Ship’s Log, Supplemental: Star Trek: The Next Generation Series Bible
The beloved crew of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D were not always the people we know and love and have become so intimately familiar with over the years.
Though Star Trek: The Next Generation did not undergo as radical a transformation as some shows do between preproduction and filming, there are still a handful of drastic differences between the show as conceived and the show as aired, in particular in terms of the characters. There are a number of surprises in store for the Next Generation fan who decides to look back into the show’s early brainstorming sessions and first-draft series bibles, and before we boldly go off into the show that was, I think it’s important for us to take a moment and reflect upon the show that almost was. A show that is many respects the same as the one we all know, but in many others significantly different, and, perhaps in some respects, more intriguing.
This essay then is not a straightforward transcription of the original Star Trek: The Next Generation Writer’s Guide by Gene Roddenberry, but is rather an amalgamation and distillation of a number of early drafts and ideas that Roddenberry and the team were working on before the cameras finally started rolling. I make no pretenses that I’m organising all this according to any particular structure or logic apart from the one that emphasizes the things I think are most important to focus on and keep in mind about this period of the show’s history. Honestly, I’m not even sure the actual preproduction of the show was as ruthlessly concise and methodical as I’m making it out to seem, but I maintain my goal here was to create a sort of unofficial, pseudo-bible for a version of Star Trek: The Next Generation that had a very respectable chance of actually happening. With that in mind, let’s have a look at
The New Crew
Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Sir Patrick Stewart, takes his name from Swiss inventor and explorer Auguste Piccard. Auguste is famous, along with his brother Jean-Felix, for their scientific expeditions in hot-air balloons to record data on the upper atmosphere, their studies of cosmic microwave background radiation and their invention of the bathyscaphe Trieste, which his son Jacques piloted to Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, the deepest point in Earth’s oceans.
Captain Picard is described as an aesthete; someone who enjoys the “privileges” and “eccentricities” his rank affords him. A veteran officer, Picard got command of the Enterprise due to already being a “24th century Stafleet legend”. I seem to recall someone commenting once in a Star Trek magazine that Roddenberry had described his conception of Captain Picard as a dashing, suave and debonair “hairy Frenchman” who enjoyed things like fine wine. Apparently, women in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s universe consider men like Picard (who is described as being in his fifties) to have “just entered [their] best years”.…
Good Soldiers (Into the Dalek)
‘Into the Dalek’ is about good soldiers vs bad soldiers.
The pain of being a good soldier, the pain of the memories which a good soldier has, vs the anaesthetised mind of the bad soldier.
But, of course, what do we mean by terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’?
For the army, a ‘good’ soldier is a soldier who obeys orders without question, kills without hesitation, and doesn’t let themselves be haunted.
A ‘bad’ soldier is a soldier who thinks about, and makes decisions based upon, things other than the orders of a superior… perhaps leading to their inability, or refusal, to kill on command.
In a soldier, morality is a malfunction. A good soldier is a ‘bad’ soldier. Because good people can’t do a soldier’s job, which is to fight and kill.
At least, that might be how the Doctor would put it, in his simplistic way. The Doctor doesn’t like soldiers. As in ‘The Sontaran Stratagem’ he is rude and patronising to the soldiers he meets as a matter of course. He refuses to take Journey Blue with him because she’s a soldier.
But the soldiers on the Aristotle are rebels. They are specifically described as rebels. Rebels against the Daleks. The Daleks, who are, for whatever reason, inherently evil. This is fuzzy (it still may be because of technological control of the brain) but, at the end of the day, Rusty reverts to type. He realises that life is beautiful and unstoppable, that the Daleks are the enemies of life, and his response is to decide that all Daleks must die. Because he’s a Dalek, and that’s how Daleks think. So, contrary to the Doctor’s hopes, there’s no saving the Daleks… which makes Rusty pretty much right: they’re beyond saving, so they must be fought. Which is what the rebels are doing. So Rusty kills all the Daleks… which is a BAD THING judging by the Doctor’s defeated frown (though quite how any of them would have survived if that hadn’t happened escapes me).
So, once again, as in ‘A Good Man Goes to War’, we have an episode which says one thing about warriors while showing us another. Soldiers are scary and irredeemable… umm, even the ones who rightly rebel against unappeasable and unsalvageable aggressors.
See, I have no problem with the soldiers on the Aristotle. They’re rebelling against the imperialists of the universe. I’m supposed to think they’re wrong or suspect for shooting to kill? When you’re in an army fighting aggressive imperialists or fascists, you’d better obey orders and shoot to kill. That’s what the soldiers of the International Brigades did. That’s what the Red Army did when they drove back the proto-fascistic West-sponsored Whites. If the Whites, or Franco’s troops, or the Nazis, are advancing on you, you want an army that’s ‘good’ at what it does to come and fight them.
Of course, Danny is a former soldier… and Clara doesn’t reject him the way the Doctor rejects Journey. She, despite her copy of the Guardian, rises above the kind of knee-jerk, right-on disdain for soldiers that (supposedly) so many people have, like the Doctor.…
Robot of Sherwood Review
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Right. Top-line assessment is that this one’s a bit more polarizing than the last two, which seemed to be widely liked with an inevitable pool of detractors. The first comment on the episode to come through declared it to basically be the worst thing ever, and GallifreyBase currently has it at 55.48% in the 8-10 range. Which is on the whole still pretty good, but clearly the most mixed reception of the season to date.
For my part… well, look, this was never going to be my favorite episode. I’m not a huge fan of Gatiss, the celebrity historical is not my favorite Doctor Who subgenre, and I’ve seen enough Doctor Who at this point in my life that the business as usual/meat and potatoes episodes, while often enjoyable, aren’t exactly highlights. And this was, at the end of the day, a meat and potatoes celebrity historical written by Mark Gatiss.
But none of those are reasonable things to hold against the episode on any level other than ranking it in the list at the end of the review. One can’t critique a beach for not being a paperclip. Instead, what jumps out is that everyone involved knows exactly what they’re doing. This alone puts it ahead of Gatiss’s previous swing at a celebrity historical, in which nobody quite seemed to know what tone to go for at any given moment. Here, everybody from Gatiss on down understands that they’re doing a fluffy one.
Perhaps more to the point, however, everybody gets how best to approach one of these. Gatiss is at his best when he’s taking an old and well-worn structure and giving it a spit and polish to modern tastes (The Unquiet Dead, Cold War, The Crimson Horror), and so this is firmly in his wheelhouse. There’s nothing particularly extraordinary about the script (indeed, when the first five scripts leaked, more than a few people proclaimed four of them good and this one to suck), but it moves through its set pieces and knows what it’s doing at any given moment.
But this isn’t a story about the clever script. It’s a story about dancing merrily through the obligatory set pieces. Gatiss holds up his end of the bargain by getting them all in and keeping the pace up. But the heart of this one is the execution, and it’s there that this does sparkle. It’s pure melodrama, and everybody gets that. The episode would be completely derailed if either of the two major guest roles (Robin and the Sheriff) pulled a Graham Crowden (or, if you want a more recent option, a Roger Lloyd-Pack).…
The Svadishtana Chakrah (The Last War in Albion Part 60: Rite of Spring)
This is the tenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.
The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the second and third volumes. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. The third is available in the US here and the UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.
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Figure 444: In a surprisingly bleak twist, Pog’s crewmember Bartle is devoured by real gators. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Shawn McManus, from Swamp Thing #32, 1984) |
Sensor Scan: Doctor Who
Hi everyone. Since we’re all friends now and this is a judgment-free zone, I’d like to tell my story here today as part of sharing time. I know we’ve all been talking lately about the things we grew up with and how they shaped us into the people we are today, so in light of that I have a confession to make. I never grew up with Doctor Who.
Let’s be realistic here. Nobody reading this needs me to explain to them what Doctor Who is. It is, as of this writing, arguably the biggest, most talked about, most beloved and most overanalyzed television show on the air today. It has a cultural weight that utterly demolishes everything else remotely comparable, and regularly sweeps the science fiction awards shows year after year partially because it’s the only science fiction show left on TV. As I write this I’m coming off of the franchise’s fiftieth anniversary in 2013, a year where it absolutely dominated entertainment headlines and was an omnipresent sight in every store, at every convention, and in every neighbourhood. Doctor Who currently has a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-level of media presence, so trying to historicize it in any way feels bemusing and inauthentic. You know what this is, I know what this is, let’s not kid ourselves.
It’s not that I’m bitter or jealous, it’s just that Doctor Who is not a cultural phenomenon that I’m along for the ride with. I occasionally watched the New Series off and on between 2005 and 2012, but I eventually just lost interest in it completely and it’s not something I have any sort of emotional investment in. Doctor Who interests me mostly at an academic level: The current phenomenon is sort of fun for me to watch unfold as it reminds me a bit of what Star Trek: The Next Generation was like in the early 1990s, but now I’m on the other side of the glass, as it were. But also, as many critics, including many of my personal friends, have pointed out, Doctor Who is a show that does some very clever things with things like narrative and metatext and, thanks to a handful of the architects who worked on it in formative years, inherits a relatively unique kind of progressive edge. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail about that here, because there are people who can explain it far better than me and have dedicated a not-insignificant part of their lives to doing just that. You could go ahead and check out, say, Phil Sandifer, Jack Graham, Andrew Hickey, Alex Wilcock or the co-hosts of the Pex Lives! podcast.
What I will talk about is my history with the franchise and what we can glean about Star Trek through looking at it. The Doctor Who I remember is an unusual thing: It’s not the show itself, even though it was on the air at the time.…
Essential Problems and Dialectical Solutions (‘Deep Breath’ 5)
Many people have already commented on the expansion of Clara’s character in ‘Deep Breath’. I think there’s something to this… in that Clara now appears to have a character, now that she’s been freed from her tedious and contentless mystery-arc. Those impatient with the right-on critique of Moffat will respond with all sorts of examples of brave, complex things she did in Series 7, and some of those examples will be right, but still… she really did look like a characterless blur across the screen, a sort of jumble of traits, a Rubik’s Cube with a face drawn on it. There’s no denying, she looked better in ‘Deep Breath’. It’s possible that, as with so much else that seems better about ‘Deep Breath’, I may just be perceiving an improvement because the episode is largely free from the dominating and infuriating presence of a certain actor who will not be missed at all by me. But then, such things do make a difference. One performance in an ‘actually existing’ production of a written text can change the meaning.
Clara’s monologue rebuke to Vastra is part of her apparent improvement… though I have to say (in my complainey way) that the monologue contains yet another example of Moffat fetishizing the powerful, with Clara saying that Marcus Aurelius was her only pin-up. Of all the philosophers she could have idolised, Moffat chooses the one who was also a Roman Emperor! I also noticed an implied contempt towards teenage girls who like boy bands, as if that makes them inherently trivial people. Clara gets to angrily reject the notion that she is unwilling to accept an older man, but the idea is expressed in terms that imply contempt for young women who who don’t reject young hot guys for old, establishment figures. To be painstakingly fair, I’m sure this is not what was intended. It’s one of those examples of a writer being unable to fully win no matter what he does. Which happens. Sometimes writers can’t win. Sometimes they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. It’s not about their flaws so much as the social context in which they write. That’s not an excuse, but it is a thing. The solution to this, as I’ve said before, is not to find better writers, or better ways of writing which square such circles away nicely and neatly so we can all watch in perfect comfort, but rather to change society so that massive imbalances of power don’t keep setting off these little textual mines. Sounds like I’m demanding a lot, doesn’t it? Well, I am. Deal with it. That’s just how I roll. Etcetera.
At first, the whole business with Clara’s difficulty accepting the new Doctor reminded of the nasty reaction towards ‘fangirls’ that was unleashed by the news of Capaldi’s casting, with all those memes about the shallow, hormonal girlies, supposedly devastated by the news that the new Doctor was someone old and wrinkly. Just another manifestation of the ‘fake geekgirl’, a chimeric invention of a closed shop full of males objecting to the scary presence of women in ‘their’ fandom. …
Comics Reviews (September 4th, 2014)
As always, and by always I mean just like the last two weeks, from worst to best.
Original Sin #8
Well. That didn’t work. Which is odd, because so much of it felt so close to working. The “a secret is revealed” trick to tie into the crossovers was great on paper, but then got squandered when both Avengers and Uncanny X-Men just did their own plots without actually using the “truth bomb,” but branded them as Original Sin crossovers anyway. The plot wasn’t uninteresting, but it was continually below the level of what it felt like a big crossover should be. This was a small, personal story that affected, ultimately, one character who doesn’t even hold down his own title, but was done as a giant mega-crossover event, which just wasn’t the right frame for it. The art was quality, but almost consciously wrong for the slightly humorous story Aaron was telling. Nobody felt quite on the same page as anyone else. Pretty much a flop.
Miracleman #10
It’s not a bad issue, to be sure. But even in the original, this was a filler issue between the huge birth issue and the start of Book Three, and while there exist issues of Miracleman good enough that $4.99 feels reasonable, the sixteen pages of actual story in this book aren’t one of them.
Moon Knight #7
I won’t lie, I’ve gone off Brian Wood a bit since the sexual harassment allegations came up a while ago. It’d been coming, with my getting bored with his X-Men, Conan, and Star Wars runs in fairly rapid succession, but there’s no point in pretending that the slight cringe whenever I hear his name isn’t the biggest problem. So I went into this kind of expecting it to be the issue where I dropped Moon Knight.
Much stays the same – stylistic complexity, the one-issue story, et cetera. And, appropriately, much changes, as it should, since just doing a Warren Ellis imitation would be doomed. The problem is that the changes consist of taking things Ellis did that were interesting and replacing them with the boring. A tease in the final panel gesturing towards an arc. The way in which the high concept premise of the issue isn’t explored and plumbed, but is just the backdrop for some action sequences. All the stylistic innovations and structures that powered Ellis’s book feel like they’re receding, replaced by the ill-conceived Batman clone that Ellis was always fighting the gravity of.
It’s good enough to get another issue, which means it beat expectations, I suppose, but I’m still pessimistic.
Uncanny X-Men #25
It plays to Bendis’s strengths in many ways. The interactions among X-Men, particularly from both sides of Ye Olde Schism, are great. The big retcon, Matthew Malloy, gets enough space to breathe that he feels like a functional and interesting character. The extra story pages are used well, in equal measures to allow for more plot and to give the plot to breathe. It’s still a Bendis comic, with that strange anticipatory tone whereby everything that’s happening now is overshadowed by some promised future event that, whenever it arrives, will itself be overshadowed by the next big thing.…
Outside the Government: The Curse of Clyde Langer
Sensor Scan: Hellraiser and Hellraiser III
The psychology behind horror movies interests me. I know there have been studies done that show a link between fear and endorphin release, and that a lot of their popularity has been attributed to the rush your brain gets when the pleasure and fear senses get crossed. But do we actually watch horror movies to get scared? There’s a whole massively popular genre of campy, no-budget horror movies that no one could possibly be remotely frightened of, yet is beloved precisely because of how cheap, fake and ridiculous it is. Then there are people who just really like seeing blood and guts splattered all over the screen: They’re not getting anything deep or meaningful out of the experience, they just like the lurid spectacle.
I know for me, while horror is not a particular favourite genre of mine, the bits of it I partake in I enjoy because of the way they build atmosphere. That’s sort of been a defining theme in all of my various media interests: I like things that can build a mood and a feeling. A lot of the reason I’m so partial to the German Expressionist movement and the early Universal Horror movies is because of the way those films use light, colour and design to craft a surreal mindscape the convey certain themes and emotions. I mean, that’s no real surprise at this point and by now I really need to come up with some new words to describe what I like to see in media.
But I also like horror movies that use their horror trappings to explore something that’s horrific or somber in real life, like how Alien made generations of men uncomfortable with themselves by turning rape culture and patriarchy into something repulsive and monstrous. The original Godzilla should really be considered a horror film, and there the horror comes from not just the obvious allegory (atomic weapons, natch), but in that classic Japanese trope of modernity’s shortsighted disconnect from the natural universe. But as much as we’re supposed to be horrified at the destruction of Tokyo, we also sympathize with Godzilla herself, and take pity on the tragic plight she endures. As much as we’re aghast at the destruction left in her wake, we want Godzilla to win.
Which, weirdly, leads into the Hellraiser series. An adaptation of Clive Barker’s novel The Hellbound Heart helmed by the author himself, the first Hellraiser film is an examination of the role pain and violence play in the human psyche as conveyed through a horror movie. It concerns a magical puzzle box that, when solved, opens a portal to the realm of the Cenobites, creatures of a monstrous visage who practice a form of ritualistic sadomasochism and self-mutilation in an effort to explore and understand carnal experience, them seeing no distinction between pleasure and pain. It’s definitely an intriguing concept, especially for a horror film in 1987. With a set-up like that, there’s a lot of potential for metacommentary on the whole genre, filtered through an examination of real-world S&M lifestyle.…