I didn't think of this before, but I suppose when you narrow it down to "good guys" and "bad guys", the best way to telegraph "rebel" is to give your hero character a criminal record. What else could the writers do?
I didn't think of this before, but I suppose when you narrow it down to "good guys" and "bad guys", the best way to telegraph "rebel" is to give your hero character a criminal record. What else could the writers do?
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To which I added:
Essentially, it's been done (too) often.
To which I added:
Essentially, it's been done (too) often.
Fun fact, in William Shatner's Star Trek Academy: Collision Course (originally pitched to CBS as a series back in the early noughties), Kirk has the option of Academy or prison after stealing a police car and going joyriding.
The prison-to-Starfleet pipeline has always been a thing, then?
Likely based on the fact that in the US, for certain offenses military service can be done as substitution for prison time.
Given that in the future, penal systems have been reformed (more focus on rehab, new sentence techniques, etc.), I wonder how many people might prefer prison. There's still the varying degrees of stigma from being an ex-con, of course, depending on where you live/work/travel.
Not so much (if at all) anymore but it was extremely common at one point.
I can't confirm or deny that is how my father ended up in the service in lieu of finishing high school.
Federation society does seem to have a low opinion of criminals in general. Just look at the disdain Commander Cavit and Voyager's human doctor showed to Tom in Caretaker.
I suppose crews of smaller ships apprehend a lot of career criminals and rarely get to see the rehab success stories.
It wasn't that Tom was a criminal that Cavit and the original CMO of Voyager took issue with. It was WHY he was booted out of Starfleet. (It's basically why Ro was not liked by any of the officers of the Enterprise when she was assigned to that initial mission with them in "Ensign Ro". It's also why Picard made a point of asking for Ensign Sito Jaxa to be assigned to the Enterprise after she graduated... he wanted to make sure she would get a fair chance.)
Honestly? I can't fault any of those people for feeling like they did about someone in Starfleet who either got other officers killed for not following orders or betraying Starfleet. It would feel especially insulting for those who REALLY love and believe in Starfleet and its organization.
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My father was hardly a hyper gung-ho army guy—reservist, left at captain (years before I was born), had a sense of humor about it, found the experience of being in the army more notable than anything he did, but there were definitely times watching Trek where he’d get upset at something unprofessional or un-officer-like.
I think the prison thing can be done well (and in ways that aren’t cliché, see Andor) but I think it’s often a storytelling shortcut—you establish something about them quickly and obviously enough that you don’t have to spend time on it and can get to the plot. Of course I think that a lot of the fun of television is getting to know the characters better over time. This can involve prison time—again see Andor, with his time in juvie forming part of the larger puzzle of his personality and elaborated on in bits-and-pieces over the course of the first season.
I think the way it’s treated in Trek, though, is in the “quickly establish the character so we can get it out of the way” version. I think the only time it really works for me is in “Ensign Ro,” where there’s limited time and the story immediately gets to work on her character a bunch of levels so we see how the character might have ended up in prison and how it doesn’t define them.
Paris is a case where it’s “get the archetype out of the way so we can do a bunch of stuff,” and Paris’s past in prison doesn’t often end up relevant past the pilot (he grows but it’s mostly a case of McNeil and the writers settling into the personality, not growth).
I think Burnham was hurt by this—it would have been better, I think, for us to have gotten to know her over time and for her initial encounter with the Discovery crew not to be defined by her mutineer/prisoner status (and this was compounded by the fact that we saw Burnham’s past rather than getting to learn it along with the character, so the audience also comes to Discovery with its own pre-judgments).
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