Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2x02 - "Ad Astra Per Aspera"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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Amaris
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A rose by any other name.
Was it? I don't know. As an autistic person, who struggled much the same as young Julian, I find genetically augmenting neurodiversity away to be completely horrifying. I've learned to thrive as I am. When I think of the way Julian says, "You never gave me a chance", I feel it in my bones. How many parents would engineer away every "late bloomer" and neurodiverse individual simply because it reflects poorly on them? Or because they don't want the responsibility of a child with special needs? The Julian Augment storyline isn't perfect, but I think it's a necessary topic for idealistic speculative fiction to tackle.
I don't care if you're stronger and smarter. That you are not accorded the same rights and liberties as a "normal" person makes you subhuman.
Una mentions directly that it was the Starfleet slogan pre-Federation. This is almost certainly a deliberate nod to Enterprise.
I think Julian's story is the other side of Una's.
Una is happy to be Illyrian, loves her parents for how they cared for her, and is happy with her identity. Julian is resentful of his parents for not accepting him for who he was, and uncomfortable with an identity forced upon him by parents that created a "better" child that fit what they wanted.
That's my biggest nitpick with this episode. I think they sidestep the Federation's position with the ban a little too much in order to make it fit the idea of being based in fear.
That's a completely fair reading of it @Citiprime. SNW seemed to be using it as a queer narrative (with the whole "non-augment passing" and that it's two formerly close women split by a disagreement over whether being in the closest is a good thing), while DS9 was much more directly talking about neurodiversity.
To clarify regarding April, he didn't say he wanted her punished now. He said that, hypothetically, he would not have recommended her for Starfleet years ago if he had known that doing so would violate regulations.
Which is not his finest moment, and we saw that this wounded Una, but he was talking about not admitting her to Starfleet decades ago, not throwing her in prison now.
My impression is that he thought his clout as character witness, extolling Una's outstanding career in Starfleet, would help convince the court to go easy on her. He planned to defend Una, only to find himself under attack, and was pissed off, in part, because he had imagined himself supporting Una by stressing all the good she had done since joining Starfleet.
All of which, yes, leaves hanging the fact that he would have rejected her application years ago if he had known she was an Augment, which is something he's going to have to do some soul-searching about.
Which is not his finest moment, and we saw that this wounded Una, but he was talking about not admitting her to Starfleet decades ago, not throwing her in prison now.
My impression is that he thought his clout as character witness, extolling Una's outstanding career in Starfleet, would help convince the court to go easy on her. He planned to defend Una, only to find himself under attack, and was pissed off, in part, because he had imagined himself supporting Una by stressing all the good she had done since joining Starfleet.
All of which, yes, leaves hanging the fact that he would have rejected her application years ago if he had known she was an Augment, which is something he's going to have to do some soul-searching about.
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This is a society that banned all androids to the point that they let children die. lol
It's hard not to think about it too much, even if they don't want you to think about it too much.
That was my take as well. Had her attorney bothered to follow up with questions on his opinion of Una's service since then, he would have been happy to do so. Instead the attorney decided to attack his record and grandstand which didn't accomplish anything. Una even confronts her later about it.
And April is being asked how he would have handled an application 25 years before. Does anyone actually think Pike or any other officer wouldn't have done the same? Sure, Pike hid it once he found out, but that was only after years of serving with her. People tend to care more when the problem involves someone they know.
Also, this had a happy ending, but if we are going to bring real world into it, then in a real military tribunal she would have been busted for fraudulent enlistment and could have served three years in prison with a felony on her record. Lying on an enlistment application is something they don't play around with. And no amount of legal trickery would have saved her from that fate.
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That might be going a bit far. My takeaway was that April really does believe that the regulation is correct. Sure. believing this is of personal benefit to April, since his career depends on acting as if he believes it. What was that old line... you can't make a man understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it. Something like that. But that doesn't mean that he's insincere.
Prejudices? Yeah, also true.
But how else could things be? It's just not believable that everyone in Starfleet, and in the Federation generally, knows that this law is unjust and are just going along to get along. The only way you have a more-or-less decent civilization endorsing unjust laws is if a lot of the decent people are (mistakenly) supporting those laws.
If there weren't millions, or even billions, of Aprils in the Federation, this situation would have been untenable. And it's canon that this situation is tenable, since it endured for many decades after SNW.
I agree, but I guess this is why the episode didn't completely work for me. The scifi mcguffin they used for the allegory wasn't set up to be as intrinsic as someone's gender, sexual, or racial identity... even if they declare April to be racist.
Like the episode's use of 'passing' several times, in the same way that they made Shaw deadname Seven in Picard S3, is clearly meant to invoke contemporary fights about Trans rights, but for me at least, they didn't do the job of making augmentation as something fundamental to Illyrian society. The fact that they wrote in that some Illyrians chose to stop practicing it to conform with Federation laws I think unnecessarily complicates matters, particularly if it's meant to be Trans allegory, because it makes it seem like it's a choice and not something intrinsic to them.
From the same law.
April might simply be more by-the-book, following most rules, only breaking the PD in extreme situations to save people's lives (I forgot the examples they brought up). If the rule is that xyz cannot join SF, and no lives immediately, directly depend on it, someone who swore to follow the rules will most likely follow that rule. Even Kirk, the famous rule breaker, probably followed those more basic laws most of the time. Picard initially wanted to let Sarjenka die, and only realized how bad it is when he heard her voice.
Actually Pike will be lucky if he doesn't survive the court martial and kicked from Starfleet. Because then he'll be saved from his cursed fate.
Then the galaxy will be conquered by Romulans.
But there is also a chance that after Pike, it will be Kirk who will become the captain. So the history will stay the same.