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"Field of fire" and others

Trekker09

Trekker09

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Captain
In this episode, Ezri consults former host Joran and investigates the murder of several apparently random victims on the ship….the Vulcan who went berserk was targeting people who had photos of themselves laughing.
In the wake of recent news, I’ve been wondering if there is a DS9 or any Star Trek episode that deals obliquely with the mass shootings at schools, stores, theatres, etc that have become horrifically common in the US…. someone having a bad day, grabbing an assault rifle and shooting strangers in a public place. TOS “Spectre of the gun” sort of acknowledges how Western culture glorified gun fights …. TNG “Fistful of Datas” is more lighthearted but does romanticize gun violence. Those are both about staged confrontations. I’m not familiar with DISC or PIC so maybe there are examples of the writers taking a stance.

Hopefully this isn't too political....
 
Field of Fire is one of my least favorite episodes just because of how badly it uses crime show cliches. The logical jump from “Smiling pictures” to “The killer is Vulcan!” is one of the biggest facepalm moments in the franchise.

Star Trek doesn’t usually have the sort of villains who kill strictly out of emotional distress. Their killers usually either turn out to have some empathetic motive or else self interest. I guess The Darkness And The Light is just revenge/insanity.

I wouldn’t say Fistful of Datas glorifies gun violence especially compared to the Western genre. Considering it’s in a holodeck and Worf even lets them go at the end. Especially compared to how things go in Rio Bravo, the movie it’s based on.
 
I agree --it’s not a good episode, just the only one in DS9 I could think of about shooting strangers for no apparent reason. Mainly it exists to show an edgier side of Ezri, and there were already too many episodes about her. “Darkness and the light” - the resistance fighters were targeted, a particular group.

Trek themes have wrestled with many deadly social problems through the years - yet this distinctly American insanity doesn’t seem to be something they want to tackle, as far as I know.
 
Off the top of my head I can't think of any Trek episode that seems to be a direct allegory to gun violence and/or mass shootings. There's stuff like Odo being anti-gun and plot points like politically motivated terrorist attacks (“In the Hands of the Prophets” comes to mind with a school bombing and an attempted assassination), but nothing outright condemning guns or looking at the dangers of a society creating a situation where troubled outcasts and individuals become murderers. But I agree with you that it would be the kind of topic I'd love to see tackled on one of the newer shows.

EDIT: As for “Field of Fire”; it's not my favorite episode by any stretch, but I reckon it's less about a murder mystery and a homicidal Vulcan than about a message about accepting parts of your character or psyche you'd like to suppress. Ezri finds out that the thing she needs to solve this case is something she only has because of perceived bad influences within her. It's about self-acceptance, I believe. Or something like that. It has been a couple of months since my last rewatch. :lol:
 
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Strange, I actually enjoyed "Field of Fire". But, I didn't see much of a "mass shooter" allegory in it. It was about a serial killer, who killed one victim at a time, due to a serious mental illness. And also Ezri's inner demons, of course.
 
Oddish said:
I didn't see much of a "mass shooter" allegory in it.
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That was kind of my point. I thought maybe someone who had watched DISC and PIC would tell me yes, the writers have dealt with that issue in a particular episode, or no, they never have.

It would be interesting to see how the crew would resolve the situation if they came across it on another planet, since future earth supposedly would have no such crimes any more.
 
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One possible reason is that there's no potential scope for a mass shooting. Such a shooting requires two things: an armed shooter, and unarmed, unprotected victims. Most starships and space stations have armed security, and most officers have sidearms, seen in "Phantasms" (Worf confiscates Data's) or "Aquiel" (Geordi pulls his phaser out of a drawer and vaporizes the doggie blob). Guinan keeps a rifle behind her bar in "Night Terrors", and Neelix is able to acquire a phaser easily in "Fair Trade". And yes, Odo restricts weapons on the Promenade, but has armed guards.
 
Not an episode that I'm aware of.

There is a DS9 novel, "Fallen Heroes" that deals with the station being boarded by individuals looking for something and getting violent when they don't find it, and it's pretty dark and graphic by Trek novel standards. That's probably the closest thing to a mass shooting scenario in the franchise.
 
Interesting. I’m not eager to see a Trek episode or novel about a mass shooting. I’d just be curious as to how our Star Trek heroes dealt with it, on some hypothetical planet….not necessarily in DS9. And I’d like to think the Trek writers haven’t been forbidden to focus on certain issues. Hopefully they see US gun violence as an outrage, a devastating problem that might actually have a solution (like the ones described in the article), not as something inevitable we have to blindly accept.

Thanks for listening, I appreciate the responses.
 
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As Oddish pointed out, within the premises of most of the franchise properties it's hard to imagine how such a scenario would come about. You not only need an antagonist that wants to engage in such a thing, but you need Our Heroes' security technology to be unavailable for one reason or another.

"Power Play" thankfully wasn't a mass shooting scenario, but may be the closest the franchise ever came to such?

The A Time To... series, at least the later installments, certainly didn't shy away from reflecting allegorically on current events. Into Darkness... offered commentary on drone warfare. TUC was obviously a commentary on the end of the Cold War.

A more general thread about Trek novels that are allegorical might turn up some interesting results. I'm almost curious enough to start such a thread.
 
I'm not sure I follow that point. The promenade on DS9 is like a public space, where stuff like that could surely happen. Sure the “police office” isn't far away, but as we saw on the show there's plenty opportunity for people to engage in criminal behavior. Just in the first season alone we had a robbery, a school bombing, a terrorist attack and a deadly knife assault on the promenade. So I'm not sure why this wouldn't be an environment to tell a story about a mass shooter.

Plus, why would it have to happen on the station in the first place? Could be down on Bajor, or Earth or wherever. Point is, there's is nothing inherent in the premise of the show making it particularly difficult to tell such a story.
 
Because you not only need someone to want to be a shooter, but you need Our Heroes to be incapable of beaming them right into a holding cell or phasering them. Also, mass shootings take time.

Robbery's aren't an immediate crisis (usually).
A bombing isn't a mass-shooting. There was no way for Our Heroes to stop the bomb before it had detonated (unless they knew it was there to begin with).
Not sure which terrorist attack you're referring to?
A knife assault also isn't a mass-shooting.

I never said it would have to happen on the station. I said that the big issue is that future tech is generally shown to be advanced enough that it's a lot easier to stop a mass shooting than it is in the present day. Classrooms could be built with stronger doors and forcefields in case of emergencies, for instance. Hell, for all we know classrooms on Earth have automatic stun phasers that can be deployed in the event of a mass shooting event, and scanning for weapons is likely vastly improved over where things are currently.
 
DonIago said:
As Oddish pointed out, within the premises of most of the franchise properties it's hard to imagine how such a scenario would come about. You not only need an antagonist that wants to engage in such a thing, but you need Our Heroes' security technology to be unavailable for one reason or another.
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Which is exactly how Star Trek plays with its technology. Hell, even phasers are only as effective as the plot demands, with people being able to walk off a single hit at times. The transporter is a famous example because it could solve so many problems easily so it became "What is wrong with the transporter today."

Yes, security can be increased, but that doesn't make it impenetrable. Technology can still fail, and on Trek it usually does.
 
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DonIago said:
Because you not only need someone to want to be a shooter, but you need Our Heroes to be incapable of beaming them right into a holding cell or phasering them. Also, mass shootings take time.
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As @fireproof78 correctly points out, when did they ever use transporters or phasers to their full implied potentials on Trek? They are only ever used when the writers want them to be used in a situation, otherwise they usually find a way to disable them or just gloss over the fact that they would easily solve a particular problem.

I still don't see why they couldn't have a mass shooting-like event on one of the shows. It's a sci-fi show, I'm sure they'd find some sci-fi aspect to add to it.

DonIago said:
Robbery's aren't an immediate crisis (usually).
A bombing isn't a mass-shooting. There was no way for Our Heroes to stop the bomb before it had detonated (unless they knew it was there to begin with).
Not sure which terrorist attack you're referring to?
A knife assault also isn't a mass-shooting.
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I didn't try to claim any of these were equal to mass shootings. My point was just that plenty of criminal activity still happens on DS9, despite all the technology that could theoretically prevent them.

Hell, I can play that game, too: Why are there no sensors scanning for bomb material all the time? They scan for fire, phaser use and intruders, so why not for bombs?

DonIago said:
Not sure which terrorist attack you're referring to?
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Maybe “terrorist attack” was the incorrect term. I was referring to O'Brien's Bajoran colleague Neela, who tried to assassinate Vedek Bareil on his visit to the station in “In the Hands of the Prophets”.

DonIago said:
I never said it would have to happen on the station. I said that the big issue is that future tech is generally shown to be advanced enough that it's a lot easier to stop a mass shooting than it is in the present day.
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Easier perhaps. But the point of such a story would not be to see the assailant succeed, but to explore how their motivation came about, what societal problems led to them attempting the mass shooting etc.

DonIago said:
Classrooms could be built with stronger doors and forcefields in case of emergencies, for instance. Hell, for all we know classrooms on Earth have automatic stun phasers that can be deployed in the event of a mass shooting event, and scanning for weapons is likely vastly improved over where things are currently.
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Please don't take it the wrong way, but I think it's a little amusing that all the measures you can think up to prevent these shootings are more militarized schools, with automated firing devices, forcefields etc. But I guess it's kind of the American perspective.
 
That I was coming up with tech solutions to the problem doesn't mean I wouldn't prefer a non-tech solution.

I'm also not sure how to take your last sentence. "The American perspective"?
 
When Britain had a mass shooting in 1997, they immediately passed laws vastly curtailing gun ownership. Ditto with several other countries.

Since the NRA is the second most powerful political organization in the US, such efforts never go anywhere. Gun ownership is endemic to our culture. We're the only country with more firearms than citizens. Not saying that's good or bad (I'm a gun owner myself), just that it is what it is. Our perspective on guns is different from the one most common in other countries.
 
Michael said:
I still don't see why they couldn't have a mass shooting-like event on one of the shows. It's a sci-fi show, I'm sure they'd find some sci-fi aspect to add to it.
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Isn't this conversation then better placed in the forums of the current series? Mass shootings were far less part of public consciousness when DS9 aired. The period between shooting has halved since 2009, and Columbine, arguably still the most notorious mass shooting, happened in April 199, when the entire DS9 series was already in the can.
 
DonIago said:
That I was coming up with tech solutions to the problem doesn't mean I wouldn't prefer a non-tech solution.

I'm also not sure how to take your last sentence. "The American perspective"?
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It was just meant as a lighthearted observation, nothing more and nothing less. Most certainly no personal insult was intended. You are American, are you not? Going by your location field, I felt pretty safe to assume that you are.

And well, it's hard to sugar-coat it, but outside of your country, the US' handling of gun laws isn't seen as particularly sensible by many. Solutions to problems arising from liberal gun laws can usually summed up as “More guns!”. I'm not sure how your personal awareness is of these things, but believe me, metal detectors in schools are something I never ever saw anywhere but the US. Where I live something like that is seen as a laughably cynical measure. And that was what your technical solutions reminded me of. I'm sorry you felt attacked because of that.
 
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