Part Two: The Dark Side

William Shatner: You know, before I answer any more questions there's something I wanted to say. Having received all your letters over the years, and I've spoken to many of you, and some of you have traveled... y'know... hundreds of miles to be here, I'd just like to say... GET A LIFE, will you people? I mean, for crying out loud, it's just a TV show! I mean, look at you, look at the way you're dressed! You've turned an enjoyable little job, that I did as a lark for a few years, into a COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME! I mean, how old are you people? What have you done with yourselves? You, you must be almost 30... have you ever kissed a girl? I didn't think so! There's a whole world out there! When I was your age, I didn't watch television! I LIVED! So... move out of your parent's basements! And get your own apartments and GROW THE HELL UP! I mean, it's just a TV show dammit, IT'S JUST A TV SHOW!

Charlie: Are - are you saying then that we should pay more attention to the movies?

- Saturday Night Live, December 20, 1986

The infamous Saturday Night Live skit with William Shatner takes us to one of the curious aspects of science fiction that has almost defined the genre in the eyes of the public: the Star Trek Fan, or "Trekkie".

It is customary to blame Fandom on Star Trek, and let's be fair, if fingers have to be pointed, Gene Roddenberry's opus really does create the first really big (and slightly insane) fan community. Star Wars and Harry Potter have attracted more than their fair share of, ah, "overly-excited" followers, but I still think that Star Trek sets the standard. In fact, as a phenomenon, Star Trek fandom has probably garnered as much attention as the material that created it.

And let's be honest, some of the excesses of Star Trek fans would sound like jokes if they weren't true. In fact, they are true and they still sound like jokes. Bad enough that someone has translated Hamlet in Klingon, but who in their right mind would decide to raise their children bilingually in English and Klingon, for heaven's sake? Yes, fine, it's probably a bit marginal to admit to attending Star Trek conventions in costume, but several years ago I was sitting in a strip club in Toronto (I make no apologies) and someone walked in wearing a full Next Generation Star Fleet uniform. Hallowe'en? No, sorry, middle of summer. (I saw one of the dancers chatting with him, and later asked her if she'd gotten any explanation of his outfit. Apparently he just liked the attention that it brought - which was probably not intended to be funny, in spite of the fact that he was talking to someone who was wearing a g-string and fishnet stockings for similar reasons.) Plenty of fans write their own versions of the material: Star Trek fans build eerily accurate duplicates of the bridge of the Enterprise and hire Walter Koenig and George Takei so that they can shoot their own episodes. (Don't believe that one? http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/)

As Shatner's monologue points out, over the years Star Trek has replaced real life for innumerable geeks, losers, nerds and fanboys. And yet...and yet...time heals all wounds. Somehow the ongoing cultural penetration of Star Trek has given it an unexpected legitimacy, to the point where it's become (dare I say) almost respectable to display a comprehensive grasp of the history of the Federation charter when chatting over cocktails. And, if anyone wishes to join the select, enviable few that possess that kind of knowledge, just let me know. After all, I do own TWO copies of the original Starfleet Technical Manual...

- Sid

Part One: the best known split infinitive of all time.

Space: The final frontier
These are the voyages of the starship, Enterprise
Its 5 year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life and new civilizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before...

Today we celebrate the birthday of one of the great science fiction icons: the original Star Trek, which began its run on September 8th, 1966.* It is impossible to think of any other piece of popular entertainment that has had the same impact on society as this short-lived NBC series, which only managed to limp along for three seasons before being cancelled.

Why is the damn thing so popular?

For the moment, let's ignore all of the sequels, movies, spin-offs, cartoons, comic books, novels, and games: let's just look at the original Star Trek, because it paves the way for all of the others. All of the succeeding material is a bit like preaching to the choir - the original series is what creates the enormous following that allows for everything that follows. So let's jump back in time (pardon me a minor science fiction moment there) to 1966 and have a look at the original Star Trek in its natural environment.

In 1966, science fiction is thin on the ground for the television viewer. The Twilight Zone had come and gone (with a younger William Shatner featured in the episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet") and since then very little has come to fill the gap. Lost In Space is starting its second season, but it's already starting down the road to increasingly juvenile and camp episodes, and The Time Tunnel, an unfortunate pastiche of historical inaccuracy and movie filler shots, begins its first season. Bewitched and Batman are only marginally in the genre, and Dark Shadows is more of a soap opera than anything else.

Having listed the competition, the question becomes more one of why Star Trek wasn't more successful than it was! Full credit has to go to Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, for the breadth of his vision of the 23rd Century. Unsuspecting people who didn't know their Asimovs from their Ellisons (so to speak) were suddenly exposed to a startling array of marvels: fast-than-light warp drive, the transporter**, phasers and photon torpedoes, replicators, tractor beams, force fields, time travel, parallel universes, alien races, planet killers, androids, galactic empires, and the entire catalogue of future wonders. It must have hit unsuspecting viewers like a bomb when compared to the alternatives.

The main characters are perhaps a little one-dimensional, but the real value of the triumvirate of Spock, Kirk and McCoy is that they represent the elements of Logic, Will and Emotion that are constantly in conflict in everyone's character, but externalized and given life. Similarly, at their best the plot lines deal with topics on an almost Shakespearian level, the constants of love, hate, laughter and fear that are the mainstays of life. Are all of the episodes brilliant? No, of course not, but even at its worst Star Trek has a feeling of elemental appeal, of addressing fundamental issues and questions.

And yet, somehow, all of that is secondary to the real significance of the program. The Cold War is a very real threat in 1966. In 1962, a mere four years earlier, the Cuban Missile Crisis had poised the world on the brink of nuclear war, and the hands of the Doomsday Clock stand at seven minutes to midnight. Meanwhile, angry crowds barrage Martin Luther King with stones and bricks in Chicago, Malcolm X has been dead for just over a year, and the Watts Riots are still an angry memory.

Star Trek presented a future in which humanity, as a species, had survived - not a perfect future, but a better one, a hopeful one, and the word "hope" is the one most often used when the importance of the show is discussed. The multi-racial bridge crew represented one aspect of that hope: again, forty years after the event, it's difficult to realize how astonishing the character of Lieutenant Uhura was in 1966, where the concept of a woman of colour occupying a position of authority would still have been extraordinary - and inspirational.

"Inspirational" may be the key to all of it. If, as is the dream of every science fiction fan, we eventually make our way to the stars, some small credit for that leap should lie with Star Trek, simply for suggesting that we might be capable of making it.

- Sid

* We also celebrate the birthday of Paul Levesque, TPH courier, but since he hasn't spawned any spinoffs or sequels, there are no Paul Levesque conventions, and his fan base, although dedicated, is much smaller, some other blogger is going to have to discuss his quirky success.

** I know full well that the transporter was invented in order to save the money that would have been spent on special effects shots of the Enterprise landing on planets, but that in no way diminishes the brilliance of the idea.

"Madness, as you know, is like gravity."

"Do I really look like a man with a plan, Harvey? I don’t have a plan. The mob has plans, the cops have plans. You know what I am, Harvey? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do if I caught one. I just do things. I’m a wrench in the gears. I hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone’s."

The Joker, The Dark Knight

Having now seen The Dark Knight, I have to agree with the general opinion that Heath Ledger does a stellar turn as the Joker. However, it may be too stellar a turn - the Joker's dominance of the movie turns it into something other than a Batman story.

No one that I've spoken to after they've seen the movie makes any reference to the Batman at all. All the comments are about the Joker: as a character, as a performance, as an idea. When The Phantom Menace came out, disgruntled fans did guerilla cuts of the movie without the character of Jar Jar Binks, and I have to wonder how The Dark Knight would play out if someone went through and remove the Batman. What would you have left? It would be a kind of twisted morality play, the Joker versus Harvey Dent, Gotham's white knight, and an almost inevitable turning of that symbol to the sort of insanity and chaos that he has opposed. Normally the Batman acts as an equal counterweight to the Joker, order versus chaos, but in this case he seems overwhelmed by the Joker's glittering madness.

Logic says that credit for the creation of that madness should lie with Jonathon and Christopher Nolan, the screenwriters. After all, an actor is only as good as his material, and so much of the Joker's material is so very quotable. But in this case, the performance so completely suits the material - Heath Ledger gives the Joker a kind of febrile madness completely different from the original "Clown Prince of Crime" version of the character, to the point where Ledger is invisible behind - or within - the role. When we see Jack Nicholson as the Joker, part of the reaction to his performance is the recognition of Nicholson in an uncharacteristic place, whereas Heath Ledge vanishes completely within the smeared, corrupted clown makeup of his Joker.

The New York Post reported that Ledger spent six weeks in virtual isolation as he experimented with the character of the Joker. As part of the process, he is said to have kept a journal of the Joker's thoughts, a document whose appearance in some form or another is inevitable. No one will ever be able to say with any certainty if the performance had any connection with Ledger's death, although personally it seems too much like a convenient news hook rather than a believable tragedy.

And the rest of the cast? I'm sorry to say that I found Christian Bale's performance to be workmanlike, like he was only doing the job he was hired to do. I acknowledge the difficulty of acting behind a cape and cowl, but there are times when his Batman almost feels like a parody, with too much concentration on the gravelly tone of menace. The scenes that he shares with Michael Caine are probably his best, but unfortunately Caine probably has the second best lines in the movie after the Joker's.

Does Batman come in third for dialogue? Sorry, third place goes to Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent. As suggested above, you could easily turn the movie into a struggle between Dent and the Joker, and it's unfortunate that Eckhart and Ledger ended up in the same film. Eckhart could have easily supported an entire plot line with Dent versus Batman, but in this case he ends up as a bit of a sideshow. Oh, and I'm sorry to say that for me, Maggie Gyllenhaal comes across as a placeholder: "Stand here and read these lines - thanks." (I seem to be having a critical summer in terms of female love interests, Glyneth Paltrow also didn't work for me in Iron Man.)

I'm curious as to where they'll go from here. Someone must be kicking themselves about the decision to kill off Two-Face and keep the Joker alive, given how subsequent events have unfolded. It's oddly fitting, somehow - it's almost like some kind of slightly twisted joke...

- Sid