Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Jordan Stokes to overthink Star Trek.
At least, that’s what they intend at the outset. The tenth anniversary of 9/11/01 does come up, and the conversation does wander a bit. Maybe even more than usual. But they eventually get around to Star Trek. So it’s not a broken promise. Which is an improvement.
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It’s really wrong that I do want to email Pete, isn’t it. Having said that, his story about the Cognitive Science class is amazing, I may well mention it on my podcast if we talk about the amygdala, because it’s just such a great example.
Although I love science fiction movies, I just can’t seem to get into any science fiction TV shows. Thus, I’ve never been a big fan of any of the Star Trek series. And yet I was still able to get a lot of value from this episode.
Is there anything that listeners who don’t have iTunes can do to support the podcast? I expend some of my daily overthinking capital getting Linux to work.
Tell a friend about the show. That’s the best thing ANYONE can do for us. And we’re very grateful when you do.
I always thought that “Darmok” was the Star Trek writers making a subtle jab at its own fans, because we all know that fan boys like to communicate with references to their favorite property. At the time, Star Trek fans were just about the only people who did this, but I went to college with a generation of people who could communicate in Simpsons references.
Wrather (I think) does point out that it doesn’t seem possible to have this reference-based metalanguage without first having the core language, which makes sense–but maybe a version of the show where they talked a mixture of sense and nonsense would hit a little too close to home =P
Sure — when you say “Darmok and Jelad at Tenagra”, you need to understand at least “at” and “and”.
When people talk about how communism kills and how Communist China is taking over the world, I use the TNG version of the future as my analogy for what communism, as Marx and Engels envisioned it, is supposed to look like. Of course, I add the caveat that replicators are what makes that utopian society possible- but the replicator sort of takes the place of the revolution, in a way, since its invention results in the obliteration of capital. I also pitched that at my students last week when someone said, “And we’ve seen how great communism works,” during a discussion. They loved it.
I think Marx and Engels really thought industrialisation on the scale of Britain at the time WAS able to produce as much surplus as the replicator can. Was it deliberate by Roddenbury?
Britain/ industrialization: I was about to say that, due to the Nature of Man, as soon as the proletariat got ahold of the economy, they’d rule it like the elite they had just usurped- but then I thought, “Hm, who’s in charge of the replicators, then?” But I think that disparity relates to what the dudes in the podcast were saying, how TNG is all about people aspiring to be great and such. The society in Star Trek works because people have somehow lost their greed and only use the replicators to do Good things, not to hoard resources.
About Roddenberry being deliberate, I imagine he was. He probably didn’t have communism per say in mind as he was creating his universe, but he was rather anti-capitalist. So it follows that he’d create a utopian society without money in some way, shape, or form. It shows up in a few other ways, too, like how the Federation doesn’t imeperialize, but rather practices a quite literally universal version of pluralism ala Isaiah Berlin or Hannah Arendt. So it’s sort of a universal utopia, in the sense that nobody is forcing anybody to live in ways or do things they don’t want. The Star Fleet, after all, is a “peace keeping” organization. Ahem. But, oddly enough, for all this talk of “utopias,” of all the old dead white guys I have read, Sir Thomas More is one I haven’t.
I have it on my shelf but have never gotten into it. For my shame.
Great point, and it makes me wonder if an explanation was ever given for how or why latinum was un-replicatible (which of course resulted in the Ferengi-driven reassertion of capitalism as seen in DS9). I do remember it being implied that both the invention of the replicator and, later, the first contact between the Ferengi and Federation caused massive economic collapses, as replicators made gold relatively worthless.
That’s an interesting take. I always thought the replicator was another Star Trek comb-over, ie a minor impossible technology device designed to make the major impossible technology more plausible. For example, the Heisenberg compensator, which makes the transporter work. In this case, the replicator makes it possible for the life support of thousands of crew members to be infinitely sustainable. Clearly, though, the replicator does sweep up models of capital quite cleanly.
“Star Trek comb-over”
Ha! Love it.
“Anti-hair, Data! Anti-hair!!!”
That is a great phrase. And it’s ironic in Star Trek because Patrick Stewart was “anti-comb over” in that he made it cool for white guys to be bald, especially when he easily could whip up a dashing toupee in the replicator. Maybe they never did that because it would call too much attention to the replicator being silly- like the writers are making a meta joke, or maybe they did address that issue as I, like Chris, have never watched the show but have seen a couple of the movies.
Toupee in the replicator? Why not just genetically “cure” baldness? Or maybe I’m making too many assumptions of medial advances in Star Trek. Is there cancer or AIDS in the 24th century?
I’d have to… comb… through the series and movies to figure that out. But from my immediate memory, I don’t think it gets addressed. Presumably no cancer and the like, if replicators can cure diseases and fix injuries and whatnot. So then perhaps his baldness is a deliberate attempt to demonstrate how vanity is something humanity has surpassed?
Gab, I don’t think it would be the replicator, but instead the transporter technology that could cure diseases and fix injuries, apart from what Doctor McCoy has in the sick bay. (Yeah, you heard me. Crusher was a quack.) I expect the transporter and replicator technologies are closely linked, since it involves the complex ordering of matter. One idea is that there could be a record of the transportee kept every time they are sent through, and if a medical problem arises that can’t be taken care of in sick bay, the person could be sent through the transporter and their current self could be melded with the previous, non-sick version to cure the malady.
This gives rise to potential abuse if people could start using it to mix themselves with the transport records of people with more desirable attributes. Another problem comes up if the record could be used to generate a distinct separate version of a person. I mean a whole version, essentially a clone, not a split personality like Kirk from The Enemy Within. Then you get questions of who is the real person since they would have the same memories up to the point of the second version’s creation. Who gets to live the life that had been started? Go home to the husband/wife and kids? This is the sort of thing that would be better handled by the writers of Doctor Who than most anybody related to Star Trek, as they’ve had great success with similar themes in the past few years.
Oh, good point, Paul. I forgot they aren’t the same thing. I need to brush up, don’t I?
Have you seen The Prestige? If so, you prolly get why I ask. If not, I won’t spoil you. :)
I think someone once asked Gene Roddenbury why they hadn’t cured baldness in the 24th century, and he replied something like “In the the 24th century, they wouldn’t care
Hazbaz: Yes! That was rather what I assumed and meant by the “something humanity has surpassed.”
There are a lot of serious talk in this episode, but the most important question was not broached, and that is simply this: Mark Lee, when playing Super Mario Kart battle mode on the island course, did you ever use the feather to jump over the ledge and see how far you could drive before the guy in the cloud came and fished you out of the water?
I’ve only seen one Star Trek thing ever and that is, of course, Star Trek: First Contact.
We actually were never much for battle mode. At some point during sophomore year we only did grand prix mode.
For us, the final frontier with regards to feather jumping was on one of the lava levels; it allowed for a massive shortcut. We were never able to pull it off though. Anybody out there know of this?