Trek: Prestige vs Commodity

Over the last few months I've watched a lot of episodic, 24 eps/season-type shows. Shows like The Murdoch Mysteries, Haven, Flash, and Elementary. Lately it's been Elementary that's my video wallpaper while I do color work on my comics and eat lunch and try to defend my living room from the constant influx of red-gray dust we get in the high desert. A few days ago I told my husband, "I think I actually prefer Elementary to Sherlock. I realize it's not as artsy and fancy but its characters' stories play out over a long period of time, which means they actually have more time to develop, which means I care more about them. It also has a sense of humor and it feels like it exists in a real world that's really well thought out and..." I kept going on this Pros/Cons monologue for a while and then today I found an article from said husband in my inbox. It was published in Wired and it's about the importance of "commodity SciFi" vs "prestige SciFi." It's a fantastic read and, since I've been thinking about the topic anyway and because it also made me think a lot about Star Trek: Discovery and the direction it's taking... here I am.

Since you're reading this blog I'm assuming you're a SciFi/Fantasy fan and/or some type of geek who isn't totally unaware of the fact that traditionally geek-ish tropes like dragons, zombies, robots, and super heroes are all being wheeled out for the consumption of people who like to think of themselves as high-brow. These shows win Emmys and public approval for their artistic take on traditionally pulpy themes/set pieces. And I've always had a bit of a thorn in my paw about them. It annoyed me that people who would turn their nose up at hobbits and wizards were more than willing to eat a full helping of dragons as long as it came with plenty of HBO-style drama. And folks who would never sit down to enjoy Supergirl or Batman: The Animated Series or Buffy will always pony up for superheroes as long as the heroes in question come with all the cable grit and grime we have come to expect from them.

Of course, this isn't always the case. I have plenty of friends who watch and love both LOTR and GOT, both Data and... whoever's a robot in Westworld. I myself loved Black Sails on Showtime and Strike Back on Cinemax. And, of course, I think all kinds of TV should exist for all kinds of people. If gritty serialization is your thing I hope you're dancing a jig at all the options currently available to you...just please do your best not to look down your nose at the all the people who rush to their TVs once a week, 20-25 nights a year, for a slice of their pie (which is bigger, btw, even if not made from top shelf, hard to acquire ingredients.)

And this brings me (nearer) to my point (I promise.) Star Trek has always been commodity TV. It's always been low-budget, cut-the-corners, rush-to-production, re-use the sets, re-hire day-players you can trust because you're screwed otherwise, how are we possibly going to make 24 of these again kind of TV. And... that's kind of awesome.

Here's why:
Aside from Star Trek being genuinely charming in spite (or because of) its traditionally low-budget and low-prestige rating, it's always had to push against its constraints and it's always had to push for a lot of episodes. But that's how innovation happens.

The Wired article mentions, and I've mentioned several times on this blog over the years, that Star Trek, like any genre show, reuses stories and tropes over and over. There's the memory wipe episode, the alternate-timeline episode, the fight club episode, the dream inside a dream episode, the conspiracy episode, the mistaken identity episode... etc etc etc. But that's alright. Because within those familiar tropes and stories is the ability to reveal character in surprising ways. And, because we've spent thirty or fifty or seventy episodes with those characters, those revelations mean a lot to us, the fans. I smile when the tribbles tumble out of the storage compartment, I cry when Picard plays his flute, I rejoice when Nog is accepted into Starfleet, I laugh when The Doctor sings about ponfar, I grin when Hoshi declares herself Empress. And I do these things because me, the writers, the crew, and the actors have all been through 43/176/173/168/94 episodes together.

And here's the other thing; notice how high the numbers are in the previous sentence? With commodity TV, episodes are produced on a weekly basis for about half the year, thus the approximately 20-26 episodes. After a while, this builds up, by the time you get to season three or four or five you've already done... everything. Well, at least it seems like everything. I've seen in various places that I don't care to google at the moment that writers/comics/artists come up with their best stuff after the first several tries. And the best writers/artists/comics are the people who don't settle with the first ideas that come out. Of course, if you're pushing out 24 episodes you kind of have to take the first great idea that comes along but once you're 40 episodes in you've run dry. Or, at least you think you have. Having to reach into the back of your brain is how you get episodes like The Inner Light and Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy. It's how you get (what is probably the best hour of television ever) Once More With Feeling, the legendary Buffy musical episode that TV shows have been (mostly unsuccessfully) trying to reproduce ever since.

But the ideas alone aren't what make the episode magic. It's the combination of the idea (and the pen of the, by now, practiced writer) with the well known and loved (or hated) characters that produce the tears and the laughter and the grimaces and the way I still tear up if I even start talking about All Good Things.

Again, my point, (hey give me a break, I haven't been blogging regularly so I get a really long post to make up for it, right?) is that Star Trek: Discovery is consistently talked about as serialized with thirteen episodes. It's being billed like a prestige cable show when everything in Trek's history says it's a commodity show. Will they still have a groundhog day episode, a fight club episode, an alternate history episode? I don't know. Will they have an episode equivalent in feeling and magnitude to The Inner Light? I don't know, but that sort of depends on if they're around long enough to create the environment in which those episodes grow organically. No matter what, I'll be watching.

There's A Jerk In My Brain Sometimes

Almost ten years ago my husband and I drove from where we were living in northern Kentucky to the bottom of the state to visit my dad. As soon as we got in the door we were inundated with all the stuff he'd recently discovered. Movies. TV shows. Art books. Camera gear. Computer stuff. Video games. Whatever. It's like a taking a tour of the room of a twelve-year-old boy. This is just his way. It's better not to fight it because he might introduce you to something completely amazing.

That day, he wanted to show us an insane show he'd found on G4 Network. Sasuke, or Ninja Warrior as it's known in the States, is a Japanese obstacle course tournament that had been running on the other side of the world since 1997. My dad had like six tournaments worth of episodes recorded and we sat on the couch, completely entranced, and watched every single one of them. I still remember the names of some of those guys--Akiyama, Nagano, Yamamoto.

We didn't have cable and couldn't watch it on our own so every time we went back, he gave us some more. Then, a couple of years later, we got G4. And then, G4 started sending over a bunch of yanks to run the course. I remember those guys too--Meeuwenberg, Orosco, and later Campbell.

We watched the show as we moved from place to place and have viewed it in four different apartments and two houses. And, even though we aren't 100% behind the recent Esquire/NBC changes, we're always happy to see new episodes. We followed Kacy Catanzaro last year and loved her. So, this year, we FREAKED OUT when she made it up the warped wall for the first time. When she made history for the second time by being the first ever woman to make it to the Ninja Warrior finals in Vegas, we were literally crying. Crying. And screaming. And also jumping up and down. It was intense, folks.

Imagine my surprise when, the next day, I heard people talking about this event in the gym. And then on Facebook. And then Twitter. And Pinterest. And... just... everywhere.

And you know what my first reaction was? What my first, knee-jerk thought happened to be?

"What the hell?! This is MINE! This is my show! You people don't know Kacy OR Ninja Warrior!"

I know, Captain. I'm ashamed of me too.

And then, immediately, I realized what an awful fan I was being. I've talked about this terrible attitude right here on this very blog. I've talked about how elitism has crept into Geekdom and become a poisonous part of a culture that's supposed to be all about what we love. I've also talked about how, yeah, I understand it--I know that you feel like you've suffered through all kinds of private nerd hell only to have your special thing invaded by people who you think probably don't "get it." I understand it because I'm guilty of it. The problem comes when you start spreading those feelings around instead of dealing with them in any kind of real, grown up way. (I guess my way is being super ashamed of that feeling and then writing a really long blog post about all my feels.) Anyway, the problem comes when you don't realize what a great thing it is that everyone else likes your thing.

I guess the point of all this is to say that, as a geek, I get why you want to protect your special thing. But, you have to remind yourself (and so do I) that your special thing isn't going anywhere. No one's coming along and tearing it down or stealing it from you. They're not burning your DVDs or comic books or whatever. And it isn't being made any less special just because some ass hat at the gym knows who Kacy Catanzaro is. I'm glad the ass hat (he's an ass hat for other reasons, people) knows who she is and what Ninja Warrior is and whatever. Because that means it'll stay on longer. And, hopefully, the videos and articles will get to more people--not fewer.

Hopefully girls who are interested in sports, or who maybe didn't know they could be interested in sports, or girls who'd already decided they were bad at sports will find videos of Kacy. And hopefully they'll be inspired. Hopefully what Kacy can do, and how popular this thing has become, will help open people's eyes about what women can do in sports. I hope it goes on for another million-bajillion years and I hope they have to rock climb and play freaking pareses squares at the end of that future course.

Anyway, I caught myself being really lame and I feel bad about it. I want to be a good geek and not part of the problem. So, here's that video. Show it to every single person you know.

The Games

So last week I was absent because I had to split my time between work on my new novel, some commissions (that I was behind on) and Murder School. I'll write about Murder School tomorrow on the X-Files blog. Tonight, I just want to mention the Olympics and how completely useless I am while they're going on.

I love both Winter and Summer Games and my preferred sports tend to be the weirder ones. Steeplechase, anyone? My favorite winter event is the biathlon because the combination of cross country skiing and shooting essentially makes it the Jason Bourne of athletic activities. Anyway, since all I can do is work with Bob Costas yammering in the background for the next week and a half, it's inevitable that I eventually start planning a Star Trek Olympics.

There are a TON of crazy-ass sports in Trek. I mean, these people have had another World War, alien contact, and a couple hundred years for the Olympic committee to hem and haw about whether or not space wrestling is a thing. I feel like by the time the CXXI Olympiad rolls around this is what it'll look like:

1- Parrises Squares
This seems the most obvious. Next Gen revived Trek and suddenly everyone was tromping down the corridor in shiny blue spandex to play what is apparently a very tough, dangerous game. If this were an Olympic sport, Harry Kim (a Starfleet Academy champion) would probably hold a medal but no one would believe him.

2- Anbo-Jitsu
A game favored by the Riker clan, Anbo-Jitsu is a sort of pseudo-Japanese armored combat sport that you play BLINDFOLDED.

3- Fencing
Here's a thing captains (and future captains) apparently love--even in the future. Both Picard and Sulu are enthusiasts. If anyone held a fencing medal though, it'd be Guinan, obviously. She'd keep it in a drawer along with some other epic stuff she never talked about like Mark Twain's hat and a bottle of Aldebaran whiskey.

4- Velocity
This is pretty much just futuristic target shooting where two people try to hit and avoid being hit by a disc that constantly zips around. Yet again, Harry Kim was supposedly some kind of big shot Velocity player but I'm really not buying it.

5- Rock Climbing
I'm not sure how one makes this an Olympic sport but it's the future. If they can figure out faster than light travel, I think they can put a time limit and some judges on a guy scaling a rock. Anyway, freaking every single person in Star Trek likes to go out on their off time and climb rocks. Why? I don't know. It's clearly the most popular pastime in the twenty-third century so it should obviously be included here (and in a future post dedicated to this weirdo phenomenon.)

6- Baseball
Ok, I know this is an outdated game and no one plays it by the time Picard and Sisko are mad at each other. But I love it. And, really I think after the Niners-Logicians game of 2375, people of the future will come to their senses and reinstate this as an Olympic Sport.

So that's six sports. I thought about including some Vulcan or Klingon martial arts. What do you think? Or maybe Dabo? I don't know, I'm pretty happy with these. Therefore- let the games begin!

The Sorting Hat

So, it seems that I've been gone for quite some time. Honestly, things have been crazy around here. My first book is in the pre-production stages and I've been completely swamped with getting it ready. Of course, I can't work ALL the time. Sometimes I have to take breaks and/or procrastinate and let my brain relax. Break taking inevitably leads to taking a quiz about which Harry Potter character you are.

I've always felt like a Luna Lovegood and that's exactly what I got. The thing that surprised me was that when I put my result on Facebook, everyone else felt obliged to comment on how I'm so obviously a Luna. Apparently I might as well just be walking around in radish earrings and spectrespecs. I guess part of my Luna-ness is not really understanding/caring how other people see me.

Anyway, this led me to much (again with the procrastination) consideration about how to sort the TOS crew into Hogwarts Houses. The core group is pretty easy:

Or, if you're more of a traditionalist: 

I felt pretty proud of myself when I came up with these things so I figured, why not sort everyone else into their houses?

Well, this is about as close as I could get: 

Honestly, pretty much everyone under the Spock/Kirk/McCoy trifecta can either be sorted into Gryffindor or Huffelpuff but whatever. I put Scotty in Slytherin because he jumps to defend the honor of the Enterprise but not the captain, he's rather cunning, and he tends to purposely over-estimate the amount of time it'll take to fix things to get Kirk off his back. Uhura's like, crazy smart and talented. Sulu ends up being a superb starship captain. And Chekov is Chekov. He's basically the most Huffelpuffy Huffelpuff of the 23rd century. 

I started thinking about the rest of the series, too. What do you think? Any Star-Potters/Potter-Trekker/Potter-ies out there have ideas about how to sort TNG-Enterprise?