Saturday, May 07, 2005
Oh the Tholian webs we weave -- or -- Fiction as Lie
I don't know how sublime a realization this will be, but the topic of Star Trek and its various movies and spin-offs comes up semi frequently on Slashdot.com. Chief complaints with modern Star Trek series are lack of continuity and various other inconsistencies. On the other end of the spectrum is Orson Scott Card's recently posted article Strange New Wold: No 'Star Trek'"criticizing the original series for being unchanging, everything back to status quo by the end of every episode.It then occurred to me that problem of writing episodic fiction, especially decade spanning episodic fiction, is that it is like maintaining an elaborate lie. Having to reconcile recent advances in science and past proclamations on the imaginary workings of Star Trek devices, ST-TNG used to lapse into near incoherent and overly elaborate "techno-babel" to motivate marginal plot lines.
Comic books have been dealing with these issues for far longer than television. Their solution has been to reinvent their more popular heroes from time to time. Battlestar Galactica is probably the only TV Sci-Fi to do this, and has done so to great and dramatic effect. Were I to revive the Star Trek line I would reinvent the universe from scratch and retell the story of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy with fresh actors and back-stories. Especially to be avoided would be reintroducing previous actors reprising roles from previous series in contrived and obvious attempts to boast ratings versus telling a good story. So many unlikely and incredible things happened in the course of telling a Sci-Fi story, why add to the improbability with time-travel and various other means of reincarnating characters? I'm not saying Sci-Fi time-travel stories can't be told, but of late in the Star-Trek universe time-travel has become a Band-Aid for explaining inconsistencies and a ratings ploy excuse to bring back popular characters [retch].
With the recent self proclaimed hiatus for Star-Trek TV series, I would be very surprised if they didn't go the Battlestar Galactica route when reviving the franchise at a later date.
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2 Comments:
Yup, sounds good to me. With the license capitalistically raped into submission over the past 5 years, we need a few years of no Star Trek. I feel that would be a good time to break out & reinvent that wheel. But please dont get into television Larry, I dont want you to turn into a souless TV exec.
By Daniel, at May 07, 2005
PS, wheres the Star Trek game eh? EH? its nearly midnight sunday in my neck of the woods...
By Daniel, at May 08, 2005
