Carrion Luggage

Lower Expectations

I held on to this article from Polygon, not just because it's about Star Trek specifically, but because it has some insights into writing in general.

    Star Trek as ‘going to a national park’: Lower Decks’ creator reflects on the end of the show  

Not too long ago, I went on a personal quest to watch every single Star Trek episode and movie, in release order. There's a lot to watch, and too much for me to remember. Lower Decks was full of inside jokes, so, as someone who has lived and breathed Trek for their entire life, I've sometimes wondered whether someone without much Trek background would appreciate the show. The article suggests that they might.

Most of the article is in the form of an interview with Mike McMahan, the creator mentioned there in the headline.

The show McMahan was working on was Rick and Morty, which went on to be a massive pop culture sensation. More confident than ever in McMahan’s instincts, Secret Hideout reached out again in 2018, this time to ask him what he wanted to do. McMahan answered with a pitch for an animated sitcom based in the Star Trek universe, a truly wild swing for the typically reverent and cerebral sci-fi franchise.

On the flip side, I have never seen even one single episode of Rick and Morty.

I should emphasize that Star Trek has been no stranger to comedy, however serious and dramatic some of the stories and situations have been. From the beginning, many episodes of TOS included humorous moments. Hell, we wouldn't have the show at all were it not for the vision of funny-lady Lucille Ball, back when she and Arnaz were running Desilu studios, before it got bought out by Paramount.

But Lower Decks dialed the comedy to eleven. Somehow, though, it not only maintained some continuity with live-action Trek, but also kept the setup-conflict-resolution style of its more serious cousins.

It could have devolved into a self-parody. But it didn't. And I want to know how to write like that.

As the series comes to a close after five seasons, Polygon caught up with McMahan about how his wacky passion project made its mark on one of American pop culture’s most cherished legacies.

The article is from last year; the series has since wrapped up, by design. Everything ends; it's only a question of whether they leave us hanging or not.

Yeah. It was cool because when I was becoming a writer in TV and writing my own stuff all the time, I was watching Star Trek with my wife, being like, “Man, I wish Star Trek was still around,” because it was in the in-between phase. And I remember being like, “I’m just gonna write Star Trek whether somebody pays me to or not.”

There have been a few in-between phases in Trek history. McMahan was certainly not alone in writing Trek fanfiction. Some of it even became non-canonical, but official, novels. I've read many of them. Some of them suck. Most of them are passable. Some are even excellent. Some SF/Fantasy authors got their start writing Trek fanfiction.

I say this because fanfiction has a crap reputation, but it really shouldn't. Not all fanfiction involves crap writers writing crap porn.

And this part of the interview ties in to my entry from the day before yesterday:

Sure. I mean, luck is usually something that only works in your favor if you’ve done a lot of hard work first, right?

Yes.

I'm still fuzzy about the definition of "hard work," because I don't think most day laborers would consider what writers do hard work. Whatever you want to call it, sometimes you have to put in the effort, physical and/or mental, to take advantage of opportunities when they arise. Though I think even possessing the ability to do that effort is also dependent on luck.

The remainder of the interview, which I won't reproduce here, is relevant to writers, no matter what the genre. Well, maybe not the literary genre, but stories that people actually pay attention to.

Whether the article is any more or less accessible to non-Trek watchers than Lower Decks, I have no idea.

Since Lower Decks ended, there has only been one other Trek installment: Section 31, which was originally slated to be a series but became a TV movie (which, nowadays, is basically just a movie that never made it to a theater but went directly to streaming). Despite the presence of always-awesome Michelle Yeoh as one of the primary characters, the movie was (for me at least) a huge letdown.

But Trek has always had its ups and downs, and I look forward to what's next.