A Meaningless Title

29 - If you could tell Gene Roddenberry one thing, Star Trek related or not, what would it be?

Honestly, I’m going to reject this question, just because Star Trek – maybe even more so that other media franchises – isn’t purely the work of one person. Yes, Roddenberry came up with the original concept, but the strength of Star Trek has always been how easy it’s been to adapt that basic premise to cover such a variety of stories.

(And, of course, a lot of TOS’s world building was fairly obviously ad-hoc. It takes the better part of the first season for the writers to reach any sort of consensus as to who, exactly, the Enterprise works for!)

Roddenberry wasn’t the single genius behind Star Trek, and his involvement in Trek was quite often blatantly mercenary. I’ve heard the characterisation of Cochrane in First Contact was, in part, a bit of a parody of Roddenberry, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that was true.

So instead, a thank you to all the writers, actors and artists that contributed to Trek as whole in its many incarnations.

In hindsight, I’m thinking these ‘post something every day’ memes aren’t for me… anyway. Catch-up time!

25 - How has Star Trek changed you?

It’s given me the phrase ‘Shaka, when the walls fell’ as a generic response to people talking about things I’m completely unfamiliar with…

More seriously, Trek was my first real fandom. Back before the internet was 90% cat pictures, it was 90% Star Trek sites, and so without Trek, I probably wouldn’t have spent nearly as much time online.

Through the novels, it’s introduced me to several of my favourite authors – I might have found Barbara Hambly’s historical novels through Children of the Jedi, but then again, maybe not.


26 - Lots of Star Trek Parodies out there. Which do you dig?

Does Futurama’s ‘Where No Fan Has Gone Before’ count? Lots of cute references and great lines, with my favourite moments being William Shater’s spoken word redition of The Real Slim Shady, and the image of Kif at the end of the credits as the puppet from “The Carbomite Manoeuvre”. It’s a rare parody that goes to the effort of parodying TOS’s end credit pictures…


27 - What would you cross over with Star Trek?

Back in the ‘90s, Marvel Comics briefly had the rights to Star Trek, and, of course, promptly put out an X-Men/Trek crossover. I always thought they missed an opportunity by having the X-Men show up in the 23rd century – it was the 1990s, they should have had Khan show up in the X-Men continuity. The Eugenics Wars wouldn’t be at all out of place there…

I’ve also always felt we need a Doctor Who crossover where The Doctor and Guinan meet up.

Crap, been busy. Quick, catch up, catch up!

21 - Which Star Trek food would you want to try at least once?

None of the major Trek species seem to have particularly interesting cuisine, really. There’s Klingon (Real warriors eat nothing but raw meat, apparently), Vulcan (Logical apparently equals bland), Ferengi (Apparently the same live bugs eaten by the “Conspiracy” aliens… hmm…)

22 - Which Star Trek world would you want to visit at least once?

Well, no surprise, my choice is Romulus. Admittedly, that’s as much because we don’t ever see much of it on the show, but also because it seems like a nice enough place to visit, assuming you can avoid running afoul of the authorities. Vulcan is dry and hot, Andor very cold, the Klingon and Cardassian homeworlds seem perpetually overcast, and their architecture seems to lean towards totalitarian brutality anyway. Romulus seems a lot more temperate, and the cities aren’t quite as overbearing.

23 - Is there anything you'd want to change about Star Trek? Why?

Ignoring trivial changes to specific episodes, if I were to change one storyline it would be... the Section 31 storyline in DS9.

Now, one of the things DS9 did quite well was to challenge the setting assumptions that underlined TOS and TNG; the exchange between Bashir and Kira in “Emissary” about ‘the frontier’ is a great scene, and in general, DS9 did quite well at underlining some of the unstated flaws in the Federation culture that had been previously established. That’s great, that’s good stuff. Section 31 seemed to spring from the same impulse, but it…

Well, the problem was that depicting the Federation and Starfleet as vaguely, unthinkingly colonialist or imperialistic in its dealings with alien worlds is something that’s perfectly in line with what was shown before. Depicting the Federation as being secretly maintained by black-ops puppet masters who do all the dirty work needed to maintain security… was not.

Now, to be fair, “Inquisition” is a fun conspiracy theory episode. The problem is, like most conspiracy theories, Section 31 doesn’t really stand up to much analysis. How does a secret organization like that get the resourced needed to not just deal with threats but then cover up all trace of their own existence? How does Section 31 even benefit from being so utterly secretive in the first place? The Tal Shiar and the Obsidian Order might not operate openly, but they don’t try to cover up the fact that they exist in the first place.

For that matter, the idea that Federation citizens are so fragile they need to be shielded from the dirty work being done in their name… well, that’s getting dangerously close to the “Hard men making the hard choices that weak-willed liberals won’t” trope so beloved by reactionaries. Never mind that it doesn’t hold up even as part of the setting as established. From “The Enterprise Incident” to “Chain of Command”, Kirk and Picard never shied away from covert operations against the Federation’s enemies. For Section 31 to work, it needs to pretend that it’s even vaguely plausible that these unelected, secretive men in black are the sole force working to protect the Federation – never mind that the very next episode demonstrated that regular Starfleet officers are just as capable of making those hard choices in the name of security – and dealt with the dilemma in a far more interesting and realistic fashion than secret agents in black leather uniforms.

What’s worse about Section 31 is that it infects the rest of the series. Now, it seems, every other novel can’t go five minutes without cutting away to the secret puppet-masters, making sure our hero’s foolish sentimentality and morality won’t doom the galaxy. A prime example; the TNG ‘A Time To…” series, which concludes with Section 31 secretly assassinating the Federation president and his staff, the implication being that that was the only way to prevent a galactic war, and, fundamentally, the only real option. Because when you think of TNG, that’s the sort of scenario that immediately comes to mind, right?

Section 31 didn’t need to exist. We’ve seen plenty of corrupt admirals and mad captains in the show; “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges” would have worked fine with Admiral Ross alone as the agent behind the scheme, while the Changeling virus storyline in the final arc… well, honestly, that was a mess that seemed to have been thrown in at the last minute, and might as well have been excised entirely. The concept of Section 31 is fundamentally at odds with the rest of Star Trek, and rather than challenging its premises, all it does is ignore them in favour of a third-rate conspiracy thriller.

19 - How did the Star Trek reboot affect you?

Well, I appreciated a Trek movie that seemed to have actually had some effort put into it; it was certainly a relief from the last couple of TNG movies. One has to give it credit too for somehow pulling of the feat of being a prequel, a sequel and a reboot of the franchise while still remaining at least largely coherent.

And, of course, it brought a lot of new people into Trek fandom, and it’s been fun seeing people watching the various series for the first time. (And their reactions on learning that Pon Farr is canon, not just a wacky fanfic trope…)

On the other hand, as I said at the time, I wasn’t exactly a fan of the film itself. If nothing else, reboot!Kirk is one of the least likeable protagonists I’ve seen in a long time, and his role in the film seems to exist entirely due to writer’s fiat. Not to mention that the writing managed the seemingly impossible by being scientifically ludicrous even by the already low standards set by previous Star Trek.

And, in general, I find the reboot-verse fails to offer anything particularly new. By putting all the characters in their familiar places, regardless of whether it made any real sense, it means the reboot universe feels far too familiar. Alright, Vulcan’s destroyed – how often was Vulcan’s existence really relevant on the show? Amok Time and Journey to Babel aren’t going to happen anymore, but that’s about it.

So, all in all, while I’m glad the reboot film managed to get Star Trek out of the pit it had dug itself into during the 2000s, I don’t really have that much interest in the reboot as a setting, and as a film, I count it, at best, as solidly in the middle, alongside The Search for Spock and Generations*, not as a standout in any way.

* Yeah, I kinda like Generations. Sue me.

17 - Have you read any of the books? If so, which ones?

Well, as I said on an earlier question, I actually started reading the novels before I’d watched much of the actual show. The best ones – or at least the most interesting ones – are the early TOS novels, written before most of the canon had been set in stone, and, more importantly, during a period where Paramount really didn’t seem to be paying attention to what wacky stuff was being published.

Once TNG started coming out, the novels become a lot blander due to increasing publisher oversight and a refusal to allow anything that might even potentially contradict something in the show. More recent novels seemed to be breaking free of that straightjacket a bit, but unfortunately then took a wrong turn into increasingly convoluted internal continuity, endless crossovers and galaxy-threatening disasters, and utterly senselessly killing off major characters…

Worth picking up are Diane Duane’s novels; her Romulan series gets a lot of attention, and justifiably so, but my favourites books by her are actually her TNG novels. ‘Dark Mirror’ is great fun, featuring, among other things, an excerpt from the mirror-verse version of The Merchant of Venice (‘The quality of mercy must be earned…’), and presents a far more interesting take on the mirror universe than Ds9’s interpretation. ‘Intellivore’ is a wonderfully creepy horror story; both her TNG novels really emphasis the emptiness and hostility of space.

Barbara Hambly’s two TOS novels introduced me to one of my all-time favourite authors. ‘Ishmael’ is, of all things, a crossover with a short-lived western/comedy ‘Here Come the Brides’; the entire novel seems to exist purely due to Mark Lenard appearing in both shows. It features cameos from everyone from Han Solo to the Doctor (two different incarnations) to Paladin from ‘Have Gun, Will Travel’. In other words, it’s pure crack-fic; but Hambly writes it in a way that it’s entirely possible to miss the swarms of references to other series, and to let it work as an extremely well-written time travel story.

Her other Trek novel, ‘Ghost-Walker’ isn’t – to my knowledge – based on anything else, but it is an excellent story in its own right, with a well-developed alien culture at its heart and an extremely tense atmosphere. Interestingly, at one point Hambly has Kirk survive a telepathic attack by storing his consciousness in the Enterprise’s main computer – shades of Callista?

L.A. Graf’s novels are also some of my favourites, for giving more of the spotlight to Chekov, Sulu and Uhura. Their Ds9 novel ‘Time’s Enemy’ is also extremely good; the highlight of the ‘Invasion’ crossover series, despite – or perhaps because – it all but ignores the original premise of the series…

Ds9 also has the excellent “A Stitch in Time”, essentially Garak’s autobiography, written, appropriately enough, by Andrew Robinson. The Ds9 reboot novels that picked up from the end of the series were also fairly strong, at least for the first few until sudden changes in editors led to the schedule being increasingly erratic…

So, hey, I made it almost two weeks before forgetting about this, which is more than I expected…

14 - What's your favourite Star Trek quote?

A fair number of my favourites I’ve already mentioned for ‘favourite dramatic moment’ or ‘favourite humorous moment’, so I’ll skip those. From what’s left…

Well, if we’re talking memorable quotes, Garak has more than his fair share them, but my favourite has always been his interpretation of the boy who cried wolf – "That you should never tell the same lie twice..."

For ‘most uninitentionally hilarious quote’, there’s Dr. Crusher in “Sub Rosa”: “There’s no such thing as a ghost; you’re some sort of anaphasic lifeform!”. Ah, of course! Glad to see there was a reasonable explanation there!

15 - How did you get into Star Trek?

Well, I’ve covered previously the first episodes and series I watched – but my first real exposure to Star Trek was… Micro Machines.

See, back in the early ‘90s, Micro Machines managed to get the licence to both Star Wars and Star Trek, and made a bunch of toy spaceships from each franchise. I found the designs fascinating when I first saw them, and managed to cajole my mum into buying me a set of each – for Star Wars, the Empire Strikes Back pack with a snowspeeder, a TIE fighter and an AT-AT, and for Star Trek, the movies pack, with the Reliant, the Excelsior, and a Klingon Bird of Prey.

I ended up with most of the toys before I actually started watching either franchise; I’ve still got most of them, even if the TIE fighter’s solar panels and the Reliant’s warp engines are now stuck on with blue-tack…

Anyway, one of the things that fascinated me on seeing the toys was just how many different spaceships there were, and the back of the packaging listed them as all coming from different episodes and movies. Then there was Playmate’s line of Next Generation action figures, obviously created with the collector market in mind, that was obsessively complete, with separate action figures covering such key characters like ‘Riker disguised as a Malcorian’, ‘La Forge transformed into a Tarchennen III alien’ and ‘Data undercover as a Romulan’.

(I still regret that I never bought any of the K'ehleyr figures that every toy store seemed to have dozens of…)

The idea of this fictional world with so much stuff in it, so many different elements, was something I hadn’t encountered before – at least, not on that sort of scale.

12 - What's your favourite funny moment?

‘Ode to Spot’ is a strong contender, but if I had to pick one, it would be the ‘explanation’ of differences between TOS and TNG Klingons in “Trials and Tribble-ations”. Actually, pretty much all of that episode, now that I think about it.

It is a long story. We do not discuss it with outsiders.

(I’ve been told Enterprise actually did provide an explanation, which to me is proof enough that I made the right decision to stop watching that series…)

10 - What's your favourite species?

For once, an easy one to answer. As I’ve said before, my favourite species is the Romulans.

To begin with, they have the best ship designs. (Well, alright, maybe not the best, but since the Klingon Bird-of-Prey in Star Trek III was originally meant to be a stolen Romulan ship, I’m going to count it as Romulan by proxy.)

I’ve been playing Star Trek Online a lot recently, and one thing I like is what they’ve done with the Romulans – it’s almost enough for me to start accepting the events of Nemesis and Trek ’09 as canon again. Basically, the game’s set a few decades after the destruction of Romulus, and the Star Empire has all but collapsed. The military and the Tal Shiar are locked in a battle for supremacy, the surviving Reman forces are trying to establish their own independence, colonies along the old neutral zone are petitioning the Federation for membership. It’s an interesting situation for storytelling (even if the game often squanders it), and it focuses on one element that separates the Romulans from the other major races in Trek.

Trek tends to treat species and citizenship as interchangeable. All Klingons are citizens of the Klingon Empire, all Ferengi answer to Ferengi law, if Bajor joined the Federation, presumably all Bajorans would gain Federation citizenship. The Romulans, though, are different. They’re an offshoot of the Vulcans, and the Romulan identity is one created by choice, not a genetic one.

(There’s an interesting idea in, of all things, one of William Shatner’s Trek novels, that the Reman identity also isn’t genetic, that it’s more of a caste status. The human Shinzon is as much Reman as the Reman natives.)

I always thought it a shame Ds9 didn’t do much with the Romulan alliance; I always felt they were a better fit for allies of the Federation than the Klingons – on the other hand, that’s what’s interesting about them, that they’ve rejected their Vulcan heritage, and have no interest in ever returning to their ancestral home – except, perhaps, on their own terms.

8 - Your favorite actor/actress?

Hmm, another tough one. I’m leaning towards Shatner, largely for his wonderful role in Boston Legal, but Patrick Stewart is a strong contender too.

And, unfortunately, both of them have appeared alongside the Muppets, so that doesn’t work as a tie-breaker either…

6 - Your favorite canon pairing?

Well, couple of options here. I’m pretty fond of Odo and Kira as a couple, even if the actual execution sometimes left me a little cold. B'elanna and Paris was a pairing I ended up enjoying a lot more than I thought I would at first. Sarek and Amanda’s always been a favourite of mine, but that’s really more from the novels than the series itself – I still haven’t seen Journey to Babel. Reboot Spock and Uhura was a nice surprise, though it’s not really developed enough in the film for me to count it as a favourite…

If I had to pick one canon pairing to be my favourite, though, I’m going to have to go for… Worf and Troi.

I mean, this one has to get points just for somehow managing to work despite sounding like the result of a random crack-fic generator and most of the relationship taking place in alternate timelines, parallel universes, or telepathic hallucinations.

One of the things about Worf is that, as a Klingon raised in the Federation, he’s obsessed with proving himself as the perfect Klingon. He pretty much sabotaged his relationship with K'Ehleyr by refusing to accept any deviation from his own image of perfect Klingon behaviour. Having him paired up with Troi – and actually admitting he has feelings for someone so un-Klingon – implied that he was starting to move beyond needing to constantly prove himself as truly Klingon and to relax slightly, to become the person he wants to be rather than the person he thinks Klingon society wants him to be.

(And, of course, based on what we see of Klingon culture and society, the ultra-honourable warrior ideal Worf tries to live up to doesn’t reflect reality in the slightest. Worf pretty much refuses to notice or acknowledge that the Empire is full of petty backstabbing bastards and always has been…)

From Deanna’s point of view, pairing her up with Worf emphasises that she does have a fair amount of strength of character and will herself, and can keep up with someone as stubborn as Worf. It was also nice to see her finally begin to make a decision regarding her relationship with Riker; the way that neither of them were willing to either renew or abandon their relationship, but just let it drag out for years on end, didn’t reflect well on either of them.

(I do actually like Riker and Troi together – but I also like them as people who’ve managed to move on past each other without losing each other as friends.)

The most appealing aspect of the relationship between Worf and Troi, though, is imagining how Lwaxana would have reacted when she heard about it…