Comic Disbelief

The original Prophet, if you aren't familiar, was a Marvel comic run in the 90's at the height of comics. Flash forward to 2013, and the boring 90’s comic hero stereotype John Prophet has been revitalized to serve as an avatar in a short self contained story collection by Image comics. Each comic a self contained story that explores the alien, yet familiar. John is designed in each as an avatar in which the author uses to interact with absurdly fascinating alien settings. Prophet suffered from many of the same problems of Prometheus and was originally a rather self serving comic. Neither their characters felt true to themselves, especially in the case of Prometheus, they didn't feel true to the Aliens series. The original Prophet was just a Marvel comics hero from the 90's, boring to put it bluntly. What the original Aliens struck on that the Image revival of Prophet does also, is that good stories tell the truth. It doesn't matter if they haven't ever happened or never will. They're truthful in their own ways.

The problem that Prometheus suffered was that of it’s design, something that it could have learned from Prophet’s short story format. None of the characters in Prophet, or the original aliens for that matter, overstay their welcome. It’s this brevity and simplicity of their brand which allow “Game over man.” to hold more emotional weight than say “Big things have small beginnings.” As much as I rag on Prometheus, I really did not hate it. The film is infinitely recommendable on it’s look alone, and acting was top notch, even if the lines they were asked to deliver weren't. Prometheus just suffers from being too clever for its own good, with the gun on the mantelpiece choreographing every potentially interesting plot twist in the film. From the fact that the Charlize Theron’s segment of the ship is a lifeboat to the fact that Noomi Rapace is sterile, Damon Lindelof set his cast up for failure at every turn.

If you’re going to have a film have a run-time of over two hours, you can’t have a collection of themes which overpower it’s characters. As much as I wanted to love David as an analog for Lawrence of Arabia, the film openly contradicts itself on this front. David’s trajectory of pessimism downward throughout the film, in stark contrast with Lawrence, which begs the question why did they even include that entire theme to the film? Possibly if his arc had been left more vague, these schisms would not have existed. Each Prophet story is like stacks of violently beautiful graffiti painted over a wall, overlapping each other but self-contained shining through like peeling plaster. That is the sort of experience I expect out of Ridley Scott, not a comic book.

As I Lay DS9ing

I want to travel into space before I die. But would you really? This fantasy we often create for ourselves of the stars is so wonderfully represented in Star Trek. Unlike it's contemporary The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine accepts the responsibility of having characters which must accept the consequences of their actions. By having a static location, they bear their burdens when mistakes happen and do not claim to a prime directive. When you contrast the two main bars of the two show. Quarks feels lived in, like a place where people would actually go for entertainment & drink while the bar on the Enterprise feels like the 90's fantasy of a bar on a space ship. Stale in it's simplicity and bourgeois in atmosphere, being more of the embodiment of what most fusion cuisine restaurant look like than an actual bar working stiffs would frequent.

From the original pilot it is clear the intention of the show was to establish a moral progeny, which eventually led the show to becoming the most pious & politically charged of all the Star Trek shows I have seen(all but Voyager). The scene which most illustrates the length at which they go would be Quarks critique of  liberalism. With that scene Armin Shimerman owned his role as Quark, which is so uncharacteristically Star Trek in nature, by being so good. The show continues to critique the liberalism present in Star Trek and in doing so divorces itself from the rest of Star Trek. Instead of presenting the fantasy of traveling the stars, DS9 constructs a harsh reality of living among the stars with the inevitability of war.

From the Founders Melian dialogue-esque view toward other races, to the existence of warships in the Federation to the way the show dealt with PTSD, DS9 is unmatched when it comes to shows in the Star Trek universe in covering the human condition through war. It's through these hardships and the fact that they must accept the consequences of their actions that divorces the show from the usual fantasy of Star Trek & delivers a transformative story. The philosophical difference between TNG & DS9 is the difference between a show that always has a good ending and a show that can end tragically.

When viewed in aggregate after I've finished both, the difference in practice is profound. While the former was clearly influenced by television at the time, it's clear to see that the latter was trying for something new for the time that's currently in vogue by shows like Breaking Bad or The Wire where there is true character development. The dynamic between characters on TNG is stagnate, few characters end the show in a different position from whence they started. The irony is that despite traveling thousands of parsecs across the universe, the TNG cast generally leaves the show in the same place that they started. While in DS9 all the universe's a stage, and all it's cast mere players, they play many more parts & trek so far without travelling but a few parsecs from whence they came.