Yes. I’m a Trekkie. Yes. Instead of beginning my weekend readings about “character” and narrative, I caught up on two Star Trek Discovery episodes I’ve missed in the last few weeks. I’m trying to refocus on fictional causality or canons of probability. I’m still ruminating on this notion, but at the moment I understand it as the internal logic created by the narrative. Or, what happens in a story makes sense within the framework created by the story itself (or its narrator). Like, I used to watch Roseannea long, long time ago, off and on, but I do remember that the lead male character, Roseanne’s husband, died in the story. In the remake, he’s alive again. How do they explain that? I haven’t watched the show.
And in any case, I started out with scenes from Star Trek Discovery. I often watch the latest episodes by myself. My wife isn’t a Trekkie, though quite often she humors me. The last time she watched — one of the first episodes of Discovery’s new season, she asked, “Why’s Spock everywhere and in everything?”
“Because it just works that way,” I said. “It’s just so cool.”
“But how can [Commander] Burnham be his sister? I didn’t think he had a sister,” she added.
I admit it. I sighed. For not only is the Star Trek “story” multilayered and multidimensional and spread out over time and across TV networks and into the movies and back again in a CBS streaming service, Spock is the half-human, half-Vulcan myth that helps tie together so many of its threads. As a Trekkie, I’m the almost-ideal viewer, familiar with all the worlds and all the platforms (and yes, I’m old enough to have watched the original, except that, at five years old or so, I wouldn’t have liked it much; I didn’t watch Kirk and Spock until after the show was canceled and popped up in some late-night syndication). I recognize the sense of familiarity that comes with Spock’s appearance in this latest Trek narrative. His appearance doeslink the possible worlds.
According to Marie-Laurie Ryan in the “Possible Worlds” entry of The Living Handbook of Narratology, PW theory rests on the notion “that reality—conceived as the sum of the imaginable rather than as the sum of what exists physically—is a universe composed of a plurality of distinct worlds.” This theory also holds that a central element exists somewhere in this multitude; somewhere, we can find the Actual World (AW).
Does that mean that I exist, and you exist, and we exist in the AW (the “real” world) and that All Things Trekkie exists in a possible world, or a multiverse of possible, imagined, narrated worlds? Or, within the Trekkie universe (the many worlds and narratives revolving around Gene Rodenberry’s initial television creation), is there a Star Trek Actual World, something like Star Trek Earth 1, with its almost boundless Federation of Planets (and planets outside the federation, ripe for exploration and discovery and all that cowboy-space-opera jazz)? How many worlds and how many iterations of Star Trek will there be? I mean, the Rocky series finally seems to have stopped — oh, wait, there was Creed II last year. May Rocky live long and prosper.
I hope we never tire of never-ending, ever-expanding metanarratives like Star Trek. I want Spock to live forever, across multiple dimensions, through many PWs. The new series bets on the persistence of my desire for narrative connections, for stories in which a universal yet original Spock appears.
Four episodes, and we haven’t seen Spock yet, other than flashbacks of him as a child and previews of upcoming episodes. I will watch. I will follow this improbable yet internally logical story. Next week, Discovery promises that Burnham will go home. [dramatic pause] To Vulcan. We all come from somewhere, but in narratives, we do predict where the journey takes us. We expect it. We want it. That’s part of the power of narrative.
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