ExerTrek: The Royale

[For my daily workout, I'm pedaling on a recumbent exercise bike while watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I'm posting my reviews here.]

(199.0 pounds)

Ah, yes: a metatextual exploration of the inextricable and paradoxical link between the fictions we live and the fictions we speak, an extended commentary on the costs implicit in the instantiation of our words qua words.

Or…just another dopey Star Trek episode in which an alien race misinterprets something about us and makes us the wrong kind of paradise. This one, a bad novel set in a casino, might even be worse than the Nazi planet and the mobster planet, largely because the sets and costumes have a disquieting late Eighties feel about them, all thin ties and white suits, all “Hungry Like the Wolf” but without Duran Duran.

The writers opted to use a fictional book, Hotel Royale, passing up the opportunity to do some real intertextual criticism. Wouldn’t it be grand to have the characters encounter a planet founded, say, on…

• To Kill a Mockingbird: “They’re gonna hang Worf! Captain, you’ve got to be Atticus Finch!”
• Atlas Shrugged: “But sir, our phasers can’t penetrate the manly entrepreneurial spirit of Reardon steel!”
• The Shining: “Come play with us, Wesley Crusher!” “But Mr. O’Brien…you’ve always been here.”
• Silence of the Lambs: “Sir, Data is making a human suit…out of real humans.”

I mean, the possibilities are really endless. The Scarlet Letter. The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Stand. 1984. The Castle of Otranto. The Bible. And those are just the fictional ones.

You want to know real hell is? Being trapped by aliens who make you live in reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that’s what.

(And, hey, I didn’t know we were allowed to use the Fermat Theorem ploy in our stories. How does it work? Easy. You have a character mention Fermat’s Last Theorem at the beginning and then, instead of resolving the ending, you can have that character go, “Well, who the fuck knows? It’s like Fermat’s Last Theorem and we may never understand it.” Huh. I’ll have to remember that for the next story I write. Except, of course, that it has been proved. Oh, well.)

My grade: D+, but mostly because of the inspired weirdness of the revolving door in the middle of the void like that, and for Worf having to answer a telephone.