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warren ellis
BAD SIGNAL

It was rumoured the other day that US networklet UPN was considering
replacing STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE producer Rick Berman. WIth that in mind, I
decided to watch a few recent episodes, to see how bad it had gotten.
Longtime readers will know that I occasionally keep an eye on US genre TV
for professional reasons as well as for purposes of comedy. ENTERPRISE, in
particular, is something I've been interviewed about for American media.

In its second season, ENTERPRISE had the authentic chill of doom on it,
faithfully following the sausage-machine formula of lightly rewriting
episodes from previous Trek series in order to pleasure the extant Trekkie
audience that watches the show for comfort. By the end of the season, the
show was choking hard, and a revamp was in order.

The revamp took the form of the science-fictional trope of mapping a
present-day event onto future territory for distanced consideration. The
contemporary event was predictable. Towelheads From Beyond Space
perpetrate a terrorist attack on Earth -- I allow that there may have been
a kinky sense of humour in having it happen to Florida -- and Enterprise is
loaded up with Marines and dispatched to the foreign caves of The Delphic
Expanse (where nothing makes sense) to bomb the bastards.

This gives them an actual story arc for the third season. But structure
was not necessarily what the show needed.

Last time I covered ENTERPRISE, I noted that the addition of the Marines
cuts the actual crew off at the knees. Our Heroes, it says, aren't
actually hard enough to beat the Space Gooks alone. Not that we've seen
much of the Marines, it seems -- and the excellent Steven Culp, as Head
Marine Bloke, is both misused and underused. Patrick Stewart in a
wifebeater can kick the shit out of a dozen cyborg goths on his own, but
big Scott Bakula needs a bunch of jarheads to hold his hand.

STAR TREK: NEXT GENERATION was and is frequently laughable -- I mean,
beyond the basic anodyne nature of the thing, having the ship's therapist
sitting next to the captain on the bridge just cracks me up.

"Starfleet pigdog, God will roast your stomach in Hell."

"Captain, I detect... anger."

Poor Marina Sirtis. She can actually act, but you'd rarely know from
watching Star Trek. Star Trek, in general, is really not very good TV much
of the time, and criticising it sometimes seems beside the point. But in
its previous iterations, it had, y'know, actors. And actors who were
reasonably well-cast. Next Generation was rich with serious actors --
Patrick, Brent Spiner, Colm Meaney, LeVar Burton. Jonathan Frakes, I
think, missed his calling as a comedy actor, but I thought he did a
terrific job as a shamelessly, enjoyably showy director on the FIRST
CONTACT movie. Deep Space Nine had the brilliantly charming Avery Brooks,
Rene Auberjonois, Nana Visitor and Andrew Robinson. (And Alex Siddig from
that show did a blistering turn on the BBC's SPOOKS last year that should
have put him back on TV for good somewhere.)

VOYAGER, of course, had nothing and no-one, and alarm bells should have
gone off all over when they sat down to plan ENTERPRISE.

Scott Bakula is a gifted stage and screen actor, but over the years has
been revealed to have little range. He works a virtuous boyish innocence.
He sounds apologetic when he's angry. He's surrounded by polite
middle-class bots with punchable faces. The security officer has no chin.
The communications officer spends her time looking like she's going to
burst into tears at any moment. The pilot has all the soft half-formed
personality of a baby's foot. I'm sure all these actors could excel in
other parts in other shows, but ENTERPRISE remains perhaps the most
hideously miscast show to reach three seasons.

And removing the producer isn't going to cure that. If the scripts stink
and the actors don't work and not enough people are watching the show, then
it needs to be killed. Insisting on bulling through because Star Trek
Shows Last Seven Seasons is just shitty business. If it's old and it's
tired and it's not working, then it's time to clear the decks and come up
with something new.

Of course, TV's natural reaction is to dig up something old again.

I was given the opportunity to watch the recent BATTLESTAR GALACTICA TV
miniseries the other day. Its inaugural screening on America's Sci-Fi
Channel was very successful, the third most-watched programme they've ever
broadcast. Which is still only, you know, four and a half million people,
but I'm given to understand that for a niche cable channel that's pretty
damned good.

It doesn't quite have the courage of its convictions.

I watched it because I did a Bad Signal some months ago about the response
to the writer/producer Ronald Moore from hardcore fans of the original TV
series. Fifty-odd ageing fanatic followers of a bad 70s sci-fi TV show
with heavy Mormon overtones, given the opportunity to submit questions to
Moore for a website interview, subjected him to a bizarre inquisition
reminiscent of HUAC interrogations. These people purely radiated hatred
for him, based upon a smattering of earlier comments he made about his
intended approach to the work.

His intent was to jettison everything that made the original stupid --
which was quite a bit, as the original was barely passable as children's
television -- and build a realistic adult sf drama around what was left.
Lose the dumb names, remove idiocies like sound in space, get rid of the
Erich Von Daniken-via-Salt Lake City messianism, maintain a dramatic tone.

He didn't lose nearly enough to make it a serious piece of work.

The first obvious failure of courage is, in the opening scenes, the
presence of, guess what, sound in space. Which is oddly jarring since the
special effects are excellent. Taking their cue from things like the
effects work of FIREFLY, the camera zooms and shakes to capture vessels in
flight from unusual POVs, the result of Moore's conviction that the
spaceborne "camerawork" should reflect not an omniscent floating POV, but
actual thinking about where the "cameras" might be located. At the
conclusion of the opening scene, in fact, the "camera" is struck by flying
debris, and our POV spins off into space before fading into black. This is
what's going to be lifted by the copycats -- a return to long- and
middle-distance focus in visual sf to communicate scale. (The AUTHORITY
trick, if you like, borrowed from sf manga)

These very realistic images, occasionally inspired by such things as the
cameras mounted on Apollo spacecraft, rub hard against the goofiness of
Cylon fighters sounding like racing cars as they zoom past our field of
vision.

The original show starred some frankly awful actors. Lorne Greene,
heartdead from years of TV Westerns, had a good voice and little else, and
was surrounded by pleasant yet giftless presences like Dirk Benedict,
Richard Hatch, and The Crying Girl Whose Job Was To Tell The Crew That
Everyone Was Dead. If I wanted to be cruel, I'd note that in the new
version The Crying Girl is now black and gets to smack the tonsils clean
out of a wimpy political aide with her tongue.

Edward James Olmos, in Lorne Greene's role, is twice the actor Greene was.
Katee Sackhoff, as Kara Thrace (callsign "Starbuck"), plays against her
looks -- in repose, she is strikingly pretty, but she spends most of the
piece grinning and gurning -- with wild abandon, entirely prepared to make
her character an unpleasant living shitbomb blasting everyone around her
with shrapnel. Mary McDonnell, whom I haven't seen onscreen since
SNEAKERS, wears an emotional quirkiness close to the surface as the dying
education secretary promoted to President in the wake of human society
being destroyed by the bad old Cylon robot things. She, in particular,
suffers from frame-fucking -- hard cutting and dialogue overlapping shots,
denying her complete in-frame performances.

What Moore can't leave alone are the elements that made GALACTICA fantasy.
In the new version, everyone has English (or, at least, Terran) names --
but they all pray (a lot) to The Lords Of Kobol, and at the end they revive
the whole thing about Earth being a mythic "lost colony". So the
commander's name is William, but Earth was colonised at the same time as
their twelve worlds? I call bullshit on you. It's a logical hiccup, an
element of out-and-out fantasy in something that had been otherwise
rigorously imagined with strong internal logic. How hard would it have
been to have Earth as the original source of the twelve colonies, thereby
closing that loop? That gives you the Lords Of Kobol (dumb name) as the
leaders of the original colonies, perhaps in the mode of Roger Zelazny's
LORD OF LIGHT. I don't mean to rewrite the guy -- my point is that he
works hard to persuade a viewer to sit down and commit to the piece, and
then leaves a leg off the chair.

I think maybe as a writer working in a visual medium I watch these things
differently to someone looking to be entertained. I was bugged by every
officer on the ship having a different salute, for instance. One service,
one style of salute. Internal consistency is important in sf , because it
asks the viewer to process so much new information. (This is part of why
Star Trek is considered to be worthy of continual renewal -- the audience
is already educated in its world.) We need things to recognise, and we
need to be taken in. Show me eight different forms of salute in ten
minutes and I'll show you a bunch of bloody actors. And a writer-producer
that's thought hard, but sometimes not hard enough.

There's a lot of sound acting, some intelligent (and callous) setpieces,
and in general it's a lot better than it has any right to be. You find
yourself allowing for some occasional tacky and cheap-looking bits, because
it's trying very very hard. You just about forgive it for Boxey -- the
orphan kid from the original, cloned here, and, somehow, with the same
Seventies haircut.

It's worth watching. It puts most, if not all, recent sf tv in the shade.
It's not as charming as FIREFLY (too late) became, but it shows ENTERPRISE
up as the plain, thin thing it is. And if it's Trek alumnus Ron Moore who
illustrates, even with a revamp, that sf tv needs to grow up a bit, then
that seems kind of just to me.

-- W

(I think I'm working up to a piece on revamping in general.)

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What about Tim Russ, who was generally praised for being able to create second best Vulcan?

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