Lower Decks

At the start of the year I wrote about the state of Star Trek before the release of ‘Star Trek.’ Now that we all know how spectacularly successful the relaunch was at the box office, it’s a good time to reflect again, about what it now means to be a fan.

Let me repeat one of those things again: “spectacularly successful.” For Star Trek fans, that’s pretty weird. The most a Star Trek film had made before 2009 was just over $100 million, and that was 1986 (I’m not one for adjusted grosses, so that’s all we’re talking about), which was almost matched ten years later. But in ten films, the average was thirty million less, and the last one limped to sixty million less. Being a fan of Star Trek was always knowing exactly where this all came from, and that was a short-lived 1960s TV show that had an improbable trajectory toward immortality that somehow landed to movies and four spin-off series over the course of forty years. Through it all the idea of being a fan was only ever really united over the original show, and sometimes only over the fact that it had started it all. Let’s face it, after a point new fans won’t be looking nostalgically over a dated even if groundbreaking three-year experience.

Looking over the covers of the recently re-released DVDs for the original six films, I’m struck again that it’s probably the only time anyone was able to sustain interest in an aging cast that wasn’t called ‘Golden Girls.’ You really had to like Shatner and company to keep that ball rolling. By the time it seemed natural for Picard and his team to inherit the big screen, it must also have become apparent that, hey, Star Trek maybe didn’t really need, maybe, to be in movies that badly. It was that same time when TV audiences were realizing the same thing, when it seemed like it wasn’t possible to escape some new episode of some new series. Suddenly, an immense privilege had turned into an unsupportable burden, and everyone started to think of Star Trek merely as…a cash cow.

Lots of people seemed to know what Star Trek was really about, what waited at the heart of its appeal, if you bothered to look, if only all those people would stop calling you a geek for liking it. Chiefly, it was assumed that Star Trek was really a moral allegory, a chance to shine a beacon of hope in a time that really needed it. That’s exactly what all the hype commentators were saying when ‘Star Trek’ was poised for release, calling it exactly the film for the new Obama era. Then people saw it and didn’t find quite that kind of message, that kind of story waiting. Oh, there was, to a certain extent, but nothing very blatant. The only message was, quit running from yourself.

That’s what Pike tells the civilian Jim Kirk, a bum who has nothing better to do than get in trouble and squander his potential, and what Spock is trying to get his Vulcan peers to understand, that he isn’t just the son of a human mother whose success is as much luck as logic. The movie becomes about great heroism in embracing what you are, not so much destiny as possibilities, if you’ll just get out of your own way. Kirk’s father is the most heroic figure of the entire film, and he dies early, before you really get to know him, in a moment where he has to make just one decision. Pike come to Kirk and reminds him of that moment, as if he’s forgotten it. I don’t know that the filmmakers say that the recklessness in which he’s been living is a product of that knowledge so much as a lack of direction in knowing, more than anyone else around him, what he’s capable of, because he is his father’s son, even if he’s never known him. Spock knows his human mother, and defers to her almost bashfully, asking her permission for things she gladly grants, because she is a proud mother. Kirk’s dad would have been proud, too.

But before we spark a debate of nature versus nurture, back to Star Trek as a whole. The franchise, even in its darkest hours when it seemed no two fans could agree on anything and thus would gladly lose everything, it was pretty plain to see that every time someone suggested a straight reboot to fix everything, they had no idea what they were really asking. In a completely unprecedented move, Star Trek had managed to maintain the same cast playing the same roles for thirty years, William Shatner as Kirk, Leonard Nimoy as Spock, and so on. It had become unimaginable to view anyone else in those roles, so for twenty years, a number of new casts were introduced. Maybe Picard really could have become as iconic as Kirk, if he’d been left as the second and only other captain. For a while, when ‘The Next Generation’ finally hit its stride three years into its run, it certainly seemed that way. Then Sisko, who wasn’t even a captain when he first appeared, showed up, and then Janeway, and then Archer. By 1994, Star Trek was well past its peak already, but nobody knew it, so when Kirk and Picard finally met, no one cared. They were just angry that Kirk got killed, in a manner that wasn’t “right.” The seeds were already sewn.

But who could guess what it meant? For years, Shatner scrambled, in a series of books that still continue, to come up with a plausible means to say, Kirk wasn’t dead. Not the old Kirk, the one who still existed in continuity, the one Shatner himself could still play, if someone would only greenlight another adventure, one of his, any at all. There was that, a return of Shatner as Kirk, or a reboot, but in 1994, 1995, Sisko was still in the early phases of his adventures, Janeway was just getting started. Archer was some time off, waiting for the bold move of moving the story backward for the first time. But the fans gradually grew less and less interested, sick of the structure of it all, the inevitability. The TV shows were too safe, the movies too predictable, if not for their actual plots than for the clockwork nature of their releases. A franchise is not what a fan really wants. They want excitement, not a chance to see the cracks begin to show, for the novelty to wear off. They want a world to live in, but not necessarily for someone to continue working on.

Not, er, that they will ever admit that. Fans appreciate creativity, but anyone who enjoys entertainment will always tell you, in some way, that entertainment is supposed to be the springboard for a little personal creativity. A monolith like the Star Trek franchise makes everything too difficult, after a while, to imagine what comes next, what happened to set these conditions in the first place. Once you start setting everything down for the fan, you reduce the prospect of retaining that fan. There are only so many people who want to exist in a world where everything is known, because that makes it too much like the real world. Some people want to pretend they have a life there, too.

So if Star Trek was to mean anything anymore, what was it going to do? Well, J.J. Abrams and his crew did something clever indeed. Not just the alternate reality bit. They boiled Star Trek back down to the essentials, and realized it was all about what kind of person needed to exist in a world where we were finally getting things right. Even in that context, someone would be needed to rub the complacency away from your eyes. Someone like, well, Kirk.

In a way, William Shatner should be really proud. Without him, without NBC’s insistence that Jeffrey Hunter’s Pike be replaced (we’ll excuse their momentary short-sightedness concerning Spock), Star Trek might have been about a man who reacts to more than engages strange new worlds, who needs an amazing crew around him the more to enhance his own heroics. Shatner put the bold in Kirk, in Star Trek itself, created an icon that sustained a TV show, and then a series of movies, and many memories. Picard was never Pike, but he was never Kirk, either, and the more successful, the more dependable Star Trek became, the less it seemed it needed Kirk. You watch ‘Star Trek’ (2009) enough, you can’t fail to notice how the filmmakers make an entire point of the film out of this fact.

The new film, this first reboot and recasting in Star Trek (a new Saavik doesn’t count, among any number of technicalities you can think of), might have been inspired by the success of ‘Batman Begins’ and ‘Casino Royale,’ but it was just as smart as those films in recognizing that this opportunity came with the chance to revisit the original appeal in the best way possible, to forget about the myth-making and see what really makes it work. Kirk becomes James Bond, an action hero in his own unique context, with his own needs, his butler Alfred and Ra’s al Ghul working the conditions he comes ready-made with to the best effect. Kirk isn’t just someone you follow, but a man whose story engages you, and becomes plenty motivation for fans old and new to follow enthusiastically, for the first time.

For the first time, Star Trek isn’t seen for its trappings, but for what it has always tried to do, make the human condition something we can understand, maybe cast in an outrageous situation where an alien miner blows up worlds for revenge and time paradoxes seem almost like a matter of fact, something rousing, filled with characters who aren’t just familiar but friends, maybe even family, with their own stories, their own moments to shine in new and exciting ways, but the same Star Trek it always was, improbably.

The new film makes an old franchise back into what it became without the baggage, the story about a new cultural icon, and that makes all things suddenly seem possible, and that’s what Star Trek is like now.