The Fallacy Of Kirk vs. Picard

posted by Tygrrius @ 12:01 AM

Really, I thought the senseless Kirk vs. Picard debate was put to rest about 13 years ago. Apparently not. CBS is now sponsoring a Kirk vs. Picard fan fiction contest over at FanLib.com.

I don't consider fan fiction, even officially commissioned fan fiction, to be news, so I've not covered any of this over in Frontier News. It's the same reason I don't cover New Voyages, Of Gods And Men, and various other fan films. Yes, I know that some claim these are not fan films but let's not delude ourselves.

Anyway, last week, those participating in Kirk vs. Picard voted on the overall premise from four contenders: The Return of Khan, History Lesson, Prisoner of Time, and The Guardian of Forever.

Though crafted by actual Star Trek writer André Bormanis, none of the concepts were very inspired. Perhaps I should qualify "actual Star Trek writer" a bit. He's written Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise. He also co-produced Enterprise and was a science/technical consultant on various other TNG-era productions.

Had I been forced to vote, I probably would have chosen Prisoner of Time, simply because it seemed to offer the most opportunities for realistic conflict between the two captains. But, really, I just don't buy the overall Kirk vs. Picard concept. It's about as pointless to me as Superman vs. Batman.

Star Trek Generations established, and the Shatner/Reeves-Stevens novels expanded upon, a great working relationship and friendship between the two heroes. Perhaps they have different methodologies (Picard is often more like Spock than Kirk) but their overall values and goals are more or less the same. Generations even went so far as to show that both captains essentially had the same regret in life: no time for an Earth-based home and a family.

Predictably, The Guardian of Forever concept won out. If you put the Guardian in any Star Trek vote, it's going to win. Harlan Ellison's "The City on the Edge of Forever" was, after all, one of the ultimate episodes of Star Trek.

Unfortunately, the Bormanis use of the Guardian is just garbage:

The Guardian of Forever is malfunctioning [...]. Time-quakes are erupting from it, throwing an entire sector of space into chaos. Kirk is ordered to investigate, but the Enterprise becomes trapped in a temporal eddy. A tractor beam from another Federation ship pulls Enterprise to safety. Kirk is shocked to discover that the other ship is Enterprise-D! [...] The time-quakes are becoming more violent, and could eventually spread throughout the galaxy. Kirk wants to destroy the Guardian immediately, but Picard argues that would be immoral - the Guardian is a unique, sentient being. [...]

And right off the bat, Kirk vs. Picard is off to a false start. Bormanis apparently isn't familiar with James T. Kirk so he's bought into the whole "shoot first, ask questions later" myth. While he was at it, I'm surprised he didn't throw in something about Kirk taking time off from the mission to sleep with Ensign Lefler or any/all of the other Enterprise-D beauties.

If we give this pseudo-Kirk the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume that the Guardian really will spread chaos throughout the galaxy and that there really is no other option but to destroy it, then Bormanis is making Picard look like an idiot for saving one sentient being at the expense of how many quadrillions of other sentient beings? Unless this fan fiction is supposed to take place in TNG's first season, I don't remember Jean-Luc Picard being that foolish.

Also involved in this fiasco are George Takei and Wil Wheaton, who act as "hosts." The funniest part of all is the intro on the site:

Star Trek royalty (George Takei, Wil Wheaton and writer Andre Bormanis) and FanLib.com are teaming up with CBS Interactive and the Star Trek franchise for a fan-driven storytelling event that uses scenes written by you and other Star Trek fans to create a new online story.

Star Trek royalty? Takei? Wheaton? Bormanis? Who are we kidding here? Wheaton seems like a nice guy, and I'm one of the few who actually liked Wesley Crusher (though not overuse of the character by lazy writers), and I'm sure Bormanis is, too. But Star Trek royalty? Come on. Did Takei write this?

Incidentally, it doesn't look like Takei is involved with the judging but just in case he is, make sure you always refer to Sulu as a captain. Even if this is set before Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, it doesn't really matter. Never call Sulu anything except a captain. Trust me, you'll win.

Oh, and intrepid writers, be sure to come up with a clever explanation for why Kirk doesn't remember Picard when he meets him in Star Trek Generations. Otherwise, you're leaving a huge continuity error. And you wouldn't want to do that. This isn't an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, after all.

Think I'm being too hard on Kirk vs. Picard, since it's only fan fiction? Why, thank you for proving my point.

How To Survive Nuclear Winter

posted by Tygrrius @ 12:01 AM

June 11, 2007. 2007. It still sounds so far in the future to me. Back in 1987, when I was about 12, I'm pretty sure I imagined we'd all have flying cars by now.

Space travel would be routine. Astronauts would have already visited Mars. Popular family vacation destinations would include an Earth-orbit space station and a moon base.

That is, assuming America and the Soviet Union had managed to avoid World War III. Nuclear war. Nuclear winter. I had no idea what these really were when I first heard the terms as a kid. I just knew they weren't good. And they were the only things that could rob us of the bright future promised by the 21st century, if we could just make it here alive.

It wasn't until high school in the 1990's that I really began to somewhat comprehend the enormous power of nuclear weapons. I took a semester-long 20th Century US History class. I still remember the teacher's description of the United States dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II.

"Boom. Big boom. Biggest boom ever," he began. He then went into minute detail of what happened to the people directly killed and those who died from the fallout.

That threat of nuclear war was part of the culture of growing up in the 1980's. In third or fourth grade, I remember a clamor among my friends to watch a controversial TV movie called The Day After. Like most of those friends, I wasn't allowed to watch it. Little did I know that the director of that movie had also been responsible for Star Trek II just a year before.

A year or two later, CBS began airing The New Twilight Zone. We watched that one every week, and nuclear war played a pivotal part in the first episode's second segment.

An updated telling of the classic episode "A Kind of Stopwatch," "A Little Peace and Quiet" dealt with a woman who finds a necklace that can freeze time and affect everyone except her. She lives through an extremely loud life, so she uses this at first mostly to obtain some well-deserved quiet moments.

By the end, though, she begins to abuse this power. And anyone who's seen more than a few Twilight Zones knows that simply isn't allowed. When a couple of anti-nuke activists come to her door, she freezes time ("Shut up") , drags them outside, and lays them on their backs in the grass. She looks out the window, resumes time ("Start talking"), and laughs while they get up and run away in fright.

Later that night, war breaks out between the Soviets and the US. She stops time and walks outside to see a nuclear missile frozen overhead, waiting to unleash destruction as soon as she resumes time. By stopping time, she has finally obtained world peace. Lesson learned, in the Twilight Zone.

Anxiety over nuclear war was also part of the background of a children's novel I enjoyed back then called The Computer That Said "Steal Me." It was years before I had my own computer (courtesy of JS, as a matter of fact--look what you started, buddy), but I was always fascinated with them. In fact, by not having one, I had this misconception that they could do a lot more than they actually could, a la the series Whiz Kids.

Anyway, I remember being somewhat disappointed once I got into the novel to find that the "talking computer" was actually a computerized chess set. I remember one passage of the book describing jet fighter pilots who wore a patch over one eye so that if they were blinded by a nuclear flash, the other eye would still be usable.

The kid who stole the chess set used an elaborate method to pull off his scheme, involving a tape recorder alarm clock. His plan worked, but his guilty conscience caused him to try to secretly return the set. The return operation was poorly planned, though, and he is caught. Another lesson learned.

Of course, the nuclear threat was around long before the 1980's--that just happened to be the decade of my childhood. Even some episodes of the original Twilight Zone from the 1960's were obsessed with it. "Time Enough At Last" and "The Shelter" come to mind immediately, for instance, but there are plenty of others.

Now, the threat of nuclear war with Russia is not what it once was. Today's generations instead have the ongoing threats of terrorism, which can take many forms.

Hopefully, twenty years from now, someone will be writing about those crazy times in the 2000's when everyone was worried about terrorist attacks, a thing of the past. And hopefully, he or she will be doing so from the comfort of a talking, auto-piloted, flying car.