Comment Stream

Re: VOY S1: Prime Factors

At the time, it was easy to identify Gath with the then-widely known term "Eurotrash" -- an American understanding of a continental leisure class.

Re: DS9 S7: Afterimage

It's worth noting that DS9 never had any woman staff writers and relatively few episodes even cowritten by women (not a single one in the last season: https://www.trekradio.net/star-treks-women-writers/).

Re: TNG S3: Who Watches the Watchers

Even in keeping with the Prime Directive, mightn't "stay hands off and hope for the best" be a better solution than "reveal selves to Bronze Age aliens"? The fact that Liko's new Picard-based religion could catch on is no guarantee that it will. It might just die with him, the way so many small cults do.

Re: SNW S2: Among the Lotus Eaters

Is this hair thing still going on? Well, I guess they did once call it Hair Trek...

Re: DS9 S4: Paradise Lost

So you honestly think that this eight-grade namecalling counts as some kind of powerful rhetorical stance? I suppose that says something.

Re: DS9 S4: Paradise Lost

So far, Michael has struck me as someone doing some kind of performance piece funny only to him, noticed only by him. I'm happy to keep it that way.

Re: TOS S3: The Mark of Gideon

It definitely makes me uneasy when people start trading in eliminationist logic.

Re: DS9 S3: Family Business

Here's an article speaking to this very phenomenon in 2000: https://www.salon.com/2000/02/14/interracial_movies/

In-narrative, I see no reason to regard it as much more than Sisko having a "type."

Re: DS9 S7: Take Me Out to the Holosuite

Baseball is widely played in Latin America and parts of Asia, just for the record. (It bores me too but it’s not uniquely American)

Re: PIC S1: Remembrance

"I know that there are fans who refuse to accept ST:Enterprise or even DS9 as part of the Trekverse "history", and that - too - is a legitimate choice."

I'm hung up on two words here: "accept" and "legitimate." As I've repeatedly said, people's choices of consumption are their own. So it's "legitimate" not to watch or like those shows, just as it's legitimate not to watch or like Star Trek period. I'm just not really sure where this discussion interfaces with canonicity which, as I keep emphasizing, is the terrain of the people who own the thing. Feel like rejecting the authority of CBS or whomever else to declare "canon" -- go to it. If you further the religious metaphor, that would be called heresy. "Heretic" does have a nice ring to it.

I will say that declaring (for instance) "I accept TNG but not DS9 as canon" -- which in the weird terrain of accepting that some of these fictional event are more fictional than others -- feels a bit Quixotic, sort of like Grampa Simpson brandishing his US flag with 49 stars: "I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missourah." The joke of course being that Missouri exists both geographically and as a recognized political entity whether or not he "recognizes" it. It's rather the same with whatever bits of Star Trek you choose not to "recognize," and it has naught to do with "canonicity."

That said, I don't disagree too strongly with this statement: "But this doe not mean that we should feel forced to accept everything automatically. I'm sorry, but there comes a point where common sense should trump any and all "canon" considerations." Just as, even if one accepts that the Catholic Bible is the true word of God, that doesn't necessarily preclude discussing and debating and examining it.

Re: PIC S1: Remembrance

The value-based version of canon (also in the broader sense of "literary canon") always seemed to me a bit different. After all, we treat a Star Trek episode like "Spock's Brain" or "Shades of Gray" as canon... any Star Trek product that bears the stamp of "canonicity" no matter how artistically worthless, while -- with select exceptions -- no novel (say, The Final Reflection) or fan film (World Enough and Time) gets to be canon, no matter how good or even influential they prove to be. In other words, I don't think canonical status should be thought of as some sort of blue ribbon. It's a descriptive term for establishing its status relative to officialdom.

Re: PIC S1: Remembrance

Quite the opposite: regardless of their religious origin, these terms are founded in the vagaries of corporate ownership. Reject what you like, but the language of "canon" does not apply, and is in danger of becoming meaningless the moment you make it mean "thing I like." To quote myself, "We do not have to accept their authority, but as soon as we reject it, we're not talking about canon any more."

To further this metaphor, if creator/owner says "X is canon," if your reaction is "I don't like X," you have the ability to not watch X or not watch the entire show if you feel like it. But creator/owner can produce more operating under the premise of "X is canon" and your decisions don't affect that directly.

Re: PIC S1: Remembrance

To build on Yanks point, I think that the term "canon" is used so loosely these days as to lose descriptive usefulness. Canon means officialdom; it's ultimately an institutional term. It means those things legitimized by the Word of God, and this is slightly more than a pure metaphor, since the very term references matters of the sacred. The Catholic Church claims among its powers the ability to degree which books of the Bible are canon, are of divine origins and which are not (Apocrypha, Deutercanon, Pseudepigrapha, etc.). Now obviously every other denomination claims these powers too and sometimes have slightly different versions of the Bible, and any individual reader of the Bible has the ability to declare "I think this part is real and this part isn't"... but in so doing, they are hypothetically going against canon. A book like "Bel and the Dragon" obviously does exist — you can go and read it. The question isn't whether or not it exists, but whether or not it contains that mysterious touch of God that gives it the status of canon. The parts where Star Trek canon is nebulous or unclear are roughly equivalent to those moments when the Bible contradicts itself; points for discussion and debate, certainly, but even engaging in this debate theoretically accepts that there is such a thing as canon and that it's worth talking about. Just as the Catholic Church claims for itself the powers to say "this is real and this is not," the people running Star Trek (or whatever eklse) do the same. We do not have to accept their authority, but as soon as we reject it, we're not talking about canon any more. Fans have a place in this canonization process (I gather that a fan poll helped (re-) canonize TAS), but it's not an all-determining one, it's one of influence and the ability to assert pressure through ones choices of consumption, etc. Saying "I don't like this" is not the same thing as saying "this is not canonical"; saying "I don't want to think about this" is not the same thing as saying "this is not canonical."

Re: VOY S7: Repression

Which half? The suspense is killing me.

Re: TNG S4: Suddenly Human

It’s fascinating that an episode others have treated as a trans analogy (If not by design) here becomes something about that by you shouldn’t stay in a culture that’s insufficiently macho. Ink blot-like.

Re: BSG S4: Daybreak, Part 1

I’m guessing Jammer does not read these comments so defaming him first person over decade old reviews is fruitless.

Re: DS9 S4: Sons of Mogh

Never understood why they didn't just euthanize Kurn outside of Bajoran or Starfleet jurisdiction.

Re: DS9 S4: The Visitor

If there's a likeness with "The Inner Light," it's that they're both decidedly off-format episodes that focus almost exclusively around a single member of the ensemble. They're also both decidedly melodramatic pieces where soaring emotion is prioritized (and logic consequently takes a back seat). The level of taste people have for such episodes is, I suspect, directly related to their tolerance for melodrama.

Re: Star Trek: Generations

Episodes like "The Paradise Syndrome" supply some precedent to the idea that Kirk's ultimate fantasy might be retiring to a quiet, agrarian life. It's not quite out of nowhere.

Re: DS9 S2: The Wire

Ignore him. He's not operating in good faith. Asking for figures of deaths "directly" from an ideology is bullshit, since it will forever allow you the out that anything you want to ignore is "indirect." It's sophistry, plain and simple.

Re: DS9 S7: Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang

It would appear that the topic here is revisionist history -- less "do these things happen today," but "how do we work unpleasant facets of the past into our cultural representations of the past." I would agree that this is not to most graceful or subtle way to handle it, nor the one most consistent with Star Trek's style of social commentary through science fiction. But it is a topic worth exploring, and there's no particular reason that Sisko shouldn't retain a sense of identity as an African American (any more than O'Brien still sees himself as an Irishman, or Scotty as a Scotsman) and know the history of what that entails.

Re: DS9 S6: Valiant

One gets the impression that Starfleet, which has been described as a "combined service," has somehow absorbed a lot of the bureaucracy of the Federation. Which is certainly odd. People focus on how militarized the Federation seems to be, but I'd also like to draw attention to the bureaucratic side of things. It seems like a triumph of the liberal-democratic ideal that efficiency, management, planning and bureaucracy will build a better, more equitable society (a la Max Weber).

Re: VOY S3: Distant Origin

I've heard this suggestion that the Preservers (from "The Paradise Syndrome") were responsible for moving the Voth. Of course, that's pretty far fetched because it would have required them to visit Earth both in the Cretaceous and a few centuries ago.

Re: TNG S3: Menage a Troi

I actually find the "Wesley saves the day" thing a tad bit more earned this time than most. He just happens to be the one who notices the pattern -- not too bad. The whole "giving up his chance to be at Starfleet to save the day" part is contrived as all hell, though. The scene between him and Picard is good, though.

Re: DS9 S6: Valiant

In "Errand of Mercy":
KOR: Hardly. They were quite important to us, but they can be replaced. You of the Federation, you are much like us.
KIRK: We're nothing like you. We're a democratic body.

Weirdly enough, Kor again, in "Once More Unto the Breach":
KOR: Worf, you've been living among this democratic rabble for too long.

Now, what kind of democracy is not really clean, but it seems to be some sort of representative democracy (Jaresh-Inyo represented his planet before becoming UFP President). We are later told that Jaresh-Inyo is not longer president, but not if he resigned, died or was voted out.