Cynical Cinema

I noticed something odd about Star Trek when watching Season Three of the original series, out tomorrow (November 18th) from Paramount Home Entertainment.  William Shatner is the kind of character who might conceivably refer to himself in the third person.  He’s overblown and arrogant and overacts and so forth.  But he doesn’t refer to himself in the third person, he does something more bizarre.  His name, really, is James.  Certain characters call him James.  Kirk is his last name.  Most characters on Star Trek call him “Captain”.  Because he is the captain.  Captain Kirk.  So far so good?

OK.  Now, when he meets other people, as he does quite often in many episodes, he needs to introduce himself.  So he says his name is Captain Kirk.  But when he meets old friends, people he has known for many years, or even people with whom he has grown up, he refers to himself as “Kirk”.  Like, “hey, Steve, it’s Kirk”.   Would anyone in the world do this, for real?  Phone up a friend and announce themselves by their last name?  It makes very little sense to me.  Your last name could be the name by which your friends know you, (as is often the case with me).  But even if that is the case, you don’t refer to yourself by that name, because it is a nickname.  If you do, you come across like George Costanza when he tried to give himself the nickname T-Bone on Seinfeld.

Anyway, just something I noticed.  Star Trek:  The Original Series, Season Three comes out tomorrow, and features that awesome episode where the weirdo creepy kids take over the Enterprise.  That episode, in itself, makes the third season better than the second one.

Star Trek is one of the great phenomena in pop culture. Somehow it has managed to maintain it’s relevance over the course of five incarnations, with similar stories and similar characters and similar sets throughout all five. Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing a box set tomorrow, September 16th, that highlights the similarities between all five series. Star Trek: Alternate Realities Collective contains episodes from The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyageur, and Enterprise. It’s a box set featuring 20 episodes of Star Trek that explore alternative realities. And by that they mean mirror universes, parallel dimensions, twisted realities, and alternate lives.

What this box set does, most of all, is highlight the similarities between the five series. For example, no matter which version of Star Trek you watch, trouble causes the flight deck to shake and shudder, and makes the lights flicker, no matter what that problem actually is. And at the end of every one of these “alternative realities” episodes, the bizarre occurrences are easily explained away as “a temporal discharge of abnormal anomalies”, or some such thing. Most of these episodes fall into one of two categories. Either they are like clip shows - there are crossovers with old episodes, sometimes even other series, and they are really easy to do with a minimum of effort. For example, the episode of Voyageur where one of the characters is able to pass from deck to deck in the spaceship, and each level exists in another time frame. So old episodes get recycled. Or, they function as a reason for the creators of the series to do something totally different for one episode. Like the episode of The Next Generation where Captain Picard is in a coma and lives another man’s life on another planet while in his coma.

Perhaps that makes this box set less than appealing for true Star Trek nerds, or maybe it’s even more appealing. I really don’t know. But as a non-Star Trek afficionado, I found it to be very interesting. There are some great episodes here. The episode of Voyageur where two of the crew members cause the destruction of the ship, and send a message from fifteen years in the future in order to avert the catastrophe. Or the episode where a hot woman appears to be constantly jumping backwards in time, from the moment she dies until the moment she is conceived.

But the best episode on this box set, the one that makes it all worthwhile, is the episode of the Original Series where there is an evil Captain Kirk and a good Captain Kirk, and William Shatner fights himself. There is, I believe, no moment in television history (outside of that Star Wars holiday special) that involved worse acting than does this one. You see, Captain Kirk’s personality has been split in two - one of them all of his evil characteristics, and one of them all his good ones. The Evil Kirk makes it known that he is evil by twitching his face like a hamster. It is absolutely hilarious! William Shatner was silly at the best of times, but here he sets some kind of record for over-the-top silliness. This episode alone is worth the price of the box set. However, for those of you who don’t want to spend the money buying this massive box set, but would still dearly love to watch William Shatner fight himself, check out the bargain-basement DVD White Comanche, in which he plays long-lost twins, one who has grown up cowboy and one who has grown up Indian. The final showdown is as bonkers and hilarious as is this episode. Star Trek: Alternate Realities Collective hits stores tomorrow.

The first thing I noticed about Star Trek The Original Series: Season Two when I picked it up today, August 5th, from Paramount Home Entertainment, was the packaging. The packaging is irritating. There is a big, clumsy plastic box, and inside that there is a cardboard package with a bunch of episode cards in a little pouch. Also in the cardboard package are the DVDs themselves, in a book-shaped plastic case. There is no artwork on the DVDs themselves, and the listing of episodes and special features is on the cards in the other pouch. I guess the idea is that it looks futuristic, yet is in practice rather clunky and unnecessary. Much like the series itself.

When, after thirty-one minutes of twisting, prying, and shaking, I managed to get the DVDs out of the package, my girlfriend immediately wanted to put on Disc 5, the “Tribbles” episode. From what I understand, after listening to her Trek-nerd ramblings, this is one of the most famous episodes of Star Trek. After watching it, I still didn’t really understand what the big deal was. The tribbles are these tiny little fuzz balls that make a comforting noise. They don’t move, they don’t have eyes or feet or features. They’re just stuffed…nothing. And so they can’t really be cute, because they aren’t really anything. But the idea is that these “tribbles” just eat and reproduce, to such a massive extent that very quickly they cause a real danger to the Enterprise.

On the fifth disc, the “Tribbles” disc, there are two other Star Trek episodes - one of them is a tribbles episode from a cartoon Star Trek series that ran in 1973 and 1974. And another is an episode of Deep Space Nine that actually takes footage from that original, Shatner-led “tribbles” episode. The cast members of the new series are superimposed on the old one, in a sort of homage to the original Star Trek. This is an episode that really calls attention to the difference in production values between the modern and the classic. I had forgotten how low-budget the classic Star Trek really was compared to today’s versions. But all the same, I think I still prefer the original.

Now, although I find William Shatner’s overacting to be totally hilarious, I realized in watching Season Two of this original series that he wasn’t the only one! In fact, just about everyone in the original Star Trek was an overactor! Even Leonard Nimoy, as the emotionless, uber-logical Spock, still manages to have a scene or two where he manages to over-act. Now, I’m not sure it’s the fault of the rest of the cast - I think it’s likely that when acting next to William Shatner it’s natural that it would just come out. It seems like over-acting would be the only way you would even know you were in the scene with him.

Campy over-acting, some interesting ideas, and of course the Tribbles make Star Trek Original Series: Season Two worth checking out for nerds and non-nerds alike.