Consequence Free...Or Maybe Not

[nevermoreraven]

(read the last part of the title in Yami's voice, seriously, it makes it better)

I read an article recently where someone was comparing the lack of consequences in Doctor Who to the lack of consequences in Star Trek.  Except…and this just shows how bad NuWho’s gotten under the Moff’s reign…they aren’t the same.

 

The Original Series of Star Trek has consequences.  They don’t carry on from episode to episode, but they sure do exist.  Much as we might make jokes about Red Shirts (which, at least from the first season, isn’t true, though that might be because they hadn’t fixed on shirt color convention yet)…crew members and (overwhelmingly) people on planets Starfleet visits die.  The universe is a hostile, sometimes largely unforgiving place.  This isn’t glossed over or, even worse, rewritten.  Every time you see a crew member die, you see Kirk take it personally, worry about protecting everyone.  We don’t usually get to see the funerals (unless it’s Spock, which is a bit of a point the article’s writer had but I’ll come back to it) but remember the episode The Balance of Terror?  The episode starts with two of the crew getting ready for marriage.  The small chapel is a happy, hopeful place.  Kirk’s excited about officiating the wedding.

One of them dies during the events of the episode, leading to the ending.  Kirk and the remaining crewman (crewwoman?  do we really want to have a different term for the different sexes, since sex doesn’t matter in the future of Starfleet, you’re all people here?  Kirk corrected past!pilot with ‘crewman’ rather than ‘woman’ so I’m gonna stick with ‘crewman’ for now) are standing in the chapel again.  And it is every bit as bleak and poignant as you might expect.  Not twenty-four hours ago, they were going to have a wedding there.  Instead, it’s a funeral.

I give Star Trek a bit of a pass because in moments like these they deal with the episode’s consequences so brilliantly.  Old Who was like that too.

Moffat’s ‘deaths’ or ‘consequences’ mean absolutely nothing, because you know they’re not going to stick.  He wants all of the angst with none of the actual consequences.  I’m pretty sure I’ve ranted over this line before, but “Just this once, Rose, everybody lives!” only has the impact it does because people have actually died.  And, you know, stayed that way.  The movies can get away with resurrecting Spock because he’s one person amongst so many people that have died in the Star Trek universe that haven’t stayed dead.

As much as I like the flawed 2009 movie, the Kelvin!verse kind of follows that lack of consequences.  We never hear about how the loss of Vulcan meant to the majority of the race, the Federation.  Spock talks about how he’s now a member of an endangered species.  We never see that.  There is the whole ‘consequences for not following the Prime Directive’ thing.  (On a side note: I’m into Season 2 and still have yet to hear the words ‘Prime Directive’.  Kind of hard to follow something that doesn’t exist yet even if it was supposed to be retconned back.  Does anyone know when it actually first shows up?)  So consequences do kinda exist, even if they’re not always sensical and may only exist when the writers want them to.  I think it still works less well, though, because when there’s character growth and consequences, resetting them is worse than a TV show in which the characters don’t really show character growth but do have more complicated characterization, rather than a shallow impression, especially when you get to see so much about the characters through them reacting to various difficult topics (you know someone a lot better when you get their opinion on philosophical things such as whether a beautiful illusion is worth living because you see how their mind works).