I like the original series (very funny and human, pre PC). I used to watch Next Generation often. The Janeway Voyager series was terrible, although not as bad as Deep Space Nine.
In my passing over to the Dark Side in the last decade or so, I have paid more attention to the political and moral messages in the series and, no surprise, most of them strike me as pompously silly or worse. And so much of their moral highmindedness is based on a technologized and homogenized Earth far beyond possibility, one that makes scarcity and contingency insignificant. A Rawlsian paradise.
An episode of Next Generation tonight. Two alien species who hate each other are on board the ship to have their differences mediated. The crew can't tell what the basis of their differences are. Picard and the always annoying Number One exchange thoughts about it. Picard says, with some amazement, that in the past, on earth, people used to fight over things like God-concept and even...dramatic pause...over economic systems. Shocking.
An example of how immoral these moralizing shows can be. The battle between the West and Communism was not just about economics --although that is not at all trivial to the issue. May I say Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, etc? One hundred million deaths in seventy years. The "economic system" came with an inherently vile political system. But Jean Luc is too evolved to find that of interest.
If people take their moral clues from Star Trek, cluelessness follows.
____________________
5 comments:
Star Trek is a great show and its better now then its ever been. From the very beginnig it shows a way of being that we needed to see--and not just the technology but the people love each other
Anonymous misses my point, rather closely instantiating my final sentence.
A "way of being" which is divorced from reality has little use. If you want to see "people love each other", try Little House on the Prairie or The Waltons. At least there you had humans struggling on planet earth with scarcity and contingency as their context.
Looking to Star Trek, especially Next Generation, for moral modeling is like taking a richly-endowed monastery as a pattern of imitation. You remove most of the real pressures people have to face and give yourself a pattern of life more suited to angels than actual men and women. You might wish you lived in a world like that, but nobody does. Dreams are not very useful vectors for ethical living.
You're taking the show way too seriously. Star Trek gives people hope that the shitty world they live in can get better but in reality because of people like you and others who don't really care-we won't. Now enough hiding behind the internet. I'm going to go back to real life and actually try to make the world a better place all because I was inspired by Star Trek at an earlier age.
I think the old show was the best. Its episodes were all filmed before I was born, but I don't care.
Although it was technically well done, with great models, nice effects, etc, I thought The Next Generation was a bit moralistic. And it sort of talked down to the audience, kind of like some of the actors and writers wanted to show the public how smart (or smarter) they were...
I think DS-9 and Voyager wre pretty okay. It's just that instead of creating new stuff, the writers were pretty much recycling ideas from the previous series. Well, most of the time.
I thought Entreprise was awful! Totally disconnected with what real fans of Star Trek (or Trekkers, as some like to call themselves) looked for in their favorite show.
Those scenes, in which Archer was having fantasies about T' Paul... Not convincing. And not even sexy... It was like the writers were trying to pander to 12-year old nerds, or something.
Ok, so I really love the Star trek phenomenon, as a whole, but I think Babylon 5 had a more "realistic" way, perhaps, of showing us a possible future for mankind...
Lots of advances will have been made, but there will still be conflict among humans. Because you'll always have people who don't want to play by the rules and people who try to get more than their fair share.
Star Trek was about characters who lacked id, as psychoanalysts might say.
totally agree with u, DS9 were the worst star trek series, and Voyager series very pretty bad. But Enterprise series rulz. Peace out ^^
Post a Comment