Garry's Rules for Trek Plots
Or: Why I do as I do and don't do what I don't do
Here are some of
Epiphany Trek's plotting rules. These are "plot" ideas that I will not
use because I think that they are; A) stupid, or B) vastly over used
and therefore stupid. No one is required to agree with me. However I
reserve the right to believe that Star Trek in general would be
improved if they where followed by TPTB.
1) "The holodeck will never be used
for anything but crew entertainment, and does not have 'interesting'
failure modes."
Isn't space travel
"interesting" enough that we have to take entertainment with us that is
also dangerous? The first time the holodeck pulled a "The Big Good-bye"
on the Kongo Tim Kirk would have it shut down and examined nanometer by
nanometer for any sign of flaws in design, manufacture, or wear. If he didn't
find any it would be ripped out and replaced with a fern bar. If
something was found, it would be corrected, and the holodeck only put
back in use once it passed a full engineering check, again. Second
incident? Hello fern bar.
To my thinking, any holodeck
"adventure" that cannot be reframed as a story outside the holodeck,
doesn't need to be told. That doesn't mean that holodeck shouldn't
appear in stories, but that it should be a setting, not a plot device.
Worse than holodeck
malfunctions, the holodeck is used for "pretend" adventures when the
crew could be having "real" adventures. In TOS you visit a Roaring
Twenties planet, in TNG you run a Roaring Twenties program. TOS you
take shore leave on a planet, and if you want to play baseball, you set
up a diamond. DS9, you play baseball in a holodeck. Does this mark a
trend were we want our world safe and sterile, and our dangers washed
for bugs first? Perhaps. I want my characters to live larger.
2) "Warp cores and other critical technology do
not fail for reasons outside of massive damage."
How long has Earth been in
space by the time of The Next Generation? Some 400 years. How long have
they had warp drives? Some 300 years. You would think that in that
amount of time, something was learned about the making and maintaining
of warp drives.
During the run of TNG I
walked into my local hobby store and asked Mike, the guy at the
counter. "Hey Mike, do you have the new Enterprise D model with warp
core breach in progress?" He fell off his chair, and he isn't even a
fan. Yes, it got to be that big a joke.
Why the necessity of placing
the ship in danger? Is this false sense of drama needed? Does it mean
that the writers can't do anything but cheap thrills? Towards the end
of the run, I began to think so.
I assume that unless you have
a Good Reason, technical glitches are not life threatening. Consider
the US Navy's safety record. It is not perfect, but when you consider
the toys they play with, and the sheer deadly nature of the carrier
flight deck, the fact they don't lose a man a day per ship is testament
to good technology and good operational doctrine. Why doesn't Starfleet
at least have that?
Now flying on an airliner is
safer than my car. My car, I have had it since 1998. Not once has it
suffered a serious malfunction that was of any threat to me. And I have
blown the "internal combustion core"! Auto technology is only 100 years
old give or take. Cars don't have "interesting" failure modes. (Sorry
SUVs roll-overs are 90% driver error, an SUV is not a car, and cannot
be driven like one, but, different rant.) My car is very safe, but
airplanes are safer still. Protocols are in place to assure this
safety. Should an airliner fail, others of the type are grounded and a
solution sought before anyone else gets hurt. Aircraft do have
"interesting failure modes" that is because if it stops working in the
air it is going to fall. You can't pull over to the nearest cloud and
wait for the tow plane. So aircraft have more stringent safety standards
Why can't I expect a similar
degree of safety from starships that have "been around" longer than
either the technology of my car or the airplane? Yes there are
technology failures, but once it fails that way, efforts are made to
see it doesn't happen again. I expect as much from Trek.
Now, how do we get this
degree of safety? Yes, I accept that machines will break. We get it the
same way the Navy gets it and the airline industry gets it. Aggressive
maintenance is the how.
Mean time to failure is known
for each part, and it is replaced before that time. Why would Starships
with the ticklish matter/antimatter drive be less well maintained than
today's aircraft? Call it my machinist background, but mature
technology will be stable and safe due to aggressive maintenance and an
operational doctrine based on the 400 years of experience in space. Our
Heroes will not behave as if all this was just invented and they don't
know how to deal with it.
Therefore I resolve to do
better. if a ship blows up in my stories, it is either a self destruct,
or massive battle damage is involved.
3) "Transporter failures have been done to death,
therefor we will not do any."
I don't think a lot needs to
be said here. Transporters have been around over 200 years and they
don't have the bugs out yet? McCoy and Polaski might have had the right
idea.
See above, what goes for warp
cores is double for transporters. Yes, mechanical failure is a fact of
life. However if my car's engine fails, the fuel tank does not explode.
In 200 years of engineering, transporters should be engineered for
"safe failure" If something is wrong they don't do anything. If in the
middle of a transport they hand off to one of the other five
transporters on the ship. They shut down, not explode your guts across
the pads.
Ever notice that? If one
transporter is broken, all of them are? Yet every set of "ship plans",
official and otherwise, indicates more than one transporter on any
given ship except the very smallest. Often in TOS Kirk mentions
"Transporter room three", for example, on the way down. Where are these
presumed back up systems when the primary one is out of service? In any
case. This leads to...
4) "The Transporter is not the SF equivalent of
the Philosopher's Stone, and will not be used as a plot device or worse
'Deus Ex Machina'."
At first they used the
transporter to fix stuff the transporter did, I didn't have a big
problem with that, until transporter failures got old. Then they
started to use the transporter to fix stuff the transporter didn't do.
That was beyond the pale (old word, look it up). If I have to use the
transporter to "fix" my plot conflict, I need another plot conflict, or
a better writer. Transporters safely and conveniently whisk people to
and fro, and are not plot devices. It is over done.
We get back to "Why would
people continue to use and tolerate death machines?" If two airplanes
of a type crash in a six month period they ground the entire fleet
and check them out. That is real life. Why would the 24th century
abandon a fundamentally sound practice for when something potentially
dangerous fails? I am reminded of the scene in Metropolis where the
workers shuffle mindlessly into the maw of Mammon. Friz Lang ladled the
allegory pretty heavily in that film. Having these incidents again and
again makes the people of the 24th century look stupid.
If you have to break sound
real life practices to get a good story, it's not a good story. You
just created a five minute plot. We endeavor to do better, and assume
that our characters are not stupid or suicidal.
5) "Captain James Timothy Kirk does not have a
girl in every port." (When the Hell did Tomcat have the time to get any
Starfleet work done? :)~~ )
Nothing wrong with a girl in
every port, but that's not the character's personality. No rant
required.
6) "Time travel has been done to death, et all."
(I bent that one badly, but to good effect I think. See "Time and
Again")
Repeat of the transporter
rant, and one more. "The Big Red Reset Button". Time travel is used as
a way to make horrible changes in our characters, and then make it all
go away by magic. It never happened. I don't buy that one. If I am
making changes in the character that is the point of telling the tales.
They learn something, they take something away from the experience and
that deepens them. The reset button is a cheat. It's the author
cheating the reading public out of a good tale, and himself out of
better characters. Therefor...
7) "I will never use the Reset button, never ever.
If something happens in my Trek universe, the characters, and the
universe, eat the consequences."
8) "Klingons will be treated as creatures with
brains, as will other villains that have them." ("Our brains shrunk"
--Borf, Serv Trek)
Klingons are too often
treated as honor on a stick. No thought behind the same, fight to the
death every last one of the puppies. Truth is if the society was that
way, there wouldn't be many Klingons left. So, Klingons in Epiphany
Trek have brains under the ridges.
Star Trek villains need
brains. More than that they need to be people too. Remembering that "No
one is a villain in their own mind." is a very much a Star Trek
principle, I have villains that have a wife and kids, hopes and dreams.
Such villains are simply at odds with our heroes. If I cannot get you
to see inside the villain's motivation I have, at a fundamental level,
failed the tale as Star Trek.
9) I will not introduce a neat new technology and
have it vanish never to be seen again at the end of the story.
One of my pet peeves about
Trek is that they introduce the test tech of the week, and we never
hear from it again. OK, M-5 was a failure, but no one developed an M-6
from the experimental data? If I intro a whiz bang device and it is
good, you will start to see that device in use. Does the device
fundamentally break the Trek universe? We'll then I shouldn't use it,
no matter how neat a plot can be woven around it.
10)"Dark and scary" is not an indication
of complex background and plotting.
DS9 started this Voyager
leaned on it, and now Enterprise is falling back on the same hack
writer trick. The "Dark and Scary" setting. This and the pragmatist
"hero" are the two worst things that have ever happened to Trek. The
most Basic of Trek tropes is that Our Heroes live the Ideals of the
Federation even if it hurts. They have a better world and upholding
those ideals is the only way they will keep it. Yes we will not be
perfect, but unless we strive to be perfect we have no chance at it.
Section 31 is an abomination.
It is against the very ideas that the federation itself have been said
to be founded on. It is an admission that the good guy code doesn't
work, and that hard men willing to do evil things are required for good
to win. I must fall back on the Bible here; "What profit it a man
to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul." Picard is the
patron saint of those principles of Star Trek. It is Picard that stands
up again and again to state "What kind of people are we?" Again and
again he confirms that we are a people that hold truth as the highest
virtue. We are a people that hold you cannot defend a principle if you
break it. James Kirk also has his moment at the pulpit. "Yes, we are
killers, but we will not kill today!
Enterprise kicks these two
fine men right in the teeth. Voyager does it again and again. "Ooo dark
and scary" and "The ends justify the means" are never "principles" that
will succeed in Epiphany Trek. Tim Kirk and the other Heroes in my
tales will adhere to the principles of "the First Duty" and "The
Drumhead". there is no Section 31 in Epiphany Trek. The Federation
itself adheres to those principles as well.
11)Epiphany Trek characters will never save the
Federation, nor will they save the Earth.
The former is bigger than any
single threat, the latter has been over done.
My Star Trek is about people,
not epic threats to all civilization. Epic threats are huge. They are
not caused or solved by a single person. I want my Trek to remain
focused on faces, single people and single people problems. While
larger events can and will happen, the focus remains on the single
character.
Saving the Earth.... Never
has one planet required saving so many times. Too Hollywood
and Vine for me. My Star Trek is about out there, not back
here. Earth will be seen, visited, and talked about, but Earth will not
be the focus of any story I write. A story might happen on Earth, but
Earth is not the focus.
I am of the opinion
that there is a reliance on the gimmicks listed above, and it is found
in filmed Trek and unfortunately followed by many a faithful-to-canon
fan-fiction site. I eschew such gimmicks because they have been used to
the "gimmick" point. I think anything they have to say, has been over
said, badly.
What I am saying is the flash
and glitter will not make up for a rotten foundation. If you don't have
a good plot with good characters, free of rationalization and plot
holes, or inconstant behavior, all the fancy words and bright dialog
you can write will not hide the facts so stated. Your foundation must
be real, and firm. Nothing can replace that.
Look at it this way. I can
walk on stage with the fanciest costume ever designed to dance in, it
can be worth thousands of bucks. However, the audience is going to
figure out pretty quick that dead elephants dance better than I do.
Gregory Hines can walk out in a white t-shirt and black stretch pants
and wow their socks off. The difference being that Hines is a master of
dance, I barely manage to move without hurting myself. Most people you
meet are at least smart enough to know the difference.
The written word or filmed
tale might fool "most people" a little longer. But if you don't put in
the beef, by the time they get around the tale or film the smart ones
are saying "Where's the Beef?"
I question my ability to
write using these tired old gimmicks because I don't believe in their
base concepts. I write under the assumption that if I cannot believe my
words, no one else can either. Sure, I could sulkily churn something
like that out, but I wouldn't vouch for the quality.
However, the Narn Bat Squad
is not going to visit your house if you write one. I haven't found
their number yet. ;P
See the Trek
Creative Lexicon - "Hollywood & Vine Syndrome".
Copyright © Garry Stahl 2002-2005 inclusive
Do not reprint without permission
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