Just, Like Star Trek Stuff

Okay, I felt obligated to finish up my thoughts about Star Trek because I’d done all that other stuff basically no one cares about. But I did it. I even rewatched three seasons of Enterprise to write this. I hope whoever’s reading this is grateful because that’s true sacrifice. Also babies eat two things, milk and time.

This will be the last post in the series, and I’m going to talk about my other interactions with Star Trek, namely The Animated Series, Enterprise, Discovery, the movies and my parting message.

The Animated Series:

This is the least offensive on the list, and I downright enjoyed it a decent amount of the time. This is basically season 4 and 5 of TOS animated in the 70s by a Norwegian studio. It’s surprisingly all right, which I didn’t expect it to be when I first sa it. It has a surprisingly large amount of technology and standards that basically decided TNG. They even have holodecks. Some episodes are good, some are bad, but nothing is as bad as season 1 TOS.

Enterprise:

Oh boy, the worst Star Trek series. Okay, some of the movies are worse… than most of the episodes. Bad Star Trek episodes are really hard to judge because, like Tolstoy said, all [good TV franchise episode] are happy in the same way, but each [bad TV franchise episode] is unhappy in its own way. And oh boy is Enterprise dissatisfied and dissatisfying.

The first two seasons are how the earth slowly got its stuff together with the help of the Vulcans (this being not long after a world war with nukes and the invention of fast space travel). Then season 3 is a 9/11 allegory and season 4 is… I don’t know. Don’t ask me. A lot of melodrama? Season 3 is pretty bad and anti-Trek for a lot of reasons, but the worst part is the temporal cold war (ugh, just typing that out hurts). I could explain it, but I don’t want to. If you really want to know, go read memory alpha or something, but, for your sake, don’t.

The fact that it’s a prequel isn’t nearly as bad a thing as it should be. There’re some solidly okay episodes. Basically anything that doesn’t have the Xindi or the time travel stuff in it goes from subpar to good. However, the problem is the very best of these would’ve been better as TNG or VOY episodes.

If the whole series had just been a prequel, I would’ve been more fine with it instead of time travel shenanigans and stuff like that. It also annoys me that very few people are significantly more technologically advanced than the humans. Speaking of which, the humans are incredibly stubborn and are always trying to prove themselves as if they’re insecure teenagers. I guess in that way it’s a fine metaphor for the script writers.

I’ll say that one of the things I like most about this series is that stuff like view screens and almost devices have buttons. Okay, that’s not what I like, but what I mean is that all of the buttons are marked generically like “D1” “D2”, etc. It reminds me a lot of actual scientific instruments. Because that’s what this series is supposed to be about, a scientific crew going out and learning about the universe (like astronauts). Another point in its favor is the Vulcans. The first time I saw the series, the way they were portrayed annoyed me. But it’s grown on me because they’re shown as still grappling with some of their philosophies, and most of the society lives in denial in the good episodes. In the bad episodes it is actually just really stupid. So it sometimes is one of those really clunky Star Trek allegories that is one of the reasons for watching Star Trek. I just wish it was as campy as most of the other ones are.

Let me just talk about the Xindi for a moment. They attack Earth, and then humans go to them to make them not blow up humanity. It’s like if Osama Bin Laden was actually a mastermind and actually the Taliban was significantly more powerful and advanced than the USA. Also the Xindi are five distinct species that are somehow united as one species because they have shared ancestry. Given that there are avians, reptilians, insectoids, primates, arboreals (how that’ different from primate, I don’t know. They’re hairy and look like humanoid great apes. It seems to me that calling them arboreal would be a slur), the common ancestor must have been so long ago it’s a moot point to call them the same species. It’s like calling humans invertebrates. Why they couldn’t just be an alliance of different species from the same planet that achieved technological advancement is beyond me. Either way, they show far more introspection and thought than the humans, who are always butting heads with the Vulcans.

Oh, and one last thing. The temporal cold war plot line is wrapped up in a stupid two parter at the beginning of season 4. It was never carried out or thought through to a degree that warranted its existence in the first place.

Discovery:

Discovery is fine sci-fi but not Star Trek for the most part (I enjoy The Expanse more than it as for contemporary sci-fi TV). The first warning sign is that there’s a running plot line. Then there’s lots of action. Oy vey! What are they doing? I want my heavy-handed metaphors, technobabble, simplified morality tales and camp, not mediocre to good TV. If I wanted that, I’d watch the million versions of it on Netflix. Basically it’s Star Trek mostly in name but little in soul.

The first episode has the gang uncovering a Klingon cult attempting to unite the empire with technology. The insistence on having a storyline creates a timeline conflict with TOS, and, even if it doesn’t, it makes TNG ignore the biggest event to happen to the Federation in a long time (the unification of the Klingon empire, dissolution to explain why they can’t have cloaking technology for TOS, reunification for TNG, re-dissolution in season 5-6 of TNG and re-re-reunification at that same point).

There are a few episodes I liked for being Star Trek. Mostly it was the sympathy with the tardigrade and the mirror universe destruction of the mycelium network, though it’s a minor point and absurdly escalated to be perilous for every being in existence. Why couldn’t the global warming metaphors be more important and less ‘everything will die because our enemies are the bad guys’? TNG treated a similar theme as a local threat with existential implications, and they had to painfully open neoliberal eyes with terrorist action, all of which was on point.

I saw all of season 1 and a little of season 2. Maybe it gets better later, but it didn’t look like it. Things just blow out of proportion. Section 31! A plot with time travel and stuff! I don’t know. You’d have to convince me hard that this series was worthwhile. I want schlock, lots of philosophical debates that have little to do with reality, and people getting along to tackle the true enemies of the galaxy, cyborgs who want to convert everyone into replicas of themselves or the Nazi planet. The Jem’Hadar! There is your fascism without having literally an evil empire, an empire that finds itself evil. At least with the Dominion you have more of a chicken or the egg debate about the evil. Yeah, I get it, mirror universe evil federation is an allegory for the American government, but, as I said above, it doesn’t feel the same at all and has no nuance.

Movies:

I’ve seen a few of the movies, and they’re almost all like 2- and 3-part episodes. Some of them are good (the joke being that the even ones are), and some of them are awful (Return of Spock). The ones I recommend are The Wrath of Khan (the best one), Generations and First Contact. The Wrath of Khan is the best episode of the original series because it feels like a two-parter that got chopped because it wraps up a plot point from season 2 of TOS. Generations explains Guinan from TNG, and First Contact is the limits of where I want my action in Star trek. I didn’t really enjoy any of the rest. The whales one is all right, and it’s basically redone as a two parter on VOY.

However, you know, you don’t need to hear from me about Star Trek movies. Either you’ve seen them, heard about them or don’t care. My comments are irrelevant to the first two categories, and I’m not going to convince anyone. I think a bunch of them are on Netflix if you’ve never seen Star Trek and want to not enjoy yourself for a few hours (except Wrath of Khan).

My conclusion:

Star Trek isn’t art. Not with a capital A or even a little a. When you watch it, you don’t walk away pondering reality and trying to get a bigger picture of things. There are some things, like Measure of a Man in TNG or the bigger picture in DS9, that have value. Okay, before I go on, Measure of a Man is fantastic. It is the only thing I’d call close to art. For everything else, there’s something that lacks. Usually it’s execution, self-awareness, writing, consistency, impact or whatever.

That said, I really like the series because it gave, continues to give and will always give me hope for a better future. Not because it’s always happy or uplifting but because it’s reasonable and an examination of what such a future would entail, at least at its better moments. VOY and everything after, not so much.