Star Trek the Next Generation: Symbiosis
Oct. 3rd, 2010 02:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethYou know every now and then I take a moment to realise what a bad name for a series that is. Next Generation? Way to not stand alone there.
The title is so the smallest part of many kinds of bad here.
This is the 'don't do drugs, kids!' episode. There's even a little speech with Tasha being very earnest to Wesley. It's made of *facepalm*.
And it skips over some really very important points. In the middle Dr Crusher does say 'The physiological and psychological dependency is very real', but then when it gets to solution time, they're all, 'eh, it'll hurt but they'll get over it'. And actually no, sometimes people just get dead of it. Withdrawal symptoms are dangerous. I've taken prescribed meds where the warnings said quitting them of a sudden could give me a heart attack. And the withdrawal symptoms from commonly used alcohol are seriously nasty. Bodies can just get thoroughly messed up from withdrawal. So doing that to a whole planet of billions of people? *shudders* Not even getting into the psychological effects. Even if the only remaining effect is very much wanting the next dose and the violence already demonstrated in the episode that planet is going to be a mess, not even civil war, everyone out for themselves and convinced their neighbour is holding out one last dose. Ladling out a moralising ending where they'll be better off when they're not addicted is just... ghastly wrong. Skips too many horrors.
There's also the nontrivial plausibility problem, in that in order for this to happen, the whole entire planet must never have had one person do without their meds long enough to get over the addiction. I guess their neighbours would treat it as attempted suicide, but it's still difficult to imagine 200 years of perfect medication compliance.
Mostly though this one reminds me how deeply annoying the Prime Directive is. And how I'm never quite sure if Star Trek means it to be. It seems like the story comes down on the side of calling this a job well done, act by the prime directive and it will all work out. But that's bollocks. They're leaving people to suffer and maybe die, and they're doing it because they've decided they're less developed. *shudders*
Using a technological marker, development of warp drive, seems a ridiculous line for first contact and welcome to the universe. It's nothing about how 'ready' people are, it's just the point past which their neighbours can't ignore them without active intervention to make them go away. And there's plenty of scope for a civilisation to have warp drive but not have the conceptual categories needed to interact with their neighbours in a way both can live with. Say we met aliens but only had the categories of old school religion to work with. If our understanding of the universe was based on the great chain of being, demons and humans and angels and god, then meeting other species of intelligence we'd try and fit them on that chain. They're clearly not human... so do we expand 'human' to cover more kinds of people? Or do we put them in as demons or angels? Actually fiction does a hell of a lot of that anyway, even now we've got a widely understood category of 'alien' to mean something like 'people like humans are only not the same biology'. And that category has its own problems, which science fiction plays with a lot. But anyways... there is no fundamental incompatibility between a hierarchical religious conception of the universe and having warp drive. You could be out there travelling the stars and only having the mind tools to call it all heavens and hells. Why not? But would such a species be 'ready' to join the Federation as equal partners? Or would they be tearing themselves apart trying to fit everything to that view? And flip side, you can have plenty of mind room for alien neighbour people, and not the technology to go reach them yet. If your star system didn't have some necessary element you wouldn't develop that technology. Does that make you unready forever? Rubbish idea.
And then there's the whole idea of a less developed civilisation. You know how long it takes humans to reach and exceed the current tech level? About 25 years. That's how long it takes any particular human to do all their studying and, if they pursue it, end up with a PhD and originating new science. Is that longer than it used to be? I don't particularly know. But even if you add ten years for super duper advanced science learnings, that makes humans all caught up in a single generation. It's only education like a Time Lord does, the ones that take longer than a human lifetime, where you can argue for some species not being able to learn it all. And Federation science doesn't work like that: Vulcans live longer than humans, but you don't have to live as long as a Vulcan to understand Vulcan science. So what's the justification for not teaching kids new stuff? They can and will learn it, once they're let out of the little cage of 'not ready' someone decided applied to their planet. How does that mesh with the decision?
I'm getting cranky about science fiction societies that don't exist at all at all. :eyeroll:
But some of it intersects poorly with some racist rhetoric. The idea some races just can't learn, aren't ready, need protecting, even by isolating them from the advanced people they couldn't compete with... the Federation idea tries to avoid one evil, the Borg's evil, but it's still absolute bullshit.
The Doctor has more reason for non interference. Paradox avoidance. But he totally ignores it and tries to help people, because he can and he cares, so that's the right thing to do. He helps them to not kill each other mostly, and not get killed, and do things they already were trying to do. Also to notice when they're being ignorant arseholes and dumping on people. At least when Doctor+writer is not distracted by big pit monsters. So the Doctor is win and the Federation is a bunch of stupid heads, basically.
... I is grown up, see my rhetorical elegance...
I think it was the Babylon 5 spin off where their response to an isolated paranoid pre contact species was to drop off an encyclopedia for everyone. That makes sense. Know more, understand more, works better.
Ignorance is poison, basically.
This is not me arguing for telling people how to build big big bombs. Ignorance is countered by wisdom, which to my mind involves understanding the exact scale of the destruction of big big bombs, and compassion, which would involve understanding the harm in blowing up each and any and all of them people under the big big bomb. When that kind of learning is understood the ignorance and hate that would want to learn the big bomb building would be fixed, no more poison. So requests for tech specs can usefully be answered with explaining more about the people they want to use the tech on. Probably. Understanding people > understanding things.
... I'm sadly not very good at understanding people. Bit of a problem really.
The title is so the smallest part of many kinds of bad here.
This is the 'don't do drugs, kids!' episode. There's even a little speech with Tasha being very earnest to Wesley. It's made of *facepalm*.
And it skips over some really very important points. In the middle Dr Crusher does say 'The physiological and psychological dependency is very real', but then when it gets to solution time, they're all, 'eh, it'll hurt but they'll get over it'. And actually no, sometimes people just get dead of it. Withdrawal symptoms are dangerous. I've taken prescribed meds where the warnings said quitting them of a sudden could give me a heart attack. And the withdrawal symptoms from commonly used alcohol are seriously nasty. Bodies can just get thoroughly messed up from withdrawal. So doing that to a whole planet of billions of people? *shudders* Not even getting into the psychological effects. Even if the only remaining effect is very much wanting the next dose and the violence already demonstrated in the episode that planet is going to be a mess, not even civil war, everyone out for themselves and convinced their neighbour is holding out one last dose. Ladling out a moralising ending where they'll be better off when they're not addicted is just... ghastly wrong. Skips too many horrors.
There's also the nontrivial plausibility problem, in that in order for this to happen, the whole entire planet must never have had one person do without their meds long enough to get over the addiction. I guess their neighbours would treat it as attempted suicide, but it's still difficult to imagine 200 years of perfect medication compliance.
Mostly though this one reminds me how deeply annoying the Prime Directive is. And how I'm never quite sure if Star Trek means it to be. It seems like the story comes down on the side of calling this a job well done, act by the prime directive and it will all work out. But that's bollocks. They're leaving people to suffer and maybe die, and they're doing it because they've decided they're less developed. *shudders*
Using a technological marker, development of warp drive, seems a ridiculous line for first contact and welcome to the universe. It's nothing about how 'ready' people are, it's just the point past which their neighbours can't ignore them without active intervention to make them go away. And there's plenty of scope for a civilisation to have warp drive but not have the conceptual categories needed to interact with their neighbours in a way both can live with. Say we met aliens but only had the categories of old school religion to work with. If our understanding of the universe was based on the great chain of being, demons and humans and angels and god, then meeting other species of intelligence we'd try and fit them on that chain. They're clearly not human... so do we expand 'human' to cover more kinds of people? Or do we put them in as demons or angels? Actually fiction does a hell of a lot of that anyway, even now we've got a widely understood category of 'alien' to mean something like 'people like humans are only not the same biology'. And that category has its own problems, which science fiction plays with a lot. But anyways... there is no fundamental incompatibility between a hierarchical religious conception of the universe and having warp drive. You could be out there travelling the stars and only having the mind tools to call it all heavens and hells. Why not? But would such a species be 'ready' to join the Federation as equal partners? Or would they be tearing themselves apart trying to fit everything to that view? And flip side, you can have plenty of mind room for alien neighbour people, and not the technology to go reach them yet. If your star system didn't have some necessary element you wouldn't develop that technology. Does that make you unready forever? Rubbish idea.
And then there's the whole idea of a less developed civilisation. You know how long it takes humans to reach and exceed the current tech level? About 25 years. That's how long it takes any particular human to do all their studying and, if they pursue it, end up with a PhD and originating new science. Is that longer than it used to be? I don't particularly know. But even if you add ten years for super duper advanced science learnings, that makes humans all caught up in a single generation. It's only education like a Time Lord does, the ones that take longer than a human lifetime, where you can argue for some species not being able to learn it all. And Federation science doesn't work like that: Vulcans live longer than humans, but you don't have to live as long as a Vulcan to understand Vulcan science. So what's the justification for not teaching kids new stuff? They can and will learn it, once they're let out of the little cage of 'not ready' someone decided applied to their planet. How does that mesh with the decision?
I'm getting cranky about science fiction societies that don't exist at all at all. :eyeroll:
But some of it intersects poorly with some racist rhetoric. The idea some races just can't learn, aren't ready, need protecting, even by isolating them from the advanced people they couldn't compete with... the Federation idea tries to avoid one evil, the Borg's evil, but it's still absolute bullshit.
The Doctor has more reason for non interference. Paradox avoidance. But he totally ignores it and tries to help people, because he can and he cares, so that's the right thing to do. He helps them to not kill each other mostly, and not get killed, and do things they already were trying to do. Also to notice when they're being ignorant arseholes and dumping on people. At least when Doctor+writer is not distracted by big pit monsters. So the Doctor is win and the Federation is a bunch of stupid heads, basically.
... I is grown up, see my rhetorical elegance...
I think it was the Babylon 5 spin off where their response to an isolated paranoid pre contact species was to drop off an encyclopedia for everyone. That makes sense. Know more, understand more, works better.
Ignorance is poison, basically.
This is not me arguing for telling people how to build big big bombs. Ignorance is countered by wisdom, which to my mind involves understanding the exact scale of the destruction of big big bombs, and compassion, which would involve understanding the harm in blowing up each and any and all of them people under the big big bomb. When that kind of learning is understood the ignorance and hate that would want to learn the big bomb building would be fixed, no more poison. So requests for tech specs can usefully be answered with explaining more about the people they want to use the tech on. Probably. Understanding people > understanding things.
... I'm sadly not very good at understanding people. Bit of a problem really.
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no subject
Date: 2010-10-03 02:45 am (UTC)And on top of that unlikely thing, everyone on the planet has to react to it the same way! Some people can take a drug every day and never be addicted; others can take the same drug three times and be hooked.
The Prime Directive always pissed me off! Not to mention that they only obey it if they WANT to. There's always some exception.
I have a huge fondness for pretty much every Star Trek, I watched the original one when I was a little kid and it's always been in my life, whether up front or in the background, whereas Who was a few years in my 20s, then these past few years. But, yeah, the Doctor is a whole lot more win.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-10 01:19 pm (UTC)Exceptions to the Prime Directive involve cute kids from the Enterprise. Obeying the Prime Directive involves funny looking alien dudes. Nice to have an excuse in writing and all :eyeroll:
*waves Doctor Who flag*
... what would DW flag look like? Aside from TARDIS blue...
no subject
Date: 2010-10-03 03:37 am (UTC)On the other hand, there was an episode where politicians who have been smugly reminding the Next Generation crew of the non-interference directive are faced with an uprising by the very people who have suffered the most from the pols' callousness. When they plead for help in putting down the rebellion, Picard rather sardonically reminds THEM of the Prime Directive and leaves them to their just deserts.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-10 01:21 pm (UTC)the smug vs smug fights? that resembles several eps I've seen already. And I've only seen the first season.
It do undermine the stakes somewhat. It makes it difficult for the writers to do involving stories when there's this rule that seems to mean situations should work out exactly the same without the Enterprise as with it.