In the interim between the cancellation of Star Trek in 1969 and its resurrection as a television series with Star Trek: The Next Generation, creator and idolized leader Gene Roddenberry got high on his own supply of mythmaking and adoration.

After Trek vanished from the active airwaves, becoming the fare of syndication with daily reruns of episodes on local stations, the idealized version of the series and its message took hold in the growing and devoted fan base. The idea that Trek showed a future free of the human failings that so troubled our society then and continue to today, particularly bigotry, instead accepting everyone and celebrating their differences. People had been made better over the centuries, despite Kirk having to admonish officers to leave their bigotry in their quarters because there’s no room for it on the bridge, and McCoy’s continual treatment of Spock and his unending comments about the first officer’s heritage would earn him a perpetual hall pass to H.R. in any current corporation. When Roddenberry, after being booted from the film franchise, got the chance to make a TV series again, it was one that reflected what people praised about Trek while ignoring how the original series had actually been written. Every character would love and accept every other character, making drama among the crew something very difficult to write. This newfound “we love everyone” ethos was particularly strong in the empathic half-Betazoid Deanna Troi.

Paramont/CBS Home Video

Troi (Marina Sirtis) acted as the ship’s counselor and adviser, using her racial abilities to know the hidden emotional states of her patients and the people that the ship encountered on its adventures. She was presented as a warm character, accepting and understanding of everyone with a kind heart and word for the people around her and deeply troubled by their pains.

I find the construction quite improbable.

The truth about people is that we all wear masks nearly all the time. People rarely reveal just how much their inner thoughts, emotions, and drives are not reflected in their surface expressions and actions. Now, this would make someone like Troi a very useful agent in ferreting out the truth of a matter, a useful writing and plot device, but think about it from her point of view. She knows just how often everyone around her tells their little “white” lies, just how often men fake interest in a woman’s conversation when their minds are driven by more base desires, just how often people hold each other in contempt while presenting smiles and politeness. I can think of no better recipe for creating a hardened cynic, someone who knows that people are far nastier and crueler than they reveal. How much we are all just animals restrained by social conventions.

And that is a much more interesting character than a Pollyannaish woman wailing about joy and pain.

Fans watching this week’s episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, where pilot Erica Ortegas is

Credit: Paramount Pictures

marooned on a planetoid with an enemy of the Federation, can be forgiven if they think that the plot was lifted from the 1985 film Enemy Mine. Of course, fans with a more extensive knowledge of televised SF programming might think that film lifted its plot from the final episode of Galactica 80: The Return of Starbuck. This ignores that the 85 film was an adaptation of Barry B. Longyear’s 1979 Hugo winning novella of the same name.

If we go beyond the science-fiction genre, we get to what might be the Ur-text of the modern incarnation of this plot, the 1968 feature film, Hell in the Pacific.

Warriors from opposing sides stranded and forced to work together to survive, eventually overcoming their prejudices towards each other, is a powerful metaphor for life in general and it is not surprising that it feels like it has been adapted and readapted as many times as the plot of The Seven Samurai.

Episode 9 of this season, Terrarium, sees Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia), after taking a shuttle craft into a gravitational anomaly, stranded on the moon of a gas giant only to discover that a Gorn pilot has also crashed here. Ortegas, a survivor of a brutal Gorn assault, has to grow beyond her personal terrors and emotional trauma to join forces with the alien pilot if they are both to survive until Enterprise can locate and rescue them.

Terrarium echoes the original series episode The Galileo Seven as the ship, tasked with delivering vaccines to a plague-stricken colony, faces a ticking clock that will force Pike to abandon the search for their missing officer. It is a nice bit of lore in the episode that the Enterprise is scheduled to rendezvous with the starship Constellation and its captain, Decker. Ortegas’ solution to alerting her crewmates as to the location of her crash also feels borrowed from that original series episode.

While the elements copied over from the original series are detracting from this episode, I still very much enjoyed it. Unlike Hell in the Pacific, The Return of Starbuck, or Enemy Mine, Ortegas’ history and emotional trauma makes this a more personal story and therefore one of greater growth than the other explorations of this concept. That does not diminish the other interpretations; each has their own charm and message about seeing past the surface of another and are worthy of enjoyment, even the Galactica 80 episode.

Credit: Paramount Pictures

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Let me say that in general, and with the exception of a single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Hollow Pursuits,) I detest stories centered on the damned holodeck. In order to make the story have any stakes at all and to avoid the dreaded trope of “it was all a dream,” something has to go disastrously wrong so that the ship is in terrible danger, and the safety features have to fail so disastrously that the troublesome piece of equipment cannot simply be turned off.

Putting a holodeck episode into Strange New Worlds is particularly offensive. The damned thing was new when it would be installed in the Galaxy-class cruisers some 80 years later—so new that Data had to instruct Riker on what the room actually was.

Wait, someone might be screaming: weren’t you the person for whom canon is more like a guideline than a rule? Yes, I said I don’t mind breaking canon to create a good story, but that is a very high bar for a holodeck-centered tale to clear.

So, we have one of my favorite characters, La’an, thrown into a fictionalized setting and plot while the rest of the crew faces death due to the poor engineering of the device. The episode was meant to give us a deeper look into the Spock/La’an relationship, but with a story—the murder mystery—that has no stakes and a B-plot that is predetermined to resolve happily (no way the Enterprise is getting crushed or cooked by a neutron star), the episode is left with absolutely no tension or drama.

Add to that the fact that the story La’an is thrown into takes serious time to puff up the chests of Star Trek writers by proclaiming how special the entire enterprise was for ’60s television, and you have a self-important, narcissistic piece of writing that has all the emotional depth of a dry riverbed.

Don’t get me wrong—Star Trek, in the ’60s particularly, was very important and has had a profound cultural impact, but to take time out of your own script to crow about your own important influence is just downright tacky. It is the job of others to analyze the effect and influence of a piece of art, not the creative artists themselves.

The most enjoyable aspects of episode three of season three were watching Anson Mount have tremendous fun burying himself in yet another role and hearing Jess Bush get to deliver some lines in her native accent. Aside from that, watching the episode was a chore.

Paramount Studios/CBS Home Video

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I become Medicare-aged next year, and so to me Star Trek always means the original series and the original crew. Amid the adding and subtracting of cast and the morphing future history of the United Federation of Planets, one of the constants was the friendly combative relationship between Spock, the reportedly unemotional half-Vulcan, and the ship’s chief admitted sensualist and emotional heart of the crew, Medical Officer Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy. McCoy continually needled Spock over his unemotional nature, his strangely colored green blood, and his distinctive appearance as the alien among humans. Spock usually responded in kind with a simply delivered but devastating remark that any observer could judge as victory in their mutual burn contests. Underneath the jibes and jabs was a foundation of deep respect, loyalty, and friendship, displayed most clearly in “Amok Time” when Spock invited McCoy, along with Kirk, to the very private Vulcan wedding ceremony.

What has fascinated me of late is watching younger people, usually those born in the early 90s, discover and react to the original series episodes and how they interpret Bones’ behavior toward Spock. They see it as inappropriate and borderline racist.

They aren’t entirely wrong.

The fact that Vulcans are fictional gives us some distance from the nature of Bones’ ribbing and cutting remarks, but the truth is that if he said similar things about real people and real races, we would be horrified. Denigrating comments about someone’s appearance or culture are something that is far less acceptable today than sixty years ago.

Growing up with these characters, we understood that there was and is a deep respect and love between them. We knowthat McCoy or Spock would lay down their lives to save the other, and that this surface tension is mere “play fighting.” It is not unlike comments my friends and I have made to each other over the years, but when it slides into observations based on biology, that crosses the line.

It gives me hope that the past is seen this way by the generations replacing us.

Tonight is the return of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for its third of five seasons. It is a shame that when this series completes its run, the episode total will be only 50 fewer than the ‘failed’ original series with its three seasons. It is a shame because this is the first Star Trek series in a very long time that, to me, has the voice and feel of the original series.

Credit: Paramount Pictures

Yes, this series, produced nearly six decades after the original, has a very different tone and sensibility from its progenitor. It ‘violates’ established lore and canon numerous times, such as repeated contact with the Gorn prior to Kirk’s encounter following the destruction of Cestus III, or the sexual activity of Vulcan’s outside of pon farr, the time of madness; but as I have written about in other posts these divergences have led to more complex characters and more interesting plots, so I am not irritated by them.

Sunday evening my sweetie-wife and I rewatched the season two finale, which, of course, following the modern trend established by Dallas decades ago, ended with something I truly despise: a cliffhanger. That said, I and thrilled and excited to be returning to Pike’s Enterprise. To re-engage with what has surprised me, my favorite character, Christine Chapel, and the rest of the stellar crew as they sail the stars seeking out strange new worlds.

The other day I was engaged in a discussion, not an argument mind you, on Twitter concerning Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and its violation of Star Trek’s established canon.

I myself am not bothered by violation of ‘canon’ if the result are more interesting character, deep stories, and compelling plotlines.

Paramount Studios/CBS Home Video

It is interesting to remember that Star Trek was not designed to have a rigid history with a lore and a canon well-defined. The original series is a product of 1960’s television and, in that day and age, television worked quite differently than it does today at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. A program was deemed successful if it ran for at least 5 seasons of 20 plus episodes. That produced enough episodes that the series could be ‘stripped,’ run on weekday afternoons in random order. Season five episodes might precede season one episodes so there were no continuing storylines, one episode rarely affected the events in another.

Star Trek, and here I am referring to the original run, the original cast feature films, presented a contradictory and inconsistent ‘canon’ for its future history. Here are some examples.

In The Conscience of the King when McCoy asks Spock to share a drink with him, Spock comments his father’s race was spared the dubious benefits of alcohol to which McCoy replied, “Now I know why you were conquered.”  Who conquered Vulcan? No one, this bit of history was discarded.

Pon Farr the mysterious and secretive collection of rituals and biological drives surrounding Vulcan reproduction. Which is it: the thing that ‘no outworlder may know, save for those few who have been involved’ or something Saavik can just casually explain to David Marcus? Additionally with this aspect of Vulcan biology is it something that Spock hoped he would be spared as he said in Amok Time or is it a predictable cycle of every seven years as mentioned in The Cloud Minders and again in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock?

In Space Seed it is established that in the late 20th century a cadre of scientists employing eugenics bred a number of humans with superior abilities creating dictators that sparked the Eugenics War. Eugenics is directed and controlled breeding in human to produce desired traits. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Chekov explains to his captain that Khan was the product of later 20th century ‘genetic engineering.’ Eugenics, which is breeding for traits, and genetic engineering, which is gene alteration for traits is not the same thing, however advances in science and the public’s understanding of science made the genetic engineering a much more likely scenario, so ‘canon’ changed to fit public perception.

Here’s a biggie. Is it Federation policy to leave planets and cultures to adhere to their own destinies without coercion or as in A Taste of Armageddon or do they have standing general orders for the genocide that any ship’s captain can employ?

My point with these examples is not to ridicule or mock the original series, which I adore, but to demonstrate that a rigid lore or canon has never been an essential element of Star Trek. Strange New Worlds does break accepted ‘canon’, but it does that to give us wonderfully complex and interesting characters and stories so in my book it’s a plus not a minus.

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Apple TV +

In May I posted that I had begun watching the Apple+ series Severance. It’s about a group of workers for the vast and powerful Lumon corporation who toil under a condition called ‘severance’ where their work-selves, called ‘innies’, exist with no knowledge or memory of their lives outside of work, called ‘outies’, and their ‘outies’ have no memory or knowledge of anything that their ‘innies’ experience.

At the time I wrote that post, I had watched two episodes, and now I have watched the entirety of seasons one and two. I had commented that the series, while stimulating my intellectual curiosity, hadn’t really grabbed me emotionally. While my emotional investment has grown, it has never reached the levels that it has with other genre programs. I remember dreading the ending of Andor because some of my favorite characters are never mentioned in the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and therefore would likely end up dead by the end of Andor. Severance is fascinating and the characters have grown on me, but I think this division of their nature, central and essential to the show, is also creating a barrier to full engagement.

That said, I do not regret watching and have thoroughly enjoyed the ride that is Severance. The show’s creative team is also doing a bang-up job handling what is in essence a mystery show. The first season ended with a massive revelation for the viewers and the characters that created a cliffhanger, which I despise. I watched season two dreading what sort of cliffhanger they would craft for this ending.

And they did not.

Oh, they certainly did not wrap up all the various storylines and threads. There are a ton of things to propel the show into a third season, but there was also resolution to the reveal from the first season, some clear explanation of some of the strange and mysterious work that the corporation commissioned from the severed, along with expansion of the world and the characters. Instead of another stupid cliffhanger, they properly teased the next phase of the story without making it feel as if they were never going to resolve the issues already raised.

Well done.