“There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.” ~ Ed Howdershelt, author
The soapbox didn’t help us.
The ballot box didn’t help us.
The jury box didn’t help us.
There’s only one box left.
Monthly Archive for May, 2009
Next week, The New Adventures of Queen Victoria takes aim at J.J. Abrams’ ham-fisted “reimagining” of Star Trek by imagining what he would do if asked to re-launch my comic strip for a “younger, hipper” audience.
Since J.J. has to use Greg Grunberg in everything he does (it’s the law!) Bryan suggested I use him in the strip.
I don’t even feel like asking for permission to use his image, but I did do a mock-up just for fun…
Greg Grunberg IS Queen Elizabeth I!
Dreamed that the playreading committee for Cumberland Players was meeting, but it wasn’t Cumberland Players. It was at college. And the Idiot Box people were there instead of the people I did theater with at college.
One of the people flipped open their copy of the stage play of “Are You Being Served?” but instead of the normal playscript, it was a series of short sketches. The one that we opened to was entitled “IF MEL BROOKS WROTE THE FAMILY CIRCUS…”
That was when I woke up. Sad, though, because I would have liked to see how that worked out.
Wyndham Rewards
1910 8th Avenue NE
Aberdeen SD 57401
To Whomever:
Enclosed please find, unopened, an unsolicited mailing from your company.
I have already informed your company that I will never again stay in any of your hotels because of your Ellicotville, NY’s hotel’s policy of forcing attendees in the breakfast room to watch The 700 Club. The managers of this hotel forcing those who choose to avail themselves of the “free” breakfast to sit through right wing religious propaganda and proselytization is, in my opinion, unforgiveable.
The refusal of either the franchisee in question, or the home company, to explain, end, or even apologize for this policy ensures that I will never allow your company to collect one more dollar from me, and will actively encourage my friends to also avoid your company.
Any further unsolicited mailings from your company may now be construed as harassment, and I will not hesitate to act accordingly should any be received.
Trying to be a little more positive before I go back to slagging off the new Star Trek movie (see the last two entries), I thought I’d put my creative juices to a little work, and tackle a question posed by my Bryan Irrera, and try to come up with a modern-day version of the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, the League is an entity in a series of amazing graphic novels by Alan Moore (and a lackluster film allegedly based on same) encompassing classic pulp heroes and villains formed as a secret British-government run team of “extraordinary” people to protect the interests of the British Empire. The original team included such notable figures as Dr. Henry Jeckyll, Mina Harker, Allan Quartermain, and so on.
Moore has evolved the team as time has gone on, creating new generations in different decades. In his Black Dossier, Moore started to run up against the hostile waters of trademark and copyright laws and needed to hide the true identities of some of his characters like Jimmy the Spy and Miss Emma Night.
A couple of times, Bryan and I have talked about who would be the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen if they were operating today. He’s had some inspired ideas for team members in the past, which have influenced some of my selections, I will admit. (Most notably Cole, who was on his team as well.) After a lot of debate, and a little bit of thought, I arrived at this list.
Some ground rules. First, while Alan Moore’s League obviously concentrates on British characters protecting the remains of the Empire, my team is considerably more multinational, as I believe any team today would need to be. They’d probably be operating with UN sanction, instead of just the British Crown, allowing them more access to trouble spots that are no longer under Her Majesty’s long shadow.
Second, I decided to stick with characters who are known in their own right and not as parts of a team already. This rules out the DC and Marvel superhero pantheons, obviously. Even though they aren’t “really” a team, I count the characters from Heroes in this category. Also, characters who are mainly known as sidekicks to other heroes are generally ruled out, so as much as I would love to have Dorothy McShane Schofield on my team, she has to sit this one out.
Third, characters need to be contemporary, or near contemporary. Characters from the future, or who make their name in the future, are verboten, so no Wesley Crusher or Mike Smith.
I’m also reaching across more media than Moore since the 1990′s, 2000′s, and onward have new versions of the Penny Dreadfuls. TV, films, games, and websites share the place in today’s culture that the pulps did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
With all that out of the way, here is my team.
The team is led by Lara Croft, famous British explorer and archaeologist. Recruited for the team by her predecessor in the position, longtime friend and rival Dr. Henry Jones Jr., Croft assumed command after Jones mysteriously disappeared. She is brash, brazen, and willing to take risks that many — no, make that most — would consider ill advised, yet she always manages to get the job done. An inspiring leader, she has earned the loyalty of all of the other members of her team.
Croft’s second in command is Dr. Leroy Brown, the team’s strategist and researcher. Although older than Croft (he just marked his 50th birthday) he defers to her leadership mainly due to a dislike of field work. In addition to his encyclopedia-like knowledge (which had earned him his now-hated boyhood nickname), Brown’s mastery of computers and information systems makes him invaluable. Although shy and retiring, rumor has it that Brown was once quite the ladies’ man, as evidenced by his long list of female operatives who he has been known to call on in a pinch, ranging from longtime friend Sally Meaney to newcomer Harriet Welsch. While most of the team members receive very generous stipends from the U.N. in reward for their work, Brown still insists on only accepting the same salary he started with: $91.25 a year…plus expenses.
Nancy Thompson is the team’s resident demonologist and parapsychologist. In her life she has experienced more supernatural phenomena, and fought off more otherworldly baddies, than anyone since the legendary Mina Harker. Her bravery and recklessness are second only to Croft’s, and her boundless energy and dogged determination have convinced the rest of the team that she probably never sleeps. Like her idol Harker, however, Thompson has a dark side that has only been glimpsed on rare occasions. Like Dr. Brown, Thompson also has a team of field operatives she can call on in an emergency, most notably two brothers from Kansas.
Nancy’s right-hand man and protege is Cole Sear. At only 21, Cole is very wise beyond his years and has as much experience, or more, than anyone on the team except for Nancy and Dr. Brown. He has been at work with the paranormal ever since the age of 9, when he discovered that he had the ability to not only communicate with, but also see and interact with, the dead. Originally seen as a bit of a mascot for the team, Cole has more than pulled his weight in recent years.
The team’s resident engineer and gadgeteer is Go Mifune. Once an aspiring young race car driver, Go was crippled in a horrific accident in his mid 20′s, and turned his talents to the mechanical and engineering aspects of his preferred field. Dr. Jones recruited him to the team six years ago, after telling him about a former member of the team: a similarly-crippled tennis player who had used technology to allow her to walk again. Much of the team’s high-tech weaponry and gadgets are Go’s creations. Some of his teammates believe that the reason Go joined the team was to use its resources to help him in his obsessive search for two people: his long lost brother, and the mysterious Racer X, who Go believes responsible for the accident that crippled him.
Amélie Poulain heads up the European operations for the team. While her angelic looks might lure people into a false sense of security, her targets often find that to be a fatal mistake. Miss Polain has a singular ability to see connections between people and things, and in her former job learned more about human nature than almost anyone else in history. She is also very creative and innovative, particularly in the area of revenge. She handles most of the team’s “wet work” when discretion is a must.
And on the other side of the globe, the team’s Asian operations are overseen by another disarmingly beautiful woman, Moroboshi Lum. Mrs. Moroboshi (née Invader) is one of a notorious alien race known as the Oni. Like her European counterpart, Lum uses her feminine wiles and beauty to her benefit, and the people that she goes up against are often shocked by her abilities. Lum is also the team’s extraterrestrial expert, and has almost single handedly fought off a number of alien incursions. Like her longtime friend Go (who recruited her), Lum is also obsessed with a missing loved one: her darling husband Ataru.
That’s my team. Your milage may vary.
This is the second in my series of posts on the flaws I found in watching the new 2009 flavor of Star Trek. The first post, where I dissected the ill-advised decision to use a time-travel device and create an “alternate universe” for the franchise reboot, can be found here. I will add links to forthcoming articles here as well, as the series progresses.
By the way, a study on “Star Trek Fandom: Why It Sucks” is probably long overdue judging by the reaction not only to my post but to the general discussion and disagreement that has taken place over this film. I’ve lived through this fight three times before when Trek fandom seemed irreparably smashed to pieces (the debate over TNG vs. DS9, DS9 vs. Voyager, and “Enterprise” vs. everything), but have seen nothing like the metaphorical bloodshed this movie is engendering. This movie has now caused the Trek equivalent of the Protestant Reformation, and the fandom is now in for some long and bloody Holy Wars. Sadly, all of this would not have been needed if the producers and writers hadn’t made some key mistakes.
Again, another disclaimer: I didn’t hate the movie. It was not as bad as I had expected it to be. It’s just that the few things that were bad about the movie were unbelievably bad. And must be addressed.
WARNING/GUARANTEE: The really bad thing about this movie that I’m going to discuss now deals with at least one major plot point. If you haven’t seen the movie and want to see it, I’m going to reveal a major, tremendously stupid decision by the production staff, and you might not want to read it before you see the movie.
With that out of the way:
The Mallory Dog Testicle Copout…why it sucks.
When George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he answered “because it is there.”
When asked why dogs lick their testicles, the anonymous philosopher answered “because they can.”
Mallory sucked; the mountain killed him and his body lay in the snow for 75 years before someone stumbled over it.
Dogs suck; their tendency to lick their testicles in public means that they never get invited to the really good dinner parties.
Lesson number one: “because you can” does not mean “you should” nor “you must.” “Because I can” is never a good reason for doing something. But, obviously, no one ever bothered to tell the production team of the new Star Trek about that, and that’s why they made some boneheaded decisions with this movie.
I discussed the stupidity of the need for an “alternate universe” for this film, and the need to use a ridiculous plot device to create this alternate universe and still shoehorn it into the alleged “continuity” they were so eager to get away from in my last article, so I’ll keep my screaming about that to a minimum. Yet, once they created their alternate universe, they seemed to feel that they had to put as much distance between the original series and their new incarnation as they possibly could; they went out of their way to do things differently, to draw a line under their version and shout “oooh, look at us, we’re alternate!”
One of these, just a little disturbing, is the romantic relationship between Uhura and Spock. Spock has always felt compelled to control his emotions, including his romantic feelings. Besides, at the time he’s fooling around with Uhura (it started before we saw them both aboard the Enterprise, for the clueless) he’s still engaged to T’Pring. That bonding took place before the divergence point between the universes, so at the time he started fooling around Spock was still telepathically bonded to his mate and would have been unlikely to stray. That’s a minor nitpick. (Of course, since the same trauma to the timeline managed to turn Kirk’s brother into Chuck Cunningham and allow Porthos Archer to live to be 658 in human years, it could have just turned around and bitch-slapped T’Pring back to Nazi Germany for all we know.
The characterization of Kirk as a reckless young man with an apparent death wish is another unneeded change. True, this difference can easily be explained by the early death of his father and being raised instead by Matt Parkman (or by the possibility that he’s really his brother Sam — see the first post if you’re confused), but it wasn’t really needed.
Blowing up Vulcan, however, is another story.
That’s right. Afraid that people wouldn’t appreciate the whole alternateness of the alternate universe they created (why? because they could), the producers decided to blow up Vulcan. Or, actually, suck it up. True, they needed to demonstrate the power of the weapon yielded by the insane bad guy, not to mention provide some cool special effects, but, really, Vulcan? Dramatically, Star Trek has always been about the characters. From the very first series bible Roddenberry insisted that stories impact the regular characters in some way. What purpose for our regular characters does destroying Vulcan do? Nothing, really. Of course, it impacts Spock, meaning he’s homeless but Spock has never really had a home. He’s not fully Vulcan nor fully human, and has never felt comfortable around either.
Some might say it makes him more special since he’s now one of only 10,000 or so beings in the universe instead of one of 6 billion, but the problem with that argument is that Spock is already unique. He’s the first and at the time of planetary suckage only Human/Vulcan hybrid (well, the first successful one anyhow). It doesn’t make Spock more interesting as a character; if anything, it diminishes him because it makes him less likely to interact with other Vulcans and thus less likely to feel like an outcast and less likely to continue to feel the need to suppress his emotions to fit in with them.
It also really fucks up the entire dynamic of the Federation. As envisioned by Roddenberry, Earth and Vulcan have always been id and ego to each other. (In Enterprise this was expanded to be id/ego/superego with the establishment of the Andorians as id, pushing the humans up to ego and the Vulcans to superego). It really fucks up the chi of the Star Trek universe.
And it was completely unnecessary and gratuitous. They didn’t really need to make Spock unstable to allow Kirk to leapfrog him — it was always known in Star Trek that Spock was not ambitious, and was not even Pike’s first officer as was implied in the new movie — so they didn’t have to blow up his home planet to make him attack Kirk and be relieved, which is the only real impact the destruction of Vulcan and death of Spock’s mother (but the less said about that the better, please) had on the plot. A better, less contrived, method of doing that could and should have been worked up.
In drama, everything needs to have a reason. And in good drama, every reason should be the best reason possible. There was no real reason to destroy Vulcan. There were lots of other alternatives. It was sloppy writing, done solely for shock value.
And that sucks.
In the interest of full disclosure, I really wanted to hate this movie. I wanted a passionate hatred to burn so deep within my soul that phaser-like beams would shoot out of my eyes and destroy the screen that it was exhibited on.
I did not hate this movie.
However, my not hating the movie is not the same as my actually liking it. Yes, the movie had a lot of stuff that really worked well; for example, I honestly believed that Chris Pine, Zach Quinto, and Karl Urban were actually better in their roles than the original actors. However, there were several major problems with it that flipped the little “suck” switch inside my brain, and those problems must be addressed.
I will go so far as to say that they must be addressed in a calm, rational manner. Thus, I will be forgoing my usual profanity-laden, snarky manner with which I usually dissect why things suck. This film’s level of suck, while significant, is not fatal. And besides, the fanboys have already been screaming to high heaven with vitriol and hyperbole. I will arrive at my arguments in a calm, rational manner.
In other words, pardon the pun, I will be addressing this film’s shortcomings…logically.
Part One: Time Travel…why it sucks.
I will be breaking my analysis and criticism into manageable bites by addressing them in separate posts. The second article of the series can be found here , and I will add links to future installments as I put them up.
People have been complainining about, and saying this film was necessary because of, the enormous amount of continuity that the Star Trek franchise has accumulated. I call bullshit. And I’m allowed to say that because I wrote for Star Trek. My DS9 spec script “Division By Zero” got my then-writing partner Joe Passarella and I invited in to pitch to DS9. None of our scripts made it to the screen (although one of our B-plots was eventually re-envisioned as “Take Me Out To The Holosuite”) but I was, in the process, one of the writers invited onto the ground floor of what would become Star Trek: Voyager. I ended up passing on the opportunity because I hated how the show’s staff squandered the potential that the late Mike Piller had created when dreaming up the characters and their stories. (I may write more on that at a future date; let me know if there is any interest.)
Thus, I’m one of a few hundred people who is honestly in a position to tell you that Star Trek has no continuity. What it has is a history. The two are completely independent. Star Trek has never been afraid of just ignoring the inconvenient baggage it’s saddled itself with, or just brushing over the little mistakes that popped up when some writer wasn’t paying attention. (For example, the possibility that Data had slacked off for 64 years after graduating Starfleet Academy — what a long semester abroad, huh?) We even have an acronym for it: YATI. “Yet Another Trek Inconsistency.”
In fact, the Star Trek front office, at least under Mike Piller, actively discouraged people from making continuity references. Writers were told that we should focus on telling our own stories and our own concepts, and continuity be damned. The producers would find ways to make good enough ideas fit into the history when needed, and when not, continuity be damned.
Yet, now some people are saying that the only people who have a problem with the new Star Trek movie are continuity freaks, and that that massive continuity was the reason a reboot was needed. Sadly, the producers and writers of the 2009 movie wound up hoisted on their own petard by trying to make the movie “fit” into continuity enough that they could then blow up all the continuity and start over.
And that’s where they made several huge mistakes.
Marty McFly and the Shaved Cat
In fiction, there are two major theories of time travel and its consequences, which I like to call the Marty McFly theory and the Shaved Cat theory.
The Marty McFly theory embodies the Grandfather Paradox, and claims that if you make a change in the past that might impact your life, then those changes will eventually catch up with you. If you prevent your forebears from breeding, then you will cease to exist. The Shaved Cat theory works around this, and states that no matter what you do in the past, you can’t change the fact that you existed to make that change. Time is resilient.
Star Trek subscribes to the Shaved Cat theory. Kirk and his crew were not wiped from existence when McCoy prevented Edith Keeler from dying because they were there to observe it. Kira, Odo, and O’Brien were not wiped from time when Sisko, Bashir, and Dax jumped into dystopian San Francisco because they saw them beam down. When timelines re-form after major disruptions they accomodate the people who make the changes.
The only major thing which these two theories of time travel agree upon, however, is that changes caused by a changed timeline only go in one direction. Ripples from bending the timeline do not drift back into the past. For example, if you were to jump back to September 10th, 2001, and alert the authorities to the hijackings in New York and Boston the next day, the consequences of that act would not bounce back and reverse the ruling in Bush v. Gore the previous year. Yet somehow the gigantic disruption of the timeline that took place in this movie somehow rippled backward and changed at least three major events before it took place.
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Jim Kirk in the 2009 movie is an only child: the first and only born son of Lt. George Kirk of the USS Kelvin. In the Original Series (which J.J. Abrams openly admits he never watched), Kirk had an older brother, George Samuel Kirk (who he called “Sam”). Sam is not seen in the 2009 movie, neither on the ship nor on Earth. He is never referred to. In fact, I refuse to believe that Lt. George Kirk would not ask about whether Sam had been gotten off the ship when he asked about his wife, or at least tell his wife to tell Sam that he loved him. Some acknowledgement at least. Rumor has it that the kid that Kid Kirk passes on the road after stealing Matt Parkman’s car was supposed to be Sam, but his name was changed at the last minute to take Sam completely out of the picture.
Unfortunately, if you want to change history with a plot device, you can’t retroactively change something that happened four years earlier. Whether the writers just ignored Sam (as it looks from watching the film) or went back and edited him out (a retcon made with splicing tape) after the fact, taking Sam out of Jim Kirk’s life is not something that can be done that way.
There is one alternate possibility that occurred to me while typing this, however. In the original timeline, Jim Kirk was supposedly born in 2233, and Sam born in 2229. Yet the birth of Kirk in the 2009 Star Trek film is clearly stated to be taking place in the 2220′s. What if the child who was supposed to be born aboard the Kelvin in history was not James Tiberius Kirk, but George Samuel Kirk? Then, when Mommy Winona gave birth to the child who was supposed to be Sam under extreme duress caused by the events that screwed up the timeline, the parents were pressed harder than usual to come up with a name. Instead of defaulting to George Jr. (much like I was given my father’s name when the two grandfathers were arguing over whether I would be named Anthony or Lewis) they quickly picked the first acceptable male name they could think of: James. This also fits in with the Shaved Cat theory, which states that by traveling back and causing the time disruption, our timeline’s Spock has to be cushioned in his landing. He needs a Jim Kirk to make him who he became. Thus, since the genetic material that would have become James Tiberius Kirk was atomized somewhere along the neutral zone before his birth could have occurred, his destiny and name fell to the next best thing.
And since both Sam and Jim were played by Bill Shatner in the original series, we can easily explain away why people from the future recognize Sam Kirk as Jim Kirk.
You see the shit we’re put through when we’re forced to reconcile continuity? If the producers had just left the time travel crap out of the film, this could have been avoided.
Turn Pike
There can be no doubt that Christopher Pike was born before Jim Kirk. Pike was in his 30′s when he commanded the Enterprise in the original series (there is some obscure reference to that, I forget where). The new movie is set some time during where Pike’s first mission aboard the ship would have take place. Yet Pike is clearly older than his 30′s in this movie. This is especially disturbing because the actor playing Pike in the movie (Bruce Greenwood) is slightly older than Pike would have been during Kirk’s command of the Enterprise in the original series.
Thus, it looks like the effects of the time disruption knocked Chris Pike’s birth date about 20 years. Wow, that’s powerful temporal stuff. I can buy the distorted timeline causing Hikaru Sulu, Nyota Uhura, and Pavel Chekov being born earlier than before since they were all born after Jim/Sam Kirk to begin with (and the Shaved Cat theory would lend to the timeline putting them there when Spock needed them). But it can’t make someone born before Jim/Sam be born ever earlier than him.
Again, stuff we wouldn’t have to argue about without the time travel crap. We wouldn’t have to try and reconcile this.
By the way, in both timelines Montgomery Scott and Leonard McCoy are older than Jim Kirk. Fortunately, their stories are changed the least.
Except for…
That Fucking Dog
Scotty talks about testing his Transwarp Beaming theory on “Admiral Archer’s Prized Beagle.”
Jonathan Archer was captain of the NX-01 Enterprise in the 2150′s. With Star Trek’s medical science I can buy the idea of a 140 year old Jonathan Archer. I can not buy the idea of a 94 year old Porthos. Not even Phlox is that good a medic.
If the temporal disruption was powerful enough to reach all the way back to Enterprise time, why didn’t it spare us by wiping out the entire show? Or at least the second season?
And it’s all for naught anyway….
…because if you insist on keeping with continuity, then you’re screwed. There is no way in the Star Trek universe to create any significantly altered timelines. In the 29th Century, the Federation has a series of ships that are specifically used to maintain and preserve the integrity of the Federation’s timeline. The pretty ship you see to your right is the USS Relativity as seen in the Yoyager episode Relativity (written by Bryan Fuller, Nick Sagan, and Michael Taylor, three writers I trust more than the people who wrote the screenplay for this movie). They patrol the timelines and make sure that major screw-ups don’t threaten things. The destruction of a certain important planet (this is the last spoiler warning you get — that plot point gets hammered in an upcoming post) and the death of six billion people would certainly be enough of a problem to make a 29th Century Federation ship jump back to the 23rd Century, where it could easily destroy a 25th Century Romulan ship before it could even destroy the Kelvin.
So, either you throw all continuity out the window, or you’re screwed because the continuity is self-correcting. Unless you just ignore it.
“I hate temporal mechanics”
As I keep saying, all of these problems would have been avoided if the producers had just done what every other Trek writer in the past has done: say “screw continuity, I’m telling the story I want.” But they felt the need to use a deus ex machina to create their alternate timeline so they could feel free to do whatever they wanted and still claim that every Star Trek story afterward still happened.
So, that’s my first major problem with the new Star Trek movie. But far from the most significant. I just wanted to get it out of the way first because (a) it’s such a big gripe on my part and (b) it’s the only major part of suckage of this film that I think the writers and producers could have easily avoided. They probably aren’t talented enough to have avoided the other pitfalls, which I will address later.
I was doing an Amazon search on my name to see if they’ve finally acceeded to the request I made of them during the whole #amazonfail bullshit and remove my books from their “store.”
I was frustrated to see that they haven’t, but intrigued by one of the selections that came up:
Intrigued? I was. I didn’t write anything in that book. So I did the Amazon inside-the-book search for my last name. It landed on page 206:
And followed down to the footnotes:
This is probably as close as I’ll ever come to having Denny O’Neill edit something of mine.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
If you want to read further, you can find the book at Barnes & Noble or, if you must (because they’re cheaper, even if they’re evil), Amazon.
It’s scary how many strips of mine are actually tagged as “stupid” at GoComics.
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