Ship's Log, Supplemental: A Fragment Out of Time

Slash fiction is a thread that's been with us for quite some time already, and it's been with Star Trek arguably since as early as “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. Although certain hardcore fans might not like to admit it, it is unquestionably one of the franchise's most defining and signature motifs: Although slash has existed for pretty much as long as people have been telling stories, the current manifestation of it, the interaction it has with late-20th and early-21st century fan culture, and thus the way it is commonly conceptualized today, can be directly traced back to Star Trek.

There are any number of possible opportunities to discuss slash over the course of the franchise's history, but the one that seems to most appropriate is here, with the first documented piece of Star Trek-inspired slash fiction, Diane Marchant's “A Fragment Out of Time” (Page 1, Page 2), dating to 1974. Marchant submitted it to one of the first (and at the time only) Star Trek zines targeted expressly towards adults, a publication somewhat wonderfully titled Grup. Given the zine's comparatively small audience and interviews she's given after the fact, Marchant never expected it to be the bombshell it ended up becoming.

However I think she really needn't be ashamed, because the piece itself is, perhaps contrary to what one might expect, really quite tame and laudably well-written, describing a night of passionate lovemaking between two parties of whom great care is taken to speak in vagaries (though an accompanying illustration, not to mention the fact it was published in a Star Trek zine, sort of makes it obvious who the two paramours are supposed to be). And “lovemaking” really is the proper term: Marchant is very clearly interested in the intimacy and tenderness shared by her protagonists, and the gentle, poetic tone that permeates the entire piece reflects this. Honestly, as far as slash fiction goes, or really erotica in general, you could do considerably worse for yourself than this.

Like so much fanfiction of its era, Marchant wrote “A Fragment Our of Time” largely as an experiment. However, she also always maintained that she didn't come up with the idea of shipping Kirk and Spock herself, she was merely responding to what she felt was blatant subtext in the original Star Trek and that everyone who watched the show recognised and acknowledged to one degree or another, regardless of whether or not they actually admitted it. Marchant was adamant that the only thing she contributed to the history of Star Trek and the broader fan culture was the first work that was bold enough to put it into words, and I'm more than reasonably convinced she was right.

There was, of course, (and still is, to some extent) some manner of controversy over this opinion. The popular consensus for what happened next (I mean as much as there can be consensus about something as understudied and undervalued as fanfiction) is that “A Fragment Out of Time” caused a great schism amongst Star Trek fans and a firestorm of a debate about how proper the fic itself was and whether Marchant's argument was convincing or not. It would be altogether too easy for me to draw the line between, well, not necessarily fanboys and fangirls, but let's say patriarchal proto-nerd culture and feminist fandom, but it's not quite as simple as that. Remember the vast majority of the invested parties here are still women, including some of Marchant's staunchest critics, like one Connie Faddis, who penned an extremely negative review of “A Fragment Out of Time” and who would go on to be a pioneering figure in the Kirk/Spock scene herself.

But perhaps the most damning evidence that slash fiction didn't cause a huge rift in Star Trek fandom circa 1974 or emerge with the uncomfortable connotations it maybe has nowadays comes from our friend Paula Smith. When questioned about her views on erotic Star Trek stories (or if you prefer straight-up Star Trek pornography) at a convention, Smith gave this sparkling reply (emphasis hers):

“I agree that ST pornography is a lousy thing -- it is so badly written. In search for titillating themes, good or even credible characterization is ignored, and plots degenerate to the simplest push-push gimmickry. A lousy Get-Together story is worse than a lousy Mary-Sue story, because the reader doesn't expect a Mary-Sue necessarily to be any good. If it is uneven, juvenile, or just plain silly, that is typical, and the reader is not disappointed. But when a reader takes up a story on an adult theme, she expects an adult treatment, or ought to. A simpering, or brutal treatment of sex is evil in a most fundamental sense, because such trivializes and degrades our greatest humanity -- love. But sex, and sexuality, per se are not dirty and disgusting.”

Furthermore, when asked specifically about slash during her tenure as editor of the zine S and H when it was at its absolute peak as a debate topic, Smith responded, at once guarded, cheekily and triumphantly

“Some folks are hobbits: they need to be aware there are wider vistas than that of Bag End. Some are wizards: they must take care not to strike and blast as forcibly as they feel like, because there is always some fuzz-footed clown out there just itching to swipe yer Ring. The most useful thing anyone can learn is when to shut up. Like now.”

which I think is just hilarious, as she has documented Starsky and Hutch BDSM slash fanfic to her name.

So if slash is something Star Trek fandom at large circa 1974 seems on-the-whole comfortable with and the only real new ground Marchant is breaking is putting everyone's unspoken assumptions into textual form, the question then becomes, what was it about the original Star Trek that made it so easy for widespread and near-universal slashing to happen to the point a significant majority of fans seemingly took it for granted? We briefly talked about this back in the post on “And The Children Shall Lead”, but, to elaborate, Star Trek in general, though particularly the original series, exists at a unique junction of events and factors that make the evolution of slash an almost predictably logical outcome in retrospect. We've discussed at length one of the primary reasons why, which is that Star Trek was, even amongst the notoriously puritanical climate of US television, heavily sexually repressed and confused.

Gene Roddenberry never did quite manage to get a handle on how to handle writing women and approaching gender roles, even though he does get considerably better at it come Star Trek: The Next Generation. The closest he's gotten so far has been “Turnabout Intruder”, which was still ludicrously problematic and the fact it worked to the extent it did when it did was primarily due to William Shatner and Sandra Smith. Her employing Margaret Armen aside, D.C. Fontana gets it, though she prefers to demonstrate her feminism in far more subtle ways that work within the framework Star Trek already established for itself.

And yet Star Trek has proven to be wildly popular with women-So much so that literally none of the fan literature and history I've been able to dig up about this era even mentions the fact that men probably watched the show too, unless you count the most likely at-least-partially staged “Save Star Trek!” campaign and its strong technoscience undertones. This is self-evidently because, at least on the surface, Star Trek claims to envision a world where differences between genders no longer matter. That alone is an incredibly powerful declaration, and, in my opinion, may be the single most important thing about the entire franchise.

But even aside from its embrace of feminism (as tentative and clunky as it may often be), Star Trek has always been quite sexy and sexual, and I don't mean because the women wore miniskirts in the 1960s and 1970s and there are a lot of one-off alien ladies. Spock is simply way too easy to read this way, I mean “Amok Time” alone practically demands it. He's a very sexually repressed and conflicted character, and whether or not Roddenberry meant for his inner struggle between logic and sensuality to be a metaphor for that, it works too well to ignore (although it's also worth remembering D.C. Fontana has attempted to correct this not once, but twice: First in “Journey to Babel” and then, more blatantly and effectively, in “Yesteryear”). Either way, because of this conflict and repression, it's especially easy to see Spock as in some sense a closeted character, as the closet is all about keeping up appearances that are really a facade to disguise the way you truly view yourself.

Then there's Kirk, or perhaps I should say William Shatner. Kirk as written, at least early on, is flatly not terribly interesting. He's a generic leading man. But Shatner, being firstly an extremely talented theatre actor and secondly someone who immediately recognised how overstuffed and pretentious Roddenberry had made Star Trek, from the very beginning set about trying to knock the show down a few pegs and get it to loosen up. So Shatner deliberately overacts, playing Kirk not at all straight, but as a kind of subtly exaggerated caricature. Subtly exaggerated caricature, or in other words “playing a role and getting it ever-so-slightly-wrong”, is also something that is sometimes associated with gay male culture because, as best I understand it, calling attention to one's own artifice was something that, at least at one time, could be used as a kind of secret language with which members of an underground and oppressed culture could communicate with each other (in fact, the connection between gay male culture and theatrical performativity may even be where get “straight” a synonym for heterosexual).

Now this is not at all to suggest Shatner or Nimoy were playing their characters gay per se (although if I recall correctly there was a point I think in the third season of the original series where both actors have gone on record basically admitting they started to do precisely this and were stunned it took people decades to figure it out. I mean it sure is hard to read at least “And The Children Shall Lead”, “Spock's Brain” and “Turnabout Intruder” any other way), it's just that the way Nimoy wound up conceiving of Spock and the way Shatner played Kirk ended up paralleling very nicely with things that were also considered part of gay male culture at one point. That aside, another reason it became so easy to ship Kirk and Spock was because, well, they were really the only characters who were allowed to express their emotions to one another.

The primary reason for this was network standards and practices. Ostensibly the leading man, Kirk wasn't allowed to actually become emotionally intimate with any women (even Janice Rand, who was originally supposed to be Kirk's closest confidant) as there could be absolutely no implication of anything untoward going on off-camera, because this was still an era where sex was still largely seen as obscene by at least the people paying the salaries of the cast and crew. This is the real reason Kirk had to be “married to the ship and the job”, although some of that may have come from Roddenberry too (though I doubt too much of it, given his relationship with Majel Barrett). This is also why so many of the female guest stars seemed disposable and interchangeable because, well, they were. This meant that if the show wanted to have any actual character moments in between the stupid fight scenes, they had to be between the supposedly very heterosexual and virile close friends. Of course, given the way Nimoy and Shatner played their characters, this was not entirely successful in dissuading assumptions about the crew getting busy with each other in their off-hours.

So we have two characters who are built out of theatrical tropes that were also associated with at least a part of gay male culture at one point and the only people they can be emotional, honest and intimate with is each other. Kirk said she was closer to Spock than anyone else in the universe in “Turnabout Intruder” for a reason, because, from a narrative standpoint, that's literally, actually the case. That's the exact logic the show works by. I mean, you do the math: How do you think fans were going to read that? Believe it or not, they tend to be a rather savvy bunch. Savvier, I daresay, then studio and network executives. But that said, there's another side to this: In spite of all the overtures we can make to gay male culture, slash fiction remains if not the exclusive domain of, at least very strongly associated with, straight women.

It is an unspoken, though widely held, belief in the pop consciousness that straight women are overwhelmingly interested in gay male erotica. That's not to say gay men don't indulge in it themselves, but so do straight women, and enthusiastically so. And the thing about a lot of slash, including “A Fragment Out of Time”, is that it is, counterintuitively, actually very strongly heteronormative, or at least heterosexual and heteroerotc. There was a Tumblr post making the rounds awhile back as of this writing that summarised the phenomenon quite well: The author made the point that the vast majority of the most famous and beloved slash pairings consisted of a light-haired, gregarious, outgoing “badass” character and a quieter, more reserved dark-haired character who frequently plays the support role to his partner. Most recently, you can see this manifest in Dean Winchester and Castiel in Supernatural and Merlin and Arthur in the 2005 BBC Merlin, and in fact it seems to have become so ubiquitous it seems to have been a deliberate casting choice on the part of the latter show specifically to encourage the slashers. Others, like Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss' Sherlock and Weda's The Hobbit trilogy, seem to invert and play with this archetype for a variety of reasons. The author then goes on to trace this trend all the way back to what's seen as the pioneering, archetypical slash pairing: Kirk and Spock.

Now, this makes going back and re-reading “A Fragment Out of Time” interesting, because Kirk is very clearly portrayed as the dominant, “masculine” sexual partner, and Spock the submissive, “feminine” one, as it's his reactions that are depicted in the most flowery and voyeuristic detail. Even if you extrapolate this out to non-sexual slash, this pattern holds: There always tends to be an energetic “masculine” half of the pairing and a reserved, demure, supportive, “feminine” half. The whole idea of dominant and submissive power structures in sexual relationships, and the further conflation of this with “male” and “female” poles is extremely heteronormative. Yes, Western society is *so* patriarchal and misogynistic that even a power structure this heteronormative is paradoxically only acceptable if it's shown being acted out by two gay men because it conveniently cuts the bothersome woman out of the picture.

Now this is not to say that slash isn't just as much about storytelling as it is sexuality: After a point, it just starts to make strong narrative sense to ship Kirk and Spock given a lot of the textual evidence on display and the inarguably talented writing pool in the K/S scene were right to point that out in my view. Even Marchant herself recognised this. But I do think a portion of the appeal of slash, at least as far as I can tell, lies within the very traditionally and stereotypical Western heterosexual (albeit traditionally stereotypically Western heterosexual female) fantasy of one person coming in and, through doting support, rehabilitating and healing another, or at least being swept up by a powerful masculine force. It's the exact same reason Twilight was so wildly successful, as this is precisely the way Bella and Edward's relationship worked. Slash isn't so much GLBTQ detournement as much as it is detournement by straight cis women who are trying to find ways to be emotionally validated in an overwhelmingly patriarchal culture whose media artefacts have an unsettling tendency to pretend they don't exist.

This is not, of course, to dismiss slash as necessarily retrograde. I think it serves a very important purpose and as long as Westernism continues to hold such backwards and convoluted attitudes towards gender and sexuality, and so long as Westernism continues to be the dominant intellectual framework for popular discourse, stuff like slash is bound to crop up. I'm just not entirely convinced it's quite as radically queer as I sometimes see it made out to be. It's just like what we learned in “Amok Time”: Everyone has a sexual side (even if for some that sexual side is “null and void”), and trying to pretend it doesn't exist is unhealthy and counterproductive. It's going to manifest somewhere in some form. And we live in a culture where any sexuality other than that of the stereotypically virile heterosexual cis male dom is considered shocking and forced underground. Maybe it's best, and fitting, for us to learn from and share with each other and use our shared marginal positionalities to recognise this.

Ship's Log, Supplemental: A Trekkie's Tale

Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky! It's Lieutenant Mary Sue!

Oh boy, here we go. Yes, my friends, the time has finally come.

“A Trekkie's Tale” needs no introduction. A notoriously vicious bit of satire attacking a particular trend within Star Trek fanfiction, the story is infamous for introducing the world to the hated Mary Sue. It took no more than five brief paragraphs to completely tear Star Trek fandom asunder and, as a result, “A Trekkie's Tale” has transcended fan circles to become ubiquitous in the larger pop consciousness such that it's had a truly transformative, profound, and arguably profoundly negative, effect on the way we look at genre fiction even to this day. A case could be (and has been) made that the introduction of the Mary Sue archetype is one of the largest and most sweeping acts of reactionary silencing tactics in the history of genre fandom.

And yet “A Trekkie's Tale” itself is misread and misunderstood by pretty much everyone.

First, some background for those perhaps less familiar with what this is than others. “A Trekkie's Tale” is a piece of satirical fanfiction published in 1973 and featuring a character named Lieutenant Mary Sue who is the youngest, most beautiful and most talented officer in the entirety of Starfleet. On her first day on the Enterprise, Lieutenant Mary Sue outperforms everyone else on the ship, causes Kirk to instantly fall in love with her at first sight, outwits Spock with logic (that is never fully explained) and singlehandedly saves the ship, the crew and the Federation at least twice before tragically dying randomly at the end of the story to be mourned by everyone and essentially turned into a modern-day saint. Lieutenant Mary Sue, and “A Trekkie's Tale” more generally, is fairly transparently an attack on a certain kind of Star Trek fanfiction, and is most often read as a parody of (usually female) writers who create author avatar characters as wish fulfillment, thus sidelining the original cast and narrative in the process. In the years since the initial publication of “A Trekkie's Tale”, the term “Mary Sue” has become a stock character archetype and nowadays gets tossed around rather carelessly, most typically as a knee-jerk reaction from insecure male fans to the concept of “strong female character I don't like and who makes me uncomfortable with my masculinity.”

What's the most interesting thing about the Mary Sue archetype to me, however, is how uniquely Star Trek a concept it really is. Star Trek fandom has, in my opinion, a very peculiar fascination with an *extremely* specific sort of fantasy: It's an almost omnipresent dream amongst Star Trek fans of all ages, generations and genders to be captain of their own starship, command their own crew and, essentially, to be the star of their own Star Trek spinoff. This goes totally contrary to the stereotypical conception of the obsessive fan, which would be someone fantasizing about the characters or the actors, either in a romantic or sexual way or just a desire to meet them in person. But that's not what Lieutenant Mary Sue does (indeed, the fact Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the others are largely incidental to her story is the whole point of it) and it's not what Star Trek fans seem to want either: Instead, they want their own personal slice of the Star Trek universe to themselves and they want it to revolve around them, or at least to explore it on their terms. It's the entire point of things like the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas or the video games Star Trek Starship Creator, Star Trek Bridge Commander and Star Trek Online.

So, despite how much the fans will talk up Star Trek's commitment to strong character development, it seems that when the cards are down they're ultimately going to default to projecting themselves onto the show. To me this is very interesting and unusual, if for no other reason than it doesn't match up with my own personal history of Star Trek fandom at all. This was never a fantasy that ever would have crossed my mind for a moment: What I always liked about Star Trek was its sense of wonder and exploration, the familial atmosphere the crew shared with each other and the characters themselves. I admired Jadzia Dax and Tasha Yar, saw them as role models and wanted to be like them, so a lot of my experience with Star Trek consists of looking up to people like that and trying to learn from them to better myself, and to, in a sense, take a little bit of them into me. From my perspective, that's as fundamentally, purely Star Trek as it gets, but it seems like my emotions aren't shared by fandom at large in this case.

But the other thing that defines my experience with Star Trek is wanting to write my own version of it, and for that there is a precedent. Here's where the other half of “A Trekkie's Tale” comes into play and, for my money, it's the more interesting half. So, if we're going to get anything remotely near an understanding of what these five little paragraphs actually are and how they fit into the history of Star Trek (as opposed to merely the way people have responded and interpreted them), we need to establish some simulacrum of context. By this point in the mid-1970s, Star Trek fandom was largely clustered around a series of fan-published and distributed zines. In the 1960s, the fan culture around the show, despite how loyal and vocal it had been, was still largely a disperse mainstream phenomenon. By the 1970s with the Original Series in syndication and hardly anyone watching the Animated Series (or at least hardly anyone seemingly willing to write and talk about it), Star Trek fandom was now very definitively a niche thing, with the first proper Star Trek convention (that is, separate from larger science fiction conventions) taking place in 1972.

As such, the 1970s Star Trek fandom comprised mainly two different factions: Middle-aged women who had been general science fiction fans in the 1950s and 1960s and remembered when Star Trek first started and the scene people like Bjo Trimble belonged to (and that Gene Roddenberry overtly tried to court), and younger college-aged women who were just getting exposed to the show through syndicated reruns. Both groups were very much interested in writing their own Star Trek stories, and there was such a surplus of them the zines had trouble keeping track of them all. So a situation arose where fans would be inspired by zines and cons to write, thus necessitating the need for more zines and cons so the cycle continued to self-perpetuate in perpetuity for awhile.

Back then, there was a stronger link between science fiction fans and science fiction writers than we might think would be the case today, perhaps a holdover from the days of the Golden Age conventions where readers and writers commingled and the dividing line between was quite blurry. It was not an unheard of scenario even as late as 1973 for science fiction authors to get their start writing for zines, and the fan culture sort of acted as an unofficial pipeline to more professional gigs. The problem was, of course, there was nowhere to go if you were writing about Star Trek, because the famous live-action show had been off the air for half a decade and, once again, nobody cared about the animated reboot. So you'd frequently get a lot of writers contributing a lot of really excellent, professional grade Star Trek stories as fanfic to zines because there was nothing else to do with them. Because of this, the fans introduced a kind of loose structure of their own, with zine editors oftentimes acting as a kind of surrogate script editor. One of the most prolific and influential of these semipro writers and editors was Paula Smith who, as it so happens, wrote the story we're talking about today.

Yes, shocking as it may seem, the person responsible for giving us the insecure femmephobic fan's favourite trump card is, in fact, a woman. It's at this point I'm probably expected to pull a Margaret Armen and take Smith to task for internalized misogyny issues, but I'm not going to because I actually don't think that's what's going on here. Like all works of satire (including Gulliver's Travels), “A Trekkie's Tale” has been badly, badly misinterpreted by generations of clueless readers who don't seem to get the joke. In fact, an even better point of comparison might be Upton Sinclair's The Jungle: Intended as a condemnation of wage slavery of migrant workers in the United States, which is helpfully and blatantly compared with the literal enslavement of Africans by that same country, history has largely proven itself to be the domain of white male middle class authoritarians by comprehensively missing the point and using it as a call-to-arms against lax heath code regulations in the meat packing industry. I feel something similar happened to Paula Smith.

The key to figuring out what I think Smith is actually saying here is to keep in mind her status as a kind of D.C. Fontana for fan culture. She was responsible for vetting hundreds upon hundreds of Star Trek fanfics and giving an innumerable amount of writers tips on how to hone their craft (actually, it was from interviews with her that I gleaned the majority of the historical information I use in this post). Indeed, one of the most classic, foundational maxims of fanfic, Langsam's Law, comes largely from her. It states that (in Smith's words)

“There is a special caveat for writing media-based fiction. Don't make an established character do or say something out of line with his established character, of if you must, give good, solid reasons why."

which is frankly just good writing advice in general as far as I'm concerned. This touches on the other side of the 1970s zine culture, which was that because Star Trek was off the air, and regardless as to whether or not they knew about the Animated Series, the fans sort of saw themselves as penning if not the official continuation of it, at least one semi-proper, semi-authorized version of it. So it would kind of make sense that these people would take good care to make sure their stories could plausibly have been Star Trek episodes themselves had the show not been canceled.

And this is the nut of “A Trekkie's Tale”, because what Smith is lampooning with Lieutenant Mary Sue is not women daring to write Star Trek fanfic, or introducing new female characters, or introducing female author avatar characters or even introducing new female characters who go on to be love interests for canon characters. What Smith is lampooning is bad writing in general. As many good editors often are, Smith was a prolific writer herself, penning countless fics (debatably literally so, since she used a different pseudonym practically every single time she wrote something, making her work a headache to track down today) for not just Star Trek, but also Starsky and Hutch, Harry and Johnny, The Professionals and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. She had written enough and been around the scene enough to know what worked and what didn't, and “A Trekkie's Tale” is her way of compiling and caricaturing the most egregious and problematic trends she noticed in an attempt to show new writers “Here: This is what not to do”.

And if we divert our attention momentarily from Mary Sue herself, who is indeed admittedly a veritable perfect storm of painful amateur writing mistakes exaggerated beyond infinity, it becomes obvious she's not the only thing we're supposed to pay attention to. The fic's dialog is stilted, repetitive and awkward, plot developments happen out of thin air, there's no sense of internal coherence or consistency, a general feeling the whole thing was banged out in a terrible rush and even the tense keeps jumping back and forth between past, present and future. Even the title “A Trekkie's Tale” itself is a dead giveaway, eschewing completely any and all pretenses that this is going to be anything remotely resembling a straightforward or recgonisable Star Trek story because, their obvious boundless energy and enthusiasm notwithstanding, this is something the writer has clearly put next to no effort into (not, it must be stressed, that this is entirely their fault, however: They're clearly too young and/or inexperienced to know any better). As the saying goes, it takes talent and skill to craft something this memorably awful.

So, while Smith did hold up the Mary Sue archetype as something to be avoided, unlike successive people who have appropriated the concept, she recognised it for what it was: One type of mistake among many that beginning writers have a tendency to make but that can be expunged through experience, guidance and support. But as noble as Smith's intentions with “A Trekkie's Tale” might have been, and I do think they were noble, the question remains: Has the story actually done what it was supposed to do and had a net positive effect on fandom such that it's help blossoming writers, fanfic or otherwise, to learn and develop their skills? Of that I'm not so sure, because the Mary Sue as it exists today is a terribly problematic concept loaded up with toxic connotations and, as is well known, a favourite silencing technique of the patriarchal hegemony. Decades of reactionary reappropriation have twisted and distorted the Mary Sue archetype into a misogynistic weapon.

It's an altogether too common story to hear female writers, even professional ones, confess that they consciously avoid having too many female characters in their cast or writing their women too strong or too independent out of a very serious and legitimate fear they'll be scorned and attacked for writing “Mary Sue stories” and will never be respected or recognised as proper writers (or even worse, have their careers completely destroyed outright) as a result. Anybody can write a character like Lieutenant Mary Sue, and such a character can be of any gender. But the “Mary Sue” archetype has become exclusively female and that's a problem. That does retroactively harm the original work and make me wonder whether the actual satire was ever all that clear to begin with. Because of that, I'm uncertain that Smith's original five paragraphs can now be taken apart from the tangible, material and very negative effect they had on female fans and writers, as riotously funny as those five paragraphs might be (and they are riotously funny: Phrases like "Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky”, “Tralfamadorian Order of Good Guyhood” and “beautiful youth and youthful beauty” crack me up every single time).

But regardless of the quality of the actual story, let's make sure we don't damn the author as well. Good writers have bad days. We all do. The most important thing about Paula Smith is that she always kept trying no matter what: She wrote an incalculable number of stories, oftentimes just on a dare or as an attempt to do an experiment or proof-of-concept for just herself. Like anyone, she missed her target just as much, if not more, than she hit it. That's only called being a writer, after all. Because she was involved in zines and conventions to the extent she was and ran so much (and kept so much running), I'd call her showrunner of her own underground version of Star Trek. Hell, given the staggering scope of her fanfic resume even beyond Trek, Smith should probably be seen as someone just as seasoned as the most experienced TV writers and producers of her day. So, even if she did strike out with “A Trekkie's Tale”, it's ultimately one minor bump on the very long and winding path of a career that spans literally decades and frankly puts most professional writers to shame.

Paula Smith never gave up, never stopped trying to challenge and better herself and never let anyone stop her from writing what she loved. And I think that's the lesson she'd like her readers to take with them most of all.

Paula Smith keeps the Enterprise running at warp speed.

“Though all men be equally frail before the world...”: The Jihad

Oh, had I a golden thread/And needle so fine/I'd weave a magic strand/Of rainbow design

This episode was written by Stephen Kandel, better known for the Harry Mudd trilogy and, would you believe it, it turns out he did have a good Star Trek story to tell after all. More than good, in fact: “The Jihad” is properly excellent and closes out the Animated Series' first season on one of the show's high notes.

Kandell had been a regular writer on Mission: Impossible during the original era of Star Trek, and that's sort of what this episode feels like a little bit: A Mission: Impossible story. Kirk and Spock are called to a summit held by the Vedala, the oldest known spacefaring civilization. The Vedala have assembled a crack team of specialists from around the galaxy to partake in a top-secret mission to prevent an interstellar war. Aside from Kirk and Spock, there's Lara, a ranger and tracker from a planet where humans remained hunter-gatherers, Sord, a reptilian warrior, Em/3/Green, a nervous lockpicking expert who resembles a kind of insect (and voiced by Dave Gerrold no less: Gerrold has something of a habit for getting people to write him into Star Trek episodes) and Tcharr, hereditary prince of the birdlike Skorr, who is the primary reason for the team-up.

The Vedala have gathered the team together to track down The Soul of the Skorr, an ancient artefact that literally holds the soul of the Skorr's great prophet Alar, who was made immortal upon death by being bound into an energy web and whose life force keeps peace among his disciples and their descendents. The Soul has gone missing, and Tcharr fears that should word of its theft become public, the Skorr will return to their warlike roots and declare a holy war on the galaxy. Thankfully, the Vedala have traced it to the “Mad Planet”, a lifeless rock constantly tearing itself to pieces due to constant earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, blizzards, tsunamis and gravity shifts. On the way, the task force will have to contend with the harsh unforgiving and ever-changing landscape of the Mad Planet while learning to trust and respect each other in order to work together as a team.

There is so much going on right from the outset here it's difficult to keep track of. “The Jihad” is simply overstuffed with fascinating ideas and concepts it's hard for me to even figure out where to begin, and I couldn't be happier: This is a picture perfect example of taking the potential of science fiction television, and in particular animated science fiction television, resolutely rising to the challenge and just running with it. I've never seen a Star Trek episode quite like this one before and I'm actually not sure I'm going to see another like it again. I suppose a good place to start would be the team itself: This is a truly creative and inspired bit of creature design. For the first time in awhile, it feels like the Animated Series team is really taking full advantage of their medium and showing us visuals they really couldn't have pulled off through live action. More to the point, each individual member has a defined and memorable personality, which is something Star Trek has been a bit changeable with in the past. It perhaps helps there's a larger voice cast than normal: Though Dave Gerrold and James Doohan are predictably good, the standout for me is Jane Webb as both the Vedala and Lara, both of which are charming and charismatic characters.

Actually, it's Lara who was the real standout for me. She's someone utterly unlike basically anyone else in the entirety of Star Trek-In many ways she reminds me of Doctor Who's Leela, except much, much more effective. Lara is an indigenous hunter and tracker who eschews the technoscientific world of the Federation to live solely through her instincts and her ability to read the land. Nevertheless, her and her people have still obviously managed to develop spaceflight and Lara herself is just as cosmopolitan, knowledgeable and essential as everyone else on the team.

This is so incredibly utopian it's practically more Vaka Rangi than Vaka Rangi: A non-Western, non-Modern hunter-gatherer society that holds women in esteem, maintains their connection to the land and the skills that allowed them to foster that connection all the while cherry-picking the things from more Western societies that suit their lifestyle but that don't put it at risk of extinction that's now out among the stars in equal standing with the vast, sprawling galactic empires? I mean that's just absolutely perfect. It's exactly what Star Trek needs: Proof positive there are ways for humans to live in peace and dignity in its world without becoming subsumed by the more problematic aspects of the Federation. In Lara we see Star Trek's idealistic dream of living out among the stars on a journey of self-improvement mixed with the equally idealistic, though often neglected, hope that traditional indigenous knowledge and ways of life can live on too. It's the final disconnect between Modernist Neo-Imperialism and space travel story, demonstrating once and for all that Star Trek doesn't need to be western to be utopian.

As for Lara herself, there's a wonderful little story thread between her and Kirk throughout the episode: For Lara's people, it's not customary to obfuscate one's feelings and desires, especially when it comes to romance and friendship, and Lara makes it perfectly, blatantly clear to Kirk that she finds him attractive and that she'd like to use their brief time together to “make green memories”. However Kirk gently and politely rejects her advances, saying he has too many “green memories” of his own, but they eventually grow to respect one another and become close allies nevertheless. Not only is this a clever subversion (and inversion!) of a lot of the stereotypes of Kirk from the Original Series, it's a fantastic little series of character moments and it propels Lara to the forefront of Star Trek's female characters, at least in this phase of its history. I mean at what other point before the early 1990s or so are you going to find someone like this, a woman who is not only an unabashed equal but who is this blunt and forward to boot? It's great to see, and Webb and William Shatner knock it out of the park, which is tough to do when you're not in the same recording studio as the person you're supposed to be reacting to.

Furthermore, there's yet another great scene with Lara near the climax, where it's revealed someone on the team is trying to sabotage the mission from within and kill off their teammates. For awhile I was really worried the traitor would be Lara, as she's set up to be such a bold, aggressive and determined character. But no, it's one of the other characters, and it's Lara, along with Kirk and Spock, who helps rally those who remain loyal to the Vedala to recapture the Soul of the Skorr and bring everyone back home alive.

I guess I owe Stephen Kandel an apology: Freed from Harry Mudd and Gene Roddenberry it would seem he's more than capable of writing an admirable female hero, because “The Jihad” gives us two: Lara, of course, but the Vedala star-mystic as well who summons the team and gives them guidance on their journey through her powers of foresight and telekinesis.

Speaking of which this episode is dripping with magick. It's almost as magickal as “The Magicks of Megas-Tu”. The Vedala are plainly psychic and use straight-up astral projection to help discern the location of the Soul and also seem to have mastery over telepathy, teleporation and telekinesis. And, just like in “The Magicks of Megas-Tu”, this is given no other explanation other than that it self-evidently exists. This isn't “mental science”, it's magic plain and simple. However, this is not what we'd think of as straightforward high fantasy either, though it might appear to be this at first glance. What's really interesting about the trappings of “The Jihad” is that this is all happening against the background of what remains a science fiction setting: While the Vedala may not practice “mental science” the way Isaac Asimov might have conceived of it, what they do is demonstrate the mundane reality of magick within the Star Trek universe. The magick of the Vedala exists alongside all the other ways of knowing in the galaxy and is treated as just as valid a worldview as any other. Indeed perhaps it might be even more highly valued as the Vedala are considered the oldest and most revered civilization in the galaxy and their word carries considerable clout on the interstellar stage.

Then there's the Mad Planet, which seems to operate according to a distinctly magickal logic.The whole world feels alive, which is even more fitting considering the inclusion of Lara, as many indigenous hunter-gatherer societies also understand their connection to the land through animism. But more to the point the Mad Planet feels not just alive, but also angry and tormented: It's the personification of the challenge the team must undertake to recover the Soul of Skorr, and that also gives the title “The Jihad” a secondary meaning. See, in actual Muslim spirituality, “jihad” means “struggle” (this is, in fact, literally what the word translates out to), and the Qur’an mentions two different kinds of jihads. One is the version that's most familiar to a 21st century audience, that is, a righteous struggle against one's enemies (though crucially this is most traditionally seen as a revolutionary act done to overthrow oppressors, not a holy crusade against nonbelievers for death and glory). However the second, and more important, meaning is that of an inner personal struggle to overcome challenge on an everyday basis. It's a challenge to remain true to your ideals and beliefs each and every day. So not only will the Skorr launch the holy war kind of jihad if the Soul isn't brought back, but the team themselves are undergoing a kind of jihad on the Mad Planet to work together and respect one another, thus living up to their own ideals.

Which brings us back to the Soul of Skorr itself, which is this message given form and, as a result, it's ultimate magick spell. On first glace it looks straightforwardly pop Christian, much like the life force receptacles from “Return to Tomorrow”, but it's actually more arcane than that: Tcharr says it's the result of binding Alar's soul to the mortal plain, but there's no mention of some technobabble explanation for extracting life energies or whatever that would prompt a Cartesian reading. No, in practice the Soul serves a very different purpose. Alar was a beloved prophet who inspired the Skorr to leave their warlike past behind them and the Skorr made him a cultural hero and strove to follow his example ever since. Knowing this, it makes that name extremely telling. The Soul of Skorr is just that: The collective hopes, dreams and ideals of a people projected onto a sacred totem, thus giving them immortal life and power. This touches on the heart of magick, which is the appropriation and manipulation of symbols and the belief that symbols have power and agency unto themselves, because belief itself grants them. No wonder the disappearance of the Soul would put the Skorr on a retrograde path and plunge the galaxy into war, because without ideals people become cynical and, even worse, apathetic. And that's also why a multicultural team of equals culled from all ways of life and all knowledge networks is needed to get it back.

Which means “The Jihad” is, put simply, perfect Star Trek. It's a story about idealism and cultural signifiers and the role they play in our lives. It's utopian not in the didactic, authoritarian way the franchise gets a bad name for these days, but because it looks frankly at the concept of ideals, why they're important and how people challenge themselves to try and live up to them. This is not a story about the enlightened space navy going around reorganizing societies, it's a story about how all people all over the universe try to better themselves, and how magickal it is when they succeed. And on top of that, it's bloody gorgeous to look at. It's absolutely everything Star Trek is good at wrapped up in a neat little gift basket.

Even across the span of decades, I think I can still hear D.C. Fontana dropping the mic.

“Just think what some zoo will pay for you!”: The Eye of the Beholder

Which of you is the one named "Mr. Snuffleupagus"?

“The Eye of the Beholder” concerns the Enterprise attempting to locate the crew of a research ship that went missing in the vicinity of Lactra VII. Beaming down to investigate, Kirk, Spock and McCoy discover three wildly different ecosystems positioned unnaturally adjacent to each other. Spock supposes that this planet might in fact be some kind of enormous zoo created by beings significantly more advanced then the Federation races, a supposition proven correct when giant telepathic slugs with trunks come, abduct the landing party and take them to a specially-crafted humanoid exhibit guarded by an unbreakable force field.

Somehow it feels like we've been here before.

This episode was written by David P. Harmon, who also wrote “The Deadly Years” and co-wrote “A Piece of the Action” with Gene Coon. However it's pretty clear now that the latter story must have been primarily Coon because this episode is much more akin to the former. In other words, it's another perfectly forgettable filler episode. And let's be honest: “The Eye of the Beholder” is totally “The Cage” all over again. It doesn't even try to distinguish itself from possibly the most famous episode of Star Trek ever, apart from having the zookeepers be the aforementioned giant telepathic slugs with trunks instead of Talosians.

Since Harmon apparently has no qualms about stooping so low as to recycle the plot wholesale from the very first episode of Star Trek I don't feel bad about reusing a lot of my commentary from “The Deadly Years”. The concept of filler episodes (in the original “this-feels-like-an-off-week” sense and not the contemporary “I-have-to-wait-another-week-to-learn-more-about-my-Big-Damn-Character-Arc" sense) is a phenomenon somewhat unique to television, and United States television in particular, born as it is out of the necessity of making sure something makes it to air every week during the season. Flatly, sometimes you just need to crank something out to fill your episode quota. TV has always been one of the more visibly workmanlike of the creative mediums as a result, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it gives us as viewers and critics special access to the creative process that goes into making it that the allure of the Cinematic Artifice and Singular Vision usually makes it hard for us to notice in, say, movies.

However.

As wonderful as that may all be and as criminally overvalued as I do in fact find plot and character development to be, I still tend to find that US TV engages in filler episodes alarmingly more frequently than it perhaps needs to. This is because in the US, the annual television season traditionally runs nonstop from September to May except for a hiatus in November and December and demands a quota of about 25-30 episodes as a result. There's only so many stories anyone can come up with for one setting in one sitting, and this means time, money and other resources get spread out over a huge swath of productions instead of being discreetly allocated to a small handful of them. US TV creators tend then to be ludicrously overworked and pressured, and corners get cut that inevitably bring down a show's average day-to-day potential. Eventually it can start to feel like the production team is punching a timecard and cranking out generic, formulaic stories because that's all they're physically capable of doing.

And anyway, even if “The Eye of the Beholder” did in fact have to be a filler episode (and given that it's the penultimate episode of The Animated Series' first season, it in all likelihood probably did) there were still ways to make it unique and entertaining without engaging in one of the most painfully obvious bits of self-plagiarism in the franchise to date. This could very easily have been a very enjoyable generic space adventure: Indeed, the first third-to-one-half of the episode is basically that-Kirk, Spock and McCoy wander first through volcanic hot springs, then a desert and finally a forest fending off giant monsters that keep popping up every now and again in search of the missing research team and bantering the whole way. The episode could have played up its already-weird and captivating setting and been about how the landing party survives in such an uncanny place.

The episode could have come up with some out-there technobabble explanation for why so many ecosystems exist in such close proximity to each other, like maybe this is an amalgam planet made up of the hunks of a lot of other planets that fused when their orbits caused them to smash into one another. Or maybe it's a planet that exists in multiple time periods or universes all at the same time and each time the landing party moves into a different ecosystem they're travelling between different realities. There would probably have to be some kind of signature Star Trek twist at the end to keep it from turning into full-on Space Ghost, like perhaps Kirk having to find a way to save both the lost research team and the local wildlife without endangering either of them, but that still strikes me as perfectly doable and exceedingly more interesting then defaulting back to the franchise's dead end of a pilot.

That aside there are a lot of little things that irk me about this one. Though they get some good lines and I enjoy how Kirk keeps imploring Spock and McCoy to stop bickering, the landing party is written in just about the most stereotypical and uninteresting way you can think of. Spock's a logic machine, McCoy is irrational, emotional and impulsive and Kirk tries to mediate between them. Furthermore, Harmon seems to view the rest of the crew besides Spock with some manner of disdain, because for one, hardly anyone outside the triumvirate actually appears in this episode (though Scotty and M'Ress show up near the end and play minor important roles) and secondly Spock is written to be always right: He has the whole plot basically figured out five minutes in, corrects everyone and just generally lectures everyone on how wrong and illogical they're being. I guess it's a return to “The Cage” in politics as well as plot, as this is a very unlikably Gene Roddenberry-esque conception of Spock (or rather the logician character, as in "The Cage" this was, of course, Number One): The character who exists to point out how fallible and naive the hopelessly emotional humans are.

The one thing that is sort of fun about “The Eye of the Beholder” is how it handles its resolution in comparison to how “The Cage” handled its. In the earlier episode, Pike broke the Talosians' thought shield by frightening them with violent imagery and physically and mentally muscled his way out. Here, Kirk and his crew make constant attempts to contact the Lactrans and convince them they're members of intelligent species who don't deserve to be imprisoned. And, in spite of Spock's gloating about the telepathic link he shares with the Lactrans it's Scotty and M'Ress who end up saving the day here: After a botched attempt to beam back to the Enterprise, a baby Lactran ends up getting transported up in Kirk's place and makes its way to the bridge where it confronts Scotty and M'Ress.

After a moment, Scotty beams down with the baby (who, despite being only six years old has an IQ in the thousands) and casually informs the landing party he was able to strike up a telepathic conversation with it and taught it all he knew about the Federation while M'Ress gave it access to the ship's computers to learn more. In doing so, the working-class everyman Scotty does what the highly trained mentalist Spock was unable to do and convince the Lactrans that humans and Vulcans (and Caitians) are intelligent beings: In fact, the Lactrans pay them the highest compliment by telling the landing party (as relayed by Scotty) that they remind them of the Lactrans themselves long ago, and that maybe in a few more (Lactran) centuries, everyone will be able to communicate as equals. It's a wonderfully Animated Series style ending that builds on the work of stories like “The Magicks of Megas-Tu” and “The Time Trap” and ends up making the whole episode worthwhile.

So once again this isn't a terrible episode: Like the vast majority of this series' poor stories, it's a mediocre outing that still shows Star Trek making visible progress even in its weakest moments. And that's pretty damn admirable place to be in at the end of the first season of an animated reboot of a failed Cult Sci-Fi show.

“We must not let it happen again.” The Slaver Weapon

Take note: This is what a sci-fi planet should look like.

Like so many other stories like it, “The Slaver Weapon” is a not-actually-terribly-good episode that still manages to set in motion events that will change everything we thought we knew about the world of Star Trek and call into question the franchise's closest-held tenets and ideals.

It has an interesting pedigree though. We've heard a few hints and clues about the Kzinti and some hostilities with them before, but this is the first time we've actually seen them: An aggressive race of catlike people who have persistently attacked settlements, who make war to eat those they defeat in battle and who are so misogynistic they've literally bred intelligence out of their women. They are a frighteningly unlikable adversary for this series, and if they don't sound like typical Star Trek villains that's probably because they're not, in point of fact, from Star Trek at all. The Kzinti actually hail from the self-contained Known Universe, encompassing the collected work of noted science fiction author Larry Niven, and this episode is actually a straight translation of his short story “The Soft Weapon” for Star Trek. The reason it's here is because D.C. Fontana was a huge fan of Niven's and personally requested he contribute something for the Animated Series. The two approached Gene Roddenberry with the idea, and while it was thought many of Niven's pitches were too violent for the show, Roddenberry eventually suggested adapting “The Soft Weapon”.

As a result there's not a whole lot to say about the episode as aired, because it straightforwardly, literally *is* “The Soft Weapon”, only with the names changed. An interesting consequence of this is that the episode features exclusively Sulu, Uhura and Spock in starring roles, standing in for the original story's protagonists (a human couple and a vegetarian alien scientists named Nessus), and thus none of the other regulars appear. This sadly doesn't help the episode much though, because while it's nice to see Sulu and Uhura get really meaty roles again, it's painfully clear “The Soft Weapon” had a rather blatant Pulp structure, so we get to see many riveting scenes of our heroes getting captured by Kzinti pirates, escaping said Kzinti pirates and being recaptured about ten seconds later. And of course, the female character has to be abducted and held for ransom.

There are, however, two main aspects of this episode that remain quite provocative. The first is, of course, the Kzinti: Despite being canon expatriates, the fact remains having a concept as shocking as the Kzinti here does change the game rather decisively for Star Trek. Trying to weld established Star Trek mythos with Niven's Known Universe has some really bizarre consequences that, thanks to a happy accident, wind up adding a lot more nuance to our franchise. The biggest bomb comes about when you try and reconcile the supposedly pacifistic and utopian Federation with the nasty history of the Earth-Kzin Wars: The implication of this episode then becomes that at some point prior to the foundation of the modern Federation, Earth and its allies were engaged in a series of horrific and consecutive wars where they absolutely decimated the Kzinti armies.

The decisive moment comes at the Treaty of Sirius, where Earth demanded harsh concessions from the Kzinti, forcing them to completely demilitarize and give the nascent Federation total unhindered access to Kzinti space. I have little sympathy for the warlike, misogynistic Kzinti (who were, of course, always the aggressors), but the sheer scale of the repercussions Earth called for at the Treaty simply sounds vicious, and it reminds me altogether too well of, say, the quick scapegoating of Germany following World War I. In Niven's original work, he further puts this into “natural selection” terms, explaining how the instinctively confrontational Kzinti died out due to their own belligerence, thus allowing the “more evolved” humans to thrive and the more progressive Kzinti to eventually adapt. It doesn't take a whole lot to twist that into imperialistic propaganda and apologia for Social Darwinism, and this is an unthinkably serious accusation to level at the Federation.

But not, in retrospect, an altogether unexpected one. We've always maintained that the Federation is far from a perfect, ideal model of government, despite the increasingly universalist rhetoric of the franchise that is slowly but surely beginning to dangerously conflate Star Trek's idealism with that of the Federation. It's not a huge leap of logic to extrapolate this back and figure the Federation probably had some kind of an imperialistic past or that a desire for empire might not in some way be built into the core of how it operates. Indeed, when next we see the Kzinti in Star Trek the Federation is put explicitly on the same level as any number of other wide-reaching galactic empires. It becomes but one massive military power among many others.

I'm also reminded of something Robert Hewitt Wolfe said in regards to the episode “Crossover” on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:

"Empires aren't usually brutal unless there's a reason. There are usually external or internal pressures that cause them to be that way.”

There's more to this quote and Wolfe frames it in a way that's not totally unproblematic, but we'll deal with that in 1994. What I want to focus on here is the idea that empires arise out of a *need* to be brutal. The fear of the unknown, or rather of uncertainty and fungibility, a fear of the idea things can entropically change outside of your control (and a further belief that you are *entitled* to exert that control) and a panicky desire to maintain order has been a driving force of authoritarianism since time immemorial. The true horror of the Earth-Kzin wars is that it opens the possibility that this kind of fear and paranoia might actually be the defining belief upon which the entire Federation was founded.

Think about it. The Kzinti, despite how despicable they can be, are basically complete rubbish. As Beowulf Schaeffer says in Niven's story “Grendel”, “The Kzinti aren't really a threat. They'll always attack before they're ready". Not to mention the fact they lost every single conflict they ever had with Earth hilariously decisively. They're not a threat, they're a joke. It's Earth, and by extension the proto-Federation, who commit the worst atrocities during the Kzin Wars via the Treaty of Sirius thanks to their need to assert their dominance and growing military might and influence. This becomes the new Original Sin of the Federation: Despite all its rosy utopian rhetoric, it has roots in the same old ugly empire building Westerners are so depressingly good at. Oh sure, later writers will shy away from this, try to correct it and posit other origins for the Federation, but the damage has been done. This never goes away. This is a part of the Federation and Star Trek from here on out.

This ties into the other intriguing concept Star Trek inherits from the Known Universe via “The Slaver Weapon”: The titular weapon itself. In both stories, an Earth team has recovered an ancient stasis box dating from what amounts to The Old Universe, when they're abducted by the Kzinti. Apparently there once was an infinitely old race that existed billions of years ago who conquered the entire universe and enslaved every other sentient species (in Star Trek they're the Slavers, while in the Known Universe they're called the Thrint). Although no traces of their civilization still exist, they did leave behind these boxes which contain assorted artefacts preserved by a stasis field and which, through modern reverse engineering, have provided the basis for basically all technology as it exists today. The box Spock/Nessus found that he and his friends are fighting with the Kzinti over contained a weapon used by a Slaver/Thrint spy that can transform into many different forms, one of which has the power to instantaneously convert planet-sized pieces of matter into energy.

This is almost a bleaker revelation than the Kzin Wars. Literally the entire contemporary society of the Star Trek universe is modeling itself after an oppressive and genocidal race of actual monsters (we get to see an image that's largely assumed to be a Slaver/Thrint, and it looks like a giant saurian) not only technoscientifically but socially: The Federation and the Kzinti would go to war again over such a device-The Kzinti already proved they would be willing to kill and die to posses it, and after it predictably self-destructs at the end, Spock attempts to console Sulu, who is saddened that he won't be able to bring the device to a museum, by saying it would never have wound up in a museum anyway. This might well be the darkest ending we've seen yet on Star Trek: The Enterprise crew get to remain noble, but there is now overwhelming evidence that they might be the only scrupulous and upstanding people in a a universe built entirely around hatred, conflict and a desire to oppress and subjugate others. This is paradoxically the least Star Trek story we've ever seen, but, terrifyingly, it's absolutely in keeping with the way the show works.

Although the plot is less than compelling, the historical significance of “The Slaver Weapon” alone makes it worth a look. This is the starting point of a new approach to Star Trek: Not quite another reboot or reconceptualization, but a secondary thread that haunts the margins of the franchise popping up every now and again to remind us that we can hold to our utopian fantasies about the show as much as we like, but we'll never quite be able to distill this out of it. This is Star Trek's Dark Side, and the only way to confront your Dark Side is to accept that it exists, if not embrace it.

“Well, I'll be damned. It's the gentleman guppy.”: The Ambergris Element

"...part of your wooooooooooooooorld..."

Some episodes I have a really hard time building a post around. It's not that they're especially terrible, it's just there's not a lot of content there for me to really grab hold of or find new and interesting things to say about them. Thankfully, Margaret Armen wrote this one so that won't be the case here.

And I really wanted to like this one too. When I was planning this project I did a cursory scan of all the episodes I hadn't seen or didn't remember all that well, and this one looked fascinating. The Enterprise is conducting research on a planet that's almost entirely ocean due to persistent underground tremors causing the continents to fall into the sea. The crew hope they information they gain will be helpful in providing aid to other planets with similar geological activity. One of the things I love most about science fiction is its ability to depict wondrous and fantastic spectacles of worlds that exist far out in the deepest realms of outer space. It goes back to things like Georges Méliès, the hauntingly evocative spacescapes dreamed up by the Golden Age science fiction artists and the fist glimpses we saw of the Lunar surface from the Apollo missions. Few things stir my imagination quite like a well-done bit of space art. Indeed one reason, if not *the* primary reason, I don't despise Star Trek is how fantastic Star Trek: The Next Generation and early Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were at evoking this kind of imagery: The visual design alone is enough to get our minds racing to imagine what life in the sort of world those shows depicts must be like. And animation is a medium essentially custom-tailored for precisely this.

One of my greatest loves, obviously, given the way I've structured this project, is the ocean. When I was young one of the things I thought I might grow up to be was some kind of oceanographer or ocean explorer. I developed my love of the ocean and my love of outer space roughly at the same time, I suppose because both seemed like universes unto themselves and we knew next to nothing about either. In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense given the Polynesian belief in the intertwined world, with the realms of the Earth, Sea and Sky all interconnected. Many variations of the Polynesian creation myth even claim that the world was created out of the sea, and often that the world exists within a giant clam shell in the middle of an even larger cosmic ocean.

At one point, I naively fancied myself some kind of professional astronomer and was involved in a project to detect extrasolar planets. It was my unspoken hope that at some point I'd be able to see a planet like the one described in this episode: One comprised almost entirely of ocean. I've also long had a fascination with Neptune in our own solar system: Although it's named after a Western sea god, Neptune is in fact a gas giant and even though it's thus more properly described as a planet made entirely out of sky, I still think it would be an incredible sight to visit a place like that.

But I'm not going to go too far down the road of autobiography and self-contemplation here when there's Margaret Armen to talk about. For her final Star Trek hat trick, Armen somehow manages to outdo herself and turn out yet another new low for the series. Astoundingly, this one is even worse than “The Lorelei Signal” and a contender for her worst effort of all. Only “The Paradise Syndrome” really gives it competition for the title. This episode is garbage on burnt toast.

While Armen's previous efforts have showed off her well-documented problems with representation, “The Ambergris Element” returns to the other thing that was notably bad about “The Paradise Syndrome” by being constructed entirely out of narrative Swiss Cheese. There are so many serious, egregious plot holes in this story I honestly lost count. Literally nothing about this episode makes sense, and I'm not saying the script is dealing with heady concepts that are difficult to wrap your mind around, I am saying it is so shoddily put together it is actively, physically incoherent. Furthermore, Armen doesn't have anything remotely like the combined diegetic and extradiegetic narrative collapse of something like “The Alternative Factor” to bail her out here, helpfully reminding us that in addition to being a racist and an internalized misogynist she was also just a terrible, terrible writer on principle.

Two of my favourite moments from “The Ambergris Element” (and by “favourite” I mean memorably godawful) involve the civilization of merpeople Kirk and Spock find living in the planet's world-ocean (So I guess Armen really did have a thing for mermaids/sirens/Rhine maidens after all) called the Aquans. See, long ago there was a dispute between the ancestors of the Aquans and a society of land-dwellers who existed when the planet had continents. Eventually a massive war broke out and the Aquans became territorial and isolationist and developed a xenophobic hatred of anyone who breaths air. So, when Kirk and Spock are attacked by a giant Kraken-Lizard and flung into the sea, they infuse their blood with a special mutagen that causes them to turn into merpeople too, because when you're a xenophobic society terrified of invasion the first thing you do is allow your suspected enemy agents to adapt to your environment and force them to live in intimate, close proximity with your populace.

So naturally Kirk and Spock are less then thrilled about turning into Ariel's step-siblings, so they go back to the Aquans to ask their council for help in changing them back. And here's where it becomes clear how paper-thin the world building in this episode is: The Aquans are a generic race of codgy traditionalists who only act in accordance with a set of ancient dicta laid down before the grandparents of anyone who's now alive to read them were even roe. They can't reverse the mutation even though the technology exists to do so because it's not allowed and they can't go find the technology they need to make the antidote because that's not allowed either. Precisely why it's not allowed is never explained. As for why the Aquans hate the surface dwellers, that's not ever made clear either and I guess I'm not allowed to ask about that. Eventually one of the younger council members, Rila, offers to help Kirk and Spock as she believes their story about coming from another world and needing to know about their planet to help other worlds in need.

Then it gets really good, and by good I of course mean bad. At one point Kirk and Spock are captured by some particularly conservative Aquans and marooned on a rock, where they will suffocate because they have gills instead of lungs now. Scotty and McCoy come to their rescue with Rila's help, who can of course breathe air like it ain't no thing. Then Rila tells them they need to travel to the lost ruins of the ancient civilization to find the medical records they need to make the antidote (because all underwater cities have lost ruins of ancient civilizations, it's like a law). On their way they get attacked by another Kraken-Lizard thing, but conveniently an earthquake happens at that exact moment and crushes it under a collapsing pillar (and meanwhile Scotty, who was with them, has now mysteriously disappeared). Then it turns out the venom from Kraken-Lizards is a key ingredient in the antidote: Amazingly instead of going back to harvest it from the one that was already killed by the earthquake, Kirk, Spock and Rila elect to hunt down a totally different one *with their bare hands*. The Kraken-Lizards are, in case you couldn't guess, roughly the size of a smallish kaiju.

(It is also worth mentioning at this point that the time elapsed between the Aquans first capturing Kirk and Spock and the Enterprise finding them stranded and suffocating to death is supposed to be five days.)

“The Ambergris Element” might be the first episode I've seen, or at least the first in a while, that has absolutely nothing for me to recommend in it. The plot is a disaster and wouldn't even be terribly interesting if it wasn't, the dialog is amateurish and flat, the acting is predictably phoned in and even the beautiful ocean planet I had hoped to see is in truth the antithesis of beautiful: The whole planet looks flat and featureless to the point of feeling unfinished and the ocean itself is an unappealing pale yellow for no good reason. It looks like an ocean of stale orange dry. And I hate to say it, I really do, but the only positive thing I can find to say about this one is that it is in fact Margaret Armen's last Star Trek script. She submitted a pitch to Star Trek: Phase II called “Savage Syndrome”, which she co-wrote with a writer named Alfred Harris and which we were thankfully spared by that show getting canceled in pre-production.

I wish I had something kinder to say about Armen's stint in her final aired episode, but I really don't. I'm honestly just thankful to see the back of it. And, while I may be jumping ahead here, if memory serves me, I don't think any future Star Trek writers ever hit quite the same lows as she did. I only hope I'm right.

And next time everything changes. Again.

“'We are the only path.'”: The Time Trap

I'd like to remind everyone this scene was animated. By Filmation.

“Entrapment” is the key word here, on multiple levels.

While exploring a region of space known as the Delta Triangle, where starships have been reputed to go missing for eons, the Enterprise comes under attack by the Klingon battlecruiser Klothos, captained by the crew's old enemy Commander Kor. Suddenly, the Klothos vanishes into nothingness: Suspecting a trap, the Enterprise immediately warps to its last know position and follows it in before the commander of the Klothos' sister ship can press war crime charges. Both crews find themselves in a starless void where starships from centuries of spaceflight history aimlessly drift about. Kirk and Kor are then transported to a gigantic council chamber, where representatives of the crews from all the other ships welcome them to a world they call Elysia, a pocket universe where time does not exist that they have transformed into an ideal society where everyone relies on and respects everyone else, because there's no way to escape. The Elysians also warn Kirk and Kor that violence is strictly prohibited, and that they will be held responsible for the violent actions of any of their crewmembers by being frozen forever in a stasis field.

Elysium, naturally, is the most interesting thing on display here, though deceptively so: It's an effective and memorable concept on a number of different levels. Though writer Joyce Perry originally only came up with the idea of a Sargasso Sea-type area of space that Kirk and Kor would be forced to work together to escape from (which is in fact what ends up happening here: The Enterprise and the Klothos can only escape by combining their warp cores into a kind of Super Warp Drive), the actual final product is wonderfully oversignified. Firstly of course, Elysia is not only compared to the Sargasso Sea in the script, but to the nearby and contiguous Bermuda Triangle as well, and both very explicitly so. In Forteana, triangles, or to be more precise triangular regions of physical space, have always held special significance as areas that act as a kind of lightning rod for strange and unexplained activity. The Bermuda Triangle and its disappearing ships and aircraft is the most famous of course, though equally worthy of note, yet lesser-known, such places include my personal favourites, the Bridgewater Triangle in Southern Massachusetts and the Bennington Triangle surrounding Mount Glastenbury in my own home state of Vermont, the latter of which was also chronicled in an episode of William Shatner's as-of-this-writing current Discovery Channel docudrama series Weird or What?.

But even the famous Triangle is a bastion of a truly fascinating sort of weirdness that doesn't always show up in the stereotypical pop culture accounts of it. The Bermuda Triangle isn't just a place where ships vanish into thin air, it's a place where blatantly unnerving and otherworldly things are said to happen. Arguably the best-known (or at least one of the best-known) of the Bermuda Triangle incidents is the case of Flight 19, a bombing squadron that, while flying through the aforementioned area on a practice run, suddenly began to experience widespread instrument malfunction while its crew suffered from extreme and immediate onset confusion and disorientation. Eventually Flight 19 did what we expect to see planes do in the Bermuda Triangle and vanished without a trace, but not before its pilots were able to relay some truly chilling messages to their flight controllers, such as this one from an unidentified cremember

"We can't find west. Everything is wrong. We can't be sure of any direction. Everything looks strange, even the ocean."

And these disturbing words from flight leader Charles Carroll Taylor

"Both of my compasses are out and I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land but it's broken.”

"It looks like we are entering white water . . .We're completely lost."

Almost spookier is what allegedly happened to pilot Bruce Gernon, Jr., one of the only people who both claim to have experienced something strange in the Bermuda Triangle and returned to talk about it. Gernon and his father set off on a recreational flight in the Bahamas from Andros Island, an area they both knew instinctively, on December 4, 1970 when their aircraft was unexpectedly and immediately engulfed in a large, undulating cloud. While inside, Gernon claims to have witnessed the sky shrink in on itself and that the inside of the cloud was a dark void without any discernible meteorological phenomenon that one would expect to see inside a storm, except for a series of bright white flashes.

Like on Flight 19, all of Gernon's instruments began to wildly malfunction. Contacting Miami air control for backup support, Gernon reported that he was somewhere southeast of the Bimini islands, only to be told air control couldn't actually *find* him anywhere near that area. Suddenly, an unidentified aircraft was reported to have appeared in the skies over Miami Beach...which turned out to be Gernon's plane. Miami Beach is ninety miles away from Bimini, and Gernon had travelled that distance in what had seemed to him to be twenty seconds. Eventually landing in Palm Beach, Gernon calculated the total time of his flight: By his count, he'd made the trip from Andros Island to Palm Beach in the flat-out impossible time of forty-seven minutes.

And, just to top off an already disquieting story and make it even creepier, Gernon's eventful journey took place almost exactly twenty-five years to the day after the disappearance of Flight 19, with a difference of only 24 hours.

So given the tales of Flight 19 and Bruce Gernon, Jr. in the Bermuda Triangle, not to mention the numerous eyewitness accounts from the other triangles of strange beings and inexplicable phenomena, it's probably safe to say places like this have a tendency to invite and attract mystery. Speaking strictly in terms of folklore here, in many ways the stories of odd happenings in the triangles is also very reminiscent of what might be called in other time periods reports of certain faery or spirit Otherworlds: Both sorts of places are defined by the prevalence of things that go beyond the boundaries of what humans can currently comprehend. And of course, Star Trek has always been on the vanguard of this and “The Time Trap” is the next step in the development of this motif.

As we might expect, Elysia (though perhaps more accurately the Delta Triangle) is also a black, starless void where the laws of space and time break down and that causes starships' instruments to go completely haywire. But Elysia is also an Otherworld, and it's even more of one than the part of the Original Series it's arguably the most comparable to, the haunted interspatial rift full of ghost ships and Spriggans from “The Tholian Web”. This time the Enterprise fully crosses over to the other side and finds an entire civilization that's at once extremely reminiscent of their own and strikingly different.

And Elysia very much is a sort of reflection of the Federation: Like the Federation, it's clearly a kind of vast, galactic representative democracy (the council chamber alone calls for that reading), and also like the Federation it claims to hold itself to virtues of nonviolence and peaceful coexistence. But as utopian as Elysia seems, there's a darker side, as explained by Devna, Interpreter of Laws: The council presides over Elysia with an iron fist and there is swift and extremely harsh punishment for any transgression against their unyielding and monolithic set of laws. There's arguably even a nod to the notion Otherworlds are one place the spirits of the dead might go to live on, as the Elysians are all former starship crewmembers who disappeared and were left for dead throughout history. And it's always existed, as Kirk says ships have been reported missing in the Delta Triangle since “ancient times”.

What “The Time Trap” adds to this is just what it says: Elysia is an Otherworld, but it's also a trap. That worrying lack of stars is just as revealing here as it was in “The Immunity Syndrome”, moreso in fact. The danger here is that the Enterprise will be marooned here and rendered obsolete and ineffectual. And this is very interesting, because Elysia is also very much a utopia, and at first glance the full realisation of the exact thing the Federation claims to be striving towards. Why would eternal life in a place as idyllic as Elysia be something so repugnant both Kirk and Kor would be willing to risk their ships and crew to escape from? Firstly of course there are the staunch rules: Neither the Klingon Defense Force or Starfleet have been shown to always be terribly enamoured of authority, and certainly not someone as transgressive as James Kirk. If one is trying to fashion a perfect society where everyone is respected and treated as an absolute equal, it does seem to be a rather concerning conflict of interest if the only way you can get there is by anointing yourself and demanding absolute loyalty and obedience.

There's something else about Elysia that clearly worries the Enterprise crew though, and in hindsight it's the same thing that that was the real threat of “The Tholian Web”: It's the possibility of becoming static and unchanging. A society like Elysia's is predicated on the assumption that it has already reached perfection, and in order to maintain that perfection absolute control must be maintained. Aside from being offensively authoritarian, this is behaviour is also flatly entitled and presumptuous. Who are the Elysians to say they're the model by which everyone who chances into the Delta Triangle is obligated to aspire towards? This is absolute anathema to the Enterprise crew, because, as we now know from “The Magicks of Megas-Tu”, it's their goal to always better themselves, to never stop learning and improving. To stay in Elysia, no matter how peaceful a life of subservience there might be, would be a betrayal of everything they believe and stand for. This marks yet another welcome honing of the Star Trek mission statement: In the Original Series, the Enterprise all too often took on the role of Elysian missionaries, going around and forcibly imposing their model of utopia on everyone while touting themselves representatives of an evolved and advanced Master Race. Now, however, they're overtly interested in discourse and shared ideas. To stay in Elysia would require the Enterprise to stop travelling, and that would mean her and her crew would have to stop growing and learning.

That's the other side of the Otherworld concept, so to speak. When you get right down to it, the Otherworld is still a place where people live lives and have weird cultural quirks, rituals and mores just like we do. It may be a realm of wondrous and fantastic things, but it's also another world, not necessarily a better one. And it's certainly not a place you would want to end up stranded in against your will. The goal of the shaman is not just to leave one world and enter another (after all, most myths hold the dead can do that simply by being dead). No, the shaman's trick is the ability to transgress the boundary between worlds. The idea is to bring learning and knowledge from one world to the other while maintaining an existence in both, to be a kind of spiritual teacher. You don't want to become an Otherworld expatriot, you want to be the ultimate traveller, journeying to planar realms as easily as you can down the street or across the ocean, and to show others how they can do the same. So, for the crew of the Enterprise, imposing a utopia from above and agreeing to live unquestioning under it is tantamount to bringing the natural process of intellectual and spiritual growth that is intrinsic to the human experience to a standing halt. And that's not the Star Trek way.

Somehow it seems altogether fitting now that the first-ever episode of Star Trek was about escaping a gilded cage.