I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek recently; not only the new series, Discovery, but also the ill fated series Enterprise. Star Trek: Enterprise was set a century before the original series and as such had the burden of retrofitting the existing canon into its plot.
I lack the encyclopedic knowledge that many people think I possess but there are three episodes which in conjunction have a fascinating quality which a lot of magicians would do well to pay attention to.
The first is the original series episode The Trouble with Tribbles, in which Kirk and the crew have to deal with an infestation of small furry creatures. This episode was probably the first to show that Trek could pull off a genuine comedy.
The second is Trials and Tribble-ations, an episode from Deep Space Nine (the Babylon 5 knock-off) in which Sisko and the gang travel back in time to that first episode. Amongst them is Worf, the Klingon, disguised as a human since back in the time of the original series Klingons and humans were at war. What made this episode amazing was that the stars of DS9 were digitally edited into original series footage, giving it a kind of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern feel. The best part is when they actually point out that the Klingons in the original series look radically different to their appearance from Next-Gen onwards. When this question is put to Worf he says “We do not talk about it.”
This is a great joke hand waving away the advances in special effects.
When Enterprise came along they had a decision to make. Do they use the improved Klingon makeup devised for Next Gen or do they double down on canon and the fact that Klingons don’t talk about how they got real ugly after original series (though before the movies)? In fact they decided to have their cake and eat it. The third episode which fits into this equation is simply called Divergence, and after three and a half series of the Klingons being meated up with the big rubber forehead makeup, this episode focuses on a Klingon plot to genetically modify their spies to appear human. It’s kind of convoluted but it accidentally mutates into a plague, billions of Klingons get infected and the cure leaves them looking like humans but with minor Klingon facial characteristics. In other words it makes them look like original series Klingons. At the close of the episode the doctor comments that being a genetic mutation, this will pass on to the next generation and as such the descendents of the victims are a whole new lame-ass looking sub-species of Klingon. Everything got explained.
It got me thinking about explaining things as part of a plot, whether tiny details like this pull an audience in or make them step back and see how convoluted it all is. I think there’s a thing or two for the attentive magician to learn from this. Though most often seen in mentalism I’m also rather guilty of allowing my causal premise to rule a routine, most commonly in the form of offering a faux scientific explanation. Where Derren Brown will tell a person the microscopic motions of their eyes are indications of innermost thoughts, I will explain that cards being 2 dimensional in a 3 dimensional world are ideal parallels for the apparently impossible sight of 3 dimensional objects moving in 4 dimensional space. Similarly where a simple example of how to tell someone is lying makes an unexplained leap into knowing what number a person is thinking of by touching their shoulder, my intro to 4 dimensional geometry doesn’t really explain what’s happening in my hands. I mean…. 4 dimensional maths don’t actually work in real space¹.
I’d argue that all magic, no matter how deep its causal premise, must at some point hand wave it away. In case you’re not well versed in the work of Derren Brown and you’ve probably never seen any of my routines, this hand wave is best observed in sucker tricks, where the magician is apparently explaining how the trick is done whilst surreptitiously setting up a bigger reveal which isn’t explained at all by the ongoing explanation. My favourite is this gem:
This necessity of hand waving the a causal premise at some point inspires many to drop the idea altogether, but I’d argue that with an illusory peek into a briefly believable faux methodology audiences can be engaged on a level which is otherwise unreachable. If the audience thinks they might be about to learn something they’re already one step down the garden path.
Of course the point at which you drop the premise is very important. I’d argue that Trials and Tribble-ations is where the thing about changing Klingon makeup should have died, but Enterprise tried to get one last jolt out of it² and in doing so had to dedicate an entire episode of pretty much irrelevant plot points into explaining a noodle incident. I don’t know for certain what proportion of the viewership understood that the finale of this episode was backstory to that one throwaway line two seasons earlier, but I’d argue that the episode doesn’t have much value beyond that one revelation. In this way it’s like continuing to talk about neuro-linguistic programming and body language after the final reveal. Arguably Derren has pulled this off, kind of, but the finale of An Evening of Wonders explaining the way he primed the audience to pick the final word of the show is more of a twofold revelation that the secret was hidden in plain sight the entire time, similar to the ending of Enigma. However in Enigma he doesn’t go into this methodology a second time, even though he does a similar unmentioned priming exercise early on in this show³. Could it be that Derren realised that he could get the same “hidden in plain sight” revelation to Enigma without the exhaustively explained causal premise right to the end. It’s inspiring to think that even a polished performer like Derren can get better.
Although I doubt his growth was the result of obsessive Star Trek fandom⁴.
The 2017 series Star Trek: Discovery includes similar plot callbacks to the history presented in Enterprise, mentioning both Captain Archer and some Mirror Universe plot points about the Empire and the agoniser technology.
Despite this connection to canon, the look of ST: Disco is totally different to any previous incarnation of Star Trek. The Klingons look even less human, the tech has holographic displays and a cool metallic low light aesthetic. There are lots of previously unseen alien species in the show and the uniforms are totally different.
Zero explanation has been offered.
¹ Or do they?
² Just like they tried to get one last jolt out of Star Trek.
³ I’m not going to go into this, you’re gonna have to watch it. Twice.
⁴ Or did he?⁵
⁵ Probably not.