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Is Enterprise the most US-centric Trek series?

Ragitsu said:
Ahhhh. Much better.
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Ragitsu said:
Turning those margins into canyons.
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Not at all.

"Amok Time" portrays Vulcans as arrogant, duplicitous, emotionally-driven and dishonest. Sturgeon was an extraordinarily good writer, and he understood that people hold out impossibly idealized visions of what their cultures are like, based on their ideals.

Sturgeon dug the canyon, taking a line from "Balance of Terror" in which Spock describes Vulcans of the past, and seeing in it the seeds of their hypocrisy - "This is want Vulcans want and hope to be, at their best, not what they always are."
 
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Then again, at the end of the day, Star Trek is supposed to an optimistic franchise. I got the sense that ENT's Vulcans were the Space English to the US-themed explorers from Earth: someone to rebel against.
 
Over time, the Trek producers painted themselves into a corner with their prehistory, one that mattered little when said history was just a matter of the occasional "Back in the days..." reference, but a great deal once they began dramatizing some of those events.

Again, it tracks back to "Balance of Terror," as a surprising amount of Trek continuity does.

In the aforementioned speech about the Romulans, Spock indicated that Vulcans had been in space for possibly thousands, certainly many hundreds of years - their "early colonizing period."

And then, the writers of First Contact exacerbated that by making the Vulcans the first human encounter with extraterrestrial beings.

Which meant that when we first ventured into space it was not a mysterious, unexplored territory at all. We had guides from the beginning.

Which contradicted the essential Trek-ish premise of humankind venturing out into a frontier, exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life, yada yada.

So...the creators of Enterprise had to justify the fact that the Vulcans were of little help to us. And they attacked it from two angles:

  1. The Vulcans "aren't explorers" - they just lack the curiosity, or they're too cautious or whatever. There were many, many reachable places they hadn't been; and
  2. The Vulcans are dicks, and don't want to help us, don't want to provide information to us.
 
Ragitsu said:
Then again, at the end of the day, Star Trek is supposed to an optimistic franchise. I got the sense that ENT's Vulcans were the Space English to the US-themed explorers from Earth: someone to rebel against.
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Not sure how culture/political conflict between various future Federation members somehow negates the overall optimism of the franchise. That was baked in by season two of TOS in Journey To Babel where we see arguments and factionalism at a meeting of Federation representatives. The Federation membership is not lockstep in their opinions, attitudes and actions. JTB also continues the trend from Amok Time of showing that Vulcans can be dicks.

Not seeing too many parallels between American-British relations in colonial times and Human-Vulcan relations in Enterprise. Earth isn't a Vulcan colony and humans aren't a cultural off shoot of Vulcans. Humans never rebelled against unjust Vulcan laws. Bitched and moaned a little though. If I was going for an analogy, I'd liken it to America and Europe post WWII. They are there to help but certain factions chafe at their presence.
 
Ragitsu said:
Enterprise treated Vulcans poorly.
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Strongly disagree. ENT's depiction of Vulcans as a hegemonic neocolonialist power makes perfect sense and embodies the idea that the Federation would represent a synthesis of different cultural values -- combining some Vulcan values but not others, some Human values but not others, some Andorian values, but not others, etc. -- rather than the domination of Human culture over alien cultures.


Nerys Myk said:
Ragitsu said:
Then again, at the end of the day, Star Trek is supposed to an optimistic franchise. I got the sense that ENT's Vulcans were the Space English to the US-themed explorers from Earth: someone to rebel against.
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Not seeing too many parallels between American-British relations in colonial times and Human-Vulcan relations in Enterprise. Earth isn't a Vulcan colony and humans aren't a cultural off shoot of Vulcans.
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Exactly. Really, I would compare the relationship between Vulcan and Earth in ENT more to the relationship between the various European powers and the nations they colonized on the eve of decolonization, or to the present day relationship between the U.S. and its client states in Latin America today.

Go back and watch "Broken Bow" -- one thing you'll notice right away is Vulcan's complete lack of respect for United Earth's sovereignty. They try to steamroll over United Earth authorities when an alien vessel violates U.E. space, crashes into U.E. territory, and destroys the farm of a U.E. citizen. They don't allow U.E. authorities to participate in the investigation, they don't let U.E. authorities take any sort of leading roll, and they don't even share all their sensor data. They then try to take custody of the alien without U.E. government permission, and they try to use the incident as an excuse to prevent the launch of United Earth's first starship capable of travel speeds comparable to their own.

Or check out "Shadows of P'Jem." There's a civil war on Coridan -- it's not clear which side has any real democratic legitimacy. But instead of following any sort of "noninterference directive" to respect Cordianite sovereignty and let them hash out their own internal conflict, Vulcan actively takes sides and props up the Coridanite government in return for dilithium supplies. It's textbook neocolonialism -- the U.S. does the same thing to this day with the Saudis.
 
Nerys Myk said:
TNG was pretty American heavy. Riker, both Crushers, LaForge and Yar came off as pretty American. Even Worf spoke with an American accent, even though he was raised by Russians in Russia (partially)
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Ragitsu said:
I feel as though Trip kinda overpowers all of them in terms of sheer United States flavor. (Besides which, Will Riker is Canadian :cool:.)
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Ragitsu said:
In all fairness, Riker is actually Alaskan; that was a bit of TNG-fan humor. Does that help?
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The Wormhole said:
Sam Lavelle has a Canadian grandfather.
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A lot of those political lines were supposed to have been erased by the 24th century. The fact that TNG still draws a distinction between Alaska and Canada already makes it American-centric .
 
Silvercrest said:
A lot of those political lines were supposed to have been erased by the 24th century. The fact that TNG still draws a distinction between Alaska and Canada already makes it American-centric .
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It would make sense. The former was never part of the latter. We don't know really what the divisions are on Earth, exactly, even during ENT. There seems to have recently been a UK since Reed had once held ambitions of being in the Royal Navy. But is there still a United States, and is Alaska part of it? I don't think that was ever answered anyway.
 
Agreed to all. It just strikes me as a strange distinction to still have to make after 400 years, like none of the political lines have ever moved. Do you imagine that 24th-century Puerto Rico is still a U.S. territory?

Though as you say, none of those references say Alaska is still part of the US. Come to think of it, it'd make a lot of sense for Alaskans to distinguish themselves from Canadians if 24th-C Alaska was its own country.
 
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