#redshirts

I'm eager to know how they make their way out of the narrative.

Because if they were on a good show at least it would suck less overall, I gues.

They're similar stories in certain ways, and different stories in other ways, but I think one reason why Galaxy Quest is a masterpiece while Redshirts is fairly good without rising to the same level is their attitude toward the genre they're satirizing.

In Redshirts, it feels like Scalzi is seething with bitter contempt toward the genre of Trek-like TV Space Opera. While Galaxy Quest definitely has some moments poking fun at ridiculous or inconsistent writing in its Star Trek-like show, it's still able to respect it for what it is.

You might say that Chronicles of the Intrepid is, specifically, supposed to be a quite bad Star Trek ripoff. After all, Star Trek actually is confirmed to have existed in the Redshirts universe, and Scalzi could say "look, you can feel how you want about Star Trek or Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica, but Chronicles of the Intrepid is some real hack stuff." I don't know. Maybe. Except that I feel like it would have been better if CotI were also a work that had something genuinely compelling about it in addition to its flaws. Maybe it does: it's not supposed to be a total flop, after all, and an actor who is part of the bridge crew's "big five," but is not the leading star, is stated to make over $90,000 an episode. If so, though, we can't see any of the compelling parts of CotI from the characters' point of view.

Like, Andy spent years as a Forshan seminarian, but if he ever grieves to think that some of the seminary students he studied with have now died in pointless sectarian violence, or reflects on the horror of seeing Forshans he regarded as decent, thoughtful people committing horrible atrocities and calling for the death of those in the Rightward Schism, or he ever feels joy at the prospect of the Intrepid bringing peace to Forshan, or the weight of responsibility in not just getting the weird actor/character body-swapping trick to work to save Hester/Matthew Paulson but to actually get the presumably peace-bringing message encoded in Hester's invasive DNA to the Forshan belligerents, we never see it. It's all snide remarks about how the whole thing makes no sense.

If the whole universe is such stupid hack scifi that a man can live for years on an alien world, learning several of their languages and studying their religion, and feel nothing about that world being plunged into religious civil war, why should we care about these characters? Because Andy Dahl, Maia Duvall, etc, are the main characters, and they matter regardless of how flimsy the plywood sets and made-up space politics that surround them are? In that case, aren't we just re-iterating on the same attitude that's so risible at the core of CotI, but with a different crew as the main characters?

At the end, the book does come close to confirming this, diving a meta-level deeper, with Andy Dahl realizing that while he may be a glorified extra in Chronicles of the Intrepid, CotI doesn't actually exist either, and he's actually the main character of something else (presumably Scalzi's Redshirts). The best and worst thing I can say about this is that it's a brief excursion toward the end. If it were developed more, it could have been interesting and compelling, or it could have been awful, but as it is, it's little more than a brief wink toward the reader at the end.

Can you make good art about the subject of bad art? Probably. I'd be reluctant to say that every satire should be express a Galaxy Quest-like love for the genre, and that there's no place for a truly acerbic, no-holds-barred take-down of Extruded Space Opera Product. I don't know exactly what the best approach would be for writing something like that (maybe something a little more centered on the hack writer, more like Californication or Bojack Horseman?), but I feel like Redshirts specifically would have been better if it were about slightly better art, and if the narrative could evince a smidgen of respect for the people behind CotI, rather than just pitying them for their problems such as Paulson's comatose son and Weinstein's post-narrative writer's block in Coda I.