Not long ago, two people I follow on Twitter were talking about Star Trek.

The first was, based on my knowledge of the tweeter and the context of the here and now, I see as (most likely) a comical remark about the nature of our current culture of politics and how distrustful we are of foreign powers¹. The reply was less clear. It seems pretty obvious that, in the context of the Star Trek universe, the Federation is a peaceful organization. The only wars we’ve seen them take part in have been defensive, and they establish political and economic ties with neighbouring civilizations, including former enemies.

The only two rationales I can see for that second tweet are 1) that he agrees with Matt Yglesias that the Federation is not to be trusted and he misspoke intending to say it is absurd that they insist on claiming to be a peaceful organization; 2) he believes that an organization as large and powerful as the Federation should be a non-peaceful organization, perhaps expanding and annexing nearby planets and civilizations by force. The former is ridiculous when you look at the canon of Star Trek, which clearly shows the Federation as a benevolent force. The latter is ridiculous for a few different reasons.

Arguing for any nation/organization to be aggressive and possessive toward non-members is very odd to me. I’d thought the days of moral superiority, Manifest Destiny, or American Exceptionalism — all the sorts of ideas that lead to thinking a people are above another in some fundamental way — were gone but I can reluctantly accept that some people still linger on some of those thoughts. The even odder thing is that we’re applying 20th century precepts to a fictional 24th century organization, created by a man trying to construct a futuristic utopia. The political realities of today probably won’t apply three hundred years from now, and they definitely won’t apply to the fictional, preconceived-as-peaceful, time of Star Trek.

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Footnotes

1. It’s entirely possible he is genuinely positing that the Federation doesn’t deserve to be trusted, but if that’s the case, this post remains relevant. [↩]

I tried to keep this one short, but it’s still touching on 900 words. The gist, though, is that I liked it, but I was hoping for more.

Quick plot summary: Boyd drugged Echo/Caroline so she wouldn’t be able to tell everyone that he was Rossum’s founder. Then they went straight to Tucson and got arrested by Rossum goons. Boyd ‘broke out’ with Topher and led him to the lab where they were building the remote imprinting device. It wasn’t working and Topher fixed it, at which point Boyd reveals that as part of his plan and reveals he’s Rossum’s founder. Ballard and Mellie went off to destroy Rossum’s supercomputer and as they were doing it Boyd forced DeWitt to activate Mellie’s sleeper mode. Ballard managed to get Mellie to ignore her assassin orders but not for long so she killed herself. Boyd holds Ballard hostage to stop Echo from killing him, but she shoots Ballard in the leg to get him out of the way. She gets into a tussle with Boyd and when Boyd gets the upper hand, Topher appears from behind and Dollifies Boyd with the remote imprinting device he fixed earlier. Echo tells the Doll Boyd to wear a vest of C4 and carry a grenade into Rossum’s supercomputer and pull the pin. They destroy the supercomputer, Topher has the only working prototype of the remote imprinting device and Rossum’s two founders appear to be dead. The world is saved. Cut to ten years later, the world is in turmoil, Ballard and Echo are fighting their way through the streets of LA, now an apocalyptic battleground.

As all of that was happening, Anthony and Priya headed to Tucson to help out and they did, and Dr Saunders is now a new version of Clyde, wears a suit and is still outrageously hot.

OK, so let’s talk about Boyd’s master vision. Years ago he saw Clyde’s tech, presumably before anyone else since it was pretty wildly revolutionary, and decided that because it existed it would be used, abused, and eventually lead to the downfall of man through weaponized imprinting. So, rather than destroying the technology, he decided to neuter Clyde, take the technology far beyond Clyde’s initial goals, abuse it to become one of the most powerful men in the world so he could find a vaccine for imprinting, use that vaccine on the precious few he wanted to save, and then create the apocalypse himself so that he and his followers could be the few sane people in a world of madmen.

I guess it works, but I think it would have made more sense if Boyd didn’t think he was being the good guy. He’s fomenting an apocalypse, he developed and distributed the technology he’s supposedly trying to stop. He’s not the good guy. Buffy villains always knew they were the villain, it’s what made them interesting. The Mayor of Sunnydale is the best example out there of an affable villain, and that seems like a better mold to make Boyd from. Nonetheless, it worked well enough. The one thing I particularly like about villain-Boyd was his dislike of Ballard, since Boyd and Ballard apparently have the same fundamental belief — that the technology will be abused if it exists — though one of them is obviously thinking bigger and the ways they react to that fundamental belief are diametrically opposed.

The ending was also interesting but at the same time uninteresting. Either the technology got reinvented and the world still ended, someone else took over at Rossum and finished the job, or Boyd and/or Clyde had other copies of themselves, along with the schematics for the remote imprinting device, and continued their work until they brought about the apocalypse. One of those things happened, and it might be fleshed out and explained in the series finale, but there’s a question of it really matters what particular finger pushed the button on the apocalypse. Besides, the promo for the finale made me think the show has something else planned.

And since we’re on the topic, I thought I’d pooh-pooh the finale as it is sold in that promo. It seems like they’re planning on having Topher invent a new magic that can restore people to their original personalities. And I can only assume also make imprinting either impossible or closer to the way Echo experiences it, thus making the tech mostly harmless. The world will still have collapsed into horror for ten years meaning that rebuilding the world as we know it is a long-term project unlikely to be finished in their life time. And it’s also just more magic. I know that the show is sci-fi, but inventing a new technology that fixes everything each time things get worse is not a good system. It’s what Voyager did for years and we all know how I feel about Voyager.

Still, I hold out hope that the finale will be better than that. And I guess we’ll know for sure in a couple weeks.

I said I was going to meticulously go through the entirety of Star Trek Voyager and describe the many ways the show went wrong (and the few ways it didn’t), and I’ve been taking notes as I go along. But a problem has come up.

Yesterday, I downloaded a few of the Babylon 5 movies and began downloading the series proper — I already own them on DVD but AVI files are less hassle most of the time and I don’t want to rip them myself — but once I had some downloaded I made a crucial mistake: I watched one.

And another. And another.

You see, Babylon 5 is one of the best television shows I’ve ever watched. And it is unequivocally the best science fiction I’ve ever seen. So once I watched one of the movies, I couldn’t stop. The story is too good, the characters too rich, the morals too strong. And in the meantime, Voyager was busy pumping out generic episodes with generic characters and little to no character development. So, quite frankly, I can’t stand to watch that shit with the beauty that is Babylon 5 fresh in my mind.

I still plan to write up a few subsequent posts about the first half of the first season — I originally planned to write only one post for this chunk of episodes, but there’s so much wrong in there I think it deserves more than one post (I’m still not sure though) — but I’m not going to continue on my torturous little mission. I might return to it at some point — there’s too much Voyager love out there for me to just let it stand — but, for now, I’m just going to enjoy Babylon 5 all over again.

A few months ago, when I wrote my critique of Captain Janeway, I wrote that “I could go on for much longer (I really really could) ranting and foaming at the mouth about all the things that Voyager did wrong” and I wasn’t kidding. In fact, I’ve decided that, in an effort to pass some time while still avoiding growing as a human being (cause who needs all that hassle?), I’m going to go through all of Star Trek: Voyager and describe all the things the show did wrong and how it could have done things better.

I don’t mean when I saw “how it could have done things better” that what I will describe is the best way to do those things. I’m not a genius or anything, and that’s exactly the point. I’m just a guy with a blog, who watches way too much TV, and I can still do better than the shit the Voyager team plopped out on a weekly basis. I’ve already watched a few episodes from the first season and I plan to start my write ups soon. And for the record, my posts won’t be unbridled hating; already, I’ve seen a few decent ideas that were merely horribly executed. Who knows, maybe there will even be a good episode in there every so often.

This review’s a short one, as promised, but mostly because I don’t have a lot to say about this episode. I liked it, but after last week’s powerhouse this one was bound to be deflationary.

First things first, Paul Ballard gets the shaft this week; he cooks Mellie/November some post-rape-slash-murder-attempt breakfast and then Mellie decides it’s over. After the brouhaha at the Dollhouse and Caroline’s old college, Mellie skips town, and Ballard tell her she knows where he is. So that relationship is apparently over. For now, at least. Which is sort of par for the course for Joss Whedon. And obviously, what Mellie experienced last episode was incredibly traumatic, but it still felt a little abrupt for me.

The rest of the story was interesting verging on cool, but it was all too cursory. The corporation behind the Dollhouse, is working on a memory drug, and one of the grad students they have developing it decided to go rogue and steal it to sell for billions. But he had a partner and he didn’t want to share. So before he took the drug and ran off, he dosed his partner-in-crime which led to a spread-by-touch craziness epidemic.

Because this drug in the wind is a huge deal to the Rossum Corporation, and they happen to own the Dollhouse, they get an army of Actives to play government agent on campus and clean up the mess while hunting down the vial of crazy juice. While all of this is happening, Echo is having another engagement with the motorcycle dude from the premiere, so she’s out of the loop. But when she sees the college on TV she leaves abruptly. She’s remembering flashes of her life before the Dollhouse.

Caroline was, apparently, a bit of a bitch. She dedicates all of her time to war protests and anti-animal testing crusading. So much so that, when she and her boyfriend break in to Rossum’s lab on campus and finds that they’re experimenting with human fetuses and mind control, she’s still most outraged by the doggie in the cage. That was a little much, and actually made Caroline less relatable to me. Regardless, it appears that this break-in is the event that led to Caroline’s enrollment in the five year “become a Doll and you live” program. So there’s one mythology mystery (mostly) answered.

When Caroline gets to the campus she’s taken in by the Doll agents, led by Victor, where she befriends the dude who is behind it all. She helps him break into the lab, where he plans to retrieve the vial so he can split town and sell it, with the memories or her previous break-in bubbling below the surface. He’s got a sad sack story about a momma with too many bills. Which is only relevant because at the end of the episode we see him being given the Dollhouse recruitment speech in exchange for them paying his mom. The cycle continues.

Along the way, Victor, Sierra, and November (AKA Mellie) all experience an unexpected side-effect of being dosed with the memory drug: they start remembering their most traumatic moments. Sierra remembers her rape by Hearn, November remembers Hearn’s attempted rape of her, and Victor seems to recall a eastern European war zone where he once worked. Whether this is before being an Active or not is unclear, but I’m sure it will be explored before the season is out. These traumatic memories fell flat for me as well. Mostly because the two that we remember are both so incredibly recent; the horror of those moments is still fresh in our minds, so it’s bizarre to experience them reliving it as something from a lifetime ago when it happened to them mere days ago. They also suffer no ill side effects from it, apparently. The drug makes them remember those things, then Topher cleans them out, which made the whole sequence feel empty to me.

And for the sake of comedy relief, Topher and DeWitt in the Dollhouse, and Dominic and Boyd on the campus all experience the effects of the drug and hilarity ensues. Topher is pantless, DeWitt jumps on a trampoline, Boyd laughs at his inability to control Echo, and Dominic is super super sorry for trying to burn Echo alive. It’s all really great, so I’ll leave those moments to be relished by the viewer on their own.

All of this isn’t to say that this episode wasn’t good. But the only parts that I really enjoyed, were the “Naked Time” moments where the buttoned up Dollhouse staff got a chance to let their freak flag fly. The rest felt subdued and simplistic to me. This was a solid episode, but one that just didn’t strike me as particularly amazing. I’m also writing this after only one viewing of the episode, whereas all my previous reviews were based on at least two viewings. So, when going back over the season after it’s all over, this may turn out to be a watershed moment for the series, but right now I’m just going to wait for the next episode and hope it’s better.

There was a lot of hype surrounding last night’s episode of Heroes, entitled “Cold Wars,” because it was all about HRG and the last time the show was well loved was the last HRG-centric episode they did, titled “Company Man,” way back in season one. So they tried to recapture season one (which wasn’t even that good in retrospect) and managed to create a really shoddy hour of TV. Do the writers even try anymore?

On the TWOP forums, some people will come out proclaiming that a certain episode of Lost was patently obvious and they saw it all coming. Most of the time, I’m astounded by that. “Nobody could’ve seen all the little details that came out during that episode coming!” But the bookends of this Heroes episode were obviously supposed to come as a shock and failed utterly to do so. And the only reason the little details that came out during the episode weren’t obvious was because I was still under the assumption the writers would try to make the characters actions make sense.

Instead we get an utterly pointless “reveal” that Mohinder received oblique references to the Guantanomutant Brigade’s plan via HRG a few weeks before all this happened (which doesn’t even make sense because Suresh got into HRG’s car to try to escape the commandos earlier this season); and Parkman decided to become really stupid, or at least further express his innate stupidity. I admit, I enjoyed the scene last week where Suresh, Parkman, and Peter took HRG away for nefariously good purposes, but when they continued with that story all we got were a couple lame references to torture and Parkman realising that if Daphne is alive he doesn’t need to be a dick. He still barely knows Daphne. And the life that he initially saw of them living in NYC raising Molly isn’t going to happen since Molly seemed to have disappeared at some point during this season. They still haven’t really given a reason for the appeal of that relationship. I think they wanted to imply that they’d become a long-lived relationship earlier this season with the household squabbles they had before the squad of mutant-ready commandos took them away, but we never saw any of the connective moments before that so it feels hollow to me.

And the torture stuff was even worse, because in the real world torture doesn’t even get accurate results. So Heroes attacks the technique of torturing people for information not because it’s useless and doesn’t even get you useful information, but because it hurts people. And obviously the intense staring that Parkman gave HRG is nothing compared to the psychological warfare that took place inside the torture chambers of the Bush administration. So they fail in two ways.

And for some reason they’re trying to redeem Nathan now, but here’s the thing: this volume started off with him giving the information on the heroes to President Worf. If he’d kept his mouth shut, he wouldn’t have needed to rein in the more extreme hardline members of his anti-hero task force. His intentions are bafflingly stupid.

Heroes failed to redeem itself. After last week’s episode, and the Heroes screed I wrote shortly afterward, I was close to quitting Heroes entirely — which is a pretty big deal given how long I’ve been watching Smallville, a show that peaked a long long time ago and was offensively bad for a few years there — and this episode has done nothing to shift me away from that stance. Naturally, I have to stick it out until at least the end of the season — i.e. Bryan Fuller’s return — but unless the show improves drastically in those last few episodes don’t expect me to still be watching when season four rolls around.

Dan Meth posted his Trilogy Meter and because I’m a pedant and a geek I thought I’d raise a little umbrage over a couple of points.

First off, a lot of these aren’t trilogies. Trilogies need to have a consistent narrative and at least some semblance of progressive story. If the next Batman movie isn’t by Christopher Nolan then those three movies put together are not a trilogy; at least, not necessarily. Back to the Future is a trilogy because the story is consistent throughout and each movie sets up the next. Going back to my point about films changing hands mid-trilogy belying the term, the X-Men films switch from Bryan Singer to Brett Ratner for the final film. But, and here’s where it gets tricky, they are still a trilogy because the second one sets up the Dark Phoenix storyline that the third one carries out, however poorly.

I honestly can’t say much about Rambo, because I haven’t seen any of them, but at the same time my intuition regarding Rambo is that the films merely follow the same character. Are any three consecutive Bond films a trilogy simply because the same character heads the film? I give the Die Hard movies a pass because the third one involved Hans Gruber’s brother, but it was different from the previous two in almost every other way. Similarly, I have trouble considering the Indiana Jones movies a trilogy; but there is a tenuous theme that runs throughout the movies regarding the growth and development of Indiana Jones that qualifies them, but I flip-flop on this subject.

We tend to have this desire to collect films into sets of three, even when they’re not a set of three. Which brings me to my biggest question about this chart. Which trilogy does it mean when it rates Planet of the Apes? Does it mean the first three Planet of the Apes movies? Because I don’t see how you could interpret those as a cohesive trilogy. The second one ends with the world being incinerated by a doomsday bomb. The third, fourth, and fifth movies are a wholy different animal and are in fact a consistent trilogy with an overarching storyline threading through the three films.

Not everything is a trilogy, but our pattern matching monkey-brains still have a fascination with the number three. The same circumstances don’t make movies a part of a trilogy. The same actors don’t make a movie a part of a trilogy. The same characters don’t make a movie a part of a trilogy. A consistent theme or ongoing story does. I know I’m being finicky about this, but people throw the term trilogy around for any set of three films and they’re not all trilogies.

Lately, I’ve been staying up later and later every night. While 2 in the morning was an uncommon but not unprecedented bed time for my self over the last year, more recently it’s become the earliest I make it to bed. Because of this I’ve been catching bits and pieces of episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise. I’ve spoken previously about my distaste for Voyager and how overall even Enterprise was a better show. I’ve espoused this for quite some time both here and in one-on-one conversations with fellow Trekkie friends. Clearly, I have some retractions to make.

Enterprise is not a better show. Once Manny Coto took over the show and shifted the plots away from the Temporal Cold War nonsense, the show got markedly better. And at that time, it was probably better than most, if not all, of Voyager. But overall? Not even close.

In truth, I’ve never even seen the majority of Enterprise. I missed most of seasons two and three and what little I’ve seen of it hasn’t made me want to go back to it. Watching almost any episode of Voyager makes me change the channel just as fast but that’s due to the accumulation of ill will. It took seven years of consistent underperforming to get me to that point. Enterprise did it in just one.

But, like Voyager before it, Enterprise had a great premise. Not the specific premise they had, but rather their general idea. Telling the story of the first exploratory crews of Starfleet before the Federation had been created could have been spectacular. There had been stories of pre-Federation colonization from the very beginning of Star Trek, and to see the first official envoys head out into those waters was a tantalizing prospect. There are elements of this in Enterprise but too little of it. Their ship is a little too tip-top. NASA put a lot of work into the Apollo capsules but they were still barely capable hunks of metal.

Beyond this, the very first premise the show pushes on you is that for fifty years after Zephram Cochrane’s first foray into Warp speed, Earth barely ventured out again. Not because the people of the world didn’t suddenly and miraculously form a global government, but because some Vulcans said we weren’t ready.

The real problem is that they wanted to show the birth of the Federation while ignoring all the aspects of humanity that would have led to Earth being impactful enough to be at the head of a large Federation. Aside from our ability to work with each other and form consensuses — a quality the show rarely brings to light — we’re also a fairly egotistical and brutal species. We wouldn’t have listened to the Vulcans, and while we’d play nice with neighbouring species, we’d also be constantly working on attaining military dominance. It’s a show that came out a decade too early. The kind of rough and ragged sensibility behind Battlestar Galactica would have been ideal for a Star Trek prequel.

Brannon Braga and Rick Berman are ultimately at fault. They were involved in TNG and DS9 but there must have been some checks and balances further up the food chain on those shows because once they were the lead architects of Star Trek it went down the crapper. So I hereby rescind any and all endorsements of Star Trek: Enterprise I have ever offered. That show fucking sucked. And I pray I never stay up late enough to see it on my television again.

The cool thing to do now in TV and film is to go “dark.” That is, to take a character down a turbulent, depressing, and possibly disturbing path to bring greater depth to them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but there is something wrong with the idea that merely having “dark” stories brings character development or that it improves the quality of your stories. (There is also the implied assumption that to bring depth to your character you need to take this darker path; if you need an example of excellent character growth without the trappings of “dark” storytelling just watch The Office.)

Of course, dark stories come in different shapes and sizes. The Dark Knight was a much grimmer and darker look into both Batman and Joker’s psyches, and it delved into their interdependence on each other. That’s good dark. In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the characters endure a crushing war which drastically changed many of the characters and it explored the complex relationship between politics and religion and science. That’s good dark. Oldboy is the story of a man imprisoned for 15 years for reasons unknown who is given a week to discover why; Oldboy examines solitude, the influence others have on you, the monsters inside everyone, and many other disturbing and difficult questions. That is good dark.

But there’s a very bad trend, which seems most pronounced among sequels and spin-off shows, with a very different, and lazy, technique of telling darker stories: the deal with the devil. In Stargate Atlantis, the Atlantis expedition will on occasion tentatively join forces with the Wraith, the enemy du jour of the Pegasus Galaxy. On Star Trek Voyager, the crew reluctantly joins forces with the Borg to stop a common enemy more powerful than both.

The deal with the devil isn’t necessarily bad, but it needs to make sense. Team Atlantis wouldn’t join forces with the Wraith, or at least they shouldn’t because it doesn’t make sense; the Wraith are not a morally ambiguous group, they were designed to be essentially pure evil. The Atlantis team, and similarly the crew of Voyager, are bastions of sanctimonious self-righteousness and to have them coordinate with these evil groups reeks of story superseding character.

The point of dark stories is not to be cool. It’s not to be dangerous. It’s certainly not to tell dark stories. As always, it’s all about the characters. If your characters have inner demons requiring exploration of inseemly qualities, or they aren’t portrayed as a paragon of propriety, then their story can naturally progress toward those darker stories and possibly come back from it a stronger person and a richer character. But TV shows, and obviously movies as well, shouldn’t use it as a crutch to sustain their weak plots by sacrificing their characters, and viewers shouldn’t accept it.

What is /.? Beyond an excuse to sexually abuse your grammar checker, /. (slashdot) is a tech news site. With the recent boom of Web 2.0 many people have seen the future heading away from sites like slashdot where editors determine the content of the site and towards social websites with user generated content.

Of course, the arguments for and against Web 2.0 are numerous and varied. Pretending like I have the definitive answer is absurd, but I do find that historically the solution to most problems is found between the two extremes. Which is why slashdot’s “Fire Hose”  — which allows user generated content to be voted on by anyone but still requires editor’s to officially upgrade it to the front page — is the closest I’ve seen to the best of both worlds.

Of course, people have said for a few years now “go to Digg for the stories, go to slashdot for the comments” which is true for two reasons. Firstly, comments on Digg are frequently stupid, ignorant, racist, prejudiced, or all of these and many more. Their comments are so offensive at times that I no longer go to the site at all because I was simply disgusted by the comments I was seeing on a daily basis. Slashdot, on the other hand, tends to have more comments per story but because of their moderation technique you tend to get really smart or really funny stuff bubbling to the top. Granted, the know-it-alls on slashdot know that they know it all, but if you’re willing to suffer through a bit of conceit you’re almost guaranteed to learn something new or at the very least be given another perspective on something you already know.

Slashdot has an antiquated perception among the younger internet dwellers but I think that slashdot will survive at least as long as Digg and most likely outlive it because of its ability to grow into a new internet experience (social networking, et. al.) while retaining its original goals and experiences. But the real reason slashdot is still relevant is a simple one: quotes like this in random user’s signatures:

“Sisko > Picard > Kirk > Archer > null > Janeway”

Granted, I would have swapped Picard and Sisko but to see another person judge Janeway accurately warms the ventricles of my heart.

Star Trek Captains have a heavy weight to burden; they not only have to carry the responsibility of the welfare of their entire crew, but depending on the week they could be making first contact with a new species, infiltrating secret Cardassian strongholds, or bolstering security back at home. And with all of this, they have the constant awareness that they are being compared against the greats of the past with every action and decision. Luckily, ever since Captain Kathryn Janeway came back from the Delta Quadrant, every Star Fleet Captain has one less burden. Because they’ll never be as bad as Janeway.

I know that sounds like a pithy remark with nothing behind it, but it really isn’t. Every other Star Trek captain in the canon of Star Trek (which excludes the novels thankfully) is better than her. Even that douche that got Kirk stuck in the Nexus in Generations. Even that shitty I’m-so-goddamned-evil captain in the episode of Voyager where the other Starfleet ship lost in the Delta Quadrant shows up and much more worse for the wear.

Now you might think that her ship is in such good condition because she’s managed to avoid conflict and stayed out of interplanetary politics in this backwater ditch of a quadrant. If you thought that, clearly you’ve never seen the show.

Janeway didn’t survive because of her natural leading ability, like Kirk; Janeway didn’t survive because of her subtle politics and ability to empathize with opposing views, like Picard (among other reasons); and Janeway certainly didn’t survive because she had a deep spiritual connection with the plight of those around her and was destined to play a part in shaping the worlds and future before her. Janeway survived because every week, there was a new particle discovered, or existing one exploited for purposes completely unrelated to all previous known usages, that was exactly what her ship needed to get out of the Tight Jam of the Week.

And her ship wasn’t pristine because of the military strategies she employed in her frequent needless battles, but because the budget required exterior shots of the ship to be repeated in new episodes to make the CGI department cost-effective. Every single battle that Voyager went through in those seven years in the Delta Quandrant — always 75 years away from the Alpha Quadrant even though every season they would find at least one shortcut that shaved five to ten years off their journey — was more destructive than anything the Enterprise D suffered but every week the ship was in tip-top shape once again. Even Enterprise made some lame attempts to show that not everything can be repaired without a starbase and some dry dock time with their body-snatching space station episode. But Voyager doesn’t need things like ship repair and shore leave.

Admittedly, some of these complaints are about the show in general, but the fact is the captain is the show. People will prefer The Next Generation if they prefer Picard. But even ignoring the completely unrealistic journey that Voyager took, there are plenty of things wrong with Janeway.

She was a hypocrite of the highest degree. The very first episode of the show, Janeway barters with a tribal species known as the Kazon for some information. What does she barter with? Water, something she can generate unlimited supplies of through Alpha Quadrant replicator technology, but is incredibly rare on the dying desert planet on which those Kazon reside. Eventually Neelix, her tentative ally up until now, destroys all the water they brought just to fuck with the Kazon. Any other captain would have kicked that rat-faced little shit off their ship then and there. But she keeps him around because he knows his way around the Delta Quadrant. If she had seen the rest of the first season already, she would know how little Neelix actually knew about the area, but even without that foresight, trusting someone who acts so duplicitously is an idiotic move.

That’s not completely hypocritical, although her over-the-top reactions to lesser crimes later on in the series show that she has absolutely no memory of past actions; what’s truly mind-bogglingly hypocritical is when she next runs into the Kazon, instead of offering replicator technology and a sincere apology for the actions of one fool under her stead, she claims moral and intellectual superiority by telling the Kazon that they shouldn’t have fucked with Voyager and that she couldn’t give them replicators, or even replicate supplies for them, because it would violate the Prime Directive: noninterference in undeveloped civilizations.

The closest the Prime Directive ever got to noninterference with already space-faring species was when Picard refused to repair the rickety shuttles used by the two planets to deliver the “medicine” for a long-lived plague from one planet to another. Not only was that an exceptional situation where Picard used the Prime Directive to stick it to the planet of smug drug dealers, but it was also exceptional because their ships were actually inferior. The Kazon had warp drives, a massive interstellar pseudo-empire, and could hold their own in battle against virtually every adversary in their midst, Voyager included. That’s hardly an inferior species. No-one would begrudge her for making peace with the Kazon through a cultural and technological exchange.

But that’s all semantics and law interpretation, right? We know now that Janeway has a very strict interpretation of the Prime Directive, so everything’s good. Right? Well, it is until the Hirogen show up and beat the living snot out of Voyager (another instance of the reset button enacting miraculous repairs) and after two episodes of pointless World War 2 holodeck simulations with the Hirogens as the Nazis (why they wouldn’t chose to be the allies is left unclear) Janeway gives them holodeck technology and databases of pre-existing holodeck programs to give them a head start! But at least she’s consistent. Within an episode. (And even that isn’t a guarantee, I just don’t have the time to do more than vaguely recall the idiocy of this show.)

I recall when a lot of people would get angry at disliking Janeway because she was a female captain, so she’d have to be a little tougher. First of all, Star Trek is supposed to be a colour-blind, gender-blind, species-blind co-operative of planets, so why exactly would the sexism of our society be relevant to her? Second of all, she wasn’t a little tougher, and she wasn’t just being an assertive woman. Her character changed depending on the episode, for the sake of a plot. One episode she’d be a tough-as-nails take-no-prisoners hardass, and the next episode she’d be a soft demure lady-in-waiting who had fallen for the Brave Man of the Week. It’s not that people can’t be both those things, or that people can’t change and grow over time, it’s that these disparate aspects of her personality don’t complement each other and they don’t mesh together naturally.

When we see Picard get stabbed by a Nausicaan as a rebellious youth, it’s not a sudden jarring discontinuity in the character, it informs the character we’ve come to know and love. Picard was a complete character, as was Sisko, but Janeway is woefully outgunned here, both by the calibre of the acting but also by the writing and characterizations. Again it’s not that her characteristics couldn’t work together, or couldn’t work together in a female character; Voyager could have been the best Trek up until that time if done properly, but it wasn’t so we’re left with the piece of shit that unfortunately stinks up the rest of Star Trek canon.

I could go on for much longer (I really really could) ranting and foaming at the mouth about all the things that Voyager did wrong and why Janeway is at the heart of most of these problems, but I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t know of anyone who genuinely enjoys all or most of Star Trek — that is, not just Voyager — and doesn’t dislike Voyager, and Janeway herself, to a certain degree. And it’s not hard to see why. She was an egocentric and fickle, yet stubborn, captain who, despite years of efforts on the writers’ parts, never became a sympathetic or respected character.

It was Voyager and Janeway (and we’ll never forget the horror that was Seven of Nine) that degraded the image of Star Trek to the world. Deep Space Nine was never as popular as The Next Generation or Voyager, but it was consistently better than the latter and was at least as good as the former. With each new year Voyager got worse, and DS9 got better. But when Deep Space Nine left the airwaves, Voyager had to stand for all of Star Trek on its own. It took only a year, but without the credibility of Deep Space Nine to bolster the weaker Voyager, Star Trek was soon tarnished and that scar remained for Enterprise’s entire run. Enterprise didn’t do much to repair Trek’s image until its later years but it was still better than Voyager on its worst days.

I sometimes wonder what the landscape of Star Trek would be like right now if Voyager and to a lesser degree Enterprise hadn’t failed their progenitors so horribly. Would we still have a relaunch movie coming out next year? Or would Enterprise be closing off its seven year run with a Deep Space Nine movie coming out and a new series exploring the troubled lives of intergalactic starfleet explorers as they journey to our nearest neighbour galaxy. Who knows what wonders they would have found in that deep void. And what terrors.

For a long time I’ve considered Angel the superior show. Not because I thought that Buffy was bad but because I thought Angel was that good. But that being said, it’s been a long time since I really explored the reasons behind that decision. And one of the things that’s been racing through my mind as I’ve been flipping between Angel season two and Buffy season five is how damned amazing both of these shows are. With each new episode I start to think “man, this show really is the best of the two” but each show makes me think that!

Both have been so impressive and expressive with their core message. From the startling and terrifying realism of the shock of losing a loved one found in The Body to the nearly beatific monologue Angel gives at the end of Epiphany, both shows were just endlessly awesome through and through those years. One thing that I noticed this year was the much improved serialization on Buffy. In previous years, there was an overall season arc but each episode felt fairly self-contained but this year the stories spread out over the season in a much smoother manner. I still think that seasons two and three were their best stuff but the constantly intensifying story really made the season much more dramatic and addictive.

But as much as I like the more mature themes the show explores in the fifth season, I can’t help but remember the annoying early Dawn. I never loved the character, even in the final year of the show — probably because she was more and more frequently given the childish reactionary personality the annoying selfish half of Buffy handled in earlier seasons — but in the first half of this season she’s like Wesley Crusher on crack for annoying fans. It seems to me that they created the Dawn character to give Buffy someone to care for and not lead — a daughter of sorts — but I don’t think the show ever recovered from her introduction. For that season the story was beautiful and moving and I love the sacrifice that ends the season, but after that she returns to being an annoying teenager who gets in the way more than anything else. Like season four, season five has some fantastic episodes and some really moving moments, but there are aspects of it which still rub me the wrong way. Of course, it’s still a vast improvement over season four in virtually every way.

And yet, with all the greatness going on over on Buffy, Angel still wins out for me. The thing that really stands out about Angel to me is this: there is no Big Bad. When the season is over, the world doesn’t decide that evil is Just Not Worth It for the summer before a new unspeakable evil decides to give it a try. From the very first episode of Angel, Wolfram and Hart is shown as ambiguous at best with regards to morality. But they’re never the Big Bad. Evil simply persists in Angel’s world. Holland Manners says to Angel that if each and every human didn’t have a little tinge of evil in them, Wolfram and Hart couldn’t exist. This goes with the idea that Angel is in many ways about the banality of evil. Wolfram and Hart isn’t the source of the evil we see in our world, it survives because of it. When Angel finally understands this after a dark turn in his character he comes to a realization:

If there’s no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters then all that matters is what we do. ‘Cause that’s all there is. What we do. Now. Today. … All I want to do is help. I want to help because I don’t think people should suffer as they do, because if there’s no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.

That idea is the reason I think Angel is the better show. Angel comes to a realization that, no matter what you do, evil will persist but that doesn’t matter; what matters is what we do in the face of evil. This sentiment echoes something Angel says in the fourth season.

Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be. It’s harsh, and cruel, but that’s why there’s us. Champions. It doesn’t matter where we come from, or what we’ve done, or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world were as it should be. To show it what it can be.

And all of this comes back to the idea that there is no Big Bad. There’s life and there’s what you do with it. Which is a good philosophy whether you’re in our world or a supernatural one filled with demonic monsters hoping to bring ruination to all of humanity. Beyond the appealing worldview there is the fact that, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a great deal of stuff going on with the peripheral characters, Angel was much more of an ensemble show. It wasn’t until the later seasons that Buffy explored the lives of the Scooby Gang in any real depth; there were episodes like Dopplegangland and The Zeppo earlier but they dealt with the insecurities of the character and weren’t a part of the greater mythos of the show. On Angel, on the other hand, characters underwent strife and character growth from the beginning. Doyle’s heroic sacrifices stemmed from what was revealed about him and what had happened to him in earlier episodes. Cordelia’s ongoing struggle with her visions rarely took the spotlight but was persistent even when the plot of an episode was not reliant upon it. Wesley’s development from a bookish weakling to a warrior, though still bookish, and his ongoing distaste for father figures never felt forced and informed much of how we see Wesley’s actions. I did not even mention any of what has happened to Angel over the course of these two seasons; the show is so rich with well developed characters and subplots that it’s not necessary.

There is just so much that I love about Angel and Buffy as shows and as explorations of the human condition through inhuman subjects. Now that these seasons are over with I get to enjoy seasons six and three respectively. Buffy will pleasure me (in my dreams) with episodes like Once More, With Feeling and Tabula Rasa and finally let the fans who had yet to realise it see that Xander is what keeps the world from falling apart. Meanwhile, Angel’s actions from the last season will come back to haunt him in more ways than one and the consequences will reverberate throughout not only the characters but also their world for the rest of the series. This rocks way too hard.

As the episodes overlap I’m beginning to see why having a joint Buffy/Angel marathon has its flaws. When it comes to multi-part storylines, there’s that annoying gap between stories. That is most noticed when there’s a heavy cliffhanger, which I haven’t run into yet, but even with simple two parters it feels weird to take a break between halves to see a completely unrelated stories. But with the interleaved episodes you get to experience those great crossover episodes like when Buffy goes to LA and in the next Buffy episode she comes back frazzled.

I think that to properly handle this kind of stuff out you have two options: you can either have a Buffy marathon where you watch the Angel episodes that directly crossover with Buffy episodes or, if you really need to see all of Buffy and Angel, you should go through a detailed analysis of where Buffy and Angel episodes overlap and schedule accordingly. My best idea so far is to interleave Buffy and Angel episodes unless there is a multi-part story. So if there is a two parter in Sunnydale then you watch them directly after one another and then follow it up with two Angel episodes. This way, each series goes steadily forward but the ratcheted tension of multi-episode stories doesn’t get broken up by intervening series episodes.

There are some problems with that but it’s probably the best way to do it when dealing with a multiple TV shows. Of course, how many shows have interconnected shows running at the same time. I mean, you could have a Frasier Crane marathon, but that would entail watching all of Cheers and then all of Frasier; neither show aired at the same time. I’d wager that no other shows have this kind of problem — with the possible exception of the Star Trek shows, but they have completely separate storylines so you could easily watch them independent of each other — so this may be the last time I have to really think about this kind of problem.