You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 8th, 2009.
X-Men may have been the most excrutiatingly-awful long-running show of my childhood. This particular clip has been a running joke since it first aired in 1992. I felt compelled to share it.
The devil is *fine*.
Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It comes on at one in the morning in WGN, and they happen to presently be airing the absolute peak of the shows quality, season four. I am consistently amazed at the depth of the storytelling in a way I never was before; in the past, I got far too caught up in my love for everything good about Deep Space Nine that I tended to write off The Next Generation for being episodic alien-planet-of-the-week sort of stuff, with cranky special effects and a ship that amounted to a luxury hotel in space. I’m still not a fan of the fact they they stage plays on the ship, but let’s move past that.
As I said, they’ve been showing season four, which happens to include some absolutely amazing episodes, from “The Best of Both Worlds, part 2,” to “The Loss,” in which Deanna Troi loses her empathic abilities, to “The Wounded,” in which a rogue starship captain is causing a bunch of havoc in Cardassian space (featuring the first appearance of the Cardassians and of Marc Alaimo) to “Devil’s Due,” which aired last night. “Devil’s Due” is yet another entry into Trek’s ambiguous relationship with religion.
It’s in a long tradition of Trek dethroning false gods. From Vaal in “The Apple” to, um, God in The Final Frontier and again and again and again, this is a franchise that has long loved to cast down myths and make the universe a safer, if less mysterious and more boring, place. I’m being overly critical, of course, but the recurrant theme is that people are capable of making their own paradise without the need for gods, at least false ones. This episode deals with that quite explicitly.
According to Ventaxian lore, a thousand years ago, while the planet was in the midst of ecological disaster and war that threatened to destroy them all, a devil figured named Ardra arrived, and promised to provide the planet with a thousand years of peace and prosperity, at the end of which the planet and all its inhabitants would be given over to her. Lo and behold, a thousand years pass, and Ardra arrives, with all the great powers she was purported to have (nothing, of course, that the Enterprise wasn’t capable of), and claimed her planet. But of course, it wasn’t really her, and after an episode’s worth of tormenting Picard and the planet, she’s revealed to be a con artist, but the real tour de force is Picard’s demonstration that Ardra, even if this really was her, hadn’t accomplished anything; the Ventaxians had made their paradise themselves.
It’s an article of faith in the Trek universe that our unmitigated potential is immense, if only we would claim it for ourselves, and as much as I love these shows, I can’t help but disagree. In the solely-material world of The Next Generation, even folks of terrifying and godlike power like Q are to be resisted decried, fought and simply dismissed. What gods there are – from Q to Trelane to Flint — are mercurial at best. Instead, consistently, purely human potential is glorified, even when its a madman like Khan, who is treated with a bizarre admiration for the entirety of “Space Seed.”
This is, of course, at odds with the Gospel, with Catholicism — while we do believe that mankind is capable of great things, we predicate that greatness on the loss of self and submission to God, who raises us up, and not on our own efforts at greatness, which, we have seen countless times, and inevitably doomed to crash and burn. Pride goeth before the fall, and all that. Star Trek presumes, though, that material progress will eventually be matched by spiritual progress, that mankind will eventually figure out what to do with the horrifying things we’re capable of. It’s the only explanation I can think of as to how the people of the twenty-forth century aren’t entirely fixated on the holodeck. And yet, how little evidence we really see for that in the show!
No, instead, we have the same weak, fallible people. They haven’t grown. The fight and falter and stumble and trip, face addiction and corurption, fight wars, grow paranoid (Ben Maxwell, “The Wounded”) and harbor grudges and nurse hatreds. They’re us, just us, and we’re supposed to presume they’ve overcome their spiritual decay? No, they haven’t overcome a thing. In fact, all the evidence suggests that what Star Trek shows us is a military, fascist dictatorship. There’s no religion. There’s no economy. As one article I read so appropriately put it, “if daily life is not concerned with familiar economic activities and the whole of life is not informed with religious purposes, then what is life all about in Star Trek?”
Ronald D. Moore, one of the brains behind Deep Space Nine and the genius behind Battlestar Galactica, was consistently stymied by this; why, he wanted to know, is everyone obsessed with Starfleet? Why does everyone just say “there’s nothing I want more than to put on the uniform and explore the galaxy”? So he tried to write characters for whom this wasn’t true. He gave us journalist and writer Jake Sisko, and was the driving force behind Wesley’s eventual abandonment of his Starfleet path. And yet, the question presents itself; there’s no economic life, there’s no spiritual life; the only human accomplishments left are either learning Tae Kwan Do at the adult learning annex or joining the military. In the military, there’s meaning. In the military, there’s purpose. There’s direction. There’s moral force.
And so, Starfleet is everywhere. They’re on the Federation council. They have their own commander-in-chief. We’ve even seen them stage a coup. It’s the only thing that commands any kind of loyalty; it even has a spiritual force to it. Picard reminds us in “The First Duty” that “the first duty of a Starfleet officer is to the truth, be it scientific truth, historical truth, or personal truth,” and that if that cannot be accepted, one does not deserve to wear the uniform of the Fleet. Indeed, we find again and again that within the confines of the military establishment, there is endless search for personal meaning, from Data to Worf to Troi to Bashir and again and again and again and again. It seems that the only place in the future you can find meaning in yourself is in the last form of public service out there.
Star Trek is all about casting down false gods, except the biggest of them all: Starfleet itself.
