Kit Walker

So it looks like there's going to be a writers' strike in the United States. Among the demands brought forward by the Writer's Guild of America is the regulation of "generative AI" in screenwriting: the use of large language models like GPT, which produce text by calculating where certain words in the English language are statistically most likely to appear next to each other.

No matter what your job is, there's an AI booster out there who thinks GPT can do some part of it better than you can. Those guys are frequently wrong; for example, here's a post by Bret Devereaux examining in-depth the idea that ChatGPT can write your college essays for you. Short answer: it can produce an assemblage of text that looks like an essay, but submitting that text as your essay will not result in a good grade, because a truly successful essay requires a cognitive depth that is completely beyond large language models.

Where ChatGPT and other generative text models like it actually excel is in producing text that meets formulaic requirements in a confident, passable, vaguely novel and blandly inoffensive format.

It is, from a certain point of view, the perfect Hollywood screenwriter.

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So. Klingons.

In the original Star Trek series, Klingons were dudes in brownface makeup with a penchant for snakeskin pants and Fu Manchu moustaches. Starting in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and throughout the Star Trek series of the 80s and 90s, the Klingons suddenly had dramatic forehead ridges and dressed like they were headed to a Slipknot concert. In the early 00s, Star Trek: Enterprise started out with the forehead-ridge metalhead Klingons, then had an entire arc that transformed them into the original series’ brownface snakeskin-panted Klingons. Star Trek Into Darkness, which takes place in an alternate-reality version of the original series, kicked that whole thing in the shins with their slightly pointier take on the metalhead Klingons. And then Star Trek: Discovery, which takes place a few years earlier than the original series, slam-dunked Enterprise’s explanation into the trash with its incredibly dramatic take on the Klingons.


There are other, smaller incongruities throughout the timeline of the various Star Trek series; for example, Discovery’s holographic communication system is, by official canon, contemporaneous with the original series’ space fax.

The non-diegetic explanation for these things is obvious: Star Trek is a show about the future, and nothing dates faster than the future. On top of that, each successive production had a higher budget, access to improved effects tech, and artists who leveraged both to try out some Stuff.

There have been attempts to explain these incongruities diegetically; for example, Enterprise’s arc devoted to a gene-altering virus that made the Klingons look the way they did in the original series. Discovery also had some throwaway lines to explain why the holographic communication system disappeared in later shows. But Star Trek didn’t need that and I don’t care.

There are people who will tell you these explanations are vitally important, and every little timeline discrepancy needs to be explained. These people are annoying and you don’t have to listen to them.

Anyway, let’s talk about theater. In live theater, there’s a distinction between the reality the audience observes and the reality the characters experience.

Sometimes this distinction is slight. Julius Caesar probably didn’t speak in iambic pentameter and almost certainly didn’t speak English. Shakespeare doesn’t bother to explain why Caesar does both in the eponymous play; it’s implicitly understood that the characters of Julius Caesar are actually speaking Latin, and the use of English is an interpretive device.

Sometimes the distinction is more blatant. The Broadway production of Hamilton is performed on a bare-bones set featuring a walkway, a couple of staircases, an occasional table, and nothing else. The characters fight on battlefields and walk the streets of 18th century New York, but it’s all implied by their performances; what they see isn’t what we see.


This is how I watch Star Trek: with a wall of interpretation between me and the characters. To me, the technological standards and alien makeup change constantly; to the characters, it’s all perfectly consistent. The reality they experience is different than the one I observe. I don’t need anything explained, and whenever Star Trek tries to explain it anyway, all that does is raise even more questions.

The bit from “Trials and Tribble-ations” where Worf gets embarrassed about original series Klingons is good, though. That can stay.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but everything kind of sucks right now. Fascist governments are on the rise, a climate crisis looms, and those with the power to solve these problems are utterly uninterested in doing so. In times like these, people turn to utopian fiction to make sense of the world around them and find a way forward. But no piece of art produced in the past few years, no novel, no film, has emerged as the great utopian work of our cultural moment.

Because the great utopian work of our cultural moment already exists, and it came out 30 years ago.

In 1989, the Cold War was coming to a close. Throughout most of the 20th century, the world had teetered on the precipice of doom: the two most powerful nations in the world possessed, between them, enough firepower to destroy the Earth several times over--and they were at each other’s throats. Then it was over, and despite the fact that the world had failed to physically end, there was still a sense that a kind of apocalypse had occurred. Something had died. Something new was coming.

And on February 17, 1989, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was released in theatres.

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Sometimes I wonder if the reason Hollywood studios have embraced "NO SPOILERS" culture as much as they have is because they see it as a form of damage control.

Let's use Avengers: Infinity War as a case study. I, and many other people I've talked to, are absolutely disgusted by Gamora's death in that movie. Not in the Watsonian sense, where they're mad at Thanos for killing her, but in the Doylist sense, where they're mad at the filmmakers for deciding she needed to die and the subtext surrounding her death. Many found the scene's inherent abuse apologia triggering. It broke the movie.

If our culture at large didn't care about ZOMG SPOILERS, then I would have found out about Gamora's death and how she died very shortly after the movie came out. I, and the many people who feel the same way I do, could have saved our $15 and skipped the Infinity War, content to wait and read a recap later.

But of course, that means fewer ticket sales for the studio.

And because Marvel's marketing team berated fans so heavily not to reveal spoilers about the movie, all those people who would've otherwise avoided Infinity War ended up buying those tickets.

There's a good chance Marvel did that on purpose.