Pluto has a 24/7 Star Trek channel, they cycle through each series in full. They’ll show every episode of the original series and then move on to Next Generation and keep going through all the Star Trek series until they cycle back and start over.
I usually only watch the original.
This weekend they tossed in the entire Center Seat, 55 Years Of Star Trek.
As Spok would say, fascinating.
The episode about making Wrath Of Kahn was particularly interesting.
If you haven’t seen it, there are 11 episodes, it’s really good stuff.
It’s on several streaming platforms including Prime for free. It’s also on demand on Pluto.
There’s a great scene in Past Tense of Dax at an upper crust party full of people talking about the failing Neo-Marxist governments of Europe and while I’m sure the writers meant it to be people who know what they’re talking about, it really feels like a room full of people who listen to Fox News and OAN in the modern idiom.
There are so many ways that that episode feels prophetic today, everything from the homelessness crisis, to the tech dude-bro having far too much control thanks to his relationship with local/state/federal goverments (although the guy in the show was certainly not as lawful evil as our tech-dude-bros today), to them turning off the internet when the people in the Sanctuary district start broadcasting to the public, the fact that the Black and Brown guy ended up in the district, while the pretty white woman does not… compared to lots of other films set in the 20-teens or 2020s, it just sort of nailed where we actually are… Crazy, isn’t it?
Absolutely, I rewatched it a couple of years ago and like a month or two after some politician suggested walling off run down parts of a US city and dumping all the homeless people in there… My mind literally boggled.
One thing I always really appreciate about DS9 is that it is a good reminder that having a good future rests on people making choices, and that progress is not inevitable. It felt like a needed corrective to the Roddenberry optimism, which is far too easy to just assume will happen, because “progress”…
This episode came out long before the Good Friday agreement when there was no clear end to The Troubles. It had been ongoing for decades and no end in sight, so 2024 was not inconceivable. I dont think the writers had enough imagination to predict Brexit 25 years before it happened.
You could argue that the Good Friday Agreement and the framework for Northern Ireland joining the Republic was the result of the various terrorist campaigns of the IRA, UDA, LVF, UVF et al, and when unification happens it’ll be because of that framework. It’s absolutely stretching Data’s definition of using terrorism to obtain political goals to, if not well beyond the limits though.
