The Big Goodbye
This one is a lot of fun. That’s certainly not all it is, though.
For a seemingly basic – frothy, sure, but basic - rip-off of The Maltese Falcon, “The Big Goodbye” manages to pack in a lot of interesting ideas, on several related subjects. At its foundations, this is a story about fiction, and how we produce and process it. Additionally, though, it’s about the perils of not recognising the difference between fiction, and the realities of people who are different to you.
For some of us, this is a useful warning. Treat other people's lives as nothing but a story to entertain you, and sooner or later someone is going to bring the fun to a sudden stop.
In A San Fran Minute
Central to both these strands is the idea that there exists no bright separating line between reality and fiction. Instead, there’s a liminal space between the two, which is where the holodeck resides. The holodeck makes the fictional real, of course, but it also makes the real fictional, by channelling historical truths through the subjective interpretations of whomever happens to be writing that month’s hot new holodeck programs. “We’ll Always Have Paris” might (rather quietly) suggest the Federation is a terrifying totalitarian state where literally every moment in every public place is recorded and kept on file for later review, but the vast majority of programmes set in the 20th century or earlier are going to involve no small amount of guess-work, assumption, and even bias. The fact we’re considering this as we watch it happen inside another work of fiction, one which has taken such cultural weight that it has changed our own reality, further underlines the point.
Or so it seems to me, at least. This is not remotely my area, so I’m in even greater danger than usual of humiliating myself and/or failing to adequately describe concepts that are blatantly obvious to those who know anything about the topic. Still, if there’s any episode for which it’s appropriate to dive into a world I know nothing about and start prodding at things, it’s surely this one.
Thanks to the vagaries of the IDFC time-warp, this is the second time we’ve encountered Star Trek intersecting with film noir. The first was Voyager’s “Ex Post Facto”, which took a very different approach. The drive behind that episode was trying to figure out how to make noir function in a story centred on a Starfleet crew. “The Big Goodbye”, in contrast, demonstrates why the combination is so tricky to pull off in the first place. Picard and his crew aren’t equipped to understand 1930’s San Francisco under any circumstances, but they'll struggle particularly badly in a vision of the city viewed through a noir lens.
This isn’t a particularly trenchant observation. Indeed, much of the humour in the episode exploits this very idea, from Beverley swallowing gum to Picard failing to say “Joe DiMaggio” correctly (I love how that joke appears in a story hinging on Picard’s need to perfectly pronounce an alien greeting, by the way). This is about more than a simple unfamiliarity with the details, though. It’s about our protagonists not thinking that this unfamiliarity matters. Picard is roundly mocked when he shows up in inappropriate attire, and risks getting punched in the face when he responds to Detective Bell’s “bad cop” routine with an unabashed delight easily readable as mockery. The crew have to excuse Data for being totally clueless on more than one occasion. What a buncha mooks, right?
And they can behave this way without hesitation, because they’re convinced the system underpinning this situation protects them completely. You can interpret this as an expression of privilege. It’s simply not necessary for the crew to blend in, because what makes them different also makes them untouchable. This reading gets a boost from the episode every time someone has to make excuses for Data – the whitest dude imaginable. And it clearly works for them, until the moment it doesn’t, when Whalen confronts Leech. He takes his turn at playing in this world he believes he understands, and the realisation he’s wrong reaches him wrapped around a bullet. One moment everything is fun and frolics, the next somebody’s going to emergency, somebody’s going to jail.
This is what happens when you conceive of people as being just characters appearing in your own story. As Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin coldly explains at the end of Last King Of Scotland: “This is Africa, and we are not a game.” When you treat the real as fictional, things can go very badly wrong. It’s an act of solipsism and hubris, and it doesn’t just end up biting Whalen. The episode’s climax forces Picard to confront the possibility this awesome new technology may come attached to weighty moral responsibilities that no-one seems to have even considered. With so much of Voyager focused around the philosophical questions raised by the Doctor’s existence, it’s worth noting that this has been a concern of the 24th century Trek shows since almost the very beginning.
The McNary Paradox
Really, then, this isn’t about the fictional becoming real at all. Not unless we use a terribly crude definition of “real” that’s essentially equivalent to “tangible”. Yes, characters from fiction now have density. That’s not what I’m getting at here. The revelation that spins from Picard’s discussion with McNary is that the people created by the holodeck have always been real, since their creation. They never existed simply in the eyes of their observers. If the holodeck is a tunnel through which fiction and reality are connected, it’s dark enough to mistake one for another if you’re not willing to pay attention.
The episode’s final conversation, the eponymous “big goodbye”, does great work outlining this, and is probably the best scene here. Certainly it’s the most affecting. Gary Armagnac sells the absolute hell out of a genial but weary San Francisco flatfoot suddenly thrust into an existential crisis, when all he wants to do is go home and see his family. You can see the effect it has on Picard, too, when it finally dawns on him that he hasn’t given the slightest thought to the philosophical and moral implications of creating people for his own entertainment. The moment where our captain leaves and the holodeck goes dark is actually rather bleak and disturbing. It’s a real shame that this wasn’t the last shot of the episode. It wouldn’t have been difficult to rejig the final minutes so that Picard delivered his greeting to the Jarada from the holodeck, and only then had his final conversation with McNary.
On the other hand, by finishing the episode outside the holodeck, “The Big Goodbye” offers us an interesting symmetry. We enter the fictional world of Star Trek, which we then see enter the fictional world of Dixon Hill. It makes sense for us to see Trek leave that fictional world and return to its own narrative space before we take our own leave.
The episode is obviously enamoured with this idea – of McNary being to Picard as Picard is to us. Even the direction points us in this direction, with the lovely shot of our protagonists walking through the holodeck.
Get it? We’re watching the USS Enterprise as framed through our TV screen, and the holodeck itself (also on our screen, of course) is being framed by the entrance to it in an Enterprise corridor. We’re seeing Picard, Data and Whalen doing exactly what we do every week – using a portal to enter a fictional world. McNary’s existential crisis would extend to Picard too, were we ever able to tell him what he truly is. Our captain’s sudden need to question what McNary becomes when the holodeck is off is a question we might ask ourselves. What status do our favourite fictional characters have when we’re not actually watching them? Because it’s abundantly clear that they don’t simply vanish.
By putting our protagonists in a new fictional world, “The Big Goodbye” manages to make them more solid – in fact, inasmuch as this episode sets up one of the major story forms that secures the show’s success, it does this in at least two ways. Which means this is about the fictional becoming real, at the exact same time that it isn’t. Does that matter? Is it a problem that McNary simultaneously operates as a metaphor for the importance of recognising other people’s realities and as a stand-in for every fictional character ever? I don’t think so. Metaphors can overlap. Characters can exist to do more than one thing. And in the grey area of the holodeck, it’s entirely possible to be fictional and real at the same time. Just as it is anywhere, really.
Furthermore, it’s only on the level of McNary and Picard being equivalent that we can make sense of Wesley’s suggestion that if they turn the holodeck off with their colleagues inside, they might disappear along with the simulation. That’s a ridiculous way to believe a holodeck works, if only in terms of basic health and safety – imagine if you couldn’t reset a video game that had crashed because it would cost you your life. Turning off a holodeck shouldn’t make you vanish any more than turning off a replicator should make you immediately lose weight.
Unless, that is, there exists no actual distinction between the characters that entered the room and those that were created there. Given that, as I’ve argued, Wesley is in the early stages of learning the universe around him is one that he can rewrite at will, it makes perfect sense that he would be the one to fear Picard and entourage are no less fictional as the inhabitants of Dixon Hill’s universe
.
“We Are NOT ANIMALS!”
Let’s move on from the topic of fiction which becomes (or is revealed to be) real. What happens when we reverse the polarity of the neutron flow? As I said above, filtering any aspect of reality through the mind of a holo-programmer must introduce elements of subjectivity and inaccuracy. The scale of the problem increases when the reality in question has passed out of living memory, as it has here. Even the most rigorously researched replica of history is unlikely to be perfect. And that’s when an exact reproduction is the goal, which it often isn’t where fiction is concerned (let alone fiction about fiction).
One of the most fun realisations about “The Big Goodbye” is that, somehow, this is just the first of three episodes in which a subset of the Enterprise crew visit historical San Francisco within the same 40-year time period. Just as with “Ex Post Facto” above, the difference between this episode and the two that make up “Time’s Arrow” is rather instructive. Yes, the stories are separated by less than four decades regarding the era they’re meant to represent, but only “Time’s Arrow” was intended to faithfully recreate a historical location. And there would seem to be a clear difference between a TV show trying to replicate history as well as its various limitations will allow, and a TV show offering a diagetically fictional version of history. “Time’s Arrow” pretends Picard was in 1893. “The Big Goodbye” pretends Picard is inside a programmer’s idea of an author’s idea of 1944.
There’s all sorts of fun you can have with so many metaphysical layers to dig through – my personal favourite is that Tracey Tormé is also the name of the writer of the Dixon Hill novels, meaning he’s reworking Hammett and Huston both within and without Trek’s fictional world. Beyond this, though, there’s the fact that by highlighting the difference between fictional representations of history on the one hand, and of historical fiction on the other, we’re forced to ask ourselves how much of a difference there actually is to begin with. The second stage of extrapolation reminds us of the need to consider the first.
Obviously, much of the changes that take place between the actual past and our portrayals of it are simple mistakes, and therefore of no interest. Nitpicking this kind of stuff is big business, I realise. Googling “historical inaccuracies in” generates well over four million hits. Honestly, though, I can’t see any reason to care why, for example, Joaquin Phoenix’s thumb jabs in Gladiator are the wrong way round, no matter how much it infuriated my Latin teacher at the time.
As unimportant as that example is in itself, though, it points to the real problem. If enough fiction gets something wrong, actually getting it right becomes difficult. People start to complain historical realities aren’t “accurate”, or “realistic”, or “believable”, because they’re so used to seeing the error. Again, this couldn’t matter less when it’s about gladiatorial digit displays. But not all errors are equal, in either cause or effect. Getting the statuary wrong in The Hunchback of Notre Dame shouldn’t bother anyone who doesn’t specialise in historical architecture. Finding a bunch of ways to stuff up the Romani characters in the movie, however, is a legitimate problem. When fiction gets a group of people wrong often enough, the fiction supplants the reality in the public consciousness.
(The same process can be used to inappropriately rehabilitate as well as to damage, of course. When the Doctor can have a civil conversation with vile anti-Semites, or pal around with a man who knowingly caused the starvation of millions of Bangladeshi, you don’t get to claim you’re practicing an “apolitical” approach.) This brings us back to my initial point – there is danger in treating people as though they are equivalent to the image you have of them in your head. It’s dangerous for those making the mistake, as Leech demonstrates to Whalen. But it’s far more often dangerous for those who find their own reality is being ignored in favour of someone else’s fiction. It’s worth asking how much of the bigotry that shames our species could remain viable were the fiction that acts as vectors for lies about the marginalised swept away entirely. Maybe the authorities on Rampart had a point, after all.
It’s an insidious phenomenon, too. Sometimes the need for others to play roles for you doesn’t end in confrontation. Sometimes people acquiesce, for a whole host of reasons, and perform the lie you didn’t even realise you were asking for. “The Big Goodbye” gets at this as well. Let’s start here by considering the source material. Not The Maltese Falcon, you understand. In a lot of ways, the manner in which Tormé files the serial numbers off John Huston’s debut is about the least interesting part of the episode. Harvey Jason does a passable impression of Peter Lorre, and calling the Gutman equivalent “Cyrus Redblock” is at least a little amusing (especially given the Cold War had yet to end when this episode was broadcast). There’s also something to be said about how Picard beats Redblock and Leech in a similar manner to how Spade beats Gutman and Cairo – by letting them leave on a quest for riches knowing full well they’ll barely make it out of the door.
The fact Tormé manages a reasonably decent respray doesn’t really get us anywhere interesting, though. We’d do better considering another Bogart Film instead: In A Lonely Place. It’s from that movie that Tormé got the name “Dixon”. Indeed, the original plan was to use the full name, “Dixon Steele”, but Paramount balked about doing so when the TV show Remington Steele was doing such big business. It’s not just the name Tormé took from the film, though. There are similarities to the plot, too. Picard learning a woman he only just met has died and he’s the police’s chief suspect is a beat taken from In A Lonely Place, not The Maltese Falcon, the latter’s instigating incident being the murder of the detective’s partner.
More interesting, though, is the fact Dixon Steele was a film writer, one who doesn’t always seem to recognise the line between his own fiction and reality. This is most obviously demonstrated in a tremendously uncomfortable scene where Steele describes how he imagines a murder took place (a murder the police suspect him of committing) and makes the couple he’s dining with act it out. Steele becomes ever more intense and caught up in the fantasy as he explains the actions and motivations of his hypothetical murderer, all while instructing his friend to choke his wife in front of him.
This is clearly far more unsettling and extreme than anything Picard gets up to here. The link is there, though. Given, again, that the holodeck programme is a fictional recreation of San Francisco , McNary, Redblock and the rest are more akin to actors than they are to characters. They are actively contributing to the creation of a fiction. And their doing it at Picard’s behest, whether or not it’s something they necessarily want to do. The standard reference in Trek to a “holonovel” was always misleading, because you can’t interact with a novel. They can act upon you, obviously. But whatever emotions or ideas are inspired by what you read, every page in front of you remains entirely unchanged. You can keep reading, or you can stop reading. That concludes your list of options.
What the Dixon Hill programme represents, in contrast, is quite clearly some kind of LARP (our second example in just three episodes). Or perhaps improvisational theatre, depending on your definitions – I like the rather simple distinction between the two as LARP being mainly focused on the experience of the players, and improv being focused on the experience of the audience, but that just opens up a whole new discussion about how an audience is actually defined. Whatever. My point, as I say, is that the people created by the holodeck are closer to being actors than characters, and that, like the poor couple who have Dixon Steele over for dinner, end up in that role irrespective of whether they actually wanted to or not. Hell, by the end of the this very first episode in which the holodeck creates beings readable as actual people – as oppose to the animated training dummy Yar sparred with in “Code Of Honor” – two have attempted escape and a third may be heading towards a nervous breakdown (the fourth has been punched into unconsciousness by Data for the crime of doing what his program dictated, which is pretty ironic).
The moral dimensions of this will be periodically picked up and played with over the course of this show and its spin-offs (“Elementary, My Dear Data” comes along less than a year later), but it all started here, with the two linked ideas that those with power (however one defines that) need to constantly be aware that others might feel compelled to perform for you, and that no work of fiction is good enough to justify making others suffer for it. Stanley Kubrick was not too great a genius to have to consider the welfare of his actors. It wasn’t OK for James Cameron to force his actors into miserable conditions just because Terminator was a huge hit. And to switch abuse forms, but stick within the entertainment industry, with the righteous fury of the #MeToo movement having its genesis in revelations about predatory men sexually abusing female actors, the point is more relevant than ever.
“Crouch We Here A While, And Lurk”
Before we finish up, let’s take this consideration of acting and performance in a somewhat less bleak direction.
We’ve already seen that the concept of performance is central to the episode. We’ve yet to fully clean up on that, though. There’s still the Jaradan to consider. It’s worth noting that the only direct threat to anyone aboard the Enterprise, up until the final moments of act three at least, is that Picard will fail to perform the Jaradan greeting to their satisfaction. They are the crisis for which even Whalen’s shooting is ultimately a distraction. It seems fairly important then that, as much as this is about a diplomat successfully opening up a dialogue with a new culture, this is also clearly about the importance of an actor nailing their lines.
This is certainly in Deanna’s mind at the start of the episode, when she warns Picard about the dangers of over-preparing. A valuable position in any case, because it’s always worth reminding people that labour and output are not directly proportional. I’m glad to see that by the 24th century people have apparently finally worked that out. Leaving such generalities aside, it’s easy to read Deanna as reminding her captain that there is such a thing as over-rehearsal. And it seems she was right. A little time playing Dixon Hill was just what Picard needed to allow him to nail his Jaradan voice acting.
More than that, though, it’s clear all three of the regulars who get caught up in the holodeck malfunction are having the time of their lives before Whalen gets too cocky and gets himself shot [1]. This episode is entirely unambiguous on the idea that, when everyone is on the same page, acting and roleplay are not only a fantastic way to relax, but a way to grow closer to other people. It’s no wonder we learn later how much Dr Crusher is into am-dram (though I guess it’s not clear what that term even means in a society where no-one technically has a job. The Federation is an entire quadrant of amateurs).
This unabashed defence of the power of group performance is just a lovely sentiment, and a good place to end this essay after having walked through a couple of fairly dark places. Tormé’s story may introduce some of the problems with the holodeck as a concept, but it’s ultimately more interested in celebrating its potential.
And ultimately, even with half this episode set in an entirely different franchise, that’s about the most Star Trek thing you could possibly do.
Ordering
2. The Big Goodbye
[1] Of course the initial result of the attempts to bring the holodeck back under control briefly send everyone to a frozen wasteland. It literalises the bucket of cold water flung all over Crusher, Data and Picard when they suddenly realise this isn’t the hilarious romp through someone else’s genre they’d all taken it to be.