Gods and Monsters

Caught up to the Walking Dead's seventh episode this season.  The characters improved quite a lot, Rick lost his hat, story coverage was again given to the interesting people, and the less interesting people broke down in fairly charming ways.  Rick and his deputy both have obtuse moral compasses that point only in the direction of one plot rail or another, but the show has dramatically improved, and it was already pretty great.

But when you have no money in Portland, you get to watch a lot of things.  And it just so happens I'm also wending my way through the first episodes of the original Star Trek.

This was an odd choice for me.  It's been somewhat impossible to deny that Star Trek is, at least in many different parts, good.  Its overarching message, which can pretty much be equated to the beauty and triumph of exploring and confronting the unknown, is as powerful today as it was 40 years ago.   Still, it has that nagging little problem of 40 years of continuity that always serves as a rather ominous barrier to entry. And there's a pretty wide variety of other Star Treks to choose from, all of which seem to maintain an at least tenuous grasp on quality.

There's a mood you have to be in to even think of starting from the beginning - which I'm in. But under no circumstances can I make getting to the end even a remote priority. That way lies madness, madness and despair.  Nonetheless, I decided I couldn't go without seeing the pilot and... well, I enjoyed it.  And then I enjoyed the next couple of episodes too.  So I think I'll ride a while with Kirk and his crew, and see how long it takes me to move on.

Notes from episodes 1-4:

• The pilot with Captain Christopher Pike has the most ridiculous aliens ever.

Sup.

• These aliens spend the entire episode trying futilely to convince Pike to have sex with women.

• The new movie did a pretty good job of capturing a lot of the charming little elements from the first show, the ones that slowly introduce the characters:  Uhura openly flirting with Spock; Sulu and his swordsmanship and musketeering, Mccoy and Kirk's friendship, Spock openly crying over his human mother.  The plot writers clearly just scribbled down every endearing moment of character development they could find in the first season and threw them into a cohesive narrative, for which they actually deserve some mad props.  

• These are elements that the shows writers clearly hadn't really discovered just yet - Spock mentions his mother incorrectly as "a human ancestor" in the episode before he has a mental breakdown, a friend of 15 years carves a gravestone for Kirk but screws up his middle initial, and several characters don't really have any distinguishing personality traits until a few episodes in when they develop them so they can have personality problems.  The show in its infancy is just about Kirk, but it expands very quickly and within just a few episodes.

• Funnily enough, one of the only other character who gets an actually charming moment in the pilot is Uhura, who is SUCH A BADASS.  At this point in the shows life span, Star Trek deserves a pretty thorough gender critique but Uhura makes up pretty much all of the exceptions to their generally shitty portrayal of women.  See also.  She's my favorite character in the show right now, and feels more adventurous and clever than Kirk, who might as well have adventurous and clever in his job description.  

• There's some element to Star Trek at this point that involves ship captains getting into fist fights and tearing their suits off with stunning regularity.

• Alien life is for pansies.  The challenges the Enterprise faces in the early days almost entirely consist of fighting omnipotent beings and acts of god.  Two episodes in a row, a human being develops psychic powers capable of tearing starships apart.  The things that Kirk faces are things he has no hope of defeating without reasoning with them, and he has to do that without sacrificing his own ideals, which are pretty straight-laced. Sometimes they're out to replace humanity entirely, and not entirely for the wrong reasons. It's an interesting dynamic, really, one that they clearly run with as Q becomes a part of TNG later on, and it forces some hard questions with skewed, but interesting answers.  

• In the fourth episode, Mr. Scott firmly insists that he cannot break the laws of physics, and then reverses time by three days so that the ships engine will boot up faster.

Even in its early, early days, Star Trek is surprisingly smart.  It doesn't have a budget, so it has to get by on the quality of ideas and discussion it generates, and I'd say it succeeds pretty well at it. Whether it passes or fails with me depends on to what level the show repeats itself, espousing the same ideals over and over again, or constantly asks new questions and (preferably) leaves them unanswered.  It's that part of the show, that venue for discussion and new avenues of thought, that really appeals to me.

Because.  You know.  Neeeeeeeerd.