Astrogator's Logs

It has been a longish while since I last wrote a post. The madness of US politics and the pandemic hardships, on top of the never-shortening to-do list, temporarily saturated my bandwidth. But that doesn’t mean I’m totally off the swim of cultural pop, as the opinions below demonstrate.

— The Mandalorian has confirmed itself as dedicated fan service with its assiduous mining of archives in classic missing-scene fanfic mode. Yodling/Grogu/whatev remains consistently annoying and my views of the Jedi remain unchanged (in an interesting sidebar about childgathering in Star Wars that has been left to lie fallow so far, Din Djarin himself is revealed to be not just a janissary, but also a member of a extremist splinter cult in his adoptive culture).

That said, Rosario Dawson made a poised and poignant Ahsoka Tano (Anakin’s name trembles on her tongue at one point, reminding us of the Jedi Council’s lethal self-satisfied stupidity); and Katee Sackhoff was a steely, unflappable Bo-Katan Kryze. However, Temuera Morrison’s Boba Fett looks to be phoning his part in, even if we take the character at his full age and hard living. Where’s Julian Arahanga (as fierce as Morrison in Once Were Warriors) when you need him?

— Discovery is also mining its archives (Andorians, Trill symbionts, empaths) while threatening to become full-time therapy cinema; too, I think Saru making Tilly his Number One because she’s not fully qualified and has nebula-sized insecurities is an appalling decision. The series creators appear to be advancing the tenet that it’s good to have a wobbly high-ranking officer (“No elitist experts!”) plus it’ll be convenient when disobedience suddenly becomes the right stance for a plot twist. It also brings up, yet again, the fact that Starfleet is in fact military, despite its pious mouthings about scientific priorities.

Equally against not just common sense but also principle is the Vulcan president’s unilateral decision to covertly hand over potentially dangerous data to a powerful entity that may not be benign, despite the stated cogent reasons—as well as the transparently self-interested wishes—of all the motley groups that make up this universe’s Vulcan-with-Romulans. Parenthetically, it’s interesting that (with the partial exception of Enterprise) no Star Trek series has managed to make Vulcan just going about its business arresting on its own, resorting to variations of blowing it up instead—perhaps the “Follow your feeeeelings!!” crowd’s ultimate revenge.

The transportation of the Qowat Milat sisterhood of lost causes from Picard into Discovery adds a potentially bracing condiment to the stew, but Gabrielle’s initial behavior towards her daughter is inexplicable unless you chalk it up to convert zeal; likewise, Michael’s avoidance of finding out how her little brother fared once she literally left him behind is equally against character. At least David Ajala (Cleveland Booker, the worthy inheritor of the Book moniker from Firefly/Serenity and a far better partner to Michael than Ash/Voq) remains balm on both brain and eyes, just as Ethan Peck (younger Spock) and Anson Mount (Captain Pike) did in the previous season.

Both The Mandalorian and Discovery try to show what happens after an empire has fractured into tribal splinters. The Mandalorian is better at capturing the anomie, opportunism and potential of this configuration, whereas Discovery dangles reconstruction optimism in typical Star Trek fashion. Of course, the franchise hedges its bets by having its concurrent Picard outing hard at work to deconstruct this hopeful mirage. The combined view from Discovery and Picard suggests that the Federation was/will be as good an overlord as the Empire. At least Discovery is no longer summarily killing its mother figures, while The Mandalorian hews to the Lucas diktat of bringing kids up without them. On the third hand, I’d hate to see Ahsoka Tano abandon her own quests to help raise Gluglu, despite fetching Madonna-and-Child poses in that episode.

— I recently finished two science fiction novels that looked extremely promising at the start but fizzled out spectacularly midstream: The New Wilderness by Diane Cook and Goldilocks by Laura Lam.

Wilderness is an apocalyptic limited-knowledge-POV diptych that’s admittedly atmospheric but totally lacks character depth (everyone remains a cipher) and context underpinnings. Goldilocks starts with the launch of a fascinating unsanctioned mission (with interesting correspondences to the Mercury 13), only to then spring all the hoary tropes on record: demonic powermongering crone, unplanned pregnancy as an unexpected boon, deus ex machina global rescue. Where are good editors when you need them?

— Last but not least, I saw Ammonite, a film purporting to “freshen up” the story of Mary Anning, one of the intrepid explorers who changed science despite the strictures laid upon her by Victorian mores. Beyond being a second-class human (aka a woman), Anning was also working-class and self-educated, additional stones in an already bulging bucket of handicaps. Cuvier accused Anning of fraud, since someone like her could never possibly have achieved what she did. And of course the conclusions forced by her findings (she was Darwin’s contemporary) went directly against the dictates of what was then state-sanctioned religion.

It comes as no surprise that the “freshening up” in Ammonite is a no-holds-barred sexual bonfire between Mary Anning and Charlotte Murchison, respectively embodied by Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan—both outstanding at portraying complex characters. In real life, Anning and Murchison hunted fossils together and became close friends; and of course Victorian-era close friendships between women could be anything from the equivalent of the Han laotong to full-blown love affairs and Boston marriages.

The chemistry between the two performers is incandescent, the sex scenes undeniably hot. And Winslet, in particular, excels at presenting Anning as a formidable presence who won’t be bent into performing the traditional feminine appeasements even for love. However, the focus on the love affair detracts from seeing Anning at her work. The glimpses we get are thrilling, and we crave more. Additionally, Murchison was not the wilting, lisping princess of this film: she was a geologist who traveled all over the world pursuing her interest, and it’s unlikely she had the brittle Betty Boop mannerisms that Ronan adopted for this incarnation.

If you want a truly insightful, absorbing view of Anning that does full justice to her vocation, read Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures. Chevalier chose a different counterpoint for Anning: Elizabeth Philpot, who’s reduced to a doleful spurned lover in Ammonite but was a far more dynamic figure in real life (inter alia she was Anning’s mentor). Women who broke molds deserve happiness and hot sex; but they also deserve full embrace—and illumination—of their creative fires.

Images: top, Bo-Katan Kryze and Ahsoka Tano in The Clone Wars animated series; middle: Book with his familiar; bottom: Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures

Selected related articles:

Who Will Be Companions to Female Kings?
Those Who Never Got to Fly
Where Are the Wise Crones in Science Fiction?
“We Must Love One Another or Die”: A Critique of Star Wars
The Hue (and Cry) of Stormtroopers
Of Fast Micro-Sails and Slow Swashbucklers
The Last Jedi: Lunchboxes for the Next Generation
“Nen lókdwenzish, Michael”: Sister-Brother Love in Science Fiction

“He turns the clouds into a horse, the stars into a bridle,
and with the moon as company he goes to bring her back.”
— The Dead Brother’s Song, 9th century CE
(perhaps the oldest surviving Hellenic folksong)

There’s a deeply-rooted biological reason why nearly all unforgettable stories are family sagas, whether they unfold on the plains of Troy or the spice beds of Arrakis: humans are not solitaries; we’re embedded in our kin groups. That, in turn, colors all aspects of our behavior. Whatever our technological level, we remain keenly interested in personal connections, as central throughout civilization as they were in the bands of ~100 members that comprised the initial gatherer-hunter tribes (and still do for our first cousins, the bonobos and chimpanzees).

Stories from all cultures explore the full gamut of family interactions; but mainstream and genre literature, especially the dominant Anglophone incarnations, heavily pluck only a few strings of that versatile instrument. Mainstream tends to foreground mating interactions – the inherent dilemmas between blood and chosen kin, between old obligations and new loyalties. Fantasy has walked in the steps of its predecessor, folklore, of which more anon. Science fiction (SF), on the other hand, notoriously fearful of “chick-lit” or “romance” cooties, twangs primarily on father-son conflict, with brother rivalry a distant second. Mothers are invariably dead in SF and fantasy, unless they surface as either evil stepmothers for daughters or impediments to independence for sons. The vast majority of SF has let one particular chord lie mostly fallow: sister-brother love.

Myths and folktales brim with sister-brother stories. Many pantheons have sibling pairs down several generations as their base: Gaia/Ouranos to Hera/Zeus, Nut/Geb to Isis/Osiris, Izanami/Izanagi, Yemanja/Aganju. The bond is also a major engine in literature: Electra, Ifighenia and Orestes; Antigone and her two feuding-till-death brothers; Alexander’s sister Thessalonike, ruler of Macedon after his death, said to have become inadvertently immortal and to have mourned him forever after as a storm-wielding mermaid; the Akritiká folksongs, starting with Konstantís and Aretí in The Dead Brother’s Song; the brothers in the Grimm tales turned to harts, ravens, swans protected (often at staggering cost) by their sisters; the Völsungs Siegmund and Signy aka Sieglinde, Kullervo and his nameless sister (and the Tolkien clones, Túrin and Niënor)…which highlights a reason why Anglophone speculative literature, far more priggish than its predecessors, avoids this chord except in the gritty-grotty dark fantasy cave where Cersei and Jaime Lannister dwell.

The not-too-hidden shoal, of course, is incest. Whereas parent/child incest has steep in-built power differentials, sibling incest is on almost-level ground – and several cultures have practised sibling mating, especially among groups where either “purity” of descent or retaining family property was paramount. Physical or cultural isolation also factored into this. Before the advent of DNA analysis, unless men kept punitive vigil over women, the paternity of offspring could never be incontrovertibly known, whereas children of maternal relatives were without a doubt genetically close to their mothers’ male kin. Hence, sibling matings – or, in much of the world, cousin marriages. A more benign alternative to obsessive patroling of female reproduction were the systems in which a sister’s children were heirs of her brother’s property and/or status (Fili in the film version of The Hobbit is an explicit example of this).

However, given the overall habits of humanity, there is a second, less obvious shoal. In most of the list above, even when brothers love their sisters, it’s invariably the sisters who must abjure their life, happiness or vocation to further their brothers’ objectives. Both Electra and Ifigheneia break all kinds of taboos and vows for Orestes’ sake; Antigone’s decision that she’s duty-bound to bury Polyneikes makes her forfeit her life when she’s at the cusp of a love match consummation; Leia ends up untrained in her Force potential and very much an adjunct to Luke and the shabby Jedi initiatives (the Mary Poppins act in The Last Jedi is an almost-contemptuous afterthought as is Anakin/Vader’s reaction when he becomes belatedly aware of her existence in Return of the Jedi); likewise, Alia Atreides is an instrument of Paul’s messianic goals throughout the Dune saga.

Fantasy has told tales of sisters shaping their lives around brothers, from Éowyn to Jane Yolen’s “Brother Hart”. Science fiction has mostly elected to slide by such bonds or keep them largely schematic: Leia and Luke don’t interact meaningfully once it’s established they are twins, and Leia’s great moment happens before she discovers she has a brother (Luke goes on to change the fate of the galaxy before he peters out into a damp squib). That said, two major exceptions in SF come to mind that show not only a sister and brother devoted to each other, but also a scenario in which the sister does not sacrifice herself in some way for her brother: River and Simon Tam in Firefly/Serenity; and Michael Burnham and Spock in Star Trek: Disovery.

The River/Simon arc is in some ways strongly reminiscent of The Dead Brother’s Song: Kostantís promised his mother that he’ll bring his sister home, and not even death will deflect him from his purpose. Simon, too, is committed to retrieving his preternaturally talented sister, at the cost of his family fortune and cherished vocation — though he, at least, is spared the ultimate sacrifice. It’s an incidental reward that Simon’s rescue of River uncovers the immoral experimentations of the Alliance. The siblings are lucky enough to find a hearth with the lovesome if unruly Serenity crew, where River has a hope of healing and both can forge meaningful lives.

Michael/Spock is a sentimentalized yet touching variation on Electra and Orestes. The Powers that Be mapped Michael’s character development primitively (Season 1: Logiiic! Season 2: Emotionnn!!), though it gradually emerges that she’s named after the warrior archangel for valid reasons. She also suffers from a surfeit of parents, but I’m happy that she’s granted not one but two mothers who do a whole lot more with their lives than mothering, and even happier that she evolves into a formidable mover and shaker in her own right who’s allowed a lover (standard bumps are put in that path, but at least they’re not the career-versus-family cliché). Even rarer is that the series also lets her love her little brother and be loved by him without faux-edgy penalties. Of all the interaction arcs in Star Trek – and beyond – that’s the least trodden.

[Parenthesis 1: Spock’s total silence on the topic of a sister was a major roadblock for original-universe Star Trek fans. By the end of season 2, Discovery managed to have its cake and eat it, too: remain canon by virtue of industrious retrofitting, but also allow AU scenarios by catapulting Discovery to where none has gone before. The crew that stayed behind is as interesting and fresh as the one that went ahead…and by adding Section 31 goings-on we face the prospect of at least three series, with potentially huge lunchbox/paraphernalia lucre.]

Spock’s inner conflicts, echoed by Michael’s, remain compelling and poignant. In Discovery he reconciles with his adopted sister after a long estrangement and they help each other in crucial ways (to say nothing of the universe’s long-term future). Of course, this is a Hollywood series and a franchise captive to both tradition and profit. So the derring-do is arbitrarily ratcheted for unearned drama. Nevertheless, in a manner that’s unusually quiet for Hollywood, brother and sister enable each other to fulfill their immense potential. The ending is a trailblazer on several levels: their adieu is stark and in minor key; it also shows Spock – a potent cultural icon of long standing – first willing to follow his sister into the unknown, then acknowledging her as his lodestar and role model. Mind-boggling that this happened only in 2019, but at least it happened.

[Parenthesis 2: What made a crucial difference, to me at least, was Ethan Peck’s take on Spock. It’s a welcome original angle (as much as that’s possible with the character). I vastly prefer his interpretation to Zachary Quinto’s, though some of this is leakage: I detest the reboot, which has totally abandoned Star Trek’s exploring mindset for Fast-n-Furious-in-Spaaace grinding noises.]

Sister-brother love is a hybrid like Spock, like Michael – poised between that of mates and parents/offspring, between agape and eros. It shares some of the frisson of the former, the deep hooks into the solar plexus of the latter. The next cycle of Discovery may be interesting – and, who knows, that of Enterprise as well if the producers choose parallel developments (those lunchboxes…). But it won’t have Amanda Grayson’s children of the heart urging each other to ever greater achievement. Nor is it likely that Whedon will add to the Serenity/Firefly ‘Verse. Everything must come to an end. But the gatherer-hunter part of me wishes I could see more of Michael with Spock, River with Simon…in their full flowering.

Postscript: I predict that in future seasons Discovery will be allowed to do the occasional deus-ex-machina foray into the “regular” space of Enterprise, if only for Michael to stock up on hugs with Spock, her adoptive parents & Tyler.

Related Articles:

Iskander, Khan Tengri

Who Will Be Companions to Female Kings?

Grandmothers Raise Civilizations

Hidden Histories; or, Yes, Virginia, Romioi are Eastern European

Where Are the Wise Crones in Science Fiction?

“We Must Love One Another or Die”: A Critique of Star Wars

Mystique: The True Leader of the X-Men

Mad Max: Feral Kids and Chosen Families

Mediterranean Diasporans: Dúrin’s Folk

Of Fast Micro-Sails and Slow Swashbucklers

Images: 1st, The Dead Brother’s Song (etching, Katraki); 2nd, twin bear cubs

Everyone who’s not on a silently running nuclear sub has said their piece about The Last Jedi by now. I have a few stray thoughts of my own – few, because I don’t want this sorry contraption to take any more time from my finite allotment. Losing two-plus hours of my life to watching it was bad enough.

I found The Last Jedi sloppy and contemptuous of its audience. It shares these attributes with the rest of the Star Wars franchise except for the first two films (IV and V in the revised gospel). But it’s additionally static and derivative. Its real closest relative is Star Trek Voyager: high on woo, nil on substance, cynically hackneyed. Why bother with plot, dialogue or characterization when you can count on a base that’s conditioned for knee-jerk devotion? It’s unabashedly sodden gruel, even if it liberally uses colored water. Brief random points:

— All the nominally powerful women spend almost their entire precious time mothering infantile men: Rey pulls double duty with Luke and Ben/Kylo, it takes the two most senior resistance leaders to control Poe, Finn gets Rose all to himself. There’s no dwelling on such trivia like Leia losing both her partner and her only child, and Rey’s hero quest is abridged to gazing into mirrors – perhaps in preparation for when she starts primping like a proper Disney princess.

— Finn & Rose meet cute while she’s tasering “traitors” who are abandoning the cause – except I thought the Resistance was voluntary. Otherwise, what makes it different from the “tyranny” it opposes? Speaking of the latter, Snoke (who?) is a boring non-entity whose sole function is to remind us how appalling the dialogue has been on all SW installments.

— The Resistance appears to lack even a shred of a plan, and this cannot be disguised by the garbled, muddy dogfights that pop up like quantum clockwork (with full sound in space, yet, except for the silent end of Dern-Purple-Hair). The battles themselves are so poorly choreographed that you neither know nor care who’s who.

— The franchise owners happen to think they’ve democratized things by positing that everyone has full Force abilities and can wield them proficiently by just wishing it. It’s good that the toxic stew about the Force is no longer an officially meta-approved religion (with its acolytes gleaned by involuntary childgathering yet). However, what they’ve accomplished with this is to effectively demolish the concepts of learning and discipline, in line with the accelerating trend against the “elitism” of expertise in any domain.

— Starting with The Force Awakens, the powers that be didn’t even bother to create new musical leitmotifs. Whatever music is there is programmed to trigger leftover emotional reservoirs from previous Star War rounds.

Which brings me to the larger point. The Last Jedi is in essence lazy canon fanfic that wants to pass as original, with sketchy characters whose serial numbers are visible underneath the thin, brittle veneer: Ben/Kylo is what is known in SW fandom as “suitless Vader” with the matching facial scar and waxed torso; Rey is the obligatory singleton-per-trilogy feisty smurfette (the almost-certainly temporary placeholder about her being “not of noble blood” is beside the point: neither was Anakin whose spiritual descendant she is – the Skywalker “dynasty” is barely two generations deep just like its US equivalents); Luke fills in for gnomic Kenobi and the nasty, obnoxious Jedi leadership (including the pseudo-zen spoutings and the pernicious quasi-lies to needy apprentices); Poe is reissued Han Solo on steroids; and so forth.

To be fair, I found Carrie Fisher’s swan song moments touching (ditto Mark Hamill’s final sunrise watch).  It did my heart good to see a crone featured as a quasi-forceful figure, and “a mere girl” effortlessly wield that most taboo object, a lightsaber, without its flame, er, wilting. Rose had a nice moment of paraphrasing Hector’s last words. And there was real tension between Rey and Ben, unlike the erotic/romantic (if only) pairs in the previous trilogies. But the need to guarantee lunchbox sales in perpetuity won’t allow promising seeds to germinate, let alone become new forests.

Related Articles:

Where Are the Wise Crones in Science Fiction?

“We Must Love One Another or Die”: A Critique of Star Wars

The Hue (and Cry) of Stormtroopers

Mystique: The True Leader of the X-Men

Mad Max: Feral Kids and Chosen Families

Mediterranean Diasporans: Dúrin’s Folk