Ancient Logic

At some point in between catching up with The Orville, I paused to watch the new Star Trek television series. It occurred to me that while I enjoyed both series, it's fair to say they are simply two branches of the same tree. Namely the great and spreading arbor that is the Star Trek universe. It interested me that although The Orville is clearly meant as a shameless homage (rip-off?) of Star Trek, its use of certain classically Trekian tropes like the legal struggle over personhood and what it means to be human struck a more immediate and familiar tone than anything I've seen in Discovery so far. And yet, I wouldn't say I enjoy The Orville more than Discovery, in fact far from it. Orville is a decent amount of fun, but Discovery feels like the genuine and sincere look at what made Star Trek Star Trek that Enterprise always wanted to be.  We live in an age of facsimiles. Facsimile food. Facsimile presidents. Facsimile art. In part, this isn't new. No matter h...

Setting aside hype and concerns, I think my basic reaction to the new Star Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond was, oh so that's what a decent Star Trek episode would be like as a movie. Your reaction to the new movie will probably depend a great deal on whether or not you can make your peace with Star Trek as a summer sci-fi thriller. When the first trailer for Beyond dropped earlier this year, I told friends that this was exactly what I thought a trailer for a movie directed by the guy from the Fast and Furious franchise would look like. I was not excited. Having watched the movie, I would say pretty much the same thing but add that's not necessarily a bad thing. Justin Lin has a rep for focusing on ensemble character interactions and kinetic action sequences. That's what you get in this movie. Beyond is strongest when the superb cast is together in various combinations, talking, arguing, and working to solve their problems. It gets a little muddled as the scale of act...

After two weeks of playing Fallout 4, I find myself increasingly doing missions so I can kill enough raiders to fuel my bottomless appetite for copper. This is by no means done but I think it gets the general idea across. View post on imgur.com

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is a novel about endings both big and small. It begins with the last moments of Arthur Leander, a Hollywood actor who suffers a fatal heart attack during a production of King Lear and then goes from there to describe the end of the entire world. The “Georgian Flu” wipes out 99% of the human race, as well as many of the characters prior to that collapse. Although the novel orbits around the world created by near total end of the human race, it also circles back to the lives of characters before the Flu, hopping back and forth through time with such regularity it’s impossible to say that the novel is truly “post-apocalyptic.” Much of the novel seems to take place pre-apocalypse. Strange coincidences and relationships unify these narratives as does the sense the novel is concerned with the theme of endings. While the beginning of the book might be considered the beginning of the end, it’s purpose is the same as later sections, to descr...

I saw Star Trek into Darkness again this weekend, same movie twice in three days, something I don't normally do. I wondered why to myself afterwards. What makes me want to see a movie again, especially back-to-back? As you might tell from my review , or possibly your own experience, the movie is good, very good in places, but certainly not the best-thing-I've-ever-seen great. So why was I so enthralled? What was I hoping to get out of a repeat viewing? To me it boils down to two images, one of which is a SPOILER and one of which is definitely not. First, I loved the image of the monster crying. Benedict Cumberbatch does a phenonemal job selling a sinister and yet devoted Khan Noonien Singh. There is something so perversely right about the helpless rage he lapses into after surrendering to Kirk. He was convinced the others exiled with him had been killed and now he saw the possibility that they would be saved. The idea of these genetically, genocidal maniacs running ar...

Star Trek into Darkness poses a challenge to review without spoilers. So much of what makes it worth talking about, as a Trek fan, is bound up in the interplay between the mythology of Star Trek and the requirements of a summer blockbuster. Nevertheless, it's possible to talk about the first third of movie without getting into too much trouble so I'll start there. J.J. Abrams' second movie opens on the planet Nibiru with James T. Kirk (again played by the very versatile and energetic Chris Pine) fleeing through a scarlet forest away from some sort of wicker ziggurant. He holds a scroll in his hand, which he informs Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban who at this point  owns Bones' folksy snark) he saw the natives of the planet prostrating themselves in worship over. Overhead we see the roiling smoke of the volcano where Spock, Sulu, and Uhura (Zachary Quinto, John Cho, and Zoe Saldana) are getting ready to drop a 'cold fusion device' into an active volcano, freezing it...

Last post I laid out a few story arc that weave through the mostly episodic mass of Star Trek: The Next Generation, lending some continuity to the overall series. Whether we're talking about the Borg, Q, Klingons, or Data's quest to be more human, these stories provide a sense that the series is moving forward, that one episode's story can communicate with another. This same purpose is also met by a few of the series' big themes: man's relationship to technology, utopian noninterventionism, and exploration. When you put together the stories that introduce "strange new life" and "new civilizations," you discover a largely consistent world view from the show: discovery for discovery's sake is good; irrationally closing one's minds to possibilities is bad. One other theme that really emerged during my rematch of the series: the consistent questioning about the nature of reality. At times this question was overt. One o...

For me, "Cause and Effect," an episode late in the fifth season, offers a rare glimpse into the series' emerging self-awareness. Although the show flirted with continuity (even as far back as the "Conspiracy" arc previewed in "Coming of Age"), it's interesting to think of this time-warping episode as a moment of clarity about the nature of procedural episodic drama. Procedural dramas, contrasted with serial television, are shows composed of stand-alone episodes, where each story can be understood basically on its own terms. The characters might reappear, their traits consistent from one story to the next, but the events of one story only rarely impinge upon the events of the next. Episodic series are often formulaic, relying on resolutions that neatly tie up all of the loose ends into a neat and tidy denouement  This is obviously a very common device in television shows, particularly sitcoms. It is harder to attract new viewers ...

I'm including a list of five episodes never included in 'best-of' lists that nevertheless point to what was good about this show on a week-to-week basis while you waited for another great mind-blowing episode. So, none of these episodes are perfect. So what. All of them are plenty of fun, have memorable moments, or help move the characters forward. If we're making room for the best and the worst, why not spend a little time with the merely average? Identity Crisis: Another Brannon Braga script with DNA issues but tons of fun if you can get past that. LaForge discovers that all of the other members of an away team he was on several years before have disappeared save himself and a crewmate Susanna Leijten. Returning to the apparently uninhabited planet they beamed onto, both LaForge and Leijten begin to exhibit strange behaviors. Ultimately, Crusher figures out that all of the visitors to the planet pick up a strange parasite that rewrites their genetic code (SCI...

This is a list of guilty pleasures. Any show will have its share of stinkers; maybe the guest star can't act, maybe the script is bad, or maybe someone thinks a story about stealing Spock's brain is a good idea. Whatever it is, this list serves to put together my selection of episodes so bad they're kind of fun. These are failures on many levels but still entertaining enough to go MST3K on them.  You will notice that none of these episodes are entitled "Shades of Gray," because seriously, don't. 5) " The Loss " My first choice is a Deanna Troi vehicle. Essentially the Enterprise gets stuck in a swarm of two dimensional creatures. The massive feedback caused by the impact of the swarm on the ship causes injury to Troi's empathic region. Because the only reason early season Troi seems to exist is providing redundant insights into alien minds, this serves as a major career crisis. So much so, in fact, that Troi delivers an impassioned plea...

Even the weaker seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation had their stand-out moments, enough that it's quite a challenge to whittle down the dozen or so obvious classic episodes to a best of list. I don't think my list represents anything radical, although I have omitted the two or three classic episodes that always appear on these sorts of lists. I'm not doing this because I dislike the episodes but rather because I'm hoping to use my 'best-ofs,' to highlight key themes in the next few essays. So, keeping that disclaimer in mind, here are my favorite five episodes:  #5) The Measure of a Man: This is my pick for a 'new-to-Trek' story. Lt. Data, an artificial life form serving as a Lt. Commander on the Starship Enterprise, receives an order to submit to disassembly by a Starfleet scientist named Maddox. While intrigued with the possibility of creating more androids like him, Data is not convinced the research will work, and might even render him i...

Katsushika Hokusai, a  ukiyo-e   painter in 19th century Japan created a series of intensely detailed and colorful prints collectively titled the "Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji." From either near or far, each print showed some view of that volcano from a variety of angles and distances. Mount Fuji,  serving as a symbol of immortality and divinity, had a profound spiritual significance in Japanese culture. By placing the mountain in the background of every image, the painter seemed to suggest that the mountain was too big, too complicated, to ever be captured from one single perspective. After completing seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, wading through the good, bad, and ugly, following the Enterprise and her crew from one end of the universe to the other, I have a similar reaction. This was the first time I've ever watched the show from start to finish and I have to say, the experience really affected me. More than I thought it would. Thi...

This is my first chance to respond to the big news on the internets today: JJ Abrams signing on to direct the first Star Wars sequel (of the original trilogy). I have to say, my reaction is basically positive. 'El Maesto' of the lens flare gets mixed press but I've never seen anything by him that I out and out hated, I liked the Star Trek reboot a great deal, and even his misses like Cloverfield have a certain degree of puzzle-box charm. But then, as is probably apparent from a brief check of my current watching habits, Star Wars isn't something I get super worked up about. Don't get me wrong. I like Star Wars, it's a big part of my childhood but I've always been on the fence about what the show is about  really. The idea of Luke Skywalker as a timeless expression of the monohero, the duality of good and evil, wookies, it all works a lot better with a healthy dose of sly humor: which is probably why "Empire Strikes Back" is my favorite film....

If you are, let's say, re-watching two television shows more or less concurrently, you might experience a weird sort of conversation taking place between the two shows. Especially if the show come from a similar corner of the pop-cultural universe. Now watching Star Trek The Next Generation's second season, I got to the episode "Contagion." Quick recap to save you the effort to remember a very forgettable episode: the Enterprise responds to a distress call from the USS Yamamoto in the neutral zone to find her sister ship stricken with mysterious equipment failures. Right after the captain of the ship waves off Picard's suggestion to evacuate the ship, the Yamamoto suffers a core containment malfunction and violently explodes. Subsequently, the Enterprise begins to suffer similar equipment failures throughout the ship, a problem Geordi eventually traces to what amounts to a computer virus. The problem nearly destroys the Enterprise until Geordi tries... Cut to...

"When you've gone, will this world continue to exist? Will my wife and kids still be waiting for me at home?" Lt. McNary to Captain Picard in "The Big Goodbye." Stories need conflict, the tension between what might and might not occur. Some conflicts are immediate and visceral, others are abstract and harder to quantify. Different genres seem to reflexively reach for certain conflicts, certain stereotypical problems. Horror and suspense stories are about danger, unseen threats and fight/flight responses. Romance stories often explore the tension between interpersonal love and societal expectations. People read thrillers and fantasy novels to see super-competent people struggle through unbelievable adversity, their hair consistently un-mussed. Science Fiction, set on alien worlds, surrounded by mind-bending technology, is well positioned to handle questions of transcendence and the limits of human potential. Abraham Maslow coined the term self...