Lower Decks

Okay, I’m going back to Star Trek country this week, but it’s by way of one of my favorite new shows, Heroes. Wait, new? Well, to me, a bit. This week may have seen the third season premiere of the series, but I’ve only really begun watching this year, thanks to the DVDs. I’ll be spending a later column about my Heroes experience, but for now would like to concentrate on the epochal moment of the first season, “Company Man.” The seventeenth episode of the first season, it was in many ways the moment fans understood the depth of the show, when the infamous HRG (Horn Rim Glasses) has his story told, Noah Bennett exposed as (nearly) just another pawn in the wider Company conspiracy.

I’d been looking at the writing credits all along, because I knew Michael Green was working on the show, and I’d become a fan of his through a comic book (an excellent origin-of-Joker arc called “Lovers & Madmen” he wrote for Batman Confidential). I’d known of another comic book alum’s participation, Jeph Loeb, on the creative side (not to mention Isaac Mendez’s alter ego, Tim Sale), plus was aware that in the second season Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man) had joined ship. I just wasn’t prepared for a name I knew from somewhere else entirely to pop up. The name was Bryan Fuller.

Bryan actually left the show after the first season to create Pushing Daisies, his second cult creation (after Wonderfalls, but he also did Dead Like Me), which is returning this fall for a second season, but although I’ve since seen star Lee Pace in the summer cult classic The Fall, I’ve yet to see Daisies. No, I knew him from somewhere else. From Star Trek.

I’ll be writing a future column on the impact of the famous core of writers on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but it’s worth noting here that the franchise has long benefited from such stables, from the very start, in fact, and it’s a facet that hasn’t often been emphasized. Noted, sometimes, certainly with the original series and DS9, but never quite appreciated for the influence the particular nature of the writing staff has had on Star Trek as it has come to be known. You can ask any random fan at this point what the franchise means, as one will tell you of its social significance, the next will revel in its space adventuring. You ask one what their favorite show is, they’ll say DS9 because of its serialized nature, another TNG because of its episodic explorations. You ask again what made subsequent series Voyager and Enterprise harbingers of the so-called second Dark Age, and they’ll say it was because Star Trek had become increasingly derivative of its own past.

Well, my friend, because this is my column, I get to blast such theories away, and Bryan Fuller will help me. Merely based on Pushing Daisies, you’ll know this alumnus has a particular brand of storytelling, quirky, you might say at first, but beyond the surface is a distinct sense of a supernatural element that’s rooted in the human experience. His defining moment in Heroes, “Company Man,” also demonstrates his ability to produce gold from an experience in which he was not after all a direct driving force. Over the course of twenty-three episodes with Star Trek, you would have known these things already.

Fuller is indicative of the Star Trek creative imperative. The franchise is indeed many things to many people, but it is also one thing in particular, and that is one of modern culture’s great centers of synthesis. Not even from the later series when hundreds of hours of television had already been produced but from the very beginning, not merely a platform for allegory, the days of Kirk were an opportunity to tell any story in any sort of alien contact the writers could conceive. From the obvious, a Wild West sojourn, or trips to worlds contaminated to resemble Chicago mobs or Nazi regimes, or Greek gods and Roman circuses, Star Trek was interested in creating a platform to study every facet of experience, from the past to the present, transposing it to the future simply because it was possible when no one could say it wasn’t. These stories were set in the future, after all, under circumstances no one could say were impossible. It was science fiction at its best, not a mere look at what technology could get us, but what the imagination said could be done.

Reading through Terry Erdman’s Deep Space Nine Companion, you’re constantly amazed at how the writers reworked some of their favorite films into TV episodes, the classic Casablanca reworked to star Quark, the shifty bartender whose Ferengi lobes were the least that seemed to make him anything but Bogy, for instance. When you get to Fuller’s episodes, “The Darkness and the Light” and “Empok Nor” from the fifth season, you get to find out what his interests were, and how they’re reflected in his writing. This isn’t to say he did things that were uncharacteristic of Star Trek or even DS9, but rather stories of a certain interest that bended into the greater narrative around them.

In Voyager, Fuller had the chance to write character episodes for nearly every member of the cast: Seven of Nine (“The Raven”), Neelix (“Mortal Coil”), The Doctor (“Living Witness”), Tuvok (“Gravity”), B’Elanna Torres (“Barge of the Dead”), Tom Paris (“Alice”), even Kes (“Fury”). Rarely does a TV writer work alone, and of course throughout his twenty-one Voyager scripts there are collaborators, but as a body of work, there is a certain unity and theme running through his writing from the fourth through seventh seasons. Because of the nature of Paul Ruditis’s Voyager Companion, I can only guess, but I have to assume that Bryan particularly enjoyed the sixth season’s “The Haunting of Deck Twelve,” as deliberate an homage as any episode in franchise lore. Prior to researching his work in Star Trek, I wouldn’t have made any such connection, but its significance, while still a fairly trivial entry, becomes a little greater, something a little easier to understand.

It fits into the greater pattern a little more easily. There are many ways to work through the vast amount of material Star Trek has amassed over forty years, but when you start to look at it as more than just a collection of episodes and films, when you start to look at the work of individual creators such as Bryan Fuller, you begin to see how this labor of love is not merely a platform for some greedy studio to crank out more profit, but as something that has allowed some of the entertainment industry’s brightest minds to expand not only on Star Trek but of the possibilities inherent in a shared culture to offer new insights into old ideas. It’s easy to be cynical, but hard to allow yourself to look beyond what seems obvious. Fuller’s work includes “Bride of Chaotica!” and “Relativity,” “Spirit Folk” and “Friendship One,” “One Small Step” and “Drone,” the two-parters “Flesh and Blood” and “Workforce,” “Juggernaut” and “Course: Oblivion,” and finally, “Retrospect.” Given the number of years since Voyager has been on the air, and the fact that the Internet is hardly to be called the show’s best fan base, any number of Fuller’s episodes might provoke a shudder of recognition, if any at all. Some may actually elicit some fond memories, even of a show that particular fan didn’t much care for.

To Bryan, of course, they’re something else entirely. Maybe he’s not fond of every one of them either, but that’s the body of his Star Trek work, his own particular canon. To me, they represent a fairly comprehensive look at what Voyager was capable of, great drama (“Living Witness”) as well as great levity (“Bride of Chaotica!”). He even has time-travel in there (“Relativity”), as any good Star Trek creator should. Heck, if someone told me I could only watch Bryan Fuller Star Trek, I wouldn’t be disappointed.

All of which brings me back to “Company Man.” In an earlier version of this column, it was going to be named “Company Man,” in fact, back when I was still thinking I’d be naming each of them, not in honor of the episode, but for Bryan Fuller himself, in recognition of his unheralded work in Star Trek, during one of the franchise’s least celebrated moments. The work Fuller did, however, speaks for itself. He may not be recognized as one the key Star Trek writers, or even for Voyager itself, but he is, whether because of the work he actually did or for what he represents, a tradition the franchise has secretly kept throughout its history, of honoring the past while forging the future.