The Vulcan Coiffure Conundrum

 As incredible as it seems, there were other things going on in 1960s pop culture besides Star Trek. For example, these guys:

The Beatles were kind of a big deal in the '60s, in much the same way that dinosaurs are a big deal in Jurassic Park. Since Star Trek was a product of that decade, it was inevitable that someone in the cast would have a Beatle-esque hairstyle.

You see, Gene Roddenberry or whoever made the decision about what Spock's hair should look like wasn't thinking "This is the official haircut of the planet Vulcan." Leonard Nimoy had straight hair, and this was a contemporary style that looked good on him.

Fast-forward to 1977. The studio was gearing up to revive Star Trek as the cornerstone of their Paramount-branded TV network that was supposed to launch in 1978. Leonard Nimoy refused to sign on, so a new, younger Vulcan character named Xon was created and actor David Gartreaux was cast in the role. In the surviving footage of the screen tests for Xon, the character has a very 1970s look:

Of course, Xon didn't get to join the rest of the cast in their jump to the big screen. Robert Wise was insistent that you couldn't have a Star Trek movie without Mr. Spock, so Leonard Nimoy was brought back after all. And although the rest of the Star Trek cast had appropriate 1970s hairdos to go with their disco pajama costumes, Nimoy was still sporting the same look he had in the '60s. It's a little strange when you think about it. They didn't put Grace Lee Whitney in her 1960s beehive, after all. And despite also rocking a Monkees-esque 'do on the TV series, Walter Koenig appeared in the movie with a more appropriately-1970s Brick Tamland look.

But Spock wasn't the only Vulcan in the movie. In a scene at Starfleet Headquarters near the beginning of the story we meet the refitted Enterprise's original Science Officer, ill-fated Commander Sonak:

And it's here where the franchise starts down the path of the "All Vulcan Men Look Like Spock" cliche. You could argue that Sonak's assignment to the Enterprise sprang from Kirk's irrational desire for everything to be just like it was on his first 5-year mission, and having him look kind of like Spock was intended to be a subtle visual cue to Kirk's mental state.

We didn't see a lot of Vulcans in the other Original Series movies, but we did catch a glimpse of one at the very beginning of The Next Generation's premiere episode. Given that Gene Roddenberry was eager for the show to stand on its own, you'd think that he'd take the opportunity to give the first Vulcan we ever see a slightly different look. Instead, we get Spock Junior.

Aside from Suzie Plakson's Dr. Selar in the second season, we didn't see another new Vulcan character until the third-season episode "Sarek". Sure enough, he was also rocking the Spock look:

Which is kind of funny, inasmuch as the writers had to fight tooth and nail to be allowed to even mention the name "Spock" in the episode. The Star Trek universe had received a complete visual overhaul since the days of the Original Series, so why was it still clinging to this one very dated piece of the 1960s?

Even worse were the Romulans. It was bad enough that the costume designer decided that their singular fashion motif would be "cartoonishly big shoulderpads". But (no doubt to save money and time on makeup) every Romulan we ever saw on the TNG-era shows--male or female, military or civilian, young or old--had the exact same Moe-from-the-Three-Stooges hairstyle:

And the few times we saw Vulcans on Deep Space Nine the makeup people just slapped a leftover Romulan wig on them:

Of course, 1990s Star Trek was made on very tight schedules with TV budgets. And since Executive Producer Rick Berman was aggressively uncreative, he was very strict about never stepping outside established franchise tropes. But after Berman's time with the franchise was over the studio tapped big-name creator J.J. Abrams to reimagine Star Trek as a big-budget blockbuster movie.

Suddenly, nothing was sacred. Matt Jeffries' classic USS Enterprise design was sleekified and amped-up. The interiors were redesigned to look like a futuristic Apple Store (except for the Engineering section, which now looked like the inside of a brewery). And for the first time in decades, our favorite starship's command crew wouldn't be played by a group of aging TV actors. Much like David Gartreaux thirty years earlier, the actor cast as the Vulcan science officer had a good head of hair:

Since the rest of the cast wasn't being forced to adopt the 1960s hairstyles of their TV counterparts, there's no reason to think that J.J. Abrams and his team would saddle Quinto with an embarrassing bowl cut, right? Right?

Of course they did! Because how would the audience know it's Spock without his 1960s hairstyle? I mean, we somehow recognized Anton Yelchin as Chekov even though he wasn't wearing a Monkees wig but Spock just HAD to look like Moe from the Three Stooges or we wouldn't know who it was! It's almost as bad as that scene in Star Trek: Nemesis when Picard is looking at a picture of himself as a young cadet and it's Tom Hardy with a shaved head. You can almost hear the clueless executive saying "He has to be bald in the picture or the audience won't know it's Picard, because Picard is the bald Captain."

Fast forward to the present day. Star Trek has again been reimagined (this time with the J.J. Abrams-adjacent Alex Kurtzman at the helm) and once again has angered a lot of old-school fans with its frequent disregard for some of the long-standing Star Trek tropes. They even recast Ethan Peck--another young actor with Hollywood-quality hair--as Spock.

But did they resist the temptation to put a ridiculous Moe wig on him this time? Did the new powers-that-be finally bow to the logic that Vulcan society just might be a more follically-diverse place than North Korea? Maybe, just maybe, did they let this guy keep his perfect hair, put a pair of pointed ears on him, and call it a day?

Are we even surprised?

You said it, Doctor.

The Extremely Strange Story of Snow White

While Disneyland was closed for the pandemic, they made some changes to the Snow White ride that apparently some people are outraged about. I don't know what the complaints are about and honestly I don't care enough to find out. But it DID get me thinking about how deeply weird the story of Snow White is.

I've only seen the Disney animated classic one time, during my junior year of high school in 1995. (I had a two-hour Electronics class, and Disney let Snow White out of the Vault that year so the teacher brought it in and played it in lieu of us doing any work one day. We spent most of the movie trying to convince our classmate who had recently immigrated from India that there was actually an eighth dwarf named Horny, but you never see him because he's in the bathroom the whole time. This was not the only time we watched stuff unrelated to our Electronics curriculum in that class; we also occasionally watched the OJ Simpson trial. Another fun fact related to that class: I don't remember what the teacher's name was, but I remember that we called him Al because he kind of looked like Al Borland from Home Improvement. This annoyed the crap out of him, so naturally we did it all the time.)

My point is that  I may be a bit fuzzy on the details of the movie. But as I recall the driving force of the plot is this evil queen who's worried that her stepdaughter is prettier than her. Oh, and the ultimate judge of female beauty is apparently this magic mirror that the queen has hanging on a random wall of her castle. The way it works is, every day instead of taking care of important queen business, the queen goes up to this mirror and says "Hey, I'm still the hottest lady in the world, right?" and the mirror always replies "You know it, girl." Until one day when it says "Actually, your stepdaughter's looking pretty good these days." 

The stepdaughter's name is Snow White, which strikes me as kind of odd. Is "Snow White" her whole first name, and nobody ever uses her last name because she's a royal? Or is her last name actually "White" and her parents were attention-hungry celebrities and they named her "Snow"? I don't think the movie ever addresses it.

But back to the magic mirror for a second. I have some questions about it being the sole arbiter of female beauty. For years the woman in whose house the mirror is hanging has been asking it who the prettiest lady is and it's been like "It's you! The person standing in front of me who owns the wall I'm suspended on!" And then when it finally says that the prettiest lady is someone other than the Queen, the person it names is the only other lady who lives in that castle? A lady, I should mention, who has an old-person hairstyle and a nose so unnaturally small it makes post-surgery Michael Jackson look like Jamie Farr? Really? The mirror never says something like "Now don't get mad, but there's this woman in Brazil named Carmelita who's really got it going on." I don't buy it!

So anyway, the Queen is all upset over losing the title of "Most Attractive Woman as Decided By a Talking Mirror", and then to make things worse some random prince happens to see Snow White and immediately falls in love with her strange noseless face and unnaturally-squeaky singing voice, which makes the Queen even more jealous for some reason. Why? He's young enough to be her son! You'd think she'd prefer the company of a guy closer to her age who has more in common with her and knows what the heck he's doing. But anyway, this is the last straw and the Queen decides that Snow White must die. So how does she do it? Poison her food? Maybe hire a hit man? No! Instead she calls up the royal huntsman and tells him to take Snow White out into the woods, cut out her heart, and bring it back to her in a box. But since the huntsman's job doesn't involve murdering human beings he can't go through with it. He tells Snow White to run away, and she ends up moving in with the Seven Dwarfs.

But the magic mirror rats Snow White out, so the Queen goes to plan B. First, this beauty-obsessed supreme monarch drinks a magic potion that turns her into Emperor Palpatine's hemorrhoid. Then she dips an apple in an evil potion that makes it poison. Only the poison isn't deadly; it just puts the victim in a coma that can be broken by true love's first kiss. And her plan is to find Snow White somewhere in this huge forest and trick her into eating the apple. Even if this plan works, and the Queen drinks another magic potion to restore her original appearance, she will have accomplished nothing because Snow White won't be dead! She'll be like "OK, magic mirror, who's the hottest lady now, huh?" and the mirror will reply. "Snow White, who's now in a coma for some reason." It makes no sense!

And yet, somehow the Queen's plan works. She finds the Dwarf's cottage. Because Snow White is extremely gullible, she believes it when the Queen tells her that the poison apple is actually a magical wish-granting apple. And like any vacuous rich kid, Snow White is naturally selfish, so she immediately takes the apple instead of considering that the horribly deformed person that the woodland creatures flee from in terror because she looks (and probably smells) like something that crawled out of Nosferatu's butthole probably needs a magical wish granted a lot more than Snow herself does.

So Snow White takes a bite of the apple and collapses. The Queen's ridiculous plan worked. Only not really, because the Dwarves and the woodland animals chase her off a cliff and she dies. And then that prince who met Snow White exactly once comes along and is really attracted to her comatose state. (His last name must be Cosby.) So he kisses her, she marries him instead of pressing charges, and they live happily ever after. Later, Snow White becomes a panelist on the medieval version of The View along with Cinderella and Princess Aurora, but because there was no TV back then nobody ever sees it.

The Case Against Star Trek Movies

NOTE: The dollar amounts in this article are approximate and inflation-adjusted.

It's pretty well-known that the only reason we even have Star Trek movies is because of Star Wars. Paramount Pictures tried to make a low-budget Star Trek film a couple of times in the mid-1970s before giving up, concluding that there was no Star Trek story "big enough" for the cinema. But when George Lucas's crazy little space movie made literally ALL the money, Paramount had a sudden change of heart about the property they owned with the word "Star" in the name. Well, the fact that they desperately needed a way to recoup all the money they sank into preproduction on a new Star Trek show for their stillborn TV network probably had something to do with it, too.

A funny thing about Star Trek in those days was that nobody knew how big it could actually be. Star Wars ended up making $1.3 billion in its initial release. It was safe to assume that almost every Star Trek fan bought a ticket for Star Wars; was that movie's enormous box-office take a clue to how well a Star Trek movie might do? It seemed at least possible.

But it turned out not to be. Star Trek: The Motion Picture ended up making less than half what Star Wars did: about $441 million. Star Trek clearly had value, but it was no Star Wars. Paramount eventually decided to go ahead with additional films, but they refused to give them proper motion-picture budgets. Despite that, the Star Trek movie series did respectably well for a while:

FILM	BUDGET (in millions)	BOX OFFICE (in millions)
1979-The Motion Picture	$144.1	$441
1982-The Wrath of Khan	$30.4	$262
1984-The Search for Spock	$42.8	$219
1986-The Voyage Home	$59.7	$317

By 1986, the studio executives were feeling so good about Star Trek that they decided to expand the franchise with a brand-new TV show. The premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation kicked off an incredible run of new televised Star Trek that didn't end until 2005. And from 1993 to 1999 there were two Star Trek series airing concurrently! But what about the movies? Let's take a look at the earnings for the films that came out during that period:

FILM	BUDGET (in millions)	BOX OFFICE (in millions)
1988-The Final Frontier	$61.5	$139
1992-The Undiscovered Country	$57.6	$181
1994-Generations	$61.8	$212
1996-First Contact	$75.0	$250
1998-Insurrection	$93.0	$191
2002-Nemesis	$87.2	$97

As you can see, as soon as there was new Star Trek on TV the movies took a steep dive at the box office. Pre-1987, the lowest-earning film was The Search for Spock. The only spinoff-era movie to earn more was First Contact, but thanks to its larger budget it was actually less profitable. So why did this happen?

Obviously, a big part of those early films' success was that they were the only new Star Trek being made. All the storytelling for the Star Trek universe was being done in two-hour chunks released two to three years apart, so each movie was a big event. But after 1987 we were getting a new story every week! Why go to the theater to get new Star Trek when it was already being served up to you at home?

And because the movies were still fairly low-budget, and the TV shows were able to use assets from them to make themselves look more expensive, there didn't seem to be much of a difference between movie Star Trek and TV Star Trek:

Basically, Star Trek cannibalized itself. Even a really good movie like The Undiscovered Country, which was billed as the final appearance of the original cast and boasted a topical story about peace with the Klingons just couldn't get audiences into theaters the way the earlier films had.

And when the Next Generation films rolled around the problem got worse. Deep Space Nine and Voyager were both on the air during the period that most of the TNG movies were released. So there were lots of ways to get your Star Trek fix without leaving home. Even worse, the Next Generation-era movies were made by the same people who worked on the TV shows, so they often seemed more like double-length episodes than actual movies. In the end, the audiences that gave The Next Generation its huge TV ratings mostly didn't bother to come see them on the big screen. (In fact, Brent Spiner once joked that the main difference with the movies was that fewer people saw them.)

Finally and perhaps worst of all, the Star Trek audience had started to fragment. Back in the early 80s "Star Trek" was just one thing: the adventures of the original cast aboard the USS Enterprise. But the different TV spinoffs tended to attract different (and progressively smaller) audiences. Not all fans of the original Star Trek liked The Next Generation. Not everyone who enjoyed The Next Generation liked Deep Space Nine. Many Deep Space Nine fans didn't care for Voyager, not all Voyager fans watched The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine, and almost nobody liked Enterprise. And as passionate as the DS9 and Voyager fans were, there simply weren't enough of them to warrant a jump to the big screen.

In 2002 cinematic adventures of the Next Generation crew sputtered to a disappointing end with the embarrassing failure of Nemesis. (That movie failed to even win the box office in its first week of release, losing out to the Jennifer Lopez romcom Maid in Manhattan before getting absolutely destroyed the second week by the latest Harry Potter installment.) Rick Berman worked with a new writer to develop a script for a prequel set between Enterprise and the Original Series, but the studio was never serious about the project and nobody was surprised when they shelved it. Over on TV, Enterprise limped to a lackluster finish in 2005. The series finale was one of the most hated episodes in franchise history, and showed just how little longtime producer Rick Berman understood the Star Trek fanbase. There was a tiny "Save Enterprise" campaign, but to most fans the show's cancellation came almost as a relief. 

In 2009 the Star Trek movies were rebooted by a big-name director and were finally given a proper movie budget for the first time in 30 years. J.J. Abrams' Star Trek was a bigger hit than any Star Trek movie had ever been, but it benefited from coming out a time just before the dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the return of Star Wars. Also--and this is key--the Abrams films were the only new Star Trek being made. There was no Star Trek on TV to steal the spotlight.

By the time Star Trek Beyond was released in 2016 Star Trek had to compete for attention with the Marvel and DC cinematic universes, not to mention a resurgent Star Wars franchise. It was a losing battle. The lesson of Star Trek: The Motion Picture had to be learned by a new generation of executives: Star Trek just isn't a major-league movie franchise.

By the time Star Trek Beyond hit theaters, plans were already underway to bring Star Trek back to TV in an entirely new way: as the cornerstone of a CBS-branded Internet streaming service. (A strategy that Disney is mimicking now with new MCU and Star Wars television offerings). Streaming Star Trek has a little something for everyone: Discovery appeals to the younger fans brought in by the splashy J.J. Abrams films, Picard and Lower Decks are aiming for the older Star Trek audience nostalgic for the 1990s, Strange New Worlds seems to be aimed at an audience that wants fun Star Trek adventures that aren't so heavily serialized, and the upcoming Prodigy is aimed solely at kids who may have never seen Star Trek before. And of course, the people who find their greatest contentment when they're screaming at their YouTube audience about how much they hate everything are finding plenty to dislike. So everybody's happy.

After I started working on this article, the news broke that Discovery writer Kalinda Vazquez is working on a new Star Trek movie script for J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot Productions. Will it actually get made? Or will it join Quentin Tarantino's and Noah Hawley's projects in the dustbin of cancelled/indefinitely delayed Star Trek movies? Who knows?

But I just can't see how a Star Trek movie, no matter how good it is, could possibly compete with a Marvel, Star Wars, James Bond, DC, or even Transformers in a standard theatrical release. Maybe it'll be released directly to Paramount+ as some kind of special Star Trek event during a gap between seasons of the new shows. 

Star Trek is back on TV now, and that's probably where it should stay.

We Need to Talk About Gene Roddenberry

 Over the last few years, the bad behavior of lots of men in show business has come to light. For ages, guys like Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer, and Bill Cosby were able to shush all the stories about their awful rapey behavior (which often included actual rape) and for the most part the public went along with it right up until they suddenly didn't.

Exactly why people suddenly decided to believe the victims of these and many other men after years of NOT doing that is outside the scope of this blog. But the vast majority of Star Trek fans share the belief that everyone should be treated with respect and dignity regardless of their gender or their spot on the org chart of whatever organization they belong to. And while folks have different opinions on whether it's okay to still enjoy old reruns of The Cosby Show, nobody is arguing that Bill Cosby the man is worthy of the admiration he enjoyed before everyone realized he was a serial rapist.

Which is why we need to talk about Gene Roddenberry. 

No, I'm not calling Gene a rapist. As far as I know, he never physically forced himself on anyone, or drugged them and assaulted them while they were unconscious, or preyed on minors. But his views on women were deeply problematic. Don't believe me? Take a look at his novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Despite persistent misunderstandings, the book was not ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster; it's pure, unfiltered 200-proof Roddenberry. Most fans read it through the gauzy lens of nostalgia, but when we step back and view it more objectively it's painfully obvious that Gene viewed women as objects. He used to joke that it was okay for him to portray women as sex objects because he himself had been a sex object in his younger days and he quite enjoyed it. Which is a specious argument because it ignores the power imbalance between men and women in Hollywood and in society in general. 

As he aged, Roddenberry's attitudes about women became downright misogynistic. The second volume of Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross's oral history of Star Trek, The Fifty Year Mission, quotes people who worked with Roddenberry early in The Next Generation's run saying how he was so bitter over the divorce settlement he had to pay his ex-wife (a divorce that was caused by his serial infidelity) that he would launch into angry, red-faced, anti-woman rants when people visited his office.

And then there's his longtime assistant/mistress Susan Sackett. Very early in her employment, their relationship turned sexual. In her 2002 book Inside Trek, Sackett recounted how Roddenberry convinced her to swim naked in his pool, then repeatedly pressured her to perform a sex act on him until she finally gave in. She wrote:

Although I felt somewhat used and left out, I was convinced that I was really a very lucky girl, to be here in this time and place. It was almost as if I felt a responsibility to the fans, to keep their hero happy. I was still in awe of this great man, falling in love with him, and I would have done anything to please him. And so, to paraphrase Queen Victoria’s suggestion to young English brides, I closed my eyes and thought of Star Trek.

Obviously this was no healthy relationship between equals. Although Ms. Sackett may technically have consented, Roddenberry clearly had no qualms about exploiting the power imbalance between them to get the physical gratification he wanted.

But why should we care? Gene Roddenberry died thirty years ago. The Star Trek franchise has passed through the hands of three distinct groups of creators since then. And although Susan Sackett wrote honestly about her relationship with Roddenberry, she never really accused him of forcing her into anything. At worst, Gene Roddenberry was just like a thousand other sleazy Hollywood producers who used their position to extract a sexual favor from someone who might not have succumbed to their advances if they'd met as equals.

I think it matters. It matters because a core component of Star Trek fandom has always been the Gene Roddenberry personality cult. During his lifetime, Roddenberry talked at length about how he wanted Star Trek to reflect his own deeply-held views on politics, morality, and the human condition. And even though most folks are quick to admit that Gene Rodenberry was no saint, they can't seem to stop treating him like one.

Every discussion of Star Trek's enduring popularity seems to veer into poetic musings about "Gene's vision".  Fans invoke "Gene's vision" to lend credence to their arguments over the relative goodness or badness of whatever Trek installment they're talking about, and the franchise's corporate masters are always quick to invoke it to promote their new Star Trek projects. 

Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek, but he didn't create its philosophical underpinnings from whole cloth. Fans like to imagine that Star Trek was the first and only TV show in the 1960s to say racism is wrong, that peace is better than war, that people who are different from you shouldn't be automatically feared and distrusted, and that just because something looks ugly doesn't mean it's evil. But in reality, a lot of those same messages are found in episodes of The Twilight Zone and even Bonanza! And of course, all of those ideas predate the medium of television and even Gene Roddenberry himself.

Yes, Gene infused the show he created with those ethics. That's laudable. But since he was also guilty of behavior that was creepy and awful and would get him fired and ostracized if it happened today, I think it's time to stop idolizing Gene Roddenberry the man. Fans should stop invoking Gene Roddenberry to justify their Star Trek opinions, and the producers of modern productions should stop trying to ingratiate themselves with the fanbase by ending seasons of Discovery with soaring snippets of Gene Roddenberry oratory.

Star Trek's ideals are bigger than any one guy.

Progress City, USSR

When EPCOT Center opened in 1982, the Disney company worked hard to make it look like their new theme park was exactly the thing dreamed up by Walt in the 1960s. The definitive EPCOT Center bible, Walt Disney's EPCOT Center: Creating the New World of Tomorrow, even opened with this picture of Walt Disney taken from the EPCOT infomercial he filmed shortly before his death in 1966, accompanied by a quote from that film:

"It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing testing and demonstrating new materials and new systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world of the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise."

The book never came out and said that thing on the wall behind Walt was an early EPCOT Center concept, or that the "community of tomorrrow" he mentioned was the theme park that Disney opened sixteen years after he died, but it implied the heck out of it.

Of course, as the first generation of EPCOT Center geeks grew up and did more reading, we learned all about Walt Disney's actual plan for the Florida property: to build a prototype "city of tomorrow" that would simultaneously function as a tourist attraction and an innovation hub for American industry. The Defunctland YouTube channel recently posted an excellent video that delved into Walt's original concept and ponders whether it would have actually been workable. You should definitely check it out.

The thing that fascinates me most about Walt's E.P.C.O.T. is the inherent hypocrisy of it. The past didn't happen in a vacuum, and Walt Disney wasn't just a wholesome purveyor of family entertainment. The mid-1960s were the height of the Cold War, and Walt was fervently anti-communist. He even testified before the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee about his belief that a strike by employees at his studio for higher pay was actually a nefarious Communist plot to take over his business. Seven years before Disney filmed his E.P.C.O.T. pitch, then-Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had their famous "kitchen debate" where each argued that their country's political/economic system produced the best standard of living.

My point is that Walt Disney didn't just want to build his prototype community to show what a pedestrian-friendly city could look like. E.P.C.O.T. was supposed to be a living repudiation of communism, a gleaming showcase of the American system's superiority. A key tenet of Soviet-style communism was that individual citizens weren't allowed to own property or vote and all decisions were made by unelected Communist Party bureaucrats in bad suits. So naturally, a city built by anti-communist Cold Warrior Walt Disney would be totally different. In his E.P.C.O.T., residents would not be allowed to own property or vote, and all decisions would be made by unelected corporate bureaucrats in better suits. Wait, did I typo just now? No. Amazingly, Walt wanted to demonstrate the superiority of the American system by running his city like a Soviet state! And he never seemed to realize that was what he was doing!

During my childhood in the 1980s, adults would frequently lecture my elementary-school classmates and I on the evils of Soviet Russia. (My 6th grade math teacher was doing it as late as 1990 while the Soviet Union was collapsing. I don't think she watched the news.) The political and economic differences between the Soviet and American systems were a bit over our heads, so what the adults always told us was that in America we had "freedom" and little Russian children did not. This seemed a little hard to grasp at the time because the one thing you do not have as an elementary-school-aged child is freedom. Your existence is basically one long series of adults telling you what to do and yelling at you for doing the wrong thing. But during the Cold War "freedom" was a big selling point for the American system over the Soviet one, which is why it's equal parts disturbing and hilarious that Walt Disney expended so much effort trying to figure out how to legally deprive prospective E.P.C.O.T. residents of it.

The way Walt saw it, the only way to make E.P.C.O.T. the best all-American community of tomorrow it could be was for him to have near-total control over the residents' lives. This would be a place where agents of the city government would have the ability to unlock your doors and come into your house whenever they wanted, only instead of searching for incriminating "evidence" against you they'd swap out your appliances and furniture with new up-to-date ones. It's like if the Stasi were appliance installers. The kind of people Walt imagined as residents of his utopian city were endlessly cheerful and perfectly obedient, with no personal preferences, opinions, or need for privacy. In other words, the ideal denizens of Walt Disney's E.P.C.O.T. were the family from the Carousel of Progress. You know, Audio-Animatronics.

The only workable version of Walt's city was a tourist attraction populated by Animatronics, which is not that far from what the Disney company ended up building. I wonder if Walt would have come to that same conclusion, if he had lived. Would Walt have become like David Nix in the 2015 movie Tomorrowland, unwilling to actually let people actually live in Progress City because it would only mess everything up? 

If his city had finally been built it would have been completed in the mid-70s, smack dab in the middle of the Watergate years. Assuming the city had residents, and Walt was able to achieve the level of control he wanted, how would his authoritarian tendencies have played in that era? Would his carefully-crafted "Uncle Walt" persona have survived a more cynical climate? It's a fascinating AU fiction idea for somebody to write.

In the end, the ideal form for Walt Disney's Progress City is probably the model that briefly lived on the second floor of Disneyland's Carousel theater before it was chopped in half and sent to Florida. A lot of Disney fans accept "if you can dream it, you can do it" as a truism, but "if you can dream it and a lot of other people are willing to go along with you, then you can do it" is probably more accurate.

Encounter at Farpoint

“Encounter at Farpoint” is the Phantom Menace of televised Star Trek. 

You see, when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered with “Encounter at Farpoint” in September 1987, it was the first new live-action Star Trek TV episode in almost 20 years. Sure, we'd been getting a new movie every couple of years since 1979, but the fans were desperate for more. The idea of a new weekly show helmed by The Great Bird of the Galaxy Gene Roddenberry himself, remaking Star Trek as only he knew how, sounded great. It was a lot like the excitement Star Wars fans would feel in the 1990s when they learned that George Lucas would be returning to the franchise to make more movies.

And although Star Trek: The Next Generation would end up being a much bigger creative success than the Star Wars prequels, the opening stanza of each is similar in the sense that it’s frequently boring, dysfunctional, and ultimately unsatisfying.

Also, two of their main characters have a very similar fashion sense:

 

So, let’s take a look at Star Trek: The Next Generation’s maiden outing, and all the weird little problems it has.

Number 1: The Q Subplot

Believe it or not, the character of Q was actually a late addition to the story. Originally, TNG’s premiere was to have been a regular one-hour episode. Veteran Star Trek writer DC Fontana developed a story where the Enterprise comes to the rescue of a peaceful spaceborne lifeform that’s being held captive by an aggressive alien species.

But then someone on the upper end of the food chain decided that Star Trek’s return to television should be a two-hour TV movie “event”. Suddenly, the story had a whole second hour to fill. How would they do it? With one of Gene Roddenberry’s favorite Star Trek tropes: humans proving their moral worth to a skeptical godlike being.

As I’ve written in the past, by the mid-80s Gene Roddenberry was the lone resident of an alternate universe where the sole reason for Star Trek’s success was his high-minded “vision” of the future. He seriously believed that audiences would rather watch characters stand around and debate 24th century philosophy than engage in a fun action-adventure story. And that’s basically the reason for Q’s existence: he’s a foil for Captain Picard to speechify at.

Now don’t get me wrong; John de Lancie did an amazing job bringing life to the character. But if you just read the script, Q comes across as a rather one-dimensional and cartoony villain. Only de Lancie’s performance brings a sense of depth and menace to the character.

Nevertheless, the addition of the Q subplot highlights another huge problem with “Farpoint”:

Number 2: The Actions of the Story’s Major Players Make No Sense

Let’s start with Q. The way he goes about things in this story is pretty nonsensical for a super-intelligent omnipotent being.

First, his major issue is that humans are a “dangerous, savage child race” that has no business being out in space. So when does he choose to appear on the bridge of a human-crewed ship to insist that they return to their own solar system? In the 24th century, after they’ve already been out in interstellar space for a few hundred years. That’s like waiting until the 19th century to demand that Europeans stay on their side of the Atlantic.

And since his problem is that humans have gone too far out into space, then you think he’d direct his complaints to the humans who are farthest away from Earth. And at the top of the show, Picard voiceovers that the Enterprise is en route to Deneb IV, “beyond which lies the unexplored mass of the galaxy”. But when they get to Deneb IV, the USS Hood that dropped off Riker, Geordi, and the rest of the crew is there in orbit. So shouldn’t Q have appeared on the Hood’s bridge and done his whole “humans are a savage race” schtick with their Captain? It’s almost like Q was aware that the Enterprise was the ship with its own TV show, and he wanted to play to the cameras.

Next we have the Bandi, Deneb IV’s cheerful inhabitants:

At some point they managed to capture an giant spaceborne sentient jellyfish with shape-shifting powers and force it to transform into a sleekified version of Walt Disney’s Progress City.

^{Nice, but where are the monorails?}

Presumably because their planet is the Star Trek equivalent of a third world country, the Bandi christened their new “city” Farpoint Station and used it to attract outside investment from more affluent species. So far, so good. But who’s the first “investor” they try to attract? The Federation, the one group that would have a problem with them exploiting a poor defenseless creature for selfish gain. Why not try the Klingons or the Ferengi?

And then, when Federation representatives like Picard or Riker meet with the Bandi leader, Groppler Zorn, he arouses their suspicion by acting as shifty and defensive as he possibly can. How did this guy manage to become leader of an entire planet? He couldn’t even manage a Burger King! And speaking of people who aren’t qualified for their jobs:

Number Three: A Lot of the Starfleet Officers Are Idiots

Part of Gene’s grand vision of the future was that humanity would “mature” into a peaceful and wise people. One of the ways that TNG’s characters were supposed to differentiate themselves from backwards 20th century humans (besides their preference for spandex pajamas) was their reaction to things that were different and alien.

Since the Enterprise’s mission was to seek contact with strange new worlds, life forms, and civilizations, it would make sense that it be crewed by people who wouldn’t immediately become fearful or violent when they encountered something alien. And if they found themselves in a tight situation, they’d remain cool, calm, and collected like modern-day astronauts or fighter pilots.

With that in mind, let’s examine how these “evolved” 24th Century Roddenberrians react when, in the episode’s opening minutes, they encounter a new kind of alien:

Q announces his presence by throwing up a giant CGI chain-link fence that impedes the Enterprise’s forward progress:

Then, he appears on the bridge dressed as an Elizabethan explorer and talks some trash to Picard using more thees and thous than a performer at a Renaissance Fair.

When some security guards burst onto the bridge with phasers drawn, Q traps them in the turbolift:

So far-and I can’t stress this point enough-Q has done nothing violent. He’s just stopped the ship from moving and been a jerk to everyone. For his part, Captain Picard certainly doesn’t overreact to the situation. He calmly asks Q what he wants and engages him in debate to learn more about this strange new life form. But the people under his command don’t follow his lead.

First, Lieutentant Redshirt McDeadmeat decides that the best way to react to this trash-talking alien with godlike powers is to try to shoot him. Q responds by going all Mr. Freeze on him:

Picard is furious, but not at his idiot crewman who tried shoot an alien who hadn’t done anything overtly threatening yet. He’s mad at Q for not letting himself get shot!

So anyway, Q changes costumes a few more times (seriously, he changes clothes more than Queen Amidala. Does he want to put humanity on trial or have a fashion show?) and then disappears, promising to return. Captain Picard decides that since they can’t go forward, they’ll turn the ship around and run away as fast as they can. Unfortunately, Q’s CGI chain-link fence turns into a giant flying Fireball of Doom that pursues them at warp speed.

After Picard decides to separate the saucer to get the children and families out of harm’s way, the command crew transfers to the Battle Bridge. And it is here that we start to wonder how elite this Enterprise crew really is. Because Lieutenant Tasha Yar, Chief of Security, the person responsible for the safety of the Enterprise’s 1000 crewmembers and the officer the Captain relies upon for sound tactical strategy mounts an impassioned plea to get Picard to let her shoot phasers at the Giant Warp Speed Fireball of Doom. As if that would do anything. And a few minutes later during the Q’s courtroom scene she almost gets herself killed when she has a truly hilarious overblown dramatic freakout.

It really makes you wonder what’s going on at Starfleet Headquarters. One imagines that the job of Security Chief on the new Enterprise would be a highly sought-after position. There was probably a big pool of qualified applicants to choose from. So why did Starfleet go with the gun-happy drama queen whose response to anything unexpected is to freak out and try to shoot it? 

And then we come to Worf. He doesn’t have much to do in the episode other than be the Token Klingon, an example of Star Trek’s new 24th Century status quo. But there’s this scene two-thirds of the way in where Q appears on the viewscreen to taunt Picard a little bit, and Worf does this:

Yes, he tries to shoot the viewscreen because it’s showing a picture of the bad guy. At this point, Picard should just revoke Worf’s phaser privileges. Heck, he shouldn’t even be allowed to eat with a fork! He’s clearly a danger to himself and others. Still, the Big Dumb Stupid Worf moment does give us something to chuckle at, which is nice because it distracts us from:

Number 4: The Ridiculous Amount of Padding

As I mentioned earlier, the TNG pilot was extended from a one-hour to a two-hour show fairly late in the game. D.C. Fontana was definitely a good-enough writer to come up with an additional hour of material, but Gene Roddenberry was keen that he receive a writing credit on the new show's inaugural episode, so he pulled rank and bolted the Q subplot onto the existing story. Only Roddenberry's skills had deteriorated by 1987 and he wasn't capable of coming up with enough interesting things to fill the additional time.

So what we got was padding. Lots of it.

The padding starts with the initial Q encounter. All that really happens is that Q shows off his costume-changing powers while he and Picard argue about whether humanity is a dangerous savage child race or not.

Then the Enterprise runs away and Q chases them, so they separate the saucer and then Q spirits Picard and company away to his post-apocalyptic courtroom so he and Picard can have basically the same argument they had at the beginning of the show. This renders everything that happened from Q’s first appearance to the start of the courtroom scene ENTIRELY POINTLESS. It would have been much better from a story perspective to have Q bring Picard and his officers into the courtroom for their first encounter.

An even more egregious example of padding happens after Commander Riker comes aboard. Before Picard will talk to him, he makes Riker sit at the back of the bridge and watch what’s essentially a clip reel of the episode up to this point.

^{At least Picard could have let him get some popcorn}

Usually your cheesy 80s shows waited until later in the season to have a clip show, when money was tight and the writing staff was out of ideas. Working a clip reel into your pilot episode may be a television first.

Hey, remember that whole “mystery of Farpoint Station” you were supposed to be solving? When are you going to get around to that?

I understand that one of the functions of a pilot episode is to introduce the characters and their world. But a well-written pilot would do that while moving the plot forward. In “Encounter At Farpoint”, however, the plot keeps getting put on hold so we can have these little expository scenes. Don’t get me wrong, some of them are nice. But the constant digressions away from the main story to introduce this or that character or piece of technology really end up hurting the episode because we find ourselves constantly waiting for things to get moving.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen until almost three-quarters of the way into the episode. And our characters solve the mystery of Farpoint Station pretty quickly. Which isn’t too surprising, after all Groppler Zorn’s not much smarter than your average Scooby-Doo villain.

^{“And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for those nosy kids in their spandex pajamas!”}

It’s certainly better than doing the thing where the solution to the puzzle is blindingly obvious but you need to pad out the episode so you make your characters too stupid to figure it out until there’s only five minutes left. However, it has the unintended side effect of making Q’s promise that the Farpoint mission would be a test of the worthiness of the human race ring a bit hollow.

But wait! Haven’t I forgotten something? Don’t I want to make fun of Wesley Crusher? No. No, I don’t. While some of the scenes with him are part of the unnecessary padding I talked about earlier, I actually like Wesley. I’ll talk more about that in a future post.

But for now, I’ve said my piece about “Encounter at Farpoint”. It’s a weird, dysfunctional couple hours of television. And yet, TNG would get worse before it got better.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! And if you didn’t make it this far, then I guess it doesn’t matter that this post doesn’t have a clever ending.