The Next Degeneration

Three months ago, right-wing billionaire David Ellison’s Skydance Media bought Paramount, the venerable and storied studio that is the home of SpongeBob SquarePants, Mission Impossible, and of course Star Trek.

As Variety has recently reported, Ellison’s short tenure at Paramount has already brought significant changes to the company. Management directives have included everything from hosting Mixed Martial Arts events on the White House lawn in celebration of President Trump’s 80th birthday, to firing executives who made the unforgivable mistake of being women, to blacklisting stars who have condemned the Israeli invasion of Gaza. 

New Paramount CEO David
Ellison is afflicted with resting
frat-boy face.
(Image via Paramount)

It is clear that Paramount now has a specific political perspective. It is also clear that the studio’s owner plans to expand their reach by acquiring additional intellectual property.

Given the long production schedules of television and cinema, the effects of this right-wing turn will likely not be immediately obvious. But it is likely that the next generation of Star Trek showrunners will be incentivized to curb the franchise’s progressivism, either directly or by the knowledge that advancing left-wing ideas is a career-limiting move in the company. Five years from now, it is almost inconceivable that whatever Star Trek is still being made by Paramount will depict labour unions or transgender characters without villanizing them.

Blogger Darren Mooney has ably pointed out that the series is not always as progressive as its reputational legacy, but recent incarnations such as Discovery and Strange New Worlds have certainly leaned into diversity, equity, and inclusion as essential elements of the franchise. This is in sharp contrast to the values of the franchise’s new owners, who have vowed to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at the studio.

We suspect that Star Trek is boldly going nowhere good.

The spectrum of political viewpoints expressed within canonical stories of a franchise that is considered to be acceptable exists within certain expectations governed by creators and owners. In the 1960s, Gene Roddenberry was prohibited from depicting a labour union in The Original Series, but in the 1990s labour organizing became part of mainstream Star Trek politics. In the 1980s, David Gerrold quit The Next Generation because LGBTQ stories were prohibited on the series, but by the 2020s, such stories were an essential part of Star Trek. This is the Overton Window of the franchise; the spectrum of political storytelling that is considered canonical.

Star Trek Picard was not our favourite series,
but they do have to be given credit for being
pretty clear on their position on I.C.E.
(Image via StarTrek.net)

This window shifts slowly. It is unlikely that there will suddenly be a Star Trek: Neutral Zone Patrol show where Dean Cain and an alien hedgehog first officer are heroic Starfleet officers trying to prevent Romulan immigrants from stealing Federation jobs. But It’s more likely that the show will maintain a patina of progressivism, while airing an increased number of episodes that implicitly endorse warrantless wiretapping, right-wing military adventures, or racial profiling.

There is a faction within every fandom that embraces the franchise as part of their identity. Someone isn’t just a fan of the television show Dr. Who, they identify as a Whovian. Someone isn’t just a fan of the television show Star Trek, they identify as a Trekkie. Someone isn’t just a fan of the television show Mercy Point, they identify as a Pointhead. There is often in-group slang and a rejection of criticism of the franchise coming from those outside of the group. Once you have pledged allegiance to a specific intellectual property, the ability to assess its output becomes more difficult.

This type of fan loyalty is already big business, with media properties monetizing commitment to community through slapdash sequels and merchandise. The most die-hard fans will continue to follow the franchise uncritically even when intellectual property is owned by someone whose overt political agenda informs the end product. For a franchise like Star Trek, which has built an occasionally insular partisan core of fandom, the most fanatical group is fairly well established. It is conceivable that Trekkies who once celebrated inclusivity, exploration, and social critique may find themselves complicit in endorsing a vision they did not initially share, simply by remaining loyal.

Two years ago this blog predicted that within a decade, one of the major streaming services would lean into culture war divisions in an attempt to build a walled garden that appeals to the increasingly extreme right wing political identity. That prediction is coming true faster than we had anticipated. Paramount Plus is on its way to becoming the Fox News of entertainment content.

Declaring allegiance to a specific corporate-owned franchise effectively puts one’s loyalty up for sale; whichever media conglomerate owns the property has its hooks in the fandom. The transformation of Paramount under Ellison illustrates how corporate ownership might reshape both the content of a franchise and potentially its fandom.

When allegiance to a brand eclipses critical engagement, even the most idealistic communities risk being co-opted by forces that run counter to the values they once championed.

Inconceivable! (Hugo Cinema 1988)

This blog post is the thirty-first in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.  

Confusion about program item locations, registration difficulties, and a convention committee that seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis. These are some of the reasons that the 1988 World Science Fiction Convention is remembered as a largely shambolic affair. Held in New Orleans on the weekend of September 1, it was described by Locus Magazine as “easily the most disorganized large-scale Worldcon ever held.”

The Metropolitan Auditorium in New Orleans
where the 1988 Hugo Awards took place has
lain vacant and in shambles since 2005.
(Image via NOLA.com)

The lineup to get into the Hugo Awards ceremony was also a mess, but once fans got inside the festivities were actually pretty entertaining. Toastmaster Mike Resnick had the audience roaring with laughter, and Gardner Dozois’ acceptance speech for his first Hugo Award was lauded as heartfelt and moving.

Not a single Best Dramatic Presentation finalist appears to have been in attendance for the ceremony, leaving Resnick to announce the award fairly quickly, hand the trophy to publicist Terry Erdman (who hadn’t even worked on the movie), and then move on.

Hugo voters had been enthusiastic in their support for The Princess Bride, with more votes being cast for the Best Dramatic winner than anything in any other category. With 493 votes, it eclipsed its nearest competitor Robocop, which garnered only 276 first-place votes.

The 1988 shortlist is a mixed bag. On top of Princess Bride and Robocop, there was Star Trek The Next Generation’s pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint,” Arnold Schwarzenegger's Predator, and George Miller’s Witches of Eastwick. Two of these probably didn’t deserve to make the cut, but it’s difficult to think of other movies from that year deserving inclusion instead.

Perhaps the British anti-war low budget movie Friendship’s Death might have warranted inclusion on the ballot, or the classic Anime Neo Tokyo. Inner-Space, Batteries Not Included, and Spaceballs all have their adherents, but any of these would likely have been a marginal call. Harry and the Hendersons also came out that year.

It would be fair to say genre cinema was in a post-Star Wars lull. As unbelievable as it may seem in retrospect, there was not a single science fiction or fantasy film among the Top-5 highest grossing movies of the Hugo-eligible year. This had not happened in more than a decade, and has not happened since.

In fact, the highest-grossing science fiction or fantasy movie of 1987 was the mostly-mundane Witches of Eastwick, which earned $63 million and eighth in the box office rankings for the year (behind the mediocre Richard Dreyfuss cop comedy Stakeout).

David Foster Wallace dismissed Witches of Eastwick
author John Updike as “a penis with a thesaurus.”
(Image via New Statesman)

The Witches of Eastwick probably should not have been considered for a Hugo Award. It’s barely fantasy, and is a meandering and irritating movie. Based on a novel by Couples author John Updike, and brought to the screen by Mad Max director George Miller, it portrays three single women (Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, and Cher) who are seduced by a stranger who might be the Devil (Jack Nicholson). Each of the three women are portrayed as missing something in their lives, and the audience is supposed to accept that Nicholson’s devil has the power to change that. Insultingly, to the characters, each of them essentially gives up their career and artistic aspirations as soon as they’re with him. John Updike may have his admirers, but to us the portrayals of women and LGBTQ people in his works have aged extremely poorly, and Witches of Eastwick is no exception. There is also a tonal mismatch between the source material, the directorial vision, and the energy brought to the screen by the stars. As a reviewer in Variety Magazine noted, “Miller seems to become impatient with the material and tries to hike it up a notch toward the end with some inappropriate special effects.”

The Predator is probably not the best his planet has
to offer. The scorpion-faced alien is just a half-rate
nepo kid trying to pretend that he’s formidable
and worthy of his father’s affection.
(Image via Newsweek)

Released on the exact same day that summer, Predator is a well-constructed and highly quotable pulp adventure action movie featuring one of the best-designed alien creatures of that era’s cinema. The almost all-male cast is muscle-bound and somewhat cliched, with action beats interspersed with bro-handshakes between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers. But while Predator is on its surface a testosterone-fuelled jungle romp about heroic American soldiers put into conflict with a deadly alien who hunts them, it is often pointed out that the movie can be read as a condemnation of American trophy hunters who take high-tech weaponry with them on African safaris where they hunt whatever animals they can put their sights on. It’s a savvier movie than it’s often given credit for, and was a worthy Hugo finalist. As an interesting aside, as far as we can tell, Predator director John McTiernan is the first Hugo-winner to serve time in prison.

Probably the most anticipated science fiction event of the year had been on the small screen, as Star Trek launched The Next Generation — and earned a Hugo nomination in the process. Although the series would eventually become a classic, and possibly the most popular iteration of the franchise, it got off to a very rough start. The pilot episode “Encounter At Farpoint” is a fairly clunky two hours of television, with two plots that seem to work at cross purposes. On one side, the Enterprise D and its new captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stuart) gets accosted by a malevolent god-like being, while on the surface of a nearby planet half of the crew are trying to solve the mystery of how a city got built fairly rapidly. It’s rough around the edges, and occasionally very clunky in terms of dialogue. Whether or not this deserved to be on the Hugo shortlist probably depends on your affection for The Next Generation, but we would suggest “Hide and Q,” which aired on November 23 of that year, would have been a better pick.

However, two works on the shortlist — and indeed in that entire year — stood head and shoulders above the rest.

Given the militarization of police over the past three decades, the increasing corporate dominance of

It may be of fannish interest to note that in 1987,
Forrest J. Ackerman played the President of Earth
in the movie Amazon Women On The Moon.
(Image via Letterboxd)

America’s legal system, and the lack of accountability among those in power, Robocop’s grim satire seems more timely now than when it first hit cinemas. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, it’s an over-the-top social commentary peppered with immersive and organic worldbuilding and intense non-diagetic inserts. Depicting a near-future Detroit where the police force is being privatized, the movie follows a detective named Alex Murphy (Peter Weller). Murphy is killed and then brought back to life as a cyborg who must avenge his own murder. But the story is so much more than that, tackling the dehumanization of labour and the alienation of late-capitalism. The movie is occasionally witty, sometimes disturbing, and structurally perfect. Details introduced in the first act (e.g., the way Alex Murphy holsters his gun) are relevant to in the denouement (e.g. the reveal of who Robocop is), Some members of our cinema club argued that this is the most incisive and relevant science fiction movie made in the entire decade, as the movie offers brutal social commentary presented in an innovative manner.

Studios had struggled to market The Princess Bride, and as “Inconceivable!” as it might be now, the movie was widely regarded as a box-office disappointment. Opening on barely 800 screens, it hadn’t even cracked $30 million, and wouldn’t be popularly regarded as a significant movie for several more years. So the fact that fandom chose it as their favourite indicates that the Worldcon community was ahead of the curve. Told as a metafictional narrative read by a grandfather to his sick grandson, the movie follows a farm boy named Westley (Cary Elwes) on a quest to rescue his true love Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright). For at least one member of our cinema club, Princess Bride remains her “favourite movie of all time,” but some others found the delivery a touch too saccharine and the whimsy to be forced.

Although some of us still wish a more purely science fictional movie like Robocop could have won the Hugo that year, it’s difficult to quibble with the overwhelming vote of the 1988 Worldcon attendees. The Princess Bride was the film that represented the tastes of fandom voters that year. Considering the fact that it remains a cult favourite in the broader public, it’s probably the right pick for the award.

Art as a Video Game

The Hugo Award for Best Game or Interactive Work presents the Hugo voter with a conundrum: should the works be judged based on the quality of the gameplay, or on the merits of the storytelling as science fiction or fantasy. As an example, Donkey Kong Bonanza might be one of the best video games of 2025, but its story is uninspiring. Consequently, for some, it is difficult to put forward as a Hugo contender.

The president of France celebrated the success of
Clair Obscur as a triumph of French art.
(Screen capture)

When making our selections, we view the Hugo Awards as being an institution that was designed to recognize story first and foremost. Although gameplay is a factor in our votes for this category, it is secondary to the quality of narrative and the artistry of how that narrative is expressed.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, however, offers no such tradeoffs, taking the framework of a standard role-playing game (RPG) and evolving it in ways that reinvigorates one's faith in the format. It is first-rate fantasy storytelling combined with well-balanced and compulsively playable action.

The story is set in a world where every year, people who have reached a certain age suddenly die, and every year that age gets younger. Now that the population is dying at the age of 33, an expedition is organized to try and find out why and to confront the villainous Paintress who is thought to be responsible.

One of the aspects of Clair Obscur that should be highlighted is the design. Rather than hewing to very standard, anime-inspired art, the game designers took inspiration from sources such as Belle Époque, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Symbolism, Dark Romanticism, and Surrealism. The resulting, eclectic art style makes gameplay encounters feel both unnerving and alien; emphasizing how little the player knows about their enemy.

Unlike some other RPGs, Clair Obscur offers a fairly lean cast of characters, including earnest and loyal Maelle and fanciful giant Esquie. However, this cast is well developed enough to offer satisfying gameplay and story telling. The characters’ interactions feel organic and the relationships develop naturally. Each party member gets fleshed out through vignettes in the game’s camp, developing their relationships with the game’s main character and each other.

It's clear that Clair Obscur directors Guillaume
Broche and Maxance Playez understand and love
the history of this type of RPG game.
(Image via liesofp_official Instagram)

This cast eschews much of the adolescent power fantasies that have been staples of video game narratives for far too long. This is, instead, a story about adults who are facing their mortality and decide that it is better to carry on in a quest for the sake of future generations. There are discussions about the dangers of optimism, the morality of euthanasia, and the value of perseverance in the face of declining health.

At first glance, Clair Obscur’s gameplay might seem slightly antiquated. Turn-based combat is so out-of-fashion that most flagship titles from AAA studios (such as Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy series) have done away with the whole concept. Clair Obscur’s designers have breathed new life into this mechanic, however, through a combination of balanced options and attention to detail. It’s a turn-based system with real-time dodges and parries that make the action energetic and exciting. This may not be a complete reinvention of the system, but it is a thoughtful implementation of it.

This actually points to one of the aspects of Clair Obscur that is worth celebrating; it is a mid-budget title, something that has become rare in the era of AAA vs indie. French games developer Sandfall Interactive doesn’t have the resources of a gaming titan like Electronic Arts or Sony Interactive — but neither is it a tiny indie studio putting out titles solely via Steam or itch.io. They have the resources to devote to a project like this, and the nimbleness of a smaller studio to take some risks with it. It’s a subsector of games development that has unfortunately become less common in the industry.

The people at Sandfall Interactive seem to really care about the storytelling traditions of RPGs. They created a work that is in conversation with classics of the genre, adding thoughtfully to the canon. We look forward to seeing what Sandfall Interactive does next.