“Khan, nothing more?”: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

I don't like it.

Yeah, I said it. As far as I'm concerned, the consensus-best Star Trek EVER is a bunch of *ridiculously* overrated tat. But honestly, you must have expected this by now. Was there really ever any suspense over how I was going to read this? Surely, there was no way I was ever going to taken in by Star Trek going whole hog into Horatio Hornblower naval pomp and circumstance? Not after everything I've yelled and screamed about here for the past year. I think it's a mistake, I think it gets Star Trek's philosophy utterly wrong, I honestly don't think its a particularly captivating movie in its own right and I can't in good conscience recommend it. So there. You can all close the book or the browser tab or whatever, as I'm sure my yay or nay on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is what you've been waiting breathlessly all this time to find out about.

Anyone still here? Good. Then we can continue.

The first, most obvious problem I have with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is in fact bringing Khan back in the first place. “Space Seed” was an utterly abhorrent episode that posited Star Trek's utopian future would be built on the back of Philosopher Kings and enlightened despots who benevolently oppress us while they squabble over turf by manipulating catastrophic gang wars and indulging in extravagant, overblown dick measuring contests. It also made the passionate claim that women gain their inner strength through submissiveness and subservience and that rape culture is the natural hierarchy of humanity. And Khan himself was a spectacularly racist amalgamation of generically “exotic” nonwhite, nonwestern motifs the script bewilderingly seems to think will add to his “charm”. Charm, incidentally, is the one thing Khan wasn't hurting for simply because the show hired Ricardo Montalbán to play him, who was an amazing stage presence and the one likable thing in that whole dreadful hour.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan does at least manage to be better than “Space Seed” as it drops pretty much all of the symbolism and themes Khan was originally written with in mind, bringing him back simply to exert gravity as a powerful antagonist, which is a role he's perfectly suited for. No, Khan does work here, which is more than can be said for any of his other appearances in Star Trek, but the problem this movie has is that, by virtue of being so obviously a sequel (something I'll talk more about later on) and because it was so phenomenally well received, this retroactively makes “Space Seed” seem like it was actually a good idea to any generation of Trekker who grew up with this movie, and in doing so renders both stories completely untouchable. And *that* has done provable harm to Star Trek's legacy, because any version of Star Trek that takes “Space Seed” as the definitive display of its philosophy is a Star Trek that's inherently wrongheaded and toxic.

I'm not going to talk about the plot or anything like that: Everyone knows it by heart, even the plot holes, of which there are about a billion. No, the chronology doesn't make any sense. No, it's never explained why the most seasoned crew in the fleet is running cadet training simulations when the last time we saw them they were gearing up for a new five-year mission (though the expanded universe helps out a lot here: You're frankly spoiled for choice when it comes to stories set between Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). No, Chekov shouldn't know who Khan is. And no, Khan's behaviour in regards to both Kirk and Marla McGivers doesn't make an ounce of sense. The thing is though, none of this actually matters because it's very clear this movie is meant to be a retcon in everything but name.

In spite of the fact it did make money, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was considered a critical failure, and Gene Roddenberry (rightfully) got the blame for it and was kicked upstairs basically permanently, to be replaced with a guy famous for getting paid to write Sherlock Holmes fanfic. Bringing in Nicholas Meyer is the biggest creative shift the franchise has experienced since Gene Coon came on as executive producer, and it would make sense this film would want to distance itself from its predecessor any way it could. You can see this everywhere in Wrath of Khan, from the tone and obvious naval epic influence to its loose attitude to continuity: This is a movie that's more interested in Star Trek as a cultural object than it is in any kind of established Star Trek universe. Even the aging and death themes tie into this, with Wrath of Khan feeling very much like an attempt to pass the torch to a possible new kind of Star Trek (Saavik is the key character here, as she's obviously the protagonist and obviously The New Spock).

What Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan really wants is to be a new big screen debut for the franchise, to the point it even (likely unintentionally) recycles beat-for-beat a lot of the key scenes from “In Thy Image” that were left out of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, such as McCoy trying to coax Kirk to get back in the captain's chair, and then an emergency forcing him to. Seriously, fuse Decker with Chapel and then replace them with Saavik and Admiral Nogura with Spock (and strip out absolutely all of Alan Dean Foster's utopian themes) and you've got essentially the same setup. One way to read this movie then is an alternate version of where Star Trek Phase II would have tried to go had it been made, which is basically the only thing that could possibly excuse the fact that practically the whole first half of the damn movie is stock footage from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

(And yet that said, Wrath of Khan is *also*, bewilderingly and paradoxically, the most continuity-heavy Star Trek has been yet: It requires the audience to know, for example, who Khan is and how Vulcans work. There is very little exposition of any kind here. As much as it's trying to reboot the series, it also remains firmly committed to the idea of an established canon and pleasing longtime Trekkers, and that's going to prove to be catastrophic to its overall effectiveness.)

But that's not the major issue here. On the Memory Alpha wiki, there is a *lengthy* section in the article for this movie called “Analysis”, dedicated to exploring Wrath of Khan's apparently extremely heady and complex themes such as “Age”, “Vengeance” and “Death”. This is the only Star Trek work that is given such an in-depth treatment, so obviously Trekkers, at least the Trekkers who edit Memory Alpha, think this movie is more intelligent and sophisticated than any other Star Trek, a prospect that I find gravely concerning, as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the most childishly obtuse and obvious this franchise has been since Gene Roddenberry was running it in 1966.

This movie reads like a high school English essay with the characters blatantly reciting the CliffNotes of the movie's Major Themes. It has absolutely all of the overblown and silly Big Important Speeches people accuse The Dark Knight of having, and is no more subtle when it comes to blocking and visual symbolism. I was particularly impressed with the cut in the cargo container, made as dramatically and noticeable as possible, to Khan's literature collection, which contains such obscure rarities like King Lear, Paradise Lost and Moby-Dick, helpfully reminding us precisely what he's supposed to symbolize and how we're supposed to read him just in case any of the audience had fallen asleep or happened to actually be Vulcans.

Roderick Long will want me to mention that, since this movie is basically “Star Trek Does Moby-Dick (Again)”, there's a useful redemptive reading of that book courtesy of Trotskyist and post-colonialist writer C.L.R. James we can apply that basically sees Starbuck and Ahab as representing two sides of capitalism, with the former symbolizing prudence and the latter symbolizing obsessive totalitarianism. James has a famous quote here, stating that

“For generations people believed that the men opposed to rights of ownership, production for the market, domination of money, etc. were socialists, communists, radicals of some sort united by the fact that they all thought in terms of the reorganization of society by the workers, the great majority of the oppressed, the exploited, the disinherited...Nobody, not a single soul, thought that in the managers, the superintendents, the executives, the administrators would arise such loathing and bitterness against the society of free enterprise, the market and democracy, that they would try to reorganize it to suit themselves, and, if need be, destroy civilization in the process.”

This is what James sees Ahab as: Someone who, while a product of the capitalistic system, embodies its worst excesses and resents the way it prevents him from attaining absolute control. And furthermore, someone whose extremist sense of individuality alienates him from his peers and causes him to see them as machine parts instead of human beings. And it is possible to apply at least part of that reading to what happens to Khan here, as his blind hatred for Kirk and desire for vengeance drives away his loyal crew (as symbolized by that one random guy who says a few lines and then dies pointlessly) and is ultimately his downfall.

The thing is, doing that is, to be very charitable, putting far more thought into the motif then the people writing this movie did, who very obviously did *not* intend to write a polemic against capitalism but rather wanted to reference Moby-Dick because it's a Big Important Western Literary Thing that makes them look highbrow and intellectual. It would certainly redeem a lot about Khan as a character to have him fill the role James feels Ahab plays in the original, but I simply don't see any evidence this story in particular is anything other than a hollow recitation of Moby-Dick done simply because Moby-Dick was a naval epic and Star Trek is the Space Navy again now. Add to that the use of “Amazing Grace” at Spock's funeral (unfortunately, Meyer and his team did not have the benefit of time travel and were thus unaware that Spock was fond of that poem, as we learned in “Come What May”), Kirk constantly flashing A Tale of Two Cities as if it's cash and he's a high roller at a dance club, not to mention *Genesis* itself, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan becomes a truly insufferable paean to Great White Western Culture as filtered through the lens of a New York State Regents Exam.

The other thing about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is that is looks astonishingly cheap. I don't just mean it looks like it had a smaller budget than Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which it did and is understandable because that movie's budget was obscene and ridiculous and it still looked like crap when it wasn't doing things with V'Ger. I mean this movie doesn't actually even look like a proper Hollywood blockbuster, which is...puzzling, to put it mildly, considering this was Paramount's marquee release in 1982 and meant to compete with The Empire Strikes Back and Blade Runner. There's simply no excuse for the overabundance of stock footage here: I don't care if your budget was slashed, you make a movie of this scale and get Industrial Light and Magic to do the effects and you can't get a single new shot of the Enterprise model until three quarters of the way in? Especially when you've somehow managed to make the drydock scenes look *even worse* than they did in Star Trek: The Motion Picture?

(And really, I don't mean “admirably and promisingly amateurish” or “pleasingly theatrical”, I mean “cheap”. All of the interior starship scenes are shot on what are visibly the exact same sets with no effort made to distinguish them, which is distracting and sad, and that William Shatner and Ricardo Montalbán never actually get to act off one another because Khan only appears in what are obviously pre-recorded segments is absolutely ridiculous and basically the antithesis of theatre.)

It's not that I expect or want Star Trek to look like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I do expect it to actually *try* with whatever resources it has. You don't have to have a ludicrous budget to look imaginative and inspiring: Doctor Who can do it. Raumpatrouille Orion is a bloody masterclass at it. Once we get further into the 1980s, I'll start talking about a show that absolutely revolutionized doing world-class science fiction on an Ed Wood budget. Even the Original Series *itself* wasn't terrible at this: It didn't start to look cash-starved until invisible one-way exploding spaceships started showing up and we began to do episodes about empty Enterprise stage sets. This though, looks and feels like every bit of the drab, grey and uninspired military affair it is.

The big problem is that this is simply not good enough for a marquee Hollywood blockbuster, which by its very nature needs to have an element of spectacle about it. But this brings us to an interesting revelation: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan isn't actually a marquee Hollywood blockbuster in spirit, even if in practice it was supposed to be: It's a B-movie. Granted, just about nobody involved is treating it as anything *other* than a B-movie (just look at the acting, especially in the big emotional moments, in particular William Shatner and DeForest Kelley), but the fact is that's what this is. And this is interesting, because it *also* wants to be a deathly serious war epic and a story about aging. And this genre and that narrative structure have never really overlapped before. But while it has the trappings of a B-movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan lacks the art house enthusiasm of something like Eraserhead, the niche appeal of a horror movie or the the campy escapist fun of any of the cult classics. It is, somewhat tragically, a B-movie that doesn't realise it's a B-movie.

Yeah, OK, I'll briefly talk about Spock's death.

I mean, there's not a whole lot to say about it, aside from the acknowledged clever double feint of having him die in the simulation early on to cover up for the fact the initial draft of the story leaked. Leonard Nimoy wanted to retire from Star Trek again, which is something of a hobby of his, and wouldn't do the movie unless Spock was killed off. So he was. It was, understandably, a big emotional moment for fandom and one of the most memorable images from the franchise's history. No need to go over that again. A few things that stick out to me about this scene that I don't think are commented on a lot: One, everything leading up to the actual death scene is completely laughable and ridiculous: Spock just gets up, as if he got a cue from off camera and then heads down to the irradiated engineering deck as if to say “Welp. Guess it's time to die now”, where he proceeds to just wreck all of the shit in sight with no particular method or purpose while DeForest Kelley and James Doohan try their absolute hardest to give the single most hilarious, overblown and impossible-to-take-seriously tragic monologue in history.

The other thing about this scene though, is that it's an absolute perfect microcosm for this movie's ambition...and its shortcomings. Because killing off Spock happens to be incredibly symbolic, considering he is the most iconic aspect of the Original Series story and arguably the character who symbolizes it the best, both diegetically and extradiegetically. Those comparisons I made to “In Thy Image” above? Those musings about how this could have laid the groundwork for a new Star Trek? That was precisely the point. Not only was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan meant to be the “new” Star Trek: The Motion Picture, it was also meant to be the *last* Star Trek Motion Picture. Those aging motifs may have the relative subtlety of your average blunderbuss, but Meyer put them in for a reason: This is very clearly and explicitly an attempt to end Star Trek as a mass market Soda Pop Art franchise. In many ways we're back in the territory of Star Trek: The New Voyages: The new status quo is established with Saavik, The New Spock (and really, The New Kirk as well), ready to take charge of a new generation of Star Trek, which is to be left in the capable hands of the fans to take wherever they want her to go.

But...

How many times has Star Trek tried to kill itself off by now? Like, five or six, by my count already? How do you think that was going to take? There's no way Paramount was going to let its primary cash cow disappear, and so we get a stonking great sequel hook where Spock's casket lands on the Genesis planet and every single bloody character makes unbelievably unsubtle comments about “new life”. Yeah, no, contrary to popular belief it's not the next movie that zombifies the Star Trek film franchise, it's this one. Even *without* knowing the next movie is called Star Trek III: The Search for Spock its impossible *not* to assume a sequel is going to be imminent looking at the last shots of this movie. It's as obvious as anything else this movie does, and Harve Bennett, who wrote the initial draft of the script, is on record saying Paramount immediately contracted him to write Star Trek III before this film was even released. The studio simply couldn't leave it alone, so Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ends up feeling utterly pointless on top of everything else that's unsatisfying about it.

Is this a better movie than Star Trek: The Motion Picture? Well, I suppose so, simply by virtue of it having things like actual scripted dialogue instead of making the actors recite flight training manuals and pacing that resembles something human beings might film rather than primeval stone-giants. And, much of the acting is well done and suitable for the setting: Special props must go to Kirstie Alley and Bibi Besch, both of whom give absolute first-rate performances and the latter of whom perfectly embodies what James T. Kirk's wife would be-Someone every bit as commanding and driven as he is. But, when the smoke clears and Khan gets his final Epic Villain Monologue, the fact Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a B-movie that doesn't want to admit it's a B-movie and that Trekkers actually think this is an erudite and sophisticated cinematic masterpiece say it all for me. This movie is every bit as self-absorbed and pretentiously middlebrow as its predecessor, it just doesn't *look* like it anymore.

In many ways, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan really is the definitive Star Trek movie: It's a solidly executed translation of the blunt, ham-fisted moralizing and blatant militarism that characterized the early Original Series to film. Perhaps that's why this movie is as beloved as it is. And why I can't stand it.

Sensor Scan: Eraserhead

Here's another entry I know I'm likely out of my league on, but we're doing it because we really don't have a choice. David Lynch has been cited as a primary influence on an extremely significant creative figure for...not the period of Star Trek we're about to enter, but the one right after that, and continuing on to 2005. And since 1977's Eraserhead was Lynch's motion picture debut and widely considered to be the best demonstration of his perspective, we need to take a look at it for the future's sake.

Since context and influence is the name of the game today, I won't beat around the bush and come right out and say the person I'm talking about is Brannon Braga. Braga is, suffice to say, a controversial figure within Star Trek, and definitely a misunderstood one. Along with Rick Berman, he is almost universally blamed for killing the franchise off in 2005 and his reputation in Star Trek fandom tends to hover between “Public Enemy Number One” and “Satan”. This in spite of the fact Berman helped shepherd Star Trek through what is typically seen to be its Golden Age and Braga helmed what was, at least for a time, the consensus fan-favourite Star Trek series, Star Trek Voyager, and co-wrote the consensus second-best Star Trek movie, Star Trek First Contact. We'll deal with Berman another day, and, in regards to Braga, while it's true he has a number of fumbles and missteps to his name, and in some cases quite egregious ones, he's also someone whose positionality is frequently badly misread, and putting him into some kind of intellectual tradition will prove supremely helpful down the road.

Which brings us to David Lynch. What strikes me about Lynch is that he's a filmmaker who is on the one hand regarded for his surreal, disturbing and frequently confusing style of cinematography, yet is also someone who wears his influences very obviously on his sleeve and is quite upfront about his positionality. This, to me, renders reading his work somewhat trivial. There are two major aspects of Lynch's life that seem to crop up over and over again throughout his work: One, he has a major interest in dreams, and in particular the subconscious side of dreaming. However conversely, Lynch also seems to believe the only way to truly comprehend this is to be awake to engage with it, and Lynch seems to believe quite strongly in the ability of filmmaking to convey this kind of dreamscape, such as in this quote:

"Waking dreams are the ones that are important, the ones that come when I'm quietly sitting in a chair, letting my mind wander. When you sleep, you don't control your dream. I like to dive into a dream world that I've made or discovered; a world I choose ...”

So, it's not actual dreams he's interested in, but daydreams. This is actually a pretty significant distinction to make, because, at least judging from this, it means that Lynch is probably unfamiliar with the concept of lucid dreaming, because, a lucid dreamer actually can control her dreams when she's asleep. That's the whole point-To understand the environment of a dream and the interaction between the dreamer and the dream and use that to attain an enhanced state of consciousness. Right away, this means Lynch is primarily invested in the more material and psychological aspects of dreaming as opposed to what other truths those aspects can reveal to us, and this also means we're probably not going to get something like “Practice in Waking” from him.

Lynch and his biographers, most notably Greg Olson, have also pointed out on numerous occasions the jarring culture shock Lynch felt upon moving from his childhood home in isolated rural northern Montana to gang violence-riddled Philadelphia when he went to study painting and filmmaking at the Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts. This, along with Lynch's reoccurring fascination with industry (which is something else that his childhood upbringing makes somewhat easy to understand, coming from someone who's had similar experiences) handily explains the dingy, heavy industrial imagery that permeates Eraserhead. Another thing this explains is the confused, everyman nature of Henry Spencer himself: Everything in Eraserhead happens *to* him and the film, when you get right down to it, is essentially about his confused reactions to the grotesque and violent world he finds himself in. There's an almost childlike quality to Spencer; it feels very much as if he's a small boy in an adult's body not fully understanding the adult sensations and situations he's experiencing. Eraserhead is the Limbo of cinema.

This also segues into my main complaint against Eraserhead, which is, by virtue of it being this kind of story to begin with, and in spite of all the lurid imagery and symbolism it plays with elsewhere, it very much takes a masculine main character and makes him the centre of the narrative universe. This means it has some sexism baggage simply through inheritance, and that's before you look at the actual story. Eraserhead is seen to be fairly transparently autobiographical, as Lynch's daughter Jennifer was born with clubbed feet that needed corrective surgery. Considering Henry Spencer's child is a grotesque, deformed monster that nobody is even sure is really human and who he eventually kills...uh, I'll let you figure out on your own why that's maybe problematic. Then there's the fact that all the women in the movie are manifestations of the surreal nightmare world and are all some manner of crazy, unpredictable, neglectful and dangerous, and it kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth by the end of it.

Lynch also credits Franz Kafka as a primary influence, and it's with him where this intellectual tradition we're trying to build starts to become a bit clearer. Kafka, in spite of his similarly grotesque imagery, is fundamentally a writer who we can peg as a pioneer of existentialism, and this becomes the key as I see it. Existentialism is a word that's bandied around a lot, typically as a facile (and inaccurate) synonym for “philosophy”, or, to be more precise, “navel-gazing”. In reality, existentialism as a philosophy is somewhat similar to nihilism: It's a belief that the universe is a fundamentally illogical, absurd and meaningless place and a system of thought in place to help people deal with that. Like David Lynch, the general attitude is to react with utter confusion and bewilderment, though Søren Kierkegaard was of the belief that each individual granted their own meaning by living life “sincerely”. Where this would differ from nihilism is that while both philosophies grant to inherent absurdity of the universe, nihilism is basically an act of surrender, considering all of life to be hopeless, purposeless and valueless in the face of such a truth.

Lynch is rather easy to place into this tradition, but where this brings us back to Brannon Braga is that the later writer is a self-avowed passionate atheist, and has gone on record claiming Star Trek is a kind of atheist philosophy, religion or worldview (I'll once again leave it up to you all to guess how I feel about that statement). Either way, it's not too much of an intellectual leap from existentialism, especially of the individualist kind that Kierkegaard espoused, to the common atheist conception of hedonism that because there's nothing else then the chance accumulation of molecules that allows our lives, we ought to make the most of what little time we have to live our lives to the fullest and any real sense of values and meaning we ascribe to an inherently meaningless universe we do on an individual basis ourselves (though the extent to which different atheists hold this and to which extremes they take it varies from person to person). So in sum, what we would expect existentialist Star Trek inspired by David Lynch and channeled through Brannon Braga to look like would probably be some kind of psychological body horror dealing with a conception of the subconscious that's more materialistic than not, possibly featuring some kind of small child's (read small boy's) perspective very firmly rooted in secular humanism.

One other thing looking at Eraserhead in the context of Star Trek allows us to do is examine the role of B-movies to its history. This is important, because the next two major iterations of Star Trek we're going to be looking at belong very firmly to the B-movie tradition, and while it's best to save the full ramifications of this for the entries themselves, it's worth taking some time now to refresh ourselves a bit on what the genre tends to represent and what it allows filmmakers to do. Traditionally, B-movies would have significantly smaller budgets than films on the A side of the reel, and attracted a considerably smaller and more niche, yet also more loyal, following. Well, some of them did at any rate: The age of the drive-in double feature is a pretty big exception I can think of off the top of my head, but there are probably others-I'm not a film historian. This means that B-movies can be simultaneously far more experimental and far more shlocky: The genre is a safe haven for both the art house crowd and the Roger Corman set.

Eraserhead plays both sides of the B-movie coin. It's flagrantly auteur and experimental to be sure, but it's also, thanks to its cramped budget, amazingly cheap-looking. Not to mention the fact its gruesome and grotesque imagery and subject matter is something that was never going to attract a wide mainstream audience, putting it squarely in the same camp as the goriest slasher horror movies. This is a very similar line to the one Star Trek is soon going to start walking, between respectable avant-garde cinema that wants very hard to be taken seriously and completely gratuitous, over-the-top midnight movie shmaltz. And it's a duality that Star Trek never quite manages to escape, even during the period of its life when it's explicitly trying to do top-of-the-line science fiction cinema for television on a weekly basis. Most importantly, it's the reaction of the next generation of Trekkers to this fact that will be especially worth taking note of.

Sensor Scan: Alien

I actually went back and forth a bit on whether to cover Alien or not. It is certainly one of the most important movies from this period and a landmark in its genre: I'm not disputing that. The influence on Star Trek, at least of this particular film, is tenuous at best, but it's not like that's ever stopped me before and Alien does do many things right that subsequent science fiction works should emulate more frequently. The catch was never whether Alien was an important movie worthy of discussion, but whether or not it was an important science fiction movie, because in spite of its futuristic outer space setting, Alien is actually more properly thought of as a horror movie.

However, there's simply no getting out of talking about the sequel in 1986 and there's another movie related to this one I'd kind of like to talk about a bit once we reach the 1990s, so to LV-426 we go.

Like Star Wars before it, Alien is a movie about which I have extremely little to add to the discourse that's already out in the wild, and this time I don't have an especially meaningful personal story to relate to make up for my lack of erudition. Its setpieces are, of course, iconic, and all of its most memorable themes and scenes have been analysed and re-analysed countless times over. I'm reasonably confidant anyone reading this knows what this movie is and what it does, so there's not a ton of new material to build an essay out of here. But there is some. There are three primary things I'd like to discuss about Alien and its impact: The first is that, as horror movie expert James Rolfe points out, Alien is fundamentally a slasher movie set in outer space. More specifically, it's a throwback to the old haunted house movies that characterized the early 1930s, where a group of ill-prepared travellers show up somewhere they're not supposed to, come into contact with some kind of supernatural horror and get picked off one by one.

Alien's major innovation in this regard is that the slasher villain is an extraterrestrial and the haunted house is a crashed spaceship on a foreboding planet on the edge of outer space in the far future. But while the trappings are horror, the plot is very heavily indebted to B-movie science fiction of the 1950s, namely It! The Terror from Beyond Space, which Alien is, plot-wise, essentially the exact same movie as. This is both completely intentional and completely forgivable: Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon, who we'll be talking a great deal about in this entry, flat out said “I didn't steal from anyone. I stole from everyone.” in regards to his script for Alien. Forgivable firstly because that's so charmingly glib, but also because Alien is a case study in how actually unimportant plot is to crafting a successful and influential work of fiction. Alien is of course legendary for the way it conveys narrative through atmosphere and setting, and director Ridley Scott and designer H.R. Giger get a lot of credit in this regard, as well they should: Scott's direction gives the film a dark, claustrophobic feeling and Giger's designs for the ships, the landscape and the alien itself are famously nightmarish and twisted.

There's also a significant class aspect to the setting that's very much worth commenting on: The Nostromo is explicitly a floating refinery and ore processing unit, and its crew are miners and engineers in the employ of the massive Weyland-Yutani corporation. Alien isn't quite the first time such overtly working-class space travellers were depicted, but it is the first time they're given such explicit focus in a massively populist work of blockbuster Soda Pop Art, especially when they're so clearly meant to be the sympathetic heroes: Weyland-Yutani was ready to sacrifice the entire crew to bring back one of the aliens so they could use it as a doomsday weapon, and sent the android Ash in disguise as a science officer to ensure the plan went off without a hitch.

Treating its employees as expendable worker units, not to mention attempting to weaponize something as horrific as the alien, marks Weyland-Yutani as obviously evil, but the fact they didn't install any oversight apart from one android supervisor to oversee such a delicate operation marks them as pretty incompetent too. This means that, among everything else it does, Alien also manages to get a fairly comprehensive and damning critique of the corporatist mentality on actual movie screens in 1979, the dawn of the greed-and-misanthropy fueled Neoconservative revolution, which is a truly remarkable achievement that ought to be considered among the rest of the film's substantial legacy.

Alien is also known for its feminist motifs and examination of gender roles. Most people like to point to Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, the first motion picture action heroine, as the prime example of this, but she's actually a feint (in fact, she was supposed to be a man until a last-minute rewrite). Alien is, in fact, a sexual horror movie, and this informs everything it does in regard to gender. The idea is not as straightforwardly bizarre as it might seem: There is a shared malaise and uneasiness in regard to sexuality, a genuine fear of sex, in Western culture that Alien deliberately plays off of: As I mentioned in the context of “Mudd's Women”, because of the network of taboos associated with sexuality, sexual desire and nudity in Western societies, there's an accompanying sense of guilt and confusion that winds up stunting emotional growth and leads to many of the problems with attitudes toward sexuality we see today. And, perhaps fittingly, this is where the film's feminist themes come through as well. Not strictly from Ripley herself, though she's a part of it: No, the real feminism in Alien comes from a far more disturbing place: Its lurking, predatory sexual imagery.

Everyone comments on H.R. Giger's famous sexually-charged designs, such as the extremely phallic alien head, mouth and tail, Space Jockey seat and starship, as well as the facehugger, which resembles a cross between a penis and a vagina. Then there is, of course, “Mother” and the climactic chase through a darkened tunnel where a woman in torn clothing is being chased by a drooling, mindlessly violent penis monster. It actually goes even deeper than that, however: The interior of the Space Jockey ship has very vaginal-shaped openings and tunnels, and Scott shoots the scene where the crew inspects the cargo of alien eggs a very specific way. Crucially, however, Alien doesn't make its monster a stand-in for straightforward sexual desire, either to explore Western sexual fear or as an act of subversive rebellion (that's the next H.R. Giger sci-fi horror movie): Rather, it takes a specific cultural narrative about and attitude toward sexuality and depicts that as horrifying and monstrous.

And this is not Ridley Scott's doing. This is the work of Dan O'Bannon (with help from Giger), and this was in truth the entire impetus for Alien in the first place. And O'Bannon is not shy about this in the slightest-In a retrospective interview about the entire franchise, O'Bannon describes his goals for the original Alien like this:

"One thing that people are all disturbed about is sex...I said 'That's how I'm going to attack the audience; I'm going to attack them sexually. And I'm not going to go after the women in the audience, I'm going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs. Homosexual oral rape, birth. The thing lays its eggs down your throat, the whole number.'"

Much has been made about the underlying rape motifs in Alien and the overtures it makes to rape culture. And this is all perfectly valid: Alien is *absolutely* about rape culture. But Alien doesn't *subscribe* to rape culture, not in the slightest: Rather, it takes the rape culture of men and throws it back in their faces. It forcibly subjects men to the fear, shame and depersonalization they put women through on a daily basis. There's the famous part with Kane and the facehugger, but what's not picked up on as often is that this was totally telegraphed. That scene I mentioned above, where the crew goes to inspect the alien eggs for the first time? Kane is the character in that scene too. But the other side of that scene we're supposed to notice is that Kane was implicitly “raping” the Space Jockey ship. Kane makes his way through the vaginal doorways to the ship's “womb”, which is full of alien eggs, where he finds the one that promptly hatches. Kane is, in fact, a sperm cell, and his very presence is what fertilizes the alien egg and causes his undoing, and, by extension, that of the entire crew.


(I'm not the only one who's noticed this, by the way: Cracked even did a whole article on it, for which I am quite grateful.)

This is where Alien's haunted house trappings come back into play: Just as the hapless travellers are not supposed to be in the haunted house, the Weyland-Yutani corporation (and they are the ultimate villains here, not the crew they sent on this doomed mission: Blaming them would be akin to blaming spermatocites-Spermatocites too frightened to understand what's going on) is not supposed to be on LV-426. Its presence and overtures are flatly not welcome, and its persistence is directly responsible for unleashing the horror of the alien. Weyland-Yutani, the idealized masculine corporate body of late capitalism taken to the extreme, is a rapist in more than one sense: Its treatment of its workers and plans for the alien are evil, so when it all backfires thanks to its incompetence it's at once grotesque and cathartic to see its attempts at greed and domination brutally undone. But if Alien is an anti-corporatist screed, it's still primarily an incidental one, and it's important to remember the movie's real target is institutionalized rape culture in all its forms. And that means that anyone who has partaken in rape culture is equally as guilty and frightening as Weyland-Yutani and the extraterrestrial monster who stalks helpless victims through corridors.

This is where the film's true strength becomes clear: Its reappropriation of the rape culture narrative. Did you ever notice how, in spite of being unbelievably phallic, the alien must by definition be female (or at least partly female), because it lays eggs? This is the end result of Alien's systemic inversion of the rape culture narrative, and how O'Bannon was able to tap into every man's subconscious fear-A monster with the single-minded violent determination of a male rapist, but who's actually female. A female entity capable of dehumanizing and subjugating men with the same effortless power men have traditionally asserted over women. Alien, and its titular monster, is the collective nightmares and evil emotions of patriarchy given form and will and unleashed to terrorize the minds and bodies of the masculine oppressors to show them the true depths of their monstrousness...and to remind us how destructive such attitudes ultimately are.

It is impossible to overstate how important this is. And, despite Alien not actually being fully sci-fi, this has tremendous repercussions for any sci-fi work made in its wake. Science fiction as a genre, unique even among a lot of other kinds of fiction, is appallingly glib and capricious about rape. Any number of the B-movies Alien itself lifts from freely and happily engaged with it, another thing that makes referencing them such a genius movie on O'Bannon's part. Star Trek itself has been guilty of some shockingly inexcusable acts of rape culture already. Hell, we just came off of “The Child”, which, in spite of the strives it makes with its conception of Deltan sexuality, is still mired down in rape culture. And, in a post-Alien world, this is simply no longer acceptable. Well, I mean it never *was*, but now a cultural shift has occurred where this fact at least should be more widely understood and accepted. There's a target on the back of anyone who might dare to engage in rape apologia from now on.

It's long past time for our culture and cultural artefacts to grow the fuck up.

Sensor Scan: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

“'You're probably right, but that's not what the public is expecting — this is Hollywood and I want to give people something that's close to what they expect”

-Steven Spielberg to Jacques Vallée

It is named, of course, after J. Allen Hynek's system of classification. Hynek was an astronomer who worked with the United States Air Force as a scientific consultant into their studies into the UFO phenomenon, most famously Project Blue Book. Initially a staunch skeptic, Hynek's views began to change as he investigated more and more and more cases and it became less and less easy for him to discount the credibility of the witnesses he interviewed. After a falling out with the Air Force, Hynek spent the rest of his life investigating UFO cases on a personal basis, and is considering the pioneer of scientific research into UFOs. His famous scale is as follows, in order of increasing high strangeness:

• Nocturnal Lights: Sightings of unexplained lights in the night sky.
• Daylight Discs: Sightings of disc-shaped objects during the daytime.
• Radar-Visual: Confirmed radar hits.
• Close Encounters of the First Kind: A UFO observed less than 500 feet away.
• Close Encounters of the Second Kind: A UFO, sighted less than 500 feet away, with a seemingly discernible physical effect.
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind: A UFO sighted less than 500 feet away, accompanied by sightings of animated beings.

That Steven Spielberg named a movie after Hynek's scale (not to mention casting Hynek himself as an extra in the climactic meeting with the Mothership, along with UFOlogist Stanton Friedman, famous for his interest in the Roswell case) is well known for being the impetus for it becoming ingrained in pop consciousness. But it also reveals the extent to which Close Encounters of the Third Kind is genuinely indebted to a specific philosophy: Friedman's presence aside, this is not actually a movie about UFOlogy. Indeed, ironically in spite of his influence on the field, Hynek was not what we'd think of today as a UFOlogist and the work he did would likely be met with some suspicion, if not outright scorn, in modern UFOlogy.

No, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a movie about spiritualism, childhood, wonder, and the sacred music of the universe. And that makes it pretty much the single most important and powerful work we've looked at so far.

Steven Spielberg, as a creative figure, is often criticized for his fixation on a somewhat vapid notion of “childlike wonder”, and there is something to that. Spielberg has always privileged the child's perspective (or what he perceives a child's perspective to be) and does seem to feel there's something genuinely special about the way children see the world. And certainly it can be argued that starting with E.T. he begins to dutifully recite these themes as comfortable platitudes film after film. But, in regards to Close Encounters of the Third Kind in particular, two things really need to be established early on: One, though this is Spielberg's first post-Jaws work, he's still something of an up-and-coming filmmaker coasting on the latter film's success. At this point, he still very much has something to say and something to prove. And two, Spielberg's interest in childhood, at least in this case, does not come from a place of cloying sentimentality, but from his interest in exploring his own positionality and life experiences.

Steven Spielberg is someone who grew up knowing from a very young age that making movies is all he ever wanted to do. He's the success story every aspiring indie filmmaker dreams of someday being able to emulate. But what this also means is that Steven Spielberg is someone who has a deep, instinctual understanding of images, memories and the power they have over us. It was a confluence of both that compelled a young Spielberg to create the work that became Close Encounters of the Third Kind when he and his father watched a meteor shower together one night. Some of my earliest and most formative memories are images of the night sky, so I speak from experience when I say I can understand the impact this might have had on someone as creative and imaginative as him.

These images seemed to linger with Spielberg as he made his first commercial movie as a teenager called Firelight, which was essentially the first draft of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, incorporating almost all of the same shots and scenes with the exception of having the aliens be malevolent. Six years later, he wrote the short story Experiences, which tells of a group of teenagers who witness an unexplained light show in the sky one night at the local lovers' lane. It's with Experiences that Spielberg seems to begin to crystallize what these images mean to him: A group of ordinary, working-class people share something together that changes how they view themselves and their connection to the world by exposing them to the cosmic whole. This is not the pomp and grandeur of religious visions, at least as commonly depicted, this is an intimate moment of soft, gentle beauty that quietly brings them a newfound sense of personal understanding.

Throughout the 1970s, Spielberg developed an interest in the growing fascination with the UFO phenomenon, and initially attempted to pitch either a documentary or a docudrama about it, but was always rejected and, eventually, Jaws took precedence over anything else. It's this that informs Close Encounters of the Third Kind as much as anything else, because the 1970s were the true heyday of inexplicata and high strangeness. Although the modern UFO phenomenon as it is usually conceptualized dates to the 1940s and 1950s and thus is more properly seen as a contemporary of the Golden Age of science fiction, with which it ran parallel, it was the 1970s that saw the highest concentration of sightings that form the background of what the field of Forteanism is today.

In April of 1977, the same year Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released, multiple witnesses claimed to have sighted a pale creature with large eyes and limbs like tendrils haunting the town of Dover, Massachusetts in an event that has come to be known as “The Dover Demon Case” and that launched the cryptozoological and Fortean career of behavioural scientist Loren Coleman. Two years prior to that, John Keel published his landmark work of investigative journalism The Mothman Prophecies, which retold his firsthand experiences trying to report on a series of bizarre and unexplainable events in Point Pleasant, West Virginia leading up to the collapse of the Silver Bridge, including multiple sightings of glowing, shape-changing lights in the sky, a reported contactee case with a being known as Indrid Cold, the definitive, archetypical Men in Black account and, of course, the titular Mothman: A six-foot tall, black, winged humanoid resembling a headless torso with glowing red eyes where its chest should be and enormous black wings, thought by some to be a spiritual guardian come to warn of impending doom. Although all the Point Pleasant events happened in 1966 and 1967, Keel's book wasn't published until 1975, which is when the story became a mainstream phenomenon.

One year before the publication of The Mothman Prophecies, in 1973-4, there was a rash of unexplainable events throughout the state of Pennsylvania, including a plethora of UFO sightings that corresponded with sightings of Bigfoot-like creatures with green, glowing eyes who seemed to appear out of and disappear into thin air at will. Cases like these and other such events throughout the 1970s began to blur the lines between conventional UFOlogy, which had long held (and still does) to the “ETH” or “extraterrestrial hypothesis”, (which predictably, claimed that UFOs are spacecraft piloted by advanced visitors from other planets), an attitude which defined the so-called UFO era of the 1940s and 1950s, and Forteanism, a discipline which hadn't been seriously examined in a century.

Named for natural scientist and satirist Charles Fort and his concept of “Damned Data”, Forteanism simply means the scientific pursuit of anomalous and unexplained phenomenon that conventional science doesn't like to soil its hands with and a rejection of the claim made by anyone, even scientists, to posses Ultimate Knowledge. And Close Encounters of the Third Kind is very much a part of this zeitgeist: Far from being a throwback to Golden Age Hard SF, UFOlogy, Roswellianism and the ETH (despite the UFOs in the movie actually being extraterrestrials), Close Encounters of the Third Kind takes the tortured, wailing Fortean soul of the 1970s and sets it at ease by combining it with Steven Spielberg's rapturous sense of cosmic oneness and personal memory. There are three key figures here: One, of course, is Spielberg himself. Second is Richard Dreyfuss' character Roy Neary, and third is Jacques Vallée.

A former student of J. Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallée is a computer scientist and astronomer who helped create computer models of Mars for NASA and worked with the early ARPANET experiments, but who is likely most famous for his captivating and controversial theories about the UFO phenomenon. A self-described “heretic among heretics”, Vallée gained fame in the UFOlogy community for providing a credible scientific defense of the ETH...before then going on to completely reject it, or rather to reject its self-assured universal acceptance amongst UFOlogists as being too narrow (how very Fortean).

Drawing on Hynek, Vallée believes that we should be open to the possibility that what we know as the UFO phenomenon could actually be a series of different phenomenon, one of which could be a singular nonhuman intelligence that has existed alongside humanity that adapts different cultural forms, perhaps as part of a shared collective unconsciousness. Vallée was the first researcher to compare modern UFO reports to ancient stories about encounters with faery and travelling to Otherworlds, as described in his book Passport to Magonia, and to point out the UFO phenomenon has existed practically since the dawn of humanity (his most recent book, Wonders in the Sky, is a rather staggering work that chronicles every single UFO sighting of scientific merit *in history* up to the 1880s-I highly recommend it).

Steven Spielberg was provably influenced by Vallée's work when making Close Encounters of the Third Kind, because not only did he bring Vallée on as a consultant, he also explicitly based Doctor Lacombe, François Truffaut's character in the film, on Vallée himself. But while Vallée frequently openly wonders about his hypothesized nonhuman intelligence potentially manipulating humans for some unknown and unseen purpose, Spielberg's idealism, and, I'll say it, childlike sense of wonder, prevents him from being that cynical, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind has all of this in droves. The scene on the hill where the contactees watch the UFOs glide over the road before flying off in formation perfectly conveys a profound sense of cosmic wonder, beauty, love and togetherness, which is mirrored again when Jillian and Roy tearfully watch the aliens greet the humans in the film's final moments. At no point in the movie do the UFOs once feel frightening or threatening: Strange, mysterious and difficult to understand, yes, but never scary. When we see those lights in the sky at night, we feel nothing but an overwhelming sense of joy and kindness.

Spielberg's focus on children is easy to see throughout the film. Barry is the first person who is contacted, and he's the only main character who is never unnerved or confused by what's going on: He simply accepts and understands. The aliens themselves look remarkably childlike too, so it's quite easy to read this as Spielberg saying a child's perspective is the best way to engage with the world and attain higher states of enlightenment. And it's easy from this to launch into the typical criticism of Spielberg, that his focus on childlike wonder embraces naivete and sentimentality at the expense of adult experience. But to do this, we would have to ignore practically everything else about Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Unlike with E.T. and Elliot, Barry is manifestly not the protagonist here, Roy and Jillian are (actually, to be perfectly accurate, the protagonist is really probably Lacombe, though the film is really quite good at building an ensemble cast for what it is) and it's not his perspective we're supposed to be paying the most attention to.

Like Experiences before it, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is really about the intersection of the greater universe with everyday, working-class people. The mythic with the mundane. This is the most obvious with telephone repairman Roy and single mom Jillian, but none of the other people contacted come from particularly privileged backgrounds either, from the other blue-collar people Roy and Jillian meet on the Indiana-Ohio line to the farmers and nomads in Mongolia, India and the Sonora Desert. Even Lacombe, who is a scientist and spends most of the movie running around with the military, is just someone who wants to understand his place in the universe and is at frequent odds with his ostensible superiors (which mirrors the real life Jacques Vallée's distrust of the military establishment: It was his witnessing of the immediate wiping of record tapes capturing a retrograde satellite while working for the French Space Agency in 1955, a time when no space agency had the means to launch an artificial satellite, that inspired him to take up independent UFO investigation in the first place).

“The sun came out last night. And it sang to me.”

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is sometimes read to have Christian undertones (odd, given Spielberg's Jewish heritage), and there is the slightest hint of pop Christianity about it: The Ten Commandments comes on television at one point, and the aliens greeting Roy and escorting him into the Mothership looks a bit like angels escorting someone to heaven (Roy's arms are even outstretched, and he has been described as a Moses figure. Yes this, is from the Old Testament, but the iconography on display, especially The Ten Commandments, is obviously pop Christian).

A few things strike me about this reading: For one, Jacques Vallée would probably point out a lot of things described in the Bible could be read as UFO sightings. Secondly, it's silly to suggest Spielberg didn't know who his audience was in the 1970s United States (Hint: the major's comment when the army is trying to figure out how to evacuate the area around Devil's Tower about “every Christian soul” is a big clue). But what really disabuses me of any pop Christian reading of this movie is its most iconic aspects: Devil's Tower, and those five little notes.

It would be facile to claim that the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind simply communicate through music, or that music is their language. That's plainly not what's going on: Rather, it's music that both the aliens and the humans recognise as a *universal* form of expression. Recent neurological studies suggest that our reaction to music is largely on the subconscious level, literally resonating with parts of our brain that no other art form can reach. Music is something very primal, and this is once again something mystics have known for centuries. Shamans around the world use music to help enter trance and attain altered states of consciousness, and the Gnostic heretics believe in the concept of musica universalis, “The Music of the Spheres”, upon which the entire universe is built.

And again, Steven Spielberg understands this: Lacombe and his team travel to India to learn the famous five notes, where the aliens have quite clearly already been. To me, this is one of the most hauntingly powerful and moving scenes, not just in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but in all of cinema, as the entire population of an Indian spiritual sect has turned out to chant that indescribably lovely musical sequence at the sky in unison. Spielberg and his team gave us an unabashed Classic Hollywood moment in just about the last moment it was possible to do so. I hear, and feel that chant, and its powerful sense of understanding, resonate in my mind long after the credits to the actual movie roll.

(Which is not, of course, to discount the more famous synthesizer version at the end: A soft, poignant, gently yearning rendition that's quintessentially Long 1980s and an elegant masterpiece of electronica. I dare you not to cry along with Jillian when you first hear it.)

And furthermore, it provides us with all the material we need to redeem the heavy military focus elsewhere in the movie: It's simply not the case that the US military were the ones who made first contact, in spite of them getting the climactic scene: The aliens came and spoke to people all over the world, and, just as Jacques Vallée felt, each group of people interprets the experience through the lens of their own culture. Which is indeed what happened to Roy and Jillian too, and what Experiences was trying to get at: It's the same thing William Shatner was trying to tell us on The Transformed Man-Ultimately, we all have to look within ourselves to work out what enlightenment and the transcendent means to us individually and as communal beings. Imagine a scene as spectacular and wondrous as the Indiana/Ohio line or the climax at Devil's Tower playing out each night to different people all over the world: *That's* what's happening during the cuts in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

There is, of course, Devil's Tower itself. The special effects of the scene are of course magnificent: Douglas Trumbull did them, and he also similarly supervised the effects shots on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner, meaning he's pretty much responsible for every one of the most iconic and memorable images from my moviegoing career. I'm constantly awestruck by Trumbull's work: He's an unabashed master at perfectly conveying the most esoteric and indescribable visions and landscapes, which also makes me more than a little jealous of his raw talent. As someone who constantly struggles trying to convey their visions and imaginary worlds in an artistic form, there's not much I wouldn't give for an ounce of Trumbull's skill.

But the power of this moment extends beyond the scene itself: Loren Coleman, an expert in both behavioural patterns and Fortean inexplicata, often points out how places that have certain names (most frequently ones that in some way or another reference devils or faeries) tend to have a much higher concentration and rate of high strangeness than others. Like his frequent nods to the work of J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée, this shows that Steven Spielberg quite evidently did his homework properly. Of course the aliens would point Lacombe's research team to Devil's Tower. And of course, it would be a Tower, a structure that commands a sense of mystery, awe and wonder as it rises from the Earth like a tuning fork or maestro's baton, to tune into the eternal music of the universe.

If Close Encounters of the Third Kind is indebted to any part of Westernism, it's not pop Christianity, but rather a resurrection of esoteric gnosticism fused with ancient pagan tales of faery-lands and Otherworlds (also note how the people who return from the ship at the end have not aged since they were last seen, just as travellers to the Land of Eternal Summer do not age at the same rate as people in our world do). This is, in fact, a story about ordinary people who have a chance encounter leading them to fall into a whole new world, or rather, who gain the experience and knowledge to understand the harmony between worlds that unites us all together. It's a story about the rediscovery of mysticism, shamanism and enlightenment in the late-capitalism, modernist West, and its trying to tell us such things belong to all of humankind, but especially to the ordinary folks.

It is also true, however, that Close Encounters of the Third Kind is oftentimes more about the awe one feels at the dawn of such a journey, not the wisdom one learns from undertaking the journey itself. In many was this could be seen as a return to children's literature, and thus another example of Steven Spielberg's “childlike naivete”. But, to borrow from Shigeru Miyamoto, one not need be a child or revert to the mentality of child to understand wonder and joy at experiencing the Cosmic Whole: One merely needs to consciously understand some things that children may know innately and retain that throughout our lives. Always keep learning and growing, but never lose sight of what connects you to your fellow beings and the larger universe. And remember to smile about it, because that's the most joyous feeling of all. If Close Encounters of the Third Kind is children's literature, it's children's literature for adults, remaining as cosmically profound and moving as it is structurally simplistic. I think we need more things like that.

If that's hopelessly naive and childish, than guilty as charged.

I will submit Close Encounters of the Third Kind is not *quite* a perfect movie. There are things about it I've always had problems with, and even Steven Spielberg says there are things about it he would change, but I'm actually going to disagree with him on what. Spielberg says that he made the film before he became a father, and had he made it now he would never have let Roy board the Mothership and “abandon” Ronnie and his children. Well, with all due respect to Mr. Spielberg...he's wrong. Ever since becoming a parent, Spielberg has supplanted his themes of childlike wonder with an equally strong emphasis on the importance and responsibilities of fatherhood, the most egregious example I can think of is turning Captain Haddock into a father figure for Tintin in his Adventures of Tintin movie, which couldn't misread both characters any harder if it tried. I hate to say parenthood ruins people's sense of creativity and imagination...but in this case it kinda did.

The thing is, Ronnie and those kids are *not* Roy's family. That's actually the whole point of their entire role in the movie: Roy didn't “abandon” them, they left him because they couldn't understand him and Ronnie in particular simply could not accept that the world was not as neat, orderly and mundane as she wanted to think it was. Just like William Shatner said, enlightenment looks like raving lunacy to the unenlightened, or to those too scared to try for it. Props go to Teri Garr here, by the way, who plays Ronnie as essentially what Roberta Lincoln from “Assignment: Earth” would be like as a housewife, which is as demonstrative of her considerable acting chops as it is somewhat sad, considering two of her three most famous roles are harried, frenzied and ditzy blonde women (and speaking of the original Star Trek, I have to say I noticed and appreciated Roy's AMT USS Enterprise and Klingon Battlecruiser mobile). No, Roy's real family is Jillian and Barry, and *that's* where Close Encounters of the Third Kind actually drops the ball.

The scene at the end where Jillian explains to Roy that she's “not ready” and stays behind to pick up Barry while Roy leaves to join the aliens is basically inexplicable and inexcusable. The entire movie has been building to bringing Roy and Jillian together because of their shared experiences...and now it splits them up, at the most crucial scene in the whole film? To paraphrase Roy himself, why can't they all go together? Because there's a real sexism here, as it implies Jillian's entire motivation was to look after Barry (which it isn't, but that's the implication of that scene) and this means the movie ends on the really sour note that men can go on transcendent mystical adventures and so can children because of their unique perspective, but women can't because they're too domestic (I know there are women in the military unit that leaves at the end, but why wouldn't you have your actual heroine among them?). I can forgive Ronnie because being willfully blinkered is part of her character, but there's absolutely no reason or excuse for Jillian not to leave with Roy. In fact, it submarines the entire message of the rest of the film: She had the exact same kind of shamanic experience and is every bit as entitled to it as he is, and furthermore, they love each other goddammit.

(Incidentally, Teri Garr initially tried out for Jillian's role, which she really wanted and I actually would have liked to see).

There are a few other little things that are maybe less successful than others: Something could be made about the fact that there are fewer nonwhite, non-Western characters depicted as individuals when compared to the Westerners: Mongolia, Mexico and, as brilliant as the rest of the scene ultimately is, India, are all ultimately portrayed as somewhat homogenous and uniform, though there *are* nonwhite, non-Western characters too (most notably the African American air traffic controller in Indianapolis and a few officers in the climactic scene at Devil's Tower). Although that noted, I tend to feel Close Encounters of the Third Kind is much, much better than Hollywood's usual standards when it comes to this sort of thing and while these inconsistencies should be pointed out, they're nowhere near bad enough to damn the whole film.

Which is actually my takeaway from this movie in general: Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a profound, moving, inspirational work that should stir the soul of anyone who watches it. It may not be the most comprehensive overview of everything it tackles, but you'd be hard pressed to find a better introduction in the world of mass market Soda Pop Art, especially one that leaves you with more vivid images and more powerful emotions. Coming during Hollywood's last great stab at relevance, its a fitting reminder of the things the cinematic spectacle model could actually do right, and also arguably the last moment where it did do them right. There aren't many times I truly *get* Hollywood or will praise its overt embrace of spectacle, but as far as I'm concerned Close Encounters of the Third Kind is without question the pinnacle of what Hollywood can do.

It is, quite simply, the greatest live action science fiction movie of all time.

Sensor Scan: Star Wars

You didn't think I was really going to skip this one, did you?

But this is going to be a different sort of Star Wars retrospective then is perhaps the expected norm. Because I really find all the major things that can be said about this movie to be not only obvious, but commonly accepted knowledge. And ultimately because, one or two points notwithstanding, the legacy and impact of Star Wars are not actually especially important here in Star Trek land.

The major intersection between Star Wars and Star Trek I can think of is far more materialistic than inspirational: Paramount's decision to scrap Star Trek Phase II and greenlight Star Trek: The Motion Picture instead would seem to be the standard response, but that actually had far more to do with Close Encounters of the Third Kind then it did with Episode IV, as during the period between the two films everyone largely assumed Star Wars was a fluke and science fiction held no promise for regular, reliable success at the box office. The only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is the frequent description of Benjamin Sisko's story as a “Hero's Journey”, which to me is just as much about a fundamental failure to understand what Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was supposed to be about then it is about Star Wars cementing itself into the collective Western consciousness.

I am, of course, expected to talk about Joseph Campbell, the Myth of the Hero, how Star Wars draws on many myth and story archetypes from around the world and how that transformed not only the pop culture landscape, but how people respond to all stories at an instinctual level. It's had an incalculable impact on entire generations of writers and readers alike, and I'm sure you all are waiting for me to say something about it. The thing is, absolutely everybody who has ever written about Star Wars has talked about this: Star Wars is, in fact, one of the most overanalysed and overstudied works of fiction in history. I'll just let James Rolfe explain this in a far more heartfelt, poignant and personal way then I could ever manage, and then call in Phil Sandifer to make the case for the prosecution (in spite of me largely disagreeing completely with his opinion of Star Trek) and to point out the problems with the Campbellian approach. I have literally nothing more to contribute.

One observation I will make is that one of the reasons at least the original Star Wars had the impact it did was because it is very good at building a sense of a larger pre-exisiting world and history that we only get fleeting glimpses of. Everything from the famous opening text crawl, to Obi-Wan telling Luke about the mysterious and long-departed Jedi, to the Jawa merchants and the canteen on Tatooine (with its twin suns) to the Empire itself, is described in terms that make them seem equally wondrous, fantastical and mundane. Star Wars, right from the very beginning, seems to exist in a grand, rich world of its own, and the fact that the characters were all very well versed in what this world was and how it worked and we as the audience very much weren't was surely fascinating at the time, and made it all the easier to become drawn to Luke Skywalker and his Hero's Journey Myth Arc. And I will grant that Star Trek, in spite of its ridiculous predilection to pointless fanwank, is simply nowhere near as good at this: It's not reliably great at instilling that particular kind of wonder and imagination, even in the cases where it really, really needed to be (Bajor springs immediately to mind here).

But the thing is, for whatever reason, Star Wars' magic spell never worked on me. I can't really tell you why (well, I can to some extent, but I'll talk about that later), it just didn't. What interests me the most about Star Wars as a work is how patchwork a thing it really is. The iconic look and feel of the series is of course due to Ralph McQuarrie, as is well known by now, and most of the world-building elements come from Alan Dean Foster. Even the much talked-about toyetic nature of Star Wars comes from somebody else, namely Steven Spielberg. During the production of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg was approached by Kenner who wanted to use the film as the basis for a large-scale new line of toys. Spielberg pointed them in the direction of an up-and-coming filmmaker named George Lucas who was working on a new science fiction film that he felt might be more what Kenner was looking for.

Most tellingly, though George Lucas gets a bunch of credit for taking the Myth of the Hero stuff and translating it into the context of a science fiction blockbuster, neither he nor anyone else associated with it seemed to talk that angle up much until The Empire Strikes Back, which was also suspiciously around the time Joseph Campbell was starting to get really popular as a fixture on PBS and when discourse about Star Wars was starting to reach critical mass. Furthermore, in spite of what literally everyone says, as far as I understand it The Empire Strikes Back was never even planned, nor, for that matter, was Return of the Jedi or any other Star Wars work: The original film was a total gamble with no real expectations, and it retroactively became the first part of an epic when George Lucas realised how successful it had been (I don't have a specific link here, but search Cracked.com for “Star Wars”: They do a surprising amount of historical mythbusting in this regard).

So what we have here is, like all examples of large-scale Soda Pop Art, a loose, dissociated collection of things that have been given the appearance of being a singular, monolithic, untouchable artistic statement in the wake of, and to capitalize on, its unexpected popular and critical success. Indeed, I'm not even convinced that Star Wars' resurrection of the pulp style of science fiction was in any way unique apart from being the first real time this was done on a blockbuster, hyper-mainstream scale. Certainly not when compared to the fusion of Hard SF, Pulp sci-fi and soap opera that characterizes, say, Star Trek. Which is, incidentally, what this blog is about.

Looking at Star Wars from a Star Trek perspective (or, at least mine) is a confusing experience. There was a period in my life where it seemed the most obvious thing in the world to view Star Wars and the Star Wars faithful (who I once derisively nicknamed “Warries” as payback for “Trekkie”-It was very, very long ago and I wasn't any cleverer at that time then I am now) as The Enemy. This was exacerbated by the fact that the Star Wars fans I did know were extremely loyal and combative, and took every opportunity to attack me for my love of Star Trek and indifference to their franchise. This became especially painful for me when Star Wars began to take over *massively* in the 1990s on the back of the home video and theatrical re-releases, Special Editions and prequel films while Star Trek faltered and stumbled through that same era, beginning its long, slow slide towards irrelevance the moment Star Trek: The Next Generation signed off. Nor did it help when, in response to this, the Hasbro Star Wars toy line absolutely exploded, relegating my beloved Playmates Star Trek line to extinction, ironically doing so on the back of Playmates' reinvigoration of the toy industry.

(This is a longstanding source of enmity between me and Star Wars: I explicitly blame it for preventing me from being able to find figures of Tasha Yar, Ro Laren and the *entire* Star Trek: Deep Space Nine line for over a *decade*. Similarly, I'm also less than thrilled that the “official” Star Wars “holiday” on May 4 each and every year completely overshadows the actual history of the day, which is, among other things, Alice Liddel's birthday and the day when Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is said to take place, as well as a major date in revolutionary politics. Sometimes it feels like this franchise is deliberately harassing me.)

Indeed, this seemed to be the accepted thing for at least a time. Star Wars fans and Star Trek fans were not seen in polite company together, and there was no love lost between the two camps. One of the foundational pop culture debates has always been: “Star Wars or Star Trek?”, to the point it's even a question on OKCupid. But then there came a period where there started to be more of a bleedover between the two fandoms, and I'm not sure where to draw the line here. I want to say it wasn't any time in my lifetime: Maybe it was with The Phantom Menace, as that was the first Star Wars in living memory of the generation for whom fandoms stopped being seen as a sparring, factionalized things and became things you collected: The Tumblr generation talks at great length about all the different fandoms they're a part of where when I was younger you only tended to have one (the obvious thing that changed was, of course, the Internet. No, I'm not doing a Sensor Scan on that).

But then there does seem to be the belief among some people that the people who like Star Trek should like Star Wars as well, and I'm not sure why, as they're not even remotely the same thing: While both Star Wars and Star Trek can loosely be called sci-fi-fantasy, Star Wars owes far, far more to the epic sword-and-socery adventure serials and dimestore novels then Star Trek, which is more its own weird little thing. If you could sum up Star Trek's brand of sci-fi fantasy, you might say it's about exploring the territory between the mythic and the mundane and what it means to be utopian. Star Trek isn't always as true to its underlying philosophy as it really needs to be, but Star Wars doesn't even have an underlying philosophy, except for some superficial motifs haphazardly lifted from Eastern mysticism and United States-ized to make them palatable to a popcorn blockbuster audience.

(There is an argument to be made here that it's specifically this slapdash syncretism and hyper-mainstream status that allows Star Wars to be many people's first interaction with the concept of comparative mythology, and I grant that: Star Wars isn't particularly good at this, but it's likely the first exposure many people are going to have with the idea.)

I want to say this shift in attitude has to do with Nerd Culture, who stereotypically enjoy anything that's remotely science-y (it doesn't have to be actual science and very frequently isn't: The key is that it's science-y and thus has a whiff of futurism, technofetishism and elitism about it), but then again one of the biggest joint Star Trek and Star Wars fans I can think of is VFX artist and professional MythBuster Grant Imahara, who I wouldn't call part of Nerd Culture. Imahara is more what I'd refer to as a Maker Hobbyist and has a fascination with tinkering, the process of making movies and practical effects, which is not something the average Nerd cares about.

(The reverse is also true: The Makers I know who aren't interested in the filmmaking side of things couldn't care less about Nerd Culture stuff.)

Indeed, Imahara, as well as his colleagues at M5, did a lot of the effects for the Star Wars prequels themselves. But Imahara also talks about how much he was inspired by “Arena” and watching Captain Kirk build the tree cannon as a kid (not to mention the fact he's as of this writing the current Mr. Sulu, which means I probably ought to talk about him more often), which is a statement that would have been considered blasphemous when I was younger. No, M5 may be heroes to a certain sect of Nerds, but they're not Nerds themselves.

But I've run into this attitude and overlap elsewhere too. As a matter of fact, it's the primary reason I have a history with Star Wars to talk about in the first place. My parents strongly pushed me to watch the original Star Wars trilogy after my love of Star Trek started to blossom, being of the belief that because I clearly liked science fiction now and Star Wars was science fiction too, I'd like it just as much as Star Trek. This...did not go over well with me at first and it took some arm twisting to get me to actually sit down with these movies. Even then I knew Star Trek and Star Wars were never supposed to meet, and watching the original trilogy felt a little bit like betrayal. Though I will say I didn't *hate* the first movie when I finally saw it, and I remember actually being impressed with a few things. Naturally, Princess Leia was my favourite, and I also liked the design of the X-Wings and the Death Star, as well as the trench run bit from the end. I liked the other two movies significantly less (though I did dig the Luke vs. Vader tightrope battle over the pit scene in Empire Strikes Back), to the point I actively disliked Return of the Jedi, and I'm still not a fan of either it or Empire to this day.

But in spite of this, and even though I quite enjoyed the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron video games from the late-90s and early-2000s, Star Wars simply did not have the profound, life-changing impact on me that it seems to have had on everyone else (Well, everyone save Phil Sandifer, obviously). People who I'd otherwise consider kindred spirits and fellow travellers (like James Rolfe above) don't hesitate to share their breathless love of the Star Wars Saga, and it always leaves me feeling left out. Even Michael Kirkbride, one of the lead designers on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and someone who has become a massively inspirational figure for me, was profoundly shaped by Star Wars, so much so that in 1999 he and fellow Elder Scrolls luminaries Kurt Kuhlmann and Ken Rolston pitched a television show set in the Star Wars universe called Star Wars: Rebellion, which would have chronicled the rise of the Rebel Alliance, and, knowing who was involved, would likely have been a brilliant, subversive and transformative take on the franchise and probably the single greatest science fiction show of its time. It bothers me that I can't see the same things people like them see in Star Wars.

(Though now that I've said that I wonder if one of these things might in fact be the same thing I see in Star Trek: The fact it's a contemporary myth structure drawing from a wide pool of cultural themes and motifs that has grown to such a size it belongs to everyone. It's telling to me that at least Kirkbride's background is in comparative religion: He and his co-writers are the only people apart from Aleister Crowley and Alan Moore I've ever read who can do syncretism without lapsing into cultural appropriation. In fact, given that and where my interests for future projects lie, this means I may have to actually cover Star Wars: Rebellion in depth at some point.)

This is actually the real legacy of Star Wars for me: It left me with a profound feeling of loneliness and isolation, because it was so obviously a shared cultural signifier that I was denied participating in because I simply didn't get it. Everyone else I know seems to have the exact same story and experience with the original Star Wars Trilogy...except me. Everyone shares their fond, vivid memories of having their lives changed, eyes opened and worldviews shifted upon viewing these films at an early age...except me. And, as the Hasbro Star Wars line snowballed to greater and greater sizes, displacing everything else and pushing the Playmates Star Trek line I loved so much and so deeply further and further to the margins of each and every toy store I visited, my lack of understanding turned to active anger and resentment, as it seemed to be a metaphor in plastic for the direction science fiction fandom was starting to go in the 1990s. And it was a direction that had no place for me anymore.

Myriad Universes: The Wristwatch Plantation

The Wristwatch Plantation

My initial plan here was to follow up both iterations of Star Trek Phase II with a look at the Star Trek comic strip that ran in US newspapers from 1979 to 1983. There are a number of reasons why I wanted to do this, chief among them was that, given its time frame, it would have given me a very nice “third season” of Phase II, putting that show on about equal footing with the Original Series in terms of episode count (or at least episodes *worth* counting) and neatly providing a gap between the first Star Trek movie (which wasn't actually a movie) and the next two (which were).

Also though, I was really intrigued to learn that, for the majority of its existence, the strip was handled by none other than Sharman DiVono, a television and animation veteran who, along with creator Mark Evanier, was the head writer and co-showrunner of Garfield and Friends, which happens to be one of my favourite television shows of all time. I was genuinely excited by the prospect of a Star Trek overseen by DiVono, and I fully expected to see and be delighted by how she'd apply her wry postmodern humour to the Star Trek universe. But, once I started to prep for this section by reading a few of the strip's story arcs, I quickly discovered they weren't actually anything to write home about. They all seemed like quite bog standard and uninspiring pulp action serials set in the Star Trek setting, nothing I had come to expect of DiVono's work on Garfield was present and, most worrying of all, the first two arcs were beginning to give “Savage Syndrome” a run for its money in terms of offensive depictions of teleological evolution and “primitivism”. Maybe I can blame that on DiVono's co-writers.

So, because I was nearing the end of my patience as it was (in hindsight, it was a bad sign that I couldn't come up with anything terribly interesting to say about the actually quite solid and enjoyable “World Enough and Time” and “Enemy: Starfleet”, I decided to scrap that plan, and none of you *really* want to read about mediocre tie-in comics for another month any more than I want to write about them. But, there was one arc I knew I had to cover regardless of what I did with the rest of the strip, because between January and July, 1982, DiVono teamed up with Larry Niven to give us an epic, sprawling return to the Kzinti and the Known Universe with “The Wristwatch Plantation”. Perhaps predictably, judging by how “The Slaver Weapon” turned out, this is just as much of a pulp serial as the rest of the strip's arcs were, but this is a good one.

But before I leap into the story, I want to take a little time to talk about the strip itself, as this is probably the only time we're going to engage with it and there are several noteworthy things about it apart from DiVono herself and the rather changeable quality: First of all, I was very, very impressed with Ron Harris' artwork: Star Trek looks extremely good for a newspaper comic strip, with detailed. accurate representations of the Phase II-era Enterprise, its crew, and memorable, evocative spacescapes and backgrounds. There are times this strip looks just as good as the best full-fledged Star Trek comic books and graphic novels, especially from this period. I know the comic pages are not what they used to be, but I have to admit being genuinely surprised with how nice this looks. Also, while I decried the pulpy structure earlier, I know a lot of that comes from my own dislike of the genre: Most of these stories are totally serviceable (the earliest ones notwithstanding), they're just very, very much of a different time and style of storytelling, although I will say by 1982 this kind of pulp sci-fi was definitely old hat.

And “The Wristwatch Plantation” is a genuinely enjoyable serial: Reading it is almost nostalgic in a sense-There's a kind of quaintness about it that's hard not to like. Upon reflection, Star Trek was always going to be well suited to this kind of structure: It was, of course, originally inspired at least in part by old film serials, which is part of why “The Cage” felt so dated even in 1964. But here DiVono and Niven outdo even Gene Roddenberry in terms of pulpiness and everything just *works*: Newspaper strips lend themselves well to serialization anyway, and having Admiral Kirk do his Captain's Log spiel at the top of every strip to recap the story so far just adds to the tone and is actually really effective-Not only is it a good idea in principle, it's also a good idea done well, and I don't always get to say that about Star Trek, even (hell, especially) on television.

(Not only that, but the interjection of excerpts from the “Starfleet Life Sciences Reference Manual” and “Starfleet Spaceflight Manual” in the Sunday strips to provide tiny little bits of world-building is positively delightful.)

As is befitting its genre, “The Wristwatch Plantation” plays out very, very serialized: The plot starts off at one thing and then grows denser and more complex as more and more new elements are introduced until there are a plethora of different plots and stories all happening at once until DiVono and Niven collapse everything together into a resolution that ties it all up at the end. The plot is not confusing to follow, everything makes sense and fits together, but it is convoluted enough to render summarising it pointless: It really is easier to read it yourself, which I do recommend (or you could skim Memory Alpha's *extensive* play-by-play here), but the basics are these: The Enterprise is escorting a delegation of Bebebebeque scientists and engineers to investigate a colony they established on the planet Mimit fifteen years ago, but that hasn't been heard from since.

The Bebebebeque, or Beeks, as they're colloquially known (and that I'll refer to them as for the rest of this piece because come on) are a species of small insect-like beings renowned for their ability to miniaturize complex machinery who buzz around on little warp sleds. Despite this being the most adorable thing ever, this freaks out a lot of the crew, who aren't used to dealing with such small creatures, while the Beeks are likewise unnerved by working with giant humans. Onboard is a xenoanthropologist (or “alienologist” as this story refers to him as) named Mernat, who is simultaneously monitoring Starfleet-Beek relations and clandestinely inspecting the Enterprise for illegal drugs, as he suspects there are crewmembers aboard heading a major drug smuggling ring involving the narcotic Theep, which causes his people, the Ferreth, to go into a blind rage upon exposure. While that's happening, a Kzinti warship modestly named the Giant Killer appears looking to pick a fight with the Enterprise. The Giant Killer is armed with a whole bunch of very scary and very illegal weaponry that the crew is anxious to test out on their old enemies in the Federation.

(Worthy of mention here is that like the Kzinti, the Beeks are also the original creations of Larry Niven, though they originate from his Draco Tavern series instead of the Known Universe the Kzinti come from, so this is just another example of Niven integrating his universe even further with that of Star Trek.)

Naturally, of the most interest to me was what insight, if any, this story can give about the Earth/Kzin Wars. And, while “The Wristwatch Plantation” lacks the punch that “The Slaver Weapon” packed simply by virtue of being the first to examine the issue, it also lacks the unpalatable cynicism and militarism that in my opinion characterizes Star Fleet Battles: The Kzinti aren't much more than two-dimensional bloodthirsty tyrants with an axe to grind against the Federation, but then again they were probably never going to be anything else: The key is always how the Federation itself is depicted in this kind of story, and while it isn't bad here it doesn't quite go as far as I would have liked it to. Tellingly, and suspiciously, Kirk mentions a “Starfleet Colonial Operations” a number of times throughout the story, and we even get an intel briefing from them in one of the Sunday strips. As far as I'm concerned, the mere existence of anything called a “Department of Colonial Operations” is enough to justify quite a large amount of the disdain, resentment and volatility the Kzinti might happen to throw the Federation's way.

More interestingly, this is the first Star Trek story I think I've seen to portray the Enterprise crew itself in a less than unambiguously positive light. While all our regular characters remain noble and sympathetic (as are, actually, the Beeks), which is as it should be, there's a lot going on outside of their control that's less than savoury. There's the drug smuggling ring for one, which I actually had a problem with: The smugglers are little more than a second set of antagonists and are just portrayed as generically greedy, slimy and unscrupulous: You'll not be getting a nuanced and even-handed look at the societal realities that lead to drug trades (or the drugs themselves, for that matter) here, that's for sure. It's borderline excusable as by the story's internal narrative logic this is clearly meant to be telegraphed as an example of “Starfleet Officers Doing Bad Things” and nothing else is intended to be implied by it so it kinda works, but I'm still less than satisfied with it.

A better example is the reaction of the non-regular crew to the Beeks, which seems to provoke in them a kind of frazzled space madness with very obvious xenophobic overtones that McCoy dubs (ugh) Bebebebequephobia. One of the most memorable scenes in the story occurs when a huge brawl breaks out in the rec room after one officer declares with disgust that he “...doesn't want to sit with 'bugs'”, leading another to indignantly defend the Beeks, who are his friends. The brawl soon takes over the whole rec room to the point not even the senior staff can put a stop to it because no-one can even hear them. It would be considered a bold move *today* to portray Starfleet officers so belligerent, bigoted and intolerant, let alone doing this with crewmembers of the *Enterprise* in *1982*. If such reactionary individuals can make it onboard the most prestigious and beloved ship in the fleet, it really starts to make the Federation's lovely rhetoric about idealism, equality and tolerance look a bit hollow and hypocritical, which is extremely fitting for such a Western institution. Frankly, if I were in the Kzinti's place, I'd be pissed about now too.

(This also leads to a genuinely funny bit where Kirk stares, weary, exasperated and knowing, out the actual comic panel at us while the brawlers, having calmed down, try to explain themselves. The speech bubbles catch only meaningless, out-of-context fragments and everyone is trying to cover their asses and talk at once. I guess this is more similar to Garfield than I initially gave it credit for.)

What I've taken away from Larry Niven's interaction with Star Trek is that, under him, we see a universe that's not de facto idealistic; in fact it may well be precisely the opposite of that, with big empires flexing their muscles and posturing to each other at the expense of ordinary people (the Kziniti's super-secret super-weapon in this story is *actually called* the Hamstringer) who get caught in the machinery. And yet idealistic Star Trek remains because people like Admiral Kirk and his crew exist: Good people who strive for, if not perfection, constant self-improvement in an imperfect world. Utopia exists then because people want it to exist and strive to make it so by staying true to themselves and their ideals. And I guess I just can't figure out why it's taken this long and a medium and writing team not even associated with televised Star Trek to come right out and state this very simple, very Star Trek truth.