Safe Travels, Lieutenant Uhura

I was saddened to read over the weekend of the death of Nichelle Nichols at age 89. She brought to life Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, one of the greatest Star Trek characters from the original series. Her portrayal was so good that later shows in the Star Trek universe, such as the current Star Trek: Strange New Worlds couldn’t resist exploring new facets of this very compelling character.

Lieutenant Uhura–the name is based on the Swahili word for freedom–was the communications officer on the original crew of the Enterprise. She was always poised at her comm station, with her cool receiver in her ear as shown in the photo above, ready to open a hailing frequency, put an image on the view screen, or announce that an important message had been received from Starfleet Command. Along with Spock and Captain Kirk, Lieutenant Uhura was a mainstay on the the bridge crew. The guys at the helm and on other stations on the bridge might change, but Uhura was a rock of stability and such a good officer that from time to time Captain Kirk would call upon her to fill in as navigator, too.

Lieutenant Uhura was one of my favorites because she was one of the most well-developed characters and she seemed like a real human being. She laughed, she sang, she hummed songs she liked, she enjoyed furry, trilling tribbles, and she hung out with the other members of the crew during her free time. You got the impression that Lieutenant Uhura would be a great friend and crewmate. And, in many of the episodes, Lieutenant Uhura was the voice of common sense and reason, pointing out something that others missed. One website has collected some of her most memorable moments here.

My favorite Lieutenant Uhura moment came during the classic episode City On The Edge Of Forever. She was on the landing party that went down to the planet’s surface to try to find Dr. McCoy, who had inadvertently injected himself with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. When McCoy eludes the crew and goes into the past to change history, Kirk and Spock decide their only option is to also go into the past to try to find McCoy and stop him from changing history. The task seems impossible, and each member of the landing party is told that they will have to try, too. When Kirk and Spock prepare to depart, Mr. Scott, the ever-proper engineering officer, says “Good luck, gentlemen.” Lieutenant Uhura, in contrast, says: “Happiness at least, sir.”

“Happiness at least.” That was Lieutenant Uhura as portrayed by Nichelle Nichols. We wish her safe travels.

The Individual Versus The Arc

TV has changed a lot since the three-network days of my youth. One of the more significant changes involves the basic concept of what you are trying to accomplish with a TV series. In those days, every series (that I can think of, at least) consisted of disconnected individual episodes, and what happened in one episode wouldn’t affect future episodes unless the producers decided to bring on a new character at the start of a season. Every episode began and ended with the Cartwrights back at the Ponderosa, or the Bunkers at their tidy house at 704 Houser Street in Queens, or Kirk, Bones, and Spock on the command deck of the Enterprise.

Now, many series focus not on individual episodes, but on broad season-long story arcs. Episodes may tell an individual tale within that overall framework, but each episode also must have at least some elements that advance the general seasonal story line. I’m not quite sure when the arc concept took hold, but it’s been here for a while.

Here’s the issue: the arc approach is wholly dependent on the quality of that overall story line for the season. If that story line is compelling and the individual episodes help to fulfill its promise, the show can be great. If the seasonal plot is stupid or annoying, on the other hand, each episode is yoked to that failure and weighed down by it. I was thinking of this very basic point as I watched two of the most recent Star Trek offerings. Star Trek: Picard follows the arc concept, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds doesn’t.

In my view, Picard exposes the intrinsic weakness of the arc concept: in both seasons, the seasonal story line just has not justified multiple episodes in the telling. As a result, the show has felt bloated and self-indulgent and overly impressed with the supposed importance of its message. I’ve watched it, because I’ll watch pretty much any Star Trek offering, but it really sets my teeth on edge.

On the other hand, Strange New Worlds is freed from the heavy messaging that has made Picard such a leaden exercise. To be sure, there are some general character points being illustrated, such as Captain Pike’s (apparent) awareness of his own future fate, but each episodes stands on its own. As a result, the show has a kind of liberated, old-school feel to it that is much more in line with the original Star Trek series. Whereas watching Picard grind on to the end of season became a grueling chore, watching Strange New Worlds has been enjoyable and fun. (I say this even though I groaned, initially, at yet another show involving Spock and other familiar characters, like Uhura and Chapel, rather than exploring totally new ground, but the show’s creators and writers have dealt with that issue in an intriguing way that I’ll probably address at some point after I’ve watched a few more episodes.)

I’m not saying that the arc approach to a TV series is necessarily flawed or doomed to inevitable failure; shows like Better Call Saul would refute such an argument. I’m just saying that if you’re going to go with the arc approach, you’d better be darned sure that the story line is important and robust enough to carry the heavy burden of multiple episodes. Not every story line merits that kind of treatment, and when it doesn’t, the show suffers mightily for it. The individual episode approach, in contrast, has a kind of built-in protection against the clinker story line. There might be a lame episode here and there, but the next week the crew is back in their places and a new, and hopefully better, story is ready to be told.

Pitiful Picard

I recently watched the second season of Star Trek: Picard. By the last episode I felt like Patrick Stewart looks in this photo from the show–slack-jawed, slightly befuddled, and dazed at just how crappy this show is.

The premise of the show was a little dubious to begin with. However old Jean-Luc Picard is, we know that Patrick Stewart is over 80. That means he’s not going to be out there duking it out with the Gorn or doing any of the other physical stunts and fistfights and dropkicks that Captain Kirk did in the original series. Picard’s advanced age wasn’t necessarily disqualifying, however, because he was the cerebral starship captain, the trained diplomat who understood that he couldn’t put his life and command at risk because he was curious about what might be found on an alien planet. Perhaps Picard would draw upon the diplomatic past, and give us a show about Jean-Luc negotiating a difficult treaty with a new alien species, or something that would be a little on the intellectual side?

Nah! The first season was a mess, and the second season was no better. And here is the problem: this is probably the most uncreative show in the Star Trek universe, and it is depressing, besides. It’s uncreative because the writers can’t resist bringing back characters from the past–like Data, and Riker, and counselor Troi and Seven of Nine in season one, and Q and the Borg and Guinan and a distant ancestor of Dr. Soong (Data) in season two. It makes you realize how liberating working on the original Star Trek must have been, where the writers and actors were working with a totally blank canvas and didn’t feel hamstrung by having to bring back tired old characters and plot lines.

And speaking of plot lines, Picard season two follows a too-traveled road of alternative history, where Picard and his band need to reverse some event that changed history. Of course, the new history is unrelentingly bleak, violent, and racist. But then, every plot line on Picard is pretty darned bleak. We learn of a terrible incident in Jean-Luc’s past that shaped his life that you’re likely to guess early on, but that takes forever to fully depict. (Silly me! I thought the Next Generation Picard was just a stiff-necked, duty bound, by the book captain who thought he would be better at his job if he didn’t pal around with the crew, and I kind of respected him for that.) But everyone on the show is struggling with some kind of depressing problem, whether it is Q, or Guinan, or Dr. Soong, or the astronaut who needs to get on her history-changing flight. It’s a downer, which is the exact opposite of what the Star Trek universe is supposed to be all about. The show is so grim that, when Picard is hit by a car at one point in season two, I kind of hoped that the poor old guy would be put out of his misery. Alas! It was just another excuse for a bit more psychoanalysis.

The original Star Trek promised to “go where no man has gone before.” How about living up to that promise for a change? How about forgetting the Borg, and Data, and Guinan, and trying to develop some totally new characters and concept, like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine once did? Regrettably, I’m not holding my breath.

My Favorite Star Trek Episode

Kish was out of town earlier this week, so I seized the opportunity to indulge in a little Star Trek fix. It had to be something from the original series, of course–those shows I’ve been watching since they first aired during my childhood and that I’ve watched consistently in the more than five decades since. Some of the later Trek series are quite good, but nothing will really overtake the original series for me, with those familiar characters and plot lines that are as comfortable as an old shoe.

Of course, the viewer’s mood can affect show selection. If I’m looking for a lighter episode, I might go for I, Mudd, or The Trouble With Tribbles, or A Piece Of The Action, and if I really want to venture into the realm of guilty pleasures I might go for one of the bad, campy episodes from the third and final season. But I wanted instead to watch one of the best episodes–one of the classic shows that helped to make me into a fan of the Trek world until my last day. I thought about what my all-time favorite episode might be, and after a minute or two of reflection, I opted for Amok Time.

It wasn’t an easy call. Mirror, Mirror and Journey To Babel are great episodes, and so are Balance Of Terror and Devil In The Dark and City On The Edge Of Forever and a few others. I’ve got a soft spot for The Corbomite Maneuver, too. All of those episodes feature crisp plots, some meaningful insight into the Trek universe, and the great byplay between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy that the fans of the original series love.

Amok Time, where Spock’s biological impulses require him to return to his home planet of Vulcan to mate, and Spock and an unwitting Kirk must fight to the death due to Vulcan tradition, has all of that. It’s the first episode to give the viewers a significant look at Vulcan culture and Spock’s inner turmoil and what lies beneath that logical exterior, and the interaction between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy is all the diehard fan could hope for. I particularly love the scene where Kirk promises to risk his career to get Spock back to Vulcan, the scene where the crusty Dr. McCoy is surprised and honored to be asked by Spock to accompany him to Vulcan for the mating ceremony, and the entire final part of the show, where the quick-thinking McCoy saves the day and is rewarded with a chance to see an emotional outburst from Spock. Amok Time is just some great, vintage TV.

Now that I think of it, I probably should watch some of the other contending episodes, just to be sure that I’m right in picking Amok Time as my current favorite.

Tread Lightly, Pranksters!

On this April Fool’s Day, here is some heartfelt advice for those who are scheming about practical jokes: tread lightly today.

Any capable prankster has to consider the setting, the nature of the prank, and the prankee. Any kid old enough to attempt an April Fool’s Day gag during his formative years intuitively understood this. You might try the “put salt in the sugar bowl” trick on your brother, but you were risking an explosion if you pulled it on your Dad as he was taking his first, wake-up sip of morning coffee. And doing anything permanently destructive, like sawing through the legs of a chair so your sister would crash to the ground when she sat down for her cereal, was clearly out of bounds.

This year, any practical jokers need to understand their audience and some reasonable boundaries, too. We’ve been pretty battered by the past year, and we’re more brittle than normal. So slipping somebody one of those dripping cups, or putting an obscene hat on the statue in Schiller Park, or sticking a “kick me” sign on Captain Kirk’s back might be funny, but nobody’s going to get much of a belly laugh out of a COVID-oriented gag. Let’s not mess around with vaccination needles, for example, or cut up vaccination cards. And I’m not sure how those who have been involuntarily housebound for more than a year now would react to a flaming bag on their doorstep, either.

The best April Fool’s Day jokes have a certain silly, timeless quality, anyway–like the 1957 BBC broadcast that convinced some gullible Brits that pasta was harvested from trees in Switzerland. If you’re interested in reading about legendary pranks of the past, take a look here and here. But if you’re going to actually try a prank, please–go easy on us!

The Alternative Calendar’s Tale

My longstanding practice is to put things on my work calendar as soon as I plan them, even if they are not going to happen for months.  It’s not unusual for me to have deadlines and appointments on my calendar a year in advance.  In my experience, I’m just less likely to create a scheduling conflict or double-book myself if I keep my  calendar current.

Normally, there’s nothing strange about this.  The planned dates and deadlines arrive, the appointments and conferences and meetings happen, and the calendar pages turn and fade into the past.

Of course, in 2020 nothing is normal.  In 2020, all of the appointments and meetings and trips that were planned were cancelled — but they have remained on the calendar because there’s no point in going through the effort needed to delete them.  As a result, each week I get notices of what I was supposed to have been doing if the coronavirus pandemic hadn’t thrown us all a gigantic curve ball.  I’ve gotten reminders of haircuts missed, dinners that didn’t happen, performances that never occurred, and business and personal trips to places like Austin and Chicago that simply vanished on the wings of the wind.

Looking at those calendar entries that I made long ago has been a very weird experience.  It’s like unexpectedly catching sidelong glances of yourself in a mirror, where your reflection is reversed, or getting a glimpse of my life in one of those parallel universes that have been fodder for so many Star Trek episodes and sci fi novels, movies, and TV shows.  And, because all of these things were actually planned, they are far more plausible than the scenarios where the Nazis won World War II or an evil empire controls the galaxy.  If anything, the reverse is true:  Alternative Bob’s life seems a lot more plausible than one where the United States shut down for months due to a virus.  In fact, the sudden emergence of a virus causing the world to close its doors seems like a pretty contrived plot device.

I’ve been following his exploits with some interest, and I can tell you that, so far, Alternative Bob has had a heck of a 2020.

Messing Around With Genes

Since 2015, Congress has included language in its funding bills to prevent the Food and Drug Administration from approving any application to create in vitro fertilization children from embryos that have been genetically modified.  Because the prohibitory language has been included in funding bills that have expiration dates, it needs to be renewed every year.  The House of Representatives just passed legislation that includes the renewal language, as part of an effort to fund certain governmental activities like food stamps and drug approvals.

The issue of genetic modification of embryos has some special urgency these days, with the recent news that Chinese scientists have announced the birth of the first genetically modified children — twin girls whose genes allegedly have been altered to supposedly make them specially resistant to HIV.  The Chinese scientists used a protein to edit the genes on a “CRISPR” — a stretch of DNA.  Some people question the validity of the Chinese claim about these so-called “CRISPR babies,” but there is no doubt that genetic manipulation of human beings is moving from the realm of science fiction to the reality of science fact.

The bar to such activities created by Congress ensures that efforts to genetically modify humans are not going to be happening in America — at least for now.  Is that a good thing?  The FDA Commissioner has said:  “Certain uses of science should be judged intolerable, and cause scientists to be cast out. The use of CRISPR to edit human embryos or germ line cells should fall into that bucket. Anything less puts the science and the entire scientific enterprise at risk.”  Others argue that Congress has taken a “meat axe” approach when it should be crafting a more nuanced policy that recognizes that some genetic manipulation could be beneficial.

It’s hard to know what’s right.  Scientists have been involved in the reproductive process for years, and their work, through processes like in vitro fertilization, has allowed people who are struggling to conceive to realize their dream of having children.  But I think the notion of scientists tinkering with genes to create “better” human beings crosses a line in several ways.  First, I’m not entirely confident that scientists know what they are doing and that there won’t be unintended, negative consequences from the removal of the genes the scientists snip out.  Anyone who has read about the history of science knows that scientists have been wrong before, and its reasonable to think they might be wrong again — only this time, their errors wouldn’t just be about the impact of certain foods or the properties of atoms, but would directly affect specific human beings.  Second, where do you draw the line in genetic manipulation?  Modifying DNA sequences to try to avoid diseases or debilitating health conditions is one thing, but what if scientists want to edit genes to create humans who are smarter, or more athletic, or taller?  Do we really want to permit the creation of “designer people” — like Khan Noonien Singh, that memorable Star Trek character who was genetically modified to be a kind of superhuman?  And finally, as this article points out, the whole issue brings up uncomfortable memories of the eugenics arguments of the early 20th century, where certain ethnic groups and traits were considered superior and others inferior.  If “improved” humans are created, where does that leave the rest of us?

In my view, this is an area where a sweeping rule makes sense — at least initially.  I think we need a lot more evidence, and a lot more thinking, before we should allow scientists to go messing around with human genetic material.

The Significance Of Sound

Doug Grindstaff died late last month, at age 87.  It’s a loss for anyone who has enjoyed the Star Trek universe.

Who’s Doug Grindstaff, you say?  He’s the guy who came up with all of those nifty sound effects on the original Star Trek — the beeps and bloops and whooshes that made the show a feast for the ears.  The sssshhh sound when the doors from the turbolift to the bridge opened.  The blurbling bleeps that were emitted when a communicator was opened.  The puffing air that we heard when Dr. McCoy injected someone with some advanced medicine.  And the kind of crackling, whirring humming that the transporter made when Scotty beamed the away team down to the surface of a new planet, where one of the anonymous red-shirted security guys was bound to meet his maker.

We forget about how important sound can be to TV shows and movies.  But take a look at this snip from the beginning of the epic Star Trek “City on the Edge of Forever” episode — and then think about what it would have been like without all of those classic, memorable, and entirely fitting sound effects.  It’s hard to imagine Star Trek without those sounds.  We can thank Doug Grindstaff’s special form of genius and creativity for that.

Writer On The Edge Of Forever

Harlan Ellison has died.  An Ohio native, a graduate of the Ohio State University, and a prolific writer who had a long and productive career, he will always be remembered — by me at least — as the genius who came up with the idea, and wrote most of the screenplay, for one of my all-time favorite Star Trek episodes:  City on the Edge of Forever.

City is generally considered one the finest episodes from the original Star Trek series.  It told the story of Edith Keeler, a gentle, peace-loving woman who lived during the Great Depression, helped the unfortunate, and dreamed big dreams.  When Dr. McCoy is inadvertently injected with a drug that induces a psychotic episode and finds a time portal, he goes back in time and interacts with Edith in a way that somehow changes history, prevents the formation of the Federation, and leaves the Enterprise leadership stranded on the planet with the time portal.  Kirk and Spock use the portal to try to fix the damage and also go back to the Depression era, where Spock attempts to build a primitive computer from vacuum tubes — or, as he puts it, “stone knives and bearskins” — to learn what happened and Kirk falls madly in love with Edith.  When Spock determines that McCoy somehow saved Edith from death, and thereby created a universe in which her pacifist leadership delayed America’s entry into World War II and gave Nazi Germany time to win the race to build atomic weapons and capture the world, Kirk has to make the excruciating decision to allow the woman he loves to die.

When he does so, and he and Spock and McCoy return to the planet with the time portal, a heartbroken Kirk says “Let’s get the hell out of here” to end the episode — which legend says was the first time a curse word of any kind was broadcast on American network television, and the censors let it go because it punctuated the episode perfectly.

It turns out that the City episode was a point of great contention between Ellison and Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek who thought producing the episode as Ellison wrote it would just be too expensive.  Ellison wasn’t happy with the changes that were made and asked that a pseudonym be listed as the script writer, but Roddenberry kept Ellison’s name on the episode — which then won Ellison a Hugo Award.  Ellison was still fighting, and writing, about the episode years later.

RIP, Harlan Ellison, and thank you for an impressive body of work that just happens to include an all-time classic idea.

Rating The Captains

Kish and I have been spending the last few months working through the Star Trek TV shows.  We began with Star Trek:  Deep Space Nine, after Richard recommended it as an interesting and thought-provoking show.  Kish, who just does not like science fiction and never got into the original Star Trek, gritted her teeth and agreed to watch a few shows.

To her surprise, and my surprise, too, Kish liked the characters and some of the plot lines on Deep Space Nine, so we watched every episode.  Then, after we finished that series, we turned to Star Trek:  The Next Generation, and now we’re on to Voyager.

I think one of the things that we’ve found interesting about the different Star Trek shows is the different styles of the captains.  Deep Space Nine‘s Benjamin Sisko, stationed out on the frontier, was brave, tough and aggressive, with a sense of humor and a ready smile and a very strong mystical side.  In many ways, Sisko is the most outwardly human of the captains.  The Next Generation‘s Jean-Luc Picard, entrusted with the command of the Federation’s powerful flagship vessel, was formal, reserved, and by-the-book, an intellectual who was far more comfortable mediating a difficult dispute between warring alien races than dealing with the personal problems of his crew.  (Thank God Counselor Deanna Troi was on board to deal with those troublesome personal issues!)  And Voyager’s Kathryn Janeway, trying to unite a patched-together crew and get them home after being thrust 75,000 light years away by a powerful alien, is careful and decisive but with a decided warmth and obvious interest in the individuals who make up her crew.  Sisko, Picard, and Janeway all can deliver a reprimand, but she’s the captain who is most likely to take a moment to offer a compliment.

Which captain is best?  Kish started out advocating for Janeway, then switched to Picard, and now is thinking maybe it’s Sisko.  Each of them has their own style and their own strengths and weaknesses, and each of them engendered great loyalty among members of their crews for different reasons.  I think your choice might depend upon the specific circumstances.  If you had to select a captain to make a decision that would decide the fate of the universe, I’d definitely pick the careful, thoughtful Picard.  If you needed a captain to try to beat the odds and come up with an imaginative solution, I’d go with Sisko.  And if you had to pick a captain to be your boss and colleague, day after day, I think I’d opt for Janeway.

How do these three stack up against Captain James T. Kirk, the swashbuckling adventurer who invented the captain’s role on the original series?  Well, he’ll always be my favorite because he was the captain of my youth, but the episode-by-episode nature of the original shows and the movies never allowed his character to be developed with the same care and consistency as the others.  One thing’s for sure — if you were one of those anonymous red-shirted security guys who got killed every episode on the original series, you’d prefer anybody but Captain Kirk.

When You Know Your Doctor Is A Hopeless Nerd

Look, I love the original Star Trek TV series as much as any ardent Trekker.  I loved Kirk, and Spock, and Bones, and Scotty’s thick Scottish accent, and Uhura and the cool little gadget she wore that stuck out of her ear, and Sulu and Chekhov.  I even liked some of the bad guys, like Kang and the Romulan woman with the bad complexion that Spock seduced in one of the later, forgettable episodes.

But even I would never try to invent a tricorder like the one used on the original series.  Of course, as any dedicated fan of the show knows, the tricorder was a device that allowed the crew of the Starship Enterprise to gather enormous amounts of information simply by vaguely waving the tricorder in the general direction of an object or person.  In the classic episode City on the Edge of Forever, where Kirk must kill his beloved Edith Keeler, Spock apparently used a tricorder to record millennia of human history being displayed by the time portal that allowed Bones to go back in time and change human history so the Nazis won World War II.  (Trust me — this synopsis, while totally accurate, doesn’t do the episode justice.  It really is a great episode.)

But I digress.  Three ER doctors from Philadelphia, who seized upon the fact that Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy used the tricorder in diagnosing the medical condition of his patients, have invented their own version of the tricorder.  Their device monitors vital signs, goes through a series of questions that assist in the diagnosis, and ultimately helps the doctor to come up with a determination of what’s wrong with the patient.

So, these doctors are total Star Trek nerds — a conclusion confirmed by the fact that, as the article linked above shows, they had their picture taken in replicas of the uniforms worn by crew members in the original series.  So what?  It looks like they’ve been inspired by the show to create a useful diagnostic tool, which is a good thing.  No word, however, on whether this tricorder also makes that really cool whirring sound that fans of the show remember so well.

Next up — the transporter!

Redshirts

If you’re a sci fi buff looking for a book recommendation for the new year, I suggest John Scalzi’s Redshirts, which was published in 2012 but which I’ve just discovered.  It’s fast-paced, well written, laugh-out-loud funny — and I’m not somebody who use “LOL” very often — and it addresses an important issue.

It’s an issue that any fan of Star Trek, the original series, recognized long ago :  namely, the appalling mortality rate among the member of the away team that were sent down to the surface of the planet with Kirk, Spock, and Dr. McCoy.  Those poor anonymous red-shirted bastards — because typically, they wore red shirts identifying them as members of the Security department — were lucky to be given a name or have even one line before they were blown up, devoured by beasts, ravaged by rapidly accelerated old age, cut down by phaser fire, reduced to a cube and then crushed into dust, or otherwise knocked off in painful, embarrassing, and inexplicable fashion before the first commercial break.

Even worse, as the episode went on, you learned that the red-shirted deaths were the result of some colossal misunderstanding or bad decision by Captain Kirk, and the misunderstanding would be resolved, and at the end of the episode Kirk would make some funny comment as the Enterprise left orbit.  And, even as you chuckled at Kirk’s witticism, it became all-too-clear that nobody gave a a second thought to the red-shirted guy who met his maker on Planet Albatron 4.  You couldn’t help but wonder if you thought about it:  how do these red-shirt guys even get insurance?  How much is the United Federation of Planets paying in widows’ and orphans’ benefits, anyway?

This issue has been explored before — Galaxy Quest does a pretty good job with it, through the ruminations of Sam Rockwell’s character Guy Fleegman — but Redshirts takes it to a different level by imagining how the rest of the crew in a similar circumstance in a different TV universe might react to the constant rain of death that was befalling randomly selected “away team” members.  It’s hysterical, and the clever ways in which the desperate crew members try to deal with the issue tell you a lot about Scalzi’s creativity.  He’s a good writer, too.

It’s always fun to find a new author and work your way through his catalog.  I’ve been enjoying Scalzi’s truly excellent Old Man’s War series, too, but Redshirts was a special comedic treat.

To Boldly Charge Where No Man Has Charged Before

The good news:  a new Star Trek series will premiere on CBS in January 2017!  The bad news:  after the first episode, you’ll only be able to watch it on CBS’ video on demand channel, which has a $5.99 a month subscription fee.

I love the Star Trek franchise, so the idea of a new series — with new characters and plot lines — is very welcome, indeed.  But the idea of charging people to watch the series, rather than putting it on a free broadcast network, seems antithetical to the whole Star Trek egalitarian/United Federation of Planets/”we’re all in this together”/the future is about a united human race following the better angels of its nature message.  I don’t remember any Star Trek, The Original Series episodes — other than those featuring Harcourt Fenton Mudd, and maybe The Trouble With Tribbles — where material items or money seemed to play any part.  The fact that they’re charging for new episodes therefore seems kind of chintzy of me.

Will I watch the new series?  I’ll watch the first episode, for sure.  And if it looks good, maybe I’ll watch more and pay the $5.99 a month.  But I didn’t really watch much of Star Trek:  Deep Space Nine or Star Trek:  Voyager or Enterprise, because they didn’t really grab me.  If the writers can come up with new characters of the quality of Spock or Jean-Luc Picard or Data or, of course, James Tiberius Kirk, I’ll tune in.  If not, I think I’ll probably save that $72.00 a year and use it to watch the next Star Trek movie.

A Well-Made Cocktail

 
Normally I’m a wine guy.  I shy away from distilled spirits because appalling incidents from my college days remain fresh in my memory.

But some nights, a cocktail sounds good.  Last night we visited the Society Lounge in Cleveland, which makes many fine cocktails and maintains a well-stocked bar.  When I learned that the barkeeps were locked in a Campari Cocktail Contest, with proceeds to benefit charity, I felt honor-bound to participate.  

Our bartender invented a drink called The Enemy Within, with gin, Campari, Cocchi, and blackberry, garnished with lemon peel.  It was excellent, looked good, and went down easy.  The fact that it was named after a Star Trek episode didn’t hurt, either.

Live Long And Prosper

I was very saddened to learn today of the death of Leonard Nimoy at age 83.  He was an accomplished stage and screen actor, poet, and photographer — but to those of us who loved Star Trek, he will always and forever be the man who created Mr. Spock.

Books have been written about Spock and Kirk and McCoy, the complex relationship between that trio that made Star Trek such a terrific show, and the half-Vulcan character who struggled mightily to keep his human side in check in compliance with the dictates of Vulcan culture and its relentless emphasis on logic.  Nimoy made Spock a believable character — and thus a great character — when he very easily could have been as silly as Jar Jar Binks.  After all, an alien with pointed ears, green skin and super-human strength who eschews all emotion?  But thanks to Nimoy’s deft touch, Spock was as real and complex and layered as any character in the TV or film universe.  And, for those of us who were awkward adolescents at the time, dealing with a rush of weird new emotions and our own feelings of not quite fitting in with the rest of the world, Spock was enormously appealing.

I also liked that Nimoy seemed to struggle with the Spock character almost as much as Spock struggled with his human side.  Nimoy knew immediately that Spock was an iconic character, and he wanted to avoid being typecast.  When the Star Trek series ended, he promptly took on a completely different role as Paris on Mission: Impossible, wrote an autobiography called I Am Not Spock, and seemed to constantly reject the great character he created.  But ultimately he relented, reconnected with the role, and played Spock in a long series of movies and TV appearances — and Star Trek fans are grateful that he did.  Indeed, his connection with the character became such that he wrote a later autobiography called I Am Spock, and by the end of his life, as Richard points out, Nimoy ended his tweets with LLAP — a reference to Spock’s great Vulcan salutation.

Live Long and Prosper.  What a wonderful, simple sentiment from what was supposed to be an unemotional culture!  Nimoy lived that sentiment and gave us an unforgettable creation.  He will be sorely missed.