I recently saw a couple of interesting commentaries on Star Trek, and it got me thinking about Discovery from another angle. Maybe it could do with a bit more of the Victorian explorer attitude that inspired some elements of The Original Series. Kirk was a cunning commander and enlightened patriot, admired by his crew. Like Hornblower or Aubrey he outsmarts opponents and is utterly loyal to his civilization's ideals. Lower decks is good and all, but maybe Burnham needs to be someone who actually commands, for the show to feel like it is really about a ship on the frontier, in competition with other empires?
A BBC documentary on science fiction from a few years ago compared Star Trek to Victorian high seas adventure, and revisited Nicholas Meyer's famous comments on it's links with Horatio Hornblower. The argument was that fundamentally, Kirk was Victorian hero on a 'civilizing mission', citing his speech to the natives of Organia about providing "hospitals, schools, infrastructure, farming technology, you can feed ten where you could feed one before". The mission was updated from the Victorian agenda, to the more universally acceptable standards of human rights, freedom of thought, democracy and progressivism.
I recently saw a clip in which British national-treasure Stephen Fry explained that he used Star Trek in an academic thesis. He showed how Kirk, Spock and McCoy adhered to the classical idea of emotion (McCoy), intellect (Spock), and synthesis of the two (Kirk). But more interesting than this now widely accepted idea, was when he took this reading further, arguing that many episodes actually involve this playing out on a planetary scale, with Kirk encountering a civilization in which one force or the other had been taken to an extreme (i.e. a computer ruling them with rational absolutism, or an anarchy being ruled by barbaric fears); with Kirk restoring balance between Apollonian and Dionysian.
But all this might require something that current TV is very wary of; acceptance of interference in other cultures, or acceptance that different social systems might be in competition, and that there might be an ethical case for favouring one culture over another. What do you think? Is this angle too controversial? Or is that an essential conceit of TOS that DSC could rediscover?
Is some kind of evangelistic Star Trek perhaps appropriate when universal human rights and freedom of conscious are big issues around the world?
A BBC documentary on science fiction from a few years ago compared Star Trek to Victorian high seas adventure, and revisited Nicholas Meyer's famous comments on it's links with Horatio Hornblower. The argument was that fundamentally, Kirk was Victorian hero on a 'civilizing mission', citing his speech to the natives of Organia about providing "hospitals, schools, infrastructure, farming technology, you can feed ten where you could feed one before". The mission was updated from the Victorian agenda, to the more universally acceptable standards of human rights, freedom of thought, democracy and progressivism.
I recently saw a clip in which British national-treasure Stephen Fry explained that he used Star Trek in an academic thesis. He showed how Kirk, Spock and McCoy adhered to the classical idea of emotion (McCoy), intellect (Spock), and synthesis of the two (Kirk). But more interesting than this now widely accepted idea, was when he took this reading further, arguing that many episodes actually involve this playing out on a planetary scale, with Kirk encountering a civilization in which one force or the other had been taken to an extreme (i.e. a computer ruling them with rational absolutism, or an anarchy being ruled by barbaric fears); with Kirk restoring balance between Apollonian and Dionysian.
But all this might require something that current TV is very wary of; acceptance of interference in other cultures, or acceptance that different social systems might be in competition, and that there might be an ethical case for favouring one culture over another. What do you think? Is this angle too controversial? Or is that an essential conceit of TOS that DSC could rediscover?
Is some kind of evangelistic Star Trek perhaps appropriate when universal human rights and freedom of conscious are big issues around the world?
