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Star Trek: Pick A Plot
Vinnie_333 writes "This article on the New York Times sounds out on the often repetitive plots of the 10 Star Trek films to date (this include ST: Nemesis, coming soon). It refers to the film franchise as '10 films with 5 plots' and lays them all out in front of you. This does have a ring of truth. As a fan of Sci Fi (but not particularly Star Truck), I have to admit that there are only so many unique plots out there, and most of them have been well used by HG Well's time. Star Trek is, after all, a genre franchise and the story lines are held back by certain restrictions of the genre." I personally would pay Berman/Braga et al $20 if they never have a holodeck or time-travel-based plot ever again.
when you have such great acting?
Ahhh yess, the obligatory sigh oh, did you say sig?
Well, if you really want to admit it, there are only about three plots. You have Man against Nature, Man against Man and Man against Himself.
I would suppost that Man against computer (or Superman against computer) could be any of the above.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
I read an article about TNG production a little while back. Rather than coming up with a exotic particle/lifeform/radition of the week to save the day, TNG scriptwriters would often just write in a placeholder to be replaced with a tech-adviser's technobabble at a later date.
Scripts would look as so:
GEORDI: Let's [technobabble] the main thrusters so that we can [technobabble] the Borg.
Etc...
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Not trying to flame. I used to be a big fan of the original as well as TNG. :-)
However, the plotlines in B5 were far superior to anything on StarTrek, IMHO of course.
Also, no Wesley Crusher type characters
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
If it wasn't for the predictable plots you couldn't play The Star Trek the Drinking Game.
The writers of Star Trek aren't held back by anything other than their own incompetence. There are a million potential plots out there. For that matter, well-written characters and dialog can make a trite plot into a fine film.
Granted, many plots were used by Wells or Bradbury or Burroughs long ago, but if you simplify things down to that level everything starts to look the same. If you wrote a 1-paragraph summary of all of the romantic comedy films ever made, for example, it would look like this:
"Two characters who at first seem to have insurmountable differences meet and, through a series of comic moments, fall in love. A complication threatens to dash their hopes, but at the last moment everything works out."
That doesn't mean all of these films are without value. Just most of them.
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Don't all the Bond movies essentially have about three or four plots? What about Police Academy? Indeed, is there any series of movies that *doesn't* have the same few plots repeated again and again?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
... it's about character. A good deal of both DS9 and TNG (arguably both really good shows, whether you like Trek or not) was about character interaction. I'll give you an example:
There's an ep of DS9 where Will Riker's duplicate (transporter accident in an ep of TNG) stole the Defiant and went off to give the Cardassians hell.
One could very easily dismiss that ep as "Oh geez, dude steals a ship, fires the guns a few times, and gives up when he's outnumbered. What an original plot. *sarcasm*"
However, that wasn't the interesting part of the episode. The interesting part was WHY Riker's duplicate did this. He was stranded alone on a planet for 8 years. When he was recovered, he couldn't live up to success that the Riker that made it off the planet enjoyed.
When you watch this ep, you're lead to believe that the Riker duplicate was going for the 'greater good' trying to uncover some Cardassian plot. What was really going on was he was hoping to quickly turn himself into a hero, even if it meant death for him.
There were other interesting details of the episode, but I just wanted to make that little point: Plot isn't everything. Here's a case where scifi gave birth to a situation not likely to happen in reality, and gave the audience an interesting glimpse into a fictional world.
Frankly, I think Enterprise would be a lot more popular if people understood this concept. The 'plot' of the episodes isn't the strong point, the development of the characters is. That's what it's all about.
Umberto Eco points this out in his article The Myth of Superman (I'm afraid a quick google only turned up this synopsis, not the whole text). Here are some key quotes from that link, and, I assume, the article (come on, it's been nearly six years since I've read it! :^D Maybe I did earn that B.A. degree after all...). I try to recall a few more important bits below.
...
.construct on a small scale 'analogous' models which mirror the larger one."
:^) (Last season was a dream!)
:^) Anyhow, it's no surprise Star Trek is often similar. It's part of the myth that "resonates with our archetypes". Hey, someone much smarter than me said that. Stop making fun. :^)
Traditional mythic heroes were governed by a law, therefore these heroes were predictable and held no suprises for the audience.
... and
Authors preferences are not considered when writing a novel. They are forced to write along the guidelines of a cultural model. In this case, "authors. .
Basically the deal was that if you started at A and went to B, you might pass through C or D or E but your story must end up at A again or you'll have spoiled the myth.
There's only so much a mythical figure can do (or mythos o' figures). Here are some of the more horrendous deviations from the "A leads to B leads to A again" that I can think of off-hand (a little Spidey-centric, I'm afraid):
* The brilliant folk at Marvel kill off Aunt May. (She's back now)
* The brilliant folk at Marvel decide Spider-Man is really a clone. (The clones have all disappeared now)
* The brilliant folk at DC kill off Superman and then have several return. (I think we're back to one, but I don't read Superman)
* Patrick Duffy leaves Dallas.
* Felix Lieter (sp) has his leg eaten by a shark in Licensed To Kill. (Haven't fixed that yet, but they did ditch Dalton, even if it isn't his fault that movie stunk to high heaven)
This is why, I believe, these fictional stories rarely do things that are irreversable, like have Peter Parker age [much] or main characters get married (last I looked, Marvel was still struggling with that one, even having MJ disappear). It's also why shows tend to die after the leading man & woman get romanticly involved -- see Moonlighting. Or why they die when they switch tone -- see all those Carol Burnett[-esque] episodes later on in Magnum, P.I.
So, in one sense, the reason Star Trek is always the same is the same reason everyone was on pins and needles when Diane left Cheers.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
...that there are only five basic plots worth writing about in existence. They boil down to Romance (good person meets true love), Redemption (bad man turns good), Justice (good person is elevated), Tragedy (good person is fallen), and Quest (good person saves everything). Whether the person in question is in conflict with one other, many others, nature, or himself, they all come down to that.
So "Star Trek" tends to be formulaic. So what? So's everything else that's ever been written; it's a matter of how well it's written that draws or repels us, which is why "The Wrath of Khan" is so popular and "Generations" is less so.
There are so many places they could go with their plot motifs (Man vs. Himself can be seen in the motif of a stranded person surving the odds and their personal self-doubt until rescued, for example.) Science fictions offers endless variety of these!
Cambellian science fiction was all about asking "What if?" Where has that gone with this franchise? Technobabble, non-sense and special effects usually. The problem Trek has been accused of often is not thinking about the consequences of certain technologies. Great examples are missed opportunities with cloaking and teleportation or explaining how the toilets on the Enterprise work (if in fact they are connected in some obscure way with the food replicator).
In stead of asking a What If question about technology we are usually instead given a song and dance routine by Data, a sexual episode between data and a real woman, a lame space battle (sit down B5 folks already) or some dumb ass plot where they come across a planet populated ONLY by Gangsters/Sou Chefs/Half Naked Californians.
Oh, and one more plot about dystopia and I will scream.
I'm not asking that they make their movies as stunningly boring as, say anything written by Robert L. Forward (*great* scientist - lousy story teller in my humble opinion). But get some real writters: David Brin, Greg Bear, Vernor Vinge even! These guys could take that Franchise where No Science Fiction Franchise has ever gone before!
Well, that's my piece. Thanks for listening.
--Peter
He takes a ship out with a training crew, doesn't follow Mr. Savik (Kirstie Allie's) advice about raising deflectors when the Grissom doesn't respond and gets the guts tore out of the Enterprise. We then find that the Federation has some kind of gadget they shouldn't be messing with, and the designer is the progeny of Kirks chronic "fooling-around" having caught up with him, who is as bloody-minded as the old-man Kirk himself. And to straighten out the whole mess, Kirk ends up sacrificing his best friend Spock.
This thing with Kahn is sort of like Bush and Saddam -- we know that Kahn is crazy, but if you think about it, Kahn has some legitimate grievances that Kirk has on his conscience.
There is no other Star Trek that gives that level of character development to either Kirk or Kirk's nemesis.
On the subject of the decline of Trek, the technobable bugs me the worst -- I saw this promo piece with Levar Burton explaining that they write "technobable" as a line in the script to call on a consultant to fill something in.
Classic Trek didn't have techno-babble. Enterprise would get enveloped with some kind of multi-color thing, Kirk would bark "Spock, what is that?" and Spock would stare into his science station Tektronix terminal hood and say "I don't know, it isn't registering on our sensors." Compared to NG, Classic Trek was high concept -- they wouldn't try to explain it like one shouldn't try to explain the Monolith in 2001.
...producers had to 'shush' the actors every time they came on stage...
This is true. I hope I don't ruin anyone's good time, but those doors were opened by a SFX guy, who sat on an upturned bucket behind the set wall, pulling on a cable. (In the second season, the advanced technology of a wooden handle was added!)
Imagine the sound a sliding glass door makes when the track is rusty, and you know what those doors sounded like...a far cry from the pleasant "woosh!" we hear on TV.
Watch TNG, and you'll see that actors RARELY speak while doors are closing behind them. Sometimes you'll see an actor walk into a room (usually the transporter room) and you'll hear the doors close while they're speaking, but you won't see them. This happened because that rusty door noise was replaced with the happy "woosh!" sound in post production.
Interesting side-effect of this for me is that even in real life, I rarely talk while a door is closing behind me. It just became a habit to wait.