Guide Page: "Believers" (original) (raw)

• By the way, here's something interesting: an outline got turned in this week for an episode which I won't identify just now. Came in from one of our writers, based on an assigned premise. It's something you've never seen done in ANY SF-TV series, and I don't think has ever been done in TV overall. A very daring little story.
  Word finally came back from our liaison with PTEN. "Number one, this is absolutely against the demographics on the show. Number two, no studio or network executive in his right *mind* would EVER approve this story in a million years. Number three...it's a hell of a story, I love it, let's do it."
  This has been emblematic of our relationship with PTEN: they've left us alone, and are trusting us in our storytelling. We want to go right out to the very edge, and they're letting us, which is wonderful. They've been, and continue to be, terrific to work with.
  If the end of this particular story doesn't absolutely floor you, nothing will.
• When I developed the basic Believers story, and was looking for someone to assign it to, David was the first person we went to. He asked me at the time why him...he's more generally associated with humorous stuff. I had my reasons. See, lately, David adopted a young boy, about the same age as Shon. So about halfway into the outline, David called and said, "NOW I understand." I knew that having a child of his own now would mean that the story would be a lot more personal. Especially the end scene, which I knew would have to be done *very* carefully. I think David did a great job, and under his guidance it turned into a very moving episode. And with any luck, he'll write more down the road.
• There's some small amount of blurring that goes on in this show; a freelancer turns in a script, and things get added. For instance, there was a need to really tighten up the story in "Believers," which could best be done by bringing in a small B story, which would allow us to streamline and intensify the main story. So I wrote the B story and slipped it in.
• Today David Gerrold came by the set to watch some of the shooting on his episode, "Believers." Unlike many shows, which basically throw the writer off the set, our writers are welcome to hang around. It's not only okay, it's *expected* that the writer will be there at some point, to be a part of the process. David was quite ebullient about the whole thing; he thinks that this is the best script he's ever written, and it's being filmed exactly as he'd hoped, if not better. So there he was, getting autographs, muttering something about somebody named "Hugo...."
  What was interesting was one comment he made, which echoed almost verbatim something D.C. Fontana said when she came by the stage: that the atmosphere on set, with the crew, the cast, the production people is exactly the same as it was on the first season of the original Star Trek.
• I know from pfingle eggs...I let David have the reference because... well, I don't know anymore...I think water torture was involved.
• Who wrote Kosh's line about the avalanche?
  That was Gerrold, as I recall.
• Similarity between "Believers" & a DS9 novel?
  A couple points. 1) When "Believers" was written, Peter's book hadn't yet hit the stands. 2) Peter likely got his notion of the sick kid and the religious parents from the same basic source we did: the headlines. This has been an ongoing problem in real life for some time. So he took that real premise, and did one story based on it, and we did another extrapolation. This notion did *not* originate in the Trek universe....
• And yeah, TV generally doesn't do this kind of ending. Which is why we did it...and our liaison at Warner Bros. deserves a lot of credit for letting us do it.
• It was important to tell David to pull no punches because in TV, most producers *want* you to do so, and he had to know going in that this was the way the story would go. David's a great writer, and David's a professional...meaning he understands where the general limits of TV are. If you're going to move the lines around, it behooves you to tell your writer that. Knowing the rules, he went out and did a bangup job on the episode.
• I view Delenn's comment about "suffering the interference of others" in regards to matters of the soul in "Believers" to be a reference to the Soul Hunter.
• What happened to Ivanova when she encountered the raiders? She got away by long-distance firing as she retreated as fast as she could, taking shots as she went. It wouldn't look real exciting in the long run.
• How Ivanova got away from the Raiders was taking advantage of her lead to run away, occasionally firing backward to deter pursuit, until she got to the jumpgate. It wasn't really anything dramatically interesting, and at that point you would start distracting from the main plot...and that couldn't be allowed to happen. There's really no place in the rest of the act where you can cut in without destroying it. And in the tag there's no room for the pursuit, only the arrival.
• Excuse me....
  You don't think that "Believers" was SF. Tough.
  No, it didn't have warp gates, or tachyon emitters, or lots of technobabble...it was about people. And the dilemmas they face.
  Part of what has screwed up so much of SF-TV is this sense that you must utterly divorce yourself from current issues, from current problems, from taking on issues of today and extrapolating them into the future, by way of aliens or SF constructs. And that is *precisely* why so much of contemporary SF-TV is barren and lifeless and irrelevant...and *precisely* why such series as the original Star Trek, and Outer Limits, and Twilight Zone are with us today.
  Like Rod Serling and Gene Roddenberry and Joe Stefano and Reginald Rose and Arch Oboler and Norman Corwin and a bunch of other writers whose typewriters I'm not fit to touch, my goal in part is to simply tell good stories within an SF setting. And by SF I mean speculative fiction, which sometimes touches on hard-SF aspects, and sometimes doesn't. Speculative fiction means you look at how society changes, how cultures interact with one another, how belief systems come into conflict. And as someone else here noted recently, anthropology and sociology are also sciences; soft sciences, to be sure, but sciences nonetheless.
  It's been pointed out that TV-SF is generally 20-30 years behind print SF. This whole conversation proves the point quite succinctly. In the 1960s or so, along came the New Wave of SF, which eschewed hardware for stories about the human condition set against an SF background. And the fanzines and prozines and techno-loving pundits of hard-SF declared it heresy, said it wasn't SF, this is crap. And eventually they were steamrolled, and print SF grew up a little. Now the argument has come to settle here. Well, fine. So be it.
  I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who said that SF is anything I point to and say, "That's SF." Go pick up a copy of "A Canticle for Liebowitz," one of the real singular masterpieces of the science fiction genre, and it won't fit the narrow criteria you've set up for what qualifies as SF by your lights.
  There is a tendency among the more radical hard-SF proponents to stamp their feet and hold their breath until they turn blue, to threaten that unless the book changes or the field comes around or the series cottens to *their* specific, narrow version of what SF is -- and that definition changes from person to person -- they'll take their ball and their bat and go home. Fine and good. And the millions who come to take their place in the bleachers and on the field will get to have all the fun.
  Some of our episodes will fit your definition of SF. Some will not. This worries me not at all.
• The area that cannot be opened is the chest area, primarily; a nick or cut or scratch really doesn't count; it's puncturing to the body cavity wherein the soul is housed.
• No, the parents were not charged with murder. When a species on the station acts against one of their own kind in a particular way, and no other species is affected, they are judged by the laws that apply to their own species and culture. In their culture, what they did is not a crime, so they received no punishment. Had they done this to a human, then yes, they would have been charged with murder.
• I'm not quite sure if we're talking about the same thing; the two parents never said that the kid would die if he underwent the surgery, only that his soul would escape. This would leave him "soul-dead," for lack of a better phrase. And how are we to tell that they weren't right? I don't think it's quite as cut and dried as you seem to present. (And again, they were acting very much out of their real beliefs of how the universe operates. If someone here is injured, and declared brain dead, most folks think it's okay to pull the plug...even though one could make the argument that there's still a living soul in the body. This is the opposite situation; one may argue that there is still a mind somewhere in the body, but the soul is dead or gone. The phrase they use is that they put the shell out of its misery. To their mind, he was dead already.)
• Actually, I disagree when you say that the doctor was right. Says who? Not the parents. Not the episode. Nobody was really right, when you come down to it, except maybe Sinclair, who made the correct call. You say the boy was okay at the end...the parents didn't think so. Who's to say if there was or wasn't a soul inside?
  I think David's script walked a very fine line and really didn't endorse either side. (I've had people send me email upset because we showed that the parents were right, and others because we said the doctor was right, and others because neither was right and the ambiguity bothered them.)
• Of course the surgical scars would've been a dead giveaway that surgery had been performed. Also, lying to them would have also been a violation of medical ethics. This was not a story about easy solutions.
• There's a wonderful scene in "Fiddler on the Roof" where Tevya is caught in an argument between two Rabbis. The first one makes a point. "You're right!" Tevya says. The second Rabbi makes a contradictory point. "You're right!" Tevya says. A third Rabbi, looking on, says, "Wait a minute, they can't *both* be right."
  "You know," Tevya says, "you're right too."
• A lot of our episodes are constructed to work as mirrors; you see what you put into it. "Believers" has been interpreted as pro- religion, anti-religion, and religion-neutral..."Quality" has been interpreted, as you note, as pro-capital punishment, and anti-capital punishment. We do, as you say, much prefer to leave the decision on what things mean to the viewer to hash out.
  A good story should provoke discussion, debate, argument...and the occasional bar fight.
• The thing about "Believers" is that, really, nobody's right, and in their own way, from their point of view, everybody's right.
• "The concept of loving parents being able to kill their child for their religions seems to be unrealistic."
  Funny...I seem to recall this little story in the Old Testament about how a good and wise man was asked by god to sacrifice his own son, to himself kill his own child, and he was willing to do it, and was only stopped by god saying, in essence, "April fool."
• On the "predictable" argument...I can only shrug. The kid has a 50/50 chance...he'll survive or die. And guessing the end isn't, for me, the key; this isn't a who-dunit; it's how our characters react on the way there, and what it *does* to them, I think.
• Since I suggested the ending to David, right down to the candles, I suppose I'll take the rap...but the question you're raising isn't the issue. There are only two possible results: the kid lives, or the kid dies, there ain't much in-between. You ask, "Who on earth is going to side with people who kill their own child?" The audience isn't being asked to *side* with anyone, there IS no easy solution, and no one is 100% in the right.
  There is a wonderful short story, which we adapted for Twilight Zone, called "The Cold Equations," where a small shuttle is going from point A to point B. There is enough fuel for the shuttle, and one pilot, and no more. The ship is bringing medicine to save 500 colonists. A young girl has stowed away on the ship to see her brother. She's discovered. If the pilot does nothing, the ship won't arrive, and he and the girl will die, and the colonists will die. If he sacrifices himself, she won't be able/won't know how to guide the ship to its destination. The only way out is to ask her to enter the airlock so he can space her and continue the mission. And that's what happens. You can't argue with math.
  Sometimes, there are no-win scenarios. And what matters then is how your characters react, what they do and say, and how it affects them. That, really, was the thrust of the episode. And to go back to your question, "Who on earth is going to side...."
  The operative word in your question is "Earth." No, no human is going to side with them (although I'd point out in the Bible that there is the story of Abraham, who was quite willing to murder his own son at god's request). They're not humans. They have a wholly different mindset, cultural background and belief system. People ask for ALIEN aliens, then judge them by human standards, and feel it's wrong if they don't behave like humans. These didn't. That's who and what they are. If humans side with them, or accept them, doesn't enter into it.
• The choice *had* to be either/or. That was the point; to put the characters in a situation of conflict and see how they handle it. Sometimes in life there are ONLY two choices, neither of them good. Your message comes from a position of trying to avoid the hard choices. But the episode is ABOUT hard choices. It *has* to be either/or.
  To support your thesis, you bring up the "Cold Equations" alternate ending of the pilot cutting off both his legs to make up the weight differential. Lemme explain something to you. I was there. When we turned in the script, by Alan Brennert, MGM went nuts. "You can't have a sympathetic young woman commit suicide! It'll kill the ratings!" So they (the studio exec) suggested various "fixes." One was that instead of stepping willingly out the airlock, the pilot shoots her and has to deal with the guilt. (This by them is a *better* idea?) The other was the notion of the guy cutting off his legs to make up the weight.
  First and foremost, it was a dumb idea because he'd be in no shape to pilot the ship. Second it wouldn't be enough weight. And finally, the very *nature* of "The Cold Equations," what the very TITLE means, is that there are some occasions in which the choices are stark, and there is NO way around them. If the ship has X-weight, and the fuel is for Y weight, and Y is less than X, then you've got a problem that can only -- ONLY -- be resolved by someone walking out the airlock. (And yes, they tried dumping things, but the ship is lean, not much to get rid of.) That's why it's the COLD equations; not the LUKEWARM equations.
  I fought like hell to retain the original ending, and won. (You probably read about this, btw, in my articles for TZ Magazine.) This is studio-think, let's find a nice, unthreatening, safe, middle-ground where we can resolve this without anybody being upset, threatened or offended by the story. I'm sorry, but life sometimes hands you hard choices, there ARE either/or scenarios, in which nobody really wins, and SF should be exploring those as well as the fuzzy feel-good stories. It's time SF grew up a little, damn it, and started confronting hard questions that can't always be resolved by reversing the polarity on the metaphase unit.
• Afterthought: I just wandered into the kitchen, still ranting (as I am wont to do), explained it to Kathryn...who brought me up short (as *she* is wont to do) by pointing out the antecedent to BOTH stories. The ultimate "hard choice" example in SF-TV is of course "The City on the Edge of Forever," fromST. There are only two choices, both hard: either Edith Keeler dies, or the Nazis win WW II. Kirk *has* to let her die; there's no other choice.
  It is, at the same moment, gratifying and annoying to have someone around who's smarter than I am....
• There were no changes in dialogue made in "Believers" subsequent to the first airing.