Up until today, the most cringe-worthy moment in sci-fi was Darth Vader in Revenge of the Sith learning that Padme was dead and screaming “NOOOOO!”  That was completely fucking eclipsed in this movie by Zachary Quinto parodying William Shatner’s iconic “KHAAAAAN!”

Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek walked a line between establishing its own universe (in an alternate reality – important to point out that it didn’t “overwrite” TOS, TNG, DS9, or VOY, just set them in another timeline) and paying homage to the franchise (i.e., Kirk’s Kobyashi Maru), whereas Into Darkness pretty much just said “Wrath of Khan was cool, let’s just rip that shit off.”

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Khan. As in Ricardo Montalban. Khan’s been coerced into working for Section 31 (nice hat tip to Deep Space Nine), led by our Big Bad: Admiral Marcus (aka Robocop aka Buckaroo Banzai). Marcus believes war with the Klingon Empire is inevitable, and utilizing information from Spock Prime (Leonard Nimoy), has located the SS Botany Bay, and unfrozen Khan Noonien Singh. Working under the fictional identity Commander John Harrison, Khan has helped develop secret weapons to use against the Klingons. Forcing Khan into this action are the 72 lives of his crew, frozen in cryo-tubes, until he engineers a plot to liberate all of them. Marcus is able to play Khan’s actions to his favor and maneuvers Kirk into an action which will provoke a war with the Klingons. To stop Marcus, Kirk and Khan team up and work together to defeat him. That done, they turn on each other, as the Enterprise, powerless, adrift, and blown to hell and back, begins falling into Earth’s atmosphere.  Kirk sacrifices himself to realign the Enterprise‘s engine and allow the ship to escape, while Khan pilots Marcus’s super-dreadnaught into a collision course with Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco (good bye, Alcatraz), and survives (?!?!) only to be run down by Spock so his magic blood (no kidding) can be harvested, injected into Kirk, and used to revive our dead captain.

Star Trek Into Darkness is no Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  It’s also really no The Search for Spock …

And I think what’s really strange is that until the sudden turn of Khan (in fairness, after Kirk betrayed him first), and until Kirk and Spock flip and replay that classic scene from The Wrath of Khan (TWOK), the movie had a chance to do something completely different.

Khan was introduced in an episode of the original Star Trek series. He was a genetically modified human from the Indian subcontinent who, along with his followers, was banished from Earth. Two hundred plus years later, Kirk & company found his drifting starship, and revived the crew. Khan, as is his wont, tried to take over the ship – and failed, because, y’know, Kirk always wins.  After being defeated, Khan learns that he and his people will be set down on an uninhabited world where Ceti Alpha V, where they will have the chance to build a civilization of their own.  Kirk and Khan don’t part as friends, exactly, but not as enemies either.

But then Ceti Alpha VI exploded, and Ceti Alpha V, a rich, gorgeous world, was shifted off its orbit and became a desert waste. Our good, virtuous Captain Kirk apparently never bothered to ask anyone to stop in periodically and check in on Khan’s group, so for fifteen years, they suffer, and they freeze, and they burn, and they die, until a Starfleet survey mission accidentally stumbled onto their settlement, permitting Khan, driven mad by the past years and the death of his wife (a former Starfleet officer who betrayed Kirk to help Khan), to commandeer the USS Reliant, pull Kirk into a trap, and disable the Enterprise, requiring Spock to expose himself to lethal levels of radiation before the ship can escape at warp speed.

And what I can’t help but think – is that here’s Khan, who was banished from Earth, and was sleeping peacefully, and then he’s roused against his will, and told if he doesn’t help Starfleet, they will murder his crew – his family. And I’m not saying he’s a nice guy, but what I am saying, is that instead of turning Khan into the bad guy, or at least, instead of turning him into the ultimate bad guy, they could have turned him into a hero of sorts. Kirk and Khan, defeating Marcus, and bringing down Section 31, and then Khan perhaps accepting exile to some distant world where he and his family could live in peace.

But, hey, why do that when you can just rip off Star Trek II, amiright?

Also: I don’t know if I can state how absolutely infuriating Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk is. The movie opens with Kirk & crew “freezing” a volcano to prevents its eruption and complete eradication of a native species.  For reasons unstated, instead of being in orbit, the Enterprise is actually under the ocean (Scotty’s not happy about the salt water). Meanwhile, of course, Spock has been inserted into the volcano to actually set off the “freeze bomb,” but Sulu can’t keep the shuttle there, and they can only beam Spock out if the Enterprise is directly overhead … so Kirk takes the Enterprise out of the ocean and saves Spock. The sequence ends with the native population throwing away their religious scrolls and drawing the Enterprise on the dirt with sticks. (This is bad).

Maybe I’m just a little too Jean-Luc Picard, but I don’t recall William Shatner’s Kirk as being quite so loose with the Prime Directive; I mean, sure, he broke it, but never willy-nilly. He never left all mention of it out of his captain’s log – an action which results in Pine’s Kirk being busted down to Enterprise first officer under Chris Pike. Before being named XO, Kirk is first told he’s actually being sent back to the Academy (he goes into the meeting thinking he’s hot shit, and is about to be assigned the first five-year mission), which is actually where he belongs: Pine’s Kirk is a hot headed idiot who continuously throughout both films demonstrates a need of the same seasoning Will Riker was complaining about in TNG.  And speaking of Picard, when Enterprise-D crewmembers in “Who Watches the Watchers” inadvertently revealed themselves to the native population of a pre-industrial civilization, causing those individuals to reject rationalism in favor of religion (with Picard as god), he was willing to be shot – and killed – with an arrow to illustrate that he was not a god and correct the damage to their civilization.

The first time we see Benedict Cumberbatch, my honest-to-god thought was, “in a reboot of Star Trek: The Next Generation, he would be the perfect Commander Data.” He is, without a doubt, the best part of this film. I’m not quite sure how Khan, a character of Indian descent, played by a Hispanic actor the first time through, is now white … ? Right?

One thing that struck me is that Star Trek Into Darkness ends very similarly to the 2009 film. We flash forward a year, and the Enterprise is about to launch on its five year mission. Kirk, claiming that Pike made him recite it when he first became captain, repeats the captain’s oath: “Space – the final frontier” etc …. which is weird, because the film puts forward that the notion of a five-year mission is a brand new concept to Starfleet. Then we cut to the bridge, Kirk walks in, kicks Sulu out of the captain’s chair, converses with Bones, Spock walks up … no, seriously, it’s actually a lot like the ending of the 2009 film.

The score seemed mostly to be a complete rehash of the 2009 film (I don’t know, I mean, I don’t, partly because the release of the score was delayed by two weeks), but brought in the Alexander Courage score towards the end.

There are a lot of interesting nuggets in the film. We find out it is set in 2255 (ish), so a full decade in advance of the original series – which is weird, because I’m pretty sure that means Chekov should be like, seriously, 10 years old.

After the Enterprise returns to Earth, the first time, Kirk is seen in bed with two lovely women … with tails. Not quite cat people, though, but interesting.

Nurse Christine Chapel is mentioned. She had a fling with Kirk and transferred to some distant outpost. Kirk doesn’t actually recollect who she is.

Speaking of Nurse Chapel, I don’t recall if there are any points of narration by the Enterprise‘s computer. Majel Barrett Roddenberry, of course, who played the role of Chapel in Star Trek, and who voiced the Enterprise computer, returned for Abrams’ film to once again voice the computer.  Big shoes to live up to.

McCoy has a tribble. Why would anyone allow a living tribble on a starship? How is this man qualified to be a ship’s medical officer. How is the Enterprise not covered in tribbles (they’re all female, they’re all born pregnant, and they multiply like rabbits in Australia)? I don’t know…

McCoy also apparently once performed an emergency birthing operation of some type on a female Gorn. Which is … ok.

There is an expanded open-atrium corridor set. I actually thought it was really cool.

Admiral Marcus has a model of the Enterprise NX-01 (from the prequel series Star Trek Enterprise) on his desk; that was cool to see.

There’s a shattered Klingon moon in orbit of Kronos – it’s never explicitly revealed to be Praxis (which blows up at the start of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country), but, I mean, how many shattered moons can Kronos have?!

We do see Klingons in this film — they have heavy leather tunics, armored masks, and fly little patrol craft that look like brutal, mini-Birds of Prey. The one Klingon we see has rings through his crest, some sort of slit on his nose, and weird eyes.

The first time we see the Enterprise, it’s under water. It’s a gorgeous reveal, but utterly and totally stupid and pointless, serving only to set up a ridiculous chain of events for, literally, no reason. But when the ship rises from the water? Amazing.

There’s another, equally amazing visual later in the film. The Enterprise is plunging out of control into the atmosphere and falls through the cloud layer. A few seconds later, engines restored, she thrusters up. Reminded me of the Titan cloud sequence from the earlier film.

Scotty’s little tiny buddy with the weird eyes is back. He doesn’t do much.

UPDATE: 5/19/2013

I found out the film was playing at the historic Avalon Theater on the DC side of Chevy Chase, and since I’ve been wanting to get up there for some time now, I used this as an excuse and went up Sunday morning for the matinee.

I liked the film a lot more my second time through: Kirk’s death and resurrection has, of course, less emotional impact than Spock’s in TWOK, but no less than either of Worf’s deaths in The Next Generation, and in both cases, he was brought back within moments. And while I’d loved to have seen Khan as a frenemy, what really continued to kill me was Quinto’s awful roar of “KHAAAAN!” Zach Quinto is literally a bad parody of William Shatner. Muse on that.

In other news, Star Trek Into Darkness is a superior film to the 2009 film. I’ve also preordered the blu ray from Amazon (and if you liked the film, and you liked this post, hey, feel free to preorder through this link so I can get a few pennies, m’kay?)

Here’s a clip:

These were some of my takeaways:

-Ron Moore had sold “The Bonding” and was out to lunch with the TNG writing staff.  He’d been pitching ideas but none others had been sold, when someone, I think Michael Pillar, said he wanted to do a show about a Romulan defector; Moore then claimed he was working on a script with that concept and came up with the outline on the spot, which was bought.

-Rene Echevarria’s friends were concerned with how many Star Trek TNG scripts he was writing and sending to Paramount; he agreed to stop, after he put down one last idea: it became “The Offspring.”

-Rene’s script for “The Offspring” was completely rewritten after “he screwed the pooch” on his own rewrite; he was sure he was done with professional writing (but grateful that Snodgrass & Pillar had left his name on the script), but Pillar called him a while later and said he felt bad about how things had gone, that he was sure Echevarria was a good writer, who’d just been under pressure from his first sale, and, hey, they had a story idea they couldn’t quite crack, would Rene want to take a shot? The crew rescues someone from a crashed ship, and it’s supposed to be a Beverly episode – what happens next?; Rene pitched his idea the next week, sold it, and wrote “Transfigurations.”

-Ira Steven Behr’s first day on the TNG writing staff, never having seen the show or even knowing who the characters were, was asked to do a rewrite of an act of “The Hunted”; he asked some friends on the staff for a quick into to Trek, but they were too busy to help, so he had to write really on the fly; when he turned it in, Pillar said it was excellent.  I think this explains the weird “dude breaks out of the transporter beam” bit…

-Behr’s original concept for “Captain’s Holiday” was that Picard would visit a holosuite on Risa that promised its users they would experience their worst fear – for Picard, that fear is that he would be promoted to Admiral and have to turn command of the Enterprise over to Riker. Everyone loved it … except for Gene Roddenberry, who killed the idea. Even then, Patrick Stewart (who was apparently worried Gene wanted to kill off the Picard character, as Gene really didn’t like Patrick) met with Behr and told him he would never do that script, then asked if he could please just fuck someone and maybe fight a little.  Please?

-Gene wanted Data to screw Ard’rian in “Ensigns of Command,” but Melinda Snodgrass couldn’t quite figure out how a computer would decide to have sex; whereas “Measure of a Man” was a study of Data as a sentient being, this episode was intended to show Data learning how to command people.

-Everyone had their own type of episodes they liked to write. Echevarria liked romance stories; Moore liked Klingon stuff (and Michael Dorn knew when Moore was writing a Klingon script because Moore would grow a “Worf beard”); Braga loved time travel.

-Both Braga and Moore expressed surprise that they worked so long and so hard on “Generations,” and put “All Good Things” together in just a few days, yet both prefer “AGT.”

-Every Thursday, each member of the writer’s staff had to listen to a story pitch from an outside writer. They hated it.

-Behr wanted Picard to say “Spock!” in “Sarek.” Michael Pillar said “Absolutely not.” A few weeks later, as that episode was being filmed, Behr, in a meeting with Pillar on something else, revisited the question; Pillar threw his arms up in defeat and agreed that Picard could say “Spock!”, but only once.

-Brent Spiner complained about having to work with Spot so much, that someone (I forget who) wrote a (fake) teaser for an episode that opened with Geordi walking into Data’s quarters to find Data installing a collar on Spot. “I am working on a translator for Spot. It will translate Spot’s meows,” Data said. Spot then looks at Geordi and says, “Hi Geordi.” About two minutes after the script was delivered to Spiner, he stormed out of his trailer in a fury.

-One of Naren Shankar’s buddies came up with a “technobabble” internet-gidgit, which the staff began to use.

-Ron Moore arrived late to a staff meeting with Jeri Taylor; the staff had been trying to break down a script. Taylor asked him what he thought, and Moore came up with a completely different idea that they went with – he’d never read the script they were supposed to discuss.  Naren Shankar mouthed “I hate you” from across the room at Moore, who shrugged it off.

-When working on DS9, Behr had to meet with Pillar over the script in which Vedek Bariel dies. Pillar said, no, no, but over the course of the conversation then admitted he was spending all his time on Voyager, and that Behr & the DS9 staff should do what they felt best for the character and that he (Pillar) would no longer have any notes for them.

-”Sins of the Father” were originally two different story ideas, possibly outside pitches the staff bought. In one, Worf’s brother came aboard the Enterprise; in the other, Worf’s dead father was accused of crimes. Moore had the idea to combine them into one story.

-”Yesterday’s Enterprise” was also originally two different stories: one about a past Enterprise coming into the future and the Ent-D’s crew morale debate about sending them back to an uncertain death; and the other about Sarek. (Seriously). Co-writer Eric Stillwell ran into Denise Crosby at a ST convention, and she mentioned she wanted to return to the show, and the concept for the episode went in a different direction.

-While re-writing “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” the writing staff had to be called in over a holiday (possibly Thanksgiving), and were PISSED, until Behr told them his idea: they would kill everyone on the cast off at the end of the episode. Everyone really liked this. Picard manning tactical at the end, obscured by smoke, was inspired by a movie called “Bataan.”

-Snodgrass wanted the crew to discover the holodeck was causing cancer so they could stop using it; to summarize her points – it would be interesting if everyone used it together, but they didn’t; if a piece of equipment routinely endangered the ship or the crew, anyone sane would rip it out.

-Behr once BEGGED Michael Pillar not to send out a memo titled “How to Write for TV: a basic primer.” Pillar did it anyway. The writing staff was exceptionally upset with Pillar; Melinda Snodgrass remembers calling her agent, and Hans Beimler & his writing partner, Richard Manning, were ripping out their hair.

-Michael Pillar never told anyone what he liked about their scripts.

-Almost all of the writers found later jobs in network television to be considerably less constricting than writing for Star Trek.

-The writers tried to avoid being on set because they would be accosted by the actors asking for more stuff to do; Patrick Stewart would always ask to “fuck more” and “fight more.”

R Street NW, Washington, DC

Did Fort Sumpter jump up and attack a bunch of innocent Confederate cannon balls flying around, hurting no one?  Of course not.

The Civil War is NOT “The War of Northern Aggression.” It’s not this for two reason. ONE, the South started the war. You don’t get to start a war and then claim the other side was aggressive. Well, no shit they were aggressive, you started a war, asshole. But you don’t see people in the North calling it “The War of Southern Aggression and Stupidity,” do you? TWO, going to war with the U.S. is fucking stupid: you will lose.* But do you see the Spanish, or the Mexicans, or the Germans, or the British, or the Japanese, or the Germans and British again, calling their wars with the U.S. “the War of American Aggression?” Of course not. You know why not? BECAUSE WAR IS NEVER FUCKING NOT AGGRESSIVE and really the only party here that has a right to complain is the Spanish since they didn’t ACTUALLY blow up the U.S.S. Maine. Anyway, in summary, please shut the fuck up with this stupid “War of Northern Aggression” shit. If you didn’t want an aggressive war, maybe you shouldn’t have started one.

(Oh: and the “stupid” comes from an agrarian society picking a fight with an industrialized one. Yeah, what a wonderful idea.)

Here’s what bothers me about the term “War of Northern Aggression:” it prevents a false reality in which the South was a blameless victim, and where life was some sort of paradise for people, provided they were white; what is glossed over is the horrible crimes committed by a plutocracy that victimized people of African descent who were held as slaves: captive, powerless, used as sex toys or murdered, worked to death, separated against their will from their native lands and their families.  The South, today, is for the most part a lovely place; but the South leading up the Civil War was EVIL.  And I’m sorry, but I’m not willing to buy this “but back then, everyone thought slavery was a-okay” argument. No, not everyone thought slavery was a-ok. That’s a stupid argument used as a blinder by people in modern society to approve of gross crimes against humanity committed by our forebearers. Go look up abolitionists, and John Brown in particular (American terrorist? American hero? Maybe both, but mostly the latter). Americans knew what was right, and what was wrong, even back then. What’s most disgusting is the people today who continue to romanticize a frankly evil society even without the blinders of yesteryear. The South was NOT Gone with the Wind, and while you’re welcome to disagree with me, frankly, I don’t give a damn. You’re still wrong.

*There are exceptions: namely, War in Vietnam, and War on: drugs, homeless, poverty, etc.

I was kind of meh about seeing the new Tom Cruise sci-fi film “Oblivion” until 1.) I became aware it was playing at the Uptown, and 2.) I read Kelly Torrance’s review in The Washington Examiner.

I don’t want to spoil anything — but the drones are pretty mean looking, awesome, and remind me of that floating head/blob thing from Big Trouble in Little China — but it was a lot of fun to see on the big screen.

Me neither, until a friend handed me the flyer she’d been given at the Metro.  AND THEY’VE APPARENTLY BEEN DOING THIS SINCE LIKE 2009.  WTF.  How’d I miss it?

Benefiting DC Public Schools, the store is located at 1030 17th Street NW (that’s on the west side of 17th between K & L Streets).

Last thing in the world I need is more books (have you seen the photos of my apartment?!), but I couldn’t resist; I’ve already been twice, and I’ve got plans to go twice more.  There’s a pretty good selection of books, and many are in good or like-new condition.

And if you’re looking for copies of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or Eat, Pray, Love, hooboy are you in the right place.

By the time I realized what had happened, the victim was looking mournfully at the train with its closed doors, and the perpetrator and his friends were already on the mezzanine; my head was starting to throb, the alcohol from an evening in Alexandria was still in my system, and I’d just witnessed an aborted snatch-and-grab, a young African-American kid in a white t-shirt waiting until the last second to bolt off the train, holding a smart phone, its owner in close pursuit shouting “POLICE! POLICE!”, and the kid throwing the phone over his shoulder, at which point the phone’s owner went for the phone and abandoned his chase.

STTNG-Fall