Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Important Safety Tip: Don't cross the streams.

Today is the day we mark the martyrdom of any one of fourteen early Christian saints named Valentine by giving cards and flowers to the people we love and bang. Why? Because nothing says 'I love you' more than beating a priest with clubs before hacking off his head.
'I know chocolates are more traditional, but just I couldn't help myself.'
I love you Doc, but get the
fuck out of that chair.*
Speaking of things mating, I'd like to complain a little about this, which I caught wind of here. What? Too busy to click? Fine. There's going to be a comic book cross-over between Doctor Who and Star Trek: The Next Generation and the word you're looking for is 'no.' I'll explain, but if your nerd quotient is any lower than 6, I'd stop reading now and just assume that my rant is correct. Still with me? Ok and I apologize in advance. So here goes: while both DW and ST:TNG are both awesome (as are acronyms), the characters just don't belong in each other's narrative sandboxes, or more specifically the Doctor doesn't belong in Star Trek.


Not knowing exactly what the plunger
is for actually makes it scarier.
Don't get me wrong, this is not Who-hate and it's not that a super-advanced being with the ability to manipulate space and time couldn't exist in the Star Trek universe, it's the rest of the Doctor Who baggage that comes along with him. Par example: in the Who-verse, the Earth was taken over by the Daleks in the 22nd century. Meanwhile in the Trekiverse Scott Bakula was Faith of the Heart-ing around the galaxy and never once encountered an invasion of the plunger-wielding cyborgs. What's up with that?

Similarly, the Doctor never had any wacky adventures on the Klingon Homeworld, never saved the Earth from a Whale probe and to my knowledge never had to fashion a crude diamond cannon out of bamboo (though if anyone could...).
It was simultaneously the stupidest and most badass moment in television history. 
'You know it's weird, 139 episodes and no one
 ever asked me to end war or cure cancer.'
Ok, so the crossover probably has the Doctor TARDIS-ing into the Star Trek universe, and that's why the future encountered on DW is different from the one on Star Trek. But this is complicated by the fact that characters on DW have referred to Star Trek before, suggesting that it exists as a TV show in the reality the Doctor comes from. Does your head hurt yet? Yeah, mine too. The Doctor finding himself interacting with Jean-Luc Picard would be sort of like us being magically transported into an episode of I Dream of Jeannie. 

"Robin? Dead? Zoinks! How am I going
to break this to Scoob and the gang?"

There's a 'realism gap' between the two series. Doctor Who regularly plays fast and loose with logic and reality whereas Star Trek presents itself as a little more grounded (note: I said 'a little'). Where the Doctor can sort of get away with dismissing the crossover as a timey-wimey spacey-wacey-thing and move on, the best Trekkies can do is write off the whole escapade as Q screwing with the crew (which is trek-speak for 'a wizard did it'). It's like how when Batman hung out with Scooby Doo it made much more sense for those meddling kids to run into Batman than it did for Batman to ride around in the Mystery Machine.

Fortunately for continuity-obscessed fanboys who over-think such things (yes, like me), the rules for what counts in Star Trek and what doesn't (canon) are pretty strict and comic books most definitely don't count which is good because I'm pretty sure the crew of the Enterprise once ran into the X-Men. That said, Happy Valentine's Day!
Alright, that's it. Everybody out of the multiverse.
'What? Pike didn't save his seat.'
*Seriously, it's nothing personal but there are only three ways a person can legitimately sit in the Captain's chair:
1-Graduate the academy and become a Starfleet officer.
2-Happen to be doing the Captain.
3-Be the under-qualified son of a dead space hero and grab it while the captain is recovering from eel-torture.

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