Month: October 2002

STAR TREK Redux, part three.

(Introduction, Part One, Part Two)

:: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

With the release of the fourth Star Trek film, an odd pattern began to emerge: it seemed that the even-numbered films in the series were better than the odd-numbered ones. STIV:TVH was the most successful one yet, opting for a sense of fun and light-hearted adventure over the heavy-hearted dramatics of the previous two installments. Leonard Nimoy returned to direct this one, and he displayed a much more certain directorial hand than he had in The Search For Spock; the pacing was more even, the action sequences less rushed and much less fake-looking (with the exception of Chekov’s attempted escape from the Feds). The Voyage Home was also the series’s most successful attempt at telling a story that would appeal to Trekkers while also appealing to mainstream audiences who were not as well-versed on all the various bits of Trek lore that crop up.

The plot is fairly well-known: an alien space probe is dispatched from…somewhere, on a heading for Earth that is pretty disruptive of everything it comes across. It is broadcasting a very powerful signal and directing it at Earth’s oceans, and it is actually threatening Earth with destruction. Meanwhile, the Enterprise crew, stuck on Vulcan with their captured Klingon Bird of Prey starship, decide it’s time to go home and face the music for their actions in The Search For Spock. While on the way home, they learn of the alien probe, and in some of the wildest leaps of deductive logic ever shown in Star Trek, they learn that the probe is attempting to contact humpback whales…which are now extinct. This, of course, raises a few questions: How was this alien race communicating with the whales, anyway? Did whales have some means of interstellar communication? And why did they wait until two-hundred years after the whales’ extinction to send a probe to find out what was going on? And, if the probe just wants to know where the whales are, wouldn’t the probe realize that vaporizing the whales’ habitat probably wasn’t going to help matters? And I’ve always wondered just what the whales and probe talked about in the exchange at the end of the film. I picture the probe saying something like, “What do you expect me to do? You never call anymore…you never write…” The plot is fairly absurd, but it’s a lot easier to swallow than all that Katra-swapping from The Search For Spock — even when Kirk decides that the best thing to do is go back in time, swipe a couple of whales, and bring them forward in time. (This yields one of the film’s many wonderful humorous moments: when McCoy realizes what Kirk is thinking, and growls, “Now wait just a damn minute….”)

A subplot of the film is Spock’s struggle to put his mind back in order. In The Search For Spock, McCoy had said at one point: “It would seem that I’ve got all his marbles.” As The Voyage Home opens, Spock’s got all his marbles back — but the bag has been shaken. All of the progress that Spock has made over the years of combining his Vulcan and human instincts has been undone, and he has to feel his way again. All of this provides an added dimension for the “fish out of water” stuff that happens when the crew goes back in time to 20th century San Francisco; not only are we watching the crew try to deal with a culture that is as alien to them as anything in their own time, but they have to deal with their friend who is not quite the way he used to be. There follows some inspired riffing on all of these themes, which would probably not work at all if not for the fact that for these actors, playing these characters by this point in their lives had become something like muscle memory. I suspect that Spock’s attempts at profanity, for example, would have been excruciatingly painful in any other context than here.

Not all of the film’s humor works; the jokes involving Chekov’s pronunciation of “vessel” fall flat, for example, as does Chekov’s scene where he is interrogated by some Federal agents. Sulu is short-changed, unfortunately; he doesn’t really have a good scene of his own. (He was originally to have a scene where he meets a child in Chinatown who is his great-great-great-great-grandfather, but as I recall the scene was not able to be filmed for some reason.) The film also displays some continuity problems: why does the bridge of the Bird of Prey look completely different here than it had in The Search For Spock? Why is Saavik pretty much brushed away in an early scene, never to be seen again? (Fan speculation at the time was that Saavik should have been pregnant with Spock’s child, after their bonding during his pon farr in The Search For Spock. Sadly, this was never mentioned or treated, or anything.) And what became of the tensions between the Klingon Empire and the Federation, which are hinted at in the film’s opening scenes? In fact, whatever became of the whole Genesis project? The film probably didn’t have room to address all of this, but I still find it odd that such strong plot threads pretty much disappear completely. (And for a total geek question, since when can a ship go to warp speed while in a planet’s atmosphere?!) The film also boasts a music score that is hit-and-miss. Leonard Rosenman’s main theme and “frolicking whale music” is quite good (although the main theme recycles a secondary subject from Rosenman’s score to the 1978 animated film version of The Lord of the Rings), but a lot of the underscore during the central parts of the film is merely serviceable. It’s also a shame that James Horner didn’t return to musically complete this third installment in the trilogy formed by STII, STIII, and STIV.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home isn’t my favorite film in the series, but on the whole, it may be the most satisfying of all the Star Trek films.

:: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

….and then we have the fifth Star Trek film.

This may be the most roundly-detested sequel ever made, at least until The Phantom Menace came along. People who hate STV:TFF have a lot of ammunition, too. This film has the worst special effects of the entire series, some truly awful character moments (Sulu and Chekov trying to convince Uhura that they’ve become lost in a snowstorm, Scotty banging his head and knocking himself unconscious), more uneven pacing, more continuity gaffes (Spock has a brother? Really?), and a number of other flaws. This is a very easy film to hate, and even if I don’t consider it the mess that it’s been generally agreed to be, I can’t totally disagree with its detractors. I don’t hate Star Trek V, mainly because it has one thing going for it: if it is a failure, it is at least an ambitious failure. A real attempt was made with this film to make a grandiose science-fiction adventure, to address some big themes, and to engage the ever-elusive “sense of wonder” that is so hard to come by in modern SF. I give STV:TFF a pass pretty much on that basis. Star Trek rarely reaches for the moon, and here, it did just that. Fine by me. “A” for effort is always admirable, even if one only gets a “C” for the results.

The film is not even a total disaster. There are some compelling moments to be found. The early “campfire” scenes are entertaining (except for the godawful effects during Kirk’s mountain climb). Laurence Luckinbill’s performance as Sybok is very well-done, skirting the edge of sanity and reason so that while we think this may be a madman, we are never totally certain of it. (Now, why they felt the need to make him Spock’s brother is beyond me. It adds nothing to either the story or the subtext.) The scene where he tempts Kirk, Spock and McCoy — by exposing “their pain” — is one of the more effective scenes in all the Trek films, culminating in the wonderful Shatner moment: “I want my pain! I need my pain!” And the scenes preceding the meeting with “God” are the best in the film, up to and including the film’s other wonderful Shatner moment: “Excuse me, but what would God need with a starship?” Of course, the air is let out a bit by the summation scene where Kirk reduces the entire quest for spiritual experience and reality to a facile kind of secular humanism; I would have preferred that the whole issue be left unresolved. And the film’s best aspect is probably its music. Jerry Goldsmith returned to Trek, and he wrote a very fine score indeed, combining his Main Theme from ST:TMP with a more lyrical, Americana-style theme and some excellent “mystical” music for the film’s concluding scenes.

William Shatner has taken just about all of the blame for The Final Frontier‘s problems over the years, but I think the problems are more script-related than direction-related. The film’s acting is as good as in any Star Trek film, the individual scenes work well for the most part, and the action sequences are well-framed and shot. The problems with the film stem from writing, not from directing. I’m wondering if Shatner had a darker film in mind, but the producers required him to “graft on” more humor, since that’s the element that made The Voyage Home so successful. Watching Star Trek V, I get the feeling of a good film lurking around the corner, just beyond the edge of the frame. It’s too bad that film didn’t get made, even if the resulting product isn’t the horrible film everyone thinks it is.

Next: The Undiscovered Country, Generations.

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The Giants tied it up last night, winning a tight one, 4-3. So we’ve had two tight games, both won by the Giants by scores of 4-3; and we’ve had two slugfests, both won by the Angels (11-10, 10-4). I wonder if this World Series may end up being like the 1960 Series, in which the Yankees scored 57 total runs in the entire series, versus the 27 total runs scored by the Pirates — with the Pirates winning the series in seven. Wow.

And maybe Barry Bonds should stop hitting home runs. So far this season the Giants are undefeated, going 7-0, when he does not hit the ball out. When he does hit a homer, the Giants are 2-5. (Weird stat courtesy Jayson Stark at ESPN.)

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STAR TREK Redux, part two.

(Introduction, Part One)

:: Star Trek III: The Search For Spock.

After the death of Mr. Spock, the Star Trek powers-that-be faced the task of bringing him back to life. (I’ve always been a bit fuzzy on this point; when he was originally killed off in STII:TWOK, was his death intended to be permanent? or was his eventual resurrection planned all along?) They had the seeds of how to do it: the previous film had ended with a shot of Spock’s coffin sitting in an Eden-like glade on the new Genesis planet, and there was an unexplained mind-meld with Dr. McCoy. So, the basic gist of the matter is this: before embarking on what Spock knew would be a suicidal mission to save the Enterprise, he “downloaded” his memories, personality traits, and various other bits of mental stuff into Dr. McCoy’s brain. Sure enough, in The Search For Spock, we are informed that this is “the Vulcan way when the end of the body is near”. As the new film opens, Dr. McCoy is being driven insane by the clashing stuff in his head, the Enterprise is being decommissioned, the Enterprise crew is being held up from new assignments because they’ve been witnesses to the creation of Genesis, and a science vessel containing David Marcus and Lt. Saavik is being sent to explore their new world. Oh, and some Klingons have also found out about the Genesis project and the new planet, and they smell a nifty weapon in the offing, so they’re off to Genesis as well.

STIII:TSFS may be the strangest of the Star Trek films. It has some gargantuan flaws. Foremost is the plot, which quite frankly is not only half-baked but is also tied for the most ludicrous SF plot in the entire series (the other will be revealed later on….). As science fiction, of course, Star Trek was never much for plausibility — its approach was pretty much always to posit SF-nal things and show them in action, rather than try to explain them. (At least, that was its approach until The Next Generation came along and dressed everything up in a veneer of “tachyon bursts” and “space-time anomalies” and “cosmic string fragments” and various other items of technobabble.) Suspension of disbelief is always essential in Star Trek, but STIII:TSFS really puts it to the test. I think I can accept Spock transferring the core of his “personhood” to McCoy, but I’m not sure I can accept that he does it in less than sixty seconds — although, admittedly, the baud-rate of a Vulcan mind-meld has never been established. And if the Genesis wave can “regenerate” Spock’s cells, why would it return him to infancy? How was his body nourished? We are told that his body is somehow “linked” with the planet, so he is aging in sudden spurts as is the planet itself — but how does that work? And why would it be sufficient to merely get him off the planet to stop the process?

I guess I can accept all of this, but none of it really stands up to close inspection. Consider Sarek’s meeting with Kirk, early in the film. They establish that Spock gave McCoy his “Katra” (the Vulcan “soul”, I suppose). The remedy for this is that Kirk must “bring them both to Mt. Seleya” (a mountain on Vulcan). Note Sarek’s insistence that both Spock and McCoy must be brought there. However, at this point they have no idea at all that Spock’s body has been “regenerated”; as far as they know, he’s still lying stone-dead in his coffin on Genesis. Why do they need Spock’s body, then? What are they going to do with Spock’s Katra, given that as far as they know there is no living body to receive it? I would have liked to have seen this explored, since I must assume that all those Katra’s from dying Vulcans end up….somewhere. Kirk claims personal responsibility for Spock’s “eternal soul”, but what exactly is to become of that soul is never revealed. Of course, this is because we all know that his soul is going to be put right back where it originally came from….but as that’s not known to be an option, there’s a big hole in the story’s rationale here. And it’s not the only hole in the story:

:: Whatever happened to Carol Marcus? Wouldn’t she also be exploring the new planet, or if not, shouldn’t her whereabouts at least be mentioned? Maybe she’s testifying before the Federation Council about Genesis or something like that….but her absence should have been explained.

:: It’s revealed that David Marcus used “protomatter” in the Genesis Matrix, which is what’s making the planet so unstable and ultimately doomed to destruction. It’s also implied that the events of The Wrath of Khan are all David’s fault. This makes no sense at all. If David hadn’t used “protomatter”, would Khan still be stuck safely on Ceti Alpha V? And there was a whole team of scientists working on Genesis — did none of them notice what he was doing?

:: If Genesis is such a security issue for the Federation, why isn’t there a ship stationed at the Genesis Planet to protect it? and can Klingons really fly into the Federation at will, the way they do here?

:: What is up with Lt. Saavik in this film? Kirstie Alley is replaced by Robin Curtis, who plays Saavik as a straight Vulcan — we see none of the ambition and barely-concealed emotion that Alley displayed in STII:TWOK. This may not be Curtis’s fault, though. I remember reading an interview with her in Starlog in which she described how Leonard Nimoy kept coaching her line delivery, telling her to make every line “dryer”. Also, consider a small continuity breach: in TWOK, Saavik has arched, human eyebrows — but in TSFS, her eyebrows are now the slanting, Vulcan brows. Saavik’s character was basically overhauled, for no apparent reason, and in a way that pretty much negated one of the most interesting potential characters to come along in Star Trek.

The other chief problems with The Search For Spock are its production values and its pacing. The sets, quite frankly, all look cheap, and some of the direction (by first-time director Leonard Nimoy) is less-than-convincing. (Witness the McCoy jailbreak scene, when Sulu overpowers a hulking security guard. Note the way the actor playing the security guard goes right along with George Takei’s fighting moves, right down to the facial expression that says, “Oh, man, my first big movie appearance and I gotta let this little guy rough me up.”) As for pacing, STIII:TSFS suffers from the opposite problem that afflicted ST:TMP and, to a lesser extent, STII:TWOK: it actually moves too quickly. This is the shortest of all the Star Trek films, and many of its plot elements are breezed over or handled in perfunctory fashion.

I’ve probably given the impression that The Search For Spock has nothing going for it, but it actually has quite a bit going for it — and, when it really counts, the film delivers in a big way. Despite all of its plotting flaws — and believe me, it’s loaded with them — STIII:TSFS is still a good film, because of the way it treats the heroism of its characters. This film is almost a treatise on the conduct of true heroes: of how a hero will opt for the hard road, accept all of the suffering and pain and misery dumped on his head, and still in the end stand up to do the right thing. Toward the end, there is an exchange between Kirk and Sarek that perfectly captures the essence of heroism:

SAREK: Kirk, I thank you. What you have done —

KIRK: What I have done, I had to do.

SAREK: But at what cost? Your ship…your son…

KIRK: If I hadn’t tried, the cost would have been my soul.

I’ve never seen it put better than that.

The film’s other strengths include James Horner’s fine music score and the acting of the principal players. By this point, these actors can display their characters’ quirks in their sleep, but still there is some fine work here. DeForrest Kelley’s scene with a comatose Spock toward the end of the film is extremely well-done, as is the film’s final scene as Spock tries to recapture his memories. Christopher Lloyd makes a fine Klingon villain, although it would have been nice if he could have played a post-TNG Klingon; at the time of this film’s making the Klingons were still big, dumb brutes as opposed to a culture based on blood and honor. There are a lot of very emotional moments in STIII:TSFS, the most harrowing probably being the destruction of the Enterprise. After all of the hardship endured, to see Mr. Spock raise one eyebrow in the film’s next-to-last shot is a fine thing indeed.

If I were to make a baseball analogy to describe the overall quality of Star Trek III, it would be the big slugger who goes 1-5 with four strikeouts and a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth to win the game.

Tomorrow: The Voyage Home.

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STAR TREK Redux, part one.

(Introduction)

:: Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Following the amazing success that Star Trek: TOS became in syndication after the show’s initial three-year network run, in the late 1970s the possibility of returning Star Trek to series television was explored, so much so that scripts were written (some of which would later be reworked for other Star Trek series) and casting was done. The entire original crew was to return, with the exception of Leonard Nimoy, who was then in his I Am Not Spock phase. The series, called Star Trek 2, was however abandoned in favor of a big-screen incarnation of the original series. The result was 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a film that overcame a lot of flaws to become a very successful launching of the film franchise.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is actually a better film than its reputation would indicate. It is the most directly science-fictional of all the films, and aside from the also-much-maligned Star Trek V: The Final Frontier it is the only film in the series that actually deals with Trek‘s main premise of voyaging into the unknown (although in this case the unknown is voyaging to them). The film occasionally engages the “sense of wonder” that the best SF evokes, and its plot is suitably complex and cinematic in scope. There is actually a great deal of nuance to the story (even if it is a reworking of the idea first explored in the TOS episode “The Changeling”), and thus Star Trek: The Motion Picture improves on repeat viewings.

The film’s chief strengths are in its character arcs, and the best parts of the film are the early scenes, which establish the mystery of the V’Ger cloud, the threat it poses, and the hasty gathering of the Enterprise crew. James T. Kirk, who has now become an Admiral, pretty much steamrolls his way into command again, with occasionally embarrassing results as it turns out that he doesn’t know as much about the new Enterprise as he should; his clashes with the displaced Captain Decker form the backbone of the main plot’s eventual resolution. The other main character arc is Mr. Spock, who as the film begins is attempting to complete the Vulcan ritual that purges all remaining emotion from him. He is contacted by an alien intelligence, however — the V’Ger cloud — which, like him, is seeking answers to unanswerable questions. Thus, Spock is very cold throughout much of the film — until the end, when he reaches a kind of epiphany. At one point, he weeps openly, a startling character moment for the steadfast Vulcan.

The film’s other strengths are in its special effects (except for one terrible effect, the “shaft of light” probe that appears on the bridge of the Enterprise and kills Lt. Ilia) and in its music score, an epic creation by Jerry Goldsmith. Goldsmith’s music more than makes up for a number of effects sequences that go on too long….which leads to the film’s biggest fault, its pacing.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is one of the most unevenly-paced films I have ever seen. (Pacing problems would become something of a theme in the remainder of the Star Trek series; from my point of view, only two of the films don’t suffer from pacing difficulties.) The opening is tense and dramatic, with palpable sense of menace and mystery; but then we almost forget about the mystery entirely as we watch the Starfleet Command scenes, with the five-minute Enterprise flyover which, despite all of his love affairs, is the closest we ever come to witnessing James T. Kirk having an orgasm. The tension is re-established somewhat when the V’Ger cloud destroys the Epsilon Nine space station, but then we’re back into Enterprise test-flight stuff, in addition to the introduction of Lt. Ilia (Persis Khambatta, whose performance in the film improves later on when her character is actually replaced by a robot). There is a failed warp-drive incident, confrontations between Kirk and Decker, Kirk and Dr. McCoy, Kirk and Decker again, Spock’s arrival, another warp-drive test — and only then does the Enterprise reach the mysterious cloud. This is followed by some really interminable effects shots as Our Beloved Starship flies into the cloud, interspersed with reaction shots of the crew. There is some sense-of-wonder here, but the effect dissipates under the weight of continual effects stuff. The film’s story does not so much ebb-and-flow as it starts-and-stops. It proceeds in fits, with “character” scenes taking place when the plot should be moving forward quickly (another fault which would rear its head in later Star Trek films). The film does not necessarily need to be shorter, but its structure should have been more evident. The result is an entertaining, but maddeningly meandering, film.

:: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Despite the somewhat frosty reception that Star Trek: The Motion Picture received, it did enough business to generate a sequel, although the reins were turned over to a new producer, Harve Bennett. Bennett knew nothing about Star Trek, so he did what a good Vulcan would do under the circumstances: he watched every single episode of Star Trek: TOS. One episode in particular intrigued him: “Space Seed”, in which the Enterprise encounters a prison-ship in deep space that had been launched from Earth in 1996 with a group of genetically-engineered criminals on board, whose leader was a charismatic and megalomaniacal man named Khan (played by Ricardo Montalban). After averting a near take-over of the Enterprise by these people, Captain Kirk decides to deposit Khan and his followers on an unexplored planet, Ceti Alpha V, where they will be allowed to do as they will with the resources that they can coax from the world. After they are taken away, Spock says something like, “It would be fascinating to return here in twenty years and see what has sprouted from the seed planted today.” That’s literally what Star Trek II does. Unfortunately, it is revealed that Khan’s exile took a disastrous turn when the planet next door exploded, causing his own planet to shift orbit, thus destroying the planet’s ecosystem except for a rather nasty beastie with a taste for the human brain.

So, Star Trek II is a revenge story that begins when Khan manages to do what he failed to do twenty years before: take over a Federation starship, the Reliant. He then begins a hunting mission, with his prey being the Enterprise — which is now an old ship being used only for training purposes. Also stirred into this mix is “Project Genesis”, a scientific project whose aim is to create a torpedo which can convert a dead planet into a planet with a viable biosphere — supposedly a device to be used to alleviate problems of population and food supply, but can also be used as a doomsday weapon. Thus begins a long cat-and-mouse game between Kirk and the Enterprise and Khan on the Reliant, ending in an extended sequence inside a nebula as the two ships seek each other out. I don’t think I’m revealing anything shocking when I disclose that Mr. Spock ends up sacrificing his life so that the Enterprise can escape destruction.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is often ranked first in the series, in terms of quality. I don’t rank it that high, but it is definitely a much stronger film than Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Its story is tighter, its characters more sharply drawn, the performances are all first-rate, and it features some crackling action sequences. (Who doesn’t feel a thrill when the Enterprise finally gets the drop on Khan in the end, by taking advantage of his failure to think in terms of three dimensions in space?) It also features an excellent music score by James Horner that uses melancholy, sweeping melodies to suggest a kind of “seafaring” tone, which is in keeping with the film’s nautical literary subtext (Khan keeps alluding to Moby Dick, for instance). The character arcs focus squarely on Kirk, who is suffering a mid-life crisis. We also meet the one woman — aside from Edith Keeler — whom Kirk has ever truly loved, Dr. Carol Marcus, who also happens to have Kirk’s son working with her on the “Genesis Project”. Star Trek II gets a great deal right: the introduction of the new character Saavik, for example; Kirstey Alley plays her with a wonderful sense that she does not know what her proper place really is. Half Vulcan and half Romulan, she had the most potential of any new character ever introduced in the Star Trek films. I also cannot say enough good things about Spock’s death scene; from the moment when Spock considers his options and concludes there is really only one option and accordingly leaves the bridge to the conclusion of his funeral, everything is perfectly played — and the final conversation between Kirk and Spock is a sublime moment, a wonderful synthesis of good writing and pitch-perfect acting by Shatner and Nimoy.

I do have a couple of difficulties with the film, though. Although its pacing is far better than that of its predecessor, it still suffers from a bit of uneven-ness — especially in the scenes in the tunnels of the Regula planetoid, scenes which meander a bit (although they do feature the most wonderful Shatner moment in Star Trek history, when he nearly pops a vein from his forehead as he screams “KHAN! KHAN! KHAN!” into his communicator). The scene where Captain Terrell and Commander Chekov happen upon Khan and his followers really takes too long to play out, even if it does end in surprisingly horrific fashion.

My other problem with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is that it really isn’t that good a sequel. Not to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, that is, but to TOS episode “Space Seed”. The Khan in the episode is a man who believes he is destined to build an empire and to rule it; he even quotes Milton: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” I find it highly unsatisfying that he should end up being an obsessed and homicidal man, bent on nothing more than killing James T. Kirk. I would have liked it better if Khan had actually been able to build a society from nothing, perhaps a society that would come eventually to threaten not Kirk by himself, not just the Enterprise, but the entire Federation. Better, maybe, if the story had been followed up not by the TOS crew, but by the Next Generation crew. I would rather have seen what the seed Kirk planted in “Space Seed” bore at maturity, rather than seeing what happened when it was stunted shortly after gestation. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is, by itself, a good film; but taken as a follow-up to one of TOS’s best episodes, it is curiously lacking.

Stay tuned for Part Two….

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So now the sniper is threatening children. This is one of those terrifying moments when the disconnect between reality and the world as depicted on television shows is revealed in all its awful glory. It’s hard, being spoiled on shows like Millennium and Profiler and CSI, to look on the hunt for this terrible killer and not be utterly incredulous at the apparent lack of any idea of who this person is on the part of the police. He has killed all of these people and still has not committed that “one big mistake” that we’re told all criminals eventually make. I still believe that he will make such a blunder, if he keeps killing; but that in itself is the terrible part. We can only catch him if he keeps killing.

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I’ve done a bit of maintenance on the permalinks at left: two blogs that have not been updated in more than two months have been removed (It’s All About Books and Dear Owen), and I’ve added a link in “Notable Dispatches” to my post a few months back about controversial film composer James Horner.

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STAR TREK REDUX, introduction.

In the wake of my enormously successful James Bond Redux series of posts (see “Notable Dispatches” at left for links), I’ve decided to do the same thing with another long-standing film franchise: the Star Trek films. (Of course, “enormously successful” is a relative term for a blog that averages 33 hits per day….)

I’ve loved Star Trek pretty much all of my life. Some of my earliest memories are of watching episodes of the original series (hereafter referred to as TOS). I used to be so well-versed on Trek: TOS that I could name all of the episodes and give small plot summaries. Sadly, I have forgotten many of them over the years, especially since TOS has vanished from syndicated TV except for certain cable-stations. I was thrilled when The Next Generation came along and I loved it, although I don’t think that TNG hit the heights that TOS did on as consistent a basis. TNG was more consistently good than TOS, but while TOS had some amazingly painful episodes (particularly late in its run, with such abominations as “Spock’s Brain” and “And the Children Shall Lead”), it had more truly great episodes than TNG. I’m thinking of amazing stories like “Journey to Babel”, “The Trouble With Tribbles”, “The Menagerie”, and of course, the towering classic “The City On the Edge of Forever”. TNG was, though, a very worthy addition to Trek lore. TOS was less an ensemble show than the subsequent series, but the whole Kirk-Spock-McCoy dynamic continues to amaze. TNG did more as an ensemble, which has hurt the TNG films somewhat in my view. (I’ll say more about that when I get to those films.)

Then, of course, came Deep Space Nine. I just may love DS9 most of all, with the edgy tone that it often achieved and its structure, with long story arcs as opposed to stand-alone adventures. I’ve always felt that DS9 was tremendously underrated. It achieved a character dynamic that was unique in Trek, even when it added Worf to the mix halfway through its run, and it experimented quite boldly with its storytelling in a way that TNG and Voyager really never did. I’d love to see a DS9 feature film.

Voyager, though, was the least of the Trek shows. Its concept was an interesting one, but it was never employed to tell daring new stories, and was thus a tremendous disappointment. Voyager was probably the purest evocation of Gene Roddenberry’s original conception of Trek: “Wagon Train to the stars”, with the biggest reliance on the whole “Boldly going where no one has gone before” bit that Trek was about in the first place. How disappointing, then, that Voyager pretty much served up more variations on the “aliens who are really nothing more than humans with odd-looking latex prostheses” bit, along with the worst villains Trek ever conceived: the horrible Kazon, whose hair (or whatever that stuff atop their heads was) never failed to put me in mind of Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons. The lead characters, also, were never really drawn sharply enough to become interesting to me.

(To date I have not been able to see a single episode of Enterprise. I have heard mixed things about it: from what I have heard it is very blatant in its deviation from established Trek history, but then I have also heard that setting continuity aside, it’s a fine show. Unfortunately, it was only available on cable channels in Buffalo, and the same applies in Syracuse. As my family has opted out of cable for now, I cannot watch Enterprise.)

Before I get on to the films themselves, I should name my favorite Trek episodes of all time. In no particular order:

TOS: “The City On the Edge of Forever”, “The Menagerie”, “A Piece of the Action”, “Metamorphosis”, “The Trouble With Tribbles”, “The Gamesters of Triskelion”.

TNG: “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, “Tapestry”, “Redemption” (both parts), “Best of Both Worlds” (part one), “Disaster”, “The Pegasus“, “All Good Things”.

DS9: “Emissary”, “The Visitor”, “Trials and Tribblations”, “Blood Oath”, “The Quickening”.

Voyager: “Caretaker”, “Phage”.

To be continued….

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I watched the first sketch on Saturday Night Live the other night. This was the episode hosted by Senator John McCain. In this one sketch McCain played Attorney General John Ashcroft, appearing on that Chris Matthews show Hardball. The whole thing was funny, with the best moment coming when McCain-as-Ashcroft announced that “Every American will have a barcode on his forehead and a chip in his brain, and those chips will be controlled by this remote control!” whereupon he produces one of those gigantic remote controls that TVs come with these days. I wish I could agree with McCain on more issues, because I genuinely like the guy.

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According to this MSN article, the recent troubles in the stock market may signal a boom in the art market, with paintings by the masters going for even more outrageous sums than ever before.

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I hadn’t planned on taking a weekend off from posting (except for a couple of items that I put up over on Collaboratory); it merely happened that way. Anyhow, my Monday reflections on the NFL and MLB:

:: I actually did not watch the Bills game this week; instead, I went out with the family to enjoy a rare Sunday off together. I did listen to the fourth quarter on the radio, and my jaw dropped when I heard the score: at the time it was 20-10 in favor of the Bills. (The Bills went on to win, 23-10.) I had noted earlier this very week that I did not think that the Bills were in the same class as the Dolphins, and that I expected their lack of strong defense — which has neither stopped most opponents’ running games nor forced turnovers — to be the major reason why they would lose this week. But, in the immortal words of Chris Berman, “That’s why they play the games.” The Bills forced six turnovers yesterday (versus four in the previous six games combined), including four interceptions (versus zero in the previous six games combined). They held Ricky Williams, one of the NFL’s top running backs, under 100 yards and didn’t let him break any runs longer than 14 yards. The one thing they could have done better was move the ball in the fourth quarter with a power running game. All in all, though, a totally surprising and welcome victory. Next week, Detroit — a bad team that can kill you if you overlook them.

:: There was a lot of scoring in yesterday’s games. There were five games in which both teams scored more than twenty points; seven teams scored more than thirty points; and there were four overtime games. Wow. (Of course, one of the games decided in overtime was the Cardinals-Cowboys snoozefest, which the Cardinals won, 9-6.)

:: My pick for NFC Champion, the Philadelphia Eagles, won 20-10 over Tampa Bay. Tampa has a very good defense, but the Eagles’ back Duce Staley put up 152 yards rushing, and the Eagles are now a healthy 4-2, leading their division but trailing Green Bay and New Orleans for overall best record in the NFC. (Both those teams are 6-1.)

:: As for my other Super Bowl pick, the Piitsburgh Steelers, tonight’s game may make or break their season. Their division doesn’t seem to be very good (although Baltimore is showing some real signs of life right now), so this may be a year when 9-7 is enough to win it and get into the playoffs, but the Steelers are 2-3 as they host the 4-1 Indianapolis Colts in tonight’s game. The Colts will be a tough test for them. If the Steelers want to be a playoff team and prove that they can beat someone other than the Bengals, they have to win this one.

:: Baseball now. Two games have been played in the World Series. The series is tied at one game apiece. Each team has scored fourteen total runs thus far in the Series. Both games were decided by one run. This Series could end up truly being a Fall Classic.

:: What exactly are those red things the Angels’ fans keep banging together, anyway? Apparently they make an amazing amount of noise, but the noise they make doesn’t seem to translate well to the TV speaker, because it didn’t sound that loud to me.

:: Win or lose, Barry Bonds is having an excellent Series thus far. I hope this silences all his critics who claim that he can’t get it done in the postseason.

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