Category: Movies

What If Copyright Was Still 28 Years?

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One of the easiest ways to demonstrate how eminently reasonable a 28-year copyright duration – the United States’ original copyright length – is to look at what would and would not be public domain if we switched to a 28-year copyright right now. Ordinarily, a sudden legal shift like this would be devastating. Even if the new law is completely reasonable and better than the current system, pulling the rug out of people who made plans around current laws would be disastrous for people whose only crime was failing to anticipate the laws being changed immediately, with no grace period to change course. But a 28-year copyright doesn’t actually do that! We could seriously just declare that all copyrights last only 28 years, that all copyrights older than 28 years have expired as of right now, and it would be fine.

Let me demonstrate.

Genshin Impact

Genshin Impact is a phenomenally successful and quite recent intellectual property, first released in 2020. That means it will remain under copyright for full 28 years, going public domain in its 29th year of release, 2049. That is a fucking sci-fi year. Genshin Impact is not remotely at risk of being devoured by copycats stealing their thunder at the height of their popularity, because the height of their popularity is not going to be 29 years after they’re released. Things sometimes take a couple of years to rev up, but not three decades, come on.

Star Wars

Even under a 28-year copyright scheme, the entire Prequel Trilogy is still under copyright. While Star Wars fans and competing studios would be free to make new stories in the Original Trilogy and the first phase of the expanded universe, Disney’s control over the prequel era means that competitors either have to look to Disney’s canon and make their new stories compatible with it or else accept the daunting task of taking the OT and maybe some of the 90s books as the only canon and attempting to compete with Disney’s canon. On the one hand, Disney’s canon isn’t very popular. On the other hand, you’d have to try and convince people to accept the de-canonization of the Clone Wars and the Knights of the Old Republic. You can pick up Princess Leia’s reference to the Clone Wars in A New Hope and tell an entirely new version of that story and that would be cool and all, but it would have to be entirely new, which means it would decanonize the Clone Wars TV show, which means a lot of Star Wars fans will not follow you there. It’s technically possible to fight Disney for the Clone Wars era, but even under a 28-year copyright scheme, you’ll lose. They control the foundational IP for too many beloved stories in that era.

But there’s a time limit on that. In 2024, you can’t use battle droids, the planet of Naboo, or the vast majority of details of the Jedi Order before Order 66. Disney has the copyright on all of those, and anyone who wants prequel stories has to get them from Disney. But in 2028, the copyright on the Phantom Menace would expire, and by 2033, the copyright on Revenge of the Sith would be up. Now it would be possible for competing studios to make prequel-era content compatible with the prequel canon that people love, even if specific episodes and new ideas introduced by the Clone Wars would remain under copyright for a while. You wouldn’t be able to make stories about Ahsoka Tano until 2037, but you could make stories about clones fighting battle droids as early as 2031, and it would be easy to make them compatible with Ahsoka Tano’s existing stories even if you can’t directly reference or recreate them. Disney isn’t doing anything particularly exciting with the character of Ahsoka Tano these days either, so by 2031 (when Attack of the Clones would go public domain) you have all the clone troopers, battle droids, and Mace Windus you need to tell new stories in the era that don’t contradict anything fans already love. At that point, as long as you can produce better movies and TV shows than Disney, you can fight them for control of the Star Wars canon and win.

This puts Disney on the clock: They can either start making good, new Star Wars content in the few remaining years while they still have control of critical IP, or if they can’t, then it’s an open call to any studio who thinks they can make good Star Wars movies to release enough bangers that they seize the crown of “the Star Wars guys” in the eyes of the public.

Marvel/DC

If the public domain had been radically expanded in 2005, Marvel still would’ve been able to build the first three phases of the MCU because no one else was able to build a decade-spanning franchise like they were. If it had been radically expanded in 2015 (around when Age of Ultron came out – easily the weakest Avengers movie, but not bad enough to derail the MCU) no one would’ve been able to wrest the title of “the Marvel guys” away from them, both because of their affiliation with original creators like Stan Lee and because they were making good movies. If it had been radically expanded in 2020, then yeah, Marvel Studios would probably have lost their crown as “the Marvel guys” by now, because nobody liked Phase Four and four years is enough time for competitors to get some films out. Or maybe superhero fatigue is real and nobody can produce popular superhero movies anymore because the genre is too tired. Whatever.

The point is that regardless of the state of copyright law at any point from 2005 onwards, it is unlikely that anyone would’ve been able to stop the MCU from happening up until the point when it turned mediocre. Drastically curtailing copyright lengths wouldn’t have stolen those characters from Marvel Studios, just given them to anyone else who thinks they can do better.

And on the other end we have DC. DC’s cinematic universe is a continuous trainwreck. There have been several individually good movies, but they have way too many bad ones for anyone to ever feel good about the whole. Batman and Superman would’ve been an absolute feeding frenzy, and the worst thing that could’ve happened is that more bad movies about these characters would’ve come out, which wouldn’t have made things any worse (you’re under no obligation to see them), or else someone else makes the Justice League work and now the number of good movies goes up.

Every superhero anyone cares about is already past a 28-year copyright deadline, but that would not have stopped any of the superhero movies that were any good from being made. Or if it did, it would’ve been because they were outcompeted by other, even better movies. But the reason nobody made Iron Man movies except Marvel Studios in 2008 isn’t because no one had the copyright. Studios who wanted the copyright to Spider-Man, X-Men, and Daredevil had gotten their hands on it and, either immediately or eventually, squandered it. The reason why nobody but Marvel Studios made Iron Man is because nobody but Marvel Studios believed in Iron Man’s potential as a movie.

The Legend of Zelda

This one I bring up because nothing would change. Yeah, you’d be legally allowed to release a game called Zelda and try to compete with Tears of the Kingdom. Good fucking luck.

Pokemon

The copyright on the original 151 Pokemon and the Kanto region would expire in 2026 under a 28 year copyright term, and if anything that just proves that 28 years might be too long. People are trying to make Pokemon knock-offs left and right, and while Game Freak isn’t exactly doing an amazing job with the franchise, the wall that people keep running into is that 150 is a big number. Games that try to take the concept in an interesting direction run into the problem that it ceases to be recognizable, while games that stick to the Gen 3-5 formula risk succeeding and being knock-offs. What this franchise desperately, desperately needs is to give fans access to some of the earlier generations of monsters so that someone can take the concept in a new direction while still having Bulbasaur and Pikachu in it. A lot of media works by taking something familiar and putting a new twist on it and the Pokemon fan-game sub-genre is being absolutely strangled by the inability to use the actual Pokemon as the familiar thing, leaving us with games that have to make everything else familiar and use a new set of ~100 monsters as the “twist.”

Nintendo won’t want to give up on this cash cow because it’s made them $50,000,000,000, but also it has already made them $50,000,000,000. What kind of idiot would try to argue that anyone will be dissuaded from making new stories and intellectual property because Pokemon was only able to make $50,000,000,000 before going public domain? Particularly when Nintendo will still have copyright over every other generation, which will either encourage them to give those generations a bit more love rather than recycling Gen 1 over and over and over again or else see the entire franchise slip through their fingers one generation at a time until the games people actually like are all in the public domain and they’ve got nothing left but the likes of Sword and Shield.

And in order to avoid cluttering up the list with a half-dozen similar examples, here’s a bunch of other intellectual properties that could be producing lots of fun new interpretations but which aren’t, because it’s just not practical for the majority of creators to sell an audience on two different new concepts for one project, which means by the time you’ve finished selling them on the idea that your version of [thing] is interchangeable with the original, you have exhausted their patience for new ideas and have no room left for the new twist you’re putting on [thing]:

-Gundam
-Warhammer 40k
-Godzilla (and King Kong, but Kong is public domain in the reasonably attainable year of 2029)
-Judge Dredd
-Tomb Raider (past the 28-year mark in 2025)
-The Elder Scrolls
-Diablo (past the 28-year mark in 2026)
-Fallout (past the 28-year mark in 2026)
-Half-Life(!) (past the 28-year mark in 2027, although Half-Life 2 isn’t until 2033 – Valve’s been cool about people selling Half-Life spin-offs on Steam, so copyright law probably isn’t standing in the way of a third-party Half-Life 3, but this just goes to show that you can let people pick up your famous-but-abandoned properties and it’s fine)
-Jason, Freddie, and an assortment of other slashers
-WarCraft (although you would want a lot of the lore from WarCraft III, not past the 28-year mark until 2031)

In all these cases, I think the most fertile ground for new stories comes from relatively low-budget indie productions who wouldn’t be able to afford a license even for a mostly-abandoned property, or else they’re being squandered by their current owners, or sometimes a combination of the two. Warhammer 40k already gives out licenses with such hit-and-miss quality that whether or not a specific 40k game or book is any good is a crapshoot, why not open the floodgates completely? Let some indies take a stab at making a better Godzilla video game, or at making a Judge Dredd TV show or game. Maybe the threat of someone else making Elder Scrolls VI will convince Bethesda to stop fucking around with Skyrim rereleases. The Diablo series is a trainwreck that would benefit from going back at least to III, probably II, regardless of copyright law, and the sucking maw of evil that is Activision-Blizzard isn’t going to rescue the series.

Harry Potter

Under a 28-year copyright term, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone would go public domain in 2026. A lot of the iconic imagery comes from the films, which would start going public domain in 2029. Most of what people actually care about from Harry Potter would be public domain with the first film, although there’s a few elements like the Marauder’s Map and the Deathly Hallows (the symbol, at least) that would take longer. But for the most part, a more sane copyright duration would break JK Rowling’s grip over the setting within just a few years.

This is also an example of how 28 years is way more than enough time to prevent original works from getting eaten alive by cheap imitators. The time when Harry Potter fanfic frenzy peaked was like twenty years ago and a 28-year copyright term would still only be almost expired on the first book.

Dragon Ball

Dragon Ball Z premiered in the United States in 1996 and DBZ Abridged started releasing in 2008, so although 1984’s Dragon Ball manga would’ve been completely public domain as early as 2013 (still five years ahead of the 2008 release of their first episode, though), the footage they used for the first ten episodes (not counting any brief cuts from things like the Bardock special) wouldn’t be public domain until 2023. It would barely now be legal to make an abridged cut of the anime and sell it.

I use this example to demonstrate that it’s not like a 28-year copyright duration would be some kind of anarchy where anything goes. Even artistically valuable projects that help newer voice actors and directors develop their talents to a professional level and thus clearly serve the public good wouldn’t have been strictly legal under a 28-year copyright term. It is, if anything, still too long.

I don’t want to give it a separate section, but Sonic the Hedgehog is a similar story playing out right now. I’m sure whoever’s making the movies would be desperate to avoid facing competition because they are okay at best, but the world would be a better place if that Jehtt guy on YouTube could start building hype and a team for Sonic Adventure 3, officially Kickstarting in 2028, the first year Shadow the Hedgehog would be in the public domain.

Frozen

One of the biggest losers of a 28-year copyright duration would, of course, be Disney, who would lose half of their iconic Disney princesses immediately. Elsa and Anna wouldn’t go public domain until 2042, though, so they’ve got mountains of time to figure out another money printer before losing that one. Competitors can use Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, and Jasmine, including their iconic Disney appearances (even ripping screens straight out of the films, which would be in the public domain), but not yet Mulan or Rapunzel. They also wouldn’t be allowed to call their toys, TV shows, etc. etc. Disney princesses, because the name Disney would still be covered under trademark law. You can use Steamboat Willie in your own media now in the Alpha Timeline where he’s gone public domain, but you’re still not allowed to trick people into thinking it was made by or in affiliation with the Disney Company.

Competitors can sell Belle and Ariel, but if your kid’s favorite princess is Moana, you’re still stuck with Disney. While Disney would undoubtedly lose some sales, even enough that I’m sure they would hate a 28-year copyright term, they’ve actually been pretty cool about shows like Once Upon A Time and the birthday princess industry. Despite having positioned themselves as the ultimate Final Boss of copyright law, even the drastic “change the copyright duration to 28 years and apply the new law to all works regardless of the law under original date of publication and put it into effect immediately and without warning” hypothetical doesn’t actually damage them that much.

Final Fantasy

For starters, the name “Final Fantasy” should probably be trademarked, because it doesn’t describe a specific setting or characters, but rather the work of a specific company in a certain genre. The only thing that unites the Final Fantasy series is that they are JRPGs made by Square-Enix (not even every JRPG made by Square-Enix, but whatever). But the first six games in the series would still be public domain, so anyone could host them for free download (or sell copies of them, but if free archives haven’t completely dropped the ball, it should be easy to find a free download of famous media in the public domain), and you could make sequels and spin-offs and remakes of those, specifically. So the Fabula Ultima guys could release official stats for the characters, settings, and monsters of Final Fantasies I-VI, for example, they just couldn’t call themselves Final Fantasy while doing it, and once the Final Fantasies with more famous setting names hit public domain, you could start using names like Midgar City Stories, Squall in the Garden, or Spira Chronicles. Those names won’t grab people as hard without the Final Fantasy prefix, and if that leads companies to try and build an identity around abstract titles rather than specific IPs then that would be great please do that.

Final Fantasy VII wouldn’t go public domain until 2026, which means that Square’s remake series would be well into its run before anyone else would be allowed to release a competitor, and it’s well-received enough that such a competitor would have to absolutely blow Square’s version out of the water to make it a favorable comparison. People are already going to be predisposed to think of the former IP holder as the “legitimate” continuation of the series, and they have to seriously fumble the setting to lose that. And Final Fantasy VII was famously a game that people clamored for a remake of for years before finally getting one even under existing copyright law where there was no threat of someone else picking it up and walking away with it in 2026.

This is another demonstration of just how long 28 years is, and how easy it would be for any reasonably competent company to retain de facto control over an IP even after its original installments are in the public domain. So long as they manage to take the story in an interesting direction in any of the 28 years since original publication, those follow-ups mean people will look to them as the “real” owner of the setting and view others as cheap knock-offs or, at best, a B-team making compatible material. And if they go 28 years without making anything good enough to stop a competitor from riding into the setting and making a follow-up that captures the public’s good will, then maybe they should suck less.

Being Bad At Chess Is Star Trek Tradition

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3-dimensional Chess is supposed to be some kind of futuristic turbo-Chess in Star Trek, but every time it comes up, it’s a fantasy where writers pretend that intuition and gumption can possibly defeat logic and analysis in a game of perfect information with mathematically exact moves. They do this in the Original Series with Spock’s perfect logic being defeated by Kirk’s…well, exactly what quality Kirk has isn’t clear, but some kind of creativity and human gumption. That isn’t a thing in Chess. If an opponent surprises you with a sudden checkmate, it’s not because they invented a new way to move their pieces, it’s because they saw one of the very large but finite number of perfectly mathematically defined moves that you missed.

The Next Generation usually has Poker games, not Chess, which is a better choice for many reasons: It allows a larger number of players at once, Poker-playing strategies straightforwardly reveal a lot about someone’s personality, especially concerning appetite for risk, while Chess-playing strategies require a lot of knowledge of the game to reveal anything besides the fact that these two characters play Chess, and if you want to do the “pure logic gets outmaneuvered by intuition” thing, then it makes perfect sense in Poker. Data, taking up Spock’s role as the flawless logician with poor intuition, can instantly calculate the exact odds that any other player has any other hand based on the cards in his own hand and the river, but this means he has a very predictable strategy and no ability to guess when someone is bluffing even in a weekly Poker game where players can get to know each other’s tells. Paradoxically, Data would be very good at high-tier professional Poker where everyone has figured out how to mask their tells so the math is all that’s left, but because it’s a multiplayer game, Data can lose because of an inability to take advantage of other players’ weaknesses.

But also, when 3D Chess does show up in TNG, it’s Deanna Troi checkmating Data and saying that Chess isn’t just a game of logic, it’s also about intuition. No it isn’t! Games of intuition exist, Chess is not one of them!

The Federation Has Stupid Laws

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Here’s another TNG bit of lore that bugged me as filler, although this one feels like less of a nitpick. An entire episode’s premise turns on it and it suggests that the Federation will literally sell its people into slavery if they happen to be in a jurisdiction where that’s legal. In S4E13, “The Devil’s Due,” space Satan comes to collect on a thousand-year-old contract to enslave a planet while the Enterprise happens to be in orbit to check up on some Federation scientists. According to the contract’s legal terms, space Satan gets the Enterprise as well because they were in orbit around the planet and thus within the bounds of the contract when it came due.

Okay, so the terms of the contract include everything in the planet, including its orbit, and under the existing legal system, people can promise the property of their distant descendants as part of a contract. Sure, whatever. But the Enterprise isn’t governed by that legal system. It’s governed by Federation law and whatever international law exists in the Star Trek galaxy (it’s not clear if there’s any at all). Surely, in both cases, they would not permit a starship and its crew to fall under the legal ownership of space Satan just because they happened to be in orbit around a planet when their debt came due. The people who made the contract do not own the Enterprise, so they can’t give it away. It doesn’t matter if their own local laws claim otherwise – Federation law, surely, does not allow slavery regardless of what contracts are signed, surely does not allow its citizens’ personal property to be signed away against their will just because some foreign law proclaims they forfeited it merely by entering another planet’s orbit at the wrong time, and very certainly will not give away one of the most advanced starships in their fleet because of a technicality in some other planet’s legal code.

If space Satan is a being of laws and contracts at all, then she has no claim to the Enterprise, which operates under Federation law, and Federation law would have to be braindead to consider itself subject to local laws to the point of giving away a starship and its crew.

TNG: The Game

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Star Trek: The Next Generation S5E6, “The Game,” is an episode that was presumably written by a recent college grad whose entire dorm nearly had their academic careers ended by an addiction to…this seems like a WoW thing, but it’s a 1991 episode, so we’re not even to Diablo yet. Maybe Tetris? The simple “put thing into thing” gameplay of the game depicted in the episode does resemble Tetris more than anything with even an excuse plot like the standout games of 1990 and 1991 (Link to the Past, Final Fantasy III, Super Mario Wrold) all had. Anyway, I’m giving them a ton of credit with the assumption that it was based on some kind of actual experience, when it draws its themes at least as much from video game alarmism that used to be so common before the children of the 80s became culturally dominant.

I don’t feel a ton of need to go over why that was dumb, feels like anyone reading this blog is probably already on board with that, at this point most of the people who knew little enough about video games to be taken in by that kind of bullshit are dead, probably from old age, but maybe there was a gamer uprising that I missed while I was working on a D&D sourcebook. No, what I want to talk about is that near the climax, Wesley Crusher, the last holdout against the mind controlling game, is hunted down by the rest of the Enterprise crew and forced to play it and become addicted. They force his eyes open so that he’ll be forced to interact with it, and then…he blinks. Clearly non-diegetically. Humans blink a lot and unthinkingly, and of course they didn’t actually pry the actor’s eyes open for the shot, they just pressed their fingers nearby and then he shot his own eyes open wide (movie magic!). The human blink reflex is really hard to control so I’m guessing they did lots of takes and all of them had this problem, and sometimes you just have to ask the audience to suspend their disbelief over a literal blink-and-you’ll-miss-it error. Still kind of funny, though.

This is Wesley Crusher’s last significant episode (he’s actually visiting the ship after having left for Starfleet Academy), and I find it interesting how completely rehabilitated the character is. This episode is even doing “Wesley holds out against a threat that’s overtaken the adults” like they did incessantly in season 1 and it was miserable, but they pull it off just fine here in the post-beard growth season 5. Wesley avoids the game because he’s got a crush distracting him long enough to be one of the last holdouts, by which time the way the game has overtaken the entire crew is immediately obviously creepy, not because he’s a speshul wunderkind. His flight from the older officers of the Enterprise involves a lot of resourcefulness on both sides, which makes him seem genuinely clever, not like the adults have all had their teeth beaten out by the Idiot Ball so Wesley can save the day. Ultimately he succeeds not by single-handedly overcoming the crew of the Enterprise, but by repairing damage done to Data, who is immune to the game and was taken out early on to prevent him from counteracting it, and then leading the crew on a chase long enough to distract them that Data is able to whip up a solution.

Apparently it was too late, though. Wesley’s writing in season 1 was abysmal, and apparently his season 2-4 writing (he appears only sporadically in season 5) wasn’t enough to save him. The main solution to Wesley’s writing problem in seasons 2-4 was to de-emphasize his role – he’s mainly there to be Geordi’s sidekick in Engineering, and he works fine in that role, but it does mean there’s not really a chance to rescue the character so much as just to overlook him. Clearly by season 5, if not by season 2, “Wesley sucks” was too much of a meme to dislodge.

One carried forward eternally by Wil Wheaton’s refusal to get over it. People love Kate Mulgrew, all Wil Wheaton has to do is say “I was fifteen years old, they gave me a terrible script, and I did the best I could with it” and most people would be sympathetic to him.

We Were At War With Cardassia, Apparently

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This is a really tiny nitpick but I’ve slipped from 3/week to 1/week blog posts, so whatever. In Star Trek: The Next Generation S4E12, “The Wounded,” the opening captain’s log states that it has been slightly more than a year since the Federation signed a peace treaty with the Cardassians, putting an end to a long war. But we know from comments about Wesley Crusher’s service on the ship a few episodes earlier that each season of the show maps to one year in-universe, so this war would’ve ended at some point in sesaon 2-3. And yet it doesn’t come up at all in any of the first three seasons. The Ferengi are the main antagonists of the first season, which didn’t really work out because they just aren’t that intimidating and they tend to come across more like plucky-but-ruthless small business owners rather than rapacious industrialists. They focused more on the Romulans for seasons 2 and 3, though the series’ ultimate primary antagonist in the Borg also made some pretty impactful appearances.

Obviously they needed Cardassia to have recently-ish signed a treaty with the Federation to make that episode work and they didn’t want to have an entire Cardassian War arc to justify that one episode, and that was the right call. Still bugged me, though.

Binary Doesn’t Work That Way

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This is a really tiny nitpick, but I wanted to do something for 1024 (2^10) and this is the first thing that popped into my head. There’s an episode of Star Trek TNG about the binars, aliens who have merged with computers to the point where their primary language is binary. They hijack the Enterprise to upload their consciousness into its databanks and then download it somewhere else safe. When asked why they didn’t just ask for help from the Federation, they say that there was a chance they would say no and their mission was too important to accept no for an answer. Riker says, with enough confidence that the show pretty clearly intends this to be taken as fact, that this is a result of their binary computer thinking, they can’t deal with probabilities.

So, I guess they dedicated exactly one bit of memory to storing the probability of success for asking the Federation for help, and rounded down. Rather than, for example, setting aside ten bits so they can store 1,024 different points on a spectrum of probabilty.

Tasha Yar’s Death Was Dumb

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Tasha Yar’s death near the end of the first season of TNG was the first step of the show growing the beard. Tasha Yar was an okay character and Worf makes much more sense as Chief of Security than as helmsman or whatever he was doing in the first season. So I’m sympathetic to the plight the writers had landed themselves in at the end of that first season: Tasha Yar had to go to make room for Worf’s character to grow, and that had to be some kind of plot point. Having her die was a good idea to make it clear that being on an away team wasn’t necessarily safe, particularly since, at her rank, it wouldn’t make much sense to transfer away from the Enterprise unless she had some kind of strong personal reason to prefer a different mission, which slams us into the problem that Tasha Yar’s backstory is dumb and offensive. It was close to being cool – a refugee from a wartorn failed state who joined Starfleet after they evacuated her.

Unfortunately they decided that the defining feature of the failed state was going to be “rape gangs.” Which are gangs assembled for an indefinite period of time primarily for the purpose of rape? Or is this the only planet in the galaxy whose gangs commit rape at all? Both are dumb and just the words “rape gang” are so overly edgy that I feel second-hand embarrassment on behalf of the writers just repeating them. Like, rape gangs exist in places with extreme violent crime problems, but they’re not a career path the way gangs that focus on smuggling and extortion are. They’re more like a fucked up hobby club.

Refocusing away from “rape gangs” and onto general violent chaos could’ve salvaged her character the same way Riker got salvaged further down the road. That would take time, though, time during which Worf is left on helm, so given we need to get rid of Tasha in one episode and the less said about her backstory the better, easiest thing to do is to kill her.

The problem is the monster of the week selected for the killing is a pile of black goo who’s having a real rough time in tenth grade. Plus they lean a lot on Tasha’s pre-recorded funeral speech at the end to see the character off. Data’s moment with Picard where he asks if he missed the point of the funeral because it seemed to be more about the living than the dead was pretty good, but Tasha’s recorded speech itself was mediocre. General pattern of the first season, really, Data, Geordi, Picard, and Dr. Crusher are already firing more-or-less on all cylinders, but Riker, Worf, Tasha, Troi, and Wesley are all dragging things down. Some of these characters would be salvaged, others would be cut. Cutting Tasha was the first step along that path (bafflingly, this was soon followed by cutting Dr. Crusher, who was a perfectly good character even in season one – I’m guessing this was something to do with the actor’s career, but I like to imagine Crusher got hit by splash damage when they nuked Wesley who, narrative cockroach that the character is, survived the explosion). Shame about the execution, though, because she was one of the more salvageable of the dud characters. Presumably that’s why they killed her again in an alternate timeline episode. Tasha practically turned to camera and declared she was determined to have a cooler death than the one she got in the Alpha Timeline.

The Prime Directive Is Stupid

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I’m hardly the first person to point this out, but the Prime Directive from Star Trek is dumb. At least in TOS it seemed to be taken as more of a friendly suggestion than the pre-eminent rule of Starfleet. That’s in direct contradiction to its name, but also makes way more sense. “Avoid interfering with other civilizations unless they will clearly be worse off if you do” is not a terrible rule the way “don’t interfere with other civilizations ever even if they’re facing imminent extinction” is.

But by TNG, the Prime Directive is living up to its name as the first and most important rule of Starfleet, so we get things like S1E22, “Symbiosis,” where there is a planet of drug dealers and a planet of drug addicts, the latter of whom think that they’re infected with a terrible disease and that the dealers’ product is a treatment that alleviates the symptoms, when in fact it causes the symptoms via withdrawal. And apparently it would violate the Prime Directive to tell the addicts this. Totally cool to mediate negotiations between the two for sale of the drugs! That’s not interference. Sharing information about the nature of the “illness,” though, that’s strictly forbidden. Repairing ships that facilitate the drug trade wasn’t a violation of the Prime Directive in the first half of the episode, but in the second half of the episode, now it is. Captain Picard is pretty clearly changing what counts as “interference” in order to suit himself – so why doesn’t it suit him to share some information for the addict planet?

They try to justify this at the end of the episode with a historical precedent, but the show takes place 300 years in the future so the historical precedent is completely made up. So rather than drawing on real historical precedent to say “we may not understand why, but clearly interfering in other civilizations harms them in the long run,” the show is instead saying “I’m totally certain that interfering in other civilizations harms them in the long run despite being totally unable to provide any reasons why. Just believe me now and assume that the evidence will show up later.”

The implicit justification is that species have some kind of natural evolution to warp flight and that interfering with this prevents them from achieving their full potential somehow. If you think of it as “we should not use our superior technology and economy to turn single-planet civilizations into dependent states” then that is at least a coherent justification, although it’s not like there isn’t historical precedent for dependent states being perfectly capable of picking themselves up and carrying on when big brother crumbles. Sure, the smaller states often suffer, but the suffering is in the form of no longer receiving the benefits they used to. But regardless, sharing a bit of information isn’t turning the addict planet into a dependent state of the Federation (and they’re already a dependent state of the dealer planet!).

Rather than a practical concern about dependency, this justification seems more mystical if you scratch the surface, like they do in S2E15 “Pen Pals,” that each species has some kind of destiny that they would be held back from if the Federation shared its knowledge and wealth with them. In reality, people generally flourish in abundance and grow weaker in poverty. The popular idea of harsh conditions breeding strength and resilience is completley in opposition to real history – powerful empires are usually people who go around starting wars, not having wars declared on them, and they start those wars because they have a position of superior wealth and power from which they expect to win, and nine times out of ten, they do.

There’s also echoes of the American isolationist movement here (and Star Trek was made in America, so that’s not surprising), that big powerful nations trying to help small ones usually goes poorly for the small ones. But that’s not really true. Like, obviously when a big, powerful nation sends an invasion force that doesn’t become a good thing just because the troops have been instructed to shout “we’re here to help!” before mowing down every native who voices support for local sovereignty. And sending out gobs of free stuff blindly to poorer nations is a terrible long term solution to their economic problems and can destroy local industry by forcing them to compete with donated hand-me-downs. So there are defintiely forms of intervention that are bad for the smaller nation. But disaster relief is pretty purely a good thing, and whether or not trade ends up being good depends mostly on the smaller nation’s own government. Trade creates wealth, and whether or not that’s a good thing depends on who gets to have that wealth. The Marshall Plan worked out great for western Europe, so just giving people a shitton of money for infrastructure projects works at least some of the time. The Belt and Road Initiative is struggling and looks like it’s going to collapse, but those were loans, not gifts.

Again, this is voiced more explicitly in Pen Pals, but that explicit voicing just makes it clear that TNG is committing to stupidity. Picard insists that there’s no clear delineation between intervening in a natural disaster and intervening in a war, but yes, there is! One requires temporary economic aid to offset a disaster and/or scientific expertise to mitigate or avert the disaster, you can swoop in, solve the problem, and rocket off with no longterm entanglements and without having killed anyone. A war is going to require either years of investment, a massive bodycount, or both. Saying “taking sides in a war might go poorly, so let’s not save people from natural disasters either” is absolutely braindead.

Things like comparing the Marshall Plan to the Belt and Road Initiative (and in defense of Star Trek, the latter was not a thing during the production and original airing of TNG) makes it clear that it’s not immediately obvious what interventions are going to be beneficial to smaller states, but also that it is totally possible to intervene beneficially. A Prime Directive of “no interference, ever” only makes sense if Starfleet is a domineering organization with a history of malicious interference that the Federation needs to slap down with a straightforward, inviolable rule, even if that leads to a few cases where Starfleet refuses to intervene even when it would clearly be beneficial to do so.

This hardly seems to be the case in Star Trek – the Enterprise crew are consistently portrayed as highly ethical and highly skilled professionals. Even if other ships tend to be less competent (which does seem to be the case), the Enterprise crew never brings this up when justifying the Prime Directive. No one’s ever like “hey, sure, this specific intervention would probably be good, but if we set a precedent of this sort of thing for the rest of Starfleet, those clowns on the Constellation Class ships are going to start orbitally bombarding any pre-Warp civilizations who refuse to embrace pacifism.” They always act like the intervention itself would somehow be harmful in the long run, and their justifications for why are always paper-thin. It ultimately boils down to “because the Prime Directive is Star Trek-y,” and that slavish devotion to the established lore of the show is in direct violation of the general spirit of progression to a brighter future pushed by the show.

Moneyball

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I just watched Moneyball recently. I’ve known the story for a while and it’s the go-to shorthand for ignoring flashy spectacle assets in exchange for 5% here and 8% there adding up to a stronger result in aggregate, but I never saw the movie. And the movie is honestly kind of depressing with some of the artistic choices they made.

See, the movie is the story of how a statistics nerd is way better at assembling baseball teams than any of the old men in the decision-making seats because they make decisions based on shallow metrics like healthy aesthetics and flashy spectacle plays like home runs. They’re really just ascended baseball fans with no sense of professionalism or capacity for real analysis but a hubris born from the fact that the people currently in charge are also in charge of picking their successors, and they pick other baseball fans (including retired baseball players) to replace them, which means statistics nerds who look at the result over the aesthetics don’t get to play and prove how much better they are. But things turn around for the statistics nerd when an aggro dipshit with nice hair takes up the cause of statistics-based baseball because said aggro dipshit is desperate for an advantage that can bring his horribly underfunded team up to par. This is not a terrible story, except that the aggro dipshit is the main character.

That would be fine if that was the real story of the Oakland Athletics’ 2002 season, and the fact is that the statistics nerd is a fresh college grad who more-or-less had his shit together while Oakland Athletics’ manager Billy Beane had stumbled through a series of false victories into a death spiral and really needed something to turn around for him, so even if Billy Beane’s greatest asset is his hair he’s still the better character because sometimes that’s how real life is.

But that isn’t how real life was! The actual real Billy Beane is not an aggro dipshit with nice hair whose only smart move was finding someone smarter than him to take orders from under the disguise of hiring on an advisor. The statistics nerd from the movie is a complete fabrication. Not a conglomerate character, but made from scratch. The closest thing to the statistics nerd in real life was Sandy Alderson, the manager prior to Beane. The Oakland Athletics came under new ownership during Alderson’s tenure and the funding for players was cut from the highest in the league to the lowest, with predictably disastrous consequences for their wins, so Alderson started using the statistical methods of Moneyball to create an aggressively cost-effective team. Billy Beane learned that method while working as assistant manager and, evidently, got way better at it than Alderson was after he took over in the late 90s, leading up to the poorest team in the league reaching the playoffs four years in a row in the early-to-mid 00s. Moneyball was published as non-fiction in 2003 about how the Athletics pulled off their 2002 upsets, and other teams’ managers adapted to the strategy over the course of the next couple of years, which is why the Athletics’ performance fell off after a couple of years.

You can even hear traces of this true story in some of the montage audio which is, I believe, a direct quote or even actual audio of baseball commentary of the season. They talk about how Billy Beane built the team off the theories of a book that he read, not a nerd who he met in person and took orders from while barking loudly enough to preserve the delusion of being in control.

Billy Beane wasn’t a front man lending good looks and “confidence” to a helpless but brilliant nerd, he did the analysis himself. Hollywood evidently decided this story would be better if Billy Beane was at-best mediocre at his actual job of managing baseball teams and had to find someone much better at it to do the job for him, and also that the more competent person had to be a nerd reluctant to advocate for themselves who had to be bullied into taking their shot at greatness (through Beane) so that the protagonist can retain a veneer of being in charge. The Moneyball protagonist version of Billy Beane isn’t even a particularly good negotiator or charming or anything, his only “social skill” is a willingness to be a jackass, and while that isn’t nothing, it’s the same mediocre-at-best level of competence as he demonstrates as a manager.

The movie makes a lot of smart artistic choices with the true story. Cutting Alderman to compress the 5-ish year process of developing Moneyball into a single revolutionary season where drastic action was taken in response to a devastating gutting of the team helps to make the Moneyball story more dramatic even when told from the people who were closest to it, when in reality, if you’re close to the process, by the time it’s paying out huge dividends it usually does so after many smaller victories which makes the big wins seem like a matter of grinding inevitability. There’s a throughline in the movie about how Beane signed up for professional baseball because the Mets were impressed with a bunch of attributes that turned out to not mean fucking anything to the actual winning of the game, passing on a scholarship to Stanford to do so, and movie!Beane hires the statistics nerd because the statistics nerd accurately assesses that he might have had the appearance of being “the complete package” but his stats showed someone who was mediocre at everything that mattered.

But apparently it was also super important to this story that the protagonist had to be a moron cheating off of someone else’s homework.

Dynasty Warriors But Instead Of Regular It’s A Movie

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Dynasty Warriors is, in addition to being a video game series, a 2021 movie depiction of the coalition against Dong Zhuo at the beginning of the Three Kingdoms era. Being a movie made by a Chinese studio for a Chinese audience set in China, it was naturally filmed in New Zealand. Being Dynasty Warriors, it depicts it with insane over the top action where people shoot lightning from their halberds and release chi blasts that send mooks flying in a ten yard radius. Despite this, it is a really good adaptation of the Luo Guanzhong novel in its first half. It does stumble a bit in the second half, though.

In the first half, we have an in media res opening about Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei rescuing Dong Zhuo from the Yellow Turbans and defeating Zhang Jiao, then we skip ahead to Liu Bei being run out of his position as magistrate by a corrupt bureaucrat and setting out to join the coalition against Dong Zhuo. Some spooky magic lady in a mountain gives our heroes sweet magic weapons and also serves as frame story for Cao Cao’s attempted assassination of Dong Zhuo, his subsequent flight from the capital city of Luo Yang, and how he then raised an army to depose Dong Zhuo through force. This is all really novel-accurate in a way that sets up Cao Cao’s character really well.

The actual Dynasty Warriors games have a problem with this part of the story in that there are few major battles which makes it very hard to communicate the important character beats of how the coalition came together. Instead we just kind of drop into Si Shui Gate with the coalition already formed with no mention of how we got here from the Yellow Turbans. Emphasizing Dong Zhuo’s role in the Yellow Turban rebellion and taking advantage of the fact that this is a movie and not a video game to depict Cao Cao’s failed assassination is a good decision (although, not for nothing, the blocking of Cao Cao and Dong Zhuo’s soldiers and the way the music kicks up as Cao Cao begins his escape could 100% be a Dynasty Warriors cut scene, and the movie makes a strong argument for the inclusion of Cao Cao’s escape after the failed assassination as a stage in the games).

Once we arrive at the coalition, though, things fall apart. The movie sticks with a novel-accurate and historically correct coalition of eighteen warlords against Dong Zhuo, enough that we can’t really keep track of any of them as characters. About half of them back out after Hua Xiong kills a bunch of their champions, but not Yuan Shao or Cao Cao, the only two who have remotely significant speaking lines. “The warlords are backing out” is a good way of marking time before the good guys lose, but with eighteen warlords there’s way too much granularity. Better to have some manageable number: Cao Cao, Sun Jian, Yuan Shao, Yuan Shu, and three-ish also-rans like Han Fu (they rewrite Liu Bei’s inclusion in the coalition, so Gongsun Zan is not important). This gives room for Yuan Shu and the also-rans to back out leaving over half the coalition gone while still retaining our major characters.

A related problem is the lack of focus on Sun Jian and Yuan Shu’s conflict. Sun Jian is barely even depicted, the entire sub-plot of Yuan Shu denying him supplies to try and destroy his army so he won’t be a threat after the coalition is cut, and Sun Jian’s recovery of the Imperial Seal in Luo Yang is barely mentioned. You probably want to rewrite the supplies so that instead of food it’s some kind of magical bullshit because that’s in keeping with the Dynasty Warriors theme and allows Sun Jian to fight Hua Xiong and be relying on his magic bullshit to keep things up, and then when Yuan Shu cuts him off, he’s injured, overwhelmed, and forced to retreat. This can replace Hua Xiong’s setup as a powerful enemy general in place of the scenes where he kills like eight different no-name generals from the coalition. That montage is novel-accurate and they’re pretty good fight scenes, but they’re not worth cutting our only opportunity to introduce Sun Jian and what he did for the coalition. Sun Jian is not generally portrayed as especially virtuous by the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but he served China well in the Yellow Turban Rebellion and the coalition against Dong Zhuo and was nudged into self-interested power-mongering by the slimy machinations of the Yuan family, which sets up his son Sun Ce’s rivalry with Yuan Shu. He’s important!

The final problem is that it’s very difficult to keep track of who’s winning the major battles and why, and instead the movie relies a lot on expository dialogue or monologues over its mass combat scenes to establish who’s winning. The major battle is for Luo Yang, a city on the other side of Hu Lao Gate, so this should be pretty straightforward: There is a gate, and we need to get past it in order to defeat Dong Zhuo. Find a part of New Zealand where you can use natural landmarks to judge distance to the gate easily and visually, or if absolutely necessary set up the relative position of different landmarks using a conversation over a map.

You can use these visuals to establish that Sun Jian is advancing rapidly but still far away from the gate, where Dong Zhuo and his court have gathered to watch the battle, and Dong Zhuo can order Lu Bu out to confront him, at which point we get Hua Xiong’s line about how you’re swatting flies with a chainsaw and he should send Hua Xiong instead, followed by Hua Xiong’s fight with Sun Jian and the betrayal of Yuan Shu. Sun Jian falls back, some also-ran like Han Fu tries to plug up the line and gets murked, and a bunch of other warlords run away. We get the scene between Guan Yu and Cao Cao about pouring wine for the fight and Guan Yu telling him to save it so they can drink to his victory afterwards, and the wine is still warm when Guan Yu gets back from killing Hua Xiong, stabilizing the front line, whereupon Sun Jian and Cao Cao lead their forces to reretake the ground that Hua Xiong retook.

Then you can have a meeting with the coalition council. Hua Xiong is defeated and the coalition has advanced, and a bunch of the retreated warlords’ troops pledge their loyalty to Liu Bei as the nineteenth regiment of the Coalition forces. Cao Cao has his line about how Yuan Shao is held here only because he’s the nominal leader so there’s no way he’ll escape Dong Zhuo’s wrath if this coalition fails, it’s do or die for him. Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Sun Jian are effectively leading the attack, as Yuan Shao is cautious and cowardly about committing his troops to anything. The three leaders conclude that someone is going to have to fight Lu Bu and lure him away from Hu Lao Gate while the other two wait in reserve to capture the gate and Luo Yang. Liu Bei volunteers to lure Lu Bu.

The fight with Lu Bu goes basically as depicted in the movie, but instead of being intercut with scenes of Cao Cao in some battle with only tenuous connection to the rest of the plot, it’s intercut with Sun Jian and Cao Cao breaking through Hu Lao Gate while Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei are fighting Lu Bu in the river. Cao Cao sees Dong Zhuo retreating from Luo Yang and ignores the city to pursue him, allowing Sun Jian to reach the city and win whatever prize was supposed to be up for grabs for doing so – I forget exactly how that sub-plot was framed, but it’s a good setup for Yuan Shao going back on his word after Sun Jian is the first to arrive.

I don’t know how this works out budget-wise, but time wise the movie can definitely afford to add an extra 10-20 minutes to its 118 minute runtime without becoming excessive, and anyway you can make a bit of room by cutting the Diao Chan sub-plot that doesn’t go anywhere and makes more sense contained entirely in a sequel that would focus on Lu Bu, Cao Cao, and Liu Bei.