The bridge is yours.

-May 6 will be my favorite day of 2012.

-If I was a star Japanese pitcher, looking at the available evidence, I’d probably want to stay in Japan.

-HBO GO may finally be available to all HBO subscribers.

-Time to start playing with Google Music.

-Really excited for the Star Trek sequel.

Both Susana Polo and Graeme McMillain raise an interesting question: is Star Trek too tonally inconsistent, and too averse to long-arc plots to make it on television today? As McMillan writes:

All of the Treks – with the possible exception of Enterprise – had a wonderful schizophrenia about their tone that is very rare on television today; you would never really know, tuning in, whether you were going to see a drama or a comedy, or whether the drama was going to be of the “This is an allegory for a real-world situation and we shall all be making a Very Serious Point” variety, or the “We’re trying to make a suspenseful thriller, so expect long looks punctuated with stirring soundtrack strings” one, or even the “Want an action movie in less than an hour? We’ll do our best, but don’t judge us too harshly” attempts. What was weirdly wonderful about Trek was the play-of-the-week nature of the show, even when there were longer-running continuities running through episodes, and television – especially genre television – has lost that variety; normally shows stake out their tone early on and stay there, hoping to ensure loyalty through stability and knowing exactly what you’ll get when you switch on.

I think they’re generally right about tonal consistency, though something like Community does veer from being entirely goofy and surreal to fairly grounded and human, so it’s not entirely impossible. And I think with Star Trek, it’s easy enough to solve: have each season revolve around a long-arc mission and all of the things that happen along the way, some of which will be serious, some of which will be goofy, all of which will offer opportunities for different tones and different points — in other words, make the show like Buffy. But I actually wonder if the Very Serious Point bit, the optimism about a progressive, secular, interconnected vision of the future might actually be the bigger challenge for networks that are either skittish about politics or committed to a gritty, pessimistic take on them. I would love to see a network show (as opposed to a cable network like Showtime or SyFy) have a major character on a show who is a rehabilitated extremist.

The bridge is yours.

-Awesome women in fantasy.

-Lieutenant Uhura, space program champion.

-Odd Future gets an Adult Swim show.

-Who owns modern mythological figures?

-Say what you will about Mel Gibson, the man is persistent.

The video for “You and I” is far from Lady Gaga’s most original, and it’s interesting that she made the video with the so-called “Country Road” version of the song. This being Gaga, she’s in drag as her male alter-ego Jo Calderone (which I’d actually like to see more of), people are keeping mermaids out in the barn, and androids are meandering down the backroads:

I actually kind of dig that last bit of it. In a weird—but good—way, it reminds me of the car chase scene that introduced us to what a punk James T. Kirk was as a kid in J.J. Abrams 2009 Star Trek movie:

I think we often assume that the future’s going to look totally different than it is today, when actually a lot of it might look the same, but with tweaks. We’ll still have corn fields, it’ll just be robot cops who police them—and android hitchhikers who meander down them.

Or it could just be a riff on Lady Gaga’s collaboration with Farmville:

Either way, she seems pretty determined to conquer the heartland.

I realized that it might seem that I’ve been advocating a couple of contradictory positions this week: that Bert and Ernie shouldn’t get married because the Sesame Workshop has stated definitively that neither character is gay and they are not in a relationship, and also that J.J. Abrams is acting with cowardice in throwing up barriers to adding a gay character to the Stark Trek universe to complement the franchise’s racial diversity. There’s a complicated web of issues here, all of which deserve careful consideration and respect: the rights of artists to define their own creation; the powerful desire of minority groups to see their experiences represented and validated in the culture that’s important to them; and the role of popular culture in normalizing non-white, non-heterosexual experiences and imagining how the future will be different from the past.

I should say up front that I think the folks who create characters have a right to determine the basic facts around them and not to have them reversed. This is why the Star Wars Holocron makes sense both as business decision and as narrative device: it simultaneously protects George Lucas’s rights to determine the basic facts about Luke, Leia, Han, and company while opening up other space for people to experiment and produces a grand narrative that, though it differs stylistically, can be read as a whole without being confusing or contested. The Sesame Workshop has said that Bert and Ernie are not gay, and I don’t think, however much we wish it were true, we have the right to contest that definitive laying down of continuity. We can rage against the tide as much as we like with fan fiction, but as consumers, we have to accept the limitations of the universe that are laid down for us. That said, if a creator leaves room for a character to be shaded in and expresses no particular discomfort with additional detail, I’m comfortable with character expansion. George Lucas may have created a fighter pilot named Wedge Antilles, but for all we knew, he could have been the gay son of Corellian glitterstim smugglers. Lucas left it to Michael A. Stackpole to fill in Wedge’s history, to give him an attraction to strong, intelligent women and the lost dream of opening up a fueling station with his dad. If there are no objections from Gene Roddenberry’s family to filling in Hikaru Sulu’s — or another sexually undefined character’s* — background and fleshing them out as gay or bisexual, I think that’s fine and consistent with respect for artist-defined continuity.

If there were objections, of course, then I think they should be respected, however unprogressive I think those wishes are. But I do think if a universe is being rebooted, or expanded beyond its original conceptions, or if it has a tradition of adding new characters, then it is entirely appropriate for folks who want to see themselves and their experiences represented in those remakes or expansions to advocate for that. Archie Comics’ introduction of Kevin Keller has been handled beautifully in this regard. He was introduced in a way that was consistent with some of the core themes and storylines of the universe — as an object of rivalry between Betty and Veronica — but that added dimension to those old themes in a way that reflected not just the desire of Archie Comics to be more progressive but the actual lived experiences of teenagers today.

Julian Sanchez argues persuasively that the assertion that the Muppets don’t have sexual orientations# is an embarrassing dodge, and I agree. But it might be best to have two new characters who are introduced as a couple from the start and who are entirely no-nonsense about it. And if children are meant to model the Muppets’ behavior, it might also useful for the audience to see the Muppets treat an adult human gay couple (and perhaps their children) with love and affection as we’d hope they would in real life. Similarly, it makes sense for an Archie comics character date someone of the same sex, or deal with having a crush on someone who isn’t attracted to them, because those are the issues that the target readers are dealing with. In Star Trek, it’s less a matter of dealing with the specific characters’ relationships than it is establishing and reaffirming the values of the universe the audience is buying into. It makes sense to push for more diversity in art for the sake of realism and pulling new audiences and merely for its own sake, but if that representation can also accomplish strategic specific goals, so much the better.

*One weird thing to me in these conversations: does no one assume that the characters we see in heterosexual relationships could be bisexual? The persistent invisibility of bisexual in our culture, pop and otherwise, is fascinating.

#Another group of people who are invisible and our society and culture? Asexual folks.

Over at the League of Ordinary Gentleman, guest-poster Ryan B. thinks I’m being too hard on J.J. Abrams:

In defense of Abrams, he clearly wants to use Star Trek, a show that really is about what the future would be like if liberalism won and became the dominant ideology of humanity, to both portray the reality of same-sex love and advance the cause of gay relationships in a larger cultural sense. And he is struggling, in a way I think Rosenberg doesn’t give him credit for, to figure out how to make that work in a movie that has to be simultaneously a blockbuster, a work of art (for some definition of “art” – don’t interrogate this too much, please), and apparently now also a liberal clarion call. That’s hard!

The thing is, I don’t know that it is clear that Abrams is particularly engaged with Star Trek‘s progressive legacy on this or any other issue. Rather than being about exploration or governance, the plot of his 2009 movie is about security, and the security threat doesn’t actually say much about the nature of the universe. Nero isn’t the Borg, who want to impose a totalitarian vision of perfection on the universe: he’s just angry and destructive. Nero believes that the Romulans were sold out by the Federation, but Nero’s wrong — the destruction of his planet is an accident, rather than, as might have been more interesting, the result of Federation ineptness, callousness, or strategic coldness. I’m sort of entertained by the idea of Nero as an intergalactic Don Blankenship using the tools of mining for evil, but that’s a stretch beyond even the kind I’m comfortable with. The closest thing the movie has to politics is the idea that the Federation and the Academy are more welcoming of folks of mixed heritage than the Vulcan High Council is, but that’s pretty weak tea if we’re trying to imagine an awesome progressive society of the future.

And more to the point, as Zack pointed out in comments on my original post, you can include a gay character in a franchise without having the story be a story about that character’s gayness. If Abrams decided to give Sulu a sex life, he could do as little as include a funny throw-away reference to the boyfriend Sulu’s got back in port in the same vein as Sulu’s confession that by combat training he meant fencing lessons. It would shade in our vision of the future in a usefully progressive way. It wouldn’t actively disrupt continuity. And the inclusion of gay people in the background of a story who aren’t actively angsting over their sexuality isn’t tokenism. It is real, and it’s true, not just in the future, but today.

In a deeply odd interview (HT: The Mary Sue) with AfterElton, J.J. Abrams sets new standards in equivocating when he discusses whether he’d have an openly gay character in a subsequent Star Trek movie:

I would say that it is, you know, something that I would love to do, but just the way I would be careful doing a story that would involve any of the characters and their personal lives. The balance is always, what how does that story relate to sort of the bad guy, which by the way is always going to be that critical thing, what are they up against? The question how do you get into literally these are personal sexual lives of these characters?

I just wouldn’t want the agenda to be … whether it’s a heterosexual relationship or a homosexual relationship, to tell a story that was, that felt distracting from part of the purpose of the story is. So I’m in complete open-minded, you know, I’m interested in finding a way to do that but it’s almost like, it’s a tricky thing, because it’s the right thing to do and sometimes so is a story about something that also has some kind of meaning but do it and if it in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re doing it in order to make that point because then it’s almost a disservice. Because then it feels like “oh that stupid distracting subplot about you know, you know, that minority. Or those people… ” The thing that really matters to you as a writer. So the question is how do you do it where it doesn’t feel like why am I getting into that kind of detail about the character’s life if not just to make a point of it? So the answer is, I think it should be done and I’ve love to be able to do it. And the question is once we get through the bigger issues of certain structural things that are really the key to the show or the movie being done well.

I guess I must have missed something where Uhura and Spock’s relationship is integral to embodying the fight against Nero because dude came through a black hole to ban interracial relationships in the Federation. And Abrams, who says here that “I don’t know who’s assuming characters aren’t gay or are gay” in expressing concern about how fans picture the characters, doesn’t seem to have been so vastly concerned about the original conception of Spock and Uhura — in which Uhura hits on Spock and he blows her off — that he resisted pairing them up in his alternate continuity.

What worked about that pairing, in fact, was that Abrams and Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci did something that movies rarely do, but that is, in fact, totally natural: showed two characters in a relationship using sexual contact as a means of expressing tenderness rather than desire. The fact that Spock needed comfort in the wake of extreme trauma was specific to the plot, but there was no reason the person he got comfort from also needed to illuminate the Romulan threat. The same could easily, and comfortably, be true of a gay character. Someone should tell Abrams that it’s not a victory over tokenism to keep gay people invisible, especially when that invisibility is increasingly obviously at odds with the Star Trek vision of a progressive future.

Well, this is kind of nifty. The Star Trek theme park that’s opening up in Jordan is apparently going to incorporate a bunch of renewable technologies. Given Jordan’s reliance on oil imports, this actually makes a great deal of sense on a practical level, and it’s cool that the park’s going to have exhibits about various environmental issues, taking the show’s social messages seriously on both a design and programmatic level.

Unless King Abdullah starts inviting his fellow Gulf States monarchs over for all-night debates about the campy awesomeness of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (I can’t resist the idea that Spock was in Students for a Democratic Society) and the viability of producing dilithium crystals, the impact of the park will probably be more international than regional. Of course, it remains to be seen whether this is a viable tourist attraction at all: folks’ll make pilgrimages to San Diego, but Jordan’s a slightly more expensive plane ticket, even when you book a year in advance.