Star Trek Into Darkness: Too many dicks on the Enterprise.

[From my Star Trek Into Darkness article at The Daily Dot.]

In 2009’s Star Trek, JJ Abrams successfully made the effort to appeal to new viewers as well as dyed-in-the-wool Trekkies. This time round, he seems to be going further afield— and alienating the original fanbase entirely.

The publicity for Into Darkness has been solidly high school: Don’t worry—it may be Star Trek, but it’s not for nerds anymore! In an interview with Jon Stewart this week, Abrams made it very clear that he’d never liked the show as a kid, because it was “too philosophical.” “I stopped listening when you said you didn’t like Star Trek,” Stewart joked. “I saw your mouth moving, so I assume you apologized.”

It’s not actually necessary for a director to be a lifelong fan if they want to make a successful adaptation. In fact, JJ Abrams’ first Star Trek movie was proof of that. But it’s another thing for an adaption to leave most of the original show’s values in the dust, which is what Into Darkness seems to be doing. The dialogue is snappy, the action sequences are fun, and the characters seem real enough, but the heart and the brain are now gone.

In 1966, Star Trek broke new ground with its international crew of hopeful explorers, scientists, and adventurers. True, the show was full of heavy-handed Cold War metaphors and casual 1960s misogyny, but its central messages were obvious: Racism is bad. Give peace a chance. That kind of thing. Men and women, Russians and Americans, aliens and humans: all could work together on a more-or-less equal footing. For many viewers, Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura) was the first woman of color they’d seen playing anything other than a maid. Star Trek was pushing the envelope.

In 2013, not so much. [READ MORE]

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Interview with Michael Kaplan, costume designer of "Star Trek" (2009) and "Star Trek Into Darkness".

I interviewed the Star Trek Into Darkness costume designer for Wired.com! You can read it here.

Since Star Trek first made its way to the big screen, its costume design has veered away from the classic color-coded uniforms in favor of experiments with red double-breasted uniforms and unfortunate flesh-colored jumpsuits. But for the 2009 J.J Abrams Star Trek reboot and its recently released sequel, Into Darkness, costume designer Michael Kaplan helped move the sartorial stylings of the Enterprise crew forwards by looking backwards–at the trusty old red, blue, and gold. It’s a comfortingly familiar detail amongst Abrams’ trademark lens flare and glowing spaceship interiors: a conscious chromatic nod to the vintage style of the original costumes.

“I wanted the film based in the ‘60s,” Kaplan told Wired. “Not literally the ‘60s, but I wanted my thinking to be grounded in the concept of the original Star Trek, almost like an homage…. I had a lot of books in my library that I’d consult: [André] Courrèges [inventor of the mini-skirt], designers like that. To keep things rooted in that, even if when you look at the movie, you don’t say, ‘Hey, this is the early 1960s.’" [READ MORE]

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The evolution of the Star Trek uniform.

Just in time for the new Star Trek movie, I wrote this article for Empire Online! It follows the original series Starfleet uniform from the 1960s to the present day -- but don't worry, there aren't any spoilers for Into Darkness. You can expect a post about that sometime next week, after the US release date. :)

Even Star Trek’s most devoted fans wouldn’t dare claim that the original series was a high-budget operation. In among the cardboard sets, guest stars had to wear a selection of costumes that ran the gamut from the baffling (an evil baby in a silver lamé toga; girls in hot-pink fur bikinis) to the plain ugly. In one early episode, an entire alien species is kitted out in a vaguely familiar fabric that one later realises is also used for all the bedspreads on-board the Enterprise.

But in the original series Starfleet uniform, Star Trek struck costuming gold. [READ MORE]

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Star Trek: The Motion Picture -- A costume design nightmare.

Previous Star Trek posts. 

I came to Star Trek: The Motion Picture pre-warned. Kind of. It's famous for being The Worst Star Trek (a title for which there is already some stiff competition) and I'd already heard the various nicknames: The Motionless Picture, The Motion Sickness, etc. But even that didn't prepare me for what was in store. I mean, what were they even thinking?
In fact, watching The Motion Picture, it's pretty clear what they were thinking. They were thinking, "Let's make 2001: A Space Odyssey!" Except it turns out that if you give Gene Roddenberry a quadrillion dollars and too much creative leeway, what you actually end up with is a three-hour screensaver interspersed with shots of William Shatner emoting into the middle distance. Plus music. There are whole sequences where nothing happens except kaleidoscope space-travel effects and an impressive orchestral score for minutes at a time. Come to think of it, it's probably a great movie to watch while high. Thanks, 1979.

In all seriousness, this scene lasts for about 100 years in real time.

The many faults of this movie will surely be evident to anyone who watches it. It goes on for far too long. It's humourless. It lacks the emotional depth that made the original Star Trek series so compelling. The camera spends way too much time panning over William Shatner's increasingly luxuriant middle-aged arm hair. And then there's that whole situation going on with the costumes.

We need to talk about this.

Star Trek's original series ran on a budget of $3.75 per episode and regularly featured guest stars wearing bikinis made out of curtains and tinsel. Yet somehow its costumes still managed to look more plausible than the unsettling fleshbags we see in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Starfleet's oldschool "red shirt/blue shirt" uniforms are iconic for a reason. They're extremely simple by sci-fi costume standards (which is why the 2009 reboot movie barely had to update the uniform at all), and make it easy to differentiate between characters when they're running around. The Motion Picture's uniforms, on the other hand, are distractingly terrible in every regard. The palette runs from beige to pale blue -- a selection of colours usually restricted to hospital scrubs and control underwear. Worse still, they're actually less practical than the original series uniforms, which in 1979 were seen as frivolous and outdated.

The original intention of The Motion Picture's Starfleet uniforms was to depict a futuristic society where people wore egalitarian, recyclable, organic clothes. Sadly, the eventual result was the creation of some of the worst outfits in science-fiction history. While 1960s Star Trek revelled in tinfoil armour and various other accoutrements of classic sci-fi ridiculousness, its cartoonish atmosphere allowed for a certain suspension of disbelief that The Motion Picture never quite managed. Supposedly designed by the best minds in the galaxy, Starfleet's new uniform was a nightmare in every regard:

1. Physical impracticality. Catsuits with shoes attached to the legs are pointless and stupid. This is a prime example of what I think of as "idiot futurism". It's perfectly acceptable to design a stupid costume if it's for, like, Barbarella or Flash Gordon, but if you're trying to conceptualise a functional future society, then your costumes should make sense. If your cast is threatening to go on strike because they can't go to the bathroom without an assistant, then chances are your costumes aren't as great as you think they are. 
2. Visual impracticality. From the perspective of the viewer, the new uniforms were downright confusing. The colour-coded science/communications/command uniforms of the original series provided a useful visual shorthand as to the positions of each crewmember, while the new uniforms had a near-incomprehensible internal logic. In an attempt to make Starfleet seem less militaristic, everyone had the same three uniforms: the dress uniform (the belted tunic thing Shatner wears in the picture above), plus two more casual outfits, which were (maybe?) interchangeable. The end result was that everyone on the bridge was wearing different outfits, all of which looked terrible.
3. Eye-boggling hideousness. This is already a problem from the perspective of someone watching the movie, but it's also pretty terrible as a worldbuilding detail. If Starfleet is meant to be so utilitarian and clever, then the uniforms wouldn't be so goddamn ugly. 

There are so many contributing factors to the ugliness of the 1979 Starfleet uniforms that it's kind of miraculous. They're like the holy grail of bad fashion. In terms of colour, the problem is immediately obvious the first time you get distracted by a background extra who looks naked because they're wearing a skin-coloured body suit. Although of course, wearing flesh-tone clothes is already kind of an aesthetic disaster. For those of you who always feel guiltily puzzled when someone describes two colours as "clashing": it's similar to the Uncanny Valley. The closer two colours get to each other, the more uncomfortable they are to look at. This is doubly true for skin-tone clothes, because one of the colours that looks gross is you.

There is at least one scene in The Motion Picture where a male character ends up in an unfortunate moose-knuckle situation thanks to those flesh-coloured body suits. It's just not a good idea, is what I'm saying. The best type of uniform is one that's comfortable and practical enough that you can forget that you're wearing it, and it's difficult to forget about what you're wearing if you look really terrible in it. An argument could be made that 300 years in the future, people just don't care as much about appearances as we do in the 21st century, but this is plainly untrue because characters in The Motion Picture have a wide variety of hairstyles, makeup and jewellery. Anyhow, it's difficult to take your coworkers seriously if they're wearing beige catsuits that lovingly cling to every bra strap and roll of paunch, just like it's difficult to take Captain Kirk seriously when he's dressed like someone who works in a health spa onboard a luxury cruise liner:

The one breath of fresh air in this nightmare of taupe taupe onesies and weird Teletubbie belt-buckles is... Spock. Beautiful, beautiful Spock. When we first see him, he's on one of the most painted-on alien planet sets I've ever seen in a legitimate blockbuster movie. There's a giant glowing red foot statue that's probably meant to be made of volcanic rock but looks more like Lego, and a bunch of Vulcan notables wearing a selection of A+ robes. That's more like it.

Then once Spock inevitably decides to go back to the Enterprise, he's dressed in a cool hipster-goth cape and trousers. Not only would I happily wear this outfit myself, in real life, but it looks equally practical to the terrible Starfleet uniforms. Hell, take the poncho-cape off and he'll just be wearing a shirt and trousers, which is better than what Kirk and McCoy have to wear for 90% of the movie.

You can tell everyone on the bridge agrees with me, because they're all, "Holy shit! Someone wearing clothes that let him move around without getting a wedgie!" Spock is the fashion messiah. Which is kind of intriguing when you consider the fact that Vulcans are supposed to be ultra-rational and unconcerned with material things. I always found Vulcan fashion to be a particularly clever element of the visuals of Star Trek, because it's this blindingly obvious visual clue that Vulcans are nowhere near as logical as they claim. The intricacies of Vulcan style are completely in keeping with their love of tradition, ritual, and symbolism.

The weirdest thing about the costumes in Star Trek: The Motion Picture is that the same costume designer, Robert Fletcher, worked on the next three Star Trek films as well. In hindsight, this movie was an experiment that went embarrassingly wrong, and even the most intense Trekkies are hard-pressed to say much in its favour. I tend to assume that the costumes were another indicator of Gene Roddenberry going mad with power, and that Fletcher fared better when working with other directors.

Coming soon: The costumes of The Wrath of Khan.

Previous Star Trek posts.

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Star Trek Into Darkness teaser trailer theories.

If you thought my posts on The Avengers were in-depth, then gird your loins because Star Trek is gonna be 10,000x worse. Despite being raised in a household without access to television (yeah, I know, I'm making up for lost time now) I've always been a maximum Star Trek fan thanks to a combination of tie-in novels, and a mother who subscribed to xeroxed Bring Back Trek zines during her own childhood. So you could say that I'm kind of invested in this movie. 

This trailer really takes the name "teaser" to heart because it's so damn uninformative that the Star Trek corner of the internet is already self-cannibalising. WHAT IS HAPPENING? NOBODY KNOWS, BUT EVERYONE'S CAPSLOCK KEY SEEMS TO BE STUCK ANYWAY. To be honest, it would still inspire this type of reaction even if it was just a couple of shots of the Enterprise flying around and Kirk flossing his teeth. Unfortunately, we can't even analyse the style of the trailer for ~hidden meaning~ because it's clearly just following the same formula as the recent Avengers, Dark Knight Rises and Iron Man 3 trailers: vaguely apocalyptic danger, with the villain providing an ominous monologue in the background. The biggest question right now is Who Is Benedict Cumberbatch? There were already three popular theories knocking around -- Gary Mitchell, Sybok, and Khan -- but I think that all three can still be backed up by things we see in the trailer.
Gary Mitchell is my favourite because Khan's story has already been told, and since the first reboot movie was already very Vulcan-focused it seems less likely that we'd get an entire movie about Spock's renegade half-brother. Gary Mitchell is a relatively obscure character but could potentially be a very interesting villain thanks to the Original Series backstory of his Academy-era friendship with Kirk. The main thing counting in his favour, trailer-wise, is the presence of the woman pictured above (who also shows up wearing a blue science/medical Starfleet uniform).

Gary Mitchell and Dr Elizabeth Dehner.

She bears a strong resemblance to Dr Elizabeth Dehner, who appeared alongside Mitchell when they both gained god-like superpowers in the second Star Trek pilot episode, "Where No Man Has Gone Before". Of course, this woman could also be Janice Rand (unlikely, because Rand wears a red Command/Security uniform) or Nurse Chapel -- or indeed an entirely new character -- but her hairstyle is so similar to Dehner's that it can't possibly be unintentional, even if it's a red-herring.

Sybok doesn't have much going for him aside from the fact that Cumberbatch's voiceover is revenge-themed, and the film's subtitle is "Star Trek: Vengeance" in Russia. As a Vulcan he might well have reason to be angry at Starfleet for failing to save his home planet, which fits in with some things Cumberbatch has said about his character being more morally ambiguous than outright evil. However, I feel like "morally ambiguous outcast half-brother attacks earth" is really too similar to the Avengers plot to be a viable option in a major blockbuster only one year later? Particularly since they've hired another posh English actor with dyed-black hair to play the villain. There's also the detail that Cumberbatch doesn't have Vulcan features, but that doesn't necessarily negate him being a Vulcan since there are several instances in Star Trek canon where characters have plastic surgery to look like a different species.
Khan probably has the most trailer-related evidence, since in the Japanese version of the teaser there's a short clip mirroring the Kirk/Spock scene at the end of The Wrath Of Khan. But that scene is so iconic that I doubt they'd attempt to rereate it exactly, so this is probably some kind of homage. Also, Cumberbatch appears to have some kind of super-strength and is quite physically badass, which I think fits in slightly more with Khan's character -- even though Sybok has Vulcan strength and Gary Mitchell has telekinesis.
Personally, I think the costuming is a strong indication towards Khan, since several characters (including Kirk, Spock, and Uhura) wear a kind of semi-uniform of grungy black leather in the trailer. Obviously the "hey, check out my pecs" costume of traditional Khan fame couldn't really work in a modern movie because it's so utterly Barbarella, but the faintly grubby, post-apocalyptic theme of the leather outfits could well be inspired by that. If you look at the coat worn by Uhura in the picture below and compare it to Khan's costume from The Wrath Of Khan, I think there are definite similarities in the shape of the collar and shoulders. But whoever the villain turns out to be, I suspect that Kirk, Spock and Uhura will be dressing like Cumberbatch (and his followers?) as part of a disguise. (N.B. At one point we do see Cumberbatch wearing a dark Starfleet uniform, but that could mean anything.)

Misc. thoughts:

• "Star Trek Into Darkness" is still a terrible title.  
• I've already seen a couple of people saying things like "I find that blonde girl annoying already". CUT THAT OUT. If you hate the new blonde girl based on 3 seconds of trailer footage, then I don't know how to put this any simpler: you're being a sexist idiot. 
• If you're going to get annoyed by anything, get annoyed about the fact that the two women in the trailer spend half their screentime screaming or crying while the men do action stuff. I have no doubt whatsoever that Uhura will be awesome in the movie, but I'm not hugely impressed that the trailer-editors decided to devote half of her miniscule screentime to crying into Scotty's shoulder. If anything, someone should be crying into her shoulder. Maybe Chekov.
• I've also seen people on Tumblr getting excited over "how good Benedict Cumberbatch's American accent is". I'm sorry, what? He's speaking in his normal voice. 
• I do kinda like the brown/black leather outfits worn by Uhura et al, but sci-fi movies realllly need to retire the whole "badass/villain = long black leather coat" thing because long black leather coats are dorky as hell. The only way I can really legitemise them in this instance is if everyone's on a lava planet, because leather is relatively fire-proof.
• That red planet is super cool -- does anyone have any idea what it could be?

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Rick Owens, Spring 2013.

Rick Owens is a maximum expert in the field of draping people in 37 yards of fabric that look like either dust sheets or blackout curtains. Conversely, he's also pretty damn good at tailoring, albeit the sort of tailoring required to make the shoulderpads fit really well on things that look like a High Priestess costume in an episode of Star Trek. Given this combination of gothy apocalypse drapery and Needs More Gold alien royalty-wear, it's probably not all that surprising that I kinda love him.

pics from Style.com

This season's show opened with the simplest outfits in the collection, a selection of shapeless shifts that will be surely an A+ choice next time you decide to dress up as a Sexy Coffee-Filter for Halloween. Not being massively psyched about beige shift-dresses at the best of times these outfits didn't really grab me, but thankfully things warmed up pretty quickly after that.

 I loved the styling in this show. This is what Tilda Swinton's kids look like, right?

This is probably what the costumes in Dune would've looked like if the Dune movie hadn't been a visual representation of David Lynch being handed an unlimited budget and promptly going into a psychic tailspin.

(OK, Google just refreshed my memory re: Dune, and actually the costumes are one of the best things about that movie.)

When I'm a rich old lady (which will definitely happen because people whose speciality is "writing niche reviews of movie costume design" always end up rich, am I right?) I fully intend on being a collector of high-end fashion. My entire collection will be made up of outfits that look exactly like black plastic bags but inexplicably cost $$$, and when people look at my collection and judge me I'll just cackle the laugh of the 1%.

Rick Owens provided several variations on the black-plastic-bag theme this season, although I'm sparing you the bin-baggiest of them because I'm a kind and considerate person. Instead I picked out the slightly superior bug-lizard outfits, which are actually pretty OK as long as you're comfortable with looking like you just made a smock out of Xenomorph hide.

The final third of the show was where the Needs More Gold alien priestess outfits truly came into their own. Honestly, I'm rather confused about the target audience this season. The show wasn't particularly out-there in terms of extreme style (although the catwalk itself did involve a waterfall of foam), but at the same time it wasn't wearable or on-trend enough to truly court the Ready-To-Wear crowd. Although the balance of layers and the relaxed, unusual tailoring style are pure Rick Owens, the overall mood and colour palette are a lot less grungy and dramatic than I'm used to seeing from him -- so I'm not altogether sure that he'd even retain his usual audience. Still, it's an eyecatching and interesting collection.

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The new Judge Dredd movie is a great chick-flick.

Most people have a favourite genre of fiction, one where they'll watch or read any old crap as long as it ticks the right boxes. For my mother, it's those crime novels that always have a dark picture of an alleyway on the cover and a blurb including the phrase "web of deceit". My friend Alex is a great aficionado of any and all vintage SF/F where the sets and costumes look like they were made out of cereal boxes. My own speciality is dystopic sci-fi/action movies, meaning that I got near-equal quantities of entertainment from the truly brilliant Children Of Men as I did from the baffling cinematic fart that is The Spirit. (For those of you who haven't seen The Spirit, it's basically what would happen if someone tried to remake Sin City while tripping balls. And allowed Samuel L Jackson full creative control over all of his and Scarlett Johansson's costumes. Seriously, ask me about The Spirit sometime. It has a bellydancer/Nazi/dentistry scene that you would not believe.)

My point is, you could not pay me to watch a three-star movie about a middle-aged white guy angsting over his divorce from Kate Hudson, but a three-star movie where the exact same guy duels a malfunctioning android in a city made entirely from neon striplighting and concrete rubble? I'm sold.

The problem is that my own outlook on the world often seems to clash with that of the filmmakers I love, ie: I generally view women to be people, and the creators of the films I watch give every impression of disagreeing with this viewpoint. Of course, I could try watching nothing but feminist documentaries and serious real-life dramas about women overcoming personal tragedies, but quite frankly those kinds of movies don't fulfill my needs vis-a-vis mutant zombie hordes, improbable leather body-armour, and soundtracks that sound like twelve-ton steel girders being banged together by Skrillex. Sadly, if I want to sit down and watch some ridiculous bullshit about a bunch of murderous idiots rappelling down the ruins of a post-apocalyptic megacity, then I generally have to put up with the only female characters in the movie either being Lara Croft clones, or a roomful of strippers who get gunned down in the second act.

My knowledge of the Judge Dredd comics is fairly limited (I'm more of a Halo Jones girl), but the trailers for the new movie were generic enough that I had every reason to suspect that it was your average run-of-the-mill "guy goes on a brainless killing-spree in the name of Justice" story. The surprising 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating and the presence of Cersei Lannister as the primary villain (!!!), however, were enough for me to give it a try. And you know what? This is an ideal girl-nerd action movie. It has all the exploding-head violence you'd expect from a movie about a capital punishment-obsessed cop battling drug-dealers in a futuristic towerblock, but none of the sexism you'd expect from, well, any film with that premise. Lena Headey is sneeringly excellent in her somewhat typecast role as a villainess perched at the top of the criminal food-chain, ordering her lackeys to rain death upon any commoners who get in her way. Dredd's rookie sidekick (Olivia Thirlby) may be young and inexperienced but she's also competent and professional, and actually gets more screentime and character development than Dredd himself.

Dredd (or Dredd 3D, because the 3D-movie marketing people are apparently still trying to make Fetch Happen) effectively shoots down the assumption that if you're going to see a brainless action movie, you're going to have to put up with some offensive shit as well. A lot of the time when people complain about Transformers and how it's, you know, sexist and all-round badly written, the comeback is that it's "just a stupid blockbuster". And this doubly counts for movies with higher age-ratings, where the filmmakers have a green light to show as much T&A as they want. In the case of Dredd, however, you have a relatively simple comicbook adaptation that's dark and gory enough to receive an 18 rating and yet mysteriously contains zero scenes where the camera lovingly pans over naked and/or recently-murdered strippers. The thing is, I'm not even advocating some kind of puritanical no-boobs law for cheesy action movies, I'd just like filmmakers to class up the boobs scenes a little, you know? Like maybe giving the lady characters a personality other than "daddy issues" or "likes to blow things up while wearing hotpants". 

After watching Dredd, I realised that the reason why it seemed so... weird, I guess... is that it didn't follow the kind of predictable cliches I was expecting. This type of movie -- especially one with an adults-only rating -- usually has very poorly-drawn characters and a lot of throwbacks to grindhouse cinema, but despite Dredd's plethora of extreme violence it never really went that route. Although it has the basic plot of a shoot-em-up videogame, the decision and emotional reactions made by the characters were far, far more intelligent and realistic than other movies of the genre. Which makes sense when you find out that it was written by the screenwriter of 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Never Let Me Go, all sci-fi movies with a broader appeal outside the main target audience of teenage boys and genre fans.

Judge Dredd has more in common with the emotionless killing-machines of '80s action movies than with the wrong-place-wrong-time John McClanes you see in most modern blockbusters. I'm kinda hoping this movie is successful enough for a sequel, actually, since the director has already stated that he'd like to explore the idea of Dredd as a fascist. Judge Dredd is in the unique position of being an adult comicbook antihero who hasn't been neutered or simplified by his film adaptation, filling a role that's almost a parody of the kind of right-wing American cop characters who glorify the idea of hyper-violent law enforcement. In some ways, Dredd 3D reminded me more of sophisticated films like Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly than it did of more thematically similar movies like Demolition Man. The vision for Mega City One was founded in the real world rather than looking like the type of cartoonish, larger-than-life post-apocalyptic settings where most leather-clad antiheroes seem to reside. The aesthetic was solidly reminiscent of inncer-city towerblocks in the real world, neglected and graffiti-spattered, with charmless breezeblock slums sporting ironically chirpy names like "Peach Trees".

Upon reflection, I'd rate Dredd as being significantly better than The Dark Knight Rises because it's so much more consistent and self-aware. Obviously Nolan's Batman trilogy is more complex than any Judge Dredd series is likely to be, but TDKR missed its mark by such a wide margin that I'd put it below a simpler but more clearly thought-out movie like Dredd. And -- surprisingly enough considering Judge Dredd's total absence of backstory or character-development -- I found him to be a more appealing and engaging character than the most recent appearance of Nolan's Bruce Wayne. The two characters fill the same basic niche, but Dredd is virtually ego-free while the Dark Knight movies gradually became more and more about Bruce Wayne's manpain until we reached a point where the actions of side-characters and villains seemed tailored exclusively to inspire an emotional reaction from him. Judge Dredd is motivated so purely by dedication to the Law that we never even see his entire face, yet he somehow seemed more authentic than TDKR's Bruce Wayne.

Links
The full Dredd soundtrack is available to stream online, and I'd highly recommend it for any and all criminal ventures out into your friendly neighbourhood post-apocalyptic megacity. Also available is the equally excellent but rather more '80s-influenced Drokk: Music Inspired By Mega City One, by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow of Portishead.

Interview with Alex Garland, the writer and producer of Dredd. Having read this, I can really see how the film turned out so well and so faithful to the comics.

Previously on Hello, Tailor: Dressing for the Apocalypse, and Movie Costumes I Have Loved: Doomsday.

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Star Trek's original 1965 pilot episode: The Cage.

If you haven't seen Original Series Star Trek, you are missing out, dear readers. This may sound counterintuitive, but I love it so much that I... still haven't seen all of the episodes. I have to keep something for my old age, you know? But the other day I did watch the original pilot episode for the first time -- the pilot pilot, back before James T. Kirk was even a twinkle in Gene Roddenberry's eye, and the captain of the USS Enterprise was still Christopher Pike.

The premise of the unaired pilot is similar to a typical seek-out-new-worlds Trek episode, but the cast and overall tone is fairly different. The main trio of Kirk, Spock and McCoy plus crewmembers Sulu, Uhura and Scotty didn't settle down until halfway through the first season, but the pilot episode featured the rather dour and worn-down Captain Pike backed up by first officer Number One (we'll get to her later), a surprisingly emotional Spock, and a crew of mostly interchangeable American men. Kirk's absence is significant, highlighting how gosh-darn serious the pilot is when compared to the rather jokey, colourful tone of "real" Star Trek episodes. I mean, there's still a hell of a lot of campy stuff to laugh at in The Cage -- angry humanoid pig-bear alien, anyone? -- but it was surely a good decision to replace the cynical, world-weary Pike with the more youthful, ridiculous Kirk and his love of doing forward-rolls in the middle of fight scenes for no apparent reason. (Sorry, have I mentioned yet that I LOVE CAPTAIN KIRK? I love him.)

A bizarrely smiling Spock inspects some super-convincing local flora with Cptn Pike. (source)

So, The Cage. Some of the crew beam down to the planet Talos IV to look for survivors from a long-ago spaceship crash, and find a small encampment of old men and -- gasp! -- a hot girl. What could possibly go wrong? As soon as Pike and his companions set eyes on Vina ("This is Vina, her parents are dead," one of the old men explains suddenly, in a moment of great unintentional comedy.) they become incompetent, because everyone knows that merely seeing an attractive woman instantly turns all men into craven imbeciles. Within minutes, Pike has been captured by mysterious aliens and his crew are left bewildered and bereft in a landscape of haphazardly-painted cardboard boulders. Number One was left onboard the Enterprise to lead the rest of the crew in the Captain's absence, and I'm pretty sure that if she'd been on the landing team then this whole kidnapping malarkey would've been a non-issue.

The plot of The Cage is pretty hackneyed, even by 1960s sci-fi standards, but it does work better with Pike than it would've done with Kirk. Pike, who admits to his friend the martini-swilling ship's doctor (some things never change) that he's thinking of retiring and going for something less stressful like the Orion slave trade (!!!), is the perfect victim for telepathic aliens who tantalise their prey with projections of their heart's desire. So even though he quickly works out that what he's experiencing is an illusion, his mind continues to conjure up fantasies of rescuing a damsel in distress, watching a sexy Orion slavegirl dance around in a bikini, and being married to a nice lady who makes picnics for him in the forst. Unfortunately, poor Vina is made to act out the woman's role in every one of these scenarios. (It's really astonishing that Pike is still single, isn't it?)

I love Number One's manicure and so should you. DITTO HER LASER GUN.

In some ways The Cage is less sexist than much of the later Original Series episodes, but it's still utterly rooted in 1960s society. Number One's presence on the bridge of the Enterprise tells us something about shipboard sexism almost immediately, beginning with an unfortunately realistic scene where Pike remarks that he's uncomfortable with "a woman" being on the bridge (referring to a young Yeoman, there to deliver some documents) before being reminded that Number One is a woman. He quickly catches himself and says that she "doesn't count". This kind of thing -- plus the fact that Number One is demonstrably the most competant person in the crew, yet is still left in a support role right up until the last moment -- indicates to me that the writers knew quite a bit about sexism and how it would show itself in this type of workplace (from a 1960s perspective, that is), and yet other aspects of the episode are preposterously misogynist. It's almost pointless to criticise a TV show written in 1965 for having terrible representations of women, but I find it fascinating that such a strong and strongly-written character as Number One can coexist with Vina's two-dimensional damsel/sexpot characterisation and Pike's incredibly dated fantasy life.

Vina in her guise as an Orion slavegirl.

When Vina first appeared ("This is Vina, her parents are dead.") I laughed out loud because she seemed so parodically vacuous and poorly acted, but by the end of the episode I was thinking that her situation was about 3242 times more horrifying and tragic than Pike's relatively brief clash with the Talosians. As a survivor of the earlier spaceship crash, Vina had been in the hands of the Talosians for twenty years, being tortured and forced to live in a fantasy world created by her telepathic captors. Pike, on the other hand, was trapped by the Talosians for a couple of days before his crew rescued him, during which time the Talosians forced Vina to try and seduce him in the hopes of creating more humans for the Talosians' entertainment. And at the end? Vina chose to stay behind because it turned out that her beauty was a Talosian illusion all along (and probably she has Stockholm syndrome). Oh, and it was Number One who saved the day. I miss Number One. If only Majel Barrett could've stayed in that role instead of turning into Nurse Chapel for the rest of the series.

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Regarding the less serious stuff (because let's face it, some enterprising superfan has almost certainly written their dissertation on gender roles in 1960s Star Trek, and this post is already fast approaching tl;dr territory): the costumes and sets in this episode are A DELIGHT. For one thing, the Starfleet uniforms are understandably even more cack-handed than they are in later episodes, with officers and crewmembers all dressed in the same blue or gold sweaters, all of which look like they're doing their best to choke the wearer. And when going down to the planet's surface, the crew changes into jackets so ill-fitting that even I, with my limited dressmaking capabilities, could hot-glue-gun something better.

The stunning Number One in a not-so-stunning jacket. (source)

The costume team must have invested in a job-lot of uncomfortable-looking silver synthetic fabric, because not only are all the Talosians decked out in it from head to foot, Vina's minidress is made out of the same material, as is the comforter on one of the beds. Oh, and speaking of beds, the set-design inside the Enterprise is, as always, to die for. The sets were spruced up quite a bit after this pilot episode was made, but the overal aesthetic is the same. That is, an aesthetic that revels in acres of soul-deadening empty space, greyish lighting, and an oppressive atmosphere of being trapped in a sealed container drifting through the cosmos with no hope of rescue from the monotony unless you volunteered for a deadly-perilous mission to an alien planet.

Captain Pike "relaxes" on his uncomfortable, too-short bed.

Honestly, I find it hilarious just how much of a nightmare it'd be to live on the Enterprise if it were a real place. You probably know that hospitals and prisons are painted specific colours in order to help calm the patients and inmates, and most offices have dismal-looking houseplants lurking on the windowsills in an attempt to inject some life into the room? Well, the USS Enterprise has none of that. Just hundreds of grey, pink and pale green oblong consoles and angular 1960s furniture, with the occasional ornament in peoples' personal quarters only serving to highlight the overall monotony. No wonder the redshirts are always so keen to fling themselves, lemming-like, into danger. One of my favourite Tumblrs in existence is Space Trek (subtitle: "the quiet despair of the Starship Enterprise"), which posts nothing but hauntingly empty shots of 1960s-era Star Trek sets, sans people.

Pike and Vina have a picnic in the least organic-looking forest I've ever seen. (source)

Star Trek always seems to try harder with its "outdoor" sets. I like to imagine that somewhere out there, there are whole teams of people who spent their entire careers crafting air-filled boulders for TV heroes to throw at each other. In The Cage, the alien planet sets are even more painted-on than I dared hope, with the best ones being the utopic picnic scene pictured above (Pike's fantasy life = there is no middle ground between "alien slavegirl in a bikini" and "mid-20th-century suburban nuclear family Stepford Wife") and this deliciously cardboardy planetscape:

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So, yeah, there's a lot of fun stuff in this pilot (most of it in the adorably crumby low-budget visuals), but it's flawed enough that I can definitely see why so many changes were made before the series went to air. I'd have loved for Number One to reprise her role in the rest of the series, but I have my doubts over whether the writers could've created a successful dynamic between Kirk and Number One, particularly since The Cage featured some foreshadowing of Number One having feelings for Pike. From what little we saw I feel like a Pike/Number One relationship would be a lot more compelling (for all that Pike gives every appearance of being a misogynist) than a Kirk/Number One relationship. I can only imagine how easily it might have degenerated into Number One playing the role of sensible, scolding foil to Kirk's fun, adventurous playboy -- a dynamic that very rarely works, especially since it's almost always the woman who ends up being the straightlaced one. Like James Bond in the earlier Bond movies, Kirk's carefree skankiness is in many ways preferable to an ongoing romance subplot. As for Pike, I suspect that an Enterprise helmed by him would have made for a significantly different Star Trek from the show we know and love. He was wrong for the optimistic, forward-thinking tone the show later developed, whereas Kirk turned out to be the precise opposite of a reluctant hero.

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Doctor Who 7x01: Asylum of the Daleks. (SPOILERS!)

Is it bad that I'm now kind of wishing that Jenna Louise Coleman (Oswin) isn't the new companion? Not because I disliked her or anything like that, but purely because I'd find it funny if the entire photoshoot/announcement/etc turned out to be a complete fake-out. The Doctor Who team tried to do that with one of the previous companions (Donna, maybe?) but in reverse, although the casting info got leaked early so everyone knew it was her anyway. I just enjoy the idea of them being able to pull one over us, although of course there have been tons of photos of JLC in the newspapers and so on so I can only assume that she'll be playing a different character (Oswin's... identical twin...?).

As for the actual content of the episode... I have mixed feelings. The latter half of last season was kind of a mess, and starting off this season in what felt like the middle of another storyline may well have been a mistake. Amy and Rory's divorce, an adult and complex topic, was handled and wrapped up in one episode, with the entire problem being solved purely by the Doctor leaving them alone together to talk it out. I feel like we've already been through this kind of conflict several times with Amy and Rory, and it seems pointless to rehash yet another variation on the same old song right at the beginning of a new season. The issue of Amy's infertility was handled convincingly by the actors, but the fact that it was introduced and then cleared up withing about ten minutes cheapened it entirely. As a card-carrying sap I was 100% onboard with every hackneyed emotional cue when Amy and Rory predictably reunited at the end, but up until then I was unimpressed by the decision to throw in a break-up subplot for what may or may not have been no good reason at all.

Regarding the Daleks, well, this show needs to cut down on them. I didn't feel any real sense of threat at any point during the episode, partly because the danger level inspired by the Daleks has gone way down. Daleks are tricky to include in the first place because they're near-indestructable killing machines and the Doctor and his companions are squishy humanoid pacifists, making it less and less convincing every time the Doctor defeats them. And in this particular episode there were several moments where a character would just sort of stand there while the Daleks failed to kill them. When the Doctor was first told that he was being sent down to a planet full of "insane" Daleks, I thought this was a brilliant idea because what would seem insane to a Dalek? Love. Compassion. A desire for peace and debate rather than war and genocide. I assumed that the Doctor was going to be confronted by something almost incomprehensible to his mindset -- Daleks who are deemed unfit by their race because they can feel something other than hatred. But instead what we got were more of the same Daleks we've seen since forever, except these ones had been mouldering in a soggy dungeon so they were too rusty to kill anything properly. The end result was a repeat of what we've encountered in multiple earlier Dalek episode: miraculous escapes all round, and the Doctor yelling about how much he hates Daleks -- which is beginning to pall a little. Particularly since the Eleventh Doctor was originally a fresh start to counteract the tragic, rageful, post-war darkness of the previous two incarnations.

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The revelation that Oswin was a Dalek was brilliant -- especially if you're a kid, I should think, and therefore less likely to have picked up on any of the foreshadowing. Honestly, I'd have loved it if the Doctor had freed her instead of leaving her to die. I think we're getting to the point now where the Doctor's hatred of the Daleks is making him seem bigoted rather than the grieving war veteren he was in earlier seasons. It seems weird to complain about "bigotry" against Daleks because they're so obviously written as beings of unadulterated evil, but what we basically had here was the Doctor being sent down to an "asylum" full of mad and/or traumatised aliens, and then tricking one of them into blowing itself up before blowing them all up. And these are the only Daleks in the universe who weren't any threat to anyone else. Hopefully the whole memory-wipe thing will mean that we're due a Dalek-free period for at least the rest of the season, because the way this Doctor is written is a far cry of the kind of compassionate, violence-avoiding characterisation I'd prefer. It would've been excellent if Oswin had been set free in her new Dalek form and proved to the Doctor that not all "Daleks" are 100% bad -- but c'est la vie.

Perhaps if one or two of the Daleks inside the asylum had seemed like more of a threat then I would've been more taken by this episode. As it is, I give it a solid 6/10 but wouldn't rate it as a season opener, particularly when compared to the epic mystery and emotional hook of "The Impossible Astronaut" (an episode which unfortunately never received the payoff it deserved). Aside from the sudden launch into emotional conflict between Amy and Rory, this seemed like a mid-season filler episode. For me the main high points were the visuals (almost movie-level in parts, building on the increasing quality of the special effects in the previous two Moffat-led seasons), and the handful of little jokey Doctor Who moments like Rory's bafflement at the Daleks calling out "Eggs... eggs... eggs-ter-min-ate".

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Oh, and a little postscript regarding Oswin. I don't look at Doctor Who spoilers AT ALL so I haven't much clue about Jenna Louise Coleman's involvement outside of a couple of publicity photos, but I'm pretty glad that the Oswin character appears to have died a death. She's great for a one-off episode, but maybe not so good for a full-season run. I love the idea of a genius who has the ability to hack a bunch of Dalek supercomputers but chooses to be a cruise-ship entertainment manager because she's so naturally perky and that's what she enjoys. I LOVE IT. Doctor Who companions are one of the very few roles where I can accept Butlins levels of enthusiasm and Blue Peter-esque behaviour in what is generally regarded as a high-quality sci-fi show, but I don't really trust Steven Moffat with this type of material. When Oswin first appeared I was already a little "uh-oh", because here was a stunningly beautiful woman who'd been trapped in an escape pod for a year and was wearing a cocktail dress and had shaved her legs?? I mean, I can explain that away by her being just so mind-numbingly bored that she got dressed up for herself now and then, but I was still relieved when it turned out she wasn't trapped in an escape pod after all. Under a prolonged period of Moffat's direction, I can only imagine that such a character would have quickly veered off into Manic Pixie Dreamgirl characterisation. 

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