arcadia_cover

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/death-finale-star-trek-picard/"></div>When I wrote about the premiere of Star Trek: Picard in January, I tossed in an aside to our “grim political moment,” in an essay largely about the pitfalls of nostalgia. It is arrogant to presume to trace the contours of future nostalgia while the catastrophe that will spur it is still in motion: suffice to say that ten weeks after the show’s premiere the pandemic has the feel of a dividing line of history that will one day be yoked to a cultural nostalgia for the pre-pandemic era.
Unfortunately, Picard produced a largely forgettable first season. The show’s structure could neither pull off the episodic, “big bad of the week” that made the Buffys and The Next Generations of nineties television work, nor the tightly interlocked, multiple storylines told in hour-long “chapters” that have made The Expanse one of the best new sci-fi shows on the air. Among many strange choices, the show elected to run a multi-episode honeypot-spy meets sibling-incest plotline, where Romulan sibling-spies all but kissed onscreen. Star Trek, needless to say, is best off when staying as far away as possible from Game of Thrones.
Still, the show regained its legacy of big-hearted optimism in a finale that seemed to settle the question of the show’s genre going forward. In the final scene, we see a ragtag band of heroes unite under Admiral Picard on the bridge of the scrappy La Sirena: the vigilante (7 of 9), the scientist (Dr. Jurati), the addict with a heart of gold (Raffi), the warrior elf (Elnor), the genius-supergirl (Soji), and the cigar-chewing captain with a dark past (Rios). This ensemble cast may bear more resemblance to Wheedon’s early-aughts Firefly than to The Next Generation, but it lends structure and established tropes to a show that sorely needed it — because the risks it could have taken, both structural and conceptual, never materialized.
The two-part finale showcased the best of Trek’s utopian vision. Picard rejects the post-apocalyptic violence we have come to expect in modern science fiction and insists on a third way: peacemaking and diplomacy, bolstered by a benevolent intergalactic institution. Just as all seems lost, the Federation, in the person of a greybeard Will Riker, shows up to protect a new sentient, synthetic species from destruction. As everyone powers down their weapons and goes home, the theme music from The Next Generation swells. At its core, despite small gestures through the season towards a faithless Federation or lawless wild space, this is no dystopia. I don’t know what to do with this show’s deep-seated faith in Western individualism safeguarded by strong institutions in the present geopolitical moment: it feels both misplaced and aspirational, at once dangerously nostalgic and refreshingly optimistic. I, too, would like to have faith — but in what are we asked to believe?
From the premiere of this season to its end, Picard’s character has functioned as a cipher for human mortality and frailty. His wardrobe designer draped him in earth-tone knits and wrinkled linens. His hands shake; his voice quavers. And at last, he declares that his purpose is to teach the synthetic “children,” scared into calling down Terminator-style android Armageddon, what life “is for.” He does this by dying in the attempt to save them, only to be resurrected as a synthetic himself. This plot twist — a synthetic Picard! — could have been the show’s bravest hour. After all, a midseason twist had the retired admiral step onto a Borg cube — the site of his previous synthetic “assimilation” — and promptly suffer a severe PTSD flashback. It did not seem likely that he would cope well with being rendered artificial without his consent.
But in the end, the show cannot separate itself from a humanism that reifies the nondisabled, “perfected” human body towards which all other forms of consciousness and life must iterate to be worthy of rights. Picard is not rescued through anything so crude as a visible patchwork of Borg implants: an assistive, cybernetic technology that marks the user as monstrous in the Trek universe. Instead, his mind is implanted into a <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/golem/">“golem”</a> and made to look exactly like him at his current age (presumably someone wrote “emes” on the body’s forehead, offscreen). When he awakes, he says first, “Am I real?” Soji, the synthetic, immediately answers, reassuringly, “Of course you are,” as warm light streams through a window and he calmly sips tea surrounded by comrades in his rumpled, off-white, linen shirt. A more organic scene for Picard’s synthetic awakening could not have been conceived.
Throughout the season, the ex-Borgs, styled xBs, are shown trying to extract their old Borg implants, or else have them forcibly removed. 7 of 9 repeatedly contemplates suicide. Picard is shown having repeated flashbacks to his brief time as Locutus of Borg. At one point, 7 and Picard share a brief exchange about their time in the collective:
<blockquote>7: “After they brought you back from your time in the collective, did you honestly feel like you regained your humanity?”
Picard: “Yes.”
7: “All of it?”
Picard: “No.”</blockquote>
On the one hand, the horror of the Borg is simply one of nonconsensual violation of body and mind. The collective is bad because its participants do not consent to a collective consciousness. The language 7 and Picard share here, the common vocabulary of feeling set-apart and somehow “inhuman” is frequent among survivors of severe trauma. But on the other hand, Picard was not asked if he wanted to be turned into a synthetic, either. The difference at work between the two is primarily aesthetic: the “perfect” synths are more-than-human, they eat when they are hungry, sleep when they are tired, and bleed when they are cut.
The Borg and xBs are always shot in grey, dark spaces. With the exception of 7 of 9, their skin is pale and mottled. They are shown as mentally ill, disfigured, an assemblage of spare parts to be surgically dismantled to get to the human, individual consciousness underneath. Once a person has been contaminated with Borg technology, their humanity — more specifically, their individuality — can never fully be regained. The Borg have rejected the natural bounds of death and the body and thus are monstrous. To speak in the shorthand of the Western canon, with which the show has always been so familiar, Picard paints the Borg as Frankenstein’s monster, rather than Coppelia or Galatea (and indeed, the name of the synth settlement is itself “Coppelius”).
Picard grants the synths, on the other hand, the authenticity of “art,” “lovingly and deliberately created.” Rather than the cyber-zombie aesthetic of the Borg, their appearance mirrors the 17th-century painting for which the finale is named: Poussin’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_in_Arcadia_ego#/media/File:Nicolas_Poussin_-_Et_in_Arcadia_ego_(deuxi%C3%A8me_version).jpg">Et in Arcadia, Ego</a>. In Poussin’s painting, four classical figures gather around a tomb. The sky is blue, the trees green, the togas appear to be made of fine silks: the entire scene is a sumptuous neoclassical pastoral. And on the tomb, an inscription reads, “And even in Arcadia, I am.” The “I” is usually understood to be death and “Arcadia” utopia. The Picard writers clearly intend the episode title to be read in this way. After, “Am I real,” Picard’s next question after his resurrection is, “you haven’t made me immortal, have you?” He is told that not only does he not have any “superpowers,” he has been given only as many years of life as he would have had without his fatal brain defect. His body is perfected, but not “improved” to the point of monstrosity. As he deactivates Data, whose mind had been stored in a supercomputer on Coppelius after his body’s death, Picard quotes Prospero in The Tempest, “We are such stuff/as dreams are made on/And our little lives/are rounded, with a sleep.”
The lesson here is cliché and clear: immortality corrupts and synthetic life can live in peace with organic life only so long as both strive for an archetypically human, Western, individualist existence that orients itself inexorably towards a good death. This is a central theme of Netflix’s recent series Altered Carbon as well, where “Meths,” short for Methuselahs, operate at the top of a deeply unequal society. If the patriarchs — the fathers — refuse to go gently into that good night, the meaning of life cannot be taught to their “perfected” children. As resolutions to the classic android/human science fiction plot go, Picard has found the most peaceful one I have ever seen. But the moral weight it gives to a good death sits wrong, today, writing from lockdown with <a href="https://www.boston25news.com/news/trending/coronavirus-90-year-old-with-covid-19-says-no-ventilator-said-keep-it-younger-ones/OLIN2MUR4BBMLDBRZOXTMIWPDE/">90-year-old women</a> featured as heroines for giving up their ventilators to the next generation.
The idea that we need to accept death to be fully human, that there is some magical number of years we are fated to have as flesh-and-blood and to exceed that results in inevitable moral decay, is at least as old as Ecclesiastes and the Biblical expulsion from the Garden of Eden. To buy into this moral framework in speculative fiction forecloses the radical possibilities of artificial life and how it might, one day, fuse with, augment, work with, or even replace human life. It ignores the possibility that other modes of consciousness or other ways of being might hold equal weight to our own. And, at last, it fails to ask the hard question: why is it so good to die? In whose best interest, exactly, is the death of the old?
<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/18/the-final-frontier">Michael Chabon</a> has written at length about writing Picard through losing his own, elderly father. You can feel the shadow of his grief throughout the series. Sometimes it comes through at odd moments, like when Will Riker and Deanna Troi are given lines about their dead son that resonate more with the death of a parent than that of a child. But it never comes through so clearly as when the show tells itself this pat story about human mortality: that death in old age is not only inevitable but a moral good. Everyone’s story should end, we are told, but, please, not this one, not just yet. Forestalling the central character’s death is, of course, a structural necessity: you cannot have a series named Picard without Picard. To exist, Picard continually pushes that final frontier back, even as it insists that it must be crossed. The show’s reticence to accept its own terms, that Picard’s death is necessary both for narrative, existential meaning and moral authority, highlights the aporia at the heart of its season-long argument on what, exactly, it means to be fully human.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/death-finale-star-trek-picard/"></div>

On Death and the Finale of Star Trek: Picard

On Death and the Finale of Star Trek: Picard

picard_cover

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/voyage-home-star-trek-picard-millennial-nostalgia/"></div>About halfway through “Remembrance,” the first episode of the new Star Trek: Picard series, Jean-Luc Picard visits an archive. Inside the archive is a veritable fan museum, containing <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Worf">Worf’s</a> bat’leth, models of the USS Enterprise, and a large, colorful banner with “Captain Picard Day” scrawled on it in childish lettering. The banner is from “The Pegasus,” a forgettable episode in the last season of Star Trek: The Next Generation that aired in 1994. Forgettable, unless, like many elder Millennials and younger Gen-Xers, you happened to have been roughly the age of the children who had scrawled that sign when you watched it. When Admiral Blackwell overhears the “Captain Picard Day” celebration in the background of his call, he <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Pegasus_(episode)">banters</a> with Picard:
<blockquote>&#8220;Captain Picard Day?&#8221;
&#8220;Oh uh… Yes it&#8217;s a… It&#8217;s… It&#8217;s for the children. I&#8217;m a… (nervous chuckle) I&#8217;m a role model.&#8221;
&#8220;I&#8217;m sure you are. Starfleet out.&#8221;</blockquote>
And for a generation of nerdy American children raised on the Space Shuttle, the ISS, and the Hubble Telescope, he was. The choice to revisit his character leans heavily on the millennial Trek viewer’s nostalgia for Jean-Luc Picard. There is no doubt that this is a show by and for fans of the franchise. Prudently, however, it chooses not to anchor our sympathies for its central character in fan sensibilities alone. “Remembrance” asks us to remember the Star Trek of the late 80s and early 90s, yes, but it also ties Picard to deeper American cultural narratives of World War II and Homer’s Odyssey. The combination makes for a potent mix of nostalgia and righteousness, though not one without its narrative — and ethical — pitfalls.
Picard, played by the 79-year-old Patrick Stewart, never shades into a millennial parent figure — there is no danger of “okay, boomer,” here. Instead, the premiere places him squarely in the safer narrative of the Greatest Generation and the Second World War. Stewart is slightly too young for this allegory to map onto him perfectly, but the episode makes it work, opening with Bing Crosby’s 1946 “Blue Skies.” “Blue Skies” has a canonical role in the Trek universe and functions as a tip-off to fans that the series will revolve around the now-dead character of Data, the android who sung it in the final Next Generation film, Nemesis (2002). Simultaneously, however, the song draws our attention to the 1940s, the time our “role model” represents.
“Remembrance” doesn’t settle for leaving subtext as subtext — its very title, after all, announces that the episode is an exercise in nostalgic memory. Picard explicitly references WWII and the heroism of the Greatest Generation when giving an interview in the beginning of the episode. He compares the Romulan refugee rescue effort to Dunkirk, then tears into the reporter for daring to question him too deeply about his past, biting out, “And you, my dear, you have no idea what Dunkirk is, do you? You’re a stranger to history, you’re a stranger to war.” <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/dunkirk-a-war-movie-about-patriotic-ciphers">Dunkirk</a> is a movie of “patriotic cyphers” that “functioned as a tribute to the virtue-inspiring power of war,” as Richard Brody put it in The New Yorker. It was nominated for Best Picture in 2017; it is in every way an <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OscarBait">Oscar Movie</a>. Picard relies on that recent adaptation to jog the viewer’s memory, rather than any deep knowledge of military history. The viewer, identifying with Picard both as “role model” and the episode’s primary protagonist, hears “Dunkirk” and calls up righteous American heroism. By appealing to cheap nostalgia for WWII, the allegory makes an American viewer, in this particularly grim political moment, feel good about themselves.
To get the viewer to that feel-good moment, the show chooses to paint the female interviewer — one of only two black characters in the episode and the only one to live to its end — as a galactic xenophobe, as she remarks that rescuing millions of Romulan refugees was a politically contested, expensive choice. Picard responds with this exchange:
<blockquote>Picard: “But the Federation understood there were millions of lives at stake.”
Journalist: “Romulan lives.”
Picard: “No! Lives.”</blockquote>
This is the Picard of The Next Generation, the one who embodied the optimistic, yet fundamentally imperialist vision of Gene Roddenberry’s post-WWII economic expansion and NASA’s lunar plaque, “We come in peace for all mankind.” The franchise has always wanted, to its great and lasting credit, to believe in a vision of all mankind, one that renders the Other — be it the Borg, the Romulan, the Klingon, or the android — a part of that expansive definition of mankind. “Remembrance” does the racial justice legacy of the show a disservice in how it cast the scene. Further, what 20 years ago was a visionary change — the show’s voiceover shifted from the original series, “where no man has gone before,” to “where no one has gone before” — is no longer enough for a radical statement about who deserves human rights. It is not the artistic or ethical obligation of a television show to provide such a statement, of course. But Trek is, historically, one that has tried.
The problem has always been that in Trek’s post-Enlightenment, European figuration of human rights, it argues that those worthy of being allowed into the circle — of being members of the United Federation of Planets, if you will — must iterate fundamentally towards the human, when the show’s archetypical “human” is a white, male, military veteran that owns an estate in France, when &#8220;human&#8221; looks very much like our retired Admiral Jean-Luc Picard. Data, the android whose backstory forms the connective tissue of Picard, spent seven seasons and four feature films trying to become more human. The stakes of his humanity are high. In “The Measure of a Man,” Starfleet holds a trial on whether or not Data may be experimented on as Starfleet property, culminating in one of Picard’s <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Measure_Of_A_Man_(episode)">more memorable speeches</a>:
<blockquote>Your honor, the courtroom is a crucible; in it, we burn away irrelevancies until we are left with a purer product: the truth, for all time. Now sooner or later, this man [Commander Maddox] — or others like him — will succeed in replicating Commander Data. The decision you reach here today will determine how we will regard this creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of people we are; what he is destined to be. It will reach far beyond this courtroom and this one android. It could significantly redefine the boundaries of personal liberty and freedom: expanding them for some, savagely curtailing them for others. Are you prepared to condemn him [Commander Data] — and all who will come after him — to servitude and slavery? Your honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life: well, there it sits! Waiting.</blockquote>
The title of the episode circles back to the central problem with its conceit. To gain freedom, the android must fit the “measure of a man.” Data’s humanity throughout the episode is figured in terms of his ability to understand art, literature, and sentiment — in particular, Shakespeare’s sonnets. To escape slavery, understand Shakespeare: this is the definition of human rights which the United Nations and the United Federation of Planets leave us. It is better than nothing, but today, with migrant children dying on the US-Mexico border because the American president sees them as “animals,” it is not enough.
Trek, and in particular The Next Generation, has always maintained a deep investment in canonical European arts and literature, or what is often problematically termed “high culture.” While sometimes sliding into the corny or the colonial, this willingness to pull from Shakespeare and Melville at will remains one of Trek’s great strengths. In that tradition of Trek, “Remembrance” draws its deepest cultural parallels with Homer. Like Odysseus, Picard has returned to the family estate after a lifetime at sea (i.e. space). Yet home is unrecognizable to him and he is unrecognizable to it: like Odysseus’ dog Argos, Picard’s dog is the only one who seems to be able to recognize him fully. And, like Odysseus, Picard will leave this home before long, heading back into space. Odysseus only got one night; Picard has had 14 years. But they have all happened off-screen; to the viewer, it is as if he is home for the space of this first episode, then gone again.
“Remembrance” makes much of Picard’s age, using it to mark the pain of this return to his now-aged character — the Greek algia of nostalgia — to the viewer. He cannot make it up stairs without stumbling. He pauses getting out of bed in the morning. His voice quavers with age and indignation. We see long shots of his hands, with their visible veins and liver spots. He orders decaf tea. It hurts to see the great Jean-Luc Picard in this way, when he could have lived immortal in my generation’s memory. But to crib from the <a href="https://www.fayard.fr/pluriel/la-nostalgie-9782818504024">French philosopher Barbara Cassin</a>, “Nostalgia is what makes one prefer going home, even if it means finding there a time that passes by, death — and worse, old age — rather than immortality.” Or, to put it differently — the danger of familiar narratives is that they are so difficult to resist, even as they are (pleasurably) painful.
In Trek the narrative necessity of a “universal translator” flattens everyone’s speech into English. Without the translator, every episode of Trek would be covered by Arrival (2016). Trek’s English is what  Cassincalls “globish.” In reading Hannah Arendt’s accounts of being a German-Jewish refugee in the US, Cassin argues that host nations ask the “obedient refugee” to speak this “globish” English, a language in which one may only speak in cliché. This is the language that deals in the clichéd nostalgia that makes us enjoy the outfits in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel without asking what would have happened to Suzy had she been caught crossdressing, or how Picard’s whiteness is complicit in our willingness accept him as a spokesman for righteousness over the black reporter.
One of the more jarring moments in the episode comes when Picard speaks to his dog in his supposedly native French. His accent is terrible and he is instantaneously identifiable as British by any francophone listener. Yet we are asked to believe he is here, on his father’s land, or perhaps also the fatherland, speaking his mother tongue. That sudden break in the show’s smooth Englishness, when it goes out of its way to mark Picard’s place on his land speaking his language, legitimizes him as one who can speak for others and ties him to a pastoral, European “homeland” for the white American viewer. But that legitimization comes at a cost. It establishes him as a subject in the vernacular of ethno-nationalism, where the mother tongue and the fatherland exist in a naturalistic pair.
In “Remembrance,” Picard asks us to return to Ithaca if only to leave it again, so soon, next week. Whether the show will grapple with the dangers of its particular nostalgias, I cannot say. But there is immense possibility here, most centrally in the premiere’s hints, via its “synthetic,” android plotline with shades of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, to finally confront Trek’s definition of the “human” and rewrite it in such a way that does not require those radically different from us to become like us, in order to be seen as persons.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/voyage-home-star-trek-picard-millennial-nostalgia/"></div>

The Voyage Home: Star Trek: Picard and Millennial Nostalgia

The Voyage Home: Star Trek: Picard and Millennial Nostalgia

Real Life

T. S. Mendola is a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. She has published in&nbsp;The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lilith, Rewire.News, Health Affairs, and a number of academic journals. Her work has won Best of the Net, a Best American Essays notable, and has been nominated for a Pushcart. Find her on Twitter&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/tsmendola">@tsmendola</a>or at&nbsp;<a href="http://www.tsmendola.com/">tsmendola.com</a>.

T. S. Mendola

Like a Great Fish: Simile and Structure in Brandon Taylor’s “Real Life”

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

T. S. Mendola is a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. She has published in&nbsp;The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lilith, Rewire.News, Health Affairs, and a number of academic journals. Her work has won Best of the Net, a Best American Essays notable, and has been nominated for a Pushcart. Find her on Twitter&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/tsmendola">@tsmendola</a>or at&nbsp;<a href="http://www.tsmendola.com/">tsmendola.com</a>.