Organizing Principles – Page 32 – A Blog about the Pillars of Belief: Politics, Culture, Stories

December 12, 2015

Revisiting The X-Files: Mulder’s Return from Abduction

An Emotional Punch

Usually when a lead actor departs from a TV series (be it over contractual, personal, or mortal reasons) the departure is permanent. The character that actor played must be written out of the show with degree of finality, usually killed off. Since Duchovny’s desire was to only lessen his episode load during Season 8, the writers were given a rare dramatic gift. They could lead Scully and the rest of us to think that Mulder was ‘killed off’ while also teasing the audience with visions, nightmares, and flashbacks with Duchovny playing Mulder in the flesh.

Doggett and Scully each have moments where they imagine they are seeing Mulder standing before them, and in the filmed scene Duchovny is clearly on set standing before them. These are jarring images that capture both Doggett’s desire to find Mulder and Scully’s suffering at the loss of Mulder, not to mention our own desire to have him back.

Mulder Ghost

In the first episode of the season were Mulder is in full scenes, The Gift, the entire teaser is devoted to a big reveal of Mulder as a concealed shooter. The mystery of the episode is about why Mulder would shoot someone in cold blood. The answer has to do with the fact that he was dying from his brain surgery with Smoking Man in Season 7, and involved an unusual and great monster-of-the-week. It was fun in the midst of his absence from the series to watch Mulder solving an X-File in flashback, while Doggett solved the same X-File in an interwoven plotline set after Mulder’s abduction.

One of the best elements of Season 8 is watching Scully grieve. Mulder is gone but not gone. He might return, but then again he might not. Like so many mysteries on this show, no satisfying answers are forthcoming. It is heartbreaking to watch, especially because we know as viewers that Mulder is so close. In the second episode, Without, Scully is in an empty desert just outside of an invisible UFO. We know Mulder is inside that craft—Duchovny is filmed strapped in the alien laboratory—but she doesn’t even know the UFO is there. Mike Snow also wrote a haunting choral theme that played whenever Scully was shown contemplating her loss. These scenes truly capture how painful an abduction feels for the people left at home with nothing but their questions.

scully in desert

This pathos—‘so close yet so far away’—is surely what inspired the writers to return Mulder only to kill him off. The scenes between Scully and Skinner—just before Mulder’s return where Scully is recalling that Mulder once told her that souls of the dead reside in starlight, and at his funeral where she can’t believe she is standing over his coffin—are heart-rending. Of course, Mulder is not dead. He is nearly dead—to borrow a phrase from The Princess Bride—and that makes watching Skinner and Doggett solve the mystery of how he could be in a grave for three months but still alive kind of fun to watch. It is the pleasure of watching what you know is highly improbably but narratively inevitable unfold before your eyes.

One Contrivance Too Many

Now, as with so many mysteries, the full explanation is so less satisfying than the slow unveiling of it. According the what we see in these episodes, the new alien tactic of colonization—or whatever they are up to—is to abduct groups of people, return them nearly dead and infected with “the alien virus,” and have them be reborn as alien-human hybrids, or as “alien facsimiles.” This happens to poor Billy Miles. There is no information, not the slightest suggestion, as to what these reborn aliens are supposed to do to further the alien agenda.

At some point you realize that the entire crazy idea exists only so that the writers could kill Mulder, have a funeral and then bring him back to life. This is the definition of a plot contrivance.

Trouble is, The X-Files has always trafficked in these contrivances. It is just that the series was much better at wielding them for dramatic effect earlier in its run. It’s an unfair criticism to say the writers are making it up as they go along. All TV is made up episode-by-episode, and so long as the stories are good, who cares? The X-Files writers always started planning mythology stories by asking: what is a scary or bizzarro concept that could adequately carry the drama for one hour of television? Once that concept was established, only then did they bother to explain it in context of the overarching mythology, usually in dribs and drabs over a season or two or three.

I imagine the writer’s room sounded something like this over the years:

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a human who is spliced with an alien, who has super-human strength, can breath under water, and has toxic green blood—we’ll call them alien-human hybrids, or alien clones.
Let’s have an Invasion of the Body Snatchers type creature—we’ll call it the Black Oil alien virus.
People are scared of killer bees, let’s do killer bees—we’ll say the aliens are growing bees to deliver the alien virus.
Uh, we’re making a big summer blockbuster, and our spindly gray alien isn’t much to look at on the Big Screen. Let’s make an alien that is big and slimy with long claws and teeth—but when we get back to the small screen next season we will reveal that the long-clawed alien is nothing more than a gray alien at an early stage of its development, just after it rips itself out of its host body.

long claw alien

The exact details of the alien colonization conspiracy don’t matter all that much. They are secondary concerns, mere vessels for delivering scary, creepy, weird stories. This is not a criticism because the show would not have been a hit without the approach. But it is an important thing to understand as we evaluate the later seasons, and the upcoming Season 10, because the writers can only keep adding new elements to the mythology arc so many times before the process itself gets old. There are a lot of balls in the air to begin with.

The Season 8 concept of abductees returning as corpses that come back to life, shed their skin and become reborn as aliens is no more or less ridiculous than any of the previous alien storylines. And it is genuinely unsettling to watch Billy Miles’ corpse get out of bed, get in the shower and have all his rotting flesh wash off of him. This might have been a fine addition to the mythology if it had been introduced in Season 2 or 3. It then would have been given some nefarious purpose that contributed to the whole colonization story—like the clones, black oil and bees were. But this particular contrivance is introduced in late Season 8, and it’s clear that once the writers use it to resurrect Mulder, they want to forget about it. There is not better evidence for that than the fact that reborn alien Billy Miles is allowed to walk out of the hospital and go do whatever he is designed to do—and the episodes never even hints at what that might be. Mulder and Scully know he’s an alien, and they let him go. They don’t even care about this story line.

We are left to wonder: “Man, I thought I hade the colonization plan all figured out. The virus will be spread to the population. The aliens will gestate inside of the hosts and then kill them. They will take over the planet. Now you are telling me that the aliens will first abduct people, return them dead and have their bodies become reborn with alien consciousness? How does that fit with everything else we know? Oh, you’re not going to tell me, not even a hint? [Throws up hands in frustration] I give up!”

A similar break down of narrative sense happened with the Season6/7 bridge episodes, the ones where we learn that the aliens gave us the world religions. Great sci-fi concept! But the writers never give us any insight into why the aliens would do this. After Mulder and Scully are out of danger at the end of the episodes, the whole concept is never brought up again.

In fact, very little about the alien stories make much sense after the official end of the Syndicate Conspiracy arc in Season 6, when the rebel aliens supposedly dealt a blow to the Gray’s colonization plans—which is yet another major plot point that was dropped and never mentioned again.

In summary: Loved how they used Mulder’s abduction to create genuine pathos, but hated how they eventually explained it all.

Implications for Season 10

Chris Carter has said the new episodes will stay true to the mythology of the series. To which I reply: Great, but which part of the mythology? The clones? The Black Oil? The virus-carrying bees? The gestating long-clawed aliens? The faceless rebel aliens? The corpse-facsimile aliens? Surely they won’t risk losing contemporary viewers by rehashing all of that in the two out of six episodes that will be devoted to the mythology.

No, the writers will start the process like they always have, by asking what will make good, scary TV? The show’s science advisor has said that the last episode, a mythology episode, will introduce some “scary science.” The hard part—and I hope they figure this out—is to start with that question and come up with an answer that doesn’t have the same feeling of contrivance as the later seasons, but feels as fresh, scary and even awe-inspiring as the early seasons.

November 23, 2015

CBS’s New Star Trek Series Red Flags

It is premature to engage in any fanboy handwringing over the new Trek series since we don’t yet know if CBS Access is creating a show that will be worthy of our interest. For all we know it could be a cartoon. Talk of Star Trek being CBS’s “crown jewels” aside, if their goal is to attract viewers to their streaming site they might figure they don’t have to pull out all the stops to increase usage over what it is now, which is apparently no one.

But since fanboys love to wring our hands, here goes.

Here is my list of red flags that—if I hear them from CBS’s marketing and eventually from the show runners—I will consider bad omens about the new series.

Characters

Token Person of Color: I won’t go so far as to say that we should expect and demand the captain not be a white male. I don’t care who plays the captain, or even if there is a captain. But I would find it hard to watch another Star Trek show where people of color are represented by one, poorly drawn, dull or dimwitted minor regular. The cast should reflect Earth’s diversity with similar ratio that Ridley Scott got for The Martian.

Vs.

Token Gay Guy, or Trans: I’m also not suggesting there must be a gay or trans character, partly because I fear how they would be depicted by the straight, white male writers who will most likely be writing such a character. Not that they should have an excuse. It is not surprising to me that TNG never had a gay character. It premiered in 1987, the height of the AIDS epidemic, when most gay professionals were in the closet, when few gay youth were out in high schools and colleges, when there was no political or social support for gay rights. It would have taken a supreme act of imagination for men of the 80s and 90s, who were not personally close to any gay people, to take the popular impression of gays at the time and project what a gay person would be like three hundred years in the future. As a gay man, I’m grateful they did not try. They probably would have come up with a cross between Liberace and Boy George.

Writers today don’t need much imagination to picture what a gay Star Fleet officer would be like. Still, I cringe to consider the likely scene where it is shockingly revealed that the handsome and dashing Number One is gay when he goes into his quarters, strips his uniform off of his washboard abs and jumps into bed with his hot young twink boyfriend from stellar cartography. There are many ways to depict gay people without sexualizing it, but I’m skeptical the writers’ imaginations will extend that far.

The Women: There is a lot riding on how this show portrays its women characters. It has the potential to bring Star Trek into the 21^st Century so far as gender is concerned (let’s forget for argument’s sake that DS9 already did this). The new show’s women characters can put to bed the 60’s overt sexism and miniskirts, the underutilization of Troi and Dr. Crusher, the mixed bag gender politics of Janeway’s captaincy, the truly awful cat suits and decon. gel of Enterprise. This show needs to get it right.

Token Vulcan: No more Vulcans for a while. Be your own show with your own aliens. Stop trying to carry “break out” characters on Spock’s long coattails. Create actual break out characters. And let’s remember that an actor playing a Vulcan must be as difficult as playing Hamlet. The only actors to effectively portray Vulcans were named Leonard Nimoy and Mark Leonard.

Setting

The Enterprise: Go ahead and set the show on a starship if you must, but don’t make it the Enterprise-H or any other version. If they do go with another Enterprise it will be a sign that the writers do not have faith in their ability to tell stories that will get people’s attention unless those stories harken back Kirk and Picard’s ship. It was one thing for Roddenberry to do it in 1987 when he wanted to stress continuity to the original series. But that is no longer necessary. Nothing Archer ever accomplished on the Enterprise NX-01 was made remotely more profound because it happened on a ship named Enterprise. It felt cheap, that we were supposed to care about silly stories simply because they were happening on a ship with that name.

Theme

“We’re going to stay true to Gene’s Vision”: If CBS says this, I sure hope they do what people who have said it in the past almost never do, which is explain what they think that vision actually is. Too often the executives pay lip service to the fans with hollow praise of whatever we think made Trek great, but they don’t actually share that vision or even have a vision of their own. To them it is just a brand. They need to take Trek’s vision of the future and update for our time.

“We’re not going to stay true to Gene’s Vision”: The most simplistic expression of Trek’s message is optimism for the future, and CBS may decide that optimism is not hot right now. They might want to make a Trek show that can compete in the “gore Olympics” (and Binge-watching Olympics) with Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. Trek is malleable, but it’s not build for apocalypse and cynicism. If it was turned into that kind of show it could only reasonable be called Star Trek during its title sequence.

Time will tell. As CBS starts to divulge more details, we will be all ears.

November 8, 2015

Agent Doggett and Stepdad Syndrome

I hated Special Agent John Doggett’s guts. Everything he did and said annoyed me. It was nothing against Robert Patrick’s portrayal, which was fine. I didn’t care for Doggett’s average joe “just-a-New-York cop” shtick. I rolled my eyes at all the things he was written to say that showed he was the opposite of Mulder. I hated the self-referential Terminator 2 reference in one of his early episodes. I really hated that he had an entirely new alien mythology concocted around his character—the super solider arc. I hated that poor Scully had to deal with this man, how the new role changed her. I hated the he wasn’t Mulder. I wanted Mulder. Why, oh why, did Mulder leave and stick us with this guy?

I stopped watching the show—after being a weekly viewer since mid-Season 1. I never finished the series. It was all just too sad.

At the time, back in 2000, Duchonvny leaving the show seemed so final (even though he was only absent from nine episodes). The series had only just been renewed at the last possible moment. The Season 7 finale was filmed and about to air when FOX renewed, so it was possible that they could have pulled the plug and Mulder’s abduction in finale would have been the end of the series. We did get that renewal, but fans weren’t exactly clamoring for it. The prospects for a hoped-for film franchise were suddenly murky. It felt like the end, but with a replacement cast to steer the ship into harbor. There was no energy around the show or in fandom. As one TV critic wrote at the time, without Mulder you are left with “half a show.” How wrong we all were.

Now I am watching Season 8 for the first time and with fresh eyes. The old bitterness is gone. I’m excited about Season 10 premiering in January, when Mulder and Scully are back on the case. And from this perspective, the first half of Season 8, and Patrick’s Doggett in particular, are terrific. All the things that annoyed me about Doggett (when I was still smarting from my Mulder daddy issues) I now see were strengths.

I love how Doggett approaches X-Files cases with a hardboiled, sometimes unethical, cop mindset. I love the way he simply ignores evidence of the paranormal that is right in front of his face. His tendency to refuse to believe is something that most people would do in his case. It is a reaction that Scully was never able to have because of her scientific method. She had to grapple with Mulder’s questions. Doggett refuses to even listen. It’s fun and satisfying to watch Scully come into her own and fully and merge her scientific practice with the evidence of the paranormal she has amassed all these years: “I have observed phenomena that I cannot deny. And that as a scientist and a serious person it is a badge of honor not to dismiss these things because someone thinks they’re BS.” She gives herself a desk for the first time, and thus corrects the subtle sexism of the Mulder-Scully dynamic of old. And that episode that referenced Patrick’s character in Terminator 2—Salvage—is actually a pretty solid monster show.

The surprising fact—and wonderful discovery for an X-Files fan who has never seen them—is that all of the episodes in the half of Season 8 are solid, and most of them are excellent. Roadrunners is a thoroughly creepy murderous-cult story with a monster quite unlike anything the series had done before. It’s got a twist reminiscent of Season 1 and 2.

Redrum is a well-executed time travel story where the main character lives each day of the week backward until he arrives at the point in time of his wife’s murder. He is able to save her, but the twist ending results in a sci-fi morality tale worthy of classic Star Trek or The Twilight Zone. Invocation is the series’ creepiest use of a demonic child. Via Negative is a scary and suspenseful story of people being killed in their dreams. And Badlaa gives us one of the most unusual murder methods of any magically-powered killer in the series, and he is played by the great Deep Roy.

Here is what is interesting: all of these episodes are legitimately scary television. I remember reading media reports that Carter wanted to use Duchovny’s departure as a means to get back to basics and “scare the pants off people.” At the time, I was not having any of it. Bring back Mulder! But Carter delivered.

I have a theory as to why the first half of Season 8 worked like gangbusters, and why some episodes, particularly Roadrunners and The Gift, captured the sublime weirdness of Season 1 and 2 X-Files. It all comes back to the chemistry of the leads. Doggett and Scully have chemistry alright, but it’s like two flint stones rubbing together. They don’t see eye to eye, they don’t trust one another, and they don’t like one another. But they are professionals who do their job. The result is that we the audience get to focus on the spooky story that revolves around them, and not the psychodrama between them.

While I praise Season 6 and 7, especially the great conclusion to the mythology arc, so much of Season 6 was about the fact the Mulder and Scully kissed in the movie, and they were actively flirting through much of Season 7. From a storytelling perspective, it is hard to scare the pants off of people when your main characters are falling in love with one another. There is a reason horror movies—to the extent they deal with romance at all—depict sex in a carnal way. Sex can be scary, can portend foreboding and doom. Love, however, is all about hope, the antithesis of horror. For all those who claim that The X-Files can still remain The X-Files with Mulder and Scully in an active romance, they have to answer to the fact that Season 8 rejuvenated the series by ejecting—or at least postponing—the Mulder-Scully romance. It is really hard to tell a good horror story when your main characters are flirting.

Implications for Season 10: Patrick is not interested in coming back to the series, so Doggett won’t reappear in Season 10. In one sense that is too bad because I really like the character. But it’s for the best because with only six episodes I don’t won’t to devote too much time to other characters, and it would be wrong to give him a brief cameo.

More importantly, we know Carter is capable of upping the horror and weirdness ratio of the X-Files formula because he did it in Season 8. Can he do it again with Season 10? I suspect this is why he split Mulder and Scully up for the new episodes. With the romance put behind them, the new shows will be able to focus on the aliens, the monsters, the conspiracies, and solving the mysteries of the Universe—which is what The X-Files are all about to begin with.

November 8, 2015

Revisiting The X-Files: Like many characters, this show had multiple deaths

In the late season 7 episode “Fight Club” Mulder is giving another one of his slide show expositions for the case they are investigating. Scully interrupts his line of questioning with this:

“What I’m thinking, Mulder, is how familiar this seems. Playing Watson to your Sherlock. You dangling clues out in front of me one by one. It’s a game, and… and, as usual, you’re holding something back from me. You’re not telling me something about this case.”

It was a nod to the audience that, while it had been a satisfying season, the formula was straining credibility. We were starting to ask ourselves: how long could Mulder keep this up? How long would Scully put up with it? If the answer to both questions was a good while, then how long would we want to watch it?

In the season finale “Requiem” two episodes later, in one of his finer moments, Mulder tells Scully: “The personal costs are too high. There is so much more you need to do with your life. There’s so much more than this. There has to be an end.” He is suggesting that she quit the X-Files. By the end of the episode, he is the one who leaves the X-Files in the form of being abducted.

The series had a simple TV procedural formula: a brilliant but paranoid believer in the paranormal partnered with a skeptical scientist assigned to the FBI’s caseload of unsolvable crimes. This formula churned out episode after episode, but the writers always seemed to be aware that if left alone this formula would get old quickly. It is easy to forget that part of the X-Files storytelling formula was to always mix up its formula.

As early as the season 1 finale, Mulder and Scully were taken off of the X-Files. They are reinstated during season 2, although they continued to be harassed by their off-and-on nemesis Assistant Director Walter Skinner well into season 3. The formula is intact until the season 4 finale when Mulder has a crisis of confidence and decides that he no longer believes in aliens. Scully’s beliefs in the paranormal deepen. The two switch roles. This continues until the season 5 finale when Mulder fully returns to his belief in aliens. But in the same episode, Mulder and Scully are reassigned from the X-Files yet again, and CSM literally burns the X-Files in their filing cabinets. Next, in the first movie, the X-Files is reinstated. But then, in the season 6 premier, Agent Spender is put in charge of the X-Files, who lets it wither by ignoring paranormal cases, and Mulder and Scully are assigned to Assistant Director Kersch, who does not allow them to investigate paranormal cases. This state of affairs lasts half a season. By mid-season 6, Kersh and Spender are gone, and Mulder and Scully are back on the X-Files under Skinner.

Even though the events described above happened during so-called mythology episodes that generally do not impact stand-alones, the formula switches were felt and even repeatedly mentioned in the intervening stand-alones. These elements were designed to shake things up, to keep the stories fresh in the season that followed.

The only time during the series when Mulder and Scully were allowed to investigate X-Files with the full backing of the FBI was the latter half of season 6 through all of season 7. It is satisfying to watch them be able to perform their job as they always wanted (although there are no “classics,” all but a few of these latter episodes are excellent tales). It is also evident that the two characters are at their happiest by the end of season 7. They are professionally at the pinnacle of their careers, doing work they love. The secret Syndicate has been uprooted, and the alien invasion potentially thwarted by the alien rebels. Mulder has made peace with his sister’s death. Mulder and Scully become much more openly loving with one another. It’s no wonder their love affair began around this time in their lives.

In the penultimate season 7 episode “Je Souhaite,” where Mulder is granted three wishes from a genie, the moral of the story is to not wish for things that are out of reach, but to enjoy the life you are living. The episode ends with Mulder spending the evening with Scully watching his favorite movie, “Caddy Shack.” This is basically a date. For those who thought it would be impossible to show Mulder and Scully on a date—including me—this is what it would look like. They know one another completely—it was never going to be like a typical TV version of an awkward first date. This moment, and the entire season, would be the happiest time they would ever share, considering what happened next—the next formula switch.

In the end—in this end—Mulder is abducted by the Gray aliens who are trying to clean up the evidence of their work with the Syndicate. Scully is pregnant. It is deliberately open to interpretation whether they were both aware of this during the episode, or that they were together. Based on how the scenes were written and acted you could argue either way.

As the “Fight Club” quote hinted at, a change in formula was needed—in fact expected, because the X-Files had always made changes at similar points in its run. It was publicized that Duchovny was leaving the show, but FOX had not decided to renew the series. So when “Requiem” aired I truly believed that I was watching the series finale, and that the movies would continue the story. Even as the season finale aired, I was not expecting it to change the formula, but to end the show. I held this belief right up until the last frame. This was the experience of many fans because FOX did not renew the show for an 8^th season until just before “Requiem” aired. The producers didn’t even know if it a season finale or a series finale when they were making it.

It felt like the right time to end the series. According to Frank Spotnitz: “There was a pretty strong sentiment inside and outside the show that it was time to call it a day.” Even a rabid season 1 fan like me was not hoping for a season 8. The show seemed to have run its course on the small screen.

What’s interesting to me now is that re-watching “Requiem” for the first time in 15 years, without any of the baggage about renewed contracts and ratings, etc., the episode is a pretty exciting re-set button. I’m actually excited to watch season 8 for what will be my first time. Wish me luck.

November 8, 2015

Revisiting The X-Files: The Women Problem

Only 8 of the series’ 201 episodes were written by women. By the time Gillian Anderson got to write and direct her season 7 episode “all things” she was the 7^th female writer of the show and only the 4^th to get a sole writing credit. She was also the last. Her episode was the last one written by a woman.

This is not surprising considering male-dominated Hollywood, nor am I raising it as a criticism. In fact, it is a testament to the sensitivity and feminism of Chris Carter’s all-male writing room that the show was so even handed on gender. The horror and sci-fi genre to this day is notorious for sexploitation of female bodies and sexist stereotypes. The X-Files mostly avoided that. You could sense that the writers were actively balancing the number of times each partner got to rescue the other. If you add it up, you might even find that Scully rescued Mulder more times than he rescued her. Over the years, Scully went on dates. She had sex a few times without the story shaming her for it. When Mulder did act possessive of her, this was always done in a way that cast him in a negative light, like he was being petty or even creepy.

It is also a credit to the writers that they kept the narrative balanced between Mulder and Scully despite the fact that the show was about Mulder’s life’s work, not hers. Almost every episode is structured around Mulder’s crazy idea being right—this is part of the fun of watching. He’s like a paranormal Sherlock Holmes, which makes Scully his Watson. Watson’s narrative purpose is basically to show how smart Holmes is by comparison. Not so with Scully. She is Mulder’s counterpoint, her critical perspective making his methods stronger, and vise-versa. Unlike a lot of depictions of Watson, Scully is not a dolt or a buffoon. She always held her own.

And still… by Season 6 and 7 this relationship started to grate ever so slightly. By then she was not personally invested in many X-files because of her health or her family. It was just an all-consuming day job. She spent a lot of time whining to Mulder that what they were investigating was not an X-File, only to be proved wrong. Much of their work was on Mulder’s terms, and he gave her a lot of marching orders with every expectation that she would do as told. We were left to wonder, how long would a strong, independent woman—a medical doctor who can kick butt in heals—put up with this?

Anderson’s episode “all things” is a corrective to this Scully drift, and also a sly, brilliant maintenance job of the status quo in their relationship. Anderson tackles the imbalance head on from Scully’s point of view, and let’s Scully have some agency in deciding to keep the path she is on.

In the voice-over opening monologue she even uses the word ‘drift’ to name what is by then obvious about Scully: “How rarely do we stop … to consider whether the path we take in life is our own making, or simply one into which we drift with eyes closed.”

Anderson gives Scully a juicy backstory that dramatizes this choice. Before joining the FBI she had an affair with a married man that resulted in the dissolution of the marriage. She left him, but in this episode he reappears in her life offering to take her back. She contemplates the life she could have had if she stayed with him, and that she could restart now if she wanted. But by the end of the episode, she has chosen against this old flame. She tells Mulder, “I once considered spending my whole life with this man. What I would have missed” [Emphasis mine].

Here Anderson allows Scully to voice her reason for staying on the X-Files. Scully values what she has learned, how she has grown, in her years working with Mulder. She is saying: I chose this, and I continue to choose this for myself. It is an understated moment at the very end of the episode, but one that is the key to her character.

Anderson also has some good-natured fun with Mulder’s character. After 7 years of episodes of him always being right, she makes him wrong about everything in this episode. The episode begins after an autopsy of an X-File that is legitimately not an X-File. Scully says that the victim did not die “of inhalation of ectoplasm as you so vehemently suggested.” Mulder says: “What else could she possibly have drown in?” It was margarita mix.

But Mulder had already moved on to crop circles in England. In a well-shot scene, he is talking through one of his slide shows and the camera is on Scully picking through a salad not paying any attention to him.

When he calls her on it she says, “I guess I just don’t see the point.” And besides, it’s Saturday so instead of flying to England to track down “some sneaky farmers who happened to ace geometry in high school” she’d rather be doing just about anything else, like taking a bath. You really get the sense of what her work life is like at it’s lowest. When Mulder is hot on the trail, he is brilliant and it’s riveting. But on an average day in the office, he can be nutty, pedantic, and boring—and she is expected to play along with every crackpot idea. Turns out Mulder flies all the way to England—Scully refuses to go—and he finds absolutely nothing.

In theories of literacy there is the concept of Landscapes of Action and Landscapes of Consciousness. The former is when the story is all about action, the quest, winning the prize, reaching the goal. The latter is all about what is happening in the interior of the characters, their hearts and minds, their inner-most thoughts. Literature uses both to tell its stories. Boys are supposed to respond better to literature that inhabits the Landscape of Action, while girls tend to relate better to the Landscape of Consciousness. The same goes for male and female writers, of course not 100% of cases fit this model. It is telling that Anderson’s episode contains no mystery to solve, no case to crack, no monster to capture. There is very little plot. There is a beginning, middle and end, but it maps onto Scully’s internal conflict: is she happy; has she made the right choices in her life; should she choose another path? As Scully has been telling Mulder all season: there is no X-File here. Except for the mystery of existence, and the role of fate in our lives, which the series, in its season 7 maturity, has been suggesting is the most important X-File of all.

The episode Duchovney wrote and directed in Season 6 was all about baseball, pure Landscape of Action. Of the two episodes I think Anderson’s, though flawed, was superior. His story was kind of a mess. He concocted a twin brother to Arthur Dales, presumably so he could work with an actor that he preferred over the original Arthur Dales. Admittedly that actor was great fun to watch, but the story was just a mess, even though it had an interesting concept: a gray alien in the 1940s rebels against colonization and shape shifts into a black baseball player before integration. It is the only time in the entire series when we get the point of view of an actual alien, but because the depiction is in such a silly episode and unmoored from the rest of the mythology, I don’t put much stock in it.

Scully does not factor much in this one, but there is a striking scene in the end when Mulder is teaching her to hit a baseball. It starts out as a sweet scene, but grows more cringe-inducing. Mulder holds her torso and forces her movements so that she swings the bat to hit the ball. He looks like he is manhandling her. First of all, I don’t think this is how you teach someone to hit a baseball. Second, it is a terrible visual that symbolizes Mulder as the puppet-master of her life.

Duchovney started co-writing episodes with Carter in Season 3 and continued into Season and 9 (when he wasn’t even acting in the show). He had sole writing credit on episodes in Seasons 6 and 7. This is not evidence of gender bias as much as it is Duchovny’s personal desire to write for the show, born out by the fact that last year he published a novel and admitted he always wanted to be a writer. It is surprising that Anderson did not write and direct again, especially during season 9 when she had a lighter acting schedule. I can only hope that this did not happen because of her own wishes. In any case, I’m grateful we got her take on Scully in “all things”

Implications for the new season:

“all things” has a great teaser where we see Scully getting dressed in the bathroom and then walking out with Mulder asleep in bed. We later learn she fell asleep on his sofa the night before. Still, the moment was arresting. For the first time—after years of being against the idea and even denying it ever happened—I totally accept Mulder and Scully as a sexual couple. Not only is it plausible, it is also highly likely considering their close bond and complete lack of any factors holding them back from trying out a romantic relationship. Their flirtation has been building over Season 6 and 7. By mid Season 7 Duchovny and Anderson portray the characters with more affection for one another, with more outward signs of their love. And the scripts give them romantic lines like Mulder whispering to himself, “She still can surprise me.” They seem genuinely in love, but also afraid and unsure what to do with it. At the end of “all things” as they are musing about their life paths Mulder says, “One wrong turn and we wouldn’t be sitting here together… That’s probably more than we should be getting into at this late hour.” It’s a scene that, if Scully had not fallen asleep, would have ended in a kiss.

While it makes good character sense to put them together, the relationship would have fundamentally altered the show’s narrative. The love affair would necessarily become such a big part of the story that it would crowd out other elements of the successful X-Files formula. The writers could not have them chasing monsters and killers like they used to. We would always be wondering what they were doing together when they weren’t working: are they on a date? Do they go on vacation? Are they moving in together? Do they argue about the toilet seat and who does the dishes? If they were romantically involved, the show could never avoid the details of how they are as a romantic couple. So it is good that they got together at the end of the series, and in such a vague way. For the same reason, I am glad that Mulder and Scully won’t be a couple in the new season.

What has changed for me, upon re-watching the series, is that I now accept they were in an active romance. It lasted a few years but it did not work out because they are two different people who want different lives. When they reunite in the new episodes it will be as best friends who know one another better then anyone else, who share a deep love and history, but who have gone their separate ways. All the better since they can chase aliens without having to pick up toilet paper on the way home.

November 8, 2015

Addendum: The X-Files and Closure

I know I just argued that Season 7 marks the X-Files’s incomprehensible period, but now that I am over half of the way through the season this description only applies to the season 7 two-part premier. The mid-season mythology two-parter “Sein Und Zeit” and “Closure”–where Mulder finally accepts his sister is dead–is a masterpiece. It shows The X-Files at its most narratively mature. It is the narrative pinnacle of so much of what the series was about: faith in things unseen; acceptance that answers, when they come, will only scratch the surface of understandings that we will never fully grasp.

In a way, these two episodes are almost like the finale of the series we had been watched up to this point, and it had all the right notes of where the should should have ended if Carter had decided to end it that season. If anyone here is re-watching in preparation for the new season, this two-parter is a must revisit.

“In spite of the series’ slow fade throughout its later seasons, The X-Files has never felt finished, in the same way we’ve never been able to close the book on the great mysteries of our time (the Kennedy Assassination, Roswell, Bigfoot, Donald Trump’s hair). The timelessness of the show lies in the way it prompts us to consider the mysteries of the universe and comforts us with the notion that there are answers out there we will one day find.” (from: http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/08/i-want-to-believe-why-the-new-x-files-series-will.html)

To which I would only add that the X-Files appeal is that some mysteries will never be solved and there are things in heaven and earth we simply will not be able to comprehend. This is a central theme of the show.

I’ve been thinking about how the show never had a proper “everybody hug goodbye” finale—like how a lot of finales try to place the characters in a position that we can imagine them in after the freeze frame/fade to black. Even “The Truth” was not a goodbye, more of an until-next-time.

“Closure” really has the feel of a good bye–at least to the mythology arc. Samantha was the last thread of that mystery yet to be resolved. If Carter had wanted to end the X-Files, he could have pushed that mid season episode to the end of season 7 and had the series end with Mulder blissfully letting go of The X-Files (and perhaps embracing a love affair with Scully). And it would have worked 100%.

But the quote above makes me think that the X-Files, whenever it ends, doesn’t need a traditional finale. There will always be X-Files to uncover, and apparently Mulder and Scully will always come out of retirement to solve them.

November 8, 2015

The X-Files Enters its Incomprehensible Period

First, a note about how the mythology was structured in the seasons. An X-Files season finale will address some of the questions raised during the season’s mythology episodes, but then add an entirely new, out-of-left-field element that sets up a big season premier after the summer hiatus. That premier, usually a two-parter, set the stage for the following season’s mythology arc. This follows the good mystery writing advice that for every question you answer, raise two new ones. So: The 1^st season finale confirmed that the government has evidence of aliens in the form of a fetus, and added the element of the Human-alien hybrid Project. The 2^nd season finale confirmed that there is a government syndicate of elders working on said Project, and introduced the idea of vaccinating humans against an unknown virus. The 3^rd season finale explained the shape shifting aliens, and then introduced the idea that there is a coming colonization that some aliens are opposed to.

This cycle repeats until the 6^th season when the alien colonization arc is definitively resolved mid-season with “Two Fathers/One Son” where the alien rebels kill the Project and all the elders except CSM. Now the writers’ trusty mythology-episode formula is inoperable. There are no more questions the need answered, and the alien mythology needs an entirely new direction. The finale provided a new direction with great promise—unfortunately the season 7 follow up squandered it by being nonsensical and full of cop-outs.

On the plus side, I loved the concept of the aliens having our genetic code (not mapped out at the time the episode aired) and the holy texts of all world religions scrawled on a ancient artifact buried off the coast of Africa. The mind reels at the possibilities: Humans were not just planted here, but the aliens also bestowed their creation with religion and culture. Why? And how does that fact fit with the idea that the aliens are returning to take over the Earth and potentially kill their creation after we established a global society and modern infrastructure? These are good, satisfying questions for a sci-fi series to pose. Also, CSM has a brief scene where he is in a conference room overseeing a group of men in suits getting up to speed on the alien invasion plans, essentially reconstituting the Syndicate. An exciting, mind-bending finale.

Unfortunately, the season 7 payoff does not pay off. Scully is exhuming the ancient alien artifact and faces three biblical warnings: a plague of insects, the sea turns to blood, dead animals and one person comes back to life. Her reaction is that she is not supposed to gain the knowledge contained in the artifact and she decides to walk away from it. She returns to the U.S. without any evidence. Later—after we see a reanimated human corpse!—the massive craft-shaped artifact is simply gone. No clue as to how it was removed. Was is the government, or aliens? Did the zombie drag it out to sea? The episode doesn’t tell us.

Even more nonsensical is Mulder’s illness. Apparently he has had the junk DNA in his temporal lobe activated much like Gibson Praise (though the episode does not make this explicit connection to the season 5 episodes) and he is now “more alive” by becoming “biologically alien.” His brain is so active that his body can’t respond and he switches from raving lunatic to comatose. In the words of CSM he has become an “alien-human hybrid…immune to the coming viral apocalypse.” CSM has his doctors extract the alien DNA from Mulder and inject it into himself so that he will survive also.

The reason Mulder was thus altered? A rubbing of the artifact in Africa on a piece of paper reacted with the latent alien virus that was still in Mulder’s system since season 4 when he was infected with the Black Oil (in that two-parter “Tunguska/ Terma” where he went to Russia with Krycek and was captured in the gulag).

So now we have the kind of not-so-good questions that indicate a sci-fi series is not telling a coherent story. How did a piece of paper turn Mulder into an alien-human hybrid, the thing that took the Syndicate 25 years and countless abductions to fabricate? If Mulder’s exposure to the alien virus is the answer, then why wasn’t Scully affected by the same piece of paper? She was infected with the virus too, and worse. When Mulder was splashed with the Black Oil, it crawled into his skin, but he was shown in the next scene none the worse for ware. But when Scully was infected we actually say an alien baby sucked out of her mouth. The rubbing did not affect her.

Furthermore, in the previous big mythology episode, we learned that the alien invasion is thwarted because the rebels are winning. Their victory was made apparent when they killed all the members of the Syndicate and stole the alien fetus that was the center of the Project. Why does CSM act as though that did not happen and the “coming viral apocalypse” is still on schedule? This too is ignored.

The 6^th season finale cements an X-Files cliché that has Mulder going crazy. At the end of season 2 he was suffering extreme paranoia because CSM was drugging him. At the end of season 4 he suffers depression and we are left to believe he actually commits suicide. Season 6 ends with him committed in a padded room. The fact that he is going crazy yet again would be excusable if the reason for it made sense. In this case it does not. Nor does it add anything to his character. By the end of the follow up two-parter, the alien DNA is extracted from him and he returns to his normal self. It was all just a contrivance to put Mulder in danger in time for another cliffhanger.

And that is why shows like The X-Files run out of steam about this point in their life cycles. You cannot tell stories of a global-to-cosmic scale without having something interesting and usually dangerous happen to your main characters (if you doubt that, try reading Last and First Men—I cant get through 20 pages.) There are only so many times you can put your characters through the ringer without it getting ridiculous.

The TV writer’s first priority is to develop stories that don’t have characters simply walking from one room to the next or getting sunk into long, talky scenes of expository dialogue about action happening elsewhere. You have to make sure your story has something happen to your characters every 10-15 minutes of screen time no matter what. The second priority is to connect that action with some larger meaning or significance. The third and final priority—and here is where it gets hard—is to keep the action and meaning of this episode consistent to all the mythology episodes that came before it. A writer is going to care about the first two priorities, and if the third one doesn’t fit… oh well. Deadline’s coming.

The trick is to keep the plates spinning. I for one am glad that The X-Files kept them spinning for 6 years. By season 7, the plates were falling.

Implications for the new season:

It will be interesting if Chris Carter radically changes the X-Files mythology formula described above. There are undoubtedly unanswered questions left over from Season 7-9. Does he answer them and pile on new questions? Does he ignore them and try to start new mysteries?

And what does a 6-episode X-Files season look like–one that we now know will contain stand alone and alien mythology episodes? Will the first episode establish a new mythology to be resolved in the sixth episode? Will the sixth episode contain a cliff hanger?

I’m reminded of Mathew Weiner’s philosophy when writing Mad Men, a series that he was never sure would get picked up for a next season. He said that every season they went for broke, never holding any great twist for a later season, but dumping into the one they were writing. And every season finale was written as though it was a series finale. Carter should heed that advice right now.

One thing I am confident of: the new season will not continue the “TV senility” of the last few X-Files seasons. This will feel like a fresh, new TV series. It will be narratively tight and comprehensible. I hope.

November 8, 2015

The X-Files Revisited

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?

November 4, 2015

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

NOTE: Now that Star Trek is coming back to episodic TV, I thought I’d repost an essay on the topic from last year.

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? I don’t think so. 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, 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, or 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?

October 21, 2015

The new Star Wars trailer

Well there’s quite a bit of plot in the new Star Wars trailer actually.

You’ve got Rey, the young woman who thinks she is “no one”–I bet that will turn out to be false.

You’ve got Finn–apparently a reformed storm trooper who gets his hands on a Jedi light saber. He may not actually be a storm trooper but that seems to be the conventional wisdom.

Whoever they are, the story is centered around them. Our older, grayer heroes will guide them. But the adventure of the entire trilogy will probably belong to Rey and Finn.

Then there is the villain, Kylo Ren. This generation’s Darth Vader. He is young like Rey and Finn but, unlike them, past-oriented. He worships the idea of Darth Vader, a person he’s probably never met but has been taught about, and he wants to continue Vadar’s cause.

Now the editorializing:

On the positive side, I love the diversity of the heroes. I love that Kasdan and Abrams are building a new story around new heroes, not just replaying a Luke and Han adventure. It offers a lot of potential. I’m encouraged by the generational take. Young people, listless, trying to survive in a cut throat Universe, choosing the good or the dark side. There are some timeless themes here that just might happen to be pretty timely without being a cloying allegory about “kids these days” i.e., read Millennials.

On the negative side… anymore I always worry about the villains in modern Hollywood movies. Why are there still storm troopers 30 years after the Empire was apparently defeated? If it wasn’t defeated, what exactly did we see in Return of the Jedi? And why does Ren have a fascination with Vader? If he’s truly going to the dark side, when he says “I will finish what you started” shouldn’t he be talking about the emperor? Or does this character exist simply to tap into fans’ love of Vader, and to also be an updated version of that character for new viewers. This part feels a bit contrived.