Make sure you get the right background music.
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Mulgrew is a very talented actress, but from season 4 on (more or less), the writers were spewing out a serious mess. There’s never an attribution to the quote, so I get the sense the rumors are just a fan theory to explain why the character she portrayed seemed like they were in a steady decline into madness, but it’s a perfect way to explain things.
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Ha! I actually like that he calls the prime directive fascist crap… Especially since it was always optional anyway.
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I take your point that DS9 (and more or less contemporaneously and to a lesser extent, Voyager) were the first Trek to acknowledge the criticism and work it into stories, but I would argue that the criticism was probably being made since TOS.
I don’t remember many serious discussions about Star Trek when I was an undergrad in the mid-80s steeped in radical this and Marxist that, but it’s easy to imagine that many episodes would have been immediately branded as imperialist propaganda framed as allegories for righteous, freedom-loving Americans smashing the yoke of totalitarian oppression. That may be why we didn’t talk about it much. Most of us loved it, everybody knew it was imperialist propaganda, so few people wanted to go there. What if we had to stop watching it, on principle?
That said, I do remember one conversation where someone argued that every episode was about freeing the Enterprise. Free Enterprise. And then somebody lit another joint and we moved on.
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[QUOTE]And I like the one with Kate Vernon and I called “In the Flesh” and she was Species 90210 or whatever the name was.[/QUOTE]
Oooh, now I wish there had been a Species 90210.
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Academia has much more working out ideas through popular culture now. Hell, I go to entire conferences (with hours and hours of panels) devoted to pop and popular (in the Gramscian meaning) culture in all of it’s forms. People have always made meaning out of stories - those that existed prior to their engagement with them and those they made themselves.
I’d say that Star Trek is very much a product of its time - and TOS especially is a great example of American cold war modernization theory. But the later parts of TNG, DS9, and Voyager all have juicer and less black and white stories to tell, which I really appreciate.
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I sense a spin off/mash up series coming on.
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It occurs to me the post you were replying to was a little disjointed and might not have made a lot of sense. I had edited something out before posting, essentially a claim that those kinds of criticisms were being made long before Trek addressed them overtly (and before TNG even saw the light of day), but they weren’t often heard in the mainstream largely because it was still the Cold War.
In any case, didn’t mean to imply I was an expert then or now; I was in a field at best tangentially related to these kinds of questions.
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I found it perfectly… er jointed… I think with pop culture, we’re all as much as an expert as we want to be. I study popular culture and try to say smart things about it, but I don’t think I’m any sort of expert either. I just like trying to get as much out of it as I can and get to some good discussions. I think what you’ve been saying is rather smart and I was enjoying reading your thoughts on Star Trek! Thanks for sharing them!
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They’d run into Doctor Who too often.
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Not enough people watch Lexx.
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I have to confess that, when I first saw Lexx, I thought it was crap. But my girlfriend of the time liked it and insisted we stick with it, and after a couple of episodes (probably when Tim Curry showed up…), I got it.
You just have to remember that it’s intended as a surreal comedy. It explores a lot of genuine SF tropes, but it affectionately takes the piss out of 'em as it does.
Compare and contrast the infamous T’Pol “decontamination shower” from Enterprise with the Zev/Stanley shower scene in S1/E2 of Lexx. Despite featuring actual nudity and overt sexual content, the Lexx scene is funny as all hell (in an over-the-top pisstake manner) and arguably feminist. The Enterprise scene, OTOH, is nothing but exploitative crap.
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YOU GUYS! The punk from Star Trek 4:
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A surprising number of SF fans seem to have a tough time with this kind of absurdism in a genre that tends towards taking itself very seriously. My family and I are enjoying Braindead, a SF political sendup with alien bugs eating peoples brains and turning them into ardent party fundamentalists. The best part is Jonathan Coulton’s musical recaps.
On of my standard speeches is that SF is NOT a genre, contrary to popular belief. It’s a genre modifier. You can have SF adventure, romance, horror, comedy, mystery, procedural, whatever. Sadly, Hollywood usually starts and ends with “adventure”.
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I was listening to Mission Log, and in their summary of the episode they said that after Robin Williams wasn’t available, they seriously considered casting Tom Baker as the time-travelling thief.
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More Doctor Who/Star Trek silliness:
I’m sure there’s more.
EDIT: Someone help me out; I could have sworn I heard someone utter the full “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” in Star Trek. Geordi’s always reversing the polarity.
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O! That’s an interesting way to think about it. It’s a context?
