Some thoughts on modern-day literature

[tacit]

There will come a time
This life you live
Will catch up with you
And no one will be left
When honesty is blind
In ignorance exist the fallen.
We’re begging for the truth

I just returned from a trip to Chicago to visit dayo. The flight's a little over two hours, plus ancillary waiting-about at the airport after passing through the absurd farce we

Comments

[tacit]

Oh, I could go on for days about it, too.

Star Trek tries hard to explore the human condition. It really, really does. It fails, owever, because it considers its own characters sancrosect, and is unwilling to take risks.

You'll never find that McCoy has a dark secret buried in his mind, a memory of something terrible evil he did. You will never see Captain Kirk placed in a position where he must make a moral choice of profound consequences, where every option is cloaked in shades of gray and people will die no matter what he chooses.

Even the "duality" in Spock is written crudely in crayon. Humans are emotional, Vulcans are not emotional. OK, OK, we get it! Humans are emotional, Vulcans are not emotional. Fine, as far as it goes. Now, how about exploring the depths of those emotions? How about illuminating something about the way in which those emotions influence our choices, for good and for ill?

But no.

We get clean, antiseptic starships and clean, antiseptic characters, with no hint of moral decay. We get problems couched in the simplest of moral terms, unframed by ambiguity. We get problems that are solved in tidy 49-minute chunks by cross-reversing the neutron polarity generator with the tachyon field emitter. And above all, we get a show terrified of questioning its own premises and just as terrified of exploring anything that might be the least bit uncomfortable.

The show could have been so much more. Even the short-lived Firefly explored more of the human condition in its abortive one-season run than Star Trek has in decades.

[james_the_evil1]

I would disagree with that analysis on several points & can point to episodes to back up my thinking. If you include the movies with the TOS cast it's even more clear.

The episode "A Private Little War" (which was itself a rumination on Vietnam) entirely belies your comment about Kirk not having to make profound moral choices cloaked in grey where people will die no matter what.

I can't think of the episode title, but the one on the planet with the plants that cause Spock to give in to his emotions brings up some of the ways in which those 2 sides and their diversions affect our choices.
Vulcans also aren't WITHOUT emotion, they CHOOSE to suppress them.

Like I said, I could go on here. :)

[ab3nd]

Even ST:TNG had some good episodes. I'm thinking of "Darmok" especially, since it had aliens in it that were actually a little bit alien, rather than just humans with funny foreheads.

I may have read too much Stanislaw Lem, though. That man had a real grasp on what "alien" means.

[sylvar]

It's a minor point in the Trekverse, but the Kobayashi Maru scenario is a "people will die no matter what he chooses" situation.

[tacit]

And it's a simulation--not only that, but a simulation on a very tiny scale. Not the kind of morally ambiguous choice I'm talking about; a person in that simulation has no decision to make which will alter the outcome, short of cheating.

[james_the_evil1]

But the episode I mention DID require that sort of choice, as did others.

[james_the_evil1]

Doesn't count for 2 reasons. 1, it was fictional. 2, Kirk cheated to win outside the parameters of the contest which supports Franklin's point.

Certainly tho (since the KM makes me think of Janeway) once you get in to the other series past TOS they certainly undercut his premise.