Review links and writerly gossip
Sep. 3rd, 2018 10:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakSo, about those reviews I've been browsing through.
Do by and large not like, and thus do not link: Zach at the AV Club, who seems to regard the very existence of Deanna Troi (and Guinan, and to a lesser degree Beverly Crusher) as a personal offense to his Star Trek enjoyment. And I don't mean criticism like "Troi and Crusher being given caretaker jobs - Counselor and Doctor respectively - reflects conventional gender thinking", I mean endless diatribes about how he hates her voice, how useless she is, how bland Beverly is, how Guinan is nothing but mystical jumbo etc. etc. etc. Ugh. The only female characters he seems to like are the warrior women types like Tasha Yar and Ro Laren.
Aside: just like "Wesley saves the ship all the time" is one of those "everyone knows..." things not actually validated by canon, "Troi does nothing but say obvious things like 'I sense he's upset" and show cleavage" is rubbish as well. Again, not that you can't complain about, say, it taking six seasons until Deanna gets a standard uniform, or the sheer number of times she's goes through metaphorical rape by possession. (Cally on Blake 7 can relate, I'm sure. It's not that possession plots aren't done to male telepaths at all - a very recent Marvel example on tv comes to mind - , but if you're a female telepath or in Troi's case empath on a genre show or movie you can bet it will happen to you, and more than once.) But TNG might surprise you in terms of Bechdel Test passing when it comes to Deanna Troi. When in the episode The Emissary K'eyhlar comes on board, she and Deanna immediately hit it off. You know what they don't talk about? K'eyhlar's blatantly obvious UST with Worf, or Worf at all. You know what they do talk about? Being half human, half Klingon (K'eyhlar) and Betazoid (Troi) respectively, and how being from two different cultures affects them. When Deanna temporarily loses her empathic abilities in The Loss, you know whom she talks about re: her feelings? Riker. With whom does she talk about re: her job? Guinan. And speaking of her job: one thing that I've always thought was good world building was that we do get to see Troi active in it in episodes which are about other characters altogether, in snippets, not just in episodes where it's a main plot point. (For example, her conversation with Picard early in Family, or at the very end of Chains of Command II.)
Do like, with caveats: Keith de Candido, who did complete rewatchs for TNG,DS9 and TOS. (No Voyager or Enterprise.) Has a "fond, but not uncritically so" attitude towards most Trek that makes the reviews usually interesting and worth reading. And of course he has his favourites (Worf and Kira in their respective shows), but then, we all do.
Do like, also with caveats: Darren at TheMOvieBlog, who writes incredibly detailed reviews with a lot of background info drawn from interviews and books. He did all of DS9 (his clear favourite), TNG until the start of s4, Voyager completely until and including s4 and then intermittendly, and TOS completely. What I find most appealing is that his negative reviews manage to critisize without devolving into bashing (i.e. attacks on how that actor/character sucks and should have been killed etc.), and, as mentioned, that the reviews offer a lot of backstory. Take this post on the Voyager episode SURVIVAL INSTINCTS, which also mentions to be an essay on Ron Moore's entire history on the Stark Trek franchise. Incidentally, the quotes re: his short and disastrous time on Voyager and break-up with long time writing partner Brannon Braga briefly made me wonder about Moore & Braga as the Lennon & McCartney of Star Trek, co-starring Rick Berman as Allen Klein, because, quoth Braga:
Ron came aboard as a writer and – God, I have a lot of regrets – he came aboard wanting the show to do all sorts of things. He wanted the show to have continuity. When the ship got fucked up, he wanted it to stay fucked up. For characters to have lasting consequences. He was really into that. He wanted to eradicate the so-called reset button, and that’s not something the studio was interested in, because this thing was a big seller in syndication. It wasn’t until season three of Enterprise that we were allowed to do serialisation, and that was only because the show needed some kind of boost to it, because it was flat. I made a big mistake by not supporting Ron in that decision or supporting Ron in general when he came aboard the show. That was a dark chapter for me and Ron and Rick. It was a bad scene.
Quoth Moore: I kept pushing, and out of that dynamic Brannon stopped wanting to have me in meetings and stopped wanting me to be around, and then the whole thing blew up once I found out that that they literally were having meetings where I wasn’t around and they were developing stories that I wasn’t part of, and the staff had been told not to tell me these things. I walked into Rick’s office and said, “I want out.” He was shocked and Brannon was shocked, and Brannon and I had it out. It was a hard, very emotional and painful scene. Brannon said, “You’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t know why it’s been like that, but I’d really like you to stay.” But I was just done.
Quoth Bryan Fuller, bringing in a new angle: Rick would taunt Brannon, saying things like, “I should have hired Ron to run Voyager instead of you.” So of course Brannon is going to be insecure and vulnerable. Brannon is a very complicated guy, but an amazing storyteller and a good guy ultimately. Both Ron and Brannon are good guys. But when you’re in a situation where you are feeling vulnerable and insecure and you’re having somebody essentially say I wish you were more like that guy, you’re going to resent that guy. And when that guy is told, “I wish Brannon was more like you,” then you’re going to feel like you should come in and you should be in a position where you’re exerting a certain sense of control over the story.
I had heard about the Braga/Moore breakup before, but not Berman trying to play the two out against each other. Speaking of Bryan Fuller, though, the article also includes his farewell present to Ron Moore, which turns out to have been something perfect for the Godfather of Klingon tales:
My last day was Thursday, July 1 and I spent most of it walking around the lot, saying good-bye to various members of the cast and crew, some of whom I’d worked with for a decade. It was a melancholy sort of task and I was eager to be done with it and get outta there. So when Bryan pulled me aside and said that my birthday gift had come in, my first reaction was to put him off for another day, but then I relented and he walked into my office with it hidden behind his back.
It was a bat’leth. A genuine, metal, leather-handled, sharp as all hell, bat’leth. Made by our prop department, which is as close as you can get to getting one from Kronos itself. I was touched and I laughed, but it wasn’t until I was on my way home that I realized what Bryan had really given me: an ending to my own Star Trek story. You see, ten years ago I walked onto the Paramount lot for the first time with a script under my arm and last week I walked off with a bat’leth. I left carrying my sword. There’s a certain poetry to that and it went a long way toward making me feel as if I’d left with my head high and my “honor” intact. Thank you, Bryan.
In conclusion: Star Trek writers = geeks to the end. These days, when Moore is mainly associated with BSG (both in the positive and negative sense) and Fuller with Hannibal, it's a neat reminder to where they came from. Qua'pla, fellows! Anyway, background stuff like this is why I do enjoy reading Darren's reviews the most, even if I don't get how you can write about Second Skin without doing an extensive compare and contrast to Face of the Enemy, but hey, nobody is perfect...
Do by and large not like, and thus do not link: Zach at the AV Club, who seems to regard the very existence of Deanna Troi (and Guinan, and to a lesser degree Beverly Crusher) as a personal offense to his Star Trek enjoyment. And I don't mean criticism like "Troi and Crusher being given caretaker jobs - Counselor and Doctor respectively - reflects conventional gender thinking", I mean endless diatribes about how he hates her voice, how useless she is, how bland Beverly is, how Guinan is nothing but mystical jumbo etc. etc. etc. Ugh. The only female characters he seems to like are the warrior women types like Tasha Yar and Ro Laren.
Aside: just like "Wesley saves the ship all the time" is one of those "everyone knows..." things not actually validated by canon, "Troi does nothing but say obvious things like 'I sense he's upset" and show cleavage" is rubbish as well. Again, not that you can't complain about, say, it taking six seasons until Deanna gets a standard uniform, or the sheer number of times she's goes through metaphorical rape by possession. (Cally on Blake 7 can relate, I'm sure. It's not that possession plots aren't done to male telepaths at all - a very recent Marvel example on tv comes to mind - , but if you're a female telepath or in Troi's case empath on a genre show or movie you can bet it will happen to you, and more than once.) But TNG might surprise you in terms of Bechdel Test passing when it comes to Deanna Troi. When in the episode The Emissary K'eyhlar comes on board, she and Deanna immediately hit it off. You know what they don't talk about? K'eyhlar's blatantly obvious UST with Worf, or Worf at all. You know what they do talk about? Being half human, half Klingon (K'eyhlar) and Betazoid (Troi) respectively, and how being from two different cultures affects them. When Deanna temporarily loses her empathic abilities in The Loss, you know whom she talks about re: her feelings? Riker. With whom does she talk about re: her job? Guinan. And speaking of her job: one thing that I've always thought was good world building was that we do get to see Troi active in it in episodes which are about other characters altogether, in snippets, not just in episodes where it's a main plot point. (For example, her conversation with Picard early in Family, or at the very end of Chains of Command II.)
Do like, with caveats: Keith de Candido, who did complete rewatchs for TNG,DS9 and TOS. (No Voyager or Enterprise.) Has a "fond, but not uncritically so" attitude towards most Trek that makes the reviews usually interesting and worth reading. And of course he has his favourites (Worf and Kira in their respective shows), but then, we all do.
Do like, also with caveats: Darren at TheMOvieBlog, who writes incredibly detailed reviews with a lot of background info drawn from interviews and books. He did all of DS9 (his clear favourite), TNG until the start of s4, Voyager completely until and including s4 and then intermittendly, and TOS completely. What I find most appealing is that his negative reviews manage to critisize without devolving into bashing (i.e. attacks on how that actor/character sucks and should have been killed etc.), and, as mentioned, that the reviews offer a lot of backstory. Take this post on the Voyager episode SURVIVAL INSTINCTS, which also mentions to be an essay on Ron Moore's entire history on the Stark Trek franchise. Incidentally, the quotes re: his short and disastrous time on Voyager and break-up with long time writing partner Brannon Braga briefly made me wonder about Moore & Braga as the Lennon & McCartney of Star Trek, co-starring Rick Berman as Allen Klein, because, quoth Braga:
Ron came aboard as a writer and – God, I have a lot of regrets – he came aboard wanting the show to do all sorts of things. He wanted the show to have continuity. When the ship got fucked up, he wanted it to stay fucked up. For characters to have lasting consequences. He was really into that. He wanted to eradicate the so-called reset button, and that’s not something the studio was interested in, because this thing was a big seller in syndication. It wasn’t until season three of Enterprise that we were allowed to do serialisation, and that was only because the show needed some kind of boost to it, because it was flat. I made a big mistake by not supporting Ron in that decision or supporting Ron in general when he came aboard the show. That was a dark chapter for me and Ron and Rick. It was a bad scene.
Quoth Moore: I kept pushing, and out of that dynamic Brannon stopped wanting to have me in meetings and stopped wanting me to be around, and then the whole thing blew up once I found out that that they literally were having meetings where I wasn’t around and they were developing stories that I wasn’t part of, and the staff had been told not to tell me these things. I walked into Rick’s office and said, “I want out.” He was shocked and Brannon was shocked, and Brannon and I had it out. It was a hard, very emotional and painful scene. Brannon said, “You’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t know why it’s been like that, but I’d really like you to stay.” But I was just done.
Quoth Bryan Fuller, bringing in a new angle: Rick would taunt Brannon, saying things like, “I should have hired Ron to run Voyager instead of you.” So of course Brannon is going to be insecure and vulnerable. Brannon is a very complicated guy, but an amazing storyteller and a good guy ultimately. Both Ron and Brannon are good guys. But when you’re in a situation where you are feeling vulnerable and insecure and you’re having somebody essentially say I wish you were more like that guy, you’re going to resent that guy. And when that guy is told, “I wish Brannon was more like you,” then you’re going to feel like you should come in and you should be in a position where you’re exerting a certain sense of control over the story.
I had heard about the Braga/Moore breakup before, but not Berman trying to play the two out against each other. Speaking of Bryan Fuller, though, the article also includes his farewell present to Ron Moore, which turns out to have been something perfect for the Godfather of Klingon tales:
My last day was Thursday, July 1 and I spent most of it walking around the lot, saying good-bye to various members of the cast and crew, some of whom I’d worked with for a decade. It was a melancholy sort of task and I was eager to be done with it and get outta there. So when Bryan pulled me aside and said that my birthday gift had come in, my first reaction was to put him off for another day, but then I relented and he walked into my office with it hidden behind his back.
It was a bat’leth. A genuine, metal, leather-handled, sharp as all hell, bat’leth. Made by our prop department, which is as close as you can get to getting one from Kronos itself. I was touched and I laughed, but it wasn’t until I was on my way home that I realized what Bryan had really given me: an ending to my own Star Trek story. You see, ten years ago I walked onto the Paramount lot for the first time with a script under my arm and last week I walked off with a bat’leth. I left carrying my sword. There’s a certain poetry to that and it went a long way toward making me feel as if I’d left with my head high and my “honor” intact. Thank you, Bryan.
In conclusion: Star Trek writers = geeks to the end. These days, when Moore is mainly associated with BSG (both in the positive and negative sense) and Fuller with Hannibal, it's a neat reminder to where they came from. Qua'pla, fellows! Anyway, background stuff like this is why I do enjoy reading Darren's reviews the most, even if I don't get how you can write about Second Skin without doing an extensive compare and contrast to Face of the Enemy, but hey, nobody is perfect...
