Is Enterprise the most US-centric Trek series?
- Thread starter Ragitsu
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It also just makes no sense.
No matter how destructive ww3 was, it only killed a fraction of the population. Numbers I've seen from Trek wouldn't even kill off all of China.
While I detest any real attempt to hash out the pre-tos era - ent included - i'm glad they didn't hash out ww3 for the show - it just doesn't make any sense even with the limited info we got.
United Earth's 'first' (really, is it really the first, whatever...) exploratory cruiser should feel like, a United Earth. Mayweather could easily had been African, maybe Ghanaian or so; for example, Sato Japanese-Brazilian, gods, I would happily remove Phlox for a Russian or so.... Tucker could had been, say, Turkish. I was going to muse Indian but that felt like a bad stereotype kneejerk to me.
They aren’t considering cancer rates due to the exchange, war related diseases, famine, and post atomic horror justice system in the immediate post war setting. And that the war's destruction is intended to be at minimum WWII x5, which would amplify all of the above. And China's one child policy (I think its a two child policy now) impacting recovery.
Its why both numbers cited - 600M by Riker and Burnham, and 2B by Pike - are correct. One is about the immediate conflict itself. And the other is about the post war effects. The latter would affect China's population significantly.
Still doesn't make the idea that Asia in particular was genocided any more plausible in-universe, or any less racist from a metatextual POV.
I am not sure what racist about it.
US/European born Asians exist in Star Trek (Hikaru Sulu, Harry Kim, Julian Bashir and his family, that family in Into Darkness), and Asian states such as Japan and Malaysia still exist. And in the unused Star Trek: The Beginning script, even the Eastern Coalition was intended to survive WWIII and still exist in the late 2150s and play a role in the war effort against the Romulan Star Empire, which is huge considering that “very few governments were left”. I do not think there is an intention to be racist. In fact, in FC, they never even said that the ECON were the aggressors in WWIII at all. Just that Zefram Cochrane and Lily thought it was the ECON attacking the warp complex, thus suggesting that the US was familiar with ECON attacks.
If you are trying to understand why a populous region in Asia suffered and another populous region in Africa or Latin America did not…we do not know enough of that period to understand what happened, or to presume that Africa and Latin America did not suffer also. While we see many Black characters in Star Trek, only Uhura and La Forge are billed as being from Africa, and East Africa in particular. Rios is the first person born in Latin America we have met. Hoshi Sato only lived in Brazil, she was not from there (thought her children might be born there), and something clearly happened for Panama to become a part of Venezuela. We do know that the 1990s Eugenics Wars already imply that it was Asian cities bombed out of existence, since it never reached North America. That is the lore, established in ’66 and re-established in ‘96. Asia was already, presumably, not in great shape before WWIII in the Star Trek universe. And now from SNW, the breakdown of the political and social order that started in the US with the Second Civil War metastasized to encompass the globe.
Next, clearly the Eastern Coalition was not, as TOS would put it, as an efficient state as Nazi Germany (the most efficient state in the history of the world as Kirk put it). The Eastern Coalition population suffered for the ECON not being as efficient administrators and managers and were not able to turn their fortunes around like Germany did in the 1930s. Why has never been explained and I do not ever expect it to be explained. It does not seem all that important to Star Trek.
And finally, even TAS said that there were space arks used in the early days of colonization; why wouldn’t some of those space arks come from Asia and make their way towards the Alpha Quadrant? ENT did not do the greatest job in exploring early human colonization, peaking at Terra Nova and a couple of space boomer stories. The show never once gives the NX-01 or even an alien ship an encounter a British or Russian sleeper ship, which were established to have existed in “Up The Long Ladder” in TNG.
You can say that the political and social backstory of Star Trek is poorly explained. But I do not see the racism.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if Star Trek is supposed to be an aspirational vision of the future, then depicting it as a future in which Asians have been genocided is racist, because the effect is to associate the genociding of an entire set of nations with an aspirational future. The only way a future in which Asia has been genocided is a positive future is if you don't value the lives of Asian people as much as others.
Furthermore, if real-life racism is what led to a lack of representation of marginalized cultures in earlier productions -- why would you want to rationalize that lack of representation and therefore reinforce that marginalization? The anti-racist response is to increase representation, not rationalize a lack of representation.
Yes. Thank God, the idea that Asia was disproportionately depopulated by World War III is not canon and is merely fan speculation.
Intent does not equal impact. Something can be unintentionally racist.
Yes. In fact, we do not canonically know what the Eastern Coalition is, whether it existed during WW3 or after, or whether it had anything whatsoever to do with Asia.
(I doubt it would be an Asian organization. As far as I know, that nomenclature is only applied to Asian nations by Europe and its settler-colonial offshoots.)
What on Earth are you talking about?
Nothing canonical ever established that the Eugenics Wars never reached North America. Spock's line in "Space Seed" is, "Your Earth was on the verge of a dark ages. Whole populations were being bombed out of existence." He never identifies those populations as Asian.
... All of that is just you speculating on the basis of nothing. Again, we have no idea what the Eastern Coalition was, other than that it was some kind of organization that Lily feared might have been responsible for the Borg attack on Bozeman. For all we know, the Eastern Coalition might have been an alliance of former U.S. states on the East Coast that formed after the Second Civil War. Or it could be a million other things. We have no idea.
The racism that has actually happened is in Star Trek not giving proportionate representation to marginalized peoples. The metatextual idea to try to rationalize that practice with an in-universe explanation would be even more racist but has thankfully never actually been done by actual Star Trek productions.
The anti-racist response to prior ST's lack of Asian representation is not to rationalize it. It is to increase Asian representation in modern productions.
Well, I can't remember too many Europeans, Australians, or New Zealanders appearing in most Star Trek series either. Not saying there weren't any (Picard is a famous example), but in far lower numbers than their populations would suggest. (Europe's population is significantly larger than that of the US and Canada together). So I'm not sure that by not showing many Asians (or other groups), Star Trek is racist rather than US-centric (unless perhaps if you think that the amount of 'Asians' (or other groups) shown should be an accurate reflection of the relative numbers of people of Asian (or corresponding other) heritage living in the US).
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In ENT 2x26 'The Expanse', Archer says that the Xindi weapon "cut a swath from Florida to Venezuela" then the camera pans to an overhead shot of the Enterprise orbiting the damaged region which clearly shows a straight path running from central Florida, through Cuba, and through Panama before ending in the Pacific, leaving the following possibilities:
-- At some point in the future, Venezuela expanded and annexed parts of Colombia and Panama, or the three united and became known as Venezuela.
-- The Xindi weapon made one or more sharp, almost 90° deviations from its path that we didn't see onscreen (and apparently left no visible scorch marks) to take out more populated areas like Caracas, Venezuela, which may explain its seven million+ death toll despite mostly being shown to pass through farmland, swamps, jungles, and Trip's sister's patio. Though one wonders why Venezuela in particular when the beam could have diverted to hit Disneyworld (maybe it thought Epcot was a distant relative) / Orlando, Tampa, Miami, Havana, Kingston...
-- Archer flunked geography in school because he was too busy playing water polo.
-- The person who relayed the damage assessment to the Enterprise was the great-grandparent of the Reliant crewman who couldn't tell the difference between Ceti Alpha V and Ceti Alpha VI.
-- There's a discrepancy between the earlier scripted dialogue and the later visual effects, and we shouldn't worry too much about trying to shoehorn an explanation for this into canon.
Clearly, he was being pestered by his roommate...Berlinghoff Rasmussen.
Hm, what certainly jumped to my eye was that after the Trek series' since TOS had become more and more "inclusive" from a male, "white" American perspective (TNG had a cultured European in the lead, DS9 a black man, VOY a woman -- all of them characters that might appear culturally "alien" in varying degrees to more traditional white Americans), ENT apparently attempted to go back to "the good old times" with male white Americans dominating the show (arguably, the Archer/Trip friendship was the center of the show). There are only two females among the seven main characters, and the show puts quite some focus on showing how Archer and Trip feel T'Pol is culturally alien to them and how they handle this.
It was obviously an attempt to revive the TOS character dynamics, which is not a bad thing, but it had the effect that this approach felt a bit like a return to the 50s or 60s and their white male hero roles.
A friend of mine happened to say "oh, that's Star Trek for Republicans", when ENT became a topic (he didn't necessarily mean this in a derogatory way), and I immediately understood what he meant. Especially in season 3, it's obvious how much the show was influenced by the post-9/11 climate in the US (it kind of attempted to be "the 24 of the Star Trek universe").
So yes, I think the show does have a stronger American angle than, say, TNG.
It was obviously an attempt to revive the TOS character dynamics, which is not a bad thing, but it had the effect that this approach felt a bit like a return to the 50s or 60s and their white male hero roles.
A friend of mine happened to say "oh, that's Star Trek for Republicans", when ENT became a topic (he didn't necessarily mean this in a derogatory way), and I immediately understood what he meant. Especially in season 3, it's obvious how much the show was influenced by the post-9/11 climate in the US (it kind of attempted to be "the 24 of the Star Trek universe").
So yes, I think the show does have a stronger American angle than, say, TNG.
Which I have no problem with, as I watch a lot of Asian media these days anyways.
But, the lore of the last 6 decades has created issues. And its intent needs to be understood.
Nothing wrong with wanting to go back. But it needed to be modernized. That no one could even reference an off screen male enlisted crewmember having a husband, and that the two people of colour in the main cast got marginalized and had limited development while yet were still Americanized as Archer and Trip - despite their characters not actually hailing from America! - is problematic.
Even 24 eventually added an anti-torture stance near the end of the show's run because the world had changed.
We still haven't seen anyone in the new series condemn Archer for using torture. Just that Archer is one of Starfleet's most decorated captains and has a spacedock named after him.
Not saying i want Archer cancelled (though that might make for an interesting episode), but Starfleet seems to have rationalized that what Archer did was okay. Or he was rehabilitated like Dubya is today.
Maybe Archer as a character wasn't criticized or even "canceled" on screen, but I was very glad when this "24 in space" phase ended in season 4. In the first season 4 episode after the season opener, where Archer goes climbing with his female friend, it was shown that he got self-doubts and perhaps something like a bad conscience because of the things he had done -- that kind of reconciled me with ENT, after season 3 had really alienated me.
I'm not sure why this is necessarily "problematic". Imo, people put way too much focus on skin color or sexual orientation of depicted characters these days, but way too few on writing good characters and stories. Resulting in a huge wave of inferior, badly written pop culture whose only aim seems to be to be "inclusive" (or, even worse, the production companies push this angle in full knowledge it will cause controversy, which is free advertizement for their products).
If a straight white male character is well written, then even people of color or queers will be able to identify with this character or at least like him, like they did when TOS was the only Star Trek around (remember how K/S fan fic came up in the 70s? Or when Spock was a good point of identification for "outsiders" of all kinds).
And likewise, a poorly written poc or queer character will not inspire or include anyone, when this character is unrelatable, unconvincing or annoying.
But alas, I don't want to turn this into a political controversy. All I'm saying is, I think writing by far has a greater impact than external looks of the cast. Just like ideas make a much larger part of our "identities" than external looks do, imho.
I appreciate representative casting, when the actors are good and their roles well written, but I don't think it "harms" anybody when a series neglects diverse casting unintentionally. It just happens to be the case that whites and straight people still are a majority in the USA, so it's no surprise when they are overrepresented on tv shows. Also, I don't think it's a hostile gesture towards minorities, when a show fails to represent their skin color or sexual orientation (doesn't mean they don't represent these people, either, because the identity of people is made of much more than skin color and sexual orientation. When you're a math nerd, the depiction of a math nerd might represent you, regardless of your or the character's skin color, for example. Or when a character is a loving father, fathers among the viewers might identify with this character, regardless of skin color).
In the end, we're all humans and there are more things we all have in common, regardless of skin color or sexual orientation, than there are traits that divide us. So it doesn't exclusively depend on skin color or sexual orientation, if you like a fictional character or even identify with that character.
Sure it's nice when producers of tv shows are aware that there are interesting characters beyond the mainstream, and when they take care that people beyond the mainstream enjoy their shows, but I don't think it harms anybody when they don't. Nobody is forced to watch a show, when it doesn't give him much.