Organizing Principles

Friday, June 26, 2015

Michael Gummelt compels us to ask: What is Star Trek?

7:48 AM — Unknown — 1 comments

Is Star Trek old and in need of re-engineering, or does it need to be abandoned to the museum of 20^th Century science fiction?

I was getting caught up on HBO’s The Newsroom last night, and in episode 5 of Season 3, there was a Star Trek reference that peeked my interest. Trek references in pop culture are telling signs of the status of the franchise. If Trek is on the cover of Time magazine (1995) or getting full page coverage in The New York Times (2009), then it is probably a good year to be a Trek fan. But this reference put me in a particularly morose mood about the state of Trek. It was not a negative reference. The problem was the type of person the reference associated with Star Trek, and not because the character was a stereotypical nerd like on Big Bang Theory. It wasn’t like that at all.

For those of you who do not know The Newsroom or Aaron Sorkin, this is a show (and a show runner) that glamorizes the past over the future. The show’s hero Will McAvoy played by Jeff Daniels is constantly equated to the 17^th Century anti-hero Don Quixote (just as The West Wing’s hero Jed Bartlet was a throw-back to JFK). The central conflict of the episode with the Trek reference is whether the newsroom can adapt to a new millennial corporate overseer who wants to replace their Edward R. Murrow business model with an Internet-driven/TMZ/citizen-journalist style of news. Just one of the questionable things they are being asked to broadcast is an on-air debate between a rape victim and her accused rapist. The show’s heroes can’t adapt, as evidenced by the crusty old president of the news division, Charlie Skinner played by Sam Waterson, suffering a heart attack in this episode. A young reporter, Jim Harper played by John Gallagher Jr., is just as old-school idealistic as the other heroes of the show (and Sorkin), as evidenced by the fact that he broke up with his girlfriend who left the newsroom to write gossipy click-driven Internet columns, as opposed to the ‘real journalism’ he thinks he does. Sorkin has said in the commentary that Jim is a younger version of Charlie, the embodiment of the old ways of journalism instilled in a young man just starting out.

Jim is the character referred to in this episode as someone who watches Star Trek. He takes umbrage at the fact that someone confused the Star Trek episode he was watching with Star Wars. There is a scene where we actually see him watching a classic Star Trek episode on his iPad. To my ears this brief, insignificant reference, screamed this (probably unintended) message: the guy who says ‘piss off 2015, I prefer my media like it was 1955’ is the Star Trek fan.

Am I overreaching? No. Consider the summersaults Hollywood types are doing right now to update Star Trek for modern sensibilities. The Bad Robot reboot is one example. But those who want to produce a new TV series, who will have to film dozens of hours of TV, have a higher hurdle to make their show relatable to modern audiences, of which the most important demographic will be millennials.

Enter Michael Gummelt, apparently in talks with Paramount/CBS, who said to TrekMovie.com about a potential series: “[Star Trek] needs to be reinvented for a new generation. Not a reboot, that’s already being done in the movies. What I want for this series is for it to be the future – a Star Trek TV series that feels modern and feels futuristic relative to our current times.”

Futuristic relative to our current times. There’s the rub. This is the real reason Trek canon gets a bad wrap by current Hollywood people involved with Trek. It’s not that writers and producers feel constrained by fictional facts, decades old lines of dialogue, Trek history. They desire to be free of the old Trek aesthetic, the look, feel and sensibility of TOS and TNG-era Trek. They want a Star Trek that seems futuristic to people in this decade, not the 60s or the 80s.

Classic Star Trek was standard science fiction of that era (written by some well-know 60s science fiction writers), but as TV, Roddenberry knew that the setting, the characters, and how they interact had to be visually familiar and relatable to his audience. His solution was to make the Enterprise look, feel and sound like a WWII battleship in outer space. There was the bridge, complete with pinging sounds; tight crew quarters; a sickbay; a rec. room, etc. The viewer tuning in could make the necessary suspension of disbelief—Oh I see, it’s the Navy is space—and then enjoy the story.

When TNG came around 20 years later, that TV audience did not have the same cultural reference points as a generation before—we did not come of age close to WWII and Korea or having seen a lot of WWII movies. So the Enterprise-D resembles a plush, leather-interior luxury cruise liner, more Love Boat than the Battle of Midway. The bridge, it has been said by the show’s own writers, looked like the lobby of a chincy hotel; sprawling crew quarters; a lounge (ten-forward); state-of-the-art entertainment (holodecks); children romping down the corridors—a cruise ship in space. Voyager, TNG’s sister show, was virtually identical in sensibility.

In these shows, the way the characters interact is deeply 20^th Century. They communicate using glorified radios. Decisions are made from a central authority, distributed down a clear chain of command. They hang out socially in rec. rooms and lounges (bars, when they are in alien environments). There are more robots and devices that want to be human than there are humans who want to be more technological. Nobody ever Tweets, or even emails. I don’t expect Twitter to still be a functional company in the 23^rd or 24^th Centuries. But you have to admit that characters on even TNG-era Star Trek do not interface with technology as much as the average person does in a coffee shop or elementary school in 2015.

The change to Trek lore that potential future Trek writers and producers are calling for is not about technology per se, faster warp drives and sleeker communicators (there is not more archaic-sounding term than ‘communicator’ is there?). No, the so-called necessary change is about the interface between people and technology. It’s about a millennial seeing a star ship on TV they’d want to hang out on, instead of one modeled on a naval battleship, an ‘iBridge’ grafted onto a naval battleship, or a cruise ship.

This is why Michael Gummelt says that the future trek series he envisions is “set sometime in the future, distant enough that it doesn’t really matter which universe it takes place in. It’s universe-agnostic.”

These are the words of someone who wants to tell a Star Trek story on a completely blank canvas. He wants to eject the archetypes of characters that would be familiar to those of us who grew up in the 1980s, or who saw many WWII movies, or, in the case of Kirk’s archetype, read stories about 18^th Century naval captains (Horatio Hornblower, as a character born in 1776, as a piece of fiction born in 1937). All of that, and necessarily all of Trek canon, needs to be relegated to the dust bin of pop culture history. In exchange for… what exactly? Maybe it will be great, modern science fiction. But will it be Star Trek? If so, what threads of Star Trek DNA will it shed and what will it retain? On The Newsroom, the heroes have to ask what exactly can be considered news in 2015? For us Trekkies, what is Star Trek in 2015?

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Notes on Past and Future X-Files

6:25 PM — Unknown — 0 comments

The mid-Season Six two parter Two Fathers/One Son all but ended the six year central mystery of the show involving the alien conspiracy plotline. Despite the fact that the series finale was titled The Truth at the end of Season Nine, the whole truth was basically told in these two episodes (more on Season Nine later).

I am going to try to summarize what we learned in just these two episodes in as few words as possible:

In 1947 an alien ship crashed in Roswell—the first time the U.S. government became aware of the aliens. They salvaged an alien fetus. A group within the State Department formed to address this problem, and they spent twenty-five years collecting information on the alien’s plans. Bill Mulder and C.G.B. Spender (Smoking Man) were part of this group. By 1973, the group had learned that the aliens intended to colonize the Earth and by infecting humanity with a virus that would transform the species into a slave race (they learned only at the very end that people would become not slaves but host bodies for gestating aliens). The only true survivors would be those immune to the virus—alien-human hybrid clones.

The group realized—or were told—that the aliens needed their help to create the hybrids. The group voted on the following course of action: each member will give the aliens a family member, who will be one part lab rat, and one part collateral. The family member will be used as test subjects to create an alien-human hybrid, which will allow the family and the member of the secret group to be injected with the hybrid genes, thus ensuring their survival. The fact that the family members will still be alive, with the hope of being rejoined with their family after colonization in a presumably non-slave status, is the motivation for the members of the group to continue working on the project. What the group would get in return is the alien fetus, and the alien Colonist’s support in creating an alien-human hybrid that would allow themselves, their family, and perhaps countless others to survive colonization.

Bill Mulder was opposed to helping the Colonists. He proposed that the group chose to make a vaccine that will stop colonization. The group compromised with Mulder. They would agree to help the aliens create a hybrid—including giving up their family members (Smoking Man’s wife Cassandra Spender and Mulder’s daughter Samantha)—but stall the project until they could create a vaccine that would save everyone.

Fox Mulder describes the choice his father and the other’s faced: “stand and fight, or bow to the will of a fearsome enemy. Or to surrender—to yield and collaborate. To save themselves and stay their enemy’s hand. Men who believed that victory was the absence of defeat and survival the ultimate ideology… No matter what the sacrifice.”

On November 27, 1973, the family members were abducted by the Colonists. From that day on, the group became the Syndicate, and according to Smoking Man, they “no longer cleaved to any government agency.”

Twenty-five years later, the Syndicate’s doctors succeeded in creating a successful alien-human hybrid: Cassandra Spender. The project is over. Colonization can begin. The Syndicate members—now known as Elders—can be reunited with their families. But a rebel alien force has interceded. They are not going to allow the Colonists to commit genocide just to reclaim the Earth for themselves. The Rebels destroy Cassandra, kill all the members of the Syndicate—except Smokey—and steal the Roswell fetus. According to Krycek: “The Rebels are going to win.”

That is all there is (I don’t think the later season added much to this story—but I have yet to see Season 8 and 9). My first impression, after my recent re-watch, is that this is a great science fiction story. Where else has the tantalizing but threadbare myth of the summer picnicker abducted by UFOs been dramatized to its fullest potential and most logical global conclusion? The perverse but very humane twist of turning the evil government conspirator “black hats” into reasonable human beings who make choices that maybe we all would have made is something the modern blockbuster usually tries and fails at (especially recent Trek films). Suddenly all of Smoking Man’s kills, even of Bill Mulder—the hero’s father—seem understandable, if not almost acceptable. The spinoff that The X-Files most called for was not Millennium or Lone Gunman, but the story of how those men of the post-WWII generation discovered the alien plot, decided to hide it from their own government, then had hubris enough that they thought they could play poker with an interstellar superpower and actually win. Smoking Man: “You can't think these choices were made lightly. They were the most painful decisions of our lives. Watching our families' faces…” That would be a great show.

Now, what does this mean for the upcoming new episodes?

First, I find in increasingly unlikely that that the six new episodes will deal exclusively with aliens. But there is the potential that they could dispense with the entire alien storyline by claiming, as Krycek predicted, that the Rebels won. The Colonist aliens don’t have to be punched out by Mulder and Scully like Will Smith in Independence Day. We can just be left to assume that the Rebels punched them out a million light years away. Over and done.

Also, in the 90s the UFO myth had a lot more cultural purchase than it does today. The mystery of it was enticing. We could more easily imagine that maybe that couple was abducted on the deserted road in the middle of the night. Today, when that couple and everyone else has a camera in their pocket, do we think that way anymore? Carl Sagan wrote about the UFO myth being culturally and historically specific to the 20^th Century. Fifteen years into the 21^st Century, I feel confident we are going to move on to other myths. And this still dovetails nicely with the X-Files mythology because according to the story, the abduction project stopped around 1999, when above episodes aired.

Finally, The X-Files was always ripe with social commentary, and the alien story was only ever a small part of that. (One big piece of commentary I never got until recently: There was a lot of significance in the 1990s in depicting a group of old white men from the post-WWII years making momentous decisions that affected the fate of all humanity, and the rightness or wrongness of their decisions.) I wonder what Chris Carter has in store for us when his new episodes air in 2016. The world is much weirder than some of Mulder’s X-Files, many of which now seem downright old fashioned. Can this show that prized its cultural commentary be updated, or will it play like a vintage throwback to a simpler time?

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Chris Christie and the Nurse

6:42 PM — Unknown — 0 comments — Labels: Politics

Last week while he was campaigning for a local candidate in New Jersey, Christie quoted a disillusioned voter who complained, "We used to control events, and now it seems we are controlled by events."

This was a few days before he held a press conference with Governor Cuomo to announce a 21 day mandatory quarantine for any health workers returning from West Africa. This policy makes sense only on an emotional level. It makes us feel we are in fact controlling events. But medical professionals and scientists, as well as the White House, say this is overkill and counterproductive. Overkill because Ebola is only infectious from a person who is exhibiting symptoms, such as fever. Counterproductive because the most effective way to keep Ebola from spreading to the United States is to stem the plague in West Africa, which will require hundreds of volunteer health workers to travel to and from those countries.

Now maybe the governors of NY and NJ were won over by the above arguments within three days of their first quarantined health worker. Or maybe they just were unlucky enough to have their first test case to be Kaci Hickox.

For the record, Hickox did not have any symptoms. A scanner in the airport thought she was flush. No human ever took her temperature until she arrived at University Hospital in Newark, where she was diagnosed with not having a fever. We've got another 2 1/2 weeks before we know for sure that Hickox was not infected when she was in Africa. Even if she turns out to have Ebola, the logic of closely monitoring people until symptoms appear, short of mandatory 21 quarantine, is still intact.

But Christie is following a different kind of logic. One hopes that his quote about the necessity of controlling events is merely election season bluster, and will give way to more a reasoned, limited-- dare I say conservative--governing style--both in his remaining years as our Governor and, potentially, as our president.

But I doubt it. Ever since Sandy and the 2012 election, Christie has repeatedly put forth one criteria for his political viability: his leadership skills. The problem--as this Obama NJ voter has noticed--is that he often defines his leadership skills against Obama's using situations that Obama, and not Christie, has faced. It is extremely easy to claim that people will simply bend to his will after they hear him say "Because I say so" when he never actually has to say "Because I say so." It is extremely easy to say that Putin, or ISIS, or Ebola would listen if it were only someone of Christie's leadership caliber shaking his fist at them all.

The most likely result of this style of leadership, as actually practiced by an executive after an election, is someone who spends a great deal of time paying attention and fretting about the 24 hour news cycle, someone who makes bold, rash pronouncements to prove that he is shaping that news cycle come what may, and someone who refuses to admit mistakes when it becomes obvious to all that he acted rashly.

This is on display this week, and continues to be as Christie is still arguing that Hickox was symptomatically ill last Friday when the facts show she was not. Christie's schtick may be wearing thin even for an election season.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Primer on Space Politics: The Vision Thing

7:02 PM — Unknown — 0 comments — Labels: Space Race 2.0

Last month, when announcing the contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to ferry Americans to the space station, instead of having to rely on Russia as we do now, Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator proclaimed:

“Today we’re one step closer to launching our astronauts from U.S. soil on American spacecraft and ending the nation’s sole reliance on Russia.”

Maybe it’s the use of the hallowed phrase “one step” in the mouth of the NASA administrator that seemed to gear us up for an inspiring announcement. But what he said after that phrase is utterly depressing, and baffling. How could we have let this happen that 50 years after sending people to the Moon we now can’t even get them into Low Earth Orbit?

The reason it has happened is simple: for decades there has not been any political vision for human space flight coming from our leaders. The quandary is that this lack of leadership coexists with a clear vision for how we will use space to enhance technology on the ground, and the less discussed but very real vision for how we will use space militarily, as I have written in the posts below. The big question is whether the former two space strategies will be met with an equivalent strategy for human space presence.

Every modern U.S. President gives the big space speech where he lays out his Administration’s space policy objectives. These policies usually are just updated and tweaked versions of the previous administration’s policy, and they usually evoke the glory days of the Moonshot era. During his re-election in 2004, George W. Bush announced, “Human beings are headed into the cosmos.” This being an election, it was said by pundits at the time that George W. Bush was trying to show the electorate that he had what his father called “the vision thing.” It was not until 2006 when he finally completed his official space policy. This document called for a replacement vehicle for the shuttle, to return us to the Moon by 2020, and to send a robotic mission to Mars that would somehow study the feasibility of a human mission to the Red Planet. The Constellation program consisted of the Orion space craft (formerly Crew Exploration Vehicle) and launch vehicle Ares I (formerly the Crew Launch Vehicle) and would potentially carry humans to the Moon and Mars.

In any case, the Obama Administration scrapped and refashioned most of that plan. They kept the Orion capsule plan but canceled the Ares rocket. An Orion-type crew vehicle will sit atop Boeing’s old and Russian-made Atlas V, or the SpaceX Falcon9, in future launches. By 2025, we are supposed to begin crewed missions beyond the Moon, including to an asteroid. In the 2030s we are to send humans round trip to Mars and back. The Obama plan also calls for finding exoplanets and signs of life in the universe.

Another way that the space policy of subsequent administrations is generally consistent is the distance presidents keep putting between their time in office and the real tough goals. To truly match and surpass the glory of Kennedy’s Moonshot, humans will have to travel beyond lunar orbit. Like the old joke goes, Presidents agree that this can only happen 20 years from now, and it always will.

As anyone who has read Lee Billings 5 Billion Years of Solitude knows, millions or even billions of dollars are spent on designs for space ships and telescopes (and diverted from other promising designs) only to be canceled after a few years, when people realize how much it will cost to actually finish the project. The cycle is repeated over and over in every NASA department. The money wasted in the canceled projects would probably have been enough to fund to completion a set of project designs had they been nested within a single space policy vision from the beginning.

Will this cycle be broken? Granted, there are major recent achievements in space exploration, mainly on the robotic and telescope fronts. But what of human space flight? Have presidents figured out how to spin the politics of their space policy: make sure the GPS is working, send some robots to Mars and kick some money to the exoplanet finders, but always keep the Moonshot business 20 years in the future, an inspiring goal we’re never actually supposed to reach? Is it all just rhetoric to justify the aerospace industry’s existence? Or is it an actual achievable goal that in fact does justify the aerospace industry?

Maybe we will find out the answer only when the people get interested in space again. Until the public finds its passion for space exploration we can’t expect politicians to be passionate about it. Maybe we need to be inspired by non-terrestrial sources. Perhaps shrimp on Europa, or a habitable planet a few light years away would do the trick. If a president truly wanted to motivate an era of space exploration, they might call for finding evidence of life outside the Earth within 10 years, and fund that mission. If it worked, we would have to head into the cosmos so we could go say hello to whatever is out there.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Space Money: Brand spaceX

2:27 PM — Unknown — 0 comments — Labels: Space Race 2.0

One month ago, Boeing was awarded a $4.2 billion contract, and SpaceX $2.6 billion to begin ferrying astronauts into orbit by 2017. Once each company’s space capsules are certified, the companies will both perform 6 missions through 2023. Completion of those launches is the only way they get all their money.

SpaceX’s involvement—and the fact that a smaller company Sierra Nevada was apparently also a close enough contender that they contested NASA’s decision not to also award them a contract—is highly significant and a new development in how we launch people and satellites into space.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin have heretofore exclusively received government contracts for space work through their joint venture called United Launch Alliance (ULA). It’s widely written that this is a monopoly on U.S. space industry, and that the lack of competition drives up what they charge for their launches. Elson Musk of SpaceX claims he can launch into orbit for under $100 million, while ULA charge $380 million on average.

Another interesting wrinkle is that while SpaceX’s rocket is American made, ULA rely on Atlas Vs, which require a Russian made RD-180 engine.

Also, politicians with a Boeing or Lockheed plant in their district will have a bias when talking about SpaceX. But there are others who are not on the SpaceX bandwagon, for better reasons than politics.

I suspect that SpaceX and companies like it will continue to play a larger role in the American space presence. When hearing about these companies and their big dreams in the news, we need to keep in mind the fundamentals they are operating under: money, and the realities of the aerospace industry. These companies are not just about space tourism and building hotels on the moon. They are about the government’s space policy (and presumably military space policy). The next Neil Armstorng—if we are to ever have the like—will be a private contractor.