Star Trek and the franchise era.
I think that my most contrarian position is that enterprise is fine. It's so hated, so loathed that just saying it's fine is the ultimate betrayal.
David Seitz:You really make a strong case for the novel versus ability to synthesize continuity and originality. Why Star Trek and why late Star Trek? Hello, my name is David Seitz. I am Associate Professor of Cultural Geography at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, and I'm the author of A Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine. It is my honor and delight to be speaking today with Adam Kotzko, Kotsko, who is the author of Late Star Trek, The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era, which is hot off the press from University of Minnesota.
David Seitz:Adam teaches in the Scheimer Great Book School at North Central College and is the author of many books, including Neoliberalism's Demons on the Political Theology of Lake Capital, Agamben's Philosophical Trajectory, and What is Theology, Christian Thought and Contemporary Life. Welcome, Adam.
Adam Kotsko:Thank you. Thank you for doing this, David. It's a privilege to talk to another Star Trek scholar.
David Seitz:A trekademic as So Steve Ravich would Adam, this book has so many implications. It's a really important book, including for how we think about possibilities for creative storytelling in what you refer to as the franchise era. Now, to put things into historical perspective, media historian Shauna Kidman observes that in February, franchise films accounted for 25% of all studios wide release features. In 2017, that number was 64%. So my first couple of questions for you have to do with what Star Trek in particular adds to assessments of the franchise era.
David Seitz:Why Star Trek and why late Star Trek?
Adam Kotsko:Yeah, I think the real honest reason of why Star Trek for this particular book for me is that I personally just love Star Trek and I write books. And so I was eventually going to write something on Star Trek. There is something about this moment that makes Star Trek especially illustrative of what's going on in our culture. This book is the inaugural volume of a series that Minnesota's putting out called Mass Markets. It's edited by Jerry Canavan and Ben Robertson, And this speaks to the desire to understand in an academic and more holistic way what's going on with our culture that these franchises are taking over.
Adam Kotsko:We all agreed that having Star Trek be the first volume was appropriate because Star Trek is in many ways the first franchise. It's the first property to have this kind of ongoing open ended stories, constantly accruing canon of real fictional events, authoritative for future installments, and that it has unfolded across multiple media, television, animation, film, novels, comic books, more recently video games, basically any genre that you can think of, you know, like happy meal toys, like anything, you know, like there's been a Star Trek version of everything. Because it's the most long running franchise and one that promotes a great deal of personal loyalty from its fans. But at the same time, I think it's been a troubled franchise for most of its existence. It's been successful in the long run, but almost never in the short run.
Adam Kotsko:And I think that that's just a really interesting dynamic. And that's what drew me to writing this book in a kind of contrarian way about all of the Star Trek that people dislike and reject and say, it's like a fall away from the great, you know, next generation and original series, the more authoritative, the more successful versions of Star Trek. And I thought that getting past that kind of dismissive attitude was necessary to try to understand like what is happening to Star Trek as a franchise and how can we use that as a model for how to think through what's happening to others, the franchises as well.
David Seitz:So where does late fit into that account? Do I know you draw a little bit on Frederick Jameson and Anna Kornblu tell us about lateness.
Adam Kotsko:Yeah, lateness, the term late capitalism, it's a famously failed prophecy, you know, because capitalism seems to keep going and going and going. How do we know that it's the late period? I've heard it said that it's late in the state, in the sense of like late stage cancer, like that everything's becoming capitalism. It comes to feel as though everything is absorbed by capitalism or capitalist values are the only things that hold any sway or that kind of shape our lives. And I kind of draw an analogy to that, like this late stage of Star Trek where it can seem like they're just putting out more and more stuff with the Star Trek name put on it so that people will be forced to buy it out of loyalty.
Adam Kotsko:That it's the absorption of Star Trek, which seems to have these kinds of anti capitalist and progressive values, like the absorption of Star Trek into this pure commodification. And I think in both cases, can see that, that the, this dynamic never fully succeeds, that we never become like the capitalist board who are just synergizing our networking or something like that, that we still have kind of this, this authentic humanity, that we still treasure having a space apart from capitalist values. And often most of us view that as, as being what is most important in life. And I think similarly that Star Trek has always resisted this kind of pure commodification, even though from like the early seventies, if you were in the market for spending money on Star Trek, you could spend all your money on Star Trek. Like from very early on, there was like this ability, this like this kind of cash cow aspect to it for the cult followers.
Adam Kotsko:And yet it's always been something more. And I think that continues to be the case now.
David Seitz:I like that theme of excess a lot, right? The past twenty four years of trek, trek since nine eleven, Trek starting with Enterprise, it's not just all, you know, uniformly mere slop that's cynically doled out to already captive fans, you you and I very much included, nor is it completely incommensurable with the first thirty five years of the franchise. So in the book, you identify three primary strategies that creators use that are between continuity and originality as a side of kind of navigation and negotiation. Can you tell us a little bit more about what those three strategies are and how they work?
Adam Kotsko:Yeah, thank you for that. For me, the key insight that made me feel like I had a book here was actually these three strategies. And I don't think they're particular to Star Trek or franchises. I think they're perennial kind of strategies that people, when they're trying to make a new contribution to an already existing kind of mythology that these are strategies that they build on. And the first and most obvious thing you're gonna do if you're contributing to something that already exists is just do more, just do more of the same thing.
Adam Kotsko:And, I call that fan service because it's just giving us more adventures in the same basic tone as what has come before. We're making sure not to cause any controversy or disappointment by just imitating what came before. And of course, if you just keep doing that over and over, you start to wonder like, what is the point if we're simply reproducing what was done before? Why not just watch the original episodes over again, instead of this derivative product, that's just trying to imitate them. And so that calls forth a subsequent strategy of seeking creative freedom.
Adam Kotsko:You are given control of Star Trek, for instance, and you want to say, we're not just going to do more of the same Star Trek. This is not your father's Star Trek. We can push this franchise in new directions. We can do new things with it. We can defy your expectations.
Adam Kotsko:Probably one of the biggest examples of that is your area of expertise, deep space nine, which in many ways systematically reverse the formula of star Trek instead of having a ship they're out of stationary, you know, location instead of being episodic, it's very, intricate politics and these kinds of long running storylines with much greater continuity. Many fans detect darker themes as compared to other installments. Once you do that, once you're kind of, you know, the question that arises, if you're trying to just negate everything that Star Trek is about, why are you even still doing Star Trek? Like what is going on here? And I think that a kind of uneasy synthesis between these two tendencies is to say that we're giving you world building.
Adam Kotsko:We're not just giving you more stories. We're not just giving you more characters. We're giving you like insight into how the world works, how the Star Trek universe works in answering questions that maybe fans have had for a long time. I think that fans have always been very intrigued by the politics of Star Trek. And, you know, that's one area that Deep Space Nine really delves into.
Adam Kotsko:But it also, I think in an anxiety prove that it's authentic Star Trek, Deep Space Nine piles on all kinds of references, including references to the original series, which at that point had not been much touched by next generation. And there's a kind of just like desire to show that this world is more cohesive and that this work, that this particular installment is giving you that cohesion and making things fit together much better. And I think that Deep Space Nine really did actually achieve that. And sometimes I've joked that Deep Space Nine is like the origin of the Star Trek universe as a universe. But in any case, I think that these three strategies, it's simplistic to say that they're all isolated.
Adam Kotsko:Any installment that's only doing one of them probably isn't doing a very good job. Any given installment, could probably say pretty clearly they're doing two of them at one time. And when things really get interesting is when they try to take on the extra work of doing three at the same time and doing a true tour de force that's just embracing everything.
David Seitz:A true synthesis. Yeah, it's interesting about DS9 because like on the one hand, there is a lot that feels like anti thesis, but then you're so right, like they bring back the Mirror Universe, they have that time travel episode where they actually go back to Kirk's Enterprise that people love. We can have a whole conversation about DS9, but I think that's best reserved for another podcast. So, part of what I really appreciate about this book is that I think it is both contrarian and fair. So, I think that's a testament to its rigor and the rigor of this three part method.
David Seitz:You do not pull any punches when it comes to writers and producers' poor choices, and especially I think when it comes to some of the disastrous impacts of certain corporate decisions made by Paramount's leadership. But at the same time, you do engage in good faith and genuinely assume, you know, that creative workers are doing their best under really constrained and increasingly constrained political economic conditions around writing in Hollywood. And by the same token, I think you defend the intellectual rigor of institutions of Trek fandom, particularly Reddit's Daystrom Institute, while at the same time you break with fan consensus on a number of occasions. We see this on display, I think, the first chapter of the book on enterprise, which is kind of much loathed, you know, running between 2001 and 02/2005. Tell us a little bit about the changes in Enterprises relationships to the Trek fandom over the course of its production.
David Seitz:And tell us in particular, I want to hear more about an Enterprise episode called The Interregnum and what it tells us about those relationships.
Adam Kotsko:Yeah. So I think that my most contrarian position is that enterprise is fine. Like it's, it's so hated so low that just saying it's fine is like the ultimate betrayal. And I kind of, you know, in the Daystrom Institute fan forum, where as I was rewatching Star Trek, kind of as an adult, maybe like around ten years ago or so, I really started to cut my teeth as a Star Trek commentator. I found that enterprise was the area that I really dug in and I became kind of the resident like enterprise expertapologist simply because I couldn't understand why their reaction was just so one sidedly negative.
Adam Kotsko:You know, I'll admit when I first watched it, we had just gotten through like all the other series. It was the last one left. And when it got to the theme song, I looked over at my partner. I'm just like, cannot be real. This cannot actually be the theme song because it was this bizarre, like Rod Stewart rock song, like so completely different than every other thing, but you know, that's why God invented the mute button.
Adam Kotsko:And once you hit the mute button during that song, it's clear that the quality of enterprise is broadly comparable to Voyager and broadly comparable to kind of like forgettable Deep Face Nine episodes. Like, it's not like outside of the ballpark. And I think that I was trying to understand why it was so hated and why fans were so resistant to it. And doing that required me to accept in good faith, like the producers, they presumably were not trying to betray everything that Star Trek was and like overwrite all existing Canada and like piss off the fans to no end. And I think that what I arrive at in the chapter is that Enterprise is this kind of weird neithernor.
Adam Kotsko:By creating a prequel, they were opening up all kinds of problems. The biggest problem would be, did Klingons really go from having bare foreheads to having ridges at a certain point in their evolution within like fifty years? Did Captain Kirk really just operate the ship with like little dials and switches? All of this kind of stuff, as well as suddenly needing to keep faith with the fact that certain things happen at certain dates, throw away lines from past episodes suddenly, or like interfering with the story that you're trying to tell. They didn't realize about what they were doing was turning Star Trek into a different kind of franchise where Canon mattered a lot more and where the ongoing history was supposed to be taken much more seriously.
Adam Kotsko:And I think that the tragedy of the show is that the producers didn't understand that that was what they were doing. And that when they were confronted with fans who kind of were taking these expectations more seriously than the producers themselves did that they just got irritated and just kind of doubled down. Like there's one episode that I think is literally just an allegory of fans being way too picky about stupid things. They spent an entire episode just to say fans stop it. And I think that, you know, to kind of transition to the interregnum, which is my favorite episode of enterprise.
Adam Kotsko:This was one of my favorite, discussions from the Baystrom Institute, the forum. I asked people because there was one story arc in enterprise where it was like, it was a continuous arc for 26 episodes, which they had never tried to do anything like that before. And I asked them like, what was it like to try to watch this live? Like at week to week, how did it feel to watch for people who were watching it at that time? And one person said it was actually incredibly difficult to watch because one thing that they never talk about when talking about the success of enterprise or the failure of enterprise is that its time slot was constantly moving around and it was constantly getting preempted by other shows.
Adam Kotsko:And back in the linear TV days, that was the kiss of death because people base their TV viewing on their habits. If you can't form a habit of watching it at a particular time, you're just not going to get into it. And so this person was sufficiently committed to figure out when it's running. And he said though that on the fan forums, they usually have like a forum to discuss that night's episode. And yet on a particular night in the middle of this arc, suddenly it had been preempted unexpectedly again unannounced.
Adam Kotsko:They were probably watching like WWE or something instead of enterprise. And somebody put up a thread saying, what do people think of tonight's episode, the interregnum? And they just like made some like little remarks that would be applicable to almost any episode, you know, like this character gets underplayed or something like that. The rest of the fans started like jumping in and kind of riffing on it until they had developed this entire elaborate plot. And there were people there were haters who were saying, isn't this just as bad as every other episode?
Adam Kotsko:There were people who were like defenders, no, this was a cool idea. And the episode never happened. I went to great lengths to track down this thread when I was writing the book. I had to collaborate with another more technically oriented person to like get on the way back machine and like dig into the innards of the HTML because it wasn't showing up or whatever. Because to me, the story shows that the fans that were watching that did manage to figure out when to watch it.
Adam Kotsko:We're into it and they were invested. And even if they were negatively invested, they were, they were taking it seriously. They, it was like part of their lives, part of their routine and like complaining about it was part of how they engaged in this community. And I think to just view them as a bunch of like nitpicky comic book guys, like standing there with their arms crossed. I don't think that that's really what was going on at all.
Adam Kotsko:And I think that a more productive dialogue with the fans was possible, and that was a terrible missed opportunity.
David Seitz:You're making me think of some of your other work on TV creeps and sociopaths, because whenever my mom emails me about the latest thing Trump has said, I always say, hate watching is a kind of love mom, you know? And I think as goes with Trump goes with enterprise. It's interesting because rightly or wrongly, I did feel that way about enterprise when it was on the air. Was on the air when I was in high school. I do remember high school, sort of that early aughts period.
David Seitz:It was a harder time to be a Star Trek fan. And then we Enterprises canceled in 02/2005. We don't get more small screen Trek for a dozen years after that. You know, Star Trek Nemesis, which came out in 2002 was also not so good. Roger Evertz said something like, let's face it, they're out of gas.
David Seitz:And we didn't get another Trek film until 02/2009. So for you, it's in that relative vacuum that actually the novel verse thrived. And so Trek novels remain hugely understudied. They're often dismissed as derivative, but you really challenge this assumption and really make a strong case for the novel versus ability to synthesize continuity and originality. So tell us a little bit more about like how you got into the novel first and like what you observed about it, particularly in this period?
Adam Kotsko:Yeah. I mean, as I say in my book, I have never met a serious Star Trek fan who hasn't read at least a couple of the novels. Like it's a part of the culture in a way that's like weirdly unacknowledged. Like maybe this is embarrassing to people. Shows that you're going too far.
Adam Kotsko:You're like, you're not just watching a TV show. You're not nerdy enough. You have to actually read a book too. The novels were a big part of fan discussion culture. And one of them was famous for undoing the ending of enterprise, which everybody hated.
Adam Kotsko:Like they killed off a beloved character and the whole thing was presented as a holodeck kind of simulation instead of a real episode. And it just felt like very disrespectful to the series of the actors and things like that. When they wrote a novel series that was going to continue Enterprise, the first thing they did was make sure to say, this never happened. And I was just like fascinated and I wondered what it would look like. I was at a used bookstore.
Adam Kotsko:There it was. I picked it up, lo and behold, I've probably read like 100 novels since then. Man, I can't believe I just said that out loud. I found it fascinating the way that the novels could continue the story and especially after TV track was, you know, just kind of off the air that they felt like for all of these series, there was no longer anything that was going to like override them or contradict what they did. Like when the shows were running and even like when the, you know, the shows were all in the same, like fictional time period or something like that.
Adam Kotsko:If you make a decision that like, I don't know, you know, Captain Picard and Doctor. Crusher are finally going to get married. And then like they do a guest spot on Voyager and they're not married. Like your book is invalidated, you know, because in the hierarchy of value of franchise, like the televised and film, instances always take priority over things that are secondary, like the novels. And so once they were off the air, this actually created this huge opportunity for them to start, changing the status quo, to continue the stories, like, validate certain fan intuitions, such as the fact that Captain Picard and Doctor.
Adam Kotsko:Crusher obviously should have gotten together and they made it happen. And they could, they had this free space because they had the reasonable expectation that there was never going to be another Canon installment that would contradict them. And so starting from just a handful of novels, re opening the story of Deep Space Nine, and then they gradually folded in the other series. It created this very sprawling continuity. By display a section from this flow chart that somebody developed to show you like the order in which you could read these novels.
Adam Kotsko:And it's just overwhelmingly complex. They were empowered kind of by this vacuum to develop new stories, to develop new forms of storytelling. Like they could tell longer term stories. They could address different types of issues like long term effects of divorce, or like, what does it look like to be married and then have a child and have the child grow up. And like in a, in a seven season TV show, you can't realistically present as much of that.
Adam Kotsko:But in like this twenty year continuity that they had developed, you could. Towards a later stage, they would have like a series that was reflecting on various events that were affecting the whole galaxy. They would just have different locations with their perspective on it. The books were not in any particular order. And I'm like, that's innovative storytelling.
Adam Kotsko:That's using the affordances of these novels in a different way, to show different types of stories that you never could have done. The one that I'm on right now, they're doing a strike force on a planet and they have like six away teams like doing synchronized action. And like, you could never present that comprehensive way in a one hour TV episode, but they could do that. And so I wanted to vindicate this as like a really unique achievement, not just for Star Trek, but just in general, like this kind of collaborative story world developed by dozens of authors, all working together, all kind of referring to each other's stuff, all like held accountable to it. But like they genuinely were able to do creative things and to move the story forward and to do things that I think are preferable to what they did when they finally did bring back Picard and all of these other guys.
Adam Kotsko:And so I use the novel verse as kind of my showpiece for the three techniques. And I highlight three authors who illustrate each of these strategies. Christopher Bennett, my personal favorite, who was in charge of the Enterprise novels for the most part, is like a true scholar of Star Trek lore, and he integrates that all into his novels. He's like the ultimate fan service. He even tries to develop a theory of Star Trek time travel where everything makes sense, even though that's impossible.
Adam Kotsko:Kirsten Beyer, who is a author of Voyager novels. She embraced the concept of Voyager by getting them back to the Delta Quadrant as far away from everybody else as possible so that she could have like artistic freedom to develop her own plot lines without having to interfere with everybody else. And then the guy who I think is really the architect of the novel verse, David Mack, he was in charge of everything. That was a major world building situation. He's most famous for a series in which he gives the origin and the defeat of the board all in one big cohesive package that incorporates characters from all the series, including enterprise.
Adam Kotsko:And, he was the one who wrote the final, novel, in the novel verse and kind of like shut the door behind him. And I think that's very appropriate. But like all three of them do all three techniques, but they just seem to specialize, in each. And I still think there was an edited volume that came out about novels, but I think that my treatment in this chapter remains so far the definitive treatment of the novel continuity. And I'm pretty proud of that.
David Seitz:As you should be, although I have to confess when you said that every true Star Trek fan has read at least two of the novels. I'm at two, so I qualify, but I'm I'm no 100. That's that's for sure. I wrote a paper recently about Harry Kim from Star Trek Voyager and, like, the his racialization and his sexualization. And so different novels have different accounts for whether he ends up getting married to his long time, on again, off again fiance back in the Alpha Quadrant or not.
David Seitz:So I was very interested in tracking that down and memory beta was a wonderful kind of parallel novel verse repository for helping me make sense of those different endings. I want to go back for a minute to the perceived failures of Enterprise and Nemesis. Because even if we don't agree with those takes, and Nemesis have cast a long shadow, you point out, I think. And and as far as I know, you're one of the first people to notice that. They significantly, influenced the narratives of both the the sort of JJ Abrams and Justin Lin films that we saw from 2009 to 2016 and Star Trek Discovery, the TV show that that came out in 2017.
David Seitz:So as I was rereading your book over the weekend, I found myself summing up this influence, like the the things that Enterprise and Nemesis offered these these later incarnations as the three Ts, terrorism, time travel, and trauma plots. And so I wanted to ask you, what do you think it is that makes sort of George W. Bush era Star Trek so intertextually significant and influential for Obama and Trump one era Star Trek?
Adam Kotsko:Yeah, that's a tough one. The realization of how big of an impact that had, like, was like disappointing because I, taking an inventory of how many times they use terrorism plots. In 02/2005, doing a terrorism plot, like if they had not done that, that would have been strange. But the fact that they keep going back to the well in like 2023 or something like good grief, get over it. There's a couple of factors that work.
Adam Kotsko:The logic of the franchise indicates that there's always a desire to like redeem material to make it a usable history again. They'd never want to admit a mistake basically. Never want to admit like, just shouldn't have made enterprise and we're just going to ignore it. They're like, no, you have to keep integrating it more and more and more. We have to make it essential.
Adam Kotsko:We have to make sure that everybody is obligated to keep paying attention to enterprise. That's partly because they kept going back to like a timeframe where only enterprise would apply. Like only enterprise is like an available reference because both the JJ Abrams movies and discovery are set in the era of the original series. So the only thing that's still in the past is Enterprise. And so if you want to make Easter eggs, that's what you got to do.
Adam Kotsko:But I think that once they introduced this terrorism trope into Star Trek, which is present in both, it became available to express, I think, frustrations and anxieties that the creators faced. One reason that the universe is always one clever reversal of polarity away from being destroyed or something like that is that they're made to feel as though each Star Trek production could be the very end of Star Trek as such. That the viability of Star Trek going forward is at stake in every installment. And I think that the fact that enterprise was a failure and was canceled. And the fact that Nemesis was such a flop, it had apparently the worst word-of-mouth in movie history that the box office dropped within one week, like more than almost any other movie ever.
Adam Kotsko:And I believe that the only competitor is Geely, the Ben Affleck Shedderfer Lopez vehicle. So that's pretty bad. They were thinking of doing another next generation movie, but the failure just meant that they couldn't like, they just, it was it. That was it. And so like the fact that it had failed in both respects, TV and film, it just, it's an impossible pressure.
Adam Kotsko:Again, they keep coming back to this theme of like the galaxy is going to end because the galaxy might end. If this show fails, the whole thing could fail. And that goes back to the earlier theme that you were saying of taking seriously the fact that the producers and creators are hardworking people who are doing their best. Like, think that even the creators of enterprise were put in an impossible position. They were two dudes with no writing staff who were just supposed to churn out these long seasons and like nobody can do that with any consistent degree of quality.
Adam Kotsko:And I think you can see that, with the streaming thing too. We know that the conditions of labor under streaming are very exploitative and very intense. And you can see that coming out in like repeated plots across different properties and the difficulty of stringing together a cohesive plot for some of the seasons. They're really put it under like a lot of very unfair pressure in a way that previous generations of Star Trek or of TV writing in general simply were not.
David Seitz:So despite those constraints and despite the despite or maybe because of the persistence of these terror and trauma plots, you actually kind of go against the grain in your favorable assessment of Discovery Season One. And so I was wondering if you could say a little bit about where Discovery Season One succeeds, where it might be allegorically salient, and then where did Discovery go from there in your view?
Adam Kotsko:Yeah, I think that discovery season one is the closest to a true like prestige level, quality that Star Trek has ever attained. Not just the production values, the writing, the performances, the quality of the actors that they're able to get. Like, I think that Jason Isaac's performance as Lorca is the best performance by a mile that Star Trek has ever had, including Patrick Stewart, including every other person that you could mention. I think it does that by taking seriously the franchise concept and, and kind of like inhabiting these, this world in a different way than anybody had before. I think that the serialized format allowed them to explore the fact that this crew where completely messed up things are happening to them every week, that this would have a cumulative effect and it would affect their lives.
Adam Kotsko:The fact that they don't refer to it in the next episode just simply isn't realistic. And so they create a plot where actions really have consequences and where people have to live with the consequences of their actions and their reputation in their, you know, self-concept. And like the main character, Michael Burnham has to kind of earn her way back into Starfleet after, you know, committing a serious betrayal of her captain. And I think that that's clever too, because it kind of acknowledges the situation of the show in the text that any new Star Trek they know is going to be like guilty until proven innocent. It has to prove itself as something that's worthy of Star Trek.
Adam Kotsko:And so they write that directly into the show. I think this is like an element of self awareness that is handled really well, at least until the very end. I also think that the mirror universe concept, this is one of the most controversial aspects of the season. Captain Lorca is running a tight ship. It's a very, you know, constrained and harsh environment compared to past, captains.
Adam Kotsko:It doesn't feel like Star Trek. And it turns out that's because he's not a star fleet captain. He is an imposter from the mirror universe. And many people, you know, watching this, they're just like, Oh no, they turned a nuance character into, a mustache twirling villain or something like that. And I think they take the mirror universe concept more seriously, maybe then it deserves to be taken.
Adam Kotsko:And they're just like, if this is a brutal world where moral values are inverted, where everybody gets by, you know, like crawling over everybody else, where you get promoted by killing your captain, all of this kind of stuff. It wouldn't be a fun and campy environment. Like people portray it on the other episodes. It would be terrifying and living in that environment for a long term would be morally corrosive to you. And they put Michael Burdham in the situation where she is forced to kind of pose as a mirror person.
Adam Kotsko:It's supposed to like pose as evil. She has to like, one of the first things she has to do is kill like the doppelganger of like somebody who was her mentee on the other side of the universe. And she expresses this, she says, I can't do this anymore. Like, I feel like I'm losing myself. And yet Lorca, this person from the evil universe is able to fit in on the Starfleet side during this war effort.
Adam Kotsko:What people wanted out of that plot line, I think was for us to hear that Lorca has been traumatized by war. He just wants to defend the federation so hard that he winds up making some morally questionable decisions. And we need to understand that he's really a nice liberal at heart and give him room to, you know, like express his trauma and things like that. And I am, am bored to death of that story. That has been the story of American pop culture since 09/11.
Adam Kotsko:Oh my God, military virtues are sometimes necessary to defend liberalism. Tell me more. What Discovery does is it tells a story that only Star Trek can tell because of this mirror universe concept and the kind of pre existing infrastructure that we have to tell a story like that. And it sends us a message that there really are enemies. There really are people out there who don't share your values, who are not waiting to be converted, who are not just like psychologically damaged and that's why they act the way they do.
Adam Kotsko:There really are enemies out there and sometimes these enemies simply need to be defeated. What people took to be simplistic moralism, I think, was actually a step towards a greater maturity in Star Trek. And I think that it's a message that's actually necessary in our present day.
David Seitz:And I mean, it's salient for debates on the left too, right? You know, Todd McGowan would say that on the left, you can't have an enemy, you can only have an adversary. Jody Dean would say, Oh no, you can have an enemy, especially a class enemy. So there's lot more to work through there. I do want to talk about Picard though, speaking of class, because I think Picard is in some ways more explicitly addressed to questions of neoliberal inequality.
David Seitz:You write on Picard that what should have been the streaming era's greatest triumph turned out to be its worst creative failure. And even spicier, you include in this assessment the season of Picard that seemingly almost everybody likes season three, which is the beloved, you know, cast reunion of Star Trek, The Next Generation that many people wanted all along. Now I too have spoken publicly and also not so favorably about Picard, So I can well appreciate how hard it can be to hold this unpopular view. Tell us more about the strategies that Picard uses across its three seasons and why, in your view, these mostly don't work.
Adam Kotsko:I think in a way you could say that it uses all three strategies. It uses creative freedom and world building more in the first season, which I think is the most ambitious season. And it brings up these class issues and things like that. What most people were expecting a cast reunion, they radically altered the status quo. Picard is no longer the dashing captain.
Adam Kotsko:He's a bitter old man who is disappointed that the federation has betrayed its values by abandoning this humanitarian effort he was heading up. And he is like just rotting in his French chateau on his vineyard. And meanwhile, his former first officer, Raffy, this is a new character for the show, not who we knew before, that she's living basically in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, just kind of subsiding on alcohol and vaping apparently. Already that's like a huge shift from how people usually view next generation, that it's a post scarcity utopia, that everything is equal. They really want to take us through kind of the seedy underbelly of the galaxy As Picard is trying to like reconnect with his Starfleet values and kind of get his mojo back.
Adam Kotsko:And I think that I liked the idea behind it. I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, but simply on the level of execution, they just did an absolutely terrible job. The pacing makes no sense. The plot, like they kill off a beloved character for no reason. They kill and resurrect Picard within one episode.
Adam Kotsko:Like there's just like so much that's confusing about it and strange. And I think it's because they put too much trust in the showrunner, Michael Chabot, who's a great novelist, but who has had never done a TV show before. And in fact, in one interview they let slip that they started filming before they knew what the story was. So I think that was obviously a misstep. And I think that the second season, they continued down the path of not having a cast reunion.
Adam Kotsko:They, for some reason, had them travel back in time to contemporary Los Angeles and like drive around. And they were clearly only making a season so that they could like produce something to put out during, you know, the COVID boom of streaming. And this was like just bizarre fan service, like just trying to straighten out like history of Star Trek and like the near future, which is kind of a mess. If you're a fan, you know what I mean? And it was just like constantly having Picard geek out about seeing things like from past episodes.
Adam Kotsko:Was really not very satisfying. The final season, I was glad to see they finally got the band back together. I was happy to see every new character that they brought back. I was happy to see them, you know, on that level, it was a success. But I think that in that season, there's this kind of ugly undercurrent of triumphalism because they have a plot where the evil board queen who heads the cybernetically connected, you know, collective mind of the Borg manages to kind of, inject this virus into all of the younger Starfleet officers, everybody 25 or under.
Adam Kotsko:They're taken over by the board and they start killing their superior officers, trying to attack earth and things like this. And I just cannot understand what this is supposed to mean other than the woke mind virus. And that all of these young cadets, just like our Gen Z people, like in between like bouts of hydration, they're canceling their elders or something like that. And they make it so that only the enterprise headed by a captain Bacard can solve this problem. The final episode is literally called the last generation.
Adam Kotsko:And what does that refer to other than the next generation turns out to be the last generation, the only one that can do anything right. It's glib. It does world building that doesn't make any sense and hems in any future story because how are you going to do a story in this world without addressing the fact that every single young officer is traumatized by having been brainwashed and like induced to commit murder against their colleagues and things like that. Like what story is available at that point? They booby trapped the franchise all in the service of saying it was good back then and it'll never be good again.
Adam Kotsko:And I just think that is a bizarre waste of everybody's time and talent when they could have just given us a fun story about what these guys have been up to.
David Seitz:It's really hard to miss the kind of the woke mind virus, you know, kids these days kind of allegory and it does feel defensive and nostalgic in all the wrong ways to me too. That's not a popular opinion, but it's all the more important to say that, I think. Let's talk about my favorite chapter, which is more upbeat because of its objects. So, is the chapter on Minor Triumphs, so Prodigy, Lower Decks, and Strange New Worlds. These are programs that you say have less cataclysmic, all or nothing stakes.
David Seitz:They have more modest ambitions. You know, they're largely not as serialized, and you're not opposed to serialization, as you point out with respect to Discovery season one, but you do also see virtue in the franchises, you know, finally coming back to to the episodic format, particularly in Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds, which is, you know, you suggest part of what made the original series and the next generation so popular and so accessible in reruns. So I obviously love Deep Face Nine. I wrote a book about it, and that is kind of the show that introduced serialization to Star Trek in the nineties. And I think it did so really well.
David Seitz:But your book also forced me to consider the ways that DS nine's sort of serial turn might have also left open something of a Pandora's box in its wake. So I was persuaded, I think, by your praise for the episodic aspects of Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds. And as you point out, like more contained episodic shows can be really hard to write well, but really satisfying when they pull it off. I also thought here a little bit about Lauren Berlant, who has been a big influence on me and a lot of other people and who passed away back in 02/2001, whose posthumous book, On the Inconvenience of Other People, has a whole discussion episode as a concept. Verlant writes, To call something an episode is not to denote a mere episode, life reduced to things that happen.
David Seitz:It denotes a situation that takes time, that rises and falls in intensity and consequence, that may be forgettable until it emerges later in a series. It might become an episode, it might become an event that, reshapes a life or a world, but it prefigures nothing. I think that's just such an interesting quote, especially in light of everything that's going on in late Star Trek with respect to prequels and with respect to writers having the time to do their work well. So, what is it about these more episodic shows like Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds? Why do these shows in your view work to the extent that they do?
David Seitz:What makes them successful?
Adam Kotsko:I think that it's the factors that you mentioned, like the fact that it's episodic, that the stories are more self contained and by their very nature, they're not as high stakes or not as cataclysmic that it's not that the galaxy is at stake in everything. And I think that that goes with the fact that they're considered the second tier products that, like strange new worlds was kind of like created almost as a web, you know, based on fan demand. After the captain Pike and the young Spock appeared on discovery season two, everybody thought that they did a really good job. They're like, we want to see more from them. And they made that happen.
Adam Kotsko:And then just put out a kind of 10 episode homage to original series. That doesn't pretend to contribute a ton to our understanding of the franchise or anything. And similarly lower decks, you know, just it's animated format and that's kind of like Rick and Morty esque tone. Just keep it from getting too heavy into a full of itself. And I liked the quote that you said from Lauren Berlant.
Adam Kotsko:And I think that just on a nitty gritty level of TV, back in the heroic era of Star Trek, back when they had these twenty six episode seasons that were expected to be 99% episodic. They could just throw things out there. Like sometimes an episode could just be merely an episode. Sometimes, you know, have something happens and then your memory is reset. You don't even remember that it happened or something like that.
Adam Kotsko:But then sometimes an episode can unexpectedly touch a nerve or lay down a marker and suddenly you find yourself wanting to follow-up. When Jordy decides to make a holodeck version of the engineer who created the Enterprise, who turns out to be an attractive woman, and who in this avatar gets along with him famously, one is almost compelled to have that woman come to the ship and discover that this has happened, you know, to create this like, unbearable cringe. A lot of the follow-up stories in next generation that they were feeling their way to things. They created characters. Sometimes they go away and we only see them one time.
Adam Kotsko:And then sometimes they become like semi recurring. Some experiences of different characters are important and some are not. They just could, they could explore and they could figure out what would resonate instead of committing themselves to this kind of lockstep. Every single episode is going to contribute to this one overarching plot that we've committed to and stake the entire season on. I think that there's something about the streaming format, serialized format that is inherently inhuman.
Adam Kotsko:Like if I had told you in 02/2002, I am going to show you a ten hour movie. You would have thought it was a torture chamber. Like nobody wanted this before streaming claim to have like this ten hour movie format. And I think that there's something, the fact that streaming seasons are so often poorly paced so often repetitive so often is because this is not a format that works, that the human mind is set up to process things and units of about a half hour or an hour, maybe two hours at the, at the limit. And I think that forcing everything into the straight jacket of, of a single story that's supposed to fit everything is artificial and impossible to do.
Adam Kotsko:And I think at its worst, it divides each episode into like, here's a one hour chunk of stuff that we've arbitrarily like divided it up. Think some of the streaming seasons of Star Trek do become that I think especially the card season one and two, you know, much of discovery is like that. And I think that the discipline of the episode format, which discovery season one, my favorite did I think do well, it did adhere to the episode format. That that creates a more manageable, more approachable, and a more exploratory format that allows things to emerge. I think that there's something about the streaming format of the kind of like everything has to be shoved down this one path that fits with the abuse of the writers that we see happening that became much more public during the writers' strike.
David Seitz:Yeah, I'll say too that the episodic shows are a lot more teachable. When I teach my first year course on Star Trek, I just teach DS9 because then over the course of the six weeks of viewings that we do in class, they actually see the build. But when I teach my survey class for sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and I start in the 60s and go all the way to the present, I'd never know what to do of Discovery or Picard. I usually just do the pilot because that, you know, it sort of introduces a little bit of the concept, at least of one of the seasons, but it's hard to sort of with these other series that are more episodic, you can just pick up a particular morality play and say, okay, what was that saying about the Vietnam War? What was that saying about the war on drugs?
David Seitz:You know, it's a little harder, not that there aren't political messages, but like the form of them, as you say, is just harder for the brain to digest and it's harder to teach in a format that like, I can't ask a student reasonably to watch a whole season of Picard and then write about it, you know, for a term paper.
Adam Kotsko:I did a course too. I took the risk of assigning some Deep Space Nine episodes, even from Deep In. You know, fan favorite episode in The Pale Moonlight, where Cisco and Garak figure out this deceitful way to get the Romulans to join the war and the balance of power. Like, it's so in the weeds, but it does stand alone. Like, was shocked how much it stood alone.
Adam Kotsko:Rewatching it, I realized they're telling you everything you need to know about this particular situation right now. And the fact that you haven't been following all the other episodes, that means your experience is different, but it doesn't mean that you don't understand what's going on or what's at stake in that episode. And I think that a similar episode is one that I highlight from Strange New Worlds. So one where there's the Klingon ambassador who, Doctor. Mbenga winds up.
Adam Kotsko:This draws on the whole season of discovery with the Klingon war and everything like that. And if you haven't seen that, it'll hit differently. But that episode gives you everything you need to follow it. You should totally do In the Pale Moonlight in your more survey classes in the future.
David Seitz:It's so salient. There's a number of episodes about which people often say, Oh, this could have been a two parter, but they often stand apart really well because they're not, you know, like Far Beyond the Stars could easily have been a two parter. But the fact that it's not, it's like, it's got the all of that density and brilliance worked into this episode that stands alone really well. Okay, so I like this book a lot, right? I was one of the press reviewers.
David Seitz:I was one of the blurbers. I think it succeeds in assessing twenty first century Trek in assessing we could say how the franchise got from there to here if we wanna quote the awful corny lyrics of the enterprise theme song. My final question for you has to do with where your work is going from here. This is not your first book on television. You've written important work on political theology and continental philosophy.
David Seitz:What is next for you?
Adam Kotsko:Yes. One thing that's not next for me, although it was tempting, is I saw there's a call for papers on a special issue about Enterprise. And I am doing a Substack newsletter that kind of is now my outlet for Star Trek stuff. So people who want to hear more about Star Trek from me should subscribe to that newsletter. But I'm kind of shifting gears away from pop culture and away from Star Trek for the near future, kind of returning to my roots in political theology and kind of the history of Christian thought.
Adam Kotsko:I'm under contract right now to write a book that's an introduction to the topic of political theology. I'm hoping that'll be a classroom resource, that that'll be just written at a very kind of introductory level. Longer term, I had the opportunity to apply for a sabbatical, which would be the first time I ever got any type of research leave in my career. What I am currently planning to do during that time is a study of the Faust theme in maternity, the notion of selling your soul to the devil and the specific versions of Faust. Things that are avowedly about Faust and about this character, you know, like Marlowe's play or Greta's play or things like that.
Adam Kotsko:And then I want to try to mine less obvious texts that kind of play with those themes. I'm just interested in what Faust has to say about modern concepts of freedom, ideas about scientific curiosity, modern ideas of authority and how they're still kind of working through this Christian heritage and still kind of have a guilty conscience of trying to break with that heritage. The way I think about Faust is as like one of the most successful franchises of the modern world. And a lot of the kind of patterns of thought that I use in the Star Trek book, would use it in the Faust book as well. So it's not as big a break as it might appear.
David Seitz:Yeah. I was going to say, I'm going to lobby you right now for a chapter on In the Pale Moonlight in that Faust book. Cause you know, I'm sure Garik is somebody's idea of the devil rightly or wrongly.
Adam Kotsko:I actually wrote about that on my Substack. You should check it out. I'll send you the link.
David Seitz:Well, Adam, it's been a pleasure. I highly recommend the book. I'm already thinking about I've actually already been recommending it to students in my Star Trek course this semester. The book is Late Star Trek, the final frontier in the Franchise Era, available everywhere books are sold and on University of Minnesota Press website. Thanks.
Adam Kotsko:Great, thank you.