Up this week: Insurrection! Highlights: we search our memories for non-crapbag Trek admirals (and speculate on how Starfleet’s admiral training assures such uniform crapbagdom), hear Audra’s boob report (featuring Anij’s dunk in the lake, Crusher and Troi’s discussion, and Data’s mimic), wonder what else happened during Picard and Anij’s time-stop date, note LeVar’s awesomely-expressive eyes (and wonder why writers didn’t direct the Enterprise to the Baku back in, say, TNG season three or so), wonder what secret messages might be encoded in @BrentSpiner’s Tweets, discover the best way to shave, and detail Audra’s argument with Mark Sheppard regarding Icheb’s father’s dick-ness.
when is the new Caprica podcast coming out?
Just cuz Helen Mirren is hot!
If there is one it will be some time down the road once everyone has had a chance to see it.
ThotFullGuy went to H.S. with the actress Donna Murphy. You can read about it here:
http://forum.galacticwatercooler.com/showpost.php?p=172207&postcount=74
BTW, Thot, you get to wear this this week.
I think Sean was talking about this Admiral Crapbag, Admiral Quinn and his attache (alien) Lt. Cmdr. Dexter Remmick.
In light of all the sexual talk on this podcast I decided to post this advice:
WARNING:
If your Insurrection lasts for more than 4 hours,
Please contact a Health Care Professional.
Yay, I’m someone on the podcast 
Not difficult to forget. I’m just saying.
Hooking Audra up. Here is the rumor about Catwoman and Batman 3.
http://screenrant.com/rhona-mitra-catwoman-batman-3-rumor-carl-3952/
I’m halfway through #163 and Audra is making me choke. With laughter. The second she says “Coming To America”, I lost it. “The royal wrecker is clean.” I. Die.
Florida friends read meet up thread.
Wooot!!
Done. The “Someoned” dog tag is in my sig, baby.
Audra, did you ask Mark Shepard what he was talking about when he called into the podcast?
I’m about 1/3 into the podcast but I may have another non-a-hole admiral: The admiral from the last episode of Voyager that commands the fleet to meet the "borg attack’ that is Voyager’s return.
Also, you need jingles for Audra’s reports. Just sayin’.
And I think Gates Mcfaden getting better looking over time could be related to a phenomeum noted among former companions on Doctor Who (see actresses who play(ed) Sarah Jane, Ace, Peri). More research needds to be done on this (maybe in the gutter).
Great cast guys! My feelings on Insurrection are pretty much what Audra said, which is that its good, but not a big enough story, and it feels kind of like a long episode.
Don’t know if anyone else caught this, but Rick Worthy, our very own Doc. Simon the Cylon has a small role in Insurrection.
Turns out he actually played a lot of roles in Star Trek:
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Rick_Worthy
Interesting call out at the end, I have to think about if I want to give it a try…
I thought this was a fascinating take on the movie, and it made me realize that the Ba’ku were essentially the bad guys:
If the only problem with the Ba’ku were an annoyingly self-righteous character in Sojef and the ridiculous “we don’t use technology but we still remember every aspect of it” motif, that would be marginally acceptable. But those are hardly the only problems with the Ba’ku. They are the most irritating cliché in all of fiction: the Wholesome Small-Town Folksy People.
Wholesome Small-Town Folksy People are everywhere in fiction. You see them in Westerns: they are the wonderful quaint little villages whose inhabitants get along fabulously with the native Indians and who need rescuing from evil land barons who want to take their land. You see them in sitcoms: they are the good-hearted out-of-towners who visit the city and don’t understand strange alien concepts like “violence” and “crime”. You hear about them in songs: John Cougar Mellencamp waxed poetic about life in small towns, and he wasn’t exactly the only singer to do so. There’s no escaping Wholesome Small-Town Folksy People. They till the land. They love their children. They never swear, they don’t commit crimes, they are never violent. They hate technology. They live the wholesome life, as a shining example to all of us, the unwashed masses.
The problem is that they’re a myth. In real life, small-town people really aren’t that much different from big city people. I’ve lived in both large cities (~5 million inhabitants) and very small towns (<3000 inhabitants), and I’m speaking from experience. Once you account for the huge population difference, there is just as much crime, violence, drug use, teen pregnancy, etc. in small towns as there is in big cities (note that I’m talking about decent suburbs, not the burned out cores of certain American cities- I drove through Detroit once and I must admit that I was scared).
But there’s a darker aspect of the wonderful Wholesome Small-Town Life: racism. No, I’m not just being hyper-sensitive and seeing sinister intent in casual glances. I’m talking about being asked (dozens of times) what it’s like in China (my answer? “If you ever visit there, let me know”). I’m talking about being told by numerous people that my children, the product of a mixed race relationship, might suffer serious birth defects because “the genes don’t match”. I’m talking about listening to some guy use the word “nigger” over and over in casual conversation, assuming that I wouldn’t be offended because he was attacking a different visible minority from my own. I’m talking about a woman telling me, to my face: “you should stay with your own kind.” I haven’t been hallucinating after watching civil rights documentaries: these incidents actually happened. And every one of them happened in a small town, surrounded by Wholesome Small-Town Folksy People.
Why do I bring this up in a discussion of STI? Well, I admit that I didn’t check the film over frame-by-frame, but I don’t recall seeing any non-white members of the Wholesome Small-Town Folksy Ba’ku community. If you have never been the victim of racial slurs or discrimination, you may not appreciate the sinister overtones of this omission. But I do- while I was watching the film, I became slowly more and more irritated. This was not an accidental omission- in the opening sequence, we seamlessly transition from the all-white Ba’ku village to the multicultural Federation crew in the observation post- why did they remember to include visible minorities in the Federation observation post, but not among the the spiritually enlightened ranks of the Ba’ku?
Part 2:
The film makes it very clear that these Wholesome Small-Town People are supposedly better than us. “They have incredible mental discipline”, according to Counsellor Troi. They are smarter than us. They are more enlightened than us. They are healthier. They will live forever, thanks to the disease-curing, genetic defect-fixing, life-extending effect of the “metaphasic particles” in the planet’s rings. Their kids play wonderful non-competitive games. The weather is perfect every day. The landscape is perfect. The architecture is classical and flawless. Yessir, they’ve found paradise, and we are given the distinct impression that they deserve to be there.
And why not? They’re superior to us in every way, right? They’ve eliminated all sorts of “bad” things- hatred, violence, crime, technology, pollution, old age, disease, racial impurity …
Maybe that’s why they deserve immortality while the rest of us must suffer from the ravages of disease and age. Maybe that’s why, when faced with a choice between preserving a society of 600 Wholesome Small-Town Folksy People and providing doubled life spans and improved health to billions, the obvious choice is to preserve the society of the 600 Wholesome Small-Town Folksy People. Why should they lose their homes just so that billions of us dirty, unwashed, technology-using, racially impure people can enjoy doubled life spans and freedom from disease? Even Captain Picard himself is destined to suffer from a serious disease later in his life (as revealed in the TNG final episode), but he will gladly sacrifice himself to help these people maintain their idyllic, worry-free, pain-free, disease-free, ageless lives. Clearly, he understands the inherent superiority of the Wholesome Small-Town Folksy People- why don’t I understand it?
Maybe, as some have suggested, I’m just mean spirited. Maybe, as others have suggested, I’m over-sensitive to race issues (although it’s pretty damned easy for a white person to tell a visible minority that he’s oversensitive to race issues). Maybe, as still others have suggested, I just don’t like Star Trek and I try to find excuses to say bad things about it (although I never had this reaction to STFC or better yet, ST6, which was the pinnacle of all that Star Trek represented).
But maybe, just maybe, I have a point. If you can find pictures of non-white members of the Wholesome Small-Town Folksy Ba’ku People, feel free to let me know. If you disagree with my interpretation of the film, feel free to let me know. If you feel that there is some intelligent reason why the immortality and happiness of 600 people should outweigh doubled life spans and freedom from disease for billions, feel free to let me know. But I honestly can’t imagine any conceivable reason not to detest people who intend to hog the greatest medical miracle in history, all for themselves.
"Some of the darkest chapters in the history of my world involve the forced relocation of a small group of people, to satisfy the demands of a large one."- Captain Picard.Patrick Stewart, to his credit, tries his best to invest his fictional captain’s moral position with conviction. Unfortunately, there’s only so much that an actor can do with a fundamentally untenable situation. Leonard Nimoy hit a lot closer to home when he said that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” In real life, people are moved for the good of society all the time. How many people have been ousted from their land to make way for something as mundane as a highway? Relocation is not particularly heinous- it certainly is not so horrible that an incredible boon like these “metaphasic particles” should be kept from billions. Picard may be referring to slavery, WW2 concentration camps, or perhaps native American Indian relocations when he makes his statement, but regardless of what he is referring to, there is no similarity to this situation:
The Ba'ku relocation promises to benefit billions while hurting a mere 600. On the other hand, the aforementioned incidents benefited no more people (if any) than they hurt.
The Ba'ku relocation is just that- a relocation, without any of the enslavement, torture, execution, massacres, or other atrocities that went along with the aforementioned historical incidents.Let’s face reality- if the Indian relocations hadn’t involved rapes or massacres, and if they had somehow brought about the elimination of disease and caused the average lifespan to jump to 160, would we look back on them as one of the darkest chapters in our history? Or would we look back on them as the moment when we took an unfortunate but necessary action to usher in a golden age? You can try very hard to make a simple relocation seem heinous, but it just doesn’t work, especially in the context of the potential gains.
Yes, the So’na are demonized in the film’s script- just to make sure we know who the good guys are, the So’na behave more and more villainously as the movie drags on, until they become homicidal maniacs near the end. But the So’na are mere window-dressing. If they don’t grab this resource and boot this little Wholesome Small-Town Folksy Community off their land (gee whiz- where have we seen this cliché before? Oh yes- about two hundred westerns, just replace “metaphasic particles” with “gold”), then someone else will. The dilemma remains. In real life, if a community of 600 people discovered a magic elixir that could double life spans and cure all diseases, how long do you think the world’s governments would let them keep it all to themselves? How much sympathy would you have for them?
The mere fact that they hog it all to themselves demonstrates that they are selfish and callous- wouldn’t it occur to them how much suffering is going on in the outside world, that they could stop? They understood what the “metaphasic radiation” was doing to them, they possessed warp drive at one time, and they still had the means to leave (which is how the So’na left). Surely, if they were one tenth as moral and caring as they claimed to be, they would have shared their incredible discovery. But instead, they chose to secretly hoard it, and ignore the billions of people who could have benefited.
If your son was dying, would you feel comfortable explaining to him that “yes, you’re going to die, but when you go, please remember that there are 600 people out there who are enjoying wonderful, immortal, pain-free, idyllic lives thanks to your sacrifice.”? Frankly, if it were my son, I would go to that little community and gun down those crass, self-righteous, holier-than-thou Wholesome Small-Town Folksy People myself. As far as I’m concerned, if they’ve been creeping around for hundreds of years, they’re way past their natural expiry date already. Lock and load.