Terry Matalas Nominated For Writers Guild Award For ‘Star Trek: Picard’

Oh, I’ve seen Season 1 of DS9; the last episode my husband and I saw was S2 E15: “Paradise.”

That episode really threw me! Sisko got out of the box, and Kirk or Picard or Janeway or Pike would have made a rousing speech about individual liberty, and the populace would have remembered what it was like to be real Federation citizens and would have broken away from the evil leader. Sisko … got back in the box! I mean, I guess I have to admire his ability to endure, but endurance doesn’t gain you anything except more pain unless someone else is working to CHANGE things. Luckily, Chief O’Brian did.

So, yeah, I guess I’ll talk with my husband over dinner tonight about moving on independently.

As for your watching TOS, *I* love it, but if YOU don’t, then I don’t want to twist your arm. It’s true that there are some stinkers in S3 of TOS, but there are also a handful of great episodes and a lot of episodes that might not be great in and of themselves but that I wouldn’t be without because of the new stuff about Vulcans or the Federation that it adds. So, for example, “The Paradise Syndrome” has NOT aged well; having Kirk be a “god” to a bunch of Native Americans is really awful. But in it, we learn that Spock can go TWO MONTHS without eating or sleeping when he needs to do it in order to rescue Kirk. Holy moly! Two months! Vulcans are awesome. So a lot of TOS S3 is like that. :-) But if you haven’t seen “The Enterprise Incident,” do watch that; watching Spock play the Romulan Commander like a violin is fabulous. “Are the guards also invited?” Heh.

You should just watch the show in your then. You have 6 and three quarters of one of the greatest Star Trek shows ever made. But it took me six years to even watch it myself lol.

Once I finally did though…wow!

I originally didn’t like DS9 as well. It didn’t feel like Star Trek to me at all. But I really started to enjoy it after it’s first season actually. For Voyager I always liked it because it felt like TOS and TNG but I struggled with it at the beginning too. I really started to like it after second season but I always loved Janeway from the start. She was also my daughter’s favorite Captain growing up. It was so great there was a woman Captain for young girls to look up to and Janeway always got it done!

I read an article she was supposed to be in Picard season 3 too but they didn’t have enough money. Hopefully if the Legacy show happens she will appear there. Kate Mulgrew is a treasure.

Janeway was a big reason I even became a Star Trek fan. She was awesome on day one when I started watching it. It was years before I started to watch the other shows.

I would’ve loved to seen her in Picard too. But even if we don’t get Legacy she will probably show up in live action at some point. But I’m so excited she will be on Prodigy full time next season.

As for as The Paradise Syndrome now I have to check that episode out! 😁

DS9 definitely has early growing pains in the beginning and it did turn a lot of people off. I wasn’t one of them. I was intrigued with the whole show on day one even though I wasn’t loving it either. But I just loved the entire vibe and atmosphere. It just felt so different from TNG and that was a good thing even though I loved TNG.

I was kinda hoping Discovery would be similar for me but never really took for me in that way.

Yeah but I think I saw all of those already. 😂

Miss you, too!

Nope. “And the Children Shall Lead,” 55 years on, is still the worst Trek franchise episode. “Shades of Gray” indeed mightily sucks, but it’s more of a non-episode.

I used to always have CHILDREN listed last or next to last for TOS, but in retrospect, isn’t ALTERNATIVE FACTOR even worse? I mean, there is at least some inintentional hilarity when Shat does his ‘i’m losing command’ breakdown into the turbolift in CHILDREN. I tried watching ALTERNATIVE for the first time in decades a couple years back and I still couldn’t tell which Lazarus was which — it actually gave me a feeling like I was watching TENET again, which might be the worst thing I’ve ever said about any form of TREK (and coming from a big Nolan afficianado, my utter lack of getting or enjoying TENET is a big deal.)

Nimoy recalled telling them the show had already done menacing children in a ‘good’ way with MIRI and that Freiberger called that one ‘trash’ so he knew then what their headspace was like with respect to taste. I don’t exactly love MIRI but realize it functioned as far above CHILDREN as warp drive does above simple impulse.

I remember that Oswald gave an interview, probably in STARLOG, where he trashed Shatner pretty badly (it was the late 80s, when that became the in-vogue thing to do after his brilliant and misunderstood turn on SNL), so my impression is that he wouldn’t have gone back for a third under any circumstances.

I suppose one way to think of ALTERNATIVE is to figure it was sabotaged when the intended guest star — John Barrymore’s kid, who I’ve seen in an excellent early THE WILD WILD WEST episode called THE NIGHT OF THE DOUBLE-EDGED KNIFE that featured Leslie Nielsen, Katherine Ross, Harry Townes and Elisha Cook from a Steve Kandel script — didn’t show up and they had to grab this Brown guy just to be able to shoot and stay on schedule. Brown was also highly-regarded at the time, but I keep thinking the other guy would have really delivered if he had been coherent enough to work, so Lazarus, for me, is maybe what THE DARK KNIGHT would have been if instead of Heath Ledger they had gotten Raphael Sbarge. (if you don’t recognize the latter name, watch the ‘traitor’ eps of VOYAGER or the awful ARRIVAL 2 movie.)

I have no idea how those movies are rated so high when they are such bad stories? My only guess is they just like the constant action in them and something teenagers can enjoy I guess.

Oh I agree. They are like Transformers and Marvel movies, an endless barage of silly action but with zero depth. I’m surprise they didn’t make a billion dollars like those other two did? That’s the kind of stuff teenagers like and will go again and again.

No they never will. I don’t even think the another will do over $300 million at this point but I been wrong before.

Either way Paramount seems to agree considering how much they keep wasting everyone’s time announcing movies instead of actually making them for 8 years now.

Rob Reiner’s STAND BY ME was a fine adaptation of “The Body” by any measure, but what you don’t get is King’s first person interior monologue when Geordi and his friends finally come upon the object of their morbid quest and really confront death for the first time. “The train had knocked him out of his shoes just as it had knocked the life out of his body. I couldn’t get over it, the distance between his Keds and the soles of his feet. It was eighteen inches, and it was a googleplex of light years. The kid was dead.”

The pie-eating scene is funnier in King’s novella, too, and the story’s climax more moving. But I still like Reiner’s film a lot (more than his adaptation of MISERY, truth be told, which I recently rewatched and found to be somewhat disappointing aside from Kathy Bates’ fine performance).

I once mouthed-off to Harlan Ellison in public for no good reason whatsoever, and the look on my face when I realized what I’d just done must have been very like Gordie’s after he’d said those fatal words to Ace.

All right, you asked. It’s a fairly lengthy story, so I’m glad I was able to find it pretty much where I’d left it on a “Demon With a Glass Hand” YouTube thread. And I swear by Kahless that this is all pretty much how it went down, allowing for lapses in an aging memory:

​​⁠Many moons ago, around the time of the Early Cretaceous (1977) I was a young man who met Harlan at an SF gathering being held at the Anaheim Convention Center. I’d handed him to autograph my copy of the recently released “Six Science Fiction Plays,” which included the long-awaited publication of his original teleplay for “The City on the Edge of Forever.” I recall he was in a pretty genial mood that day, which may have saved my life, since as he was scribbling his signature I grinned in probably the most loathsomely obnoxious fannish way possible and said, “Of course, I preferred the aired version.”

To this day a half century later I still have no idea what got into me; it was like the moment in STAND BY ME when the bookish Geordie LaChance tells the town’s toughest young hoodlum to suck his big fat one. Like Gordie I literally couldn’t believe what had just come out of my mouth, and unlike the case with that character it had been completely unprovoked. It wasn’t that I didn’t find Ellison intimidating; I was well-aware of his volatile reputation and even though I topped him by half a foot I have no doubt he could have dusted me in a matter of seconds — this writer who had run with street gangs in the toughest sections of Brooklyn and faced down Frank Sinatra and his mafia cohort and once broke the pelvis of an ABC executive over a script dispute. No, he definitely wouldn’t have found me much of a challenge, my scant martial arts training or no.

So Harlan hands me back my book, gives me the Long Stare — and throws my pen into the trash.

Up till that point I guess I was just filling in his eyes the role of the obnoxious SF fan-dweeb he routinely excoriated in convention speeches and in print for decades, even as he made quite a good living off of them. But what followed, I think, managed to surprise us both: instead of abjectly apologizing or even blabbering that I’d just been kidding (which was only the truth), I matched his stare and said, “I’d like my pen back, please.” And you know what? Possibly realizing he’d gone too far, he actually started digging through the wastepaper basket looking for that sucker. Did I mention that there were a couple of gorgeous young women behind that autograph table with him? Of course there were, and as Harlan continued his search one of them disgustedly told me that she’d GIVE me a new pen, but I demurred. Within a few seconds science fiction’s Angry Young Man came up with it, and that was that.

Several years later I was in Thailand, working for WHO teaching Cambodian refugees the rudiments of English. I was riding the tailgate of a tuk-tuk in heavy Bangkok traffic on my way to class, groping the overhead bar for purchase with one hand while clasping a load of books with the other, one said book being that autographed copy of “Six Science Fiction Plays,” which for whatever godforsaken reason I had chosen among the hundreds of books I owned to bring with me to Asia. Then the tuk-tuk hit a bump in the road, loosening my grip on the overhead bar, and I had a split-second decision to let the books go so I could grab the bar with both hands, or fall into traffic with them. Well, like I said, it’s been fifty years, and I’d gladly pay $1000.00 or even more to get that book back.

Thanks. I saw Harlan twice in person after that, but never spoke with him again. I did entertain hopes of getting him to sign my omnibus edition of IDW’s excellent “City” graphic novel adaptation, even thinking that I might (tactfully!) remind him of our encounter all those years ago, it now being water under the bridge for two old men, which would have brought the whole incident full circle. I heard that he did do a final signing at LASFS with David Gerrold running interference, but by then he was gone, and our world got a little bit smaller.

I’ll have to dig my copies of the two “Glass Teat” books out of my attic and give them a re-read sometime, lost echoes as they are of a bygone era. Remembered highlights: Ellison’s “Dating Game” experience; his hysterical one-line review of “The Partridge Family”; the open letter to his mother explaining why he was writing for the Free Press in the first place; and his script “ The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” which bears no relation to his acclaimed story of that name and in all honesty is not that good.

You ought to tell your wife that despite his sexual braggadocio Ellison’s “Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled” would be worth it for the heartbreaking “Neither Your Jenny Nor Mine” and “The Resurgence of Miss Ankle-Strap Wedgie” alone.

Language is a strange thing, written language in particular. A guy put some squiggles on a sheet of paper in just the right sequence and you find yourself moved by the death of a young woman you never knew, who never actually existed at all. Weird.

I should hasten to add that his FLINTLOCK script for an unmade OUR MAN FLINT TV series was fantastic, kind of FLINT meets THE PRISONER at times.

And I found his adaptation of Spinrad’s BUG JACK BARRON, called NONE OF THE ABOVE, to be very interesting, but in that ‘almost but not quite there’ way of his take on Asimov’s I ROBOT.

I’d say that William Goldman has had more of an impact on the way I write scripts than Ellison, but that’s largely because I like the way things flow when he goes informal — it convey attitude in a way that can kind of suffuse down to the onscreen talent as well as the b-t-s folks. Then again, when you make 400 grand back in the 60s for a single script, you can probably break any ironclad screenwriting rule you want.

Don’t think I’ve ever seen CRAZY, though I saw most of his other 80s TZs and liked them. That series doesn’t seem to stream, and I don’t think the dvd prices ever come down to anything reasonable, even used. Plus the VFX are really cheap-looking, though I tried to overlook that at the time.

I’ve tried to watch the OSCAR a few times (as you know, I have an affinity for junk movies as different as THE BIG BUS and ACTION JACKSON) but everything seems wrong in it. I’ve even managed to watch the last half of VALLEY OF THE DOLLS in one viewing (there’s a lot of eye candy between Parkins and Tate — boy that would be an enviable position to be in, he said), but THE OSCAR … well, I have to invoke THE ODD COUPLE and just wail ‘Oscar, Oscar, Oscar!’

I’ve read so much about HOUR 25 down through the years and really wish I’d been in the area to take it in. I’m afraid my great radio memories are limited to select Bay Area ballgames from 69-72, though I have a feeling if I had more exposure to radio drama (instead of just one good one, the vinyl of Orson’s WotW broadcast) that things might have turned out differently.

Good news, for sure. What the world could definitely use right now is some more “Loudermilk.”

Also hoping that the move to Netflix might also result in a revival of Showtime’s “Warrior,” which can be a little much but featured some of the best martial arts choreography I’ve ever seen. I gather, though, that putting that band back together would be a much taller order.

I once debated someone — I think it may have been on this very site — who contended that for all the Sturm und Drang about his work and persona that Harlan Ellison was mostly a flash in the pan whose work wouldn’t on the whole be long-remembered. I strenuously begged to differ, but in the long run, who knows? It would be the irony of ironies if he ended-up being best known for an adulterated teleplay written for a space opera franchise he affected to despise, but stranger things have happened. (Anthony Burgess would have preferred being recognized as the author of just about anything he wrote besides “A Clockwork Orange.”) Harlan himself said, anticipating his own epitaph: “He was here for a little while, and for a little while, he mattered.”

Well, he was a mixed bag, like us all. I admire his artistry, and the courage that allowed him to march with civil rights protesters and challenge the prerogatives of major Hollywood studios. In his sphere, he made a positive difference. But he was also often unreasonable (Asimov once said of his friend that he thought ‘diplomatic’ referred to someone with a college degree), unnecessarily caustic, and at times even a bully. The last time I saw him in person was at a panel discussion where he expounded on the desirability of revenge — coming mere years after the destruction of Sarajevo, surely one of the most tin-eared if not offensive public utterances I’ve ever heard. (That’s when I *should* have openly challenged him, which I failed to do, to my everlasting regret.)

I also don’t agree with him about the primacy of art — no; sorry, “The Ode on a Grecian Urn” is not worth any number of old ladies — or on an elitist stance pretty indistinguishable from that of Ayn Rand. (If, as he maintained in a “Glass Teat” column, equality is the sworn enemy of freedom, so then inequality is the eternal opponent of justice.) And while his willingness to stand up for his friends was admirable, I didn’t much appreciate his defense of Frank Miller, who went off on a rant about how college-age Iraq War protesters should grow a pair and enlist instead, in spite of never having served a day in uniform himself.

He was larger than life, at 5’5”, snd contained multitudes. I miss him.