TREKKER'S CONFESSIONS PART II: ALTERNATE REALITIES

I am not going to provide a spoiler alert, because if you are a long-time Star Trek fan and you haven't seen the new movie yet, you are a contradiction in terms. Besides, no one protected me in the eighties from learning ahead of time that Spock dies, Spock comes back from the dead, and (from that other series) Darth Vader is Luke's father. And if you aren't a Star Trek fan you won't care anyway.

The new movie manages to take care of any possible inconsistencies between established Star Trek "history" and the new "original crew of the Enterprise" introduced here, by having time travellers alter history - to wit, James Kirk's father is killed by the time travellers just before Kirk's birth, and a couple of decades later these same time travellers destroy the planet Vulcan. Lives are subtly and dramatically altered, the Enterprise is built vastly more shiny and sophisticated, the transporter effect is different, product placement is an unfortunate reality in the 23rd century, it seems (although, strangely, the products are 21st century), and Uhura is bonking Spock.

I'm fairly sure the Internet is abuzz with debates over this. (Note: I never pay attention to the Internet.) Does the new time line replace the old one, so that (in effect) the Star Treks we've known and loved (...in varying degrees...) all these decades never happened? No original series, no Wrath of Khan, no Next Generation, Deep Space Nine or Voyager? Ironically, only Enterprise, the prequel series, escapes this scourge as it took place earlier than the new movie. (As Enterprise for a while unfolded a story arc of a "time war" with the potential to alter history, one can imagine all kinds of complications to established future histories.) Alternately, maybe the new continuity is taking place in a time line that exists parallel to the original one, so we fans can take comfort that everything that has happened, is still happening. Or to put it another way, "All of this has happened before and it will happen again." Then again, the Kirk/Spock/McCoy and company of the "JJ" universe are so genetically dissimilar to their "GR" universe counterparts that it may be that this is an entirely different timeline that existed prior to the time-travelling reset button. I rather favour that theory myself.

What annoys me is how the critics, while applauding this clever ploy, have not yet failed to take a swipe at the old fanbase: We are stick-in-the-muds with an obsessive insistence on continuity, which if it had been catered to, would have made this film impossible. As it is, Abrams has successfully subverted our nerdiness to appeal to a new, hipper generation of fans. The following parody news item from The Onion neatly sums this up:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/trekkies_bash_new_star_trek_film?utm_source=most_pop_pop

Very funny, Onion, but my "inner nerd" insists on pointing out that Klingon dialogue was subtitled most of the time. (Besides, there are no Klingons in the new movie.)

It's also slightly absurd to assume that anyone would knowingly make a Trek movie that they thought would likely alienate the original fans rather than please them. (Well, not totally absurd. Look at the "reimagined" Battlestar Galactica.) "Yes, J.J, we're giving you millions of dollars to produce a revamped Star Trek, because it's been our biggest money-making franchise and we'd like to put new life into it. But we certainly don't think you should worry about the old fans - don't bother with them at all - maybe introduce one of the original cast in a small cameo, just toss them that bone; but we want you to concentrate on the younger generation who basically don't know Star Trek or if they do don't like it."

I'm fairly certain that the "Not your father's Star Trek" publicity campaign was orchestrated merely to take the stink of recent failures (Nemesis, Enterprise) off the franchise. Too bad the critics bought into it.

In point of fact, Star Trek fans have never had a great deal of problem with continuity changes. Speaking of Klingons, in the original series they were depicted as basically human in appearance, with bronze skins, goatees, and arched eyebrows to distinguish them (and make them look evil). For the first movie, their makeup was redesigned to make them look genuinely alien, with forehead ridges giving them a reptilian cast. That became the basic Klingon look for all subsequent series. There were no loud cries of "Bring back the real Klingons!" heard from fans due to this change.

Then there's Mr. Spock, famous for his lack of emotions. In the pilot episode "The Cage" (which was incorporated into the first season two-parter "The Menagerie"), he is portrayed by Leonard Nimoy as rather excitable. That's simply because he was a minor character in the pilot and Gene Roddenberry thought the pointed ears were enough to make him interesting. When he was made First Officer in the revamped series he was reconceived as being half-human, half-Vulcan; as the Vulcans are relentlessly logical and renounce emotions, that made him a good foil for Kirk's impulsive and passionate nature and McCoy's irascibility. And being half human gave him a ready made inner conflict to deal with. Most of us do not think that "The Menagerie" spoiled things with its few seconds of Spock as originally conceived.

Moreover, Trekkers weren't particularly troubled when it was revealed that Vulcans were the race that humans had first contact with (in the Next Generation movie with that title). This had never been hinted at in previous stories. Nor was James Cromwell's portrayal of Zephram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) - utterly unlike the character as portrayed in the original series episode "Metamorphosis" - there he was an earnest and serious "square", as opposed to Cromwell's hard-drinking, rock-and-roll loving version.

True, the revelation in Star Trek V that Spock had a long-lost brother didn't please us, but that was because the movie basically sucked.

In short, the continuity changes of the new movie aren't in any sense a problem to us. Star Trek has frequently featured alternate timeline/parallel universe stories. From "Mirror/Mirror" to "Yesterday's Enterprise" to "All Good Things" these have been among the most popular episodes. Placing the new series in an alternate reality was thus completely within Star Trek tradition, and more than acceptable.

TREKKER'S CONFESSIONS PART 1: "STAR TREK: THE MOTION SICKNESS"

With the runaway success of the current "new and improved" Star Trek movie, I thought I'd hark back nearly thirty years ago to the overbloated spectacular that started it all: Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Maybe not quite "started it all": You will recall that the original Star Trek t.v. series ran from 1966 to 1969, when it was ignominiously cancelled by NBC. Then it began to be broadcast endlessly in syndication, which was when it really took off. A distinctive form of fandom was born, consisting not just of people who enjoyed the show a lot, but of many people who made it the centre of their lives. They would attend conventions dressed as their favourite characters from the show. They would write earnest papers discussing alien taxonomy, the mechanics of warp drive and the matter transporter. They would fret over the inconsistencies caused by taking the stardates of each episode literally and arranging them in order. (Stardates were Gene Roddenberry's coy way of avoiding specifying the actual century the series was set in. They were never meant to be taken seriously.) They would write scripts and stories. They would write slash fiction, which is a form of sexual fantasy involving two (or more) of the characters - Kirk/Spock, Chapel/Spock, Spock/McCoy, etc. On the commercial side, not only were the conventions lucrative, but books, comics, and models continued to be produced in homage to this defunct series. (I myself owned in the 1970's all of James Blish's adaptations of the original episodes, Alan Dean Foster's Log series, which adapted the animated series, The Star Fleet Technical Manual, and the blueprints for the Enterprise.) If the series had been a person, it might well have informed its enemies at the network: "You can't win, NBC. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

There was little question that the series would be revived, but in what form? A two-season animated version ran in the early seventies, with most of the original cast reprising their roles vocally. While this was well-intentioned, the animation was severely limited, with overuse of stock shots, stiff character shots and frozen backgrounds; and the stories were mostly embarrasingly poor in quality. Most fans preferred to ignore it. A revived t.v. series (Star Trek: Phase II) was beginning production, when the runaway success of Star Wars led Paramount executives to decide to make a movie instead. Most of the original cast was signed on, with newcomers Persis Khambatta as the exotic and sexy Ilia, and Stephen Collins and the soon-to-be-displaced Captain of the Enterprise, Willard Decker. Robert Wise was the director and Douglas Trumball was in charge of the special effects. The production cost of the movie became notorious - at $45 million, this was the most expensive movie ever made up to that point. Most of this money was spent on the special effects.

Star Trek fans generally love the design of the original Enterprise. Personally, I don't believe that if the series had been set in a needle-nose rocket, a flying saucer or something resembling an aircraft carrier in space that it would been nearly the success it was. The movie Enterprise was redesigned, but only to make it look better, sleeker - the nacelles in particular were flattened from their original tubular shape. This is the version of the Enterprise I like the most, and what I most regret about the movie series is that it was seen so little. Later Enterprises - that of The Next Generation and of the prequel series Enterprise - weren't nearly so cool and classy.

But you do get your fill of the starship in ST:TMP. The newly-refurbished Enterprise is first seen in spacedock, just after Admiral Kirk has announced that he is retaking command of her. Kirk is being flown to her in a shuttle (the transporter isn't working properly). We see from his point of view as he approaches - for the first time we realize the sheer size of the ship. The camera leisurely takes us on a three hundred and sixty degree tour, all the better to salivate over. It's dizzying and perhaps a little nauseating. Eventually, the ride's over and the shuttlecraft approaches a docking port, to which it cleanly connects with a satisfying whump (or some such sound effect). It's virtually pornographic - SFX porn. And just like regular porn, it goes on for far too long.

Which proved to be a keynote of the special effects in the picture. The threat in this movie is a huge cloud of energy, capable of destroying planets, containing at its centre a mysterious entity known as V'ger. It is the mission of the Enterprise to penetrate the cloud and get to the heart of the mystery, thus saving Earth. Several overlong sequences detail the approach. These are somewhat fascinating, but don't (as they say) advance the plot. It's either roiling spacecloud, shapes resembling Mandelbrot sets, or the bridge crew staring at the viewscreen in cosmic wonderment for what seems like half an hour... The sexual metaphor continues when Spock has himself shot through a dilating orifice in order to meet V'ger face to face. To say nothing of what happens at the climax, when V'ger, having assumed the form of Ilia, and lovelorn Decker literally become one, in an explosion of cyber-orgasmic energy.

Fans such as myself were by and large discontented with all this. They protested that the plot was not original, but taken from at least three original-series episodes - The Doomsday Machine, The Immunity Syndrome and The Changeling. We did not like the way the characters were portrayed - in particular, Spock was so emotionally cold for most of the picture that the Kirk-Spock-McCoy dynamic couldn't be reestablished (then near the end, Spock gets all gushy - again, not good). The new characters, Ilia and Decker, while central to the plot, were also given short shrift. Early in the action, Ilia is disintegrated by V'ger and replaced with a machine duplicate that talks in a staccoto monotone; Decker is shoved to one side so Kirk can regain command; and both are literally out of the picture at the end. All this makes them seem curiously pointless. (They were originally intended to be regular weekly characters on the Phase II series.) Not all of us loved Jerry Goldsmith's bombastic theme music, which replaced the original series' swanky romantic theme.

Nevertheless, the movie made back its cost three times over, possibly because the fans, while disappointed, would go to see it again and again. Silly fans! Or is it clever fans? Because due to the possibly undeserved success of ST:TMP, a second movie was made. Then a third, then a fourth. Then a new t.v. series, six more movies, three more series, until finally, this...