My Vacation is Trying to Kill Me! (Part 2)

This essay is a follow-up to Star Trek: My Vacation is Trying to Kill Me!

Data and Worf in the Star Trek episode “A Fistful of Datas”

The Star Trek holodeck episode “A Fistful of Datas” has major overlapping themes with Michael Crichton’s 1973 schlock adventure flick Westworld. Both feature high-tech modernists wandering into a simulation of the American West, expecting to swagger around in buckskins while having gunfights. But in both stories, the simulation’s safeties fail, leaving protagonists at the mercy of Colt-wielding synthetic outlaws who can’t be killed.

Smarter critics than me have observed the recurrent theme of killer entertainment in Michael Crichton’s bibliography. Both Westworld and Jurassic Park feature amusement parks where people go to gawk at merciless killers, only to find themselves on the receiving end of that violence. But Crichton also addressed this theme less overtly: White explorers in “darkest Africa” in his novel Congo, for instance, or thrill-seeking stormchasers in his screenplay Twister.

Putting Westworld and “A Fistful of Datas” together, considering what I wrote previously about the moralistic tone implicit in holodeck episodes, I’m struck by the judgment inherent in both. Each story shares the image of high-tech moderns wanting to participate in what they consider a more savage time. Both present the “American West” in overlit desert colors, contrasted with the adventurers’ dusty earth-toned clothes.

Equally important, both stories feature moderns expecting to witness savagery, but not get hurt. Both stories assume the presence of safeties ensuring that living humans won’t get killed, or even hurt that badly. But then the safeties fail, because of course they do. There’s no story if our protagonists can’t get hurt. Our modern heroes must fight for their lives against undying synthetic humans which they, or their technological overlords, created.

For Westworld to make any sense, we must accept two assumptions that don’t withstand much scrutiny. First, we must accept the premise, common in Marxism and other early-modern philosophies, that natural humans are naturally violent and destructive, and social evolution has been a constant movement away from that. Current anthropology doesn't believe this, of course; evidence suggests we’re getting more violent, not less. But the story remains persistent.

Second, we must believe the Freudian supposition of thanatos, the innate psychological drive toward death. We must believe that youth seek adrenaline-producing behaviors, like driving recklessly and picking fights, while the elderly embrace religion and other transcendental ideas, because deep down, we secretly want to die. This premise doesn’t withstand scrutiny simply because we need only look around to realize these behaviors are neither universal, nor inexplicable.

Teddy (James Marsden) and Delores (Evan Rachel Wood) in Westworld

Westworld, Jurassic Park, and the more action-oriented holodeck episodes share a theme: tourists go to watch others die. Consider the innate frisson of watching that goat lowered into the T-Rex enclosure. Whether we accept primal human savagery or “nature red in tooth and claw,” we want someone, or something, to die for our amusement. Things become less amusing when death redirects its attention onto us.

Crichton’s body of work broadly distrusts science, technology, and modernity overall. He repeatedly assumes scientists will create (or, in stories like The Andromeda Strain, invite) catastrophes that threaten human survival. But Crichton, like Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry, ultimately shares the humanist principle that humanity deserves to survive. Whether faced by Yul Brynner’s Man in Black or a rampaging velociraptor, humans are finally the good guys.

The 2018 television remake of Westworld doesn’t share that presumption. The first-season arc, which (Spoilers) reveals that the evil, marauding Man in Black is actually gentle, lovestruck William, depicts what happens when the safeties remain active too long. Given godlike power over synthetic humans, William becomes cruel. He indulges the violence of the setting until it permeates him, confident in his faith that it can’t hurt him.

Until, of course, it does.

Meanwhile, like Star Trek’s Moriarty, the synthetic humans become aware of their artificial environment and the digitally replicated nature of their experience. They realize the ways they’ve been abused, raped, murdered for decades. Star Trek, with its humanist presumptions, handled this by appeasing Moriarty with a second-level simulation. Westworld, stripped of such presumptions, decides that somebody has to pay.

Viewed another way, Crichton and Roddenberry both assumed that humans are innately good, and getting better. But both demonstrated something very different, that tweaking the rules slightly reveals humanity’s poorly-buried violent streak. Worf and William enter their respective simulations believing death is aberrant and truth will win if spoken confidently. But when the safeties fall, and death becomes normative, it’s a very different game.

And in some games (the stories imply), losers deserve to be punished. Good people don’t play games, they remain in the real world.

Star Trek: My Vacation is Trying to Kill Me!

Lieutenant Barclay departs the holodeck in the TNG episode “Hollow Pursuits”

I’ve long forgotten who first pointed out that much 1990s science fiction begins with the premise that we can’t tell what’s real. Movies like Alex Proyas’ Dark City or the Wachowskis’ The Matrix address different aspects of what happens when a gormless Everyman (who is, naturally, White and male) discovers that his entire life is a simulation. The original list included the ubiquitous Holodeck episodes in Star Trek: TNG.

Having ruminated upon that thought for a while, I was recently struck when a friend described watching a TNG episode and noting that the holodeck wanted to kill the crew, again. I realized that the holodeck isn’t really the same as those all-encompassing simulation narratives. First, the characters usually know they’re in simulations. Second, the characters’ own malevolent pleasures want to kill them.

Unlike those other movies, most holodeck episodes begin with the protagonists generating their own simulation. The holodeck’s purpose, established in the TNG pilot “Encounter at Farpoint,” is to offer the crew the deep-space equivalent of shore leave, the opportunity to put aside their Starfleet identities and be someone else, somewhere else, for a few hours. Options, the show demonstrates, are endless; they’re circumscribed only by characters’ imaginations.

That imagination, however, repeatedly proves the characters’ undoing. The most common outcomes are a mechanical failure trapping characters inside their own simulation, a recurrent theme in Picard’s Dixon Hill episodes; characters getting so entranced by their fantasy that they lose track of reality, as in “11001001”; or the simulation seizing control of the ship, as in “Elementary, Dear Data.” Characters never stop being aware that the simulation is a simulation.

Therefore, rather than repeat the 1990s theme that we’re trapped in a program we can’t even see—which, in practice, starts looking like a reheated critique of capitalism—the holodeck takes on a moralistic tone. The characters are punished for indulging their imaginations too often. Holodeck episodes don’t encourage audiences to resist the unseen program dictating their lives. Rather, it scolds them to more closely police their own imaginations.

In movies like Dark City and The Matrix, the simulation generally doesn’t want to kill humanity. The Strangers or The Agents only actively oppress those who dare stray from the official narrative; those who comply, get ignored, or occasionally even rewarded. Sure, the characters have no control over the simulation they’re trapped in, which the movies depict as oppressive. But it’s easy to avoid punishments; just go with the flow.

LaForge, Pulaski, and Data in the TNG episode “Elementary, Dear Data.”

By contrast, the holodeck punishes those whose imaginations are too fruitful. When characters believe in their dreams, those dreams become malevolent. Consider the recurrent Moriarty character, depicted as the only character ever to escape the holodeck. He actively punishes his creators for giving him an identity, because they were busy dreaming when they should’ve been working. Agent Smith wants Neo to remain in the dream; Moriarty punishes anyone for straying from reality.

This theme becomes most pointed with the character of Lieutenant Barclay, whose holodeck fantasies are presented as inappropriate, but essentially harmless. (More on that elsewhere.) Barclay’s retreat into fantasy is, on some level, a scolding of fanfic writers and cosplayers who rewrite the canonical characters to suit their own sexual or power fantasies. The show basically reprimands fans for getting too deeply immersed in their favorite franchise.

As the holodeck premise becomes more familiar, writers do expand their vision. The Voyager episode “Bride of Chaotica!”, for instance, depicts a photon-based lifeform that thinks the holodeck is real, and the organic crewmembers are invaders. But it still fundamentally scolds Paris and Kin for creating a fantasy so realistic that it threatens to overtake the ship. Like always, the sin is dreaming too big.

Star Trek isn’t opposed to play. Episodes show characters using the holodeck as dance studios, dojos, and gymnasia. Some episodes even show characters using the holodeck to practice religious devotion, a rarity in Star Trek. The show only punishes them for caring too deeply about their fantasies. When the holodeck becomes more important than “reality,” the holodeck chastises them and returns them to the real world, where they belong.

The Matrix depicts humanity fleeing the illusion to rediscover reality. The holodeck, by contrast, scolds characters for escaping reality and preferring their illusions. It moralistically demands that characters ground their lives in “reality,” which is defined by uniforms, rank, and work. The holodeck is basically a starched-collared schoolmaster, rapping a ruler on a student’s desk and saying, “Get your head out of the clouds.” Which is, of course, ironic.

You can find this analysis continued in My Vacation is Trying to Kill Me (Part 2)

The Future is Dead, Long Live the Past!

What does a naïve fascination with Laura Ingalls Wilder have in common with this week’s projected election of a literal Fascist government in Italy? I hear the knives coming out among my few regular readers even as I write this. Yet I contend that America’s attachment to a beatified past reflects the same sentiments that have installed Giorgia Meloni as Italy’s next presumptive Prime Minister.

Smarter critics than me have written about cottagecore, a design aesthetic based on a supposedly better agrarian past. From the architecture and artwork to the now-notorious “prairie dresses” briefly sold at Target, the cottagecore ethos lionizes a time in America’s past when people lived simply, ate food from their own gardens, and didn’t busy themselves with sleek design. Many cottagecore enthusiasts have attested their loyalty to Wilder’s Little House books.

Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t simply write her simple novels to entertain children, though. She wrote at the urging of her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who probably served as unbilled co-author. Lane was also one of the founders of Libertarianism, the political philosophy holding that everything would be better if rules and regulations were unilaterally rescinded, and everyone were free to follow their internal moral compass.

Ingalls’ Little House books are replete with messages of self-reliance and autonomy. Repeatedly throughout the novels, the characters learn the importance of swallowing their complaints, working hard, and not asking anybody for help. The characters are resolutely unmoored from community, with the assistance which community entails. One novel commences with the family moving west, claiming their motivation was that too many people were around.

Contrast that with Peter Weir’s 1985 movie Witness. Forced from a Back-East city to harbor among the Amish, detective John Book (Harrison Ford) learns the exact opposite lessons which Wilder taught: restraint, sharing, community. Important moments happen when he learns, for instance, to sip his lemonade, not guzzle it. I can’t be the only American who considered decamping to Amish Country after watching Book participate in an Amish barn raising.

Cottagecore espouses rural simplicity, but not a communitarianism. It’s all Laura Ingalls Wilder, no John Book. Adherents believe, to a greater or lesser degree, the popular White American myth of autonomy and rural solitude. But real early rural life was deeply communitarian, because it needed to be. Besides, as historian Nancy Isenberg writes, the Ingalls family probably moved west, not to avoid crowds, but because richer Whites chased them off the land.

Meanwhile, as Americans of every political hue romanticize Oregon Trail pastoralism, Italians have elected a presumptive PM whose own party calls themselves “heirs of Il Duce.” Giorgia Meloni promises to reinstate nearly the entire Mussolini policy agenda, because that ended so well last time. Mussolini literally gave global nationalism the shorthand name of Fascism, and provided the political blueprint that Hitler duplicated and expanded upon.

Meloni cites the endless panoply of evil-bringers which American and British audiences will recognize: immigrants, “globalists,” homosexuals. She promises to restore lost national greatness that definitely existed in the vaguely defined past: make Italy great again, if you please. Fundamental to small-F fascism is a belief that things used to be good, but now they’re not— though that goodness, and that lost time, are always fuzzy and intangible.

Italy isn’t alone in yearning for a more authoritarian past. Vladimir Putin has lamented the Soviet collapse, and attempted to regain Russian greatness by repeating Stalin’s greatest sin, oppressing Ukrainians. Britain’s new PM, Liz Truss, announced her own good-old-days policy by slating Thatcher-level tax cuts, and global currency markets responded with scorn. Because if there’s anything Europe needs, it’s 1980s-level unemployment and labor unrest.

As I’ve recently written, popular culture keeps looking backward because, I suspect, it’s leery about whether we have a future. But in pulling focus outward to encompass the larger social terrain, that seems to be a widespread attitude outside Hollywood, too. From gingham dresses to brownshirts, our discourse is dominated by nostalgic longing for a beatified past that never quite really existed. Just ask anybody who survived Jim Crow.

I understand this fear of having no future. Look outside your window: it’s blazing hot and getting hotter, and we’re running out of clean water. Capitalism has created intense poverty, but rosy-eyed alternatives don’t fix injustice, they move it around. A small handful of centibillionaires are so wealthy they’d rather flee Earth than fix its problems. It’s easy to feel like there’s no future. But if we don’t find our future soon, the future will surely find us.

Quantum Leap: Time Travel Fiction in a World Without a Future

Caitlin Bassett and Raymond Lee in the Quantum Leap soft reboot

I’ve heard good things about the newly-launched soft reboot of the 1980s TV series Quantum Leap. Though only the first episode has streamed at this writing, friends and reviewers who’ve watched it describe it as a worthy relaunch of the story concept, without trying to retell the exact story. Yet I can’t bring myself to watch it. The very thought of yet another soft reboot from the Hollywood dream factories just makes my skin crawl.

Fans use the term “soft reboot” to signify a story that’s technically an extension of the original, but which attempts to shoehorn new characters into the protagonists’ role. The way, for instance, Disney gradually wrote the original trinity of characters out of Star Wars in favor of younger, handsome successors. Or the way Terminator: Dark Fate slowly squeezed Sarah Connor and the T-101 in favor of a new resistance and a new, looming future terror.

According to reviews, this Quantum Leap exists in parallel to the original. It’s unclear whether any actors from the original series will appear, though Scott Bakula has given interviews from the sideline. (The only other actor to appear throughout the original series, Dean Stockwell, passed away in 2021.) The new series features entirely new characters, and apparently mentions the original characters, so it’s possible that original protagonist Sam Beckett will reappear in the unspecified future.

Thus Quantum Leap joins the ranks of previously ended shows, like Roseanne, iCarly, and The X-Files. These series had clearly delineated final episodes, and came to definitive conclusions, sometimes under poor circumstances. Sure, Quantum Leap was remembered more fondly in its absence than when it actually aired. But Roseanne languished for literally decades, its final season a subject of mockery and scorn, before somebody decided to try again.

But somehow, nostalgia won out over derision.

It’s easy to pooh-pooh these studio reboots. In an era when instant digital interconnectedness puts thousands of writers within easy reach, the studios aren’t seeking new ideas or new thinkers; they’re ransacking the vaults to retool old ideas with minimum effort. But this isn’t a new complaint. Cultural snobs disparaged the love of remakes and sequels at last back to the 1980s, when I began paying attention. This is something worse.

I don’t think the studios believe there’s a future anymore.

Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell in the original Quantum Leap

This is perhaps remarkable to say when so many reboots, hard and soft, are in the science fiction realm. We currently have four Star Trek series currently in production, the largest simultaneous output the franchise has ever seen. But the future depicted in Star Trek is the future Gene Roddenberry envisioned sixty years ago. Resurrecting characters like Captain Pike and Mister Spock isn’t visionary, it’s downright cowardly and retrogressive.

Quantum Leap takes this to new heights. Though it’s an essentially optimistic show, grounded on the idea that we can be better people if we’re given the opportunity to make better choices, it’s also necessarily based on regret. Series protagonist Dr. Ben Song wants to rewrite the past and make historic mistakes just disappear—a feeling familiar to anybody who survived middle school. On some level, he just wants to make the past go away.

In fairness, this approach possibly could help audiences deal with today’s issues. Faced with a present where old issues—racism, war, religious nationalism, and environmental devastation—are happening all over again, maybe it helps to revisit past mistakes and consider what choices we could’ve made, but didn’t. It depends on how showrunners handle the developing story. We’ll need to see whether they show imagination and courage, or retreat into low-friction storytelling and cheap fan service.

I’m not entirely averse to reboots and relaunches. Both Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica came back from the Hollywood graveyard with new approaches to addressing modern issues. When America felt adrift post-9/11, with little unifying us except a poorly defined enemy, Galactica made that mission drift appear literal onscreen. It gave Hollywood appropriate tools to dissect America’s political malaise, and our need to find an identity if we wanted to handle our modern problems competently.

But these are outliers. Most reboots, hard or soft, aren’t addressing today’s problems with today’s tools. The recent Twin Peaks third season or today’s orgiastic Star Wars smorgasbord are attempts to snuggle up in past media products like a security blanket, and avoid addressing today’s issues. Hollywood studios are essentially throwing their hands in the air and refusing to even look at the world around them. And it shows in the reheated product they’re producing.

See also: Quantum Leap, the Enlightenment, and “Laplace’s Demon”

Creedence Clearwater: Burnin’ Hard and Burnin’ Out

Bob Smeaton (director), Travelin’ Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival Live at the Royal Albert Hall

Promo photo taken during Creedence Clearwater’s only European tour

Fans of the rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival often discuss them in awe-filled, nearly reverential terms. I should know, I’m one of them. They burned fast and hard, producing five albums in 1969 and 1970, working under singer-songwriter John Fogerty’s iron-fisted rule. But they burned out equally quickly: by early 1971, John’s brother Tom Fogerty quit the band, and they barely limped across the finish line a year later.

This documentary depicts CCR’s April 1970 performance at London’s Royal Albert Hall. That concert, though, runs barely 45 minutes, too short to constitute a feature-length performance. So to flesh out the performance, the film is bookended with a documentary, more a hagiography, narrated by Jeff Bridges. This recounting presents CCR as “the biggest band in the world,” presented as literal heirs to the Beatles, who disbanded weeks before this concert.

Reviewing something like this, we’re split between two forces. The concert itself is solid, fast-moving, and entertaining, a breathless display of CCR’s aggressively American musical ethos in an iconic British venue. The documentary is… something else. It was clearly written in an attempt to recapture the experience of being a CCR fan in Spring of 1970, and blithely ignores much of what we now know was happening behind the scenes.

Bridges’ linking narration, written by John Harris, starts with the band’s origins in El Cerrito, California. Anchored by kids who’d known each other since middle school, the band, initially known as the Blue Velvets, consciously rejected British Invasion influences and played blues-rock based on Buddy Guy and Leadbelly. Snippets of seldom-heard 45s sound anachronistic for the middle 1960s, granting insight into John Fogerty’s early anti-rock influences.

As engaging as this chronicle is, though, fans can’t ignore that by 1970, fault lines were already developing. We know this, but the documentary apparently doesn’t. Tom Fogerty in particular appears disconnected from the band, stone-faced and out of sync even while singing classics like “Bad Moon Rising” and “Proud Mary.” Worse, the narration is uncritical of Fantasy Records, with whom CCR notoriously had one of rock’s most lopsided contracts.

Therefore we know, but the documentary apparently doesn’t, that the seeds of breakup already existed. Like the Beatles’ Get Back, which shows the band playing live on a London rooftop years after they’d already disbanded, the documentary depicts the illusions of the moment, not the historical scope. CCR appears only in archive footage, film shot and curated in 1970 by Fantasy Records’ PR department to sell albums, not depict reality.

A still from the performance video

After the throat-clearing, the film transitions to the concert itself. Here’s the part we actually wanted. CCR plays with a musical alacrity most acts only capture briefly: old enough to know their instruments and play with passion bordering on violence, but young enough to withstand the hot lights and screaming crowds. They play (most of) their classics for an audience to whom this music is still new and dangerous.

The 52-year-old footage shows signs of the times. Camera operators keep trying to capture band members, especially John Fogerty, in tight face holds, a common maneuver in 1970, substantially undercut by Fogerty’s refusal to stand still. John’s brother Tom plays rhythm on a big white arch-top guitar, but mostly stands still, frequently overshadowed by the amp stacks. Camera operators mostly ignore him, which is unfortunate.

I saw John Fogerty perform live in 1997, by which time “John Fogerty” had become a stage character as much as an individual. Like Mark Twain, Fogerty wore his persona consciously, with his affected semi-New Orleans accent and nostalgic ramblings. That Fogerty isn’t on display here. This Fogerty is soft-spoken but hard-rocking, aggressively belting hits with almost no stage banter. He appreciates the audience without courting them.

This is a period piece. The footage, though digitally restored, is aged, and the sound reflects 1970 amplifier technology. But I appreciate one aspect: unlike The Band’s The Last Waltz or the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter, this film doesn’t interrupt the concert. CCR plays straight through, without self-conscious cinematic intrusion. One suspects this might be what it felt like to see them playing at their peak.

In the final moments, Bridges’ narration calls CCR “the biggest band in the world.” But ten months later, they were already disbanding. Fans will watch this performance with a fatalism that the documentary tries to avoid. Notably, no band members were involved with this documentary; it’s a product of the money machine, not art. But it’s also a tight, muscular performance of a band whose work really mattered.