The Future Will Be Carpeted (175)
“I hate the Gamma Quadrant.”
-- Quark
Calling Wrath of Khan the best Star Trek movie is one of the most uncontroversial statements it’s possible to make. Of course, making it on the internet practically guarantees someone will respond with a 10,000-word post beginning with the word, “Um.” “Um” is the “don’t eat, cat poop” of sentence structures. Once you see it at the beginning, you can comfortably not look at the rest.
“It’s really good to see you again, Dax. That sounds so strange. I mean, I’m looking at a different face, hearing a different voice, but somehow it’s still you.”
-- Dr. Lenara Kahn
Of all the various flavors of Trek, DS9’s alien aesthetic and experiments in serialization have allowed it to age the most gracefully, yet even it is not immune to the passage of time. When you’re trying to pin down what aspect is the most dated, you usually go to the obvious: the clunky desktop computers, the sartorial nightmares Garak seems to be churning out as part of an elaborate prank, or the wall-to-wall carpeting. But, far more obvious, far more weird to the modern eye, is what’s missing.
“I’ve found that when one has a difficult job to do, personal reasons can be quite an incentive.”
-- Gul Dukat
The cliche that men and women are fundamentally different is an ingrained part of our culture. The question is, how much of it is ingrained in biology? Reputable studies have suggested men are better at spatial relations while women are better at distinguishing color, though both of these areas have profound overlap. Are men better at spatial relations because we’re culturally encouraged to play war games? Or are women better at color because, as gatherers, they were evolutionarily selected for the ones who could tell what was ripe and what was poisonous?
“I have fought against races that believe in mythical beings that guide their destinies and await them after death. They call them gods. The Founders are gods to the Jem’Hadar. But, our gods never talk to us, and they don’t wait for us after death. They only want us to fight for them. And, to die for them.”
-- Goran’Agar
There is no fallacy more damaging to the state of modern discourse than the misguided notion that “there are two sides to every story.” There are two sides to many stories, sure. Other stories have three or more sides. Some only have the one. Yet when you have scientific facts like climate change being man-made, vaccines being safe, and evolution being real turned into only one of two valid political positions, you run into a problem. This is why it’s so nice to see a liberal/conservative debate where both sides actually do have a point. Granted, you have to go into the arena of Star Trek to see that today, but still. Such a thing exists, in its way.
“It’s life, Jake. You can miss it if you don’t open your eyes.”
-- Captain Benjamin Sisko
Science fiction has a reputation of being the emotionless genre. An enduring fascination with stoic characters like the Vulcans, any number of robots, and the odd hive-mind alien race can leave the universe looking like a pretty gray place, emotionally speaking. Yet sci-fi writers are as human as the rest of us (Honest, we are!), and we have the same feelings. If you prick us, do we not laugh that you said, “Prick?”
“You have sided against us in battle, and this we do not forgive. Or forget.”
-- Chancellor Gowron
If there is a single episode when DS9 becomes the show people are always insisting, “No, seriously, this is the best Star Trek,” it’s this one, the fourth season premiere. The modern TV fan in me rebels at the idea of waiting three full seasons for “things to get good,” but I hope if these reviews do nothing else, they at least point out a lot of goodness lurking in the first three seasons of the show and establish that DS9’s quality was less a switch getting flipped and more a series of incremental improvements.
“You’re too late. We are everywhere.”
-- The Changeling
My favorite movie of all time is John Carpenter’s The Thing. Not Citizen Kane. Not Casablanca. Not The Shawshank Redemption or Pulp Fiction. That’s right, the film I love above all others is about a group of men trapped on Antarctica with a shapeshifting alien who looks like someone turned a meat locker inside out. At the time of its release, The Thing was dismissed with the same sneering distaste leveled upon modern horror subgenres like torture porn or found footage and using some of the same language. Over time, it has come to be recognized as belonging in the pinnacle of the genre, somehow melding the deep psychological question of how well you can know anyone with practical gore effects that still look incredible over three decades later.
“What is a person but the sum of their memories?”
-- Lela Dax
Identity is a tricky thing. Even for someone like me, who has a pretty self-explanatory setup. When you’re young, you try on different personae, different obsessions, different cliques. And then, there’s the stuff that might not be okay in the culture of the time. There are a lot of things that determine both one’s identity as presented to the world, and one’s identity as a concept held internally, and how these two faces interact. Certainly, a large portion of identity comes from experiences, filtered through memory. The most terrifying aspect of that is just how unreliable memory is, meaning one of the largest things shaping who we are is a bunch of s--t our brains made up.
“I didn’t fight the Cardassians for twenty-five years just so I can start shooting other Bajorans.”
-- Shakaar Edon
In a long-running series, specific episodes are often thought of as “sequels” to earlier ones. While every episode coming after one is technically a sequel, these kinds of things draw clearer connections between them, uniting themes, events, characters, and ideas across seasons of distance. The writers intended this as a sequel to “Life Support,” which was the one where Winn and Bareil united like the Riggs and Murtaugh of diplomacy (so, you know, the exact opposite of Riggs and Murtaugh) to carve out the treaty with Cardassia. Bareil died, and his death is still felt here, with Kira praying for his soul. I saw a deeper connection with another episode, the first season hour “Progress,” when Kira had to move a cranky farmer off a moon before it was turned into a charred hellscape.
“If you ask me, this society could use a little chaos.”
-- Ishka
The most baffling, and yet virulent, opinion in all of criticism is that dark and gritty is inherently more meaningful than light and funny. You see it everywhere. It reared its sad, clown head over at Warner Bros. when they pledged that DC movies wouldn’t have any jokes, implying that the relentless grayness of Man of Steel is somehow deeper than Peter Quill overcoming the loss of his youth to forge a deep bond with a talking raccoon. It was apparent in the few bad reviews of the Parks and Recreation finale, that the idea of the future as a place for hope and happiness is inherently silly and shallow. “Dark” is too often accepted as a synonym for good, while “light” is empty.
