You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 13th, 2008.
Like many of you — I hope — I’ve been waiting for JJ Abram’s new vision of Star Trek not so much breathlessly as with many and copious nosebleeds of fear and anticipation, and I feel I may need medical help.
Fear? Why am I afraid? Well, Trekkers are a strange bunch, as close to traditionalists as science fiction can realistically get, the group the least supportive of change and creativity, partakers more of nostalgia than solid story-telling who inhabit a universe devised haphazardly over forty years by dozens of writers without any sort of central plan. It bothers me the extent to which my co-Trekkers demand little more than more of the same, the same starship wandering through space, the same rough-and-tumble spirit of frontier adventure, and alongside that, the same format without deviation; we’re the people that whined and complained when Enterprise had a vocal theme song instead of an orchestral fanfare.
I’ve established elsewhere that I’m a particular breed of Trek fan, a subspecies called the “Niner,” an odd and rare variety that likes it when the show breaks its own rules and does weird, unexpected things. My favorite of the shows is Deep Space Nine, the one the least like it’s kin; it eschewed the planet-of-the-week format for ongoing stories, abandoned the close-knit family for the bickering stepkids, the easy solution for the unsolvable problem, the neat moral with the unthinkable choice. Granted, it still had it’s faults. The show was still prey to the vile monster Techno-Babble; were I to be a Trek showrunner, my first rule would be that technical problems must actually be solved, instead of pretending to be solved. I’m quite sick of arrays being realigned.
Anyway. Abrams, the genius behind Alias, Lost, and, confusingly enough, Felicity, has been put in charge of Star Trek, and is putting together a movie that goes back to basics: an all-new adventure with the original Enterprise crew of Kirk, McCoy, and Scotty. And this is where it’s going to get messy, because Trek fans are insane. Not in the “get a life” kind of way, but in the foaming-at-the-mouth-over-every-new-abomination-against-the-franchise. And oh, they’re a touchy lot about that sort of thing. God forbid Abrams imply that this is a reboot. Because, as the new Battlestar Galactica told us, reboots suck. Oh wait. That’s the best show on television.
I’m not a traditionalist. I think Trek could stand a reboot, because it’s forty years of convoluted nonsense. Sometimes it’s damned good convoluted nonsense. But it’s largely incoherant, internally inconsistent, and often laughably bad. I’m honestly at a point where The Next Generation is pretty much unwatchable. A reboot, faithful to the spirit of the series, would give us better television, a better vision of what the damned show could be.
People are not comfortable with change; look at the weird, paranoid Rad Trads in my own Church, who have convinced themselves that a few liturgical reforms have wiped away the One True Church and turned the Vatican into the seat of the Antichrist. They elect their own popes sometimes, devise their own hierarchies, and inevitably collapse into factions and infighting, because they have elevated themselves above everyone, so everyone else must be wrong. It’s an arrogant attitude, this persecution complex, and I see it everywhere people love traditions more than the thing from which the traditions emanate, be it God or Star Trek.
The Second Vatican Council was intended to allow the Church to function in the modern world, to equip it with the tools to engage a critical, postmodern culture struggling with issues of ideas qua truth, for whom a gleaming white ediface proclaiming the One True Way would look more threatening than welcoming. The world is full of preconceptions that limit it’s willingness to even engage Christ as an idea worth considering, the Church as a meaningful sacrament of that truth, and V2, as I affectionately call it (no relation to Nazi rockets to the moon) attempted to make it possible to talk in a language comprehensible to that world. It has taken decades to sort out, unfortunately, what that means (much of the credit in the path to that goal must be given to the genius of John Paul II in that regard).
But some people were not so much married to Christ as to the Church’s external form and prejudices, and collectively soiled themselves when they say the ensuing chaos. Fearful the Church had collapsed, they retreated to the mountains, unable to comprehend that the Gospel is for everybody, and not, in fact, just for them.
Star Trek conventions remind me of that sometimes.
Be a mensch, and visit my friend True. He’s started a new political blog called Blarg! at my insistence. He had originally wanted to join the Saint Superman team as it’s political contributor, but I felt that, this being primarily a religion and culture blog, that he wouldn’t be a good fit, and his political beliefs certainly clash with what is, near as I can tell, the clear teaching of the Church. But then, he’s not Catholic. Anyway, this blog being suptitled “Culture, Catholicism, and Comic Books,” and “Finding God in the Geekiest Places,” I didn’t think Saint Superman would be a proper home.
And, in a quick peak behind the scenes, I maintain a pretty strict style guide and exercise a good amount of editorial oversight, which Kemiro chaffs under enough as it is.
Anyway, True is a good guy, and very smart. He’s politically quite astute, and while an unabashed Obama-worshipper, he’s clear-eyed enough to be a sound political analyst. He’s less paranoid than I am, a bit more triumphal than I am, profoundly more liberal and not terribly partisan. So welcome him to the Interblog and pay him some time.
I’m consistently amazed at the quality of work I put in for school. I can turn it something I think to be complete drivel, a last-minute paper scribbled while I scrambled at two in the morning the day before it was due, compounded by an unclear assignment and an unhelpful professor, that, near as I can tell, barely scratches the assigned minimum, or is at best shows only an ancillary relationship to the assignment, only to receive an A on the paper with a note that says “Spot on! Thanks! Just a few technical problems.” This happened today on a paper for my English Drama class (which I actually posted here as “The Lamb in the Crib;” I thought the writing was fine, but I sure as hell wasn’t certain it would make my professor happy).
She’s running for Fake President, and has some interesting Fake Solutions to real problems.
But I have to ask. Have we already won in Iraq?
