Hi everybody! I'm back after a week in which I kept thinking there's something I was forgetting to do and then having to tell myself, oh right, I took the week off to get other things done.
I don't know if you caught the news but last week William Shatner went into space. I actually wrote about it for my day job. And I thought this week I would do a set of posts about patterns/techniques you find in Star Trek shows. If you're as much of a fan of DISCOVERY or PICARD as I am and are dreaming of someday going with their writing staffs where no one has gone before, hopefully this will be for you!
PATTERN ONE: THE GAP CHARACTER
There are some patterns to the show's writing that are pretty obvious, like its interest in moral quandaries. We'll get to talking about them later in the week, but today I want to lay out what I think is the real secret sauce of Star Trek, the engine of story and interest.
Here it is: Star Trek almost always has one or more characters who are either in between two worlds or a complete stranger to existence. Spock is the archetype of this—half human, half Vulcan; also the only Vulcan on a human spaceship, and so both strange to them in his ways and also puzzled and curious by the ways they proceed. There's a gap in other words, between him and them, and building a bridge to cross that gap provides an endless engine for storytelling. He's even given his own hand gesture, which both signals a desire to cross the gap--it's a gesture of blessing and peace--and by its nature as a thing only he does indicates the gap itself.
(When you're thinking about working with or creating a Gap character, it can be useful to play with ways of metaphor-izing a character's gap. If you can embody a gap, even in something as small as a gesture, it can create a great shorthand (no pun intended but sure I'll take it). I think that's why Spock's gesture pops so hard for people, actually, i.e. why when you say Star Trek today people do that gesture. Gaps by their nature stand out.
If you're looking for an exercise today, you might brainstorm some ways of embodying the gap in a character of your own. )
In TNG, we’ve got Data as the prime example of this, and I think he's perhaps the greatest example in the whole Trekverse. The metaphor behind him of course is Pinocchio, the robot who wants to be a real boy, and again the attempt to cross that gap provides endless story (and also heart) – at least until the movies, where he at times has emotions, and wow, that never seems to go well, perhaps because turning a switch on to let yourself feel things is not something you can easily explore in two hours while your ship is getting blown up. But also, I wonder if the problem is that gap characters NEED that gap. If you take it away by "completing it", they just don't make sense anymore. In fact in my experience they become really uncomfortable to watch, like suddenly we've stumbled into an Uncanny Valley.
TNG also eventually discovers that Worf is another great vessel for these kinds of stories. In some ways he’s closer to Spock than Data, very much caught between two worlds and proceeding in ways that are absolutely different than everyone else. People like to say that TNG has no real conflict or stakes (and by people I also mean me until I started rewatching). It’s definitely not Picard or Discovery or DS9 in terms of its level of stakes, but there is conflict and risk, and Worf is a big part of it. He’s always caught, and unlike almost anyone else on the show he has lots to lose, pretty much constantly.
The show even found a way to make Picard a Gap character, by having him get captured and changed by the Borg. In some ways PICARD is able to explore that more than TNG, but it is present there, too, a gap created by what he’s been through that can never be repaired. He says as much in an episode of PICARD, talking to Seven, I think, and it’s quite a moment. One of my favorite parts of PICARD, in fact, is the many times they stop to explore the disconnects and gaps within Jean-Luc, the ways he’s not emotionally available or kind of running away. You would never see that in TNG, and yet it fits perfectly with what we’re shown there.
(How bold is it for a
show to take the keystone character of the Federation, and turn him into
this strange outsider? It's really something. I wish TNG had done more with it, but in some ways it took a more contemporary storytelling approach to allow for that. And PICARD really has done so well with it. Love that show.
DS9 had Odo, who ends up being pretty much central to the series as a whole, and also Kira, who has that Worf-like between two worlds thing going on. Sisko, too, will have that between two worlds idea going on with regard to the Prophets and consequently Bajor. Voyager has the Doctor at first--a smaller character plotwise--but then adds Seven of Nine, who immediately becomes central to everything.
Lastly we’ve got DISCOVERY. And at this point I think the metaphor is pretty clear, and as with PICARD, it's the series' protagonist that is the central Gap character. In fact she’s not only a sort of mirror image of our OG Gapper Spock, in between Vulcans and Humans, but she’s this whole retconned character, which means she’s in between two things in a meta sense too, the old Trek universe and the new. That ends up being one of the exciting things about DISCOVERY in general-- the spore drive, Pike and Spock and Number One in the second season – there’s just a lot here that’s half changed, half dancing between the raindrops of the original series. And unlike say the Star Wars prequels, here it’s done with a refreshing impunity. They even give our protagonist a name that itself creates that sense of dislocation – a traditionally man’s name on a female character. It’s brilliant.
In the second season even more than the first, Saru becomes another place for these kinds of stories. The story of his people, oppressed to the point of not really even understanding who they are and what they’re capable of, is really interesting. In a sense the gap engine of his character is his relationship with himself. I’m sure there are plenty of characters in the past that people have looked to as metaphors for sexuality and self-acceptance, but I wonder if Saru isn’t the purest one.
Captain Georgiou has now become another fascinating gap character, someone from another universe with different morals and rules living in our own. In a sense so was Jason Isaacs’ Captain Lorca, we just didn’t know it. But in a sense that didn’t work as a gap character for exactly that reason. Rather than living a struggle – which might have been slightly more interesting in the end—he’s just a secret villain.
So if you want to write Star Trek, tell a story about a character trapped between two things, or on the outside. It doesn’t have to be one of the characters I’ve mentioned; really I think the best stories of most Trek characters end up built around some kind of issue of gap or Between Two Worlds conflict. And it's eminently relatable: everyone is in between or out of sorts in some way, and that’s usually where things get interesting.
