Forest of Illusions

The rapidity with which Star Trek Phase II went from “fannish love letter” to “pseudo-official Star Trek” is somewhat astonishing. Between the release of “Come What May” in January, 2004 and “In Harm’s Way” in October, the show picked up an endorsement from Eugene Roddenberry, Jr. (who also signed on as “consulting producer”) and Doug Drexler, who not only came aboard as producer, make-up artist, casting director, editor and VFX artist, but also co-wrote the latter episode as well. “In Harm’s Way also boasts a veritable cavalcade of former Star Trek acting alumni, such as Barbara Luna, Malachi Throne and William Windom, who reprises his role of Commodore Matt Decker from “The Doomsday Machine”, the story from which this episode draws the majority of its source material.

With a pedigree like that, one would expect “In Harm’s Way” to be one of those grandiose epics that franchises like Star Trek enjoy doing every once in awhile, and one would be correct. This time around, Star Trek Phase II feels like it’s trying to pick up any perceived slack from “Come What May” and doing the proper, blockbuster series premier that’s expected of it. Indeed, the official episode listings go so far as to list this as the “actual” first episode of Star Trek Phase II, granting “Come What May” an episode number of zero, thus somehow managing to make it even less canon then it already was.

And “In Harm’s Way” certainly delivers on that expectation, serving up an impossibly complex and detailed alternate universe time travel plot where the Planet Killer from “The Doomsday Machine” runs into the Enterprise fourteen years early under the command of Captain Pike thanks to some dodgy chronitons, vaporizing it in one shot. This leads to an alternate timeline where Kirk is in command of the USS Farragut, with the majority of his regular crew, with the notable exception of Spock, who was on the Guardian of Forever’s planet at the time and was spared the time shift. In his place on the Farragut bridge is Klingon science officer Kargh, as apparently in this timeline the Klingons and the Federation formed a shaky alliance to combat the Planet Killer and its brethren (it would seem there’s more than one of them now, and the galaxy has been at war with them ever since).

After summoning the Farragut to the Guardian’s planet by way of a Priority 1 order, Spock explains how the timeline has been altered and has to be corrected. This is actually my favourite part of the episode, as it explains, for the first time I think in the history of the franchise why the timeline needs to be restored, as there’s an actual value judgment made: In the current timeline, billions upon billions of people have died in the so-called Doomsday War, which wouldn’t have happened had history not been altered (a similar argument, I suppose, to the one Guinan makes in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, though I like the bluntness of the argument here better).…

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There’s something about Star Trek that inspires people, in spite of itself.

2004 marked the beginning of a period of tender, heartfelt introspection for Star Trek fans, perhaps unmatched at any other point in the history of the franchise. The mere fact that Star Trek Phase II (at this point still operating under its original name of Star Trek: New Voyages) exists here while Enterprise was in the middle of its third season and the “Save Enterprise!” campaign in full swing is probably a decent indication of the faith anyone had in the continued longevity of the sixth Star Trek series, or indeed Star Trek itself, at least as an extant and relevant mass media presence. Perhaps it was this zeitgeist, and the accompanying urge to “go back to where it all began” in an attempt to understand things, that was what motivated James Cawley and Jack Marshall to make their own Star Trek TV show.

But 2004 is also an interesting transitory period for independent TV shows. This is still before the advent of YouTube made easy and accessible Internet video hosting and sharing a major cornerstone of what’s come to be (somewhat inaccurately) called “Web 2.0”. One could imagine that had Star Trek Phase II come along just a few years later it would have resembled much more closely the recent Star Trek Continues: Kickstarter-funded and then given a major sponsor such that it attracted the much sought-after “buzz” and had an actual budget. But Star Trek Phase II didn’t have the luxury of any of that in 2004, being entirely funded out-of-pocket by Cawley’s career as an Elvis impersonator (which comes through delightfully in Cawley’s portrayal of Kirk in “Come What May”: Not only does his hairstyle look like an Elvis wig, he has appealing sense of artifice) and having to build its own web presence and following entirely from scratch. There’s a sense that this show is in some ways a throwback (but not a bad one) to a time when independent filmmakers could only rely on their own resources, ingenuity and tenacity, trying desperately to convey their visions in somebody’s backyard with a home VHS camera.

(Not that Star Trek Phase II looks cheap by any stretch of the imagination: The fact the creative team managed to convincingly recreate the sets from the Original Series is staggering, and the CGI effects shots, while obviously comparatively crude, look more dynamic and interesting than the ones on the actual show did.)

Star Trek Phase II is, predictably, in part a revival of the abandoned show from 1978 that Paramount had initially hoped would bring Star Trek back to TV and serve as the flagship programme for their new network. The name is slightly misleading, however, as it’s also pegged as the fifth year of the five-year mission depicted in the Original Series and Animated Series and is comprised of mostly original work. The show has the rather ambitious aim of linking together the various and disparate stories and timelines of the Original Series, Animated Series, Phase II and Original Series movies into something resembling coherence.…

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Summary of shakedown trials for prototype codename “VOYAGER”…

In orbit around Shadir, a planet whose inhabitants are rumoured to be highly cultured and refined aesthetes, the Enterprise receives a distress signal from a passing spacecraft that’s apparently been through a massive battle, as little remains of it but debris. There’s also the larger issue that Xon and Uhura can’t pick up any lifesigns on either the ship or the planet. Kirk takes Xon and McCoy over to the ship where they meet Yra, a soldier who claims she and her ship are casualties in a planetary war that has overtaken Shadir. Before Kirk can pontificate on the tragedy of such a civilization falling to warfare, a massive blast strikes the Enterprise, rendering Decker unable to raise shields and crippling its critical systems. As the landing party returns to asses the damage, Kirk sends Yra to sickbay, where McCoy discovers that she’s actually an android.

Decker and Scotty tell Kirk the ship can’t survive another attack, but Yra claims another attack is forthcoming and asks to return to Shadir, where she might be able to help stop another projectile from being launched. Kirk agrees and takes her, Xon and McCoy down to Shadir to investigate. There, they learn that Shadir is organised around two basic premises: Upholding and preserving the sanctity of all life and the notion peace can be achieved through using armed conflict to resolve differences. The reason the ship’s sensors couldn’t pick up any lifesigns is because the Shadirians all live underground, but project their consciousnesses into android duplicates who fight a neverending war above ground and in space (an apparent “corruption” of the original purpose of Shadir). Furthermore, it turns out Yra was a double agent, and attempted to capture the Enterprise and her crew to attain a credit bonus from her superiors (so apparently war on Shadir isn’t just perpetual, it’s a form of capitalist labour as well).

I mean, it isn’t good. The fact I can barely remember any of the major plot details is probably a bad sign, as is the fact I kept thinking of the Original Series episode “A Taste of Armageddon” all throughout. Both stories look at worlds where war has become a banal fact of everyday life and is considered necessary to uphold a tenuous peace, and both stories end with a massive explosive conflict that brings about the end of the existing social order. “The War to End All Wars” comes across as the more effective and acceptable of the two because it has Kirk state on numerous occasions that war is never the solution to anything, as opposed to having him go on a bizarre tirade about humans being natural-born murderers (but then again, it damn well better come across as more effective given how morally bankrupt this show has gotten in recent weeks).

This episode’s particular tweak is the concept of voluntary rather than obligatory warfare. While it was never especially clear to me whether or not the Shadirians were engaging in this elabourate ritual for recreational purposes, there is the sense this is something they do not just to resolve disputes, but for excitement (Kirk says something to the extent of “the mistake the Shadirians made was that they became numb and needed to seek out more and greater thrills”).…

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Bloody hell.

“To Attain the All” has got to be the worst episode of Star Trek Phase II by *far*. “Cassandra” was bad. “The Child” was awful. “Savage Syndrome” was appalling, but that was by Margaret Armen, so that’s par for the course. And nobody really expected greatness from “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?”: A brief like that is angling for major problems from the outset. But this? Wow. There’s no excuse for this.

While investigating a system of planets strung together like a pearl necklace (so *that’s* where Star Trek: Year Four got the idea from. Seriously, how do you screw up a visual like that?), the Enterprise is suddenly transported to a realm outside normal spacetime where they are visited by a hyper-evolved energy being called The Prince who claims to represent an infinitely old culture who hold the secrets of the universe, and declares he’s going to test the crew to determine whether or not they’re worthy of attaining a form of enlightenment called “The All” (and it should be an indication for how bloody long this show has been going on that a brief like that feels hackneyed and boring). The Prince says he wants two representatives to face a series of challenges, to which Decker and Xon immediately volunteer for their own reasons (Xon thinks it’s logical, while Decker is starry-eyed at the prospect of learning and new discovery). Reluctantly, Kirk agrees, but at the same time begins to work with Uhura and Ilia to find a way to free the Enterprise.

After that bit, Decker and Xon go off to rainbow space land to play Legends of the Hidden Temple. They are faced with a series of puzzles and physical challenges they must overcome by using a combination of logic and intuition to progress to the next stage and reach The All while The Prince occasionally pops in to give them advice. You thought I was kidding. I wish I was. While this is going on, Kirk begins to notice that the remainder of his crew are starting to act disturbingly similar to each other: McCoy and Chapel are having a professional disagreement, but then start to see each other’s points, Sulu is starting to display character traits more associated with Chekov and vice versa, and Uhura and Ilia are starting to speak for each other. Eventually, this culminates in the entire crew, save Kirk and Decker, becoming subsumed by The All, which turns out to be a great big ancient hive mind that goes around assimilating other people, so naturally the two manly action heroes have to go and punch some sense into everyone and aggressively re-introduce them to good ol’ American Individuality.

Christ on a bike.

Where do I begin? The All is self-evidently enlightenment, obviously coded as a Buddhist version of it to boot…and the show thinks this is an evil, horrible thing. Idiotic and embarrassing children’s gameshow trappings aside, this is the fundamental problem with this episode. It dwarfs everything else and puts Star Trek into a dangerous position the likes of which it hasn’t ventured near for at least twelve years.…

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Well, the first thing I have to say is that this episode isn’t as bad as I was led to believe it was going to be given the description, and especially considering the source material. But it’s also pretty tough to call “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?” an especially good idea in the first place: When the best thing that can be mustered to say is that “It’s not as irreparably catastrophic as it could have been”, that’s not exactly praise either.

The imminent problem is that “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?” was apparently based on the novel The Revolt of Man, which was an 1882 dystopian story about a society ruled by dominant, aggressive women who crush and subjugate the passive and weak men. Naturally, this results in the end of all scientific and technological progress, because that’s “men’s work” and women are incapable of properly handling it. So, the men stage a massive planetwide revolution to restore the “proper order” of things, in the first time I have ever cheered *against* an oppressed minority rising up and overthrowing their oppressors. There is no possible way adapting this book into a Star Trek story could ever conceivably be seen as anything remotely resembling a good idea, even to a creative team *this* tone deaf. And yet, here it is. That Worley Thorne somehow manages to avoid the somewhat unthinkable feat of unseating Margaret Armen as the single most hatefully reactionary writer in the entirety of Star Trek is nothing short of a small miracle, yet that doesn’t make “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?” something to get terribly excited about either.

Star Trek Phase II‘s “twist” on this story is that the alien planet is not ruled by women, but is in fact made up entirely of hermaphrodites who have both male and female hormones. The society they build is basically a stock-reiteration of the Talosians from “The Cage”, honing their powers of illusion and their “mental abilities” in lieu of developing more and better material technoscience. Apparently though, their bodies can’t manufacture the male hormones naturally, and either both or specifically the male ones are needed to control their illusory powers, so, in a scene reminiscent of “The Lorelei Signal” (which isn’t a good sign), they’ve been luring starships to their planet so they could supplant their chemical deficiency by harvesting from their crews. There’s also something about the illusions causing people to regress in age and be hypnotized and something else about the Enterprise being in a deteriorating orbit and needing dilithium crystals that the previous ship left behind and that the aliens are hiding for some reason or another, but I literally did not care enough to go back and check.

The sad thing is this is once again a really great episode for the new characters: There’s more anxiety over Xon’s youth and inexperience, Chekov is in full swing in his new role as security chief/tactical officer and even Janice Rand is back, for the first time since “In Thy Image”, and gets to join the away team early on.…

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It’s Margaret Armen again. That’s really all you need to know.

It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect Margaret Armen-penned Star Trek Phase II to be: Almost comically terrible, offensive and unworkable drivel that largely misses the entire point of the show. So structurally unsound as to actually become some kind of cosmic anti-structure and loaded up with the most unforgivably ghastly racism and misogyny you can think of, “Savage Syndrome” is without question the worst episode of the show to date. No contest. It’s also probably her very worst submission overall, which wow, we’re really hitting record lows here.

There’s no point in any kind of summary, but basically, the Enterprise gets hit with a space mine that “reverts” the crew to a “primitive”, “animalistic” mindset, all save for an away team comprised of Decker, Ilia and McCoy, conveniently the three crewmembers who could most easily resolve the plot at the end of the episode, who were conveniently off exploring a derelict spaceship and conveniently decided to use a shuttlecraft so they wouldn’t have to be beamed back aboard (no, the script does not explain why they just happened to decide to use a shuttlecraft on the precise mission where it was absolutely vital that they do so). And of course, Armen’s conception of “animal instinct” is the absolute worst it could possibly be, firstly totally misunderstanding how gender roles manifest in real life animals by embracing the patriarchal assumption that female animals are always submissive breeding stock for alpha males and the appallingly racist notion that evolution is linear and that indigenous cultures are closer to animals and thus more “primitive” and “savage”. I can’t even muster up the energy to get righteously angry at this shit anymore. It just sucks. That this evil, reactionary, talentless hack is still getting paid writing gigs in fucking 1978 is beyond belief. Fuck this.

(Ironically, in spite of all of this, “Savage Syndrome” is, somewhat horrifyingly, Decker and Ilia’s best outing yet. Both get really sizeable and important parts and carry the majority of the episode’s narrative weight, given that everyone else save McCoy is incapacitated. Ilia in particular is quite good: She does manage to get kidnapped a couple times, but she frees herself, and she uses her “Deltan powers of sensuality” to manipulate the male crewmembers because of course she does, but she runs all over the ship rerouting power and just generally fixing things and, scary as it is, this is her best episode to date.)

As it would be terrible for my patience, temper, mood and general mental well-being to do so, what I’d rather do instead of meticulously going through this episode’s litany of flaws is to talk about the story’s underlying assumption. This would be, in an attempt to strip away as much of the hideous racism as is possible, the idea that simplifying one’s life is tantamount to being retrograde, going against the idea of progress. The affected crewmembers, for example, do not know how to use the modern technology of the Enterprise and resort to fashioning basic implements out of metal rods and bars.…

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“Deadlock” is incredibly frustrating. On the one hand, it’s the first Star Trek episode to deal overtly with the dark side of the Federation and Starfleet, but on the other hand it’s not because it doubles-back on itself and refuses to actually fully commit to the accusations it levels and issues it raises. It opens seemingly promising to make explicit a lot of the implicit concerns and reservations we’ve held about Star Trek from the very beginning, but because of its ultimate balking and painfully bog-standard climax and conclusion, it actually ends up feeling less satisfying and critical then previous efforts.

Answering a distress signal from the USS Intrepid (no, not that one) in “Uncharted Region 019”, the Enterprise is suddenly and inexplicably called away to Starbase 7, leaving Kirk suspicious and Decker enraged. Upon arrival, a Commodore Hunter informs Kirk that he called the Enterprise away to participate in a series of top-secret Starfleet psychological experiments. The crew’s first assignment is to shut down all power to the ship and await further orders from behavioural scientist Lang Cardon. Troubled, Kirk asks Scotty and Xon to come up with an algorithm that would allow them to take the ship from a cold stop to mission stations at the first sign of danger.

While powered down, the crew experiences a series of hypnotic, flashing psychedelic images. The crew becomes entranced, with the exception of Xon and Ilia, who have altogether different and disturbing experiences. Afterwards, Xon tells Kirk that he and Ilia had visions of grave danger, and a message: “Enterprise, you must escape! Report to Starfleet…A plot-Cardon is…”.After learning Cardon’s experiments had been suspended some months prior with no official explanation given, the crew decides to investigate the starbase themselves. Kirk beams over to check things over for himself, instructing Decker to wait an hour, at which point, if Kirk hasn’t checked in, he’s to seize and secure Starbase 7, using any means necessary.

While “Deadlock” initially seems like it’s going to be a deconstruction and criticism of Starfleet ethics and operational structure, what it in practice turns out to be is another of Star Trek’s semi-regular “let’s try and do a current events story” type of episodes. This time, it’s Star Trek’s stab at Project MKUltra, which was a series of CIA experiments looking into the feasibility of controlling human behaviour through various stimuli. From in the 1953 to 1973, Project MKUltra tested a whole suite of techniques running the gamut from illegal to unethical to completely ridiculous, such as sexual abuse, torture, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and, most famously, clandestinely dropping LSD into random people’s drinks to see if the ensuing acid trips could be used as a form of mind control. Some historians believe the endgame of Project MKUltra was to create a kind of mentally servile supersoldier, while others posit the theory that the more out-there experiments were deliberately emphasized by the CIA to draw attention away from its real purpose, which, according to this theory, was to find more effective means of that favourite government buzzword: “Enhanced interrogation”.…

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“Practice in Waking” is an interesting submission. It’s written by Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. This is not, in and of itself, altogether promising, considering Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a cornerstone of the middlebrow, populist, mystique-chic New Age movement with a plot so dull and facile it led Roger Ebert to once memorably compare it unfavourably to The Little Engine That Could. There’s a very serious line to be drawn between actual magick, narrative or otherwise, and the kind of thing championed by the Western, and mostly United States, New Age fad, which more often than not tends to be built out of the exact same imperialism, syncretism and cultural appropriation that defines the rest of the West. If Star Trek wants to take its spirituality seriously, it really ought to stay as far away from this kind of thing as possible. Clearly, “Practice in Waking” is screaming towards disaster.

And, wouldn’t you know it, this is could possibly be the best episode yet. Funny thing that.

“Practice in Waking” opens up hauntingly prescient, very strongly evoking Star Trek: The Next Generation, in particular the first season finale “The Neutral Zone”: Out in deep space, the Enterprise discovers a derelict spaceship called Project Long Chance, one of the last sublight ships built by Earth in the early 21st century. After Xon exposits that the crew must have been placed in suspended animation, Decker takes an away team, consisting of himself, Scotty and antiques buff Sulu over to the Long Chance, where they find one active unit: The casket of chief engineer Deborah MacClintock. Before they can fully relay their findings to the bridge crew, Scotty accidentally touches a panel on MacClintock’s chamber, generating a massive pulse of energy that knocks the away team out and places them in instantaneous suspended animation.

Decker, Scotty and Sulu awake in sixteenth century Scotland in the middle of a forest. Having no memory of who they are and where they came from, they scarcely have time to get their bearings before they see a woman, MacClintock, who is being chased by a royal garrison and about to be put on trial for witchcraft. As the away team fights off the guards, MacClintock reveals that she does in fact believe herself to be a witch, because she has the power to dream events and objects into reality and declares that they too must be witches as well. Meanwhile, on the Enterprise, Kirk, McCoy, Xon and Uhura work feverishly to find out what’s happened to the away team and to find a way to safely wake them, for as long as they stay in a coma, their life signs will deteriorate, to the point they have only hours to live. Curiously, this parallels with events in the “dream world”, as pursued and eventually captured by the witch hunters, MacClintock, Decker, Sulu and Scotty only have hours before they’re burnt at the stake for witchcraft.

Right away, this is once again an episode that’s both structurally very sound and ahead of its time.…

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