Finding the Story

This is an archive of an old pseudonymously written post from the 90s from someone whose former pseudonym seems to have disappeared from the internet.

I see that Star Trek: Voyager has added a new character, a Borg.
(From the photos, I also see that they’re still breeding women for breast size
in the 24th century.) What ticked me off was the producer’s comment (I’m
paraphrasing), “The addition of Seven of Nine will give us limitless
story possibilities.”

Uh-huh. Riiiiiight.

Look, they did’t recognize the stories they had.
I watched the first few episodes of Voyager
and quit when my bullshit meter when off the scale.
(Maybe that’s not fair, to judge them by only a few episodes.
But it’s not fair to subject me to crap like the holographic lungs, either.)

For those of you who don’t watch Star Trek: Voyager,
the premise is that the Voyager, sort of a space corvette,
gets transported umpteen zillions of light years from where it should be.
It will take over seventy years at top speed for them to get home to their
loved ones.
For reasons we needn’t go into here,
the crew consists of a mix of loyal Federation members and rebels.

On paper, this looks good. There’s an uneasy alliance in the crew,
there’s exploration as they try to get home, there’s the whole “island
in space” routine. And the Voyager is nowhere near as big as the
Enterprise — it’s not mentally healthy for people to stay aboard for
that long.

But can this idea actually sustain a whole series? Would it be
interesting to watch five years of “the crew bickers” or “they find a
new clue to faster interstellar travel but it falls through”? I don’t
think so.

(And, in fact, the crew settled down awfully quickly.)

The demands of series television subvert the premise. The basic demand
of series television is that our regular characters are people we come
to know and to care about — we want them to come into our living rooms
every week. We must care about their changes, their needs, their
desires. We must worry when they’re put in jeopardy. But we know it’s a
series, so it’s hard to make us worry. We know that the characters will
be back next week.

The demands of a story require someone to change of their own
accord, to recognize some difference. The need to change can be imposed
from without, but the actual change must be self-motivated. (This is the
fundamental paradox of series television: the only character allowed to
change is a guest, but the instrument of that change has to be a series
regular, therefore depriving both characters of the chance to do
something interesting.)

Series with strict continuity of episodes (episode 2 must follow episode
1) allow change — but they’re harder to sell in syndication after the
show goes off the air. Economics favour unchanging regular characters.

Some series — such as Hill Street Blues — get around the jeopardy
problem by actually making characters disposable. Some characters show
up for a few episodes and then die, reminding us that it could happen to
the regulars, too. Sometimes it does happen to the regulars.

(When the characters change in the pilot, there may be a problem. A
writer who was approached to work on Mary Tyler Moore’s last series saw
from the premise that it would be brilliant for six episodes and then
had noplace to go. The first Fox series starring Tea Leoni,
Flying Blind, had a very funny pilot and set up an untenable
situation.)

I’m told the only interesting character on Voyager
has been the doctor, who can change.
He’s the only character allowed to grow.

The first problem with Voyager, then, is that characters aren’t allowed
to change — or the change is imposed from outside.
(By the way, an imposed change is a great way to start a story.
The character then
fights it, and that’s interesting. It’s a terrible way to end a story.)

The second problem is that they don’t make use of the elements they
have. Let’s go back to the first season. There was an episode in which
there’s a traitor on board who is as smart as Janeway herself. (How
psychiatric testing missed this, I don’t know, but the Trek universe has
never had really good luck with psychiatry.) After leading Janeway by
the nose for fifty minutes, she figures out who it is, and
confronts him. He says yes — and beams off the ship, having
conveniently made a deal with the locals.

Perfect for series television. We’ve got a supposedly intelligent villain
out there who could come back and Janeway’s been given a run for her money
— except that I felt cheated. Where’s the story? Where’s the resolution?

Here’s what I think they should have done. It’s not traditional series
television, but I think it would have been better stories.

First of all, the episode ends when Janeway confronts the bad guy and
arrests him. He’s put in the brig — and stays there. The viewer gets
some sense of victory here.

But now there’s someone as smart as Janeway in the brig. Suddenly we’ve
set up Silence of the Lambs.
(I don’t mind stealing if I steal from good sources.)
Whenever a problem is big enough,
Janeway has this option: she can go to the brig and try and make a deal
with the bad guy. “The ship dies, you die.” Not only that, here’s someone
on board ship with whom she has a unique relationship — one not formally
bounded by rank. What does the bad guy really want?

And whenever Janeway’s feeling low, he can taunt her. “By the way, I
thought of a way to get everyone home in one-tenth the time. Have you,
Captain?”

You wouldn’t put him in every episode. But any time you need that extra
push, he’s there. Remember, we can have him escape any time we want,
through the same sleight used in the original episode.

Furthermore, it’s one thing to catch him;
it’s another thing to keep him there.
You can generate another entire episode
out of an escape attempt by the prisoner. But that would be an
intermediate thing. Let’s talk about the finish I would have liked to
have seen.

Let’s invent a crisis. The balonium generator explodes; we’re deep
in warp space; our crack engineering crew has jury-rigged a repair to
the sensors and found a Class M planet that might do for the repairs.
Except it’s just too far away. The margin is tight — but can’t be
done. There are two too many people on board ship. Each requires a
certain amount of food, air, water, etc. Under pressure, Neelix admits
that his people can go into suspended animation, so he does. The doctor
tries heroically but the engineer who was tending the balonium generator
dies. (Hmmm. Power’s low. The doctor can only be revived at certain
critical moments.) Looks good — but they were using air until they
died; one more crew member must die for the rest to live.

And somebody remembers the guy in the brig. “The question of his guilt,”
says Tuvok, “is resolved. The authority of the Captain is absolute. You
are within your rights to hold a summary court martial and sentence him
to death.”

And Janeway says no. “The Federation doesn’t do that.”

Except that everyone will die if she doesn’t. The pressure is on
Janeway, now. Janeway being Janeway, she’s looking for a technological
fix. “Find an answer, dammit!” And the deadline is coming up. After a
certain point, the prisoner has to die, along with someone else.

A crewmember volunteers to die (a regular). Before Janeway can accept,
yet another (regular) crewmember volunteers, and Janeway is forced to
decide. — And Tuvok points out that while morally it’s defensible if
that member volunteered to die, the ship cannot continue without either
of those crewmembers.
It can continue without the prisoner. Clearly the
prisoner is not worth as much as those crewmembers, but she is the
captain. She must make this decision.

Our fearless engineering crew thinks they might have a solution, but it
will use nearly everything they’ve got, and they need another six hours
to work on the feasibility. Someone in the crew tries to resolve the
problem for her by offing the prisoner — the failure uses up more
valuable power. Now the deadline moves up closer, past the six hours
deadline. The engineering crew’s idea is no longer feasible.

For his part, the prisoner is now bargaining. He says he’s got
ideas to help. Does he? He’s tried to destroy the ship before. And he
won’t reveal them until he gets a full pardon.

(This is all basic plotting: keep piling on difficulties. Put a carrot in
front of the characters, keep jerking it away.)

The tricky part is the ending.
It’s a requirement that the ending derive logically
from what has gone before. If you’re going to invoke a technological
fix, you have to set the groundwork for it in the first half of the
show. Otherwise it’s technobabble. It’s deus ex machina. (Any time
someone says just after the last commercial break, “Of course! If we
vorpalize the antibogon flow, we’re okay!” I want to smack a writer in
the head.)

Given the situation set up here, we have three possible endings:

• Some member of the crew tries to solve the problem by sacrificing
  themselves. (Remember, McCoy and Spock did this.) This is a weak
  solution (unless Janeway does it) because it takes the focus off
  Janeway’s decision.
• Janeway strikes a deal with the prisoner, and together they come up with
  a solution (which doesn’t involve the antibogon flow). This has the
  interesting repercussions of granting the prisoner his freedom —
  while everyone else on ship hates his guts. Grist for another episode,
  anyway.
• Janeway kills the prisoner but refuses to hold the court martial.
  She may luck out — the prisoner might survive; that million-to-one-shot
  they’ve been praying for but couldn’t rely on comes through — but she
  has decided to kill the prisoner rather than her crew.

My preferred ending is the third one,
even though the prisoner need not die.
The decision we’ve set up is a difficult one,
and it is meaningful. It is a command decision.
Whether she ends up killing the prisoner is not relevant; what is
relevant is that she decides to do it.

John Gallishaw once categorized all stories as either stories of
achievement or of decision.
A decision story is much harder to
write, because both choices have to matter.