Maybe it’s just because I’m old, but I don’t get the whole meme that’s been going around the last few years that there’s something inherently funny and/or icky about the word “moist.” It’s a perfectly fine word, one that’s very onomatopoetic. So I was really worried that “Moist Vessel” was going to be full of characters going “oooh ick” over the word moist.
Once again, the title led me down a garden path. The word “moist” is never even used…
[SPOILERS AHOY!]
The title does apply, however, because the Cerritos and their sister ship, the Merced, are assigned to relocate a generation ship. The ship itself malfunctioned and the people on board died, but there is raw material for terraforming and repopulating a world on board, and so the two ships are towing it to a base.
Things go horribly wrong, of course, because if things didn’t go horribly wrong, the episode wouldn’t be about this, and the terraforming material gets loose on both ships, transforming the starship into a verdant world full of waterfalls, plants, and so on.
For the first time, we see Mariner and her mother, Captain Freeman, actually interacting with each other significantly. Fed up with Mariner’s insubordination—she keeps yawning while distributing padds in the midst of the mission briefing—she tries several tactics to get rid of her. First she assigns Mariner the worst duties on the ship, but, while turbolift maintenance and holodeck waste extraction nearly do her in, she finds a way to make scraping carbon off the carbon filter fun, thus ruining Freeman’s plan.
Buy the Book
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
So she goes with Plan B: promoting her. The freewheeling Mariner chafes horribly under all the boring paperwork duties that come with higher rank, not to mention the socializing, which is apparently enforced by Freeman. (Though it’s perfectly possibly that Mariner is the only one that has to be forced to attend the poker games and such…)
But then the terraforming goop gets loose on both ships. Freeman and Mariner are in the former’s ready room when the ship goes bonkers, and they have to work together to save the ship. It’s Mariner who comes up with the plan, while Freeman just kibitzes and also criticizes everything Mariner does. It’s a stereotypical mother-daughter dynamic, which is tired, but at least not as actively annoying as the usual Mariner nonsense.
They save the ship, of course, and mother and daughter almost have a moment, but then Mariner sabotages it by making fun of an admiral’s pronunciation of the word “sensor,” which gets her demoted, to her glee.
Boimler’s initial reaction is my favorite part of this. He’d kill to get promoted, to get his own quarters, to do all that boring paperwork. He doesn’t get that it’s being done to punish Mariner. Unfortunately, that side plot falls over a cliff when Boimler decides to emulate her behavior in the hopes of likewise getting promoted, which is just a dumb sitcom plot (and yes, this is a sitcom, but still), and results in him spilling hot coffee on Ransom’s groin when the crisis hits.
My biggest problem with the ship-in-danger plot, besides the fact that it’s kinda hoary, is that it all starts because Captain Durango, the Tellarite captain of the Merced, decides to change his position in the formation because he’s the senior captain. Durango up to this point has been established as being boring, but not stupid, and his actions here are utterly nonsensical, done solely to move the plot along. But it’s unnecessary—this is Star Trek, there are, like, eighty million technobabble reasons you could come up with for why this happened. The willful incompetence of a captain to stroke his own ego at the expense of mission sense just rings completely wrong and unnecessary.
Meanwhile, Tendi is thrilled to learn that one of their crewmates, O’Connor, is about to ascend to a higher plane of existence. This is an old Trek cliché, one that we’ve seen with John Doe, Wes Crusher, and Kes, among others (not to mention Daniel Jackson and dozens more on Stargate), and I like the way it’s played with here. O’Connor isn’t actually trying to ascend, he’s just pretending to in order to make himself more interesting. But Tendi’s boundless enthusiasm ruins the ceremony, as she messes with the sand sculpture he’s spent years on, and the peace of the whole thing, making O’Connor lose his temper and sacrifice all his serenity.
For the rest of the episode, Tendi keeps trying to make it up to O’Connor, which just pisses him off more. Rutherford tries to convince Tendi to back off, but she is determined to help him ascend, dagnabbit. When the ship falls apart, Tendi and O’Connor both save each other’s lives, and O’Connor reveals his fraud, and they bond—
—and then that gives him the final bit of serenity he needs to ascend. Turns out that he faked sincerity a little too well, and all the playacting he did really did prep him for ascension. But—and I have to say, I loved this part—the actual process of turning into a being of pure energy is slow and painful and horrible and agonizing, and apparently involves a smiling koala.
Several things are becoming apparent as we’re 40% through Lower Decks‘s first season. One is that Mariner is still extremely annoying. Two is that Mariner is more interesting when playing off a senior officer (her mother this week, Ransom last week) than she is among her fellow lower decks denizens. And three is that invariably, the B plot involving Tendi and Rutherford is going to be more interesting than the A plot involving Mariner and Boimler, which is a problem insofar as the latter two are the primary leads.
Random thoughts:
- The unrelated comedy teaser that isn’t funny is eschewed this week in favor of a teaser that sets up the story, as we open with the mission briefing where Mariner keeps yawning in the middle of it. Let’s hope that trend continues, as I’d rather the teaser actually tease the episode…
- My least favorite part of “Second Contact” was two officers chest bumping and finger-pointing while setting up a post-away mission beer, which had 21st-century stuff intruding on the 24th. This week, we get another one of those, and this time it’s one that doesn’t even track with what’s already been established on Trek. Boimler is thrilled to get conference room cleaning duty because it gives him access to the “better” replicators that the senior officers use. Except the replicators are all the same. They can all produce the same stuff. That’s been the case on every single 24th-century Trek show prior to this. The idea of an “executive key” that only certain people have access to is one that is not only not the case on Starfleet ships of this era, but one that was actively described as anachronistic nonsense from a stupider past in TNG‘s “The Neutral Zone.”
- When told by Tendi that O’Connor is becoming a being of pure energy, Rutherford’s first thought is, “Oh, like a Q or a Traveler.” I gotta say, I love the idea that ascending like that is relatively commonplace and well known in the Trek universe.
- Also, while O’Connor’s body and uniform and underclothing and socks all ascend, his boots do not. Make of that what you will.
- Apparently, the poker game on the Cerritos is so friendly that everybody always folds. Also Dr. T’Ana wears a visor, because of course she does. (If it’s good enough for Data…)
Keith R.A. DeCandido wants you to know that, if you like what he writes here for Tor.com, you’ll love what he puts on his Patreon, including one movie review and anywhere between one and six TV reviews per month, as well as excerpts from his works in progress, cat pictures, vignettes featuring his original characters, and more!
“…it all starts because Captain Durango, the Tellarite captain of the Merced, decides to change his position in the formation because he’s the senior captain. Durango up to this point has been established as being boring, but not stupid, and his actions here are utterly nonsensical, done solely to move the plot along. But it’s unnecessary—this is Star Trek, there are, like, eighty million technobabble reasons you could come up with for why this happened. The willful incompetence of a captain to stroke his own ego at the expense of mission sense just rings completely wrong and unnecessary.”
Tellarites are known to be both impatient and intensely proud. Either or both of these societal qualities could have contributed to the poor decision to change his ship’s position. It’d be great if Starfleet captains were always perfect in their decision-making, but as already demonstrated by Freeman, this is not the case in the Lower Decks corner of the Trek universe.
It occurs to me that a lot of Starfleet’s best, brightest, most noble and heroic officers must’ve gotten killed in the Dominion War, and this is only four years later. So they probably had to promote a lot of officers who never would’ve been good enough to make it to command positions under normal circumstances. Also, the counselors would’ve been busy tending to all the people traumatized by the war, so other officers might not have had enough help learning to manage or outgrow their less extreme psychological issues. So you’d end up with a higher ratio of screwups, neurotics, and jerks in officer positions than you had during the heyday of TNG.
If the Enterprise encounters a statistically unlikely (but dramatic) number of exciting space anomalies, then the Cerritos gets an unrepresentative (but dramatic) supply of jerks.
We’ve long known that the UFP Starfleet and related agencies (23rd to 29th centuries) have a supply of criminally insane admirals, captains who break under exceptional pressure, arrogant young doctors eager to practice frontier medicine, overbearing ambassadors, legal officers who go on witch hunts, respected scientists who make poor decisions when trying to match early-career success, snooty Vulcans, and the like. The main difference with LDS is that such people are the recurring secondary characters on the “hero” ship, rather than antagonist-or-impediment-of-the-week.
(Disclosure: I haven’t yet viewed any of the four episodes — waiting for an opportune juncture to reactivate my CBSAA subscription — so my interpretation of the annoying-level of the characters is second-hand, based on reviews like this.)
Ah. So when Freeman saw the episode “Lieutenant O’Reilly”, she must have thought Hawkeye and BJ were trying to screw Radar over.
Given her being a holdover from the Dominion War who I half expect to order Dr T’Ana to start blood screening back up to catch Changeling infiltrators, that’s probably not a surprise. People like her were handy to have around back when the Federation was in real trouble but given that the only real threat is Romulans who hate synthetic life, she’s too damned intense for her own good. Also, Mariner simply doesn’t understand that the war warped a lot of people.
Paul Jones: That’s not fair — Freeman was responding to the very specific situation of Mariner. Promoting her is the worst thing she could do to Mariner because she hates responsibility. She’s closer to Scully than Radar, to keep the M*A*S*H metaphor going….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@3/phillip_thorne: CBS has made the first episode of Lower Decks available for free on YouTube so you can at least watch that one if you don’t feel like waiting to react your All Access subscription.
So the Merced had blue livery in contrast to the gold livery on its sister ship the Cerritos. i know Starfleet’s never done like this before but it would certainly be appropriate for a ship in a support role like the Cerritos to have gold livery. And considering it was supposed to be responsible for the preservation of the generation ship and all its scientific potential, the Merced could have been a science vessel…
Yeah, never mind, Mike McMahan already covered this:
“In the California-class [line], there are three types of hull painting: there’s blue, red, and yellow. We’ve extended the visual metaphor of the uniforms to the ships, and the Cerritos has yellow on the hull because it’s primarily a second contact engineering ship. They show up to planets that need engineering stuff done on them in order to be able to communicate with the Federation. There’s also, you’ll see in the show, blue-hulled California class ships, which are usually deployed to places where there has to be more medical expertise, and red-hulled ships that are like for moving around ambassadors and doing more command-level stuff.”
Well, this week they managed to avoid any character appearing in underwear or naked, so that’s something. But they make up for it next week by pulling a woman’s pants down. Always hilarious! except when it reinforces the belief that it’s acceptable.
My challenge with this show is there is no purpose for it. We learn nothing new about Starfleet; other than individual character traits (annoying / childish; ambitious; naive; etc) there is no series or season-long plot; a few fan call-outs are mentioned but nothing that ties this ship or crew into the wider Trek universe; and if Mariner were that disrespectful and disobedient, she would have been removed from service, or the Academy, long ago.
I made it through four shows but don’t know if I’ll watch any more.
At least we find out where all the cum goes on the holodeck. It has it’s own filter! I always kinda expected something like that.
@8 How else are you going to find out If she has a tail? Prudish much?
I got the sense that at least some of the stuff Freeman invited Mariner to as an officer was arranged ahead of time with all the other officers in on the scheme, so that they could all behave in ways perfectly calculated to drive her nuts. Like, everyone folding at the poker game and such.
@8/B Scott: “My challenge with this show is there is no purpose for it. We learn nothing new about Starfleet; other than individual character traits (annoying / childish; ambitious; naive; etc) there is no series or season-long plot; a few fan call-outs are mentioned but nothing that ties this ship or crew into the wider Trek universe; and if Mariner were that disrespectful and disobedient, she would have been removed from service, or the Academy, long ago.”
Continuity is not the exclusive purpose of fiction. What’s the point of a thing whose only value is how it connects to things outside itself? If everything is like that, then nothing has any value at all, because it’s just a bunch of interconnected zeroes.
The primary purpose of a story is to tell a story. Its value lies in itself, your ability to enjoy what you’re reading or watching or listening to at that moment. A good story is one that is complete and satisfying within itself, independently of anything beyond it. You need to have that before there’s any point in connecting different stories to one another. So continuity is a secondary concern, and an optional one.
You can see this in the movies. The Marvel Cinematic Universe works because they started out making a series of good, separate, standalone movies, with only a few minor, optional allusions and connections between them, so that they had a solid and worthwhile foundation to build on when they did start connecting them more. But other studios tried to copy their success by making movies like The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Batman v Superman and Cruise’s The Mummy that were so obsessed with setting up a future multi-movie continuity that they forgot to do the most fundamental work of making a movie that was good in itself. That’s why it’s foolish to prioritize connections to other stories over the quality of the current story you’re telling. Tying different stories together is pointless unless the stories are worthwhile in themselves.
Re better replicators: In “Ethics”, Riker makes a joke about Worf eating sickbay food, as if the replicators there are substandard. (Yes, it’s a joke, but if it’s impossible for a replicator to be substandard, it’s a very anachronistic one.) A major plot point in “Babel” revolves around Quark using command level replicators to feed the station’s general population. Maybe “better” just means “better maintained”?
Not much to say about this episode, it was fun, but it might be my least favorite this far. I enjoyed seeing the generation ship, and the Tellrite captain, though. Oh, and the terraforming inside the Cerritos looks really cool.
@2 – Chris: Works for me.
cap-mjb: Yeah, but on a Cardassian station that was populated in part by slave labor, it makes sense that the command officers would have better replicators than the ones on the Promenade. It makes no sense on a Starfleet ship.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@11/:ChristopherLBennett
Interesting argument and I agree the strength of a story and characters is of greater importance than attempting to shoe-horn new fiction into an existing world; unless the story and characters are initially presented as part of that existing world. To the best of my knowledge ‘Below Decks’ has never been mentioned as an ‘alternative’ Star Trek; or a ‘what if’ or a reboot; but the stories of characters and events within the Star Trek story universe that until now have largely not been told.
It is widely known that Marvel had planned their literal ‘Endgame’ from the very first move in the series and their skill was not in inserting a new story or new interpretation into an existing Marvel world, but building that world via individual movies and character story arcs. For the characters, that world already existed – it is the world they live in – and through each movie, as the world was built before our eyes, the viewers grew to be a part of that world, also.
DC struggles with feature movies because in nearly every story the audience is expected to enter a slightly different world; much of what was presented before forgotten or tweaked or negated or re-imagined until virtually every DC story causes the audience to question just what story-universe this is.
Does your argument “A good story is one that is complete and satisfying within itself, independently of anything beyond it”; and “Tying different stories together is pointless unless the stories are worthwhile in themselves” predicate ‘Below Decks’ are good stories? If so, many reviewers and commenters would disagree.
@15/B Scott: There are always positive and negative reactions to anything. I’ve heard more positive or guardedly encouraged reactions to Lower Decks than negative ones; indeed, so far it’s getting surprisingly little of the kneejerk screaming hatred that closed-minded purists have spewed against every new Trek series for as long as I can remember, though of course there is some.
But my point is not about whether one specific show is good or bad. It is merely to refute the fallacy that lack of continuity porn makes something bad. Too many people today, both fans and creators, have become unhealthily obsessed with continuity above all other storytelling considerations. It’s high time the pendulum started swinging back toward the center and we rediscovered the value of episodic shows that acknowledge their continuity but are not solely defined by it.
Just before Durango broke formation, he was glaring at Freeman’s pic on his viewscreen. Now this episode certainly suggested that Freeman and Mariner are much more alike then either would like to admit and in the pic of Freeman that Durango is evil-eying, she’s looking as cocky as her daughter. With Durango being perceived by both mother and daughter as boring, i wonder if Freeman and Durango’s relationship back on the Illinois had some parallels with the current relationship between Mariner and Boimler. And i could certainly see poor Boimler getting all insecure with Mariner’s seemingly effortless competency and doing something equally stupid as Durango’s breaking of formation.
@14. krad: It’s far from impossible that, in this context, ‘better replicators’ is subjective rather than objective – the replicators aren’t ‘better’ because they’re superior hardware, they’re ‘better’ because they’re being used by the Best & Brightest in Starfleet (aka the Starfleet Officer Corps).
A rather peculiar notion, but exactly the sort of idea that would occur to a neurotic young shavetail so hungry to be promoted that he’s willing to change his entire personality.
@18 Well, in this case they’re specifically described as better because they have access to better recipes. As granted by the key card Mariner gives Boimler at the end of the episode.
And I could see that. I mean, there have to be perks of rank to make people want to get promoted. Clearly, they’re working on Boimler.
@19/Robotech_Master: “I mean, there have to be perks of rank to make people want to get promoted.”
Why? This is the 24th century, where people seek personal achievement and growth as ends in themselves, rather than seeking material gain or privilege over others. Rank in Starfleet is supposed to be more an organizational convenience than a classist pecking order. Promotion is something you seek so that you can do more good for others or fulfill your potential more fully, not so you can get some petty material advantage that others are arbitrarily deprived of to make them feel inadequate.
There’s no reason why there should be any difference in the recipes between replicators. Data is data, and a gourmet meal and a PB&J sandwich are both just different combinations of CHON atoms.
p.s. For the record my point above was intended to suggest an illusion, rather than a delusion.
@19. Robotech_Master: I wonder if this is due to one of the officers simply having a more educated palate than most and having taken the time to tinker with the default recipes? (The sort of endless minor adjustments that aren’t really worth applying across the board, but are a nice change from the default settings*).
*I nurse a pet theory that replicator food tastes excellent, but that if you keep ordering the same dish it will taste exactly the same every time unless you take the time to programme in some variation (as noted above, one imagines this to be detail work of the most nit-picking sort and a process that produces results not always guaranteed to please everyone … especially since this sort of fiddling usually requires that the replicator not be used while the adjustments take place).
@20 Yeah, and nobody argues with each other anymore, and there aren’t any more lawyers. Gene Roddenberry had a lot of grand ideas, but a lot of them don’t make a lot of sense or leave room for much drama, and many of them went by the wayside to a greater or lesser extent once Roddenberry was no longer directly involved with the series. If nobody was seeking material gain or privilege anymore, Quark would be out of a job.
And anyway, not all replicators having access to the same recipes is already a matter of canon.
(Also, I have to giggle every time I log into Star Trek Online. The game set in an era when we’re beyond money has well over a dozen different forms of earnable or tradeable currency. Heh.)
@14: That was certainly part of it, but another part was that Sisko was insisting O’Brien prioritise getting the command level replicators working whilst the ones in public eating places were way down the maintenance schedule. If that’s standard Starfleet procedure, it may be that while all the replicators on a Federation starship are the same standard when they’re brand new, the ones for the senior officers get a lot more debugging and upgrades than the ones on the lower decks.
@22/Robotech_Master: Who was talking about Quark? I’m talking about the Federation.
“And anyway, not all replicators having access to the same recipes is already a matter of canon.”
In some contexts, perhaps, but this is different from your examples. It’s one thing for Earth replicators not to have access to a recipe popular elsewhere in the galaxy, or for an auxiliary craft’s replicator to have a smaller database and matter stock than the replicator system on the main ship. But we’re talking about different replicators on the same ship, connected to the exact same computer system and supply grids. There is no functional reason why some of them would have less access to the database than others; it’s completely arbitrary. And I am offended by the suggestion that the inequality would be created deliberately for the sole purpose of manufacturing a hierarchy of haves and have-nots. That’s too much like the way things are in our benighted time.
@23/cap-mjb: “…it may be that… the ones for the senior officers get a lot more debugging and upgrades than the ones on the lower decks.”
Except they just did an episode about how the junior officers give themselves “buffer time” to work on other projects after finishing assigned tasks. So they’d have plenty of time to tweak and upgrade their own replicators.
And again, all the replicators are connected to the same computer and database, the same way my laptop and your device are connected to the same internet and have the same access to Wikipedia and Google and Amazon and so forth. Replicator “recipes” are computer data and should be equally accessible by every replicator on the ship. The only difference should be in the hardware, the fine-tuning of the phase transition coils and whatnot, and, well, see previous paragraph.
No, ED’s explanation is the one that makes the most sense to me.
So that’s why everyone gets exactly the same size of rooms, and all the same privileges and rights no matter what rank they are? Because material things don’t matter, so everyone should be given exactly the same things?
It doesn’t work that way even in the fully canonical shows. From the viewpoint of the various other privileges higher-ranked officers are seen to have over lower-rankers elsewhere in canon, it seems entirely reasonable that, while everyone might be able to get all the perfectly delicious and nutritious regular food they want, certain gourmet items or special recipes (like the “gnocci and fritters” or “that macaroni and cheese with the breaded top” Boimler mentions) could be the privilege of officers.
@25/RM: “Because material things don’t matter, so everyone should be given exactly the same things?”
You’re twisting it. Equality is not about forcing everything to be exactly the same. It’s just about not deliberately inventing arbitrary inequalities for the sole purpose of having inequality. It’s the gratuitousness of the motive you’re suggesting that’s so ugly. As I said, there is absolutely no valid reason to segregate which replicators get access to which parts of the pattern database. Data is data. It’s like throttling broadband, or censoring certain people’s search results.
Most of the “humor” in Lower Decks doesn’t seem at all funny to me, but I did laugh out loud once during the episode, when the computer announced that it had detected “unauthorized terraforming.” The idea that the computer is set up to detect terraforming INSIDE THE SHIP … that really tickled me. But stuff like Boimler intentionally pouring coffee in someone’s lap just seems stupid and ridiculous to me.
Humor is very subjective, though, so I accept that some people find that stuff hilarious. I’m just not one of them.
Or like insisting that people pay the publishers for e-books or movies instead of just downloading them all from Pirate Bay. After all, data is data, right? It’s so cheap, without any marginal cost to make more copies of digital files, why should we have to pay for them?
Just because people (supposedly) don’t use money anymore in Star Trek doesn’t mean things don’t have intrinsic value anymore. Remember the saying “information wants to be free”? It’s usually quoted out of context:
Information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.
The thing about Star Trek is that, while it really should be a post-scarcity economy, it doesn’t seem like a great deal of effort has ever been put into making it come off that way, or even necessarily into making it internally consistent, because we live in a scarcity economy and viewers would have a hard time relating to it if nobody had to struggle to earn things. An actual post-scarcity economy might look something like the setting of Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway, but it would be so very different from how we live that it would make it harder to hold up the mirror the show uses to reflect our society in.
So instead, we get platitudes about how nobody uses money anymore…but they don’t put a lot of effort into explaining how that sort of economy should work, or what other incentives Federation society uses to make people be willing to do useful stuff; they just handwave it by apparently contending that everyone in this fantastic society does what they do merely for the sake of self-actualization. I honestly find it hard to believe that’s sufficient incentive for a society to run, just because I know how lazy I am, and by extension just how lazy much of the rest of the world is. I’d think such a society would end up looking more like “The Machine Stops” than the Federation.
(And yet even so, Riker’s happy enough to gamble up a storm whenever he’s at Deep Space Nine to get a heap of latinum IOUs that he can trade Quark for information as the plot demands. If the Federation doesn’t use money, what did he put up for his stake?)
Even if money isn’t being used directly, the impulse to trade, to barter some good or service of value for some other good or service of value, is one of the oldest human impulses, even pre-dating the invention of money. It’s something that we recognize even now. It surely wouldn’t be snuffed out by then, no matter how much “better” we supposedly are. There must be things that are valued, and there must be incentive for people to strive to earn them. That’s the way the world works now, and it’s the way it must work in the future, too, for those stories to have applicability to the present day. And when it comes down to things some people can have but not others, in a world where pretty much anything can be replicated, the only thing that can really even have value anymore is information.
Such as replicator recipes. If I put in the effort to create a replicator recipe for some tasty unique meal for myself, am I then obligated to share it with you just because it exists? Nope. I may give it to you because I want to, or because I want you to do something for me in return, but it’s my recipe. Maybe these are recipes that the officers in question earned, created, received in trade, or otherwise acquired, and they decided to restrict them to officer use. Who knows?
Anyway, it’s just being used as an example of “perks” for the sake of the story, like the good old-fashioned executive washroom cliché, because that’s a trope and a motivation we can understand from our own personal experiences. One of Doctorow’s free-living “walkaways” scoffing at materialistic “schleppers” presents an intriguing idea, but it’s awfully hard to spin it into a relatable analogy to how life is now because it’s just too different from life now.
@28/RM: “Or like insisting that people pay the publishers for e-books or movies instead of just downloading them all from Pirate Bay.”
What a terrible analogy. That payment is not arbitrary just for the sake of creating inequality of access. It’s to compensate the creators for the use of their work. The officers on a starship did not create the recipes used by the replicator (except in the specific case ED proposed). If the creators are entitled to compensation, then the senior officers should be just as obligated to pay it as the junior officers are.
Plus, we’re not talking about a whole community where it’s logical to expect some kind of economy to operate. We’re talking about the crew of a single starship and their respective access to the same computer files.
“Even if money isn’t being used directly, the impulse to trade, to barter some good or service of value for some other good or service of value, is one of the oldest human impulses, even pre-dating the invention of money.”
I’m not denying that in general. Please don’t commit the logical fallacy of replying to a specific, focused argument with universal generalities. I’m saying that the single specific scenario you propose, in which the junior officers of a starship are gratuitously, artificially cut off from access to a portion of the ship’s database for absolutely no other reason than to create an artificial economic inequality just so the senior officers can lord it over them, is an abuse of economics rather than a legitimate application. You’re talking about “privilege” created purely for the sake of privilege, and all you have to do is look at the news headlines these days to understand why I find privilege such a toxic commodity, especially when it’s manufactured by arbitrarily depriving a less “privileged” group of resources.
Interesting discussion. Apologies in advance, I haven’t seen the episode, but it seems to me the only situation where someone might have a lower grade replicator is in the brig or in prison as a mild form of punishment — nothing but cream corn for you! Otherwise, I can’t recall anything to suggest in Starfleet you can’t have your favorite meal on any deck of a ship. Replicators are replicators.
We do see at least one inequality between senior officers and ensigns, and that’s living space, in that senior officers get their own quarters. While other shows don’t go to the extremes that Lower Decks does with ensign living space, even in the TNG episode Lower Decks, we see ensigns room together (Ensigns Lavelle and Taurik share quarters). Now, you can make an in universe argument for this, of course. Ship space is limited, and maybe there’s not enough room for everybody to have their own quarters, and somebody’s got to get the short end of the stick. And that is different than having different specific replicator menus for ensigns vs non-ensigns (Please note, when I talk about Star Trek, too, I’m just talking about TNG and onward. In the TOS episode The Cloud Miners, there’s a Federation planet that has an actual caste system, which Kirk and crew do their best to bring down).
I think in a way, with The Neutral Zone, the TNG writers sort of wrote themselves into a kind of a corner. Roddenberry certainly had the idea when he was doing TNG that humanity’s fundamental concepts had changed. Humans no longer cared about wealth, no longer argued about politics, no longer believed in gods, no longer grieved at death, and so on, and Picard’s speech in The Neutral Zone reflects that.
The problem is, this sort of stuff can he hard to write for. Both Robert Moore and Ira Behr expressed their hatred for the replicator, for instance. And, pretty much as soon as Roddenberry got too ill to be involved in the show, it started walking back on these principles. Season 3’s “Captain’s Holiday” gave us Vash, who, in spite of being human and a Federation citizen, was a fortune hunter concerned with nothing else but profit. By the time of DS9, not only was the Bajoran religion portrayed positively, but Sisko pretty much converted.
I don’t know that I have a deeper point beyond the fact that I think the Neutral Zone was sort of an ill conceived episode from the get go and that Roddenberry’s principles weren’t consistently followed throughout the Star Trek universe (which I think is probably a good thing).
@31/Just Me: It’s also very interesting that Gene himself didn’t practice his very own Roddenberry-ian principles as he obviously profited greatly from his prized creation. There is of course nothing wrong with him doing so, it’s just the irony of his becoming wealthy off of a franchise espousing humanity’s casting off of capitalism in our future.
@32
Yeah, nothing wrong with him capitalizing on his creation; he still lived in the 20th century. On the other hand, what he did to Alexander Courage over the theme was going too far. Not sure even Quark on his worst day would have done something like that.
@32/garreth It’s true that Roddenberry did make a bunch of money off of Star Trek. I’m not sure that I like the hypocrisy argument, in general, though. First, in Roddenberry’s specific case, he probably adopted these beliefs near the end of his life, and we don’t know to what extent he believed this in the ’60s and ’70s. More generally, though, you can believe that there are better economic systems out there and in the future we’ll outgrow our need and desire for money and so on, but at the same time realize that living where and when you live now, you need to make money to live.
More generally, there’s the La Rochefoucault quote that hypocrisy is the complement that vice plays to virtue. Even if somebody doesn’t live up to ideals they have, the fact that we consider that bad is sort of the realization that their ideals are good ones.
If you want to criticize Roddenberry for anything, the biggest thing probably would be misogyny and sexism and the terrible way he treated women, especially his wives. But, that doesn’t change the fact that Star Trek was a great accomplishment and a great fictional universe.
@33/JFWheeler: Ah, I didn’t know about the Alexander Courage controversy as I just read up on it with your reference to it. It is a shame and it does seem the poor man was cheated.
@34/JustMe: I actually wasn’t calling Roddenberry a hypocrite but merely pointing out the irony of the matter. Regarding his sexism and misogyny, he was definitely a flawed man. And not excusing that behavior, but it shows an interesting dichotomy that at the same time he was championing to have his girlfriend at the time, Majel Barrett, to play first officer on Star Trek. And towards the end of his life he was also all for showing gay crew members on the Enterprise so he was becoming more progressive.
@31/Just Me: “Now, you can make an in universe argument for this, of course. Ship space is limited, and maybe there’s not enough room for everybody to have their own quarters, and somebody’s got to get the short end of the stick.”
All of that makes sense except the last clause. Why should somebody get less than others? That’s like saying “This pizza’s only 10 inches wide, so I get a bigger piece than you do.” That’s a complete non sequitur. The simplest, most obvious way to divide the pizza — or the living space — is to give everyone an equal share. Taking it as an axiom that some form of inequality must automatically exist is a habit of our own capitalist culture, but the whole premise of Trek is that we’ll grow beyond that kind of artificial inequality. Economics can exist in the Federation, but as an optional, peripheral aspect of society, not an absolute stricture that enforces an arbitrarily unequal distribution of resources.
If there’s a reason for senior officers to have larger quarters, it can’t be simply because inequality is treated as an axiom. There has to be some logical, functional reason for it, one that arises from Starfleet’s more enlightened values where the well-being of the crew is the priority. For instance, senior officers have more responsibility and more difficult decisions to make, so they have more need of privacy and a psychologically comfortable place they can spend time in. Also, senior officers seem to be more likely to stay at a single post for a longer time; that might not be true in the real-life military, but of course Trek characters tend to stay on the same ship for many years, and they’re usually members of the senior staff. So people who spend more time in the same living space would presumably need a larger, more comfortable living space for their psychological well-being, so they wouldn’t be as likely to get cabin fever.
Anyway, the “Ship space is limited” argument doesn’t wash for something like the Galaxy class, which is so gratuitously oversized that it could easily hold 10 times as many people as it does, and the writers of the TNG Technical Manual had to posit that there are huge empty voids inside the saucer that are set aside for possible future expansion. According to the TM, the design of the Enterprise-D allows 110 square meters of living space per person, which is huge. From what I can find online, the highest average living area per person in the modern world is 89 m^2 per person in Australia, while North America is in the 70s, Europe averages around 45, and 2/3 of the world is below 20. So there’s no logical reason for anyone to have small quarters. That’s just a bit of 20th-century thinking intruding into the set design.
@36/CLB I fully agree with your last sentence. Whatever in universe rationalizations we create for discrepancies like this, the real reason is writer inconsistency/failure to live up to the premises established. You’d obviously know better than I would what restrictions are put on writers of Star Trek novels, but I know as far as the shows are concerned, there was a bunch of flexibility with canon, especially as the shows continued past the first one. (When you’re writing in 1967, 1995 is comfortably far enough away to be the date that the world revolts over eugenicist tyrants who have taken over large portions of it, but in 1995, that becomes less feasible. (And, of course, the happy ending to Past Tense, where we learn that following the Bell Riots of 2024, the Sanctuary districts were disestablished and the United States totally transformed the way it treated those in need of help becomes less happy when it gets revealed later that World War II started in 2026.)
In other words, of course, canon is often flexible
Another in universe solution to reconcile some of this with the Neutral Zone speech (which you probably won’t find much more appealing) is that inequalities and things still exist, but Captain Picard/Commander Riker just don’t recognize it or take those things for granted. This is, of course, something we see in the world right now. It’s very easy for us to recognize past flaws we’ve since overcome or flaws in other societies while overlooking our own. And I think DS9 looked at this to some extent, as in fact did TNG itself.
And, of course, regardless of whether the society in Star Trek has gotten rid of inequality or privilege entirely, we can certainly agree that it’s much more equal than ours. And the thing that’s always attracted me to Star Trek since I was a 10 year old watching reruns of TOS isn’t the idea of utopia. It’s the idea that we can and have to be in a constant process of making the world better. There will always be new problems, new adventures, new achievements, but Star Trek gives us hope that we can overcome them, and that we can stand up for what’s right and make change, even if it isn’t easy.
@37/Just Me: “You’d obviously know better than I would what restrictions are put on writers of Star Trek novels, but I know as far as the shows are concerned, there was a bunch of flexibility with canon, especially as the shows continued past the first one.”
The creators of a canon always have total flexibility to change it, because it’s all just made-up stories to begin with. It’s only tie-in writers who have to stick to what’s been established. It’s like how the owners of an apartment building can remodel their apartments however they want, but renters can only make minor changes because the property doesn’t belong to them.
“…when it gets revealed later that World War II[I] started in 2026…”
That was never established except in an onscreen graphic not intended to be legible to the audience, so it isn’t binding any more than the giant rubber ducky in the Enterprise-D deck-plan cutaway. All we really know is that the war ended in 2053.
@36/CLB. Interesting point about the available living space on the Enterprise -D. It does make something in my head canon a lot more plausible. I always figured there should be way more holodecks than we ever see, or their use (or lack of use, really), makes far less sense. I mean, we only see the senior officers deal with a couple of them, but there are supposedly 1,000 people on board. Assume three equal shifts and there should be hundreds of people off-duty at any given time looking for ways to unwind and amuse themselves, and yet the senior officers never have a problem finding a free holodeck when needed. (Yes, not everybody would want to use them all the time, plus availability is required by the plot, but still.) Make the couple we see exclusive to the senior staff, while other ranks have their own banks of holodecks to use, and suddenly all that extra space makes sense.
It also does show that there is going to be some stratification regardless of scarcity. Even with equal sized quarters, placement would matter. Do you get an exterior window? Interior room with no windows? Top or bottom of the saucer with sloping walls? Close to transport tubes? Close to recreation facilities? Closer or further away from the engine core or other sources of potential sound or vibration disturbances? We can always find something to separate ourselves over, but again that may just be our less-evolved sensibilities.
Regarding the replicators, I figure the one constant in the universe is the way rumors spread on a ship. Lower-deck personnel believe that the command team gets better food. That doesn’t make it true – it just means that there’s a natural assumption the person who has a better deal in one way (the Captain has a private office) gets a better deal in every possible way. Boimler isn’t an informed source – he believes the scuttlebutt about better food, but he we see him misinterpret all sorts of things.
@40/AndyLove: That’s the best explanation yet.
I’m viewing this whole show as an in-universe cartoon created some years after the events depicted, with the writers having taken comedic creative license with the historical record.
That way it’s possible for the jist to be correct, but not quibble too much over the throwaway details.
For all the discussion over replicators let’s not overlook the wonderful premise of this week’s installment. A very Star Trek idea that in another show could have led to a fascinating episode. I like that they’re not overlooking the high concept whilst going for the laughs.
@42/jmwhite: That’s basically how Roddenberry always approached Trek — as a dramatic reconstruction of “actual” events. It struck me a few years ago that he got his start in TV by writing up real police cases for Dragnet to dramatize with “the names… changed to protect the innocent.” And TOS had much the same format as Dragnet in that it was framed by a voiceover recitation of the official report of the incident being dramatized.
In the preface to his TMP novelization, Roddenberry pretended to be a 23rd-century producer who’d made an “inaccurately larger-than-life” drama based on the Enterprise‘s missions, and he promised that this time he’d be more authentic because Admiral Kirk was on board as a consultant. That was implicitly how he accounted for the changes in TMP’s depiction of the tech, aliens, etc. I’ve found it’s a useful idea to keep in mind when looking at Discovery‘s portrayal of the 23rd century vs. TOS’s version.
I’d not heard that Gene had said that! I like it, I’m going to remember that.
I’m someone who prefers but isn’t a stickler for visual consistency. I hope to be watching new Star Trek for the next 50 years. That ambition wouldn’t be well served if everyone insisted they stick to the design limitations of the 60s/80s/whenever.
@43
I like it. I heard that George Miller takes a similar philosophy about his Mad Max movies, that they’re meant to be future myths told around a camp fire, or words to that effect. So, so what if Mel Gibson and Tom Hardy don’t look alike and he has his car back with no explanation. The telling changes with time.
I’d assumed the “moist” thing was kids these days discovering Monty Python.
@33 – JFWheeler: Quark would have done worse.