Cardassians one day, Federation the next... but justice is justice.
May 27, 2019 11:00 AM Subscribe
'How much merit do our heroes gain by peacefully seeking out new life and new civilizations if they are incapable of conflict in the first place? Is it really tolerance if the Federation only has to tolerate those who will adopt Federation ideology? Or is the Federation essentially the same as the Borg, the evil cyborgs whose catchphrase is: “We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” What happens when our enlightened Federation heroes encounter someone intolerable, like the Dominion?'
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in 82.5 Hours. An episode guide, but mostly an essay about the show.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in 82.5 Hours. An episode guide, but mostly an essay about the show.
100x better (Stargate:SG1)
Oh man we remember these shows very differently.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 11:23 AM on May 27, 2019 [79 favorites]
Oh man we remember these shows very differently.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 11:23 AM on May 27, 2019 [79 favorites]
Once again I find myself wondering what's really so bad about the Borg. They seem to have it all figured out, at least until Lore and Hugh come along and ruin everything.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:23 AM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:23 AM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
They're the symbolic embodification of the suppression of individuality. It's a uniquely American enemy to have. It's also oddly (now that I'm thinking about it) nicely prophetic about our current data-harvesting society.
posted by hippybear at 11:25 AM on May 27, 2019 [12 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 11:25 AM on May 27, 2019 [12 favorites]
Long form serialized sci-fi storytelling was done before DS9 (Babylon 5) and was done 100x better (Stargate:SG1).
Both of those shows are very good, but neither can provide me the great pleasure of watching Avery Brooks regularly devour entire sets like a kind of theatrical cookie monster.
posted by Reyturner at 11:27 AM on May 27, 2019 [67 favorites]
Both of those shows are very good, but neither can provide me the great pleasure of watching Avery Brooks regularly devour entire sets like a kind of theatrical cookie monster.
posted by Reyturner at 11:27 AM on May 27, 2019 [67 favorites]
Once again I find myself wondering what's really so bad about the Borg. They seem to have it all figured out, at least until Lore and Hugh come along and ruin everything.
The Borg are the ultimate American villain. Our national mythos stresses individualism and personal freedom over nearly everything, and the borg are the opposite of all of that, the total annihilation of that while leaving you trapped in what most Americans would characterize as servitude. Until they made Picard into a special borg with a personality (haven't watched that stuff in years, don't remember when Borgs really started to get personalities) there was no sign that any borg was more important than any other borg, and social hierarchies are more important than their own lives, family, health, and well-being to a lot of Americans.
posted by Caduceus at 11:30 AM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
The Borg are the ultimate American villain. Our national mythos stresses individualism and personal freedom over nearly everything, and the borg are the opposite of all of that, the total annihilation of that while leaving you trapped in what most Americans would characterize as servitude. Until they made Picard into a special borg with a personality (haven't watched that stuff in years, don't remember when Borgs really started to get personalities) there was no sign that any borg was more important than any other borg, and social hierarchies are more important than their own lives, family, health, and well-being to a lot of Americans.
posted by Caduceus at 11:30 AM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
The Borg always read as a metaphor for rape, to me, since they literally invade your body +mind. They're also a good symbolic representation for what colonialism looks like to the colonized.
They're also basically Space Zombies in that you go through the horror of seeing a loved one become a monster trying to kill you.
posted by emjaybee at 11:33 AM on May 27, 2019 [30 favorites]
They're also basically Space Zombies in that you go through the horror of seeing a loved one become a monster trying to kill you.
posted by emjaybee at 11:33 AM on May 27, 2019 [30 favorites]
They're the symbolic embodification of the suppression of individuality.
Yes, and isn't it beautiful? There's no disagreement among the Borg. There's no ignorance; that which is known to one is known to all. There are no Nazi Borg, no Borg who look at other Borg and say "I am superior to those Borg." It's perfect equality and unanimity. I can't imagine any preferable state of being.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:34 AM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
Yes, and isn't it beautiful? There's no disagreement among the Borg. There's no ignorance; that which is known to one is known to all. There are no Nazi Borg, no Borg who look at other Borg and say "I am superior to those Borg." It's perfect equality and unanimity. I can't imagine any preferable state of being.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:34 AM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
Long form serialized sci-fi storytelling was done before DS9 (Babylon 5)
Big G'Kar and Vir Kotto fan here, but the first DS9 episode aired more than a year before the first B5 one (or, if you want to be charitable, a month before the B5 pilot aired). That was close enough that there were allegations that Paramount plagiarized the idea of B5 for DS9 - especially since JMS had been trying to get B5 made for several years beforehand.
posted by adamg at 11:35 AM on May 27, 2019 [11 favorites]
Big G'Kar and Vir Kotto fan here, but the first DS9 episode aired more than a year before the first B5 one (or, if you want to be charitable, a month before the B5 pilot aired). That was close enough that there were allegations that Paramount plagiarized the idea of B5 for DS9 - especially since JMS had been trying to get B5 made for several years beforehand.
posted by adamg at 11:35 AM on May 27, 2019 [11 favorites]
I rewatched a sort of greatest hits of DS9 culled from the lists of diehard fans & continuity obsessives earlier this year and I largely enjoyed revisiting the show. However, I'd disagree with the writer of the linked article on a few points.
I found most of the Maquis episodes a bit one note. They never seem to want to go as far as they need to in those episodes making them for me pretty hollow & tedious. Same goes for the O'Brien suffers episodes which always felt like "let's laugh at this guy as he tears his pants AGAIN". Or the romance between Odo and Kira... And that final season... I found it nearly unwatchable. The show utterly deflates in that last season. But when it is firing on all cylinders? The show could be really great.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:40 AM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]
I found most of the Maquis episodes a bit one note. They never seem to want to go as far as they need to in those episodes making them for me pretty hollow & tedious. Same goes for the O'Brien suffers episodes which always felt like "let's laugh at this guy as he tears his pants AGAIN". Or the romance between Odo and Kira... And that final season... I found it nearly unwatchable. The show utterly deflates in that last season. But when it is firing on all cylinders? The show could be really great.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:40 AM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]
adamg: B5 was pitched first and I suspect that at the very least the idea for the story serialization was taken from it (at least based on what I've heard from a friend who worked on B5)
posted by Cosine at 11:41 AM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by Cosine at 11:41 AM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
They're the symbolic embodification of the suppression of individuality.
Interesting. I’ve always read the Borg as fear of technology. Rather, rampant and unconstrained technology. When the Borg were the big bad we were seeing lots of leaps towards automation and the unintended consequences of technology. (Still are, but...) I read the Borg as "maybe advancements in technology aren't always good after all..."
posted by jzb at 11:42 AM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
Interesting. I’ve always read the Borg as fear of technology. Rather, rampant and unconstrained technology. When the Borg were the big bad we were seeing lots of leaps towards automation and the unintended consequences of technology. (Still are, but...) I read the Borg as "maybe advancements in technology aren't always good after all..."
posted by jzb at 11:42 AM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
ds9 was so good because it changed the moral calculus of the trek universe just slightly in a way to make you think it had always been that way, just not previously shown. like, imagine a movie series, a western. in the first several iterations, the hero does hero stuff and it's cool. then, there's a spinoff movie showing the hero's youth, and it turns out that before they grew up virtuous and true, they used to pick the wings off butterflies. and so you're like, hmmm, this colors my perceptions of everything i saw before...
that said, the moral quandaries are not all encompassing. the dominion are still pretty much ultra villains, more or less. it's still trek, just a shade of gray trek. really a great show if you can stomach some of the schlock and melodrama. in my view, better watched alone at 2am so you dont have to be bashful when your partner eyerolls at you.
posted by wibari at 11:45 AM on May 27, 2019 [9 favorites]
that said, the moral quandaries are not all encompassing. the dominion are still pretty much ultra villains, more or less. it's still trek, just a shade of gray trek. really a great show if you can stomach some of the schlock and melodrama. in my view, better watched alone at 2am so you dont have to be bashful when your partner eyerolls at you.
posted by wibari at 11:45 AM on May 27, 2019 [9 favorites]
There's no disagreement among the Borg.
Wasn't there a civil war?
posted by ODiV at 11:48 AM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
Wasn't there a civil war?
posted by ODiV at 11:48 AM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
Long form serialized sci-fi storytelling was done before DS9 (Babylon 5) and was done 100x better (Stargate:SG1).Babylon 5 had a phenomenal supporting cast and an excellent plot but suffered from some of the worst script-level writing and dialogue in television history. George Lucas looks like Billy Wilder compared to J. Michael Straczynski. (1993 seems to be the year of serial storytelling on TV, though; Homicide: Life on the Street, which also made use of longer serialized stories, debuted a few weeks after DS9.)
Both of those shows are very good, but neither can provide me the great pleasure of watching Avery Brooks regularly devour entire sets like a kind of theatrical cookie monster.
DS9 primarily suffers from too much focus on "explaining" religion. The wormhole and the politics around it, even the religious politics, were sufficient to tell interesting stories without the actual quasi-omnipotent wormhole aliens, which is a kind of story that Star Trek loves to tell but never uses to say anything interesting.
I'd argue also that the characters weren't inconsistent, they changed organically, which was not only unusual on television at the time, it was essentially unique in all of Star Trek. Bashir is a prime example of this; he was deliberately an abrasive jackass in the beginning, and he was mellowed and changed and learned over time and eventually became likeable and charismatic. (I always thought of him as a stereotypical* SF fan in the beginning--smart and eager to contribute, but oblivious, shallow, and completely incapable of speaking to another human being without being annoying.)
SG-1 was definitely underrated, imo.
*I'd like to emphasize here that I'm referring to a stereotype and not the reality of fans as people.
posted by Fish Sauce at 11:53 AM on May 27, 2019 [17 favorites]
They're the symbolic embodification of the suppression of individuality. It's a uniquely American enemy to have.
Hmm. Are zombies uniquely American enemies? 'cos the Borg are pretty definitely Zombies in Spaaaace
posted by Leon at 12:01 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
Hmm. Are zombies uniquely American enemies? 'cos the Borg are pretty definitely Zombies in Spaaaace
posted by Leon at 12:01 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
Thank you for posting! I’m going to give DS9 a proper shake... does this article have any spoilers? I’ve not watched one episode start to finish.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 12:04 PM on May 27, 2019
posted by St. Peepsburg at 12:04 PM on May 27, 2019
Faint of Butt: Yes, and isn't it beautiful? There's no disagreement among the Borg. There's no ignorance; that which is known to one is known to all. There are no Nazi Borg, no Borg who look at other Borg and say "I am superior to those Borg." It's perfect equality and unanimity. I can't imagine any preferable state of being.
But they don't give you the choice of being part of that equality and unanimity. They force it upon other sentient beings, without any regard to whether they want to join up or not. When the Borg arrive, it's not "Do you wish to join the collective?" it's "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile." It's not a utopia if you're forced to be a part of it.
posted by SansPoint at 12:10 PM on May 27, 2019 [17 favorites]
But they don't give you the choice of being part of that equality and unanimity. They force it upon other sentient beings, without any regard to whether they want to join up or not. When the Borg arrive, it's not "Do you wish to join the collective?" it's "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile." It's not a utopia if you're forced to be a part of it.
posted by SansPoint at 12:10 PM on May 27, 2019 [17 favorites]
Yeah, I always thought the Borg were a symbol of ruthless efficiency above all else. There’s no pain, but no pleasure. They kill and destroy. Why celebrate a lack of internal conflict if you had to be brought into that bliss against your will? It’s authoritarian. The Federation isn’t made up of saints, but at least they try not to grind cultures down into a smooth paste.
Anyway, I thought this was a good summary of DS9. I definitely like it way more than TNG as an adult. It’s morally complex without being mean or overly cynical. Especially nowadays, in a landscape of shows that can feel cruel, DS9 humanizes optimism without turning it into something else.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 12:13 PM on May 27, 2019 [9 favorites]
Anyway, I thought this was a good summary of DS9. I definitely like it way more than TNG as an adult. It’s morally complex without being mean or overly cynical. Especially nowadays, in a landscape of shows that can feel cruel, DS9 humanizes optimism without turning it into something else.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 12:13 PM on May 27, 2019 [9 favorites]
that said, the moral quandaries are not all encompassing. the dominion are still pretty much ultra villains, more or less.
They're ruthless, but they just want to be left alone. There's an episode (last in S2?) where Sisko gets, essentially, arrested for trespass by the Jem'Hadar. A Jem'Hadar swings by the station to inform them they're not getting their Commander back and they should stop sending ships into Dominion space. Jadzia's response is, basically, "you can't tell us what to do, we'll go where we want".
Makes you start to wonder about all those Neutral Zones all around Federation space that only get set up after the Federation's had a war.
posted by Leon at 12:13 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]
They're ruthless, but they just want to be left alone. There's an episode (last in S2?) where Sisko gets, essentially, arrested for trespass by the Jem'Hadar. A Jem'Hadar swings by the station to inform them they're not getting their Commander back and they should stop sending ships into Dominion space. Jadzia's response is, basically, "you can't tell us what to do, we'll go where we want".
Makes you start to wonder about all those Neutral Zones all around Federation space that only get set up after the Federation's had a war.
posted by Leon at 12:13 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]
Yes, and isn't it beautiful? There's no disagreement among the Borg. There's no ignorance; that which is known to one is known to all. There are no Nazi Borg, no Borg who look at other Borg and say "I am superior to those Borg." It's perfect equality and unanimity. I can't imagine any preferable state of being.
Yeah, sure, just have to give up art and love and joy and food. And you don't have a choice, they're gonna do it to you whether you like it or not.
posted by Caduceus at 12:16 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]
Yeah, sure, just have to give up art and love and joy and food. And you don't have a choice, they're gonna do it to you whether you like it or not.
posted by Caduceus at 12:16 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]
“I've been thinking a lot about what a true Star Trek reboot would look like -- a show as fresh/forward-thinking as the TOS (and TNG partly) were at the time they aired.
I think the starting point is to fully flesh-out what a no-money society looks like and build from there. Star Trek has always said that society progressed past money but only with hand-waving. I wouldn't want a dry show about weird future economics, but I think when you work out how it works you necessarily end up with more radical looking world than the Federation. “ @jonathanfly
posted by The Whelk at 12:20 PM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]
I think the starting point is to fully flesh-out what a no-money society looks like and build from there. Star Trek has always said that society progressed past money but only with hand-waving. I wouldn't want a dry show about weird future economics, but I think when you work out how it works you necessarily end up with more radical looking world than the Federation. “ @jonathanfly
posted by The Whelk at 12:20 PM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]
Star Trek has always said that society progressed past money
Did TOS say this? They mention money a few times.
I would like to know how resource allocation works in the federation. How do the Picard's get dibs on a vineyard, etc.
posted by biffa at 12:24 PM on May 27, 2019 [6 favorites]
Did TOS say this? They mention money a few times.
I would like to know how resource allocation works in the federation. How do the Picard's get dibs on a vineyard, etc.
posted by biffa at 12:24 PM on May 27, 2019 [6 favorites]
DS9 is the best Trek. Whether that's a good thing or not depends on your view of the franchise: despite writing reams of content about Trek over in Fanfare, I actually also like B5 and SG-1 more. (I just think Trek is more culturally relevant, and therefore more worth detailed analysis.) I had a hard time on my last rewatch of DS9 over the sexism, and will probably not be doing an 'all episodes' review ever again.
(I'd also argue SG-1 is a better spiritual successor to TOS than TNG or DS9, since it hinges on a small band of adventurers encountering weird shit every week, but whose interpersonal relationships are the backbone of the entertainment value.)
That said, some stuff:
* DS9 is the only Trek that shows its work about how the sausage gets made. TOS/TNG handwave how and why humanity is 'evolved,' and shy away from positing scenarios that really challenge that. VOY just flubs the question of 'is humanity better,' offering a pretty good argument for 'nah, not really.' DS9 forces a post-scarcity human society to deal with compromise: compromise with religious locals, compromise with their former fascist oppressors and even compromises with their actual gods. Characters have to learn and grow and get their hands dirty to get from 'things suck' to 'things are better.' This is a good thing. It's also the only Trek that really deals with the tension of stuff like 'they're not supposed to have money but that doesn't actually make sense.'
* The Dominion are a dark mirror of the Federation, notably one of the very few antagonistic factions that is comprised of multiple species, the way the Federation is. The difference is that the Dominion are fascists: entire races are literally bred to serve the greater good, the state religion forces literal worship of their Founders and nobody can leave. All of these things are soft takes on Starfleet's attitudes: race essentialism is one of Trek's original sins, nobody questions or even lays out the Prime Directive, and humans who leave the Federation are always depicted as foolish at best.
* The Borg are also a dark mirror of the Federation, the other major multi-racial power Starfleet ever fights. The difference is that the Borg are unrestrained progress: they're technology without contemplation, togetherness without privacy or choice, etc. They're the Bad Future where people never stop to think about how to use advancement responsibly and just plug right in. This is an expression of the constant fear in Trek about humanity going too far: Trek fears human augmentation, fears AI, etc.
Anyway. Now I'll actually go finish the article. My bad for being one of Those People today.
posted by mordax at 12:26 PM on May 27, 2019 [54 favorites]
(I'd also argue SG-1 is a better spiritual successor to TOS than TNG or DS9, since it hinges on a small band of adventurers encountering weird shit every week, but whose interpersonal relationships are the backbone of the entertainment value.)
That said, some stuff:
* DS9 is the only Trek that shows its work about how the sausage gets made. TOS/TNG handwave how and why humanity is 'evolved,' and shy away from positing scenarios that really challenge that. VOY just flubs the question of 'is humanity better,' offering a pretty good argument for 'nah, not really.' DS9 forces a post-scarcity human society to deal with compromise: compromise with religious locals, compromise with their former fascist oppressors and even compromises with their actual gods. Characters have to learn and grow and get their hands dirty to get from 'things suck' to 'things are better.' This is a good thing. It's also the only Trek that really deals with the tension of stuff like 'they're not supposed to have money but that doesn't actually make sense.'
* The Dominion are a dark mirror of the Federation, notably one of the very few antagonistic factions that is comprised of multiple species, the way the Federation is. The difference is that the Dominion are fascists: entire races are literally bred to serve the greater good, the state religion forces literal worship of their Founders and nobody can leave. All of these things are soft takes on Starfleet's attitudes: race essentialism is one of Trek's original sins, nobody questions or even lays out the Prime Directive, and humans who leave the Federation are always depicted as foolish at best.
* The Borg are also a dark mirror of the Federation, the other major multi-racial power Starfleet ever fights. The difference is that the Borg are unrestrained progress: they're technology without contemplation, togetherness without privacy or choice, etc. They're the Bad Future where people never stop to think about how to use advancement responsibly and just plug right in. This is an expression of the constant fear in Trek about humanity going too far: Trek fears human augmentation, fears AI, etc.
Anyway. Now I'll actually go finish the article. My bad for being one of Those People today.
posted by mordax at 12:26 PM on May 27, 2019 [54 favorites]
Yeah, sure, just have to give up art and love and joy and food. And you don't have a choice, they're gonna do it to you whether you like it or not.
But Hugh always thought of it as a positive. He found the continual hive presence to be a comfort, not a restriction.
I mean, it can be an allegory of communism or whatever you want, but can you really argue with success?
posted by Autumnheart at 12:26 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
But Hugh always thought of it as a positive. He found the continual hive presence to be a comfort, not a restriction.
I mean, it can be an allegory of communism or whatever you want, but can you really argue with success?
posted by Autumnheart at 12:26 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
can you really argue with success?
Well, this is the central fascist question, so...
posted by praemunire at 12:28 PM on May 27, 2019 [15 favorites]
Well, this is the central fascist question, so...
posted by praemunire at 12:28 PM on May 27, 2019 [15 favorites]
I've been working through the show from this guide for a couple weeks now; most of the way through Season 2, just finished the Maquis two-parter. I found it to be pretty strong: the Maquis are pretty one-sided, sure, but they're adding some amount of color to the otherwise too-bland-to-actually-examine Federation. But the part that really shines is Sisko's relationship with Gul Dukat, who is clearly a nazi, but does his best to really sell the point that the Federation's morality gets in the way of its effectiveness... especially while the Maquis reinforce that things aren't so shiny on the federation side, anyway.
I've also been struck by how much distance the show (so far!) gets out of pairs of characters playing off one another. Odo-Quark, Bashir-Garak, Sisko-Gul Dukat.
I missed all this the first time around because the first season was so atrocious; picking up just the highlight episodes has been awesome so far, and quickly bringing it into 'favorite trek' status for me, at least.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:29 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
I've also been struck by how much distance the show (so far!) gets out of pairs of characters playing off one another. Odo-Quark, Bashir-Garak, Sisko-Gul Dukat.
I missed all this the first time around because the first season was so atrocious; picking up just the highlight episodes has been awesome so far, and quickly bringing it into 'favorite trek' status for me, at least.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:29 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
I imagine that many other species view the Federation the same way the Federation view the Borg. "We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own" is not that different from what the Federation offers.
posted by ckape at 12:32 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by ckape at 12:32 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
Y'know the whole dark-and-gritty reboot trend? Star Trek needs to be the opposite of that.
The galaxy at large can be kinda shitty, but I want to see a ship full of motivated people, working together, trying to make a difference. None of this Section 31 or dark underbelly crap. Don't show me good people doing bad things for good reasons (It's a faaake).
Show me people who don't believe in a no-win scenario, but approach each situation with compassion and awareness. I want the ethical test to be "How do we avoid this obvious act 3 ethical test?"
I really want a light-and-fluffy reboot. For dark and gritty I can watch almost everything else on TV.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 12:33 PM on May 27, 2019 [43 favorites]
The galaxy at large can be kinda shitty, but I want to see a ship full of motivated people, working together, trying to make a difference. None of this Section 31 or dark underbelly crap. Don't show me good people doing bad things for good reasons (It's a faaake).
Show me people who don't believe in a no-win scenario, but approach each situation with compassion and awareness. I want the ethical test to be "How do we avoid this obvious act 3 ethical test?"
I really want a light-and-fluffy reboot. For dark and gritty I can watch almost everything else on TV.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 12:33 PM on May 27, 2019 [43 favorites]
From the article:
Deep Space Nine stands alone as the only Star Trek show to have a good pilot.
Bullshit.
The Cage, the pilot that got this whole Star Trek thing started, was pretty damn good-- 'too cerebral' for the network execs in 1966, in fact. Where No Man Has Gone Before was no slouch, either. Encounter At Farpoint wasn't great, but not bad, either, which pretty much sums up how I feel about TNG. Caretaker was Voyager's pilot episode, and it was the best that that show could do, up until the Year In Hell episodes. If you want to talk bad pilots, Star Trek Discovery's The Vulcan Hello probably comes closest to that description, being uneven and relying more on melodrama and expensive pew-pew than good writing. I know DS9 is the cult inside the cult, but it was never that impressive, and certainly not its pilot, Emissary.
“You come into my house? How dare you!”
posted by KHAAAN! at 12:36 PM on May 27, 2019 [9 favorites]
Deep Space Nine stands alone as the only Star Trek show to have a good pilot.
Bullshit.
The Cage, the pilot that got this whole Star Trek thing started, was pretty damn good-- 'too cerebral' for the network execs in 1966, in fact. Where No Man Has Gone Before was no slouch, either. Encounter At Farpoint wasn't great, but not bad, either, which pretty much sums up how I feel about TNG. Caretaker was Voyager's pilot episode, and it was the best that that show could do, up until the Year In Hell episodes. If you want to talk bad pilots, Star Trek Discovery's The Vulcan Hello probably comes closest to that description, being uneven and relying more on melodrama and expensive pew-pew than good writing. I know DS9 is the cult inside the cult, but it was never that impressive, and certainly not its pilot, Emissary.
“You come into my house? How dare you!”
posted by KHAAAN! at 12:36 PM on May 27, 2019 [9 favorites]
Oh damn, I forgot about Enterprise's pilot, Broken Bow. But then again, everyone forgets about Enterprise. There's your criminally underrated Star Trek.
posted by KHAAAN! at 12:43 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]
posted by KHAAAN! at 12:43 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]
Yeah, I really liked Enterprise, and honestly it had the best pilot. (And I'm sorry, but Encounter at Farpoint was soooo bad. Not as bad as Fear of a Black Planet or whatever that other early S01 episode was called, but still very bad.)
posted by Fish Sauce at 12:45 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by Fish Sauce at 12:45 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
I thought DS9 was the peak of the whole universe in terms of character development and plotting, and that the rest was kind of childish wish fulfillment by comparison.
Because humans and the rest of Federation species were no more than deeply intellectually inferior wild animals they were in the process of domesticating to the Dominion. They were clearly the superior species, and that they were defeated was ridiculous and completely implausible.
posted by jamjam at 12:45 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
Because humans and the rest of Federation species were no more than deeply intellectually inferior wild animals they were in the process of domesticating to the Dominion. They were clearly the superior species, and that they were defeated was ridiculous and completely implausible.
posted by jamjam at 12:45 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
Because I'm overthinking this, more rules for my ideal reboot:
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 12:50 PM on May 27, 2019 [34 favorites]
- No end-of-episode resets.
- Our heroes can suffer, but they actively engage in caring for themselves and others. There are costs to the high road, that our heroes acknowledge and know they must pay.
- In order to have captains that quote Shakespeare, you need lieutenants that study Shakespeare. Show us that even the lower decks do their research.
- Security has just as much time to burn as everyone else. Think they might practice their de-escalation techniques? Picture a red-shirt talking someone down from a fight, because dealing with fights is their job and they have a range of potential responses.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 12:50 PM on May 27, 2019 [34 favorites]
Yes, and isn't it beautiful? There's no disagreement among the Borg. There's no ignorance; that which is known to one is known to all.
The first appearance of Seven of Nine had what I think of as the best bit of dialogue in Voyager:
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:51 PM on May 27, 2019 [23 favorites]
The first appearance of Seven of Nine had what I think of as the best bit of dialogue in Voyager:
When your captain first approached us, we suspected that an agreement with Humans would prove impossible to maintain. You are erratic, conflicted, disorganized. Every decision is debated, every action questioned, every individual entitled to their own small opinion. You lack harmony; cohesion; greatness. It will be your undoing."Those triplets (erratic/conflicted/disorganized; decisions debated/actions questioned/ individuals entitled; harmony/cohesion/greatness) are known as tricolons in rhetoric. I guess the Borg had previously assimilated some Planet of the Hats whose notable power was persuasive public speaking.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:51 PM on May 27, 2019 [23 favorites]
Surprised at the love for SG1 here, that show is so right-wing its basically the anti-trek. The American military colonizes the galaxy in secret, other countries are bumblers at best, and the democratically elected government is one of the primary antagonists.
posted by rodlymight at 12:53 PM on May 27, 2019 [27 favorites]
posted by rodlymight at 12:53 PM on May 27, 2019 [27 favorites]
I think arguing about Star Trek is honestly one of my favorite pastimes.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:00 PM on May 27, 2019 [24 favorites]
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:00 PM on May 27, 2019 [24 favorites]
I imagine that many other species view the Federation the same way the Federation view the Borg.
Or root beer.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:01 PM on May 27, 2019 [17 favorites]
Or root beer.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:01 PM on May 27, 2019 [17 favorites]
Wasn't the Bad Thing about the Borg that the individual components no longer reproduced at all?
So that if you were only in a single system, like Gynan's species for one, once the Borg took essentially all of you up and those individuals aged and died as Borg without having children, that was it for you. Finito.
And of course they simply dispensed with any extant children who were alive when they showed up.
posted by jamjam at 1:02 PM on May 27, 2019
So that if you were only in a single system, like Gynan's species for one, once the Borg took essentially all of you up and those individuals aged and died as Borg without having children, that was it for you. Finito.
And of course they simply dispensed with any extant children who were alive when they showed up.
posted by jamjam at 1:02 PM on May 27, 2019
Show me people who don't believe in a no-win scenario, but approach each situation with compassion and awareness. I want the ethical test to be "How do we avoid this obvious act 3 ethical test?"
I really want a light-and-fluffy reboot. For dark and gritty I can watch almost everything else on TV.
If you can forgive or at least ignore a certain amount of sophomoric humor, you might enjoy The Orville, which is definitely a conscious attempt to recapture some of that early-TNG-era essential Trek optimism.
How do the Picard's get dibs on a vineyard, etc.
Honestly, if there's one thing I most want from the Picard series, it's an answer to this.
posted by mstokes650 at 1:04 PM on May 27, 2019 [10 favorites]
I really want a light-and-fluffy reboot. For dark and gritty I can watch almost everything else on TV.
If you can forgive or at least ignore a certain amount of sophomoric humor, you might enjoy The Orville, which is definitely a conscious attempt to recapture some of that early-TNG-era essential Trek optimism.
How do the Picard's get dibs on a vineyard, etc.
Honestly, if there's one thing I most want from the Picard series, it's an answer to this.
posted by mstokes650 at 1:04 PM on May 27, 2019 [10 favorites]
DS9 is pretty much the only Trek I return repeatedly. Easily the best Trek for me. Have really enjoyed the Pensky File podcasts.
posted by juiceCake at 1:06 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by juiceCake at 1:06 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
Cosine it is so rare to find other DS9 haters in the wild. I hear you and I value you. I suffered through 4 seasons of that show before I realized - I don't have to watch it! I'm not the Borg! Resistance isn't futile!
After a lot of contemplation my big problem with DS-9 is that the writers wanted to explore all the problems with Roddenberry's post-scarcity idealism but they didn't have any real teeth to it because they were chained to the a-plot/b-plot 25 episode season format. So in half of the episode we are grappling with federation war crimes and in the other half get ready for Quark's *wacky hijinks*. The tonal shifts were jarring. And it was supposed to be an ensemble cast but the writers didn't care at all about some of them (honestly that was probably a good thing) and that really shows when fans talk about the best parts/episodes.
Redo the show with 12-episode seasons, cut Miles O'Mysoginist, and now we're getting somewhere.
posted by muddgirl at 1:09 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]
After a lot of contemplation my big problem with DS-9 is that the writers wanted to explore all the problems with Roddenberry's post-scarcity idealism but they didn't have any real teeth to it because they were chained to the a-plot/b-plot 25 episode season format. So in half of the episode we are grappling with federation war crimes and in the other half get ready for Quark's *wacky hijinks*. The tonal shifts were jarring. And it was supposed to be an ensemble cast but the writers didn't care at all about some of them (honestly that was probably a good thing) and that really shows when fans talk about the best parts/episodes.
Redo the show with 12-episode seasons, cut Miles O'Mysoginist, and now we're getting somewhere.
posted by muddgirl at 1:09 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]
After Roddenberry cast Patrick Stewart as the captain in Next Generation, a reporter joked, “Surely they would have cured baldness by the 24th century!” Roddenberry replied, “In the 24th century, they wouldn’t care.”
A minor sidenote, I know. But I think it's worth pointing out that there are early test shots out there of Picard with a toupee.
posted by Naberius at 1:12 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
A minor sidenote, I know. But I think it's worth pointing out that there are early test shots out there of Picard with a toupee.
posted by Naberius at 1:12 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
Our national mythos stresses individualism and personal freedom over nearly everything, and the borg are the opposite of all of that, the total annihilation of that
The Borg claim they will add your distinctiveness to their own. Perhaps the real fear is that this will not amount to very much.
posted by biffa at 1:13 PM on May 27, 2019 [17 favorites]
The Borg claim they will add your distinctiveness to their own. Perhaps the real fear is that this will not amount to very much.
posted by biffa at 1:13 PM on May 27, 2019 [17 favorites]
I only watched because I'm into baseball.
posted by peeedro at 1:16 PM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]
posted by peeedro at 1:16 PM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]
I imagine that many other species view the Federation the same way the Federation view the Borg.
Or root beer.
So my favorite planet of the hat tropes for humans in a space opera setting is that we’re so aggressively friendly and able to domesticate /pair bond anything that we come off as chirpy, happy and deeply weird biological colonizers. The Borg you can negotiate with who love dance parties. No one is more willing, accocdating or aggressively able to co-opt or assimilate your technology and cultural practices like humans.
Its not a ...negative trait ...the only real risk to humans is other humans and disease ...but other aliens find the whole mindset utterly ...alien. “So they turned predators into pets and, fucked thier sibling species into extinction, and turned anything halfway usefulinto a client species?”
“Yep, thier whole Deal is “oh this animal doesn’t love me I better force feed it and raise its offspring as my own.”
Like As a joke they give the humans a planet crawling with blood worms to colonize, five years later they’ve bred toy blood worms that purr and do tricks and got large beast of burden bloodworms to tunnel thier subway system for them.
Could be a good trait/tension for some space opera with luxury space communist humans “Earth is a paradise, everyone helps and supports everyone else.” “ No everyone helps and supports humans .” That’s the thing that makes everyone wary of the humans, their skill in long-term genetic and natural environment modifaction cause they’ve been doing it as long as they’ve been sentient.
posted by The Whelk at 1:24 PM on May 27, 2019 [44 favorites]
Or root beer.
So my favorite planet of the hat tropes for humans in a space opera setting is that we’re so aggressively friendly and able to domesticate /pair bond anything that we come off as chirpy, happy and deeply weird biological colonizers. The Borg you can negotiate with who love dance parties. No one is more willing, accocdating or aggressively able to co-opt or assimilate your technology and cultural practices like humans.
Its not a ...negative trait ...the only real risk to humans is other humans and disease ...but other aliens find the whole mindset utterly ...alien. “So they turned predators into pets and, fucked thier sibling species into extinction, and turned anything halfway usefulinto a client species?”
“Yep, thier whole Deal is “oh this animal doesn’t love me I better force feed it and raise its offspring as my own.”
Like As a joke they give the humans a planet crawling with blood worms to colonize, five years later they’ve bred toy blood worms that purr and do tricks and got large beast of burden bloodworms to tunnel thier subway system for them.
Could be a good trait/tension for some space opera with luxury space communist humans “Earth is a paradise, everyone helps and supports everyone else.” “ No everyone helps and supports humans .” That’s the thing that makes everyone wary of the humans, their skill in long-term genetic and natural environment modifaction cause they’ve been doing it as long as they’ve been sentient.
posted by The Whelk at 1:24 PM on May 27, 2019 [44 favorites]
Redo the show with 12-episode seasons,
I don’t get the enthusiasm lately (see also GoT season 8) to “redo” entire seasons or series. There has been a lot of Trek; if there is some of it you don’t like, you can just ignore it and not watch it (you have probably been doing this with the seventies animated series already, possibly without even realizing it).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:30 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
I don’t get the enthusiasm lately (see also GoT season 8) to “redo” entire seasons or series. There has been a lot of Trek; if there is some of it you don’t like, you can just ignore it and not watch it (you have probably been doing this with the seventies animated series already, possibly without even realizing it).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:30 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
My apologies, I don't mean a modern remake of the show character for character. I am saying what I think would have made the show actually good to me, instead of a complete drag. I have no appetite for any kind of Star Trek remake or reboot.
posted by muddgirl at 1:33 PM on May 27, 2019
posted by muddgirl at 1:33 PM on May 27, 2019
If you can forgive or at least ignore a certain amount of sophomoric humor, you might enjoy The Orville, which is definitely a conscious attempt to recapture some of that early-TNG-era essential Trek optimism.
Thanks! I'll keep an eye out for it.
Cosine it is so rare to find other DS9 haters in the wild. I hear you and I value you. I suffered through 4 seasons of that show before I realized - I don't have to watch it! I'm not the Borg! Resistance isn't futile!
Yeah. I was a big Babylon 5 fan. By comparison DS9 just felt so... small and petty, but with very high production values. It was almost a devolution in TV science fiction.
SG-1 certainly was a devolution. Sci-Fi (they hadn't changed their name yet) and Fox used SG-1's low production cost as a justification to cancel arguably better written and better looking shows.
Don't get me wrong. I've watched all of these to death, and they've all had their moments of glory, and their moments of cringe. So much cringe.
Whenever I watch DS9 I see how much they missed. They contrasted these great empires, the Dominion, the Cardassian Empire, the Klingon Empire, even the Romulans against the Federation. We got one measly episode where they even approach how the Federation might try to be different, and they shrug away from it. It's too busy pointing out that the Federation doesn't work, it doesn't even try to grapple with how it could.
Another example: Gold pressed latinum. If you're on Earth, you don't need latinum. The Federation is in an (already canon!) post-scarcity state. It stands to reason that they would trade with lesser civilizations in worthless beads. But the Federation won't want to destabilize their immediate neighbours.
How does the Federation ensure that travelling agents or citizens can trade without destroying every economy they touch? What happens when someone accidentally uses enough latinum to buy a planet when ordering a drink at Quarks'?
But no, let's just pretend everyone was using money anyhow and just not talking about it.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 1:45 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
Thanks! I'll keep an eye out for it.
Cosine it is so rare to find other DS9 haters in the wild. I hear you and I value you. I suffered through 4 seasons of that show before I realized - I don't have to watch it! I'm not the Borg! Resistance isn't futile!
Yeah. I was a big Babylon 5 fan. By comparison DS9 just felt so... small and petty, but with very high production values. It was almost a devolution in TV science fiction.
SG-1 certainly was a devolution. Sci-Fi (they hadn't changed their name yet) and Fox used SG-1's low production cost as a justification to cancel arguably better written and better looking shows.
Don't get me wrong. I've watched all of these to death, and they've all had their moments of glory, and their moments of cringe. So much cringe.
Whenever I watch DS9 I see how much they missed. They contrasted these great empires, the Dominion, the Cardassian Empire, the Klingon Empire, even the Romulans against the Federation. We got one measly episode where they even approach how the Federation might try to be different, and they shrug away from it. It's too busy pointing out that the Federation doesn't work, it doesn't even try to grapple with how it could.
Another example: Gold pressed latinum. If you're on Earth, you don't need latinum. The Federation is in an (already canon!) post-scarcity state. It stands to reason that they would trade with lesser civilizations in worthless beads. But the Federation won't want to destabilize their immediate neighbours.
How does the Federation ensure that travelling agents or citizens can trade without destroying every economy they touch? What happens when someone accidentally uses enough latinum to buy a planet when ordering a drink at Quarks'?
But no, let's just pretend everyone was using money anyhow and just not talking about it.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 1:45 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
Latinum can't be replicated, which is why it's used a currency. That's canon, isn't it?
(Everyone including the Ferengi have replicators though, so you have to ask yourself what they're planning to buy with all that latinum).
posted by Leon at 1:52 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
(Everyone including the Ferengi have replicators though, so you have to ask yourself what they're planning to buy with all that latinum).
posted by Leon at 1:52 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
"Post-scarcity" just means that everyone's basic needs are met; it doesn't mean that there's no trade whatsoever in the Federation and everyone can instantly have anything they want. People on Earth still need transporter credits to use a transporter, for instance. Latinum is used as a universal currency because it can't be replicated.
posted by painquale at 1:55 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by painquale at 1:55 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
“So they turned predators into pets and, fucked thier sibling species into extinction, and turned anything halfway usefulinto a client species?”
I'm just imagining Dr. Ford's monologue on this, in some bizarre Trek/Westworld crossover.
"Do you know what happened to the Neanderthals, Weyoun?
We ate them."
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:03 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
I'm just imagining Dr. Ford's monologue on this, in some bizarre Trek/Westworld crossover.
"Do you know what happened to the Neanderthals, Weyoun?
We ate them."
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:03 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
Surprised at the love for SG1 here, that show is so right-wing its basically the anti-trek.
I suppose a lot of this is about practice over ideals:
Star Trek is supposed to be progressive, but there was so much racism in VOY that I stormed out of the rewatch for almost two weeks after yet another teamup with Space Nazis. (VOY lurved their Space Nazis.) I'm currently doing posts for the ENT rewatch, and it's just Good Ole' Boys In Spaaaace right now. That'll change, but we're almost done with two seasons and those guys are still xenophobic, incurious and comically inept.
SG-1 is military sci fi, which is inherently right-wing, but... they brought us Samantha Carter at around the time Trek brought us T'Pol and Hoshi. They brought us Daniel Jackson in the era where VOY/ENT were literally leaning on 'foreigners smell funny' as a plot point. Technology advanced at a plausible-for-scifi pace and they engaged in a lot of hard work building alliances and coalitions. Also, they actually felt competent (with protocols and everything), something completely missing from Trek since about DS9 - DSC doesn't really do that either.
(To be fair, Atlantis flips this around and returns to more bog-standard stuff where they're clearly garbage colonialists ruining everything they touch, but that's why it is referred to as 'the Bad Stargate' in my household.)
Upon preview:
"Post-scarcity" just means that everyone's basic needs are met; it doesn't mean that there's no trade whatsoever in the Federation and everyone can instantly have anything they want. People on Earth still need transporter credits to use a transporter, for instance. Latinum is used as a universal currency because it can't be replicated.
That doesn't seem to be how Roddenberry appeared to view things though, and explicitly goes against most of what we saw in TNG. DS9/VOY feature a lot of specific (even ad-hoc) currencies because it's simply impossible to envision things without them except in a very sterile and limited context. Something at least like money's required to avoid the double coincidence of wants, but much of Trek elides the problem by being set on self-sufficient quasi-military ships that don't stay in one place very long.
posted by mordax at 2:04 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]
I suppose a lot of this is about practice over ideals:
Star Trek is supposed to be progressive, but there was so much racism in VOY that I stormed out of the rewatch for almost two weeks after yet another teamup with Space Nazis. (VOY lurved their Space Nazis.) I'm currently doing posts for the ENT rewatch, and it's just Good Ole' Boys In Spaaaace right now. That'll change, but we're almost done with two seasons and those guys are still xenophobic, incurious and comically inept.
SG-1 is military sci fi, which is inherently right-wing, but... they brought us Samantha Carter at around the time Trek brought us T'Pol and Hoshi. They brought us Daniel Jackson in the era where VOY/ENT were literally leaning on 'foreigners smell funny' as a plot point. Technology advanced at a plausible-for-scifi pace and they engaged in a lot of hard work building alliances and coalitions. Also, they actually felt competent (with protocols and everything), something completely missing from Trek since about DS9 - DSC doesn't really do that either.
(To be fair, Atlantis flips this around and returns to more bog-standard stuff where they're clearly garbage colonialists ruining everything they touch, but that's why it is referred to as 'the Bad Stargate' in my household.)
Upon preview:
"Post-scarcity" just means that everyone's basic needs are met; it doesn't mean that there's no trade whatsoever in the Federation and everyone can instantly have anything they want. People on Earth still need transporter credits to use a transporter, for instance. Latinum is used as a universal currency because it can't be replicated.
That doesn't seem to be how Roddenberry appeared to view things though, and explicitly goes against most of what we saw in TNG. DS9/VOY feature a lot of specific (even ad-hoc) currencies because it's simply impossible to envision things without them except in a very sterile and limited context. Something at least like money's required to avoid the double coincidence of wants, but much of Trek elides the problem by being set on self-sufficient quasi-military ships that don't stay in one place very long.
posted by mordax at 2:04 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]
Well, this is the central fascist question, so...
Sure, if you’re considering a society of individuals who are our peers, which the Borg is not. Is a hive of bees fascist? Do we kill bees because we disagree fundamentally with collective social behavior, or do we just decide to swat the bug or cultivate it depending on what we get out of it? Does the Federation hate the Borg because the Borg swats or cultivates people like bees, or because they want to be the ones who have the power to do the swatting?
I doubt Star Trek writers were considering any of these issues from a perspective of whether species should be allowed to determine their own method of competition, but we’ve had some discoveries bring those issues a little more to light since then.
posted by Autumnheart at 2:06 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
Sure, if you’re considering a society of individuals who are our peers, which the Borg is not. Is a hive of bees fascist? Do we kill bees because we disagree fundamentally with collective social behavior, or do we just decide to swat the bug or cultivate it depending on what we get out of it? Does the Federation hate the Borg because the Borg swats or cultivates people like bees, or because they want to be the ones who have the power to do the swatting?
I doubt Star Trek writers were considering any of these issues from a perspective of whether species should be allowed to determine their own method of competition, but we’ve had some discoveries bring those issues a little more to light since then.
posted by Autumnheart at 2:06 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
Transporter credits are also a DS9 innovation. Still pretending people use money by a different name.
But I do take your point that there are degrees of post-scarcity, painquale. We don't really know where the Federation was on that scale before DS9 walked it back.
If they're far enough up the scale, producing latinum could still have a destabilizing effect even without using replicators.
I can agree with some of this walk-back even if it's just to make motivations of the crew a little more accessible. Star Trek has always been somewhat allegorical. The question DS9 was addressing wasn't really "How does the Federation work", after all. In my opinion, they walked it back far enough that it's not really Star Trek anymore.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 2:06 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
But I do take your point that there are degrees of post-scarcity, painquale. We don't really know where the Federation was on that scale before DS9 walked it back.
If they're far enough up the scale, producing latinum could still have a destabilizing effect even without using replicators.
I can agree with some of this walk-back even if it's just to make motivations of the crew a little more accessible. Star Trek has always been somewhat allegorical. The question DS9 was addressing wasn't really "How does the Federation work", after all. In my opinion, they walked it back far enough that it's not really Star Trek anymore.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 2:06 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
Because I'm overthinking this, more rules for my ideal reboot:
No end-of-episode resets.
Our heroes can suffer, but they actively engage in caring for themselves and others. There are costs to the high road, that our heroes acknowledge and know they must pay.
They made that show: Farscape, and it's the BEST. SCI-FI TV. EVAR!!!11!
(Firefly was really good too, just didn't last as long.)
More seriously: I've come to the point in my life where I see how SF tv - even just the Star Trek franchise - is a great branching tree. I'd rather hang out in the places where they explore poverty, trauma and conflict (B5, DS9, Farscape, Firefly, etc.) - but other people find those shows too dark - either figuratively or literally. (Seriously: I have a friend who doesn't like DS9 because the lighting is too low and she can't see what's going on). They watch TNG and Voyager and enjoy them.
My personal favourite Star Trek will always be the rich, complex worlds created in the tie-in novels, where hints in the series were grown out into great big plants of character background, histories and cultures were created for alien planets (or even our own) - and characters could go through life-changing experiences because they weren't series regulars. Of course, I got to see a lot of this imaginative creation just canoned out of existence, because the novels don't exist as far as the television writers were concerned, even though they included the funniest Trek ever.
but in my head, they can all exist because infinite diversity in infinite combinations
posted by jb at 2:13 PM on May 27, 2019 [10 favorites]
No end-of-episode resets.
Our heroes can suffer, but they actively engage in caring for themselves and others. There are costs to the high road, that our heroes acknowledge and know they must pay.
They made that show: Farscape, and it's the BEST. SCI-FI TV. EVAR!!!11!
(Firefly was really good too, just didn't last as long.)
More seriously: I've come to the point in my life where I see how SF tv - even just the Star Trek franchise - is a great branching tree. I'd rather hang out in the places where they explore poverty, trauma and conflict (B5, DS9, Farscape, Firefly, etc.) - but other people find those shows too dark - either figuratively or literally. (Seriously: I have a friend who doesn't like DS9 because the lighting is too low and she can't see what's going on). They watch TNG and Voyager and enjoy them.
My personal favourite Star Trek will always be the rich, complex worlds created in the tie-in novels, where hints in the series were grown out into great big plants of character background, histories and cultures were created for alien planets (or even our own) - and characters could go through life-changing experiences because they weren't series regulars. Of course, I got to see a lot of this imaginative creation just canoned out of existence, because the novels don't exist as far as the television writers were concerned, even though they included the funniest Trek ever.
but in my head, they can all exist because infinite diversity in infinite combinations
posted by jb at 2:13 PM on May 27, 2019 [10 favorites]
also: the novels always had the best special effects. Absolutely seamless and realistic.
posted by jb at 2:14 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by jb at 2:14 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
Surprised at the love for SG1 here, that show is so right-wing its basically the anti-trek.
People might be thinking that Daniel the hero-scholar counterbalances the show's militarism, but that's the same mistake that led to the co-optation of anthropologists by the American military in Afghanistan.
However, I can enjoy and learn from art that doesn't match my ideology. SG1 was the most consistently-pretty-good sci fi ever aired.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:17 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
People might be thinking that Daniel the hero-scholar counterbalances the show's militarism, but that's the same mistake that led to the co-optation of anthropologists by the American military in Afghanistan.
However, I can enjoy and learn from art that doesn't match my ideology. SG1 was the most consistently-pretty-good sci fi ever aired.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:17 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
Yeah. I was a big Babylon 5 fan. By comparison DS9 just felt so... small and petty, but with very high production values. It was almost a devolution in TV science fiction.
Weirdly, I think one of us is from the mirror universe because this is 180 degrees reversed from my experience of the shows. I watched Babylon 5 on DVD a decade after its broadcast and I found that while it had grand ambitions and an admirably ambitious sense of scope, it all foundered on dismal dialogue and instantly-dated special effects and production design* and cringingly patronizing choices resulting from (I hope) network notes to dumb it down. I actually watched the premiere when it originally aired with a fair bit of optimism. This lasted until the point where the commander had his, “As you know, Bob,” conversation with his first officer about how the meeting-place aspect of the station functions kind of like the old United Nations on Earth, centuries ago.
I recall I briefly pondered a theoretical drama set at the UN today wherein an ambassador explains to a subordinate how much the UN is like the Hanseatic League’s grip on Baltic maritime trade in the fourteenth century.
*Really, did every flat surface in the station need a Dr. Cliff Huxtable sweater pattern on it?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:18 PM on May 27, 2019 [13 favorites]
Weirdly, I think one of us is from the mirror universe because this is 180 degrees reversed from my experience of the shows. I watched Babylon 5 on DVD a decade after its broadcast and I found that while it had grand ambitions and an admirably ambitious sense of scope, it all foundered on dismal dialogue and instantly-dated special effects and production design* and cringingly patronizing choices resulting from (I hope) network notes to dumb it down. I actually watched the premiere when it originally aired with a fair bit of optimism. This lasted until the point where the commander had his, “As you know, Bob,” conversation with his first officer about how the meeting-place aspect of the station functions kind of like the old United Nations on Earth, centuries ago.
I recall I briefly pondered a theoretical drama set at the UN today wherein an ambassador explains to a subordinate how much the UN is like the Hanseatic League’s grip on Baltic maritime trade in the fourteenth century.
*Really, did every flat surface in the station need a Dr. Cliff Huxtable sweater pattern on it?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:18 PM on May 27, 2019 [13 favorites]
Like As a joke they give the humans a planet crawling with blood worms to colonize, five years later they’ve bred toy blood worms that purr and do tricks and got large beast of burden bloodworms to tunnel their subway system for them.
This sounds like it could be an awesome backstory for tribbles.
posted by Avelwood at 2:29 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
This sounds like it could be an awesome backstory for tribbles.
posted by Avelwood at 2:29 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
Oh, you want a no-money society? No problem, here's some sample dialog:
A: Hey, I really like that phaser of yours.
B: Really? You can have it.
Follow-up: either A reciprocates in some way, or they never do, in which case B and all their compatriots never deal with them again.
That's one way pre-money societies work; see David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years for the anthropology. It's also how families work— as Graeber says, there's a lot more communism than people realize.
Federation people should act this way, if they really come from a post-scarcity economy. Would that make them naively exploitable when dealing with outsiders? Probably, but that would be an interesting character trait, no?
As to where Picard gets his vineyard: also easy— food is produced in labs or something, so the land is not needed for agriculture. So it was a low-value resource no one else was using.
You will eventually run into things that not everyone can have. No, you can't have your own Orbital. More subtly, not everyone can be the top content producer on Spacebook.
posted by zompist at 2:44 PM on May 27, 2019 [14 favorites]
A: Hey, I really like that phaser of yours.
B: Really? You can have it.
Follow-up: either A reciprocates in some way, or they never do, in which case B and all their compatriots never deal with them again.
That's one way pre-money societies work; see David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years for the anthropology. It's also how families work— as Graeber says, there's a lot more communism than people realize.
Federation people should act this way, if they really come from a post-scarcity economy. Would that make them naively exploitable when dealing with outsiders? Probably, but that would be an interesting character trait, no?
As to where Picard gets his vineyard: also easy— food is produced in labs or something, so the land is not needed for agriculture. So it was a low-value resource no one else was using.
You will eventually run into things that not everyone can have. No, you can't have your own Orbital. More subtly, not everyone can be the top content producer on Spacebook.
posted by zompist at 2:44 PM on May 27, 2019 [14 favorites]
(Everyone including the Ferengi have replicators though, so you have to ask yourself what they're planning to buy with all that latinum).
If nothing else, it can be seen as a way to keep score in a competitive, hierarchical society. The ultra-rich billionaires of today certainly have no need to keep increasing their personal fortunes either.
posted by Pryde at 2:57 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
If nothing else, it can be seen as a way to keep score in a competitive, hierarchical society. The ultra-rich billionaires of today certainly have no need to keep increasing their personal fortunes either.
posted by Pryde at 2:57 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
Show me people who don't believe in a no-win scenario, but approach each situation with compassion and awareness. I want the ethical test to be "How do we avoid this obvious act 3 ethical test?"
IT'S CALLED STEVEN UNIVERSE AND IT'S FANTASTIC
posted by duffell at 3:06 PM on May 27, 2019 [25 favorites]
IT'S CALLED STEVEN UNIVERSE AND IT'S FANTASTIC
posted by duffell at 3:06 PM on May 27, 2019 [25 favorites]
If there’s one thing that the first Star Trek reboot movie made me think of, in the scene where Child Kirk is driving his stolen car through the supposed Iowa countryside and then screams up to the brink of a fucking canyon carved into the earth, with inconceivably huge buildings or scaffolds in the misty distance, it’s “How the fuck do they afford to build and launch these things?” Okay, so the people on the ships don’t need money, but what about the people on Earth? Who’s building these ships? Where do the materials come from? Obviously not from the planet.
Are people on universal basic income spending 9 hours a day in the spaceship building shop, welding out of the goodness of their hearts? Doubt it. Or any of the other hard labor that must be going into these gigantic structures. We can barely launch a rocket without someone spending a billion dollars, so where’d the money come from to get starships off the ground? Where’d we get umpteen bazillion tons of iron? Who did the research? It had to start somewhere, before we had so much unobtanium or whatever to render the world so wealthy, that basic necessities became trivial to the point of being worthless.
If they’re still reshaping the planet in order to create these things then there simply must be a cost.
posted by Autumnheart at 3:07 PM on May 27, 2019
Are people on universal basic income spending 9 hours a day in the spaceship building shop, welding out of the goodness of their hearts? Doubt it. Or any of the other hard labor that must be going into these gigantic structures. We can barely launch a rocket without someone spending a billion dollars, so where’d the money come from to get starships off the ground? Where’d we get umpteen bazillion tons of iron? Who did the research? It had to start somewhere, before we had so much unobtanium or whatever to render the world so wealthy, that basic necessities became trivial to the point of being worthless.
If they’re still reshaping the planet in order to create these things then there simply must be a cost.
posted by Autumnheart at 3:07 PM on May 27, 2019
While I certainly would never argue that SG:1 isn't to the right of DS9 I think SG:1's treatment of women and minorities and anyone without a voice was YEARS ahead of the rest of entertainment. I could list a dozen examples here but will stick to one:
When a Private makes a comment about the new head Doctor, an attractive woman, making him "look forward to getting sick" he is immediately and PERFECTLY dressed down by two senior officers in a way that feels more like actual reality than ANY two lines of dialogue from DS9.
posted by Cosine at 3:12 PM on May 27, 2019 [11 favorites]
When a Private makes a comment about the new head Doctor, an attractive woman, making him "look forward to getting sick" he is immediately and PERFECTLY dressed down by two senior officers in a way that feels more like actual reality than ANY two lines of dialogue from DS9.
posted by Cosine at 3:12 PM on May 27, 2019 [11 favorites]
If they’re still reshaping the planet in order to create these things then there simply must be a cost.
One thing Discovery showed is that the Federation uses prison labour (sure, it's a prequel and set during wartime, but that kinda makes it more relevant to the question of "what was the cost of all that stuff?"), so there are definitely at least some people working against their will.
posted by asnider at 3:38 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
One thing Discovery showed is that the Federation uses prison labour (sure, it's a prequel and set during wartime, but that kinda makes it more relevant to the question of "what was the cost of all that stuff?"), so there are definitely at least some people working against their will.
posted by asnider at 3:38 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
asnider: It's also true in the latest 24th century series, Voyager; that's what Tom Paris is doing when Captain Janeway recruits him to chase after his old buddies in the Maquis.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:02 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:02 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
I guess the Borg had previously assimilated some Planet of the Hats whose notable power was persuasive public speaking.
His name was Jean-Luc Picard.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:03 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
His name was Jean-Luc Picard.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:03 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
It had to start somewhere, before we had so much unobtanium or whatever to render the world so wealthy, that basic necessities became trivial to the point of being worthless.
I think dilithium crystals are the unobtanium that allows for energy to be harnessed from the matter-antimatter reaction. With that, the amount of energy you can create is only limited by the amount of hydrogen in the universe. That nearly infinite energy can be used to make any other matter you desire through matter-energy conversion technology. What Roddenberry imagined is that once material things are no longer scarce, human will have no use for money and will not be motivated by want for stuff. The welders and machinists would build a spaceship because they love making shit, they want to learn new shit, and to be involved in prestige projects because spaceships are cool as shit. Everybody is a hobbyist in Star Fleet.
posted by peeedro at 4:12 PM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]
I think dilithium crystals are the unobtanium that allows for energy to be harnessed from the matter-antimatter reaction. With that, the amount of energy you can create is only limited by the amount of hydrogen in the universe. That nearly infinite energy can be used to make any other matter you desire through matter-energy conversion technology. What Roddenberry imagined is that once material things are no longer scarce, human will have no use for money and will not be motivated by want for stuff. The welders and machinists would build a spaceship because they love making shit, they want to learn new shit, and to be involved in prestige projects because spaceships are cool as shit. Everybody is a hobbyist in Star Fleet.
posted by peeedro at 4:12 PM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]
I mean you wouldn't even need welders and machinists when you can just print anything in any configuration you need. They will need designers coming up with new ways of construction and inspectors to make sure they are safe*. We are already trending to this in our society. The big difference is that after two devastating wars + first contact with the Vulcans, humans in the Star Trek universe were motivated to actually share their techno-utopian gains with everyone left on Earth, instead of concentrating those efficiency gains into the pockets of capitalists.
* because the federation is AI-phobic these mental processes won't also be automated for a long time.
posted by muddgirl at 4:40 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
* because the federation is AI-phobic these mental processes won't also be automated for a long time.
posted by muddgirl at 4:40 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
Federation people should act this way, if they really come from a post-scarcity economy. Would that make them naively exploitable when dealing with outsiders? Probably, but that would be an interesting character trait, no?
There a short story, The Man Who Loved Money, about a not-Post-scarcity but post-money economy where everything is judged and better resources given to people who contribute more to society, from babysitting or being fun to hang out with, or volunteering to do something unpleasant, etc. the pre-money web of social obligations and gift giving turned into a digitized and automated superstructure - the title character is someone who still works in money, cause money is the replacement for social obligation, it’s frictionless and freeing , even if the main character thinks this makes him very morally suspect (and a little greasy ..and ...intriguing).
It sort of reminds me of what Jane Jacobs talked about trading societies vs obligation societies, although I think I’m getting the words wrong - but it was about what was more important, how much resources you have or who you know? (And the observation, aristocracies and rich people networks are ALL obligation societies).
So maybe everyone in Federation space acts like how rich people act now. They can use all kinds of things to jockey for social position, being an excellent gift giver, an artist, a skilled researcher, a devoted actor or caregiver, great at sex or sport, whatever. And maybe Federation citizens are kind of charmingly naive and connable to everyone else, just like rich people now, and maybe that’s why they tend to stay in Federation space and people who go into Starfleet get lots of training or who are naturally suited for dealing with non-Federation citizens.
It’s an interesting prompt at least.
posted by The Whelk at 4:43 PM on May 27, 2019 [11 favorites]
There a short story, The Man Who Loved Money, about a not-Post-scarcity but post-money economy where everything is judged and better resources given to people who contribute more to society, from babysitting or being fun to hang out with, or volunteering to do something unpleasant, etc. the pre-money web of social obligations and gift giving turned into a digitized and automated superstructure - the title character is someone who still works in money, cause money is the replacement for social obligation, it’s frictionless and freeing , even if the main character thinks this makes him very morally suspect (and a little greasy ..and ...intriguing).
It sort of reminds me of what Jane Jacobs talked about trading societies vs obligation societies, although I think I’m getting the words wrong - but it was about what was more important, how much resources you have or who you know? (And the observation, aristocracies and rich people networks are ALL obligation societies).
So maybe everyone in Federation space acts like how rich people act now. They can use all kinds of things to jockey for social position, being an excellent gift giver, an artist, a skilled researcher, a devoted actor or caregiver, great at sex or sport, whatever. And maybe Federation citizens are kind of charmingly naive and connable to everyone else, just like rich people now, and maybe that’s why they tend to stay in Federation space and people who go into Starfleet get lots of training or who are naturally suited for dealing with non-Federation citizens.
It’s an interesting prompt at least.
posted by The Whelk at 4:43 PM on May 27, 2019 [11 favorites]
(It’s my vauge anarchist leanings but the people who can do some hard construction work get all these good social credits for it and cause ...they like the idea of building ships. Maybe there’s not such a big divide in the people who design vs the people who build the ships anymore.)
posted by The Whelk at 4:45 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 4:45 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
I like to believe that the Federation is pretty much run by enslaved super-AIs: the fact that the ship's computer can simulate a fully thinking human being in the holodeck based on nothing more than some Sherlock Holmes short stories suggests that the ship's AI is massively more capable than the human crew members ever give it credit for.
posted by Pyry at 4:48 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]
posted by Pyry at 4:48 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]
Starfleet is essentially AI babysitters for humanity. I like it.
posted by maxwelton at 5:00 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by maxwelton at 5:00 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
I like to believe that the Federation is pretty much run by enslaved super-AIs: the fact that the ship's computer can simulate a fully thinking human being in the holodeck based on nothing more than some Sherlock Holmes short stories suggests that the ship's AI is massively more capable than the human crew members ever give it credit for.
It occurred to me early in the TNG run (can't recall if it was before or after Moriarty) that once you entered a holodeck, you could never be 100% sure you had left it again. Maybe the Federation is merely AIs that have safely locked all the fragile humans away where they can pretend they are making first contacts and brokering diplomatic solutions, etc.
Or on preview, yay maxwelton.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:01 PM on May 27, 2019 [11 favorites]
It occurred to me early in the TNG run (can't recall if it was before or after Moriarty) that once you entered a holodeck, you could never be 100% sure you had left it again. Maybe the Federation is merely AIs that have safely locked all the fragile humans away where they can pretend they are making first contacts and brokering diplomatic solutions, etc.
Or on preview, yay maxwelton.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:01 PM on May 27, 2019 [11 favorites]
Computer, end program!
posted by peeedro at 5:11 PM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]
posted by peeedro at 5:11 PM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]
once you entered a holodeck, you could never be 100% sure you had left it again.
Never mind the transporters... I subscribe to the 'every teleportation is death by atomization' school of thought.
posted by kaibutsu at 5:16 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
Never mind the transporters... I subscribe to the 'every teleportation is death by atomization' school of thought.
posted by kaibutsu at 5:16 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
Yes, and isn't it beautiful? There's no disagreement among the Borg. There's no ignorance; that which is known to one is known to all. There are no Nazi Borg, no Borg who look at other Borg and say "I am superior to those Borg." It's perfect equality and unanimity. I can't imagine any preferable state of being.
Yeah, sure, just have to give up art and love and joy and food. And you don't have a choice, they're gonna do it to you whether you like it or not.
You wouldn't even have to force me. I'd sign up right now if I could.
posted by some loser at 5:55 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
Yeah, sure, just have to give up art and love and joy and food. And you don't have a choice, they're gonna do it to you whether you like it or not.
You wouldn't even have to force me. I'd sign up right now if I could.
posted by some loser at 5:55 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
Plus you know, you could never claim the borg are being "unauthentic" and authentic is big right now
posted by some loser at 5:57 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by some loser at 5:57 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
Never mind the transporters... I subscribe to the 'every teleportation is death by atomization' school of thought.
You and Michael Crichton.
posted by Autumnheart at 6:16 PM on May 27, 2019
You and Michael Crichton.
posted by Autumnheart at 6:16 PM on May 27, 2019
> Maybe the Federation is merely AIs that have safely locked all the fragile humans away where they can pretend they are making first contacts and brokering diplomatic solutions, etc.
Nah, their brains reject the simulation because it's too perfect, and it gets all kinds of pointlessly metaphysical with Architects and stuff.
posted by Leon at 6:22 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
Nah, their brains reject the simulation because it's too perfect, and it gets all kinds of pointlessly metaphysical with Architects and stuff.
posted by Leon at 6:22 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
Starfleet is essentially AI babysitters for humanity. I like it.
Check out the Culture series by Iain M. Banks.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 6:28 PM on May 27, 2019 [10 favorites]
Check out the Culture series by Iain M. Banks.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 6:28 PM on May 27, 2019 [10 favorites]
The galaxy at large can be kinda shitty, but I want to see a ship full of motivated people, working together, trying to make a difference.
You, my friend, are looking for Becky Chambers. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is the first book in her series and it's exactly what you describe.
posted by East14thTaco at 7:03 PM on May 27, 2019 [10 favorites]
You, my friend, are looking for Becky Chambers. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is the first book in her series and it's exactly what you describe.
posted by East14thTaco at 7:03 PM on May 27, 2019 [10 favorites]
Metafilter: Computer, end program!
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:22 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:22 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
Sure, if you’re considering a society of individuals who are our peers, which the Borg is not. Is a hive of bees fascist? Do we kill bees because we disagree fundamentally with collective social behavior, or do we just decide to swat the bug or cultivate it depending on what we get out of it?
Bees who want everyone to join their hive or be eliminated would definitely be fascist. That consent is completely set aside in this conversation about the comforts of the borg is confusing to me.
The Federation won't even talk to a planet until it's reached the age of consent, metaphorically speaking. They've never been shown having a problem with people leaving and setting up in truly uninhabited areas. Most of the conflicts with their emigrants are triggered by the equivalent of Anglos from moving into Native or Mexican territory during the 18th/19th century.
I'm not buying into the Federation as utopia assertion--there's a ton of potentially interesting but frustratingly unexplored territory (including in DS9) but not question which one is better neighbor. Or landlord.
posted by mark k at 7:25 PM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]
Bees who want everyone to join their hive or be eliminated would definitely be fascist. That consent is completely set aside in this conversation about the comforts of the borg is confusing to me.
The Federation won't even talk to a planet until it's reached the age of consent, metaphorically speaking. They've never been shown having a problem with people leaving and setting up in truly uninhabited areas. Most of the conflicts with their emigrants are triggered by the equivalent of Anglos from moving into Native or Mexican territory during the 18th/19th century.
I'm not buying into the Federation as utopia assertion--there's a ton of potentially interesting but frustratingly unexplored territory (including in DS9) but not question which one is better neighbor. Or landlord.
posted by mark k at 7:25 PM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]
Bees who want everyone to join their hive or be eliminated would definitely be fascist. That consent is completely set aside in this conversation about the comforts of the borg is confusing to me.
Bees aren’t fascist because their behavior is inherent. Individuals have to get together and agree to be fascist together. Bees don’t do that. Neither does the Borg. Their society is based on hyper-specialized organisms whose behavior is inherent, it’s not a political system like the Federation. It’s just not an apples-to-apples comparison at all. You can’t fight them using political philosophy, any more than you can tell a swarm of bees not to build a hive in your wall because that wouldn’t be democratic.
Maybe that’s why the Federation can’t figure out how to deal with the Borg either.
posted by Autumnheart at 7:33 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
Bees aren’t fascist because their behavior is inherent. Individuals have to get together and agree to be fascist together. Bees don’t do that. Neither does the Borg. Their society is based on hyper-specialized organisms whose behavior is inherent, it’s not a political system like the Federation. It’s just not an apples-to-apples comparison at all. You can’t fight them using political philosophy, any more than you can tell a swarm of bees not to build a hive in your wall because that wouldn’t be democratic.
Maybe that’s why the Federation can’t figure out how to deal with the Borg either.
posted by Autumnheart at 7:33 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
DS9 was always my least favorite, actually disliked, Star Trek series. Inspired by this post I watched a few of what this guy and other fans think are the best episodes. And yeah, I still find it pretty annoying though I did find some decent episodes. I think the Ferengi pretty much encapsulate everything disagreeable about the series, but they're just perhaps so often in the early episodes that I focus on them for my annoyance and can never get very far into the series. So many of the races/aliens/non-human characters are like the Ferengi, they're all just so...so unreasonable and so completely lacking in self awareness.
This is a problem in most Star Trek series, nobody but the humans seem capable of being aware of a perspective other than their own so it's always on the humans to solve the conflicts. The Klingons are an extreme example, a society that seems really unlikely to have advanced to space-faring due to the constant violence. They must be manipulated by the humans to consider anything other than condemn and destroy. What makes DS9 so much more hard to take is that these unreasonable non-human race characters stick around and don't go away at the end of every episode, they continue to be stupid week after week. Voyager and TNG, each episode they're on to some new encounter, albeit one that will likely again involve meeting a society also unable to consider a perspective other that their own, but a least they change every week.
posted by ixipkcams at 8:08 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
This is a problem in most Star Trek series, nobody but the humans seem capable of being aware of a perspective other than their own so it's always on the humans to solve the conflicts. The Klingons are an extreme example, a society that seems really unlikely to have advanced to space-faring due to the constant violence. They must be manipulated by the humans to consider anything other than condemn and destroy. What makes DS9 so much more hard to take is that these unreasonable non-human race characters stick around and don't go away at the end of every episode, they continue to be stupid week after week. Voyager and TNG, each episode they're on to some new encounter, albeit one that will likely again involve meeting a society also unable to consider a perspective other that their own, but a least they change every week.
posted by ixipkcams at 8:08 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
Individuals have to get together and agree to be fascist together. Bees don’t do that. Neither does the Borg. Their society is based on hyper-specialized organisms whose behavior is inherent, it’s not a political system like the Federation.
Except the Borg are technological. Bees are a bad analogy because nobody made bees. The Borg are the product of humanoid-engineered mechanical telepathy. Maybe nobody set out to be conquerors - the Borg could easily be an unplanned emergent behavior from the process, but that's just bad code. It isn't the same as 'this is natural.'
They also specifically make any number of philosophical arguments in favor of surrender, varying from their classic 'resistance is futile' appeal to logic, to Assimilated Picard's 'we just want to raise quality of life for all species' marketing BS, to Seven's constant talk about seeking 'perfection.' Seven, notably, acts like a former cultist about the Borg, in one of the few dramatic beats VOY ever did anything interesting with.
Among disconnected Borg, we see people who view the experience as anything from violent assault to a precious gift they want back, (VOY's "Unity" is an intriguing take on that last idea, probably my favorite Borg story in canon).
Borg-iness is definitely a political system.
posted by mordax at 8:23 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
Except the Borg are technological. Bees are a bad analogy because nobody made bees. The Borg are the product of humanoid-engineered mechanical telepathy. Maybe nobody set out to be conquerors - the Borg could easily be an unplanned emergent behavior from the process, but that's just bad code. It isn't the same as 'this is natural.'
They also specifically make any number of philosophical arguments in favor of surrender, varying from their classic 'resistance is futile' appeal to logic, to Assimilated Picard's 'we just want to raise quality of life for all species' marketing BS, to Seven's constant talk about seeking 'perfection.' Seven, notably, acts like a former cultist about the Borg, in one of the few dramatic beats VOY ever did anything interesting with.
Among disconnected Borg, we see people who view the experience as anything from violent assault to a precious gift they want back, (VOY's "Unity" is an intriguing take on that last idea, probably my favorite Borg story in canon).
Borg-iness is definitely a political system.
posted by mordax at 8:23 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
(It’s my vauge anarchist leanings but the people who can do some hard construction work get all these good social credits for it and cause ...they like the idea of building ships. Maybe there’s not such a big divide in the people who design vs the people who build the ships anymore.)
This is something that CONSTANTLY irks me about discussions of the Star Trek post-scarcity world, people wondering why anyone would take a service job, or do anything but pursue either hedonistic pleasure or try and climb various hierarchies to be in charge of something. This comes up with all the waiters in Ten Forward, it comes up with Ben Sisko's restaurant, it constantly gets mixed with ageism on really nitpicky podcasts, as in 'Why is that older person only an ensign, what is wrong with them that they haven't risen through the ranks?', it comes up with all the federation planets full of farmers they are constantly bumping into in all the shows.
This also comes up in my own life, where I went to college and otherwise have the background and interests of a computer developer type, but instead work in manufacturing, which people assume is a stop-gap or even something I'd be ashamed of, when it's actually something I discovered I enjoy doing more than chair-based work.
So it's like, I don't think you even need to consider the social credit idea at all, because I'm pretty sure that in the Star Trek universe, with everything provided for you, a lot of people are still going to want to do the kind of work replicators make needless. Some people are still really going to want to farm, and some are going to want to do blue-collar style work, and yes, some are going to want to be bartenders or waiters. Some people just really click with some jobs, and so, especially if they are not being forced to do a job by capitalistic demands, will gravitate to those jobs. I mean, we even see a lot of teachers, one of the hardest, most emotionally draining jobs, and they are doing that purely for love if there is no money involved.
You know what I would do in Star Trek, if all my base needs were covered, and I could just have the job and life I wanted and change it if I got bored? I'd be some form of janitor/repairman at some kind of science installation. I'd be the friendly guy who keeps stuff running and keeps things clean for the people inclined to be scientists to do their science happily. I'd be O'Brien, but with way less pressure. Then when I got older, I'd go and be a farmer on some planet and have robots do whatever I can't.
But in summation, some people just like doing jobs other people can't imagine enjoying, and vis versa, and probably even under a post-scarcity system, will gravitate to those jobs.
To me that's the dream of labor, to have people doing what they WANT to do without an overhead drive of capitalism.
posted by neonrev at 8:42 PM on May 27, 2019 [36 favorites]
This is something that CONSTANTLY irks me about discussions of the Star Trek post-scarcity world, people wondering why anyone would take a service job, or do anything but pursue either hedonistic pleasure or try and climb various hierarchies to be in charge of something. This comes up with all the waiters in Ten Forward, it comes up with Ben Sisko's restaurant, it constantly gets mixed with ageism on really nitpicky podcasts, as in 'Why is that older person only an ensign, what is wrong with them that they haven't risen through the ranks?', it comes up with all the federation planets full of farmers they are constantly bumping into in all the shows.
This also comes up in my own life, where I went to college and otherwise have the background and interests of a computer developer type, but instead work in manufacturing, which people assume is a stop-gap or even something I'd be ashamed of, when it's actually something I discovered I enjoy doing more than chair-based work.
So it's like, I don't think you even need to consider the social credit idea at all, because I'm pretty sure that in the Star Trek universe, with everything provided for you, a lot of people are still going to want to do the kind of work replicators make needless. Some people are still really going to want to farm, and some are going to want to do blue-collar style work, and yes, some are going to want to be bartenders or waiters. Some people just really click with some jobs, and so, especially if they are not being forced to do a job by capitalistic demands, will gravitate to those jobs. I mean, we even see a lot of teachers, one of the hardest, most emotionally draining jobs, and they are doing that purely for love if there is no money involved.
You know what I would do in Star Trek, if all my base needs were covered, and I could just have the job and life I wanted and change it if I got bored? I'd be some form of janitor/repairman at some kind of science installation. I'd be the friendly guy who keeps stuff running and keeps things clean for the people inclined to be scientists to do their science happily. I'd be O'Brien, but with way less pressure. Then when I got older, I'd go and be a farmer on some planet and have robots do whatever I can't.
But in summation, some people just like doing jobs other people can't imagine enjoying, and vis versa, and probably even under a post-scarcity system, will gravitate to those jobs.
To me that's the dream of labor, to have people doing what they WANT to do without an overhead drive of capitalism.
posted by neonrev at 8:42 PM on May 27, 2019 [36 favorites]
Neither does the Borg. Their society is based on hyper-specialized organisms whose behavior is inherent, it’s not a political system like the Federation. It’s just not an apples-to-apples comparison at all. You can’t fight them using political philosophy
But they did! One Borg, Hugh, after being separated from the collective and immersed in Federation culture came to the conclusion that individual freedom is morally good. When he rejoined the collective he brought that set of arguments with him. Central control in his cube collapsed.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 8:48 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
But they did! One Borg, Hugh, after being separated from the collective and immersed in Federation culture came to the conclusion that individual freedom is morally good. When he rejoined the collective he brought that set of arguments with him. Central control in his cube collapsed.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 8:48 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
I don't have a lot to say about the article; it's pretty good, but I'm pretty sure that serialized stories were brought to network television by soap operas.I've also written much about Trek in general and DS9 in particular on the blue (and especially the purple), but I would like to address a few things brought up in this thread:
- DS9 vs. B5: Only the people who created DS9 know whether or not they saw JMS' B5 proposal before creating the show, or talked to someone who did. I've always felt that there are a lot of similarities between the premise of the series and TOS' "The Trouble with Tribbles", including a space station on the border between the Federation and a hostile power with which they'd formerly been at war with, a neutral planet that they're both trying to win over (the idea that the Cardassians could ever win over Bajor, after the horrors of the Occupation, is absurd--except to Gul Dukat, who never gives up on the idea), a member of the station staff who is not what he seems, and a raucous bar and a character who's kind of a hustler (in DS9, the latter runs the former). JMS obviously thought that the two series tracked too closely for coincidence, but JMS is kind of a dick.
- The economy: Most basic needs in the Federation are answered by replicators, but replicators can't replicate everything (people, latinum) and also have a maximum size of about the volume of a walk-in closet (for industrial replicators). People who want to work are probably paid by getting to go out into space, which makes sense, as starships have to be assembled, not replicated. No one has figured out how real estate works. Most non-Federation societies still seem to use some form of money.
- The Federation-Borg comparison was made in canon by Eddington, a Starfleet security officer who said this to Sisko:
- The series has many flaws, as we discussed at ridonkulous length on the purple.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:55 PM on May 27, 2019 [9 favorites]
- DS9 vs. B5: Only the people who created DS9 know whether or not they saw JMS' B5 proposal before creating the show, or talked to someone who did. I've always felt that there are a lot of similarities between the premise of the series and TOS' "The Trouble with Tribbles", including a space station on the border between the Federation and a hostile power with which they'd formerly been at war with, a neutral planet that they're both trying to win over (the idea that the Cardassians could ever win over Bajor, after the horrors of the Occupation, is absurd--except to Gul Dukat, who never gives up on the idea), a member of the station staff who is not what he seems, and a raucous bar and a character who's kind of a hustler (in DS9, the latter runs the former). JMS obviously thought that the two series tracked too closely for coincidence, but JMS is kind of a dick.
- The economy: Most basic needs in the Federation are answered by replicators, but replicators can't replicate everything (people, latinum) and also have a maximum size of about the volume of a walk-in closet (for industrial replicators). People who want to work are probably paid by getting to go out into space, which makes sense, as starships have to be assembled, not replicated. No one has figured out how real estate works. Most non-Federation societies still seem to use some form of money.
- The Federation-Borg comparison was made in canon by Eddington, a Starfleet security officer who said this to Sisko:
I know you. I was like you once, but then I opened my eyes. Open your eyes, captain. Why is the Federation so obsessed with the Maquis? We've never harmed you. And yet we're constantly arrested and charged with terrorism. Starships chase us through the Badlands and our supporters are harassed and ridiculed. Why? Because we've left the Federation, and that's the one thing you can't accept. Nobody leaves paradise. Everyone should want to be in the Federation. Hell, you even want the Cardassians to join. You're only sending them replicators because one day they can take their 'rightful place' on the Federation Council. You know, in some ways you're even worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You're more insidious. You assimilate people and they don't even know it.Of course, Eddington is a Les Miserables fanboy, something that Sisko uses to catch him once he figures out that in Eddington's mind, he's Valjean and Sisko is Javert. (Eddington is also an asshole, as he probably knows that Sisko's wife was killed at Wolf 359.)
- The series has many flaws, as we discussed at ridonkulous length on the purple.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:55 PM on May 27, 2019 [9 favorites]
Bees aren't fascist. Bee colonies are democracies, where bees collectively vote on important issues like where to build their hives, and there are sometimes civil wars and secessions when different bees support different queens.
posted by painquale at 9:06 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
posted by painquale at 9:06 PM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]
I have long dreamed of a post-Voyager Star Trek series where the Borg show up yet again at Earth's doorstep but this time they come ready to join the Federation, saying their "resistance is futile" days are behind them and from now on they'll only accept individuals who come willingly to them. In fact, to show their sincerity, they give everyone access to the sum total knowledge and power of the Collective, any time they like. They come to every spacefaring culture with this same promise, and the gift of the Collective, which ranges from looking up Borg knowledge Google-style to plugging your brain into the Collective to experience the power and unity for yourself without devoting your whole individuality to the Borg. But, of course... you can always give yourself wholly to the Borg, if you want to...
Naturally, this is massively successful and the Borg assimilate billions of willing new drones. The Borg bring systematic knowledge of 99% of the galaxy. There are no more strange new worlds or new civilizations. Starfleet crumples as the Borg quickly become the de facto fleet of the Federation, doing all the Uber missions and anomaly investigating that starfleet vessels used to do. The Borg mediate treaties. The Borg pacify dangerous civilizations like the Klingons and the Tholians and the Sheliak Corporate. Entire fleets are mothballed. How do you fight this threat? What happens when a better utopia rolls up on your utopia, and deep down you think it's wrong but everyone around you thinks it's right?
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 9:32 PM on May 27, 2019 [25 favorites]
Naturally, this is massively successful and the Borg assimilate billions of willing new drones. The Borg bring systematic knowledge of 99% of the galaxy. There are no more strange new worlds or new civilizations. Starfleet crumples as the Borg quickly become the de facto fleet of the Federation, doing all the Uber missions and anomaly investigating that starfleet vessels used to do. The Borg mediate treaties. The Borg pacify dangerous civilizations like the Klingons and the Tholians and the Sheliak Corporate. Entire fleets are mothballed. How do you fight this threat? What happens when a better utopia rolls up on your utopia, and deep down you think it's wrong but everyone around you thinks it's right?
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 9:32 PM on May 27, 2019 [25 favorites]
You wouldn't even have to force me. I'd sign up right now if I could.
And I'd rather shoot myself than be brain-raped into a harmoneous hive-mind. In conclusion, people are different. Which the Borg want to take away!
posted by Caduceus at 9:36 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
And I'd rather shoot myself than be brain-raped into a harmoneous hive-mind. In conclusion, people are different. Which the Borg want to take away!
posted by Caduceus at 9:36 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
I've also thought of a Borg splinter group or something along those lines. Or maybe a smaller group of the original species that have rise to the Borg.
"Hi, we are the Cooperative, come check out what we can do for your society if you join (and you for ours)! Leave any time, we don't mind! No we're, not the Borg, no need for weapons!"
I guess there was that one Voyager episode, but I think I thought of this before I saw it.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 9:55 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
"Hi, we are the Cooperative, come check out what we can do for your society if you join (and you for ours)! Leave any time, we don't mind! No we're, not the Borg, no need for weapons!"
I guess there was that one Voyager episode, but I think I thought of this before I saw it.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 9:55 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
But in summation, some people just like doing jobs other people can't imagine enjoying, and vis versa, and probably even under a post-scarcity system, will gravitate to those jobs.
To me that's the dream of labor, to have people doing what they WANT to do without an overhead drive of capitalism.
And I assume the federation and technological progress is set out so really a small percentage of human labor is needed to produce the maximum goods - Working is voluntary and there are probably sections that are fully automated robot gay space communism but others that deliberately don’t use X or Y technology cause they like human interactions or just more humans want to do it ( childcare for one, or being a bartender or hairdresser) so why not?
And I always said a breakaway Borg Cooperative, “yeah it looks like we do everything as one but that’s just what democracy looks like at the rate we can process/argue” and “we don’t force people to join you can leave at any time” would be a fun addition to some future Trek series.
posted by The Whelk at 10:02 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
To me that's the dream of labor, to have people doing what they WANT to do without an overhead drive of capitalism.
And I assume the federation and technological progress is set out so really a small percentage of human labor is needed to produce the maximum goods - Working is voluntary and there are probably sections that are fully automated robot gay space communism but others that deliberately don’t use X or Y technology cause they like human interactions or just more humans want to do it ( childcare for one, or being a bartender or hairdresser) so why not?
And I always said a breakaway Borg Cooperative, “yeah it looks like we do everything as one but that’s just what democracy looks like at the rate we can process/argue” and “we don’t force people to join you can leave at any time” would be a fun addition to some future Trek series.
posted by The Whelk at 10:02 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
Actually there’s your future trek plotline, the Borg Cooperative comes to the Federation for help, they’ve safety escaped the Collective but they don’t really have a purpose and are looking for both Federation protection and to like ...give them a job or a planet or something?
It would be great! Space Commies Vs Space Anarchist Syndicalists
posted by The Whelk at 10:07 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
It would be great! Space Commies Vs Space Anarchist Syndicalists
posted by The Whelk at 10:07 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
They come to every spacefaring culture with this same promise, and the gift of the Collective, which ranges from looking up Borg knowledge Google-style to plugging your brain into the Collective to experience the power and unity for yourself without devoting your whole individuality to the Borg.
Bob the Angry Flower has you covered.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:09 PM on May 27, 2019 [13 favorites]
Bob the Angry Flower has you covered.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:09 PM on May 27, 2019 [13 favorites]
>Also the Borg are the huge enemies of the Federation, there’d be a huge issue resettling them anywhere, everyone would be super paranoid and wary about it! You can use so many metaphors! And also have explanations of his a Federation Money-less society deals with an actual horizontal society based around (lighting fast) consensus (We only meet for the big things Admiral, I don’t ask the Col-op what toothpaste to use in the morning, but I may inquire them on what is the best, given known knowledge.)
posted by The Whelk at 10:14 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 10:14 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
By pure coincidence I am watching Hellraiser III tonight, starring DS9's own Terry Farrell!
I bet the Borg would never waste resources on something like Hellraiser III, which is both an argument for and against their takeover.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 10:21 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]
I bet the Borg would never waste resources on something like Hellraiser III, which is both an argument for and against their takeover.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 10:21 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]
Or is the Federation essentially the same as the Borg, the evil cyborgs whose catchphrase is: “We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”
The wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke
posted by Going To Maine at 10:32 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
The wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke
posted by Going To Maine at 10:32 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
And I assume the federation and technological progress is set out so really a small percentage of human labor is needed to produce the maximum goods
I guess my point (which excludes any and all Borg related thinking) there really hinges on the word 'need'. There does not appear to be a widespread need for labor (barring some McGuffin elements and such, which can't be replicated so the plot works), yet a great many people still have to fill their time. Their labor is not 'needed', but it still has to go somewhere, and labor that doesn't ultimately need to exist, such as farming, one bafflingly common job in all Treks, can fill that need for those people, while also providing something intangibly better. Ben Sisko for sure only uses real ingredients, and is it better than replicated food? Who can say. What it does is provide a great deal of happiness to him and his customers. There is no need for him to do that labor, yet he can, and it creates value.
No one really 'needs' to work in the star trek world, but I think at the end of the day, if everyone actually did have everything provided for them to live, people would still 'want' to work, and it would free them to seek the work they'd enjoy most. That's what seems to be portrayed in the Trek that I've seen, at least.
posted by neonrev at 10:33 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
I guess my point (which excludes any and all Borg related thinking) there really hinges on the word 'need'. There does not appear to be a widespread need for labor (barring some McGuffin elements and such, which can't be replicated so the plot works), yet a great many people still have to fill their time. Their labor is not 'needed', but it still has to go somewhere, and labor that doesn't ultimately need to exist, such as farming, one bafflingly common job in all Treks, can fill that need for those people, while also providing something intangibly better. Ben Sisko for sure only uses real ingredients, and is it better than replicated food? Who can say. What it does is provide a great deal of happiness to him and his customers. There is no need for him to do that labor, yet he can, and it creates value.
No one really 'needs' to work in the star trek world, but I think at the end of the day, if everyone actually did have everything provided for them to live, people would still 'want' to work, and it would free them to seek the work they'd enjoy most. That's what seems to be portrayed in the Trek that I've seen, at least.
posted by neonrev at 10:33 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]
The Orville is easily the most pessimistic take on the Roddenberryverse I've ever seen; unlike TNG, it doesn't posit a universe where humans have evolved to be better than their spiritual flaws in the present day, and unlike DS9, it does'nt posit a universe where those flaws have merely been tamped down temporarily until humans have been inconvenienced. It instead posits a universe where humans are still exactly as shitty as they were in like 2005.
So, the thing is, TNG tells us (repeatedly! preachily!) that humans are "evolved" to be better but the people we actually see on the show are still basically very recognizable as people. Flawed people. Very good people, on the whole, but then again, this is the flagship of the Federation, so it would tend to get the cream of the crop. (Supported by, for instance, the first couple episodes with Lt. Barclay where Geordi and Riker et al. discuss that he's a bright guy but maybe just not quite Enterprise material. Or you know, all of Deep Space Nine or Voyager, where the crews are also at least a little bit more flawed.) I have no trouble whatsoever imagining that that The Orville is just a crappy C or D-list posting in the same universe as the Enterprise. By and large the crew of the Orville knows where they're supposed to be at, progress-wise - which is roughly where the Enterprise crew is, day-to-day - and the Orville crew just doesn't measure up. Frequently, they even know when they're not measuring up to their own ideals. Captain Mercer absolutely knows he's no Picard, even though he wishes he was. But he tries anyways. To me, that's actually a pretty interesting, hopeful, and humanistic angle to take. But if you want to choose to hold every failing of McFarlane and company against them but give a free pass to all the misogyny, racism, and other cringeworthy garbage that TNG, DS9, VOY, all couldn't get away from, simply because the Trek characters kept loudly insisting they were past all that (despite all evidence to the contrary), then sure I guess you can twist things around so The Orville looks like the grimdark one, but it requires a pretty harshly unsympathetic read to get there.
posted by mstokes650 at 10:44 PM on May 27, 2019 [13 favorites]
So, the thing is, TNG tells us (repeatedly! preachily!) that humans are "evolved" to be better but the people we actually see on the show are still basically very recognizable as people. Flawed people. Very good people, on the whole, but then again, this is the flagship of the Federation, so it would tend to get the cream of the crop. (Supported by, for instance, the first couple episodes with Lt. Barclay where Geordi and Riker et al. discuss that he's a bright guy but maybe just not quite Enterprise material. Or you know, all of Deep Space Nine or Voyager, where the crews are also at least a little bit more flawed.) I have no trouble whatsoever imagining that that The Orville is just a crappy C or D-list posting in the same universe as the Enterprise. By and large the crew of the Orville knows where they're supposed to be at, progress-wise - which is roughly where the Enterprise crew is, day-to-day - and the Orville crew just doesn't measure up. Frequently, they even know when they're not measuring up to their own ideals. Captain Mercer absolutely knows he's no Picard, even though he wishes he was. But he tries anyways. To me, that's actually a pretty interesting, hopeful, and humanistic angle to take. But if you want to choose to hold every failing of McFarlane and company against them but give a free pass to all the misogyny, racism, and other cringeworthy garbage that TNG, DS9, VOY, all couldn't get away from, simply because the Trek characters kept loudly insisting they were past all that (despite all evidence to the contrary), then sure I guess you can twist things around so The Orville looks like the grimdark one, but it requires a pretty harshly unsympathetic read to get there.
posted by mstokes650 at 10:44 PM on May 27, 2019 [13 favorites]
Since everyone else has already covered the Borg and the Bees... Am I the only one who (1) prefers Ezri to Jadzia, (2) liked the character but thought the Vic Fontaine episodes were 'eh', and (3) somehow finds oneself wondering how many Enabran Tain/Garek slash fics were deleted once it was revealed they were actually father/son? (Plus how many dads has Paul Dooley played, anyway?)
Also (and this tells you how admittedly little attention I've paid to ST-related shows lately), are the DS9 stories still canon in the current, post-reboot ST universe?
posted by gtrwolf at 10:52 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
Also (and this tells you how admittedly little attention I've paid to ST-related shows lately), are the DS9 stories still canon in the current, post-reboot ST universe?
posted by gtrwolf at 10:52 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]
Yes, and isn't it beautiful? There's no disagreement among the Borg. There's no ignorance; that which is known to one is known to all.
Yes, but the Borg are so STUPID.
I mean seriously, all the distinctiveness of hundreds of cultures and the best those cheap Cybermen knock-offs can manage is a bunch of pasty-faced zombies living a place that looks like the inside of an oil rig. The knowledge of hundreds of planets and the best tactic those idiots can think of is to lumber forward, whether on an individual or starship level. "Oh hey, we're going to attack Earth, and when we're losing, THEN we'll launch a Time Sphere. Not say, from 2000 light years away where the humans will never know. Duh. Borg am smert."
The lack of intelligence, subtlety and basic tactics in the Borg is depressing. The supposed massive intelligence and knowledge of that group mind is such an informed characteristic it's not even funny. They make the Cylons look smart.
The best excuse I can come up with is that they're a victim of their own success. They have so much knowledge, they cant handle the needed bandwidth to even make sense of any of it. Their linkages are overloaded so they can't really do anything with the knowledge they have. Or maybe there's so many conflicting ideas about technologies and sciences and basic knowledge of the world that nothing makes sense and they are restricted to unintelligent assimilation behavior at the level of a paramecium.
Anyway, the Borg are to be pitied, not envied. To say one wants to join them is like saying one wants to become a slime mold, or a clump of cancer cells. There's better fates to wish on oneself.
posted by happyroach at 11:13 PM on May 27, 2019 [11 favorites]
Yes, but the Borg are so STUPID.
I mean seriously, all the distinctiveness of hundreds of cultures and the best those cheap Cybermen knock-offs can manage is a bunch of pasty-faced zombies living a place that looks like the inside of an oil rig. The knowledge of hundreds of planets and the best tactic those idiots can think of is to lumber forward, whether on an individual or starship level. "Oh hey, we're going to attack Earth, and when we're losing, THEN we'll launch a Time Sphere. Not say, from 2000 light years away where the humans will never know. Duh. Borg am smert."
The lack of intelligence, subtlety and basic tactics in the Borg is depressing. The supposed massive intelligence and knowledge of that group mind is such an informed characteristic it's not even funny. They make the Cylons look smart.
The best excuse I can come up with is that they're a victim of their own success. They have so much knowledge, they cant handle the needed bandwidth to even make sense of any of it. Their linkages are overloaded so they can't really do anything with the knowledge they have. Or maybe there's so many conflicting ideas about technologies and sciences and basic knowledge of the world that nothing makes sense and they are restricted to unintelligent assimilation behavior at the level of a paramecium.
Anyway, the Borg are to be pitied, not envied. To say one wants to join them is like saying one wants to become a slime mold, or a clump of cancer cells. There's better fates to wish on oneself.
posted by happyroach at 11:13 PM on May 27, 2019 [11 favorites]
There is an episode of Voyager in which a Borg named "One" commits suicide. It's the very last scene in the episode, so no discussion about this unique event ever takes place. It's not even listed in the "suicide" section of Memory Alpha. Just some interesting trivia for ya.
posted by Brocktoon at 11:28 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by Brocktoon at 11:28 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
My personal headcannon about Starfleet is that they're not the best of the best, in any meaningful sense. They're just the type As who can't get with the program and accept that they don't have to compete anymore. The rest of us type Bs are happy on Earth.
posted by muddgirl at 11:59 PM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]
posted by muddgirl at 11:59 PM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]
are the DS9 stories still canon in the current, post-reboot ST universe?
Yep! The reboot exists in the 'Kelvin Timeline,' so both are actually canonical at this point, but divergent temporally.
Or maybe there's so many conflicting ideas about technologies and sciences and basic knowledge of the world that nothing makes sense and they are restricted to unintelligent assimilation behavior at the level of a paramecium.
One notion that I used to headcanon - which First Contact scuttled badly* - was that the Borg we saw in cubes were totally expendable worker ants, feeding a much bigger... something the fruits of their conquest. All the ideas, technology, whatever going to a superior race using the bodies and ships and tech of lesser civilizations to get them whatever they wanted to know or have.
(* First Contact was fun and all, but it was a really dumb movie and behind much of the villain decay the Borg suffered later.)
There is an episode of Voyager in which a Borg named "One" commits suicide. It's the very last scene in the episode, so no discussion about this unique event ever takes place.
Oh, that was an odd duck of an episode, yeah. The Fanfare discussion was interesting, which I now see you contributed to later. :)
posted by mordax at 2:15 AM on May 28, 2019 [5 favorites]
Yep! The reboot exists in the 'Kelvin Timeline,' so both are actually canonical at this point, but divergent temporally.
Or maybe there's so many conflicting ideas about technologies and sciences and basic knowledge of the world that nothing makes sense and they are restricted to unintelligent assimilation behavior at the level of a paramecium.
One notion that I used to headcanon - which First Contact scuttled badly* - was that the Borg we saw in cubes were totally expendable worker ants, feeding a much bigger... something the fruits of their conquest. All the ideas, technology, whatever going to a superior race using the bodies and ships and tech of lesser civilizations to get them whatever they wanted to know or have.
(* First Contact was fun and all, but it was a really dumb movie and behind much of the villain decay the Borg suffered later.)
There is an episode of Voyager in which a Borg named "One" commits suicide. It's the very last scene in the episode, so no discussion about this unique event ever takes place.
Oh, that was an odd duck of an episode, yeah. The Fanfare discussion was interesting, which I now see you contributed to later. :)
posted by mordax at 2:15 AM on May 28, 2019 [5 favorites]
Garak got all the best lines. By far my favorite character.
posted by M-x shell at 6:09 AM on May 28, 2019 [9 favorites]
posted by M-x shell at 6:09 AM on May 28, 2019 [9 favorites]
but it is one of the most hope-devoid and pessimistic portrayals of a human future I've ever seen
Wait, are we talking about a TV show, or just the state of the world around us?
posted by Ghidorah at 6:31 AM on May 28, 2019 [2 favorites]
Wait, are we talking about a TV show, or just the state of the world around us?
posted by Ghidorah at 6:31 AM on May 28, 2019 [2 favorites]
I was thinking about what The Whelk said about assimilation and I came up with this:
When the Federation comes, they will ask about your children by name. They will give you gifts for your family, your wife, your mistress. They will know your history (personal and planetary!) as if it was their own.posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 7:22 AM on May 28, 2019 [43 favorites]
Their ships are more akin to spacefaring museums and libraries. They will happily give you tours, and show how your myths, heroes and history are similar to those of a thousand other planets. They will understand your greatest artists and figures as if they studied your culture from birth. They will make the art and mythology of other cultures accessible to you. You will leave feeling richer, and smaller.
They will also have gifts for your whole civilization. They will give you a library. They will give you teaching materials and lessons tailored for your people and designed to be acceptable to even your most conservative voices. They will give you computers and networks. They will give you any riches you ask for. They will not give you weapons. At least, nothing that you would think of as a weapon.
Once they leave, your society will enter a renaissance. If you have lower castes, they will become ambitious. If you have a critical media apparatus, it will be come vastly more effective. If you don't, one will coalesce out of the seeds they've left behind. The secrets, crimes and compromises your government made — that you made — to achieve power will be come known. Not to them. The Federation already knows. Your own people will find your weaknesses. No anonymous sources, or tips. Your people will learn how to investigate, to verify, to cite and attribute. They'll learn not just their own history, but their own historiography. Propaganda will be ineffective.
Your dissident groups will find common ground. Orthodox cultures discover how historical records were altered to manufacture that orthodoxy. They don't even need to forge them! Be honest, we all clawed ourselves out of barbarism, and those claw marks remain on our histories. Founding legends will be found to be ahistorical. Dictatorships will face unified opposition. Corrupt leaders will be exposed. Your people will talk about compassion and understanding, and openness.
This will not happen fast. The Federation is patient. They are happy to prepare the ground, plant a seed and wait. They will wait hundreds of years.
We've never seen their weapons. All we know is that when they make contact you will be safe. While they wait out your renaissance, you will not — can not! — be attacked by even your most bitter enemies. You won't notice this as your battle will be with yourself.
They will call out your weaknesses, and laugh as you spin to shield them. They will walk you towards their own goals.
If they call on you personally, make peace with the death of all your ambitions. Become a farmer.
They like farmers.
TheHuntForBlueMonday, I feel like you have described The Culture as depicted by Iain Banks very well.
posted by nubs at 7:55 AM on May 28, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by nubs at 7:55 AM on May 28, 2019 [4 favorites]
Yeah, very much informed by the Culture. I got the feeling that Special Circumstances accomplishes their manipulations on a personal level. Sure, they're adjusting the course of whole civilizations, but they do it by picking a fulcrum and applying leverage.
A Star Fleet made up of ambiguously evil Picards would not deliver personalized service. They don't have the resources to model down to individual citizens, so they would apply a known set of pressures. Less leverage, less force, longer time needed to change a vector.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 8:12 AM on May 28, 2019 [2 favorites]
A Star Fleet made up of ambiguously evil Picards would not deliver personalized service. They don't have the resources to model down to individual citizens, so they would apply a known set of pressures. Less leverage, less force, longer time needed to change a vector.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 8:12 AM on May 28, 2019 [2 favorites]
Mod note: Couple comments deleted; maybe let's do this without taking random shots at people who have lead poisoning?
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:21 AM on May 28, 2019
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:21 AM on May 28, 2019
As for DS9, I enjoyed it when it aired, but often missed episodes so it eventually sort of fuzzed out on me. I was a bigger B5 fan, but even for that I wasn't able to hold myself to keeping up with the schedule and watching each new episode as it came out so that too sort of fuzzed out on me.
I'd say that DS9 wasn't really darker and grittier than TNG, but more that by its nature it was forced to get into the weeds that TNG and TOS could conveniently skim over. Piccard can give his Piccard Speech to the aliens of the week and it can look like a satisfying ending but after the ship moves on the situation is still there and often the TNG faux-solution is going to lead to some fairly serious conflict down the road unless the Federation steps in with some fairly major personnel and infrastructure to keep Piccard's ad hoc band aid over the problem in place and develop a real solution.
With DS9 we see that sort of long term problem solving at work. I don't think it was really darker, just forced to address the longer term problems, which are inevitably going to involve people intractably holding an irrational position which means in the long term it will require a pretty big amount of hand holding and cajoling to keep the situation from degrading back into war.
That, if we're going to pick a sin for Star Trek, would be my vote for its greatest literary sin: it portrays solutions as a one and done, fire and forget, sort of thing while in the real world solutions to deep social problems usually require constant correction over a period of decades.
On the economic side topic, I've always thought there should be some good material in exploring at least a bit of how the Trek post-scarcity economy works. How **DO** you allocate unavoidably scarce resources?
Presumably more people want an apartment overlooking Central Park in NYC than there can be apartments overlooking Central Park in NYC. In our universe we address this problem through money, which is arguably a really shitty way to address the problem. How do they handle it in Trek?
Same goes for the Piccard vineyard or most other real estate questions.
Offhand I can think of three methods, but which one do they pick or do they pick one I didn't think of? The answer to that is going to set how you answer most/all of the other questions regarding unavoidably scarce resources.
And, sadly, it's not one that Banks ever talked about much in the Culture series. He has a bit of a handwave in that Culture humans are explicitly not Homo Sapiens and are stated to be the result of centuries of genetic engineering which includes behavior modification.
Also, for that matter, given that Trek explicitly rejects transhumanism and has a sort of quasi-religious thing against genetic engineering so that they are all stock Homo Sapiens exactly the same as us, how exactly did they "evolve past" greed? What does the Federation do with people who have the pathological hoarding disorder that in our time prompts them to become billionaires laying claim to more resources than they can possibly consume in several lifetimes? If they aren't post-human then they've got people like that, what do they do with them?
posted by sotonohito at 10:16 AM on May 28, 2019 [6 favorites]
I'd say that DS9 wasn't really darker and grittier than TNG, but more that by its nature it was forced to get into the weeds that TNG and TOS could conveniently skim over. Piccard can give his Piccard Speech to the aliens of the week and it can look like a satisfying ending but after the ship moves on the situation is still there and often the TNG faux-solution is going to lead to some fairly serious conflict down the road unless the Federation steps in with some fairly major personnel and infrastructure to keep Piccard's ad hoc band aid over the problem in place and develop a real solution.
With DS9 we see that sort of long term problem solving at work. I don't think it was really darker, just forced to address the longer term problems, which are inevitably going to involve people intractably holding an irrational position which means in the long term it will require a pretty big amount of hand holding and cajoling to keep the situation from degrading back into war.
That, if we're going to pick a sin for Star Trek, would be my vote for its greatest literary sin: it portrays solutions as a one and done, fire and forget, sort of thing while in the real world solutions to deep social problems usually require constant correction over a period of decades.
On the economic side topic, I've always thought there should be some good material in exploring at least a bit of how the Trek post-scarcity economy works. How **DO** you allocate unavoidably scarce resources?
Presumably more people want an apartment overlooking Central Park in NYC than there can be apartments overlooking Central Park in NYC. In our universe we address this problem through money, which is arguably a really shitty way to address the problem. How do they handle it in Trek?
Same goes for the Piccard vineyard or most other real estate questions.
Offhand I can think of three methods, but which one do they pick or do they pick one I didn't think of? The answer to that is going to set how you answer most/all of the other questions regarding unavoidably scarce resources.
And, sadly, it's not one that Banks ever talked about much in the Culture series. He has a bit of a handwave in that Culture humans are explicitly not Homo Sapiens and are stated to be the result of centuries of genetic engineering which includes behavior modification.
Also, for that matter, given that Trek explicitly rejects transhumanism and has a sort of quasi-religious thing against genetic engineering so that they are all stock Homo Sapiens exactly the same as us, how exactly did they "evolve past" greed? What does the Federation do with people who have the pathological hoarding disorder that in our time prompts them to become billionaires laying claim to more resources than they can possibly consume in several lifetimes? If they aren't post-human then they've got people like that, what do they do with them?
posted by sotonohito at 10:16 AM on May 28, 2019 [6 favorites]
I've mentioned this a few times on FanFare, but on several occasions the TNG crew (not sure about other series) refer to the inhabitants of planets they visit as "aliens". Perhaps it's a writing choice to simplify things for the audience, but it's always bugged me. YOU'RE the alien, Wesley!
posted by Brocktoon at 10:31 AM on May 28, 2019 [5 favorites]
posted by Brocktoon at 10:31 AM on May 28, 2019 [5 favorites]
This is the thing that bugs me about the TNG intro as opposed to TOS, I mean I get that they were going for non-sexist, but while "where no man has gone before" could at least plausibly mean "no (hu)man", "where no one has gone before" is just plain wrong.
posted by Daily Alice at 11:02 AM on May 28, 2019 [8 favorites]
posted by Daily Alice at 11:02 AM on May 28, 2019 [8 favorites]
As much as I love Star Trek, I basically take all the series as time capsules of well-meaning white, middle-class liberalism from that period. At this point none of them, except Discovery (which I’ll never see because I’m not ponying up for another streaming service) are really fresh. And I mean, I love Star Trek. But it’s all so dated. It doesn’t mean a show like DS9 can’t be provocative or deep, but there are always huuuge blind spots (a friend and I used to have a drinking game for TNG: drink every time someone in the main cast is wildly patronizing or condescending to Worf).
Anyway, my love of DS9 takes that into account. It’s qualified love of an imperfect thing, but I think a lot of the show holds up better than the other series because it was further away from a lot of the classic Star Trek problems.
I’d watch a new Star Trek series if and only if it took a different approach. Like, maybe hire a more diverse writing staff, instead of just looking at the onscreen cast.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 12:02 PM on May 28, 2019 [9 favorites]
Anyway, my love of DS9 takes that into account. It’s qualified love of an imperfect thing, but I think a lot of the show holds up better than the other series because it was further away from a lot of the classic Star Trek problems.
I’d watch a new Star Trek series if and only if it took a different approach. Like, maybe hire a more diverse writing staff, instead of just looking at the onscreen cast.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 12:02 PM on May 28, 2019 [9 favorites]
... while "where no man has gone before" could at least plausibly mean "no (hu)man", "where no one has gone before" is just plain wrong.
"Where none of us has gone before"?
posted by ZeusHumms at 1:58 PM on May 28, 2019 [1 favorite]
"Where none of us has gone before"?
posted by ZeusHumms at 1:58 PM on May 28, 2019 [1 favorite]
Unless they're visiting an endless chain of planets devoid of sentient life then someone has gone there before.
posted by sotonohito at 2:00 PM on May 28, 2019
posted by sotonohito at 2:00 PM on May 28, 2019
Presumably more people want an apartment overlooking Central Park in NYC than there can be apartments overlooking Central Park in NYC.
Well, but why do people want an apartment overlooking Central Park? If it's really just for the aesthetics of the view, then a Culture-level civilization would simply build cities with enough green space that everyone could have a park view living space. But if the desire has some component of "to live near rich people" then I think an answer is that there simply wouldn't be rich people as we understand them.
posted by Pyry at 3:02 PM on May 28, 2019 [4 favorites]
Well, but why do people want an apartment overlooking Central Park? If it's really just for the aesthetics of the view, then a Culture-level civilization would simply build cities with enough green space that everyone could have a park view living space. But if the desire has some component of "to live near rich people" then I think an answer is that there simply wouldn't be rich people as we understand them.
posted by Pyry at 3:02 PM on May 28, 2019 [4 favorites]
how exactly did they "evolve past" greed? What does the Federation do with people who have the pathological hoarding disorder that in our time prompts them to become billionaires laying claim to more resources than they can possibly consume in several lifetimes? If they aren't post-human then they've got people like that, what do they do with them?
Well, in the real world, we had Lysenkoism. Perhaps the Federation evolves those people by sending them to work in places like Picard's wine orchard. They need to get the laborers from somewhere...
Then again, consider: the Federation in Classic Trek seemed to have a basically Capitalistic, if Social Democratic system. They had merchants and money and people colonizing harsh worlds for wealth.
And also in Dagger of the Mind they showed the new "Neural Neutralizer, which could implant memories and emotions. And then 80 years later the Federation has "evolved" past crude desires for things such as money and alcohol. Hmm.
posted by happyroach at 3:17 PM on May 28, 2019 [4 favorites]
Well, in the real world, we had Lysenkoism. Perhaps the Federation evolves those people by sending them to work in places like Picard's wine orchard. They need to get the laborers from somewhere...
Then again, consider: the Federation in Classic Trek seemed to have a basically Capitalistic, if Social Democratic system. They had merchants and money and people colonizing harsh worlds for wealth.
And also in Dagger of the Mind they showed the new "Neural Neutralizer, which could implant memories and emotions. And then 80 years later the Federation has "evolved" past crude desires for things such as money and alcohol. Hmm.
posted by happyroach at 3:17 PM on May 28, 2019 [4 favorites]
Metafilter: an unplanned emergent behavior.
posted by riverlife at 3:36 PM on May 28, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by riverlife at 3:36 PM on May 28, 2019 [4 favorites]
One bit of low hanging fruit if I were stuck as a writer or showrunner on a Trek series is do a take on those notoriously tough Starfleet entrance exams. At the time of TNG there was still a widespread belief in the meritocracy and they were an unironically good sorting mechanism. Now I think it'd be easy to see how they are potentially a way to maintain hierarchies in a world without money.
As much as I love Star Trek, I basically take all the series as time capsules of well-meaning white, middle-class liberalism from that period
100% true, and part of what makes picking at it interesting IMHO.
A lot of folks in this thread have a lot of good things to say, no doubt. But could the discussion of Federation/Borg/Dominion be any more white?
Well, I was thinking of bringing up G. K. Chesterton's complaints about how "cosmopolitanism" just meant making sure everyone was like you. So yes, we could definitely make this more white.
posted by mark k at 5:28 PM on May 28, 2019 [3 favorites]
As much as I love Star Trek, I basically take all the series as time capsules of well-meaning white, middle-class liberalism from that period
100% true, and part of what makes picking at it interesting IMHO.
A lot of folks in this thread have a lot of good things to say, no doubt. But could the discussion of Federation/Borg/Dominion be any more white?
Well, I was thinking of bringing up G. K. Chesterton's complaints about how "cosmopolitanism" just meant making sure everyone was like you. So yes, we could definitely make this more white.
posted by mark k at 5:28 PM on May 28, 2019 [3 favorites]
I have many problems with Trek but them not explaining exactly how the Federation works is not one of them. I think that Rodenberry lightbulb quote works equally well for social progress as for technological progress.
Which is to say "something something replicators" is as good (or as poor) an explanation as "something something subspace" or "use the deflector dish".
posted by iamnotangry at 6:36 PM on May 28, 2019 [3 favorites]
Which is to say "something something replicators" is as good (or as poor) an explanation as "something something subspace" or "use the deflector dish".
posted by iamnotangry at 6:36 PM on May 28, 2019 [3 favorites]
> As much as I love Star Trek, I basically take all the series as time capsules of well-meaning white, middle-class liberalism from that period
100% true, and part of what makes picking at it interesting IMHO.
The only part I'd take issue with is 'time capsule.' I feel like a lot of the attitudes in Star Trek are still pretty prevalent in the aforementioned white circles, both good and bad.
That, if we're going to pick a sin for Star Trek, would be my vote for its greatest literary sin: it portrays solutions as a one and done, fire and forget, sort of thing while in the real world solutions to deep social problems usually require constant correction over a period of decades.
While that is a huge problem, I'm not sure it's fair to pin it on Trek: long form storytelling on TV (outside of soaps, as rightly pointed out by Halloween Jack), was simply Not Done for a long time. Trek made the switch when the suits allowed it: DS9 and ENT both engaged in meaningful continuity, and DSC hews to modern notions of serialized TV. By weight, an awful lot of Trek actually doesn't just do problems of the week even though that's where its origins definitely are.
If I were picking sins for Star Trek, there are several pretty big ones in my head:
* Race essentialism.
Trek definitely posits that your race defines you in a huge way, and more than that, that it should define you that much. I had a very hard time sitting through 7 seasons of VOY over this, particularly over the dire way they portrayed B'Ellana's biracial heritage. (I am also biracial and have strong views about these things.)
* Sexism.
Star Trek is sexist as fuuuuuck. TOS actually codified the Theiss Titillation Theory (warning: TVTropes, do not click). As I mentioned in my initial comment, even DS9 was almost unwatchable in spots due to this - seeing Kira get shoehorned into one bad romance after another was bad, but finding out that she only escaped romantic involvement with Dukat due to Nana Visitor's behind the scenes work was... bad.
I feel like it's working really hard to move past this in the DSC era, (there is a wonderful scene where mansplaining pointedly gets a dude what he deserves), but as a famous song once said, it's been a long road, gettin' from there to here.
* Love of the status quo.
Star Trek is all about things moving at a 'natural' pace. People who take shortcuts are invariably bad guys: genetic engineering, cybernetic human augmentation, tech transfer from superior cultures? These are all villain tools in Trek. Everybody is supposed to advance at a rate decreed by destiny and that's that. This is the basic underpinning of the Prime Directive: it's not about colonialism or cultural hegemony, (reasonable things to fear), it's about not letting anybody skip in line toward the future.
This is where the whole 'worst sin' thing intersects the idea of 'white people time capsule,' because in addition to being Trek's sin, it's the sin of moderate whites in King's Letter from a Birmingham jail. Starfleet is all about telling people that it's not their turn to know things, to have things, to reach the stars. Even DSC is like that, in ways that make me very uncomfortable.
That said, I still love Star Trek for what it tries to be. It wants to be good in a way that so much pop culture just doesn't even care about, and so I forgive an awful lot of this simply because I think the first step to a better future is realizing that we need to imagine one is possible. So even when I complain, it's not meant to be 'Star Trek sucks,' it's more, 'the things we love are not perfect, and understanding that helps us to be better.'
(Like, I don't believe Stargate is deliberately about anything more deep than 'Richard Dean Anderson is fun.' B5 arguably kinda is, but not in the same way Trek is.)
posted by mordax at 6:37 PM on May 28, 2019 [12 favorites]
100% true, and part of what makes picking at it interesting IMHO.
The only part I'd take issue with is 'time capsule.' I feel like a lot of the attitudes in Star Trek are still pretty prevalent in the aforementioned white circles, both good and bad.
That, if we're going to pick a sin for Star Trek, would be my vote for its greatest literary sin: it portrays solutions as a one and done, fire and forget, sort of thing while in the real world solutions to deep social problems usually require constant correction over a period of decades.
While that is a huge problem, I'm not sure it's fair to pin it on Trek: long form storytelling on TV (outside of soaps, as rightly pointed out by Halloween Jack), was simply Not Done for a long time. Trek made the switch when the suits allowed it: DS9 and ENT both engaged in meaningful continuity, and DSC hews to modern notions of serialized TV. By weight, an awful lot of Trek actually doesn't just do problems of the week even though that's where its origins definitely are.
If I were picking sins for Star Trek, there are several pretty big ones in my head:
* Race essentialism.
Trek definitely posits that your race defines you in a huge way, and more than that, that it should define you that much. I had a very hard time sitting through 7 seasons of VOY over this, particularly over the dire way they portrayed B'Ellana's biracial heritage. (I am also biracial and have strong views about these things.)
* Sexism.
Star Trek is sexist as fuuuuuck. TOS actually codified the Theiss Titillation Theory (warning: TVTropes, do not click). As I mentioned in my initial comment, even DS9 was almost unwatchable in spots due to this - seeing Kira get shoehorned into one bad romance after another was bad, but finding out that she only escaped romantic involvement with Dukat due to Nana Visitor's behind the scenes work was... bad.
I feel like it's working really hard to move past this in the DSC era, (there is a wonderful scene where mansplaining pointedly gets a dude what he deserves), but as a famous song once said, it's been a long road, gettin' from there to here.
* Love of the status quo.
Star Trek is all about things moving at a 'natural' pace. People who take shortcuts are invariably bad guys: genetic engineering, cybernetic human augmentation, tech transfer from superior cultures? These are all villain tools in Trek. Everybody is supposed to advance at a rate decreed by destiny and that's that. This is the basic underpinning of the Prime Directive: it's not about colonialism or cultural hegemony, (reasonable things to fear), it's about not letting anybody skip in line toward the future.
This is where the whole 'worst sin' thing intersects the idea of 'white people time capsule,' because in addition to being Trek's sin, it's the sin of moderate whites in King's Letter from a Birmingham jail. Starfleet is all about telling people that it's not their turn to know things, to have things, to reach the stars. Even DSC is like that, in ways that make me very uncomfortable.
That said, I still love Star Trek for what it tries to be. It wants to be good in a way that so much pop culture just doesn't even care about, and so I forgive an awful lot of this simply because I think the first step to a better future is realizing that we need to imagine one is possible. So even when I complain, it's not meant to be 'Star Trek sucks,' it's more, 'the things we love are not perfect, and understanding that helps us to be better.'
(Like, I don't believe Stargate is deliberately about anything more deep than 'Richard Dean Anderson is fun.' B5 arguably kinda is, but not in the same way Trek is.)
posted by mordax at 6:37 PM on May 28, 2019 [12 favorites]
Have the Borg conquered cellular senescence of their biological parts, ie., does biological hardware eventually age and fail? If so, that's a huge bottleneck for Borg, the constant need to assimilate new organic material. Less dire if death can only arise from accident or violence.
I swear I've seen borged babies, but it's probably from a recent conquest rather than two Borg borging each other and producing a child.
re: Real Estate in a post-scarcity society; it's holodecks all the way down. Everyone on Earth are in pods. To account for physically overloading a particular holodeck created location, it's basically multiplayer online game servers.
Sometimes you have to change servers to interact with a particular person, and "local news" would also include the server name as well as the location.
Sure, you can have whatever you want on Earth, or you can actually go and do "real" stuff (service, space construction, exploration) - and if there was a shortage of a particular type of service, just use holodeck people.
As for the orbital shots of Earth, external sensors are programmed to display a pristine-looking Earth. All viewports, be it ship or spacesuit helmet, are external cameras feeding internal screens.
posted by porpoise at 7:45 PM on May 28, 2019 [1 favorite]
I swear I've seen borged babies, but it's probably from a recent conquest rather than two Borg borging each other and producing a child.
re: Real Estate in a post-scarcity society; it's holodecks all the way down. Everyone on Earth are in pods. To account for physically overloading a particular holodeck created location, it's basically multiplayer online game servers.
Sometimes you have to change servers to interact with a particular person, and "local news" would also include the server name as well as the location.
Sure, you can have whatever you want on Earth, or you can actually go and do "real" stuff (service, space construction, exploration) - and if there was a shortage of a particular type of service, just use holodeck people.
As for the orbital shots of Earth, external sensors are programmed to display a pristine-looking Earth. All viewports, be it ship or spacesuit helmet, are external cameras feeding internal screens.
posted by porpoise at 7:45 PM on May 28, 2019 [1 favorite]
I agree with the top Max Temkin essay: DS9 is a swell work of art, if you like a somewhat more realpolitik flavour of STNG, like I do.
The interesting thing is the dynamic tension in the rivalry between DS9 and Babylon 5. Their writers were competing to create more serious plots, and I think that some interesting & profound stories about spirituality, empathy, loyalty, fascism, & other things, came out of that tension.
posted by ovvl at 7:50 PM on May 28, 2019 [1 favorite]
The interesting thing is the dynamic tension in the rivalry between DS9 and Babylon 5. Their writers were competing to create more serious plots, and I think that some interesting & profound stories about spirituality, empathy, loyalty, fascism, & other things, came out of that tension.
posted by ovvl at 7:50 PM on May 28, 2019 [1 favorite]
That said, I still love Star Trek for what it tries to be. It wants to be good in a way that so much pop culture just doesn't even care about, and so I forgive an awful lot of this simply because I think the first step to a better future is realizing that we need to imagine one is possible.
There is this in spades. The major thing for Star Trek is at least it posits that the future can be better than today, that war is bad, and consensus and democracy is good. Which is massively out of step with the classic SF of Anderson and Asimov, where the best to be hoped for is an eternal cycle of Roman Empires in Space rising and falling.
Compare the future of Trek to The Expanse that has an overcrowded dystopic Earth and the best efforts of the protagonists lead to gigadeaths. Or Westworld, where our sympathetic heroine espouses genocide and we're supposed to respond "Hey, she has a point." Or Altered Carbon where- oh fuck, just kill yourself if you find yourself in that world. Or Black Mirror, where the basic argument is "hope you die before the future gets here." Seriously, Trek is one of very few SF futures where one could argue "hey, maybe I'd rather live in that than the present."
I'm kinda feeling this keenly because I'm taking a look at the Traveller rpg and I'm feeling like it's assumptions are SO 1970s. Democracy is an aberration, the future only holds techno-feudalism, war and empires are inevitable. And the alternatives? Cyberpunk or all-out space fascism. So for all its faults, Trek actually is a ray of hope.
posted by happyroach at 8:19 PM on May 28, 2019 [7 favorites]
There is this in spades. The major thing for Star Trek is at least it posits that the future can be better than today, that war is bad, and consensus and democracy is good. Which is massively out of step with the classic SF of Anderson and Asimov, where the best to be hoped for is an eternal cycle of Roman Empires in Space rising and falling.
Compare the future of Trek to The Expanse that has an overcrowded dystopic Earth and the best efforts of the protagonists lead to gigadeaths. Or Westworld, where our sympathetic heroine espouses genocide and we're supposed to respond "Hey, she has a point." Or Altered Carbon where- oh fuck, just kill yourself if you find yourself in that world. Or Black Mirror, where the basic argument is "hope you die before the future gets here." Seriously, Trek is one of very few SF futures where one could argue "hey, maybe I'd rather live in that than the present."
I'm kinda feeling this keenly because I'm taking a look at the Traveller rpg and I'm feeling like it's assumptions are SO 1970s. Democracy is an aberration, the future only holds techno-feudalism, war and empires are inevitable. And the alternatives? Cyberpunk or all-out space fascism. So for all its faults, Trek actually is a ray of hope.
posted by happyroach at 8:19 PM on May 28, 2019 [7 favorites]
more democratic space socialisms dealing with the problems of being actually just
posted by The Whelk at 8:48 PM on May 28, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 8:48 PM on May 28, 2019 [4 favorites]
I swear I've seen borged babies, but it's probably from a recent conquest rather than two Borg borging each other and producing a child.
Oh, yes! In Q Who, their first appearance, the crew discover a "Borg nursery" while exploring a Borg cube. In fact, the notion of "Borg assimilation" doesn't come into the picture until their next encounter.
posted by duffell at 3:31 AM on May 29, 2019 [6 favorites]
Oh, yes! In Q Who, their first appearance, the crew discover a "Borg nursery" while exploring a Borg cube. In fact, the notion of "Borg assimilation" doesn't come into the picture until their next encounter.
posted by duffell at 3:31 AM on May 29, 2019 [6 favorites]
Or Black Mirror, where the basic argument is "hope you die before the future gets here."Black Mirror isn't about the future; it's just a hammer-over-the-head depiction of the world as it already is. Also, it's easier to dramatize a bunch of individuals you can put in front of a camera restricting someone's rights and privileges via meowmeowbeanz (or stars or whatever they used in that "Nosedive" episode) than it is Google tracking and analyzing the race, gender, income, and credit score of transit users vial large-scale data trawling in order to tune those services via an algorithm that even they don't fully understand, with likely no real human oversight.
It wants to be good in a way that so much pop culture just doesn't even care about, and so I forgive an awful lot of this simply because I think the first step to a better future is realizing that we need to imagine one is possible.I think a lot of Star Trek tries to be nice instead of good (probably one of the reasons why it's so bad at depicting both humour and sex, actually), and those are different things. Sandra Newman had something not long ago in the Guardian about literary utopias, and I wrote an extended rebuttal looking at both some contemporary utopian novels and the two utopian political/economic structures most of us in the developed world currently live under. In the interest of avoiding self-linking, I'm just going to quote the core of my argument:
[...] utopias are not just declarations of what their architects think a better world looks like, they are declarations of who they are willing to put through hell to make them happen, who they think matters, and who they think does not. There is always someone they think does not. Always.And that's ultimately why it's so easy and even so entertaining to pick apart Star Trek (even though I still mostly enjoy it), and why the shift that happens with DS9's storytelling is so crucial and important. Nice people don't look at that underbelly; they'd rather pretend it isn't there. Good people want to look at it as closely as they can, because they want to understand it and then do something about it. DS9 is, in a sense, about getting a nice society to behave like a good one.
posted by Fish Sauce at 6:23 AM on May 29, 2019 [11 favorites]
The more I think about it, the more I find the thing I really like about DS9 is that it's the only Star Trek that does an interesting job of world-building. The series about exploring never really do it all that well because even if they do have an interesting concept for a planet, it's gone by the next week, probably never to be mentioned or thought of again. Because DS9 sticks around in the same place and develops the same cultures over the course of the whole series, you get a lot more depth. There is so much more variety in just the Ferengi of DS9 than in any other series' aliens, other than maybe the Klingons, and even the Klingons almost all break down into Worf, Rowdy Brawler Archetype, and Serious Warrior Archetype. Even beyond developing half a dozen alien cultures into somewhat dynamic societies with multiple viewpoints and internal politics, the work they do with the Federation is also some fairly interesting world-building by making characters both inside and outside it grapple with what the Federation means to people and how living in or near it affects their lives on a daily basis. That's something that most of the rest of the universe palpably does not care about at all, and, when it's done well, it's fascinating to see it dealt with in the show.
posted by Copronymus at 8:25 AM on May 29, 2019 [10 favorites]
posted by Copronymus at 8:25 AM on May 29, 2019 [10 favorites]
K'Ehleyr was one of the most interesting Klingons that we ever got to see (and paved the way for walking tragic mulatto trope the sadly one-dimensional B'Elanna). It's a shame we only got her for a couple of episodes.
posted by duffell at 6:23 AM on May 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by duffell at 6:23 AM on May 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
I think a lot of Star Trek tries to be nice instead of good (probably one of the reasons why it's so bad at depicting both humour and sex, actually), and those are different things.
This is a fair point of discussion, and the article is good.
I would agree that Trek swings around on this point a lot.
TOS involves a lot of 'trying to do good.' When Kirk encounters injustice, he mostly stomps on it. When he encounters a stifling utopia, he knocks it down even though he knows it will bring suffering, because his convictions lead him to believe people are better off being able to choose. He's not a nice guy, but he is a guy with principles that he will work to follow.
This is what I want out of Trek, and it's also what we see in DS9: DS9 is about Starfleet trying to get Bajor real help after an attempted genocide, and involves a lot of work between the Federation and a non-member state, even down to Sisko torpedoing their initial membership bid because he knows it would make the Dominion attack them first. DS9 is about people doing good, which is what makes In The Pale Moonlight so compelling: a lot of people die over what Sisko did. The murders were on Garak, but the military casualties? His.
ENT features a fair bit of Archer trying to help people, but doing a really shitty job of it because ENT is a dumb show for a large portion of the run. I think this maybe undercuts the idea that their emphasis on 'nice' is what hampers their writing about sex and humor though - I think that's more about their unwillingness to question their own assumptions.
You're right about TNG and VOY only being 'nice,' too, if I think about it: nobody there is really there to help anybody. They will. They do. But it's not the mandate. TNG featured plot after plot where preventing the extinction of a species was against the Federation's rules, (Pen Pals being particularly galling), but they were going to make an exception. VOY featured... a whole lot of VOY.
I guess the tl;dr is 'I agree with what you said, but disagree about the implications for the quality of their jokes.'
the sadly one-dimensional B'Elanna
B'Ellana fared better than a lot of characters on VOY, despite the intensely racist atmosphere in which she existed. She received some strong techno-thriller outings where she was a legitimately thoughtful and three-dimensional character, (Prototype and Dreadnought are both good spotlights for her). She was saddled with Tom Paris, but even that was reasonably progressive for the time: Blood Fever has her fighting for her own honor instead of letting Tom and Vorik battle over her.
I'd say that from a race perspective, she was treated with indignity exceeding Worf's, (everyone talks down to her), but overall, I feel like she was better developed than Jadzia Dax. (If I were ranking 'which female Trek characters got the best development,' my list runs basically Kira, Seven, B'Ellana, Dax and Other, with the caveat that I won't be thinking as hard about DSC until it's over.)
posted by mordax at 2:24 PM on May 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
This is a fair point of discussion, and the article is good.
I would agree that Trek swings around on this point a lot.
TOS involves a lot of 'trying to do good.' When Kirk encounters injustice, he mostly stomps on it. When he encounters a stifling utopia, he knocks it down even though he knows it will bring suffering, because his convictions lead him to believe people are better off being able to choose. He's not a nice guy, but he is a guy with principles that he will work to follow.
This is what I want out of Trek, and it's also what we see in DS9: DS9 is about Starfleet trying to get Bajor real help after an attempted genocide, and involves a lot of work between the Federation and a non-member state, even down to Sisko torpedoing their initial membership bid because he knows it would make the Dominion attack them first. DS9 is about people doing good, which is what makes In The Pale Moonlight so compelling: a lot of people die over what Sisko did. The murders were on Garak, but the military casualties? His.
ENT features a fair bit of Archer trying to help people, but doing a really shitty job of it because ENT is a dumb show for a large portion of the run. I think this maybe undercuts the idea that their emphasis on 'nice' is what hampers their writing about sex and humor though - I think that's more about their unwillingness to question their own assumptions.
You're right about TNG and VOY only being 'nice,' too, if I think about it: nobody there is really there to help anybody. They will. They do. But it's not the mandate. TNG featured plot after plot where preventing the extinction of a species was against the Federation's rules, (Pen Pals being particularly galling), but they were going to make an exception. VOY featured... a whole lot of VOY.
I guess the tl;dr is 'I agree with what you said, but disagree about the implications for the quality of their jokes.'
the sadly one-dimensional B'Elanna
B'Ellana fared better than a lot of characters on VOY, despite the intensely racist atmosphere in which she existed. She received some strong techno-thriller outings where she was a legitimately thoughtful and three-dimensional character, (Prototype and Dreadnought are both good spotlights for her). She was saddled with Tom Paris, but even that was reasonably progressive for the time: Blood Fever has her fighting for her own honor instead of letting Tom and Vorik battle over her.
I'd say that from a race perspective, she was treated with indignity exceeding Worf's, (everyone talks down to her), but overall, I feel like she was better developed than Jadzia Dax. (If I were ranking 'which female Trek characters got the best development,' my list runs basically Kira, Seven, B'Ellana, Dax and Other, with the caveat that I won't be thinking as hard about DSC until it's over.)
posted by mordax at 2:24 PM on May 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
> Like, I don't believe Stargate is deliberately about anything more deep than 'Richard Dean Anderson is fun.'
It's surprising how explicitly atheist it is, for an American show.
posted by Leon at 1:09 AM on June 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
It's surprising how explicitly atheist it is, for an American show.
posted by Leon at 1:09 AM on June 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
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Cheaply made, inconsistent characters, overacting, dumb-dumb scripts. I mean... I've binged watched it twice in the past decade sure but... it's really not very good.
Long form serialized sci-fi storytelling was done before DS9 (Babylon 5) and was done 100x better (Stargate:SG1). There, I said it.
posted by Cosine at 11:15 AM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]