Star Trek Wankery

[Jennifer]

That Pluto stream only shows the first four seasons of TNG, over and over again, going up to part 1 of the Klingon civil war two-parter before reverting back to Encounter at Farpoint, presumably because those seasons are all it has the rights to. But, unlike BBC America and H&I -- the two cable channels currently airing TNG including the later seasons -- Pluto airs either uncut or at least less-cut episodes than cable. I remember a couple years ago, watching Farpoint on cable, where the entire scene with old Dr. McCoy was cut out, but it remains in Pluto's airing. Also, in one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite episodes, the one with the Stone Age Vulcans who accidentally see some Starfleet members, and understandably mistake them for gods, so eventually Picard brings their leader up to the Enterprise to show her "We're not gods, just people who know how to do some things you can't"-- in one bit, the Vulcan leader says something like "Perhaps some day my people will also sail above the clouds!" and Picard looks at her for a moment before murmuring "Of that I have no doubt." Pluto aired the whole scene, whereas when I saw it on cable, they cut out Picard's comment.

[Jennifer]

Also, Pluto's Star Trek channel runs commercials for Newsmax during almost every freaking commercial break. "Real news for real people."

[nicole]

Also, Pluto's Star Trek channel runs commercials for Newsmax during almost every freaking commercial break. "Real news for real people."

Those are almost certainly targeted to you.

[D.A. Ridgely]

Also, Pluto's Star Trek channel runs commercials for Newsmax during almost every freaking commercial break. "Real news for real people."

Those are almost certainly targeted to you.

Because she's almost certainly a real person?

[dbcooper]

[Hugh Akston]

I assume that was posted on a slashfic forum?

[Warren]

DS9 shipped that so hard it's cannon.

Boom!

[Eric the .5b]

Bashir/Garak was the one the actors involved pushed, to my recollection.

[Shem]

Bashir/Garak was the one the actors involved pushed, to my recollection.

And the one with enough subtext to kinda sell it in a 70sesque, "nono, those unrelated guys who live together are just really close bros" kind of way, at least if you squint. I think the writers actually discussed regretting not pulling the trigger on it in the documentary, if memory serves.

O'Brien was way too hetero for that slash pairing to fit, though.

[Hugh Akston]

Bashir/Garak was the one the actors involved pushed, to my recollection.

And the one with enough subtext to kinda sell it in a 70sesque, "nono, those unrelated guys who live together are just really close bros" kind of way, at least if you squint. I think the writers actually regretted not pulling the trigger on it in the documentary, if memory serves.

True

Garashir fans, rejoice. According to What We Left Behind, Garak, the spy-turned-tailor who lived out his "retirement" on Deep Space Nine was definitely and unequivocally gay. Ira Steven Behr used the phrase "completely gay" if there was any doubt, and Andrew Robinson concurred during one of his own interviews (he also discussed flirting with Bashir in a soundbite that was played over a clip of him massaging Bashir's shoulders almost sensually).

Behr marked Garak's homosexuality as something he would've been clearer about had he been given the latitude, and the same went for exploring homosexuality as a whole. In a segment discussing some of the controversial topics Deep Space Nine explored in depth, Behr points out that the show dove into war, its aftermath and religion, but he admitted to not fighting hard enough on homosexuality. He refused to give the show credit for the kiss shared between Terry Farrell and Susannah Thompson in "Joined," because it only scratched the surface and he believed they could've tried harder to explore the topic than they did.

O'Brien was way too hetero for that slash pairing to fit, though.

That rarely seems to be an issue for slashfic shippers.

[Shem]

I dunno if if call Garak gay; he seems more like the prototypical "disaster bi" to me.

[Warren]

..."disaster bi" ...

Is this phrase in common parlance? Do I need to Google?

[Eric the .5b]

Bashir/Garak was the one the actors involved pushed, to my recollection.

And the one with enough subtext to kinda sell it in a 70sesque, "nono, those unrelated guys who live together are just really close bros" kind of way, at least if you squint. I think the writers actually discussed regretting not pulling the trigger on it in the documentary, if memory serves.

Yeah, the whole "Sure, Bashir just likes to regularly eat and hang out with this guy he finds terribly interesting and mysterious because they're friends." thing.

O'Brien was way too hetero for that slash pairing to fit, though.

Also, the show spent more time saying the two of them hung out than showing them, at least early on.

And good find, Hugh!

(I'm a little more charitable on the Dax episode because they played it with no exploitation or fanfare in an era where women kissing was A Thing in a way it isn't now. They just treated it as a non-issue. But yes, two pretty young actresses kissing was still more feasible than two male characters in a romantic relationship on broadcast at the time.)

[Shem]

..."disaster bi" ...

Is this phrase in common parlance? Do I need to Google?

A disaster bisexual. Someone who's bad at dating both men and women.

[Warren]

He refused to give the show credit for the kiss shared between Terry Farrell and Susannah Thompson in "Joined," because it only scratched the surface and he believed they could've tried harder to explore the topic than they did.

Any harder and they'd have had to move to premium cable

[Jennifer]

So I've been on a TNG re-watching binge lately, and the more I think about it, the more it PISSES ME OFF that the owners of the franchise keep wasting time on bullshit prequels and reboots when there are so many unanswered questions they could've addressed in unanswered storylines: let's meet the aliens who put the 21st-century American astronaut in the Royale casino! Let's revisit the two planets where one population was entirely addicted to a drug which the other population grew, and see how that all turned out! Let's learn more about the Traveler's species, and that super-powerful race whose one member used mere thought to genocide an entire other species to extinction, and see how the logical Stone Age Vulcan society is progressing now that they know aliens live on other worlds AND that truly dazzling levels of technological progress are possible .... fuck all these bullshit reboots about what Kirk was like in high school.

[Eric the .5b]

There have been decades of shows about the Traveler's species, given he was intended to be a Doctor Who Time Lord with the serial numbers rubbed off and the latex gooped on.

The stone-age society is still a stone-age society, albeit maybe one of the few stone-age societies that dreams of building starships, one day.

The rest, the writers had no real idea about. They were offscreen things to allow the plots of the episodes. Though, I sympathize; I always wanted some follow-up on all the weird-ass things they discovered. Drugs that make you move at super-speed or give you telekinesis that lets you attack ships in orbit, etc. These things clearly aren't in general circulation in the Federation, so they're restricted somehow. Something like the equivalent of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You could do a whole series about the people who study or contain...

..Oh, damn. I just invented Federation SCP Foundation. Presumably not played much for horror.

[Jennifer]

The stone-age society is still a stone-age society, albeit maybe one of the few stone-age societies that dreams of building starships, one day.

Personally, I'd still be interested in revisiting them later even if they hadn't had their experiences with Starfleet and the Picard, just to see how much faster a society like theirs [logical, rational, not inherently prone to the violent prejudices which plague and shape our societies even today] would advance compared to how long it took humans to do so from a similar technological point.

Though, here's a sudden thought: suppose we humans with all our violent, non-Mintakan character flaws nonetheless had, since the Chalcolithic or earliest Bronze Age, confirmed knowledge of -- not necessarily "Starfleet/aliens," but specifically, knowledge of the awesome potential wonders "technology/inventions" can provide for ordinary mortal beings like us -- in our real history, turns out, there were many various times in ancient history when certain genius-people stumbled upon certain amazing discoveries, or invented amazing things.

With some inventions, like the wheel and Archimedes' screw, what happened was "Someone discovered or invented this, and we the collective members of the human race never lost that knowledge, and even built upon it." But of course, there's also a lot of knowledge or discoveries that were lost -- I recall reading that some ancient Greek invented what was essentially a miniature steam-powered engine, barely powerful enough to move the tiniest of toy gadgets, but for whatever reason, nothing much ever came of it and all knowledge of that little engine was completely lost until millennia later, after we'd already had the Industrial Revolution and re-discovered the principle of the steam engine on our own -- by that point, the discovery of that ancient Greek engine was certainly interesting for historical purposes, but we gleaned no useful technological advances from discovering the machine and figuring out how it worked.

Even without Star Trek it's interesting (IMO) to speculate on things like, where might we be now, had the ancients kept and built upon inventions/discoveries like that primitive toy engine or the Antikythera mechanism? And if our ancient cultures had Mintakan-type knowledge of Starfleet or technology's potential, might that alone have made it more likely for knowledge of the early ancient Greek steam engines and computer mechanisms to have been retained and built upon?

[Jennifer]

Also, Pluto's Star Trek channel runs commercials for Newsmax during almost every freaking commercial break. "Real news for real people."

Three additional comments: one, either I was mistaken about Pluto being the culprit, or those commercials run on BBC America too; two, that ad also says something like "This is OUR nation, We conquered it, we built it..." The "We conquered it" is an exact quote, BTW. Which -- on the one hand, kudos to them for being honest (thought technically it's not "we" but "our ancestors, or someone else's ancestors depending upon how recently our own came here"), but on the other hand -- JFC, people.

And three: in addition to Newsmax ads, BBC also runs frequent public-service messages assuring everyone that the channel is against racist violence against Asian-Americans, and urging people to #StopAsianHate. In which case promoting Newsmax seems kinda counter-productive.

[JD]

With some inventions, like the wheel and Archimedes' screw, what happened was "Someone discovered or invented this, and we the collective members of the human race never lost that knowledge, and even built upon it." But of course, there's also a lot of knowledge or discoveries that were lost -- I recall reading that some ancient Greek invented what was essentially a miniature steam-powered engine, barely powerful enough to move the tiniest of toy gadgets, but for whatever reason, nothing much ever came of it

This reminds me of a question that came up on (IIRC), worldbuilding.stackexchange.com recently, where someone was asking, "How can I explain a world in which the inhabitants remain permanently at X level of technology?" And my thought was that based on the history of humanity, you hardly need to posit much of a reason at all. At one point we were all Neolithic, but 10,000 years later, some people showed up on their Neolithic neighbors' doorsteps with firearms and steam engines; the proper question is almost more "why do some cultures advance technologically?"

Certain technologies are so obviously useful that people don't seem to require any convincing to adopt them (clothing, cooking food, metalworking) but beyond that, the idea that progress is inherently good or useful or necessary is very much a culture-bound one. Plenty of cultures seem to have the idea that where they are right now is a perfectly fine way to live, and the idea that there might be a better way hardly seems to enter into their thinking.

[Eric the .5b]

The problem with that is that pretty much every culture since the neolithic changes wildly quickly compared to then. (And that's no reason to assume language, religion, and other areas of culture that didn't leave much of a paleontological trace didn't change over generations in neolithic societies.). Every culture has a conservative steak, but stasis is notable and rare.

Even medieval Europe, the textbook example in fantasy stories of a period you can somehow expect a society to stay in for millennia, had quite a lot of social and technological change. (Robert Forward had an article ranting about this perception,. including a list of many things invented during the "Dark Age"; wish it was online.)

Also, there's a big problem with generalizing, say, the Americas pre-Columbus as "neolithic". After the European plagues rolled through and killed most people on both continents before many white men got far inland, sure, there are lots of bands of nomads... whose parents and grandparents had been farmers and even city-dwellers before those civilizations collapsed. Not including the active empires in central and South America. (Or the ones we remember. It hasn't really percolated out to popular culture that the Amazon basin hasn't been jungle and scattered tribes forever.). Actual continuous neolithic culture in the modem era is damn rare.

[D.A. Ridgely]

Actual continuous neolithic culture in the modem era is damn rare.

Sure, if you don't count the annual CPAC.

[Jennifer]

Even medieval Europe, the textbook example in fantasy stories of a period you can somehow expect a society to stay in for millennia, had quite a lot of social and technological change.

Years before covid, I remember watching a medieval-life documentary where the guy was talking about how, when you imagine a "typical" medieval party/fair with the "stereotypical" medieval music (mainly lutes, flutes and recorders) -- that, he said, was the medieval equivalent of heavy-metal concerts today* (*Today meaning, bac when heavy metal fans were all teenagers, rather than people who used to be teenagers back in the 70s or 80s).

Plus it was in medieval times that the horse collar was invented, and that was a HUGE innovation at the time; having horses pull with their shoulders rather than their necks of course vastly increased the loads they could pull.

Also, there's a big problem with generalizing, say, the Americas pre-Columbus as "neolithic". After the European plagues rolled through and killed most people on both continents before many white men got far inland, sure, there are lots of bands of nomads... whose parents and grandparents had been farmers and even city-dwellers before those civilizations collapsed. Not including the active empires in central and South America. (Or the ones we remember. It hasn't really percolated out to popular culture that the Amazon basin hasn't been jungle and scattered tribes forever.). Actual continuous neolithic culture in the modem era is damn rare.

Part of that is because the word "neolithic" is often used by non-archaeologists to mean simply "primitive/nomadic," when its original meaning refers not just to the stone age, specifically the late (or new/neo-) stone age. City-dwellers can still be neolithic, and IIRC, with the exception of some very limited copper smelting in south or central America, plus of course goldwork wherever gold nuggets were found, most Americans when Columbus arrived were neolithic, even the ones living in big sophisticated cities like Cahokia (modern St. Louis).

[Jennifer]

I've been on a DS9/Voyager kick lately -- the two series I have only slight familiarity with, though I know their overall premises and main characters, so almost all of these are episodes I'm watching for the very first time -- I'm amused by how some of the same concepts get recycled across series. It's not just stuff like "Every show has its very logical and non-emotional Spock-like character," but just last night I saw the DS9 episode where people's fantasies and wishes come to life -- the show starts with O'Brien reading his daughter the bedtime story of Rumpelstiltskin, then Rumpelstiltskin actually appears for real -- the comic subplot was that Bashir has been fantasizing about his sexy colleague Dax, and is now embarrassed by his fantasy-Dax becoming real and interacting with everybody -- shades of the "Barclay embarrassed by his holodeck fantasies becoming known" episode** only worse, because this time it wasn't only a couple of senior officers who found out, but everybody."

**Also, if I were Barclay, after the time Geordi caught me in the holodeck there is no way anyone else would, because I would go back and make sure every such program includes the default command "Computer, switch program immediately to 'Shakespeare performing at the Globe Theatre' if the holodeck doors open while I'm inside."

[Jennifer]

I mostly like "Rascals" -- the TNG episode where a transporter malfunction turns adults into pre-adolescents -- but I am very annoyed by Guinan's refusal to believe Ro's "Having grown up in a refugee camp --- NO, I did not enjoy being a child."