Imaginary Worlds - The Canon

Episode Date: October 8, 2014

Every sci-fi fantasy world comes with a canon of rules and back stories. Fans can be fiercely protective of their favorite canons, but canons are often patchworks created by people with conflicting ideas. Does a dense canon make better storytelling? Or does it alienate casual fans? I talk with Derek McCaw, who runs the website Fanboy Planet. And Rabbi Ben Newman explains why the Star Trek canon has a lot in common with The Torah. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Order now. Alcohol and select markets. See app for details. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Khan, you've got Genesis, but you don't have me.

Probably the most beloved film in the Star Trek franchise is Star Trek II, Wrath of Khan. The characters are, you know, at their best. There's a villain that really gets Kirk's blood boiling. They're all quoting Moby Dick. It's really great. But here's the weird thing about Wrath of Khan. Gene Roddenberry, you know, the creator of the Star Trek series, was booted by Paramount before that movie was made.

Now, Roddenberry was on the outs because the first Star Trek movie from 1979 was ponderous and confusing, and it was a box office disappointment, and this was supposed to be Paramount's answer to Star Wars. So he was allowed to be a consultant on Star Trek II, although his notes were ignored. And then throughout the 80s, he got more and more upset because he felt Star Trek was becoming militaristic, you know, fitting in with the rest of the Reagan era.

Eventually, Paramount let him develop a new show. I think we shall end up with a fine crew, if we avoid temptation. So he created The Next Generation. And the tone of the TV show was supposed to be a counterweight to the movies. It was more peaceful, philosophical. You consider yourself superior to us? I am superior, sir, in many ways.

But I would gladly give it up to be human. When Roddenberry passed away, most people admit Star Trek The Next Generation got better. Derek McCaw runs the website Fanboy Planet. He had this mandate that there could be no inter-crew conflict, that they would have moved past that. But even the most diehard fans realize that in storytelling, if everybody's getting along perfectly, then there's no story. It's not interesting. It might be great in a way of saying, that's wonderful. I'd like to believe that we could move to that point, but that's not worth an hour of television. So this is why I find this so fascinating. We have these huge disagreements among creative people about which direction the Star Trek franchise should go.

But for fans, the Wrath of Khan and The Next Generation are all taking place in the same timeline, in the same world. And they're very protective of this timeline, which is called the canon. Of course, every fantasy franchise is a canon. But the Star Trek canon is amazingly vast, covering 12 movies, six TV shows, including a cartoon show from the 70s, which Star Trek fans argue is in canon, and all of the novels that were written in between. Even William Shatner, when he was directing Star Trek V, got into an argument with George Takei about the canon and their own characters. about the canon and their own characters. Takei wanted Sulu to get his own command because of the books he had.

And he wanted to get his own command of the movies, and Shatner was arguing with him and said, but if you do that, then you can't be in the movies. You're not on the Enterprise anymore. Actually, even Derek McCaw thought that Shatner was not properly respecting the canon in Star Trek V. I was really irritated that Kirk never referenced his brother. He talked about having a brother, and he means Spock, but he actually had a brother who was killed in an episode of the TV series.

And I was like, I was really mad, but I thought, I get it. For a movie, they can't bog down explaining to an audience who probably haven't watched the series as obsessively as we have to know that, yeah, there was that episode where there's these little plasma things, these butterflies of flesh, like, you know, went into his back and killed his brother and his nephew with pain. I think the nephew survived. And then they don't reference that family again. So I was bugged that the movies broke that continuity. But most people just kind of went, eh, and accepted it and moved on. I have mixed feelings about canons in general. On the one hand, they can be very inclusive. If you're a serious fan, you know, you feel like you're part of a community that's taking this epic

ride together. But if a canon is really dense, bogged down with a lot of mythology and exposition, casual fans will just drift away, or they feel like they're not welcome. So in 2009, when J.J. Abrams rebooted Star Trek, I was all for it. I thought, you know, this is great. Let's have this new generation have their own Kirk and their own Spock. And, you know, when I watched the movie, I thought he was being respectful because he sets up that there's this time travel snafu so that everything that has happened in the canon still happened just in a different timeline. Leonard Nimoy's in the movie to sort of hand the baton to Zachary Quinto, playing Spock as a young man.

Since my customary farewell would appear oddly self-serving, I shall simply say, good luck. These new movies are really unpopular with Star Trek fans, for a lot of reasons, but the main one being J.J. Abrams just smashed the canon to pieces. For Derek McCaw, the point of the canon is not script continuity. It's about having faith in the progress of humanity. One of the things that matters to me about Star Trek is

it's a very hopeful vision of the future Star Wars is a long time ago in a galaxy far far away that that may not be us Star Trek says say like right now when I'm scared about where the world is and what's going to happen for my kids Star Trek tells me whether it's true or not, you know, that, you know, because it's fiction, but it tells me that we could work together and we can solve it and we can get past these problems. When the first space shuttle was built, the prototype, I always think it was a mistake on our part as fans to get super excited and say, name the prototype that can't fly the Enterprise.

Wait until one can actually go into space and name that the Enterprise. But I can remember, I guess it was 1976, where they rolled it out and they played the Star Trek theme and it was like, you know, and all the cast was there. It was like, yes, this is going to happen. We're going to make it. Over the years, a lot of people have compared sci-fi fandom to religion

or they'll say the canon for Star Trek or Star Wars is like the bible for fans and they may not be totally wrong about that good afternoon this is Gretchen can I have Rabbi Ben Newman, please? Sure, just a minute.

Thanks. Ben Newman is a rabbi at Congregation Harshalom in Colorado. Hey, Eric. How are you? Good. Do you have the iPhone out? All right. Okay. Ben is also a full-fledged geek. A few days before we talked, he ran a Sunday school class

where he broke the students into groups based on Disney properties. Marvel, Muppets, Princesses, and Star Wars. The Star Wars group used this idea of the Force and being like God. I didn't actually tell them about that, but that's something that I had thought when I was that young too, so it was pretty cool. So the Old Testament, which Jews call the Torah, is kind of like the original canon. And a long time ago, rabbis started to wonder about the gaps between the stories, what happened to the characters when, you know, they're not appearing in the Torah. And so they started making up their own explanations to fill in these gaps. And those stories are called midrash, or the plural would be midrashim. There's a whole bunch of midrashim written about Abraham, because

the story of Abraham basically begins with Abraham being told by God to leave his home. But it doesn't say anything about his childhood. So they come up with all these stories about Abraham's childhood and how he rebe anything about his childhood. So they come up with all these stories about Abraham's childhood and how he rebelled against his father. Oh my God, this is fan fiction. Oh, totally. Rabbinic Midrash is kind of like fan fiction. And they become part of canon.

If they feel true enough, if they're good enough, they stick. They become part of the story. In fact, this is my favorite example of a sci-fi canon acting like a religious canon. It was 1996. Digital effects were still pretty new. And the writers of Star Trek Deep Space Nine realized that they could do a time travel episode where they digitally paste their characters into the original show so they're standing next to the young Captain Kirk.

I have guards around the Klingons. I can't believe you don't at least want to meet Captain Kirk. That's the last thing on my mind. Oh, come on, Benjamin. Are you telling me you're not the tiniest bit interested in me? But then they came across a problem because in the original show, the Klingons just look like people with goatees and heavy eyebrows. And then in the movies and the later TV shows, they got a bigger makeup budget and better technology. And so they gave the Klingons these very alien-looking prosthetic ridges on their foreheads. So how do they explain the difference when these two Klingons from different TV shows and different time periods are standing next to each other?

They are Klingons. And it is a long story. What happened? Some kind of genetic engineering? A viral mutation? Would you not discuss it with outsiders? That's Midrash. You know, that's exactly what Midrash is.

It's a way of looking at the stories and explaining the discrepancies. Okay, so if it was a biblical story, right, you would say, oh, in Genesis 2, the Klingons had no ridges on their foreheads. But in Genesis 3, they did have ridges on their foreheads. You know, what's the deal? So why does the Old Testament have so many contradictions and inconsistencies? Well, because it wasn't written by a single person. And this is something that religious scholars agree on. They identify four distinct authors with different styles and different agendas and different philosophies. Supposedly, according to scholars, they were written at different time periods and they were collected together

and probably presented to the Jewish people around 400 BCE. Now at this point in history, the Jews are scattered across the Middle East. And there's a movement to bring them back to Israel, to unite them as a culture. They brought this document, the Torah, to the people and they read it publicly. Scholars say that's probably when it was first written down, first collected. So their leaders are basically saying, we have to stick together as a people because these are our stories. They define who we are and what we believe. But the authors of the Torah still disagreed in what the stories meant and what people were supposed to take away from them.

Sound familiar? Each of the different authors has their own kind of formulaic way about them. So, for example, there's one author called the Deuteronomic author who probably wrote the book of Deuteronomy and several other passages throughout the Torah. And the Deuteronomic author, his whole formula is basically, his or her whole formula is basically, you do good things, you'll be blessed. You do bad things, you'll be cursed. Basically, every time you see that in the Torah, it's an indication that that's probably written by that particular author. The book of

Job comes along, and the book of Job basically takes the genre of the Deuteronomic author and smashes it to pieces. And basically says, no, you do good things, and it doesn't necessarily mean that good things are going to happen to you. And you do bad things, and it doesn't necessarily mean that bad things are going to happen to you. And so there is kind of a, there's a response even within the genres. And I think you see that also in, that also in modern sci-fi also. At least when you have different directors or whatever, they're responding to each other, responding to their different interpretations of the character.

In 2014 AD, a council of scholars met to decide the fate of another canon. Disney, which of course bought Lucasfilm, is about to crank out a ton of Star Wars sequels and spin-offs. But first they had to grapple with the fact that all these novels had been written that took place after Return of the Jedi, told the story of how Princess Leia and Han Solo got married and had children and etc. So Disney came out with a statement saying that those books are now invalid. None of that stuff happened. We're going to invent a whole new history for these characters when we get to Episode 7. And so fans who believe that those stories were in canon are really upset. And J.J. Abrams, amazingly enough,

has managed to piss off a group of fans from an entirely different franchise. But that's just what we do as humans. We come up with stories, we fall in love with the characters, and then we fight over them. And loving and fighting is what makes a good story. Does he dance too in his books?

What? Oh, and if you are J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasten and you're actually listening to this podcast, which I'm sure you're not, but just in case you are, my cousins Ruby, Polly, and Sloan are total Star Wars fans and they have a ton of questions that need to be answered. What does Leia do with her Bausch costume? What happened

to the Stormtroopers after Return of the Jedi? Well, why don't they brainwash it, watch them to be loyal to the Jedi? Like, why don't, in the seventh movie? That's a good question. Or any bad guy, did any bad guys break her wedding? Did they crash it?

The secret? Yeah. This foot. Can you say, Luke, I am your father? Street dinosaur. Well, that's it for today's show. Thanks for listening. Special thanks to AIR, the Association of Independence and Radio,

Jonathan Mitchell, Derek McCaw, and Rabbi Ben Newman, who just wrote a children's book called The Enchanted Sukkah, where two kids find a sukkah which travels through space and time. You can like the show on Facebook or leave a comment in iTunes. That would be awesome. I tweet at emolinski. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.