In Defense of Star Trek: The Next Generation: Characters

In the world of Star Trek bashing, certain criticisms have long since become cliche, and they include criticisms of the characterizations.

The crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation is no exception.

Of course, the show might be said to fare better than most entries in the franchise. Much better, in fact. Jean-Luc Picard, Worf and Data are on the whole very well-liked, enough so that they make the top ten lists for the whole Trek universe again and again, as at Ranker, IGN, the Mary Sue and Paste.

Still, other characters have been far less popular. They have their limits and failings, of course. But some draw much more than their fair share of flak, usually for reasons besides those normally given. Deanna Troi, for instance, seems to suffer somewhat because psychic powers are on the whole less fashionable in science fiction than they used to be, and more importantly, because telepathy, empathy and the like do not lend themselves well to depiction in visual media. That a lot of people dislike her mother Lwaxana likely hurts her all the more, their irritation with Lwaxana rubbing off on her by association. (And the gender politics that find their way into these debates don't help her much either.)

When people remember Katherine Pulaski, they usually seem to picture her prodding Data into the game of stratagema in "Peak Performance"--not necessarily the best thing she could have done in the situation, but she had the grace to admit it, and things did work out in the end. Besides, when I look back on the character, I also remember her in "Up the Long Ladder" telling a white lie to save Worf embarrassment, and then sharing a Klingon tea ceremony with him, a reminder that she had more likeable moments too. But they are the more apt to be overlooked because she had the problem of replacing a reasonably well-liked predecessor in Beverly Crusher, while Crusher's return made her presence seem that much more anomalous in hindsight.

And I suspect that a good many people hate Wesley Crusher (who often occupies the #1 spot on the "most hated" lists) because, underneath all the empty verbiage, as adults they find the idea of a kid out-smarting or upstaging adults threatening; because as parent and authority figure, they can't stand difficult children and adolescents on screen any more than they can in real life. (Indeed, while not written as super-kids, it seems noteworthy that TNG's Alexander Rozhenko and Deep Space Nine's Jake Sisko often make the lists of least well-liked characters, and that the same pattern is evident in other franchises. Wesley's Doctor Who counterpart Adric is equally likely to top that show's "most hated" list, while these same sentiments doubtless factored into the ire directed at the Annakin Skywalker-centered Star Wars prequel movies.)

However, the biggest criticism often seems to be not of individual characters, but of the cast as a whole--the group's dynamic. The characters were not without their baggage, or their rough edges, or their conflicts with themselves and each other. Still, on the whole it was a fairly harmonious group.

Dated, they say. Old-fashioned. Unrealistic.

But I have to admit that this happier dynamic does not seem unreasonable to me. This is, after all, the flagship of the United Federation of Planets' Star Fleet. It ought to operate fairly smoothly--and plausibly would operate more smoothly than any comparable effort today. If one takes the Federation as an example of the triumph of the "scientific world-view," a society which has embraced reason and humane values and succeeded in eliminating a great many of the evils we take for granted in the twenty-first century, then it stands to reason that we would be looking at a society which is on the whole saner than the one we now have, with this going for its individual members too--and the crew of a ship like the Enterprise representing the best it has. (It isn't as if Star Fleet fills its ships through a policy of impressment; or has people enlisting simply to escape hunger, and accepts them out of sheer hunger for personnel.)

Indeed, calling Star Trek unrealistic on these grounds is simply a failure to understand what it is they are looking at--a piece of science fiction imagining how, as the world changes, life changes along with it. In this case, it is change for the better--which seems to be exactly the problem many have with it.

This is, in part, a question of the fashions in our entertainment, all this being a contrast with what so much other television serves up as a matter of course: a reveling in the brutality and brutalization of rat race and marketplace, where every dialogue quickly turns into a pissing contest, or at least an occasion for colossal douche-baggery. A vision of every human heart as a heart of darkness, every mind as a basketcase of neuroses and delusions, every human being as consumed with getting ahead or evening the score or simply inflicting injury because they can; the sense that where two or three gather, there is a snake pit.

Those with a taste for such material don't want heroic starship captains, or explorations of humanity through devices like robots trying to figure humans out. (And we all know how they feel about having a character whose outstanding quality is her empathy aboard the bridge.)

What they want is soap opera, the meaner and nastier the better. They want the Enterprise to feel like the Galactica. Or King's Landing. Or the offices of Sterling Cooper. They want anti-heroes who do conniving and cruel things, brushed off with a "Whatever" or a "Get over it" or a "Welcome to the real world."

However, all but the most extreme misanthropes will acknowledge that what such fans take from those shows is hardly a complete or nuanced depiction of even our comparatively bleak era. And if the results can at times be viscerally gripping, it is far from being the sole basis for drama, or the best basis for it, or even a sure-fire basis for some minimal level of success. Indeed, however much the fashionable are ready to award automatic points for this sort of thing, it does not take any great skill on the part of a writer to give us a bunch of unlikeable characters tearing at each other--and it is not necessarily insightful or interesting or worthwhile, especially when everyone is doing this anyway.

In fact, I suspect that for those of us not addicted to what gets exalted as the "dark and gritty," it makes reruns of this edition of Trek a welcome respite from the rest of what passes for "drama."

H.G. Wells' The War in the Air

It can be said that the theme of the apocalyptic has been part of Wells' work since the beginning of his career--The Time Machine, and The War of the Worlds, for example, unambiguously so. However, in subsequent decades he increasingly presented apocalyptic visions arising in the very near future, as a result of more grounded, more literally true factors.

In 1907's The War in the Air, intensifying nationalist, militarist and imperialist behavior combine with the increasing power of military technology to wreck the world--a theme Wells was to revisit in works like The World Set Free (1914) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933). However, at this point he has not yet gone fully over to the "future history" approach of those later books, which submerge the narrative of any one character within the larger stream of events. Instead the invasion story element is blended with the realist satire of novels like The History of Mr. Polly (1910).

Running through it all is the story of Bert Smallways, the sort of character he was to sum up in Mr. Polly as "one of those ill-adjusted units that abound in a society that has failed to develop a collective intelligence and a collective will for order, commensurate with its complexities." A son of the lower middle class with a head full of notions as conventional as they are wrong-headed, "Smallways" embarks on a career of small-scale entrepreneurship that only points up its outmoded, futile quality, first in a bicycle repair shop, and later as a street performer. The hapless Smallways, through a series of blunders, finds himself ballooning to Germany, and landing in the staging area of the aerial component of a German air-sea attack directed against the American East coast, with the intent of forcing the U.S. to clear the way for its own imperial ambitions.

Smallways ends up the Germans' prisoner, from which position he becomes a witness to a great battle in the Atlantic in which German forces defeat the United States and go on to attack New York--just as Sino-Japanese forces attack the country's west coast. Very soon the whole world is at war, and while the Sino-Japanese alliance gets the better of the Western powers, their victory is ultimately a Pyrrhic one. The physical destruction caused by the fighting, and even more than that, the resulting chaos, opens the door to famine and pestilence which bring down modern civilization, and leave the remnants of humanity scrambling to survive in the ruins.

In that, there is the second great difference between The War in the Air and Wells' later treatments of the theme, the fact that the book closes with the post-apocalyptic image, rather than a portrait of a process of rebuilding and renewal creating a saner world. One may read this as a more pessimistic work, but one can also see it as a matter of his keeping this Smallways' story--the blend of which with momentous world events is surprisingly seamless.

Indeed, one could argue that it was the vision of larger events which ended up being relatively crude in this work. Certainly one might declare his early recognition of the destructiveness of aerial warfare as prophetic--but in hindsight it can also appear exaggerated, the kind of thinking that made air forces attempt to "bomb their way to victory" so many times in this past century, at such a high price in human life.

Additionally, the treatment of the geopolitics is uneven. As in his later work Wells was here a critic of nationalism, racism, imperialism and war. Yet, the images of the German attack on America, the Sino-Japanese attack on the West, can seem to play into the clichés of the invasion story genre (the "frightful Hun," the "Yellow Peril") so popular at the time, and which contributed to the toxic political atmosphere against which he was trying to fight. The satirist always risks appearing to promote what he is criticizing--and Wells was in this case less careful than he might have been, the book quite easily (mis)read as just another invasion story regaling us with spectacular techno-thriller bits as it warns us to keep on our guard against the villainous foreigner. Still, these are comparative quibbles next to the book's considerable imaginative and technical accomplishment.

Reading H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay

It is unsurprising that the early science fiction of H.G. Wells continues to be celebrated much more than any of his later work. The image of a working class degraded to Morlocks, massacring beautiful, hapless Elois in The Time Machine (1894); the note of despair at humanity's animality in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896); the viciousness and insanity of Griffin in The Invisible Man (1897); the annihilation of human civilization by a technologically superior species that is itself helpless before a humble microbe in War of the Worlds (1898); such things naturally appeal to the lovers of things "dark and gritty" who set the fashion for these times.

By contrast, Wells' penchant for satire; his daring to envision positive alternatives; his growing into the "scientific world-view"; do not appeal to them. And so his later science fiction, to say nothing of his realist fiction, have tended to be neglected or dismissed, with Tono-Bungay (1909) no exception.

In fairness, the book is not totally bereft of science fiction-al elements, the plot coming to hinge on radioactive "quap," and George Ponderovo's experiments with a flying machine. Still, on the whole the story of young George Ponderovo sticks with the quotidian, and quickly demonstrates that Wells does not need the devices of science fiction to work an effective satire of class and capitalism and colonialism, of social and sexual mores. Real life supplies all the absurdity he can want, starting with Bladesover itself--the estate on which George is born, and grows up, the son of a servant.

As George (and Herbert George) present it, the place is an anachronism, a piece of the seventeenth century enduring at the edge of the twentieth, where everyone had their assigned place in a hierarchy, with the country gentry on top, and their values and priorities predominant, and everyone confident or complacent that everything was so settled forever--oblivious as they are to the scientific-industrial, globalized, urbanized world with which it was not just tied up, but on which it was parasitic. And when George gets out of Bladesover, and sees something more of the country in which he lives, he finds that England is Bladesover writ large, muddling along similarly obvlivious to the larger world, and to contemporary reality.

Throughout, Wells paints his picture with broad strokes. Indeed, in the "Digression on Novels" in his later Experiment in Autobiography (one of the boldest, most challenging and most incisive pieces of literary theory I have ever encountered) Wells acknowledged, somewhat apologetically, that he tended toward caricature in his desire to make his point. However, there is caricature, and then there is caricature. Wells' caricatures here have a Dickensian vividness and incisiveness, married to a far stronger social vision than Dickens ever displayed, whether in the underworld of Nicodemus Frapp, or Teddy Ponderovo's meteoric rise in the world on the basis of a fraudulent patent medicine, and they contribute strongly to fulfilling Wells' quite traditional object of giving us an image of the world--of capital "L" Life--on the page.

To be sure, the book is not without its flaws. Again, as Wells noted in that "Digression," he was in this phase of his career more interested in the larger social scene than the individual personalities within it--and this too is the case here. When his attention shifts from the scene to the individuals, construed not as caricatures but as feeling human beings, the writing becomes less compelling. George's romances, for example, lost their interest when they shifted out of satire (for instance, his dealing with Marion's ideas of romance and sex) into personal drama, and the treatment of his marriage certainly ran overlong. When Wells gets away from his principal subject, England in his time, he also seems to be on less firm ground, as in the quap episode (though it is not without its points of interest, among them a parody of Joseph Conrad and his Heart of Darkness). And the conclusion is uneven. George's sailing down the Thames is a descriptive tour de force--but his doing so from aboard a destroyer seems an unnecessarily ambiguous note (a fact for which Mark Schorer took Wells to task in "Technique as Discovery"). All the same, the strengths of the book far outweigh its weaknesses, and remind one that literary history has not been altogether fair to this side of Wells' body of work.

Jean-Luc Picard, Renaissance Man

In the Star Trek universe, starship captains tend to be Renaissance Men.

Jean-Luc Picard is an obvious example. Not only does his job require him to be a good many different things (explorer, diplomat, soldier), at all of which he manages to excel; but in his own private life he also displays a wide variety of talents and interests (in literature, mathematics, archaeology, music).

The show manages this without making it all seem silly, or over-the-top, or grating, and this is much rarer than one might think. The truth is that it is very difficult to make overachievers believable and human, let alone likeable, with television usually failing at this. Far too often, we get not a depiction of intelligence or talent, but a crude caricature of it--because the writer doesn't understand what it is they are presenting to us (they write geniuses without being geniuses themselves, and so can't get into their heads; they write scientists without having ever cracked open a science book); because intelligence and talent are not the sorts of things a good writer, let alone a hack, can readily dramatize in five seconds of screen time. (Listening to a performance on a musical instrument, for example, how many of us can actually assess the technical skill that went into it?)

Besides, there is the way in which such characters are often used. Very often the overachiever is a wish-fulfillment figure, either the author's outsized fantasy of themselves, or their attempt to give some targeted audience such a fantasy; or they are an expression of an elitism as raging and mean-spirited as it is simplistic; or it is simply a writer's lame way of freeing themselves to stick their character in a multitude of different situations and somehow have them always come out on top, always have the solution, always be the hero.

The results tends to grate in all these cases.

With Picard, the show happily escaped that trap, and much as the writing on Star Trek gets a lot of flak, one ought not to underestimate that achievement.

Just how did they manage it?

Part of the secret would seem to lie in the writers' giving Picard limitations. While very capable in a great many areas, the writers never went over the top with it. We may see him working on a proof of Fermat's Theorem, for example--but not casually coming up with the proof in the middle of his conversation about this. He does not do everything by himself, and cannot, actually relying on his crew, rather than being the man who saves the day every time while everyone else is just along for the ride. (Sometimes it's Data who does it. Sometimes it's Wesley--for which the audience never forgives him. More likely it's a team effort.)

The other part of the secret would seem to be Picard's attitude toward his strengths and weaknesses. No one has yet called him bully or braggart. Respected and justifiably confident as he is, he never rubs his achievements in other people's faces. His talents and accomplishments are never cause for callousness, or for looking down on others--while his moral center and sense of honor seem virtually unshakable.

How many TV characters can you say that about today?

The End of Mad Men

Mad Men came to an end this year, and once again I found myself again thinking about how the show came to enjoy its high standing. I ended up checking out some of the comments critics offered after I lost interest in the whole thing.

Daniel Mendlesohn offered an incisive piece at the New York Review of Books, in which he found both its appeal to its audience, and its weakness as art, in its extreme superficiality. As he noted, while the show aspired to serious treatment of "social and historical “issues," it generally failed to explore "by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation," the "sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture" that it presumes to take up as themes. Instead what prevailed was implausible "melodrama."

Meanwhile, over at New Republic, Marc Tracy's later article extends the criticism with a discussion of the show's propensity for "Show, don't tell"--"Sally Draper scowling" simply not up to "the heavy work of Saying Something." Indeed, Tracy judges all this as the best "contemporary example . . . of what Dwight Macdonald called 'midcult,'" which Tracy, with a concision which compares favorably with Macdonald's writing, that by this he means "unexceptional art whose highbrow trappings convince consumers they are putting real cultural work into consuming it," all of which is "really empty calories that leave you feeling full," and so worse in its way than the frankly trifling.

Personally I don't care much for Macdonald, or for the labeling of things "midcult" or middlebrow. Historically it has not been a really meaningful concept, this problematic territory only opened up in the twentieth century by the Modernists putting a large part of culture out of reach of even the well-educated by equating "art" with material requiring the reader, viewer, listener to do a very great deal of "cultural work"--an idea that has, by fostering a worship of obscurity and obscurantism as the criterion of artistic accomplishment, and the idea that anything else must be just mass-marketed trash, deeply warped our cultural life.

Still, this is one case where the idea fits. The accent on surface, the evocation of serious subject matter without seriously doing anything with it, the stress on Show-don't-tell technique over content (lots of subtext, which is not really saying anything at all), is all tediously postmodernist--and its easy, nearly unquestioning embrace has been absolutely what Tracy describes. And while Mad Men may have come to an end, there is for the time being little sign of this attitude giving way to a greater appreciation of greater substance.