StandingWater Creations

I was watching Boston Legal another ABC show the other night. Alan Shore (played by the increasingly impressive James Spader) and Denny Crane (played by Star Trek Alum William Shatner) had a lover tiff. That is not to say that they are lovers on the show or ever will be. But their characters, who are friends, had a heart to heart where you discover that Alan is in the law firm to watch out for Denny. Denny is egotistical and doesn’t want anyone looking out for him; and in the end, in order to preserve Denny’s ego and to satisfy Alan’s needs, Alan admits that he would really miss the tet-a-tet’s he and Denny have on the balcony at the end of each episode (allegedly at the end of each workday).

The whole premise of the show is that Denny has all this power with a law firm because he founded the firm and is a named partner, and in the end the only solution he can come up with is, “I have the keys,” to the freight elevator so that Alan can keep coming up for their little meetings if Alan were to leave the practice at some future, unspecified, point.

One of my guilty pleasures in life is sitting down and watching M*A*S*H on the Hallmark Channel starting at about 9 p.m. each night. They are repeats from an earlier broadcast in the day, and obviously rebroadcasts of shows that were on the air for eleven years in the 80’s; but that’s kind of the point, for me. Watching something that is entertaining and that I don’t have to worry about so much. So, I watch M*A*S*H and I enjoy it. I think my roommate thinks I’m weird for allowing that to play in the background a lot, but hey, we still get along and I am more than willing to turn it off in lieu of almost anything he wants to put on when he gets tired of listening to the crew of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital go through their unrealistic, and yet strangely entertaining hijinks.

For a few years I’ve been thinking about this idea for a new iteration of Star Trek. The original series took place at some specific point in the future. Something like 300 years away from today (keep in mind that today = 40 years ago). The crew was dealt with social issues through the guise of aliens and planets and alternate realities. As a result of this, Star Trek became a fan favorite and had this massive following which caused the crew to return in the early 80’s in a major motion picture, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was originally slated as a pilot for a new series and turned into a series of movie franchises.

Back when, when I was assigned to child watch my youngest siblings, my trick to get them to sleep or be absorbed in whatever was to put Star Trek: The Motion Picture in the VCR and set them in front of the T.V. and invariably they would go to sleep. Don’t think that work so well now, but at the same time child watching has really changed for me. Just ask me about New Hampshire sometime and if I don’t tell you to go to hell, I might talk about watching little people.

Regardless, Star Trek’s second iteration, The Next Generation, came into being about 70 years in the future. And you get Patrick Stewart playing Captain Jean Luc Piccard with a whole cast of supporting characters. With this iteration you get the Star Trek mold and ever iteration since then has flowed within that mold. Strong captain dealing with the moral dilemma of being a captain and officers who dealt with moral dilemmas on their own. Star Trek became this cookie cutter show where you could, practically, watch any iteration and get the same awful message from it.

Thank whoever was smart enough to take it off the air. No matter how much I like Scott Bakula, I just thought the studio was grinding the show more and more into the dust.

However, I have an idea for an iteration. A rethinking of the way the original Trek brought various elements into being and how it changed with all of the iterations that have followed into a future that is darker and more sinister than what has been imagined previously. I think, just for my own sake, I won’t go into any real details and leave it with, my iteration would take place about 200 years after the final episode of Voyager.

What gets me thinking about this is an article I read in BYU’s Daily Universe the other day about a BYU alum whose first fictional novel was coming out. He’d originally started writing it as a Star Wars Universe book and when Lucas’ office told him hit was a waste of his time to continue writing the book, he removed Star Wars from the insides and published it as a stand alone sci-fi title. It’s about clones and a war they are fighting. Sure, the basic theme sounds a lot like Star Wars, but he claims to have removed Star Wars from the book and lets it stand on its own.

That may happen with me and my Star Trek iteration. A creation that is good within one universe, but could, and may, stand alone in a very different fictional universe because the powers that be have no real ability for independent thought. Take note Paramount. You lose viewers not because you have bad ideas; but because your ideas become stale because they become a rehashing of something already done.

Enough there.

Moving on.

I read a personal essay last night from a classmate. The guy is pretty smart. I mean smart in a James kind of way. Where he’s probably got a lot of book smarts, but lacks the basic common sense to apply the book smarts in a way that allows people to endear themselves to him. I’ve not made him feel threatened, at least, not directly, and so I don’t know what his reaction would be… however, he is getting married, so I am probably wrong.

Anyway, he wrote about learning to paint. It was an incomplete thought. Imagine that, a three page incomplete thought. There was a lot of structure to the way his thought was formed and yet, regardless of the amount of structure, it was still incomplete. He didn’t bother to finish what he was doing. I have to wonder if he really knew what it was he was doing.

The writing was good.

The outcome was bad.

Where have I heard something like that before? Probably something that was said about my own writing. Who knows? My thoughts are becoming increasingly complex and I just don’t bother to write them down for fear of having to spend far too much time exploring them linearly rather than allowing them to float in my head.

Okay, that’s a lie and a truth. The lie is that I write a lot of things down. Enough that the thought doesn’t end up dead somewhere; and at the same time I still allow them to float around in my head.

Ask me about The United Order and socialism. That’s a complex thought that’s been floating for a lot of years.

Lately, some of those thoughts have been on education.

Other thoughts have been on dating and marriage.

Still others are on art.

The classmate was writing about art and painting. At 17 he was writing a play about art. Then he learned to paint. Then he wrote the play. There’s a progression there. Idea, education, execution.

My current plan is art. Drawing and painting to be specific. I want to look into an Art minor. Which really means I am probably going to extend my stay at BYU another semester. But I think it’s a good plan and a good idea. Of course, you can talk to me again around January 2007 and things might be different. We’ll see then.

Enough. I think this is enough.