Its The End, But... Star Trek Discovery season 1

(SPOILERS, very obviously...)

I didn't think Cadet Tilly could be more endearing than when she said “Fuck” on screen but then she opened a conversation with “I'm really high...” having inhaled groovy volcanic ash with an Orion.

On a more serious note there was something about this episode that made it feel we were getting back to Star Trek being Star Trek. They ended a very action heavy and shooty season with an unconventional negotiated peace and a speech about facing fear and second chances. Between this and booting Evil Lorca into an artificial sun a couple of episodes ago it feels like the production team were very consciously bending the format up to breaking point before jettisoning the very things that were breaking it.

Not that I hated the series before now, far from it, I adored this run (DS9 is my favourite Star Trek so that probably tells you why).

And just to push the point home, in the final moments of the episode, the Enterprise turns up. This was either a very good idea or a very bad idea depending on how (or if) this plays out at the start of the next season.

On the one hand this series has spent so much time establishing its own style and soul that I'd hate for it to open its second season with fanservice. Yes, even if it gets us Michael and Spock interacting at last, though I admit I'm not clear on whether Spock would be on Enterprise at this stage. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see an extended take on the character of Captain Pike beyond the stern father figure the reboot movies had Kirk projecting all his sudden daddy issues onto.

Eh, we'll see.

As a last note, I am obscurely glad that Michael is reinstated as a science officer instead of just returning to the command track. I don't doubt part of the logic is that no way is Starfleet so forgiving as to put the woman who started a war anywhere near the centre seat but it is also probably meant to speak to development on Michael's part. I like the idea that she's returning to science and exploring the wonder of the universe after all this slaughter.

Also it means Saru still has a job since for some reason they decided not to make him captain, which is a pity. I absolutely think Doug Jones could carry the role and the way Saru has developed over the last few episodes into a more confident leader.

Also, just to place my bets now, I fully expect the Prime Universe version of Lorca (or the Mirror Universe version of Tilly) to make an appearance around about the mid-season break in the next run. 

Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek?

At the same time I am looking forward to this and dreading it. No matter how this goes (all we know right now is it will be “R-rated” which is the American wuss version of an 18 that usually gets downgraded to a 15 over here) it will be interesting. I don't doubt it'll be interesting.

No, I am perfectly serious. I don't like all his stuff but Tarantino is always interesting and given that he tends to create what are basically tribute movies to genres he loves as a kid... well, I wonder whether he more of a Wrath of Khan man or a Final Frontier sort of fellow.

And it will just be fun seeing a creative voice like that let loose with the Star Trek toys.

And we might get Samuel L. Jackson as the captain, that'd be nice. 

Sarek of Vulcan is Batman (Discovery spoilers)

Think about it, especially in reference to the most recent episode of Discovery: he's a member of his people's aristocracy; he's a lot better at martial arts than you'd expect a man of his profession to be; and, most importantly, he keeps gaining new children.

Honestly, though, Michael: if you think you're Sarek's greatest disappointment I question how well you observed hims interactions with his biological children. (Yes, plural, I acknowledge Sybok's existence even if Paramount never will).

Though, seriously, it is probably for the best that no canonical or spin-off media will ever revisit the disaster that was Star Trek V. It was not a good moment.

It introduced rocket boots to the franchise. That's the only legacy that film deserves.

The elevated estrogen levels of Star Trek: Discovery

An unnatural number of women types, yesterday.

You ever enter a conversation and you get to a stage where you're desperately praying “don't disappoint me, don't disappoint me, don't disappoint me”? Well, I keep having that when Star Trek: Discovery comes up. I swear, 90% of the conversations I have about this show with any guy ends up with “Aren't there are a lot of women in it, though?”

No. No no no no no.

There's five. There's Michael Burnham herself, Captain Phillipa Georgiou, Commander Landry, Cadet Tilly and the ginger flight controller whose name escapes me at the moment. So far only four out of this list have appeared in a single episode together. That's not a lot. Four women in any given episode (so far, in the UK we have episodes one to three). That's not actually a lot, especially considering one of them has so few lines I can't remember her name.

I'm reminded of Terry Pratchett's Men-At-Arms where one of the central jokes is that the Watch is being required to recruit “minorities” and they recruit a troll, a dwarf and a werewolf except no one says that Angua is a werewolf until she finally transforms so for more than hundred pages you think the minorities are a troll, a dwarf and a woman and laugh at these male characters who are so uncomfortable about (you think) having a woman in their space.

And then you get to a point in real life where people continuously act like having four women sharing screentime in a given episode of Star Trek is somehow an unnaturally inflated figure.

Spot on, Sir Terry, spot on. 

Pointless Headcanons #1: Dax's Original Job

The other night, a friend and I were talking about plot holes and unresolved threads in Star Trek and something occurred to me about Jadzia Dax. The thing about Dax, you see, is that she is the only dedicated science officer we meet in the 24^th century shows. Voyager doesn't have a science officer, unsurprising given she's not an exploration vessel, and on the Enterprise-D the job is effectively split between Geordi and Data.

The question that occurs is that Dax was assigned to DS9 before Starfleet knew about the wormhole and the strange new worlds on the other side of it. So why does a random Deep Space station in the middle of nowhere need a science officer when the flagship of the fleet doesn't?

So here's my utterly pointless headcanon reason: she's there to supervise the Starfleet relief efforts on Bajor. It isn't something that gets much play after the pilot episode but the main purpose of the Starfleet presence on DS9 is to do everything “short of violating the Prime Directive” to get Bajor up and running again after the Occupation.

Jadzia is there to help with the scientific side of that process like supervising agricultural projects or setting up genetic databases so families separated during the Occupation can reunite. Given that the chief engineering officer is a CPO (O'Brien) and never seems to work on anything not related to the station or its vehicles (runabouts, Defiant, so on) she's probably involved in the logistics side of things: what tech to send where, what Starfleet's industrial replicators should be churning out for the reconstruction effort and so on. 

Two ways to be wrong about Star Trek: Discovery

I loved the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery (which is what British Netflix has right now, I believe more was made instantly available in the US) and I have so many thoughts that its taking me a whole to hammer them into something publishable even by my low, low standards.

(I mean, what was yesterday's post even about?)

That having been said, there's something I want to pick apart on its own because it has wider implications. Be warned, we're getting into “people are wrong on the internet” territory so enjoy me screaming into the void.

There are two ways in which people in comment sections are getting angry about Discovery. The first, and most obvious, is the anger that Star Trek has gone all SJW and is pandering to liberals with its casting of not one but two women of colour as the U.S.S. Shenzhou (take note, Star Wars, there are more women in the world than white ones with brown hair) as if the series hasn't been a utopian liberal power fantasy since 1966.

Now that's just dicks being dicks, this is the world we live in now. The right wing have become so immune to subtext that they can look at the original Star Trek with its female black officer (an engineering officer, no less), two Jewish leads, Russian and Japanese characters, constant civil rights allegories and end of episode homilies about the message of the week and still think “This is on our side, there's guns!”.

So that's how people who aren't that engaged with Star Trek are being Wrong On The Internet. But what about people who are engaged with Star Trek? Is there a way for them to be Wrong On The Internet?

Why, yes there is, I'm glad you asked.

For the dedicated Star Trek fan who wants to be Wrong On The Internet there is the very simple method of obsessing over the ways in which Discovery “breaks” the continuity of the overall franchise. The main point that seems to keep coming up (and I've only read a couple of comment threads, I'm not dedicated enough to this post to put myself through that) is the use of the holographic communicator.

You see, in previous canon the holographic communicator was invented during Deep Space Nine and quickly forgotten because the production team realised it just looked like two people standing in a room together because that was exactly what it was. So, in a way, its a bit odd to see the technology in use over a century previous in the canon.

Except, here's the thing, the future isn't what it used to be. I am writing this post on a laptop smaller, thinner and with a higher definition screen than the one that sat on the desk of Captain Janeway's ridiculously spacious ready room. My phone has so many more functions than the Starfleet communicators that inspired it that I don't even know most of them.

So the 2250s now have interstellar full 3D holographic communicators for calling up Thomas Cromwell and the Klingons are not just guys in yellow face and reflective green shirts, they've even moved beyond the whole “smushed Mars Bar on the forehead” look to a more complicated full-face prosthetic. Your mileage may vary on how effective the design is (personally, I like the facial look but I'm not too sold on the ribbed battle corsets) but hating them because they contradict the canon explanation from Enterprise about how the Klingons started off with crests and then lost them and then got them back in time for the movies is, to be frank, rather nitpicky.

Maybe its just because my favourite show is Doctor Who, where the canon's made up and the plot points don't matter, but I've always been more interested in the details of the individual story than the overarching continuity.

To be honest, if we're talking about inconsistencies with the Klingons never mind their foreheads because somewhere between the original series and The Next Generations the entire species carries out some sort of personality swap with the Romulans. In the original series you'd never, ever turn your back on a Klingon but the Romulans had an honour code that could be relied upon even if it wasn't terribly nice. Fast forward eighty-odd years and suddenly Romulans are the sneakiest, most backstabby dicks in the entire Alpha Quadrant whereas Klingon honour is at least culturally consistent even if individual dickery persists (looking at you, the House of Duras).

And its just sad, guys. Its the sort of argument that stereotype nerds in bad comedy sketches make and perhaps that's why I react so strongly against it. 

New Star Trek Today!

Today the first episode of Star Trek: Discovery drops on Netflix and I am so damn ready for it. I have done my best to keep myself spoiler free. I know the point at which the series is set, I know some of the casting details and I've seen the new Klingon designs. I know nothing else.

Its been too long. I loved Star Trek Beyond, felt it was a return to form for the franchise after two pretty empty action movies, but this is a series that belongs on the small screen. There are too many messages, too many issues in the world to be dealt with one at a time once every couple of years especially as ineptly as the non-Simon Pegg written films did. That's what I think is important about Star Trek, especially now, that it is science fiction's conscience in the mainstream space.

There are things I'd like to see, of course. I'd like to see some sort of LGBTQ+ storyline not end in epic tragedy (a real failing of the series up to now, Sulu's reboot family notwithstanding). I'd like to see the series do more with the exploration aspect without getting bogged down in endless prequels concerning established races.

I'd like to see less concern with continuity than Enterprise felt was necessary. I'm not a fan of slavish continuity for its own sake, it tends to bog down stories far more than it allows for interesting explorations of established characters and races.

I mean, The Next Generation and original cast movies basically flipped the characterisations of the Klingons and Romulans and now we accept that Klingons are honourable if dicky whilst the Romulans are completely untrustworthy. Go back and watch The Original Series: you'd never turn your back on one of those Klingons whilst the Romulans had their own sense of honour that could be relied on.

So, if these strangely Orc-like Klingons turn out to not be very much like Klingons as I understand them... I won't mind if it makes for better stories.

Just so long as we don't have to sit through a multi-episode story arc explaining how their foreheads have changed shape.

Professional Fan Fiction #1: Star Trek: DS9: Enigma Tales

[SPOILERS for the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel Enigma Tales and also for Star Trek: The Fall: The Crimson Shadow.]

For those unaware, “professional fan fiction” is a term coined by Doctor Who author Lawrence Miles for the stacks of officially published anciliary material genre shows tend to produce as a matter of course these days. In fairness to Miles, he came up with this name having created a fair amount of it himself and these days runs a small cottage industry editing novels and short story collections featuring his most prominent addition to the Doctor Who extended universe, the time travelling voodoo cult Faction Paradox.

So, as pejorative as it sounds, basically it isn't really. Its just an ackowledgement of the fact that in many ways these tie-ins don't matter as much as the source material which... well, ask any pre-Episode VII Star Wars fan about the Star Wars EU they grew up with for objective evidence of that.

Also, I've never been one to find fan fiction lesser artistically. Yeah, there's a lot of crap out there due to the unedited and amateur nature of it but equally there a hell of a lot more heartfelt, moving and spectacularly well-crafted stuff that will blow you away than you'd ever assume from the form's reputation. And its not as if officially licensed tie-ins haven't produced their share of crap over the years... I'm looking at you, Doctor Who Unbound: Exile!

Anyway, I just finished a Deep Space Nine novel called Enigma Tales by Una McCormack, the latest in a loose series of books she's written about Elim Garak and the post-war reconstruction of Cardassia. This has sort of become McCormack's personal corner of the Star Trek universe over the years and I'm happy for that to continue. Over the course of her several novels she's fleshed out the culture of Cardassia's fledgling democracy and the geography of the (still, sadly, unnamed) capital city, peppering her narrative with welcome little bits of worldbuilding that add so much context to events.

She also writes a fantastic Garak. Garak may be my favourite Deep Space Nine character, perhaps even my favourite character in the whole of Star Trek, and McCormack clearly relishes writing from his morally flexible but utterly stubborn point of view. In particular, Enigma Tales has a fantastic aside where he considers the war of manners and vieled insults he's been waging against the Federation diplomatic corps for more than a decade and the ways they've been trying to bait and/or frustrate him.

Anyway, I warned you of spoilers and here's the big one: Garak is Castellan of the Cardassian Union, its head of state. On reflection its a nice redemption for him, a late in life convert to the principles of democracy, and McCormack makes sure an absolutely central part of Garak's political ambitions is to stop anything like the Obsidian Order or the Dukat dictatorship from happening again. This novel, in particular, presents him with the tricky political subject of a war crimes report about the Bajoran Occupation and the question of how to prosecute offenders (especially given that, as a former spy, torturer and killer, he's absolutely guilty and everyone knows it).

Its an interesting debate... that sadly, the book sidesteps a little by concluding that Garak has probably hidden the bodies well enough that no actual evidence of his own crimes will ever be brought to light. There's a lot to love about the book's treatment of the debate as it casts the shadow of war crimes over another character, one essentially sympathetic and innocent in the eyes of the fan, Professor Natima Lang (a one-off TV character and member of the old Cardassian dissident movement). All of this is juxtaposed with descriptions of the Cardassian literary form of the enigma tale, essentially a form of mystery in which every character shares some form of guilt, which Lang describes as a quintessentially Cardassian state of affairs.

Then there's the pleasure of Garak encountering the only character in Star Trek canon more sarcastic than he is: Doctor Katherine Pulaski (who much be about a hundred by this point in the canon, twelve years after the Dominion War). McCormack uses her intelligently, as well, as our point of view on post-war Cardassia. In particular, I enjoy how Cardassians keep mentioning the parts of human culture they adopted whilst the Federation were helping with the reconstruction effort: a police officer is addicted to human coffee, a shopkeeper learnt to play soccer from Starfleet aid workers, another who remembers having a human teacher at school.

Its the nature of prose that you have more time for asides and that's where I think the real benefit of the professional fan fiction comes in. For instance, in the series we never know who leads the civilian administration in power on Cardassia between War of the Warrior and By Inferno's Light. To all intents and purposes, Gul Dukat is still the face of Cardassia all that time, even when he's living in exile on his Bird Of Prey. This novel (and perhaps others in the past, I don't know who came up with this one) credits the leader of the Detapa Council in that time as Meya Rejal, a pretty weak leader by reputation whose reign was characterised by an ongoing humanitarian crisis that lead to the Union joining the Dominion just to feed its people.

Obviously, there's no reason this should have been mentioned on screen. The Detapa Council appears once as a gaggle of extras in Cardassian make-up during Way of the Warrior with Dukat (then their military advisor) getting the only non-rhubard lines in the scene and they never appear again. There wasn't a practical need for anything more but a novel has more leeway, as does fan fiction.

So in Enigma Tales, either as its own invention or following the innovations of others, we have Cardassian capital with distinct named districts like Paldar and East Torr, each with its own cultural and polticcal history; the University of the Union has internal politics and underground corridors connecting its buildings so students don't have to walk through the summer dust storms; Damar has a statue; wherever Garak makes his workspace he hangs a picture Ziyal drew for him where he can see it as both warning and inspiration; there's a particular flower whose petals are used in Cardassian funerals, a detail that then gets used to lend symbolism to a later scene.

I love that the breathing room of the professional fan fiction allows for these little details to get filled in.

Just so long as they don't clone Emperor Palpatine at me as they do it, that is. 

On the psychoanalysis of Harcourt Fenton Mudd

A thief, a swindler, a con man, a liar and a rogue
At least, he left that impression.

SPOILER ALERT for the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel The Light Fantastic (and probably also Immortal Coil and the Cold Equations trilogy and I'm sure there's more but those are the titles I remember in this series-ette).

MUDD

“... of course, I left.”

KIRK

“He broke jail.”

MUDD

“I borrowed transportation.”

KIRK

“He stole a spaceship.”

MUDD

“The patrol reacted in a hostile manner.”

KIRK

“They fired at him!”

MUDD

“They've got no respect for private property! They damaged the bloody spaceship!”

- ST:TOS: I, Mudd by Stephen Kandel

So I've nearly finished the latest (I think) in a loose series of TNG novels about Data and various other Star Trek artificial intelligences, Jeffrey Lang's The Light Fantastic. This one deals with the sentient hologram Professor Moriarty, long ago shoved into a free-roaming simulation of the galaxy towards the end of the TV series and left there evr since. Obviously, there wouldn't be much of a novel if that happy ending stayed happy so now he's pissed and has kidnapped someone close to Data (spoilers...) so Data will find him a real world body to inhabit.

The novel also features flashbacks to my favourite Original Series villain ever, Harcourt Fenton Mudd, that glorious rogue, and his fate after his last appearance in I, Mudd. Unfortunately, they don't stay flashbacks.

Not that I have any problem with the idea of Mudd interacting with later crews, in fact there's probably a lot of mileage to be had there. Its not even (particularly) a problem for me that this is yet another TOS-era character who has somehow contrived to live to the era following the Dominion War alongside, by my count, Jim Kirk, Spock, Bones, Uhuru, Chekov and Scotty. You know, I think at this point Sulu is the only person on that crew who had the decency to die in anything resembling a timely fashion.

Rather dents Picard's insistence that Spock's “cowboy diplomacy” belongs to a bygone age if everyone from that bygone age is still knocking around, is what I'm saying.

No, the problem is that Lang decides to try and delve into the psychology of Mudd. Lang's conclusion is that Mudd is a classic narcissist and his survival this long is down to spending a large fortune he acquires before the last of the flashbacks (sometime circa The Voyage Home) on life-extending technology because he can't bear to leave the universe without the privilege of having him in it.

I mean... Lang's not wrong, exactly, not in his basic conclusion. Its hard to say that Mudd isn't a narcissistic personality. Its just that the final flashback with Mudd in a bar, richer than he ever imagined, and running into Uhuru who greats him like an old friend felt like such a good ending, such a right ending. He has everything he ever wanted but he still feels the pull of wanting to cheat people (he desperately refers to meeting his banker as “a job” like he was robbing the guy, just to feel like himself for a moment) and maybe he'll fritter it all away and do one last job and maybe he learns to live with his happy ending and it was just such a nice note to leave him on.

Then he turns up in the 2380s at a hundred and god knows years old in a mech suit that's part wheelchair and part hospice bed trying to find a way to become immortal using salvaged AI bits.

Its sad. I don't even care if he gets a happy ending out of it, its just sad and as much as half the fun of a character like Harry Mudd is seeing them be constantly frustrated they aren't meant to make you feel sad.

Characters like Mudd are meant to be fun! There's no reason to bring psychology into it or realistic consequences. They're just there to be fun. Maybe its because I was practically raised on Robert Holmes' Doctor Who stories but I've always loved a good comedy rogue.

KIRK

“Harcourt Fenton Mudd. Thief -”

MUDD

“Come now.”

KIRK

“Swindler and con man...”

MUDD

“Entrepeneur!”

KIRK

“Liar and rogue.”

MUDD

“Did I leave you with that impression?”

- also I, Mudd

I realise that if Mudd were a real person I wouldn't want him to get away with the things he does. Hell, even as a fictional person I rather enjoy the inevitable commeuppence that's an essential part of any story he appears in, but I also admit that he's there for me to enjoy. He's a note of absurb and adorable criminality in the ever so orderly and lawful world of Star Trek. There's so much to relish about the character, not least of which the highly distinctive voice given to him by actor Roger C. Carmel.

As much as Lang captures the voice and the essential psychology of Mudd, I wonder whether he felt the joy a character like that is meant to give a writer: the deliciously naughty glee at writing someone dishonest that you know the reader is going to root for anyway, just a little.

I can't root for this version of Mudd. I just can't. He's a bitter old man whose fits of anger are genuine rage instead of wounded pride, who takes no joy in his schemes because now they really are life or death instead of get rich quick shenanigans.

Still, at least Lang has finally written one of the dream scenes of Star Trek: Data meeting Vic Fontaine. 

Chinese knock-off Legos are a trip

In my ongoing search for cheap Battlefleet Gothic miniatures, I was directed to Ali Express. Its a website hosting mainly Chinese small businesses. Sadly, I keep missing the boat on BGF minis, which go up and come down on a seemingly random basis, but in the process I have discovered a source of comedy gold I never even knew existed:

Knock-off Legos. I mean, have you ever made a Lego diorama and thought that what it really, really needed...

… was a WWII-era German anti-aircraft emplacement! This isn't even the only Second World War figures the store stocks, they do entire Lego infantry platoons for all sides of the conflict. Oh, and speaking of fascists rendered with plastic yellow skin, though somewhat more realistically in this case:

Donald Trump mini-figure with choice of hair or MAGA hat. Its the superhero branding that really makes the comedy. They even painted one of those meme expressions on his face. I have to admit, I kind of want one but not as much as I want this...

Someone made a Ben Reilly figure complete with hoodie! This one I might actually buy on the excuse of testing the oayment system and delivery time for this service. Also, just the fact that after all these years someone has actually made Scarlet Spider merch is more pleasing to me than it reasonably should be. In fact, the levels of nerd that some of these stores reach is actually half the fun. This character set was good for a lot of laughs when I showed it to some friends...

Yes, “Lt. Zulu” is a funny transliteration error but just take a look at Edward Rayburn in the bottom right. My friends and I had some real fun riffing on “The Adventures of Edward Rayburn” until I took a moment to Google him and discovered that, yes, there was actually an Edward Rayburn in Star Trek. He's only in one episode of Star Trek (TOS: What Are Little Girls Made Of?) but he is 100% a canon character, just some random one-episode security officer, and now he has a toy. That's sweet. No idea how it came to pass but it is sweet.

On a more random note...

… there in the bottom right hand corner, the Edward Rayburn Position as it will now be called, South African Military Dictator Batman. This store actually has a wealth of strange Batman variants such as...

… Pride Batman...

… “Glam Metal Batman”, which is perhaps the best deployment of the Joel Schumacher costume design ever conceived...

… Fairy Princess Batman with tutu and painted on booties...

… and, my personal favourite, Batman in a zebra costume with, for no logical reason, a luminous head component. This all pales in comparison, though, to the “Avengers Horror Movie Pack”:

This, as you can see, contains a whole two members of the Marvel Cinematic Universe plus the Joker, Ash, Freddie Kreuger, Chucky, Jack Skellington and some random Sith. If nothing else, this leads me to believe that in China there's a very different popular reading of Nightmare Before Christmas and Big Hero Six.

Now, if I can just catch this website in the ten minutes a week they have Space Marine Strike Cruisers up, I will be a happy man. And if I don't I'll just be a man with a Scarlet Spider mini-figure in the post, which amounts to the same thing. 

KHAAAAAAAAN!!!!!

Not as homo-erotic as it looks.

I'd never seen Space Seed, you see. The housemates and I were watching The Wrath Of Khan and I mentioned this gap in my knowledge. Naturally, we then had to watch Space Seed...

I had high hopes for this episode or, at least, higher hopes than I should have had. Now, for the most part it was exactly what I expected: the Enterprise stumbles across Khan's sleeper ship, wakes the fella up, he hides his evil semi-competently for about quarter of an hour, tries to take over the ship and gets promptly defeated before being dumped on Ceti Alpha Five with his followers and his beloved wife. In most regards it was exactly what I expected.

So why was I disappointed? Why did my housemates look so gleeful when I slotted the DVD into the player?

Well, it's the beloved wife, I'm not going to lie. You see, what I had imagined went down in this episode, based on Khan's motives and dialogue in the movie, was that he met someone on the Enterprise, they fell in love, she talks him down from whatever evil plan of evil he was trying to execute and they retire to live happily ever after on the planet of the brain-eating earwigs.

Lt. Marla McGivers, ship's historian and a hot mess of 1960s gender issues. The woman is obsessed with the big, butch manly men of history. She has filled her quarters with endless paintings of Roman centurions and other warriors. She becomes infatuated with Khan before he's even awake on the tenuous logic that he's a 20^th century Sikh and that makes him a great warrior (so add some 1960s racial issues to the aforementioned hot mess). Though the whole scene where he gives her the choice “Go or stay, but do it because it is what you wish to do!” is a nice little number where you can sort of see what she sees in him... well, it's far outnumbered by the moments when he roughs her up, tortures her colleagues in front of her and transparently manipulates her to follow his agenda all while she simpers submissively.

And then she decides to settle down with him.

I felt I was being realistic. I didn't expect this episode to be anything more than a run-of-the-mill TOS episode with what I knew to be a superlative actor in the guest villain role but the sheer awfulness of Marla McGivers genuinely shocked me. Okay, Star Trek is of its time and that's some defence but it does far better with female characters in so many other episodes that screwing up this badly here genuinely baffles me. Even the functionally identical subplot with Carolyn Palamas in Who Mourns for Adonais? gives that character far more agency than McGivers gets here.

I just can't connect the reality of McGivers with how Khan talks about her in the film. Eh, the memory cheats I suppose. 

Is the Prime Directive no more?

I've been thinking about it and if there's one thing I can get behind with the soulless action movies currently lurching around in the flayed skin of Star Trek its that the writers seemed to have largely dumped the Prime Directive.

Now, as a general case the PD is very high-minded and enlightened in a 1960s end-of-empires sort of way. Its there to show that humanity has learnt its lessons about just blithely destroying indigenous cultures and that just interacting with a new culture comes with moral responsibility.

However, looking back at it the PD was usually used as a cop-out so writers could avoid the consequences of confronting actual moral obscenities. If that seems like a harsh judgement on my part then look at any Voyager episode featuring the Vidiians. Yes, they're murderous organ-harvesters but but only because of the chronic flesh-eating disease they suffer from and yet Captain Janeway continuously refuses to offer them medical or humanitarian aid. The disease, by the way, turns out to be curable (there's a throwaway line about it in Think Tank). Its even worse in the early seasons of The Next Generation which all too often devolved into Picard and his crew very high-mindedly doing nothing and congratulate themselves on how moral they are as material suffering continues off-screen.

Now, the Prime Directive does feature in Into Darkness but only in its First Contact form (the episode, not the movie): you don't let pre-warp cultures know there's more out there because they have to make those discoveries on their own. The version where you just fly past atrocities, however, seems to have been left behind and I can't say I'm disappointed.

Now all we need is a movie that actually has something to say about... anything, really. Neither Star Trek (2009) or Into Darkness had much political or philosophical content to play with. 

The Memorial Watch

This was a funny habit I first picked up in 1997. Credit where its due, it all started with Jackie Jenkins, a women who might or might not exist, who used to write a column in Doctor Who Magazine. Terry Nation had just died and she spent her column relating a conversation she and her friends Chas and Nigel had about trying to choose a Nation story to watch just after they heard the news.

So when an actor or a writer whose work I admire dies I watch something of theirs. Not just anything, something emblematic, special. I've always been a fan more of the wake than the funeral, as it happens and, well, if there's a better tribute to an artist's work than enjoying it I can't think of one. These aren't people I know so I can't mourn them in any proper sense so respect is all that's available to me.

Its mainly been Doctor Who actors, to be honest, as sort of befits the origin of this funny little tradition. For Lis Sladen it was The Brain Of Morbius, for Nicholas Courtney it was Downtime (a straight-to-video job I have unreasonable nostalgia for), for Mary Tamm it was The Ribos Operation and for Maggie Stables I re-listened to The Marian Conspiracy. For Nation himself, since I decided to give it a go there and then, it was Destiny of the Daleks and... look, we all make mistakes and I really, really liked that story when I was thirteen for some reason.

For Leonard Nimoy, what else could it be but The Wrath Of Khan?

I'm not personally onboard with the idea Khan is the best Star Trek movie (that's First Contact) but it is the best Original Series effort and Nimoy absolutely kills in the scene where he says goodbye to Kirk. Spock could have stayed dead and it would have been a perfect end to the character: just that his last words are to tell Jim that they were friends, the final vindication that Spock's human side was ever-present in their relationship. 

Random hopes for Star Trek 3 next year

Just before Christmas it was announced that Justin Lin, director of the last five The Fast and the Furious movies, would be taking the directing chair on the next Star Trek film. It should be pointed out here that this film will be released next year, the 50^th anniversary of Star Trek.

Now, I've never in my life watched a Fast and the Furious film and the internet seems divided on whether Lin's appointment is a good thing. Some point to him adding depth to the Furious films and having an admirably diverse cast whilst others worry his selection means Paramount are going to continue making the Star Trek reboot as an action movie series.

The action movie thing is inevitably because after two well-performing movies in that vein Paramount has no impetus to change up the formula. Its the same reason Michael Bay's Transformers movies will continue to be military gun-wank films that sideline the titular giant robots: because after four militaristic gun-wank films made millions for their makers they are not going to risk their money changing tack. Even if Bay leaves the series the films will continue like that because its guaranteed money.

I just think Star Trek deserves better for its half century than its been getting the last couple of years. Doctor Who had a positively decadent 50^th with a TV special, a 12-issue comic series, a docu-drama, a short story anthology and several audio projects dedicated to celebrating the series and proving its relevance a half century after its creation. Star Trek is getting one film and probably a couple of novels.

It all boils down to this: I cannot for the life of me say what Into Darkness was about on a philosophical level. Obviously, Section 31 are being evil but it didn't seem to resonate for any reason other than “This isn't the sort of thing we do in Star Trek!”. There was no discussion being had there. Also, whilst I didn't hate the character Benedict Cumberbatch was playing there didn't seem to be any reason for him to be there other than as a recognisable bad guy from the classic series so some nice references could be made.

And this is Star Trek, damn it! Some things are sacred and the ultimate Humanist fantasy, a fantasy born in an age when the human race was in very real danger of annihilating itself, deserves to spend its 50^th anniversary proving that it still has something to say instead of proving it can be a good two-hour distraction.

So hopefully if this man really did add depth to The Fast and the Furious we can hope.