Star Trek: The Continuing Mission
"Integration"
Review by W. Joseph Thomas
"I suppose here in the twenty-fourth century you come up with plans days in advance… before they don’t work for you."
--Captain Paul Edwards
Bottom Line: Unremarkable. Now watch me remark on it for a couple thousand words.
2 out of 4 stars
Let's get this review kicked off with some general statements. First, the good news: I've been hired! By the time you read this, Roger (henceforth to be known as Our Benefactor) will have already published several reviews under the WJT banner, but those reviews were just my sample pieces. So this marks my first regular review, and no doubt the beginning of a long march to complacency as Our Benefactor starts paying me the Big Bucks. Soon, I may be making enough money from this column to fund my Star Trek CCG habit, or maybe even pay for a gallon of gas! Fear my power!
Second up, I need to disclaim myself here. This is the first time I've given a fan production a rating that falls below two-and-half stars. Two stars, on my scale, is still "Average (lower half)," but it's certainly not a good rating. I expect to take some heat for this. Allow me to explain.
Rating a fan production almost always poses a reviewer with a dilemma. Fan shows are not professional. Most don't try to fashion themselves as professionals, even though everyone uses professional quality as a benchmark. Fan film artists are amateurs. They know that; they present themselves as such, (almost) without exception. They make these films and animated shows and radio dramas not for the money (they’re not legally allowed to make any), but for the sheer love of Star Trek or whatever fandom they happen to be working in. They then give it to us, the greedy online consumers, for free. How great is that?
And how dare some reviewer take the sweet nectar of free Trek from the flower of fan filmdom and start criticizing it as if it were a show people get paid to make, like Stargate: Atlantis or Doctor Who? What gives me the right?
My reply, which is by no means the only or “right” answer to this question, is twofold: first, I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for anyone who goes and produces free Trek for my consumption. I know how hard it is to produce this stuff, and, whether you’re doing your show in video, greenscreen, audio, CGI, or with plastic action figures, it’s an incredibly time-consuming process that requires feats of volunteer management and stamina merely mortal men can only dream of. As a fan film fan, I like the majority of it, and, when I don’t like something, it isn’t going to make me irate like it would if it were televised Trek. (“Terra Prime” was the last episode of Enterprise, and anyone who says otherwise is getting sent to minitru.) However, as a reviewer, it’s my job to critically take these shows apart and put them back together on a sliding scale of win-versus-fail. That’s what makes me useful, something other than a cancer on society, and, on a practical level, it’s what brings me readers. I can’t afford to limit myself to glowing reviews like last week’s “Where There’s A Sea” article.
The second part of my reply is less a reason and more a hope. My fond hope, and maybe I’m giving myself too much credit here, is that, by holding fan films to the same critical standard to which I hold professional productions, I will help promote professionalism within the community as well as advertise that professionalism to the rest of the world. To borrow one of President Bush’s occasional moments of wisdom, I hope this column serves to fight the soft bigotry of low expectations often faced by fan film producers. Yet this sentiment smacks of “accountability journalism,” which is roughly the worst thing ever to happen to the AP, so maybe we should forget this paragraph.
Hopefully, even if you don’t agree with me, you can see my reasoning, and won’t send me a round of hate mail for this mildly negative review. (Although, to be quite honest, I’m not really worried about hate mail unless, God forbid, I should enrage the fairly rabid Hidden Frontier fanbase.
Now. Here I am at the top of page three, and I haven’t even started on my review of “Integration.” So enough about general disclaimers; there be Star Trek here!
Odds are, if you sit around complacently in the Hidden Frontier and Phase II fan film orbits, you haven’t heard of Star Trek: The Continuing Mission. This is because Sebastian Prooth and his production team have eschewed the standard Trek promotional channels of forum-posting and news releases to Trek online interests, opting instead to try more mainstream promotion. TCM was notably featured on CNN.com last December, and Prooth has easily the largest publicity division of any audio drama--in fact, come to think of it, I can’t think of any other fan show with a section of staff dedicated solely to promotion. My spies tell me it works; Prooth does brisk day-one download business compared to other fan audio dramas of its age and stature. However, the drawback of mainstream promotion is that people who are tuned into the Treksphere never hear about your show. I was lucky enough to notice TCM via TrekMovie.com, which stuck it in a news bullet nine months ago.
“Integration” is only TCM’s second outing. After a promising December pilot, called “Ghost Ship,” the production went into a long silence. “Integration”, originally scheduled for a February release, ended up being released in two twenty-minute parts. The conclusion didn’t make it to the web until late July. But, hey, better than Exeter’s delays, right?
And, all told, it’s a pretty good second outing. Most fan audio production groups seem to wander around in the dark for their first five episodes as they try to work out production kinks and size down their casts from thirty indistinguishable voices to five or six very distinct ones. Not so Continuing Mission. I already know the major characters, even if I can’t remember their names. I believe I’ve commented before on what a difficult time I normally have with characters, so the fact that I can tell Commander Darius Locke from Chief of Security Thomas Plummer from noted Kruge actor Christopher Plummer speaks well of “Integration” and TCM.
This is probably because of “Integration”’s strongest point: its acting is really good. This is no surprise, given the cast; a quick perusal of the cast list informs me that everyone in the cast has some acting or radio chops. On the other hand, voices who have only done radio aren’t always good at acting. These guys are. Tim Renshaw and Stephen Perkins do a great job holding down the center of the show with occasionally over-the-top but generally solid delivery of their lines, and the chemistry in their shared scenes is evident. Each of the rest of the main cast chips in with his or her own clear and distinct voice. The secondary cast of Adm. Shore (Tom Cook) and Kalag (unidentified actor) also do yeomen’s work raising their characters to a reasonably entertaining level, despite being dramatically undermined by their own script. (More on that later.) I hope it will be taken as a compliment to Mr. Cook when I say that I was expecting throughout the entire episode to hear Admiral Shore say, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
The production of “Integration” is downright excellent. There were simply no audio artifacts, at least not as far as I could hear, which allowed the show to really feel like a professional work. Sound effects were sprinkled liberally in every scene, and every footstep, computer boop, or Klingon roar achieved the intended effect of sketching out the scene for us listeners while leaving just the right amount to the imagination. (This is one of audio drama’s great strengths.) For the canonistas out there, they can rest assured that every sound effect is the genuine Trek article. What’s more, every sound is clean. And, with a mere handful of exceptions, era-specific. I don’t know where TCM’s library came from, but it’s not from any online source I’m aware of—and I’m aware of them all.
Music, too, is very well-used. All of it is from movie and TNG-era Star Trek, which certainly adds to the consistent Trek feeling of the production. I think, all told, I prefer to hear a wider variety of music—Lost Frontier’s main theme and Excelsior’s careful use of Halo motifs for certain alien characters come to mind—but I’m not sure it would work for a show as dedicated to traditional Trek as TCM seems to be. As an additional point in favor of the “Integration” crew, the unknown scorers of the episode obviously went to some pains to line up the music with what was happening on-air. Frankly, it paid off nicely in several places, especially during an otherwise predictable confrontation sequence at the local starbase.
I must add, however: in the words of Admiral Shore, “This is the Twenty-Fourth century. We are evolved. We are civilized. What we have here is a failure to…” No, wait. There goes Cool Hand Luke again. Where was I?
Right! “This is the Twenty-Fourth century. We have evolved. We have rebelled. There are many copies. And we have a…” Oh, boy. I’m having way too much fun with this.
My point is, this is either the twenty-fourth century or 2008, depending on how you look at it. Either way, the human race has evolved and civilized a great deal since 1987, to the point where the soundtrack to “Encounter at Farpoint” sounds about a century out of date, a relic of a very dark time in Earth’s barbaric musical history. I know there’s not a lot of TNG music publicly available to us, but TCM would benefit by never using that particular soundtrack again. I can’t now find where it was used, but a mention of it is in my notes under the heading “Facepalms,” so there must be some EaP material in “Integration” somewhere. And it should be excised. And possibly burned.
Now, so far, I’ve pretty much covered production only. This is an odd inversion for me: I usually like to jump right into the story in a review, because the story, in the end, is what it’s all about. Production and presentation should just be icing, and if you’re lucky they won’t damage the story. My core problem with “Integration,” and the reason for its unimpressive rating, can be summed up thusly: the production values of “Integration” were much better than the story. It was like watching an episode of ninth-season Stargate SG-1, after the producers became too wrapped up in their show’s mythology to give us a sustainable number of clever standalones, and the excellent actors (yes, Ben Browder was great as team leader) and special effects teams were left spinning their wheels in the mud of mediocrity.
Now, ninth-season SG-1 was quite watchable. The writing team still knew how to write banter, and they still knew how to manufacture dramatic tension in the (increasingly frequent) event that the story didn’t do it spontaneously. They weren’t winning any Hugos (though the wonderfully offbeat “200” in Season 10 got a nomination), but they were still putting out pretty much okay stuff.
“Pretty much okay” sums up “Integration.” The story revolves around Klingons, a General Kalag in particular, who is seeking revenge on Captain Edwards for an atrocity Edwards and the crew of the Montana supposedly committed before falling through the time warp in “Ghost Ship.” Unfortunately, we know within the first fifteen minutes that Edwards did no such thing and that it’s all just a misunderstanding caused by century-old Romulan skullduggery. Once that’s out of the way, the plot plods along without any twists you haven’t already predicted in the time it took you to read this sentence. In fact, now that I really get to thinking about it, the A-plot of this episode is downright dreadful. The only thing that might surprise listeners is an eleventh-hour deus ex machina, which is followed immediately by another deus ex machina of a slightly different sort.
There are two places in which you can do a deus ex and get away with it: (1) when it’s the appropriate and emotionally cathartic ending to an Epic Storyline (Doctor Who’s “Last of the Time Lords,” for instance), or (2) when you have a very good point you’re trying to make. Classic Star Trek was able to use reason two from time to time, most memorably in its subtle anti-war piece, “Errand of Mercy.” There is no such excuse here. “Integration” simply writes its captain into a difficult situation, checks the time, realizes there are only five minutes left in the episode, and uses two completely irritating contrivances to save the day.
It doesn’t help that General Kalag is one of the most two-dimensional aliens ever to grace a work of Star Trek. If you took a poll of all the traits Trekkies thought belonged in “the stereotypical Klingon,” packaged the results together, and made a character based solely on that information, you still wouldn’t have a Klingon as inherently dull as General Kalag. Whoever played him (again, the credits that came with “Integration” are incomplete) did a nice job playing into the caricature in order to give the character what little life he had, but Kalag, as written, had all the character depth of a one-off Kim Possible villain, only without the funny dialogue.
The decent parts of this episode, then, are the ones that have nothing to do with the Klingons. The setting alone provides a rich store of material. The series is apparently going to take place in the 2350’s, towards the end of the Cardassian Wars and shortly before the completion of the Galaxy-class prototype (as mentioned in this episode). In other words, this is the High Age of Diplomacy in Star Trek, one of the untapped sections of the “Lost Era.” It is the apex of negotiation and bargaining, before the exigencies of the Borg incursions and Dominion War forced Starfleet to become military-minded again. Drop a twenty-third century captain into this new world of ship’s counselors, diplomat-captains, and everything else we came to know and hate about the first couple years of Next Generation, and you have yourself rich opportunity for conflict and far too many mentions of “cowboy diplomacy.” “Integration” exploits this in a predictable but reasonably entertaining manner, although, much like Kalag, Federation antagonist Admiral Shore has all the subtlety of a two-ton Rectyne monopod. The conflicts involved in the Montana’s titular “integration” form a competent emotional core to the hour, and having this subplot take up more time than the Klingon-centric A-plot was definitely the right decision.
Incidentally, is there an intended irony in having a strongly-accented Southerner be the one complaining about “cowboy diplomacy”? It was so much of a subversion of the normal Southern stereotype that it had me laughing at a couple of moments. If that was deliberate, kudos to the TCM team on it.
The strong point of “Integration”’s writing is the inter-character banter, though. It’s what salvaged this episode from a much harsher rating. The second episode of a series is often bad—take “The Naked Now” or “Parallax” or “Fight or Flight”—so, frankly, I went into this half-expecting that I’d end up writing a review like this. However, the clever turns of phrase and pithy one-liners that dot the script, even if they don’t help this episode’s overall story problems, make this a very listenable hour and a good omen for TCM’s future.
That being said, I wish they would cut it out with the self-conscious Trek references. “A few loose ends to tie up,” the Kobayashi Maru, and, most annoyingly, a famous McCoy line (the last line of the episode!) all managed to make appearances. If they stop that, I’ll be a happy camper.
So, would I recommend it? If you're the type who, like me, gets a warm, fuzzy feeling just experiencing something that captures the relatively tame, standalone Star Trek atmosphere typified by average episodes of Next Gen and Voyager, then I heartily recommend "Integration." You might even enjoy it more than the darker and/or more serialized twenty-fourth century fan films like Hidden Frontier and Intrepid. The high production values of "Integration" will certainly make it easy for you to believe that you're back watching canon Trek, and, frankly, I can't say that for any other production right now except Exeter.
Plus, like I was saying, the atmosphere of "Integration" is more Trek than that of most other Trek fan films. I know Exec Producer Seb Prooth has read Michael Piller's unpublished memoir, and, after this light, funny, happy-ending episode, I can't help but feel like some form of Piller's "Roddenberry Box" is indelibly stamped on Continuing Mission, for better or for worse. I can't say that for any of the other TNG-era shows, all of which seem to be gunning for various levels of DS9/Galactica-style serialization or darkness or both. (I sometimes wonder if all latter-Trek fan producers worship at some secret Gaius Baltar-style Ronald Moore cult.) All things considered, though, if you're one of those fans who turns off the television when Next Gen's "Sub Rosa" or "Naked Now" comes on . . . well, then, you'd better avoid "Integration." It has the right feel and the right production values, but it's just not that good.
Well, that was an obscenely long review. But, hey, it was my first. Feels pretty good.
Next Week: Atlantis repeats, and I seize the opportunity to discuss the implications for Jewel Statie fanboys after Dr. Keller is turned into a plant!
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