Movie Trailer: John Carter (2012)

Theme Song of the Week: Quinn Martin’s Tales of the Unexpected (1977)

Cult-TV Theme Watch: Defectors?

A defector is a person or (character in a drama) who allegedly renounces allegiance to one nation, state, or other political entity.  That defector may be courageous for abandoning or leaving behind a dangerous or evil ideology, or may be considered a traitor or betrayer to his own kind.

 

Because the motives of a defector cannot always be easily parsed, there’s often a question in drama about his or her true allegiance.  If a person renounces all they have known and loved – down to their very home, family and laws – how can you trust them?

That is the terrain that defectors on cult TV largely play.  Often, a defector is susceptible to suspicion and concern because those whom he or she defects to can’t always be sure they aren’t being fed misinformation or outright lies.

During the long history of the Star Trek franchise, the logical half-Vulcan Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) has at least twice been considered a defector.  In both circumstances, of course, we learn that this is not at all the case, but initially the suspicion is raised. 

In “The Enterprise Incident,” when the Enterprise illegally crosses the neutral zone, Spock acquiesces to Romulan orders and agrees to take command of the Enterprise from Captain Kirk (William Shatner), even while very publicly entertaining the possibility of a future life in the Romulan Empire.  Of course, this defection is a ruse, and the eminently trustworthy Spock is really operating under top-secret Starfleet orders.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation’s two-part episode “Unification,” the matter of Mr. Spock’s allegiance comes up again.  When Ambassador Spock disappears from the Federation, there are rumblings and rumors that he is actually on the planet Romulus, having defected there.  Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) leads a secret mission to the Romulan home-world to determine if Spock’s defection is real, but not before facing the unpleasant task of telling Spock’s dying father, Sarek (Mark Lenard) that his son may be a traitor to the Federation.

In Space: 1999’s (1975 – 1977) Year One story “The Last Enemy,” there’s actually a double (trick) defection.  During a war between Beta and Delta, a Bethan vessel, the Satazius, sets up a firing position on Earth’s traveling moon.  After the Satazius, is damaged in a counter-attack, Satazius’s commander, Dione (Caroline Mortimer) seeks sanctuary at Moonbase Alpha and promises to help defend the base. Her defection is a ruse, and she is really only buying time to launch another strike against Delta.  At episode’s end, Commander Koenig (Martin Landau) apparently defects from Alpha to Satazius, but his plan is a far more cunning – and destructive – ruse.

The premises of both Star Maidens (1975) and Logan’s Run (1977) involve defectors.  In the former, two men, Shem and Adam flee a matriarchal society in hopes of finding a more equal civilization on Earth.  In the latter, Logan and Jessica flee a city where death is imposed at age thirty, and hope to become citizens of a quasi-mythical place called “Sanctuary.”

In Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century’s “Olympiad,” Buck (Gil Gerard) was tasked with helping a defecting athlete, Jorex Leet (Barney McFadden) escape from his repressive home world during the athletic gathering.  The story is a thinly-disguised Cold War parable, with a citizen from a repressive East Bloc country attempting to leave the Iron Curtain and make it to America.  What complicates this defector’s journey to the “west” (or Earth, in this case…) is an explosive device lodged in his body and remote controlled by a villainous guardian, Allerick (Nicholas Coster)

On V: The Series (1985), a Visitor named Willie (Robert Englund) defected from the alien fleet and became a dedicated member of the human resistance. Willie’s defection caused problems, however, in a later episode (“The Return”), when he encountered the Visitor love of his life aboard the mother ship and had to face the emotional consequences of his decision.

The third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987 – 1994) featured a terrific and largely-underrated episode titled “The Defector” in which the Enterprise rescued a Romulan admiral, Jarok (James Sloyan) from the Neutral Zone and was retrieved by the Enterprise-D.  Captain Picard experienced great difficulty determining if Jarok was a Romulan “plant” to spread false data to Starfleet, or a deeply committed man who fled his people and his family over his belief that war was imminent, and he alone could stop it.   

In the brilliantly-vetted Beast Wars animated series of the 1990s, two of the most intriguing and well-developed characters, Blackarachnia and (my favorite) Dinobot, were actually defectors from Megatron’s Predacon ranks.  What ultimately distinguished these two characters on the program was the fact that though they sided with the Maximals under Optimus Primal, they still went about things in their own unique fashion, utilizing tactics that Optimus, Rhinox and Cheetor didn’t always approve of.

In a more earthbound, human setting, “the defector” also proved a staple of J.J. Abrams’ espionage series Alias (2001 – 2005).  Both the Russian spy, Julian Sark (David Anders) and Sydney Bristow’s mother, Irina Derevko (Lena Olin) at times “played” at being defectors to the West, but boasted hidden motives and agendas.

The Cult-TV Faces of: Defectors?

Identified by Hugh: Martin Landau in The Twilight Zone: “The Jeopardy Room.”

Identified by Hugh: Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) in Star Trek: “The Enterprise Incident.”

Identified by Anonymous: Gareth Thomas (Shem) and Pierre Brice (Adam) in Star Maidens.

Identified by Brian: Dione (Caroline Mortimer) in Space:1999: “The Last Enemy.”

Identified by Hugh: Logan 5 (Gregory Harrison) in Logan’s Run: The Series

Identified by Carl: Jorex Leek (Barney McFadden) in Buck Rogers: “Olympiad.”

Identified by woodchuckgod: Willie (Robert Englund) in V: The Series.

Identified by Hugh: Admiral Jarok (James Sloyan) in Star Trek: The Next Generation: “The Defector.”

Identified by Hugh: Ambassador Spock (Leonard Nimoy) in Star Trek: The Next Generation: “Unification.”

Identified by woodchuckgod: Dinobot in Beast Wars.

Identified by woodchuckgod: BlackArachnia in Beast Wars.

Identified by Hugh: Spike (James Marsters) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Becoming.”

Identified by jay-jay: Sark (David Anders) in Alias.

Identified by jay-jay: Irina Derevko (Lena Olin) in Alias.

Television and Cinema Verities # 23

“Well, how much more success do I want? I’ve had enough to last me three more lifetimes. I turned down Harry Potter and I turned down Spider-Man, two movies that I knew would be phenomenally successful, but they offered no challenge to me. It would have been shooting ducks in a barrel, a slam-dunk. I don’t need my ego reminded and I don’t need to race anybody to make the biggest hit movie anymore. I’m just trying to tell stories that I can keep interested in for the two years it takes to write, direct and edit them.”

Director Steven Spielberg, discussing the state of his art (circa 2004), at Total Film.

Cult-TV Blogging: Ghost Story: "The Dead We Leave Behind" (September 15, 1972)

What if the TV set could control what we watch? 

That’s the bizarre question host Winston Essex (Sebastian Cabot) asks in “The Dead We Leave Behind, the second episode of the William Castle-produced horror anthology Ghost Story (1972).

In this tale, a forest ranger/sheriff named Elliot Brent (Jason Robards) lives in the mountains and grows increasingly irritated with his wife, Joanna (Stella Stevens).  She is bored with life in the country and spends all day, every day, watching television.  Worse, when she leaves the house at all, it’s only for sexual liaisons with local men.

When Joanna finally works up the nerve to leave Elliot for good, the spouses violently argue and Joanna is killed in a fall.  Rather than inform the authorities of the incident, Elliot moves her corpse to a garden shed.

But now when Elliott turns on her beloved television again, he sees Joanna there…still arguing with him, still tauntinghim.  After he kills one of Joanna’s lovers, Elliot’s visions on the boob tube grow even more disturbing.  He sees his victims’ bodies rising from the ground…and heading towards his house.

Then he hears a pounding at the front door, and knows that the dead have come for him…

Anchored by a superb, surly performance by Jason Robards, “The Dead We Leave Behind” is a provocative and scary installment of this program.  In fact, it forecasts much of the oeuvre of horror maestro Stephen King. 

For instance, a key component of this tale by Richard Matheson and Robert Specht is a local legend – spelled out in dialogue — which insists that all dead bodies must be buried before winter comes, before the ground freezes.  If corpses aren’t buried in time, they will come back to life wrong; possessed of both “life and death.”  

If you’re an admirer of King’s novel Pet Sematary (1983) as I most assuredly am, this set-up will seem abundantly familiar.

If you glance at a few other elements of “The Dead We Leave Behind” — such as an obnoxious, loud-mouthed wife (Creepshow [1982]), and a man’s slow descent into madness in an isolated location (The Shining [1977) — the King-like aspects appear even more pronounced. 

Nobody can know for certain, but I wonder if King was impressed with and inspired by this episode of Ghost Story, because in his 1981 book Danse Macabre (on page 249, in the chapter “The Glass Teat”) he writes enthusiastically of a Quinn Martin’s Tales of the Unexpected episode in which “a murderer sees his victim rise from the dead on his television set.”  

To the best of my knowledge, there’s no such episode in that particular series’ canon, which only consists of eight shows.  Furthermore, that description fits “The Dead We Leave Behind” perfectly.  Remember too, Ghost Story (1972) and Tales of the Unexpected (1977) were virtual contemporaries, as well as both hour-long network TV horror anthologies. Therefore, it’s easy to see how the two series might be confused.   The same thing happens all the time with The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. It’s all-too-easy to mis-remember one as the other.  Nobody’s perfect.  Believe me, I’ve certainly made my share of mistakes.

But if this indeed were the episode he wrote of, the insightful King would have been absolutely right to feel impressed with the creepy, unsettling qualities of “The Dead We Leave Behind.”  It’s well-shot, well-acted and anxiety-provoking.   

And from a certain perspective the tale could easily be interpreted as the story of a man losing his mind, responding to the sounds of his guilty conscience.  The episode doesn’t come flat out and state it, but it is strongly suggested that Elliot has killed Joanna’s lovers before, and made it look like am accident each time.  


We arrive in media res, then, as his grip on reality is already growing more tenuous.  The episode begins with Elliot having a dream involving the television, a dream that reveals his anger, and his connection with a dead man.

The powerful idea expressed here is one of inevitability.  The TV just won’t shut up, even after Elliot takes an axe to it.  He can’t escape the television, just as he can’t escape the fact that he has committed murder.  He has made a trap for himself, and very soon…it springs.  As viewers, we both desire to see Elliott escape his pre-ordained fate and face punishment for his bad deeds.

I’m a big fan of E.C.-styled stories such as “The Dead We Leave Behind,” ones where the scales of cosmic justice are righted, and we get a final closing shot (or comic book frame) that reveals how the bad have been punished.   In this case, Elliot’s corpse shares ground with Joanna and one of her lovers…all one big happy family…forever.  Yikes.

Next week on Ghost Story an episode as bad as this one is good: “The Concrete Captain.” 

Saturday Morning Flashback: Mystery Island (1977)

Saturday Morning Cult-TV Blogging: Ark II: "The Balloon" (December 4, 1976)

In this episode of the Filmation Saturday morning series Ark II, the crew runs smack into a society that, as a whole, suffers from xenophobia, a fear of outsiders or “foreigners.”  Captain Jonah’s (Terry Lester) initial log entry describes people who “refuse to have contact with the outside world.”

But from somewhere deep inside the isolationist village, someone is sending out distress messages tied to floating balloons…written in Greek.  After deciphering one message, the Ark II crew comes to understand that the very people who have so calculatingly cut themselves off from the rest of humanity are suffering from a terrible plague, one they can’t cure on their own.

The Ark II team finds the messenger — an old man working a printing press near “the place of the Iron Birds,” a destroyed air-field — and learns that this is indeed the case.  The messenger says: “We have a new enemy now…disease.”

While Ruth returns to the Ark II via hot air balloon to work on a cure for the new disease, Jonah attempts to convince the village’s leaders to “open” their hearts and minds to others.  Unfortunately, he and a young boy fall prey to the disease, and only reinforce the fear of strangers.  Now outsiders are disease carriers.

Meanwhile, Ruth and Samuel must clear a path to get the Ark II inside the village, and deliver inoculations to all the sick people.

Like its predecessors, “The Balloon” is a message-heavy installment of this Saturday morning series.  In “The Tank,” we met people who shunned machines because they believe machines caused war.  Here, we meet characters who refuse to deal with outsiders, because they fear attack from them.   In both cases, people have responded to a terrifying situation irrationally, by a blanket rule about the things they perceive caused them harm.

In real life, of course, America has witnessed periods of intense xenophobia over the last two centuries, not the least of which has been in the decade following the 9/11 terror attacks.  Yet the rampant fear associated with xenophobia is ultimately counter-productive, as this episode of a 70s kid show rightly points out.  If you close yourself off, you also close yourself down to certain options, to new solutions, and to improvements your life.  When you come from a closed place, everything – even learning – comes to a stop.  It’s not a healthy response to fear, even if it is, on some level, understandable. 

It’s very interesting that Ark II chooses to tell this particular story, about a place that has sealed itself off from the world and in its insularity faces extinction.  “By talking instead of fighting,” says Jonah “we can move forward.”

In terms of Ark II continuity and lore, this episode reveals that the Ark II can fire a focused beam from its fore section, but the beam is still defined as “a force field,” keeping in tune with the idea of self-defense and no aggressive weaponry.  Intriguingly, the force field is also quite a limited device.  In trying to move heavy stones from the vehicle’s path, the force field’s power grid short circuits…

Although “The Balloon” carries a laudable message, it plays, at this point, as fairly routine.  The series is in something of a rut, with tiny villages constantly being shown the error of their primitive ways by the Ark II team.  The civilizations of the week – battling superstition (“The Slaves”), xenophobia (“The Balloon”), cruelty to the weak (“The Rule”) and technophobia (“The Tank”) – are a bit too predictable and one-note at this point.  But the series is about to mix it up with some infusions of more science-fictional elements, from robots and suspended animation to telepathy, and that’s a good thing.

Next Week: “The Mind Group”

From the Archive: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

“Why is any object we don’t understand always called a thing?”

– Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Directed by Robert Wise (The Day The Earth Stood Still [1951]), Run Silent, Run Deep [1958], The Haunting [1963], Audrey Rose [1977]) and produced by TV series creator and “Great Bird of the Galaxy” Gene Roddenberry, this forty-five million dollar voyage of the starship Enterprise launched a film series that has endured a whopping three decades plus.

Despite proving a box-office bonanza and the father to ten cinematic successors of varying quality, Star Trek: The Motion Picture remains today one of the most polarizing of the film series entries.

The received wisdom on the Robert Wise film is that it is dull, over-long, and entirely lacking in the sparkling character relationships and dimensions that made the 1960s series such a beloved success with fans worldwide.

It is likely you’ve heard all the derogatory titles for the film too, from The Motionless Picture, to Spockalypse Now, to Where Nomad Has Gone Before (a reference to the episode “The Changeling.”)  Recently, even Leonard Nimoy derided the film as not being “real” Star Trek.

Conventional wisdom, however, isn’t always right. Among its many fine and enduring qualities, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is undeniably the most cinematic of the Trek movie series in scope and visualization.

And, on closer examination, the films features two very important elements that many critics insist it lacks: a deliberate, symbolic character arc (particularly in the case of Mr. Spock) and a valuable commentary on the co-existence/symbiosis of man with his technology.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture also re-invents the visual texture of the franchise, fully and authoritatively, transforming what Roddenberry himself once derided as “the Des Moines Holiday Inn” look of the sixties TV series for a post-Space:1999, post-Star Wars world.

The central narrative of Star Trek: The Motion Picture is clever and fascinating (and, as some may rightly insist, highly reminiscent of various episodes of the TV series). Sometime in the 23rd century, a massive, mysterious space cloud passes through the boundaries of Klingon territory and destroys three battle cruisers while assuming a direct heading to Earth.

The only starship within interception range is the U.S.S. Enterprise, a Constitution class starship just completing an eighteen month re-fit and re-design. Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Chief of Starfleet Operations, pulls strings and calls in favors to be re-assigned as captain of the Enterprise, arrogantly displacing the young, “untried” Captain, Will Decker (Stephen Collins).

After departure from dry dock, the Enterprise faces severe engine design difficulties of near-catastrophic proportion, but the timely arrival of the half-Vulcan/half-human science officer, Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) resolves the problem. In the intervening years since the series, however, the inscrutable Spock has become even more stoic and unemotional, having attempted to purge all his remaining emotions in the Vulcan ritual called Kolinahr.

Upon intercepting the vast space cloud, known also as “the intruder,” the Enterprise crew learns, following a series of clues, that the colossal space vessel sheathed within the cloud/power-field is actually an artificial intelligence, a living machine called V’ger. And at the “heart” of V’Ger is a NASA Voyager probe from the 20th century — re-purposed by an advanced society of living machines on the other side of the galaxy — sent back to Earth to find God, it’s “Creator.” In V’ger’s quest to touch the Divine, Kirk, Spock and Decker each find personal enlightenment, resolving their personal dilemmas and also saving Earth from destruction.

“All Our Scans Are Being Reflected Back…”

The creative team of producer Gene Roddenberry (1921 – 1991) and director Robert Wise (1914 – 2005) consisted of two individuals who had very distinct philosophical views about technology, and the destination where technology was driving mankind.

In Roddenberry’s case, we must countenance his progressive concept of “Technology Unchained,” the notion of technology becoming both beautiful (rather than clunky and mechanical…) and benign.

Man’s machines, Roddenberry believed, would come to serve all the needs of the species, thus freeing humanity from the age-old dilemmas of poverty, dwindling resources, racial prejudice, hunger, territorial gain and war. This was an optimistic vision of man and machine in harmony, one given even fuller voice almost a decade later in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987 – 1994).

By contrast, Robert Wise directed the technological thriller, The Andromeda Strain (1971), based on the best-selling Michael Crichton (1942-2008) novel about an alien organism (or germ…) threatening all human life on Earth. Wise once stated that The Andromeda Strain concerned “the first crisis of the space age,” a descriptor which permits us to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture as a further meditation on a similar theme, only representing a (much) later planetary crisis, one in the 23rd century.

Wise also stated that technology — particularly that on hand in the subterranean Wildfire Laboratory — was the “star” of The Andromeda Strain.

In keeping with that motif, The Andromeda Strain’s opening credits consisted of a space-age montage of technological symbols, from blueprints to graphs, to top secret communiques. Think of it as a dot-matrix age Jackson Pollock.

In the same vein, the characters in the film spoke in protean techno-babble on arcane subjects such as “Nutrient 24-5,” “Red Kappa Phoenix Status,” the “Odd Man Hypothesis,” “Sterile Conveyor Systems” and the like. In all, Wise’s 1970s sci-fi film represented a dedicated documentary-style approach, one that never easily accommodated a “lay” audience. Instead, you felt you were actually inside that underground complex alongside the Wildfire team.

Most uniquely, however, the The Andromeda Strain’s climax concerned the pitfalls of technology: a teletype/printer experienced an unnoticed paper jam at a very inopportune moment. Some critics and film scholars have interpreted this malfunction as Wise’s explicit warning about relying too heavily on technology, but the opposite was true. Had the printer worked as planned, one of the scientists would have transmitted orders for a nuclear bomb detonation at an infected site, a course of action that would have catalyzed and spread the Andromeda germ.

The machine’s paper jam gave the flawed human being time to learn more, and re-consider the course of action. Given this analysis, one can detect that Wise was, perhaps, agnostic on the subject of man and technology, seeing both how it could prove a great tool, but also a great danger.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture serves, in several ways, as an unofficial “sequel” or heir to Wise’s Andromeda Strain in terms of both approach and philosophy. Of all the Star Trek films, The Motion Picture is the only series installment to feature so many lingering insert shots of technological read-outs and schematics. For example we see a medical visualization of the Ilia Probe’s physiology, a representation of “a simple binary code” (radio waves), “photic-sonar readings”(!) and several tacticals revealing Enterprise’s approach and entrance into the cloud. 

These multitudinous close-ups of computer graphics and read-outs not only enhance the notion of Enterprise as working starship — with several interfaces directly at our disposal (fostering the documentary feel), — but go a long way towards establishing the vital link between technology and crew, a symbiosis, if you will.

A great deal of time is spent in the Motion Picture on views of the crew gazing through the Enterprise’s “technological” eye or window on the universe, the view screen. In a film about the combining of man and machine into a “new life-form,” these moments carry resonance and significance: they reveal man already traveling down that road to symbiosis, relying on technology as his eyes, ears and (in the case of the ship’s computer…) key interpreter of data or external stimuli.

In Star Trek, the TV series, Spock often gazed into a hooded library computer and we were denied access to what data he saw recorded inside (save for the reflected blue illumination on his face). In later Treks, stellar cartography played a role, but the high-tech, colorful displays it produced for crew members were not filmed as inserts. In other words, we saw Picard and Data interpreting the data, and the data itself. It’s important, I believe, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture that the data read-outs and view screen images are primarily brought directly to our eyes without dramatis personae coming between projector and percipient. For one thing, we feel as though we’re actually aboard a ship in space. For another, we’re taking part in that symbiosis of man and machine; we’re interpreting the runes ourselves.

The underlying philosophy in Star Trek: The Motion Picture seems to consist of an admonition that man and machine work best together integrated, not when separated. V’Ger is a living machine who has “amassed” all the knowledge of the universe, but is without the human capacity of “faith,” to “leap beyond logic,” The machine (without human input or touch…) is cold, and barren, and incapable of believing in other realities (like the after-life) or other dimensions. Thus it is incomplete. Only by joining with a human (Commander Decker), does V’Ger find a sense of wholeness, of completion.

Kirk’s journey is not entirely different. He views the Enterprise — a machine itself — as almost a physical lover in this film. When Scotty takes Admiral Kirk via a shuttle pod to inspect the Enterprise’s re-designed exterior, Kirk has the unmistakable look of a man sizing up a sexual conquest, not a starship captain merely reporting to his new assignment. He avariciously sizes up the “woman” in his life (and ships are always “she” aren’t they?). Like V’Ger after the union with Decker, Kirk ultimately finds a sense of completion once he has “joined” with the starship Enterprise, both metaphorically and literally. Once he is her captain again, Kirk is complete.

Consider for a moment just how many times Star Trek: The Motion Picture lingers upon the important act of a man entering — or connecting to — a machine. We watch Kirk’s shuttle pod “dock” with Enterprise after a long, lingering examination of the ship. We see Spock, in a thruster suit, “penetrate” — in his words, “the orifice” leading to the next interior “chamber” of V’Ger. This terminology sounds very biological, doesn’t it? Consider that Spock next mentally-joins with V’Ger, utilizing a Vulcan mind-meld, yet another form of symbiosis.

And finally, we see Decker and Ilia physically join with the V’ger Entity during the film’s climax. And make no mistake, that final act is equated with physical reproduction explicitly in the film’s text. “Well, it’s been a long time since I delivered a baby,” McCoy notes happily in the film’s epilogue, and Kirk remarks on “the birth” of a new life-form. They’re talking about sex, about the union of two-life forms creating a third, unique one.

Similarly, the journey of the Enterprise inside the giant V’Ger cloud replicates the details of the human reproductive process, with the final result proving identical: the birth of new life. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, man and machine mate. They join in symbiosis to create something new, perhaps even as Spock notes, “the next step in our own evolution.”

While Star Trek films have traded explicitly in both allegory (particularly The Undiscovered Country and the Cold War “bringing down the Berlin Wall in Space” idea) and social commentary (consider the environmental message of The Voyage Home), Star Trek: The Motion Picture is decidedly symbolic. That’s an important distinction.

The central images in the film all symbolize the reproductive, joining process. Spock penetrates the V’Ger “orifice,” to mentally join with a living machine. Decker and Ilia (V’ger’s surrogate) are mated in a light show that some Paramount studio executives allegedly termed a “40 million dollar fuck.” And even the journey of the Enterprise (essentially the male “sperm”) through the fallopian tube-type interior of V’Ger — carrying its creative material (the human spirit in this case) to the V’ger complex (ovum) — reflects the overriding theme of mating/joining/symbiosis.

So is technology a help or a hindrance? For the Klingons, destroyed in the film’s first act, technology doesn’t seem to help much. All their elaborate technical read-outs and tracking sensors (again, shown in dramatic insert shots) only permit them to watch the progress of their annihilation down to the last detail; down to the last second.

On the Enterprise, technological attempts to understand V’ger are constantly stymied by the living machine. “All scans are being reflected back,” Uhura notes in the film on more than one occasion, meaning that V’Ger is re-directing the Enterprise’s investigative entreaties back at itself. This is a subtle indicator that the answers Kirk and the others seek are held within themselves; in the gifts, contradictions and essential nature of “carbon based life forms.” They begin to key in on this fact when Kirk and Spock assign Decker to awaken the human (er, Deltan…) memory patterns of the Ilia Probe (a mechanism). The answer, they come to understand, rests in the human equation, not in a technological assessment of V’ger.

It’s interesting to tally the scoreboard here. V’Ger (a machine) finds “God” and evolves with the help of a human (Decker). Kirk finds his peace with a machine (The Enterprise). Spock finds his answer about the meaning of life from a machine, and that answer is an acceptance of humanity. Even Decker finds his “peace” with a machine that replicates (down to the last detail) the memory patterns of his lost beloved. Each of these main characters (Kirk, Spock, V’Ger and Decker) are intricately involved with the story’s main conceit: the mating of man and machine; of “cold” knowledge and “warm” human emotions.

“Our Own Human Weaknesses…and the Drive That Compels Us to Overcome Them…”

Despite protestations to the contrary, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a movie intrinsically, nay organically, about character, and character development. In simple terms, the film’s main characters (Kirk, Spock and Decker) serve as the deliverer of human ideals to the cold, empty V’Ger child so that it may “evolve.” But in doing so, they also bring along a lot of “foolish human emotions,” as Dr. McCoy asserts at the film’s conclusion.

Captain Kirk begins the film, for instance, as a ruthless, single-minded “my way or the highway” obsessive. We see his determination to reclaim the “center seat” when he tells Commander Sonak at a space port that he intends to be aboard the Enterprise following a meeting with Admiral Nogura, Starfleet’s top brass. We see it again when he rationalizes displacing Decker, off-handedly noting that his “experience…five years out there, facing unknowns like this one,” make him the superior commanding officer. The contradiction in that argument should be obvious. Are different “unknowns” actually capable of being categorized? How does Kirk know that Decker’s history and experience won’t prove superior in dealing with this threat, the alien cloud? He doesn’t: he just wants what he wants.

And to some extent, the Enterprise (Kirk’s other half, or perhaps a representation of his id…) rebels against this egomaniacal version of Kirk. Consider how much goes wrong on Enterprise when Kirk is acting in this selfish mode. The transporters break down, killing two new crewmembers. Kirk gets lost on his own ship and is discovered (in an embarrassing moment) by Decker, the very man he replaced. Kirk “pushes” his people too hard, forcing the Enterprise into warp speed before it is ready, and in the process nearly destroys the ship in a wormhole. He does so over the objections of Mr. Scott, Captain Decker and even Dr. McCoy. This Kirk is all ego and selfishness, until he remembers the key to commanding the Enterprise: listening to all viewpoints and making informed decisions. This also happens to be the key in any male/female relationship. Just treat her like a lady, Jim, and she’ll always bring you home. This first Kirk is too hungry, too grasping, too desperate to “re-connect” with the Enterprise in anything but a physical way. Bones puts Kirk in his place, but all the malfunctions of the Enterprise subtly (and symbolically) perform the same function.

About half-way through the film, Kirk is still learning this lesson in humility, as Decker notes that as the vessel’s executive officer, it’s his responsibility to “provide alternative” viewpoints. Kirk accepts that argument, but hasn’t internalized it. By the end of the film, he is actively listening to others again, heeding Decker’s request to join a landing party, and allowing Spock to proceed when the curious half-Vulcan overrides his orders and steals a thruster suit.

The familiar Kirk of Star Trek lore, the one who develops a strategy based on hearing all viewpoints, slowly re-asserts itself over the selfish one who wanted command and conquest of the Enterprise, and nothing else. A journey that began in selfishness, ends in his “unity” with the crew and ship, his acceptance and sense of joining with those around him, a reflection of V’Ger’s joining with the human race. Kirk has, as he states, overcome human weakness.

Although Spock is only half-human, he undertakes much the same journey as Kirk in the film. He returns to Starfleet because he has failed to purge himself of human emotion and believes that an understanding of V’Ger will lead him to that destination. McCoy fears that Spock — like Kirk — will put his own personal interests ahead of the ship’s. What Spock ultimately learns from his encounter (mind-meld) with V’Ger is life changing for him. He discovers that V’Ger has achieved what he seeks, “total logic.” But damningly, “total logic” doesn’t make V’Ger happy. Thought patterns of “exactingly perfect order” don’t leave room for belief (in the afterlife…), for the “simple feeling” of friendship Spock feels towards Kirk, or much else.

For all V’Ger’s knowledge, Spock realizes that the alien is “barren” and “empty.” Were Spock to pursue Kolinahr, he would end up the same way. Spock’s “human flaw,” if we can call it that, is also one of ego, his obsession with becoming the “perfect” Vulcan. In embracing friendship with Kirk, in feeling his emotions (and even weeping, in the film’s extended version), Spock begins to embrace the emotions he has long denied…and provides Kirk with the key to understanding V’Ger’s psychology. He would never have come to this epiphany had Spock not “joined” with V’Ger in a mind-meld. And that puts us right back at the theme of symbiosis.

Decker (Stephen Collins) undergoes an interesting character arc too. He is a young man who fears commitment and the responsibilities it brings. He left Delta IV, Ilia’s home wold without even saying goodbye to the woman he loved, which is a pretty sleazy and avoidant thing to do. It might even be termed “cowardice.” In the end, Decker overcomes this “human weakness” and joins with Ilia and V’Ger, saving the Earth, repairing his relationship with Ilia, and adding the human component to V’Ger that the machine life-form requires to “evolve.”

When Kirk, Spock and McCoy return to the Enterprise, Kirk explicitly asks if they have just witnessed the “birth of a new life form.” As I noted above, Spock’s answer is that perhaps they have seen “the next step” in their “own evolution.” This is a statement that is linked to the characters themselves. Though Decker has physically evolved to another (higher…) dimension or plane of existence, Kirk and Spock have evolved too. Kirk is suddenly gracious and comfortable in his skin again instead of imperious and dictatorial. And Spock, for the first time in his life, understands that that his human emotions carry value, and augment his “whole” personhood.

To claim that there is little or no character development in Star Trek: the Motion Picture is wrong-headed in the extreme. In some fashion, this is surely the most important story of Mr. Spock’s “life,” his final recognition of his “human” half and the gifts it offers. When we cavalierly write off Star Trek: The Motion Picture, we are also writing off Spock’s new enlightenment.

This is An Almost Totally New Enterprise…

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is often termed the film that saved Star Trek, and there may indeed be truth to that argument. Certainly, I love and admire that Nicholas Meyer film. However, consider just how much material present in later Star Trek originates directly from the re-invention of the franchise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Most notably, the Enterprise re-design and update — featured in the first six feature films — is introduced in this Robert Wise film (exteriors and interiors). This was also the first Star Trek production to feature a “warp” distortion effect around the ship when it went beyond light speed.

Also, the modern iteration of Klingons — so beloved by Trek fans today — is introduced here, in The Motion Picture. Before the Wise film, Klingons were swarthy guys with beards who talked about Klingonese (in “The Trouble with Tribbles”) but didn’t actually speak it. After Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Klingons were menacing aliens with ridges on their foreheads (and boy would Next Gen go to town with THAT idea…), wearing convincing armor and speaking their own language.

We can’t forget, either that Star Trek: The Next Generation’s very theme song, as well as the Klingon theme featured in First Contact and elsewhere — were re-purposed from Jerry Goldsmith’s brilliant soundtrack for Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

There seems to be this weird belief among many fans (and even Leonard Nimoy) that Star Trek: The Motion Picture doesn’t represent the best of Star Trek. While it is easy to see that the film doesn’t accent the humorous side of the Star Trek equation, The Wise film does get so many things right. Most importantly, it captures the Kirk/Spock friendship in simple, poignant terms (in a scene set in sickbay). Imagine how easy it would have been for Gene Roddenberry — just two years after Star Wars — to cow-tow to public opinion and make a huge, empty action film with laser blasts and spaceships performing barrel rolls. No one would have blamed him. I’ll bet you a lot of fans would have liked that story better.

Instead, Roddenberry took a much more difficult route. He maintained the integrity of Star Trek and dramatized a story about mankind’s future, and the direction we could be heading (with man and machine joined together, balancing weaknesses and sharing strengths). Some might declare that the film actually attempts and fails to reach the profound quality of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Certainly, I would agree The Motion Picture is not an equal to that film. However, here’s another point of view: in Roddenberry’s vision of man’s evolution, it isn’t some mysterious, unknown alien who transforms us for the better. No, in the universe of Star Trek, it’s mankind playing a critical part in his own evolution, taking the reins of his own destiny himself. We aren’t victims of an alien agenda unknown to us. We’re standing tall, ready to face what the universe throws at us. Somehow, this is more…noble.

In considering (or perhaps, re-considering….) Star Trek: The Motion Picture, our mission ought to be the same as the Enterprise’s: to “intercept” and “investigate” this fascinating movie and judge for ourselves if it is just the cosmic bore critics complained of, or perhaps something a bit deeper. 

Of all the Star Trek movies, this is the one that shows us the most of the universe at large (Klingon territory, Federation spaceships, Vulcan, Earth…), most closely follows the creed of “discovering new life forms” from the series, and most makes us feel like we’re actually passengers aboard the Enterprise. Perhaps we wouldn’t want Star Trek to exist on this elevated, cerebral plateau for long, since humor and action are indeed shorted. Yet there’s something intensely admirable about the fact that this careful, somber, thematically-consistent, intelligent effort was Star Trek’s opening salvo in the blockbuster sweepstakes of the post-Star Wars age. While others sought to imitate, Star Trek chose its own path.

And that’s how a movie franchise was born.

Movie Trailer: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)