Terok Nor...?

I'm a big fan of the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog -- they have a good selection of interesting and useful objects, some entirely practical, some fanciful… and some a combination of those two qualities.

But I was startled when I saw the cover of their latest catalog (or, if not the latest, at least the most recent one I've received) and saw what my eyes immediately told me must be some kind of nifty licensed "Star Trek" product.  

It was some sort of complex metallic gizmo whose unusual shape instantly made me think of "Terok Nor" -- the Cardassian space station taken over by the Federation in the third "Star Trek" TV series, "Deep Space Nine". The station was, in fact, renamed "Deep Space Nine" by the Federation in the storyline of that series. 

Here's an image of the space station from the TV series "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine". Notice any similarities?

This thing in the catalog was a pretty cool-looking product, whatever it was… and I found the answer to my "What is it?" question on page 69 (I think -- I don't have the catalog in front of me as I type this). It's a "24th Century Time Machine" -- essentially a high-end timepiece made by L'Epee of Switzerland, and you could have one for the price of a nice car -- $35,500.

But I searched in vain for anything in the description of the product which would reveal a connection to "Star Trek" and/or "Deep Space Nine". The closest the copy in the catalog came was this phrase: "Suggesting a remote station set amid the void of space". 

But it is also clearly meant to resemble the titular space station in "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine". I showed the cover of the catalog to Jim Lawson -- who is not a huge "Star Trek" fan -- and asked him what it looked like, and right away he said "The space station on "Deep Space Nine"!"

So… what's the deal here? It is hard to believe that there is no one among the folks behind the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog who would have noticed that this product bore a very close similarity to the design of the "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" space station. In my opinion, it appears to be a pretty brazen conceptual appropriation with absolutely no credit being given to the original source.

I don't get it. Am I missing something here? -- PL

[Note: The images of the catalog cover and the interior page are not scans from the printed catalog itself, but screen grabs from the Hammacher Schlemmer website -- they're not exactly the same, but as far as I can tell, the descriptive information is identical.]

Leonard who...?

I saw a story online last week* about someone selling a "Star Trek" themed house for a lot of money -- $35 million, apparently. It turned out that the whole of this "Star Trek space mansion"  (as it was described in the header of the piece) was not "Star Trek"-themed, but the owner had installed a media room/home theater which was patterned after the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise from "Star Trek: The Next Generation". I have to admit, it looked pretty cool.

There was also a sizable collection of "Star Trek" stuff in the house, and as the camera briefly panned over some of the items, my eye was caught by something odd. I wasn't sure if I'd seen it right, as it seemed so ridiculous, so I scrolled back and forth in the video until I could pause it at the right moment.

As you can see in this screen grab, it was a display of what were labeled as Spock ears from the original "Star Trek" TV series, as worn by someone named "Leonard Nemoy".

"Nemoy"?

Wait… you go to all this trouble and expense to outfit your house with all this cool "Star Trek" stuff… and you misspell the last name of one of the key original cast members?

I'm not sure why "Ears" is capitalized either, but that's a minor point.

Maybe the seller should knock a few bucks off the asking price for this "Star Trek mansion" due to this goofy misspelling… unless the ears don't come with the house -- in which case... never mind.  -- PL

*Here''s the link to the story:

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2014/05/28/pkg-star-trek-mansion-for-sale.wptv&video_referrer=

"Star Trek" revisited

After reading the flawed but highly entertaining and informative "These Are The Voyages" book about the development of the first season of the original "Star Trek" TV series, I was inspired to watch that first season again. I picked up a new release of the original show on Blue-Ray disks, with the option of watching them with the original special effects or new, enhanced effects. I chose the latter.

Of course, I could not just stop at the first season -- I had to watch all three. It took me about three weeks to watch them all, including the special features, and -- for the first time for me -- the original pilot episode "The Cage", parts of which were later edited into the two-part season one episode "The Menagerie".

And it was very interesting. Here, in no particular order, are a few observations:

1.) Casting Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock was either one of the most incredible bits of luck ever, or an act of sheer brilliance, or maybe some of both. Nimoy played the role to the proverbial "t". The closest to this nearly-perfect meshing of actor to role that I can think of right now is a toss-up between Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator and Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark/Iron Man.

Nimoy played Spock with a pitch-perfect blend of gravitas, humor, and passion (those last two qualities extremely difficult to pull off with a character such as the half-Vulcan Spock). It helped that he had excellent foils in William Shatner and DeForest Kelley, but Nimoy's Spock would probably have been intensely watchable had he been the only crew member on the U.S.S. Enterprise. (I am speaking of Spock as he appeared in the body of the series, NOT in the first two pilot episodes -- therein Spock was still very much a work in progress.)

2.) Some of William Shatner's former "Star Trek" castmates have bitterly complained about him stealing lines from them. Watching this series again, I have to say in my opinion that Shatner deserved every line he had, and THEN some. That guy had so much passion for what he was doing -- his performances in that series was the absolute antithesis of "phoning it in".

3.) Fans who have not watched the original series via the Blue-Ray disks, on a high definition TV of a decent size (something forty inches or greater) have not really seen the original series. There is a wealth of heretofore unseen color, detail and texture that comes through in this new presentation. It gave me a much greater appreciation for what the craftspeople who created the show were able to do with their relatively skimpy budgets back in the late 1960's.

4.) Except for a few obviously dated bits of technology (for example, the oft-referred-to computer "tapes") and social and sexual mores, the show feels amazingly fresh and contemporary.

5.) I've read many times about the unusual genesis of the original "Star Trek" series, and how Gene Roddenbery somehow managed the rare feat of getting two pilot episodes made for one series, the first pilot ("The Cage") being rejected by the network allegedly because it was "too cerebral".

I'd never seen that first pilot episode in its entirety, although I had several times watched the two-parter "The Menagerie", which incorporated quite a bit of the footage and story from "The Cage" in a very clever manner. But this Blue-Ray set includes the complete "The Cage", so I decided that I would watch it. I came away with the impression of another, perhaps more important reason the network rejected it: It wasn't very good.

Especially when compared to the other episodes in the first season, "The Cage" just feels old-fashioned and stilted. The lantern-jawed Jeffrey Hunter as captain of the Enterprise doesn't help, having about one-tenth the charisma of Shatner's Captain Kirk. Design elements of parts of the ship's interiors, such as the little gooseneck-mounted gizmos on the bridge, feel like they're from the era in filmed entertainment when spacemen carried "rayguns" and spaceships were powered by rockets. There's a real dullness to the look of the show, exemplified by the boring colors chosen for the Enterprise's interiors.

It's really amazing to see how much had changed and evolved for the better between the time the first pilot had been made and the first series episode was aired. The ship was brighter and more appealing, the technology sleeker and more future-oriented, and the cast much better. My gut feeling is that if the network HAD bought that first pilot and had gone to series with that as the template, with that original cast, we would not be talking about "Star Trek" in 2013. 

5.) The "space hippies" episode ("The Way to Eden") has not aged well, and I suspect it never will.

6.) It's probably a good thing that the use of new character Chekov as comic relief pretty much ended about halfway through the second season.

7.) The characters in this series seemed like real adults doing real adult jobs... which is probably one of the reasons I disliked the two recent "Star Trek" feature films, in which the characters seemed more  like poorly-trained squabbling teenagers trying to fly their parents' starship.

8.) DeForrest Kelley's Dr. McCoy -- referred to as "Bones" through much of the series -- really is one of the coolest characters ever. -- PL

A review of ""These are the Voyages: TOS Season One" by Marc Cushman

I just finished reading a very cool book, "These Are The Voyages" by Marc Cushman. It's a hefty tome -- 580 pages within its hard covers -- and is a fascinating look at the day-to-day creative process which went into making the first season of the original "Star Trek" TV series (also referred as "TOS", for "The Original Series"), using material culled from the extensive files of those who worked on the show, primarily series creator Gene Roddenberry and producer Robert H. Justman. Even if you are not a fan of that first "Star Trek" series, this book is worth reading for insights into how a television series of the 1960's was made. I suspect some of the same issues arise even now when TV series are being produced, more than four decades later -- the rewriting of scripts, the constant battles over budget, and the need to keep things workable on a practical level, to name but a few.

The book isn't lavishly illustrated, and there are no images in color, but there is an entertaining sprinkling of black and white photos throughout, many dealing with behind-the-scenes stuff, some of which I'd never seen before.

Unfortunately, this otherwise wonderful book is marred with what seemed to me to be an overabundance of typographical errors and odd misspellings. My guess would be that much, if not most, if not all of the proofreading was done with the spellcheck function on someone's computer -- leading to some goofy stuff like "breading" for "breeding" in the caption to a photo on page 62.

And there is a very odd line in the author's credit on the back cover, which reads:

"Gene Roddenberry took the pitch from Marc for "Sarek", the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to include a character from TOS and thereby link the two series together."

Huh?

According to Wikipedia, "Sarek" was the seventy-first episode of "Next Generation", and appeared in the third season of that series. But… a principal character from TOS had already appeared in "Next Generation", in the very FIRST episode of the first season, no less ("Encounter at Farpoint"): Dr. McCoy. DeForest Kelley appeared in this pilot episode as the aged Dr. McCoy, now an admiral, in a lovely, touching scene with the android character Data. 

For a book as seemingly well-researched as this one, that seems like an egregious mistake.

However, it does not put me off recommending this book highly, especially for fans of TOS. And I will certainly be purchasing the promised following volumes, dealing with the second and third seasons of TOS, when they are released. -- PL

Some thoughts on "Star Trek: Into Darkness"

(Some people have asked whether I've seen "Star Trek: Into Darkness" yet, and if so, what I thought of it. I think the question arises from my strongly negative and disappointed reaction to the first J.J. Abrams attempt to do a "Star Trek" movie. (You can find these comments in three separate blog posts: http://plairdblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/star-drek.html, http://plairdblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/star-drek-2-more-musings-on-new-star.html, and http://plairdblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/star-drek-3-further-thoughts-on-new.html.) Well, I have seen "Into Darkness" -- twice, in fact, to try to give myself the opportunity to see if what I perceived on first viewing held up on the second -- and the fact is that this movie just left me… dispassionate. I just couldn't get myself too worked up about it. Perhaps it's because it almost exactly fit what I was expecting, after the first one. Anyway, I suppose I should say something about it, if only to go on record. So here goes…)

Ever have a "jaw-dropping" moment? You know, when you see or hear or read or realize something so momentarily stunning that your mouth opens involuntarily, your jaw literally pivoting downward? It happens sometimes in movies… like back in 1976 when the first "Star Wars" opened with that amazing scene of the rebel ship fleeing before the Imperial Star Destroyer which looms onto the screen from above, and just keeps coming, and coming, and coming… or when the Tyrannosaurus Rex steps through the ruined security fence in the first "Jurassic Park"... or when the armies of men and elves clash with the forces of Mordor on a huge, teeming battlefield in the prologue to the first "Lord of the Rings" movie.

Sadly, these days, it all too often happens not because something is visually stunning or conceptually mind-blowing, but because it is just staggeringly stupid. Or lazy. Or both.

I had at least one of those jaw-dropping experiences a few weeks ago when I went with my wife to see the new movie with the title "Star Trek: Into Darkness". Sorry… I just can't bring myself to call it "the new "Star Trek" movie", because -- like J.J. Abrams first attempt -- it is not, to me at least, a "Star Trek" movie. It embraces practically none of the essential spirit of "Star Trek" as I comprehend it. Instead, it strikes me more like a movie made by someone who has had "Star Trek" described to him a few times, so he gets some of the basic stuff (there's a spaceship called the Enterprise, it's captained by a guy named Jim Kirk who has a Vulcan first officer named Spock, and a ship's doctor named McCoy, and there are enemy aliens called the Klingons, and so on) but he doesn't really grasp the whole picture.

Much like the first of J.J. Abrams' movies with "Star Trek" in the title, his second one -- "Star Trek: Into Darkness" -- is a noisy, fast-moving, entertaining mess. I have to praise the visual effects and special effects artists working on this movie, as they did some great stuff. The shots of the Enterprise emerging from the ocean were quite spectacular, for example. However, as very often happens these days, the visuals far outstrip the story and the script in quality and coherence. I'll try to touch on a handful of examples. (This is by no means an exhaustive list.)

In the beginning of the film, as Kirk is running through the red jungle, a large creature rears up in front of him, and he stuns it with his phaser. Dr. McCoy steps up from behind the downed creature and says "You just stunned our ride!" Then they continue to run through the jungle for another minute or so before deliberately leaping off a cliff into the ocean, following which we see them zooming under the surface (using some kind of turbo-boots or something) toward the submerged USS Enterprise. The question then arises: If that beast Kirk stunned was their "ride", where -- given what followed that scene -- were they planning to ride it to?

(I should also make note of the bizarre throwaway line from Kirk, referring to the scroll-like artifact he's carrying as he runs from the alien natives, about how he earlier saw them bowing and/or praying to it... so he just stole it. Huh?)

I won't go into detail about how stupid the "Cold Fusion" device to stop the volcanic eruption is, except to point out that if you are going to invent a ridiculously dubious, mostly magical technology, perhaps it would be a good idea to create a name to go along with it which does not already exist and which refers to something completely different.

While the hand phasers still have the physical parts which spin around to change power settings, at least in this movie they don't show this dorky bit of pointless action happening.

There are still some shots of what is supposed to be the engineering deck of the Enterprise which appear to be filmed in some kind of lightly redressed brewery. This was beyond ridiculous in the first film, and seems even more so here.

What the heck IS "transwarp beaming", anyway? I thought that it was established in the first movie as a way of successfully beaming someone or something onto a ship traveling at warp speed. Well, in this new movie, it apparently has evolved to the point where it allows someone to be beamed from Earth all the way to the home world of the Klingon empire, which I believe is way the heck off in space. (Of course, maybe it isn't, in this new and illogical "Star Trek"-inspired universe, as -- near the end of the movie -- it only takes the Enterprise and that other ship (the name of which I forget right now) a few minutes to travel by warp all the way from that Klingon home world to Earth.)

The Spock-Uhura romance thing is just as silly as in the first movie -- maybe even a bit sillier, with their relationship basically played for a few lame laughs as they bicker pointlessly.

Abrams seems to think that having the characters in this movie shout their lines most of the time and spend a lot of their time on-screen running around really fast and shooting big guns that make loud noises is a great way to make an action-packed movie. Well, I guess for some people that is exactly the way to go about it. I prefer a little more thought to be put into my action movies. For example, when someone yells "Fire phasers!", I expect to see beams of light blaze forth from a starship's phaser emitters -- NOT some silly-looking rockets trailing smoke. This actually happens -- in a scene near the end of the movie, I think it's Admiral Marcus who, on the bridge of the USS Bigger Than The Enterprise yells out "Fire phasers!", and the very next shot is a cut to the exterior of his ship… and a bunch of what look like little rockets, trailing smoke, come zooming out of his ship toward the Enterprise. How does something that dumb make it through to the final edit of a film like this?

So we get near the end of the movie, and the Enterprise is going to be destroyed unless Kirk can kick -- yes, literally KICK -- a misaligned piece of hardware back into place, hardware which is unfortunately inside a chamber flooded with dangerous radiation. Set aside for the moment the incredulity you might feel about this highly advanced starship not having remote-controlled devices which could accomplish this basic physical act without exposing any of the crew to fatal doses of radiation… and instead marvel at the fact that J.J. Abrams somehow got the "powers that be" who own the "Star Trek" property to agree that ripping off the key, climactic moment from the earlier (and far superior in almost every way) "Star Trek" movie "The Wrath of Khan" and pasting it into the end of his movie was actually a good idea.

Seriously, as I watched this bit, my jaw literally dropped. The only significant difference between the actions in this scene and the one from "Wrath of Khan" is that it is Kirk, instead of Spock, who sacrifices himself to save the ship. And then, watching Kirk die (well, he is really -- as famously described in "The Princess Bride" -- only "mostly dead", saved by an injection of Khan's "super blood" moments later), Spock, the emotionless Vulcan CRIES. He's only known Kirk for a few months, maybe… and he CRIES??? Everything about this scene is forced. Everything about it feels contrived, and not cleverly so.

It worked wonderfully in "Wrath of Khan" because it made sense, and because it built on three years of the original "Star Trek" TV series and the relationship of respect and affection between Kirk and Spock which was developed over those three years through multiple adventures. In addition, it dovetailed beautifully into the advancing age of both the characters and the actors playing them, with the subtext of how one faces death. It wasn't a forced cheat like it is in this new movie.

I hope I live long enough to see this "rebooted" "Star Trek" rebooted yet again by someone who actually cares about the universe of "Star Trek" which existed before and also cares about good storytelling. I am not going to hold my breath, but who knows? As the line from "Wrath of Khan" goes, "There are always possibilities…". -- PL 

A very disappointing "tour" of one of my favorite starships

(Note: This is a review I just posted on amazon.com, the online retailer from which I purchased this product.)


This is the line in the description of this... thing... that sucked me in:

"Enclosed with the book is a fabulous CD-ROM that gives viewers a detailed tour of the Enterprise ."

Don't believe it.

The reality isn't even remotely close to what this line promises.

What you get are a few panoramic still images of a few of the important and often-used areas of the Enterprise from "The Next Generation", like the bridge and sickbay, images which you can zoom in on (a little bit) and look left and right and up and down within...

... and that's IT.

There is no "tour" of the Enterprise... at least no "tour" in any sense of the word with which I am familiar.

Hugely disappointing.

I really wish amazon.com would allow zero star reviews, or better yet, negative star reviews. I could definitely have used one for this thing.

On the plus side, it only cost $12.91. That's about ten bucks more than it's worth.

If anyone from Paramount is reading this, I would happily pay ten -- maybe even twenty -- times that $12.91 for a product which was an actual TOUR of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Imagine starting off like this -- you have an option to beam onto the ship, or arrive in a shuttlecraft. From your arrival point, you point and click your way through the entire ship -- and I mean the ENTIRE ship, not just a few rooms -- getting a sense of how huge and complex a Galaxy-class starship is. And I'm not talking about some lame "zoom" in on a few images -- I mean click and move down corridors, through doors which WHOOSH open when you get to them. In short, a tour where you could go anywhere the Captain of the Enterprise could go, if he wanted. Every room, every Jeffries tube, every turbolift, every transporter, every engineering access tunnel, every room in the crew quarters, every lab, every holodeck -- everywhere.

Of course, putting something like that together would take significant effort... something which was clearly not considered for this product. -- PL

"Hailing frequencies open..."

I can't remember exactly how I got there, but after several clicks on links from my wife's blog, I found myself reading an essay on another blog about writing outside one's culture, and because the original "Star Trek" tv series was mentioned in the essay, I was intrigued enough to read more, including some of the comments, which were many. In fact, there were so many that the person in charge of this particular blog had blocked any further comments for that post… which was a drag, because some of the comments had me shaking my head in disbelief, and what you see here was originally intended as a comment on one of those comments. But I couldn't post it there, so I figured "Why not here?" So here goes, beginning with the line in one of those comments that I found most objectionable…

 "Um, no. Urhura can both be a groundbreaking character, and we can at the same time go, “Dude, the only black woman on the bridge of the ship, and her job is to answer the damn PHONE?”."

To say Lt. Uhura's job is "to answer the damn PHONE" is yet another spectacular (and dismaying) example of abject cluelessness. 

Think about it for a moment. She is the Communications Officer on a starship traveling through deep space, going -- as you might remember from the original series' introduction -- "where no man has gone before" (updated for a new era in "The Next Generation"'s intro as "where no ONE has gone before"). And as established in that first series and as expanded on in later series, that vast area of space is full of perils known and unknown, and nasty enemies like the Klingons and the Romulans, to name but two. In those circumstances, communication between the Enterprise and Starfleet, between the Enterprise and other Federation starships… and perhaps even MORE important, between the Enterprise and other alien vessels which may or may not be hostile, is vitally important.

Maybe Communications isn't -- in a shallow, skim-just-the-surface analysis -- as "glamorous" as flying the ship, plotting a course through interstellar space, keeping the engines running, firing the phasers and photon torpedoes, or keeping the crew healthy (and the occasional alien, even ones made of silicon), but it sure as hell isn't just "answering the phone". Without communications, and a smart, capable, tough officer like Uhura at that station on the bridge, that fabled "five-year voyage" might not have made it to five weeks. -- PL

P.S. As fans of the original "Star Trek" series know, I took the title of this blog post from one of Uhura's most-often-delivered lines. It was a line which almost always meant that something cool was about to happen, and I loved hearing it.

Blast from the Past #348: Fanzine drawing -- "Four-armed assassins"

This is another drawing I did for a fanzine in 1984, and I think it may have been meant to go with the other one I just posted recently. I say this because there is a tiny thread of memory drifting around in my head that links them, and because the inking styles are so similar, and also because the thing that one of the assassins is sculpting -- a mask, perhaps? -- looks suspiciously like it might be intended to replicate the look of one of "Star Trek"'s well-known alien species.

And that would be a Tellarite, first seen, I believe, in the "Journey to Babel" episode of the original "Star Trek" series (one of my favorite episodes, by the way). I could be wrong about the provenance of this drawing, but it feels right to me. -- PL

STAR TREK and related marks are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc.

Blast from the Past #345: Fanzine drawing -- "Klingon shopping with Vulcan"

Just got in from about an hour and a half of snowblowing and shoveling (and a little bit of plowing) -- the big winter storm that was predicted DID in fact drop quite a bit of snow on us. Right now, it seems to have stopped, and I am hoping we don't get more today. I am definitely tired of New England winters.

Anyway, back to warmer pursuits -- like blogging.

This drawing is another one I did for some fanzine sometime in 1984, but that's about all I can remember. It is so specific in its details that I am almost certain it was drawn to accompany a piece of "Star Trek" fan fiction. -- PL

STAR TREK and related marks are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc.

A minor "Star Trek" Christmas miracle

Anyone who knows me (or has read this blog since it started) knows that I am a passionate "Star Trek" fan. My wife is not, though recently she agreed to watch with me two of my favorite episodes of the original series, "Devil in the Dark" and "City on the Edge of Forever". Her verdict? She didn't care for the costuming, and some of the acting seemed dated, but she thought the plots and writing were strong.

But even though Jeannine is not, and in all likelihood, never will be, a big "Star Trek" fan, she knows what it means to me. And last Christmas, when I thought I had lost my treasured gold-plated U.S.S. Enterprise pendant, which had hung on our Christmas trees for many years, she felt my pain.

You see, my habit for the last few years, when it is time to get the Christmas tree out of the house, is to first use long-handled pruning shears to lop off the branches. This makes the thing easier to move through the house and out the doors without brushing against furniture and walls and dropping lots of its dried pine needles all over the floor. (It also has the added benefit of giving me a naked Christmas tree trunk, with which to craft something cool -- like a walking stick or something. I have yet to actually DO this, but as of this writing I have four such trunks in the garage from the last four Christmases, just waiting for the right amount of inspiration and perspiration.)

Sometime during the process of clipping off last year's Christmas tree's branches, the Enterprise pendant was apparently lost. When we put all the ornaments away, it was nowhere to be seen. With a sinking feeling, I realized that it had likely been left, unnoticed, on one of those branches I'd cut off and thrown out. I was bummed out.

That Enterprise pendant is something that I have had with me since high school. It's my understanding that when the original "Star Trek" series was cancelled, Gene Roddenberry formed a company called "Lincoln Enterprises" to try to make a little money off the dead show and also to keep the fans of "Star Trek" happy. One of the items I bought through this mail-order outfit was this little (about three inches long) gold-plated U.S.S. Enterprise pendant. I don't think I ever wore it as a pendant, but it made a wonderful Christmas tree ornament.

So it was very disappointing, to say the least, to think that this nifty little bit of my personal "Star Trek" history had vanished forever. Jeannine tried to keep my hopes up, saying that maybe it had been left in another box of ornaments, and we'd come upon it at some point in time. Well, maybe… but I didn't really think it would.

Fast-forward to yesterday. We were finally decorating the tree, and in the process decided to winnow down our collection of ornaments. There were quite a few which were falling apart, or just plain ugly, or both, and others which were fine and whole but just held no great appeal. So we trashed the first group and set aside the second to give away. And at some point in this process of going through the ornaments…

… Jeannine found it!

The Enterprise pendant had, somehow, come to rest underneath one shallow box which had been set, fairly snugly, into a larger box, and had thus remained out of sight. But Jeannine was keeping an eye out for possible hiding places for the starship, and this one seemed likely, so she pulled the shallow box up, and -- voila!

As you might imagine, I was pretty happy. Yes, I know it's a small thing, and not really a "Christmas miracle" (a wildly overused cliche these days, in my humble opinion)… but sometimes all you need is one of these small occurrences to brighten up the day. Thanks again, Jeannine! -- PL

iTrek

Like about three hundred thousand other people this past Saturday, I took possession of a new Apple iPad. It's a cool gadget -- very much like a big iPhone, but without the phone part. I have only spent a couple of hours playing with it, but already I can see lots of uses for it.

Every time I turn it on, I kinda feel like I'm transported into the world of "Star Trek", specifically the "Star Trek" of "Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine". I am referring -- as fans of those series will no doubt know -- to the ubiquitous "PADDS" the characters would use for a variety of purpose ranging from displaying space station crime statistics to novel writing.

And when I'm within range of a wireless network, and have the entire Internet at my fingertips through the iPad's Safari browser, it almost feels like having the U.S.S. Enterprise's library computer at my beck and call.

Obviously, the iPad doesn't have all the capabilities of the fictional "PADDS", but, like modern cellphones, the iPad is just one more example of how our technology is gradually catching up to some of the gizmos introduced in "Star Trek". I must say it puts a smile on my face.



The above photo is of my iPad displaying one of a bunch of "Star Trek" graphics I found with a quick Google search. I hope someone writes an iPad app which will allow it to simulate an "LCARRS" display like this... could be a lot of fun! -- PL

Star Drek 3: Further thoughts on the new "Star Trek" film

So, I did it -- I went to see the new "Star Trek" movie for a second time. I went by myself, so there would be no distractions. My hope was that a second viewing would allow me to appreciate different aspects of the movie more, and maybe I would see things that I hadn't seen in the first viewing which would make me revise my opinion of some of the movie's egregious flaws.

No such luck, sadly.

The Spock/Uhura canoodling stuff is still grotesquely out of place. The plot is still murky and muddled. The clunky factory sets redressed to look like 23rd century starship interiors are still painful to look at, and this time I realized it starts right at the beginning of the movie, with the ship -- the Kelvin? -- which Kirk's father heroically collides with Nero's ship. I swear there was a scene in which beer fermentation tanks were used as background elements. And what is up with those hanging plastic sheets in the shuttlecraft? You know, the kind you see in supermarkets today, separating loading dock areas from refrigerated zones or what have you. Could it BE any sillier?

Why, yes, it could.

-------------------------

I can't believe I missed this one on first viewing, but it stood out like the proverbial sore thumb when I saw the movie a second time -- the supernova which "could destroy the galaxy!!!" Did anyone working on the script for this thing have even the smallest scrap of knowledge about the nature of a supernova... or, even more to the point, how freakin' HUGE the galaxy is?! There's a lot of SPACE between them there stars, bucko.
That one is even dumber than the "transporter-can't-beam-up-fast-moving-objects" nonsense... and that's saying a LOT.

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I realize it's a spiffy cool visual to have a big, spiky, gnarly-looking, miles-long chain dangling from your spaceship, at the end of which is your phaser or disruptor or blaster or whatever, but when you think about it -- what is the freakin' POINT? I mean, the chain doesn't do anything but dangle there and provide a platform for some cool fight scenes -- it's the phaser/dispruptor/blaster/whatever thing at the end of the chain that is phasering/disrupting/blasting a hole in Vulcan into which can be dropped the grape-sized blob of "red matter". Why not just fire this cutting beam from your ship? I mean, we've seen it many times it the various iterations of "Star Trek", going all the way back to the original show -- starships can fire on a planet surface from orbit.

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Two words -- "folding katana". Yeah, I want to go into battle with A SWORD THAT FOLDS.

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I really like Simon Pegg as an actor -- he was great in "Shaun of the Dead", and I loved his short-lived "Spaced" sitcom. But his version of Scotty is, to use the vernacular, WACK. His painfully silly/stupid line reading of a painfully silly/stupid line -- "I love this ship! So exciting!" -- was at least as gratingly annoying on second viewing as it was the first time.
And the less said about the slapstick nonsense of Scotty getting stuck in the giant water pipe (a water pipe that leads into what looks like a giant food processor, apparently!), the better.

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Why does the barrel of a hand phaser have to flip around 180 degrees to change its power settings? Have they forgotten about power switches in the 23rd century? I mean, even in the original series the phasers had a conveniently placed button or dial which allowed the user to change the setting.

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There was one thing that I thought worked better -- a TINY bit better -- on second viewing, and that was old Spock meeting young Spock at the end of the movie. This time, I caught the bit about old Spock lying -- or "implying" -- to Kirk about the dire consequences of such a meeting.
Of course, here's the question that this then raises... if such a meeting really WOULDN'T have had any such consequences, then why didn't old Spock go with Kirk and Scotty to begin with? Would not his presence have gone a long way to convince young Spock of what needed to be done?

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One grape-sized blob of "red matter" is enough, when exploded, to create a singularity (black hole) with enough gravitational force to crush (implode?) the entire PLANET of Vulcan like an eggshell... but ALL of the beach ball-sized sphere of red matter exploding ALL AT ONCE can't even destroy two puny starships???!!!

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There are some other small things that bugged me, but I'm tired of thinking about it. But I do feel it's only fair to reiterate what I said before -- while I was frequently appalled and/or saddened, I wasn't bored. It's a well-paced, exciting space-action movie. What's painful to me is that with a little bit more thought and care, it could have been a well-paced, exciting STAR TREK movie, as well.
I also want to commend the people who worked on the special effects and visuals -- they are extremely well-done. It's just too bad they were crafted in the service of such an inferior product. -- PL

Star Drek 2: More musings on the new "Star Trek" movie

I intended to go to see the new "Star Trek" movie a second time, so that I could refresh my memory of some things and maybe see some things I hadn't the first time, before I made further comments on the "Star Trek" movie. However, I have not yet had the chance to do so, and I think seeing "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" and "Terminator Salvation" within about a week of each other pushed me over the edge. The dreadful "Terminator" actually surpassed "Wolverine" as the most pointless extension of a movie franchise yet... and that's not an easy thing to do.

It's quite possible that, having only seen the film once, I missed or misperceived some details. If so, I will be happy to admit I am wrong.

So here are some more critical thoughts on the new "Star Trek" movie. Before I get into it, I do want to say one positive thing about the movie -- I was never bored while watching it. I was frequently appalled and saddened, but not bored.



CAUTION!!! POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!!! RED ALERT!!! SHIELDS UP!!!






In the original series, and in all of the other "Star Trek" series (even, I think, "Enterprise", which took place in an earlier time period when the technology was not as advanced) and "Star Trek" movies, the transporter was regularly used in concert with a starship's sensors to scan, "lock on", and beam people and/or things from one place to another. Those places were often in motion relative to each other. Some were traveling at very high speeds -- there was often beaming done between spaceships, between spaceships and planets, and so forth.
In this new movie, there is a whole scene devoted to setting up the goofy idea (to be used -- VERY lamely -- in a later scene) that for some reason, the transporter has a hard time locking onto and transporting two humanoids free-falling through Vulcan's atmosphere. Now, think about this... the Enterprise has computers that can simultaneously operate all the myriad functions of a gigantic starship, including the almost unimaginable complexity of keeping track of the mind-bogglingly gigantic number of bits as a person's body is converted into energy and reassembled into matter (correctly!) at a distant location... and yet we're expected to believe that this incredibly powerful computer can't calculate simple Newtonian-type physics? That is simply, to coin a phrase, highly illogical.
And it all seems to be just a set up for the incredibly silly scene later in the movie when Spock's mother perishes because, during the destruction of Vulcan, when the rest of her group (including Spock's father) is being beamed up to the Enterprise successfully, she is lost... BECAUSE SHE FALLS OFF A ROCK DURING BEAMING. I'm not kidding.
So we go from a scene where the Enterprise computer controlling the transporter can't handle transporting two guys falling miles through Vulcan's atmosphere, to another scene where the same computer can't even handle transporting someone who JUST FELL OFF A ROCK.
I can't stand it. Who vetted this stuff?

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I'm not sure if the ship Kirk sees being constructed (or repaired, it's never quite clear... or at least it wasn't to me at the time) on the ground on Earth is Enterprise, or some other ship, or not even a real starship at all but some kind of full-size training environment. But unless I have missed something in the realm of theoretical starship construction, building your deep space vessel at the bottom of a gravity well on the surface of a planet is a VERY dopey idea. Again, highly illogical.

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The scenes in this movie where Spock and Uhura kiss and embrace in a fashion clearly meant to indicate that they have some kind of romantic/sexual relationship are simply bizarre. Not only do they add nothing to the story, but they completely go against the nature of Spock (and Uhura, for that matter) as established over forty years of "Star Trek" history.

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One of the most annoyingly overused cliches is "jaw dropping". Even so, there are times when it applies, and I had several "jaw-dropping" moments while watching this new "Star Trek" film. I think the first one may have been when there is a scene set (I think) in Enterprise's engineering section... and it's clearly been filmed in some lightly redressed 21st century factory, with clunky pipes and flanges and valves and wheels, looking for all the world like a scene in some cheap, cheesy Sci-Fi Channel movie, where an apartment boiler room can fill in for a nuclear power plant or something. I came into this movie having heard that this was the one which would FINALLY show the true grandeur of the "Star Trek" environments -- they had the budget, and they were going to do it RIGHT!
I expected that this would mean money being lavished on large, carefully detailed sets... or maybe some amazing CGI set extensions like George Lucas used to great effect in the "Star Wars" prequels. I was certainly not expecting this "amateur hour" approach. Literally, my jaw was hanging open when I saw this. I just couldn't believe my eyes.

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People who have seen this new film and the second Star Trek film ("The Wrath of Khan") have pointed out that the villainous Nero's motivation is eerily similar to (the less charitable would say "ripped off from") that of the character of Khan in "Wrath of Khan" -- i.e., each one had lost a beloved spouse, and wanted revenge on one of our heroes for said loss.
There are two key differences which make -- in terms of drama and emotional content and believability -- "Wrath of Khan" seem like high art compared to this new "Star Trek."
The first thing has to do with the original series -- you know, the one the non-Trek fans who love this new glitzy new Trek movie deride for its primitive effects, cheap sets, and so forth. That series had an episode -- "Space Seed" -- which introduced the genetically-engineered Khan (played by Ricardo Montalban) and his group of fellow "supermen", and showed how they tried to take over the Enterprise. They failed, and Kirk exiled them on an uninhabited planet, where it was felt that they might be able to create a life for themselves. (Not necessarily the most logical choice for Kirk, but that was the story.) It was an excellent set up for the "Wrath of Khan" movie -- it gave emotional weight to the reappearance of the character of Khan (again played, brilliantly, by Ricardo Montalban), and his rage at Kirk for the death of his wife during their exile on this planet.
This new movie has nothing like that, though it TRIES to get mileage out of a very similar idea. It's just that Eric Bana (as much as I admire him as an actor) is no Ricardo Montalban, and Nero is no Khan. And DOING something to someone (Kirk deciding to strand Khan and his wife on that planet) is ALWAYS gong to be far more dramatic that simply LETTING something happen (old Spock somehow letting Nero's wife die by not doing something -- I can't even remember what it was, it was so poorly dramatized).

The second thing is SCALE. In "Wrath of Khan", you could really buy Khan's anger at Kirk and his burning desire to hurt Kirk as deeply as he possibly could, including by killing him. It was personal. It was believable.
In the new "Star Trek", Nero doesn't just want to hurt Spock -- he wants to KILL THE ENTIRE PLANET OF VULCAN! And all because Spock failed to prevent Nero's wife's death. This is so over the top that it turns Nero into a true "cartoon villain", in the worst sense of that phrase. His plan is so extreme that it no longer means anything. It is, I think, one of the sad things about modern movies -- the idea that bigger is always better. Clearly, it's not.
(And I confess that, for some reason, I kept thinking of that scene in the movie "Diner", where some of the main characters are sharing a jail cell with some drunken bums, who keep harassing them... until one of those characters turns to one of the bums and says something to the effect that "I'm going to hit you so hard it'll kill your whole family!")

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And that actually brings me to another point -- WHY DESTROY THE PLANET VULCAN???!!!??? This seemed to me to be such a ludicrously unnecessary bit of spectacle which pointlessly removed one of the coolest things in the "Star Trek" universe... and for WHAT?! So that Spock can say that dimwitted "I'm now an endangered species" line?

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And don't even get me started on "red matter".

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This one just occurred to me -- if Nero's ship has the ability to travel through time, why doesn't he use that ability to go back in time and SAVE HIS WIFE?!

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On the original series, the Enterprise had a brig (essentially a group of jail cells). In fact, on all of the "Star Trek" series, Starfleet vessels all had brigs. Brigs are where you put troublemakers, if you have any on your starship. This is where young Spock should have -- LOGICALLY -- put young Kirk when Kirk starts making a pain in the ass of himself.
But no... for the sake of the shakily-constructed story, it is ESSENTIAL that Spock do something to Kirk which, in a way, is tantamount to attempted murder -- he has him put in some kind of "escape pod" (which appears to be not much larger than a coffin) and shot off into space. It's ESSENTIAL because Kirk has to -- in a coincidence so staggering that it beggars belief -- run into old Spock on the dangerous ice planet to which young Spock has condemned him for no apparent reason (at least, none that I can see).
Apparently old Spock has also been marooned here on this planet, by Nero, so that as Spock's punishment for not doing something that might have saved Nero's wife, Spock has a "front row seat" to the destruction of Vulcan. Old Spock is so marooned, in fact, that when Kirk arrives, old Spock says "There's a Starfleet installation on this planet", and the two of them apparently WALK to it in short order. There they find Montgomery Scott, who promptly (with old Spock's help) figures out a way to beam them off the planet and onto the Enterprise. Guess they weren't so marooned after all.
One wonders -- if old Spock knew about this Starfleet installation, WHY DIDN'T HE IMMEDIATELY GO THERE WHEN NERO PLUNKED HIM DOWN ON THE PLANET? Why did he wait until Kirk got there? Oh, that's right -- if he HADN'T waited, he wouldn't have been able to spew all that expository dialogue to explain the dopey plot of the movie to Kirk.

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FInally (at least for this post), I have to mention the bit near the end of the movie where old Spock meets young Spock. Let's set aside the fact that, earlier in the movie, old Spock makes a big deal out of how Kirk can't tell young Spock that old Spock has imparted the key plot information to Kirk... it would mess up the timeline or something. Okay, fine... but then we're at the end of the move, and old Spock just casually walks up to young Spock and starts chatting with him. WTF??!!!
But the bit that I really wanted to mention is the line that, on first viewing, sounded kind of clever -- it's when old Spock takes his leave of young Spock and says something like "I would say goodbye with my usual salutation, but that would seem self-serving, so I will simply say... "Good luck"."
As we all know, Spock's "usual salutation" is "Live long and prosper." Okay... now will somebody explain to me how wishing yourself good luck is any less self-serving than wishing yourself long life and prosperity? Doesn't a wish for "good luck" INCLUDE things like long life and prosperity, if not more?

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That's it for now. Hopefully, I have not remembered the pertinent details of the new "Trek" movie incorrectly in my comments here. But I'm sure that if I have, I will be informed. -- PL

Star Drek

Months ago, when I read quotes from J.J. Abrams, the director of the new "Star Trek" film, wherein he professed to not being a fan of the original show or, really, the whole "Star Trek" franchise, I took it with a grain of salt. It sounded like a little bit of clever misdirection, a kind of "Don't worry -- I'm not a hidebound, anal retentive "Star Trek" geek who is afraid to do anything new" message. I guess you could say I didn't really believe him.

Well, after sitting through two mostly painful hours of his version of "Star Trek" at the local Cinemark, I have to admit that I believe him now. It's difficult to think that Paramount would entrust their most valuable property to someone who clearly does not "get it". This movie is not "Star Trek". It's some kind of busy, noisy space adventure with some characters with the same names, and with vaguely similar personalities, as the ones in "Star Trek", flying through space in a ship that kind of looks like it belongs in "Star Trek", and even bears the name "U.S.S. Enterprise".

But it's not "Star Trek".

From Spock making out with Uhura (really... and more than once!) to scenes supposedly set on a 23rd century starship but looking all too much like the redressed 20th century factory where they were really filmed (complete with bulky steel pipes and clunky valve wheels), this is a movie calculated to annoy and depress anyone who had hoped for a respectful "reboot" of a beloved and well-established franchise.

With forty years of "Star Trek" history to draw on, it's astonishing to me that this is the best that we could get. And it's almost a year late! (What, exactly, were they working on all that time?) There's a wonderful movie waiting to be made which tells the story of how the U.S.S. Enterprise crew first came together. It's a movie I'd been waiting to see. I guess I'll have to wait some more.

The only saving grace in all this is that Abrams' "retconning" of "Star Trek" history is just another movie, and -- if the powers that be will it -- can be effectively erased from continuity and be looked at as what it essentially is... an alternate universe "Star Trek" exercise.

I will say that it was not entirely without merit -- some of the key cast did excellent work with their interpretations of the established "Star Trek" characters, and some of the visuals were very impressive.

But it is still (at least to me) a HUGE disappointment. I think the most depressing thing is that if this movie makes a lot of money (which it seems poised to do), this could be the future of "Star Trek": lots of sound and fury, signifying nothing. -- PL