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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I have consistently found going back and watching the sci-fi of my youth that it is way more preachy about the progressive ideas of its time than I thought. DS9 is photon torpedoes full spread at traditional religious beliefs(which is especially clumsy because the Bajoran gods are real), Jack O'Neill is a peacenik xenophile who sneers with open contempt at Christian Republican Senator.

I don't think they were as bad as modern shows are today, but it is still consistently surprising to me how often and sometimes heavy handed political messaging was in these shows that I was totally oblivious to when I mostly agreed with the politics/hadn't been primed to notice.

I have to disagree about O'Neill. SG-1 manages to pull off that rare accomplishment of sometimes being about politics without ever being political. They never say what party Kinsey is from, from what I remember, and the 1990s were a time where his type was available in both parties to be disdained.

The way in which they have Jack handle Daniel's actually peacenik attitudes (even if Daniel is right by plot fiat) is also a bit of a conservative stereotype of the gruff, worldly military man running rough shod over the lefty ivory tower type. The way they handled their relationship (where both get to be right and wrong at different times and both get to be both positive and negative portrayals of their archetypes who both grow by learning to deal and work with the other) is actually exceptionally good writing, both from a character handling perspective and from a 'keeping your show unpolitical' perspective.

The show absolutely is suffused with triumphalism post-Cold War liberalism, but that was a practically consensus point of view at the time and it was something most of both right and left could agree on.

Maybe I am crazy, but I don't think Kinsey's red tie was a random wardrobing decision, and his particular style of bible thumping, like arguing that God would 'physically' intervene to prevent an alien attack, seemed very republican coded to me, but you are right I don't think they ever actually say what party he belongs to.

O'Neill is absolutely less of a peacenik than Daniel, but he stands in stark contrast against all the other military personal, save perhaps Hammond From Texas. He would be the most level headed security officer to ever serve on the enterprise if you slid him into TNG. Makepeace, the only other colonel in the program and one of the few military personal with a name, is an NID traitor. Jack is very superficially a gruff military man, but in practice he only really overrides Daniel when Daniel is asking him to gamble all their lives based on the style of pots the aliens use and a half translated prayer.

Red and blue as political party colors developed recently and not all at once, spawning from 2000 election night coverage where CNN showed states flipping between red and blue.

Kinsey's style used to be something you could find along Democrats, too. Especially the budget-hawking-but-only-against-the-military bit is something that could go either way in my eyes.

O'Neill's outlook is definitely post-Vietnam military burnout, but absolutely everything else about him codes hard on the right for the time. There really was no archetype of the Dem leaning special forces guy in the 90s. If anything, he has always struck me as the kind of mostly disinterested (if not actively disgusting) in politics personally conservative but not religious middle aged white guy who would be activated by Trump in 2016.

I have consistently found going back and watching the sci-fi of my youth that it is way more preachy about the progressive ideas of its time than I thought.

I recently made a similar exercise, and you're right they could get preachy, but I think there was more balance - unless I'm misinterpreting it, Voyager literally had an episode about the Great Replacement. For me the comparison was also interesting as a sanity check. There is an idea floating around that woodenness wokeness is just a continuation of previous iterations of liberalism, and all the people objecting to it would be crying out against it watching their favorite TV shows, had they been born a generation earlier. Who knows, maybe I would have been a Reaganite, but the fact remains all the things that all the things that made me clash with wokeness, rather than go along with it - free speech, colorblindness, meritocracy - were all there in TNG's messaging. Star Trek also had episodes that I feel heralded the Awokening, and they stuck out like a sore thumb - DS9's "Far Beyond the Stars", for example.

Voyager literally had an episode about the Great Replacement.

Which episode, exactly? I don't recall this plot point, but I'm no savant.

S03E24: Displaced, took a while to find it, as my memory was playing tricks on me. Could swear it was a two partner.

Thanks. I read the synopsis and still don't remember it at all. It definitely didn't leave an impression on me like the Aschen episode from SG1.

…idea floating around that woodenness is just…

I think you had an autocorrect issue here.

Yep. But now I kind of want to leave it there.

But also - goddamn, get with the program, autocorrect, "wokeness" isn't even that new a concept.

I think the writing overall was better enough that it made for a satisfying watch even if you disagreed with the messaging. I think often about the TNG episode First Contact. In this episode, the crew is making covert overtures to an alien world with no prior knowledge of the existence of aliens about joining the Federation, which is fanatically opposed by Krola, an alien minister who is a clear conservative stand-in: suspicious, paranoid, religious, xenophobic, cruel, and fanatical. We the viewers know he is wrong in everything: we have prior knowledge that the Federation is benevolent, peaceful, and altruistic and that his concerns are groundless. But at the end of the episode, the leader decides that he has a point: the Federation were actually infiltrating them, and the changes they are offering may actually be destructive to the society they have. He rejects their offer, at least for a while, and they leave.

The intended message is clear: unfortunately, less-progressive attitudes have cost this society a chance to join the glorious future, and this is an parable about how conservative attitudes in contemporary society hold back the glorious future depicted in the show. But the writing is intelligent enough to see that there are both benefits and costs to any change, and actually gives their villains an in-episode win while still promoting their message. That's good writing. That makes an episode enjoyable to watch, even if you think the intended message is wrong or not a good parable.

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