Star Trek Phase II

The original “Kitumba” was the very best submission made to the unproduced Star Trek Phase II. The episode adapted from it for the fan series that shares its name isn’t quite its own pinnacle, but it’s definitely the best episode since “To Serve All My Days” and a fitting closure for era of Star Trek.

It’s also fitting that this episode be penned by John Meredyth Lucas, one of the great unsung heroes of the franchise. Hand-picked by Gene Coon as his successor following the latter’s dispute with Gene Roddenberry over the ending to “Bread and Circuses”, which led Coon to furiously turn his back on Star Trek never to return, Lucas oversaw the one true Golden Age of the Original Series, from “The Immunity Syndrome” to “The Ultimate Computer”. Though he was a frankly bloody amazing producer, as a writer Lucas always seemed a bit more changeable: His first story was “The Changeling” which, well, wasn’t brilliant, to be perfectly honest, but it did provide the impetus for “In Thy Image” and by association this whole show and, arguably, the whole rest of Star Trek, so that has to count for something. Lucas also wrote the script for “Patterns of Force”, which I loved despite nobody agreeing with me (but nobody ever agrees with me, so it doesn’t matter), but he had help from Paul Schneider there. He also collaborated with D.C. Fontana on “That Which Survives” which was also a miniature classic, no surprises there.

But in spite of all of this, Lucas also has “Elaan of Troyius” to his name, which was a racist and misogynistic trainwreck and cast a bit of a shadow over the rest of his tenure. It was never clear whether the failings of that episode could be safely laid at the feet of Arthur Singer and Fred Freiberger, who between them were responsible for much of what was memorable about the Original Series’ third season, or if they were really the fault of Lucas himself. “Kitumba” gives us our answer and thankfully it’s a resounding “no”, because this story is properly outstanding and marks the first time Star Trek Phase II hits actual brilliance. Today it wouldn’t seem like anything special, it’s a two-part epic about cloak-and-dagger political machinations in the Klingon Empire that threaten to plunge the galaxy into a bloody war and the Enterprise has to get involved to keep the peace. Hell, the Dominion War era did this story at least twelve times: Manufactured Civil War in the Klingon Empire was just another Tuesday.

But “Kitumba” would have been the first time Star Trek did this kind of story, at least for the Klingons. D.C. Fontana had of course tried to introduce political intrigue to the Original Series via the Romulan/Federation Cold War in “The Enterprise Incident”, but that didn’t go over so well because it was a third season episode. And actually, “Kitumba” is a very different sort of political story anyway: “The Enterprise Incident” was about diplomatic tensions and covert intelligence, or at least used that as a backdrop to examine the characters of Kirk and Spock.…

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“Enemy: Starfleet” marks an important turning point for Star Trek Phase II. This is best exemplified in the title credits, as it’s the first episode to actually go out fully under that name (the previous episode had the title card cheekily change from New Voyages to Phase II midway through). This, combined with the addition of Xon as a full-time character (though he appeared in the last episode, he was little more than an in-joke) and the teaser at the end featuring James Cawley proudly declaring the next episode is “The Child” mean the writing is on the wall for whatever the original conception of this show may have been.

Perhaps predictably, perhaps not, “Enemy: Starfleet” is the most straightforwardly Original Series-esque episode so far. The title is misleading-Considering all the signs and portents we’ve been building since “To Serve All My Days” about a potential climactic showdown with Section 31 and the Federation’s seedy underbelly, I was expecting a very different story than what this actually is based on the name “Enemy: Starfleet”. D.C. Fontana’s Star Trek: Year Four-The Enterprise Experiment miniseries for IDW was long out by now, and James Cawley and his team had surely read it. Perhaps they were trying to make it canon to Phase II, but even that story never gives us the moment of triumph this show seems to call for (indeed, I doubt Fontana had ever wanted one, considering “To Serve All My Days” itself).

Either way, “Enemy: Starfleet” turns out to be a very familiar, almost stock, story about Federation technology falling into unscrupulous hands who go on to reverse engineer it to wage a war against their now hopelessly outmatched adversaries, who initially blame the Enterprise for the ensuing years of slaughter. There’s a lot of speeches about Federation values of selflessness, and Kirk gets to fret a lot about how he refuses to let death and destruction be carried out in Starfleet’s name. Barbara Luna (who played Marlena Moreau in “Mirror, Mirror” and Veronica in “In Harm’s Way”) even gets to come back as evil warlord Alursa, who is seemingly deliberately designed to be a rote iteration of the 60s vampy seductress space tyrant queen archetype. Luna’s good and always fun to see, but she does seem a but miscast at times (after all, Marlena Moreau was explicitly and purposefully not this) and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of irony or self-awareness about her performance, which is the only thing that saved Marta Dubois’ Ardra in “Devil’s Due”. They should’ve gotten Kate Mulgrew to reprise her role as Queen of the Spider People instead, or better yet, William Shatner.

The idea of Our Heroes being framed for something, or being incidentally implicated by accident, is such a stock and hackneyed plot structure I don’t need to elabourate. Even the idea of a renegade starship impersonating the Enterprise and committing atrocities in its name is well-trod, for me immediately calling to mind for me a number of other expanded universe works, in particular the superior Star Trek: The Next Generation comic arc “Those who fight monsters…”.…

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Of the many unproduced scripts Star Trek has accumulated over the years, “Blood and Fire” is, aside from “Joanna”, likely the most famous. Actually, make that “infamous”: Notorious as the cause of Dave Gerrold’s split from Star Trek: The Next Generation six weeks into production, it’s also gained a reputation in recent years for being “that one awkward story about gay people and AIDS the show almost did”.

…Yeah. This is gonna be an uncomfortable one.

Before we get started, let’s dispel a few myths, because Star Trek’s history with LGB, transgender, queer, asexual, nonbinary, etc. issues, especially Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s, is a major source of misinformation and misunderstanding. The common reasoning goes that Next Generation was appallingly and spectacularly heteronormative and reactionary (if not outright homophobic) and thus a story like “Blood and Fire” would have been the most callous, thoughtless, trainwreck of an episode imaginable. The reasoning then goes on that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine improved things a bit, but not enough, and Star Trek ends up completely hypocritical in terms of its claim of utopianism because of it’s failure to engage with these issues in a serious and adult manner.

This isn’t actually true. Multiple Star Trek: The Next Generation creative teams did in fact want to address queer concerns at numerous points throughout the show’s run, but extenuating circumstances always prevented them from actually building episodes around them. Usually this was due to orders from Paramount executives, who felt (sadly probably correctly) that overt depictions of homosexuality, transsexuality or anything else of that nature would not go over well with US audiences, especially in the 1980s. That said, it’s probably also true that there were certain people involved with the near-fifty year history of the franchise who were less tolerant than others, though I’m not going to begin to speculate as to who. Either way, whenever a particular pitch got far enough along to actually get made, stuff tended to be bungled, mismanaged or micromanaged, leading to unfortunate confused aimless things like “The Outcast”.

The situation is best summarised by Rick Berman. Berman had the unenviable position of being both an executive and Gene Roddenberry’s heir apparent, was caught between the show’s creative teams and studio management and likely got it from both sides. He once said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that of course the Next Generation staff wanted to show how queer sexualities and nonbinary identities would be accepted in the utopian 24th century, but the problem was that it was A. difficult to actually do a story about these things (because, by virtue of it being a utopian setting, there would be no conflict to build a story around) and B. The studio wasn’t having it anyway and the team didn’t want to do it unless they could do it right. Nobody ever came up with a solution that would satisfy everyone, and this had the regrettable side effect of meaning Star Trek never actually properly engaged with one of the biggest progressive concerns of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s (and yes, today too, but Star Trek isn’t around in this form anymore), making its implied author looking like a total fucking hypocrite.…

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From the outset, “World Enough and Time” seems immediately reminiscent of a great deal of previous Star Trek stories. It’s a mishmash hybrid of a thing built out of bits of “Time’s Orphan”, “Joanna”, “The Inner Light” and, well, the last episode, actually. Also The Tempest, but that at least seems intentional.

If I sound a bit cynical here it’s because I kinda am. It’s hard for me to get inspired to write about this kind of story, because so much if it goes over ground I’ve already looked at. The Romulans are doing some shady things, tricking the Enterprise into crossing the Neutral Zone so they can test a new temporal gravity wave weapon (I think), which backfires and blows up their fleet. Caught in the residual messiness, Kirk sends Sulu and Romulan linguistics expert Doctor Lisa Chandris over to the wreckage in a shuttlecraft to get some data Spock and Scotty will need to plan a warp course out of the trap. Stuff happens, the shuttle is lost and Sulu and Chandris need to be beamed back, but the transporter goes wrong (of course) and they wind up being time-shifted to a planet in another dimension such that when Sulu beams aboard, he’s thirty years older (so George Takei can follow Walter Koenig’s lead and get to reprise his role) and has a daughter from an entirely separate life he lived for what for the Enterprise crew was only thirty seconds. The young lady’s name is Alana, she charms everyone with her disarming and inquisitive nature, and naturally, she and Kirk fall in love, causing tension not only with Sulu, but when Spock reveals her being is bound to the temporal field, and breaking free will render her fate uncertain.

It’s not that any of this is especially bad-To the contrary, the script is as well-written as anything else the show has done so far, as one would perhaps expect considering the writer. Marc Scott Zicree is a veteran science fiction and TV writer, as well as a historian, perhaps best known for his comprehensive 1982 book The Twilight Zone Companion. Some of his more notable TV credits include Babylon 5, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Get Along Gang, Liberty’s Kids, The Real Ghostbusters and, of the most interest to us, the TV version of William Shatner’s TekWar series, “First Contact” (the episode, not the movie) for Star Trek: The Next Generation and “Far Beyond the Stars”, the episode I consider to be likely the pinnacle of Star Trek’s Dominion War era (really, only one other story gives it any sort of competition as far as I’m concerned). Zicree is also a regular on Coast to Coast AM and one of my favourite guests, with a captivating conversational tone and a genuine and intoxicating passion for science fiction and writing.

And in spite of its overt familiarity, Zicree and co-writer Michael Reaves have come up with a script that manages to tell a story that’s perfectly solid, valid and fitting for 2007.…

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We’re told birthdays and anniversaries are celebrations of people and of life, but they remain, to a degree, backwards-looking: A ritualistic remembrance of a date long since passed, that seems to grow ever further distanced with each reiteration of the ritual. Western culture is fixated on dates, numbers, patterns and schedules. Nonmodern societies have seasons and cycles, the West has calendars and planner books, endlessly tallying up time and counting down to the next obligatory observation. Perhaps that’s why so many people in the West view birthdays not as a time to reflect on themselves, but as a time to become overcome with an impending sense of dread at the fear of mortality and the inevitability of aging. Once you decide time is linear, it has to end somewhere, because humans can’t accept a ray.

2006 was the fortieth anniversary of Star Trek, but it wasn’t a birthday, or rather, if it was, it was one of those birthdays we celebrate of people who have already died: “Such-and-such would have been this old today”. Enterprise had signed off a year prior, and with its cancellation came the sense that Star Trek was actually dead. It was a puzzling thing to bear witness to Star Trek fandom around 2006 and 2007: I don’t recall any talk about continuing Enterprise or any of the other Star Trek series (except for in the obligatory tie-in Pocket Books lines, but those sorts of things will always exist), or coming up with unique and transformative takes on them: Instead, there was a lot of solemn reflection about what Star Trek was, what it used to mean and where it all might have gone wrong.

What few ideas I do remember almost universally revolved around a “Star Trek XI” motion picture made out of the long-abandoned “Kirk and Spock at Starfleet Academy” pitch from the mid-1990s. And then, of course, there was always Star Trek: New Voyages. In every way, Star Trek fans tried to dowse their future by feverishly digging up the skeletons of their long-departed past. Perhaps it was the shock of Enterprise‘s cancellation combined with the holdover belief from 1990s fandom that Star Trek, as an extant mass media Soda Pop Art franchise, was a thing that would continue on in perpetuity, forever coasting on the success of Star Trek: The Next Generation. For people who can’t conceive of rays, for a time there Star Trek fandom was remarkably quick to embrace them.

So it’s fitting that for Star Trek’s wake, it should once again call upon D.C. Fontana to bury it, if not to praise it. For as much as “To Serve All My Days” is a character study about Chekov, who, thanks to exposure to radiation finally succumbs to the illness he survived in “The Deadly Years” and comes face to face with his mortality, it’s also a story about the legacy Star Trek leaves behind as it transitions into a new form. Let’s address the bombshell right from the start: Yes, Fontana kills off Chekov here, supposedly an episode set before the film series in which Chekov very obviously appears (at the request of Walter Koenig, who wanted closure for his part in Star Trek history and who gives the literal performance of a lifetime as the aged and dying navigator) and yes, this pretty blatantly flies in the face of established canon.…

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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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