Eruditorum Press

Less concerned with who’s first up against the wall than with how to decorate it

Forest of Illusions

About Forest of Illusions

L.I. Underhill is a media critic and historian specializing in pop culture, with a focus on science fiction (especially Star Trek) and video games. Their projects include a critical history of Star Trek told through the narrative of a war in time, a “heretical” history of The Legend of Zelda series and a literary postmodern reading of Jim Davis' Garfield.

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“Misery Loves Company”: Liaisons

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There’s a scene near the beginning of “Liaisons” that kills the entire episode for me. It’s where Worf and Commander Riker are putting on their dress uniforms and Worf grumbles about the outfit being “too feminine”. This earns him a deserved reprimand by Riker, which I still hate for two reasons. One, I hate any scene like this where one character upsets another, especially a friend. Two, it’s impossible for me not to read the narrative as siding with Worf: Worf is manly and grumpy and the writers love him because of that, and they hate this lame stuff about “utopianism” and “equality” that constrains their beloved “conflict”.

You know what? Fuck off. This one scene is emblematic of absolutely everything that has ever been wrong with Star Trek: The Next Generation since these guys took over in 1989.

I’m really not motivated to look further into the episode after that, frankly. It’s not like “Liaisons” is a particularly beloved episode and it’s not like I’m missing a whole lot: The entire premise of “alien dignitaries trying to experience strange and unfamiliar human emotion by deliberately pissing people off” sounds like a brief for a particularly weak Original Series episode (or at least memorably weak, as they were, to be blunt, *all* weak). Bad Original Series knock-offs were passé in the first season. To have one show up in the seventh is frankly astonishing, and that’s another indication of something that’s always been wrong with this show: Nobody seems willing to take it on its own terms. Nothing can ever escape the shadow of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, even (especially) when it’s already been explicitly killed off.

The original pitch for this episode was apparently for a “Let’s Do” take on Misery, the Stephen King story about a famous author who is kidnapped by an obsessive, murderous fan after getting badly injured in a car accident. I am dumbfounded the team even bought the pitch, because for the life of me I cannot figure out how in the universe that *wasn’t* going to turn into a horrific disaster. Misery is frequently read as being about the perils of fan culture, and in the context of Star Trek: The Next Generation in its final year that could only be projected onto Star Trek fans. And applying that to Trekkers, even indirectly, seems like a crateringly awful decision that could go wrong in a myriad of different, equally appalling ways.

For one thing, it’s staggeringly hypocritical for a show made exclusively by and for Star Trek fans to be criticizing other Star Trek fans. Oh, so it’s bad now to be an overzealous Star Trek or science fiction enthusiast? I’m not disagreeing, but who in the hell are the biggest, most overzealous and overenthusiastic Star Trek fans in existence if not the people currently writing this show and using it as methadone for their sexually frustrated creative impulses sparked watching the Original Series as little boys (and yes, I’m using deliberately gendered language here)?…

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“Legend”: The Homecoming

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“The Homecoming” opens on one of the more triumphant notes Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has done in recent memory. There’s a slow pan across the new set for the Promenade upper level into Quark’s, where the man himself in engaged in one of his classic verbal sparring matches with Odo. The energy carries through to the scene where Quark visits a brooding Kira in her quarters to deliver Li Nalas’ earring. Finally, we get a jovial and upbeat Ben Sisko having a charismatic father/son moment with Jake, followed by a friendly and breezy lunch date with Kira. Well, up until she springs the news she wants to take a Runabout to Cardassia 4 to spring a jailbreak.

The sense we get is of a show that’s on top of the world, elated by its recent success. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is *back*, refreshed and energized to continue the creative high it came off the previous season on. And it has every reason to be comfortable and pleased with itself: Late 1993 into early 1994 was the critical, creative and commercial high point for Star Trek as a franchise, and it’s on Deep Space 9 that this is manifesting the most visibly and effortlessly. This must have been around the time I started taking serious notice of the show too, because it’s “The Homecoming”/“The Circle”/“The Siege” that’s among the first crop of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine stories I can recall having an active understanding of the plot and character details from, as opposed to merely faint recollections of dissociated images and scenes. Most of this was due to my having recently getting into Starlog’s official Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine around this time (or really, the following Spring) to catch up with the series, but that warrants its own chapter later down the line.

The ironic thing is that by definition, a peak is a high as one can possibly go, and there’s nowhere to go from there but down. And while this second/seventh season is in many ways just as good as the crop of episodes that came out the year before, there’s an impossible-to-ignore shadow hanging over all the proceedings here, and as good as this opening volley was and is, it also marks the beginning of the end of Star Trek’s imperious phase. This won’t become clear for another few months though, nor will the plans being drafted behind the scenes that will conspire to make life a living hell for cast and crew alike over the next year, and ultimately bring about Star Trek’s end.

For the moment though, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is riding high. The first half of “The Homecoming” is truly iconic to me-There’s Kira and Chief O’Brien in undercover civilian attire in a fierce shootout to liberate Bajoran POWs on one of the very few alien planets where it makes absolutely perfect sense that it’s plainly a quarry.…

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“And the stars are old”: Descent, Part II

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Last time on Star Trek: The Next Generation…

“’Descent’ marks an important turning point in a number of respects. Up front, it’s the first time Star Trek: The Next Generation has done a cliffhanger season finale more or less only because this is the sort of thing it does to close off filming block seasons; in other words, the first time the cliffhanger finale structure is implemented as a matter of course and functional habit instead of being the result of unexpected necessity.” 
“This is not the same as critiquing, say Captain Picard’s specific actions in that episode: In fact, the whole reason Alynna Nechayev is here is to further reinforce that he acted wisely and correctly-Let’s not forget that Nechayev is the first Starfleet Admiral *overtly* coded as actively evil. Her very condemnation of Picard’s choice lets us know that he made the right one. Rather, what “Descent” is attacking is the notion that moral choice was ever necessary: There is no moral dilemma in regards to the sanctity of life; it should be preserved and respected above all else no matter what, end of, and ‘I, Borg’ was stupid to insinuate that wasn’t the case and to put Captain Picard and Guinan in the position of neglecting that.” 
“Because what the Borg have done here in ‘Descent’ is, terrifyingly, assimilate the very concepts of individual positionality and human empathy themselves. They’ve taken two of the most sacred tenets by which Star Trek operates, ground them into the engines of capitalism and turned them back against us in an attempt to quell any resistance we could offer before we reached a point where we were prepared to effect change. 
The Borg’s endgame is, and always has been, to kill off Star Trek as Star Trek: The Next Generation before it transitions to the form that will do battle with them on their own terms. And even if they were to fail here, they’d still be ready for us in the future. Either way, they win.”
“And who better to mastermind it all than a psychopathic fascist android?”

And now, the conclusion…

It’s hard not to go into “Descent, Part II” without acknowledging that this is the beginning of the end for Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s televisual voyage. The news had broken over the summer, so there’s no point in pretending the shadow of cancellation wasn’t looming long over the seventh season. Let’s clarify a few facts first and foremost then: Yes, Star Trek: The Next Generation was prematurely canceled. Yes, it was canceled because Paramount wanted to launch a film series with the Next Generation cast. Production costs had gone up and, with the show as popular as it had ever been, they thought it would be more profitable to start a new film series than to continue the TV one. They were wrong.…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Wave 1

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I first learned Playmates were going to be doing a line based on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on the cardback for one of my Star Trek: The Next Generation figures. In fact, on the back of my new Sela figure you can still see in bold red lettering the excited announcement that “toys and accessories” from the new show are “coming soon!”. Some of the figures from Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2 and the Original Series line (here called “Classic Star Trek”, which is how I knew that show for ages) even came with a mini checklist of all the Playmates toys released so far, with headshots of the figures and close-ups of the vehicles, playsets and prop replicas.

On the back of that checklist was one of the first-ever promotional shots of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine cast-It’s the one where everyone’s standing around in costume in front of a brown shag curtain haphazardly draped over the walls and floor of a photo studio somewhere. This was the first static image I ever saw of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine cast together in one place, and it was the first chance I had to get a good look at them. What’s also interesting about this promo is what it promised was coming in the Deep Space Nine line: All of the characters you’d expect, as well as vehicle toys of Deep Space 9, the Runabout and a Caradassian Galor Warship. That will be interesting to go back and examine in a few months, methinks.

Even though I followed this launch fairly closely (well, as closely as I could at the time at least), it took me a *very* long time to actually bring anyone from this line home. At first it was due to simple wariness: While the characters looked cool and all and I dug the general design aesthetics, in 1993 I still wasn’t completely 100% sold on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as an overall thing yet. So while I definitely saw these on store shelves at the time, I took care to admire them from afar-I was afraid to outright ask for them, and given a choice between spending my action figure money on one of these as opposed to a Wave 2 Star Trek: The Next Generation figure, the choice seemed clear. This turned out to be a cripplingly poor decision on my part, however: Within just a few months I was utterly hooked on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and I would have killed for these figures and, of course, that was just when the Playmates Star Trek line in general was starting to retreat from department stores, and the first casualties were the lowest selling toys. Namely, the comparatively more niche Deep Space Nine figures, which seemed to disappear as quickly as they had appeared.

For practically an entire *decade*, I languished in regret knowing I had very likely missed my one chance to bring home my second space family, as well as the last remnants from the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew (namely Tasha Yar and Ro Laren).…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2 Errata

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You can’t have action figures without some place to put them. Even if you’re too embarrassed to move them around in a playset, you’ve got to admit having a lavish plastic display to pose them all in looks awesome on your shelf. It was Wave 2 that started giving us those playsets for our Star Trek: The Next Generation friends-I’ve already talked about the bridge playset in this book. Although it technically came out as part of this wave, I felt compelled to talk about it back in the first wave because I really just wanted to go all-out gonzo with the first Playmates essay. This leaves me with one extra essay to write about and not a whole lot to fill it with here, however. So, let’s see how long I can talk about what’s left of Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2.

The other playset released this year was a transporter room. Now this was really cool because it actually worked by way of an old theatrical trick called Pepper’s Ghost. In a Pepper’s Ghost illusion, a one-way reflective surface is placed between the audience and a hidden room on the other side. There’s also an overhead light source that, when raised or lowered, makes any objects in the room appear to appear and disappear out of thin air. This is how the Haunted Mansion in the Walt Disney resorts create the illusion of the dancing ghosts in the ballroom at the beginning of the ride, and it’s also how Tupac Shakur appeared onstage at Coachella in 2012 and Michael Jackson did the same at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards (not, as is often reported, through the use of holography. We don’t have holodecks yet).

A lot of times in a Pepper’s Ghost trick the hidden room is painted black so that the “ghost” seems to materialize right in front of the audience, when really they’re in another closed off area. The Playmates transporter conveys the illusion a little differently, with the mirror dividing the transporter pad in two. You put your prospective away team member in the area behind the mirror, close the door and manually raise the sliders (which wonderfully take the form of the LCARS finger panels from the TV show and make a satisfyingly accurate shimmering sound when activated either way) as the overhead light gradually shifts. Obviously to give the illusion your character is standing on the pad both sections have to look identical, and this also necessitates the transporter becoming more of a chamber than a pad. As a matter of fact, during the seven years I didn’t watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, but did have these toys, I completely forgot the transporter room was even a pad on the show at all-I completely mentally retconned it as being a chamber and always remembered it as such until I saw “Encounter at Farpoint” again for the first time.…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2 Vehicles and Role Play

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The first wave of Playmates’ Star Trek: The Next Generation toys focused primarily on the Enterprise and its crew: For action figures we got (most of) the bridge crew, and for electronic light-up ships we got the Enterprise itself as well as a Shuttlecraft. Following along with the accompanying Wave 2 action figure releases, which both expanded upon the Starfleet crew and gave us a greater assortment of aliens, the Wave 2 vehicles included a Klingon Attack Cruiser and a Romulan Warbird.

Both of these ships are very nicely detailed. Actually, in hindsight, I have to say they’re a bit more impressive than the Playmates Enterprise itself: The colours and proportions of both are screen accurate, which is really important when dealing with starships this distinctive and memorable. The Attack Cruiser does fare a little better in this regard: All of the little details and elevations Rick Sterbach sculpted onto it to emphasize shadowplay with the studio lights have translated perfectly to consumer-grade plastic, and as such I’ve always considered it one of the most bang-on replicas of the Playmates line. The Romulan Warbird only suffers a bit due to limited lighting: Just like all the vehicles, only the Warbird’s nacelles light up, and while that’s nice, one of the best things about the Warbird studio model is all the beautiful windows on the…prow I suppose, or beak section. That gives the ship an incredible sense of scale and grandeur the toy just isn’t capable of recreating, and this hurts the Warbird more than probably any other ship in the fleet, save perhaps the Enterprise itself.

(One of my biggest disappointments is that Playmates never made a Ferengi Marauder. You’d think given Letek’s headlining role in the first wave this would be one of the light-up starships they’d release first, but it never happened. Maybe it was because the Ferengi didn’t play as prominent a role in the sixth season, although given all the callbacks to first that seems strange. Or maybe they were holding it back for a possible inclusion in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine line. Although perhaps its for the best, as a Ferengi Marauder without windows would have left me heartbroken.)

What the Warbird does have are some awesome sound effects. Both the Attack Cruiser and the Warbird have four sounds: Cloak, Disruptor blast, “shield hit” and impulse. Neither one has what I’d call especially accurate samples, but the Warbird’s at least were terribly cool sounding. I think I pounded that disruptor cannon button enough times to wear both it and the sound chip out. At least, that’s the excuse I’ll give for the electronics in mine no longer working. Also, my Attack Cruiser is missing its battery case cover for some reason, as well as one of the “prongs” at the front of the ship, which is really annoying. I seem to recall getting my Attack Cruiser (and maybe my Warbird too) one Christmas at my great-grandparents’ house on my maternal grandfather’s side.…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2

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As the Playmates line of Star Trek: The Next Generation action figures expanded, I have to confess I started to get less of them. I know it’s hard to believe and that I have to keep stressing this, but I was actually never a hardcore Star Trek fan, and thus didn’t possess an encyclopedic knowledge of every single character and every single episode. When it came to toys, I was primarily interested in the Enterprise crew and the most recognisable aliens: My fondest memories of Star Trek: The Next Generation are of images and scenes, not specific episodes or stories. So, as Playmates began to expand beyond the main cast of characters I wasn’t as feverish about keeping up with their releases.

It’s the second wave where this began to manifest. That’s not to dismiss the toys from this wave and beyond in the slightest: They’re all of the exact same peerless quality you’d expect from Playmates Star Trek, just to articulate and further highlight where my interest in this franchise really lies. This is the wave where variants, one-shots and reoccurring characters started to become more pronounced (for obvious reasons), and the simple fact is I just wasn’t as interested in that stuff. I still had a fair amount from this wave, but I didn’t have *all* of it. In fact, I still don’t, and I’m not likely to ever finally “complete” my collection as it were. I’m not the kind of collector who has to horde absolutely every release from every line imaginable: I like to have representations of my favourite characters, and I don’t really need more than that. So I’ll review the figures from this line that I have, and only give a passing mention to the ones I don’t.

A few of these ones I’ve already looked at as part of the bridge crew retrospective last season. Even though they weren’t part of the Wave 1 1992 releases, it would frankly have been ridiculous of me *not* to look at Doctor Crusher and Guinan,who in fact didn’t actually get plastic likenesses until 1993. It’s especially dumb that Doctor Crusher wasn’t among the early releases. Normally I would grumble about sexism in the toy industry leading manufacturers to believe that action figures based on girls don’t sell and aren’t popular (which is sadly based on real, material sales figures in spite of what certain activists would have you believe and how much we might want to think), except Deanna Troi was part of the initial wave, and she seems like far less of an action-oriented character, and thus a weaker candidate for an action figure, than Doctor Crusher. Maybe it’s because Deanna’s not a mom. The Bev released as part of Wave 2 is the rather boring, unplayable version with the lab coat moulded to her body and hands that can’t hold anything, but for quite some time she was the only Bev we got.

Speaking of Bev being a mom, Wesley Crusher is (regrettably) another new release from this wave.…

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Flight Simulator: Williams Star Trek: The Next Generation Pinball

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If you have time to kill, you could make an entertaining diversion over debating whether or not pinball tables can be considered video games or not. Traditionally, they’ve always existed on the margins of the industry: You won’t see any big video game publications talking about them, but you will likely see fans of a certain kind of video game, namely retro hobbyists, displaying a passion for pinball tables very similar to the one they have for their favourite video games.

From my point of view, this is extremely easy to explain. Pinball tables may not be video games per se, but they’re definitely close relatives-Fellow travellers at the very least. There’s a lineage shared by both pinball and a certain strand of the video game industry, which just so happens to be the one that most interests me personally. In fact, I would argue that video games, at their purest, are far closer to pinball than they are to computers and computer games. To put my point in the crudest and most basic terms, although they’re both technically speaking interactive electronic entertainment, computer games were historically always programming exercises intended both to allow coders to flex their logic muscles and test the limits of computer hardware. Video games, by contrast, I feel have always been more of an attempt to design a kind of action-oriented sensory experience. As an illustration, contrast two of the most prototypical computer and video games: Zork and Asteroids: Both came out within a few years of each other, both were called “games” of some kind, but each is profoundly different from the other. One consists of nothing but plain text, is deeply narrative-driven and is meant to be puzzled over in long, marathon sessions, the other consists of vector graphics, has no story whatsoever and is meant to be played in short bursts.

Another difference is the setting these two titles were conceived of as being played in. Zork is surely for the home computer user, and in 1977 “home computer user” signifies a very specific sort of person. Asteroids, on the other hand, was meant to be played in bars and arcades: Extremely public places. Asteroids was also a coin-op cabinet. In other words, it’s a game that can be played by literally anyone who has some loose change in their pocket. This is what brings us back to pinball, because it’s pinball tables, not computer games like Zork, that are the true ancestor for video games as we know them today (or at least as *I* know them). Like Asteroids, pinball is a stand-up, coin-op cabinet game that has no story and relies on visual and auditory sensory feedback to cultivate an experience between the player and the game, and like Asteroids, pinball games used to be found in bars and arcades everywhere and could be played by anyone with a few quarters to spare. And both pinball tables and video games exist in the liminal space between digital electronics and analog mechanics inhabited only by a chosen few.…

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Flight Simulator: Star Trek: The Next Generation (Game Boy, NES)

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If you were a casual Star Trek: The Next Generation fan in the 80s and early 90s looking for a video game based on your favourite TV show, your options were severely limited. Star Trek computer and video games were overwhelmingly dominated by the Original Series (much like the franchise in general), and if you wanted a game specifically based on The Next Generation, you pretty much had only two options: There was a trivia game released in 1990 that was just what it sounds like: A bunch of trivia questions based on the show’s early seasons. The year before that there was the rather more intriguing Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Transinium Challenge, a sort of hybrid third-person adventure detective game that put you in the shoes of Commander Riker investigating a series of attacks on a friendly outpost.

This was all very well and good, but from my perspective back then there was just one problem: Both Star Trek: The Next Generation Trivia and The Transinium Challenge were DOS games, and PC games were things far, far above my family’s pay grade and class level. I’m not sure we even *owned* a personal computer in 1989 come to think of it, and once we finally did get one it was a Macintosh, a platform that is famously well known for its excellent pedigree when it comes to PC gaming. My…history with PC gaming is something that continues to this day, and I could fill a book with all the indignities I’ve lived through involving Steam, system requirements, hard drives, graphics cards, hardware standards, trolling modders and planned obsolescence. Suffice to say, DOS may as well have been a strange and unfamiliar ancient runic language as far as I was and am concerned.

Regular readers of the blog will of course know I eventually did get to experience a computerized representation of the Star Trek universe through the wonderful Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, which satiated my need for a Star Trek video game for awhile at least. But as precious as that game has always been to me, it was destined from the beginning to be little more than a temporary solution, because that game was all about the Original Series, and I wasn’t. I needed an actual video game based on the world I knew and loved, and, even had I known they existed back then (which I didn’t), DOS games from four years ago simply weren’t going to cut it. And it would also be really nice if this game would come out for a proper video game console instead of the computer, because that would vastly increase the odds of my getting to play it.

In my opinion, consoles are the natural home of video games. For one thing they have always been, and will always be, significantly cheaper than a high-end PC built for gaming. They’re also designed for one thing and one thing only, playing video games, which means they do that one thing extremely well.…

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Myriad Universes: Malibu Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Early Days

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In late Summer, 1993, Malibu Comics launched the official Star Trek: Deep Space Nine tie-in series.

I freely admit I’m not a comics scholar so I could be wrong, but this has always struck me as a surprisingly and fascinatingly unorthodox partnership for a franchise as big as Star Trek. Except for the very earliest days of tie-in comics all the way back in the mid-1960s, Star Trek has thus far been very careful to only court the “Big Two” comics publishers, namely DC. And even then, Gold Key was not some random upstart imprint: Cheap as they might have been, they made their name on doing all the comic book tie-ins for all the big franchises of the day: Scooby-Doo, Looney Tunes, the Disney stuff that wasn’t handled by the European division, and yes, Star Trek. That kind of thing was utterly Gold Key’s wheelhouse. Malibu Comics, by severe contrast, was a small, rather fiercely independent imprint, and one that had cultivated an image of doing more idiosyncratic and experimental projects targeting a more niche audience.

It was Malibu, in fact, that published a lot of the US Manga Corps output, that being a handful of *super* hardcore American manga fans more or less led by Ben Dunn who made it their mission in life to translate and localize some of the more eccentric output of the Japanese comic industry for US audiences, or adapt some of the then-current anime hits to a manga style if adaptations did not already exist. Indeed, the most notable Malibu-published US Manga Corps project of this period was none other than Project A-ko, which we might take a look at next season if we have time, simply for the sheer charming ridiculousness that stems from reading Project A-ko as contemporary of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But the mere existence of US Manga Corps under the banner of Malibu Comics reveals a lot about how truly strange this license really was: This is still before the 90s otaku boom in the United States led by the triple threat of Ranma 1/2, Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon (although that wave was on the verge of cresting in 1993, and indeed Project A-ko would be a part of that in 1994), so anime and manga fans would still have been seen as a pretty niche target demographic.

The only other big license Malibu had at the time was Street Fighter, and while yes, Street Fighter was massively popular in 1993, you have to remember that A. the video game industry was nowhere near the lumbering behemoth with feet of clay it is today so that doesn’t carry quite the weight you might think it would and B. Street Fighter is still a quintessentially Japanese series. So giving Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to Malibu Comics, to sit alongside the video game tie-ins, creator-owned superheroes and friggin’ Project A-ko (sorry, I will never get over how silly amazing that is) is a really unique and brazen lateral move that says something interesting.…

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