Alien Universe (15 page)

FOUR
BLOCKBUSTERS

But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.
Arthur C. Clarke,
2001: A Space Odyssey

In the 1950s dozens of movies were made that reflected the influence of the flying saucer craze that began in 1947 and the worries that came with the beginning of the Cold War. Blockbuster movies of recent decades have a different flavor. Accompanied by huge advertising budgets and professional marketing campaigns, this new type of science fiction film began to shape the public’s view of Aliens. In recent years, the ubiquity of cable television and the need to fill hundreds of channels has led small budget science fiction film producers to easily connect with the niche audience of science fiction enthusiasts; for instance the ungrammatical SyFy network shows newly made movies that would have made Ed Wood blush. (If you’re not a fan of the genre, Ed Wood was notorious for making very bad science fiction movies.) However, these new “B-movies” have but a modest impact on the public. Most of us saw modern-day Aliens on the big screen. In this chapter, we’ll discuss the high impact movies and television shows of the past few decades.

The 1960s were a relative desert for movies about Aliens of any kind. The biggest movie of that decade was the artistic
2001: A Space Odyssey
in 1968, which only hinted at Aliens, in that they created obelisks that keep popping up in the movie. The first one appears in front of a group of plant-eating and timid hominids and alters them. They kill a rival group’s leader and this is the start of the lineage ending with
Homo sapiens
. The movie then jumps ahead to 2001 when an obelisk is found on the moon. When explorers get to the lunar obelisk, it sends a signal to Jupiter. The rest of the movie details a journey to Jupiter with a recalcitrant computer named HAL. Another obelisk is found near Jupiter, and, when activated, it brings an astronaut through a time sequence of aging and a tremendous light show, ending up with his being enclosed fetus-like in an orb of light staring at Earth. The idea is conveyed that perhaps mankind has again been altered and is entering a new stage of development.

The Aliens in
2001: A Space Odyssey
are never shown. This is in part due to advice from Carl Sagan, who suggested to the film’s creators that a realistic Alien would not be humanoid. Given the constraints of movie making of the era, in which computer graphics were quite primitive and therefore Aliens would need to be shown using human actors, the directors opted to not show the Aliens at all. This technique was copied in the 1997 movie
Contact
, penned by Carl Sagan and his wife, Ann Druyan. Sagan was famous for reminding people that Aliens won’t look like us.
Contact
had religious overtones but also told a tale of Aliens that were so far advanced from us as to appear godlike.

The rest of the 1960s really was a low point in film depictions of Aliens. This was the era of Betty and Barney Hill, and it would take some time for these new ideas of Aliens to trickle into Hollywood. Television was another matter. The 1960s saw such series as Britain’s long-running
Doctor Who
and cult classics
Lost in Space
and
The Twilight Zone
(which occasionally featured Aliens). But arguably the most famous science fiction dynasty was Gene Rodenberry’s
Star Trek
.

Star Trek

“SPACE: The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship
Enterprise
. Its five-year mission: To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” These are the opening words to one of the longest-lived science fiction television franchises to date.
Star Trek
began in 1966 with a modest three-season production. Ordinarily that would signify a briefly successful television series, which would
be quickly consigned to obscurity. But not
Star Trek
. The show’s fans became known as Trekkies. After years of existing only in syndication, the franchise was rebooted in 1979 with a full-length film, followed by five more. The series was introduced to a new set of viewers in 1987 with
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, which took place about a century after the first show.

Trekkies now refer to the 1966 version of
Star Trek
as
Star Trek: The Original Series
(or TOS). The show that followed it,
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, is referred to as NextGen or TNG (1987–1994). In addition to these two series, there was also
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
(DSN, 1993–1999) and
Star Trek: Voyager
(Voyager, 1995–2001). The plotlines of DSN and Voyager were contemporaneous with NextGen, and the story lines would occasionally cross. Finally, another prequel series called
Enterprise
(2001–2005) detailed the early years of mankind’s experience with interstellar flight in the same universe. Combine this with twelve feature films, a cartoon series (1973–1974), hundreds of books, comic books, and other products, and you have a marketing behemoth.

With such a tremendous amount of material, there is no way it can all be described in a few pages. So the summaries below are just representatives of the Alien types and plotlines in the
Star Trek
universe.

The Original Series

The original
Star Trek
was born in the political tumult of the 1960s, a world in which racial integration, questions of gender equality, and Cold War proxy wars were dominant concerns of the American public. The series showed fresh alternatives to dealing with these problems. The starship
Enterprise
flew around the galaxy at speeds faster than light, captained by midwesterner James T. Kirk, but it also had a black female communications officer named Uhura, an Asian helmsman named Sulu, a Russian pilot named Chekov, a Scottish engineer named Scotty, a doctor from the American South named McCoy, and a first officer, Spock, who was an Earth-Vulcan hybrid. Vulcans were a warrior race that had tamed their violent tendencies through veneration and practice of logic. Vulcans rejected emotion as “illogical,” and the show had recurring subplots with McCoy and Spock crossing verbal swords over the proper role of emotion. The crew of the
Enterprise
was ethnically mixed, highly functional, and happy. This was but the first implicit comment made by the show on the problems of the American 1960s.

The format was that the
Enterprise
would encounter some problem at the beginning of the episode that would be resolved at the end. Thus each episode stood more-or-less alone. The seventy-eight episodes covered many of
the social issues of the 1960s. For example, the episode “Let That Be Your Last Battleground,” described two Aliens, one black on the left side of his body and white on the right side, fighting another Alien from the same planet, this one black on the right side and white on the left. Their planet was destroyed from civil wars fought between these two very similar groups of people. In the end, the two Aliens headed back to their planet’s surface to continue their battle to the death. The story line was an obvious reference to the black and white racial issues playing out in the United States at the time. Critics found the message to be a bit too obvious, but it was a common sort of plot device seen in TOS.

The
Enterprise
was the flagship of the political organization called the United Federation of Planets (usually called just the Federation), a consortium of planets and races that joined together voluntarily. Planets that had attained faster than light technology, were peaceful, and could adhere to democratic principles in their external dealings with other races were allowed to join, although there was no restriction on any planet’s internal political and social organization. The main enemies of the Federation were the Klingon and Romulan empires. In TOS, the Klingons were very much human-like, although their features were what one might call vaguely Persian, with swarthy complexions and neatly trimmed heavy beards. The Klingons seemed to be paying an homage to
Flash Gordon’s
Ming the Merciless. Americans might have heard of “Death before Dishonor” as a military motto, but Klingons exemplified the credo. The Romulans were also played by human actors and were consequently human in appearance, although with pointy ears and copper-based blood. They were wily and conniving. They were collectively depicted as a combination of earthly old Roman Empire ideals with a bit of classic Ming Dynasty thrown in.

The Next Generation

Taking place a century later than the original series, the starship was now the
Enterprise
, model D. Captain Jean-Luc Picard led a culturally diverse crew in a series of adventures. The crew included a blend of the Earth genders and races, along with some new Aliens among the leading characters. Deanna Troi was a hybrid between a human and a Betazoid, which was a species of human-looking telepaths. In addition, the century had brought about political changes, and the Klingons were no longer enemies but allies. The security officer on the
Enterprise D
was Worf, a Klingon who had been adopted and raised by a human couple. In the transition from TOS to NextGen, Klingons
had been reimagined, and they were now portrayed by huge humans with makeup that added a set of bony ridges to their foreheads. The change was never explained in the show but was discussed in fan-generated fiction, as well as in books approved by the show’s creators. The official explanation was given in DSN. It was an experiment in genetic engineering that went awry. The NextGen Klingons were the real ones. In NextGen, Klingons were better developed in the fictional sense. Their society was focused on honor and advancement through combat.

With Klingons now allies, new races of enemies were encountered, including the Cardassians, who played a central role in DSN, again humanoid, with a pronounced neck ridges and Orwellian culture; and the Borg, a culture of cyborgs. The Borg were not any specific race, as they incorporated all life-forms they came across. When they encountered any new species, they would broadcast: “We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. We will add your technological and genetic distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile.” They were a powerful culture and the species they encountered were, indeed, often assimilated. However, we only encountered humanoid Borg due to the need to contain costs and given the technology available to the show’s creators.

Another entity often encountered in NextGen was called Q. Originally apparently a single entity, we learned that the Q were actually a race of super powerful beings, with essentially godlike powers. Q could, in an instant, change reality, travel through time, destroy planets and stars, and kill or bring people back to life. It was never fully explained why Q would ever have any interest in the comparatively primitive Federation.

Other
Star Trek
Spinoffs

DSN,
Voyager
, and
Enterprise
introduced new races and political situations. The series were ongoing examples of how Aliens were no longer a novelty like they were in the 1950s movies, but rather were just characters to be used to advance the plot. In a sense, the various series were just a throwback to Homer’s
Odyssey
or Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
. The races of Aliens encountered were interesting, and their differences from humanity were often the basis for the story. However meeting an Alien was run of the mill, just another type of diversity to either embrace or recoil from, but in either instance an opportunity to learn.

Without a doubt, the
Star Trek
fandom—nicknamed Trekkies and calling themselves Trekkers—is the most well known in all of science fiction. As of this writing, the literary empire of
Star Trek
is 46 years old, with another
movie released in 2013. The franchise is alive and well, and I hope it will continue to, in the words of Spock, “live long and prosper.”

Star Wars

If
Star Trek
had a cerebral component, the
Star Wars
franchise was pure fun.
Star Wars
had a much different goal, which was to tell a classic adventure tale of a boy who didn’t realize his princely origins, a princess in distress, and a powerful and evil adversary.
Star Wars
is a timeless story, in a setting “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away.”

The
Star Wars
franchise began as a single movie released in 1977. The story of the film included vital plans stolen from an evil empire. These plans are for the Death Star, a mobile battle station with sufficient power to blow up an entire planet. A princess by the name of Leia was bringing the plans to troops rebelling against the Empire. Before the princess is captured by the malevolent Darth Vader, the plans are placed in a robot (called a droid in the movie), and they make it into the hands of a farm boy named Luke Skywalker. He teams up with a Jedi knight called Obi-Wan Kenobi. The Jedi were once the protectors of the galaxy, part philosophers and part warriors, keeping the peace with their trademark weapon, the light saber. Obi-Wan and Luke discover the plans and resolve to bring them to the Rebels. They enlist the help of a smuggler named Hans Solo and his copilot called Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookie, which is the first Alien main character we encounter, a 7-foot-tall hairy humanoid, reminiscent of Bigfoot and what one character called “a walking carpet.”

The group escapes Luke’s home planet, but their ship is captured and drawn into the Death Star by a tractor beam. They figure out a way to neutralize the tractor beam and escape. However, prior to the escape, Obi-Wan Kenobi engages in mortal combat with Darth Vader and loses. In addition, Luke’s group realizes that Princess Leia is on the Death Star and free her.