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“…strictly neutral in this matter as you well know…”: The Pirates of Orion

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“…I thought we weren’t playing cowboys anymore.”

“The Pirates of Orion” is one of the best character pieces in the Animated Series and builds nicely on established Star Trek lore without feeling either slavish or repetitive, but most of all it fits neatly into the pattern we’ve been crafting for the franchise over the past few posts.

The Enterprise is en route to a dedication ceremony on Deneb V while recovering from an outbreak of choriocytosis, a particularly virulent respiratory disease that prevents red blood cells from transporting oxygen. Just when the crew thinks the plague is under control, Spock suddenly collapses on the bridge. After rushing him to sickbay, McCoy informs Kirk that Vulcan physiology is similar enough to that of humans to make him susceptible, but different enough that it becomes far more serious, and that Spock will die in three days unless the crew can get their hands on some strobolin, the only known antidote. Realising the nearest source of the vaccine is four days away from the Enterprise‘s position, Kirk calls the starship Potemkin and freighter Huron for help in forming a brigade line. However, on its way to the Enterprise, the Huron is attacked by the titular Orion pirates, acting outside the declared neutrality of their government, who hijack the ship and steal its cargo. It now falls to Kirk to track down the Orions and reclaim the cargo without provoking a diplomatic incident.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the Orion Syndicate since “Journey to Babel”, but it’s the first time we’ve seen it focused on to this extent. Even so, however, “The Pirates of Orion” keeps its space opera overtones and world building somewhat in check: The Orions act in a manner totally consistent with their previous appearance, down to the mention of how any Orion ship is duty-bound to self-destruct and its crew commit suicide should their mission fail in such a way that it puts their government’s neutrality at risk. Just like in “Journey to Babel” though, and decidedly unlike some of their later appearances, infodumps about Orion society are not actually the focal point of the entire episode. Though the space adventure stuff isn’t quite less important than the character drama here as they’re at least about equal, there’s still an appreciable balance between the two. Furthermore, this episode firmly establishes the Orion Syndicate as one of the proper, top tier antagonists for the Federation and the Enterprise crew, so when they reappear a few years later in Star Fleet Battles and when the video game based on that universe gets named after them, it’s all but expected.

Which is all good, because “The Pirates of Orion” itself is neither the most original, creative or inspiring space pirate story ever told. I was consistently hoping throughout this episode that Kirk would be forced into negotiations with the Orions to get the vaccine and that we’d eventually get to see Kirk break treaty and regulations to save Spock’s life.…

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How Puzzles Work

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So, Mystery Hunt is over. I typically post a wrap-up about it somewhere – I used to do it on LiveJournal, where there was once an active Mystery Hunt community, but that’s semi-dead, and I’ve not really found what you could call an obvious replacement. So I’ll do it here, for a somewhat odder audience.

And anyway, I don’t have a huge amount to complain about – this was a well-run Hunt that I have very few issues with. So instead I figure I’ll point at a couple of puzzles I did a large amount of work on and enjoyed and try to give a sense for the general audience of what’s fun or interesting about these sorts of puzzles. Links are to puzzles. If you for some reason want to solve, you should probably do so without reading my comments, but my comments do not explain the solutions (which are linked in the upper-right hand corner)

Some basic overview – there are basically three things you do in a puzzle: the a-ha, the legwork, and the extraction. The a-ha is the moment when you figure out what the hell is going on in the puzzle. The legwork is when you solve all the clues, fill in all the boxes, identify all the pictures, and otherwise use your understanding to fill stuff in. And the extraction is when you figure out how what you’ve filled in turns into a short phrase or word.

To use the last puzzle I solved this year – one I solved only because one of my readers who also Hunts made a comment about a Simpsons/Doctor Who puzzle, which let me know that the half of the puzzle that was making no sense was Simpsons references – here’s how the basic steps work.

Here’s the puzzle.

The two a-has are realizing that every clue both references a Doctor and a Simpsons couch gag. This is lovely, if you solve a lot of puzzles. The couch gags can be tied to episodes, and the Doctors provide a set of numbers. What we’re probably going to do is what’s called indexing into the answer. So for that first clue, “My dad made us all dress up to look like the Beatles Sgt. Pepper album. He even got the rest of the town to be there, though that one old man with a wooden cane looked a bit out of place,” we have the couch gag from the episode “Bart after Dark,” and the First Doctor. So we take the first letter of BART AFTER DARK and get B out of that clue. And we similarly get letters for every other clue – so the one that mashes up the 8th Doctor with “The Great Money Caper” takes the T, because T is the 8th letter.

All that’s just legwork – identifying Doctor references and looking up couch gags.

Often a puzzle like this also requires sorting the answers somehow. (The usual name of this type of puzzle is an ISIS puzzle – Identify, Sort, Index, Solve.…

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So You’re My Replacements (The Next Doctor)

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What do you mean they’ve cast him? He’s, like, five years
old!
It’s Christmas, 2008. X Factor winner Alexandra Burke is at number one with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” narrowly beating Jeff Buckley’s version, which charted in an attempt to thwart The X Factor from taking the Christmas number one. The remainder of the charts are basically unchanged since earlier in the month, save for Geraldine’s “Once Upon a Christmas Song” and a different choice of Beyonce singles. In news, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is arrested for trying to sell Barack Obama’s former Senate seat, 1400 people lose their jobs in Ireland due to a crisis caused by pork contaminated with dioxin, and Woolworths announces that it will be closing all of its stores. 
On television, meanwhile, it’s the fourth new series Doctor Who Christmas Special, The Next Doctor. It is difficult to list anything that’s especially awful about The Next Doctor. David Morrissey is a fine actor, and while he is shamelessly hamming here, it is a skilled execution of the style that is inappropriate neither for the part nor the occasion. Indeed, it is almost preferable to call his performance charcuterie – a distinction without any difference in meaning, but with considerable difference in implication. The plot moves along with reasonable efficiency. There are funny bits, there are moments of quality drama, and the whole thing is good fun. 
Why, then, does it feel so hollow? Even this is, perhaps, unfair. It’s hard to argue seriously that this is the nadir of the Davies era. Most people hate Planet of the Dead more, it seems. But for my money, and we’re getting ahead of ourselves slightly here, Planet of the Dead never purported to be anything other than a frothy romp written by Gareth Roberts. The Next Doctor, on the other hand, presented itself as altogether more significant.
The key step in this came on October 29th, two days after Secrets of the Stars wrapped, as David Tennant announced his departure from Doctor Who. This did not exactly surprise anybody – ever since the announcement that 2009 would consist of a run of specials instead of a full season of Doctor Who, the consensus speculation was that Tennant was leaving. Davies already played with this once with the regeneration cliffhanger of The Stolen Earth, and with the knowledge that Moffat was taking over the default assumption was that Tennant was leaving. But that was only true among the tiny portion of the audience who actually followed Doctor Who news closely. For the wider public, it was not until the 29th that the speculation over who the next Doctor would be properly ramped up.
Davies, of course, anticipated this fully, and designed The Next Doctor to played ludicrously with that speculation. And he succeeded wildly, with David Morrissey being the bookmaker’s favorite for the part. Almost anyone paying close attention assumed the truth – that Morrissey was being employed in a story distantly derived from Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman’s Colin Baker audio The One Doctor – but the general mood was nevertheless one highlighting this episode as significant and major.
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Myriad Universes: Alan Dean Foster and Ballantine Star Trek

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What’s the most immediately interesting about Alan Dean Foster’s Star Trek Logs novelizations of the Animated Series for Ballantine Books from my perspective is how neatly they fit into Star Trek’s own evolving and shifting position in culture during this period.

When we talked about James Blish, I mentioned that the choice of having him novelize the Original Series was indicative of Star Trek’s at-the-time tentative connection to Golden Age science fiction. While his novelizations seemed marketed to the Hard SF crowd (and certainly looked the part), there was always a lingering uncertainty that this was what Star Trek really was and that these were the sort of people it should be exclusively marketed towards. This was embodied in Blish himself though his paradoxical and counterintuitive connection with the sci-fi writers’ group the Futurians, who bizarrely seemed to think they could bring about a Trotskyist revolution by going through Pfizer and Boeing. Blish and the Futurians, like Star Trek itself, were compelled equally by both extremely right-wing and extremely left-wing forces.

Alan Dean Foster however, is a different breed of writer altogether. In fact, it could be argued he stands right at the precipice of the point where New Age science fiction, Forteana and fantasy meld into the blockbuster giant of a genre we’re familiar with today. Foster’s major sci-fi work, and probably what got him the gig in the first place, is the Humanx Collective, a constructed, self-contained universe of stories about a progressive representative democracy encompassing multiple planetary civilizations of which humanity is a member, so I wonder where we’ve heard that before. The primary difference between the Humanx Collective and the Federation, however, is that the former body is in many ways defined by its two founding members, humanity and the Thranx, an insectoid people, and this relationship is a symbiotic one. As a result, there’s a lot more cultural diffusion in Foster’s stories than in Star Trek, and this allows for a depiction of how cultures morph and grow over time as they interact with each other.

Foster’s also something of a message writer, and a lot of his stories have a very strong environmentalist bent to them. Unlike someone like Gene Roddenberry though (or André Franquin for that matter), Foster doesn’t tend to have his protagonists come sailing in to tell all the Bad Polluters what they’re doing wrong, but instead demonstrates how a lack of respect for nature will ultimately lead to the undoing of any people who foolishly make the mistake of selfishly exploiting their environment. Apart from just being a message I can’t find any fault with, this also puts Foster very firmly into the tradition and concerns of the environmental age, which is quite fitting for 1974 and 1975. What’s also great about Foster’s staunch environmentalism is how it demonstrates so effortlessly that science fiction, and in particular science fiction about space travel, can remain relevant without relying on being propaganda for massive state-sponsored displays of Cold War imperialism. It’s a closing argument for our “Space Oddity” concern that our stories of space travel are doomed to become relics of the 1950s.…

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Saturday Waffling (January 18th, 2014)

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I’m out of town for the weekend for my annual bit of intellectual masochism at MIT Mystery Hunt, and so am writing this several days in advance. For those who are unaware of this bizarre practice, it’s something in the range of 48-72 hours of tricky puzzles solved in pursuit of finding “the coin” and winning the spectacularly awful booby prize of your team having to write the next year’s Hunt. 

The puzzles generally do not bother with things like “instructions” or “any meaningful sign of what you’re supposed to do,” and instead you have to simply figure it out by discerning a pattern of some sort in whatever the puzzle is.
Here’s an example from two years ago that ought be in the wheelhouse of some of you. The answer to a given puzzle is always a word or phrase. I’d offer a prize to anyone getting it right, but given that the solution is linked in the upper right-hand corner, I can only offer my congratulations for your extreme skill at tasks with functionally no utility whatsoever.
Back Monday with some actual Doctor Who writing. Scandalous.
…

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Outside the Government: Enemy of the Bane

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It’s December 1st, 2008. Take That are at number one with “Greatest Day,” and are unseated a week later by Leona Lewis’s “Run.” Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Akon, and Kings of Leon also chart. In news, Barack Obama announces more of his cabinet, three people die in the course of shopping for Black Friday, Russia and the Ukraine get into a tiff about natural gas supplies, and the legendarily wretched Lapland New Forest, a Christmas-themed park so awful that its management was jailed, both opened and closed in Hampshire.
Rather less wretched, and on television, is Enemy of the Bane, a story designed to work on two levels simultaneously. On one level it’s the structural trick Davies has been using literally since the dawn of his television career – the villain from one part of the season is shown at the eleventh hour to be working with another major villain. This time it’s a return of the titular Bane mixed with Kaagh from The Last Sontaran. And the story’s topic is clear enough – it’s a story about adoption again, and about the legitimacy of Sarah Jane’s status as Luke’s mother. And, like most of The Sarah Jane Adventures, it gets the notes right and provides a fairly touching story about what a “real mother” is, deciding that motherhood is about actions, not biology. All very nice.
But as part of the “big epic finale,” this was always slated to be a Doctor Who crossover. The plan was to have Martha, since of course there was still a show she’d not appeared in yet. Unfortunately (for Davies, at least), Freema Agyeman got poached by Chris Chibnall when he jumped over to do Law and Order UK, leaving a hole in the story that Davies and company eventually filled by inviting Nicholas Courtney to reprise the role of Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, more conventionally known as the Brigadier.
For a project of this sort, then, there can be no other way to meaningfully approach this story. Never mind that the Brigadier is a relatively minor character in this story – a guest appearance with only a handful of significant interventions who spends most of his time standing in the background of scenes. This is the final appearance of the Brigadier. The Sarah Jane Adventures has an elegiac tone at the best of times due to its strange dual nature as a late career revival for Lis Sladen and the last work she ever did. Adding the last appearance of Nicholas Courtney to it feels borderline funereal.
And it’s easy to read the episode in this context. The trouble with endings is that they often come at a point when things are right to pass. From Verity Lambert’s departure from Doctor Who on, we have seen few endings in which things are cut down in their prime. Even when the endings have come through tragedy, it has often been a case of an undignified end that still comes near the right moment.
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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: A Fragment Out of Time

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Slash fiction is a thread that’s been with us for quite some time already, and it’s been with Star Trek arguably since as early as “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. Although certain hardcore fans might not like to admit it, it is unquestionably one of the franchise’s most defining and signature motifs: Although slash has existed for pretty much as long as people have been telling stories, the current manifestation of it, the interaction it has with late-20th and early-21st century fan culture, and thus the way it is commonly conceptualized today, can be directly traced back to Star Trek.

There are any number of possible opportunities to discuss slash over the course of the franchise’s history, but the one that seems to most appropriate is here, with the first documented piece of Star Trek-inspired slash fiction, Diane Marchant’s “A Fragment Out of Time” (Page 1, Page 2), dating to 1974. Marchant submitted it to one of the first (and at the time only) Star Trek zines targeted expressly towards adults, a publication somewhat wonderfully titled Grup. Given the zine’s comparatively small audience and interviews she’s given after the fact, Marchant never expected it to be the bombshell it ended up becoming.

However I think she really needn’t be ashamed, because the piece itself is, perhaps contrary to what one might expect, really quite tame and laudably well-written, describing a night of passionate lovemaking between two parties of whom great care is taken to speak in vagaries (though an accompanying illustration, not to mention the fact it was published in a Star Trek zine, sort of makes it obvious who the two paramours are supposed to be). And “lovemaking” really is the proper term: Marchant is very clearly interested in the intimacy and tenderness shared by her protagonists, and the gentle, poetic tone that permeates the entire piece reflects this. Honestly, as far as slash fiction goes, or really erotica in general, you could do considerably worse for yourself than this.

Like so much fanfiction of its era, Marchant wrote “A Fragment Our of Time” largely as an experiment. However, she also always maintained that she didn’t come up with the idea of shipping Kirk and Spock herself, she was merely responding to what she felt was blatant subtext in the original Star Trek and that everyone who watched the show recognised and acknowledged to one degree or another, regardless of whether or not they actually admitted it. Marchant was adamant that the only thing she contributed to the history of Star Trek and the broader fan culture was the first work that was bold enough to put it into words, and I’m more than reasonably convinced she was right.

There was, of course, (and still is, to some extent) some manner of controversy over this opinion. The popular consensus for what happened next (I mean as much as there can be consensus about something as understudied and undervalued as fanfiction) is that “A Fragment Out of Time” caused a great schism amongst Star Trek fans and a firestorm of a debate about how proper the fic itself was and whether Marchant’s argument was convincing or not.…

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The Tek-Judges of Anubis (The Last War in Albion Part 27: Judge Dredd, Ro-Busters)

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This is the third of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: After successfully launching Battle Picture Weekly and the controversial Action for IPC, Pat Mills and John Wagner were given the task of launching a sci-fi comic, which they called 2000 AD. The comic’s flagship was the iconic Judge Dredd, featuring hard-edged futuristic cop Judge Dredd patrolling the mad streets of Mega City One.

“The Tek-Judges of Anubis have eaten a poison-weed and they shall die soon.” – Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, Judge Dredd: Book of the Dead

Figure 200: Judge Dredd is largely unreceptive
to requests for leniency or mercy. (Written by
Malcolm Shaw, art by Mike McMahon, 2000
AD #6, 1977, click to enlarge)
But the heart of the strip’s appeal came in its combination of the anti-authority leanings of Kid Rule OK or Look Out For Lefty with the noble bad guy protagonist of Hellman of Hammer Force. Judge Dredd takes for granted that its audience would recognize that its protagonist was deeply unsympathetic. The standard set-up of a Judge Dredd story involves Dredd going to great lengths to bust some “creep” whose crime seems relatively minor. Even if there is a proper villain, it’s not uncommon for a Judge Dredd strip to end with some minor accomplice getting arrested by Dredd, who inevitably rejects any pleas for mercy. An early story, for instance, ends with Dredd arresting a man for receiving an illegal but presumably life-saving organ transplant, proclaiming him to be one of “the real villains” in the illegal transplant ring he’s busting. 
The strip, in other words, is an aggressive satire of what would become known as the broken windows theory of policing, in which focusing on small crimes against the social order – vandalism being the textbook example – was believed to reduce crime in general. In practice, of course, broken window policing became an excuse for police forces to focus on petty crime committed by poorer people, and was little more than an excuse for neoliberal crypto-fascists like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to arrest more racial minorities. Dredd predates both Thatcher’s Britain, which came into power in 1979, and the broken windows theory, first codified in 1982, but this only added to its power. It meant that when Thatcherism rose to power the artistic resistance to it was already worked out and ready.
Figure 201: Like Figure 97, this Brian Bolland
cover of 2000 AD #11 caught a young Alan
Moore’s eye.
…

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Outside the Government: The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith

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It’s November 17th, 2008. The X-Factor finalists remain at number one, but are unseated by Beyonce for the second week of this story. Killers, Girls Aloud, Britney Spears, and Leona Lewis also chart. In news, the financial crisis rumbles on with another bailout of AIG, an IMF bailout of Iceland, and a request for a bailout for the US auto industry. President-elect Obama announces a Treasury team including Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, and Gordon Brown reveals plans to increase the income tax. 
While on television, it’s The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith. Not surprisingly for a Gareth Roberts script, there’s a lot to like here. For one thing, he manages to make the frequently frustrating “morality of changing history” plot work. This is a tricky thing to do well – as we’ve previously observed, the “changing history is wrong” plot runs into significant trouble due to the fact that all morality surrounding it is necessarily invented wholesale for the plot, as the actual nature of changing history is unknown to us. The result is that it usually turns into either a story about the experienced time traveller and the newbie one and how the newbie one needs to stop rocking the boat and accept the rules (yuck) or one about arrogance and hubris.
The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith fits firmly into the latter category. Indeed, so firm is its fit that it proceeds through the arrogance plot with a calm meticulousness. The story really is one about temptation, with Sarah Jane not so much making a foolish decision to change the past but rather making a series of small decisions, each time edging a little bit closer to the big one, but never without a rationalization and a sensible justification. It’s a quite nuanced portrayal of how a good person can make a supremely, stunningly bad decision – another case of The Sarah Jane Adventures being made with a sort of meticulous care and precision.
It also manages to avoid any sort of ontological ethics of time travel. Sarah Jane saving her parents is a bad idea because the Trickster has set up a trap that destroys the world if she does that. Absent the Trickster, she probably could have gotten away with it and had it be fine. The problem isn’t that Sarah Jane does something that “violates the Laws of Time” or some similar nonsense. It’s that she does something risky when she knows it’s probably a trap, and it blows up in her face. That keeps the time travel ethics in the realm of the concrete.
Yes, there are complaints. The time travel actually doesn’t quite make sense – the initial setup of infant Sarah Jane being abandoned by her parents is a result of Sarah Jane’s actions in the story, which ties it up in a neat loop of the sort that time travel stories often go for. But if the ending situation is what always happened, where does the alternate timeline in which the Trickster reigns supreme come from?
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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: A Trekkie’s Tale

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Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky! It’s Lieutenant Mary Sue!

Oh boy, here we go. Yes, my friends, the time has finally come.

“A Trekkie’s Tale” needs no introduction. A notoriously vicious bit of satire attacking a particular trend within Star Trek fanfiction, the story is infamous for introducing the world to the hated Mary Sue. It took no more than five brief paragraphs to completely tear Star Trek fandom asunder and, as a result, “A Trekkie’s Tale” has transcended fan circles to become ubiquitous in the larger pop consciousness such that it’s had a truly transformative, profound, and arguably profoundly negative, effect on the way we look at genre fiction even to this day. A case could be (and has been) made that the introduction of the Mary Sue archetype is one of the largest and most sweeping acts of reactionary silencing tactics in the history of genre fandom.

And yet “A Trekkie’s Tale” itself is misread and misunderstood by pretty much everyone.

First, some background for those perhaps less familiar with what this is than others. “A Trekkie’s Tale” is a piece of satirical fanfiction published in 1973 and featuring a character named Lieutenant Mary Sue who is the youngest, most beautiful and most talented officer in the entirety of Starfleet. On her first day on the Enterprise, Lieutenant Mary Sue outperforms everyone else on the ship, causes Kirk to instantly fall in love with her at first sight, outwits Spock with logic (that is never fully explained) and singlehandedly saves the ship, the crew and the Federation at least twice before tragically dying randomly at the end of the story to be mourned by everyone and essentially turned into a modern-day saint. Lieutenant Mary Sue, and “A Trekkie’s Tale” more generally, is fairly transparently an attack on a certain kind of Star Trek fanfiction, and is most often read as a parody of (usually female) writers who create author avatar characters as wish fulfillment, thus sidelining the original cast and narrative in the process. In the years since the initial publication of “A Trekkie’s Tale”, the term “Mary Sue” has become a stock character archetype and nowadays gets tossed around rather carelessly, most typically as a knee-jerk reaction from insecure male fans to the concept of “strong female character I don’t like and who makes me uncomfortable with my masculinity.”

What’s the most interesting thing about the Mary Sue archetype to me, however, is how uniquely Star Trek a concept it really is. Star Trek fandom has, in my opinion, a very peculiar fascination with an *extremely* specific sort of fantasy: It’s an almost omnipresent dream amongst Star Trek fans of all ages, generations and genders to be captain of their own starship, command their own crew and, essentially, to be the star of their own Star Trek spinoff. This goes totally contrary to the stereotypical conception of the obsessive fan, which would be someone fantasizing about the characters or the actors, either in a romantic or sexual way or just a desire to meet them in person.…

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