Was I the only one who disliked Far Beyond the Stars?

I never watched the Buffy series, but I did see the original film when it was in theaters. But how could Buffy the Series predate this concept over DS9, when DS9 ended before Buffy did?

 

Buffy the vampire slayer had an episode in which all that fantasy world was established as being the hallucination of a Buffy committed to the mental asylum - the ending of the episode establishing this unambiguously.

I didn't check whether the DS9 episode or the Buffy one aired first. I gave Buffy precedence because the series established its non-reality unambiguously, while DS9 didn't.

 

That was "Normal Again", a Buffy sixth season episode made four years after "Far Beyond the Stars".

 

Where are you that lacks even the slightest racial or social injustice, past or present?

 

I did check the dates before posting, and it took less than 2 minutes.

 

There was an episode of the British series UFO from the early 1970's that got there before DS9 or Buffy.

Ed Striker found himself on a TV show about a fictional alien defense organization.

And that likely wasn't the first.

 

I believe that characters stepping in and out of pictures and films was a paradign established by Méliès.

 

Where I am lacked - and lacks - the particular brand of racial/social injustice (black discrimination) this episode harps on about.

How nice for you.

Interesting information about cultural history relating to the reality/dream dichotomy, T'Girl. Even the ancient chinese knew about it, though, so - definitely not the first.

 

Considering Americans are capable, more or less, of relating to things like the Holocaust, which took place on a different continent, I don't know why you can't do the same.

 

I can relate to it, Bad Thoughts - but relating to something and being in the centre of it are not the same thing.
Hence: For someone outside USA's historical injustices and current guilt trips over them, 'Far beyond the stars' doesn't have even half the punch it is obviously intended to have.

Really, that's not rocket science, Bad Thoughts.

 

Yeah, it really is. It's also too bad you couldn't afford to put in the same amount of effort before making the claim that Buffy was there first. But then you wouldn't have had the opportunity to use a veiled insult as a snappy comeback.

 

There are elements of the episode that are specific to the African-American experience.

The following are NOT among them:

• Being denied professional advancement for belonging to an "inferior" social or racial group.
• Being forced to hide one's identity because of membership to a social or racial group.
• Having no positive images of one's social or racial group available to them because they would not be broadly accepted.
• Being distrusted by law enforcement because of membership to a racial or social group.

All the most poignant sections of the episode could have been recast in terms of another group that experience discrimination and repression. This point was even made in the episode by the fact that neither Benny nor Kay Eaton were allowed to show up for the staff photo.

So I don't buy that cultural differences might explain why you don't feel the episode had the impact it would for an American. Maybe Jazz, Baseball or Harlem nightlife don't grab you. Those, however, were not the elements from which the emotional foundations of the episode were made.

 

An insult? Is that what you think my reply was?
Melakon, unlike you, I don't really care about this whole 'which was first with unambiguous non-reality' argument enough to bother coming up with insults - veiled or otherwise.

PS:
For your peace of mind: when I wrote the initial post, Buffy was the first series I thought of off the top of my head which unambiguously established its own non-reality (unlike the ambiguity from DS9).
Of course, all of these addendums should be implicit since quite a few posts ago.

 

It's not that I took it personally (the phrase you used is that old), it's that you brought up the Buffy issue in the first place without verifying the claim. Then you treat it as "so what".

 

Bad thoughts, you seem heavily emotionally invested in 'Far beyond the stars'.
Since I repeatedly explained to you my reaction the episode and seeing how you can't seem able to 'buy' that people may not be as involved with black discrimination as the people affected by it (or their descendants) - preferring instead to list discriminations bleached from the specific flavour of the episode (a flavour heavily emphasized) and affirming it's the same thing -, continuing this discussion serves little purpose.

 

Do what you will. However, it was your claim that cultural differences (not being in the US) changed the impact significantly. Of course, you could answer by saying where you are, and prove that it is a meaningful claim.

ETA: there is not one point that I claimed that you are required to like or approve of the episode.

 

I hope Bad thoughts corrects me here if I'm wrong, but I think his point is the episode deals with a lot more besides the characters being black. The issues could be applied to any racial or cultural group that is systematically persecuted or denied rights of other citizens. Star Trek often presented its moral statements in ways that are obvious on the surface, but with deeper meanings.

 

Bad thoughts - black discrimination was not a world-wide phenomenon.
As for where I am - at star's end, of course.

Melakon, as I already said to Bad thoughts, clinical categories of discrimination are quite different from the heavily-flavoured, specific presentations of discrimination in the episode.

 

It has potential to speak to many groups. Being a woman, Eaton shared at least some of the distrust that Benny had as a professional. On the other hand, their lives might differ in how they experience violence (if at all). A woman in the 1950s might not fear being beaten by the police, but how would she be treated by the police if she wanted to report that she was raped by an acquaintance, perhaps even her husband?

Where the episode does focus on a particularly African-American view is how it perceives the future. The whole thing about getting the story published was to assert that there was a hopeful future available to them. I hate to use the phrase, because it is very current, but the story was audacious because it offered hope. If a Jew and Jewish social movements were at the center of the story, it would necessarily focus on justice. Women, equality. Of course, all these movements share interest in equality, hope and justice, but those qualities are emphasized differently by each one. In other context, we might focused on autonomy or traditionalism. Unfortunately the script did not emphasize "hope" as much as it should. It's not something that Benny emphasized, but he responded to it from other people: Jimmy's lack of hope and the discussion about who might be having the dream.



ETA: For proper disclosure, I am Jewish with some Mexican heritage.

Finally, all forms of discrimination are comparable.

ETA2: I forgot that Herb Rossoff, who is at least coded to be a Jew, may be either a communist or socialist, suggesting a different way of looking at the future.

 

Not when it comes to the emotional punch, Bad thoughts.

PS:
Herb Rossoff denied being a communist.