Blood and Fire

I've been a big Star Trek fan since childhood, and I hold a special place in my heart for The Next Generation in particular.  It was the first Star Trek series I had ever watched, and for its time it was a fairly revolutionary and ambitious series on television.  Over 20 years later the series definitely shows its age, so it doesn't really hold up to the kind of production values and storytelling styles of today's weekly dramas, but I still have fond memories of it.

I was messing around online recently and found a list of unproduced scripts for each Star Trek series to date, some of which had plot descriptions.  One of these was titled Blood and Fire, an episode written for Next Generation's first season.  The episode was written by David Gerrold, who had written for the Original Series in the 1960s, and he wrote a few episodes during the first season of TNG.  However, his script for Blood and Fire was rejected by the show's producers due to its controversial subject matter, and Gerrold quit working on the show shortly thereafter.

The reason the episode was deemed controversial was because it was largely an allegory for the AIDS virus, and prominently featured an openly gay couple.  The script was written in 1987, so AIDS was still very new to the general public, and not many people knew much about what it was or how it was transmitted.  Ultimately the script was left on somebody's proverbial desk until a group of Star Trek fans decided to produce a fan series titled Star Trek: Phase II.

Now here's where things get really convoluted.  Star Trek: Phase II was supposed to be an actual television series in the 1970s until Paramount decided to dump the series in favor of turning the franchise into a series of films.  Star Trek didn't return to television until The Next Generation, and the rest is history.  However, a few years ago a group of Star Trek fans decided to take the concept of Phase II and make it into a series available on YouTube, and produced several episodes of the show, including a few scripts that were originally written in the 1970s.

One of the scripts they used for the new Phase II was Blood and Fire, and David Gerrold was brought back to rewrite the script, as well as direct the episode.  So now we have a series called Star Trek: Phase II featuring all the Original Series' characters, but starring a bunch of amateur actors.

I tell you all that so I can review the actual episode Blood and Fire, which is available to watch on YouTube.

I'm not going to talk about the acting in the episode much since, like I said, it's a bunch of amateurs.  All I will say is, the acting leaves a lot to be desired.  The actor who plays James T. Kirk does his best cheesy William Shatner impersonation, which ups the camp feel of everything, but it's kinda hard to take the show seriously when this guy seems more focused on mocking William Shatner than doing his own performance.

Anyways, let me talk about what I liked about the episode.  First, the production values are GREAT.  The sets and costumes look like dead ringers for the Original Series, and the lighting and photography are very similar as well.  I'm not sure if the look was designed to be nostalgic or a conscious effort to make the episode feel like it was truly produced in the 60s or 70s.  The special effects are also really good too, and they don't look like cheap CGI.  Even the transporter beams look exactly like they've been lifted from the effects used in the Original Series.  It's clear the team behind producing this web series has the money and resources to recreate the look and feel of the Original Series as much as possible.

You'll notice all the positives I've listed are technical aspects of the show.  That's because the actual story behind the episode is pretty average, and the controversial subject matter is very....odd.

I'll talk about the story first before getting to the controversial stuff.  The Enterprise is responding to a distress call from a Federation ship adrift in space near a twin pair of stars.  The crew finds it headed straight for impact with one of the stars, but they have to salvage whatever evidence and logs they can find before the ship is destroyed.  An away team beams over and finds the ship is infested with parasites known as bloodworms, which literally suck the blood out of any victim's body.

(I should add a note here that one of the other things I liked about the show was that there's a crew member's death in the episode, and his fate is in complete keeping with the "red shirt" cliche of the Original Series - very nice touch!)

With the away team stuck on the other ship, the rest of the crew has to figure out a way to eradicate the infestation and escape before the ship impacts the star.

By now you're probably wondering how on earth the gay couple fits in with the rest of the episiode.  That's my problem with the couple; it doesn't fit at all.  It's a completely arbitrary addition to the story, one that if it was excised from the episode, the rest of the show would be exactly the same.  I could certainly understand why the Next Generation's producers rejected the script in 1987 since American audiences hadn't gotten used to gay characters on television yet, but the real irony to the script's rejection is how Star Trek had been viewed as a very progressive series since the 60s (one only has to look at integrating a black woman and a Russian among the rest of the cast in the Original Series to see how socially progressive Star Trek has always been).  In the end, including the gay couple feels like they were added more for shock value than anything else, which is really disappointing.

The episode would've been much better had Gerrold added homosexuality in a more organic fashion.  Had he done something like that, the episode would've likely had more weight to itself, and the entire allegory to our day and age would've been better.  Instead, the gay couple is much more of a B-storyline involving two people we've never met before and didn't care about previously.

Science fiction is one of the best venues to tell a story that can be used to drive a social theme, and Star Trek has done that many times over the years.  Blood and Fire could've been one of the more memorable episodes that Trek has done as an allegory, but the episode was very average and the controversial aspect was unnecessary.  That's a real shame too because I understand what the producers were trying to accomplish, but they missed the mark with this one.