“In human terms, a solid B-.”

Look, this season is ass. We somehow cured Kurtzman Trek of its idiot season-long story arcs, rightly demonstrating that if you don’t like the season-long story, you’re going to give the whole show a miss. So what did their brain trust come up with? Just do a rollickin’ Star Trek adventure, with heady sci-fi concepts introduced in a clever or unexpected way with fisticuffs and philosophical conversations and ripped shirts and deadly spores and Spock’s goddamn brain? No, modern Star Trek being creatively bereft from Kurtzman on down, they made the exact same mistake: why write Star Trek episodes when we can just take a tour through genre? Which seems like a good idea, I guess, except for a compounded fatal error. Not realizing that just dropping ST characters into trope-y situations from other sorts of stories only works if you understand the genre you’re writing. The compounded error is they don’t get this (from the top down) because they don’t understand that Star Trek, after sixty years this Tuesday, is its own genre now. Want to really impress a Star Trek fan? Don’t write a horror episode, don’t write a puppet episode, don’t write a noir episode. You don’t understand anything but YA dramas. Want to really impress a Star Trek fan?

Write a Star Trek episode, for once.

Anyway. The soap opera one. Like I said, to do a particularly effective genre take, you have to deeply understand the genre you’re tackling, or the audience won’t feel thrilled or excited at the new take or, really, anything you’re trying to do if the audience can’t tell if you’re writing a love letter to those kinds of shows, or if you are doing obvious and coarse parody. “The Griffin Incident” reads like a Space: 1999 episode from the mid 70s, and not a Star Trek joint. Star Trek illuminates truths, comments on the human condition, has room for wry and sardonic humor in the icy cold of space, cowboy diplomacy, philosophical conversations punctuated by phaser fire… if not a good crack to the jaw. Put everybody in different colored sleeves and have them encounter an issue with no resolution. Oh, yeah, sometimes in space you encounter that mysterious unknown force that messes you up but you learn nothing and continue on your way. Ghosts are real!

Honestly, I would have loved this soapy one in a season that had nine other ST episodes. That one where M’Benga and Chapel’s former triage commander during the Klingon war still looks like a brash lieutenant because he’s been using the transporter to become immortal, or that one where Pike visits 1970s Earth or Ortegas sees the Black Mountain and Fred Tatasciore plays a live-action Shaxs walking her through it or Scotty is the only one who can solve the diplomatic crisis with the planet of sentient adding machines in a trenchant observation about AI. Instead, dinosaur episode, haunted house episode (ghosts are real!), The Hangover one, the noir one, the Muppet one, and last week’s take on disaster movies, although, man. I think there is something seriously wrong with Kurtzman and the modern Trek stewards because they are in love with body horror, and it looks like it stems from the most adolescent urge possible: Because they can say fuck and do injury-to-the-eye motifs and rip Scotty’s finger off (and in lost-opportunity news, it wasn’t even the finger that Scotty canonically doesn’t even have) and and Ortegas’ hand chewed off by a baby Gorn and Number One’s compound fracture and M’Benga cut in half like Mel’s wife in Signs but also like the Pelia Muppet two weeks ago just emphasizing that “creatively bereft” thing, above. And omg all the crying.

Watch this deftly handled transition… The Venn diagram of Trekkies who recognize Deidre Hall as anything other than Electra Woman from fifty years ago is, like… me, Rob Lavender, Alan Doane, and nine guys named Murray. It’s not a lot, is my point, and if it’s more than I think, they didn’t get the reference because John Oliver took a famously well-received tour through soap operas this summer already and blew this little confection out of the water. General Hospital and Days of Our Lives parodied themselves with giant winks and nods but also steadfastly colored inside the lines, doing 100% satisfying episodes. If you were a soap fan of either show and had no idea who John Oliver was, you can read his scenes as 100% serious and adding to the lore of the shows. But playing a whole season as an excuse to not tell ST adventures? You get what happens here: genre rejection.

And this is what has been fundamentally wrong the whole time: the current bosses think if we just have fun, we can bring the audience along and they’ll have fun, too. But Kurtzman and his crew don’t think producing Star Trek is fun. If they did, they wouldn’t write the dinosaur one, the haunted house one (ghosts are real!), The Hangover one, the noir one, the Muppet one, the disaster one, and the soap opera one.

They’d write a Star Trek one.