A few days ago my wife was watching a rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Klingons were mad at the Romulans, or maybe it was the other way around. Everyone was arguing.
I started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Valerie asked.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “You don’t see – or better yet, hear, what’s so funny?”
It was the way they were talking. I’ve been listening to the dialogue on the various incarnations of Star Trek for about 40 years now. It never ceases to amaze me how, no matter where the starship Enterprise goes in the entire galaxy, everyone, and everything, the crew encounters not only speaks perfect English, but the kind of perfect English you might hear in a Saturday Night Live skit satirizing the Royal Shakespeare Festival.
You know what I’m talking about. The Emperor of the Zorcons, warrior caste of the Planet Detox, addresses Captain Kirk or Captain Picard, who is trying to mediate a genocidal war between the Zorcons and their rival caste, the Kazoobicons. It sounds something like this:
“I see that you have spoken the truth, Outworlder. And as you were speaking, I saw fear in the eyes of the Kazoobicon. We will take your advice and submit our dispute to the judgment of your federation. For it is written in the ancient books that the Kazoobicons can only be trusted in negotiations if a disinterested third party is holding the french fries.”
Sound familiar? You bet it does! The one common denominator in virtually every science-fiction TV show ever made is that everyone except the humans makes speeches instead of talking. Did you ever notice this? I sure have.
It never fails to make me think of the funniest review of a TV show I ever read. It was in TV Guide, in, I think, 1983. I don’t remember who wrote the review, but I wish I had saved the person’s name because I never read two more accurate – or funnier – sentences.
The show being reviewed was a spectacularly silly sci-fi series, which only lasted one season, called The Man From Atlantis. The man from Atlantis was a visitor from another world. The usual stuff: he had unearthly powers and used them to solve earthly problems every week. I don’t remember what all of his powers were; I think one of them was that he had gills like a fish and could live underwater.
In any case, the review started out something like this: “It’s always easy to spot the visitor from another planet in a TV show. He’s the one with no sense of humor who speaks better English than everyone else. Maybe someday television will give us a space alien who says ‘ain’t got no’ and tells mother-in-law jokes. In the meantime, we have The Man From Atlantis.”
Of course a lot of this is budget-driven. TV shows usually have tighter purse strings than feature films. In the Star Trek movies, or in other space operas like Star Wars, a touch of interstellar verisimilitude is sometimes provided when you hear one of the Glorks actually speaking Glork – with subtitles. Remember the guy Han Solo zapped under the table in the first Star Wars movie? He was speaking Glork or Oobsheek or whatever, and the audience was left to conclude that Harrison Ford’s character had picked up enough of the alien’s patois to follow the threats that were being made against him, right up until the moment he pulled the trigger and blew the Glork right through the wall.
TV usually can’t afford to do this, and has to resort to such cost-cutting sleight-of-hand as the universal translator in Star Trek: The Next Generation. This swoopy gizmo enables the crew of the Enterprise to understand everyone from the Gloobs of Planet Sneeho to the Icky-Yuck Fish People of Beta Arcturus 16. Eliminating the curse of Space Babble smooths the way, after the requisite number of jeopardies and space explosions, to yet another victory for the forces of galactic niceness.
But shortcuts to universal English aside, there remains that other problem. The entire crew of the Enterprise, even its non-human contingent—Spock in the first series, a whole array of extraterrestrials in The Next Generation—was capable of human banter. Even Worf, the Klingon on the bridge in the second series, while not likely to show up wearing a flower that squirted water or making jokes about the vagaries of dating Klingon women, every now and then got off a riff that scented of wit.
However, and this is as true for the other incarnations of the series, Voyager and Deep Space Nine as it is for the first two, most of the time non-human characters appear, they talk like Roman generals making battlefield speeches in the pages of Titus Livius. And the longer I watch these shows in syndicated reruns, the funnier it seems.
Are there other civilizations in the universe? I’m not the guy to ask. 40 years ago it was largely assumed that, given the billions of stars that make up a galaxy and the billions of galaxies that make up the universe, other civilizations must exist, somewhere. But the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been combing the heavens for decades and hasn’t heard a peep from anything that sounds like it might be sentient. And recent biological and chemical research is moving in the direction of establishing that the conditions necessary to foster and sustain life are in fact extremely rare in the cosmos. Earth may indeed be a fluke. We may, indeed, be alone.
But if we’re not, and if SETI does indeed one day detect evidence of intelligent life somewhere else in the universe, some scrap of an ancient radio broadcast from M31 or a television program from the Horsehead Nebula, I hope and pray that whatever we hear won’t be on the order of “We must move swiftly to prevent the Woobles from invading our Horsnick sector.”
I hope it will be something more on the order of, “Lucy! You got some ‘splainin’ to do!!!”
I started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Valerie asked.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “You don’t see – or better yet, hear, what’s so funny?”
It was the way they were talking. I’ve been listening to the dialogue on the various incarnations of Star Trek for about 40 years now. It never ceases to amaze me how, no matter where the starship Enterprise goes in the entire galaxy, everyone, and everything, the crew encounters not only speaks perfect English, but the kind of perfect English you might hear in a Saturday Night Live skit satirizing the Royal Shakespeare Festival.
You know what I’m talking about. The Emperor of the Zorcons, warrior caste of the Planet Detox, addresses Captain Kirk or Captain Picard, who is trying to mediate a genocidal war between the Zorcons and their rival caste, the Kazoobicons. It sounds something like this:
“I see that you have spoken the truth, Outworlder. And as you were speaking, I saw fear in the eyes of the Kazoobicon. We will take your advice and submit our dispute to the judgment of your federation. For it is written in the ancient books that the Kazoobicons can only be trusted in negotiations if a disinterested third party is holding the french fries.”
Sound familiar? You bet it does! The one common denominator in virtually every science-fiction TV show ever made is that everyone except the humans makes speeches instead of talking. Did you ever notice this? I sure have.
It never fails to make me think of the funniest review of a TV show I ever read. It was in TV Guide, in, I think, 1983. I don’t remember who wrote the review, but I wish I had saved the person’s name because I never read two more accurate – or funnier – sentences.
The show being reviewed was a spectacularly silly sci-fi series, which only lasted one season, called The Man From Atlantis. The man from Atlantis was a visitor from another world. The usual stuff: he had unearthly powers and used them to solve earthly problems every week. I don’t remember what all of his powers were; I think one of them was that he had gills like a fish and could live underwater.
In any case, the review started out something like this: “It’s always easy to spot the visitor from another planet in a TV show. He’s the one with no sense of humor who speaks better English than everyone else. Maybe someday television will give us a space alien who says ‘ain’t got no’ and tells mother-in-law jokes. In the meantime, we have The Man From Atlantis.”
Of course a lot of this is budget-driven. TV shows usually have tighter purse strings than feature films. In the Star Trek movies, or in other space operas like Star Wars, a touch of interstellar verisimilitude is sometimes provided when you hear one of the Glorks actually speaking Glork – with subtitles. Remember the guy Han Solo zapped under the table in the first Star Wars movie? He was speaking Glork or Oobsheek or whatever, and the audience was left to conclude that Harrison Ford’s character had picked up enough of the alien’s patois to follow the threats that were being made against him, right up until the moment he pulled the trigger and blew the Glork right through the wall.
TV usually can’t afford to do this, and has to resort to such cost-cutting sleight-of-hand as the universal translator in Star Trek: The Next Generation. This swoopy gizmo enables the crew of the Enterprise to understand everyone from the Gloobs of Planet Sneeho to the Icky-Yuck Fish People of Beta Arcturus 16. Eliminating the curse of Space Babble smooths the way, after the requisite number of jeopardies and space explosions, to yet another victory for the forces of galactic niceness.
But shortcuts to universal English aside, there remains that other problem. The entire crew of the Enterprise, even its non-human contingent—Spock in the first series, a whole array of extraterrestrials in The Next Generation—was capable of human banter. Even Worf, the Klingon on the bridge in the second series, while not likely to show up wearing a flower that squirted water or making jokes about the vagaries of dating Klingon women, every now and then got off a riff that scented of wit.
However, and this is as true for the other incarnations of the series, Voyager and Deep Space Nine as it is for the first two, most of the time non-human characters appear, they talk like Roman generals making battlefield speeches in the pages of Titus Livius. And the longer I watch these shows in syndicated reruns, the funnier it seems.
Are there other civilizations in the universe? I’m not the guy to ask. 40 years ago it was largely assumed that, given the billions of stars that make up a galaxy and the billions of galaxies that make up the universe, other civilizations must exist, somewhere. But the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been combing the heavens for decades and hasn’t heard a peep from anything that sounds like it might be sentient. And recent biological and chemical research is moving in the direction of establishing that the conditions necessary to foster and sustain life are in fact extremely rare in the cosmos. Earth may indeed be a fluke. We may, indeed, be alone.
But if we’re not, and if SETI does indeed one day detect evidence of intelligent life somewhere else in the universe, some scrap of an ancient radio broadcast from M31 or a television program from the Horsehead Nebula, I hope and pray that whatever we hear won’t be on the order of “We must move swiftly to prevent the Woobles from invading our Horsnick sector.”
I hope it will be something more on the order of, “Lucy! You got some ‘splainin’ to do!!!”
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