30 Day TV Challenge - Day 12: "Sokath! His eyes uncovered!"

12. An episode you've watched more than 5 times.

"Darmok"

(This will have spoilers. But I find it hard to believe that anyone who genuinely cares about seeing "Darmok" hasn't already done so.)

Temba, his arms wide.

An easier question, really, would be what good episode of television haven't I watched at least five times. I'm an obsessive rewatcher -- I love going back and finding new details in the things I love. But if I had to narrow down the one episode of TV that I've gone back to the most, it would probably be "Darmok," a classic fifth-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's one of the best episodes Next Gen ever made -- one that I still love, and find myself revisiting again and again.

The premise is a simple one: a mysterious alien race makes contact with the Federation and wants to communicate. The Enterprise is sent to investigate, and runs into a minor snag: the aliens, called the Children of Tama, are completely incomprehensible. Oh, the universal translator seems to switch their speech into English (or whatever it is they speak on Star Trek), but the words don't add up to anything intelligible: "Rai and Jiri, at Lungha. Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons." When talks quickly get nowhere, the Tamarian captain, Dathon, holds up a pair of daggers, tells Picard, "Darmok and Jilad at Tanagra," and transports the both of them to the surface of the planet beneath them. Alone, Picard has to figure out the true intentions of his counterpart, without either of them able to communicate with the other.

It's brilliant, largely because it pokes at the way all of these bumpy-headed aliens in the Star Trek world don't seem to have any trouble talking to each other. Even with a universal translator, so much of language is based upon a shared history -- communicating with someone without that shared history can be close to impossible, even if you do share a language. "Darmok," in the way of good science fiction, takes that to an alien extreme: the Children of Tama speak entirely in metaphor and allusion; everything they say is a reference to something from their history books. Without that shared knowledge, the Enterprise crew is left hopeless; so too are the Tamarians, who are left completely baffled at even the simplest attempts at conversation.

It could have turned pretty silly, actually, without actors who really bought into it. Patrick Stewart is as reliable as ever, and the late Paul Winfield is excellent as the Tamarian captain. But on the most recent viewing, I really started to appreciate what Michael Dorn brings to "Darmok" as Worf: the Klingon, of course, finds the constant attempts at talking and discourse to be increasingly frustrating, and Dorn pulls off Worf's warring impulses perfectly. There are also some great tricks of staging that I appreciate that play to the nuances of the crew's interactions -- the episode opens with a meeting in the conference room, everyone seated, Picard leading the discussion just like during any crisis...but when Picard is abducted and Riker is charge, suddenly no one is sitting, the whole crew standing around in a crude circle yelling at one another.

The episode's best moment -- and one of Next Gen's very best moments, period -- comes as Picard discerns what's going on. Darmok and Jilad were warriors who came to Tanagra separately, but left as allies after defeating a common foe -- like the vicious, invisible monster that hunts Picard and his new friend. This is Dathon's last-ditch effort to forge an alliance with the Federation, but it doesn't go as he planned. He is mortally wounded by the creature, and turns to Picard for comfort during a moment of quiet.



As it happens, I've seen "Darmok" so many times that I can actually understand what the Tamarians are saying. Which is what happens in the episode itself: Picard doesn't figure out how to communicate with the Tamarians by finding a history book or doing research on the computer; he just listens, remains patient, and waits to reach understanding. When he does so, and Dathon howls with joy, "Sokath! His eyes uncovered!" his rapture is contagious. And when Picard reports Dathon's death to his officers -- "Uzani, his army...Shaka, when the walls fell." -- the sadness is overwhelming.

I think what appeals to me most about "Darmok" is that it reminds me how my friends and I (and this blog) must sound to someone who doesn't have the deep ocean of geek history to draw on. Christy can quickly find herself lost and baffled if we step too far off the path and start speaking entirely in The Big Lebowski quotes. "Darmok" is also a reminder that, no matter how little you may have in common with someone else, communication and understanding are possible. It doesn't matter if you speak the same language: Picard tells us, "Communication is a function of patience and imagination." May we all have both in sufficient measure.

Temba, at rest.

30 Day TV Challenge - Day 5: "There's coffee in that nebula."

5. A show you hate.

Again, I bet you're really surprised.

There's no getting around it, kids: Star Trek: Voyager was a wretched, wretched television show. They made 168 episodes of this thing, and out of them maybe -- maybe -- ten are what I would call "good." This is not a show that started well and went off the rails; it wasn't marred by executive meddling; it didn't lose a powerful creative voice midway through its run and suffered from the vacancy. It set up all its dominoes from the start, gave itself lots of fascinating directions to move and a whole galaxy to explore, and then chose wrong for every single decision. For seven years.

The premise is pretty solid -- a Federation ship gets blasted across the galaxy by a Mysterious Godlike Being*, then has to make the long, 70000 light year trip home alone. A thousand possibilities! Think of the endless universe they had to work with: they bragged that the completely new setting would allow them to really shake things up, leave behind all those tired villains everyone was bored with. (Which they really did leave behind for, um, seven whole episodes.) The unexplored Delta Quadrant would let the franchise return to its roots, a show about exploration and testing the limits of humanity. So why did everyone seem so bored? The characters, I mean, not just the audience? And why did it all feel so...the same?

Interesting concepts are introduced, then either abandoned or botched completely. The tension between the Federation officers and the Maquis freedom fighters, forced to work and live side-by-side? I think it came up three times. The idea that the ship had limited resources to use and had to make do with what they had? The only one who seemed to bring that up was Neelix, the ship's resident annoying goofball, and it was only a handful.

But hey, that's fine -- you want to write boring, fallow characters, that's your business. But Rick Berman and Brannon Braga (the show's creators and creative voices) took it a step further and gutted Star Trek**. The Borg, the Maquis, the Q -- classic Trek creations that made their way to Voyager, and all of them marred beyond recognition. Which shouldn't surprise anyone: Braga made no bones about this indifference toward the franchise's continuity, and pretty did whatever he wanted. Why he wanted to do this, no one knows.

The show is infamous for its most well-worn storytelling device, the dread Reset Button ending. I know how quickly I got tired of the "We have to go back in time to save the ship from being destroyed" story line, but thought it was a crutch they developed in later seasons; I was mildly surprised to do some research and discover this was the crux of the third episode of the series. But when presented with Star Trek's most obvious chance to do some real, deep character work, to actually tell a coherent story with characters who changed and grew, they did the opposite: sitcom writing in space. A problem popped up, they solved it in 44 minutes, and everything went back exactly as it was -- very often, literally exactly as it was, thanks to time travel.

I watched...so many episodes of Voyager. I'm a Trekkie die hard, no question. And I was waiting for it to be good. Because, hey, Next Gen struggled at the beginning, didn't it? Surely Voyager will improve! But no. It never did. In fact, it got worse. And by the time it finally limped to its half-assed, laughable conclusion, Star Trek had been dealt a grievous wound. I'm not sure it will ever really recover.

*Which was just laziness. The original Trek started with Mysterious Godlike Beings; Next Gen started with Mysterious Godlike Beings; DS9 started with Mysterious Godlike Beings. Voyager couldn't get out of its goddamn pitch meeting without being a boring retread.
**They would later create Enterprise, a show so vapid and dull that it's actually difficult to hate. I guess after gutting the corpse, they wanted to piss on its grave. (Braga, incidentally, would also destroy the 24 series. So it's not just Trek he hates.)

Damn!

Apparently, the new Star Trek movie has been pushed back... all the way to next May. This blows.

That is all.



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Best Wikipedia category ever

Spotted this on the article for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan...



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I hope it's Neil Diamond

In the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "I, Borg," Geordi and Data cook up a way to finish off the Borg once and for all: an insidious computer program. What is it? Just a picture -- but one that is illogical and impossible to properly reconcile in real three-dimensional space, like an M.C. Escher drawing. The theory is that once the image is uploaded into the Borg's hive mind, the Collective will start trying to figure it out. When they can't, more and more combined brain power will be devoted to it. And when that doesn't work either, even more RAM will get eaten up by this thing, until the Borg's CPU Usage meter hits 100% and they get a Blue Screen of Death.

My brain works like that sometimes, as you probably know. I hit something illogical and impossible to reconcile, and I obsess about it until...well, until my cerebral hard drive locks up.

Check this out: local radio station 94.5 FM (or "The Buzz," as they'd like me to call them, I'm sure) is sponsoring a trio of concerts over the next month, all three of which are sold out. The first is Jonathan Davis, who you might know as the frontman for Korn. The second show features local Texas band the Toadies, who haven't had a hit in about fourteen years, but have a passionate following.

The band performing at the third show? I don't know. I don't mean that I haven't heard; I mean I don't know because they're not telling.

Tickets went on sale last week. Tickets for a concert for which no band had been announced. The tickets were fifty dollars. Again, fifty dollars for a ticket to a concert with no announced act.

The Buzz then declared they would name the band...after tickets had sold out!

Huh?

There's an old adage in pro wrestling: if they announce that an upcoming event will have a "mystery guest," you're going to be let down. Why? Because if they had anyone worth talking about, they'd tell you to make sure you bought a ticket. If they've got a bona fide superstar that everyone would pay to see, they'd say so.

If they had a band worth a fifty dollar ticket, why wouldn't they just go ahead and announce it? What the hell kind of sense does it make to keep it a secret...unless they're ripping you off?

I've been bouncing this around in my head for the last couple of days, trying to piece it together. It's been a common topic of conversation among the bored at Pizza Place. The common theories:

1. "They're trying to build up buzz and excitement by keeping it a secret." Great -- except they're not announcing the band until after the tickets sell out. What good will any of that buzz and excitement do them? They'll already have all the money.
2. "It's a huge band that would normally sell out in seven minutes. By keeping it a secret, they slow that down, so everyone gets a chance to go." Except big fans of whatever band it is are still going to get left out, because they don't know their favorite band is playing! And again -- since they're not talking until tickets have sold out, what difference does it make how fast those tickets sell? They're the same price, whether they're sold out in seven minutes or seven days.

Not only does it not make sense from a business perspective, it doesn't make sense from a fan service perspective, either. Since the band is a secret, the people buying tickets are clueless. I mean, say My Chemical Romance puts on a show. Sure, My Chemical Romance sucks hardcore -- but there are people out there who like them, and they'll buy tickets to the concert. What you probably won't have are MCR-haters clogging up the seats and desperately trying to get rid of their tickets. And with the act a mystery, that's what you're guaranteed to have at this show. Even if the band is hugely popular -- like Incubus or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the two guesses that seem most popular at Pizza Place -- you're going to have a large percentage of people who would rather die than drop fifty bucks to see their show. And those people are going to feel completely screwed and ripped off by this scheme.

Want it to get more interesting? The tickets have sold out -- they sold out Saturday, as a matter of fact. Have they made the announcement? No! On Saturday, they stated that they'd make the revelation later in the day...and then, instead, delayed it until Tuesday. So now they're getting jerked around with the grand reveal, too? And keep in mind, the concert takes place on December 9 -- just a few weeks from now, giving the inevitable percentage of ticket-buyers who hate the Mystery Band precious little time to unload their ducats on eBay.

So: the scheme makes no sense from a business perspective, it makes so sense from the audience's perspective. Why the bloody hell would anyone do this? Well, I have a theory. And it draws back to pro wrestling again. (Hey, I used to work for a pro wrestling company; I have to use that business experience somewhere, don't I?)

In 1990, World Championship Wrestling introduced a villain to act as foil for their champion, Sting. He called himself the Black Scorpion, and addressed Sting decked entirely in black. A hood covered his face; his voice was distorted to further hide his identity. He tormented Sting for an entire year (!), all the while leaving fans guessing as to who he really was.

Why all the secrecy? Because WCW didn't have anyone. Their original candidate -- some schmuck no one had ever heard of -- fell through. So they just strung it along for as long as they could, keeping the Scorpion under his hood while they frantically tried to find someone to take the role.

I think that's what the Buzz is doing. I imagine the concert was a last-minute ploy, so last-minute they had to start selling tickets before the contracts were signed. And in true American style, their PR department came up with this "It's not a bug, it's a feature" scheme to make it look like an inventive idea.

Either that, or the entire company is on acid. Or they're really, really stupid. Or both, frankly.

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Scotty of the dead

A website I've never heard of is reporting that Simon Pegg -- from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz -- is going to play Scotty in the new Star Trek film. Also, John Cho -- Harold from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle -- will play Sulu. They'll join Sylar, who's playing Spock.

I have no objections to this.

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Oh, there's a joke in there about the episode where Spock's brain was stolen, but I'm in too much of a hurry to come up with it myself

Zachary Quinto, whom you know better as the brain-eating serial killer Sylar on Heroes, will be playing Spock in next year's new Star Trek movie. As will Leonard Nemoy, apparently.

This is acceptable.

I still wish that little pissant had died trying the Kolvoord Starburst

An interesting thing happens to actors who portray characters on a Star Trek series. They attract legions of rabid, loyal fans, make gads of money, and then disappear off the face of the fucking planet.

With the exceptions of William Shatner and Patrick Stewart (and Alexander Siddig, whose brilliant performances in Kingdom of Heaven and Syriana were promptly ignored by everyone), the second the series finale ends, Star Trek actors waft away like vapor trails. I mean, when was the last time you saw Michael Dorn? Or Nana Visitor? Kate Mulgrew has receded back into whatever swamp wrought her upon us, and Colm Meaney's once-prolific career has dried up almost completely. George Takei gets a recurring role on Heroes because the creators know fanboys will giggle every time he appears, but when have you ever seen Nichelle Nichols without that little metal thing in her ear? Or Gates McFadden without a medical tricorder in her hand? And is Walter Koening even still alive?

(By the way, real Trekkies don't need to ask which characters those actors played. So I'm not gonna tell you.)

So it's always fun to stumble across a Trek actor in the present tense -- even if it's not one of your favorite actors, who didn't portray one of your favorite characters.

I found Wil Wheaton's blog today.

Wil, of course, played the role of Gene Roddenberry's inner child Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, bringing to life a character almost universally loathed and reviled. Here was this kid, all of fifteen, who was somehow smarter than every educated, experienced officer aboard the flagship of the Federation. Even the android.

And, of course, Wesley got to tool around the ship in his dorky "Acting Ensign" uniform, he got to fly the Enterprise, save the ship from certain doom on a regular basis, make out with Ashley Judd, and piss off the viewers nonstop. He was such an obvious surrogate for Gene Roddenberry (the Great Bird of the Galaxy's middle name was Wesley, don'tcha know), such a pathetically written Mary Sue that most viewers of the show hated him with a violent passion.

So there's still that instinct to hate the guy who played him on sight, even though I do remember him from other things -- namely Stand by Me, in which he had the lead role (and did quite well for himself). But I stumbled across Mr. Wheaton's blog today, and it was...interesting.

No, really. 'Cause he's a well-spoken guy. The first post I read actually sounded a lot like something I'd write: it was a rambling, passionate essay on his favorite album, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Which happens to be one of my favorite albums.

So apparently, Wil Wheaton is not that bad a guy. I'm just surprised to see him breathing -- after Next Gen, where'd he go? Some sort of Dharma Initiative deserted island, trapped in the Pearl taking notes? And was Terry Farrell or Nicole de Boer down there with him?