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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29422 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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I mean, the problem is nobody knows what trans people are. Are they born that way? Is it a social contagion? Is it a fetish? A mental illness?

You could try to go the Uhura route and just calmly show that trans people exists and are like other people. But even Uhura can't be done these days. Nu-Trek is all about being as on the nose as possible, because subtlety doesn't work on fascist. A person screamed this in my face when I complained I didn't like new Star Trek, in front of our families and everything at 10 AM at a farmers market. So, even assuming a Uhura type character was an option with trans people, which you seem to believe it isn't by their nature, I'm not sure it's the sort of option you think it is. It's not enough to just not be racist, you have to be explicitly anti-racist. That's the new state of the art, and the bar you must clear to not get smeared.

That leaves allegory, but like I said, if we don't even know what trans people are, how you choose to do the allegory matters a great deal. You fixate a lot on that famous ST:TOS episode. However there was a particularly based episode of Star Trek: Voyager where Nelix feels sorry for this convict who is telling all these sob stories about how oppressed his people are. Chad Tom Paris states the obvious about them as a matter of record actually committing more crime. The story ends with Nelix trying to help this sad oppressed minority, and getting stabbed in the back for it, and endangering the entire ship when they proceed to crime them.

There was another rather based episode of DS9 where the station happens upon an infant Jem'Hadar. I believe it was Doctor Bashir who attempts to raise this fast growing genetically engineers shock trooper into a well adjusted member of society. Unfortunately for everyone, it just can't fight it's violent genetic programming and begins attacking people seemingly at random across the station. In the end it's returned to The Dominion where they can care for it better.

So, if we take as a given that those Star Trek episodes are allegories for race, they say vastly different things than your TOS episode. Likewise, any allegory you choose for trans people will broadcast loud and clear where you come down on what trans people fundamentally are.

While we're on the subject of Star Trek Voyager episodes with interesting allegories for race, there's Living Witness (which was directed by Tim Russ, the actor for Tuvok, even!). There's two alien races living on the same planet and Voyager's passage caused a war after which one of the races subjugated the other. Centuries have passed and relations between the two races have improved, but a copy of the Doctor wakes up and finds out that this relatively peaceful state of affair is based on a rather false retelling of the events where the race that won the war was belligerent and had Voyager kill the leader of the other race for them, when the doctor knows the subjugated race actually attacked Voyager unprovoked. The Doctor is stuck between leaving things as is, even if it's based on a lie, or pursuing the truth, which threatens the peace as some of the subjugating race always felt bad about the way they were cast as the villains and the subjugated race wants to clings to a view of history where they were blameless. Eventually it's settled on the truth. The whole episode has a feel of exasperation towards grievance politics.

Voyager got maligned for having some of the worst episodes (and the worst multi episode arcs) in Star Trek, but it had some great one-offs too. And it's funny to me how a show like Star Trek that's meant to be progressive can be "left behind" by an ideology that by design keeps moving.

IMHO, Voyager beats the pants off anything that came after. When I binged TNG, DS9 and Voyager in a row, I found myself really enjoying Voyager in a way similar to how I enjoyed TNG. DS9 was good, but Voyager was a return to form for me. None of the cast really had the swagger or the gravitas to really elevate it, but they put out some remarkably solid Trek stories. Even if they did start leaning into Jeri Ryan's assets.

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