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What A Strange, Long Trek It's Been
s a Star Trek fan since 1966, I would like to comment on the recent letters on the subject of the death of heroes, especially Captain James T.
Kirk.
For me, two things set Star Trek apart from other science fiction.
The first is Gene Roddenberry, the creator and the only one entitled to the fan inspired title "Great Bird of the Universe." The second is the fact that over the years, Star Trek writers, producers and fans have stayed true to a history of the future, in that they attempt to ensure that every story relates to the existing video history. I love the books, but heard Rick Berman say in response to book/story line conflicts, "I stand with Gene that only events on television and film are real."
So, as to Kirk. I had the great honor of hearing our Great Bird speak. He said that in the time-setting of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Kirk is dead. He did not say all crew members--he said Kirk. He is the creator and this was his decision. The film record backs this up. Thus the line spoken by Kirk to Spock and McCoy, "I couldn't die because you were with me. I've always known I will die alone."
Riker makes reference to Kirk's death in the Star Trek: The Next Generation Scotty episode and Spock hints at it in the two-part Romulan mission. In my heart, Kirk died on Enterprise B. It was there, alone with the successor of the ship he loved, that he died doing what he believed in--giving his life in service to others. I think the fans would have accepted this as a shocking, yet fitting death, if it had been given the film time--to sink in and to grieve--given when Spock died. The words were barely out of Scotty's mouth when the film flashed forward to the introduce the new crew. There was no time for the audience to share the emotional experience of the impact of Kirk's death as there was when Spock died.
I think this quick switch to Enterprise D was a Paramount plot to say,
"Out with the old and in with the new cheaper cast. And in with a new line of
toys." That merchandise attitude continues in all Next Generation
films with the horrible way of trying to make Picard into a "new" Kirk.
As if Kirk
would hesitate to save the universe "one more time" . It's Picard who has
made a career of standing on the bridge and ordering other people on away
missions! He's the one who on the television series never led a charge,
never risked all to save a crewmen--unless it was one of his teacher
pets, Data or Worf!
Picard spent seven years avoiding personal issues with his crew. Spock
had a relationship crisis and Kirk risked his life and career to help.
Riker poured
his heart out over a woman. Picard's response was, "Well that's your
concern, but it will hurt your career." And it is Picard who grabs
parts from dead crew members turned Borg without a second thought.
"He's better off dead," is Picard's reply when questioned about his
hard heart. Kirk constantly risked his life for everyone.
He grieved over the death of each and everyone. (Just one example--the death of the
crewman who was preparing to marry during a Classic episode.)
I've read some of Shatner's Kirk returns books, but I reject them. I think bringing him back over and over hurts the great and honorable death Gene
intended. It's a mockery of his life and of what it means to give your life in the service of others. Something, as Tasha said, all Star Fleet officers vow.
I remain true to the Great Bird's vision. I believe, if he had been alive at the time of Generations, he would have had Kirk die on Enterprise C, and just
a ghost image continue in the Nexus if needed for character or plot.
Regardless, for the millions of fans now and in the future, Kirk will always be a hero in life and in death.
Gloria Hoffner
Gloriah@phillynews.com
Which SF Came First?
n response to "Sincere Flattery Of Blake's 7" by Hannibal Gay, I have just one response. Blake's 7 was the BBC rip off of Star Trek. It is poetic justice that Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda is a rip-off of a rip-off of his own material. Now, just sit back, watch the show and quit complaining. What would you rather see? Gunsmoke?
Evan Moore
evanmoore@aol.com
She Loved Lucy
ust wanted to say good riddance in regards to Xena's cancellation. The show stopped being fun when it started to take itself too seriously. And had the show not strayed from its intended path, I bet the ratings would still been sufficient for it to live on for a couple of more seasons. But the writers seemed to have lost it when when Lucy Lawless became pregnant. From immaculate conceptions to the death of the Greek Gods and even the death of Joxer--then to have the main characters frozen in time 25 years --the show stopped being outrageous fun to just plain idiotic.
At least Kevin Sorbo knew when it was time for Hercules to retire.
Melody Arneil
arneil@idt.net
Sci-fi Is Never Debatable
would like to respond to "Lips Beat Presidency By A Pout" by Juan Suros. As the Chief Engineer of a radio group, I know that the regulation provided by the FCC is needed and they do a good job. However, I don't believe that the FCC should have any part in determining the content of radio or televison broadcasts.
One of the stations I work for is primarily a news station and it carries a great deal of political content, from debates to Presidential addresses to political commentary, which allows anyone in the listening area (5 states and 2 Canadian provinces) to hear that content--so why should every station carry it?
ABC, CBS, and PBS, not to mention several cable channels, carried coverage of the debates, meaning that anyone who had a TV couldn't help but see that the debates were on, and anyone who wanted to watch was free to.
Why then should every station carry them so that those people who don't want to watch have no choice? No one, not even Mr. Kennard, has brought up the fact that FOX is giving both Bush and Gore a half hour of uninterrupted, commercial free air time during prime time to talk about anything they want.
Should all the other networks be required to do the same thing?
Just because one man, one federal agency, or even a majority of people think everyone should watch the debates doesn't mean that everyone should be forced to. If we allow the government to dictate what people should watch once, they'll do it twice, then a third time, and eventually we won't have anything to watch but what they want us to see.
D. Taylor
dttay@hotmail.com
Cable Is The Answer
aybe 20 years ago the FCC's comments would have made sense.
Then only the big three networks were available for people to view. Now, with the growth of cable, anyone who wanted to watch the debate had that option, not
just on the major networks, but on the large number of cable news networks as well.
Also, I would like to point out that the FCC commissioner did not complain that MTV or SCI FI didn't carry the debate. Don't they have to follow the rules as FOX?
Patrick S. Baker
pbseller62@iwon.com
Praying For Prey
ans are working the net to get to the networks! Have a favorite show? Want to talk about it? Share your thoughts? Or maybe you have heard a rumor of it being cancelled? Well, today there are message boards and places on the internet to find all of the information you need. Sadly, some of them have become a common meeting place for fans to campaign and fight to save these shows that they have watched every week.
One example is the "Prey for Us" campaign, which is very active and has fans from 30 countries. Prey, a Warner Bros. production, aired on ABC in 1998. Prey, starring Adam Storke (Tom Daniels), Debra Messing (Dr.
Sloan Parker) and Vincent Ventresca (Dr. Ed Tate) told the story of another species that has evolved. It was cancelled after just one season, ending with a cliffhanger leaving Tom Daniels (Adam Storke) locked in a cage.
The SCI FI Channel started airing the reruns in January 2000. Prey fans were thrilled. The SCI FI Channel has received a thousand keys from fans all over the world to symbolize their desire to "get Tom out of that Cage". The most recent campaign strategy is to send the SCI FI Channel and Warner Bros. postcards to show the networks that Preyfans come from more than 30 countries. As of yet, there has been no response from the networks, which makes me think that they truly do not choose to take on the responsibility of their own actions.
Is it OK for a network to ask us, the viewers, to invest our time in watching their shows, only to find that they have no ending? Why are we, the viewers, then treated as though we have a problem? After all, isn't the show a product that they are selling to us? How many of us are willing to go out and buy a half of a book, movie, or better yet, a half a pair of shoes?
The networks need to act more responsibly. They are using us to make money, and when it doesn't suit them, they just cancel it. I am not asking anyone to lose money or to continue a show that is clearly not producing.
What I am asking is that they are ended properly, decently and treated with respect. After all, it is human instinct to "want to know what happened." The viewers and the cast deserve that much. Shows like Prey, The Pretender, Under Suspicion, The Client, Space: Above and Beyond, Good vs Evil (the list could go on and on) are all examples of badly treated series. Is it really too much to ask to have an ending? If it is, then why bother watching any of the new series? Is it worth it? Why should we, the fans, have to fight for what is only fair in the first place?
Karen Kates
kkates@enter.net
Just What The Doctor Ordered
hy has no one picked up the E. E. "Doc" Smith Lensmen series and made films of these adventures? While his language in these books may seem dated and quaint, his stories were awe-inspiring epics on a vast grand and complex universal scale, which still influences big-scale science fiction films to this day. These stories were written in the 1930s, but showed Smith had a vaulting imagination which conceived ideas that were decades ahead of his time and education. As a result of this imaginative drive, he gave us the Lensmen (precursor to the jedi knights concept) and their fantastic universe full of inertialess drives, free-roaming armored planets, and a host of great plots and villians--culminating in a final incredible battle to save the universe as we know it from some particuarly nasty visitors.
So lets fire up the Lensmen and see them ride the spaceways again!
Stephen Connell
spc13@hotmail.com
Character Is Everything
'll throw my two cents in for the killing characters conversation.
First of all, I must confess that I've not yet read Vector Prime, so I don't claim to know the details about Chewie's demise. But that is not the real issue. In "The Authorized Killing of Chewbacca", Stephen Rynerson argued that killing Chewie made the whole Star Wars storyline more believable. I agree with him on the principle that offing a main character does present a danger for all the characters, and that adds a distinct flavor to stories. But in this particular case, that didn't happen.
While I think Chewbacca in an indispensible part of the Star Wars mythos, I don't see him as a main character. There are only three main characters on the side of the angels, and they are Luke, Han and Leia.
Anyone else is just an add-on. Important ones without which the story just wouldn't be the same, yes, but not central to the story itself. Make no mistake, I like Chewie very much, but he didn't have any real impact besides being Han's sidekick.
And that reduces the impact of his death. Granted, from now on there's a genuine danger to all characters on Chewie's level or below, but all the really important heroes are still shielded. I still don't wonder whether Luke will survive his new ordeals, and Han and Leia are bound to be OK at the end, as always. And that lessens the justification of Chewbacca's death.
Killing of one of the central characters, that would have been something
to really talk about. But that is a path no creator wants to walk down.
Perhaps that is just as well, because changing the premise too much changes
the feeling, and if the feeling of a franchise changes too radically, it may
lose a lot of its fan base.
Killing Kirk on-screen was interesting, but not shocking.
Because during TNG, we knew that the days of the original
Enterprise were long gone, and all the old generation heroes
were either old or dead. We had accepted that they were no longer
performing heroic feats and thus were dead already, to some extent.
Getting a confirmation was just that, nothing more.
What does make an impact is something seen in Babylon 5.
Talia's personality got suddenly erased. Kosh died. Sinclair left this
time to become Valen in past. They all were sudden, all made a statement.
Nobody was truly safe. And that's how it should be, even if we consider
longtime heroes who have escaped the jaws of death a million times.
They all have to have a marginal risk of getting killed, even if it
never happens when all the stories are told.
Chewie's death didn't contribute to this philosophy and is thus rendered mostly a meaningless ploy for attention and profit for a declining line of franchise books.
So my plea is not "don't kill heroes," but rather, "if you kill the heroes, make it mean something, make it add something for the genre, don't do it just because it's fashionable."
Shimo Suntila
siilsu@utu.fi
A Fan Dreaming Of Blade Runner
ichael Heumann is correct in pointing out that Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner are very different animals.
However, having read the book and having seen the movie, I've got to say that this is a rare case where the movie outshines the book that it is based on. Would I trade Blade Runner for a more direct adaption of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Never.
Joel Jenkins
jenkins@silvernet.net
Another Take on Blake's 7
egarding Andromeda mirroring Blake's 7: it seems that it does have some resemblance, but the latter was far more intellectual. Almost every line from the first officer was a classic; he was irreverent, funny, caustic and armed with enlightened self-interest. His interactions with his colleagues were sharp and sardonic. This type of "higher level interaction" is mostly absent from American science fiction (Babylon 5 and the character of Londo being the exception). However, this interesting way of interacting extends, at least in part, to the other interactions in the Blake's 7 as well.
Now look at the interactions among the characters in Andromeda.
They are remarkably '90s, and there is nothing particularly interesting in the ways of their interactions. Contrast this with the relationship between Londo and Jakar, or Avon and Villa. (Remember when Avon tried to kill Villa so that he would survive?)
Moreover, the vocabulary that was used in Blake's 7 was much richer. Again, a rich vocabulary is nearly absent from American science fiction. (Contrast this to the vocabulary in Dr. Who).
Andromeda seems like it is watered down to meet the common denominator. For a parallel, just look to Roddenberry's other show, Earth: Final Conflict. E:FC, while having an intriguing premise, has stale, boring and mundane interactions. With few exceptions (certain episodes with Johnathan Doors, or when Sandoval's CVI malfunctions) this show is flat and not particularly well written. This is the path of Andromeda, completely unlike the ever unexpected twists and turns of Blake's 7.
Pete Boghossian
dboghossian@uswest.net
Freedom's Just Another Word For SF
think that the FCC is wrong in saying that Fox and NBC should have shown the debate instead of the baseball playoff game and Dark Angel. I watched Dark Angel because I am not a big baseball fan--I have not even watched a game of the World Series.
The first debate was carried on at least 16 different channels--ABC(2), CBS , C-Span, CNN, CNNH, PBS(2),CBN, Fox News Network, CNBC and MSNBC. If NBC and Fox should have carried the debates, then HBO, Showtime, TBS, USA, TNT, Cinemax, UPN, and WB should have had to show them also.
When the Goverment tells the TV companies that they have to show a program, then we are no longer free.
James Baker
jabaker401@yahoo.com
Death: The True Final Frontier
eroes are all well and good, but they should be allowed to die.
Patton once said that a soldier should die by the last bullet, in the last battle, in the last war, and that is what these heroes are doing. They die fighting to end injustice and, in the cases of both Chewbacca and Capt.
Kirk, they fought to end war. There is a true need to modernize shows, because you don't want to repeat the same story line, which is a big problem in today's science fiction. The killing off of characters is a way towards this end, and while painful, it is necessary.
Matthew Shealy
euro2@innova.net
Meat: It's What's For President
y thoughts on the FCC criticizing Fox for premiering Dark Angel the night of the debate: Dark Angel has better politics than either of the meat puppets on the debate podium that night. Yes, that's absurd, but the absurdity stems from the trivial differences between the candidates (Nader and Buchanan being excluded from the debate). At least one program that night challenged the idea that corporations, the police and military are our friends.
The argument that the "airwaves" are a public trust was only meaningful because broadcast technology meant that stations could interfere with each other and frequencies were limited. No such limitations exist in an era of satellite uplinks and fiber optic cable. What airwaves?
I know of only two other times the FCC has threatened to reconsider licensing at the network level: in the Nixon years and the early Reagan years, both times to intimidate network news reporting of foreign policy and dissent. This shows what kind of company this administration keeps on civil liberties.
I'm amused that a reactionary like Rupert Murdoch is running Dark Angel on his network, even if it is a co-optive sci-fi Young Rebels.
Jon Smuck
jonsmuck@hotmail.com
Bradbury Pointed The Way
n response to "Can There Be Too Many Mummies?": Yes indeed.
The only difference between most of the sci-fi movies of today and in years past is the special effects; they can now be done on computers, giving greater freedom to show more flash and make inanimate objects come to life.
There has been one science fiction author whose material
has been missing from the big screen (and with the exception
of the reruns on the SCI FI Channel on the "Summer of Sci-Fi"):
Ray Bradbury. I don't know if he has refused for most of his
material to become part of a movie production, but some of his
stories and novels would provide a fresh (and spectacular) look
at the world of science fiction. For example, there have been
time-travel stories before, where some things get changed in the
future due to actions in the relatively near past. But what has
demonstrated more impact to the future than "A Sound of Thunder,"
where one wrong step provided a very large shift in the world?
Now I'm sure someone could get on their graphics terminal and
create a convincing dinosaur to hunt, and a path to step on.
Even for a classic story like that.
David Meads
cmdruser@sybercom.net
