Mutiny of the NPCs

Hugo Nominee Black Mirror: “USS Callister.”
Review By Kerey McKenna

In honor of the 2018 Hugo Awards, Nerds who Read Editor-in-Chief Michael Isenberg has taken it upon himself to award NOT THE HUGOS to 2017 works of science fiction that he feels were overlooked by the folks at Worldcon. But those of us who live in the real world think some of the Hugo nominees are actually worth a look. Mike’s first NOT A HUGO went to an episode of The Orville, a show that out-Star Treks Star Trek, so it seemed logical for me to throw in my two cents about a real Hugo nominee that out-Star Treks Star Trek, the “USS Calllister” episode of the anthology series Black Mirror. At the very least, it has a moral that a lot of Star Trek fans need to learn.

Up to this episode, Black Mirror consisted primarily of techno thrillers or bleak dystopian fiction, with small, subtle special effects and the aesthetic sensibility of modern black box technologies. Uncharacteristically, “USS Callister” starts off with what looks like a rerun of an off-brand Star Trek series called Space Fleet; a grainy space adventure with cheesy, dated special effects, garish primary color costumes (with miniskirts for the women), and hammy overacting.

As the action plays out, the daring “Captain Robert Daley” (Jesse Plemmens doing a tribute to Shatner’s Kirk) leads his crew to an easy victory over a scenery chewing space pirate. With three cheers and a bold kiss for each of the two comely female crew members, Captain Daley and the starship Callister (it’s only a model) zoom off to the next adventure.

And then we start to learn what’s really going on. Returning to a more realistic visual style, we discover that Robert Daley is not in fact a star ship captain, nor does he play one on TV. In real life he’s a bit of a sad sack tech mogul, co-founder and CTO of the video game company Callister Inc. Yes, he invented Infinity, the hot new, fully immersive virtual reality spaceship simulator MMO game, but to him his office seems more alien and hostile than any world from a Space Fleet episode. We see that the crew members from the USS Callister sequence appear to be analogs for people in his office. Yet in the company he co-founded he commands no respect from his partner or his employees. Later, alone in his apartment, he plays a version of the Infinity virtual reality game he has customized to look like beloved sci-fi show Space Fleet, except with him as the captain, but with the ability to cruelly vent his frustrations with his coworkers on their virtual doppelgangers. The Kirk mannerisms are still there but now he accosts and harangues his cowering virtual crew in a way most unbecoming of an officer.

At this point fans of Star Trek:TNG should be having flashbacks to the character of Lieutenant Barclay and his premiere episode "Hollow Pursuits." In that story, Barclay, a timid member of the Enterprise crew with social anxiety disorder, uses the holodeck to retreat into power fantasies where he is the hero, where the women of the crew want him, and the men fear and respect him. Within his fantasy world Barclay can win a brawl against alpha-male Commander Riker and sweep the beautiful Counselor Troi off her feet. Essentially he is a Mary Sue self-insertion fan fiction writer. Eventually he learns to come out of his shell, grow a bit of backbone, and start making friends IRL.

“USS Callister” is not that story. In fact it is very much a rebuttal to that story. If you think about Barclay from the perspective of the holographic characters he creates (and Star Trek kept on returning to the plot point that a holographic character could be sentient), it’s not a story of harmless escapism, it’s about a mad god warping reality as he pleases to create beings that bend to his every whim.

No matter how much he wants to be Captain Kirk, Daley is in fact more akin to the character Trelane in the TOS episode “The Squire of Gothos,” a petulant god-child with extraordinary powers who likes to dress up as “the hero” and torment less powerful creatures for his own amusement.

The hero/villain bait and switch is fully revealed when Daley adds the digital copy of new employee Nanette Cole (Christina Milioti) to his collection. We learn that the digital Nicole, and all the digital crew, don’t just resemble Daley’s coworkers, they are exact mental copies of his coworkers with all their memories, feelings and sentience. From their perspective, they just woke up one day inside a video game as non-player characters (NPCs), with Daley commanding them to play by his rules. Everything in the game world feels real to them and they experience it in Millennial Star Trek HD with Dutch angles, lens flares, and exotic alien landscapes. Daley uses his admin powers as programmer of their bubble universe to force them to submit to his will, just like the many “gods” of the Star Trek Universe—Trelane, Apollo, Q, Charlie X, the Platonians—did to the Enterprise crew. (Wouldn’t Charlie X and the Platonians be an awesome name for a rock band?) Daley mentally and physically tortures the digital copies of his co-workers until they play along and become the cast members of his own twisted version of Star Trek: The Experience. One of his torture methods is even a reference to both the Star Trek: TOS episode “Charlie X” and the late Harlan Ellison's “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.”

Not taking this violation lying down, digital Nannette rallies the digital crew to mutiny against their tormentor. They put their existence on the line: escape the virtual hell they are trapped in or die trying. If absolute power and anonymity have proved that Daley is at heart a villain, desperate times prove Nannette to be a hero in ways her IRL self could never have imagined. Exhibiting all the daring and courage that Daley could only play act in a rigged game, the crew mounts a bold rebellion with sequences drawn visually and thematically from different eras of the Trek canon, from Original to Millennial.

Like Michael’s favorite The Orville or my beloved Galaxy Quest, “USS Callister” out-Treks Trek. It explores the franchise at a meta-fictional level and along the way comments on the fans of the franchise. In many Black Mirror episodes, the fault for the crisis of the week isn’t technology itself but the way people use technology to diminish themselves and hurt others. Ultimately “USS Callister” isn’t a critic of Star Trek itself, but of a certain kind of Star Trek fan boy. By offering amazing stories and the shared experience of living those adventures through fiction, Star Trek and other franchises bring all sorts of people together. But for some fanboys, and yes, I’m going to generalize that it’s mostly boys, escapist fantasies go to some very dark places. An expansive Star Trek MMO can be created, but a small group of players will revel in tormenting their fellow players.

A Star Trek convention can bring fans of all ages and backgrounds together to celebrate something they love, but the convention can be perilous for fangirls when some fanboys decide that 60’s mini-skirt style uniforms are an invitation to be groped.

“USS Callister” is an excellent reconstructive commentary on sci-fi and the sci-fi fandom that also works as a great adventure in the Star Trek mold. Unlike pure deconstruction, which can pull an entire genre or franchise apart to see what makes it tick but leave nothing but a mess in its wake, reconstruction is about running down to the engine room, seeing what isn’t working, then reversing the polarity, bouncing the particle beam off the main deflector dish and rerouting the power to auxiliary thrusters to keep flying better than ever. From its set design, to cinematography, to values, “USS Callister” highlights the best of Star Trek, by contrasting it with the worst of its fans.

A great nomination for the Hugo Award and I wish it luck.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.