I have to agree with the 'warp drive is destroying the fabric of space' episode.
Preachiest Trek Episode
- Thread starter roguephoenix
- Start date
"Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," "Day Of The Dove" or "The Cloud Minders." Choose one.
I think it would be that one where Riker falls in love with the genderless woman whose society rejects her right to live as a female. It was in your face "gays iz peepl 2" not that they aren't but jeez, why not just name the fucking episode "I love queers". It was overdone. Like Run Over Me With a Bulldozer overdone.
I thought it was ok, tho you'd think, if they're gonna be preachy they'd hire a male Soren.
I thought the terrorism episode had alot of peachy speeches, the bit with Data saying Irish Reunification was a result of a successful terrorism was....just....bad on so many levels.
I like this episode a lot, but it is very preachy. I did find it odd that they went so far out of the way to make a statement, but didn't cast a male in the role. They had said so much already, were they really afraid of crossing that line?
Ultimately it doesn't matter, the point got across, and I think it's a good episode regardless of message. Maybe having it be a female allowed people to relate to it better.
Bingo! This is the actual reason for having a female in the role. Being a gay man, I actually liked this episode. "It would have been too much for the Average Joe to handle if it had been a male actor," is the answer I received at the time.
Didn't that episode come after the one where Beverly falls in love with the male joined-Trill ambassador, who ends up receiving a woman as his/its next host? Although if I recall, the female host doesn't show up until the very end of the episode, with Riker hosting the symbiont for some time.
That would have at least sort of touched on gays, I suppose.
Oh it was still good, I just think they were gutless with the topic just like in Joined.
I think Sorens theraphy was a refrence to this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_therapy
Which would make it one of only two episodes that actually scared me
Wow... what an eye opener! I knew we've been hated, but this is downright creepy!
I don't think that's what he really said. He basically says that the Mintakans gave up on superstition and nonsense, and now his appearance revived it, making them think he is a god! There is nothing preachy about wanting that to be different, and our own history is filled with examples of religions involving barbarism, superstition, and crusades that he refers to. He never says that a belief in God or whatever is stupid.
I feel this is relevant since this reflects my view on the way religion is generally treated in Star Trek. An excerpt from Enterpriez:
"O god oh god?" Asked Phlegm, "I thought you humans didn't have religion anymore, that you evolved beyond it."
"No," replied Hawke, "That's just something we tell everyone else so we can feel smug and superior."
"O god oh god?" Asked Phlegm, "I thought you humans didn't have religion anymore, that you evolved beyond it."
"No," replied Hawke, "That's just something we tell everyone else so we can feel smug and superior."
Thank you!
I detest that episode for that very reason. Picard and their "superior Federation morals" are quite reprehensible in that episode. In fact, I consider Who Watches the Watchers and other scenes and episodes along the same "we know best" line to be morally far worse than anything "black-sheep-of-the-series" DS9 ever produced.
Well, that didn't make any sense.
Look at it from the 24th century perspective, might people 300 years from now not look on us worshiping a God the same way we look back on the flat earth people and those in the 16th century who believed in witches?
It may be presumptuous to portray the future that way, though I'd argue the trends in terms of religious belief are definitely pointing in that direction, all be it at a very slow pace, but Star Trek made a lot of presumptions about the future: that currency based economics would fall away with advent of new technology like the replicator, that current physicists are wrong about the light barrier, that the fermi paradox is wrong and theres millions of other species out there...
This really isn't much diffrent.
"A Private Little War" preaches a lot, with all that stuff about Cold War balance-of- power and so on. And then Kirk says the Pledge of Allegiance. Come on...
OOPS! I mean, I guess, that ALL the eps that dealt with Nato/Warsaw Pact issues seem like overkill these days.
What you need to understand is the context. These people saw him and suddenly think he is their god! That's a situation that needs defusing, and definitely falls into the category of superstition (which I hope you don't wholly attribute to religion because they are fairly different). Picard's lines seem to deal with that fairly well:
"Your own reports describe how
rational these people are.
Millennia ago, they abandoned all
belief in the supernatural. And
now you're asking me to sabotage
that achievement... send them
back into the Dark Ages of fear
and superstition.
No. We must undo the damage we've
caused."
First, I don't see anything preachy here. He implies that they had beliefs that they've found to later be irrational. Human history is full of instances like this regarding religion and superstition. He's saying that their culture has stopped believing in the supernatural, probably to the extent of things like magic, or praying to the sun, or prayers for rain. Our culture has stopped believing in that kind of supernatural, but some just replaced superstition with superstition. Some people really believe you can cast spells, read minds, that ghosts exist, or that creatures from the sky can cause massive flooding. But some of those things are nonsense and not rational at all.
In the context of Star Trek, perhaps this species came up with the Overseer concept due to other alien interference. We've already seen figures like Apollo make an appearance as an interfering alien, and a lot of faith questioned by the fact that primitive people could be highly influenced by technological tricks (Q, Ardra, etc.).
Let's think of the alternative of what Picard could've said here: "These heathens stopped believing in the supernatural, how dare they!" or "Everyone in the Federation is entitled to their beliefs!" That is a million times more preachy. Everyone gives flak to TNG for being a product of a PC era, but this is the one time they didn't bother, and that's a good thing. Picard had every right to set them straight, especially considering that he knew their Overseer was fake and that until they interfered, the Mintakans also thought it was fake.
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