OK--Star Trek Discovery has got to stop this!!!

I will withhold my reviews of Star Trek Discovery for now, as it is early going and things do look generally high quality and worth a fair shake. I like the continuing story model but hope they can weave in other good stories along the way, otherwise I fear it will be too strongly based on the main narrative and once that story is resolved, the interest in re-watching may go down. So I hope they can find a happy medium.It seems to me that the TNG/VOY/DS9 shows usually has a story A, story B (and sometimes a story C) format,so it seems there would be room to do an overarching story, with some other nearly standalone stories woven in.

What I really like is the allowance for some character conflict...long overdue and certainly a longstanding struggle the writers always had promoted, with limited success, in the past.

I also like the emotional content, and hope more of the character interactions and story threads will allow this to deepen and become more complex. Otherwise it runs the risk of being a bit too one note in its emphasis. While the show need not be an ensemble piece, it will need some more characters to round it out or risk becoming too somber and narrow. (In fairness, I think think this will probably happen with some time, and setting a pace is not such a bad idea.)

OK, that was sort of a review, wasn't it? Well that's not the focus of this posting! While Discovery has made some changes in format for the better,somewhere there is someone trying to regurgitate old technobabble! I get it. It helps to have some language that has a thread of specificity to it, top make thing credible, but this Star Trek trope has got to stop!! Now!! What I am referring to is all of the goofy, overly precise predictions and numbers. This started with Spock (and is humorous in its own way and perhaps needed as an exaggeration in the 60s) but it also continued through all subsequent iterations of the show and now I have detected at least two incidents of it in the first 4 episodes of Discovery!

In Episode #1, Captain Georgiou and Michael Burnham are walking around this planet, worried about a storm front heading their way...

Georgiou: "How long until that storm comes crashing down on us?"
Burnham: "I estimate one hour, 17 minutes, 22 seconds."

Ooohhhh!!! Aren't we all fancy with our predictions today? Science! To the second, no less? Wow you must be pretty smart, Miss Burnham, having grown up on Vulcan and such. Training in those bubble pits. Cutting your hair so short. Jokin' around with those V-nerds after hours, eh? You can calculate pretty accurate! So accurate in fact that you know when the first grain of sand will hit your brow.Or is that the center of the storm will be upon you?Wait, how do you know second-by-second where the center of a storm will be? Doesn't it blow with the wind and vary a lot? Oh, maybe you were calculatin' all Vulcan like, using some parametric assumptions or rules of thumb,eh? That oughta impress your Captain. She won't think you have no judgement, and not understanding of tolerances. She will just set her watch by your prediction, because its the FUTURE! Oh wait,maybe she will think you are showing off when she thinks about how ridiculously precise you are being when it is meaningless once it is inside your tolerance!!

OK, I don't know who it was who wrote that last paragraph but the point is clear to anyone with a scientific background. Anyone worth their salt would never provide a number like that. Sure, given some assumptions you can work out a number, but no one would use every little bit of precision, because the inputs, inherent variability, and and root assumptions can vary so much. A true scientist would understand these limits and constrain her comments to an accuracy based on these fuzzy factors. So Burham could have said, "An hour and 15 minutes." -- not "17 minutes" even, but "15 minutes", which has much more credibility and proportionality. It doesn't matter how high-tech the setting, some things just are not suited to that kind of accuracy. What's next, is she going to predict the next time someone sneezes, or how far a paper airplane will fly to a millimetre accuracy?

I get that some things can be predicted with accuracy, like satellites in motion in space, since there is little or no drag force, but part of that precision also can be attributed to the fast speeds relative to the tolerances of measurement. And then the distance traveled in one second can be pretty far.

They used to do it all the time in TNG. Life support count-downs to the second. What was going to happen? Lose gravity? Perhaps. Lose air? Not so fast. So they are saying that in one moment, all is well, and the next moment, everyone croaks. Reminds me of this Jerry Seinfeld stand-up bit about expiry dates on milk...

Now, this kind of talky-talk is the ultimate moniker for Trek-writer geekdom. I know many of these writers just inject the language to give it some sizzle, but where is their science advisor? I don't buy the idea that the extra precision makes for better drama--it just makes for hokey dialog and bounces me out of the story. In Discovery Episode 4, in worrying about a military attack, we get this one:

Saru: "In exactly five hours, 49 minutes and 46 seconds, the Klingons will take Corvan II."

Well, he must know everything! How the attack is going to proceed, how many ships, number of bathroom breaks, how they will aim their guns, etc. How much better it would be, and just as dramatic (if not more so) for him to say, "In under 6 hours the Klingons will converge on Corvan II, and all will be lost." Keep the pressure, lose the trivia. And it's actually more scientific.

No wonder casual Trek viewers think it is stupid.

OK, time to get off the soap box. Would be fun to see how many examples we can all come up with.

And watch out for that expiring milk!

Ship of Dreams

OK, as you can tell from the blog name, I am a Star Trek fan. I have been away from blogging and away from Star Trek for a number of years, but in the last year or so, I have had a bit of a resurgence of interest. It all started with reading and following the rehabilitation to the original Starship Enterprise shooting model undertaken by the Smithsonian. I have always been quite interested in the production side of the show, and less married to its mythology, aside from appreciating much of it. So this initiative to restore the original Enterprise model from the 60s TV show really grabbed me. And the 50th Anniversary made me nostalgic.

I have to say there is something about that ship. It is a ship of dreams. So may people have watched the show and imagined the environment and the possibilities. It has enough realism to seem like something we might actually build. It feels like a cross between a cruise ship, a military vessel and a university campus, full of capable and smart individuals driven by a common purpose in a cooperative and socially supportive atmosphere.

I always find it funny when I hear sci-fi fans talk about their favourite ship because to me, there is no contest. Star Trek is "Pigs in Space!" -- i.e. it is US in space, not others who are like us, US! So aside from the morality lessons that give it some heft (and some eye-rolling simplistic or partly antiquated insights), the whole IDEA of that universe being OUR universe and our future is pretty inspirational. No wonder so many NASA scientists and engineers love the show. So to me, when asked what is my favourite ship, it is always the Big E. (And by that I mean the original or refit Enterprise from TOS and related movies.)

The Millennium Falcon from Star Wars is neat. Its like a big camper or RV, where  you can imaging jetting off on your own adventure. It like Martin Riggs home in Lethal Weapon (or better yet Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files).. Solitary, self-sufficient, everything a gigolo needs. But after the romance of sleeping in your kitchen wears off, I imagine you would start to get lonely, and look for someone with some new conversation at least. Even a Wookie would do. But after a while you it might wear off a bit, especially living the life of a merchant or smuggler....tennis shoes and tobacco every week. (I kid because I love.)

Now in fairness, the TOS is looking a little dated. People can notice all sorts of flaws, some that cut right against its loftier notions of equality and sophistication. But what we are lacking when we make those observations is context. We forget what kind of culture and thinking was mainstream when the show aired, and when it went though such substantial reruns. That when forget what an immersive universe it created, and what an inspiration it could be. I wanted to show TOS to my daughter in her early teems and it is just a bit hard to sell. It has always been my theory that the only way to watch TOS is become a teenager, watch it every weekday at 5 pm, and repeat for about two years, because that's the way the world encountered it in the 70s when the show found its audience. Oh,and be surrounded by shows that are nothing like it. THAT is when you realize what an oasis of ideas and imagination and adventure the show was. An that's why that ship is the ship of dreams for so many.... as Neil deGrasse Tyson summarized so well at a convention appearance captured on youtube.

Now I understand we don't all have the opportunity to time travel to the 70s to watch a TV show. And TNG is really the linchpin to Star Trek surviving and growing so large. It proved the concept had legs and is really the reason the franchise has weathered the years well. And it is mostly watchable. So this is not s sleight to TNG or the subsequent shows, but a recognition of the compelling power of an original creation. (I know that Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas can be shown to have needed others to fill out their vision, they res-used concepts and motifs from here and there, and they can be shown sometimes to have been a drag on their own creation, but nothing can take away their agency to create their respective works and start something special.)

So that's a longhand way of saying the Enterprise model restoration sparked a desire, rekindled my affection, ended up with a family road trip to Washington (because its a great City to visit, though I did go see the model on display). Then I bought the Blu-Ray of TOS and TNG and a couple of books, like The Fifty-Year Mission books by Gross and Altman, and Herb Solow and Bob Justman's book.

And maybe now the result will be to get back to my blogging! So much more to say!

What creative works have inspired you, and when?