Comments Elsewhere

I really enjoyed the movies and I’m excited to see where things go from here. So what follows are quibbles.

william:

Can you see this sort of Trek ever openly embracing the degree of utopianism that had Picard kindly explaining the soft, enlightened, post-scarcity socialist future to the twenty-first century savage in First Contact.

Well, while TOS is supposed to have a lot of Roddenberry-utopia in it, Kirk’s era has never been nearly as “post-scarcity” as TNG. In TOS they don’t have any holodecks and they don’t have any replicators. The Enterprise is often busy schlepping basic food and supplies from one terraform colony to the next. Etc. There are episodes that revolve around a Szaszian “rehabilitation” planet (!) and a fugitive human war criminal who’d massacred dysgenic colonists during a food crisis. Their universe is necessarily more rough around the edges than Picard’s is, as a matter of the technological setting and so also the characters who dwell in it.

But the movie does definitely have lots of touches that make 23rd century Earth strangely darker than it is in the original-flavor TOS. (I mean, Nokia, yeah, but also, Robocops on hoverbikes? Wow.)

As for exploring as against military adventurism, I think this is probably a basic limitation of how script writers think about writing for movies as opposed to TV. The TV writers exploited the weekly one-hour format to write in new planets and new races without thinking that any given week had to be a blockbuster event; just about every Star Trek movie, on the other hand, has been focused on “Let’s all have a big fight!” and I’m pretty sure it’s because they (wrongly) think you can’t make a movie about discovering awesome things without getting involved in a big fight against an established menace.

To be fair, in addition to V (ugh) and IX (bleh), there is also I, which involves trying to Save The Earth from an alien menace, but it is about encountering a radically new form of life and having to learn to communicate with it. (So’s IV, actually, but in a way that makes us all stupider for having seen it.)

The movie treats the Vulcan way of life much less appallingly than Enterprise (Spock does take some opportunities to be Fascinated); but I’m also really wishing that somebody involved with Star Trek were still capable of writing a Vulcan plot that wasn’t immediately engaged with trying to get the poor Vulcan out of his Logic at the first opportunity.

And I thought the kissy-face with Uhura was the wrong thing to do — partly because, as above, it was part of the scriptwriters not giving Spock any narrative space to practice the way of Logic in a sympathetic way; and partly also because it just shreds the plot of The Naked Time, Amok Time, etc., (yeah, different timeline, I know, but still) and offers little or nothing in return by way of revealing or developing Spock or Uhura. (A tragic, Nurse Chapel-style unrequitable love for Spock? Sure, great. Makeouts on the transporter pad? Not so much.)