continue to hate-watch Discovery just to pick it to pieces. So let's have a little thought experiment: imagine an alternate universe where it's September 2017, and sci-fi fans are eagerly anticipating the premiere of two new TV shows: Star Trek: Orville on CBS All Access, and Discovery on Fox.

Now, a halfway decent blog written by a person with the Photoshop skills of your average ring-tailed lemur would spice up this article with some cleverly doctored promo posters from this alternate reality. But this blog is not halfway decent, so I've got nothing.

Anyway, Star Trek: Orville is the result of CBS's decision to give Seth MacFarlane the keys to the Star Trek franchise. The USS Orville is a Federation starship in the late 24th century, after the events of the TNG-era shows and movies. In the usual Star Trek vein, it sticks to mostly-episodic tales of space exploration told in the familiar A-plot/B-plot format. But in an effort to give this new Trek a lighter, more relatable tone it features all the toilet humor and pop-culture references you expect from a Seth MacFarlane production.

Meanwhile, Fox is going in a darker, more serious direction with Discovery, the lavishly-produced brainchild of producer Bryan Fuller. It's rumored that Fuller originally pitched the idea to CBS as a Star Trek revival but they passed, opting instead to go with Seth MacFarlane's proposal that had more in common with the Star Trek shows that had come before. Discovery is the redemption tale of Commander Michael Burnham, stripped of rank after her mutiny against Captain Georgiou of the USS Shenzhou plunges the Planetary Union into interstellar war against the alien Krill.

In this scenario, isn't it easy to imagine longtime Star Trek fans angrily complaining that Orville is just a tired retread of stuff we've seen before, and that Seth MacFarlane's lowbrow humor and anachronistic pop culture references are an insult to Gene Roddenberry's vision? Isn't it easy to imagine them gravitating to Discovery instead, with its lavish production values and more serious tone, proclaiming it to be the "real" Star Trek? Might they overlook its imperfections due to creator Bryan Fuller's Star Trek pedigree and their dissatisfaction with the Seth MacFarlane-helmed "official" Trek?

We'll never know, of course. But it's fascinating to contemplate.

The Kindness Commando

Not too long ago everyone was talking about the 50th anniversary of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, one of the first TV shows my parents allowed me to watch.

When I was a kid in the 1980s, most of the shows aimed at my age group were half-hour cartoons/toy commercials with names like Sgt. Dirk Fistpunch and the Justice Kommandos. These shows were all the same, and they went something like this:

SGT. DIRK FISTPUNCH: Oh no! General Destructo and the Slime Squad are trying get kids to drop out of school!

CORPORAL GUNMUSCLE: Hey, General Destructo! Don't you know that school helps kids learn new things?

PRIVATE SWORDTHRUST: Yeah! School is cool!

GENERAL DESTRUCTO: I don't care! My Slime Squad will trick kids everywhere into dropping out of school, and then the world will be MINE! Ha ha ha!

SGT. DIRK FISTPUNCH: All right, General Destructo! You asked for it! Justice Kommandos attack!

[The Justice Kommandos attack the Slime Squad with guns, swords, and missile launchers, but since this is a kids' show nobody gets killed or suffers gruesome injuries.]

Shows like this taught the following moral lessons:

1. The world was divided into easily-identifiable Good and Evil factions.
2. Violence was a fun and consequence-free way to solve any problem.
3. The action figures, vehicles, and accessories for Sgt. Dirk Fistpunch®, General Destructo®, and the rest of the Justice Kommandos™ and Slime Squad™ were all Sold Separately, and we needed to Collect Them All unless we wanted to be total losers.
4. Maybe something about not dropping out of school? Who cares? Whatever the problem is, the Justice Kommandos always fix it with violence!

These shows may have pretended to be educational but everyone knew they only existed to sell toys by appealing to little boys' power fantasies. And even though my parents--ever wary of the impact of televised violence on impressionable young minds--didn't allow me to watch them, they still influenced me because my friends at school all watched them, and the toys were advertised during the shows I did watch. My friends and I quickly came to view Mr. Rogers Neighborhood as slow and boring, stupid baby stuff. For older kids like us, there was more grown-up fare like Sgt. Dirk Fistpunch and the Justice Commandos. 

But fast-forward thirty years or so, and a funny thing has happened. Whenever the latest terrorist attack or mass shooting or natural disaster happens and our social media feeds overflow with outrage and grief, someone always makes a post like this:

Yes, during those times it's not G.I. Joe or the Transformers that give us comfort. It's Mr. Rogers. It turns out that the "lessons" we picked up from those cartoons in our childhood don't translate so well to real life. But Mr. Rogers grows more profound and relevant with each passing year. I'll conclude this article by including a couple of my favorite lessons of his.

 

In Defense of Wesley Crusher

It's the moment that gave birth to Star Trek fandom's first hate group, and it happened about halfway through The Next Generation's two-hour premiere. Old-school Trekkers were already grumpy by this point. They never wanted this strange New-Agey reinvention, they wanted more of the Star Trek they were familiar with, featuring the original characters they knew and loved. And now, to add insult to injury, this happened:

Yes, it's the scene where 15-year-old boy genius and ugly sweater aficionado Wesley Crusher sits down in the command chair and instantly understands how everything works, much to the annoyance of Captain Picard and the future founders of alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die. Over the years a lot of people have complained about this high school sophomore knowing as much about the Enterprise's advanced technology as the highly-trained 24th century astronauts who work there, but remember that this aired in 1987.  And speaking as someone who was nine years old in 1987, it rings absolutely true. Let me explain.

The night the crew of the Enterprise-D first leapt onto our TVs in all their spandex-clad glory, personal computers had been on the market for about ten years. But the vision of a computer on every desktop was still a long way from reality. Plenty of adults never encountered one in their daily lives, and mostly saw them as hideously complex devices that only highly-trained geniuses could understand. But a lot of us kids had them in school, where our spongelike child brains could easily intuit how to use them. Right around the time TNG premiered, our family visited some friends who had a brand-new Apple IIc in their living room. With their permission, I plopped myself down in front of it and started writing a simple BASIC program from scratch. Meanwhile, my mom hovered nervously nearby worrying that any minute now I would press the wrong button, and our friend's expensive new computer would explode in a shower of  sparks like in the movie Desk Set. (She needn't have worried. The only computer on the market in 1987 to have a self-destruct button was the short-lived Tandy Explodo 5000.)

My point is that in those early days of the PC revolution, the list of people who were proficient at using these machines that were about to change the world broke down like this:

1. Highly-trained professionals with advanced degrees.
2. Elementary school children whose only other skill was the ability to blow chocolate milk out of their nose.

To non-computer-literate adults, the ability to sit down at a computer and actually make it do things was a near-magical superpower. Most of us kids couldn't do anything useful with this power; at the height of my programming ability I think I could make various colored lines appear on the screen. But all my parents could do was make the computer say "SYNTAX ERROR", so my useless line-drawing ability made me look like a NASA engineer.

Wesley Crusher's instant understanding of the new Enterprise's advanced computer systems makes a lot of sense in that context. It's a big reason why nine-year-old me identified with him right away. Heck, it never occurred to me that I should hate him until I got online in the mid-90s and learned that all the "cool" Star Trek fans did.

There's no dispute that the character was not well-written during the show's first season, but neither were any of the other characters. Season one of TNG was a garbage fire behind the scenes. I think a big reason for the backlash against Wesley was that a lot of his most fervent detractors saw a little too much of themselves in him. They were also geeky, awkward kids who related to machines more easily than people. But instead of the character that was most like them being a suave and heroic figure, he was a frequently-annoying teenager. He failed to make them feel powerful, and they hated him for it. (A lot of these fans, now middle-aged, hate The Last Jedi's portrayal of their hero Luke Skywalker for similar reasons.)

So yeah, season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation did a lot of silly, unrealistic things. But showing us a teenager who was good at technology wasn't one of them.

Why Star Trek Should Ditch the Transporter

If someone at CBS came up to me and said "Dave, we want you to reboot Star Trek for us, but you're only allowed to make one major change," the first thing I would do is laugh nervously and try to get this person some help for their untreated mental illness. But if the offer was legit, and I really had the power to reboot Star Trek and make one major change to it, here's what the change would be:

No more transporters.

Have I lost my mind? Don't I know the transporter is an integral part of Star Trek? In a way, it's what the show is all about: we visit a new planet every week, our characters beam down to it, and stuff happens. How can you have Star Trek if no one beams down? If they have to take a shuttle, it's just The Orville without any jokes.

Teleporters aren't unique to Star Trek. They appeared in early 20th century pulp sci-fi along with ray guns and faster-than-light travel. But to those audiences, which included a young Gene Roddenberry, teleporters would've seemed like a logical extension of the same technology that gave us radio and eventually television. Even by the 1960s, teleportation was one of those things that seemed fantastical but not overly ridiculous, like the computer in a modern-day cop show that can magically enhance grainy surveillance cam footage to read the license plate of a speeding car at night.

But Gene didn't give his television starship a teleporter just because he thought it was cool. It was purely a budgetary decision; he'd promised network executives that his show would visit strange new worlds on a TV budget, and a sparkle/dissolve effect was way more affordable than weekly shuttle landings. It was only after the show had been on the air for a while that the story problems created by the transporter became obvious. You see, when the transporter works the way it's supposed to, nobody is ever in danger. Our landing party could be surrounded by vicious Klingons ready to jam painstiks up their personal orifices, and the transporter can snatch them out of there in the blink of an eye. They can jump off a cliff and escape unscathed as long as the transporter chief hits "Energize" before they hit the ground. Heck, the spaceship they're on can even explode, and as long as the transporter is energized around the same instant the explosion happens not one hair on Mr. Chekov's Davy Jones wig will be singed.

So what's a writer to do to create some jeopardy? You know the answer: he or she has to come up with some bullcrap to explain why the transporter can't come to the rescue. It's a bad idea, when creating a fictional universe, to give your characters a tool so powerful that you keep having to break it to make your stories interesting.

During the Next Generation era, the transporter became even more all-powerful. Not only could it snatch people out of danger, it could even undo serious physical transformations that resulted from catching a weird space disease or traveling at Warp 10 or whatever. On TNG and Voyager, we saw characters transformed into old people, children, and giant salamanders. In each case, the solution was to plug a sample of their unaltered DNA into the transporter, thereby turning it into a magic reset button that could turn the characters back into their old selves right before the last commercial break.

Gene Roddenberry's original Writers and Director's guide contained this important directive to differentiate Star Trek from its goofier, more kid-focused predecessors like Lost In Space:

STAR TREK is never fantasy; whatever happens, no matter how unusual or bizarre, must have some basis in either fact or theory.

The transporter does not pass that test. It's essentially magic. The fact that its operation has been surrounded with all kinds of made-up, sciency-sounding technobabble doesn't change that. The transporter is a device created to solve a budgetary problem that existed in 1966, and still existed in 1996, but does not exist now. Gene Roddenberry and his team didn't set out to create a multibillion-dollar entertainment franchise that could withstand decades of scrutiny. They just wanted to make a show that would have a good run on network TV.

If Star Trek is going to survive another few decades, I think it needs a hard reboot. The people in charge need to step back and examine each piece of the Star Trek mythos to see what holds up in the 21st century and what doesn't. Star Trek never has been and shouldn't be hard sci-fi, but I believe it does need to be science fiction and not science fantasy. The transporter is a fantastical "magic wand"  created to solve a real-world production issue that no longer exists. It robs stories of the danger and mystery of space exploration that helps make them interesting, and I think it's outlived its usefulness.

It needs to go.