Current theory points to the Enterprise being responsible for medieval Earth legends about the Skyships of Magonia.

The following is an excerpt from the archives of the United Federation of Planets Temporal Integrity Commission. It appears to be a fragment of an introductory text for prospective Agents educating them on proper temporal mechanics and etiquette.

It is common knowledge the the United Federation of Planets of our time requires all Starfleet officers to observe strict adherence to the Temporal Prime Directive. As its name would suggest, this directive is an extension of the earlier Prime Directive, which was a policy of nonintervention with the natural development of cultures less developed then ours. The logical outgrowth of this core premise, the Temporal Prime Directive clearly states that interference with historical events is strictly forbidden, and the current timeline must be upheld at all costs. In our age of freely available and accessible time travel, the preservation of the sequence of events leading inevitably to this glorious present is of paramount importance. Under no circumstances will any time travel event that could jeopardize or even nullify the possibility of this particular future coming to pass be tolerated, and the stewardship of our timeline can only be seen as our primary responsibility as Starfleet officers.

Once time travel technology became commonplace in all the civilized cultures of the galaxy, an interstellar pact was signed between all the major political powers mutually agreeing to prohibit the use of that technology for any purpose other than pure, untainted scientific research. Furthermore, the agreement outlines explicit guidelines, instructions and procedures on how time travel can be undertaken safely, rationally and virtuously without contaminating or endangering the timestreams that lead to our reality. The ratification of this treaty and related documents, which collectively became known as the Temporal Accords, remains the fundamental guiding tenet of Federation and Starfleet policy to this day. Although most governing bodies freely accepted the new terms, many more did not, and broke off their Federation alliances, feeling that temporal mechanics should be used to change the past for self-centered and misguided notions of “personal improvement”. Such temporal incursions are the greatest threat to our safety and sovereignty, and it is the sworn duty of all temporal agents to track down and repair the damage caused by such incursions, and ideally preventing them from occurring in the first place whenever possible.

Although time travel of any sort is discouraged if it can be avoided, Federation and Starfleet policy does acknowledge that the past holds merit from a scientific perspective. One of the reasons it is imperative that we do not change the past is that studying it both teaches and gives us perspective for how to live in the present. In this regard, a history of time travel is beneficial to help us better understand the moral and ethical ramifications of temporal mechanics, why Federation policy has evolved to the point it has and how best to handle a time travel situation should you happen to find yourself in one.…

Continue Reading

Then Captain Kirk left the Enterprise and went back to the space that was not a space.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, genre fandom underwent something of a shift in the way it expressed itself, at least on the Internet. A new generation of fans-turned-critics sprang up, ushering in a new style of criticism that can loosely be described as the Internet Review Show. Centred mostly around the website network Channel Awesome, which itself grew out of both YouTube and YouTube’s copyright policies, these shows took concisely analytical and frequently equal parts extremely nostalgic and extremely negative, perspectives on science fiction and pop culture ephemera from the 1980s and 1990s, often using the analytical tools of film school. Two of the primary influences on Channel Awesome and similar sites were Mystery Science Theater 3000 and The Agony Booth, both of which were known for their trademark style of sarcastically sending up assorted bits of genre fiction’s past.

Don’t you see? This is not Your ship. This is not Your crew. It’s changed, different: It’s already begun. It may be too late to undo the damage that has already been done, but You can set things right and prevent further harm from coming to Your universe. You see now the danger You are in? The natural order of things is at stake because of this! It’s not only this plane, but all of them! The Future, Our Future, Your Future is on the verge of nonexistence. You must put a stop to this here and now so the proper path of Things-To-Come may unfold as it is destined to. Find him, stop him, destroy him, whatever it takes! You must do it and do it immediately! The fate of Reality-As-We-Know-It is in Your hands!

The reason I bring all of this up is because one of the primary ways by which Star Trek fandom as we currently know it was able to take shape was through The Agony Booth’s text recaps of various episodes from across the franchise. The cancellation of Enterprise put Star Trek pretty clearly into the category of “the past”, and even in spite of J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzmann’s two blockbuster cinematic reboots, there is still a lingering sense in many corners of the fandom that Star Trek as a relevant, extant thing remains dead and buried. Therefore, it was sites like The Agony Booth and related web efforts (like SF Debris) and its descendants (like Channel Awesome and other sites like it) that helped usher in a reflexive and introspective period of self-examination in Star Trek fandom. The one problem is that, given their status as entertainment based on making fun of things, the consensus of places like this is going to be extremely negative, or at the very least they heavily emphasize the parts of the series they look at that are the easiest to lampoon.

Yes, I am He, the horrific and terrible monster who destroys civilizations and can make reality vanish in the blink of an eye.…

Continue Reading

“IF WE FIGHT LIKE ANIMALS, WE DIE LIKE ANIMALS!”

Arguably the most memorable episode of the Original Series’ first season, there’s an awful lot going on with “Arena”, and all of it is deserving of our attention: This is the first episode actually written by Gene Coon, it boasts one of the most iconic extraterrestrial designs in the show’s history in the Gorn and three of the most iconic setpieces as well: Kirk’s brutal, drawn-out fistfight with the Gorn captain, his improvised tree-trunk cannon (which recently, as of this writing, saw an entire segment dedicated to it on MythBusters) and his climactic confrontation with the Metron where he refuses to kill his opponent after beating him. Also, for good measure, “Arena” also sees the debut of a little thing called the Federation. So, kind of a big story then.

Let’s get that last one out of the way first, as it’s by far the most interesting from the perspective of the future. Like the debut of Starfleet and Starfleet Command in “Court Martial”, this is primarily a nomenclature change at this point. Furthermore, the Federation is even less important to “Arena” then Starfleet was to “Court Martial”: In that episode at least the organisational structure of Starfleet Command was important to the main plot, here, the Federation is introduced with a single throwaway comment from Kirk and then never mentioned again. Nevertheless, the word choice here is interesting, to say the least. A “Federation” is by definition an alliance of self-governing political states with partial autonomy brought together by shared mutual interest. What it’s not is a colonial empire; at least not by default: An empire grows through colonization and militaristic conquest. Calling a centralized power a “federation” would at least *imply* a more co-operative arrangement.

In the past the world of Star Trek has been pretty clearly a galactic empire based on Earth: The overwhelming majority of places we’ve visited have been Earth colonies, and we’ve seen no other significant political power in the galaxy aside from the Romulan Star Empire, and they’re tucked safely away behind the Neutral Zone. That’s all changed as of “Arena”, however: The central twist of the episode is that the Gorn, who are introduced as an aggressive, warlike Other who cannot be reasoned with, turn out to be a highly sophisticated civilization in their own right who feel threatened by Federation expansion into their area of space. The Metrons’ lesson to both crews seems to be about stressing the importance of communication and diplomacy, it would seem that this might be what distinguishes the Federation from the former Earth Empire.

This is of course not to say a federation is incapable of being imperialistic. The oldest and most influential federation on *our* Earth is the United States, which is known nowadays primarily for its policies of economic and political imperialism built around manipulating diplomacy and trade sanctions and the fetishistic focus on neoliberal privatization resulting in a capitalistic tyranny that rewards only those who are already in an extremely privileged position while absolutely crushing and dehumanizing everyone else, not to mention being a general fascistic police state towards its citizenry.…

Continue Reading

I got your gun…

We’ve finally found the weird at long last.

The opening salvo of “The Squire of Gothos” is simply put the most mental thing yet. We’ve got a planet that instantaneously materializes out of nowhere, Kirk and Sulu jump-cutting off the bridge and foppish Victorian gentle-alien holding the Enterprise hostage due to his fascination with warmaking. Each one of these concepts individually would be enough to throw viewers for a complete loop; dumping all of them on us at once requires us to take a few steps back, a deep breath, and take them one at a time.

The first thing to note is that we’re back in “Miri” territory. Actually, a case could be made this is the structure of “Miri” done right: The Enterprise is on space patrol as always, en route to deliver some more supplies. Just like in the earlier episode, however, they are swiftly interrupted by the thoroughly inexplicable. This time though, the show takes its time unfolding the mystery: The phantom planetoid, disappearing crewmembers and bizarre antiquarian message of “Tallyho!” showing up on Spock’s monitor is enough, but the show gradually builds on this, first with the reveal of Trelane’s oasis-within-an-oasis and then well into the third and fourth acts as each answer does nothing but open up a new question. Unlike the earlier episode, which promptly resolved all of its mystery in the first act, this one clearly takes the time to relish it, taking gleeful pride in constantly getting its audience to wonder what the heck is going on.

“The Squire of Gothos” is of course nowhere near as mind-bogglingly weird as something like the roughly contemporaneous Verity Lambert era of Doctor Who, best exemplified by the Georges Méliès-inspired spacescapes, giant ants and man-butterflies of the serial “The Web Planet”: This is something that’s absolutely not in Star Trek’s wheelhouse at this point, if it can in fact be argued it ever will be. But this is still a very stark break from what we’ve come to expect from Star Trek, especially under Gene Coon and in particular after the past three episodes. The precedent is, naturally, “Shore Leave”, and the effect of that episode’s traumatically altered state of consciousness is very clear here, as is it’s ultimate reluctance and hesitation. From the very beginning Trelane operates completely and utterly above and beyond the crew’s level of comprehension, and the very first thing they set about doing (and continue to do for the remainder of the story) is to try and explain him a way using rationality language they understand. It is simply inconceivable for Kirk and his crew to accept the possibility there may exist things which do not fit neatly into their currently established knowledge systems.

And Trelane is definitely unlike anything we’ve seen before: He’s the first genuinely “alien” character in all of Star Trek, for one. Spock, and by extension the Vulcans, were originally at heart just Number One’s human personality turned into the defining trait of a culture (they of course quickly become much more than this, thanks almost exclusively to the combined efforts of Leonard Nimoy, Theodore Sturgeon and D.C.…

Continue Reading

“How Beautiful You Are That You Do Not Join Us.”

“Once upon a time there were three little sisters…”

The three sisters lived together, all by themselves, on a small island. To this day no-one is quite sure where that island lay: Some have claimed it was somewhere among the modern-day Marquesas, while other swear it was much further out, an outlier island far off to the west. Then there are those mythologizer-poets who swear by the stars themselves that this island was impossible to place on a map, for any cartographer foolish enough to attempt to chart its location on parchment would find it to be forever out of reach, just beyond the edges of the paper. Most who claim to have reached it never return, and those who have are unable to find it again, even if they retrace their path down to the exact last nautical mile. And yet this island did exist, as alive and real as any of us. It presumably still does today.

“What did they live on?”

Mostly coconuts and the splendid gifts of the sea, but they were very well provided for on the island. I am told it is a place where scarcity and want does not exist, for the island and its inhabitants live together in balance and harmony. But that is not this story.

On the beach, the sisters sat in a circle facing each other, each with legs crossed in the lotus position.

“I vote one of us tells a story,” Tertia suddenly exclaimed “Would either of you happen to know one?”

“Here’s one,” Hedda responded with a smile “Once upon a time there were three little sisters…” she began, but was quickly interrupted before she could continue.

“Very funny,” Tertia drolly responded with her hands on her hips, “We’ve all heard that one, you know…”

Then, Alice spoke up: “Have I ever told you the story of the spacemen, my dear sisters?” she inquired.

“I believe I know it, if that’s what you mean,” Hedda answered, “I have seen it thus invoked.”

“Oh please do tell it anyway!” Tertia implored, “As the dawn rises over the eastern waters each night, the future shall be known to us again and again and again.”

“It was in the days before you, dearest star-sisters,” Alice began, “My counsel is sought on one of the multiplex planar realms of invocation. These are the lands where Is and What Is exist together in their death-dance. These are truths we know.”

“Yes, I have seen many such places,” Tertia remarked, “The world-stage and World-In-Itself in cohabitation”.

Alice nodded, then said “And this world-stage was Thought, which is the child of thought yet not an heir to its throne. As I passed through this realm, I met the first of the spacemen, who had come seeking my guidance. They adorned themselves in the visage of a summer’s day, but did not yet know its meaning.”

“They do not see the Day, for some are not attuned to seeing it.”…

Continue Reading