Chaos on the Bridge

Old school Kirk and Spock era Star Trek, if you follow the plots, are essentially police stories codified or dressed up as aliens, monsters and spaceships. The stories you are seeing are essentially law enforcement, security and the occasional health story of how police and other first responders encounter and deal with psychopaths, megalomaniacs, psychotics, or regular people who were smarter than average criminals and flaunted social convention.

You are essentially seeing police tactics and psychiatric regimes of how to tackle and sometimes treat people who have a leg up on everyone else, and are going to cheat, steal, or even kill their way to the top to get what they want.

So, when I watch this documentary and listen to the contradictory opinions and stories of who Gene Roddenberry was, what was happening, and who did what with what impact, I shrug my shoulders. When I worked on films and video one of the habits from everyone was to tell a story regardless of how truthful or dishonest it was. And that's the vibe I get off of this documentary.

Pretty much most of film and TV are like that, but with science fiction the idea is to inspire the smarter and more imaginative audience members to consider careers in law enforcement, military, medicine, or even intelligence services.

Original Trek was created in the wake of the end of the second world war and during the Cold War. And the Enterprise was the police cruiser that went around administering justice and law with some health overtones. Star Trek the Next Generation was essentially a giant therapeutic wing of a hospital where there were no problems, and that the audience was essentially the patient. My take is that once a fan had seen an episode that reflected their issues, they would leave and no longer be a fan. The pot served the subplots which became the focus.

What does this all mean? It means that this documentary, from my perspective, and what I've written here, was and is all smoke and mirrors trying to mask a mass hospital agenda that the production had for the audience. If you ever visited a private mental hospital everything is antiseptic and "perfect", where there are no problems and where there are no conflicts to facilitate the patients. And that's what the Enterprise-D was and is.

Ergo all of the stories about infighting, to me, are just more fodder fed to what fans this show has left, to mask the true agenda.

You know, I'm really just all Trekked out. This fictional property will never get back to the great writing it had in the 1960s. How anyone can watch Star Trek the Next Generation and be a fan of it, is just beyond me. But, all those sociologists and psychiatrists must know what they're doing, because apparently people like turning off their brains for TV and absorbing anything that gets presented to them.

So, remember, old Trek was a police show. New Trek in 89 was a primer for a younger and broader audience as a preparatory measure for the net connecting the world socially. Anything that tries to explain both flavors of Trek is just garbage, an effort at smoke and mirrors to obscure the true objective of the show.

Seeing Shatner interview people about so-called back stage dramas, again it comes across disingenuous. Part of undercover police work is to be able to act and tell a good yarn to get witnesses and perpetrators to reveal what they know. And that's kind of what film and TV are all about.

As a former wide eyed fan of the show, some of the happiest times I ever had were as a boy and young film major watching reruns of old Trek, and trying to come to terms with the new show in 89. After two writers' strikes, the first of which is mentioned in this documentary, and having seen personality conflicts and dramas for a TV show or two that were shot locally in San Francisco, the happiest day of my life was when I left a world of deception for the sake of it, a lot of which was to keep out anyone who had any ideas of misusing media for personal agendas.

Had I known now what Trek was really all about, in both of its iterations, I would have never had "stars in my eyes" about making my own Star Trek like show with a different setting, different technology, and just a different fiction altogether. But, I can watch this show without the acid flowing in my gut that I used to experience everyday I worked.

I didn't like Star Trek the Next Generation when it aired, hated it all these years, and now I understand why, and it took someone like Shatner to present to me the deceptive truth of how modern Trek was formulated with a bunch of fictional accounts of personality clashes. Oh well.

Should you watch it? Only if you're a die hard fan and think that this documentary will enhance your knowledge and pleasure of the fiction. As for me, well, knowing my parents [probably met mister Roddenberry, and helped contribute to the show's genesis, I can safely wave goodbye to the fiction.

P.s. The mysterious figure who didn't know how to write scripts but kept screwing with everyone's work, was probably a child psychologist and psychiatrist. Because that's all TV shows are all about.

We all love a good gossip fest, and William Shatner's expose of the troubles dogging the early years of Star Trek TNG ('The Next Generation) makes for plenty of entertainment.

This show is pretty lightweight and doesn't take itself too seriously, which is certainly down to Shatner's own direction and presentation. I found it enlightening to watch this immediately after the 50th anniversary documentary that paints such an uncritical view of the Star Trek universe.

If you believe the actor who played Captain Kirk in the original series might have some agenda at work in denigrating TNG, that may be true, but Shatner plays it fair and even-handed when it comes to doling out blame. And it's not as if the film is a work of fiction. There are plenty of people willing to appear on film shoveling the dirt, including Sir Patrick Stewart himself.

Shatner's film is amusing and fascinating more for casting the human condition in sharp relief rather than telling us anything we didn't already know about the TNG series itself. It's likely to affront some TNG fans, but if you accept that the human beings working on the series are more fallible than the crew of Enterprise D, you will likely appreciate and enjoy this minor gem.

"Chaos on the Bridge" has a story worth telling (the creative staff disorder during "The Next Generation"'s nascent years), but it suffers from that reality TV editing that ruins everything. You know the kind: the rapid cuts and frenetic pacing, like the producer (or Shatner in this case) has a deathly fear of slowing down. It's the last thing a Star Trek documentary needs. I know it's not comprehensive, but even at a mere 60 minutes, surely there's some room to let the thing breathe.

That said, there's enough here to entertain even the ardent TNG fan. I was surprised to learn that Mitchell Ryan and Yaphet Kotto were among those actors considered for Captain of the Enterprise for Paramount's glitzy new Star Trek series. And that the revolving door creative staff was due to a leadership vacuum.

I genuinely like the spirit of this thing, and would love to see someone tackle a broader documentary down the road (one that covers the series as a whole). Shatner's onto something here, if he wants to shed light on Star Trek shows.

Just stop cutting it like a reality show.

6/10

I really enjoy having Shatner lead the documentaries for the development of star trek. My only wish is that they had delved into the writers issues developing TNG more... It just, maybe in hind sight, appears obvious to me that the creation of story conflict is easy between the federation values and of its characters against an antagonist. I think there is more to the story of the first two seasons of TNG than they could have dug into..

I'm happy this documentary was made. The interviews with the contributing cast and etc were very I intriguing as both a trekkie and an outsider interested in TV or movie production.

I'm not exactly a trekkie but I've read several books on both ST:TOS and ST:TNG so this isn't my first exposure to the "dirt". From all I've seen and read elsewhere this show rings true. It also has some new info I'd not run across before.

Contrary to some reviewers I thought the pacing was fine, the graphics were a nice touch and it was really even handed in it's treatment of people. There were a couple of spots with bad editing such as one segment which begins with them talking about someone but they failed to include any intro to tell you who they were talking about. It took a minute to figure out who it was.

As a viewer I disagree with many of the people interviewed who suggest that the first two seasons were not very good. Seasons 1 and 2 may have had a different focus but as a viewer of them without any foreknowledge that they supposedly weren't as good I never felt that way. They were fine.

One interesting aspect revealed by the interviews is that there was much turmoil and angst going on almost the whole series. What they experienced did not, IMHO, come across negatively in the final product. To hear them tell it there were at least half a dozen people who in one way or another literally saved the show from going down in flames. The reality, again from a viewer's perspective, was that the show was fine throughout production and that the behind the scenes melodrama, which makes interesting background, wasn't actually all that big a deal to the final result. The drama of "I'll quit", or "you'll never work in this town again." add spice to people's lives but the show had a life of it's own and the two, while intertwined, did have their own lives.

One of my favorite parts was early on discussing the casting of Picard. Many were considered but Patrick Stewart was not viewed as a serious contender in part due to his baldness. They relate the story of flying his cheap toupee from the UK to the US for a final casting call where he wore it. He left and took it off and then got a quick callback. He returned sans toupee. As Bill Shatner and others discuss all this toupee related trivia I kept looking at Shatner's toupee generated hair and wondering what was going thru his mind and whether he might have a typically Shatneresque remark. Sadly he did not.

All and all a fun hour with some worthy tidbits for the Star Trek aficionado.