Yesterday's Enterprises

While doing 30 Days of Blogging in 2013, (something that I actually managed to do once or twice, unlike NaNoWriMo which I've managed to consistently fail at every year I've tried), one of the suggested topics was to share a memory of one of my parents. I didn't get to it during the month of blogging that year, but on Father's Day that June I wrote this entry about how my father spent hours making mostly military models throughout my childhood, and then described how he made me a set of three Star Trek Enterprises (the original, the Enterprise A, and the Enterprise D) before I went away to college, to take with me. I was pretty sure I still owned them, and ended with this speculation:

It's possible that somewhere in my parents' attic I have a shoebox full of Enterprise fragments, or I have the only models my father made that survived my childhood. Next time I go home, I may want to find out, but the odds are slim since I'm going in December and trips to the attic are weather-dependent.

I didn't make it into the attic in 2013 or 2014, even though I was in the house and the attic clearly isn't going anywhere, but this morning I decided I might as well go up while I remembered that I wanted to, and pulled down the steps.



As I mentioned in the previous entry, the attic isn't climate controlled. No air conditioning makes it up there, and there's very little heat. It's sort of warm right now in upstate New York (A balmy 34 degrees Fahrenheit! Practically summer!), so I figured long pants and a shirt would be warm enough to just climb up for a minute, search one box, and climb back down. My two boxes from college that are both still up there are blue and white striped lidded cardboard storage boxes (in college and after I was still into my all-encompassing "If it comes in blue, then I want it blue" phase, which lasted until about 1999, when living in an apartment painted entirely blue, every wall in every room floor to ceiling in this specific shade, cured me) with notecards describing the contents taped to each lid, and they should have been immediately right of the attic entrance.

They weren't.

Our attic used to be very neatly divided: my stuff at the far right, my brother's at the far left, and my parents' in the middle, closest to the entrance, because they would presumably need their stuff more often than we would need ours. In the intervening years, my stuff has slowly been shoved over by boxes placed in front of it, mostly Christmas items, and somehow my two blue and white boxes moved from the front of my stuff to the very back of my stuff, all the way over. Even worse, when I finally got to them after shimmying around Christmas boxes and moving a huge plastic bin of Legos (which was very heavy), I realized that my careful labelling boiled down to the same notation on both index cards: "Star Trek stuff".

21 year old me needs a stern lecturing about attention to detail.

I finally found the box of models in the second box, and carried it downstairs without opening it. If all the glue had dried and broken in the intervening time, I didn't want to try to find the pieces of these things after they rolled and bounced all over the floor of the attic. The box was not the sturdy shoebox I remembered, but all three ships were still wrapped in paper towels inside.

So, did they survive?

More or less, yes.

There's some discoloration on the top of them, from sitting in the sun on my desk for four years, which becomes really obvious when you turn them over:





If there actually was a stand, it wasn't in either box and is presumably gone, but the ships themselves are still in great shape, with paint, stickers, and glue intact, just like when Dad painted and glued them together in 1993:











Now we just have to get them back to Tennessee without breaking them.

"What's a warp core?"

During the four day Thanksgiving weekend, I had an unplanned television binge: BBC America did a "Star Trek: The Next Generation" marathon, and like a moth drifting lazily toward a bug zapper on the corner of the porch roof I was slowly drawn in and unable to turn the channel for hours. Since then, I've continued watching whenever I'm flipping channels and it happens to be on, and for some unknown reason it happens to be on a lot.

In viewing so many episodes in a row, and in discussion the show on Facebook, a thought has recently occurred to me:

For all the years that I have been a fan, I may have misjudged Counselor Troi.



No. You heard me. Like Baby's dad in "Dirty Dancing", when I'm wrong I say I'm wrong, so don't push it, lady.

I've written before about how Counselor Troi is kind of the most worthless crew member on the ship, but I've realized something in binge-watching: the showrunners did the character a horrible disservice by putting her in those all of those unprofessional, casual cleavage suits for six seasons instead of a uniform. I'm sure that guys watching liked it, but...

Here's what was wrong with all the bunny suits:

1) In a practical sense, they left Counselor Troi disadvantaged compared to the rest of the crew in potentially hostile situations. If an away team beamed down, everyone else had a belt, or loops on their pants, for holding things like phasers, tricorders, datapads, or whatever else they might need. If Counselor Troi beamed down with an away team, she had cleavage. No pockets, no loops, not even a purse.

2) In a visual sense, they left Counselor Troi professionally disadvantaged. Sure, casual clothes might make her more approachable as a counselor, but for bridge duty she should have had a uniform. Imagine, for a moment, that you are skyping with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. Everyone you see in the room is wearing a standard issue, regulation uniform, except for one sitting off to the side in a dress. Would you assume that person was a valued, key member of the leadership team, or would you assume they were a civilian? There's a reason why Ensign Ro looks so surprised that Counselor Troi is a lieutenant commander in "Disaster": It took the writers five seasons to get around to mentioning that she carried any military rank at all, much less one that designated her to be mid-level management.

3) All that cleavage made it even easier for the writers over the years to mold her into the helpless female/damsel in distress role. What kind of episodes and plotlines did Deanna get over the years? Mind raped repeatedly, kidnapped, imprisoned, forced into an arranged marriage, harassed about not being married and not having grandkids, unwanted alien pregnancy, henpecked by an overbearing mother, and let's not forget "Eye of the Beholder", where she spends an entire episode in a girl-on-girl catfight over Worf with some poor woman. Compare any Counselor Troi plotline with the ones that the other major female castmembers had and the difference is jarring. While Guinan was always written as kind of sexless, Dr. Pulaski, Dr. Crusher, Tasha Yar, Ensign Ro, Nurse Ogawa, and even Keiko O'Brien were always written as professionals first and females second. That's the reason why episodes like "Sub Rosa" and "Code of Honor" seem so out of character: they are. In most episodes you could change the gender of Dr. Crusher or Ensign Ro and only have to make minor adjustments to the plot. Counselor Troi is continuously infantalized and helpless, dependent on the men around her to protect her, which may explain why she was dead in almost every alternate future shown.

Realizing that the show creators contributed heavily to my negative impressions of Counselor Troi doesn't fully redeem the character. I still have three main problems with Counselor Troi.

1) I caught her in a lie. In the first season episode "The Battle" she tells the captain that she senses deception from the Ferengi, but in the third season episode "Menage a Trois" she tells Riker that Betazoids cannot sense any Ferengi emotions. I guess in the first season she was eager to prove her worth or something. (By the way, "Menage a Trois" is yet another example of #3 above. Not only are Deanna and her mom kidnapped, but they spend most of the episode naked after the Ferengi forbid them from wearing clothes. These kinds of things didn't happen to the other female characters, but they happened to Counselor Troi more than once.)

2) In seven seasons and multiple movies, Counselor Troi was shown at the helm, driving the ship, only one time. That time, in "Generations", she crashed the ship into a planet and destroyed it.

3) She doesn't know how the warp core works. For years I have referred to her as Counselor Deanna "What's a warp core?" Troi, on the grounds that she asked that question in "Disaster". Having finally rewatched "Disaster" tonight, I've discovered that, well...

Counselor Troi never actually said that.

But she said something equally stupid, related to the warp core. When Ro and O'Brien are explaining that the antimatter containment fields are collapsing, Counselor Troi foolishly asks what will happen then. Ensign Ro gives her the WTF? look that I remembered, and blurts out that the ship will blow up. She finds it incredible that Counselor Troi doesn't know this, and she's right to be annoyed about that. Counselor Troi, as a lieutenant commander, is a Starfleet graduate and as such is expected to have a basic working knowledge of how the engines (which are powered by a matter/antimatter reaction) work. We know, because it was a question that Wesley Crusher had to answer on the Starfleet Academy entrance exam in "Coming of Age". You can't even get into Starfleet without knowing how the engines work, but Counselor Troi has somehow managed to get in, graduate, and spend five seasons on the Enterprise without knowing it. In the entire run of the series, that may be the dumbest thing she ever said.

So, in closing, Counselor Troi may not be as awful as I've always said she was.

But she's still no Dr. Crusher.

For My Friend, Rod

A few weeks ago, my friend Rod sent me a couple of Counselor Troi action figures that he found in an antique store, because he knows of my overwhelming conviction that Counselor Troi was the most useless continuing character on "Star Trek". I've been trying to think of an appropriate way to say "thank you" (other than the thank you note I left on Facebook), and also he's been a little down lately, so I've been trying to think of a way to cheer him up.

Last night, inspiration struck, as it always eventually does.

Rod, I made you a movie:



I hope you enjoy it, and that it cheers you up.

"First Contact" is the only Next Gen movie you ever have to own

This weekend I was at Target, not because I needed anything but because Target is there and it makes me feel warm and loved inside even though they have Christmas decorations on sale already and that fills me with rage. There are ninety days and two other holidays (three if my birthday counts) between now and Christmas, and it wouldn't kill Target to let people enjoy all of Hallowthankmas season instead of just the Chriskwaanuka part.

Moving away from that rant for a moment, I was wandering the DVD section when I saw a boxed set of all four of the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" movies. For a second I was totally excited, even though I claim that I'm no longer a huge Trekkie, and I started looking it over, but then I remembered: As much as I love Star Trek, and the Next Generation, they only made one good movie and three bad ones. "First Contact: is the only movie in that boxed set worth owning, and here's why:

1) "Generations" is the movie that they had to make to go ahead and get the old Star Trek movies off the table. They had to give Captain Kirk a sendoff before anyone would accept the new movies, the same way they had to give the old series a sendoff. There's a reason why Admiral McCoy appears in the very first episode, after all. It's to wave goodbye.[1] You can practically see the Next Gen cast checking their watches and drumming their fingers impatiently on the pieces of scenery that Shatner isn't chewing while they wait for the movie to hurry up and end.

2) "First Contact" has a logical, credible enemy. In "Generations", the Enterprise is destroyed by Lursa and B'Etor, which is kind of the equivalent of the United States being invaded and conquered by WWII era Poland. Granted, they had the advantage of the Enterprise being incompetently captained at the time by Counselor Deanna "What's a warp core?" Troi [2], but still, this was almost as bad as the ship getting disabled by the Pakleds.

We'll skip right over "Insurrection"'s evil, face stretching aliens. That whole movie was like one overlong episode more than it was like a feature film, and the enemies there weren't a credible threat any more than the Duras sisters mentioned above. As for "Nemesis", yes, the Romulans are a credible threat, but the logic applied to using them in that movie was a little flawed. For one thing, where was Sela? If you're going after the Enterprise specifically, why would you not use the person in the Romulan empire who knows them best? The absence seemed glaring to Trek fans. [3] The other problem with the Romulans in that movie was the idiotic presence of a Picard clone that was, for inexplicable reasons, also bald. Picard wasn't born bald, but the movie crew must have decided that the viewers were too stupid to connect the clone to him without the shiny bald head, so they ignored that Picard had hair when he was younger, like we saw when he was de-aged in "Rascals" or in flashback in "Violations", and had a twenty year old bald clone wandering the Romulan ship instead.

"First Contact", on the other hand, has the Borg. They are the quintessential Next Gen enemies. Looking at all seven seasons, the dramatic climax of the series comes between the third and fourth seasons with "The Best of Both Worlds". Nothing before it or after it matched the drama and tension and flat out awesomeness of that two parter, and the events of that episode hung over the rest of the series whenever they encountered even a whiff of the Borg. Them showing up in "First Contact" established without doubt that this was a Next Gen movie, and in true classic movie fashion it managed to show us that everything we thought we knew about the Borg was wrong without undermining everything that came before. The appearance of the Borg Queen answered so many questions that were still hanging from the series, and she was so incredibly creepy and flat out evil that you couldn't help but love her and hate her all at once.

3) There is a logical reason for the crew to be reunited in "First Contact". Worf hadn't moved to "Deep Space Nine" yet in "Generations", so that movie doesn't really count here, but they didn't even bother explaining why he was around for "Insurrection". In "Nemesis", he forgot to go home after Riker and Troi's wedding and just started working on the Enterprise for a little while instead, as if anything like that would happen in any military in the world. While we know, as viewers, that the whole cast contractually had to be there, at least in "First Contact" they have a reasonable explanation for picking up Worf and letting him come on board for a while.

4) Everyone stays in character in "First Contact". Dr. Crusher violates the Prime Directive and the laws of time and space to bring Lilly, her patient, on board, as if this same thing didn't get her captured by terrorist in "The High Ground", didn't almost get the whole crew killed by an angry god in "Angel One", and didn't almost get her fired and drummed out of Starfleet in "I, Borg" or "Suspicions". She has a definite moral and ethical code and she sticks to it. Captain Picard's lingering scars and pain from his previous encounters with the Borg are almost palpable, and he doesn't randomly wander in Kirk's "find the female alien in charge and sleep with her" territory like he does in "Insurrection". [4] Data's striving to be human is key to the plot. Everyone hits their notes and it feels like the crew you know and love, and they're not forced to act like idiots just to satisfy the demands of an implausible plot like they are in "Nemesis", where they let B-9 freely wander the ship as if they never ran into Lore or Tasha Yar's evil sister Ishara and then act surprised when he turns out to be a tool of the Romulans.

4) Nobody gets mind-raped in "First Contact". This is kind of a nit pick, but is there a reason why Counselor Troi has to get mind-raped in "Nemesis" other than to continue painting the character as a damsel in distress and again undermining the little credibility she has? We know that Betazoid people have mental blocks to foil telepathic invasion, because Deanna's mom trots out a stream of them in "Dark Page", so why doesn't Deanna have any? Especially after getting mind-raped by the memory specialist in "Violations" or turning into a psychic waste receptacle in "Man of the People"? People who are physically assaulted get dogs, or take defense classes, or hire bodyguards, but Deanna Troi gets mentally assaulted about once a season and keeps hoping it doesn't happen again.

I'm not saying "First Contact" is totally without flaws, but out of the four movies in that boxed set, it's the only one worth watching more than once, unless you're confusing fandom with masochism.

Notes:

[1] And not just him. After McCoy, who is apprently 150 years old, shows up in "Encounter at Farpoint", Sarek shows up a couple of times, then Scotty, then Spock. They even revisted "The Trouble with Tribbles" in an episode of "Deep Space Nine".

[2] This is an actual quote, from "Disaster", and for me sums up the essence of Counselor Troi's character as a bimbo in a bunny suit who had no credibility. Sure, she was a counselor, but she was also a Starfleet officer, which means she went to Starfleet Academy like all the other cadets and had to take classes in the basic operation of a starship no matter what her specialy was. That's why Wesley had to answer that question about the matter/anti-matter ratio on the entrance exam in "Coming of Age". For Counselor Troi to show up on the bridge every day for six years and not know what the warp core was is kind of like being a flight attendant for six years and not realizing the plane runs on jet fuel. Michelle Forbes, playing Ensign Ro, deserved an Emmy for the two second, "WTF? Did you really just ask that?" look she shot at Counselor Troi when she blurted out that question.

[3] While this was not mentioned in the movie, it is entirely possible that Sela was breaking rocks in some Romulan prison or even executed following her massive failures in the invasion of Vulcan in "Reunification" and the Klingon Civil War in "Redemption". You only get so many chances in an imperial society, especially one where the Tal Shiar can have you ejected into space just for questioning their orders.

[4] Sleeping with female aliens (and the occasional genderless alien who reproduced by mutually fertilizing a husk) was Riker's job, not Picard's, even if there was that time that Picard sexually harassed the Chief of Stellar Cartography into transferring to another ship.

random photo roundup

Submitted for your approval, random photos that are completely unrelated to each other and boring anecdotes about them.

1) I took this one a while ago and forgot about it, but then it popped up on my screensaver the other night and I wondered why I'd never posted it:



At the time I was struck by how odd it is to see an entirely round shadow outside of an eclipse. Fortunately, it's just the Sunsphere, not the eternal chase of Masaka and Korgano.

2) Jeannie and I had to stop on the way to work this morning and pick up 26 dozen cookies for a program:



The cookies filled the cart.

3) I saw this tree on campus and liked the shape:



It was hard getting an angle without buildings.

saucers and plates

Given the long weekend and all my shows going into summer reruns, I’ve spent most of the weekend with “Deep Space Nine” boxed sets running in the background. I missed the last two seasons of the show when they originally aired, so it’s not only new but also good, as the writing seems especially strong in season six.

One complaint, though. The episode “Sacrifice of Angels” opens with a battle sequence with lots of Federation ships, including Galaxy class starships (which the “Next Generation” Enterprise was) flying into battle with their saucer sections in place. It’s a minor nitpick, but in the pilot for “Next Gen”, they made a big deal about how the saucer section could detach before battles and be left behind somewhere, so that the civilians weren’t endangered. I read later, though, that they only showed it once or twice because the effect was so expensive.

Was it too expensive to take the models apart before they shot the “Deep Space Nine” sequence, though? Like I said, nitpicky of me, but the fan in me looked at that shot and immediately grumbled. The shot of a burning, crashed ship sinking into the ocean behind the crew on the beach that opened the second episode of the season more than makes up for it, though. That looked awesome.

In other news, I had to throw my superhero plates away today, because I finally gave up on keeping them clean. I had three plastic plates with DC Comics superheroes on them that I got at the Warner Brother’s store back when they still had those, and somewhere along the way, sitting in the sink waiting to go into the dishwasher, they got some sort of grease on them.

It didn’t come off in the dishwasher.

I presoaked, then dish washered again, and still had a greasy residue.

Presoaked, hand washed, greasy residue. Presoaked, hand washed, dish washered, greasy residue. Presoaked, dish washered, hand washed, back into the dishwasher, greasy residue. Today, I finally gave up and decided to throw the plates away without even scraping the apparently indestructible greasy residue off of the plates for resale to some chemical firm. Since the WB Stores all closed, I can never have another set.

I guess I shouldn’t have gotten grease on them.