Transcript for this video.
What is UTOPIA? It is evolution. A progression from ETERNITY, to LIBERTY, then EQUALITY… and finally FRATERNITY. A collective of individuals dedicated to the betterment of each other. A BROTHERHOOD of all men. It is you… and it is me… Forever.
 |
| San Diego, 2023 |
For a few years now, I’ve been tormenting my good friend, Freezing Inferno, with the prospect that
The Straight Story is the greatest
Star Trek movie ever made. There is, on some level, a degree of mirth to this assessment. After all,
The Straight Story is neither a work within the
Star Trek property nor a work of science fiction. And still, I claim that it is the best of all the
Star Trek movies.
With regards to the Star Trek movies themselves, if I’m being completely honest, I’ve not really cared much for them. In truth, I’ve seen only five of them: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness, and Star Trek Beyond. The first of these, The Wrath of Khan, I believe I watched at some point during middle school. At the time, my primary interest in older cinema came from perusing the shelves of my local library for whatever struck my interest. Be it the McCarthyism comedy Clue, the sex comedy M*A*S*H, or the inexplicably charming chase film Grand Theft Auto.
So eventually, I decided to check out a copy of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It might have been because I saw an ad for the 2009 film and wanted to see more of this Star Trek thing I’d heard about from Futurama (my sci-fi growing up was more The Twilight Zone and, to a lesser extent, The Outer Limits, including the late 90s/early 2000s attempts, than Star Trek). I remember the case for the film being silver and slightly unable to be completely closed. The disc itself seemed normal, though I do recall having to clean it a little before putting it in. (The disc would eventually reveal itself to be slightly scratched, so I think I had to skip about thirty seconds of the climax, though I could be mixing it up with Galaxy Quest, more on in a moment.)
When I finished the movie, I reacted to it similarly to how I reacted to the Sam Rami Spider-Man films growing up: it was fine. I didn’t love the film the way I did M*A*S*H, A Clockwork Orange, or Dawn of the Dead. But I didn’t hate the way I did Shark Tale or Epic Movie. It was a perfectly serviceable work of science fiction. (Curiously, I would later have a similar reaction to another work of beloved science fiction with a main villain who is dressing up as another race: The Talons of Weng-Chiang.)
I don’t really remember the actual experience of watching the film. If I have the timing right, in 2008/2009, our family still had the thick television set in the family room. It wasn’t the massive cube my grandparents had (we wouldn’t get that until after I started Freshman year of High School, which would in turn be replaced with a flatscreen during Senior year, the television proper being moved to my room), but it was a decent enough sized television. Fullscreen, so the image was probably cropped (unless I wanted to watch something extremely tiny). I’d watch it again to see if my feelings on it had changed, but I don’t have access to either MGM or Paramount+.
About a year or so later, I saw the 2009 version of Star Trek. This was right at the cusp of the superhero craze when there were other films in the cinemas other than Batmans and Spider-Mans and the like. I had recently begun wearing glasses after an attempt at being a Caddie that went absolutely nowhere other than me starting to wear glasses. I had a lot of fun with that first movie, though I couldn’t tell you a thing that happened, or even which theater I saw it in. I thought we—my mom, my brother, and I—went to the one in the mall, but it could have been the one beside the mall. But when I checked with my brother, who’s been keeping track of all the movies he’s seen in theaters since 2008, it was actually in the AMC in Port Chester. I remember seeing Inglorious Bastards later that summer in the AMC in Port Chester and the rather abysmal viewing of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in the Regal IMAX over in New Rochelle (then the only IMAX in the area).
But I have no memories of seeing Star Trek (2009) in theaters. My strongest memory of the film happened in 2013, during my senior year of High School. As part of a field trip for a physics class I was taking, we went down to Six Flags: Great Adventure. I had only been to the park previously in 2005 with my Aunt. I had done Hurricane Harbor multiple times and the in-car Safari once. But the Six Flags park proper was a rare experience, mainly due to me not really vibing with thrill rides that go upside down (especially after attempting one at an annual fair my Elementary School hosted where I tried a ride called The Salt and Pepper Shaker at the age of six or seven).
But I had been extremely excited to go to the park because I had heard a lot of interesting things about this ride called El Toro. When I was growing up, I would obsess over advertisements for theme parks and activities. Every time my family went on a long car ride to visit my grandparents or my Aunt in Pennsylvania or even visiting my dad’s side of the family in New York City, I would find all the brochures for plays, parks, and theme parks. I’d even have the Florida Disney Parks DVD on order every year. But I was still intrigued by El Toro: one of the largest wooden roller coasters in the world. And I wanted to ride it. (I was also intrigued by Kingda Ka, but I was too chickenshit to ride that one.)
When the time came, I immediately ran to the line for El Toro and was on either the second or third ride of the day. I sat next to a girl roughly my age who I did not know and would not see ever again. As we began the descent, I began to sing the chorus to Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper:” “AS YOU PLUNGE INTO CERTAIN DEATH!” I think the girl next to me gave me a weird look, though I didn’t notice or care. (I still have a tendency of singing while on rides, most notably being later that summer when me, my brother, and some friends of ours went to our local fair and did a zero gravity ride and I inexplicably sang the My Little Pony theme song, a show I still have not watched a single episode of despite being intrigued by the arts and reviews of the brony community at the time.)
It was shortly after the first drop of El Toro, that my glasses flew off my face and onto the floor by my seat. As we rushed up the peaks and down the valleys, my glasses flew out of the car. I had lost my glasses and had to spend the entire day essentially blind. I have enough clarity of vision to move around, but I really couldn’t make out any details. So, when we took our bus back home later that day, I could only listen to what was happening in Star Trek (2009), despite asking to watch it against the alternative of, I think, Twilight.
For completionist sake, I did watch the other two films of the Abrams-verse in theaters, though likewise have no real memories of it. In truth, most of my cinematic memories tend to be massive horror stories.
For example, in 2012, my brother, a mutual friend of ours (though more my brother’s than my own), and I went to see the movie John Carter at the AMC in Port Chester. There, we sat in the back row, back when you had to pick your seats based on what’s available in the theater, not preselect the seats. We were sat behind this extremely angry guy who was glaring at us before the trailers had even started because we were talking. He then turned his attention towards a bunch of kids our age having fun in the corner. He approached the kids and basically threatened to beat the stuffing out of them. This went on into the opening scenes of the film, wherein the police approached the man and his family, and they all made a scene about how they were blameless and it was the kids in the corner who should be arrested.
I don’t really have any strong feelings about these two Star Trek movies. They were a fun time to watch, but not much else. Sure, I know there are several things wrong with Into Darkness, and I generally do agree with them. But I couldn’t be mustered to have an opinion at the time (or even now) beyond: It was alright. I did have more fun with Beyond, but it was very much a perfectly serviceable, dare I say good, American blockbuster. It didn’t restore my faith in humanity the way Shin Ultraman did. But I had fun. And really, what more can you ask a film?
You’ll note that I skipped The Undiscovered Country. That’s because my in for that movie was in the form of one of my two major influences when it comes to Star Trek: SFDebris. (I thought the film was fine, a bit better than Wrath of Khan.)
In many regards, a lot of my engagement with culture can be best understood through the lens of criticism. I have a massive love of the field to the point where, after my dreams of becoming a director imploded after a rather disastrous film shoot involving me being locked out of the High School by the class’s golden child, I wanted to be a critic when I grew up.
Being high school, I spent a lot of time watching reviews from people on the scene from those of Channel Awesome fame like Spoony or The Nostalgia Critic to more obscure figures like Browncoat Eric or Confused Matthew. I found out about SFDebris through, of all people, Linkara. My current thoughts on the latter are a bit… mixed, not helped by research I’m doing for what is looking more and more likely to be a book. But in May of 2010, I was rather on board with the whole reviewer thing he was doing.
In particular, I quite liked Linkara’s series History of Power Rangers, whose entry on In Space ended with a montage set to David Bowie and Queen’s hit song “Under Pressure.” At the time, and still today, I was a massive classic rock head. While I had yet to do deep dives into either Queen or Bowie, I nevertheless liked the use of the song here. Shortly after the montage was complete, Linkara mentioned that he got the idea and permission from SFDebris. So, being the curious sort to read The Divine Comedy in 8th Grade because a God of War clone was going to be made out of its first volume, I decided to check the guy out.
Truthfully, I still have a fondness for the man’s work, even as I ultimately do not agree with his vision for what Star Trek is. (Or, for that matter, the Shin Evangelion films, but that’s a whole other conversation.) Whenever I look back at his work, I often find myself gravitating away from the main draw of Star Trek and towards his other work.
For example, he wrote a rather chilling take on the origin of Santa Claus that fits within the Grimm tradition of folk stories that I still think about to this day. His retrospective looks at the rise and fall of cape comics and deep dives into the histories of The Hulk or Thanos are well informed and delightful bits of criticism. And I am rather charmed by his abridged Lets Plays of Star Wars: The Old Republic.
The problem, and I find this with a lot of critics of that era (and one not many of them have been able to shed), is that he never made me want to actually watch the things he was describing. The closest was perhaps the Doctor Who story The Enemy of the World, which was a rather delightful spy thriller that I quite loved when it was found. But despite everything he said about Star Trek or Farscape or Babylon 5, I never wanted to watch these shows.
Looking back, I think there are two reasons for this. Firstly, there’s the nature of his review schedule. SFDebris approaches the shows from all eras of Star Trek less in a chronological order the way, to use one of SFDebris’ descendants, Pop Arena would the Animorphs books. For example, in the image Linkara provides to advertise SFDebris’ channel, we can see that the three most recent videos uploaded were TNG’s The Best of Both Worlds Part 1 (released June 18, 1990), TNG’s The Measure of a Man (released February 13, 1989), and Voyager’s One Small Step (released November 17, 1999).
This, in turn, creates a shuffling effect to the episodes, removing them from their contexts. It treats them as standalone objects rather than works that build off of one another. One such case is the episode of Deep Space Nine, In the Pale Moonlight. In this review, SFDebris highlights the ways in which it demonstrates moral complexity within the character of Sisko. However, when placed in the context of Deep Space Nine as a whole rather than as a singular feature, that moral complexity becomes muddied with episodes prior that show Sisko heroically doing worse actions and subsequent episodes failing to live up to the relatively meager bar In the Pale Moonlight set. The effect, then, is that the works become weightless and, subsequently, easily disregarded.
This brings us to the second reason, that being the tone of the works of SFDebris and his contemporaries. Mainly, the mid 2000s and early 2010s were rife with snarky reviewers who frequently approached their various mediums with a degree of contempt. Look at how weird this bad comic is where Superman fights twin clones of Hitler, how silly Kirk is when he reads the Declaration of Independence aloud, how faggy Batman is when he wears rubber and has Batnipples. Any attempt at sincerity has to be countered with a jokey quip or something that goes along the lines of “Naaah.”
This has had several negative impacts on the overall world stage, none of which are SFDebris’ fault. It was the culture of the post-90s, post-9/11 landscape where the so-called End of History turned out to be a wet fart. Indeed, it’s telling that the videos by SFDebris and the like that I still gravitate towards are the ones that are more sincere and engaged with the larger culture and context from which they came from.
Perhaps the intention with this shuffling of episodes approach was to emulate the way many people would encounter Star Trek back when SFDebris first started: mainly, by watching episodes late at night on UPN. Indeed, this was how I actually saw my first Star Trek television story, Elementary, My Dear Data. It was back during my junior year of High School. The small TV that used to be in my parents’ bedroom was moved into my room after they got a flat screen for downstairs and moved the box to their bedroom.
I was flipping through channels one night in I think October, for what reason I can’t say, when I came across what was once called UPN. Now called My9 in my area, the channel was airing an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Elementary, My Dear Data. (Well, ok. They were airing the final minute or two of a different episode that I don’t remember.) At the time, I had a rather fond appreciation for the character of Sherlock Holmes, helped mainly by the second series of Sherlock and the Guy Ritchie adaptation of the character as well as the animated series Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, which was a childhood favorite of mine. And, having nothing better to do, I decided to give the episode a watch.
The story tells of Data, Geordi la Forge, and Dr. Pulaski going on an adventure in the Holodeck to demonstrate Data’s sentience to the rather problematic doctor. Said adventure takes the form of a Sherlock Holmes LARP with Data as the titular detective, which results in the villain Moriarty gaining sentience. Among the interesting aspects of the episode is the notion that the Holodeck can create life. Usually in these sorts of stories, there is a tachyon beam storm of destiny in the Bermuda Triangle Galaxy causing Photon particles to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, corrupting the Keiyurim running the holodeck with Carsonium-D, causing the ship to go haywire. But instead, the Holodeck is functioning perfectly.
Given the nature of the episode is to engage with the sentience of artificial life, it’s notable that when Data and Geordi initially confront Moriarty, it’s Data who immediately clocks what’s going on. Throughout the episode, actor Brent Spiner utilizes a rather charming Basil Rathbone impression when playing the role of Sherlock Holmes. (Or, more accurately, Spiner plays Data doing a Basil Rathbone impression when playing the role of Sherlock Holmes.) But as soon as Moriarty walks in and implies that he knows about the fictionality of his existence, Data breaks character. We aren’t told that Data has figured it out through dialogue or musical sting. The episode trusts us to understand from the acting choices Spiner is making that Data has.
And yet, Star Trek, even in its Next Generation, was never my show. Perhaps it’s because my local library didn’t have the episodes or it wasn’t airing at a regular time like The Simpsons was. This was back when Netflix was only starting to be a thing and was still sending DVDs to people who asked for them. So I didn’t have access to the entire backlog of Star Trek.
Indeed, I wouldn’t catch another bit of Trek until a few years later, during my Freshman year of college when I was at my grandparents’ house flipping channels and catching the back half of the episode Conundrum. The episode in question involves the crew of the Enterprise getting amnesia and having to figure out who they are while traveling to do a secret mission of high importance. The mystery aspect of this episode fascinated me. Who are we, when we remove all the baggage. Can we trust that we’d make the same decisions when the time comes? Or would we assume our functions, our jobs are ourselves and, in turn, commit acts of pure cruelty?
I would not recognize it then, but I see this as a fascinating layer to Star Trek’s essence, at least for me: a contradiction between utopian idealism and military aestheticism. Oftentimes, this results in one winning out over the other (usually the militarism) and one can fairly read the utopianism as being kin to the liberalism that resulted in Joe Biden being perfectly ok with Israel pushing its colonialist project to a cataclysmic climax. But at the same time, that disjunction between the two, when forced together and put at odds (as opposed to the work of Robert Heinlein, where the militarism was utopian) intrigues me.
I suppose it’s time to bring up another major influence upon my understanding of Star Trek: L.I. Underhill’s Vaka Rangi. I had first encountered Underhill through tumblr. Despite creating the account in 2011, I only began to actively use it in late 2013, shortly before the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor. I do not recall what made me create a tumblr in the first place.
What spurred me to actually use a tumblr, however, was a blog that I had started following earlier that year called TARDIS Eruditorum. I had been introduced to the blog via an AV Club review of The Mind Robber, which recommended it to me. Being the sort to dive into things, I took the site’s recommendation and my College Freshman self was inspired. (Though, I should note that I was just finishing high school at the time I discovered TARDIS Eruditorum. The baffling part was that I should have been introduced to the blog via my love of Andrew Hickey, whose work on Seven Soldiers basically inspired me to be a critic after the aforementioned shattering of my dreams of being a director. If I had a nickel for every time I should have been introduced to a critic sooner than I was, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice. The other was, curiously, SFDebris.)
Following a post mentioning she had a tumblr (or some other thing), I began following other people. First, I engaged with some people I knew via TV Tropes or Deviant Art before following people they, and TARDIS Eruditorum author Elizabeth Sandifer, were following. Among these people was L.I. Underhill, who was in the midst of a blog project called Vaka Rangi (I think they were just about to do Dirty Pair when I started reading the blog. Apparently, I was rather dismissive of the prospect of Dirty Pair being covered. I don’t recall this, though I do recall being rather dismissive of Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi in a conversation with them, which Underhill noted vibed with Dirty Pair. I think I was dealing with the anxiety of having some random kid mock me for liking a “girly” thing, Powerpuff Girls, and overcompensating for a while.)
Vaka Rangi was a personal journey through Star Trek, though later conversations with the author would indicate their preference to talk about just the TNG and early DS9 eras of Trek. There were several entries that explored the show via a more personal lens. Childhood memories of playing with Kenner TNG dolls or watching specific episodes. And I absolutely vibed with the project.
But what especially intrigued me was the numerous instances of structural trickery. I have had a long love of structural devilry in criticism and other writings. From Andrew Hickey switching back and forth between some bonkers science and the origins of Pop music to talk about Grant Morrison et. al.’s Mister Miracle to Elizabeth Sandifer engaging with the novel Interference via having multiple threads constantly interrupt each other to the numerous instances of Channel Awesome creators using the review to engage with why they even do it in the first place.
Vaka Rangi likewise engaged in this mode. Most notably, in the form of twine style choose your own adventure entries where multiple episodes would be covered at once. In truth, I was aware that there was a storyline aspect to the blog. A time war occurring in the background. But I wasn’t that invested in it. Most likely because I had entered into the project midway through and hadn’t read every single post. (To be fair, I haven’t read all of TARDIS Eruditorum either.)
What kept me along was Underhill’s voice when writing their articles. The way they expressed their memories, their love, their disappointment and hatred with Star Trek fueled me with a desire to actually dive into the show. Not enough to do a complete deep dive into the show, but enough to give a sample platter they provided a try. Their writing style felt really special, to the point where, when I began my own blog project, I would joking refer to it as a massive knock off of Sandifer, Hickey, and Underhill. The majority of it being Underhill. (I would nick a structural trick they did wherein three posts would act as engaging with the core themes of the project going forward as well as fail miserably at creating a twine post.)
But in truth, my relationship with Underhill turned into a friendship via, of all things, me asking questions and finding shit for them to look at. We would start several DMs on a number of now defunct tumblrs, twitters, and discord accounts. Our rapport would grow naturally, though my anxieties would sometimes tell me I was being a bother. But in the end, our friendship has remained firm. In fact, we’re actually going to be meeting up in person later this year. I cherish our relationship.
I would end up rather liking some of the episodes Underhill recommended. One such episode was the TOSstory The Empath. The story has Kirk, Spock, and Bones get abducted by a small group of aliens to be tortured for unknown reasons. Alongside the trio is a mute woman with empathic abilities. Being the 60s, this is taken to the extreme of her being able to take on people’s physical damage for them.
I had never even heard of the episode prior to Underhill recommending it to me. And yet, they spoke of it through the structure of a fan zine article that I found utterly charming. And, when watching the episode, I was struck by how alien it felt compared to even other episodes of TOS. For starters, there’s a minimalist quality to the episode such that the majority of the story takes place on essentially a black box set.
I quite liked the dynamic of the three main leads, in particular Bones whose warm heart is felt throughout the episode, all the way to the bitter, optimistic end. I have a love for the theatrical and the absurd, the uncanny and the strange. So much of the Star Trek I truly love is engaged not with space battles or Klingon Culture™, but rather in people being confronted with things that should not exist, but do. And then spending their time trying to understand or, at the very least, live with them.
By contrast, another episode I rather liked was the TNG story We’ll Always Have Paris. While founding itself in a rather basic time loop structure, the central hook of We’ll Always Have Paris is the relationship between Captain Picard and his ex. The first time they’re alone with one another in the episode is a real hoot. Both Patrick Stewart and Michelle Phillips have a warmth and chemistry with one another, even as they both know it would never work between them.
(As an aside, I’d like to note that I actually wrote a comic sequel to this episode a few years back, wherein I did some structural trickery involving a nine-panel grid. I should probably either revise it into something tangible or throw it out completely.)
I love how much they act like adults when talking about what happened. They don’t get into the hormonal teenage shit that science fiction (even other Trek series) is want to fall into. Instead, Picard admits that he messed up and they talk about it like a warm memory, even if it’s rather dismal. They’ve had a long time to grow in the wake of their time apart. It’s hard to keep the old grudges alive and well. Even the bad memories melt away in the rain.
Which brings us, at last, to The Straight Story. For those of you haven’t seen the film, it comprises of a man named Alvin Straight who, upon experiencing a rather startling health complication, decides to visit his estranged brother, who recently experienced a different health complication. However, being an old man, he does not have a license to drive a car. And, wanting to travel to his brother by his own means, Alvin decides the best way to make the trek from Iowa to Wisconsin is via a lawn tractor.
In truth, this is a less absurd thing to happen than one might think. When I was growing up, one of my brother’s childhood friends would frequently drive down the street in his own lawn tractor. And yet, the film nevertheless feels like a David Lynch project. I had watched the film shortly after watching a bunch of Lynch films and tv shows I hadn’t experienced at the time, most notably for our purposes Lost Highway. Though I have since warmed up to the film, I found Lost Highway to be very much a rather insecure, win the crowd back project in the wake of the critical panning Fire Walk With Me received. It felt like Wild at Heart cranked up to eleven with even more masculine energy to counteract the femininity of Fire Walk With Me. (Rewatching the film has revealed its merits.)
I bring this up because Lost Highway was the film to immediately precede The Straight Story. Contrasting the pair feels like night and day. The cocaine high of Lost Highway vs the more contemplative melancholy permeating The Straight Story. On the spot, I loved this film. I loved the scene with the deer, the digression with the family, I loved the wistful air Richard Farnsworth brings to the real life person. I love how you can feel Mary Sweeney’s interest in communities and romanticism. It is, in fact, one of my favorite Lynch films and one I can revisit whenever I want.
Around the same time, I was thinking about people who claim Galaxy Quest to be the best Star Trek movie ever made. Even as a kid, I never liked the film. I don’t remember anything about it in particular that rubbed me the wrong way that a film like School of Rock did with its unfunny, rather banally meanspirited nature. It just never appealed to me. But when thinking about it as a Star Trek film, I found none of the things I gravitated towards within it. Even the fictional show, “Galaxy Quest,” feels more in line with Flash Gordon than Star Trek. It’s just a bunch of vague references without any true substance.
And when I was thinking about that, I began to think about what the substance of Star Trek is for me. I began with the question, “What’s the best Star Trek series?” to which I rather easily answered The Next Generation. People can make cases for Voyager or Deep Space Nine, or, god help us, Lower Decks. But those are cases too wrapped up in nerdery to fully work as a best series. Be it the fetishization engaged with by DS9 and Lower Decks or the cult TV aspirations of Voyager and, if we’re being completely honest, Picard. Serious arguments can’t be made for the other shows because they fail to leave the shadow of TOS and TNG.
So, why is TNG better than TOS? Honestly, I just vibe with TNG more. I feel like the best episodes of TNG are better than the best episodes of TOS. I like that it has a rather mad cosmos that isn’t inherently hostile, but just weird. There’s this one episode, Schisms, where various members of the Enterprise crew are abducted by aliens for unknown purposes. We never find out anything about the aliens’ motivations with examining the bodily functions of various crewmates. At the same time though, there’s a warmth to the episode. It opens with the crew attending a poetry recital hosted by Data. The poetry is rather dull, more invested in formalistic trickery than actually engaging with the meanings and purposes of said trickery. But you can tell everyone there likes Data and wants to see him improve his poetry.
TOS, for all its importance to the shipping community, feels very professional for the majority of its existence. The sex is a rather crude sex that exudes the worst of sixties free love impulses. It’s more interested in border disputes than the relationship between characters. And, well, there’s that seed of imperialism growing fruitfully. TNG likewise has this bitter fruit within it, just as The Straight Story does with its rather White exploration of the American heartland.
And yet, there’s a sense of potential for there to be more out there with both TNG and The Straight Story. One of my favorite sequences within the film is when Alvin comes across a pregnant young girl, no older than seventeen, hitchhiking on the road. She’s run away from home because she thinks her family will hate her for the. Alvin, for his part, takes the girl’s situation seriously. He doesn’t dismiss her fears out of hand, but he notes that neither one of them truly knows how her family will react.
Another scene has Alvin go to a bar with another old man, and they converse about their time during the second World War. The two men talk about the people they lost in the war. Be it to the Germans or their own hands. Alvin himself confesses to shooting one of his fellow soldiers, a scout he mistakenly believed to be a German soldier. The film doesn’t condone or condemn his actions. It treats it with a degree of empathy and understanding. We can feel the regret and shame of the moment. Of a man who has had to live with it for decades finally saying it out loud.
A third scene briefly mentioned has a nameless woman react in horror to a dead dear she just hit. For seven weeks, this woman has driven down the road, hitting 13 deer in the process. She has tried everything she could to not hit these deer. And her inability not to hit a deer on this road she has to drive down has brought her to a nervous breakdown. It’s an extremely funny scene, though not as funny as the scene immediately after where Alvin cooks the deer meat, only to be surrounded by deer who just stare at the man. But the film does not belittle the poor woman in her monologue. There’s no sneering look on Alvin’s face as she rants about this insanity she’s in. It lets her vent it all out, sympathizing with her plight.
All this together, and you can begin to see why I connect it with Star Trek and The Next Generation in particular. It’s a movie that engages with what Star Trek so often aspires to be. An exploration, not a domination, of a cosmos that is strange and ominous and full of weird, interesting people. About approaching said universe with empathy and fascination, wanting to see everyone be better, including yourself.
There’s a scene in the much maligned first season of The Next Generation where Picard quotes Hamlet’s What a Piece of Work is Man monologue with conviction. SFDebris read this as another sign of TNG’s early smugness. But what he left out was Q actively challenging that conviction with Picard responding, “I see us as one day becoming that.” Sure, the rest of the episode was rather crap, but the aspiration is noteworthy and worthwhile. We can be better. If we just lend a hand.
I would first publicly express my thoughts on The Straight Story being the best Star Trek movie on June 2, 2018 wherein I would tweet, “The only good TNG movie is David Lynch’s The Straight Story. That film perfectly captures the essence of TNG’s ethos and universal laws from people generally wanting to help others and make the world a better place to the inexplicable nature of the universe.”
I would make a number of comments in a similar vein over the years, most notably on January 6th, 2019, wherein I spoke with my good friend Freezing Inferno and explained why The Straight Story was the best Star Trek movie. The conversation went thusly:
FREZNO: Guess who has two thumbs and is officially moving on from being a third-rate El echo to a third-rate Underhill echo and writing a big Star Trek post?
SEAN: Me? Cause one of the chapters of the book is flagreantly doing a Vaka Rangi riff complete with Dirty Pair fandom.
FREZNO: Oh neat.
FREZNO: …I meant that I’m working on the sequel to the Sailor Moon post, which is the Star Trek Enterprise post.
SEAN: I kinda guessed since when I asked Underhill for a Dominion War primer, they mentioned you went straight to Enterprise.
FREZNO: Haha yeah.
FREZNO: Is that where you’re going in One Must Imagine?
SEAN: One of the stretch goals that I got is going to be on Space Utopianism going to War. The main thread is Tom King’s brilliant run on The Omega Men, which does the Dominion War better. But it’s also going to talk about Garth Ennis’ Dan Dare, the penultimate episode of Dirty Pair OVA, and probably one or two more stories (probably Starship Troopers).
FREZNO: Intruiging!
SEAN: A rough excerpt is coming out this month because Aleph commissioned me to write about Dirty Pair.
FREZNO: My only experience with the Dominion War is through Star Trek Insurrection and Linkara’s really bad take on that movie in context of it when he did a crossover review of it with Doug Walker.
FREZNO: Where his take was “Well the Federation’s at war so it’s totally okay for them to do their evil plan here because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, so Picard and pals are in the wrong!”
FREZNO: The TNG movies are all flawed in some way but I like Insurrection the best.
SEAN: The only good TNG films are ones that aren’t actually Star Trek films (Affair of Nolandia, Flight 005 Conspiracy, Paddington, Paddington 2, The Straight Story, Bringing Out the Dead).
FREZNO: I know nothing about the non-Dirty Pair movies you just said except that Peter Capaldi is in Paddington.
SEAN: Paddington and its sequel are just delightful films about people trying to help others out of kindness.
SEAN: The Straight Story is pretty much evidence that the problem with early TNG is that there was no conflict is complete bullshit.
SEAN: Bringing Out the Dead is a somewhat deconstructive take on TNG’s empathy and desire to help people that ultimately views such actions as being good, if self destructive, but ultimately survivable.
FREZNO: I may need to watch these then!
FREZNO: (also early TNG OWNS)
SEAN: The Straight Story is pretty much everything early TNG was aspiring to be. People who just want to help others traveling in a strange and bizarre universe with alien judges and inexplicable deer. It’s about helping other people through their troubles, be they something simple as fixing a cart or complicated as the traumas of war. It’s one of my favorite Lynch films.
Upon rereading it now, I can see that I was slightly overexagerating my case with the majority of the films.Bringing Out the Dead in particular feels like a massive stretch. But I would like to pull at one thread that I bring up, and that’s the essay I mentioned. In 2017, I was sending out a number of reviews to the magazine PanelXPanel. These articles were predominately based around the comic series Mister Miracle by Tom King and Mitch Gerads, one of the four (or five depending on how good Walt Simonson’s Orion is) New Gods comics that are actually worth engaging with. In many regards, my work for PanelXPanel acted as a foundation upon which I would grow as a critic.
I would eventually adapt the articles into my first book, One Must Imagine Scott Free Happy. I can’t help but feel rather disappointed with the overall result of the book whenever I look back on it. There are arguments I make that I wouldn’t do now, expansions required to fully articulate my thouhgts and just a general sense that it would’ve been a lot better if my editor and I talked more while working together.
But the essay from that book (that I wrote) that I’m still quite proud of is one of the appendix essays, “My Own Utopia.” As I say in chat, the intent of the essay is to contrast various works of War and Utopianism within sci-fi spaces. Among them were the later five seasons of Deep Space Nine and their engagement in The Dominion War. (The others were Grant Morrison and Rian Hughes Dare [as opposed to the Garth Ennis take], Starship Troopers, Starship Troopers, the aforementioned Dirty Pair episode Red Eyes are the Sign of Hell Chase After the Killing Squad, and Steven Universe.)
In the essay, I highlight the failings of the Dominion War era of DS9 with regards to critiquing the utopian idealism of Star Trek in contrast to The Omega Men’s approach to its significantly different utopians. In The Omega Men, we find ourselves following the titular terrorist organization as they press gang Green Lantern Kyle Rayner into aiding their cause of freeing the planets of Vega from the imperialistic grip of The Citadel, who are visually compared to the US military by the end. It is rather sympathetic to the cause of fighting against said grip, even as it ultimately ends on a bleak defeatism.
It’s perhaps worth noting the central thorn at the heart of engaging with the work of Tom King, that being he’s a former agent of the CIA. This is something that is frequently advertized about the writer both by the various publishers he’s worked for as well as King himself. And, as I’ve said a number of times, he’s one of my favorite comics writers.
And this is the part where I need your help, Frezno. I don’t know how to approach talking about this. I am absolutely stuck here and this feels like an end stop, but I still have one last piece of the puzzle to talk about. And while this is, to some degree, me avoiding actually talking about the sodding Dominion War, I would like to talk about this. Because I have no idea what to say here and maybe a conversation with someone I don’t usually talk about these sorts of things with.
[Let’s talk CIA shit]
Now, onto the Dominion War. In truth, I was never completely sold on the matter. Not that I thought it was bad, but rather not as good as everyone selling it to me thought it was. I did watch In the Pale Moonlight, the episode everyone I followed who rather liked this era of Deep Space Nine would frequently go ga-ga over. And, to their credit, it is perfectly good drama. But I always felt I was missing something.
As such, I asked my friend LI Underhill if they had a viewing order for the era. It’s notable that Underhill is extremely unenthusiastic about this era of Star Trek. But, they gave me a list of episodes nonetheless, and I conversed with them in a now deleted twitter DM chat about the series. I came to the swift conclusion that they were absolutely right. It wasn’t the worst thing I read for this essay. I had to read Starship Troopers after all. But it was extremely miserable going episode after episode. Even in this relatively abridged format, I was quickly sick of this arc. Especially the Klingon aspects of it. My god, the Klingons fucking suck. Sons of Moghalone is one of the most soul crushing experiences I’ve ever had with a work of fiction. And The Tourist was a movie so bad, it made me the kind of asshole who turns their phone on in the middle of the theater. (My capsule reviews for Underhill usually rounded to be about 2-10 sentences in length. Sons of Mogh was just the word “Ugh.”)
The core failing is that, honestly, a lack of willingness to go all the way. The writers of the show simply had too much love for Star Trek to give it the kicking it so rightfully deserved. Now, one can certainly critique a work of art they dearly love to great success and ambition. But the love has a frequency towards the reverential. It is a canon that cannot—will not—be rejected.
It can certainly poke at the Federation with an episode like In the Pale Moonlight. There, our main character Ben Sisko engages in war crimes involving the murder of an unsympathetic senator, several bribes and illegal dealings, and yet, ultimately finds himself able to live with it. There are two problems with this, however. Firstly, Ben Sisko is, ultimately, an accesory to the majority of the misdeeds presented here. There is a distance between the captain and these actions, all comitted by third parties arranged by another figure aligned with Sisko, a spy named Garak. Sisko isn’t even aware of the full extent of what he’s an accessory to until the end of the episode. As such, it feels like the show is playing things with kid gloves.
This is further emphasized by the context of the rest of the show. In a proper engagement with the implications of the text, a figure like Sisko would be framed as a somewhat flawed hero coping with the implications of what he has done, descending further and further down the path of justification and horrors in the name of the Federation or at the very least engaging with what he has done.
Instead, the show ends with Sisko ascending to Godhood after punching space Satan in the dick.
And that’s even before you get into For the Uniform, where Sisko literally drops a poison onto an enemy colony, making it uninhabitable for fifty years while gleefully declaring himself the villain. And this episode aired before In the Pale Moonlight. Handwringing over a small set of murders, a bribe, and some forged documents seems a bit small potatoes in comparison. The show ultimately condoning what has been done “For the Greater Good.” As a result, any leftist take on the show has to contend with the uncritical approach the show has towards its militarism, at most looking down at a few bad apples.
Indeed, there’s a fetishization of the militaristic element of Star Trek in this era. Certainly, this is true of all of Star Trek. Even TNG would often embrace an imperialistic mindset with stories about Picard doing the Space Trail of Tears or whatever the fuck Code of Honor was supposed to be. But the advent of the Dominion War as a “The Federation goes to war” plot that would last for the entirety of the show’s last five seasons allowed for the militarism to surge to the surface unseen since the days of Kirk acting as the swaggering dick of the Federation.
This is seen throughout the entire show, most especially in the Federation. Generally speaking, the show is very clear cut on who the goodies and baddies are within the context of the Dominion War. This is perhaps most notable in The Seige of AR-558, which is such a flagrant Vietnam riff, it even has a guy who collects ears. There’s a bit where an anti-war person (inexplicably, the arch capitalist Quark) is put into a position where his anti-war stance has to be rejected in a life or death situation. Crucially, the perspective of the conflict is framed from an American perspective such that the enemy aliens might as well be the Bugs from Starship Troopers.
Indeed, Veerhoeven’s Starship Troopers feels like an apt if unintended pisstake of the Domion War arc: A bunch of gun ho fascists going into the depths of space to kill everything that moves. Who serve a Federation in the name of American interests. That’s multicultural, but nevertheless white American to the bone. Sure, there’s some lipservice paid to the non-white experience (most notably in the Dominion War’s best episode, Far Beyond the Stars, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything and attempts to make it connect ended… poorly), but it’s through the lens of a predominantely white writing staff.
Even the titular Dominion come across as echoes of this American vision of the future. There’s no bones to them. They simply are bad because they’re bad and bad people do bad things. And while that’s absolutely valid, when doing a critique that includes a two parter that threatens to destroy the Federation before ultimately not doing that for a lot of behind the scenes reasons. And, indeed, if you are going to have such a snidly whiplash villainy, you have to make them interesting and fun.
And, to be sure, Jeffrey Combs as the chief toadie for the Dominion is a lot of fun. But he’s frequently written with three contradictary personalities and he’s not the leadership of the Dominion. That goes to the Female Changling, a character so drab and uninteresting, she’s called the Female Changling. She’s played as a straight laced smug woman who thinks she’s the top dog of the universe who needs to be taught her place. (Ok, I might be overexagerating things. It has been a few years since I’ve actually watched the show. The memory cheats.)
That’s before you get into the Jem’Hadar, the foot soldiers of the Dominion. They are, to put it mildly, confused in terms of core concept. There are two high concepts at the core of their being. The first is that they’re drug addicts forced to fight in this god forsaken war because they’ll die if they aren’t given their daily dosage. (This is rather uncomfortably engaged with in several episodes, most notably the pro-slavery Hippocratic Oath.) The other idea being that they’re a race of religious zealots who worship the Changlings as gods. While one could certainly thread the needle to make these two ideas sing, the show doesn’t.
Instead, the show opts to add another foot soldier race, the Breen, into the mix. The Breen are a race of gas masked aliens who, up to this point, have only appeared three times in non-speaking roles. Their introduction frames them as incoherent to the point where no one can actually understand them, and yet it is fully understood that they have a contempt for the Federation that’s never explained because the scripts were running late.
Even if we frame this as akin to something like Strange Adventures or Victor LaVale’s Sabertooth mini, where the point is to contrast the problem with all the benefits it could absolutely want, the critique of the Federation often lands flat for the simple reason that a proper critique of the Federation would require hitting TOS. And the writers of Deep Space Nine love TOS. There is an almost religious reverence held to the likes of Kirk, Spock, and Bones. There are countless episodes calling back to old TOS stories from returning Klingons to literally splicing characters into the background of an episode.
But this love has resulted in an unwillingness to go for the jugular. Because, as I have alluded to, TOS is an extremely imperialistic text. As in there are multiple episodes where the plot can be boiled down to “Captain Kirk teaches the Savages about the benefits of America.” By which I mean there’s literally an episode where Kirk saves the day by reading the Declaration of Independence. One would think a critique of Star Trek’s utopianism would centralize itself on this era of the show. Have Kirk be complicit in Section 31 or have a guest staring Leonard Nemoy break bad or even just have a character justify a monstrous deed by citing something done in TOS. Instead, the show glamorizes TOS as a silly show that ultimately remains the best thing ever.
Ultimately, this era of Trek was a rather bog standard and kinda drab piece of military sci-fi. It’s a vision of Trekthat ultimately rejects any and all utopian idealism in favor of the imperialistic vision of the American Space Police. Most tellingly in the episode In the Cards, wherein one character quotes a bit of first season TNG post-captial philosophy while the other wins the argument by paraphrasing Margaret Thatcher’s line about how the problem with communism is that you inevitably run out of other people’s money.
Moreover, it is also the vision of Star Trek that would act as the end stop to this era of Star Trek. Sure, there were other series on the air. But there was a degree of epilogue-ness to these shows, most especially Enterprise and its engagement with the messy origins of the Federation. Most tellingly is the final shot of Deep Space Nine, which acts as a direct mirror to the opening shot of The Next Generation, zooming out into the cosmos in contrast to zooming in from the cosmos. The loop has been sealed and it is time to move on.
But even if we put all of that aside, the fact of the matter is… the last five seasons of Deep Space Nine largely suck. I can respect a work of art that has politics I don’t fully gel with. I’m rather fond of the work of Clint Eastwood. I’ve liked plenty of cop shows over the years like NCIS or Miami Vice. I have a sizable sympathy for some of the works of Zack Snyder. The Dark Knight is a great movie. And yeah, Frank Miller kinda slaps as an artist.
But Deep Space Nine’s last five seasons aren’t that good. I often note that the best way to understand the show is that it’s a rough draft for what would be done better with Battlestar Galactica, a show I need to be in the right headspace to watch. You can see the writers trying to figure out how to do a multi-season serialized television show. But they haven’t yet. So they end up sucking at it. Season three is a confused mess that’s unsure what it wants to be, as to be expected in transitionary periods. Season four decides to sidetrack itself with a bunch of Klingon bullshit because the studio thought it’d boost the raitings. Season five and six start to get things rolling into something coherent. Respectasble mid-tier television (albeit with a rather drab heterosexual romance given to Garak solely to make the inevitable fridging all the more tragic). But then there’s season seven, where the show just gets away from the writers, resulting in several really bad decisions culminating in an over bloated, craptastic eight part finale.
A major sticking point that comes to mind is the two parter Homefront/Paradise Lost, which is basically about Sisko and the gang finding out about a false flag operation within the Federation to push a more fascist agenda. The episode ultimately stumbles with the characterization of Sisko, starting out as being gung ho about the move to martial law before shirking in horror after one conversation with his dad, the second half acting as if he was always against the martial law.
There are certainly moments in the two parter that I wish were expanded upon. (I love the characterization of the Changling who approaches Sisko to go “We aren’t responsible” because he acts like such a little shit in a way that you wish was carried on with the rest of the Dominion.) But generally, the episodes were just meh. Which, honestly describes a lot of Deep Space Nine’s last five seasons. There are some truly horendous episodes (I will hunt down anyone who defends Profit and Lace and don’t get me started again on Sons of Mogh), but the whole is rather middling.
And yet, the shape Trek would ultimately take was in line with the more war oriented Deep Space Nine. This was due to the nature of the world being irrecably altered in the wake of the actions of the 80s and 90s finally coming home to roost with the destruction of two towers. Utopian daydreams were simply not in vogue. When Star Trek returned, as all IP do in this modern age, it came back as more militaristic in its approach. The strangeness of the universe was sanded down in favor of your old favorites like Blorbo McAnderson, the Klingons, and Q. The utopia and its subsuquent thorniness were sanded down into mere gestures.
Perhaps this is why I think The Straight Story is the best Star Trek movie ever made. Because it represents a road not taken. A road full of weirdoes, dreamers, and inexplicable deer.
And, you know, it’s actually a pretty damn good movie.
November 17, 2024-January 15, 2025
POSTSCRIPT:
A river runs through the city where we live. We’re not too far from the mouth, and the river itself is wide, with slow-moving and stagnant waters. It’s smelly, too. The land along the riverbank has been left undeveloped. There, you’ll find an overgrown field of Canadian goldenrod and cat carcasses strewn about.
 |
| Burbank, 2019 |
It’s Thursday, January 16, 2025, around about 1:31 in the afternoon. I’m at home, sick. I’ve not vomited or had bad diareha. But I’ve nonetheless felt sick. I’ve been recuporating by sleeping in and relaxing. Which is to say not adding an additional section to this absurdly long piece.
About three minutes ago, my good friend Harry informed me that David Lynch has died. As with a lot of filmmakers, I got into him through my brother, Patrick. He’s a massive film nerd, to the point where he can get rather pretentious with his taste in films. Though, from time to time, I’ll poke the bear and make jokes about his love of James Cameron’s Avatar.
He got into Lynch in High School and showed me a couple of his films. The first of them being Wild at Heartaround about my Sophmore year. I have not rewatched the film in years, but I remember liking it quite a bit. In particular, I loved Nicolas Cage’s rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” (such that I’d rather annoyingly ask my brother to play his bootleg copy of it whenever we were driving to the movies) and the rather odd ball comedy at the heart of the film. I mean, considering the film ends with Glinda from The Wizard of Oz (played, naturally, by Sheryl Lee) descending from the heavens to get Cage’s character off his ass, it’s a really funny, earnest film.
I would shortly thereafter watch Blue Velvet and fail to watch Eraserhead due to the limitations of television software and the brightness levels required to watch Eraserhead. I remember watching Blue Velvet and I’ll probably do so again tonight, given the news.
While my brother was out looking for colleges, during the summer before my Junior Year, I decided to watch Mulholland Dr. My brother had talked about how utterly confusing and confounding the film was, citing the pamphlet that had ten questions to ask when figuring out the film. As soon as I got to the scene where Laura Harring wore a wig that made her look almost exactly like Naomi Watts, I understood the movie perfectly. I called my brother while he was out with my parents in, I believe, Ithaca, NY, to inform him that if anything, the film made too much sense. In hindsight, this was an early part of my queer awakening.
I wouldn’t watch another Lynch film for a hot minute. To be more precise, 2017, shortly after I finished college. I had decided to wait to watch Twin Peaks The Return until after it had completed and I finally watched Twin Peaks proper. I had watched several video essays extoling the virtues of the show, most notably The Amazing Digital Circus actor Alex Rochon’s “Top 10 Scariest Twin Peaks Moments” and Scout Tafoya’s Unloved on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. But while skimming through twitter, I saw a tweet by El Sandifer noting the similarities between Episode 8 of Twin Peaks The Return and a movie called Wax: The Discovery of Television Among the Bees.
Curious, I watched the film and was instantly transfixed by the imagry and implications. Because holy shit, that’s some wild cinema. On a lark, I decided to watch the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return without the context of the rest of the show. I immediately clocked that this was the most Grant Morrison thing to ever air on television and resolved to watch the show in its entirety at some point.
That point would come in 2018 shortly after I watched Joel Bocko’s Journey Through Twin Peaks. The video series is a massive deep dive into the whole of Twin Peaks, highlighting Mark Frost’s mystical aspirations, David Lynch’s love of small towns, and so much more. I loved the style the video presented itself with, always aware of the necessities of the audio/visual medium. There were so many moments in here that flowed almost perfectly. Some even perfectly (The Killer Revealed still lives in the back of my mind).
I resolved to actually watch the darn show, and I quite liked most of Twin Peaks (we all know how bad Season Two is, and I don’t have anything to add) and immediately loved Fire Walk With Me. And The Return was fantastic. But more importantly was one of the Lynch films I watched prior to Twin Peaks to get me into the mindset of Lynch: The Elephant Man. Neither myself nor my brother had seen the film, so we gave it a watch. By the end of the film, we were in tears.
About a year earlier, on January 6, 2017, my grandfather died. He had worked in construction as a younger man and had some damage done to his lungs due to the concrete he inhaled. The last thing I said to him was a reference to another surealist television show, The Prisoner. “Be seeing you,” I said. The last thing he heard of me was a yelp of pain as I accedentally headbutted my aunt in an attempt to rest my forehead onto her’s. I didn’t cry then.
When we left the Hospital, my brother had to pull over the car and burst into tears. I didn’t cry then. It wouldn’t be until 3AM that my mom would return home with the bad news. But still, we knew it was over. I made another television reference while trying to console my mother and my soon to be awake brother. “It’s over, isn’t it?” I asked. We spent an hour in our company. I didn’t cry then. A few days later, we would attend the wake for the old man. I was reading a crappy book about Madoka Magica that was a bit too fanboy about the series and not as engaging as This Very Soil. I didn’t cry then. When the funeral happened, I saw my grandmother cry for the first time in my life. It was uncomfortable and nervewracking. I didn’t cry then.
When we watched The Elephant Man, for the first time, and saw that ending.
“Nothing will die. The stream flows, the wind blows, the cloud fleets, the heart beats. Nothing will die.”
All the stars in the sky, and the world felt so much colder.
Be seeing you.
