Fanfic

At 9:01pm on September 15, 1967, flipped the channels around to watch a show coming back from commercial with several unusually clad men of the future materializing with an eerie whine on a craggy landscape I would soon learn was the planet Vulcan. In my Friday night boredom I had accidentally run across the Second Season Premiere Episode of Star Trek, "Amok Time." By 9:30pm, having witnessed the death of Captain James Tiberius Kirk at the hands of his First Officer and pointy-eared best friend, Spock, due to the primal mating fever of "pon farr," and then Kirk's miraculous resurrection thanks to the death-mimicking drug administered mid-battle by Dr. Leonard McCoy, I was a fan.

In the years to follow I was a loyal fan, a Trekkie, sure, but one who was more interested in science fiction as a whole genre, with Star Trek being the only 99% credible television version for decades to come -- I might argue until the new incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, although I'm sure many Next Generation and Babylon 5 fans would argue that point. I attended Star Trek conventions at the Commodore Hotel in NYC, stood awkwardly before Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhuru) as she signed a poster from her record album for me and the next year trailed her in full diva, tight red spangly suit and furry little dog as she made her way through the hotel hallway with what was geek press at the time in tow. I watched classic episodes on the big screen late at night -- nothing like watching McCoy leap through the misty Portal to Forever projected large above your head as you recline on the convention hall floor.

I say this not to call attention to my Star Trek cred in either praising or criticizing the newest incarnation, the feature film reboot called, simply, Star Trek, which I had the pleasure of taking my family to this weekend. I had indoctrinated my two boys a few years ago when G4 ran the uncut original episodes, all running over an hour thanks to the growth in commercial time since they originally aired. Even my wife attended, and if there's one thing she hates, it's sci-fi. The movie is praiseworthy for how well it connects our (my?) forty-years back emotional allegiance to the characters to this new cast, so that we can enjoy Kirk's brashness, Spock's logic, McCoy's irascibility all over again. The biggest success, among many, of J.J. Abrams and crew is that they've successfully refreshed the show's original character constellation, sense of optimism for the future (making me wonder how Terminator Salvation with fare in a week -- zeitgeist disconnect?) and, to a large enough degree, sense of cosmic scale. Nitpicks might include giving Scotty a cute Yoda-meets-Dobby sidekick and overuse of handheld camera in late-innings battle scenes. But what I was struck by after the new movie's rapidly churning events settled in my cerebral cortex was the memory of something from those dark Seventies when the push to revive Trek seemed all so in vain: fan fiction.

Back in the heyday of fan-generated Star Trek literature, reflecting a fandom desperate for new material beyond the mere 79 episodes that existed once the show was finally cancelled for good in 1969 after three seasons (the first 1.75 seasons generally being far superior to almost all that followed). There were mimeographed fanzines distributed by hand or by mail, the first of which, Spockanalia, appeared in the same year I saw my first episode.

Fan fiction was a way for viewers who had connected to the unique and imaginative vision of the show in, let's say, a profound way to create their own stories where NBC was unwilling to create any more. While a very few fanfic writers later made it to the "big leagues" years later with paperback deals for approved Star Trek novels, most of the work was amateurish, if enthusiastic and occasionally credible.

One of the subgenres of fan fiction, however, was a kind of sexual compensation for what might have been latent but never, of course, explicated on the show. Why not show what happens with Science Officer Spock and the eternally pining Nurse Chapel behind closed doors when pon farr's in bloom. Or maybe Spock can't get the feral love he needs from the fair nurse, and instead there's a new crew member, a young woman who's highly intelligent but somewhat shy, of a hidden literary bent just waiting for the right Vulcan to remove her thick plastic spectacles...


Some SPOILERS ahead.





Then there's other unexplored crew matings. Why not Kirk and Uhuru following up on that turgid kiss in "Plato's Stepchildren" with some real black-on-white erotics. Or Uhuru and Spock. (If you've seen the movie, you see where I'm going with this.) And why stop there, what about exploring the depths of the emotional bond between the good Captain and his First Officer when it's just plain Jim, a sub-subgenre known as slash fiction. A heated dissection of whether Kirk and Spock could actually have an encounter appeared in a then-groundbreaking "letters zine" called The Halkan Council way the heck back in 1975.

The other key aspect of fanfic is that it is all, by it's very unlicensed nature, alternative universe (or "AU"). It's not the creator, or even the writers sitting in the room after the creator's been fired or moved on. The best thing about AU is that it allows you to take the characters wherever you want, freed from any formulaic restraints, the mind unfettered with new possibilities since it all off-canon. Maybe some writers aspire to canon, but the writing so very rarely cuts it. One of the main reasons the first couple seasons of the original series are still so great to watch is that so many of those early episodes were written by real science fiction writers with serious sci-fi cred: Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Fredric Brown, Jerome Bixby, Harlen Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Jerry Sohl.

The bummer about AU fanfic is that...it's off-canon. Who gives a rats ass what happens in any of those stories -- it doesn't count.

So what's interesting to me about the new movie is that it not only has a fantasy coupling off the original series, it also turns on a Lost-like (I am told) time-travel plot where we get Leonard Nimoy elevating the feature film reboot to canon, at the cost of an AU continuity solution. From this point forward, whatever happens with this Pine-led crew, isn't the story of the Shatner crew, so all bets are off. History will be written differently, historical events will be referenced for old fans to enjoys but entering in ways unaccountable to what's been filmed before. On one hand, it's a lazy way out for screenwriters not willing to do the voluminous -- endless -- research. On the other hand, why should we be forcing our 2009 screenwriters to stick to every script fix invention wedged into the canon by a fellow guild member sometime over the past forty years. What this movie proves is that you just have to get the heart(s) of the story bible right.

For all the Spock focus in the movie (very balanced, fascinatingly enough), my favorite addition to the mythos is a Kirk's. The filmmakers have him hanging by his fingertips three times in the story, the first as a young boy over a canyon, the second over Vulcan, the third in the Romulan spacecraft. The Abrahms/Pine Kirk is the embodiment of "cliffhanger" which is a lynchpin of cinema going waaay back to the silent serials. While I've heard criticism that the new movie plays like a high-budget pilot, I actually think one of the unsung reasons for it's success is that it is pretty visual, with a clever Scotty-in-tube throwaway slapstick gag, a recasting of the dino-on-dino surprise, and a Romulan bridge phaser firefight that feels surprisingly O.K. Corral.

So I have to give this to screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Krutzman. They have written what may be the single greatest piece of fanfic ever, the professionalization of a suspect genre, and sealed it with the real Spock himself, the flesh and blood actor the movie's biggest special effect. Since Vulcans live an average of 300 years longer than humans, they have the time to gain so much more wisdom, and Nimoy plays his oldest Spock (his 78 human years maybe 234 in Vulcan?) with an almost Buddhist purity of wisdom, 100% free of ego, clear and forgiving.

One other thing the movie gets right. I've heard it said that "this ain't your mama's Captain Kirk" and sure, this one's rock & roll. But he surely evokes Kirk's mental acuity and fluidity -- just like Shatner's Kirk, Pine's is completely read up but can make decisions on a dime when even the better read can't. He knows his stuff but he also knows how to lead, boldly. This young Kirk's boldness start being all about himself -- his joyride, his sudden jumping into service, his risk-taking to get on the Enterprise. His great feats of physical courage and action -- his cliffhanging. And finally he makes the bold decisions as captain necessary to finish the story satisfactorily, although I'll bet they can make a better movie now that they're past the origin(s).

AU, okay. But they remembered to honor the opening words of the show every week, the closing words of this movie, the inspiring thing.

"To boldly go..."

Zeitgeist?