Now that I think of it, the lowest point for Voyager, in my opinion, was an episode in which Tom Paris becomes a detective in a noir murder mystery on a planet they were visiting. As usual, everyone on the planet was white and spoke English with a southern California accent. But, it was worse than that. There was nothing even slightly alien about the world they were visiting, not a single indication that the culture had any unfamiliar qualities. Aside from Paris beaming up to the Enterprise to get help from the medical lab – which simply replaces the detective driving to the morgue – there were no science fiction elements in the story at all. In fact, Paris unravels the mystery by observing the behavior of the dog owned by the culprit. And it was a dog. Not something analogous to a dog, or that looked a bit like a dog, or even something that was painfully obvious was a dog with its fur died a different color. It was just a dog, and Paris catches on because he’s familiar with the behavior of dogs.
It wasn’t particularly good as an homage to noir detective stories. But what struck me was the utter lack of imagination. It’s like Star Trek is written by people who can’t imagine anything but life in a gated suburb near Los Angeles.
Lately, I’ve read several anthologies of science fiction short stories, the “Year’s Best” collections edited by Gardner Dozois. And the gulf between the sophistication, creativity, and diversity of contemporary science fiction novels and short fiction on the one hand, and the unimaginative, brain-dead crap we get in television and movies, is enormous.
