Star Trek: Discovery is Bad, and You Should Feel Bad

The first episode of Star Trek I can remember watching is The Balance of Terror, I was home sick from school and the episode played on the old channel DC20 in the middle of the day or late morning.  I'm pretty sure it aired at 10:00 am because that was when I turned on the television in my parents' bedroom after convincing myself that my mother wasn't going to suddenly decide she wasn't going to work that day.  This thought process is odd because I'm pretty sure my mom was working from home during this period, so maybe she had gone to the grocery store or something.  That's all irrelevant, but that's where my mind was while I was watching Star Trek as a child. 

As an adult, Star Trek fills a similar role as Doctor Who, a show that approaches challenges and meeting new species and people with hope and curiosity, even the Daleks and Klingons have been treated with empathy.  Not to get pedantic, but the opening sequence makes it pretty damn obvious:

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

To quote Captain Kirk, he of the flying leg kick, "We fight only when there's no choice."

After four episodes, my impression of Star Trek: Discovery's opening narration, if it had one, would be: "Victory by any means necessary. Also, fuck all the previously established storylines and precedent."  JJ Abrams can pull this off for his movies, opening up new adventures for the crew of the Enterprise, and allowing writers to work within the same universe while also exploring new ground.  The first new movie wasn't terrible, it was entertaining, but not great, much like Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home.  Star Trek Into Darkness was pretty bad, mostly because the villain had no build up within the story so we weren't invested in him or the threat he represented to the crew.  "Hi guys!  I'm Khan, even though we rebooted this movie series to allow us to make new movies we are reusing all of the old storylines!  Totally not a remake tho!"  However to try and shoehorn this sort of mentality into a universe that has previously always been about exploration, about empathy, and ever hopeful is a mistake.  Like taking away the Doctor's sonic screwdriver and replacing it with a .44 Space Magnum.

Star Trek: Discovery feels like someone at CBS wanted a sci-fi show, and all the execs would allow was Star Trek, and so the creators are begrudgingly working within that framework, while bending or breaking it as much as possible.  The two-part pilot was ham-fisted at best, and downright shitty at worst.  The main problems can be broken into two categories: the heroes and the villains.  The interactions between Michael Burnham and her captain were so forced and awkward, you would be forgiven if you thought they had been working together for 7 days, not 7 years.  Sure, Burnham was raised by Vulcans, and you might say that is why she was awkward around other humans, but if you watch Spock and Kirk for two minutes, you'd see that excuse as flimsy.  After 7 years together, those two characters knew almost nothing about each other, had no trust in each other's decisions, and couldn't communicate effectively in a crisis situation.  Essentially, this results from poor writing.

The villains of ST: Discovery are Klingons on the warpath.  Unfortunately, they're terrible, too.  Dispensing the established storylines of shows that the creators claim to be working within, the Klingons look like someone had described ST:TNG-era Klingons to a make-up artist who had never seen a Star Trek show over a bad Skype connection. This breaks with the continuity of ST: Enterprise and TOS.  These Klingons are much more savage than Klingons of any era.  I could have missed this, but I can't recall any Klingons eating the corpses of their enemies in The Next Generation, and I just finished watching that entire series only last week.  Their costumes, armor, ships, and space suits all look like they belong in a fantasy genre show, "let's just throw spikes on everything, that will show everyone how edgy and new these baddies are!"  Their entire outlook and costumes have been designed to make them out to be one-dimensional savages with whom there can be no negotiation.  That's a violation of Starfleet directive something or other: everyone deserves a chance.

Ultimately, all this boils down to a show that I might have watched an episode or two of on Netflix, but won't bother watching and certainly won't keep paying for a subscription to CBS All Access.  I watched these four episodes on CBS All Access which my lovely lady had signed up to watch the Emmys.  We have already cancelled the subscription.

If I want to watch a new Star Trek show, I'll watch The Orville.  Yeah, I said it, Seth MacFarlane's show is vastly better, with thoughtful writing, some funny jokes, some unfunny jokes, and they've stopped mentioning his character's divorce every five minutes.

The Event Horizon of Anxiety

There aren't any personal-level events that strike me with an existential terror.  As an adult male human of the large, imposing, American, hairy sub-types, I don't worry about physical violence, accidental death, accidental maiming, or much else.  I don't worry about these because should they happen, I will not be the initiator and thus these events will be out of my control.  There's nothing to worry about in events I can't control for what I think are obvious reasons, and need no explaining. 

There are a few impersonal-level events that do strike with an existential terror, on a fairly regular basis and while I recognize the irrationality of this fear since the events will be far outside of my ability to help or control, I still think about them.  Surviving a nuclear exchange is one such event, and I agree with my father's words to 8 year old me, "if there is going to be a nuclear war, I would prefer that you and your brothers not live to see the world after."  That was an interesting trip to the guidance counselor after a duck and cover drill.

One of my favorite movies details the after effects of another sort of event that wakes me up at night.  The simple premise is this: sometimes humans are too smart for their own good, and sometimes we experiment with shit that could result in a bad event, the sort of bad event that instantly causes us, our planet, or possibly even the universe to just go away.  I'm smart enough to have gone further with my education but as a young genius I was unmotivated and that might be for the best because I'd probably treat the LHC as the biggest Nerf gun and mini black holes as foam darts.  In other words, I'm smart enough to know exactly how crazy I am for worrying about this, but I'm still just a genius who worries about one or two things. 

I was reading about some ideas some other smart people have for detecting the presence of other dimensions through the detection of mini black holes using the LHC and science to do sciencey things when the anxious voice in my head said, "this is how the universe ends, if you can bend or break a fundamental rule of the universe and then everything goes blip."  I thought about this for a minute, my mouth full of coffee and my brain full of stupid.  Then I remembered that the universe is really big.  Like, really really really big.  We know that the universe is big because look up at night, that just goes on for effectively forever.  If that alone isn't enough to remind you that no matter how smart you are, you're still just a bag of meat on a rock, then you're probably a priest who is utterly confident of your place in some imaginary plan.  The fucking arrogance of thought that the idea of a greater plan to life just irritates the ever-loving shit right of me.  Seriously, if I'm constipated I'll just think about "God's plan for you" and then I'm destroying porcelain.  That's the worst type of consolation, there's a plan for all suffering so that makes it ok because you're meant to experience life this way, starving orphan or crack-addicted newborn or mildly inconvenienced middle-aged person.  I'll be right back.

Anyway, I was describing how I logiced my way out of anxiety.  The point is that the universe is big, there millions or billions of galaxies, and those galaxies have lots of stars, and some of those stars must have planets, and some of those planets will have life, and some of that life will be multi-cellular, and some of that multi-cellular life will be investigating the universe just as we are.  Since the universe is around 18 billion years old as far as we can tell, and our planet is only about 4 billion years old (suck it, creationists), and since there may be very old black holes which may or may not have started as stars, there exists the possibility that there is a much older civilization of intelligent enough creatures to build a Large Hadron Collider-equivalent.  The universe is so vast, ooo you are so big, that this possibility is really more of a certainty.  So my fears of some genius like me who wants to play Nerf tag with a particle accelerator and some micro black holes accidentally destroying this existence are stupid because if that were possible someone would have done it by now. 

Now all I have to worry about is some sort of localized disruption of the time-space continuum rendering this section of time-space so wibbly-wobbly that we can not exist within it.  That is much more comforting.

Of course the unlikeliest event of all would be the arrival of an alien super-intelligence and the co-opting of all life on this planet, but that's probably not going to happen and would be essentially the same as the events of the previous paragraph.  I am so relieved.

Getting Old?

Depending on which ex you talk to, I am either immature, not mature at all, completely immature, and terrible in bed generally cranky.  I like to think that I am maturing slowly like fine wine, or whiskey, but I have these moments when I feel as old as my parents.  I filed my taxes on time this year, I keep track of my bank balance with online banking, I pay bills on time.  I am much more diligent about cleaning my cottage, and doing the dishes.  And yet all this progress on the orderly life of a mature American feels wasted because I have been having the worst trouble figuring out Blogger's new dashboard, and am almost at the point of watching a video on the use and abuse of the new setup.  It is almost as bad as the new Facebook, and by new I mean the changes made to Facebook in early 2009.

That whiff of smoke that I thought I smelled earlier is definitely not coming from my moustache.  This is country living, I guess.  I better go check that out.  Someone is burning leaves or brush.  I don't understand the need for this.  Leaves can be composted or mulched into your turf, and brush can be tossed in the woods.  Two items we have an abundance of in this area: room for generous compost piles or mounds, and woods.

CDC: Benicio Del Toro, Anne Hathaway, Hugo Weaving, Laurence Olivier, and the BBC

This dream is from a while back, and I can't verify that all of it makes sense, but I woke up feeling like a million bucks had just stampeded through my skull. It has been sitting in my drafts for about a year, but I think longer because it was cold. Also, we had watched "The Wolfman" in the week before this dream erupted.

I was hiking in the mountains of Tibet, and struggling. I wasn't prepared for the mountains to be so tall or rugged, in fact, I was basically dressed for some cross country jogging with a stop at a coffee shop in the middle. I was freezing, wet, and had assumed that I would die of exposure as the sun set.* Shortly after the nightfall, I stumbled into a village that looked completely un-Tibetan, rather Transylvanian. Small cottages, and townhouses made of timber and plastered straw, close together like they were huddling against the wind and drizzle.

* This is entirely unrelated to my girlfriend's tendency to steal all of the covers, all of the time.

I stumbled through town and found the tavern near the central plaza.  I could hear laughing and singing, so I struggled with the door until it opened and I fell onto the floor of the warm tavern.  I was wearing running shoes, running shorts, a work out shirt, and a hoodie, all of which smelled of sweat and mud.  As I looked around the room, everyone was dressed in Edwardian suits and dresses.  I had wandered through the Himalayan mountains, and ended up in a Masterpiece Theater romance murder movie.

I was suddenly feverish and weak, so the mayor declared that he would house me until I was well.  Some men and the local apothecary carried my to the mayor's villa, where the doctor and the mayor's daughter, played by Anne Hathaway gave me a bath and a nightgown.  This was less interesting than it could have been.

The night before I arrived, a farmer had been murdered, and the town was out of sorts.  A newly arrived painter played by Benicio del Toro was the current suspect, but the mayor had forbidden any investigation until the King's Prosecutor arrived in two days.  The painter was known for saying strange things, and for acting "quite peculiar."  Anne fell for me while she was nursing me back to health, but I tried to resist her protestations of undying love for reasons completely unknown to me.  On the day the King's Prosecutor was due to arrive, I met Benicio.  The artist was a little crazy, and a drug addict, but I thought he was basically harmless when I saw him flinch when I killed a beetle that was crawling on the table between us. 

Hugo Weaving was the King's Prosecutor investigating the murder, and he was inclined to agree with most the townsfolk in their suspicions but it was something out side doing the killing.  While Benicio, Anne, and I were strolling along the outskirts of town, I noticed a camera crew trying to hide in some bushes.  I marched over and demanded to know what was going on.  The BBC was filming the whole thing as a new quasi-reality show, and had worked me into the script as a free form theater project. They were shooting on location in Tibet for a Romanian-set story. I already had legions of fans.

The Wizard Uses Item: Scroll of Reanimation

Let us all hope that no otherworldly intelligences have lain spawn within the recesses of this shambling corpse of a bloggio.

The Genius is once again deliberately, and purposefully, unemployed, but not without plan or hope. After all, in this economy it is so easy to find employment that who wouldn't want to take a couple month vacation and then merge with the job stream as the salmon so often do. Except, you know, without the orgy and death at the end of the search.

But seriously, I have moved out of the comfort and light of the lovely city of DC to the far reaches of Virginia-space. The amenities in my new lair are charming and rustic. So rustic in fact, that I must travel 5 miles to find the internets. This rusticity extends to television and radio signals, as well. You might almost wonder if I have violated both Einstein and Lewis' Laws, and traveled into the near-distant past. So do I.

I've got a backlog of post ideas longer than the list of bad wang jokes I told, and I have nothing to stop me from writing. I can't even muster a bad excuse to avoid writing. So look out Pinko Punko, I will be pestering you about Monday Goldriker Theater.

Good Government

I wonder if this post will work from my phone.

Things I've Missed

So...I've been away from the blogs and the general interweb for a long time. I've been wallowing in the fictional worlds of warcraft and warcraftier and neither are healthy places for the unemployed and those prone to extended pity parties. I've also been playing Supreme Commander in case anyone cares. Of course you don't, forget I said anything.

Anywho...

I just heard about Dr. Horrible and his sing along and normally I hate musicals but I'll give this one a chance. I may have to download iTunes finally. I have avoided this for the same reason I avoid facebook and myspace and all those other sites: everything requires a separate damn password and login and wants all sorts of information about The Genius and his life. I don't mind people knowing about my life or whatever parts of my life that I choose to reveal on my blog, but keeping track of all the damn logins I have all created all over this system of tubes is a pain in the ass. Also, I don't have any damn money and I would just be tempted to spend notmoney on songs that I probably won't be able to find on iTunes anyway. Although, I did hear that The Moderate has some songs on iTunes "which just screams legitimacy" in the words of Jim Dempsey.

I have also begun enjoying The Guild, (FOR WHICH I MEANT TO THANK MDHATTER!!!) which I know sounds a lot like a heroin addict talking about how much he loves a twelve step program and methadone. Don't bother trying to click that link, their bandwidth has been obliterated by a link from Penny Arcade and it will probably be a week before that site is up again.