Novelists Versus Screenwriters Through the Eyes of a Trekkie

How great would it be if book authors could take the insane liberties of television and not have to make anything consistent, really, ever? Take the various incarnations of "Star Trek," for instance.

The Original Series changed the max speed up and down constantly and had not only the same red-shirted actor but the same character name die repeatedly; they also reused a few actors who were highly recognizable and not changed by makeup.

"DS9" had what I call "character amnesia" in that characters forgot key insights (such as having studied their greatest enemy in incredible detail) and character traits whenever convenient for the storyline. 

"The Next Generation" did a decent job, actually, in consistency, but their tendency to recycle actors (about 100 actors played all of the secondary and guest roles in the 176 episodes, many of them playing a handful of parts each) and the later series used those same 100 yet again, which was just annoying. It's like when you see the same two actors, such as Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, playing the same type of character repeatedly and so they conflate in my mind with the same images in nearly the same scenarios ad nauseam.

The writers of "Voyager" couldn't do math: Despite having gone the distance to go back to the Alpha Quadrant about five times over by the end of season 5 of "Voyager," Janeway then mentions how they could very likely be a generational ship. Yeah, okay, sure. And despite the ship apparently holding eight shuttles in the two bays--Did you ever see four in one bay?--and literally ten shuttles getting destroyed along the way, Chakotay says they have a "full complement of shuttles" in the beginning of season 6. (Plus, of course, the Delta Flyer.)  

"Enterprise," on the other hand, required you to watch every episode in order to understand what the heck was going on. It was more like a novel--characters changed over time for better and worse, and you couldn't just easily jump in and read a chapter--which was most likely why the show didn't do so well. Reusing one of the actors who played four characters on "DS9" and one on "Voyager," Jeffrey Combs, was allowable, however, because he played one of the best characters of all time as Commander Shran, an Andorian who effectively played a likable lawful evil.

 

My point is that a novel writer can't just add elf ears or an unusual forehead to a character profile and can't lose track of the math along the way. But perhaps that's why Hollywood (or Paramount, in this case) is fake, because to do well you have to follow these insane ideas. Don't get me started on how I learned it's actually the movie consumer, not the film industry, that destroys novels in film adaptations; if people didn't eat it up, and if there weren't certain things people expected from a movie (violence, romance, sequence, length, etc.), the industry wouldn't be hacking up treasured classics.


So, the next time a writer for the small or silver screen hacks up a story you love or treats you like a mindless automaton with no memory, call them out on it. Or, better yet, go read a book.