A great episode and the “five lights” bit was clearly drawn from the Room 101 portion of Orwell’s novel.
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Dunno about now, but when I was in high school (a long time ago), the assigned Orwell was Animal Farm with a heavy underlining of COMMUNISM IS BAD. 1984 I read on my own 
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Timeless tropes are timeless for a reason.
It’s why that particular episode still resonates so strongly, even amongst non-Trekkies and casual viewers.
Much like yours, Animal Farm was also assigned reading at my HS, but 1984 was not; I, too, read it of my accord.
I’ve always hated it, even though I know how important a piece of literature it is… and I still make myself re-read it, at least once a decade.
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On what country, though? I’m German. In any case, we had both. Animal Farm in German language, 1984 in English.
Though it wasn’t simply “Communism Bad” we got from Animal Farm.
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That’s how it was often taught in American schools during the Cold War era. My liberal middle school focused more on the nature of authoritarian populist ideology and parties in general but it was an exception even in the 1980s.
I remember talking about it at dinner with my friends’s father, a conservative writer. He was a little taken aback when I pointed out that the story could have just as easily been about the Nazi purges as about (per Orwell’s intent) the Soviet ones but he couldn’t really deny it either.
Great writing (by Ronald Moore, creator of the BSG reboot) and performances too. Stewart was in top form and David Warner was perfectly (type?)cast as the formidable villain.
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U.S., I imagine that it does make a big difference in the curriculum!
Communism is Bad is not what I got out of it - I got, hm, that seems to be more about the dangers of authoritarians arising under any system
@Melizmatic Yeah, 1984 is an unpleasant read. Recently though I was listening to an Orwell scholar on…Factually with Adam Conover, maybe?..and her putting some of the language and symbols in context with Orwell’s biography really brought into stronger relief Winston as a sensual character robbed of the ability to even understand his desires, much less satisfy them. Some of that is there in the text but it really illuminated the subtext in a way I had never heard before. It was very interesting and made me want to re-read it. I would love to see her do an annotated version.
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This. The actual communism worked – all these farm animals working together and sharing the rewards until they get tricked by a feudalistic upper class.
I mean, at the end the pigs and human farmers become indistinguishable, that’s not actually an endorsement of the system the animals overthrew in the first place.
Pretty sure that “don’t rise up against exploitation against capitalism because the other side side is just as bad” isn’t a reasonable interpretation.
I mean, how did they manage to make it “communism bad” in school? Were the animals supposed to endure the mistreatment and exploitation by the farmer? Did the teacher at least say “they should’ve outed the king and established a democratic republic with a two party system?”
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[Warning: increasingly off-topic tangent ahead]
I was reflecting on a similarly-themed episode from another great 1990s sci-fi show Babylon 5 in which Captain Sheridan is tortured and interrogated with the intention of breaking his will. Both episodes were well written but it took me a while to really puzzle out why I felt Picard’s ordeal resonated better.
When Sheridan is eventually rescued he furiously kills one of his captors, then basically shakes off the ordeal in short order and insists he’s just fine. But shortly after Picard is rescued we learn that Picard was actually ready to break and tell his interrogator the lie he knew was expected of him. And we learn this because Picard immediately seeks counseling instead of trying to macho his way through recovery on his own.
I learned much later that Stewart’s father was a WWII veteran who suffered from untreated PTSD that often manifested in acts of domestic violence, so I have to imagine that showing the importance of seeking psychological help would have been important to him.
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Well, I think that part of it was just the usual U.S. refusal to ever admit that in fact the Soviet Union was not, in fact, actually a communist country, and from there you just doublespeak your way through to the end of the lesson. I imagine that might be why 1984 was not in the lesson plan?
Also just a lot of tortured re-definition of communism as authoritarianism with a centrally planned economy. Basically just point at the pigs, point at the Kremlin and say “That’s communism”. It’s not like they were assigning Marx and Engels on high school either (also had too seek that out on my own)
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As in many other things, Roddenberry was ahead of his time in making a psychotherapist one of the most important officers on the ship
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For those schools that wanted something slightly beyond a “just so story” about the bad ol’ Reds it was usually something along the neoliberal lines of “Communist (implied socialist) ideals always fail because everyone is a selfish bastard who’ll end up just as bad as the old oppressors when given political power.”
Reaganism was and still is a strong influence in American schools in a way it never was on the Continent. I doubt that even Thatcherism had that wide or long-lived a reach in UK schools.
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Understandable; it was the far more human and realistic take on being tortured and gaslighted.
I did know that, actually; it’s a core reason that Stewart is a feminist and a human rights activist.
We stan.
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Still not sure why she was the one person on the ship whose uniform showed so much cleavage though (not counting the time Riker went to the Planet of the Amazons).
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They had gender-neutral uniforms for the first pilot in 1964 … and then the show didn’t get picked up
Some combination of dumb objectification and strategic trying to keep the networks happy
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Ironically the pilot episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation was the one episode where Troi didn’t show off her cleavage until that story arc six years later when Captain Jellico temporarily took command of the Enterprise and ordered Troi to put on a damn uniform again.
She did show an awful lot of leg in that pilot, though.
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I see. A real conservative then, not the new kind.
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Even if it does happen, there’s going be constant insurgency. This isn’t going to be like the Taliban casually rolling right through Afghanistan into Kabul and just taking everything over. Ukrainians are going to make life for the occupying forces absolutely miserable. And the longer things go on, the more likely there is to be a populist uprising in Russia.
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Yeah, I remember reading in one of David Gerrold’s behind the scenes books that for the non-crew women there was often direction to the costume designers that they should look like they were about to fall out of their costumes, which you really do see in the finished product. Going back and watching some of the original series is really jarring now.
I have been watching Discovery after our conversation (into the 2nd season) and the first thing that hit me was how much better the non-gendered uniforms were.
I also like that part of Picard’s character is the life-long impact of his assimilation by the Borg. It was not a there and gone thing, or an arc, it is something that haunts him for the rest of his life
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And yes, Roddenberry was behind that. Let’s not forget that Troi is a downplayed version of a Deltan erotic interest intended for Star Trek:Phase II and then the movie.
Also, she was intended to have four breasts. Nothing wrong with with four breasts, of course but they don’t make much sense on humans.
“I honestly believe you will offend most women, and maybe a lot of men with this character. Besides, how are you going to arrange those four provocatively shaped breasts? Four in a row? They had better be small. Two banks of two? Do you know how much trouble women have with the normal number—keeping them out of the way of things, I mean. Four straight up and down? Don’t be silly.”
– D.C. Fontana
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Nonsense. The Fox network has always been at war with Eurasia Putin.
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