Kirk Drift
I read this years ago, but didn’t save a bookmark or anything, and never managed to turn it up again—until this weekend, when I stumbled across it while procrastinating as hard as I could from doing something else:
Strange Horizons - Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift By Erin Horáková:
There is no other way to put this: essentially everything about Popular Consciousness Kirk is bullshit. Kirk, as received through mass culture memory and reflected in its productive imaginary (and subsequent franchise output, including the reboot movies), has little or no basis in Shatner’s performance and the television show as aired. Macho, brash Kirk is a mass hallucination.
I’m going to walk through this because it’s important for ST:TOS’s reception, but more importantly because I believe people often rewatch the text or even watch it afresh and cannot see what they are watching through the haze of bullshit that is the received idea of what they’re seeing. You “know” Star Trek before you ever see Star Trek: a ‘naive’ encounter with such a culturally cathected text is almost impossible, and even if you manage it you probably also have strong ideas about that period of history, era of SF, style of television, etc to contend with. The text is always already interpolated by forces which would derange a genuine reading, dragging such an effort into an ideological cul de sac which neither the text itself nor the viewer necessarily have any vested interest in. These forces work on the memory, extracting unpaid labour without consent. They interpose themselves between the viewer and the material, and they hardly stop at Star Trek.
It’s excellent, and well worth your time.
(Off topic, I posted this to my then-work Slack, and this was the article that caused a coworker to wish that Slack’s link previews came with an estimated reading time. So, ah, get a fresh coffee and go to the bathroom before reading this.)
This is from 2017, and real life has been “yes, and”-ing it ever since. This provides a nice framework to help understand such other modern bafflements as “who are these people saying Star Trek is woke now” and “wait, do they not know that Section 31 are villains?”
And this is different from general cultural context drift, or “reimaginaings”, this is a cultural mis-remembering played back against the source material. And it’s… interesting which way the mis-remembering always goes.
Friday Linkblog, Poets-and-Whales Edition
And these are ones I found this week while I was clearing out the open tabs
To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare
As a fellow interdisciplinarian, Paul Ford’s views on “the humanities vs technology” are essentially identical to my own, but better written. This is the sort of essay where once you start quoting it, you end up copying the whole thing, so I’ll just stick to my favorite line:
At least art goes for the long game, you know? Poems are many things, and often lousy, but they are not meant to be disposable, nor do they require a particular operating system to work.
Scientists had a 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale
This is very, very cool; an actual sort-of almost conversation with a whale. Clearly communication happened, even if neither side really understood it! The attitude was a little weird to me, though: all the amazing breakthroughs in communicating with whales were entirely processes through the lens of “this is valuable because it might help us talk to theoretical aliens”. Whatever it took to get the grant money, I guess, but: Whales! We’re talking to them! That is (or at least should be) way cooler and more valuable than maybe being able to talk to klingons later. Maybe they can tell us about that weird probe thing early.
“It’s accurate, Captain”
Over the holidays one of the kids meant to compliment someone’s cooking, and misfired the wrong word—as you do—and as a result enthusiastically described the dish as “Accurate.”
Big laugh! Everyone thought it was funny, moved on.
Driving home, it struck me that this was a perfect Star Trek joke, and even more so, a perfect way to demonstrate the different approaches the various shows have taken over the years. All the shows have their designated outsider / “weirdo” whose job it is to do things “wrong” so the regular humans can be smug or condescending at them depending on the decade. I mean, you can almost hear how the Original Star Trek would have done it:
McCoy: Well Spock? How do you like it?
Spock: The Captain’s attempt at Vulcan cooking is accurate, Doctor.
McCoy: Accurate? After all that work that’s the best you can say?
Spock: You’re right, my apologies Captain. It’s extremely accurate.
McCoy: You green blooded etc, etc
And they keep acting superior and antagonizing at each other for however long that week’s episode was under-running by.
The Next Generation on the other hand, would have gone the other way, where Data would describe something as accurate, and then Troi and/or Whoopi Goldberg would fire off a whole speech about how accuracy isn’t the most important thing for humans and how instead what matters is the interplay of smells and textures that create an entire experience; and basically neg him for not being able to experience things the same way they do, again for as long as that week’s show was under-running.
Deep Space 9 would have built an extended joke about how grouchy Odo was, and that the most he was willing to compliment Sisko’s cooking was “accurate”. (As an extended aside, I love DS9, but a real a-ha moment was when I realized that Odo was the exact same character as Oscar the Grouch.)
I won’t belabor the point, but Voyager, Enterprise, and Disco all would have done something similar; some combination of antagonism, mutual superiority, pity, and condescension, where the basic point of the scene was that the “weirdo” was having the wrong reaction, and that’s funny and/or sad.
And then we get to Strange News Worlds, where again, you can also almost hear it:
Pike: What do yo think, Mister Spock?
Spock (enthusiastically): It’s accurate, Captain.
Chapel (amused): Really? Accurate?
Spock (mouth full): Mmmm! Extremely accurate!
Pike (sincerely): Thanks, Spock!
Because SNW also does those exact same “outsider” scenes, but the punchline is always “our neuroatypical buddy is pretty great!” instead of “wow, glad I’m not him.” SNW, unlike its predecessors, has a real, genuine love for people who act different, instead of using them as a way to illustrate how great normal people are. To be clear, I love Star Trek! But the older shows weren’t always the paragon of inclusiveness and understanding that the Paramount marketing department described them to be.
This is one of the reasons Anson Mount’s Pike is my favorite Star Trek captain; it’s impossible to imagine him taking “it’s accurate” as anything other than the genuine compliment it would have been meant as.
Anyway, I hope you’re all having an accurate holiday season.
Doctor Who and the Canon… Of Death
I’ve very much been enjoying the commentary around the last couple of Doctor Whos, especially “The Giggle”. There’s a lot of intersting things to talk about! But there’s a strand of fans, primarily ones used to American Sci-fi, that really struggle with the way Doctor Who works, and especially with how Doctor Who relates to itself. It fundamentally operates on a different set of rules for a long-running show than most American shows.
You see—Doctor Who doesn’t have a canon. It has a continuity, but that’s not the same thing.
Lets step back and talk about “canon” for a second.
“Canon” in the sense of organizing a body of fiction, originates with the Sherlock Holmes fandom. There, they were making a distinction between Doyle’s work and what we’d now call “fan fiction”. Using the biblical term was one of those jokes that was “ha ha only serious”, it’s clearly over the top, but makes a clear point—some things exist at a higher level of importance than other things.
But it also sets the stage nicely for all future uses of the term; it draws a box neatly around the core works, and the social contact from that point on is that any new work needs to treat the material in “the canon” as having happened, but can pick and choose from the material outside—the apocrypha, to continue the metaphor.
So, any future Sherlock Holmes work is expected to include the fact that he faked his death at the top of a waterfall, but isn’t expected to necessarily include the fact once he was treated by Freud.
Again, here the term mostly draws a line between what today we’d call “Official” and not. It’s a fancier way of putting the work of the original author at a higher level importance than any other continuation, formally published or not.
But then a funny thing happened. As large, multi-author franchises became the norm in the late 20th century, we started getting Official works that still “didn’t count”.
As usual for things like this, Patient Zero is Star Trek. When The Next Generation got going, the people making that show found there was an awful lot of material out there they didn’t want to have to deal with. Not fan-fiction, the official vs fan device was clear by the mid-80s, but works that were formally produced by the same people, had all the rights to do so, but “didn’t really happen.” Specifically, the Animated Series, but also every single spin-off novel. So, Roddenberry & co. declared that the “Star Trek Canon” was the original show and the then four movies, and everything else was not. Apocrypha. Official, but “didn’t count.”
(Pushing the biblical metaphor to the breaking point, this also introduced the first “deuterocanonical” work in the form of the Animated Star Trek, where nearly everything in it has been taken to have “happened” except the actual plots of the episodes themselves. And those force-field belts.)
(And, it’s absolutely insane to live in a world where we act like the Voyager episode “Threshold” happened and Diane Duane’s Rihannsu didn’t, but at least the rules are clear.)
And this became the standard for most big sprawling multi-media franchies: sooner or later nearly all of them made some kind of formal statement about which bits were “The Canon.” And the key detail, always, was that the only reason to formally declare something like this was to leave things out. This isn’t always a bad thing! As I said before a lot of this was around establishing a social contract between the authors and the audience—“these are the things we’ll adjust future work to fit, and these are the things we’re giving ourselves permission to ignore.”
The most extreme version of this was Star Wars, twice over. First, you have the overly complex 4-tired canon of the late 90s and early 00s, which not only established the Canon, but also provided a borderline-talmudic conflict resolution system to determine which of two pieces of canon that disagreed with each other was “right”.
Then, after Disney bought LucasFilm, they rescoped the canon, shrinking it down to pretty much just live action movies and the Clone Wars cartoon, banishing all the previous novels and such into the Deuterocanonical wilderness of “Legends”, which is sort of like if Martin Luther had also been the CEO of the company that bought the Catholic Church.
But, the point remains. Canon is way to exclude works, largely as an attention-conservation device, a way for a franchise to say “this is what what we commit to pay attention to, and the rest of this is fun but we’re going to ignore it.”
Which is where we get back to Doctor Who.
Because Doctor Who is unique in that no one in a position to do so has ever made a formal declaration about “Canon”. And this makes a certain kind of fan go absolutely bananas.
There’s no point in having a canon if you’re not excluding something; the whole point is to draw a box around part, rather than the whole thing. And that just isn’t Doctor Who’s style.
There’s a quote from 70s script editor Terrance Dicks that I can’t find at the moment, that goes somesthing like “Doctor Who’s continuity is whatever the general public can remember,” and that’s really the animating principle. It’s a more free-wheeling, “it’s all true”, don’t sweat the details kind of attitude. This is how you end up with three completely different and utterly incompatible destructions of Atlantis. It’s not really a show that gets wrapped up in the tiny details? It’s a big picture, big concepts, moving forward kind of show.
And this completely violates the social contract of something like Star Trek or Star Wars, where the implied promise of having a Canon is that everything inside it will fit together like clockwork, and that any “violations” are opportunities for deep navel-gazing stories explaining the reasons. This leads to those franchises worst impulses, for example both to aggressively change how the Klingons look in an attempt to prove that “this isn’t your Dad’s Star Trek”, and then also spend three episodes with the guy from Quantum Leap explaining why they look different.
Doctor Who on the other hand, just kind of says “hey! Look how cool the Cybermen look now!” and keeps moving.
The point is, if you’ve bought into the clockwork canon worldview, Who looks incredibly sloppy, like a bunch of careless bunglers just keep doing things without any consideration of what came before.
(Which is really funny, because I absolutely guarantee you that the people who have been running Who the last two decades are much bigger fans of the old show than anyone who’s worked on Star Trek over the same period.)
So when the show got big in the US, the American fans kept trying to apply the Star Trek rules and kept getting terribly upset. This has spawned a fair amount of, shall we say, internet discussion over the years. The definitive statement on Doctor Who’s lack of canon is probably Paul Cornell’s Canonicity in Doctor Who. But there’s those Trek fans that remain unconvinced. Whenever the show tosses out something new that doesn’t really fit with the existing material—bigeneration, say—there’s the fan cohort that goes completely mental. Because if you treat decades old stuff as having higher precedence that new ideas, the whole thing looks sloppy and careless.
But it’s not carelessness, it’s just a different world view to how this kind of storytelling works. Thematically, it all works together. The details? Not the point.
I tend to think of Who working more like Greek Myths than a documentary about fictional people. Do all the stories about Hercules fit together? No, not really. Is he always the same guy in those stories? Yes, yes he is.
Same rules apply to the madman in a box. And if someone has a better idea for a new story, they should go ahead and tell it. Atlantis can always drown one more time.
See you in a year, Gabriel Bell
It’s the first week of September, 2023, which as JWZ reminds us, means we’re a year away from from the Bell Riots.
For those of you not deeply immersed in Nerd Lore, the Bell Riots are a historical event from “Past Tense, a 1995 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9.
DS9 was by far the best of the Next Gen/Berman-era Star Treks, and it was always at its best when it both a) had a point to make, and b) was angry about it.
[Spoilers for a nearly 30 year-old Trek episode ahoy]
Thanks to some time travel shenanigans, Captain Sisko, Dr. Bashir, and Lt. Dax end up travelling to the then-futuristic year of 2024 and discover they’re trapped on the eve of the Bell Riots, “one of the most violent civil disturbances in American history“. You see, to solve the homeless problem, the major cities of north america have cordoned off sections of the city to seve as “Sanctuaries”, where the unhoused are sent, nominally to receive services and help, but really to be out of sight/out of mind. When the man whom the riots are named after is killed helping them, Sicko has to step in and masquerade as Gabriel Bell to preserve the timeline, and find a way out before the riots end with Bell’s death. Meanwhile, back in the future, the crew of the Defiant realize that the changes in the past have caused the Federation to never be formed—the Bell Riots were a key step from “now” to the fully automated luxury space-communism of the Star Trek future.
At the conclusion, Sisko and his crew find a way to avoid the fate destined for Bell himself, and get the word out about whats happening inside the Sanctuaries to the rest of the world, who demand change, ensuring the Federation comes into existence.
At the time it seemed like a terribly dark, dystopian near future—what might happen if things keep going! Of course now, looking back from the real Twenties, it looks almost charmingly naïve.
Trek in general, and DS9 in particular, is always at its best when angry, and “Past Tense” is positively simmering with rage. This was a show made by people with something to say. A key detail is that the three Starfleet crew members that get sent back in time are a Black man, a Middle-eastern man, and a white woman; the woman is given help and support, the two men of color are immediately thrown in the “sanctuary” without a second thought.
But.
There was a trope in 90s socially-conscious fiction that if “people only knew!” they’d demande change, and things would get better. That the only thing standing between the world as it was and the better future was sharing “The Truth”. This is a perfect example, but you can see if all over the place in 90s fiction. Transmetropolitan is probably the definitive example, X-Files, Fight Club; even the early excitement around the Internet and the World Wide Web was centered around the dream of everyone having access to all possible Knowledge.
Looking back, of course, the dark future Sisko and company find themselves in feels positively utopian. A whole area of town where the unhoused can go without being hassled? People with criminal records are prohibited? There are services? The government pays attention to who is there?
Meanwhile, in the real Twenties, local police departments are flush with military gear, they’re pulling benches out of parks so the homeless can’t sleep there, and no city on the planet would dream of cutting off commercial real estate from even a single block, much less a whole district.
We’ve essentially been running a 20-year social experiment to find out what would happen if everyone had access to everything that was happening, and come to find out, rounding to the nearest significant digit, no one cares.
There’s been this persistant belief amongst the liberal/leftist set that “people really knew the facts” that things would be better. Three decades on from Sisko picking up Gabriel Bell’s shotgun, this is a fantasy we can’t afford, a brain-rot at best, a kink at worst.
Time for a new approach. Gabriel Bell is waiting.
Is it the same Titan?
I’m kind of fascinated by Big Franchise storytelling? That is, the completely unique set of constraints and opportunities you get when you’re trying to tell a story as part of a continuity thats been going for nearly 60 years. The third season of Picard has a fantastic example of building on top of what came before while using it to make your story better, despite some sharp edges.
Picard 3 is effectively a new show—and unlike the previous seasons is much more Star Fleet–focused. (And is acting like it might be a backdoor pilot for a follow-up.) Most of the action takes place out in space on a star ship. Given all that, it realy needs its own signature Hero ship.
What ship do you use? For starters, it can’t really be the Enterprise, partly because that’ll swamp the storytelling, partly because the story works better if the ship isn’t from the Star Fleet major leagues, but mostly because I’m convinced they’re saving the Enterprise for the grand finale. (As I write this, there are still two episodes to go, so we’ll find out if I’m correctly interpreting the guns they hung over the mantlepiece.)
But, even thought it can’t be the Enterprise specifically, it should be something “like” the Enterprise. That is, the classic Star Trek look: round saucer, secondary hull, glowing dish on the front, warp drives up above. Like SNW before, this season has a real back-to-the-classics approach, and the ship design should reflect that.
But emotionally, the ship should reinforce the state we find the TNG characters in at the start of the show: retired, out to pasture, star fleet has moved on. Picard and Riker are both well past the point where they have a ship or can get one easily. The ship should reinforce their sense of displacement at the start of the story.
If it can’t be the Big E, is there something else lying around in the toybox we can use? Fortunately, there is! The USS Titan.
For those of you just joining us, Riker was promoted to command of the Titan in 2002’s aggressively mediocre Star Trek Nemesis. In keeping with that movie’s lack of basic competence, Riker finally gets a ship of his own, and the audience never gets to see it, the movie keeping it off screen the entire time.
The ship did get a design later, however, with a design sourced from a a fan contest. The winning design was a Reliant-style “light cruiser” reconfiguration of the Enterprise-E’s parts, same saucer, engines below, rollbar with torpedos above. (As an aside, I always thought the design was fine, but thought it was slightly insulting that Riker didn’t deserve a “real” Enterprise-style “heavy cruiser”.)
This design got used in various spin-off material for 2 decades—novel covers, calendars, and so on—until it made the jump to the screen at the end of the first season of Lower Decks.
Emotionally, an upgraded Tian is perfect. Riker has just enough pull as the former captain with this one specific ship to get on board, and let him and Picard try to pull off a heist through sheer charisma. But! The new captain, Riker’s replacement, doesn’t like them, and the ship is remodeled and different. It’s barely the ship Riker knew, and a thing that he thought was his one connection back to the old days ends up highlighting his disassociation even further. It’s Kirk unable to find the turbolift in TMP, but better written.
And from the dialog in the show it’s clearly supposed to be the same ship. Riker’s music was still in the library, and Shaw, the new captain, knows how to pull off some tricks with the 20-year old warp engines.
The problem, however, is that the new Titan and the old one look absolutely nothing alike, and there’s no sane theory that could explain how the one could be rebuilt into the other and have anything orignal left.
So: creatively and emotionally, it’s the right thing to do, but derailed by a 2 decade old design that was never in live action. So, what can you do? Well…
Decide to stay consistant with the old look and launch your new show with a ship that won a contest for paperback covers. Clearly not going to happen. Regardless of the pros or cons of the design, this is a new show and calls for a new ship.
Hope no one notices, and retcon the old design and pretend the Titan always looked like this. That’s just rude.
Sigh deeply and use a different ship. Sure, but… What? Make a up a new one? There’s suddenly a lot of time you have to spend rebuilding the emotional beats to a ship no one in the audience has ever heard of. Worf’s old Bird of Prey from DS9? Even worse. The Defiant? Talk about extra baggage we don’t want to spend time on!
Invoke the Mystery Science Theature mantra of “It’s just a show, you should really just relax,” and then split the difference between being a refit and new build by calling it a refit in dialog and then slapping a -A on the registry number, and hand-waving past the details.
Given the options, number Four is clearly the right choice, here.
Personally, I think it’s a pretty elegant way to use the existing material to deepen the new stuff without letting it drag the new show down. I mean, it’s pretty silly to imagine what it would take to rebuild the old shape into the new one and have it be worth the effort, but where else can you juice an emotional beat by dropping a reference to a movie from 20 years ago, which was itself a follow-up to a show that went off the air nearly a decade before that?
Not everything should be a sprawling multi-decade multi-format multi-media franchise, but I’m enjoying the way people are finding new ways to tell stories using them.
(And, as a final note here, I’ll add that Picard 3 also has what I think is the single best use of “hey, you know we have footage of these same people playing these same characters from 36 years ago, can we use that somehow?”)
Q1 2023 Links Clearinghouse
Wherein I go through the tabs I’ve left open on my iPhone over the last couple of months.
After Dark Sky shut down, I kicked myself for not taking more screenshots of the App’s gorgeous and thoughtful UI and data visualizations. Fortunatly, someone else thought ahead beter than I did:
https://nightingaledvs.com/dark-sky-weather-data-viz/
Why yes, is IS a dating sim that does your Taxes! “Suitable for singles without dependents”. Incredible.
“The stupidity of AI.” Finally starting to see some blowback on all the VC-fueled AI hype.
“Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland.” Came for the Metaverse shade, stayed for the subtle implications that American suburban life is probably worse.
The thing i am struck by the most from the current “tech stuff”; zuck’s metaverse, everything out of open ai, musk’s twitter, “ai” “art”, etc, etc, is how _artless_ it all is. Just devoid of any sort of taste or creativity, overcooked fast food pretending to be a meal. Plus for that kind of money any of them could have improved the world so much they’d get a holiday named after them, but no.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-meta-horizon-worlds.html
Back in the runup to Star Trek Beyond, Darrich Franich wrote a series at Entertainment Weekly covering all the Trek movies. Probably the best writing on those movies I’ve ever read, the best one might the piece on Insurrection, a very, very silly movie that doesn’t know it:
https://ew.com/article/2016/06/24/star-trek-insurrection-age-hollywood/
Recently discovered this clip of two icons of my childhood colliding: Isaac Asimov on the original (daytime) Letterman show?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=365kJOsFd3w
Finally, XKCD’s Randal Munroe’s grandfathers series of “Disfrustrating Puzzles”: