Tag: Star Trek

What TNG: Sub Rosa Could Have Been

On By Christopher LansdownIn Science Fiction, TV & Movies, Uncategorized, WritingLeave a comment

I was recently talking with a friend about the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Sub Rosa and how, while it was bad, it had some cool ideas. (I explained why it was bad in this post.) Specifically, it was interesting how it suggested, though it did not explore, what life might be like for people who had no interest in Starfleet.

In the episode, Beverly Crusher’s grandmother died and Beverly goes and visits the settlement where her grandmother had lived in order to organize her things. While there, she meets an “anaphasic entity” which behaves much like a ghost, and there are elements of gothic horror in the story, which mostly turns stupid toward the end. But before it turns stupid, the community is quite interesting, or at least hints at being quite interesting.

On the Enterprise, everyone is a member of Starfleet and shares Starfleet’s three primary values of exploration, technology, and bureaucracy. But on this small colony on a completely unimportant world that no one else cares about, there’s no great reason for them to care about any of these things, the valuing technology being the most interesting of the three. People need to do something during their day, and Starfleet officers occupy their time by using advanced technology, following orders, and filling out reports. But there’s no need, in the 24th century of The Next Generation to use advanced technology wherever possible. It’s entirely possible to only use it for the things you don’t enjoy doing the old fashioned way, while doing things the old fashioned way that you enjoy doing the old fashioned way.

Indeed, if you look around at people’s hobbies today you can see this all over the place. There are people who knit by hand rather than using knitting machines, though knitting machines certainly exist. There are people who hunt with a bow and arrow rather than with a gun. There are people who sew their own clothes and do some of the seams with a needle and thread rather than with a serger or more primitive sewing machine. Why? Because for the people who do them, these things are rewarding and enjoyable.

In the 24th century, it’s quite possible that people who live someplace where no great empire cares that they’re there would spend their time farming, weaving, making clothes, cooking, and similar things, only using replicators as a back-stop in case something didn’t go well.

Ultimately, these are the people that explorers find interesting, anyway. Explorers are not, generally, satisfied to go someplace else only to find people who don’t want to be there either and are spending all their time looking for something; they like to find new worlds and new civilizations. That is, they want to find new groups of people who actually want to be where they are.

I can see why most Hollywood writers would be terrible at writing this—they’re not happy where they are—but it would certainly be quite interesting to see it done well. Sub Rosa was never going to live up to this promise, but it would be quite interesting if some story did.

And given how much Science Fiction has been written to date, somebody probably already has and I just don’t know it.

Star Trek: Discovery Has Some Bad Writing

On By Christopher LansdownIn TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A friend of mine gave me this link for the first episode of the current (and final) season of Star Trek: Discovery. It starts partway into the episode, but I don’t think that matters. It’s also almost irrelevant who all of the characters are to the plot, which you can take as a bad sign but can also be a criteria of writing that an episode allows new viewers to come on without having to do a lot of reading first.

What really struck me about the episode was the degree to which the writers made decisions which moved the plot forward right before they needed it. Very little was set up beforehand, so everything felt contrived. And stupid.

The episode is mostly a chase for a McGuffin and so the bad guys need to get away a lot. I mean, they don’t need to, per say, but the episode wanted to go with the high-tension constant-near-miss type of chase, so the bad guys had to be always within sight so we could have chases and fast-moving CGI on screen. This meant that the bad guys had to get away a lot, and this was never accomplished through good planning on the bad guy’s part, or superior skill on the bad guy’s part, or really much of anything that the bad guys did right or the good guys did wrong. It was always just a random plot contrivance.

When the bad guys roll some kind of explosive at Captain Burnham, does she move? No. Does she have the ship transport her somewhere else (they have instant teleportation since this is set 800 years later than TNG)? No. She just watches until it cuts a hole in the ship straight through to outer space and sucks Burnham out. Which isn’t a problem because her CGI space suit instantly deploys from her uniform. She then rockets over to the bad guys’ ship (it’s small and nearby, there are only two of them), then magnetizes her boots onto the ship’s hull and stands on it as it goes to warp. She calmly starts using her hand phaser to disable the ship’s engines, which are on the outside for some reason, though nothing ever comes of this because another star trek vessel (who was sent to go on the mission with Burnham’s ship) shows up and puts the ship in a tractor beam. While both are at warp speed.

Which is fine, but apparently the warp bubble is in danger of collapsing for some reason and so Burnham spends a minute or so yelling at the captain of the other ship to disengage while she continues to phaser random stuff on the hull of the bad guys’ ship to no discernable effect.

Then she finally yells at the other captain enough and he terminates the tractor beam and everyone comes out of warp for some reason and Captain Burnham gets off of the bad guys’ ship for some reason and the bad guys deploy warp decoys and warp out, and now it will take too long to track them all down so Captain Burnham has to bring in an old smuggler friend because it takes a thief to catch a thief. Fair enough, though it loses some of the punch when he picks out the correct warp signature in about five seconds.

Then they go to Tatoine where they get to have a speeder bike chase with the bad guys who they narrowly missed (by actually plausible timing) and then somehow the bad guys are on their ship which is flying through the atmosphere and the speeder bikes are keeping up. The bad guys are headed for a tunnel system which will allow them to come out someplace else and then they can go to space and warp out without being detected because the star fleet ships (the same two as before) can only track a ship which is in visual range of the camera, I guess. They say it breathlessly so we’re supposed to not notice. Why no more ships have been assigned to this super important mission (which is revealed to be hundreds of years old) is also not explained.

Then someone identifies the tunnel that they’re going to use because there’s an explosive charge on it and Captain Burnham is against shooting it because there’s a 30% chance of it causing an avalanche which would kill lots of innocent people somewhere and the other Captain thinks it’s the only way and orders his ship to do it and things are fine but then the bad guys use a photon torpedo to trigger an avalanche and Burnham blames the other captain, saying, “you gave them an idea” as if the bad guys aren’t the ones who planted an explosive charge on the tunnel.

Then the avalanche happens and for minutes heads over across a flat plain towards the Tatoine settlement that they had been speeder biking away from for the last several minutes and now are speeder biking towards and all of these innocent people will be killed unless both star ships shove their noses into the ground and merge their shields and oh man is it really stupid.

I can’t say for sure whether there’s some possible way for an avalanche (of rocks and dust, not snow) to travel at full speed along a plain to a place so far away that the mountains look small, but it certainly isn’t plausible. Moreover, with the absurdly advanced technology of Burnham’s ship, it’s a bit ridiculous that putting both ships in the way is the only possible way to save the settlement. They don’t even try phasering the avalanche, they just state it won’t work. But, dramatically, it really should work. It really just feels like they need something to happen so damn it, this is the way things work this minute.

And then, after this ridiculous maneuver where both ships slam their noses into the ground for no obvious reason and the merged shields hold and the settlement is saved, as the dust settles the bad guys warp out and oh well, the ships couldn’t track them because… we’re not told.

And then Captain Burnham and her smuggler friend just sit around for a while and talk about old times as if the episode is over and we’re in a post-credits sequence. It makes no sense why there’s zero urgency to do anything about the McGuffin anymore. Including from the guy in charge of the centuries-old super-secret code double-red mission who’s been laser-focused on the galaxy-shattering consequences of getting the McGuffin before the bad guys do and who has emphasized that lethal force is authorized because it’s this damn important.

Characters’ motivations last only as long as the scene they’re in requires, technology only works whenever the plot wants it to, Bad Guys who will blithely kill (or at least endanger) thousands of innocent people set their weapons to stun when shooting our heroes, Captain Burnham has the priorities of a 1980s Sunday morning cartoon super hero, which wouldn’t be bad if it wasn’t done with no humility and everyone likes her anyway despite her being basically an anti-social narcissistic egomaniac. And also being a soldier on a mission.

The thing is, 1980s cartoon superheroes had the priorities they did because they were essentially reactive. Life was going on and then a super-villain endangered innocent people and so they went and protected those innocent people. That’s good and morally coherent.

This can be complicated by introducing other factors, like a much bigger threat to far more people that the superhero needs to stop, and so he may not have time to rescue just one person. That can make for painful dilemmas where the hero needs the maturity to recognize that no everything is given to everyone and maybe saving that one person wasn’t given to you even though, if you forsook what was actually given to you, you could have done it. Captain Burnham just ignores the bigger issues whenever she doesn’t feel like paying attention to them, which is extremely immature and irresponsible.

It’s good to stop and smell the flowers, but not when you’re rushing a transplant organ to a recipient and it needs to get there within the hour or the organ will die and then the recipient will too.

It’s weird to me how utterly bad this writing is. It would not have been hard to make the script a thousand fold tighter than the plot-hole-ridden contrived mess it was.

Also, and this is related to the entire series, they’ve cranked the technology level up so high that location barely matters anymore. People hold conversations with other people around the universe in realtime, people can find and bring aboard people from far-off planets in minutes—basically, location barely imposes any restraints anymore. And the result is that nothing feel real. It takes on an almost dreamlike quality to it which is not pleasant. (It’s also responsible for the plot being lace, since without limitations it’s impossible to have logically consistent problems.)

It’s really cool for people to be able to teleport around like Q, but the problem with the rule of cool is that you have to be careful with it or you’ll get frostbite.

Star Trek TNG: Sub Rosa

On By Christopher LansdownIn Science Fiction, TV & Movies, Writing1 Comment

I forget why, but I was recently reading about the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, Sub Rosa. It was an unusual episode, being described by Memory Alpha as a foray into gothic horror. It was a (sort of) ghost story, centering about an “anaphasic entity” which had been haunting the women of Beverly Crusher’s family. Haunting isn’t quite the right word, as it seemed to live symbiotically with them. Though like all TNG episodes, it had its share of plot holes.

For one thing, it was said to have lived symbiotically with the “Howard Women” for centuries, except that family names are patrilineal, not matrilineal, so they would have been Howard women for a single generation. (You could get around this by skipping a generation, going from grand-mother to grand-daughter, which happened in the case of Beverly Crusher but didn’t at any other time.) I bring this up not to nit-pick, but because it’s a good symbol of how much the TNG writers cared about plot holes: not very much.

A bigger plot hole was that the anaphasic entity was supposed to be sinister, but it seemed to be symbiotic, not parasitic. Beverly came into contact with it because she was burying her grandmother at a very old age, and the Howard women were, if I recall correctly, generally described as hardy. This suggests that the anaphasic entity kept them healthy. It also, according to Beverly’s grandmother’s diary, kept them happy. Why, then, it was supposed to be bad was completely unclear. It did eventually murder someone, though there was no obvious reason that things got to that point.

As I said, it’s not that I particularly care about the plot holes in TNG episodes, at least not any more. When I was watching them as a teenager I would immediately call up a close friend and the two of us would nitpick the night’s episode for the better part of two hours, but I’ve gotten over that. What I do find interesting is what this suggests about resource allocation: most of these plot holes would not have been at all hard to fix. The producers of Star Trek: The Next Generation just didn’t care. And what I found most interesting about the Memory Alpha article were some quotes from the writers at the end. First, from Jeri Taylor, the showrunner at the time:

Rick and Michael were very distrustful of this story. They considered it a romance novel in space and felt the possibility for embarrassment was monumental, but I just knew it would work. It’s a different kind of story for Star Trek to tell. It is a romance but we do have women in our audience and women do traditionally respond to romantic stories.

This from Bannon Braga:

“It was the best performance I’ve ever seen. I just thought she did a wonderful job. Picard catches Beverly masturbating for crying out loud! What a tough role to play. When I was writing the words, ‘She writhes around in the bed having invisible sex,’ I just thought, ‘Oh man, we’re asking for trouble. Are they gonna be able to pull this off?’ Thanks to [director] Jonathan Frakes and Gates, it was not hokey. It was very good. Look, I scripted the first orgasm in “The Game“. This was mild by comparison. Sure it was racy. Even Rick Berman had said, ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this.’ I think they trimmed quite a bit out of the writhing sequences.“

And finally, this from René Echevarria:

“I can still reduce Brannon to shudders when I go into his office and say, ‘I can travel on the power transfer beam’. But the cast loved it. Every woman on the lot who read it was coming up to Brannon and patting him. Ultimately I think it was worth doing because it was campy fun and the production values were wonderful. The sets look great and everybody threw themselves into it. Gates did a wonderful job. It just got bigger and broader and to the point of grandmother leaping out of the grave. Just having Beverly basically writhing around having an orgasm at 6 o’clock on family TV was great. For that alone it was worth doing. We got away with murder.”

That last line really summed up a sneaking suspicion I have about the writing on The Next Generation. “We got away with murder.” They weren’t trying to tell good stories. They were trying to be clever.

(I should note that I mean good in the sense of, well, good. Not in the sense of “addictive”.)