House of Eratosthenes

I was thinking over twelve hours ago as I was driving the car out of the garage, for some reason or another the thought just jumped into my head, “I wonder if Jeffords has ever reviewed the Silicon Avatar episode? Tonight at beer o’clock I shall have to look that puppy up.”

Guess I don’t need those doses of Vitamin E after all. I dutifully remembered without writing down a single thing, after a busy day thinking about white papers for technical conferences, buffer overruns, Linux builds, old film cameras, the household Netflix queue, where the hell are they stocking Muscato at Beverages & More, hey have we got our vacations lined up for the right day and is the hotel going to let us have 50% Sunday through Thursday, et cetera et cetera…and I remembered to search through the archives of Eye of Polyphemus. And the answer is, yes, he did. No, he did not find it to be the worst episode ever, but he did find it to be the second worst. Oh my. One mystery resolved, another one created.

What’s the worst? I vote for this one. I shall have to peruse the archives some more and see if I’m close.

Meanwhile, a big thumbs-up on the negative review. It might’ve been written by myself, word for word:

What irks me is Picard’s attitude. The Entity has committed multiple acts of genocide because it has to in order to survive. Nothing indicates it is a particularly intelligent creature. It is essentially an animal acting on instinct. I will concede the implication in “Datalore” it was intelligent enough to communicate with Lore and had a malicious demeanor, but those points appear to have been tossed by the wayside here. It is a long shot the entity can be reasoned with, yet that is Picard’s only goal.
:
…Because communicating and compromising with a genocidal creature is much more important than justice for the murdered or saving any additional lives. Picard is — and I hate to say this — being stereotypically French. Kirk would have put on boxing gloves and battled this entity himself. He has practically dome so several times in TOS and, in my view, justifiably so. Picard’s attitude goes to show the progressive avoidance of conflict is not always the best way to go.

I’ve never understood the thinking here. The writers, the producers, Rick Berman; what did they think back in 1975 when Jaws came out? The situation is precisely the same. Did they cry when the shark got blown up? Throw their popcorn, stamp their little feet?

Progressives truly are a puzzle to me. I don’t think I’d be able to truly figure them out, even if I lived to be a thousand.

Morgan, you’re coming at it backwards.

The message isn’t that we should reason with the shark. The shark was an explicit villain. It might be different if the movie were made today, but there it is.

Star Trek TNG and derivatives doesn’t have any villains. Antagonists are merely vehicles to convey the moral superiority of the protagonist. No villains, just metaphors. They are not there to demonstrate the hard choices, they are there only as a vehicle to promote the PC choice.

Likewise, the conflict isn’t there to advance the moral development of the protagonist, they are already there, on the moral high ground. Any lessons to be learned are of the “Oh, I goofed” sort, to demonstrate the need for moral advancement of the audience, because they didn’t see the other side immediately. It’s a simplistically juvenile and preachy “teachable moment”.

This is why I could never get into the newer Trek iterations. It’s not the different characters or technology, it’s because they jumped the shark on the IDIC concept.
- thebastidge | 12/28/2010 @ 05:56
“Progressive” and “coward” should officially be synonyms.
- Libsareb Raindead | 12/28/2010 @ 08:00
I’m with The Bastidge on this one. I never was much into Star Trek, either the new series or the original, but at least the original (as I vaguely recall the reruns) presented a bona fide enemy, complete with the possibility (however unlikely) that the Federation could lose. Hard choices were sometimes necessary; good people sometimes got killed. The new series just seemed preachy, even to my preadolescent self.

I think this more than anything explains why so much Hollywood tripe these days is, well, tripe — in order not to interfere with Tinseltown’s goofy manichaean morality, the villains have to be so cartoonishly evil, and the good guys so correspondingly good, that there’s no real possibility of dramatic tension. Either that or it’s all just a big misunderstanding, resulting in ditto.

The latest Trek movie is actually a good example of this [spoiler alert, although I assume y’all have all seen it]. So a supernova destroys Romulus, but somehow whatzisface (Eric Bana) is sucked into a black hole and pops out of a timewarp 70 years before said supernova. Instead of trying to prevent the disaster, though, he immediately…. waits twenty years for Spock to show up, and kicks off a decade-long plan for revenge. Why does he do this, instead of the obvious — you know, flying at top speed to Romulus and spending the next 70 years trying to convince them to evacuate the planet? Because he’s evil, duh!!! And just to make sure you get that he’s evil, they throw in a scene of him waterboarding a Federation officer.

None of that makes a goddamn lick of sense, but it makes sense in the context of Star Trek, where Kirk has to wear a ten-gallon white hat at all times. Frankly, I’m surprised they didn’t have a “Palin 2012” bumper sticker on the big-ass Romulan revenge vessel….
- Severian | 12/28/2010 @ 10:03
Actually, I think that might be why the movie did so well. Nero is a Star Trek villain in the same vein as Christopher Lloyd playing the Klingon Captain in Search For Spock. Bastidge’s reference, on the other hand (as I understand it) is to the total elimination of any real bad guys from the TNG universe. In every single conflict, on the small screen as well as on the big one, the person on the far end has some redeeming quality somewhere, or at the very least some tragic story to make him more sympathetic, like Soran, Q, The Borg Queen, Ru’afo…and all those bad dictator guys from the teevee show insisting Picard hand over [insert name here] immediately to face harsh justice, with which Picard may interfere only by interjecting his bald-headed wisdom. Every single one of them had to show some quality for a partial redemption, or a tragic back-story. Very, very few of them were involved in any classic, climactic, fatal shoot-out at the end, consigned to justly-deserved oblivion.

Which is odd, since anybody who knows anything about Star Trek movies, immediately understands Ricardo Montalban was single-handedly responsible for saving the franchise.
- mkfreeberg | 12/28/2010 @ 11:07
Which is odd, since anybody who knows anything about Star Trek…

I find this subject and its comment thread to be supremely odd. Grown men who can call up obscure dialog from alternative universes, own light sabres, and wax poetic about “special effects” might be the very definition of “odd.”

Then again, I wax poetic about great rhythm guitar licks. To each his own.

But you guys DO amuse. 😉
- bpenni | 12/28/2010 @ 13:10
It gets much worse than that, Buck: “Spock’s Brain” was my favorite episode!

At least, it was when I was six or thereabouts.
- mkfreeberg | 12/28/2010 @ 13:36
Actually, Bastiage, that was very … VERY … well and plainly put.

On a side-note that’s sort of related, it occurred to me the other day while watching “A Christmas Carol” that Progressives would consider pre-conversion Scrooge the epitome of a big-businiess conservative, and of course, post-conversion Scrooge as the enlightened Progressive.

But in fact, they have it bass-ackwards!

What was Scrooge’s answer to the charity collectors?

`At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,’ said the gentleman, taking up a pen, `it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and Destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.’

`Are there no prisons?’ asked Scrooge.

`Plenty of prisons,’ said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

`And the Union workhouses?’ demanded Scrooge. `Are they still in operation?’

`They are. Still,’ returned the gentleman, `I wish I could say they were not.’

`The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?’ said Scrooge.

`Both very busy, sir.’

`Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,’ said Scrooge. `I’m very glad to hear it.’

`Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,’ returned the gentleman, `a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink. and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?’

`Nothing!’ Scrooge replied.

`You wish to be anonymous?’

`I wish to be left alone,’ said Scrooge. `Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned — they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.’

See, he would give none of his post-tax fortunes to ease others’ suffering because that’s the government’s job – in accordance with the progressive viewpoint.

And of course, after his conversion, he gave freely of his fortunes to those to whom he chose to give it. Which would be in accordance with the conservative viewpoint.
- philmon | 12/28/2010 @ 15:02
I remember thinking the exact same thing about the “crystalline entity” episode. What do you mean, Picard? What do you mean you aren’t going to destroy it? Kill the damn thing before any more lives are lost.

I saw this episode when it was relatively newly-produced, and was left shaking my head even then. That is probably a direct result of having been raised on TOS reruns, long before STTNG was even conceived.
- cylarz | 12/28/2010 @ 15:02
All stories are morality plays. We’re not interested in simple desciprtions, we wantour entertainment to have meaning.

But the pure smugness of Star Trek, or most crap out of Hollywood these days, for that matter, is irritating to anyone who is awake. A well-told morality play has some measure of subtlety, in order not to alienate the audience before th lesson is revealed. Fortunately for Hollywood, most people are so unconscious that banging a drum counts as subtle in their world.
- thebastidge | 12/28/2010 @ 23:15
[…] friend Phil entered a comment yesterday that is even more persuasive: What was Scrooge’s answer to the charity collectors? […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 12/29/2010 @ 07:56
[…] there’s more. There, and here, and here and here. Blogger friend Phil presented the same argument a few years back. We’ve said so […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 12/25/2014 @ 07:10

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Monday, December 27th, 2010