Wobbly Utopia

Let’s be honest, Star Trek has had some bad press over the years. Its gender politics were sometimes a bit wonky. Its racial politics also wobbled a bit. Its view of homosexuality was that it didn’t exist, and if it did, only aliens were gay (and if they were hot, semi-naked female aliens, so much the better). Most people in the Western world have seen at least one episode of the original series, and if they saw it at any point other than the ’60s, they may have formed some negative views. There were probably Forehead Aliens involved, and the sets probably wobbled a bit. Captain Kirk spoke… with many… pauses… and… gestures. Spock raised an eyebrow. McCoy said, “He’s dead, Jim,” and at least one redshirt died to prove it was serious. And maybe it was interesting at the time, and had some interesting ideas, but then ten million spin-offs followed, and then there was a film, and Zoe Saldana ran around in a miniskirt while Chris Pine fought Zachary Quinto in an erotically-charged episode of fisticuffs on the bridge.

This is all true, and the less said about the debacle of Enterprise, the better. But the thing is, none of this detracts from the achievements of the original series. I’ll start with this cast photo…

Original Trek, second season cast. Image (c) Paramount

You’ll notice several things immediately:

1) everyone is wearing implausible outfits and has magical levitating hair;

2) the women are in miniskirts; and

3) the Russian guy is definitely wearing a wig.

But look a bit closer. This is a second season cast photo, so that places it in 1967/8, in a show marketed as “Wagon Train to the Stars”. There are people of different ethnicities and backgrounds, and there are also two women. Neither are secretaries.

I could talk at length about what Star Trek has done in promoting a vision of a multicultural, utopian future. The crew included a Russian crewmember at a time when the Cold War was going strong; it included a Japanese crewmember not so very long after WWII and not in a chop socky or waiter role. It featured the first interracial kiss on American television, when Kirk and Uhura are forced to embrace in the otherwise execrable episode, Plato’s Stepchildren. (In fact, the actors ensured that the actual kiss, rather than a simulated one, was shown, by pulling faces in all subsequent retakes.) The Federation itself is a multicultural utopia, where member nations hate each other and violently disagree on everything, and yet will work together for the common good just the same.

Living in the Future

I could focus instead on the technological impact. I could talk about classic Trek ‘inventing’ a cornucopia of future tech, from mobile phones to warp drive to transporters. Sure, warp drive remains an impossibility, and thus far transporters have only managed to send bits of plastic from one transporter to another, more akin to The Prestige than true teleportation, but how many people were thinking about it at all before Trek dreamed it up? Someone always has to dream up the idea before it can be invented. Sure, Trek only invented their Feinbergers because they didn’t have enough money and had to make do from scrounging through the waste bins of other shows, but that’s the beauty of it. Other people’s rubbish – when painted purple and hung on the wall – was enough to inspire people. Now that’s impressive.

Fandom

Or I could discuss the creation of slash fiction, of how it came about in the 1970s in response to the cancellation of Trek. Of how fans – primarily female and in their 20s and 30s – loved the characters and missed them so much that they got together and wrote stories for them. Many of them got published and ended up on the New York Times bestseller list – AC Crispin’s Yesterday’s Son was a fanzine before it was a book, for instance. I could talk about how they took the names Kirk and Spock and made them into Kirk/Spock, the slash in the middle indicating a homoerotic relationship. I’ve read the early slash efforts, and frankly, they’re not terribly good: it’s primarily people writing about sex they’re not having, in plots that aren’t convincing, with art that is a bit lacking. But the thing is, it’s astonishing that those early fanzines existed at all, that communities sprung up with such fervour and dedication to focus on one little show, long-cancelled. These days, ‘slash’ means an m/m story, irrespective of fandom. Many young fans have no idea of the origin of the term and, influenced in equal measure by anime yaoi naming conventions, will mark the pairing with an x (eg. KirkxSpock), yet still refer to the relationship as ‘slash’. The name endures.

That’s not all that Trek decided online. When the internet started up, the Trek groups had a tricky problem: both classic and TNG‘s main characters shared letters. This was a disaster at a time when Usenet was the main source of contact, and subject lines were limited to a small number of characters. Naming and pairing conventions quickly sprang up, with the order of the letters indicating the pairing. American film rating systems were brought into use. [FIC] TOS: New Dawn, K/S, Mc, NC-17 (1/1) was instantly decipherable as a post title. Trek fandom has had a massive impact on fandom in general, its conventions and rules seeping through a multitude of others.

Making History

Then there are the people that Trek has influenced. How about Rev. Martin Luther King, for example? In a candid conversation with Nichelle Nichols, he expressed his admiration for her work as Uhura, and urged her to remain on the show at a time when she was considering quitting. Or maybe Dr Mae Jamison, the first African American woman in space. She, too, watched the show as a child and was inspired by the example that Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura set.

“I’ll protect you, fair maiden.”

“Sorry, neither!”

– Sulu tries to ‘rescue’ Uhura, but she’s having none of it in the first season episode, The Naked Time.

Mae Jamison, being awesome.

How can you NOT love a show that gives you this much awesomeness?

“Ah,” I hear you cry, “but you’ve only talked about the impact of the show, not the show itself! I distinctly recall some dodgy gender politics at work…”

A Handy Viewing Guide for the New Recruit

Yes. OK, I admit it. Star Trek, like many shows at the time, had its writing farmed out to a pool of writers that took story outlines and turned them into scripts. Maybe they knew and loved the show and its characters, maybe they didn’t know them from Adam. Sometimes you had Harlan Ellison delivering City on the Edge of Forever, and sometimes you had Arthur Heinemann’s The Way to Eden, where space hippies sing songs and the viewer writhes in agony. So what? No show out there can claim to have 100% hit rate, and when Trek got it right, they really got it right. So here are a few episodes to check out, mostly from Season 1, but a couple from the later seasons:

1. Where No Man Has Gone Before: where two members of the crew develop god-like powers and the inevitable happens. There is gratuitous eye-candy, in the shape of Kirk’s bared chest. Meanwhile the lead female character is dressed in exactly the same uniform as everyone else, down to the ridiculous bell-bottoms. She’s the ship’s psychiatrist, and ends up saving the day… sort of.
2. Charlie X: where a young boy with god-like powers… yes, OK. But this is a creepy, scary little episode, with eye candy provided by the semi-naked Kirk wrestling for no apparent reason. More disturbing is Charlie’s attempted rape of a crewwoman, his reactions coarse and demanding and selfish, and hers grown-up and mature. He may be the one using violence, but she never once relinquishes her control.

“There’s no right way to hit a woman.”

– James Kirk to Charlie X, after the latter slaps Yeoman Rand’s bottom, Charlie X.

3. The Menagerie: where the original pilot is reworked. Trek does loyalty, captivity, mind-control and extreme measures.
4. Balance of Terror: the Cold War episode, where Kirk informs a crewmember that bigotry has no place on his bridge.
5. Devil in the Dark: where the crew learn not to make assumptions about appearances.
6. City on the Edge of Forever: where Harlan Ellison disavows all knowledge of this rather excellent episode. Kirk, Spock and McCoy end up in 1930s Earth, where Kirk meets Joan Collins, a peace activist who runs a homeless shelter. She’s strong and independent and a visionary, and is unmistakably the love of his life. (Therefore, according to the requirements of drama, she must die.)
7. Mirror Mirror: Where Uhura wears an even more revealing uniform, and evil!Spock mind-invades McCoy.
8. The Enterprise Incident: where the opposing Romulan commander is female, and is tricked in the expected way. What isn’t expected is her dignity throughout. Kirk and Spock treat her throughout as their equal.
9. Is There In Truth No Beauty?: Where Trek had a blind character, and had her as the lead guest character for the episode.
10. Turnabout Intruder: where Kirk and an old flame – who has a grudge – trade bodies. This episode, for all its flaws, is fascinating. Janice Lester was a contemporary of Kirk’s, and they were briefly involved. However, she never got command, something she attributed to her gender. In Trek-world, she has no argument: her gender is irrelevant. In 1960s America, this is something so obvious that it was rarely mentioned: of course her gender stopped her from getting command, no woman could possibly be a military commander! Lester’s fury is so intently realised that you can’t help feeling sorry for her, for all her insanity… and rooting for her, just a little.

“Your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women.”

– Janice Lester, Turnabout Intruder

Trek and Me

Valentina Tereshkova, by Phillip Bond, 2009

So, there it is: my deepest, darkest secret. I studied maths and music as a child because of Trek. I got into fandom because of Trek, trying to navigate newsgroups in a cybercafe at age 13 when an Amstrad was the height of luxury. I have the DVDs, and a few of the books, and many of the friends. And above it all, when people ask what I want to do when I grow up, my immediate, unspoken reaction is, “I want to be an astronaut.”

Tell me that’s a bad thing.

We couldn't find a still of Summer from the actual episode, but that might be because she because she's only onscreen for about 20 seconds. Here's an overly-airbrushed stretched perspective shot which doesn't have anything to do with the content of the show instead. Copyright NBC.

The Cape is a new TV series from NBC which tries to recapture the atmosphere of pulp comics and mix it with an exciting modern action show. It could be entertaining… if they changed nearly everything about it. (Spoilers follow, but in this reviewer’s opinion you’re not missing much by finding out early).

I don’t mean to be too negative. There is a lot that The Cape does very well, but each good part is immediately contradicted by the next scene, as though they locked twenty writers in a room with some foam rubber baseball bats. Mostly it’s a conflict of tone: there’s a lot of murder and violence, but it then tries to be a sappy ‘father and son’ show or fun-filled comic-book adventure as well two minutes later.

Vince Faraday (played by David Lyons) is one of the last honest policemen in a city where the entire force is about to be owned openly by a private corporation. He is Rugged, and White, and has a Jaw. In fact, he’s so generic and unmemorable that I have problems recalling his face right now.

There’s a problem with needing to cast an actor who has a physique that only a dedicated bodybuilder could ever achieve, and that is that most of your potential candidates are bodybuilder-actors. There is a small subset of these who are great for action films with zero dialogue but actually a hindrance when your story hinges on the hero’s personality, because they have just… too much… testosterone. It’s obvious to everyone that they’re obsessively driven to work out every day, and not very happy because of it. In short, your leading man is always dangerously close to just being a bug-eyed gym bunny. And there’s a hint of that here; the lead is frequently too aggressive or twitchy to be sympathetic.

Black sidekick man is played by Dorian Missick, and I can’t even remember the character’s name – look, he’s practically silent for most of the episode once we’ve established his dynamic with the hero. He seems to be doing a bad impression of the (rather wonderful) Romany Malco from No Ordinary Family (who despite being an assistant District Attorney is still very much a Black Sidekick but does at least make it clear that he’s fanboy-excited to be so, and has real lines). James Frain is the terribly-English bad guy. He was creepy to the point of terrifying in True Blood, mostly because his dialogue was straight from the “abusive relationship” manual to a triggery level, but here he is simply… English.

Sadly, not only is it yet AGAIN all about two white men and the bit-players around them, but the female parts are terrible. It fails Bechdel straight off the bat, as I don’t recall two women even meeting let alone speaking to each other. If they did, it would be about the male lead because everything, even other people getting killed and his family thinking he’s dead, is about the square-jawed male lead.

Geek favourite Summer Glau is surprisingly good, in the minute or so of screentime that she gets. She is in two scenes, one of which involves exchanging two lines with the hero and the other requiring her to peer at a hi-tech computer screen meaningfully while he goes into town to take down the bad guy. She finally seems visibly older than some of us might remember from series like Firefly (and even Terminator: SCC), and it’s given her much more credibility when she plays emotion or urgency.

Summer does have one last moment as he hurries to depart so that he can punch more people, which is this (not exact wording):

Hero McManly: “Who are you?”
Summer: *Quietly, and he’s already left anyway* “Nobody special.”

As a line it’s enigmatic and mysterious, hinting at a possibly tragic past and heroic motivations. She clearly is special, because she is a uniquely powerful name in the background story by that point. However, in this pilot episode her statement is almost true: she gets maybe four lines of dialogue and is put on a shelf marked “to be explored later when we have time, because this pilot is full already”. I have no doubt AT ALL that this is due to time constraints, so I’ll wait to see how she’s treated in episode 2. They have to establish all the characters, set up the audience’s emotional link with the hero as a Family Man who Loves His Son (much less screentime for the wife, but that might change) and also crowbar in an Incredible Eighties Training Montage!

It really is one of the quickest and cheapest training sequences I’ve seen in a while. He is rescued by circus performers (yes, really) and initially loses to them but – HAHA! – eventually beats the various trained specialists at their own games. All of them. In a few weeks or so. Maybe days, who knows.

The leader of the circus troupe is Keith David, and he is the best part of this first episode by a very, very long way. Most widely known as the Imam in Pitch Black and the Chronicles of Riddick, he has the character and likeability that the hero Vince lacks. It’s a shame he’s dropped straight into the “wise black mentor” role but he takes it on with a twinkle in his eye and a little bit of malevolence, and is the only reason I’d watch episode two. (Me saying this about a series with Summer Glau as the lead female is astonishing.) I did enjoy the performance from Martin Klebba as the tough guy of the circus – who happens to be four-foot tall. He is easily the scariest individual in the room and never doubts his ability to take anyone else in a fight (consequently rarely losing). His endless insults and energy are a delight in a show so otherwise character-starved. (Klebba is amazing in real life too, he runs the 100M in 13.84s and the 40 in 6.0.) Lieutenant bad-guy is played by Vinnie Jones, but again while I think he’s been great in the past, he’s just empty and shouty here.

There are still lots of reasons to give The Cape a second chance. It does successfully capture some of the gleeful action of old-school comics, but this is strangely tempered with a very nasty streak when it comes to the violence. No Ordinary Family did this too, with a really horrific shooting early on which sat at complete odds with the rest of the show.

From a feminist perspective, it’s a total fail. With the exception of Keith David and Martin Klebba, this is never in danger of taking the spotlight off The Hero and His Jaw for one second. Blaming the pulp source material just isn’t good enough, there have been many shows now which managed a big dumb superhero revenge story while still acknowledging that half the human race exist and might be good for more than decoration. I actually found myself wanting to use the phrase “Post-Buffy” in an indignant manner. Depending on which era and genre of pulp comics you’re talking about, some of them were incredibly progressive anyway and gave much more respect to minorities and women than this does.

But I suspect it’s because of the time constraints of a pilot ep. The potential is there for Glau to be interesting and not just exist to help the male hero, and all it needs is for the scripts to improve in the coming weeks. Okay, they’d have to improve a lot. You know, your son will recognise you if you are on his balcony in a hood which doesn’t cover your face and using your own voice, with a slightly huskiness to it. And a note to villains: letting the hero escape after telling him your plan went out with the “unnecessarily slow dipping mechanism!” in Austin Powers.

I don’t know why I’m wanting to say in conclusion “just stick with it and see if it improves” – I think it’s because The Cape has so much potential to be better than it currently is. Possibly because the only way is up in terms of script. If there’s no improvement though, follow No Ordinary Family instead: it’s also flawed, but far more interesting.