Masks... why all the hate?

I think of it as a middle-of-the-road episode. It's not on the same level as the truly bad episodes like Imaginary Friend.

 

“Imaginary Friend,” “Suspicions” and “Aquiel” have the distinction of being the only TNG episodes I have seen only once.

Horrible, meandering, boring dreck.

At least “Masks” is dynamic. Hell, even “Shades of Gray” at least had an interesting premise and the flashbacks were to exciting scenes.

 

It’s too religious for a certain branch of fandom. That’s why. Boil ninety percent of the criticism levelled at it down, and that’s what you come to. Possibly because it is *very* new age mysticism stuff, and the ‘hard’ science is mostly anthropology. The same people that *really* don’t like masks also probably didn’t like the prophets in DS9, found Q annoying, and in later Trek light years, really hated the end of BSG.

 

It's amazing how people either love or hate Masks. I'm one of the ones who loved it. I love the episodes that explore alien archaeology, and especially, mysteries regarding vanished civilizations. Masks has a lot of the kind of stuff that turned me into a Trekker to begin with.

 

I don't hate the episode, it's not a skip episode for me.

It's just kind of silly, but without any major payoff. The way it transforms the ship just doesn't logically track, and that's okay if the episode is really cool in other ways, but it's not.

 

Not to me! I loved it! But I love mysteries with an element of the mysterious and strange. I actually liked some of the Troi episodes and more "soul" searching Data ones like Phantasms and Birthright.

 

It's like an anthropology student snuck into the writers room and convinced them that the entire enterprise crew should be eager to role-play and discuss myth and ritual. At one point Troi says "but you don't know anything about this ritual" and Picard shrugs and says "well it's kinda like all the other crap I had to study" and then he skips off to his big scene where he rufees the sun -- it's just all so DUMB

 

But do you *really* dislike it, you know, hate it? Or is it just... a bit dull for you?

 

I wonder how this works. If I simply write (and this is from memory) that “Masks” is a sci-fi-concept episode about an alien race leaving behind artifacts which take over the Enterprise including Data, with no memorable guest stars, long-term impact or revelations about the main characters, will that be interpreted as hate as opposed to indifference? I have to have intense opinions about Star Trek?

An episode is simply not important enough to love or hate: it can be amazingly innovative, funny, not particularly interesting, sometimes cringeworthy, dated, and in certain instances actually offensive, which is about as low as it gets for me. But do I hate it or stop and think about the underlying causes? Does anyone actually hate certain episodes? It’s hard to imagine, so I’m pretty sure there is a shift in meaning here, where ‘I hate it’ has acquired an informal sense closer to ‘I don’t particularly like it’, similar to ‘I love it’ in the sense of ‘This is great’.

 

That’s the thing, I dislike Pale Moonlight over on DS9. I’m not meh about it, I don’t hate it, there are many aspects I even like, quite a bit. But something about one of its underlying themes rubs me the wrong way, and *particularly* the way those are interpreted by fandom — it’s audience — pushes me into disliking it. I don’t *hate* it, and there are many who *love* it (often with the opinions that helped put me off it)

In this case, Masks is one of the episodes with a spiritual bent, and my feeling is those who actually do *hate* it, are in part reacting to that. (And would therefore be the same people who *hate* the nuBSG ending, for the same reasons)

 

In the case of nBSG, the problem I have is that Ron Moore isn’t actually saying, “We wrote this for people of faith, and if you’re not one, well, sorry, but you won’t get as much out of the show and will interpret it as flawed writing, a literal deus ex machina.” ‘God’ at the very end is described as an “it” which doesn’t like the name, so the wiggle room is there, and even without it the fact is that you’ll simply have a portion of the audience that is not religious or perhaps not accepting of the religious specifics as portrayed on the show. In that case they can’t avoid seeing the deus ex machina and you’ve lost them, whether you like it or not.

That’s why Babylon 5, for example, always makes it explicit that different interpretations are possible, as with the Soul Hunter concept, even as the series fully accepts and portrays religion in that part of the future. The show didn’t leave chunks of the unexplained hanging after the finale either: there was still mystery about the Vorlons, but they were a million years ahead of us and still flawed, providing specific assistance in times of great need, not as some kind of an overreaching force driving a great mystery towards an ultimate conclusion which culminates in the reinvention of suits and ties.

Back to this topic, however, in which the main concern is still that of impact. Suppose the impact was on Data and led him to become the one outwardly spiritual person among the main characters, which would’ve been developed over the course of the films also? A simple idea, and yet quite provocative to the Roddenberry Box. But no, ultimately it was just a sci-fi thing of the week, so it could easily be forgotten.

 

I don't see Masks as a spiritual episode. I see it as an AI menace episode. An AI based on some culture's ancient mythology took over Data and started transforming the ship. They learned about the ancient mythology and used it against the AI.

But the mechanics of transforming the ship into rocks and bushes without interrupting life support, venting it into space, or causing bad things to happen to any of the thousands of things in the ship that explode seemed like a reach.

My issue in NuBSG wasn't that the divine force existed so much that it overrode the agency of the characters and made their decisions pointless. It's not the same as Q is he's not a God, just an extremely powerful alien. Prophets, from the human perspective, are the same. Benevolent aliens who don't experience time the way we do, no different than the aliens in Arrival. None of them override the characters' agency.

 

I totally thought that this was a thread about pandemic.

It's a stupid episode.

I don't remember much about it, but my gut tells me to be fine with that.

 

Fictional characters never have agency anyway, ‘god did it’ just makes that a bit explicit. I think nuBSGs ending partly caused strife because in hindsight it was obvious, not least because the original show did many of the exact same things. It made people feel a little silly I expect.

 

But that’s like saying “Fiction does nothing for me because I know the characters are written, so it makes no difference if God is written in also.” There is a difference, though, because well-written characters feel real as part of suspending disbelief, so God is then interpreted in the same real-world manner — either you believe or you don’t, in which case the viewer is probing the show for alternate explanations that never come.

As for the ending, Ron Moore and the writers were familiar with the original series, and Ron Moore specifically rewatched the pilot before coming up with his own take, but nobody seemed to be a massive fan nor was there any expectation of following up on the famous intro. They were keeping their options open and came up with the Mitochondrial Eve idea, which seemed cool enough for a show that was mainly about the characters, and all it did was suggest they really weren’t interested in carefully crafting an ending that could be interpreted in several ways or even explain to what extent (if any) the Colonials and the Cylons actually influenced Earth history.

I still think it’s possible to come up with an interpretation where life evolved on Earth and not Kobol, but that’s far too off-topic already.

 

That's some clever sophistry there, pointing out that these fictional characters don't actually exist. But within the context of immersion the fictional world, they do have agency, and the outcome is the result of their choices and actions. That's what makes it fun to watch and gives it jeopardy and suspense.

Most people don't watch the genre that took its name from 'Science' to be proselytized to that to matter what we do a divine being will show us the way.

 

I just find talking about fictional characters having anything more than an illusion of agency as... a hiding to nothing. Look at the two deaths of Data. The second in particular is *clearly* all about the actor, rather than the logical outcomes from the narrative as shown.

In terms of SF as some sort of Agnostic or Atheist safe space... no, it’s never been that. It can be, but it isn’t intrinsic to its nature. The history of the form alone precludes it. It also requires a blinkered focus on what ‘science’ even is. In masks case: Anthropology. Comparative Theology. I enjoyed Deanna and Picard having to use those skill sets, which are at the heart of Trek.

 

The original Starbuck had a late series arc (or at least) a few episodes that had big obvious hints for KaraBuck.

In terms of belief in god in universes like nuBSG: they were always shown as religious. The Deus Ex Machina was there from the start, we just weren’t seeing it, because we don’t expect it in modern, borderline hard sf. Basically, some SF fans would rather believe in FTL travel, than the existence of a deity. And there’s more hard evidence against one of those things than the other, somewhat swayed by the lack of a way to test for one of them.

 

Starbuck wasn’t an ‘angel’ in the original series. He fathered Doctor Zee with Angela, who was possibly a Being of Light.

To the extent that the Cylons and the Colonials both had their own religions, but some people were atheists like Baltar (at the start) or Adama, which is in line with the realistic society Ron Moore wanted to portray.

We shouldn’t expect it in any fiction that is trying to depict realistic characters and situations, which include people of faith as well as those who seek explanations without it. To the latter and at least to atheist viewers certain events will appear to happen without explanation, which is not usually satisfying, and the only recourse for those viewers is to think up their own alternate solutions for the origins of humanity on Kobol. And while Ron Moore hasn’t exactly gone in that direction, he isn’t particularly keen on making a definitive religious statement either:

Kara, I think, is whatever you want her to be. It's easy to put that label on her: Angel, or Messenger of God, or whatever. Kara Thrace died and was resurrected and came back and took the people to their final end. That was her role, her destiny on the show... We debated back and forth in the writers' room for a while on giving it more definition, and saying, definitively, "This is what she is," and we decided that the more you try to outline it and give voice to it and put a name on it, the less interesting it became. We just decided this was the most interesting way to go out, with her disappearing without trying to name what she was.
…
We never tried to name exactly what the head characters were, we never looked at them as angels or demons. They seemed to periodically say good things or evil things, to save people or to damn people. There was a sense that they worked in the service of something else... that was guiding and helping, sometimes obstructing, sometimes tempting. The idea at the end was that whatever they're in service of is eternal and continues, and whatever they are, they too are still around, with all of us who are the children of Hera. They continue to walk among us and watch.
​

This is fully in line with one of his ‘angels’ referring to ‘God’ in the show as an “it” that doesn’t like the name.

If one could “test” for God then no faith would be required. Scientific theories are constructed by looking for the simplest explanation that fits all the evidence, which means that you could never argue that God is a required element. That’s what faith is for.

On the other hand, a physical concept like (effective) FTL travel could in fact be tested for. You just need to get from A to B faster than 299,792,458 meters per second.

Also, you don’t seem to make a distinction between beliefs in the real world and those in a fictional reality. In both cases we accept that belief in God is a matter of faith, but then we suspend disbelief and accept FTL as a provable fact of life in the fictional world, while obviously remaining skeptical that it would ever be possible in the real world.

We really should get back to the original topic, but I just wanted to address this since you seem to believe there is a definite religious point of view in nBSG, whereas we can see from the above quotes that Ron Moore hardly wanted to be so explicit, using words like “whatever” and “something”.

 

And names like Hera. Uh uh. BSG drips with religious metaphors. In all its versions.

God can be ‘real’ same as FTL, in a piece of fiction, for pretty much the same reasons.

Masks has a ton of basic religious/anthropological things going on, and the whole moon/sun thing depends on a familiarity with that. It does the Clarke’s theorem thing with what is happening to the ship, and because it does that, and because it’s dealing in archetypes, we don’t need that to be ‘realistic’ by Trenobabble standards in this story. Like Apollo in Who Mourns for Adonais.