Star Trek: Diplomatic Relations

Episode 1x02: “Agrément”

Review by W. Joseph Thomas

“Who the hell are you to take that kind of stand on this particular aspect of a culture?”

“Excuse me!”

“I’m not sure I can, Yiela!”

--Kingsley and Yiela, in perhaps the only moment of sustained drama in “Agrément.”  Don’t blink, or you might miss it!

1 out of 4 stars

Bad

WJT’s Fan Film Ratings Disclaimer

Bottom Line: Everything’s fine or excellent except the script… which is, not to put too fine a point on it, awful.

I wanted to love “Agrément.”  I really did.  Everything was going for it.  I was fresh back to fan films after a long Altantis-induced hiatus*, and I had had Diplomatic Relations on my radar ever since its promising pilot episode.  I put on my headphones and cracked out my text editor (I may or may not have said, “Dragon up!” as I did so) and counted the good I could look forward to: the show had a solid cast, good production values (great for one so young), a solid premise, and a more-or-less fun pilot.  It’s also the home of Michael Hudson, one of several unsung heroes in Trek fan filmdom upon whom I’d like nothing more than to heap copious praise.

To some extent, I can.  There is a lot to like here.  Unfortunately, all the good was in the technical jiggery-popery, and, without a good story to rest on top of the foundation laid by cast and crew, I can’t fairly give more than one star for it.  Nonetheless, I’m happy to start with the positive and burnish as many deserving egos as I can before I put on my black spider-suit and start whining more than Alan Greenspan’s been ever since he realized that the entire economic crisis was basically his fault.  (This column’s first political zinger!  May it be the first of few!)

For one, as it turns out, I get to congratulate Michael Hudson after all.  His post-production work on “Agrément,” apparently a solo job, met all the standards (i.e. “at no point made me want to rip my own ears off with a bazooka made of knives”) that a lot of new audio dramas—the ones that haven’t worked out clear recording and audio processing standards—don’t usually manage.  Post-production even sprinkled in a few bits that went beyond mere set dressing and reached out to pull my emotions into the scene.  At one point, I missed a whole block of exposition because I was listening more intently to the child crying in the background and wondering what his story was.  There are a few fanprods out there that tell great stories but the only way to enjoy them is to cringe through the production values (I refrain here from making a specific callout at Defiant** to illustrate my point..  …oh, dear.  It seems I never learn); Diplomatic Relations is making it easy for me to be drawn into the episode—sometimes much further than the quality of the script warrants.

It probably helped that Mr. Hudson was working with a largely experienced and high-quality cast.  The ubiquitous Karl Puder is featured in a co-starring role on Diplomatic Relations. Mr. Puder’s taking an interesting turn as a Vulcan, which is such a stark departure from the Klingon he’s perfected that I nearly missed it.  Someone who shares his last name and whom I therefore presume is his wife, Barbara Puder, plays starring Ambassador Kingsley.  I’m not sold on her yet.  She may be a weak link as an actress.  There are moments—more than one—where she doesn’t sound like a Federation Ambassador, but a middle-aged American woman reading the lines of a Federation Ambassador.  This is a problem.  On the other hand, it may be that there’s simply no way to deliver lines like, “Who the hell are you to take that kind of stand on this particular aspect of a culture?” and not start sounding like a pretentious early-TNG multiculturalist windbag and/or Wesley Crusher*** about halfway through the sentence.  If that’s the case, then the moments where she wasn’t working for me were the fault of the writer, not the actress.  I otherwise enjoy her voice, and these moments are rare, so I’m going to give Ms. Puder the benefit of the doubt for now, not least because it’s been pointed out to me by some attentive readers of this column that I know nothing about acting and don’t have the least right or competence to give negative reviews about it.

There are a lot of cast members in this show, but most of them (thank goodness) aren’t important enough that I need to remember their names.  Credit where it’s due: Nick Beckwith, who apparently plays a character I can’t remember from Intrepid, put in a good job creating flashes of drama during a lengthy but flaccid medical crisis; Michael Liebmann guested as someone evil, which, given the course of his character on Excelsior, is less and less surprising these days, but I’m always happy to hear him regardless****; and Jennifer Cole appeared long enough for me to notice for the first time that, texturally, her voice bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Near from Death Note.  This is no insult.

Mr. Bodo Hartwig’s score also deserves considerable credit for being original.  In all honesty, I’m not a big fan of the fan-composed work of Milne, Hartwig, et. al., but I think both production and composer deserve a lot of credit for going to the trouble of making their own music and not violating copyright where it can possibly be avoided.  I make an effort to give that credit publicly whenever I can.  In this particular score, there were a few fade-outs I quite liked, and I made a note of enjoying the music in the final scene.  Otherwise, nice job going the extra mile for original music.

Now, like the Eye of Sauron, I slowly turn my eye to Alex Matthews, creator, executive producer, co-director, and, most importantly, writer, and I ask: “Well?  Do you have anything to say for yourself?”*****

Diplomatic Relations’ pilot, “Rapproachment,” was about half-right and half-wrong.  This was several more points more “right” than I generally expect in a pilot episode (see Excelsior, Continuing Mission, Babylon 5, Assignment: Earth, et. al.), and I immediately bumped it to the top five on my “fanprods to keep track of” list (which, thanks to the proliferation of cheap production technology, now numbers near fifty).  Certainly, the show was top-heavy with exposition—but it was a complicated show with a complicated setting and with so much material the raw info dumps were at time both necessary and interesting.  There were plot clichés practically copy-pasted from TV-Tropes.org—but amid the idiot moments and convenient foul-ups and occasional dialogue eye-rollers, there were real emotional connections being forged while the royal house was held hostage in the Preserver Repository.  There was genuine tension between Kingsley and her aide-de-camp Sovik.  Sure, there was character spam—but excess characters can be killed off easily enough (as Excelsior proved), and the show had the good sense to focus on the characters it needed to focus on.  And yes, there was far too much time spent on establishing the show within the continuity of the Trek universe, the Hidden Frontier universe, the Intrepid universe—even the Shatnerverse—but, at the same time, Mr. Matthews was laying out a complex and (so the pilot suggests) genuinely original society for those of us who enjoy creativity more than fan pornography.  So I wrote down some notes and said to myself, “Self, this was a dry run.  A pilot.  The next one, they’re going to figure out what went wrong, fix it, and you’re going to have a great show on your hands.” 

It seems that the people at Diplomatic Relations did the same thing I did—sketched out a list of the good and the bad, clearly marked which was which, and then threw one of the lists away.  Unfortunately, it looks like they threw out the good list.

“Agrément” is an episode devoid of tension, and, at times, it feels as if it is deliberately so.  There are so many “whys” I could ask about the writing—and, in fact, I think I’m going to ask them.  Why is there a frame story?  Why was it not immediately made clear that the main plot is a flashback?  Why does it take ten minutes for a conflict to appear—and another ten for the main conflict to appear?  Why does most of the emotional tension of the episode come from Ambassador Kingsley scolding everybody?  Why in the world was the conflict resolution a two-minute technobabble trick building off a character conflict that didn’t appear until the final third of the episode, whose resolution we never actually got to see and was handled through an Ambassador’s Log?   Why did you make me listen to the whole episode only to find out that that was the payoff?  Long rant short: where did this show’s complexity go?  The cleverness?  The character tension?  And who let all this deadweight exposition in to take its place?  This was bad, and there’s nothing I can think to say that might redeem it.  And I don’t really know how that could have happened.

Now, all this being said—and it is said with complete honesty—I know I’m not writing the obituary for Diplomatic Relations.  This was a second episode.  Second episodes often stink.  Look at Continuing Mission and “Integration.”  Look at that silly thing Farragut did with George Washington and the American Revolution.  Heck, look at “The Naked Now” or “Fight or Flight” or “Parallax” or “Hide and Seek.”  For whatever reason, writers and producers the world over get the idea into their heads that the second episode of their series has to be a quiet standalone after the heavy epic awesome of the first hour.  This is a silly idea that leads to a lot of substandard scripts getting produced—but it’s not a sign that a show is dead.  In fact, it just as often turns out to be a sign of life.

I hope—and expect—that that’s the case here.  The final scene, which was much better than the rest of the episode, is a hopeful sign of that.  Time will tell.

Final note: is that Commander Trask from Section 31 Files******?  If so, nice hat tip.  I won’t wonder aloud why Mark Bruzee wasn’t available, because, hey, that’d just be nitpicking.

There.  My promise to do a full review of an episode of STDR is fulfilled.  I hope the guy I promised doesn’t regret the request.

Coming up next time, I’ll be reviewing either Continuing Mission’s first installment of the Sword of Romulus Trilogy or filing an overdue review of last year’s Operation: Beta Shield.  Haven’t made up my mind yet.  Any votes?

Notes:

*Bonus Review Content!  Rejected Altantis haikus (for “The Prodigal”):

One:

When this show is bad

would it take so much to be

memorably bad?

Two:

In honor of Black History Month:

What happens to a

plot clichéd?  Does it

dry up, like—Nah.  Too mean. 

**Confession: I am only on Episode 23 of Defiant, which makes me almost a year out of date.  If they have since gotten their production quality in order, my apologies and kudos to them.

***Disclaimer: I love Wil Wheaton.  I even liked Wesley.  I think we can all agree, though, that he was given some of the worst sections of dialogue ever written for an episode of Star Trek, canon or not.  SEE ALSO: “Symbiosis,” “The Naked Now,” “Justice,” et. al.

****I believe Michael Liebmann is the one who set off the row on the Hidden Frontier forums over my review of “Where There’s a Sea,” but I’m not holding it against him—except insofar as I’ve just held it against him by mentioning it here.  This just proves what a kind, generous, and benevolent ax-man of hate I am.  I now consider myself properly revenged.

*****It would be hilarious if Sauron actually did this at some point during The Lord of the Rings, perhaps to the Lord of the Nazgúl.  The eye would turn, then blink, and you’d get the impression of Barad-dûr shrugging, and he’d say… I’m the only one finding this funny, aren’t I?

******I know, Trask is from Lost Frontier.  I deliberately confused it with Section 31 because it annoys Kirok from TrekUnited.  This may be a poor way to treat my friends,  among whom I count Kirok, but who ever said I was good at having friends?*******

*******I only wrote this note so I could see what seven asterixes in a row looked like.  I need a new way of marking off multiple footnotes without superscripting.  Huh.

I used to list links to all fan films mentioned in my reviews, but I’m much too lazy for that now.  You can either use Google, which is perfectly serviceable, or you can look up Wowbagger’s List of Fan Films, which is the biggest list I’ve seen to date.  It can be found here: http://trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=60711

Editorial Note: We are proud of the intellectual honesty of W. Joseph Thomas and we stand by our writer. We do acknowledge that people will not agree with him and while we may not agree with every opinion of WJT, we respect and admire his honesty in his critiques. His opinions are his and not necessarily the views and opinions of www.noriega.biz.

Yeah, and we also stand by Bam and his idiocies. Go figure that one too.

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