What Depression?

2009.02.17 - Tuesday

The next time someone tries to tell you that our global financial crisis is "worse than the Great Depression", just send them this link.

Star Trek Kick

2009.02.12 - Thursday

I've been on a pretty big Star Trek kick recently. I started watching episodes of "The Next Generation" here and there while I've been looking to kill some time at home, but I'm not on any kind of quest to re-watch that series since Chris and I did it just over a year ago. I've rediscovered "Deep Space Nine", which I really haven't seen since its first run, and it's almost exactly how I remembered it. The pilot is interesting on a few levels, and far superior to TNG's opener, but the series languishes for most of the first two years.

It's incredibly clear that Roddenberry's guiding influence was missed on DS9, the first Star Trek project produced entirely after his death. Until the writers came up with the Dominion threat, the show hits a few marks but mostly seems to wander around, not sure of what to do. Despite placing the station at the mouth of a wormhole to the other side of the galaxy, the entire first season only contains two or three episodes where it's explored, as if the writing staff were deliberately trying to distance themselves from TNG's quest into the unknown. I'm not against lots of character development, but I don't watch Star Trek to see whodunit crime stories, and the series makes use of the horrible alien possession gimmick three or four times in the first two years. That's a big no-no.

Still, the character work, on the whole, is better than "The Next Generation" was able to do. For me, Picard, Riker, and Geordi are still the most real characters to come out of all of the Star Trek projects. As an ensemble, however, "Deep Space Nine" has far fewer weak links. There's almost never a B-plot or character story I'm not interested in seeing, whereas TNG always felt like it was just wasting time or being polite by showing us Troi, Crusher, and especially "the boy".

I still can't bring myself to take another look at "Voyager" or "Enterprise". Maybe someday, but they're just so bland, and my memories of them are still vivid enough. I just find it interesting that I'm getting more enjoyment from watching these old Star Trek episodes, in some cases for the 10th or 15th time, than I get from a lot of the newer sci-fi that's around these days. For me, Star Trek is the dependable blanket that always seems to make one happy, and that despite its age, never seems to look old.

Has Popular Science Fiction Gotten Stupid?

2009.02.04 - Wednesday

Take a look at the above image. Just look at it for a few seconds. What do you notice? Maybe it's just me, but I notice the overall lack of stars, the pitch black shadow side of the planet, the subtle reflected light keeping the ships' own shadows from doing the same. Apart from the fact that I know space ships like those aren't real, and apart from the fact that the planet's surface isn't as graphically accurate as we can achieve today, to me, the image conveys an overall sense of reality. If I didn't know anything about our lack of cool looking space ships, I might be fooled into thinking it was a low resolution, somewhat blurry satellite image. This shot from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" succeeds in seeming real where so many other space shows consistently fail because it shares most of its properties with what real space photography looks like. The extreme difference between light and shadow, the subtle fill lighting on space craft, and the complete lack of it on planets. The near total lack of stars, and of course, the bleakness and coldness of space.

Now I'm not about to suggest that mostly-realistic space lighting is the end all, be all of a good sci-fi series, but I do believe the almost total lack of it in any show from the past 20 years outside of "Star Trek" is a symptom of something else. Science fiction, at least for me, has gotten stupid, and it seems to be getting worse with every new space-related series that's produced. I'm not sure if it's on purpose. I think it is sometimes; part of a production culture that regards the most successful sci-fi television series of all time as old fashioned, out of touch, too boring, or too nerdy. Other times I think producers, art directors, and visual effects supervisors are trying too hard to create iconic imagery and moments, only to end up with a bland visual mess at the end.

I'll never forget the first appearance of the Borg on "Star Trek: The Next Generation". We know they've detected a ship, but no one was expecting the above when the captain orders it to be put on the view screen. Right away the image fires the mind. What kind of insane alien race builds a giant cube for their space ship? The directorial choices are spot on, as well. To have it appear small at first, with only a single side lit up and the rest in complete darkness and surrounded by absolutely nothing. Mostly, however, that image stuck in people's minds because it's shockingly simple. No multi-source lighting. No colourful background. No glows or lens flares. No complicated camera move. It's simple, and it's effective, and you can say the same about almost all of that series' visual effects and design. I'm completely confident in saying that it would be flat out impossible to get this kind of groundbreaking design into a television series today. For this to be the first introduction to the deadliest of alien races, one of the prime villains of an entire series, producers would demand a hugely complicated ship design and a massive, expository CG space shot. Naturally the alien ship would have to be instantly shown next to our heroes' ship, so the audience can see how huge the alien ship is, since everyone knows that the bigger the alien ship is, the more advanced and more aggressive they are. That's just how it is. So I have no problem in saying that it would be impossible, yes, impossible, to create anything like that Borg moment in a series today, despite the fact that the first appearance of the Borg is widely regarded as one of the top sci-fi moments on film.

It's ridiculous that visual effects people, or even actual scientists, are still to this day having to bring dossiers of evidence to convince people of how objects actually appear in space. That it's okay to have black shadows. That you wouldn't really see millions of stars in the background of a brightly lit planet. That florescent nebulas aren't really visible to the naked eye or to any camera with an exposure even remotely close to one. "Star Trek: The Next Generation" looks the way it does because Gene Roddenberry and his creative team insisted on being as technically accurate as possible, and recruited help from the real-world scientific community to make that happen. It worked, too. That series was so well thought out, so well designed, that it still looks more real than most of the stuff produced today, and still feels like it's taking place in the future, despite being over 20 years old. All of that is speaking only in terms of visuals.

"Star Trek: The Next Generation" was one of the most popular television series on the air during its time. Not one of the most popular space shows, but one of the most popular shows, period. I still remember the "behind the scenes" feature that was part of two or three local news broadcasts on the night of the final episode. It was a big deal, and I'm sorry Ron Moore, but all of the bloggers' blessings in the world are never going to move "Battlestar Galactica" into that league. TNG was regularly featured on "Entertainment Tonight" and other pop culture shows, as well. The size of audience it takes to make something that popular doesn't just disappear. People stopped watching "Star Trek", slowly, over a 15 year period, because it was becoming bad television, and it was becoming stupid. The stories became bland, true, but the real science disappeared almost entirely. Real scientific terms, measurements, and numbers were slowly replaced over the years with fictional nonsense created by replacement writers' who just didn't care about those things. Still, even "Enterprise" managed roughly four times as many viewers as Galatica regularly gets, yet somehow Galatica is "a huge success" while Trek is "dead". The only other option out there these days is the Stargate franchise, which isn't really science fiction, but in the form of "Stargate: Atlantis", a comedy action-adventure show. We'll see if that changes at all with the next series, "Stargate: Universe".

Again, however, those details are just symptoms. Even in terms of story, science fiction just doesn't seem to want to think anymore. I suppose everyone who's making science fiction these days is mostly still chasing "Star Wars", because of its success. That's awfully hard to do for television, however, because "Star Wars", for the most part, lives and dies based on its spectacle. The new trilogy films are universally acknowledged as awful, yet they still made hundreds of millions of dollars because of the sheer spectacle. It almost didn't matter how bad the dialogue or the acting were, it was just something you had to see. It's the only reason I saw them in theatres. "Star Trek", however, has never been good at that. Its stories have always been smaller ones, and when the films come along, the same television writers and producers try to pile the money onto what are essentially four or five character plays. It just hasn't worked for features, but that formula has been a fantastic success for television, giving us some of the best science fiction hours ever produced. "The Next Generation" has several instances where the show would come back from commercial, play out an entire scene with two characters in a single room, and then cut to commercial. When was the last time you saw anything like that, or watched acting or dialogue that was good enough for it, in a sci-fi series? I'd be surprised if you could even suggest it anymore in a room full of producers and executives convinced that their audience is searching for an excuse to change the channel. Other types of shows still do it. "The West Wing" did it. "The Sopranos" did it. Only two of the most critically acclaimed dramas of the past decade.

That's why I think it's science fiction itself that has gotten stupid, and not necessarily the whole of television culture. The bar for sci-fi programming just seems so incredibly low these days, that shows are congratulated simply for stepping over it. All the while, older series like "The Next Generation" are patted on the head for being "good in their day", but not as "sophisticated" or "dramatic" as some of today's offerings. I really have no idea who writes stuff like that. Oh, I'm sure you could find their names, but I just can't imagine who they are. Have they even watched "Star Trek"? Or did they learn all they needed to know through osmosis and a society that mostly regards it as fluff for the socially inept? Do they praise "Battlestar Galactica" as the "greatest space show ever made" because they're actually familiar with science fiction television, or because everyone else is saying it? And if Trek's style of ideas and intellect over soap opera drama and action scenes is really so "old fashioned", then how come nothing has managed to match, let alone surpass, its popularity?

The viewers are still out there, it's just that no one is making anything they want to watch.