ST:TNG Inheritance & Homeward
Feb. 4th, 2011 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI'm watching the season 7 DVDs of Star Trek the Next Generation. So far they've only gone wrong at the start of the closing credits, or with changing languages between episodes, so I'll call them worky. It's weird, because some episodes I've seen very plenty many times, like the one with Data dreaming the Troi cake, or Worf being many alternate universe Worfs, so I skipped them because really, one more is too many. But other episodes I haven't seen ever at all. I hadn't seen Liaisons or Dark Page, I'm not sure about The Pegasus because of that thing where it overlaps with Enterprise so I had deja vu and can't tell if I had already vu, and I definitely had not seen Homeward.
So far the season has been weird and dreamlike, lots of never-happened and dream sequences and psychic explorations of minds that are quite a lot like dream sequences and illusions and holodecks and things not what they seem. And it has been dark. Dead children dark, creepy stalker lady threatening suicide dark, and a couple of actual suicides. And I'm only up to episode 13.
Inheritance seriously bothered me because the episode ends with suggesting it's a good thing to lie to a woman about medical information. Data tells her she broke a bone and she's okay now and lets her go on her merry way. But we the viewers, and half the Enterprise crew, know she's actually an android. Personally I would want to know. It would be deeply creepy for someone to decide not to tell me for my own good. The argument it would rob her of what Data most wants to achieve, her humanity, is absolute balls. It says that putting a different label on her would rob her of her fundamental nature, her capacities and experiences and personality, and that's so absolutely wrong. She was made by her then husband as a replacement for his dying wife, so he didn't tell her about herself to start with so as to keep her being this copy person, which could be worse because he did at least let her leave him when she decided to break up with him. But the really creepy seriously bad wrong thing is that he programmed in aging, and he programmed in death. Data didn't know if he would ever die, his head is centuries old and still going strong; artificial life forms are not naturally mortal, just subject to destruction. But this one has been made mortal, by the decision of one creepy obsessive man. She has had her death date programmed in. Data knows this, the Enterprise staff know this, and they decide not to tell her. That's like discovering (a) someone is terminally ill (b) there's an off switch / way to reprogram them well (c) you'll let them live in ignorance on the theory they'll be happier. How entirely grotesque is that? Taking away her choices and leaving her to die because... WHY? I don't even see the logic.
Homeward is a different but overlapping kind of creepy, keeping people in ignorance and allowing so many of them to die, for what? The Prime Directive? I'm with Nikolai on this one, the purpose of the prime directive is to let people grow and live in their own way. Leaving them to die isn't what the rule should be about. It's absolutely evil to stand there and watch while they burn. There's no two ways about it. They had the capacity to help, and they decided to let everyone die. It's sick. But then Nikolai was tricksy and saved a bunch of people, yaays! But when one of them found out about the starship, what happens? Picard tells him if he goes back to his people and tells them the truth they would decide he was insane. So the guy kills himself. And then Picard is all sad about how he didn't have time to get to know him better.
Picard's lack of awareness of having created that situation made me physically ill.
He tells the guy his options are to lose everyone and everything he ever knew, or go back to them and be rejected. What the fuck did he *expect*?
But the alien guy's reaction is fucked too. He kills himself rather than be thought insane.
Because, you see, there is a fate worse than death, and that would be it.
Fuck that.
And nobody on the Enterprise offered the option of telling everyone the truth, returning the guy to his people and providing evidence to back up his story and explaining what had actually happened to everyone. Because, what? You can't tell people the truth, you just let them die trying to learn it? Because the sky people know better? Gross bad.
The Prime Directive in stories is all about how their version of non interference is deeply deeply wrong. Except it doesn't seem to know it's about that. Which is creepy and jarring.
So I've stopped watching for a while.
Are there any more suicides this season? Child deaths? People driven mad by horrible traumas? Because there's a limit to how much of that I could watch in a row. I have reached that limit for the day. Possibly the week.
So far the season has been weird and dreamlike, lots of never-happened and dream sequences and psychic explorations of minds that are quite a lot like dream sequences and illusions and holodecks and things not what they seem. And it has been dark. Dead children dark, creepy stalker lady threatening suicide dark, and a couple of actual suicides. And I'm only up to episode 13.
Inheritance seriously bothered me because the episode ends with suggesting it's a good thing to lie to a woman about medical information. Data tells her she broke a bone and she's okay now and lets her go on her merry way. But we the viewers, and half the Enterprise crew, know she's actually an android. Personally I would want to know. It would be deeply creepy for someone to decide not to tell me for my own good. The argument it would rob her of what Data most wants to achieve, her humanity, is absolute balls. It says that putting a different label on her would rob her of her fundamental nature, her capacities and experiences and personality, and that's so absolutely wrong. She was made by her then husband as a replacement for his dying wife, so he didn't tell her about herself to start with so as to keep her being this copy person, which could be worse because he did at least let her leave him when she decided to break up with him. But the really creepy seriously bad wrong thing is that he programmed in aging, and he programmed in death. Data didn't know if he would ever die, his head is centuries old and still going strong; artificial life forms are not naturally mortal, just subject to destruction. But this one has been made mortal, by the decision of one creepy obsessive man. She has had her death date programmed in. Data knows this, the Enterprise staff know this, and they decide not to tell her. That's like discovering (a) someone is terminally ill (b) there's an off switch / way to reprogram them well (c) you'll let them live in ignorance on the theory they'll be happier. How entirely grotesque is that? Taking away her choices and leaving her to die because... WHY? I don't even see the logic.
Homeward is a different but overlapping kind of creepy, keeping people in ignorance and allowing so many of them to die, for what? The Prime Directive? I'm with Nikolai on this one, the purpose of the prime directive is to let people grow and live in their own way. Leaving them to die isn't what the rule should be about. It's absolutely evil to stand there and watch while they burn. There's no two ways about it. They had the capacity to help, and they decided to let everyone die. It's sick. But then Nikolai was tricksy and saved a bunch of people, yaays! But when one of them found out about the starship, what happens? Picard tells him if he goes back to his people and tells them the truth they would decide he was insane. So the guy kills himself. And then Picard is all sad about how he didn't have time to get to know him better.
Picard's lack of awareness of having created that situation made me physically ill.
He tells the guy his options are to lose everyone and everything he ever knew, or go back to them and be rejected. What the fuck did he *expect*?
But the alien guy's reaction is fucked too. He kills himself rather than be thought insane.
Because, you see, there is a fate worse than death, and that would be it.
Fuck that.
And nobody on the Enterprise offered the option of telling everyone the truth, returning the guy to his people and providing evidence to back up his story and explaining what had actually happened to everyone. Because, what? You can't tell people the truth, you just let them die trying to learn it? Because the sky people know better? Gross bad.
The Prime Directive in stories is all about how their version of non interference is deeply deeply wrong. Except it doesn't seem to know it's about that. Which is creepy and jarring.
So I've stopped watching for a while.
Are there any more suicides this season? Child deaths? People driven mad by horrible traumas? Because there's a limit to how much of that I could watch in a row. I have reached that limit for the day. Possibly the week.
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no subject
Date: 2011-02-04 02:18 pm (UTC)Glancing through the episode list... the good news is I don't recall any child deaths? But the other two, unfortunately yes.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-04 02:39 pm (UTC)I guess I will be putting these away for a while.