Star Trek Continues Ep. 5: "Divided We Stand"...(spoilers)
- Thread starter Warped9
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I watched this the other night.
I just... I don't know where to begin.
Ryan Thomas Riddle essentially covered all the points I would have, I think, but the overall feeling I got while watching this fan film was just one of utter exhaustion.
Exhaustion from poorly conceived stories, lazy dialogue, empty themes, all dressed up as allegorical yet serving little (if any) coherent purpose.
Certainly the production values are excellent, and probably the best in the fan film realm of Star Trek (if I were James Cawley right now, I'd be really nervous, I think of how much this outing has blown away Phase II in terms of scope) but it's also just more of the same fan film nonsense.
A hack scumbag like Marc Cushman -- whose very career of late has been built up on spinning tall tales based on other people's words -- couldn't do this film justice. It's just more of the same -- non-writers thinking they know how to write and yet still just obviously stumbling in the dark, aimlessly and hoping to pin the tail on the donkey.
No thanks.
All the drama, pettiness, bickering, sensitive egos, and bullshit has piled up around these things and made it just too exhausting to care anymore.
I just... I don't know where to begin.
Ryan Thomas Riddle essentially covered all the points I would have, I think, but the overall feeling I got while watching this fan film was just one of utter exhaustion.
Exhaustion from poorly conceived stories, lazy dialogue, empty themes, all dressed up as allegorical yet serving little (if any) coherent purpose.
Certainly the production values are excellent, and probably the best in the fan film realm of Star Trek (if I were James Cawley right now, I'd be really nervous, I think of how much this outing has blown away Phase II in terms of scope) but it's also just more of the same fan film nonsense.
A hack scumbag like Marc Cushman -- whose very career of late has been built up on spinning tall tales based on other people's words -- couldn't do this film justice. It's just more of the same -- non-writers thinking they know how to write and yet still just obviously stumbling in the dark, aimlessly and hoping to pin the tail on the donkey.
No thanks.
All the drama, pettiness, bickering, sensitive egos, and bullshit has piled up around these things and made it just too exhausting to care anymore.
Which was just as legal North of the border as South. And remained legal in many places around the world AFTER the war as well for some time.
Again, Union apologists like to ignore Lincoln's own words (in the First Inaugural, for example) that his cause was Union and taxes, not slavery. This is not in any way disputable, as the documents and texts of his speeches and writings are public record.
Neither is it possible to dispute his anti-democratic, un-Constitutional acts to silence political opposition and control the courts and press. They are also a matter of record
The South is always accused of being the aggressor, however, the fact remains that they only fired Sumter after the North tried to sneak in reinforcements (which they had pledged not to do).
Had the North simply allowed them to leave in peace, which was their sovereign right as free states, then the War would not have happened.
Those are the historical facts.
If you want to argue that Kirk's blind admiration of Lincoln and his "Let's go boys!" attitude throughout the majority of the episode reflects the simplistic storytelling of 60s Trek, I can agree there. I'm simply disappointed that the earlier, more conciliatory tone Kirk espoused (which would be the accurate way a 23rd century man would look at it) was dropped so swiftly.
Very true. Many of the Irish volunteers, for example, hoped to take their military skills (and what weapons they could scrounge or abscond with) and take them home to fight the British occupiers there after the War was over.
Yeah, because "Brazil only got there in 1888" is a great argument for morality.
Actually, they don't. They just pay attention to the two facts that the South's incredibly explicit cause was slavery and that Lincoln's Unionist cause* eventually emancipated the slaves. (To a more limited extent than is commonly remembered, but yes it was a very significant step.) Nothing else is needed to make the North look preferable to the South and there's no way around that.
* That Lincoln didn't start out trying to emancipate the slaves is actually a super-basic part of every Lincoln documentary ever, it's a bit sadly comical that you think you're engaged in some sort of expose there.
By comparison with the South's anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional acts, small potatoes.
And correctly so. Laying siege to Fort Sumter was an act of aggression*. You don't get to just demand that the US Army abandon a fort and then portray its refusal to do so as "aggression." Using resupply as an excuse to attack it is false now as it was then and just as unconvincing.
* So for that matter was aggressively attempting to spread slavery to states and territories that didn't want it.
If you're yearning for some "even-handedness," though: in a distant galaxy and another lifetime, I once posted this on a Trek board whose name shall not be spoken:
The rule that "the past is a foreign country" is pretty important to remember with the Civil War and what followed it, IMO.
Pleased as I am in the present day that the North prevailed, the fact is that the South and the North weren't really divided over whether White supremacy was a good thing. They were divided over what form it should take.
To Yank sensibilities, the South's system was agrarian and antiquated and the reliance on close-to-free Negro labour proved it. The way of the future was industry, employing a "free" workforce whose "free" nature was at the time believed to be tied up with its relative whiteness; even Northern abolitionists had a paternal and infantilizing view of Negroes, which is why Harriet Beecher-Stowe's classic "Uncle Tom's Cabin" has such a bad reputation posthumously and being called an "Uncle Tom" is an insult. The ultimate goal of the North that the Southern planter aristocracy so feared was that it would isolate the plantation slavery system to the South and simply let it wither on the vine as the rest of the world marched on by; and that was an assumption the abolitionists shared. What Lincoln represented to the planters was the threat of containment and subsequent impoverishment by comparison with their Northern counterparts.
Genuinely egalitarian idealism did manifest in the North, but it was mostly in the minority and after a few years of Reconstruction it mostly withered. The irony of the Civil War was that the South never had to secede to preserve slavery, it just had to repackage it in a more modern-looking and industry-friendly form. After the Civil War and compelled by necessity, it did so: disguising agrarian slave conditions as "sharecropping" (with most of the basic social factors antebellum still in place, buttressed by technically-illegal but largely-unpunished debt peonage), and recasting the rest as "convict leasing," abetted by laws that basically criminalized the act of being out in public and visibly free-while-Black.
Ultimately, it worked, and the resulting system industrialized the South, staying largely intact until the Second World War. The only difference (to be fair it was a major difference) was that a large number of freed blacks were able, in the wake of the Civil War, to migrate away to the North, where they'd confront their own battles with entrenched forces of White supremacy (hence the situation Martin Luther King found in Chicago when he went there and found much of the White working class turned out against him carrying swastika signs and backing segregation).
To some extent I actually get the Southern bitterness over Yankee hypocrisy, because at certain levels the hypocrisy was very real and the real purpose of the Civil War was visibly about preserving the Union, not so much about eradicating slavery (at least until it became quite clear that undermining and crushing the planter aristocracy, who became a synecdoche for "slavery," was necessary to the military goal). But of course the defeat of the Confederacy was an important turning point nevertheless; the many freed slaves who signed up to fight for the Union weren't doing so in vain, it's just the change involved was more incremental than the mythology of the Emancipation Proclamation makes it appear.
Pleased as I am in the present day that the North prevailed, the fact is that the South and the North weren't really divided over whether White supremacy was a good thing. They were divided over what form it should take.
To Yank sensibilities, the South's system was agrarian and antiquated and the reliance on close-to-free Negro labour proved it. The way of the future was industry, employing a "free" workforce whose "free" nature was at the time believed to be tied up with its relative whiteness; even Northern abolitionists had a paternal and infantilizing view of Negroes, which is why Harriet Beecher-Stowe's classic "Uncle Tom's Cabin" has such a bad reputation posthumously and being called an "Uncle Tom" is an insult. The ultimate goal of the North that the Southern planter aristocracy so feared was that it would isolate the plantation slavery system to the South and simply let it wither on the vine as the rest of the world marched on by; and that was an assumption the abolitionists shared. What Lincoln represented to the planters was the threat of containment and subsequent impoverishment by comparison with their Northern counterparts.
Genuinely egalitarian idealism did manifest in the North, but it was mostly in the minority and after a few years of Reconstruction it mostly withered. The irony of the Civil War was that the South never had to secede to preserve slavery, it just had to repackage it in a more modern-looking and industry-friendly form. After the Civil War and compelled by necessity, it did so: disguising agrarian slave conditions as "sharecropping" (with most of the basic social factors antebellum still in place, buttressed by technically-illegal but largely-unpunished debt peonage), and recasting the rest as "convict leasing," abetted by laws that basically criminalized the act of being out in public and visibly free-while-Black.
Ultimately, it worked, and the resulting system industrialized the South, staying largely intact until the Second World War. The only difference (to be fair it was a major difference) was that a large number of freed blacks were able, in the wake of the Civil War, to migrate away to the North, where they'd confront their own battles with entrenched forces of White supremacy (hence the situation Martin Luther King found in Chicago when he went there and found much of the White working class turned out against him carrying swastika signs and backing segregation).
To some extent I actually get the Southern bitterness over Yankee hypocrisy, because at certain levels the hypocrisy was very real and the real purpose of the Civil War was visibly about preserving the Union, not so much about eradicating slavery (at least until it became quite clear that undermining and crushing the planter aristocracy, who became a synecdoche for "slavery," was necessary to the military goal). But of course the defeat of the Confederacy was an important turning point nevertheless; the many freed slaves who signed up to fight for the Union weren't doing so in vain, it's just the change involved was more incremental than the mythology of the Emancipation Proclamation makes it appear.
I get being skeptical about absolutist "good vs. bad guys" framing of the Civil War for the reasons you'll see there. But buying in to neo-Confederate myth-making and "Lincoln was an evil tyrant" paranoia is not remotely a good way to convince people that the war was more morally complex than is advertised. And even given its full moral complexities, the Union still comes out the better and Kirk still comes out right in this episode and there's really just no way around that.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the highlighted phrase ended up coloring your perception of the episode to the degree that you hated it from the start...
You are wrong. I watched the episode fully willing to give it a chance, despite who was commissioned to write it.
The episode as a whole let me down. Big time.
Bringing up Cushman out of the blue more just seems... odd.
It's not odd or out of the blue. Cushman shares a writing credit for the teleplay on "Divide We Fall," and he's been listed as a consultant on the production in Continues' previous episode.
(if I were James Cawley right now, I'd be really nervous, I think of how much this outing has blown away Phase II in terms of scope) but it's also just more of the same fan film nonsense.
Well, I am not nervous and as to scope, I don't share your opinion. Honestly, If I wanted to visit a reenactors camp, I certainly could. I live in Ticonderoga which plays host to thousands of 18th century reenactors annually.
Well, I am not nervous and as to scope, I don't share your opinion. Honestly, If I wanted to visit a reenactors camp, I certainly could. I live in Ticonderoga which plays host to thousands of 18th century reenactors annually.
No. Slavery was not legal throughout the North at the time of the Civil War. Yes, slave states remained in the Union. Yes, Lincoln was in no way a saint.
Here's the kicker, though. None of that matters. Nothing anyone in the North did or said can change the fact that the primary issue of the war from the Confederacy's perspective was to ensure the preservation and expansion of slavery.
Saying the Union did bad things too doesn't make the Confederacy any better. History is neither black and white, nor a zero sum game where one bad thing cancels out another. You can't make the Confederacy's support for slavery any better by cataloging the Union's sins.
The Confederacy was fighting for an evil cause, and whatever the Union's aims at the start of the war, it opposed that evil even if only by default.
Apparently you're taking this quite personally. I'd suggest putting the last line of your rant up to a mirror, because from an outsider's perspective, "the drama, pettiness, bickering, sensitive egos and bullshit" applies equally to your post.
I don't care who wrote it. I enjoyed it. No, it isn't perfect and I have my quibbles, but overall it worked for me.
I found it generally in keeping with TOS in the kinds of stories it did. I found the chatacters largely consistent with what we've seen before with few lapses (and I can apply that to STC as a whole). I think the acting is among the best I've seen in a fan production.
Yes, it could have been better, but the overall production was quite polished and decently executed. There was really very little to jar me out of it.
My main quibble is in the writing and even there it's minor. It's a question of polishing some bits of dialogue, rearranging a couple of scenes perhaps and adding a bit more meat to the story. But I could make those same remarks about many professional productions.
This production is far from being hack work, embarassingly awkward or even just average, certainly when measured against fanfilms in general.
I found it generally in keeping with TOS in the kinds of stories it did. I found the chatacters largely consistent with what we've seen before with few lapses (and I can apply that to STC as a whole). I think the acting is among the best I've seen in a fan production.
Yes, it could have been better, but the overall production was quite polished and decently executed. There was really very little to jar me out of it.
My main quibble is in the writing and even there it's minor. It's a question of polishing some bits of dialogue, rearranging a couple of scenes perhaps and adding a bit more meat to the story. But I could make those same remarks about many professional productions.
This production is far from being hack work, embarassingly awkward or even just average, certainly when measured against fanfilms in general.
Which means dick because the 13th Amendment was passed by Congress and sent to the states 4 days before the meeting.
Hell, 7 states had already ratified it by then. 20 states ratified it before Lincoln died.
All of this discussion of the Civil War is very interesting, and could certainly be an inexhaustible source of discussion. No doubt, as historiography and historical study have improved, general popular understanding of the causes of the war has increased significantly.
But the *real* point is, in a Trek episode written and produced in the 1960s, would Kirk have speechified and ideologically sided with the Union the way he did in "Divided We Stand"?
I think that, yes, that is pretty much in character with his depiction on the original series.
Kor
But the *real* point is, in a Trek episode written and produced in the 1960s, would Kirk have speechified and ideologically sided with the Union the way he did in "Divided We Stand"?
I think that, yes, that is pretty much in character with his depiction on the original series.
Kor
Regardless of who the writer is, Karzak does bring up a few good points about the writing of this episode, even if it was delivered bluntly.
From the part of his post that's been cut out from the above:
The work itself doesn't hold up because of these points. The story isn't well-thought out, the dialogue feels obligatory in most scenes (especially the Kirk-McCoy heart-to-heart), and there is no solid theme. Because of this, it plods to the inevitable conclusion: Kirk and McCoy get out of their dream-induced dilemma.
Now that doesn't mean it isn't entertaining. For some it is, for others it isn't. I enjoyed parts of it, I cringed at other ones (as I noted in my previous post). YMMV.
I remember "The Omega Glory."
Yes, I think in a hypothetical 1960's version of this episode Kirk would have sided ideologically with the Union. However, I think the speechifying would have been saved for a final summing up at the end of the episode more than being spread through it. I'd also expect more of a connection between the two aspects of the story than just coincidence of what the nanites were scanning when the explosion went off.
There was nothing happening on the ship or with the rest of the crew that reflected Kirk and McCoy's circumstances or situation.
Can you at least admit this is the best acting a Marc Cushman script has ever received?
Neil
In the kind of story it was it parallels TNG's "The Inner Light." In that episode the rest of the crew were basically standing around fretting while Picard went through his probe induced dream. So "Divided We Stand" is hardly alone in how it handled this story.
The probe in TNG struck me as a pretty stupid way to communicate your information to whoever it might encounter. Hell, the damn thing could have encountered someone physiologically fragile and induced death in some manner. What happened in TIL was deliberate action whereas what happened in DWS was accidental.
I don't agree DWS was a porrly conceived story. One might not care for the idea, but that doesn't make it a poor idea. That said it might have come off a bit better if it hadn't immediately followed "The White Iris" wherein in both episodes Kirk is in physical danger because of something going on in his head. A telling difference is that I just couldn't buy into what was happeing in TWI and how Kirk was being affected. That and the touchy-feely and hurt/comfort sensibilities that are so intrinsically TNG.
If I'm going to complain I would say stories like "Inner Light" and "Divided We Stand" are essentially variations of the holodeck stories done so often in TNG, DS9 and VOY.
One key distinction is that while "Divided We Stand" isn't a "professional" production I enjoyed it more than "Inner Light" which I found to be something of a snore.
The probe in TNG struck me as a pretty stupid way to communicate your information to whoever it might encounter. Hell, the damn thing could have encountered someone physiologically fragile and induced death in some manner. What happened in TIL was deliberate action whereas what happened in DWS was accidental.
I don't agree DWS was a porrly conceived story. One might not care for the idea, but that doesn't make it a poor idea. That said it might have come off a bit better if it hadn't immediately followed "The White Iris" wherein in both episodes Kirk is in physical danger because of something going on in his head. A telling difference is that I just couldn't buy into what was happeing in TWI and how Kirk was being affected. That and the touchy-feely and hurt/comfort sensibilities that are so intrinsically TNG.
If I'm going to complain I would say stories like "Inner Light" and "Divided We Stand" are essentially variations of the holodeck stories done so often in TNG, DS9 and VOY.
One key distinction is that while "Divided We Stand" isn't a "professional" production I enjoyed it more than "Inner Light" which I found to be something of a snore.
To be honest, I was never the biggest fan of "The Inner Light," either.
While DWS definitely wasn't my favorite kind of story, my biggest issues lie more with the execution than the conception. I think they could have done a much better job with the same basic idea than they actually did.
While DWS definitely wasn't my favorite kind of story, my biggest issues lie more with the execution than the conception. I think they could have done a much better job with the same basic idea than they actually did.
And this comes down to the writing I think. I have no idea of the process these fan produced stories go through, but I would hazard that a strong story editing would definitely be helpful. Someone(s) who could go through this and point out and help fix the missteps.
Someone who could point out, "Not bad, but maybe here is how you can make it better."
Any available D.C. Fontana types around?
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