"Many such journeys are possible. Let me be your gateway": Come What May

There's something about Star Trek that inspires people, in spite of itself.

2004 marked the beginning of a period of tender, heartfelt introspection for Star Trek fans, perhaps unmatched at any other point in the history of the franchise. The mere fact that Star Trek Phase II (at this point still operating under its original name of Star Trek: New Voyages) exists here while Enterprise was in the middle of its third season and the “Save Enterprise!” campaign in full swing is probably a decent indication of the faith anyone had in the continued longevity of the sixth Star Trek series, or indeed Star Trek itself, at least as an extant and relevant mass media presence. Perhaps it was this zeitgeist, and the accompanying urge to “go back to where it all began” in an attempt to understand things, that was what motivated James Cawley and Jack Marshall to make their own Star Trek TV show.

But 2004 is also an interesting transitory period for independent TV shows. This is still before the advent of YouTube made easy and accessible Internet video hosting and sharing a major cornerstone of what's come to be (somewhat inaccurately) called “Web 2.0”. One could imagine that had Star Trek Phase II come along just a few years later it would have resembled much more closely the recent Star Trek Continues: Kickstarter-funded and then given a major sponsor such that it attracted the much sought-after “buzz” and had an actual budget. But Star Trek Phase II didn't have the luxury of any of that in 2004, being entirely funded out-of-pocket by Cawley's career as an Elvis impersonator (which comes through delightfully in Cawley's portrayal of Kirk in “Come What May”: Not only does his hairstyle look like an Elvis wig, he has appealing sense of artifice) and having to build its own web presence and following entirely from scratch. There's a sense that this show is in some ways a throwback (but not a bad one) to a time when independent filmmakers could only rely on their own resources, ingenuity and tenacity, trying desperately to convey their visions in somebody's backyard with a home VHS camera.

(Not that Star Trek Phase II looks cheap by any stretch of the imagination: The fact the creative team managed to convincingly recreate the sets from the Original Series is staggering, and the CGI effects shots, while obviously comparatively crude, look more dynamic and interesting than the ones on the actual show did.)

Star Trek Phase II is, predictably, in part a revival of the abandoned show from 1978 that Paramount had initially hoped would bring Star Trek back to TV and serve as the flagship programme for their new network. The name is slightly misleading, however, as it's also pegged as the fifth year of the five-year mission depicted in the Original Series and Animated Series and is comprised of mostly original work. The show has the rather ambitious aim of linking together the various and disparate stories and timelines of the Original Series, Animated Series, Phase II and Original Series movies into something resembling coherence. But lest you think this is pure fanwank, the aim of Star Trek Phase II is really quite simple: To be pure, honest Star Trek for the 21st century while paying tribute to the legacy and influence of the franchise that spawned it. This show is clearly the product of genuine love and admiration and, if “Come What May” is any indication, it honours Star Trek and reminds us what it's really all about.

Set somewhere between “Turnabout Intruder” and “More Troubles, More Tribbles”, “Come What May” sees the Enterprise beginning the final leg of its first five-year mission under James T. Kirk by investigating a series of mysterious attacks on a Federation colony. Upon arrival, the crew is met by the testy director Cal Strickland (played with delightful flippancy by Larry Nemecek) who informs them the situation is already under control thanks to the benevolent intervention of a being known as Onabi. Suspicious, Kirk decides to hang around the sector in case the intruder comes back, so he can ascertain the potential threat it might pose and see Onabi's handiwork for himself. Kirk gets his wish when a massive triangular starship suddenly appears out of nowhere and starts an assault on the colony and the Enterprise before another ship appears in a flash of light, causing the first ship to just as quickly vanish.

Locking onto the smaller ship, Scotty beams aboard its two pilots, an energy being who calls itself Ohn and a quirky, eccentric and apparently godlike young woman: Onabi. Onabi displays some inexplicable, and to Kirk unsettling, behaviour, such as stepping out of the transporter beam before materializing, walking right through a security force field and teleporting all over the transporter room. Ohn is no less distressing, causing various crewmembers to collapse upon contact with it, overwhelming them with strange visions. Suspecting Onabi of somehow being behind the attack through a form of thought projection, Kirk throws her in the brig and places Ohn under constant security surveillance before regrouping with the rest of the crew to get a handle on what they're up against. But, when the intruder returns and the Enterprise finds itself hopelessly outmatched, Kirk may have to put his trust in Onabi, who is suddenly the only person capable of saving the ship, the colony, and the galaxy.

There is an instinctual compulsion here, especially with a show that has this kind of pedigree, to roll your eyes and complain about fanwank, and there *is* quite a lot of that: The whole first act is essentially made up solely of extremely unsubtle nods to iconic Original Series quotes and episodes, the intruder is very obviously the Borg even though they're not referred to as such and Onabi displays several traits reminiscent of previous godlike beings and Kirk girls-of-the-week. But doing so would overlook the heart of “Come What May”: This is a story consciously invested in the history of Star Trek in all its forms, and is trying to distill this into a statement about what makes Star Trek worthwhile and important. The first clue is that the invocation of the Borg is not just done because they're scary and epic and Trekkers obsess over them: Rather, their presence is actually carefully considered and integral to the point “Come What May” is trying to make.

Curiously, the main plot of “Come What May” in many ways feels like a truncated reiteration of the way the Borg were introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation: Tension builds with the discovery of a series of mysterious and inexplicable attacks on Federation colonies leading to an eventual confrontation with a laughably overpowered and unstoppable force for which the Enterprise is no match and the captain has to rely on a godlike being to bail him and his crew out before they're wiped off the face of the galaxy. An enemy from the future invades and deforms the present. There are significant differences, though, and these prove crucial: In “Q, Who?” Q flings the Enterprise into the Delta Quadrant out of spite to teach Picard a lesson about hubris. Here though, Kirk has to learn to trust Onabi, who always maintained from the beginning she was on his side. This then becomes a more clear-cut Star Trek story, as it's about two parties learning to communicate and understand each other.

(This does, however, also result in what I find to be the episode's one sour note: In the scene that most clearly invokes and subverts “Q, Who?” Onabi confronts Kirk, pleading him to let her help the Enterprise, because she's travelled more and seen all the horrors that lurk in the galaxy, name-checking the Breen, the Cardassians and the Dominion, and by implication and association putting them in the same category as the Borg. In other words, the unknown is scary, threatening and full of danger and all non-Federation cultures are monolithic, monstrous and evil.)

That's not to say “Come What May” lacks metacommentary. Indeed, this is actually the more important aspect of what it's trying to get at. Ohn's visions, for one, are of commingled timelines: For each time someone comes in contact with him, the cast acts out recreations of iconic scenes from “Mirror, Mirror”, the first seven Star Trek films, an original scene where Christine Chapel marries Spock and even, apparently, William Shatner's novel “The Return”. Kirk even flat-out states that the Borg are likely an enemy from the Federation's future. But when Kirk and Spock ask Onabi if these visions are of the future, she quickly dismisses that theory, saying “the future hasn't been written yet”. In other words, what Onabi and Ohn are showing the crew are visions of potential futures: Different paths the story could take, but that aren't set in stone. The key moment comes in the final showdown with the Borg, where Onabi tells Kirk that what he says next “...will either doom your ship, or save it”. History is neither predestined nor teleological, but made in the present by people doing what they feel to be right each and every moment.

This is why the episode is entitled “Come What May”, and is a perfect point for a show like Star Trek Phase II to be making, especially in 2004, with the future of Enterprise and the larger Star Trek media franchise uncertain: No matter what happens to Enterprise, or the rest of “official” Star Trek, what Star Trek has meant to people will continue to live on, because people will continue to tell Star Trek stories as long as its characters and ideals continue to resonate with them. And, as a fan series with a dubious and changeable relationship with canon in the first place, it's the position of Star Trek Phase II to remind us that linear chronologies are nowhere near as important as the heart and soul of storytelling. And this is where Onabi's true power comes through as well, because she's not only a godlike presence from out of time, she's also a Star Trek fan.

From her first appearance, Onabi gives every sense of being someone who is simply ecstatic to be on the Starship Enterprise acting in a Star Trek episode: She jumps the gun in the transporter room, apologising for “not waiting”, because she's just so excited to get aboard the ship. She talks about how much fun it is to “play along” with the crew when Chekov puts up the security force field and is even jazzed to visit the brig. Even when she gets her stock “I can be any woman for you, captain” seduction scene in Kirk's quarters, the sense is that she's doing this because she's expected to, as she's having a gleeful romp through Star Trek cliches. All of this is duly conveyed through Andrea Ajemian's charmingly pixiesh portrayal, through which she turns Onabi into essentially an omnipotent fangirl. Hell, she's even arguably riffing on the Mary Sue archetype, as she's a gregarious, benevolent, beautiful, hyper-competent goddess who comes in to save the crew from a situation they can't handle themselves.

But this is actually precisely the sort of thing Onabi should be doing. As a true fan, she loves Star Trek, but she also understands it remains seriously flawed and problematic. And, like any good fanfic writer, she wants to help-She wants to make Star Trek greater than itself as an act of love to demonstrate how much it's meant to her. So, she harnesses the power of the maybes and could-have-beens that orbit her and reshapes Star Trek's future by reinstating its abandoned past. Star Trek lives on no matter which way the future goes thanks to the love of fans like Onabi and the people who make things like Star Trek Phase II.

This is evident in the episode's definitive scene. While unwinding in Kirk's quarters, Spock notices a framed copy of “Amazing Grace” and gets confused:

“"Captain, I do not recall previously viewing this representation.”

“What, Spock?”

“The musical composition you have on display.”

“Oh, you mean the hymn. That belonged to my brother Sam. My mother gave it to he and Aurelan when they left for Deneva. What is it, Spock?”

“I do not understand the words. 'Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me...'”

“'...I once was lost, but now I'm found. Was blind but now I see'. Spock, it's about us. It's about what we're supposedly doing out here. Extending compassion to those in need. Saving the lost. Helping those people who can't help themselves and asking nothing in return.”

“But the song would seem to indicate a deity. Were it not the religious conflicts of your world that led your species to the brink of destruction?”

“Yes. But it's the ideal that survives. Then the hymn is still relevant.”

“I shall endeavor to study it further."

Kirk reconceptualises an artefact frequently mobilised by the forces of pop Christianity to speak for the ideals he sees in the work the Enterprise does. While Jeffery Quinn's Spock at times feels more like the youthful and curious Data or the elegant and aloof T'Pol rather than the closeted and conflicted Spock, the scene still works as it plays out across generations of Star Trek history to hit at truth. Similarly, though James Cawley's Kirk doesn't seem much like the gruff military commander Gene Roddenberry wrote him as or the drag action hero William Shatner played him as, he does come across as a wise, kindly traveller and a good friend and teacher (especially in the scenes where he helps newly-minted officer Janice Rand through the hoops of command). In some ways he reminds me more of an idealized, yet much younger, Jean-Luc Picard or Katherine Janeway, but it still seems appropriate as Kirk was the template from which every other Star Trek captain was originally conceived.

And, just like canon, Star Trek Phase II need not be beholden to the original portrayal of these characters. This is its own show with its own take on and vision of what Star Trek was, is and should be. That Star Trek allows for this is its true strength, and at a time when most people are beginning to give it up as an irrelevant, passe part of history, that kind of statement of love is needed now most of all.

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say our future might look a bit like this.

“Peace through superior firepower”: The War to End All Wars

Summary of shakedown trials for prototype codename “VOYAGER”...

In orbit around Shadir, a planet whose inhabitants are rumoured to be highly cultured and refined aesthetes, the Enterprise receives a distress signal from a passing spacecraft that's apparently been through a massive battle, as little remains of it but debris. There's also the larger issue that Xon and Uhura can't pick up any lifesigns on either the ship or the planet. Kirk takes Xon and McCoy over to the ship where they meet Yra, a soldier who claims she and her ship are casualties in a planetary war that has overtaken Shadir. Before Kirk can pontificate on the tragedy of such a civilization falling to warfare, a massive blast strikes the Enterprise, rendering Decker unable to raise shields and crippling its critical systems. As the landing party returns to asses the damage, Kirk sends Yra to sickbay, where McCoy discovers that she's actually an android.

Decker and Scotty tell Kirk the ship can't survive another attack, but Yra claims another attack is forthcoming and asks to return to Shadir, where she might be able to help stop another projectile from being launched. Kirk agrees and takes her, Xon and McCoy down to Shadir to investigate. There, they learn that Shadir is organised around two basic premises: Upholding and preserving the sanctity of all life and the notion peace can be achieved through using armed conflict to resolve differences. The reason the ship's sensors couldn't pick up any lifesigns is because the Shadirians all live underground, but project their consciousnesses into android duplicates who fight a neverending war above ground and in space (an apparent “corruption” of the original purpose of Shadir). Furthermore, it turns out Yra was a double agent, and attempted to capture the Enterprise and her crew to attain a credit bonus from her superiors (so apparently war on Shadir isn't just perpetual, it's a form of capitalist labour as well).

I mean, it isn't good. The fact I can barely remember any of the major plot details is probably a bad sign, as is the fact I kept thinking of the Original Series episode “A Taste of Armageddon” all throughout. Both stories look at worlds where war has become a banal fact of everyday life and is considered necessary to uphold a tenuous peace, and both stories end with a massive explosive conflict that brings about the end of the existing social order. “The War to End All Wars” comes across as the more effective and acceptable of the two because it has Kirk state on numerous occasions that war is never the solution to anything, as opposed to having him go on a bizarre tirade about humans being natural-born murderers (but then again, it damn well better come across as more effective given how morally bankrupt this show has gotten in recent weeks).

This episode's particular tweak is the concept of voluntary rather than obligatory warfare. While it was never especially clear to me whether or not the Shadirians were engaging in this elabourate ritual for recreational purposes, there is the sense this is something they do not just to resolve disputes, but for excitement (Kirk says something to the extent of “the mistake the Shadirians made was that they became numb and needed to seek out more and greater thrills”). This is beginning to push the story in the general vicinity of a potential critique of spectacle (in the Debord sense) and the connection between television and violence, which is intriguing territory for Star Trek to be plumbing in 1979 that would put it the Long 1980s tradition of critical postmodern cinematography and ahead of its time. The problem is, however, as always, the episode stops short before doing anything really substantial with this theme and ends up at the comparatively soft and facile conclusion “violence is desensitizing the youth”, which is really nowhere near as mature or satisfying as it could have been.

That is, it would be if this is indeed the intended message of the story in the first place: I'm not actually convinced that it is. Critical postmodern cinematography sort of requires a commitment to the aforementioned cinematographical techniques hence, you know, the name. But “The War to End All Wars” isn't shot any special way that would reinforce these themes in a manner that would get us to pay attention to them. Furthermore, a reading putting this episode in the Debord situationalist school runs into problems when taking into account this is quiet possible the most cinematic and spectacular Star Trek episode to date: It even gives “In Thy Image” a run for its money. There are massive, epic battle scenes, intricate, sprawling sets for both the above ground and underground Shadirian societies, armies of undead warrior robots, gigantic alien tanks and any number of spammy beam weapon and explosion special effects shots. Having this in an episode supposedly about discouraging the fetishization of war seems...a tiny bit hypocritical.

One way to reconcile this might be to read “The War to End All Wars” as another stab at critiquing Star Trek itself. Maybe the hypocrisy was intentional, and meant to call Kirk's claim for moral authority into question. But again, the actual cinematography of the episode itself would seem to work against this interpretation. Furthermore, one of the innovations of Star Trek Phase II has been to pretty squarely keep the Enterprise crew atop the moral high ground: That commitment to utopianism and idealism we saw in nascent form throughout the last third of the Original Series and all during the Animated Series is definitely a guiding principle here. Indeed, the one serious drawback to “Deadlock” was that in that case the show played its utopianism too casually and didn't seem aware of the full ramifications of saddling the Federation with Project MKUltra and tried to backpedal before it began to raise any serious allegations. To assume the show has changed its tune a couple months later seems a bit of a stretch to me.

Then there are the usual raft of problems. The action largely revolves around Kirk, Xon, McCoy and the guest star of the week, Ilia, Chapel and Rand are all M.I.A. and Decker and Scotty are basically interchangeable. You'd think thirteen episodes in this show would have found a way to make its cast work together, but that hasn't happened: With very rare exceptions, pretty much everyone writing for this show has fallen back onto familiar structural patterns and cliches from the Original Series, completely ignoring the potential for change and growth the new status quo of Star Trek Phase II allows them. This, and the episode's larger overall failure to actually do anything with its premise, are symptomatic of this series' fundamental failing: In the end, it's ultimately a retrograde throwback. As much as it's improved on the Original Series significantly in some ways, Star Trek Phase II has proven to be overall a second draft rather than a proper sequel. It's not that it couldn't have been one, but this creative team is far too blinkered and complacent to take any serious risks or make any real attempts at change, because everyone who knew how to experiment left the party long ago.

Star Trek's creators have let it down. Once again, the franchise is in a rut. This isn't Star Trek for the Long 1980s, it's a show that's become obsessed with past glories and its own iconography and pop mythology. Fixated on the idea of its own greatness, Star Trek now looks backward instead of forward, which is as good a sign as any that something's gone badly wrong.

...catastrophic failure states recorded across all critical systems...Recommend immediate recall of “VOYAGER” project, followed by scrapping of current model in favour of a complete redesign...will send copies of revised plans upon to following-and-fifth temporal reality...

“Allamaraine, if you can see/Allamaraine, you'll come with me”: To Attain the All

Bloody hell.

“To Attain the All” has got to be the worst episode of Star Trek Phase II by *far*. “Cassandra” was bad. “The Child” was awful. “Savage Syndrome” was appalling, but that was by Margaret Armen, so that's par for the course. And nobody really expected greatness from “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?”: A brief like that is angling for major problems from the outset. But this? Wow. There's no excuse for this.

While investigating a system of planets strung together like a pearl necklace (so *that's* where Star Trek: Year Four got the idea from. Seriously, how do you screw up a visual like that?), the Enterprise is suddenly transported to a realm outside normal spacetime where they are visited by a hyper-evolved energy being called The Prince who claims to represent an infinitely old culture who hold the secrets of the universe, and declares he's going to test the crew to determine whether or not they're worthy of attaining a form of enlightenment called “The All” (and it should be an indication for how bloody long this show has been going on that a brief like that feels hackneyed and boring). The Prince says he wants two representatives to face a series of challenges, to which Decker and Xon immediately volunteer for their own reasons (Xon thinks it's logical, while Decker is starry-eyed at the prospect of learning and new discovery). Reluctantly, Kirk agrees, but at the same time begins to work with Uhura and Ilia to find a way to free the Enterprise.

After that bit, Decker and Xon go off to rainbow space land to play Legends of the Hidden Temple. They are faced with a series of puzzles and physical challenges they must overcome by using a combination of logic and intuition to progress to the next stage and reach The All while The Prince occasionally pops in to give them advice. You thought I was kidding. I wish I was. While this is going on, Kirk begins to notice that the remainder of his crew are starting to act disturbingly similar to each other: McCoy and Chapel are having a professional disagreement, but then start to see each other's points, Sulu is starting to display character traits more associated with Chekov and vice versa, and Uhura and Ilia are starting to speak for each other. Eventually, this culminates in the entire crew, save Kirk and Decker, becoming subsumed by The All, which turns out to be a great big ancient hive mind that goes around assimilating other people, so naturally the two manly action heroes have to go and punch some sense into everyone and aggressively re-introduce them to good ol' American Individuality.

Christ on a bike.

Where do I begin? The All is self-evidently enlightenment, obviously coded as a Buddhist version of it to boot...and the show thinks this is an evil, horrible thing. Idiotic and embarrassing children's gameshow trappings aside, this is the fundamental problem with this episode. It dwarfs everything else and puts Star Trek into a dangerous position the likes of which it hasn't ventured near for at least twelve years. If this is the kind of garbage that usually characterizes Norman Spinrad's work, then thank whatever forces intervened to allow Gene Coon and D.C. Fontana to extensively re-write “The Doomsday Machine”. To simplify things a bit for our purposes, there's a strain of Buddhist philosophy that conceptualizes the universe as a kind of cosmic oversoul that binds and unites all things. Each being is thus a manifestation of the oversoul and its own unique mind: We both are and are not individuals, then. We have agency, to a point, but we’re all connected together and having an understanding of both truths is a major step towards attaining enlightenment. It's a theory I was first introduced studying Self and Personal Identity, and one I tend to find helpful and attractive.

And Star Trek thinks this is the worst thing in the universe and conflates it with Soviet-style Stalinism.

Not only does “To Attain the All” have the gall to appropriate Buddhist concepts with the sole purpose of belittling them, it mashes it up with 1950s Red Scare propaganda into a vague and handwavey notion of “Groupthink”, setting the entire franchise back a good two decades in the process. This is hateful and reactionary in a way Margaret Armen never even managed to be: Spinrad is *actually saying* that understanding and empathy are toxic, destructive things only the Red Commies do and will erode masculinity and individuality. This is the exact opposite of “In Thy Image”. This is “The Return of the Archons” again, but somehow even worse. This is Star Trek's every reactionary impulse gathered together and unleashed in one angry, blind hate-filled scribe against material social progress. This isn't just wrong television, it's straightforwardly evil television.

Never, and I mean never, have I seen a Star Trek story more hostile to my redemptive reading of the franchise than this. “To Attain the All” is a serious contender for the title of single worst Star Trek story ever written, and to have it crop up this far into Star Trek Phase II is just about the most depressing and disheartening thing I can think of. And this does demonstrable harm, to not just the idea of material social progress, but to Star Trek itself: Just like “The Enemy Within”, “Who Mourns for Adonais?” and “The Apple” managed for the Original Series, “To Attain the All” kills Star Trek Phase II dead, or at least provides conclusive proof that it deserves to die.

More than even that: Honestly, this production team has to go. In hindsight, it should have been obvious. The best assets of the Original Series and the Animated Series, by which I mean the only good ones, were D.C. Fontana, Gene Coon, Dave Gerrold and Alan Dean Foster, all four of whom are long gone by now. Perhaps tellingly, Star Trek Phase II is done after one more episode, and after that Star Trek never retains the same creative team for such an extended period of time again.

Frankly, good fucking riddance.

“...a swaggering, overbearing, tin-plated dictator with delusions of godhood”: Lord Bobby's Obsession

“Lord Bobby's Obsession” is described as “Space Seed” meets “The Squire of Gothos”. This is the most accurate description in the history of things describing other things because that's literally what it is.

It doesn't even pretend to be something different. It is, beat-for-beat, the exact same story as “Space Seed” with the exact same scenes and the exact same plot twists except the supervillain is an alien fascinated with the British Empire, is acting alone this time and the submissive female humanities expert smitten with him stays on the Enterprise instead of departing with him at the end of the episode. This is my least favourite kind of story to write about, because it gives me essentially no material to work with. Even Margaret Armen gave me enough to complain about that I could find 1800 words to squeeze out of “Savage Syndrome”. You could practically take my “Space Seed” post, change the names around and write your own Vaka Rangi review of “Lord Bobby's Obsession”.

That said, like “Tomorrow and the Stars” before it, this doesn't mean “Lord Bobby's Obsession” doesn't manage to improve on its source material such that this is the superior version of the story. It definitely does, and this alone makes it noteworthy and deserving of at least a little attention. Once again, the Star Trek Phase II version manages to distill out the essence of the story by removing all of its more problematic ethical hangups. In this case, most of the welcome changes come from the title character himself: Robert Standish, Third Earl of Lancashire. Modeling him after Trelane instead of Khan is actually something of a genius move, and the result is we get someone whose latent charm and charisma belies the fact he's really a petulant, childish, self-centred wannabe with a seriously inflated sense of self worth and importance. And because Lord Bobby isn't a godlike being, he's just a regular guy with access to some advanced technology, this neatly avoids the problems we read into Trelane's character back in "The Squire of Gothos". And in doing so, “Lord Bobby's Obsession” manages to deftly invert that episode's structure, demonstrating that, despite everything, Star Trek really has come a long way.

What I mean by this is that the basic issue I found with “Gothos” was that Trelane is set up as a kind of dark parodic mirror of William Shatner's interpretation of Jim Kirk, namely, a drag action hero fixated on honour, duty, valour, the chain of command and warmaking. The intended point being, as I saw it, that in spite of Shatner's noble attempt to skewer the inherent silliness of all that by taking Kirk in a different direction then how he was originally written, by the mere fact of playing Kirk and playing the hero of this show, he was in some sense at least partially complicit in the original Star Trek's unsavoury predilections. The problem came about in the climactic reveal, where it turned out Trelane was literally a child, the spoiled offspring of a couple of standard-issue hyper-advanced energy beings, thus removing any claim Trelane had to offering any sort of serious critique.

This time though, there's absolutely no question that Lord Bobby is the antagonist and in the wrong, and furthermore this episode lacks “Space Seed”'s maddeningly terrible scenes where the crew fawns over Khan's manly manliness thus making them absolutely no different from the supposed villain of the piece. As he's not meant to have the moral high ground in the first place, making Lord Bobby act like a misguided and petulant child actually works in the story's favour this time, because it emphasizes the connection between that sort of behaviour and the imperialistic entitlement Bobby express admiration for elsewhere. What “Lord Bobby's Obsession” has managed to do is invert not just the structure of “The Squire of Gothos”, but “Space Seed” as well, placing the Enterprise crew in firm opposition to the idea of warmaking, empire building and enlightened despotism. Even the ending showcases this, having Bobby return to his ship and to what is explicitly referred to as a “fantasy”, instead of awarding him a planet to lord over like Khan got.

There's also a somewhat charming parallel that runs through all of this. My biggest complaint against Gene Roddenberry, aside from the fact his writing tends to be clunky and padded and he micromanages everybody, is that he's fixated on military procedure as a theme and seems to think spouting jargon all the time actually makes for captivating television. Now it's true Roddenberry was in the air force and presumably these were themes he was intimately familiar with, but the other thing about Roddenberry's scripts I've tended to notice is that, well, they really don't feel like they were written by a veteran. Gene Coon was a marine, and his scripts definitely do: You can tell Coon had a very complex, nuanced and multifaceted opinion on the realities of military service and this shows in many of his best moments. But Roddenberry, weirdly, tends to write like someone who never actually served, but just read pulp action stories about soldiers and spacemen. Roddenberry writes like, honestly, a little boy fantasizing about being a soldier whose only experience with war comes from pulp serials. So, regardless of whether or not the parallel was intentional or not (and I'm willing to bet it wasn't) making the antagonist of this story basically that has got to be one of the most delightful bits of self-awareness and introspection in the history of the franchise.

“Lord Bobby's Obsession” may feel like a retread that changes vanishingly little from the stories it's so blatantly ripping off, and it is, but it really deserves to be pointed out how important it is that Star Trek has made even this tentative of a statement on the matter: Ten years ago, it would have been perfectly expected to see Star Trek come up on the opposite end of this debate. Indeed, it did, and it did it so many times it's impossible to keep track of them all. But here, in revisiting and revising both “Space Seed” and “The Squire of Gothos”, Star Trek is making it perfectly clear, for what I think may actually be the very first time, that this kind of thinking is no longer acceptable, and the proper way for Star Trek to deal with it is precisely to point out how dangerous, childish and misguided it is. And that alone is more than worth the price of admission.

“These pages present a case of literary parasitism.” Devil's Due

The First Part of the Tragedy

Out in unexplored space, the Enterprise comes upon a class M planet heretofore unknown to the Federation. Taking a landing party down, Kirk learns the planet is called Naterra, and is invited by the locals to meet their beloved ruler, an elderly and highly agitated man by the name of Zxolar the Blessed. However, he is met by evasion and confrontation, as Zxolar keeps going on about the end of the world and someone named Komether and continually insisting the “contract is not yet up”. After he realises Kirk and his party have no idea what he's talking about, Zxolar explains that Naterra is about to be destroyed and begs Kirk to help, but Kirk recites the Prime Directive at him. Soon though, Zxolar collapses and an energy form appears in the room, causing McCoy to disappear. After Kirk and Xon beam up to the Enterprise with Zxolar and call for search parties to locate McCoy, the energy form reappears in sickbay and attacks Chapel.

Eventually, it is revealed that the energy being is the aforementioned Komether, who was summoned one night many years ago by Zxolar and his five philosopher colleagues, who prayed for help to avert Naterra's destruction due to its unchecked pollution. Komether agreed to save Naterra and grant it a thousand years of prosperity on top of that, but also promised to return after that time had elapsed to destroy the planet himself and subjugate it to his will. Zxolar and the other philosophers had hoped the millennium would give the Naterrans enough time to develop space travel and escape their planet before Komether returned, but that never happened. Realising Komether is a potential threat to the Federation and needing to locate McCoy, Kirk decides to find the contract (an actual document Komether and the philosophers signed) and challenge Komether's legal right in a trial, with the fate of not just Naterra, but the Enterprise in the balance.

Fundamentally, “Devil's Due” is really just Faust in a science fiction setting, which is simultaneously terribly interesting and not interesting at all. It's trite because Faust is a stock story archetype, so adapting it for Star Trek amounts to nothing more then going through the literary motions and doing something just because it's easy or you feel obligated to do it. In her first, and what remains one of her most landmark, works, Avital Ronell describes Goethe, who wrote arguably the most famous and influential version of Faust, as an intangible, monolithic force that defines, frequently unconsciously, everything considered “good” and “admirable” in German culture. Though this is best summed up in the fact that Goethe's best friend believed he embodied a kind of “classical” (meaning Greek) “totality”, Ronell also describes how Goethe was massively influential on essentially every German-speaking writer and thinker.

Sigmund Freud saw Goethe as the “father” of psychoanalysis in every sense of the word (which means Freud also often feared Goethe's disapproval). Walter Benjamin would frequently have dreams about Goethe, night terrors, in fact, as he would wake from them sobbing. Freiderich Nietzsche, argues Ronell, admired Goethe's strength and dedication of purpose: Goethe was harshly critical of others, yet always able to rebound from his own failures and possessed the uncanny ability to walk away from personal relationships with no reprisal or consequences. Nietzsche, who struggled with many of the same things himself, likely saw in Goethe a kind of Übermensch. For every German intellectual, Goethe is transformed from mortal human to intractable national mascot, a ubiquitous, untouchable, “monstrous” thing that exerts its will over an entire tradition.

This in spite of the fact that many of Goethe's works, far from the singular visions his readers project onto them, were most often the result of collaboration with the willfully marginal Johann Peter Eckermann, an illiterate schizophrenic who hero-worshiped Goethe and fashioned himself into essentially his personal ward. Indeed, it is the book Conversations with Eckermann, written after Goethe's death, that is the source of most of what scholars know about Goethe's personal beliefs. But Eckermann has been erased from the Goethe narrative, partly of his own volition, but also because of Goethe's own formidable personal will and the desire of generations of Germans to preserve the singular purity that Goethe has become. But Goethe was himself a very marginal and transgressive writer and thinker: This continues after death, as the monolithic force of Goethe essentially grants itself its own kind of twisted immortality, an undead ghost who haunts the imaginations and mindscapes of anyone who works in the German tradition.

But the Star Trek Phase II team was not, to my knowledge, working from a German perspective, nor was it in the habit of poking around abandoned and haunted mindscapes, so one would not necessarily expect standard-issue Goethe worship from their version of Faust. And this is where “Devil's Due” gets more interesting, because it does actually offer a number of welcome twists to the otherwise-hackneyed plot structure. First of all, the six philosophers are intriguing characters: After they sign the deal, they become heralded as heroes who brought Naterra into a new golden age, and become known as “The Circle of the Wise” and “The Prophets of Hope”. It's a kind of subversion of the Asimovian Church of Science motif: The priests responsible for ushering Naterra into a new era didn't actually do anything, and history is anything but teleological as the philosophers have only really bought their planet a brief reprise and everything is destined to end in fiery catastrophe eventually (eschatological, yes, but the implication is that Naterra's demise was entirely preventable).

But the philosophers are also literal priests, or at least straightforwardly spiritual figures as well as they summon Komether through communal prayer. This is a further departure from the Foundation format as Asimov, at least at first, seemed to hold philosophers with some disdain, while in Star Trek they become keepers of a sacred truth, even if it is a terrible one. But this is also very Goethe: In his version of the story, Goethe sees Faust as a philosopher frustrated with the limits of Earthly knowledge and wishing to comprehend singular cosmic Truth and Happiness. What he wants, essentially, is transcendental knowledge, which falls outside the realm of strict philosophy, and this is what he bargains Mephistopheles for. Interestingly, Faust also agrees to the deal because he feels the moment at which Mephistopheles says he'll take his soul, “the zenith of human happiness”, is impossible to reach. Eventually he does, however, in the second part of the story when he manages to bend the forces of beauty, human behavior and nature itself to his will (perhaps a very Western fantasy), leading to angelic intervention.

This is also the point in the Phase II version of this story when Star Trek interjects itself. The major innovation here is that the Faust archetype isn't among the Enterprise crew, which is nice as that would have been the instinctual thing to do, but Star Trek rightly doesn't work like that. Instead, they take the form of the angels in Goethe's original: But, instead of intervening on the behalf of a singular patrician God, they instead take Komether to trial and force him to defend his claim. This is where the episode gets a bit iffy in this regard, as there's really no case to press against Komether as the contract is perfectly legal so it's less like a trial and more like Kirk is challenging him to a debate and betting the Enterprise and Naterra on his rhetorical skills. But even so, Kirk does take the position that Naterra has a right to exist in spite of its past transgressions, thus in essence granting them “mercy”.

Ultimately though everything is rendered moot when it's discovered that Komether is actually a psychic manifestation created by the six philosophers and is promptly disposed of by tapping into Zxolar's “will”. Much like Goethe, Zxolar imposes himself on his parallel and consigns him to the dregs of the historical narrative. What caught my attention the most though was the reveal of the devil figure being, essentially, a thought-form: There's a particular strain of spirituality and occultism that posits what we think of as “demons” or “evil entities” are actually creatures that are basically willed into existence by intensely powerful negative emotions and negative emotional states. I'd figured it was a fairly recent innovation (like in the past two decades) and this is the earliest Western depiction of this kind of theory I've yet seen, at least in popular culture.

As rushed as the ending feels though, the biggest problem I have with “Devil's Due” is the same one that I find plagues many of these Star Trek Phase II episodes: It doesn't do enough to take advantage of the new setting and characters. Ilia and Xon are part of Kirk's first landing party (and note that Kirk is once again back to leading them), Xon doesn't act much like Xon and Ilia does nothing. Will Decker is once again missing in action, Janice Rand disappeared again and Chapel is incapacitated for the majority of the episode. Aside from misusing the characters and giving us precious little in terms of drama, “Devil's Due” just feels far too much like an Original Series episode on the whole: Kirk gets to make a bunch of big moralizing speeches, debates a non-corporial lifeform and mulls over the Prime Directive. This is the same story we've seen at least seventy times before. It's like despite all the strides Star Trek Phase II has made to differentiate itself from its illustrious predecessor, it can't quite escape its looming, ever-present, monolithic shadow.

"'sup?"

The Second Part of the Tragedy

Let's first take a moment to examine how bizarre it is that this episode exists at all, let alone exists where it does, because it makes even less sense here than it did the last time this show did this sort of thing.

Like “The Child” before it, “Devil's Due” is really an old Star Trek Phase II script dolled up and adapted for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Apparently, both were pegged to help make up for the dangerous lack of content the creative team had during the second season thanks to the extended writer's guild strike of 1988 and 1989 and the fact Gene Roddenberry drove away his entire writing staff after the first season. It's curious that these were the two Phase II stories seen to be the most acceptable and easiest to translate to the new show: “The Child” was an unmitigated misogynistic disaster to put it mildly, and it's hard to see how anyone could have seen it fit to produce in any context, let alone debatably the freshest and most exciting show of 1988. As for “Devil's Due”, it wasn't even especially unique or memorable in 1978, retreading a lot of old ground the Original Series had already trodden on. It doesn't belong to its own show, let alone Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Just off the top of my head, I can think of a lot more worthy unused scripts than these that not only would have made far better stories, they'd fit Star Trek: The Next Generation just as easily as they would have Star Trek Phase II: “Practice in Waking” would have been a delight, though you'd have to remove the Kirk/Xon story, and even “Deadlock” could conceivably have worked with some significant overhaul, though it would have probably have made a better sixth or seventh season story than a second season one. But either way, whatever the reason, “The Child” went out as Star Trek: The Next Generation's second season premier, while “Devil's Due” bounced around in writers' room limbo for years before finally seeing the light of day...in the fourth season.

I really have a hard time wrapping my head around this. Typically if you have a script that's been languishing for that long, that's usually the sign that it's probably not worth the time and effort to mess around with it anymore, especially if it's a script that isn't from your show in the first place. I do understand how hectic things were in the Star Trek: The Next Generation camp: Typically the team was stretched so thin they were struggling week to week to get something on the air, especially in its first three years. But “Devil's Due” is coming at a point where the show is entering into some semblance of stability: This is long after Michael Piller instituted his famous submission policy change, after “The Best of Both Worlds” guaranteed the show wasn't going anywhere, and after the writing staff settled into the form it would maintain, more or less, for the remainder of the show's run. Hell, it's the very next episode to air after “The Wounded” essentially rebooted the entire show. I really can't find a reason for an episode like this to be here: While it would have come across as an obvious and understandable sign of desperation a year or two ago, it now feels like a curious afterthought.

Especially given how out-of-time the finished product feels. “Devil's Due” is essentially the same story you remember from Star Trek Phase II: The Enterprise comes across a planet whose populace is in a state of mass panic as they fear the end of the world is upon them due to the return of a devil archetype who came to them when their society was on the verge of collapse due to pollution and war, promising them a thousand years of peace and prosperity, but to also extract a price when that time was up. However, several key details have been altered: In the original story, the devil is a male energy being called Komether willed into existence by the concentrated emotional turmoil of six philosophers praying for their planet's salvation who wants to destroy the planet himself. Here, the devil is a female being named Ardra who just wants to enslave the populace, but she's purely a mythical figure from the planet's ancient history, and the character we interact with is an interstellar con artist who's using the legend to try and take over the planet for fun.

Another difference is in the way the trial plays out: In the original there isn't really much of one as Kirk basically challenges Komether to a debate, betting the Enterprise in the process, to stall for time until the rest of the crew figures out a way to dispose of him. In this version, the Enterprise is already forfeit due to the terms of the original contract, which give Ardra claim to anything in orbit of the planet as well as the planet itself and the trial is actually a trial, as Picard suspects Ardra (she doesn't get any other name in the script, so that's what I'll call her) to be a fraudster from the beginning and holds an arbitration hearing with Data presiding as an impartial judge in order to expose her. Also, Ardra has a serious crush on Picard, and wants him to be her permanent companion if he loses (as Picard tells Geordi, “...my reputation as a litigator, not to mention my immortal soul, is in serious jeopardy”, a nice nod to the original Goethe), which actually gives her an incentive to agree to the trial.

But across the board these changes are for the better and improve the story dramatically, and I'll chalk that all up to the sublime talent, skill and professionalism of the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast and crew. Because of them, it starts to become clear why Michael Piller kept this story around as long as he did. First of all, I really want to tip my hat to the actors here. The regulars are all absolutely outstanding-just sublimely excellent. They always are, but the mere fact that they always are means it's dangerously easy to take for granted how unbelievably, overwhelmingly talented all these people really are. I mean the Original Series cast had talent but, with all due respect to them, this is in a different league. While the episode is mostly centred around Picard and Data (mainly to show off Brent Spiner's versatility and knack for comic timing, which I'll get back to), everyone gets at least one scene to themselves.

There's a great moment where Ardra is trying to seduce Picard in his quarters, insisting she can come back from his each and every rejection because she can be any woman he wants her to be. This is a fantastic moment on a bunch of different levels. Firstly, there's a bit where Ardra, after cycling through a number of different bodies, outfits and personas, suddenly adopts the form of Counselor Troi of all people saying that Picard might be yearning for a “professional woman” in a “Starfleet uniform” who is someone “close, but out of reach”. The moment she says this, you expect she's going to turn into Beverly Crusher, because this show has in the past been extremely unsubtle about shipping her with Picard, so when Marina Sirtis appears instead it comes as a genuine surprise. And Sirtis does absolute movie magic with one solitary line of dialog: “I can do anything for you, Captain”.

She's doing a recursive performance, playing Ardra playing Troi, which is a conceit the Original Series would have given William Shatner an entire episode to run around with, but Sirtis conveys the exact same amount of power and presence in four seconds. Furthermore, Patrick Stewart plays right into her hand, instinctively playing off of his longtime friend and castmate's cue like the consummate professionals they both are: You know Picard will never submit to Ardra, but you can see Stewart convey him balking a bit when Troi appears in front of him just through his expression, as if Ardra unintentionally touched on something, for however brief a moment. I never would have dreamed of shipping Picard and Troi before this episode, but that one tiny scene is enough to get a person thinking.

(And lest you think I'm intentionally shortchanging the other actorsXcharacters, who have considerably more minor roles in this episode, Jonathan Frakes is as affable and commanding as he always is, Michael Dorn is taciturn, loyal and lovably awkward and gets a great scene when Ardra takes the form of Fek'lhr, Gates McFadden has beat-by-beat comic timing when Ardra crashes the bridge and LeVar Burton is just inimitably LeVar Burton and makes me smile every time he comes onscreen.)

Theatrical performance is a major part of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and this episode is a really stellar example of how. The opening holodeck scene where Picard coaches Data through a performance of Ebeneezer Scrooge in The Christmas Carol (which first of all looks *gorgeous*, I'd just like to point out) is clearly meant to telegraph the basic “moral” about how fear can control a person's actions, but it also works really well to introduce the kind of performativity “Devil's Due” works with. In one of the story's most charming moments, Data explains how he's trying to adopt Method techniques to his acting, by using the character's emotional states to help him understand his own, instead of the other way around. Tellingly, Picard isn't very familiar with the concept of Method acting (which, of course he wouldn't be: Patrick Stewart is a veteran thespian trained with the Royal Shakespearean Company) and doesn't understand at first why Data would be interested in such an “archaic” and “antiquated” style of acting.

So Picard, like Stewart, isn't a Method actor, but he is performing here. What is he performing? The key to answering that lies in remembering this story's origins. “Devil's Due” isn't a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. It's not even a Star Trek Phase II episode. It's an Original Series episode, and, as a matter of fact, following all the rewrites to it, it's become even more of an Original Series episode. This is noticeable in a number of the details changed between the first draft for Phase II and the final draft that got filmed for The Next Generation, in particular the shift of making Ardra female and having her be a con artist instead of an actual evil entity. This is the other thing worth noting about the scene in Picard's quarters: Ardra's declaration that she “...can be any woman” the Captain wishes is basically a straight lift from any number of identical Original Series episodes featuring Kirk and manipulative paramours (off the top of my head I'm reminded of specific bits from “The Cage”, “Catspaw” and “By Any Other Name” amongst probably a whole bunch of others I'm forgetting).

But where Kirk would have sputtered defiantly, or bedded the woman and then sputtered defiantly, Picard just looks awkward, as if this isn't a situation he should really be involved in. And it isn't: In spite of Gene Roddenberry's ramblings to the contrary and Patrick Stewart's own (likely joking) comments about how he “doesn't get to do enough shooting and screwing on this show” this is really not a scene that belongs anywhere near Picard or Star Trek: The Next Generation. Even at the trial Picard feels like he's in the wrong scene, giving big, shouty, bombastic speeches that are far more commonly associated with Kirk (and Stewart, to his credit, plays them with a Shakespearean flair and flourish that calls attention to the inherent silliness of the whole thing). But the show is actually *aware* of this, and plays it as a kind of Shakespearean comedy of errors: “Devil's Due” is about Star Trek: The Next Generation accidentally crashing into Star Trek and watching the shenanigans that spring from the ensuing mix-up, and I'd be willing to bet that's what Michael Piller liked about this story.

(Piller has said as much, saying his favourite rewrite was done by Phil LaZebnik, who turned it into an outright comedy. Piller adored that draft, but as not everybody liked it, he toned the humour down, but tried to keep as much of LaZebnik's submission in as possible.)

And it's not just Stewart: Ample credit must be given to Marta Dubois, who plays Ardra, and is an absolute crowd-pleasing sensation. She's a camp delight, channeling her very best 1960s vampy seductress and cranking everything up to ludicrous levels. She delivers the exact same kind of performance William Shatner was aiming for in “Turnabout Intruder”, meaning it's straight out of a cartoon, and it's amazingly hilarious. Like Picard, Ardra reognises what kind of story she's in, but, unlike him, she thinks it's fantastic and just runs totally wild with it, clearly relishing each and every opportunity she gets to strut around pouting and giggling impudently in between bouts of maniacal scheming. So this is what we have then: Just as Star Trek: The Next Generation begins to come into its own and seriously engage with its past, it happens upon the Original Series and turns it into a pantomime, fondly poking fun at its heavy-handed naivete, as well as itself.

But there does remain another side to all this. Upon researching this episode, I happened to find that, somewhat astonishingly, “Devil's Due” was the highest rated Star Trek: The Next Generation episode since “Encounter at Farpoint”. Yes, even higher than “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II”. And it seems somewhat disquieting to me that this episode should be one made out of a script that wasn't even a Next Generation script and that was so consciously an Original Series story, even if it was also in some sense a parody of one. And then I remembered how popular and beloved “Unification” is going to be next year, and “Relics” not long after that. And how “Trials and Tribble-Ations” became so iconic it's practically the only episode featuring the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine cast anyone remembers anymore. And how “In a Mirror, Darkly” is considered not just the best episode of Enterprise's already fanwanky and already beloved fourth season, but possibly its entire run.

You get my point, I take it.

Season 4 was the point Star Trek: The Next Generation made it eminently clear for the last few people who didn't already understand that it was it's own show and its own phenomenon now. Even “Devil's Due”, an episode that is so self-consciously retrograde, becomes a kind of farce about the inherent absurdity of limiting Star Trek: The Next Generation to the style and structure of the Original Series. But as wonderful a play as it is and in spite of how exquisite and charming the satire may be, I wonder if any Star Trek fans actually bought tickets to see the show...and how many of those that did actually got the joke.

“Most women choose to be weak, because it makes their lives easier.”: Are Unheard Memories Sweet?

Well, the first thing I have to say is that this episode isn't as bad as I was led to believe it was going to be given the description, and especially considering the source material. But it's also pretty tough to call “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?” an especially good idea in the first place: When the best thing that can be mustered to say is that “It's not as irreparably catastrophic as it could have been”, that's not exactly praise either.

The imminent problem is that “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?” was apparently based on the novel The Revolt of Man, which was an 1882 dystopian story about a society ruled by dominant, aggressive women who crush and subjugate the passive and weak men. Naturally, this results in the end of all scientific and technological progress, because that's “men's work” and women are incapable of properly handling it. So, the men stage a massive planetwide revolution to restore the “proper order” of things, in the first time I have ever cheered *against* an oppressed minority rising up and overthrowing their oppressors. There is no possible way adapting this book into a Star Trek story could ever conceivably be seen as anything remotely resembling a good idea, even to a creative team *this* tone deaf. And yet, here it is. That Worley Thorne somehow manages to avoid the somewhat unthinkable feat of unseating Margaret Armen as the single most hatefully reactionary writer in the entirety of Star Trek is nothing short of a small miracle, yet that doesn't make “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?” something to get terribly excited about either.

Star Trek Phase II's “twist” on this story is that the alien planet is not ruled by women, but is in fact made up entirely of hermaphrodites who have both male and female hormones. The society they build is basically a stock-reiteration of the Talosians from “The Cage”, honing their powers of illusion and their “mental abilities” in lieu of developing more and better material technoscience. Apparently though, their bodies can't manufacture the male hormones naturally, and either both or specifically the male ones are needed to control their illusory powers, so, in a scene reminiscent of “The Lorelei Signal” (which isn't a good sign), they've been luring starships to their planet so they could supplant their chemical deficiency by harvesting from their crews. There's also something about the illusions causing people to regress in age and be hypnotized and something else about the Enterprise being in a deteriorating orbit and needing dilithium crystals that the previous ship left behind and that the aliens are hiding for some reason or another, but I literally did not care enough to go back and check.

The sad thing is this is once again a really great episode for the new characters: There's more anxiety over Xon's youth and inexperience, Chekov is in full swing in his new role as security chief/tactical officer and even Janice Rand is back, for the first time since “In Thy Image”, and gets to join the away team early on. Sure, she then gets knocked out and captured and isn't much more than a redshirt who lives (so she's basically this show's Mr. Leslie), but at least Grace Lee Whitney gets to play a seductive illusory version of Rand when one of the aliens sneaks aboard the Enterprise. While Decker sits the story out either pretending to be a cadet or smashing things in engineering (that's...honestly not much of an exaggeration), we do get a lengthy background scene exploring his background and feelings of inadequacy. Furthermore, this is Ilia's best outing yet by far: Aside from getting a very emotional scene where she talks about the plight of lovers, implicitly referencing the incapacitated Decker, she once again gets to team up with McCoy, and this time Kirk, to save the day. She has a lot of dialogue, exposition and action scenes, and it's Ilia who discerns the true nature of the aliens and comes up with the plan that helps defeat them.

What interests me the most about both versions of this story, by which I mean the *only* thing that interests me, is how much it reminds me of what anthropologist Joan Bamberger talks about in her essay "The Myth of Matriarchy". According to Bamberger, there's simply no primary source evidence anywhere in the historical record to support the notion that there ever existed a time where women were the dominant social agents, and furthermore cites numerous oral myths that describe a matriarchal society as something horrible and repugnant and makes a compelling case that patriarchy is a default mode of human organisation (not that she is in favour of this, naturally).

For me, one of her most striking examples comes from the traditions of the Yamana, or Yaghan, people, part of the indigenous cultures of Tierra del Fuego. Though they are often held up as being a prime example of true gender equality, the actual legends of the Yaghan would seem to paint a very different picture: Bamberger cites a creation myths describing a time when women dominated and enslaved men and created the Kina, or Great Hut, which serves as both a meeting place and a sacred ceremony. However, the women fooled the men into thinking they were spirits, and, when this became known to the men, they sought their vengeance by killing as many women as possible and turning the rest into animals, thus creating the (presumably more “proper”) social order that exists today where only men are allowed to know the secrets of the Kina and women are subservient.

Bamberger also mentions the similar traditions of the geographically adjacent Selk'nam people. Once again, there existed a prehistory where women ruled a tyrannical society and enslaved men. As this grew worse and worse, eventually the men launched a mass riot to overthrow their female oppressors and slaughtered as many women as they could. After the men seized power, they conspired to find a way to preserve it at all costs, and created the exclusive all-male society of the Hain, a ceremonial lodge where men could keep secrets from growing girls such that the women could never retain their former power. Both of these stories, as well as numerous other similar ones Bamberger talks about in her essay, touch on an uncomfortable truth about studying indigenous societies: It's a frequent naive (and more then faintly imperialistic) assumption that non-modern, non-western societies are inherently more egalitarian and enlightened then Western ones are. It's the same assumption that upholds the entire Noble Savage myth. But this isn't actually the case: In fact, if there's one aspect of human behaviour that could be called a constant universal across all cultures and timeframes, it may well be patriarchy and misogyny.

Why might this be the case? In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond posits that misogyny came about, along with a host of other unpleasant things about human behaviour, with the advent of agriculture. Once it became established, Diamond argues, that men did the hunting and farming and women stayed at home to cook and look after children, this was the beginning of the damaging and toxic power structures that exist to this day. Now, the quickest way to piss off an anthropologist is to mention Jared Diamond, so I'll just quickly add this is a pretty intellectually sloppy argument and carries with it a whole host of nasty baggage, such as the fact Diamond misrepresents a lot of his evidence and is worryingly inclined to lean towards teleology, master narratives and essentialism. There's also the minor fact that the Yaghan, who came up with that shockingly misogynistic creation myth above, were hunter-gatherers before they made contact with Europeans.

But there may be a germ of truth in what Diamond is trying to get at. Bamberger doesn't extrapolate much in her essay, but in her conclusion she does start to point the finger at the idea of dividing labour tasks and social roles up by gender, which is certainly something that could be seen as more indicative of societies that use agriculture than ones that rely purely on hunting and gathering (since, if you're a hunter-gatherer, you'd ideally want every single able-bodied person able to help and contribute equally to the overall survival of the group). In fact, I'll just go and quote a big section of her article right now, as it's really important:

“It appears from this cursory study of a handful of South American myths that women frequently are subjected to harsh outside controls because of their putative immorality – or at least this is my reading of male-informed mythologies. And so it seems from myth that less tangible forces than biology were brought to bear on the subversion of the female sex role. When, for example, woman was told that she behaved like a child and, like other children, was kept uninitiated (in the full masculine sense), or when she was compared to an animal, and on this ground became the unwilling victim of a male ideology, she had forfeited her right to rule. The case against her was made out to be a moral one, divorced from the biology that might have given her sex priority under other circumstances.

Whether or not women actually behaved in the manner of the charges recorded in myth is not an issue in understanding the insistent message of the myth. What is at issue is the ideological thrust of the argument made in the myth of the Rule of Women, and the justification it offers for male dominance through the evocation of a vision of a catastrophic alternative – a society dominated by women. The myth, in its reiteration that women did not know how to handle power when in possession of it, reaffirms dogmatically the inferiority of their present position.

Whatever the justification for it, the sacred male order laid down in myth and reenacted in ritual continues unchallenged in many societies throughout the world. One may surmise from this state of affairs that the Rule of Men proceeds unchanged because women, its potential challengers, have been trapped for so long in a closed system that they are unable to perceive how otherwise they might break down the successful methods used to inculcate in them an ideology of moral failure. Such feelings, I have suggested, at least for South American societies, are reinforced by the strong arm of a male religion.

Myth and rituals have been misinterpreted as persistent reminders that women once had, and then lost, the seat of power. This loss accrued to them through inappropriate conduct. In Tierra del Fuego the women tricked the men into performing both male and female chores; and in the northwest Amazon they committed the crime of incest. The myths constantly reiterate that women did not know how to handle power when they had it. The loss is thereby justified so long as women choose to accept the myth. The Rule of Women, instead of heralding a promising future, harks back to a past darkened by repeated failures. If, in fact, women are ever going to rule, they must rid themselves of the myth that states they have been proved unworthy of leadership roles.

The final version of woman that emerges from these myths is that she represents chaos and misrule through trickery and unbridled sexuality. This is the inverse of Bachofen’s view of pre-Hellenic womanhood, which he symbolized as a mystical, pure, and uncorrupted Mother Goddess. The contrast between mid-Victorian notions of the ideal woman (they are not those of ancient Greece, as Bachofen supposed) and the primitive view, which places woman on the social and cultural level of children, is not as great as it appears. The elevation of woman to deity on the one hand, and the downgrading of her to child or chattel on the other, produce the same result. Such visions will not bring her any closer to attaining male socioeconomic and political status, for as long as she is content to remain either goddess or child, she cannot be expected to shoulder her share of community burdens as the coequal of man. The myth of matriarchy is but the tool used to keep woman bound to her place. To free her, we need to destroy the myth.”

Bamberger could be describing Western patriarchy just as much as she is sexist South American creation myths. After all, how is this any different from The Revolt of Man? Or, for that matter, "Are Unheard Memories Sweet?"? The story is the same no matter where you go. This is nothing more than the ugly spectre of silencing and objectification raising its head in South America, just as it has pretty much everywhere else in the world.

As an anarcha-feminist as well as an anthropologist, I'm naturally inclined to think the omnipresent patriarchal hegemony has something to do with the corporate-state machine that dominates so much of Western culture and thought. It's a system in place that very explicitly lays out social rules, roles and guidelines, normalizes them and creates an environment where, while it's *possible* to step outside your designated caste, it would be at best very inconvenient and at worst disastrous to do so. But the tragic thing about misogyny is that it really is a universal human concept: Turning to the non-modern, indigenous people isn't by definition going to help us here. Some cultures handle gender better than the West do, but some absolutely don't and it's not an easy agricultural/hunter-gatherer, state/non-state, modern/nonmodern or Western/Nonwestern split.

I know I've once again digressed very far from Star Trek, but the point here is, ultimately, to look at how Star Trek, which is supposed to be an idealistic and utopian vision, can help inspire us to move beyond these kinds of oppressive and dehumanizing power structures. And once again, I'd like to mention Lara from “The Jihad”. Lara dedicates herself to a simple lifestyle and possesses an intimacy with the land and the cosmos that's more commonly associated with nonmodern cultures, but she also uses incredibly complex sophisticated space travel technology and has a deep understanding of what the very Western Federation is and how it works. She's somehow managed to synthesize what she and her people take as the best parts of both worldviews.

This is where the trick lies, I think: As much as we want to move away from the reactionary Western hegemony of Margaret Armen, abandoning everything about Westernism isn't going to be the answer either. Even Arthur Singer's team knew this: What was the message of “The Way to Eden”, if not precisely this? Westernism has a ton of problems, and the fact it dominates global discourse is certainly cause for us to be careful not to lapse into false equivalency, but there are some problems that transcend culture to become fundamental human concerns. Misogyny is one of them.

This is something Star Trek should realise and should be showing us an alternative to if it truly wants to live up to all its utopian rhetoric. And right now, once again, it's not.

“I live my life like I've been raised by wolves”: Savage Syndrome

It's Margaret Armen again. That's really all you need to know.

It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect Margaret Armen-penned Star Trek Phase II to be: Almost comically terrible, offensive and unworkable drivel that largely misses the entire point of the show. So structurally unsound as to actually become some kind of cosmic anti-structure and loaded up with the most unforgivably ghastly racism and misogyny you can think of, “Savage Syndrome” is without question the worst episode of the show to date. No contest. It's also probably her very worst submission overall, which wow, we're really hitting record lows here.

There's no point in any kind of summary, but basically, the Enterprise gets hit with a space mine that “reverts” the crew to a “primitive”, “animalistic” mindset, all save for an away team comprised of Decker, Ilia and McCoy, conveniently the three crewmembers who could most easily resolve the plot at the end of the episode, who were conveniently off exploring a derelict spaceship and conveniently decided to use a shuttlecraft so they wouldn't have to be beamed back aboard (no, the script does not explain why they just happened to decide to use a shuttlecraft on the precise mission where it was absolutely vital that they do so). And of course, Armen's conception of “animal instinct” is the absolute worst it could possibly be, firstly totally misunderstanding how gender roles manifest in real life animals by embracing the patriarchal assumption that female animals are always submissive breeding stock for alpha males and the appallingly racist notion that evolution is linear and that indigenous cultures are closer to animals and thus more “primitive” and “savage”. I can't even muster up the energy to get righteously angry at this shit anymore. It just sucks. That this evil, reactionary, talentless hack is still getting paid writing gigs in fucking 1978 is beyond belief. Fuck this.

(Ironically, in spite of all of this, “Savage Syndrome” is, somewhat horrifyingly, Decker and Ilia's best outing yet. Both get really sizeable and important parts and carry the majority of the episode's narrative weight, given that everyone else save McCoy is incapacitated. Ilia in particular is quite good: She does manage to get kidnapped a couple times, but she frees herself, and she uses her “Deltan powers of sensuality” to manipulate the male crewmembers because of course she does, but she runs all over the ship rerouting power and just generally fixing things and, scary as it is, this is her best episode to date.)

As it would be terrible for my patience, temper, mood and general mental well-being to do so, what I'd rather do instead of meticulously going through this episode's litany of flaws is to talk about the story's underlying assumption. This would be, in an attempt to strip away as much of the hideous racism as is possible, the idea that simplifying one's life is tantamount to being retrograde, going against the idea of progress. The affected crewmembers, for example, do not know how to use the modern technology of the Enterprise and resort to fashioning basic implements out of metal rods and bars. Of course, the notion of progress is already built around colonialism and racism: There's no way to actually separate them, they're too intrinsically linked as part of the larger Westernist hegemony.

In addition, the idea of technoscientific progress in particular also carries with it classist and capitalistic overtones. Innovation-speak tells us that it's good for corporations to constantly invent and release new products for us to buy, and it's functionally retrograde not to play into the system and buy them. Lower class people thus become shunned for their inability to buy their voice and play their ordained role. This, then, becomes hegemony: The interaction of patriarchy (which by definition desires nothing more then power and domination), capitalism, classism, racism, teleology and a modernist conception of technoscientific progress. Really, Margaret Armen's work is a perfect demonstration of how hegemony manifests in the late capitalistic West, in particular California, which was significantly transformed by the personal computer, electronics and semiconductor industries and their military-industrial complex backing.

(The electronics industries are, as it happens, some of the most wasteful and ecologically devastating: Through a combination of unnecessarily and deliberately costly manufacturing processes, a top-down and closed-box attitude, planned obsolescence, reliance on outdated components and architecture and just basic greedy scalping, they manage a truly astonishing and unprecedented turnover rate from “new-and-improved” to “worthless” and generate a monumental amount of unsalvageable technological waste that could otherwise have proved solid, reliable and useful for decades.)

One series of video games I could never get into was Civilization. This isn't my video game book and Vaka Rangi really isn't the place for me to articulate a lengthy criticism of it, but my basic complaint is that the entire game seems built around the very teleological conception of history I'm taking Armen to task for here. For those unfamiliar with Civilization, it's a series of turn-based strategy games where everyone plays as a nascent nation-state (and it *has* to be a nation-state, you can't play a diffuse group of allied people or some other kind of culture or social structure) starting at the Stone Age and moving throughout history for as long as the game lasts. The strategy comes from taking your group, who are hunter-gatherers at the start of the game, throughout the various stages of history and evolve them over the course of the game into a spacefaring civilization.

(It should be noted that you don't have to follow the actual pattern of real-world history, as that would be stultifyingly boring: You could, for example, play the United States as a tyrannical dictatorship that goes around nuking all their neighbours and taking all the resources by force. Wait...Maybe that's not actually so different from the real United States after all...)

Now to me, the deal-breaker with Civilization is that it's basically Modernization Theory: The Video Game. It ticks absolutely all of the boxes: You can't develop certain technologies until your country “advances” to a certain level, and social, cultural and technological development is all expressly linear. Literally so, in fact-You go into the sub-menus and you can see the Grand March of History laid out all neatly as a tech tree. (there are branching paths, but it's essentially one big line). And this is just as much of a problem as it would be in any other form of media for me, because it's yet another example of how hegemony reasserts itself through our media artefacts and how insidiously it can seep into our consciousnesses unless we're constantly aware of it.

What I always wanted to do whenever I found myself playing Civilization was to try and go through the entire game without ever leaving the hunter-gatherer stage. I wanted to see if I could get as far as the Space Age without ever actually establishing a permanent settlement. I never managed to, for one reason or another. Well, OK, the main reason it never happened because the guy I would play with was always in a mad rush to get nuclear weapons, so he always managed to destroy the planet (literally cracking it like an egg) before I could get my strategy in place. Now, granted, it's been awhile since I've played Civilization, this speaks more to the calibre of person I play video games with than it does the aesthetic merit of the games themselves and it's entirely possible I just suck at Civilization, but I've always remembered that nevertheless.

Now, I know I've digressed rather significantly from Star Trek (but come on dude, it's Margaret Armen. Cut me some slack), but the reason I bring this up is to pose an open question: What does this say about our franchise? I'm thinking in particular about “The Jihad” here-In that episode we had a really provocative contrast between Kirk, depicted there as the best representative of Starfleet and the Federation and all its technoscientific wonder, and Lara, someone who consciously lives her life by a code of simplicity. We're not yet at the phase of Star Trek's history where post-scarcity becomes a major theme, but, nevertheless, “The Jihad” depicted Lara as someone who deliberately rejected the technoscientific fetishism of the Federation in favour of living by the land, but whose people still managed to develop space travel. The implication, at least, that there are ways to Star Trek's galactic utopia that don't involve going through Starfleet was still there, not only intellectually, but materially as well.

Because this is the thing about simplifying your lifestyle: It's not, in point of fact, about making sacrifices. It's about cutting out everything extraneous and unnecessary. The trick is to figure out what all that is *before* you make your choices about what to keep in your life and what to abandon. And, if you believe people like John Muir, Robert Burnham, Jr. or any number of other similar thinkers (such as, er, me), simplification also involves rediscovering the bond that connects humanity with the cosmic natural world. There are ways to live in a modern world, and even utilise some of its tools and artefacts, without subscribing wholecloth to hegemony. Hegemony, like Margaret Armen, thinks simplification is retrograde and anti-progress. I'm inclined to think the opposite is likely true.

But the question remains, can Star Trek actually convey this? And furthermore, can science fiction itself, given the genre's roots in teleological, technofetishistic modernity? There are many who would say the answer to both questions is a resounding “no”. I tend to think the answer is a bit more nuanced then that: Star Trek can, and it's in fact uniquely poised to do so, but the problem is it so very rarely did. Margaret Armen's influence may be a ghost that perpetually haunts Star Trek and my attempts to engage with it, but she's no more of one than modernistic hegemony itself. Margaret Armen may be the single worst writer we've seen so far, if not of the entire franchise, but in truth the things she's most egregious at were the exact same bits of toxic hegemony that weigh down the rest of Star Trek, and really all of Soda Pop Art. It just so happens that she's the most blatantly and obviously hegemonic writer we've looked at. Ultimately, for Star Trek to move beyond Margaret Armen, is has to move beyond Westernism.