Don't let geek culture turn into dead culture

The theater of imagination is being undermined by a lack of imagination

When I went to the Fantastic Four premiere last week, all but one trailer before the movie started was a sequel, or something set in the world of an already established intellectual property. The Fantastic Four themselves are, of course, characters that started in a comic book series, went through multiple attempts to bring them successfully on the screen, and also the protagonists of cartoon series and video games. When people talk about “dead culture,” this is what they’re talking about, a popular culture landscape populated by long-running franchises, remakes, retreads, reimaginings, reflections, re-everything. While this phenomenon may be new in its intensity, this dependence on using past works as inspiration is not new.

In fact, for American popular culture, this phenomenon is at least 50 years old. In his 1982 essay “The Future Of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond),” film scholar Noël Carroll said that the generation of directors in the Seventies and Eighties were constantly harkening back to the past. George Lucas’ Star Wars was a mash-up of old serials like Buck Rogers, Westerns, and some of Kurosawa’s chambara movies. Polanski’s Chinatown was, depending on whom you ask, an homage to classic film noir, a re-shaping of it, or a parody of it. Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc? was an attempt to create a modern screwball comedy, in the mold of Preston Sturgis’s earlier films. Robert Altman’s The Long Good-Bye riffs off classic film noir, and his McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a revisionist Western. The marquee directors of this era, especially the film school graduates, often idolized earlier films and genres, or sometimes tore them down to the studs and rebuilt them from scratch. Whatever the approach, these creative types were, to use a phrase popular among film critics, “in conversation” with past movies.

These directors worked in an era when the person in the director’s chair has far more creative control over movies than their counterparts today. Now, studios have vastly more control, and very different reasons for having a fascination with past works. The motive, of course, is money. And the results are usually, on average, worse than movies like Chinatown, Star Wars, The Long Goodbye, or Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

That statement might sound weird for me to say, since I’m the co-host of a podcast with the mission of describing what was great about the books, movies, TV shows, comics, and games of our youth. You might say that Ancient Geeks is driven by nostalgia – and you’d be right, especially to the extent that we want to explain both what made these older works so good that it’s still worth talking about them, and the experience of consuming them for the first time. (We also like talking about the present: for example, we spent three episodes talking about Andor, comparing it to the original Star Wars, and describing how fervently we believed it was a great work that stood on its own.) But, sitting in the theater, watching trailers for Zootopia 2 and another Predator movie, I wasn’t feeling good about Hollywood’s manic drive to keep going back to the same wells over and over and over again.

It’s not that building on past works is ipso facto a bad thing. My co-host Steven and I are big Star Trek fans, for example, and we’re always happy when something interesting emerges, based on the Star Trek universe. I also very much enjoyed The Mandalorian. Although it was set in the Star Wars universe, it told a different kind of story, with new characters. (I was a bit disappointed when a legacy character made an appearance, since I didn’t think it added anything. Besides, it’s a big galaxy, there are plenty of other places to go, characters to meet, stories to tell.)

The rise and fall of Star Trek

The problems start when references to past works become themselves the centerpiece of the “new” work. To illustrate, let’s talk about Star Trek, from its beginnings until today.

Star Trek: The Original Series

Star Trek, which we now call The Original Series, was for the 1960s extremely original. While Roddenberry might have pitched it as “Wagon Train in space,” there was very little on TV like it, both in the broadest brush strokes, and the details. In the sense that it depicted a team of regular characters having space adventures, in the fashion of Captain Video or Flash Gordon, it was also very different. Star Trek felt like an adventure show, but also frequently like real science fiction. Sometimes Star Trek explored big ideas, such as the planet-killing doomsday machine, the mirror universe, and the uncontrolled bouts of irrationality that the highly logical Vulcans tried to keep as a dirty little secret. At other times, it used science fiction as an allegory about the Cold War, racism, xenophobia, and overdependence on technology. It also depicted a largely optimistic future, something to which people in the here and now could aspire.

Star Trek’s stories, themes, and everything you saw on the screen (including the multi-ethnic and multi-species crew) was different from what you had seen before. It told weekly stories, in the same fashion as The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. But it was clearly not exactly like those shows. (Though, like these other shows, Star Trek regularly employed science fiction authors – people whose job it was to come up with fantastical new concepts – to write scripts, which contributed to the originality and novelty of many of the best episodes.)

And that’s not even getting into the nitty-gritty of things like warp drives, shields, phasers, photon torpedoes, tricorders, cloaking devices, and other bits of technology that might have been familiar to die-hard science fiction fans, but brand new to the mass audience watching the show.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

In the Eighties and Nineties, Star Trek: The Next Generation successfully recreated the type of show that the original series was. The centerpiece was a starship, exploring the galaxy and often dealing with various crises. The crew was, again, extremely diverse, including non-humans and an android. The stories were a mix of pure adventure tales, big idea science fiction (the Borg, time travel, the ethical problems that sentient robots pose, etc.) and allegorical science fiction (for example, the way in which the two-parter “Chain Of Command” depicted the profound evil of torture).

But the next series, Deep Space Nine, was very different. Rather than being set on a starship, the centerpiece of the show was a fixed location, a space station. While there were often stories reminiscent of classic Star Trek plots, Deep Space Nine leaned heavily into political issues, vastly more than even political allegories like “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” ever did. Terrorism, the scars left by occupation and resistance, the hard choices facing people who either collaborate or rebel, the cruel logic of authoritarian governments, the trickiness of alliances, politicized religion – these were the core themes of Deep Space Nine.

The dynamics among the main characters were also different. While people occasionally argued on the bridge of the Enterprise, the characters were rarely at odds with one another. On Deep Space Nine, you had the familiar band of Starfleet officers, but also an enigmatic Cardassian, a scheming Ferengi, a Bajoran with mixed loyalties, and a shape-shifter whose identity and allegiances were put to the test. No one could say, “Make it so,” and get all of these characters to move in the same direction.

The Dominion War was also brand new to Star Trek, and not just because it introduced some new aliens. Star Trek, both the original series and The Next Generation, certainly had recurring characters (Harry Mudd, the Borg, the Romulans, etc.). But it was, at its core, episodic. Deep Space Nine was the first Star Trek series with a long story arc, the galaxy-scale conflict with the Dominion, in which the war escalated, reversals of fortunes happened, major actors shifted allegiances, new challenges emerged, and eventually the war came to a conclusion.

Deep Space Nine’s innovations were highly successful. You didn’t have to have a Federation crew zipping from one planet to another, solving problems posed by the alien of the week, to be Star Trek.

The show definitely built on Star Trek’s past. It would have been absurd not to. It would have been bizarre to have a galactic war with the Federation without saying how the other superpowers of the Alpha Quadrant, the Klingons, Cardassians, and the Romulans, would play a role in it. But Deep Space Nine used everything that Star Trek already was to tell new types of stories, often in a new way. It built on Star Trek’s legacy, without “being in conversation” with it. There were definitely call-backs to Star Trek’s past, including episodes with Dr. McCoy, Scotty, and Q, but these were exceedingly rare. “Trials And Tribble-Ations” might have been the ultimate call-back, with the Deep Space Nine characters visiting the original series Enterprise, but again, it was one of the few exceptions, not the rule. Meanwhile, Deep Space Nine continued to create excellent episodes that were unlike nearly anything that preceded it, such as the morally challenging “In The Pale Moonlight.”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

At first, the mission of the newest Star Trek series seemed to be to re-create, yet again, the type of show that the original series, its animated offshoot, and The Next Generation were. Starship? Check. Diverse Federation crew? Check. Adventure stories, like “The Serene Squall” or “Children Of The Comet”? Check. Science fiction stories, such as “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach,” which is lifted from the classic “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula LeGuin, or “The Lotus Eaters,” a horrific story about loss of memory? Check. A very occasional nod to the past, such as “The Quality Of Mercy, which revisits the TOS episode “Balance Of Terror” from a different angle? Painful moral choices, such as in “The Cloak Of War” (a very Deep Space Nine-like episode)? Check. All good so far.

Unfortunately, over the course of the next two seasons, Strange New Worlds has morphed into something where the allusions are increasingly more important than practically anything. In other words, it has become another manifestation of Hollywood’s current business model, to use allusion as a replacement for creativity, originality, and basic story-telling.

Season three, so far, has been the worst offender of all three seasons. The Gorn episodes, both in previous seasons and the start of this one, have converted a minor antagonist of the original series into a clone of Alien’s Xenomorphs. Not only is the body horror virtually the same, but the Gorn are now so animalistic and malevolent that it seems impossible that they could have an advanced civilization. “Wedding Bell Blues” seemed to exist purely to dangle in front of us an appearance of a couple of Star Trek’s god-like beings. “Shuttle To Kenfori” was a clone of The Walking Dead and countless other zombie tales, now in spaaaaace. “The Space Adventure Hour” was not only yet another holodeck-goes-kablooey story, but one with meta-elements (the parody of Gene Roddenberry and the production of the original Star Trek series) on top of the meta-ness of holodeck episodes.

Past seasons also had, proportionately, more of these types of callbacks, parodies, memberberries, in-jokes, pastiches, and the like than any Star Trek series ever had, outside of Lower Decks (a comedy show written almost purely for Star Trek uber-fans). In fact, one of those episodes was a cross-over, both animated and live action, with Lower Decks. There was also “The Elysian Kingdom,” whose tongue was so firmly in cheek that it ripped through to the other side, and the singing episode, a callback to the musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And in a preview of season four, we see Captain Pike as a muppet, another reference to an episode of Angel, part of the Buffy-verse.

On their own, none of these individual episodes are obnoxious. However, given how big a chunk of the short 10-episode seasons that define Strange New Worlds, they clearly define the ambition of the makers of the series. They don’t just want something, like Deep Space Nine, set in the Star Trek universe, building on that wealth of material, and exploiting its vast possibilities to go in very different directions. Instead, they want to be constantly winking to the audience about the past we share, not just with Star Trek, but with other franchises.

In other words, if Strange New Worlds is “in conversation” with anyone, it’s not a conversation between the audience and the material. It’s between the audience and the creators. Hey, remember Trelane? Remember zombie movies? Remember Buffy? In fact, the creators of Strange New Worlds seem increasingly to want to be a copy of Buffy, with a singing episode, a “communication problems” episode, a muppet episode, and regular quipping by the main characters.

Now, taking the Buffy-verse as inspiration for a different sort of Star Trek isn’t necessarily a bad thing. (Maybe not borrowing that much from Buffy and Angel…) Unfortunately, there was already a comic show, Lower Decks. And, as noted before, Lower Decks’ entire raison d’etre was to pack in as many allusions to past Star Trek as possible. Both humor and allusions are fine, in small doses. Too much of both, however, destroys any serious engagement with the story and characters, any immersion in what’s happening on the screen, or even the chance to tell a story in the blizzard of references. Archness creates distance, except maybe to play the game of spotting the allusions (Look, there’s the skeleton of the giant Spock from the animated series, “The Infinite Vulcan”!). Lower Decks was a fun novelty, but the problem was that the novelty is increasingly the norm.

Just as we already have Lower Decks, we also have Buffy. If one of the primary goals of Strange New Worlds now is just to mine nostalgia, with machinery that itself is designed to inspire nostalgia, then I really have to ask, why watch this series at all?

And don’t get me started on Picard, a show that, like Lower Decks, was just a vehicle for allusions. Not surprisingly, it was also one of the worst, if not the worst, of all Star Trek’s incarnations.

Living in a land of allusion

So what’s the harm of all this allusion, aside from being a turn-off for the person writing this post? Other people seem to like the allusions, just as there are a lot of people (not me) who flock to YouTube videos unpacking all the Easter Eggs in a trailer for the next MCU movie.

All the other stories to be told

One of the worst decisions made by the people behind Star Wars was to keep going back to the same characters, the Skywalker dynasty and assorted courtiers, over and over again. As I said earlier, when you have a big galaxy, or a big fantasy world, or any setting of vast possibilities, go explore it.

But beyond the boundaries of these “franchises” (an ugly word that speaks volumes about the imperatives driving it), there are tons of new books, movies, TV shows, comics, and games to be made. Some might be based on material from other media: for example, I think there could be some bang-up movies or shows that a skillful person might make, adapting the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories by Fritz Leiber, or the Hyperion novels by Dan Simmons, or the Nexus comics by Mike Baron and Steve Rude. As the movie adaptations of Dune, Hellboy, and The Martian show, there are rich lodes ready to be mined.

And – brace yourself – there are also completely new stories to be written, based on nothing existing, to be told. One of my favorite science fiction movies from recent years was The Europa Report, an exciting hard science fiction tale about exploration to that moon of Jupiter. Dragonslayer was a much older movie that’s a very interesting take on a well-worn fantasy motif. They Live was a science fiction satire that’s still fun and thought-provoking. I’d heap the same praise on Moon, which may have the vibe of a Seventies science fiction movie, but everything else is a brand new story. I’d much rather watch these, or even (in my opinion, at least) a noble failure like Krull or Red Planet than yet another “Skywalker saga” spin-off, such as (as someone else joked) a new streaming series based on Luke’s severed hand.

Recruiting the next generation of geeks

As I said, there is a market for people who, sifting through corporate slop, still enjoy the references to past works of greater quality. But that’s a limited audience, to be sure. To join the ranks of those who love these allusions, you have to first consume the material to which it refers, and then watch the content containing these references. Maybe if there’s enough excitement about the franchise, it will attract people who are interested in what all the fuss is about. But you’ll never get the kind of broad enthusiasm that, say, Star Wars created in 1977, or the first Superman movie generated in 1979, based on appeal to a broad audience who just wants to go to a movie and enjoy it for what it is, not for what it’s based on.

Expectations of producers and consumers

Creating allusion-dependent content is creatively lazy, based purely on the producers’ assumption that they don’t have to make any great effort to generate “content” that people will consume. It’s the condescending assumption about the audience – in other words, you, me, and the people we know – that leads to increasingly worse story-telling. (But lots of shiny special effects!)

Over time, if that’s all we keep getting, that’s all we’ll keep expecting. It’s much like the grimmer predictions about AI-generated slop: it will crowd out the good stuff created by human beings. Corporate slop may very well have the same effect, debasing both the material itself, and the audience. And to go back to the recruitment of the next generation of fans, this uninspired material is less likely to create enthusiasts. Not everyone is clueless that the intent of content producers isn’t to create a great work that we’ll be discussing for decades to come, but to generate just enough of a product, with as little effort as possible, and then get people to consume the next product.

Exhaustion

Eventually, corporate slop won’t just fail to move the enthusiasm line upwards, but possibly move downwards. We’ve already been talking about superhero fatigue and Star Wars fatigue for several years. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have had as much effect on the thinking of executives at Disney and other companies as one might expect. Eventually, people will get tired of being drenched with this material, or having to watch seventeen different movies and streaming shows to get enough familiarity with the material to watch the next movie or show.

People will become exhausted, both with the lack of quality, and the effort needed to consume it. As someone experiencing that fatigue, I’ve been having a much better time reading within the geek sphere than watching. Some of the things I’ve enjoyed reading or re-reading lately include The Bright Sword, a sequel to the canonical Arthurian stories; the Elric series, which Michael Moorcock wrote to be as unlike Lord Of The Rings as possible; Adrian Tschaikovsky’s Children of Time, a great science fiction novel; and We3, a very moving comic series by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Fortunately, I’ve been a geek long enough to know how much great material there is to find, or re-discover, so I’m not someone so turned off by oh so many recent TV shows and movies that I’m tired of geekery in general.

We’ve already seen this kind of exhaustion happen. After Star Wars became a smash hit, Hollywood studios did what Hollywood studios often do: beat the same idea to death. Battlestar Galactica, Battle Beyond The Stars, Starcrash, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, The Black Hole, Spacehunter, The Last Starfighter, Ice Pirates, Galaxina, Enemy Mine…While some of these offerings were genuinely good, others were noble failures, and too many were MST3K-worthy hot garbage. It was all too much, and much of it was an obvious cash grab. (“These kids, they love their star wars!”) Quickly, space opera went into hiatus.

As a fan of the literature and theater of the imagination, and someone who is co-hosting a podcast that explains how we became fans of this vast and fascinating realm of ideas, I’d hate to see us go from exhaustion to indifference again. It will be harder to get new content of good quality, and harder for others to find their way into the geek tent. We’ll keep sharing, via the medium of a podcast, what made us fall in love with geek culture in the first place. And we’ll also use this discussion to share new books, TV shows, movies, comics, and games that you might not haven’t experienced. yet. What we’ve enjoyed in the past are signposts to what we might enjoy in the future.

Image posted by Retronaut on Flickr, licensed for general use under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.