Better than yesterday

[scarfman]

crossposted to startrek

On a comics message board I was discussing Superman Returns, and -

No, this isn't off topic. Stick with me.

I. On a comics message board I was discussing Superman Returns, and I said that where Lois went wrong in her Pulitzer-prize winning editorial was in stating that the world doesn't need a savior. Not that the world needs a savior, but that's not why Superman does what he does. He does it because Earth was his savior and he's paying forward what the Kents did for him.

Another poster objected that when, in the scene in the movie, Lois tells Superman that the world doesn't need a savior, and he takes her flying to tell her about all the people he can hear (though she can't) who are crying out for help, that pretty much says to her Superman thinks the world does need a savior. The other poster admitted to being familiar with few other Superman stories and allowed as how my position might be supportable by some of them.

In response I admitted that my unexamined assumption, indeed based on all my experience with the character, had colored my reaction to that particular line in the movie.

II. Diane Carey's Ship of the Line is a Star Trek: The Next Generation novel set at the commissioning of the Enterprise-E. While Picard is off on an espionage mission, deciding whether he wants the E² (and playing a holodeck program gifted him by Riker which analyzes James T. Kirk's significant battles), Riker is serving the E²'s maiden mission under Morgan Bateson, the 23rd-century Starfleet captain played by Kelsey Grammer in the last seconds of Cause and Effect. Bateson has been given command of this mission because the Federation-Klingon alliance has fallen apart and he's the only active Starfleet captain with experience of Klingons as enemies, and Carey does a fine job writing Frasier Crane in a starship captain's clothing. But Bateson brings his command staff from the USS Bozeman and they're not all adjusting well...

Anyway, there's a scene near the beginning when Riker and Bateson are squared off arguing on the bridge of the E². Riker is declaiming his personal credo as a Starfleet officer, one that no doubt many Starfleet officers share, that one must strive every day to improve oneself, to become a better man.

Bateson replies, "Better than whom, Commander?" And Riker gets all flustered and embarrassed because he's been so un-p.c. as to imply that the men surrounding him are second-class citizens because they're from a hundred years ago.

But there is a real answer to Bateson's question, one that any Starfleet officer ought to have been able to come up with on the spot, that's not, "Better than you, Bateson." It's: "Better than I was yesterday." And it bothers me that Carey dropped that ball because her other Star Trek fiction, especially her two Kirk backstories, shows that she understands starship captains.

III. This discussion includes several expressions of opinions that the Berman administration in the franchise front office, individually and collectively, not only didn't grok the heart of the property as conceived and built by the Roddenberry administration but were actively out to subvert it. This was news to me. In fact I distinctly recall one of them stating at the time of the creation of Voyager that with all the heavy politics in DS9 and the latter part of TNG they'd got away from exploring and needed to get back to it, which struck me at the time as very perceptive and very respectful of the property's roots. But even I freely admit - yea, glory in - that Enterprise was the closest thing in the Berman years to remaking Star Trek over his way.

I think perhaps the reason I haven't seen any discrepancy between the Roddenberry vision and the Berman vision is that I didn't rely only on what Berman put out to form my impressions of Berman subproperties. My favorite TNG novels are the ones from Carey, David, Duane ... all authors who wrote Star Trek novels first and were already immersed in the Roddenberry vision before Berman came to power, as was I. Berman never controlled my Star Trek - I did.

IV. Which only goes to show: You can't let anyone but yourself - even a franchise's legal owners and operators - tell you what to keep in your canon.