Star Trek: Start to Finish

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Memory Alpha) is the funny one. Where they go back in time. With the whales. Where Scotty says “hello, computer” into the mouse.

And it’s great. It is legitimately fantastically good. It manages to take a plot about extinction and make it light and interesting and a little bit alarming without bludgeoning you with the message. It manages to be an adventure movie without violence. It takes characters that by all accounts should be worn through and makes us interested because there’ in such a radically different environment.

But let’s stop a moment and realize that it manages to do all this because it is running the same plays, cleverly disguised so you don’t notice. Oh, you went back in time to the ‘present’ and found a nearly-extinct species because a mysterious probe (or is it a big mysterious probe) is threatening to destroy all you hold dear? Oh no!

The trick is that none of that matters, because they pull off mixing and matching so many ideas with the connective tissue of being damn hilarious. At some point it was decided that this movie would allow the occasional bits of humor found in most Trek to range freely, and the freewheeling antics of all the characters allowed to speak their minds and interact in this new way is so magical that you can forgive the movie its shortcomings.

Even if these sins are forgiven, though, let’s list them for completeness sake. The size of the Bird of Prey shifts from being rather claustrophobic to easily fitting two humpbacks and no one notices. Saavik is even more wooden in this movie than the last, which is a neat trick since she’s barely on screen. Scotty actually says (I swear!) “Captain, there be whales here!” in a giddy little burst. Some of the whale reaction shots linger far too long. Last, everyone wears 80s clothes, which I suppose is understandable, but I’m only barely able to forgive it.

The actors are given some new character opportunities to play with, too. Kirk interacts with a woman but doesn’t try to seduce her. Spock is remembering how to be himself, even as that self is shifting in new environs. McCoy gets to fully commit to his role as ship conscience, wandering about making sure people do what they need to do. Scotty is free of the lower decks, finding the materials he needs to make everything everyone else does possible. And Chekov shines as the suspected spy without a clue about what he did wrong.

On the larger scale, the look of this movie is a little harder to pin down. It lacks the visual flair that Search had, where it was obvious that Nimoy was relishing the look of the scene, the framing of the shot; Voyage is much more utilitarian. The computer-generated images in the dream sequence also seem out of place; they have nothing about them that’s interesting other than their existence, which in 1986 was probably enough. Lastly, the swoopy letters are back, albeit in a less swoop-tastic form.

This movie also continues the trend of better defining the universe; we finally see that the Federation has a President and a whole hall-ful of well-costumed ambassadors, filling in the until-now-murky political aspects. We see our first black, female captain aboard the Saratoga (which, unfortunately, is fried by the probe). And we see the Federation’s nonviolence played out in a real but unspoken way throughout the movie.

The nonviolence plays on multiple levels. Easiest to see is that there is simply no fighting; Chekov failing to use a phaser on stun is as close as we come. There is some slapstick chasing, and the threat of force, but we see how solutions can be reached without resorting to the “easy” way. This contrasts nicely with Kirk’s warning at the beginning as the Bird of Prey flies toward Earth: “This is an extremely primitive and paranoid culture.”

That line is the summation of the movie. In the best Trek tradition, the movie is making its point by holding up the mirror and letting the audience see for themselves what is wrong. This movie is so confident that this trick will work– and it does, and it has, and it will in many more movies– that they can step up and call their audience out on what’s wrong, and know that the audience will spend one minute laughing, then the whole evening understanding that they were the butt of the joke, then a good long time wondering if they want to be.

That’s what Trek has always done so well, and pairing it with a healthy dose of humor makes it incredibly fun to watch.

Grade

A; a departure from the typical, but incredibly well done

Series Roundup: Star Trek

I’ve now completed Leg 1 of this epic journey: I’ve seen every episode of TOS. And I’ve got to say I liked it rather a lot more than I expected to. I thought it’d be good, and interesting, and have a few nice episodes, but it’s damn good, it’s got a ton of really great ideas, and it has some fantastic episodes.

Favorites

My favorites are the ones that everyone counts as favorites, as you can see by doing a search for those rated A and A+. Since Tumblr can’t actually search for plus signs (ugh!) here’s what I’ve rated A+:

• The Naked Time is the funniest great episode
• The Balance of Terror is the most suspenseful
• Space Seed has the best baddie in the series
• The City on the Edge of Forever has the best moral quandary
• Obsession has a great role reversal
• Bread and Circuses has the best counterfactual
• Wink of an Eye has the best female baddie

That the number of episodes I rated F is only four is really rather striking. I suspect that the vast majority of episodes fall somewhere in a rather mushy middle.

Characters

I knew going in that I liked Spock and McCoy better than Kirk, but I was surprised by how much I actually liked Kirk. He’s the square-jawed hero-scientist and doesn’t back down from the role ever, and there’s something admirable about that.

But Spock and McCoy get all the best lines, and all the best interaction, even if they (almost) never get the girl.

And boy are there a lot of girls to be gotten. Star Trek has surprisingly few Monster of the Week episodes, but it suffers from no lack of Love Interests of the Week. Every planet has a pretty young thing in outlandish garb waiting to be swept off her feet, since women are lame and need to be saved. The amazing amount of forward thinking ideas in this series is counterweighted quite effectively by how incredibly sexist it is.

As for the B characters: Scotty is freaking awesome. Sulu and Chekov could use more screen time. A couple recurring female characters with more heft would be good (see above).

Setting

It came as no surprise that they played fast and loose with continuity and little things like where the Enterprise came from and what group it was a part of, but this goes to some crazy extremes. The autonomy of the crew swings wildly back and forth, their level of technology changes radically, and nothing implied or explicit can be taken for granted next week.

But there is still a grand world here. The Klingons are reliably savage and bad; the Romulans are reliably mysterious, noble, and bad; computers are easily confused; slavery is widespread but bad and easy to end. The broad strokes of this vision are very familiar without being very explicit, because they mirror the mindset you think about when you think about the 60s, when the nation thought that most problems could simply be solved by being the right people to give the right speech at the right time. It’s a simpler world, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting. It is less nuanced, but its forthrightness is one of its charms: the world of Star Trek is custom built as a world in which Roddenberry could tell morality plays, and in this endeavor it performs with aplomb.

Shortcomings

The greatest shortcoming of the show is its inconsistency. This is somewhat of an effect of the disregard for what nowadays we call canon, but is more just a matter of writers coming and going and Roddenberry not having or not exercising any kind of power in this regard. That he had such specific ideas for some things– no mass fighting amongst the humans being the most famous example– and yet left so much up to the random assortment of writers is slightly mystifying.

A close second is the small matter of women, which I described thusly:

When a woman appears, she’s inevitably a love interest for someone, and she often has some special skillset that the crew needs but that she neglects because she’s smitten.

This is a constant theme of the show, leading inexorably to the last episode’s women-are-too-weak-to-command-starships plot line. If I could change one thing about the show this would be it. I’m very interested to see how TNG fares in this matter.

Statistics

It took me two years, three months, and twenty-one days to watch all 80 episodes of the original series. That’s 844 days. That’s an episode every 10.55 days, which isn’t that bad, except that I way front-loaded things and finished the first half in 53 days. If I’d kept that pace (an episode every 1.325 days!), I’d be on episode 637 today and well into Enterprise.

Conclusions

I’m happy I’ve passed the first major milestone; now it’s on to the original-cast movies. Time to break out the Blurays!

Turnabout Intruder

TOS’s final episode, Turnabout Intruder (Netflix; Memory Alpha), gives the whole crew a chance to go out acting, and all but the most important role does great.

The Enterprise finds a decimated colony whose lead scientist is Janice, an old Starfleet flame of Kirk’s (who isn’t, right?). She’s still mad because women can’t be captains and she wanted Kirk’s life, so she uses Alien Technology™ to switch bodies with James.

Let’s pause here and count the bits of free-floating silliness we’ve already got. First, what the hell with the sexism, Starfleet? You guys are the future but you’re still doing things that are obviously on the way out in the 60s? Second, why is that Alien Technology never ever mentioned again? Last, Kirk is put into the body of a woman and not once does he play with that. That’s an opportunity Kirk wouldn’t miss.

Begin Spoilers

But back to the episode. Janice-as-Kirk gets Kirk-as-Janice put into sick bay, but Janice-as-Kirk is obviously acting weird. Spock and McCoy get suspicious, but they can’t prove anything. Spock mind melds with Kirk-as-Janice and then makes an ill-considered jailbreak attempt, which leads to a courtroom bit and mutiny charges for everyone and a sit in and another jailbreak and a silly resolution involving special effects and no sense.

This episode is basically the archetype of Season 3: it takes characters you love, puts them in a slightly new odd situation, then completely fails to deliver anything resembling a logical resolution while nevertheless churning out a few perfect moments.

Let’s go over the best one before we return to trashing the episode. Scotty and McCoy are outside the aforementioned mutiny trial. They’re two thirds of the jury tasked with convicting or acquitting Spock, and they discuss what will happen if they go against the increasingly deviant Captain. The weight of the decision is obvious, and they know both what they have to do and the insanity and labor ahead. It’s well written and well acted, and you can tell how comfortable these two are in their roles.

End Spoilers

But it’s got, buried in the brilliance, this line:

Scotty: “I’ve seen the captain feverish, sick, drunk, delirious, terrified, overjoyed, boiling mad. But up to now I have never seen him red faced with hysteria.”

That they actually use the word ‘hysteria’ is the kicker. This episode, see, is one long tirade about how women are weak. Let’s return to Starfleet’s apparent sexism. It’s not clear who we’re supposed to be mad at about this. The policy seems crazy and stupid to my mind, and I initially assumed I should feel a good women’s-lib vibe and blame The Man for all our woes. But the episode resolves around how obvious it is that Janice isn’t cut out to be a captain anyway. And it’s not too big a leap from there to why the policy exists, except for Kirks throwaway line at the top of the episode that he’s against the rule, too. Are we supposed to blame Janice’s insanity on this rule, and think that if she was allowed to become a Captain it would have all been fine? That seems ridiculous, not only because Kirk says she’s not fit for the post “temperamentally or by training”. We see this theme echoed with Nurse Chapel being a willing patsy to keep Kirk-as-Janice locked up in sickbay, with Uhura missing and a weaker woman in her chair, and with repeated focus to Janice’s womanly wiles and petty grievances.

And don’t even get me started on the scene where Janice-as-Kirk uses a nail file while talking to senior staff, or I might have to kill someone.

Grade

C-, but only that high because Scotty and McCoy get a great scene.

All Our Yesterdays

All Our Yesterdays (Netflix; Memory Alpha) finds the crew of our favorite starship beaming down to a planet whose star is about to nova and whose inhabitants have vanished. There, in a library, they find an old man who seems to teleport around the room. As one does.

It quickly becomes apparent that the people of the Sarpeidon have invented a time travel device they call the Atavachron. They’ve used it to travel back in time to escape the impending nova, and are all hiding out in the past. Leaving aside the inherent problems with changing the past and just plain fitting that many people into the population of the past (language barrier?), this makes for a very neat little plot device.

Begin Spoilers

Kirk gets separated and does a little jail time, but this is a Spock-and-Bones episode. Those two get transported into a desolate ice age and meet the lovely Zarabeth, who has been exiled there. Spock succumbs to despair (emotion!) and falls for Zarabeth (she is pretty hot), but Bones keeps up the fight and they all get home alright.

There’s some silliness in Spock “reverting” to his ancestral ways thrown in there that’s a little hand-wavy (he wasn’t Prepared; why should he be changed?), but if you can ignore that this is a great twist: it gives Bones a leading role (he’s so often the comic relief or the doomsayer), while putting Spock into a position where Nimoy can do some acting and flex the character in new ways.

End Spoilers

I liked this episode a ton. There’s a few great scenes and a few great lines, there’s an interesting set up and a good delivery of it, and there’s enough sideline mysteries that you’re left wondering a bit at the end.

Best Bit of Dialog

Kirk: Spock, are you in the library?
Spock: Indeed not; we are in a wilderness of arctic characteristics.
Bones: He means it’s cold!

Grade

B+; would be higher if not for the slight hand-waving all over the plot.

The Savage Curtain

The Savage Curtain (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) is an episode where the crew meets Lincoln, is imprisoned by rock aliens, is challenged on the differences between Good and Evil, and fails to mount even a cursory defense of their ideology.

Interesting Bits

Kirk explains how the teleporter works. We meet Surak. They miss an opportunity to discuss labels by instead saying that they don’t matter. There’s a ridiculous rubber suit alien. Everything is bad.

Why it’s crazy annoying

Because in the end, after the battle is won, the rock aliens say that they can’t tell the difference between the sides; good and evil both use the same methods to forward their goals. This is the point where Kirk stands up for Freedom, gives the long monologue about his values and delivers the lesson. Or rather, it should be that point, but instead Kirk just says the game is rigged, makes no attempt to explain how that changed anything, and then leaves. Total copout.

Grade

D

Requiem for Methuselah

Requiem for Methuselah (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) gives too much away in the title, but is otherwise excellent.

The crew is suffering from Rigelian Fever, which will kill them all in a few days. They need ryetalyn quickly to make an antidote, and when they land on the only planet within range that’s got it, they’re shot at by a robot drone and threatened by an old guy who owns the place.

But when they threaten him back, he invites them to his house, introduces himself as Flint, offers them all the ryetalyn they need, and even offers to make the antidote for them. As if that weren’t fishy enough, he’s got never-catalogued da Vinci paintings and scores by Brahms and expensive manuscripts. And a hidden girl (there’s always a girl).

Begin Spoilers

I hesitate to even put this in the spoilers box, because the title already gives it away: this guy has been a live for thousands of years; he can’t die and has collected all this stuff, and claims to have been the historical da Vinci and Brahms. No surprises there, but it is interesting that he’s not an alien or anything; he’s just naturally and inexplicably immortal. He has no idea why and no explanation is given or even tossed out as a possibility.

His relationship with the hidden girl Rayna is more mysterious, and it’s fittingly the axis around which the plot turns. But let’s ignore the Rayna/Flint dynamic and focus on the inevitable Rayna/Kirk dynamic. Kirk meets her briefly for two scenes and is smitten. He loves her, says as much, and when he claims with certainty that she loves him back, she doesn’t argue. Later Flint and Spock both affirm that love. A possibility that I had never even entertained before suddenly hit me:

What if Kirk isn’t just a womanizing wanderer? What if he actually likes these girls? What if he’s just the most lovesick person to ever set foot on a starship, and he just has the best luck at finding people but the worst luck keeping them around? What if Kirk is, in short, a tragic hero, whose capacity for love drives him to greatness, but whose heart is always dashed on the rocks by fate?

That’d be a pretty awesome, moody, interesting character. But I don’t really think that’s who Kirk is. Kirk is a womanizer, he does just wander into relationships and then have no problem taking off, and when things do get serious the universe kindly shatters all possibility of a lasting commitment by conveniently killing off whomever Kirk banged this week.

And the Flint/Rayna bit is interesting, but you’ll have to watch the show for the full details. All I’ve got to say about that is: why is Data so novel, since the universe is apparently teeming with androids?

Now all this is good. Great, even. You get Kirk dealing with who he is, an interesting pair of guests, a neat dynamic between those three, Spock there to support, McCoy there to comment, and a messy, tragic end that leaves almost everyone shattered. But then the last scene is an absolutely perfect capstone, where Spock uses his Vulcan Mind Meld to help Kirk in whatever little way he can, because he knows that his friend needs it. We as an audience are left wondering if he knew by himself or because he listened to McCoy’s fantastic paean to love. We also get to wonder whether Kirk ever finds out. But it’s a wonderful show of mercy (an emotion?) on Spock’s part, and it’s woven so perfectly into the plot that it pulls everything together and emphasizes all the right points.

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Best Bit of Dialog

McCoy: You see, I feel sorrier for you [Spock] than I do for him [Kirk] because you’ll never know the things that love can drive a man to. The ecstasies, the miseries, the broken rules, the desperate chances, the glorious failures, the glorious victories. All of these things you’ll never know simply because the word love isn’t written into your book.

Grade

A+; easily one of my favorite episodes in a long time, if not the whole series.

The Cloud Minders

The Cloud Minders (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) brings us to Ardana, the only known source of zenite, needed to stop an agricultural plague. But when they get there, the crew is attacked by the miners!

The local government (played very well) is hush-hush about why the miners are upset, and try to play it off as a simple uprising. But it soon becomes evident (in multiple ways, including a terrible voice over by Spock) that Ardana is a bifurcated society with the workers oppressed by an upper class who literally lives in the clouds.

There’s a lot of great stuff in this episode. There’s prejudice and class, torture and diplomacy, intrigue and technobabble. There’s even a teleporter that uses a new special effect for no apparent reason.

But in the end it’s weak tea. The problem isn’t prejudice; it’s this magic gas that McCoy finds easily but has gone undiscovered forever. The ruling class really is smarter and really is right to rule; the working class really is dumber and are doomed to just go on working the mines, but now with gas masks. And neither side learns a lesson about anything; they aren’t even sure they believe in the gas, let alone their mistaken assumptions about each other. In short, this episode tries to say lots of big important things and gets in its own way while making it a sci-fi.

Grade

C

The Way to Eden

The Way to Eden (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) is full of hippies. Clad in even-more-graish-than-usual and slightly-more-revealing-than-usual attire, sporting lots of hair and odd medallions, the Space Hippies are following Dr. Sevrin and looking for Eden. They’ve hijacked a space cruiser and the Enterprise is hot on their tail; quick work is made of the chase and they’re brought on board after a tractor beam tug-of-war causes the cruiser to explode.

Yes, the Enterprise was told to go get a hijacked ship and blew it up. No one bats an eye at this.

Then they have to put up with the Space Hippies once they’re onboard complaining about their freedoms being impinged and calling everyone Herbert. The episode does a good job of portraying them as fools under the control of Sevrin, who Spock quickly determines is insane. What evidence does he have? Oh, he talked to him.

But there’s some sedition going on, lots of talking about who people are and what they want. The Space Hippies bring people out and get ‘em going. And then they take over the ship to go to Eden.

It all goes awry, of course, but not because the crew stops them; Eden isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and Sevrin actually is all sorts of crazy.

But this episode is actually pretty good, if you can get past the ridiculously over-the-top nature of the Space Hippies and the more-than-occasional folksy musical interlude (with songs that aren’t half bad, truth be told). The story is simple but interesting, the characters get a lot of screen time to talk, and the situation is relevant. If anything I’d play up the Space Hippies legitimate beefs with the “modern” era (regimented society, technological omnipresence, constant war) and stretch out the end, but neither is possible without cutting something else, so I’m giving them a pass there.

Grade

B+

The Lights Of Zetar

• The Lights Of Zetar* (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) takes the crew to Memory Alpha, namesake of the Star Trek Wikia. But before they get there, a mysterious storm of lights crosses their path and makes the obligitorily beautiful visiting expert feint!

And wouldn’t you know it but the storm did a number on Memory Alpha, too. And it’s gonna come back to finish the job on the Enterprise unless the crew can figure out a way to stop them!

Begin Spoilers

The lights are the last remnants of Zetar: a collection of noncorporeal echoes of the last survivors of that planet. And they’re slowly taking over the body of Lt. Mira Romaine, whose love of learning is matched only by her love of Scotty. Yes, Scotty.

This episode almost has a nice little freedom speech about the remnant versus Mira, and it almost has a nice discussion on identity, and it almost has a clever solution to destroying a life form native to space, but it lets the ideas wither on the vine and does the life-saving without explaining why it works. The result is an episode that needed one more draft to really shine, but instead just feels like a good idea badly done.

End Spoilers

Grade

B-

That Which Survives

That Which Survives (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) is the episode where Mr. Spock is as annoying as he actually would be if you knew him, and you want to punch him in the face. Sadly, no one in this episode does so.

Begin Spoilers

There is, though, a holographic woman who kills by touch, an artificial planet, a black second-in-command in sickbay and a woman helmsman. There’s the continued confusion over how fast the Enterprise can go before it blows up, and a not-terrible plot. But mostly this episode is completely forgettable.

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Best Dialog

Spock: “Can you give me Warp 8?”
Scotty: “Aye, sir. And maybe a wee bit more. I’ll sit on top of the warp cores meself and nurse them.”
Spock: “That position would not only be unavailing; it would also be undignified.”

Grade

C