Voyaging Home

Today I finished Star Trek Voyager. As usual, after watching a long-running television show, I'm experiencing a kind of withdrawal (though one of my roommates is watching Enterprise. It's not quite the same, but it's better than nothing.)

I have to say, I think that the show's been judged harshly. Admittedly, they don't take the premise as seriously as they ought to - Voyager has an easy time getting repaired, refueled, rearmed, and seems to have an infinite supply of shuttles, not to mention that the Delta Flyer gets literally blown to tiny pieces in one episode and by the next one, they've completely rebuilt the thing.

Yet I like the cast of characters, and that's a huge part of making a show successful. Janeway's a badass,  Tuvok is an awesome grumpy grandpa, Seven of Nine is inherently interesting (and not just because she's attractive) and everyone in the cast is likable.

Starting with the Next Generation, the makers of Star Trek created a huge consistent world of the 24th Century, building on the foundation laid in the 60s with the original and creating something that, at least so far, seems to be aging more gracefully (if you ignore the first couple seasons of TNG or some of the less-believable CGI of the mid-90s.)

Part of what makes me sad about seeing Voyager come to a close is that it's the last of the 24th Century setting (well, other than Star Trek: Nemesis.) As I've said before, I was raised on TNG, and the 24th Century is my default "future" setting.

Despite Voyager's lower popularity than DS9 or TNG, the makers began Enterprise the following season, and while I appreciate the idea of seeing the sort of bridge between our modern, underfunded space program and what would become the Starfleet of Kirk and later Picard, Sisko and Janeway, it doesn't really have the same feel (also, the opening theme to Enterprise is a hate crime against nerds.)

The finale of Voyager has the problem that I think most episodic shows have, which is that it comes sort of out of the blue. I started watching TV by the season with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in that show, and indeed most of the shows of the past decade, season finales, and especially series finales, are built to (if the show doesn't get cancelled, that is.)

There's little hint that there's about to be some big discovery that finally gives Voyager the shortcut they need in the seventh season (other than that we know the show's going to end and it would be really depressing if they didn't make it back to the Alpha Quadrant.) So we get a story about time travel (a common theme for Voyager) as well as the Borg (Voyager was, of course, the show that most thoroughly explored the Borg.) We get to see Janeway be incredibly badass, sacrificing herself to cripple the Borg Collective and take out the Borg Queen, who was the closest thing to a series Big Bad that they had. But then, because it's a time-travel episode, we also get to keep our Janeway, who gets to bring everyone (minus those who've already died, and of course Kes and Neelix, who went back to be with their people) back to Earth.

It's a pretty cool finale, and it's awesomely satisfying to see Unimatrix One go up in flames. It might have been nice to see get a bit of an epilogue to see how everyone turned out, though A: we get most of that with Admiral Janeway's alternate future, and B: the awful Vic Fontaine-soundtracked epilogue to DS9 nearly ruined my impression of the entire series (really Vic Fontaine in general,) so perhaps we should be grateful that we got a huge action sequence and then just watched as Voyager was escorted by an armada of Starfleet ships back to Earth.

Star Trek's current incarnation is all about the JJ Abrams alternate-timeline-reboot. That's all well and good. I enjoyed the first one and look forward to the second, but I do hope that at some point, somehow, we get to see more of the 24th Century. And if it's another TV show, I would like to write for it.

Jabrams and Star Wars

So, the latest announcement regarding the new, Disney-produced Star Wars films is that JJ Abrams is going to direct the newest one.

Abrams is one of the most powerful operators in Hollywood right now. Making his name first in TV-show creation (most notably Lost, as well as the aforementioned Fringe,) Abrams has, over the last few years, made his presence known on the big screen as well, both as a producer and a director.

Abrams is clearly setting himself up as an heir to Steven Spielberg, and has a great sense for spectacle and blockbuster. He had a success in his Mission Impossible III, and created an impressive homage to Spielberg films of the 70s and 80s with Super 8 (produced by Spielberg himself.) He's also behind the very successful Star Trek continuity-friendly reboot.

It's actually this project in particular that makes me optimistic about an Abrams Star Wars. As argued in the Red Letter Media review, Abrams's Star Trek is more of an action/adventure film than what one typically expects from Star Trek. Trek '09 dispenses with most of the philosophical quandaries and ethical conflict in favor of a super-charged action flick with lots of ass-kicking starship battles.

Abrams is big on emotion, and favors emotional stories over cerebral ones, which made Trek '09 a very fun movie, even if it was not exactly a Trek movie in the traditional sense (in fairness, the Next-Gen era films at least were fairly action-focused as well, which made Picard seem very un-Picard-like.)

But the thing about that is that this emotional, visceral approach to sci-fi might feel odd with Star Trek, but it's absolutely perfect for Star Wars. No one ever goes into the details of how space ships work, or how alien biology works, or how the Force works in Star Wars. It's about order and chaos, selfishness and selflessness, and good and evil.

It's often been said that Trek '09 was the Star Wars prequel we had all been hoping for in the previous decade. With the same, super-capable filmmaker at the helm, my expectations have been raised.

Optimism for the Future

So, as has been a theme since I started this blog, I've recently been on a huge Star Trek thing. I'm excited about the movie coming in a few months, but I tend to think it's a setting that works best in television (frankly, the more fleshed-out a world is, the more I think a TV show - or series of novels - serves it best.)

One of the refreshing things about Star Trek is its optimism.

I was a sophomore in high school during September 11th, 2001. Now, I realize that's a date we drag out a whole lot, but I doubt many could argue that it hasn't had a profound impact on the American consciousness. When I was younger, there was a great deal of optimism about the future. The 1990s were, frankly, pretty good (even if the seeds for the subsequent decade were already being sewn.) The Cold War was over, and things were feeling very stable - the economy was in great shape, and it looked like we had a great new millennium to look forward to.

It is maybe unsurprising that Star Trek did really well in the 90s. Next Generation (which was admittedly about half 80s, half 90s) spawned two other shows, and even though DS9 went fairly dark on occasion, the overall concept of the Star Trek world is one where we find ourselves in great shape in the future. We manage to expand as explorers, yet avoided any of the sins of imperialism by adhering to strict ethical standards (The Prime Directive being the foundation of these ethics.)

Star Trek was a future you could feel good about. We'd turned the Klingons from fierce enemies into close allies (like the Russians!) and the attitude of Starfleet boiled down to: "You guys are our enemies now. Our goal is not to defeat you, but to become friends." It didn't hurt that Starfleet also happened to be an incredibly powerful force in the galaxy, so they could reach out to others without endangering humanity (usually.)

Star Trek's Federation is basically America in its most ideal state - equality achieved by elevating everyone to the top without pushing anyone down, and providing that "City on a Hill" for the rest of the galaxy but with a very, very strict "only if you want it" policy. It's a society in which cultural diversity is celebrated, and anti-intellectualism is basically non-existent.

After witnessing both the horror of our own vulnerability on 9/11, and also watching the Bush Administration's Orwellian power-grab in the aftermath, sending the nation into two big wars without clear objectives (it took waiting for a new president to define objectives and actually start to get us out) and watching as we, the "good guys," began to argue in favor of torture, many Americans felt as if the whole world had been turned upside-down on them.

And it's reflected in art. Battlestar Galactica, for instance, begins with an apocalyptic attack that was clearly drawn to resemble 9/11, and we watch as humanity struggles both with our fear of additional attacks but also our own inhumanity, released by the trauma. We've had apocalyptic scenarios in shows like Jericho or the Walking Dead, or movies like the Road, or the Book of Eli, or I Am Legend (remakes count.) We've also seen humanity as the bad guys more frequently, like in Avatar or District 9.

The reasons for this are not hard to figure out.

So the question, then, is how to bring back the optimism.

The thing about Science Fiction is that it can have a serious impact on people. I'm all for art imitating life, and by no means to I begrudge the people who made these pieces their right to tell the story they're thinking of (a lot of my writing tends to be dark as well) but I also wonder what effect a brighter take on the future would have - one that looks forward not to a post-apocalyptic wasteland or some sort of global totalitarian state, but instead sees the current problems as a phase that we are simply enduring for the time being.

I'm attracted to the notion of the reconstruction. You're probably familiar with the idea of a deconstruction, but I enjoy writing about things, so I'll give a basic breakdown.

A deconstruction takes a well-known trope or genre, and creates a version of that trope that shows all the inherent problems one tends to ignore. The deconstruction can be thought of as a counter-argument to the original piece.

For example: Let's say you have a space-adventure story. Your intrepid heroes travel to other worlds, meet with cool aliens, fight bad guys with ray guns and save the day when things go bad. The deconstruction would recognize that your space-adventurer is actually a thoughtless brute, most likely colonizing that new planet in much the way that the British colonized India, and the "bad guys" he's fighting are actually a complex people who have a perfectly good reason to fight your protagonist. The hero might win the battle, but in so doing, he causes irreparable harm to an environment that was getting along just fine without him.

The reconstruction is kind of like the rebuttal to the deconstruction. In another way, it's a kind of synthesis between the fun, original genre or trope and the valid complaints made via the deconstruction. Effectively, it rehabilitates the original piece by acknowledging its flaws, and dealing with said flaws in an intelligent way.

This can be a tricky thing to pull off, but when you do, it's magic, because it allows you to enjoy something similar to the original trope or genre without the guilt that encourages deconstructions. You've got your healthy vegetables along with your cake.

The problem with bringing optimistic visions of the future is that most of the ones we know of, even the reasoned, ethical Next-Gen-era Star Trek shows, can provoke a bit of cynicism. Arguably (and this could be a whole other article, but I don't have time for that) Next-Gen was a reconstruction of Star Trek, acknowledging the thorny issues of interfering with other cultures and the responsibilities of a fleet of explorers/diplomats (such as not getting a crew member killed once an episode.) Nowadays, however, we might consider the Federation to be way too trusting and diplomatic for their own good, and that the bleeding-heart attitude they have could get them into trouble - or, on the flip-side, that we don't believe that humans could ever become totally unified behind an enlightened philosophy because some of us are just damned warmongering assholes.

But if we're ever going to turn things around, and start seeing a future in which humanity is on the track toward a brighter future, we've got to start imagining what that brighter future would look like.

Long story short, I want a new Star Trek show.

The Coming End of Fringe

JJ Abrams became a household name when Lost, the show he created, became one of the most influential programs of the 2000s. While there are of course many who felt that the show did not live up to its expectations by failing to satisfyingly answer the mysteries it came up with (my only major disappointment, personally, was the explanation of the "flash sideways" universe in the final season - well, and never finding out what made Walt so special,) the show nevertheless created a whole society of people who were obsessed with discussing the possibilities for what would happen next.

Lost was hugely responsible for the current TV audience's comfort with and even expectation of more serialized dramas. Lost had a great hook - in each episode, the stuff happening on the island would play from one week to the next while the flashbacks would be largely self-contained, usually.

After a few years of Lost, (and it should be noted that Abrams handed the reins of the show over to Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse fairly early on,) Abrams went on to start another show. This show was going to be less serialized, and more of an episodical sci-fi procedural: Fringe.

The premise of Fringe when it began was fairly simple, even if it was willing to do fairly complicated plots in each episode. Our intrepid group of three: FBI Agent Olivia Dunham, brilliant scientist and mental patient Walter Bishop, and similarly brilliant estranged son/underworld player Peter Bishop solve bizarre, science-fiction-type crimes.

The appeal of Fringe (to executives, I would guess, as opposed to the kind of audience who'd want this show) was that it would be more episodic, and less obsessed with giant mythological arcs than Lost. Ironically, in its later seasons, there were very few "mystery of the week" type episodes, and it largely became all about the long-term plots.

In the beginning, Fringe was actually not all that great. It had the very difficult task of differentiating itself from the legendary X-Files, which had kind of done the whole FBI-Paranormal-Investigations angle, while also attempting to live up to its quality.

Early plots for Fringe involved a radical but nebulously-motivated group called ZFT who seemed to be conducting terrorist attacks that doubled as experiments. We also began to see, fairly early on, that there was a fellow known as the Observer - a Man in Black with a nice hat and no hair - who would actually show up almost as an easter egg in each episode, though as time went on, we would find out more about him.

One of the strengths that Fringe always had (though it got better at it as it went) was that the case-of-the-week episodes, or even the arc episodes, had a Star Trek level of pure Sci-Fi - using the genre to create situations that would raise very interesting philosophical questions. Yet Fringe was also deeply concerned with tying this into humans as emotional beings. The horrors we witness in this world of technology altering or destroying our organic machines makes the search for spiritual truth all that more desperate.

After the first season, things picked up considerably, and what I would consider one of the defining themes of the series really got its first exploration: Alternate Realities. For most of the show's run, the plot concerned the underground conflict between two parallel universes - our own, and a slightly different one that had been terribly damaged thanks to the accidental effects of Walter Bishop's efforts to save Peter as a child.

For the rest of the series, we would continue to be reintroduced to new versions of reality - new versions of the people we already knew, because of parallel universes, changed timelines, and simple jumps into the future. In some ways, there's something very brave about this kind of storytelling, yet at the same time, it demands a huge amount from the audience, and can potentially alienate them.

There's a lot to recommend Fringe, though. It is very much an X-Files for the post 9/11 world - one where the thought that people in our own communities may be something other than what they seem, and one in which our enemies feel fully justified to commit atrocities. The X-Files explored the ramifications of a world with a single super-power and the fear that all the Cold War mechanisms would be turned on America's own people, while Fringe concerns itself largely with how human life can be devalued when we treat people as simply organic machines.

So here we are, with the final episode imminent. I actually have to confess that I have not kept up this whole season - another one in which there's been an enormous shift in the world we experience. Fringe has been one of those shows where every time it gets a new season, we've been breathing a sigh of relief. Given this final season to close up shop, it's nice to know that they'll be able to end it on their terms.

In a way, it's almost better to watch a TV show after it's ended. That way, you'll never have to worry about hitting a wall and needing to wait for the next episode or season to come out. Given that Fringe takes a little time to hit its groove, I could see the cult of Fringe growing quite robust farther down the road, once people can see the whole thing on Netflix or some such thing.

Like Lost, this is one of those shows where Abrams got the ball rolling, but left it to others to keep it going. JJ Abrams has moved on up to the big screen (reinventing Star Trek, for example,) yet I think that Fringe is another example of his influence on TV, making it a more cinematic medium.

Anyway, it's a good show. Check it out.

(PS: One knock against Fringe: the original premise had it set entirely in the Boston area - the main "hangout" set was Walter's lab at Harvard. As the series went on, they started setting more and more of it in New York and less in Massachusetts. There's plenty of shows in New York, and Boston is way cooler, so boo! This message brought to you by a proud Bostonian.)

The Warriors: Gritty to the point of Mythic

I just sat down and watched The Warriors, a 1979 film set in an anarchic New York City where gangs outnumber cops three-to-one, and the eponymous gang struggles to make it back to their turf in Coney Island after they are framed for killing a would-be Gangster Messiah. Cyrus.

On one hand, the film attempts to portray the dystopian feel of New York in the 70s - the sense that no one is safe from crime, and the police are only there to track you down and beat you with nightsticks. Our Warriors, who function as a single protagonist, even if they do get split up from time to time, are not necessarily good guys. They're a gang, and they act like a gang (albeit a small one.) The point is not that these are a bunch of model citizens fleeing rabid criminals - it's that they are just trying to survive an entire city sent against them.

The various gangs in the Warriors often skew toward the ridiculous. The Baseball Furies, for example, are all dressed in Yankees uniforms (so you know they're evil!) and wearing makeup in the style of KISS. For the most part, the film is almost episodic, having the Warriors travel from one gang's territory to the next, encountering various levels of resistance. All the while, the Rogues, whose leader was the one who actually killed Cyrus, search for them while Cyrus' gang, the Riffs (which is more of a paramilitary group than a street gang) coordinates the hunt for the people they think killed Cyrus.

I'll admit I've lived a relatively sheltered life, and I've grown up in areas where "gangs" of young people would be more laughable than threatening. For these people, though, there does not seem to be an alternative. The gang is your family and your sole support structure. The Warriors may not be "good" guys, but they're as honest as one can expect, and only want to get home safe.

The New York where I went to college was a much safer place - the 90s led to a huge reduction in street crime, and in Post-9/11 Manhattan, people might look at you funny if you seemed Middle Eastern (I do not,) but for the most part people were relatively friendly and gave you space. Yet I am also aware of the state that New York was in through the 70s and 80s, and this movie was made right smack dab in the middle of that era.

Honestly, even though I think the film tapped into the zeitgeist of the era, I don't know if I'd classify it as a "good" movie. The sole female character who appears in more than one of the vignettes (apart from the Tokyo Rose-like DJ) is a little ill-defined, except that we can perhaps sense that she has the same lost, nihilistic despair the drives the guys into gangs, but does not even have that outlet, capable only of watching (I assume) her brother mis-manage his somewhat pathetic gang, the Orphans. She's not alone in this - most of the characters are a bit generic, a hazard of making a story with a group protagonist.

One interesting segment is when three of the Warriors are approached by a group of women and invited back to their apartment. The women attempt to seduce them, and succeed with all but the youngest member of the gang, Rembrandt, only to reveal that they are actually only trying to kill the Warriors and earn favor with the Riffs like the other gangs.

The all-girl gang, revealed to be the "Lizzies," gives off a strong lesbian vibe, even though it is never stated explicitly (there is a long take of two of the women dancing sensuously with one another, so the implication is pretty clear at least to me.) Attitudes toward homosexuality, both male and female, have generally shifted considerably since 1979. Today, it seems the bigger issue for the portrayal of lesbians in fiction is the male gaze, co-opting female homosexuality as entertainment for men. If a story like this were made today, one would think that as Rembrandt notices the increasingly lesbian vibe among the women, he would be more excited to be around them, rather than less-so (and these are, for the most part, not particularly "butch" lesbians either.)

So are the Lizzies a plot element of female empowerment, punishing the Warriors for never considering that women could be a threat to them? Or are they meant as a new level of horror - that in this city of moral decay even pretty women are man-hating killers?

I may not find myself racing to the nearest DVD store to buy a copy, but I do get a sense that this film captured a certain attitude and aesthetic that defined its era. There's value in that as a cultural artifact, and as a work of art.

The Sliding Scale of Fantasy and Science Fiction

First off, let me do you the favor/injury of pointing out TVTropes.org, which is a fantastic resource for looking at fiction in all its myriad forms. If you're afraid to follow the link (someone has warned you of it, perhaps,) TV Tropes basically catalogues in Wiki form every trope that people can think of. This can be anything from "Did we just have tea with Cthulhu?" where characters find themselves interacting with a villain (usually a horrifically powerful one) in an unexpectedly pleasant manner, to "Drop the hammer," describing situations where a character is known for using a large hammer as a weapon, to "Freudian excuse," where a character's traits or actions are justified in the story by some past trauma.

You can find yourself spending hours there, linking from Trope pages that have lists of works where the tropes appear, to Work pages where they have a list of the tropes you'll find in that story.

It's fascinating, and I think it's a great tool to use to analyze your own stories. I'll make references to stuff on that site a lot in this blog, so I recommend checking it out.

Anyway, what I thought I'd write about here is the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy. The two genres are closely related, and there is an argument to be made that they are, in fact, the same genre.

If one is to merge the two (and perhaps include Horror as well,) something that people have taken to calling "Speculative Fiction," you can basically describe the supergenre as stories in which things we have not seen in the real world appear. This is a somewhat clumsy definition, of course, because we've never seen Jean Valjean in the real world, but what we are talking about are creatures, technologies, or phenomena that do not, as far as we know, exist.

Yet Fantasy and Science Fiction have very different feels to them, and we can usually tell the difference with ease. Often, the difference is the setting: Science Fiction often takes place in the future, and often takes place at a time when people are able to travel through the cosmos with relative ease (most either ignore or create some plot device to get around the issue of the speed of light and the vast distances between things in space.) That is not to say that all science fiction is like this. For example, Steampunk, a subgenre of Sci-Fi, is typically set in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and usually on Earth. Typically, Sci-Fi explores the way that scientific and technological breakthroughs will impact individuals or society on whole. For example, the existence of time travel could create logical paradoxes, or the development of space travel could lead to the discovery of other forms of life.

Fantasy, on the other hand, tends to be less rational. The typical setting for a fantasy story is often a different world with a different history that nonetheless appears similar to Medieval Europe (or other periods of Earth's past.) Fantasy will often have non-Human, yet human-like races (such as Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs) though many authors decline to do this. If there is one real focal-point to what defines Fantasy as a genre, it is the existence of magic. Different authors use magic in different ways, but it is quite rare indeed to find a story that creates a different world-setting that does not include some kind of magic.

The problem in drawing a clear line between the genres, then, is defining magic. Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." One could simply read this to mean that until we understand something, we will see it as magic, but I think there's a more profound question inherent to this, which is "what do we really mean when we talk about magic?"

Science Fiction, after all, often deals with discovering some phenomenon that seems to act magically - it does things that were previously thought impossible. Frequently, the hero of a Science Fiction story must solve the mystery of exactly what is going on, and then apply that knowledge to resolve the conflict of the story.

If someone had a gun to my head, I might say that the difference between the genres at its core, is that Sci-Fi ultimately believes there is an explanation for what is going on - that through scientific reasoning, one can eventually just figure it all out. Fantasy embraces the mystery - Gandalf can come back from the dead because it is the will of Eru Illuvatar. Harry Potter is a wizard because, well, he's a wizard. He might have inherited it from his folks, but it's not exactly a clear dominant/recessive gene, because there's a chance for those who have Muggle parents to be born wizards/witches, and vice versa. And even if the ability to be a wizard is genetic, the way all that magic actually works is, well, just magic.

Until the Star Wars prequels came out (and let's just pretend they never did,) there was no explanation for why someone would be "strong in the Force" as opposed to being just a normal schmo. Again, it looked like there was an inheritance to it - Anakin's kids are both Jedi-capable (it just occurred to me that if the Jedi-capability is based on "midichlorians," and we assume these are organelles like mitochondria, Anakin couldn't have passed them on because as the father, he provided the sperm, which does not have mitochondria.) But the nature of the Force had a more of a spiritual explanation than a scientific one.

So I'd actually classify Star Wars as a Fantasy story, even though there are spaceships and aliens. It's more of a story based on emotion than reason. Tellingly, the way Luke saves the day in Return of the Jedi is to reach his father emotionally, to make Vader feel love for his son once more.

Of course, this itself may be an overly simplistic distinction. Sci-Fi (at least the better-written stories) is not devoid of emotion, and often the implications of new technology or natural phenomena lead to an emotional story. In Next Gen, there's a great episode where Picard goes home to France a few months after being temporarily assimilated by the Borg, and the entire episode is focused on the emotional toll that this experience has exacted on him - the guilt over the responsibility he had for the deaths of thousands and the doubt over his life's work, as well as the sheer horror of knowing what it was like to be transformed and used like that.

Ultimately, the two genres are linked in their willingness to stretch the willing suspension of disbelief, to invent new rules by which the world will operate, and examining the implications of that new world - both on a larger, sociological scale, and the smaller, personal scale.

Yet, to paraphrase Potter Stewart, we know the difference when we see it. Most works conform to a standard setting (swords and wizards: fantasy, ray guns and spaceships: sci-fi,) and even when they play with those settings a bit, we can often identify which is which.

I like to think of the two genres as being like the oceans. The Pacific and the Atlantic are different oceans, yet what do you call the waters south of South America? The two blend together, and there's a lot of overlap. One can also argue that the viewer's opinion can change the genre of a piece.

The real point in all of this really boils down to one thing: I like both. Hooray!

Using the Bechdel Test as a Tool to Help Male Writers Write Female Characters

It's no secret that even today, most published or produced writers are men. While the fight against that inequality has made great strides over the course of the past century (and there were, of course, plenty of famous female writers throughout history - back as far as Sappho) there is still a discrepancy between the representation of women and men in media, and the way that those characters relate to one another.

While I would never argue that simply being a female writer makes one a feminist writer, it seems fairly natural that a woman would have an easier time writing female characters. Ultimately, humans tend to behave like humans regardless of gender, but this one significant physical distinction (perhaps it would be more accurate to refer to this as sex, rather than gender, as there are of course plenty of people who consider themselves psychologically male but with a female body or vice versa) does cause some inherent differences in the way we experience the world. As a subtle example, women tend to be better at discriminating between subtle variances in color. Then, of course, there is the obvious fact that women, for most of their natural lives, undergo the monthly menstrual cycle, giving their lives a certain rhythm that men do not share.

All of that said, it is my belief that the main reason male writers have trouble writing female characters is that we have a both a social construct that makes artificial distinctions between the male mind and the female mind, and also that, since roughly 90% of men are sexually attracted to women, our feelings toward women are complicated by a number of other thought processes, both conscious and unconscious.

I do not claim to be a master at writing female characters (or a master of writing male characters either, for that matter) but one first step that I think all male writers should consider is making sure that women are well-represented in their work. Certainly, the subject matter of a piece can get in the way of this: a movie closely following an Army unit in the French wilderness during World War Two may not come across many women, or a film like Fight Club, which specifically explores masculinity in a vacuum, intentionally looks at women as alien and unpredictable to emphasize the protagonist's isolation. Yet in most cases, a lack of female characters is largely due to a kind of negligence. For most people, the default human being is oneself. So typically, when conceiving new characters, a male writer will naturally first think of a man.

Alison Bechdel, in her comic Dykes to Watch Out For, uses a character in her strip to propose a test (the character refuses to see a film that fails this test.) The test is extremely simple:

1. The film must have at least two female characters.
2. The female characters must talk to one another at some point.
3. The subject matter of this conversation cannot be a man.

While this is an extremely simple test, a huge number of films and other works fail it. Unless the story specifically calls for an all-male cast or a low representation of women, this test should be considered a bare minimum when writing a story.

The nice thing is that simply complying with this test will jump-start a few other factors that will make your female characters better. Simply by having multiple female characters will force you to figure out how those characters are different. Often, if a story has a single female (usually a love interest,) the woman is simply defined by her relationship to the man, which means that she might as well exist in the heads of the male characters. Once you start creating distinctions between the two (or hopefully more) women, if you're honest with them, they will begin to develop their own ways of interacting with their world and other people, and hey: that's the beginning of a personality.

Clause Two of the Bechdel test prevents the male writer from taking the easy way out and simply duplicating the female character. By putting the two characters up together, we get a close look at the distinctions between them.

Clause Three has a fairly simple benefit that ties into this idea of preventing female characters from simply being mirrors of the desires of male characters - if they are not talking about men, then one can probably assume there's something going on inside their heads other than... well, men.

If this article seems patronizing to any writers (male or female) reading it, that is probably a good sign. Writing complex women is really no harder than writing complex men, as long as you take the character seriously as a person, and if you are a good writer, you've probably already figured that out. Still, it pays to be vigilant against the tide of thousands of years of gender expectations and conventions in fiction.

And, of course, this is just the first step. Complying with the test will encourage you to write interesting women, but it will not get you all the way there. But if you ever suspect your female characters are a little flat or marginalized, it's a good idea to take a step back and make sure you've passed the test.

Season Four Transition: Voyager

DS9 and Voyager are certainly companion shows with one another. While Next Generation grew out of a renewed interest in Star Trek (thanks to the movies, I'm sure,) these two grew out of the success of Next Gen. Voyager began a mere two years after DS9, suggesting that this had been the plan all along. They have a similar visual style, including the font in the titles sequence, and both struggled with the burden of striking out with new and different premises while also having the freedom to do something other than simply act as a new version of the Voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

Also, both shows deal with uncharted areas of the Galaxy - DS9 has the Gamma Quadrant while Voyager has the Delta Quadrant (both kind of suck compared to Alpha and Beta.)

Yet in another way, the two shows are diametric opposites. DS9 is about a single location. Deep Space 9 the station is always in the Bajoran star system, and it's always near the wormhole. It does not suffer, though, because as an outpost at a huge crossroads (and the front line of an enormous war) there is plenty of opportunity for variation, while its huge cast of recurring characters (how was Garak never a regular?) meant there was plenty of story to tell.

Voyager, on the other hand, is about a ship that is traveling a huge distance, and therefore is unlikely to encounter most of the people they see ever again.

In watching Deep Space 9, the transition from season 3 to season 4 was a marked one. For the first few seasons, we had not even heard of the Dominion, who would of course prove to be the primary antagonists of the series. Sure, the Cardassians weren't exactly friendly, but they never become a real, wide-spread threat until the Dominion gets involved. Season 4 is where confrontations with the Dominion begin, and we get to know the Vorta, the Jem Hedar, and eventually find out why Odo might not want to go back to his people.

I have just hit season four of Voyager, and there is a similar huge change that can be felt. For one thing, there was a change in the cast. Kes, whose psychic powers have grown to god-like levels, leaves the cast. I can understand that the writers wanted to pare down the size of the cast, given the introduction of a new cast member, yet personally I was not yet sick of Kes. At the same time, her departure did not feel entirely unearned, even if it was somewhat abrupt (this being before the age of serialized drama, I suppose I must make allowances that they could not create a season-long arc about Kes' development and eventual departure.) On one hand, her leaving the show means one less Delta-Quadrant-specific cast member, but, of course, we're not really in the same part of the Quadrant that defined those early seasons.

I imagine, then, that we will probably not see much of the Kazon, the Vidiians, or even the Talaxians (except Neelix, of course) moving forward. Borg space, though we spent far less time there than I expected, is a pretty serious barrier.

Though we lost Kes, we now have Seven of Nine, who is probably one of the more iconic members of the cast. Much as Worf helped to explore the Klingons after the original Trek depicted them somewhat as mustache-twirlers, I am eager to see how Seven lets us see another side of the Borg. I'm told that the Borg start to seem far less threatening as we watch cube after cube destroyed by Species 8472 - or "species CGI Protoss." Still, one of my favorite opportunities in Fantasy and Sci-Fi is to take a look under the hood of the monsters and maybe see how they might be turned into good guys. Granted, the Borg also largely get their coolness and scariness from being enigmatic, so it could be a bumpy ride.

I'll admit, I have a positive response bias, and despite people warning me that Voyager is the worst of the Trek shows (other than Enterprise, which again, those friends insist does not exist - I cannot guarantee I won't watch that one next) I am still enjoying it.

But just as the beginning of the Dominion War transformed DS9, I expect that crossing Borg space will mean a very different Voyager.

Unchained: Tarantino's Spaghetti Southern

Despite the fact that I consider myself a proud American, I do think that our history has been far from blameless. The two greatest stains (though they are not the only ones) on this country founded on principles of freedom and equality, in my opinion, are the genocidal treatment of the Native Americans and the brutal and barbarian practice of slavery that African Americans suffered under.

We should, of course, never forget that there are still Native Americans in this country, and the matter, as it were, is never closed. In the public eye, however, the struggles for equality by our African American population is still very central. We may have a black president, but the nature of race relations here has hardly settled into a comfortable balance (the fact that Obama is considered black, rather than half-black, for instance, is a relic of the time when "black blood" was considered a negative thing, and that one drop would "taint" the purity of a person's ancestry.) Even though racial segregation is no longer enshrined in law, the specter of slavery and Jim Crow rears its ugly head in the continuing socio-economic inequalities that persist.

So, full disclosure for those of you who do not know me: I'm white. And a great deal of the controversy that is stirred up by Quentin Tarantino's latest film Django Unchained, such as Spike Lee's condemnation despite his refusal to see the film, stems from the fact that he is a white writer/director making a movie about the cruel first act of African American history. Hollywood, despite nominally representing many of the egalitarian ideals and positions of a liberal democracy, continues to be dominated by white, male directors (though it is one industry in which a minority to which half my ancestors belong, namely the Jews, do seem to be able to keep pace with white people of Northern and Western European descent.)

Truthfully, I agree that we ought to have more films about the African American experience created by African American artists, but does that mean that the subject should be totally beyond the reach of non-black filmmakers?

I'm inclined to disagree. Tarantino's previous film, for example, Inglourious Basterds, is very much a companion piece to Django Unchained. In both films, the protagonists are members of victimized populations that turn the tables and take revenge on their oppressors. As a grandson of two Holocaust survivors, I did not object to Basterds (at least not on the grounds that Tarantino was ineligible to make such a film.)

But then, admittedly, it is not quite the same. In this country, at least, I have only very rarely felt alienated by my Jewish ancestry (the "War on Chirstmas" bullshit is too laughable for me to feel threatened.) The U.S. is a relatively safe place for the Jews, arguably the safest place for them in the world. On the other hand, African Americans, despite having a much larger population here, continue to be targeted by racial violence (the deplorable murder of Trayvon Martin, for instance, is a haunting example.)

Yet at the same time, I think there is also something to be said for a white filmmaker approaching this subject. By keeping alive the memory of the sort of thing that happened, and not shrinking away from the brutality of the violence, we avoid whitewashing the past and making it seem as if slavery wasn't so bad. Just as African Americans should be reminded of their need to constantly fight for equality, White Americans should be reminded of what they are capable of doing if they forget the sins of their ancestors.

Tarantino, of course, is not a conventional filmmaker. In many ways, he is not actually making a historical drama set in the early 1860s, but is instead making an action flick set on the screen of a 1970s multiplex. His films have evolved to become more artificial, and to listen to him in interviews, this is intentional.

Long story short: By all means, people should talk about what this film represents in our nation's perpetual struggle for harmony, but I'm more interested in talking about it as a story.

Django himself is a bit of an enigma. For the vast majority of the story, we see him a quiet man with deep anger, but careful self-control. On occasion, this anger boils to the surface, yet he seems to have enough control to direct it toward those who deserve to be in its way. He's fiercely intelligent, and while we are initially dazzled by Schultz' ability to casually switch between his friendly, avuncular mode to his cold-blooded-killer mode, it is Django who is smarter and has better control. When he finally goes to Candyland, the sick, ironic name of "Monsieur" Candie's (Leonardo DiCaprio) plantation, to rescue his wife, he embodies the black slave-dealer character he has created with hardly a crack in the facade while Schultz struggles to maintain composure in the face of such horrific brutality.

Perhaps, this is because, having lived the life of a slave, there is nothing there to shock him. Schultz is a man of violence, yes, but his is the world of small towns or wilderness and fast shoot-outs followed by awkward but amicable resolutions with local law enforcement. His is an orderly world, where he abides by the law, even if he does so in shocking and violent ways. He does not kill unless it is for a bounty or in self-defense (well, except once - which triggers plot point two.) So it is, perhaps, not surprising that he is unable to cope with the reality of slavery. Cristoph Waltz does an amazing job here, retaining the same mix of pleasantness and ruthlessness as he did with Landa in Basterds, yet turning it around. With Landa, the pleasant conversationalist was a mask to cover the predatory mind behind it, whereas Schultz ultimately proves to be a good man of principle whose violent lifestyle is more a product of his environment than his character.

The villain, Calvin Candie, who is not exactly the antagonist (slavery itself is the true big bad of the film,) is portrayed by a wonderfully over-the-top Leonardo DiCaprio. Candie presents himself as the epitome of the sophisticated southern gentleman, affecting a love of French culture despite neither knowing the language nor understanding anything but the most superficial aspects of his professed object of interest (in a glorious exchange, Schultz informs Candie that Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, which Candie describes as one of his favorite books, was black.) In many ways, Candie represents the white-washing of the antebellum South - a projection of aristocracy and class that belies a casual attitude toward barbarism. Until he realizes that Schultz and Django are not who they say they are, he treats them with all the southern hospitality that is expected. He radiates calm and civility even as he watches two men wrestle to the death mere inches from his seat. He is a brute in a fancy suit.

By far the most problematic and challenging character in the story is Samuel L. Jackson's Stephen, who is an elderly slave who now serves as Candie's devoted butler. Despite all the white-supremicist rhetoric that black people cannot live as civilized people, Stephen is a trusted confidant, secretary, and manager of the other slaves. Stephen has internalized all of the racism of the society to the point that he is mortified when Django arrives, and at first refuses to prepare a room for him as a guest. In the theater, Stephen was probably the character who produced the most laughs - this walking irony - but at the same time, those were extremely qualified, awkward laughs. The "happy slave" is of course an insidious myth on most levels - an attempt to justify what is an atrocity against human rights. But in Stephen's case, it is a representation of how the definition of one group of people being inferior can create a hierarchy that leads to more and more hate and racism. I am reminded of one of the Vice Principles of my Middle School, who told us that when he was younger, he, a light-skinned black person, avoided darker-skinned African Americans because of the sense that they were somehow "more black," and thus inferior. By creating a division between the slaves, the Candie family got themselves a loyal servant, rather than one that was merely afraid of retribution.

Despite being the love interest and goal of the entire film, Broomhilda, or Hildy, played by Kerry Washington, is a kind of ethereal presence, appearing only briefly. Throughout his journeys, as Django transforms from a somewhat lost fish-out-of-water to a quick-drawing champion, he is haunted by visions of his wife, spurring him on. We don't spend a great deal of time with Hildy the woman, who, despite having the "comfortable" life of a house-slave (as if being forced to have sex with Candie's guests was a "comfortable life") still retains the same strong will toward freedom she's always had. As Schultz tells us, she shares a name and, indeed, much of the story of the mythical Brunhilda. Django, here, is Siegfried, storming the castle that is Candyland to rescue his beloved. There is something mythical about her, yet as soon as the two are reunited and no longer forced to hide their connection, the mythical dissolves and we briefly get a glimpse of two people who both love each other, and are old friends as well.

I think part of the reason I liked this film better than Inglourious Basterds was that there was more to it than revenge. Despite the bloody (and I mean bloody) business that Django gets to once everything hits the fan, at no point does it seem the blood is the goal. He is there to rescue his wife. In the face of an enemy as monolithic and world-threatening as Hitler, self-destruction in the name of defeating him may seem justified, yet Django does not walk into Candyland with any intention of going out in a blaze of glory. He's there to begin a life of freedom with his wife. Perhaps they have not yet lighted the powderkeg that will end slavery in the US (see Lincoln for that, I suppose,) but as far as Django is concerned, this is a story about fighting for happily ever after.

Potentials of Star Trek: Voyager, First Look

Last year, I started on a bit of a Star Trek kick. Star Trek: The Next Generation began a year after I was born, and when I was a little kid, it was the show we regularly watched around dinner time. My dad is dyed-in-the-wool science fiction fan (as well as being a professor at MIT,) so it is perhaps not surprising that he introduced us to this show. I grew up loving Data and Geordi LaForge (it didn't hurt that LeVar Burton was also the host of Reading Rainbow, and you bet your ass I watched that as well.)

After Next Gen ended, I did not get into the other two Star Trek series of the '90s, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. It wasn't quite the same without the original cast, and as I had never really watched the original series (frankly, I think it's easy to forget it existed when you talk about '90s Trek - no disrespect intended) I did not feel a greater attachment to the overall Trek universe. In other words, we drifted apart. I discovered Star Wars, which would be my Sci-Fi obsession for the next several years (even if Star Wars is really more fantasy than Sci-Fi, though I'll get to that in a later post) and I kind of wrote Trek off until last year.

However, my interest in television has grown a lot, beginning with exposure to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in my freshman year of college. One thing that I enjoy is the ability for a show to tell very long, serialized stories, and so friends recommended that I take a look at Deep Space Nine. When a friend of mine who was also a Trek nerd moved into my apartment, it was the golden opportunity to engage with this king of nerdy American TV shows (obviously they'll have to duke it out with Doctor Who for nerdiest overall.)

So I watched through all of DS9 while the apartment as a whole has been very slowly working our way through Next Gen. While Next Gen does raise some very nice philosophical questions and explores them, DS9 earnestly examines the difficulties in being diplomatic peacekeepers in a very volatile Galaxy and what peacekeepers are forced to do when war breaks out. It also questions a lot of the utopian premises that the Federation is built on. It's still probably not as good as Next Gen, though I admit some of that might be nostalgia clouding my judgment. Also, that holographic lounge singer in the later seasons was infuriatingly annoying. Still, I respected the makers of the show for creating a very different kind of setting for a Star Trek show (even if they used the Defiant or the Runabouts to cheat and have a couple of planet-hopping adventures.) Given that Voyager overlapped DS9 by most of both shows' runs, I was curious to see what they had done with that premise.

Now, I had also heard the warnings. Voyager actually has a pretty interesting premise, in that we get to see what it's like for the Federation when they're not just a few days at warp speed from a starbase. Not only are they desperate and running low on supplies in a hostile and uncharted part of space, but nearly half their crew are members of the Maquis, a splinter group from the Federation who weren't willing to give up their homes to the Cardassians in the name of a treaty.

All of this potential could make for a much darker and grittier Star Trek, but from my season-and-a-half of experience and from what I've heard, it never really goes to that place. The replicators are rationed, but Neelix's kitchen seems to always be stocked just fine. The Maquis are insubordinate at times, but they soon learn their lessons and start towing the line. In the episode Alliances, we're teased with the idea that Janeway might have to compromise her principles in order to survive, yet the conclusion she reaches after attempting to befriend various Kazon factions or the Trabe (the too-nice-to-not-secretly-be-evil-guys) is that, screw it, she's going to just keep doing things the way she's doing, and somehow we're not going to be losing a crew member to various attacks every week.

Now, I'm still enjoying the show (and I'm looking forward to the Borg, even if, as I understand, they get somewhat wimpified after a while,) so I do plan to continue watching, but I also see why producer/writer Ronald D. Moore was inspired to create his re-make of Battlestar Galactica. In a lot of ways (and interviews with Moore confirm this) BSG was the show Voyager could have been. Desperate people, fighting a desperate fight to survive. In DS9, there's a fantastic episode ("In the Pale Moonlight") where Sisko makes a confessional video log about his role in the assassination of a Romulan ambassador that ultimately leads to the Romulans joining the fight against the Dominion. In the end, Sisko reveals that, in the grand scheme of things, even though it would seem to compromise all of his ethics and principles, he's decided that in this case, the ends justified the means. Star Trek doesn't tend to get that dark, and I think BSG was Moore's way of letting him explore those thornier ethical questions without the mandate that the Federation is always the good guys and always does the right thing.

For now, Voyager does remind us of their status on a regular basis - it's not as if things are going super-smoothly - but it does still have the sort of "return to the status quo at the end of the episode" quality than a show about a stranded star ship seems it ought to have. In Next Gen, the Enterprise is often stopping in for repairs and re-fits, and you would think that, for example, after a Kazon craft crash-lands through the hull and into Voyager's shuttle bay (a move remarkably similar to an event in BSG,) they would have a seriously tough time fixing that hole.

Part of me wonders what a new Star Trek show would be like. Obviously, there was Enterprise (though my Trekkie friends insist that that series does not exist,) but it would be interesting to see a series set in the Trek universe that took into account the modern tastes for television. I don't know how likely it is we'll see another Star Trek show, given that Enterprise was cancelled early and the current incarnation of the franchise is JJ Abram's alternate-timeline version. 2009's Star Trek was a lot of fun, don't get me wrong, but it was more of an action-adventure film than what you tend to look for in Star Trek, which I think of as being a little closer to pure Sci-Fi - where you have to take the time to really think about what you're doing instead of simply firing all your weapons at once.

But we're talking about Voyager here, so let me try to get back on track.

First of all, I think it was a clever, and logical (sigh) choice that the two non-human crew-members brought along to the Delta Quadrant are the two most iconic aliens of the franchise: a Vulcan and a Klingon - well, half-Klingon - B'ellana ironically seems to have none of Worf's issues of identity crisis. She seems pretty happy to just be an extra-feisty human with a somewhat bumpy forehead. So far I think they've done less interesting things with Tuvok, who embodies everything we know about Vulcans, and has little of Spock's deadpan snark. It's still relatively early in the series, and Tim Russ seems to do fine with what he's given, but I wouldn't mind seeing a little more specificity to his character.

I know Kes is only in the first few seasons, though I think she's reasonably interesting. In the pilot, we're introduced to the Kazon and the Ocampa, but these do not play the kind of central roles that, say, the Cardassians and Bajorans play on DS9. Neelix, I think, has a lot of potential, and the episodes where we've seen more of his background, such as when he encounters essentially his people's enemy's version of Oppenheimer, we see his goofy, friendly shell crack and find out that he's a very damaged and angry man on the inside. I hope that the writers don't forget this fact when doing future Neelix-centric episodes.

Harry Kim, more than any Trek character I can think of, is the audience character. Sure, he's a gifted graduate, and a hard worker, but more than anyone else, he's a blank slate, with very little baggage to bring on his journey. Tom Paris (who I understand a lot of people disliked, though I have not gotten sick of him yet) on the other hand is all about baggage. In a way, I think he has the clearest arc planned out for him - redeeming himself by turning his screw-up life around and becoming a hero. For the most part he's made that change by the end of the pilot, though we see his old problems pop up now and again.

So then there's Chakotay. I actually like Robert Beltran's performance in this role, and when he's not the focus of an episode, I like his position as the Maquis leader who ought to be the most defiant, but actually is the most willing to act like Starfleet again. The problem is that whenever we see an episode about him, we get some very hokey Magical Native American stuff. We don't see Harry defined by his Chinese ancestry, nor Paris and Janeway defined by their White American heritage. While I think it's great that there's a Native American cast member on a Star Trek show (think about how revolutionary Nichelle Nichols was - playing a black, female officer on a starship in an era where the Civil Rights Movement was still struggling to change the country,) I also think that Native Americans suffer from an oversimplification of their societies and cultures (note: plural.) I'm much happier when episodes focus on Chakotay the man instead of Chakotay the Native American.

Then there's the Captain herself. Janeway's got some interesting things going on. Of course, she's the first female Star Trek captain, though frankly, I think the less of a big deal of that they make, the better (and in fairness, it's not like it comes up once an episode.) While she does have a friendship with Tuvok, she is certainly isolated from the rest of the crew, and given the ship's isolation, I could imagine that taking its toll over time. So far, she's stubbornly principled, which is fine for now, but I'd like to see more dire consequences result from that (destroying the Caretaker Array in the pilot was, of course, the biggest one.) One thing that I find kind of fascinating is that the Holo-Novel she likes to relax with has her playing the part of a governess (in a weird period horror story - perhaps it's supposed to be Turn of the Screw?) She's a Starfleet Captain (which means pretty damn kick-ass) but her fantasy has her put into a subservient position. Is this problematic from a feminist perspective, or merely interesting? Unlike Picard, Janeway is too young to be a parent to her crew, so what I think would be interesting would be to see how she struggles to maintain control over the ship while people get increasingly panicked about getting home.

A lot of my critiques so far boil down to: let's have some character development. The issue, of course, is that at the time this show was made, there was a much stronger push for episodic plots. Star Trek shows of this era were made directly for syndication, meaning that whatever local channels bought the shows would be able to control the order in which they were shown. Thus, there was an incentive to keep the status quo from changing too much. In the past decade, however, television has become a far more serialized medium, and one of the huge advantages of this change is that you can make big, sweeping changes without worrying the audience will become lost.

Hell, the way we watch TV has changed significantly since the 90s. I watch a ton of TV, but none of it is through regular broadcasts. Instead, I watch on Hulu (or some other sites) and Netflix, or if not there, I'll purchase whole seasons on DVD. In this era, where you are far less likely to miss an episode (if it's on Netflix, you can't miss one) there's really no problem with letting the show move along in very different ways.