11/23/2023 0 Comments Cosmic space hippieThis is because subjective interpretation isn’t a bug: it’s what makes sentience so precious. It’s both strongly scientific in aesthetic (if not exactly in the hand-wavy “reverse the polarity” science itself) and keen on embracing the value of individual experience. The future imagined in Star Trek is different. As much as many atheists thought it “rational” to try to compel people with scientific evidence to give up their spiritual convictions, they often did so in ways that ignored what the data also tells us about what actually changes minds, versus what causes extreme or fringe beliefs to linger. A whole era of atheist/theist debate, from the late 1990s through early 2010s, focused on trying to argue people out of their subjective beliefs, in large part because of the destructive sway that many such beliefs had on the quality of public life. TOS reruns likewise factored into daytime broadcasts for years.īut the Trek universe is also decidedly humanist in a way that the real world often isn’t. I also don’t remember a time when Trek wasn’t central to the culture: Ontario’s CityTV was “Your Federation Station”, showing TNG and DS9 back-to-back on Saturday evening prime time. Reed and I are almost the same age, so his experience of Trek being background vocabulary in his media is akin to my own I do not remember a time without Trek. In more than 750 episodes of Star Trek, it is vanishingly rare for a plot to hinge on a crew member being automatically disbelieved or shunned. They’ll try their damnedest to believe each other, even when it gets weird. And they expect to be believed because that’s Star Trek ‘s baseline assumption: these are people who will not deny each other’s subjective realities. Barclay or Chief O’Brien or Kes take their inexplicable experiences to their respective captains is that it’s strange to realize they do this because they expect to be believed. Because their next step, almost without fail, is to take their concerns directly to their boss. It’s in the next step that these characters do something that can make them seem as alien as any Gorn in a loincloth. All of these are common enough set-ups in genre fiction, and none of them are unique to Star Trek. Or they simply woke up feeling absolutely, unshakably certain that the shape of reality was suddenly changed, and horribly wrong. Or they heard disembodied voices muttering when they were alone in their quarters. Maybe they saw an impossible creature moving with intention inside the usually-empty void of the transporter beam. Here’s the way the story often goes, in classic Trek like TNG, DS9, or Voyager:įirst, a character has an experience that they can’t understand or explain. In a 2019 essay for Uncanny Magazine, Nicasio Andres Reed explored what makes this trust extraordinary. What defines a “Trek” story varies between Trekkies, but one abiding feature in many series is the role of trust among crew mates. A refreshingly nuanced and multifaceted episode of SNW invites us to sit with the importance of showing up with empathy where words won't boldly go.
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