STID realistic?

That's the one. Though I seem to be misremembering it a little. I thought some others had done some looking and couldn't find any evidence either.

Sucks getting old.

 

There are background details that set the stories a part. They take place on different planets, involving different captains and different factions involved. They take place in different centuries, and involved the exchange of different weapons.

IOW, they're about as different as "The Naked Time" and "The Naked Now."

Pedantic because you're reduced to picking apart the minute details while the actual point flies right over your head.

It's like saying "Balance of Terror is nothing like 'The Enemy Below.' It doesn't take place in the ocean, nor during World War-II. The Enterprise is a cruiser, not a destroyer, and phasers are not physical projectiles like depth charges. Also, cloaking devices are unlike submarines because submarines can still fire while submerged, and the Romulans themselves are not at all similar to Nazis."

 

What actual point, Crazy Eddie?

 

The point is that both stories are about a commander who interfered in a war between natives by handing in more advanced weapons, with the consequences being that he may have made things worse than better. TOS ends on that down note, while TNG opens with a similar character feeling guilty over what he did and wanting to make up for it many years later. "Too Short a Season" is probably better described as a spiritual follow up and in that sense I kind of admire it for that, despite a couple of flaws like the crew being too relegated in the background and the youth drug being pointless, as the admiral could have just been portrayed as a more healthy old man from the start, maybe dying as a result of that away mission where he gets shot by the very weapons he gave.

 

No kidding. But it's still not the case that the TNG episode expands upon the premise of the TOS episode, as Crazy Eddie claimed. On the contrary, while the TNG episode obviously has a core element of the TOS episode in common with it, that core element is removed from the factors that mitigated Federation culpability. If you see the episodes as essentially about the same thing, then I say you're missing an essential part of what A Private Little War is all about.

And this right here is what's wrong. Since what the Klingons do in A Private Little War is beyond Federation control, unless (as Hartzilla2007 pointed out upthread) the Federation wishes to declare open war on the Klingon Empire (assuming they even can, due to the Organians), the idea that the Federation made things worse for the natives in A Private Little War is a tenable notion only if you believe that it would have been better for the Klingon-allied natives to kill all the Hill People. This right here is why there's no parallel between the episodes, not at some pedantic superficial level, but at the level of what the ultimate point of the story is.

See, A Private Little War is the poster child for the episode that can be read not only as pro-US involvement in the Korean War but also pro-US involvement in Vietnam, no equivocating about it. Sure, Kirk and McCoy argue and realize the horror about to descend upon the whole planet, and both they and we realize that right away, not later at the icebox. But, it's not the Federation's fault; it's the Klingons'!

The TOS episode's premise of how the Cold War operated in the mid-20th century is shockingly naive, to be sure. This is why many fans don't like the episode, after all. But that doesn't change what the episode is. Also, regardless of whether the relationship was based on a misguided notion of how the Cold War played out, it's still possible for the episode to make sense in the context of the imaginary relationship between the Federation and the Klingons, in a way that doesn't really fairly apply to 20th century real world history.

 

To be fair, however, "Too Short a Season" also provided a rationale for the seeming "necessity" of Jameson's actions: there was no way around giving Karnas what he wanted in the initial instance to save the lives of Federation hostages, and since Jameson could not plausibly either leave those people to die or consign Karnas' enemies to death at his hands, he took the "Private Little War" route.

This rationale is a bit thinner, dirtier and more questionable than the classic balance-of-power dilemma set up for Kirk in the TOS episode, and I think is calibrated to be that way in order to better sell the theme of sin and redemption and to avoid it seeming too obviously a critique of the Vietnam War analogy of the original episode.

 

You could say that TSAS played like an updating of APLW, with the twist that, instead of coming out in favor of Vietnam, it critiqued Iran-Contra.

 

Yeah, that sounds about right.

 

Not really, considering that Karnas emerged as an ALLY of the Federation in the end. In that sense he's basically an ascendant Tyree, finally having defeated the Klingon-backed faction and achieved hegemony of his little planet. Indeed, in the very beginning of the episode, Picard describes Karnass as "instrumental in the planet's unification and peace." IOW, as far as the establishing premise, Karnas is supposed to be the GOOD GUY.

"A Private Little War" only works as a commentary on Vietnam if you take the Klingons as a race of one-dimensional mustache-twirling mooks: "Proxy war is unfortunate, but neccesary." Too Short a Season turns that on its head by making the identity of those factions totally irrelevant: the factions are basically interchangeable, and they're killing each other with the exact same weapons. It doesn't matter who wins; millions were slaughtered in the process, and the man who sold the weapons has some blame in the outcome.

You couldn't have Karnas as, say, a Klingon with Jameson arming his enemies; that would lead back to the "evil mustache twirling mooks" and then Karnas is just being a Klingon bastard. You couldn't play it as a straight "Tyree" either, because Karnas would have no reason to seek revenge and the episode would be dead on arrival. Whoever Jameson gave weapons to, the episode would get bogged down in the moral calculus of "Why did you chose that faction? Maybe it wasn't such a good idea, maybe you should have chosen the other one..." Which undermines the point of the episode: You shouldn't have supported anyone at all.

So in Too Short a Season, the logic of proxy war is entirely besides the point and is neatly sidestepped, focusing instead on Jameson's complicity: it doesn't matter who he gave the weapons to, because the people he gave them to committed atrocities by the megaton.