V, V and Final Conflict
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What kind of more alien threat could the Jaridians have been? You can't have your series villain be a black hole or a force of nature or evolutionary stagnation. You do need someone to shoot a gun at eventually. This is television 
I do agree the initial portrayal of the Jardians were as dumb warrior Klingons. But in the fourth season they did manage to make them more multi-faceted and sympathetic. My memory is feint but Lili goes and joins the Jaridians and falls in love with one and I think they even did an episode or two from their perspective.
I do agree the initial portrayal of the Jardians were as dumb warrior Klingons. But in the fourth season they did manage to make them more multi-faceted and sympathetic. My memory is feint but Lili goes and joins the Jaridians and falls in love with one and I think they even did an episode or two from their perspective.
It's easy for a race to have several genders, since gender is a socially constructed role. There are some human cultures that include a third gender, such as the Hijras of South Asia. As for a species having several sexes, i.e. subsets distinguished by their reproductive biology, there are a lot of science-fictional precedents for that. The Andorians in Star Trek literature from Pocket Books have four sexes. The Newcomers in Alien Nation had three, the third of which was a catalyst needed to "prepare" the female before conception could occur with the male. I've come up with a number of different sexual schemes in aliens I've invented -- one with male, female, and hermaphrodite sexes, one with a third neuter sex specialized for raising and nursing young, etc. I once thought up a species that had four "slots" for reproductive organs, each of which could have one of four distinct types of organ or none at all, allowing for 625 possible sexes, though only 225 biologically distinct combinations. Though in retrospect that one was kind of implausible.
What kind of more alien threat could the Jaridians have been? You can't have your series villain be a black hole or a force of nature or evolutionary stagnation. You do need someone to shoot a gun at eventually. This is television
And that's exactly the kind of conventional thinking that won out on the show and diminished its potential. I would've rather seen Okie stay on and continue to challenge conventional assumptions about how to tell an SF story on television.
Yeah, but that's not alien. It's not enigma and mystery, it's not a challenge of conventional expectations, it's just making the "aliens" more complex in a familiar human way. Something truly, imaginatively alien wouldn't be something that a human could fall in love with or vice-versa, because its psychology, its emotions, its very definition of relationships and personal identity and so forth, would be very alien. Hell, even a species that thought in mostly familiar ways couldn't realistically fall in love with a human or vice-versa, because the subliminal and pheromonal cues that play a key role in interpersonal attraction and bonding would not translate across species lines. The very idea of a human and alien being able to love each other exactly as two humans would is a failure of imagination, a lazy cliche. It's portraying the "aliens" simply as funny-looking humans. That's exactly the sort of unimaginative thinking that Okie tried to fight against when he insisted that Taelon sexuality had to be impossible to pin down in human terms.
See, making them "sympathetic" is exactly the opposite of what I'm talking about, because sympathy comes from understanding, from knowing how another being thinks. What was so intriguing about Okie's version of the Taelons, what was so rare and refreshing to see on television, was that they were alien in the way they thought, not just the way they looked. They had a fundamentally different mentality, worldview, set of priorities, etc. Even though they meant well, there were so many barriers to comprehension and agreement that the consequences were potentially disastrous. And that's the most believable portrayal of an interspecies interaction I've ever seen on TV. Realistically, aliens from a completely different evolutionary history, with brain structures unrelated to ours and adapted for different demands, would not think in a way that mapped perfectly onto ours. At most, we could only gain an approximate understanding of one another's thinking through functional analogies. There would always be gaps we couldn't surmount.
If you don't understand how to create an alien threat more genuinely exotic than the Jaridians, then I emphatically recommend you read more prose science fiction. There have been some fantastically imaginative efforts at creating bizarre, mysterious, inhuman alien intelligences in literature.
Any specific instances of particularly well done inhuman alien intelligences that you would recommend?
The Amnion in the Gap Series from Stephen R. Donaldson are amongst the best of the "Alien" Aliens I have read.
Well, at the far extreme, there's Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, an entity so profoundly alien that nobody even begins to understand it at any point. Indeed, the whole theme of the book is that our efforts to comprehend the universe are just an imposition of our own expectations and concepts onto something fundamentally unknowable.
There's also Orson Scott Card's Hierarchy of Exclusion in the Ender series, based on Swedish terms, with ramen being the category of aliens with which common ground and cooperation are possible and varelse being aliens so fundamentally different in their mentality and priorities that no understanding or cooperation is possible. Of course, sometimes a species may seem to be varelse, but only until enough effort is put into learning about them that they become ramen. Still, ramen are just species that are capable of communicating ideas to each other at all -- it doesn't guarantee perfect comprehension or thinking the same way.
There's also Orson Scott Card's Hierarchy of Exclusion in the Ender series, based on Swedish terms, with ramen being the category of aliens with which common ground and cooperation are possible and varelse being aliens so fundamentally different in their mentality and priorities that no understanding or cooperation is possible. Of course, sometimes a species may seem to be varelse, but only until enough effort is put into learning about them that they become ramen. Still, ramen are just species that are capable of communicating ideas to each other at all -- it doesn't guarantee perfect comprehension or thinking the same way.
Well, of course there was always some basis for communication with the Taelons, but as I said, just because some communication is possible between two species, that doesn't mean they think exactly alike and that the aliens should be written merely as humans with strange appearances.
If anything, the real original point of the series was that, even with the best of intentions, the Taelons were so alien to us that they couldn't easily understand us nor we them, and it required a dedicated effort to build bridges of understanding. The true essence of the series, in its original conception, was in the relationship that formed between Boone and Da'an, as Boone tried to gain more understanding of the Taelons and help Da'an gain more understanding of humanity. It was the classic Roddenberrian formula of using aliens as a mirror for humanity, a way of exploring and commenting on human nature. If it had been easy for the two species to understand each other, if they'd been exactly alike except for the way they looked, then that thoughtful, analytical dialogue wouldn't have been necessary. It was their exploration of their differences that helped them understand each other, and themselves, better.
Exactly the point I've been trying to make. The people who took over the show plugged in the Jaridians as the mystery threat that had been hinted at in season 1, tried to pass it off as a direct continuation of that arc, but it was pretty clearly a more simplistic replacement for what was originally intended. The butterfly probe in the Amish episode, and the Taelon myth that figured in "Avatar," smacked of something far stranger. Not to mention that "Jaridian" is such a formulaic, Trekkish faux-Latinate name for an alien species that there's no way it was the name intended by the producers who came up with the exotic, whispery language the Taelons used.
I suppose this is a good place to plug this marvelous effort:
http://www.earthfinalconflict.tv/restoration/index.htm
I haven't read the latest incarnation of the stories, but I did read the original versions years ago and they were fantastic.
http://www.earthfinalconflict.tv/restoration/index.htm
I haven't read the latest incarnation of the stories, but I did read the original versions years ago and they were fantastic.
Interesting info with the Starlog article and other links. I didn't know about that.
Interesting that you view it like that. To me, up until that point, nearly every Taelon we met was pretty much the same character. Zo'or brought some diversity to the table with his "I'm-better-than-you" attitude. Now, granted, they took that and ran with it to the extreme. But as shown in that first year, I still think he was able to keep his ambiguity about him. But, I see your point as well.
I do think the Scarecrow was from this enemy race, but they were not the Jaridians-as-we-know-them until the Jaridians were first introduced (as a semi-retcon).
Interesting that you view it like that. To me, up until that point, nearly every Taelon we met was pretty much the same character. Zo'or brought some diversity to the table with his "I'm-better-than-you" attitude. Now, granted, they took that and ran with it to the extreme. But as shown in that first year, I still think he was able to keep his ambiguity about him. But, I see your point as well.
It is random. Gertz did commentary for "Decision", "Infection", and "The Joining" (which, unfortunately [but not surprisingly], shies away from mentioning the reasoning behind replacing Boone). However, in other episodes with Rod Roddenberry, Von Flores, and Lisa Howard doing commentary, they reference Gertz as head writer. Again, they don't get into specifics. Without going through each of the commentary episodes, I can't say exactly how it was said.
Oh, I didn't mean to suggest that the original arc was literally going to feature the Jaridians. I mean that the Taelons had an enemy out there that they were somehow related to. Given the Taelon myth introduced in "Avatar" with the two quarreling brothers, and later developments in the story arc of the show suggest this might have come into play more (not to mention the mysterious sleepers, who the Taelons are afraid of).
I do think the Scarecrow was from this enemy race, but they were not the Jaridians-as-we-know-them until the Jaridians were first introduced (as a semi-retcon).
^Well, I think it's important to draw the distinction between Okie's original plan and Gertz's dumbed-down substitute. The show that featured the Jaridians is not by a long shot the show that I fell in love with. Hell, the show I loved pretty much ended with "Sandoval's Run." Nothing after that approached the same heights.
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