May 3. 2010 by Curtis Webster.

Mythic form and Jungian archetype have been important aspects of the Star Trek narrative from the earliest episodes of TOS on. The universality of Star Trek’s “deep structure” is undoubtedly a major ingredient in its enduring appeal across cultural and generational lines.

Sometimes, though, Star Trek has elevated mythic tradition out of the narrative structure of an episode and examined its role in cultural formation more directly. Nowhere has ST done a better job of exploring myth and culture than in “Darmok,” the second episode of season five of TNG.

Responding to a signal from the Tamarians, a race with whom the Federation would very much like to establish formal relations, the Enterprise has rendezvoused with a Tamarian ship in orbit over El-Adral IV, an apparently uninhabited planet.

While the universal translator can decipher individual words, it cannot make sense out of the structure of the Tamarian language. The Tamarians express themselves in what, at first, seem to be nonsensical phrases. Frustration mounts on both the Tamarian and Federation sides of the exchange as neither can make itself comprehensible to the other.

In a flash, Picard finds himself transported to the planet’s surface, where he is alone with Dathon, the Tamarian captain (beautifully portrayed by Paul Winfield). More frustration and suspicion ensues. Dathon continues to speak in what seem to Picard riddles. “Darmak and Jalad at Tanagra.” “Shaka, when the walls fell.”

Picard at first assumes that Dathon intends to engage in one-on-one combat, but gradually comes to realize that Dathon is trying to use the situation to help him understand how Tamarians communicate.

Picard, ever the Renaissance man, pieces together the linguistic and contextual evidence and figures out that the Tamarians communicate almost exclusively by metaphor, and, more importantly, by metaphors drawn from their own universe of myth and legend.

When Dathon says, “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” he is apparently referring to a Tamarian myth involving two warriors who found themselves facing a common enemy together and who came to understand one another through that experience. The requisite common enemy, of course, presents itself. Dathon dies in combat. Picard grieves the death of his newly-discovered friend, but knows that Dathon’s sacrifice was necessary if the Federation and the Tamarians were ever going to learn how to communicate.

In a gorgeous little epilogue, we find Picard studying Homer in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of his own culture’s mythic heritage.

I’ve read analyses by some linguists who are critical of the episode and present what seem like convincing arguments regarding the improbability of the Tamarian language structure.

I acknowledge those arguments and then set them aside.

“Darmok” is not an exercise in linguistic speculation. “Darmok” is a Star Trek parable and its significance lies in its appreciation and exposition of the ways that myth and legend shape a culture’s self-understanding and its understanding of the universe.

The Tamarians (more precisely, the “children of Tama”) have imbibed so deeply of their own mythology that it has come to shape their language. They think mythologically and express themselves mythologically.

At first, this mythic orientation in the Tamarian language is a barrier to understanding. The specific references in Tamarian myth are meaningless out of their cultural context. A culture which does not know the mythology is completely at a loss to grasp even the most rudimentary Tamarian expressions.

But, and here is where the value of the “Darmak” as cultural parable really starts to shine, there is a universality to Tamarian myth. When Picard makes the connection between language and culture, he also makes a huge leap in his capacity to communicate with Dathon. Picard sees the parallels between Tamarian and Terran mythology and starts to make meaning out of the Tamarian phraseology.

Sadly, the Tamarians don’t show up again in the Star Trek narrative. What else might we have learned about our own mythology and its cultural significance by further contact with the children of Tama?

Metaphor is often regarded as an imprecise form of communication that frustrates the left brain, but the Tamarians nonetheless had developed a highly advanced technology, capable of space travel. Their metaphoric structure apparently had both a psychological richness and a pragmatic utility that we have yet to appreciate in our own.

Perhaps a day is coming when humanity makes breakthroughs in its mythological self-awareness that will permit us to shout out, “Sokath, his eyes uncovered!”

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December 10. 2009 by Curtis Webster.

Next Friday (December 11), a film will open in Los Angeles called “Yesterday Was A Lie.” There won’t be much publicity around the opening. Expect it to last about a week, disappear, and then be resurrected with a DVD release next March.

I’m going to guess that not many folks are going to see this movie . . . at first, anyway. The story unfolds in about as non-linear a fashion as the human mind can grasp. This is a deliberately disorienting film that demands a high level of mental agility on the part of the audience. It does not pause for a breath nor does it wait for you to catch up. For a movie-going public conditioned to cookie-cutter three-act plot structures, this movie comes as a jolt to the system. That kind of creativity is rarely rewarded with significant box-office numbers.

And that is a shame, because “Yesterday Was A Lie” is a brilliant little masterpiece of a film and hopefully a harbinger of things to come from James Kerwin (of whom I have blogged in the past), who wrote, directed and edited it.

The Star Trek connection comes with the powerful performance of Chase Masterson, who plays an archetype in jazz singer’s clothing. Chase reveals herself as an actress capable of subtle shadings and nuanced characterization as she guides the film’s heroine, Hoyle (played with equal power by Kipleigh Brown), through the shattered mess that results when Hoyle unwittingly disrupts her own timeline and begins to experience life events completely out of rational order.

As James pointed out at the premiere, “Yesterday Was A Lie” is a film without a first act. From the first frame onward, the audience has the sense of having walked in twenty minutes late. You’re on notice that this is a story that you must come to understand on an entirely different level of consciousness. At about the halfway point (for me, anyway), it begins to add up and make visceral (if not rational) sense.

James brings to this film a detailed understanding of quantum physics and all of the ways that our perception of time may really be askew. The nightmarish collapse of Hoyle’s timeline is not simply a clever story idea; it is a scenario straight out of the realm of the quantum.

James augments the dizzying sense of temporal distortion through many clever (and often quite subtle) visual cues. Rotary-dial telephones exist alongside laptop computers. Taxicabs look like they came straight from the late forties. By making Hoyle’s physical environment a hodgepodge of anachronisms, James keeps on reminding us that time itself is out of joint and that anything is possible in Hoyle’s world.

In linear storytelling, the goal is to keep your audience guessing how it’s all going to end. James turns all of that on its head by keeping us guessing how this story begins, a point that is not fully revealed until the final sequence.

Shot in a stark black-and-white noir style, “Yesterday Was A Lie” is relentless in its quest to keep the audience off-balance, and it achieves that goal with style. The film is stunning to watch. In less capable hands, many of the shots would come off as cliches, but here they feel like familiar images that have been twisted by the same ripples in the space-time continuum that have knocked Hoyle’s life out of balance.

I pray that this film will find its audience. It is indie-filmmaking at its finest, a pure expression of creative vision. James Kerwin is a brilliant film-maker and this minor masterpiece needs to be seen and appreciated. As good as “Yesterday Was A Lie” may be, I have a strong sense that we haven’t yet seen the best of what James can create.

Keep your eye out for the DVD release. This need not be an “overlooked classic.”

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September 21. 2009 by Curtis Webster.

There’s a lot of nonsense that has been written and spoken on the subject of faith. Let’s ignore for the moment the voices that say faith is a delusion and concentrate on those that treat faith as if it were as simple as a poem on a Hallmark card.

Faith in God is often presented as a kind of refuge from reality where individual believers go for comfort and strength. In this faith paradigm, there usually is little room for doubt. It’s all nice and simple . . . and, in my view, utterly unrealistic.

The realities of a life of faith were squarely on view during the September 20, 2009, session of The Spirit Of Star Trek with Chase Masterson, who portrayed Leeta on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Chase was extraordinarily enthusiastic about doing a session. All of our guests have been enthusiastic, but Chase was exceptional. It was almost as if she needed to do Spirit Of Star Trek.

After viewing “Let He Who Is Without Sin . . .” from the fifth season of DS9, Mike Westmore and I settled in for a delightful talk with Chase.

Chase has quite a story to tell. Her faith journey has been long, arduous in many ways, and spiritually quite rewarding. She has struggled with doubt and has felt a great emptiness during those times when she has had trouble connecting with God.

I always appreciate it when someone can honestly share the ups and downs of their spiritual journey without sounding like they’re trying to impress me with their piety. Chase’s story is authentic and really resonates.

The added bonus on September 20 was that James Kerwin, the brilliant director and writer of the upcoming sci-fi noir feature film, “Yesterday Was A Lie” (in which Chase has a very prominent role), was also on hand. James is a remarkably articulate spokesman for the view that faith and science are not simply compatible, but in many ways interdependent.

James has a background in physics and makes a compelling case that a careful study of quantum mechanics compels the conclusion that God exists. Standing squarely against both secular atheism and religious fundamentalism, James provides a road map for a thinking person’s faith.

As has been true with each of our guests, I feel as if I have gained two new friends in Chase and James . . . and two more companions on my own spiritual journey.

UPCOMING: Robert Picardo joins us on October 11 to discuss “Latent Image,” a Voyager episode that, as Star Trek does so beautifully so often, provokes us into deeper reflections on what it means to be human.

ELSEWHERE IN THE WORLD OF SCI-FI: Thursday night, September 24, “Flashforward,” a new series based on Robert Sawyer’s novel of the same name, premieres on ABC. It’s a fascinating premise that sprang from the mind of one of our top contemporary sci-fi writers. Check it out.

Also very much looking forward to the premiere of Stargate: Universe on October 2. Looks like the franchise just keeps rolling on . . .

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September 1. 2009 by Curtis Webster.

With apologies to all, I re-launch The Spirit Of Star Trek blog. Things will get meatier as we go along, but for now I beg your patience.

It is my hope that this blog can become a marketplace of Star Trek ideas and philosophies. I want to reflect upon each session and open the floor to you all to keep the discussion going.

For right now, I’m going to make a few long-overdue comments about the interview with Rod Roddenberry on June 14.

First off, Rod was an absolute delight from start to finish. He was understandably somewhat wary of the whole idea when first approached (through Mike Westmore) and it took a while to gain his confidence that this was not going to be a Sunday school session or an assault upon Star Trek’s humanistic underpinnings.

In preparing for the interview, I spent quite a bit of time with some of Gene’s published interviews, focusing on his comments about faith and religion. Gene’s well-publicized hostility toward organized religion sprang from some early experiences within a church that was rigid in its doctrine. To a person of Gene’s enormous vision and imagination, that kind of black-and-white thinking is repugnant. Gene left the church at a young age and never looked back.

Nonetheless, Gene Roddenberry created a vehicle that managed to provoke tremendous spiritual reflection in me and thousands of other Star Trek fans.

I lamented to Rod that night that it was a shame that Gene and I never met because I might have given Gene a very different perspective on Christianity. Gene’s instinct for optimism for the future is entirely consistent with the Christian vision of the ultimate redemption of humanity. As so often happens when people of differing viewpoints can actually get into dialogue, it turned out that there are more similarities than first meets the eye.

I hope that the Spirit Of Star Trek will provide more “ah-ha” moments for all involved.

Next up will be Chase Masterson, who will be with us on September 20. Chase is a self-proclaimed progressive Christian and she will have some fascinating things to say about her own spiritual journey and the compatibility of science and faith.

Hope to see you then.

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April 2. 2009 by Curtis Webster.

What is it about Star Trek? I was thirteen years old when we first heard William Shatner as Captain Kirk intone those now-famous words: “Space . . . the final frontier . . .” I think that at first I was simply dazzled by what were then state-of-the-art special effects (yes, they seemed pretty amazing in their day) and quite probably by the mini-skirted female crew members.   But I gradually became aware that there was something else going here, some special element that my adolescent intellect couldn’t quite articulate.   My first clue came with “The City On The Edge Of Forever,” aired during Star Trek’s first season.   It was a brilliant episode that started my eyes opening to the awesome potential of science fiction to provoke deeper understandings of our amazing universe. It was, of course, quite a long layoff between cancellation of the series in 1969 (if not the worst programming decision in television history, it’s surely among the top three) and the appearance of “Star Trek - The Motion Picture” ten years later.  I had to content myself with syndicated reruns. And while today I recognize that Star Trek’s first venture in full length film was not a complete artistic success, at the time it was more than enough simply to see those characters in action again.   I felt like part of me had been re-born. And then came “The Wrath of Khan,” a movie that still has the power to send chills up and down my spine even after who-knows-how-many viewings later.  The adventure was truly continuing. As the franchise branched out into The Next Generation, I firmly believed that nothing could ever top the Original Series and so resisted embracing Captain Picard and the crew of NCC-1701-D for quite a while.  But, eventually, the brilliance of the scripts, the incredibly talented cast, and the growing complexity of the Star Trek narrative won me over.   The final blow in favor of TNG fell with “Best Of Both Worlds,” an electrifying episode that captured my imagination as thoroughly as “City On The Edge Of Forever” had a little over two decades earlier. With Deep Space Nine, we were treated to a new and very different approach to Star Trek, essentially a serial in which the Star Trek universe was no longer a black-and-white proposition, but came at us in shades of grey.  Over its seven seasons, DS9 gave us some of the most intricate and nuanced character arcs in television history. Voyager found yet another angle to play: a starship marooned in a part of the galaxy seventy years from home where Star Fleet could give neither advice nor backup firepower.  Enterprise threw us back into an earlier era of Star Trek, a prequel to the entire narrative.  Even if faithful fans of the franchise detected disconnects between Enterprise and the Star Trek universe as we had previously known it, the series was nonetheless entertaining and, at times, thought-provoking. Throughout it all, Star Trek consistently delivered more than just great entertainment.   Star Trek has always been about something more than the action on the screen.   Star Trek, at its best, has always showed us what it means to be human.   Star Trek exposes us to both the heights of our potential and the depths of our flaws.   Star Trek has explored theology, philosophy, morals, and ethics with a keenness rarely found in popular culture.   Star Trek is a vast mine of intellectual inquiry, with hundreds of rich veins yet to be tapped.   The purpose of The Spirit Of Star Trek is to dig into that mine and see what we can find.  There are no preconceived notions, no agendas, no dogma here.  We want to come to understand the questions that Star Trek poses and to see where we can go in looking for answers.   All are welcome to The Spirit Of Star Trek.  Whether you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, agnostic, atheist or any other shading of spiritual understanding, you, as a Star Trek fan, will find a place (and a voice if you are so inclined) here.   Come join us as we explore the spirit of Star Trek.– Rev. Curtis Webster First Presbyterian Church of Encino Encino, CA  

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