These are the Voyages
- Thread starter mahler
- Start date
I am not aware of any weak episode in DS9's season 4.Was there ever a season of Trek that -was- uniformly high? I must have missed that one.
It might have been.I was going to say ENT season 5 is generally agreed to be its best season
"Of all the words of tongue and pen..."
I'm stealing both of these words, and using them every chance I get from now on!
Use them well!
I'm stealing both of these words, and using them every chance I get from now on!
Use them well!
The farce be with you!
I am not aware of any weak episode in DS9's season 4.Was there ever a season of Trek that -was- uniformly high? I must have missed that one.
Shattered Mirror and The Muse, maybe?
I am not aware of any weak episode in DS9's season 4.Was there ever a season of Trek that -was- uniformly high? I must have missed that one.
Shattered Mirror and The Muse, maybe?
The former is in my opinion the best MU story of the series (which makes it an OK episode)
and the latter may be the weaker of the season (there has to be one) but it still isn't that bad.
Fair point. I'd rank Crossover and (controversially) Resurrection ahead of Shattered Mirror, which is on par with Through the Looking Glass and stronger than The Emperor's New Cloak.
Although I think they only manage to avoid the problems with franchise lowlight episodes like Bound or Extinction by not being horribly sexist or racist. Which is a low bar. (And Shattered Mirror skirts the line in places.)
But, to be fair, neither episode is Let He Who Is Without Sin... or Profit and Lace.
That said, I don't think any show could produce 24+ hour-long episodes a year without a few stinkers. I kinda hope that if (or when) Star Trek comes back, it's with a ten to thirteen episode order.
It is sort of sexist though, by the way the T'Pol Character is treated in it.
It's very clearly - at least to me - a colonial and imperialist "lost race" fantasy in which our three infected leads "go native", which means prancing around like monkeys and talking with generic foreign accents. And they kidnap a white woman.
The third season has a pulpy sci-if vibe that generally works well, but that is a staggeringly out-of-touch and outdated genre throwback that feels like the kinda crap that was being published about so-called "primitives" and "savages" up until the fifties.
It's particularly idiotic to write a story where these morons would belong to the same people that designed the virus. I think it's the same kind of "logic" that purports that the packleds would be able to steal technology from anyone.
There's no actual colonialism or imperialism involved in the story (except perhaps "biological colonialism" by the extinct aliens). All the transformed actors were (and remained) white, and T'Pol is arguably not white, being a Vulcan. Also, it certainly never occurred to me that the embarrassing caperings of the "aliens" were related in any way to stereotypes of black people. I think the racism is only there if you really want it to be there.
One thing that struck me as absurd right off the bat about that episode is that they keep burning down the infected people on the planet and that's idiotic as well as unnecessarily cruel given that the planet is swarming with viruses. Unless you burn down the whole planet, they'll keep coming back as soon as the remains cool down. That kind of detail tells me that the writer had his head deeply up his ass when he wrote this. Plus why would the infected leave the planet to spread the disease elsewhere given that they have a built-in urge to STAY on the planet? For example, if the disease had reached Enterprise, the likely outcome would have been that they would all either crash land (given that the vessel isn't supposed to land, I think) or they would have beamed down the entire crew, assuming that the transformed morons would still know how to operate things, which is doubtful. At any rate, none of them woud have ever gotten to another planet like the guy in red allleged happened. This whole story stinks.
Well, doctors differ and patients die...
Hoshi was transformed, so not all transformed actors were white. But it doesn't matter. Just because minstrel shows featured white actors doesn't mean they're not racist; portrayals do not need to be literal to be questionable.
For example, the two infamously racist robots in Transformers II were not literally black, but that does not mean the portrayal was not horrendously offensive.
(Just like the fact that T'Pol is Vulcan does not mean that Jolene Blalock is not the only white woman in the primary cast.)
This was a story about a largely white crew of explorers who go to a world Reed literally describes as "tropical." They "go native", devolving into savages that can barely stand up straight and become a threat to the white woman on the team.
Just because nobody actually colonises the planet doesn't mean it's not a colonial stereotype. There is a clear and unquestioning line between Caliban and Friday through to Extinction. Except that Caliban and Friday were products of a very different time and featured in well-constructed works of art. Extinction was produced in 2003, and is terrible, racism aside.
If you don't see the racism in that execution, that's fine. But that doesn't mean that (a.) it's not there, or (b.) anybody who sees it is just seeing it because they want to. Trust me, I'd prefer Star Trek wasn't racist.
Indicted out of his own mouth!!!
Sorry, but if you think people acting "like monkeys" must, by definition, be racist to black people, that says something disturbing about your attitude to black people.
^ This might amuse you:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SingleBiomePlanet
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SingleBiomePlanet
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