“Basics, Part II”
Written by Michael Piller
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 3, Episode 1
Production episode 146
Original air date: September 4, 1996
Stardate: 50032.7
Captain’s log. After getting a summary of Part 1, we look in on the crew stranded on Hanon IV. The crew breaks into groups charged with finding tools, food, water, and shelter. Hogan finds some humanoid bones outside a cave, which Neelix tells him to gather for tools. Neelix downplays the danger from whatever might be in that cave, which proves fatal, as Hogan is eaten by a local animal.
Janeway is not pleased and says that nobody else is going to die if she can help it. (Spoiler alert: she won’t be able to help it.) When told that they can’t find any plant or animal life that can be eaten, Janeway suggests turning over rocks—there are worms down there, and if anyone has a problem eating them, they should suck it up.
In addition, Tuvok has started to fashion weapons, and Chakotay, for all that it’s icky, suggests using the remnants of Hogan’s uniform to make solar stills to give them water.
Buy the Book
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
On Voyager, Seska goes to sickbay and activates the EMH, who pretends to be aloof and uncaring and simply a program that will treat whoever comes into sickbay. He examines the baby and informs a very surprised Seska that the child has no human DNA—he’s half Cardassian, half Kazon. Seska is stunned, as she injected herself with Chakotay’s DNA, but that trick didn’t work, apparently.
A stunned Seska departs with the child and deactivates the EMH. He reactivates himself and tries to figure out what to do. A scan of the ship reveals that there are 89 Kazon and one Betazoid on board. Realizing that the Kazon missed Suder, the EMH has the computer hide Suder’s combadge from sensors so the Kazon don’t find him and he tells the Betazoid to head to sickbay.
Chakotay is having trouble starting a fire (he apparently sucked at it when his father taught him as a kid, too), but so is everyone else. Using some of Janeway’s hair as extra kindling, they are finally able to get a fire going. Kim and Torres also find some eggs to eat, thus sparing folks from having to go in the corner and eat worms.
Neelix goes off to find rocks to help keep the fire contained, but disappears, as does Kes when she goes after him.
Paris is trying desperately to repair the shuttle and not get killed by the Kazon. (He manages to blow up one of the Kazon ships that finds him.) He contacts the Talaxian fleet at Prema II and begs for their help. The Talaxians are reluctant, but Paris insists that he knows Voyager like the back of his hand, and he already has a plan. Once the Talaxians agree and sign off, saying they’ll be there in an hour, Paris says to himself that he has an hour to come up with a plan…
Janeway sends out search parties to find Neelix and Kes. Tuvok has, at this point, fashioned several spears, as well as a bow and some arrows for himself. Chakotay’s group finds them with a group of natives. Tuvok, Kim, and some others wait in reserve while Chakotay approaches the group unarmed. He tries to negotiate with them through a language barrier, including having to refuse the offer of one of the natives’ women in exchange for Kes. Eventually, the three just get up and walk away, and when the natives give chase, Tuvok and the others attack.
The chase is on, and Chakotay eventually must take refuge in the caves, since the natives know not to go in there because of the beast that killed Hogan.
When Janeway sees that Chakotay hasn’t come back, she takes a group to find them, and realizes they’re in the cave when they see the natives waiting outside it. Janeway drives them off with fire and then calls Chakotay’s group back. Most of them make it out, but one crewmember is killed by the beast.
Suder comes to sickbay, and is not pleased by the notion that he may have to commit violence in order to save the ship from the Kazon. The EMH tries to be encouraging, and saying that even Tuvok would agree that, to defend the ship, it’s worth reopening his old mental wounds and be violent once again. Suder moves throughout the ship performing bits of sabotage, which frustrates Culluh and Seska since they don’t think there’s anybody else on board. Unfortunately, Suder encounters a Kazon and is forced to kill him before he could alert Seska. The EMH offers him meds to help mask his depression, but Suder refuses.
Paris manages to send a covert message to the EMH, asking him to block the discharge from the backup phaser power couplings. He intends to attack the primary phaser array, and he wants the backups to blow up when they switch to the backups. The EMH sends Suder off to do that.
The Kazon are having trouble finding the sabotage because of a thoron leak, but Seska remembers the Maquis trick of using thoron fields to fool tricorders. She accuses the EMH of harboring a member of the crew; instead, the EMH takes credit for the sabotage himself, using the ship’s computer, and even shows them the corpse of the Kazon Suder killed, taking credit for the kill himself. Seska’s response is to disable all voice commands directed at the EMH from any Starfleet personnel and to blow up the holoemitters, which shuts the doctor off.
On Hanon IV, the senior staff meets. Chakotay wants to try to find a rapprochement with the natives, since they’ll all be stuck together. Tuvok is more pragmatic, thinking they will likely need to again use violence. In addition, the Wildman baby is sick and getting sicker and Wildman is worried.
Then one of the volcanoes on the planet erupts. Both the Voyager crew and the natives seek higher ground, and Chakotay rescues a native woman from a lava flow, which leads to the very friendship he’d been hoping for. The natives are also able to cure the Wildman baby of her illness.
Suder returns to sickbay but can’t activate the EMH. However, the doctor left a message for Suder in case he was deactivated to encourage him.
Paris and the Talaxians (which is totally the name of my next band) arrive and the fight is on. Suder sabotages the phaser array, which succeeds in crippling the ship enough for the good guys to go on the offensive, though Suder is killed while doing so (but not until after he kills a lot of Kazons). Seska is also killed, and when Culluh abandons ship, he takes his child with him.
With the help of the Talaxians, Paris takes Voyager back to Hanon IV and picks the crew up. They re-board and head back toward the Alpha Quadrant.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Voyager crew has to get by with stone knives and bear skins, building their own fires, foraging for food, and fashioning their own weapons. Meanwhile, Suder crawls through Jefferies Tubes and does lotsa sabotage on Voyager to mess with the Kazon.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway wastes no time taking charge of the stranded crew, giving people assignments, dealing with each crisis as it comes up (including rescuing all but one of Chakotay’s group from the cave), and making it clear that if they have to eat worms, they’ll damn well eat worms.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok fashions weapons for everyone, because he’s just that awesome.
He also has two really unfortunate exchanges with Chakotay that show an appalling level of tone-deafness on the part of scripter Michael Piller. First Chakotay assumes he made the bow and arrow for Chakotay, and the first officer tells him that his tribe never used them, but Tuvok tartly points out that it’s for himself, as he taught archery at the Vulcan Institute of Defensive Arts. (Ha ha, Indian stereotypes, ha ha!)
Much worse is the second, where Tuvok says to Chakotay, “You may find nobility in the savage, Commander, but he is only interested in killing you,” a sentiment that was routinely expressed by white people about Indigenous folk, and which is right down there with Nicholas Meyer putting “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” in the mouth of Uhura (and at least Nichelle Nichols had the good sense to refuse to say that line).
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH does a great job of pretending to be uncaring about who’s in charge when Seska first talks to him, and then elsewise goes from neurotic about how to save the ship to being utterly badass in encouraging Suder and faking out Seska.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix feels guilty for Hogan’s death, as well he should.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Before he discovers that Suder’s still on board, the EMH is wondering how he can possibly take the ship back, and he sardonically wonders if he can storm the ship with the gang from Chez Sandríne or if he can create a holographic Che Guevara or Nathan Hale.
Do it.
“One hologram and one sociopath may not be much of a match for the Kazon, but we’ll have to do.”
–The EMH giving something resembling a pep talk to Suder.
Welcome aboard. Back from Part 1 are Martha Hackett as Seska, Anthony De Longis as Culluh, and Brad Dourif as Suder. It’s the final appearance by the latter two; Hackett will return as a holographic image of Seska in “Worst Case Scenario” and again in a time-travel adventure to the events of this episode in “Shattered.”
This is the only third-season appearance by the Wildmans, with Nancy Hower again as Samantha and the twins Emily and Samantha Leibovich again as her baby. They’ll be back in the fourth season’s “Mortal Coil,” with the child finally given the name Naomi (not given here, as I mistakenly said in the “Deadlock” rewatch entry) and played by Brooke Stephens.
Simon Billig makes his final appearance as Hogan, and the various natives are played by David Cowgill, Michael Bailey Smith, and John Kenton Shull.
Trivial matters: For budgetary reasons, UPN requested that four season-three episodes be produced at the tail end of season two’s production period. However, this one was not filmed back-to-back with Part 1. Instead, after filming Part 1, they produced “Sacred Ground,” “False Profits,” and “Flashback,” then did Part 2, mainly to take advantage of the latest possible filming date so they’d have more daylight available for the extensive location shooting in Lone Pine, California for the scenes on Hanon IV.
After filming this episode, Michael Piller stepped down as executive producer, remaining as a creative consultant. (He’s still listed as executive producer with Rick Berman and Jeri Taylor for the four episodes filmed in season two and held back for the third.)
Hogan’s remains will be found by the Voth on Hanon IV in “Distant Origin.”
Voyager is now down to 143 people on board. They left the Ocampa homeworld with 154. Seska left the ship (and she’s now dead, too) in “State of Flux,” but then the Wildman baby was born in “Deadlock,” so that’s a wash. Durst died in “Faces,” three people died in “Alliances,” Darwin died in “Meld,” Jonas died in “Investigations,” Bennet died in “Innocence,” an unnamed bridge officer died in Part 1, and Hogan, Suder, and another unnamed crewmember all died in this episode.
Set a course for home. “I will not let this planet destroy my crew.” One of the biggest issues with TNG’s season-spanning cliffhangers is that Part 2 never lived up to the promise of Part 1, which is especially frustrating when Part 1 is all setup for Part 2. But in each case (“The Best of Both Worlds,” “Redemption,” “Time’s Arrow,” and “Descent“) the conclusion is a letdown after three months of waiting around.
So it’s rather a pleasant surprise to see that Voyager’s first shot at it reverses this. It helps that Part 1 was pretty dreadful, but even so, Part 2 is a strong action-adventure hour. We’ve got Janeway, Chakotay, and Tuvok doing an excellent job keeping everyone safe on the planet. (Neelix, not so much. He’s supposed to be the scavenger, the native guide, the one who knows the area, and all he does is get Hogan killed, fail to find any useful foodstuffs, and get his stupid ass kidnapped.) And then there’s the unlikely duo of the EMH and Suder fighting a guerrilla war on Voyager.
The latter is particularly compelling, because the two actors in question are at the top of their game. Robert Picardo is never not amazing, and he kicks sixteen kinds of ass here. I particularly like the way he modulates from the very Lewis Zimmerman-esque caustic wit with Seska to the neurotic paranoid wondering how the hell he’s going to stop this after she leaves. (“I’m a doctor, not an insurgent.”)
And that’s as nothing compared to the bravura performance of Brad Dourif. There’s not a hell of a lot of characterization elsewhere in the episode, as most everyone is focused on the plot—staying alive on Hanon IV, taking the ship back in space—but in Suder we get a compelling character study. Suder has been trying so hard to move beyond his psychotic past, and the situation has been shoved into his face that forces him to backpedal. The sadness etched on Dourif’s face as he does what has to be done is heartbreaking, and adds tragedy to the events on the ship.
The one downside of the fantastic work done with Suder, culminating in his sacrificing his life to save the ship, is that it shows how rote the rest of it is in danger of being. The death of Hogan is a mild surprise, as he’s been a constant presence throughout the second season, so killing him at the top of the third is more of a gut-punch than it might be with another crewmember—like, say, the poor unfortunate who gets killed in the cave and on whom nobody even comments. (At least a stab is taken at mourning Hogan.)
Still, at least the crew comports itself with competence, which is a nice change from Part 1. Janeway takes charge beautifully (her “fuck you, eat the worms” moment is epic), and Chakotay does a nice job of rescuing Neelix and Kes with a minimum of violence (though not an absence of it, sadly, but at least he tries).
Of course, it’s a little too late, and it’s kind of hilarious that a hologram and a sociopath do better against the Kazon than the entire crew did last episode. For that matter, Paris is more successful in a damaged shuttlecraft against the Kazon than Voyager was last time. And, again, if the Talaxian fleet was willing to help out this time, why didn’t Voyager bring them along into the incredibly obvious trap the Kazon laid for them last time?
The ending is just a mess. Seska could have been one of the strongest Trek antagonists, the former seeming friend turned implacable foe, and she’s made the crew look like idiots more than once. Having her die from a console exploding is anticlimactic to say the least, and it’s pathetic that she dies while Culluh, who’s pretty much Seska’s puppet, and also her biggest impediment to success thanks to his tired sexism, gets to live with his bastard child. After all the angst about the child and Chakotay going on vision quests and such, nothing is done with it. Chakotay doesn’t even mention the kid at any point in Part 2.
And then the crew comes back on board and supposedly everything’s ship-shape, which makes no sense, given that Suder and Paris between them did a lot of damage to the ship, and then they fly off and they haven’t even put their combadges back on yet, which means they left immediately. What the heck?
At least we won’t really see the Kazon again, save for flashbacks and time travel. They didn’t deserve a better ending, but Seska did. At least the conclusion was better than the prelude.
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido knows how much wood a woodchuck would chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood, but he’s not telling. So there.
Man, Brad Dourif is awesome.
I still think that it’s weird that everyone on the planet is instantly speaking the same language once they take away their Universal Translators. It would have been a nice touch to show everyone speaking different languages for a line or two, before switching to Standard. And I still don’t think there is any way that Kes and Neelix should be able to understand everyone else- all their interactions up to this point have been done through the UT, so unless they made time to have the computer or a crewmen teach them Standard, they really shouldn’t know it.
Re-watching this episode, it struck me how much more interesting Chakotay’s character would have been throughout the series if he had some sort of heel-turn about his violent past, and now is trying to make up for it. He often insists that violence is not the answer, or that land and possessions aren’t what it is important- and no one ever says “Uh, weren’t you a terrorist who used violence to try to hold on to your land and possessions?” If they had given him an episode where he is wracked with guilt over what he has done, a lot of his actions (like those here) would make a lot more sense and make great character development, in addition to giving Beltran a central struggle for his character to work with. As it is, it just seems like the writers forget that he used to be in the Maquis when it suits the plot.
@1 I think every comment to this entry should begin with “Man, Brad Dourif is awesome.” Make it so.
I can’t say how it falls on Native/First Nations ears (and I’d be interested to learn), but Chakotay’s line about failing to start a fire always cracked me up. And Tuvok’s dialogue may have been tone-deaf, but it really was a good choice to have him and not Chakotay being the one who knows how to build and use the bow and arrow.
S
Re: Suder, as we were talking about last time, Piller confirmed that it was Jeri Taylor who pushed for Suder’s death and saw no value or interesting in continuing the character’s storyline after Piller’s departure.
I…sorta get where Taylor was coming from with trying to do a hard reset and relaunch for the show after the many, many problems of the first two Seasons. And to be fair I’m admittedly unsure how much more mileage they could’ve gotten out of Suder; it kinda reminds me of Stargate Universe and the Sergeant Spencer subplot that was running through Season One.
Martha Hackett’s also weighed in on her unhappiness with Seska getting killed off and I agree. There was still dramatic mileage they could’ve gotten out of her presence and it was a mistake to kill her off this early in the show’s run and in this way.
From what Hackett and Piller have stated in those behind-the-scenes interviews, it sounds like it was a last-minute re-write because Piller wanted to kill Seska’s child as a counterpoint to Naomi’s birth and to make Seska pay a personal price…and Berman and Taylor vehemently vetoed it. Again, I get where they were coming from and how nervous the UPN execs must’ve been with that pitch, but again, it’s another instance of the Berman-era Trek‘s obsession with playing it safe and pulling punches.
@3 I think they messed up the minute they decided to make Seska a Cardassian. The whole (alleged) premise of Voyager was that there was conflict coming from inside the house. Seska as a Bajoran Maquis, who never had the Starfleet exposure that Chakotay and B’Elanna did, and who had no desire to get with the program would have been a lot more interesting. I can’t imagine the scene where Tuvok tells someone to take off their earring to go so smoothly if Seska was around to hear it. Having someone on board to openly push for doing things a different way, who really understood that they weren’t in Kansas anymore and couldn’t act like it and expect to survive, would have been really interesting. And Hackett certainly had the acting chops to pull it off. Instead, they went for the big reveal of “SHE’S A CARDASSIAN!!!” and then… kind of didn’t know what to do with her after that. Part of what made DS9 interesting to watch was that there was a constant give and take going on with the characters. It was a Bajoran station, built by Cardassians, staffed with tons of Starfleet people, frequented by all sorts of sordid characters, of strategic importance to lots of different factions. Sisko had to learn when to put his foot down, and when to look the other way. It would have been nice to see Seska, in the tradition of Ro Laren and Kira Neyrs, be someone who could push others out of their comfort zone. Instead, everyone who might have caused tension either completely changed their minds and became 100% Starfleet, died, or left the ship.
Let’s please not use “psychotic” as a synonym for “violent.” Suder’s problem is sociopathy, not psychosis. Okay?
I mostly agree. Basics part II is a mild improvement over the rotten foundation that was part one. It was a smart move to stop developing the Kazon any further and just let them perish. If the character aspects don’t work, they might as well drive the plot tenfold. It works, even though it feels like a retread of DS9’s The Siege, which is something I believe I’ve mentioned before.
Suder made the episode worth watching. If there’s a regret, is that we don’t get to see him again. Killing him was a predictable, but still tragic outcome.
This episode also did wonders for the EMH. Being put in this extreme situation helped to bring out the best in him and sow the seeds for his upcoming developments. This is yet another example I imagine inspired the EMH to develop the ECH.
But the planetside aspects fell short for me. Sure, the crew performed admirably in surviving, but the whole volcano ex-machina was a little too convenient to cap off the crew vs. hostile natives token narrative (not to mention the mildly racist overtones).
At least the Kazon are behind us now. The baby being ignored at the end is pretty much the writers cutting corners and just wanting to be rid of this soap opera plot, no matter how much they stumble doing so. It’s the only reason the whole Chakotay DNA aspect is thrown aside this easily.
@krad: I thought Nichols’ line in ST6 – the one she refused to speak – was one that didn’t make the final cut. Something that went along the lines of “Would you want your daughter to marry one of them?” Guess who’s coming to dinner was Chekov’s line.
@@.-@:
I used to be fine with the Seska reveal because DS9 had established the Obsidian Order’s surgical capabilities at that point in the 24th Century production era (“Tribunal” and “Second Skin”). And with how dangerous Chakotay and his Cell were, it was completely plausible they’d gotten their own agent undercover, much as Tuvok did for Starfleet. I also kinda liked the idea of the traditional geo-political tensions of the Alpha Quadrant powers still causing problems for VOY crew even though they were on the other side of the galaxy (not unlike Stargate Atlantis having to contend with a Goa’uld infiltrator in Season Two).
But with the discussions during the Rewatch, and looking back at VOY’s 25th anniversary and legacy…yeah, I have to concede I’ve kinda been coming around to your mindset re: Seska.
Maybe there might’ve been a way to have their cake and eat it if Berman and company actually capitalized on the built-in conflict of the premise to compensate. I also like the idea somebody suggested during the “State of Flux” discussion that it would’ve been a nice twist if Seska had been revealed as Cardassian, but the real traitor was actually Carey.
I was annoyed by how obvious is was that they had like 2.5 people to play a crew of around 150. They at least tried with the let’s split up to find supplies scenes, but the escape from the volcano scene was just bad.
And killing Hogan, Suder and Seska in the ep while the sexist a-hole Culluh gets to go off to teach her baby to be another sexist a-hole was just ugh!
I didn’t like the way he looked at me. Suder saves the ship, killing 9 Kazons in 7 seconds without missing a shot, before the Kazon even have time to react. Because he’s just that awesome.
Sorry Krad, couldn’t resist!
Eduardo: it only became Chekov’s line after Nichols (rightly) refused to say it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The main thing that stands out for me here is the whole lava-rescue thing. I get so tired of screenwriters not understanding that convective heat is a thing, that it’s impossible to spend so much time so close to molten lava without being cooked alive and having your lungs burned out.
@1/wildfyrewarning: “And I still don’t think there is any way that Kes and Neelix should be able to understand everyone else- all their interactions up to this point have been done through the UT, so unless they made time to have the computer or a crewmen teach them Standard, they really shouldn’t know it.”
There’s a huge unexamined assumption in that sentence. How do you know all their interactions have been through the UT? That’s never been stated. You’re just guessing it. And I still say that’s like expecting someone to rely on training wheels forever instead of learning to actually ride the bicycle. Most anyone can pick up a reasonable working knowledge of a language if they live constantly among its speakers for nearly two years. Especially someone who learns as fast as Kes must, or someone like Neelix who’s been trading with dozens of species for decades and is thus probably quite adept at picking up languages.
If anything, probably one of the first things Janeway did when Neelix and Kes joined the crew was to order them to learn English. After all, it would be incredibly irresponsible to complacently assume the universal translator could never break down. It’s a basic part of Starfleet training to learn how to do things yourself if the machinery ever fails. The crew not even being able to understand each other if the power went out would be very dangerous in a crisis, so it’s completely unacceptable to let it happen. Requiring every member of the crew to speak the same language would be essential as a matter of security and safety.
@6
In regards to the “guess who is coming to dinner?” from Star Trek 6. The script had Nichol’s saying the line. As she refused to say it, the line was given to Chekhov. Her version of it was never cut from the film because it was never filmed.
I didn’t mind the reveal of Seska being Cardassian. However, making her a villain in league with bad hair road warriors and threatening Chakotay with a Maury Povich level of paternity anxiety, ah for crying out loud…
As Suder demonstrates, a character is much more interesting when they’re allowed a chance to be more than their psychosis or being a “bad guy.” So I wish she had simply stayed on as a member of Voyager after the Cardassian reveal — a complicated member. Essentially Seven before Seven.
But what a waste of potential and Martha Hackett’s talents.
@@.-@ & 7:
A possible plot point that I think would have made Seska an even more interesting character (while keeping her Bajoran) was that there were a number Bajoran fighters who had difficulty living in peace and fled to the Maquis colonies to continue the fight against Cardassia.. These Bajorans could have played a crucial role in teaching the Federation colonists how to fight like terrorists. This would have made someone like Seska a rather ornery and violent character without making her into just another villain. Kind of like a more action oriented Garak. And I’m sure the resourcefulness she would have learned fighting as an insurgent on Bajor for far longer than any of the Federation Maquis would have come in handy on Voyager.
@11 I don’t remember ever seeing Neelix, or Kes (or really, most of the crew) without their combadges on. I mean, sure, maybe whenever Neelix steps off screen he takes it off so he can learn a new language, but assuming that his time on screen is reflective of the days we don’t see, it seems like almost all his interactions are done with the combadge on. They could easily have done a couple scenes of him talking to people in the chow hall to try show he was learning, but instead he always has his UT on. I mean, really, a little nod to the fact that they are very dependent on technology, in an episode about how all their technology got taken away would have been nice. Having him struggle with understanding what they are saying- in a high stress situation- without technology to fall back on seems pretty realistic to me.
@14:
DS9 actually kinda did that with Tahna Los in “Past Prologue”. And I believe KRAD approached Orta the same way in his The Brave and the Bold duology (which tied up his story after “Ensign Ro”).
But yeah, even though it was never stated on-screen, my assumption has also always been that Bajoran Resistance fighters must’ve hooked up with the Maquis in the early days. Even with the tactical experience of defecting Starfleet officers like Hudson, Eddington, and Chakotay, is just made sense that Bajoran Resistance veterans who couldn’t let go of the Occupation would’ve offered their services (much as Kira did with Damar).
Your idea….it definitely could’ve been an interesting take on Seska. It could’ve allowed them to explore avenues that weren’t possible with Kira because of her status as part of the DS9 Main Cast, her own backstory and character arc, and the completely separate contextual situation in the Alpha Quadrant vs. the Delta Quadrant.
@15/wildfyrewarning: “I don’t remember ever seeing Neelix, or Kes (or really, most of the crew) without their combadges on.”
So what? They aren’t just for translation, they’re for communication. I doubt the UTs are even routinely turned on when they’re on ship, because that’s not what UTs are for. I mean, I carry my smartphone everywhere I go, but I don’t have all its functions turned on at the same time.
Besides, how many times have we seen episodes where a starship’s comm systems or computers were knocked out in a crisis, but the alien crewmembers could still speak and understand English?
@17 Then how do they get turned on? Even when the characters bump into an alien unexpectedly, the UT seems to always be on. They don’t tap it like they do to comm, nor do they do anything else that would seem to indicate that the UT function is being turned on or off. I know the “science” behind the UT is fuzzy in-universe, but it always seems to be on (unless it is a plot point for it to be on the fritz).
@18/wildfyre: Ever heard of smart devices? I’m sure the activation is context-sensitive. If we can have Siri and Alexa boxes in our homes that react spontaneously to the things they hear us say, then surely a communicator 300 years from now can spontaneously activate the translator function when it hears a foreign language being spoken.
@19 Clearly we disagree on this topic, and that’s fine. I just think that if we had something as consistently reliable as the UT, and we had to wear it all the time anyway, then people would just talk in their native language, since that is what comes most naturally to them. I accept that maybe earth now has a lingua franca that everyone can speak if they need to, but if I spoke English, and everyone had a UT, I would just speak English, since it is my first language and everyone is going to understand me anyway. I just thought it would be a neat opportunity for the show to acknowledge that not every is Starfleet on Voyager, and that people like Kes, Neelix, or even the Bajorans (who aren’t Federation citizens) might rely on the UTs pretty heavily instead of spending their free time learning a completely new language.
This two-parter isn’t perfect by any means, but I admire that the script let the crew lose, which is one of the only times in Star Trek history that’s ever happened. The net result of the two-parter is that the crew made a bunch of mistakes, a bunch of people are dead, the ship gained nothing of value, and also they lost some travel time. The only other episode that springs to mind as coming close is City on the Edge of Forever, but even then the net result is to reset things to zero, nobody dies that wasn’t dead before. I guess maybe Q Who, but even then gaining knowledge of the Borg and doing some Delta Quadrant exploration has to count for *something*. I wish they had returned to this well more often, albeit more by making the enemy look good than the crew look quite so bad. Especially in later years it will feel like Voyager is just absurdly lucky.
@20/wildfyre: “I just think that if we had something as consistently reliable as the UT, and we had to wear it all the time anyway, then people would just talk in their native language, since that is what comes most naturally to them.”
Civilians in everyday life, in conditions where they could trust the tech to be reliably available? Sure, maybe. But Starfleet officers, often facing unpredictable conditions that could knock out their technology? Absolutely not.
First rule of Universal Translator: Ignore the Universal Translator unless the episode is about the Universal Translator.
@CLB: “Most anyone can pick up a reasonable working knowledge of a language if they live constantly among its speakers for nearly two years.”
As a white male who grew up in South Texas and was immersed deeply in the Hispanic culture, I personally know or are at least familiar with a dozen older Mexicans who have been in the US for over 30+ years and still don’t know a lick of English. I think it’s a stretch to assume that two random aliens are hyperpolyglots and have mastered English in 2 years. I know you like to play devil’s advocate, but sometimes it’s much easier to chalk it up to the easiest solution: the writers didn’t care about that detail.
@22/CLB Eh, the UT fails as often as the gravity–pretty damn rarely. I can imagine Neelix and Kes getting one token lesson in how to survive in zero-g. The UT failing isn’t likely enough to waste time learning languages.
@24: While I share the sentiment that the writers didn’t necessarily care, I’m going to say it makes perfect sense for Kes and Neelix to become proficient in another foreign language in less than two years. Both characters have always been defined by a willingness to learn and contribute to the crew in any way. They’ve always been dedicated crewmembers, living up to what Picard would define as “bettering themselves and the rest of humanity”. This isn’t your average hispanic citizen living across the border. This is the 24th century, and they’re in military starship, where officers take their duties seriously. I can easily imagine Neelix and Kes turning nights studying their asses to master English.
@krad: But how much ground round would a hound dog hog if a ground hog was ground round?
In re the great UT debate: I also find it unlikely Neelix/Kes would have bothered learning English. But who says the UT is (only) in the communicator? In Little Green Men, the Ferengi characters try to reset the UT’s by inserting something in the ear. Maybe there’s a basic implant that translates known languages that’s inserted in the ear canal. The “full” version that can translate a new language, as with the aliens here, requires an uplink to a starship computer or at least the full processing power of a combadge. So the UT still works among the crew because it’s just acting as a translator of known languages, but of course it doesn’t know the language of the natives here.
I rousing and entertaining conclusion but I still find it deeply disappointing in regards to what happens to Suder, Seska, and Seska’s baby.
Suder is of course, a very fascinating character, with his new found inner calm and abhorrence of violence. He’s also played by an excellent actor. So of course I found it very predictable that he was killed off rescuing the ship. If he were kept alive, we could have explored the personal ramifications of his having killed so many people for the greater good, his hero status among the crew, and if he would still be confined to quarters or released. Nonetheless, I loved Brad Dourif’s performance.
Killing off Seska was another blown opportunity. She’s a fun and smart antagonistic villain. But here she is shown as incompetent for failing to impregnate herself properly and not even being aware of it, and then getting killed by an exploding console. How much better it would have been for the series if she had survived and kept as a prisoner on Voyager; perhaps being used as a consultant for certain missions where her expertise was required in exchange for her getting some concessions or winning back some level of trust from the crew.
And whether or not Seska were to survive, I think it was another error in the baby not being Chakotay’s after all after the big fuss to rescue him. It would have deepened Chakotay as a character to have to raise the human/Cardassian baby with either the mother who is locked up on board, or as a single father who has to explain to his kid his parents’ origins.
I also don’t get how the EMH was able to use the computer to scan and find Suder but Seska and the Kazons couldn’t do the same. Am I missing something?
Another reason to hate Neelix: the annoying “scout” who gets to lead a big team of trained Starfleet officers when I’m sure the lot of them are much more competent than he is. Why couldn’t he have been devoured by the lizard monster instead?
@24/Austin: Again, I assume you’re talking about civilians, so the analogy does not work for crew on a military vessel. There is no way that a sane, competent Starfleet captain would not order any new alien crewmembers to learn the ship’s common language as soon as possible, for the security reasons I discussed. Just because some people don’t need to learn the local language doesn’t disprove the value of doing so in every case.
@25/Garry: “Eh, the UT fails as often as the gravity–pretty damn rarely.”
But wildfyrewarning is presuming that UTs are synonymous with communicators. Thus, if the comm systems are down and alien crew are still speaking English, that disproves the presumption. Just because the episode doesn’t explicitly mention the translators doesn’t mean they aren’t down. It just means that they aren’t a consideration in a shipboard scene. The lack of mention of something is hardly affirmative evidence that it must be working.
“The UT failing isn’t likely enough to waste time learning languages.”
It is bizarre that you think that’s a waste of time. UTs cannot be magically perfect at interpreting every nuance. Language just doesn’t work that way. No matter how instantaneous and accurate the translation, there are always going to be concepts and idioms that have no exact equivalent in another language, so no translation can ever be as good as actually understanding the language. (Especially when it comes to jokes and puns. There’s no way Neelix could effectively make jokes or understand others’ jokes if he weren’t speaking English.)
Besides, training for emergencies is not about what’s likely. It’s about being ready for the unlikely. Starfleet encounters incredibly unlikely situations all the time. Remember? “Weird is part of the job.”
@29:
And whether or not Seska were to survive, I think it was another error in the baby not being Chakotay’s after all after the big fuss to rescue him. It would have deepened Chakotay as a character to have to raise the human/Cardassian baby with either the mother who is locked up on board, or as a single father who has to explain to his kid his parents’ origins.
Agreed.
Again, I get where Piller’s original pitch for the child’s fate was coming from and why Berman and Taylor vehemently vetoed it. I don’t agree with Taylor or Berman on this, but I get their motive.
But, yeah, changing the parentage and having Culluh abscond with the kid was absolutely a mistake for the reasons you outlined. It would’ve given Beltran some nice, meaty character drama to explore and kept Chakotay interesting (especially if history had repeated itself and Seven still come aboard to dislodge him from the show’s hierarchy)..
Well, I am assuming that the same device holds both, I think it is possible that one could work without the other. My cell phone can’t make calls if I don’t have service, but I can still use the calculator on it. Considering that tech is becoming ever smaller, I think it’s possible that the two devices were combined into one badge for the sake of ease, especially since both have do with helping people communicate.
@32, honestly I think they might have remembered how much trouble they had making the whole Worf-Alexander story work over on TNG, and decided they didn’t want to repeat that.
@32:
…honestly I think they might have remembered how much trouble they had making the whole Worf-Alexander story work over on TNG, and decided they didn’t want to repeat that.
Oh, yeah.
That’s actually a good point, especially because TNG was still so recent in everybody’s heads.
It could also be they felt that road of single father already belonged to Sisko over on DS9.
@30
But isn’t the handwavium explanation for translators is that it reads the brain waves of everyone around and translates it to something they understand? That, because it’s reading the brain of both the speaker and everybody close by, it even translates idioms?
In re the UT, just remembered something that I don’t believe has been mentioned. In Riddles, Neelix and Tuvok have bookend scenes involving a pun involving calendars/dates/sundaes. At least by then, it’s overwhelming textual evidence that Neelix learned English. There’s no way the UT made the same wordplay work in Talaxian and Vulcan/English. Which I’m still not persuaded makes much sense, but it’s at least what the writer of that episode believed for what it’s worth.
NEELIX: Okay, here goes. A lone Ensign finds himself stranded on a class L planetoid with no rations. His only possession, a calendar. When Starfleet finds him twelve months later, he’s in perfect health. Why didn’t he starve to death?
TUVOK: It is a theoretical possibility that such planetoids contain hot water springs, which could sustain the man for several weeks.
NEELIX: But not for a whole year.
TUVOK: I concur. Logic dictates that the Ensign in question would perish.
NEELIX: Ah ha, ha ha! I stumped you. As a matter of fact, he not only survived, but his belly was full. Why? Because he feasted on dates from the calendar.
(much later)
TUVOK: Sundaes.
NEELIX: I beg your pardon?
TUVOK: I have given further consideration to your riddle regarding the Ensign who survived by consuming the dates from his calendar. It occurs to me that he could also have eaten the Sundaes.
NEELIX: That’s a very clever answer, Mister Vulcan, But it’s not very logical, is it?
TUVOK: No, it’s not.
In the DSC episode An Obol for Charon, we see the UT knocked out and pretty much everyone is speaking a different language.
In Metamorphosis, we get the following exchange:
COCHRANE: What’s the theory behind this device?
KIRK: There are certain universal ideas and concepts common to all intelligent life. This device instantaneously compares the frequency of brainwave patterns, selects those ideas and concepts it recognises, and then provides the necessary grammar.
SPOCK: Then it translates its findings into English.
It’s quite clear that the UT does not rely upon sound in order to translate and that Starfleet does not teach English as a common language. Sure, they might have changed policy in a hundred years but Trek has enough imperialism that we don’t need Starfleet being like some racist in a grocery store yelling “Speak English” at everyone.
English is only the third most spoken language on Earth after Mandarin and Spanish. But of course the default is the language that’s spoken by the white folks.
If we’re supposed to assume that the crew members we see are actually not the majority of Starfleet, English is probably not even the most common language spoken on starships. For all we know, Vulcan, Andorian or Tellarite languages might be the first languages of the largest number of Starfleet members, if not the majority.
But sure, the language of the most common colonizing nation is the default.
Simplest explanation, in addition to translating the UT teaches you the language over time, in that the more you hear the language the more you learn it.
There is a definite feeling of a new broom sweeping clean here and, to mix the metaphor, arguably throwing the baby out with the bath water. I can imagine a present series doing something like this as a finale to a season arc, but here it seems the show’s come back after the break (even if the break was only a month or so of filming three later episodes) and jettisoned everything apart from the main title regulars. By the end of the season premiere, Seska, Suder and Hogan are all dead. (Poor Hogan doesn’t even make it through the pre-credits!) Although they survive the episode, we don’t see Cullah and his son again. And it’s basically farewell to the Kazon, who only appear as holograms or via time travel henceforth. It’s a wonder Wildman and “the baby” aren’t offed as well, and we don’t see them again until midway through Season 4!
As has been alluded to, I read an interview with Martha Hackett in which she said the first script she got had the baby dying in the battle and Seska escaping swearing revenge, and then suddenly she was given a rewrite in which Seska died and the baby survived. She also implied that it was only in the rewrite that the baby was suddenly Cullah’s instead of Chakotay’s, in order to lower the importance and tie off the plot thread. On screen, this is rather hamfisted: The baby’s revised parentage is so completely out of nowhere that on first viewing I initially assumed the Doctor was lying and still wasn’t sure when the credits rolled. It’s ridiculous that, even though we see him visiting Seska’s body after returning to Voyager, we never see Chakotay find out.
Overall, I’m left with the feeling that Michael Piller wrote a great season premiere and Jeri Taylor-led rewrites turned into merely a very good one.
But on the plus side, it is a very good one, with nearly all the cast getting a chance to shine. There’s a vague similarity with “Resolutions”, with some of the crew having to make a new home on a planet while the Voyager-set plot involves a last showdown with one of the resident villains. (The numbers are pretty much reversed though!) At least one change between seasons is an improvement: The previous episode ended with Chakotay on Janeway’s team and Kim in charge of a quarter of the crew, but at the beginning of this they’ve swapped round. It would have been even better though to have both Chakotay and Kim as team leaders and stick Neelix with Janeway. Especially since Neelix’s main contribution is to get Hogan killed.
Nice character moments throughout. Janeway producing a handful of worms and then handing them to a bewildered extra is cool. Chakotay gets frustrated at not being able to start a fire but quickly comes up with a solution. Tuvok is good at making primitive weapons and Kes has to act as medic in the Doctor’s absence. Neelix’s possessive/jealous streak comes out again with his strong reaction to the Haakonians wanting to exchange Kes for one of their women. Chakotay makes a decent attempt at negotiation but has crew waiting nearby for when it doesn’t work, and then Janeway makes an effective rescue. Janeway and Chakotay not wanting to start a war with the natives while Tuvok seems to see it as kill or be killed is an interesting reversal of the human/Vulcan attitudes from TOS’ “The Galileo Seven”. Of course, this time it ends in a very Trekian truce once both sides work together.
Back on the ship, the Doctor excels as usual. Given that Seska hasn’t encountered him since “State of Flux”, it makes sense for her to be taken in by his acting like a simple computer programme that takes orders from anyone. (He’s also capable of ignoring her order to shut down, reappearing once she’s gone, so apparently they fixed that glitch from “Jetrel”.) His later confusing her with contradictory stories about the sabotage is another great scene. (“Sticks and stone won’t break my bones so you imagine how I feel about being called names.”)
Continuing the idea of people showing intelligence in combat from the last two episodes, Paris comes up with an effective strategy for the recapture of Voyager. And also manages to take out a Kazon ship with a damaged shuttle and a frustrated declaration of “I don’t have time for this!” Because he’s just that awesome. His return with Voyager for the rest of the crew is a brilliantly stirring moment which does set up the season in style.
The computer describes the crew complement as “89 Kazon and one Betazoid”: Did it miss Seska? Cullah managing to leave the ready room when Paris and the Talaxians are on the bridge is an odd moment in context: It isn’t until Season 7 that we see there is actually another door out of there. Presumably the escape pods used by the Kazon are replaced, since all or most of the crew are able to evacuate in later episodes.
Re the universal translators, they might be built into the combadges but the two clearly aren’t interchangeable: The combadges are just a portable version for away missions and they’ve got them on board ship. Quoting “Metamorphosis”, where the universal translator is about the size of a transistor radio and needs to be set up especially, just underlines the inconsistency. But either way, yes, it would be utter madness not to have all the crew, including “new” recruits who’ve been there over a year, know a common language for just this sort of situation, whether it’s English or something that sounds like English to those of us watching it on television in English-speaking countries. (Cos hey, France, Spain, Portugal and, er, Belgium did quite a bit of colonising of their own. That’s why English isn’t an official language of Mexico.)
The common language of the Federation is Federation Basic. It’s a sort of high-pitched nasal sound rooted in Early Trekkese, often beginning with the words, “Well, actually…”
@37: There is a definite feeling of a new broom sweeping clean here and, to mix the metaphor, arguably throwing the baby out with the bath water. I can imagine a present series doing something like this as a finale to a season arc, but here it seems the show’s come back after the break (even if the break was only a month or so of filming three later episodes) and jettisoned everything apart from the main title regulars.
Actually, you reminded me an observation made by our very own Christopher L. Bennett a few years back.
CLB’s described his view of how VOY was, and I’m paraphrasing here, struggling with an identity crisis between being about the journey home and experiencing the strange, new worlds of the Delta Quadrant frontier for the first three Seasons…until–
“But then came “Scorpion,” in which Janeway made an insanely dangerous deal with the devil merely to continue making progress along a journey she had no realistic hope of completing in her lifetime. From that point on, the Rubicon was crossed; the show could never again be about anything but the quest for home. To me, that makes “Scorpion” the most pivotal moment of decision in the series, the point where it decided once and for all what the show would fundamentally be about.”
Now, I do agree with CLB on this score and I’ll hold off discussing my thoughts more in depth until the Rewatch hits “Scorpion” in a few months. But in a way, I’d also argue that “Basics, Part II” was another, even more crucial turning point for VOY as a whole.
By doing such a hard, almost fanatic push of the reset button and jettisoning nearly all the world-building Piller had co-constructed across the first two Seasons, it was a signal to the audience. It showed the audience that VOY creative staff no longer had even a facsimile of interest building up a recurring cast or weaving ongoing story threads. At this point, I’d argue it very much became the anti-DS9 and it was a self-inflicted wound that would metastasized with the overarching repercussions of “Scorpion” a year later.
@34/Austin: “But isn’t the handwavium explanation for translators is that it reads the brain waves of everyone around and translates it to something they understand? That, because it’s reading the brain of both the speaker and everybody close by, it even translates idioms?”
Again: There is no such thing as an absolutely perfect translation between two languages. It’s not a matter of improving the translation enough to make it perfect. It can never be perfect, because every language has words and idioms that have no exact equivalent in other languages. There are fundamental differences in the concepts and assumptions underlying the words and usages.
For instance, there’s no good English translation of the Japanese blessing Ganbatte. English dubs/subs of Japanese TV and movies tend to render it as “Good luck” or “Do your best,” but the closest thing I know to a literal translation is “Stubbornly persist,” and even that doesn’t capture its full significance, because it’s loaded with cultural subtext that doesn’t exist for English speakers. And then there are all the nuances of different honorifics in Japanese and the various different contexts in which they should and shouldn’t be used, none of which has any English equivalent. Sometimes in the Japanese shows I watch, characters use archaic speech marked by older, more formal variants of the verb for “to be,” but the subtitlers have trouble conveying this; when they try at all, it’s usually by substituting English archaisms like “thou” and “verily,” but that’s only the vaguest correspondence. Then there are the insults like kisama and onore that are just “you” with various degrees of impoliteness, and swear words like shimatta, which tends to be translated as “damn” or worse but literally just means “It has occurred,” sort of along the lines of “Now I’ve done it,” a sense of regret that it’s too late to undo something bad. And that’s not even getting into the wordplays and puns based on the sounds of words rather than their meanings and therefore impossible to translate.
Then there are the cases where words have ambiguous meanings that may both be applicable, and there’s no clear way to choose just one. For instance, the Japanese title for Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is Henshin, which is also the word used in Japanese superhero fiction for a hero’s transformation (particularly in Kamen Rider). Its literal translation is either “change body” or “strange body,” and it’s intentional that it means both of those things at once. But a translator rendering it in English has to choose one or the other, or just substitute the Latin equivalent “transform,” and thus the dual meaning of the original word is lost in translation.
Every translation is a judgment call. Give the same text to two equally good translators and they will make different choices in interpreting it, both of which may be equally “right,” but both of which will be imperfect approximations, differing in what nuances of meaning they choose to emphasize or what substitutions they make for terms with no precise equivalents. So the only way to truly understand the full meaning of someone’s words is to understand the language they’re expressed in.
@38, I agree that it makes perfect sense for all the members of Starfleet to speak the same language. I was just pointing out that, 1. not everyone on board *is* a member of Starfleet, nor even a member of the Federation, and considering they are understaffed, English classes might not have been the first priority, since the UT works 99% of the time, and 2. that while they all likely are able to speak the same language, it is unlikely that they usually do so, considering that the UTs are usually on. It would have been neat to hear Tuvok say something in Vulcan, or Chakotay something in a Native American language, or even find out that B’Elanna had been speaking Spanish the whole time, before they remembered they didn’t have the UT to translate. I just think it would have been a nice touch.
I’ve thought this for a long time: Am I the only one who doesn’t buy the whole “Seska stole Chakotay”s DNA for a child” as opposed to just “I’m pregnant with Chakotay’s child”? Why not just have them be in a relationship before the events in “Caretaker,” and deal with parenthood going forward? It would have made a whole lot more emotional sense for both of their characters.
@42/wildfyrewarning: “I was just pointing out that, 1. not everyone on board *is* a member of Starfleet, nor even a member of the Federation”
Which makes no difference, because they’re not free to do as they please; they’re members of Captain Janeway’s crew and subject to her orders. If she can order the Maquis to put on Starfleet uniforms and train in Starfleet procedures under Tuvok, then she can sure as hell order Neelix and Kes to learn Starfleet’s official language.
” English classes might not have been the first priority, since the UT works 99% of the time”
Again, this fundamentally misunderstands the very concept of training for emergencies. It’s not about how frequent they are. It’s about being ready for the rare exceptions. The fact that I had to do fire drills in school doesn’t mean we had fires all the time. We never had a fire that I recall, but we still had to train for the unlikely event, because if it did happen, it would be dangerous not to know how to deal with it. And that was just school. Starship personnel would have to train far more rigorously for far more extreme situations.
And again, they’ve been aboard over a year and a half, so it doesn’t matter if it wasn’t “the first priority.” By now they’ve had more than enough time to get through hundreds of priorities.
“2. that while they all likely are able to speak the same language, it is unlikely that they usually do so, considering that the UTs are usually on.”
You are still asserting your unsupported personal guess as an absolute fact. This has NEVER been explicitly stated to be the case.
“It would have been neat to hear Tuvok say something in Vulcan, or Chakotay something in a Native American language, or even find out that B’Elanna had been speaking Spanish the whole time, before they remembered they didn’t have the UT to translate.”
That would be implausible. People in multilingual communities usually speak more than one language. Americans don’t get that because most of us are monolingual, but we’re the exceptions. The majority of humans speak at least two languages — their native, local language and whatever the dominant lingua franca of the region is. Since the Federation’s primary language has been explicitly established as English, it stands to reason that most Federation members speak both English and their own native language.
krad, one objection I have is your description of the baby as a “bastard child”. That’s putting a label on a child that had nothing to do with the circumstances that led to it being labelled as such. Imagine a situation where a child born in s similar circumstances who is called a bastard all the time by someone. It might be correct, under the definition, but it’s unfair to the child and most people would think that the person calling them that was being more deserving of such a label.
Just a thought.
@45
Poor kid. Technically, both a bastard and a son of a–
Well, it’s true.
J Michael Straczynski himself criticized this episode for the crew’s poor survival skills on the planet. Of course Babylon 5 couldn’t afford to do location shooting, so they never had an episode like this.
kkozoriz: I was using “bastard” in its original meaning, which is a child born under non-ideal circumstances (originally referring to being born out of wedlock). It’s a description, not an insult.
As for the language thing, the sad reality is that it isn’t something the writers even thought about, because when you’re writing a 42-minutes-a-week TV show you don’t have time to deal with language barriers, which isn’t a problem for most of television.
I think it would’ve made the episode much stronger if all of a sudden we saw Neelix struggling to pick the right words and no longer using idioms and asking people to speak more slowly so he can understand them., if we heard bits of Vulcan in Tuvok’s speech and Spanish in Torres’s speech and whatever bullshit made-up language Jamake Highwater fobbed on them for Chakotay’s speech. Not have everyone suddenly not understand each other, for the very reasons Christopher gave, but to show that the translators were no longer useful — especially since they did deal with that in their interactions with the natives…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@38: Not only did the Voyager computer not recognize Seska, when it identified only the Kazon and the sole Betazoid aboard, but it didn’t recognize the baby as a Cardassian/Kazon either.
Is KRAD going to provide a brand new rewatch entry for “Flashback” even though he already reviewed that particular episode several years ago?
I cringed really hard from Tuvok’s “nobility in the savage” line. What the hell were the writers thinking?! That line was dated even in 1996. I wish Tim Russ had followed Nichelle Nichols’ example and refused to say that line.
This one was much better than Part 1. I always recall Part 2 much more fondly, mainly for the fantastic, unlikely duo of the EMH and Suder. It sure helped at the start that Seska knew nothing about how much the EMH evolved since she left Voyager , so the Doctor pretending to still be as aloof as he was in season 1 was a smart move. It’s also very fortunate that Seska, apparently, never just asked the computer if anyone else was on the ship, and that the EMH learned about Suder first.
Speaking of Suder, Brad Dourif’s final performance as the Betazoid sociopath was amazing and heartbreaking; you really feel for Suder having worked hard to overcome his sociopathy, as much as he could in any case, to having to let his darker instincts come back to the surface to save Voyager and her crew.
There should have been a whole mess of uniforms on Hanon IV. The plot moves along nicely on the planet so you don’t really think about it, but we should have seen a lot more crew. 140-odd people is still a pretty big group, and in hindsight it never quite felt like that many, only really maybe 40-odd people (not even that). But the crew handle being stranded well ( except for Neelix, whose idiocy got poor Hogan killed and him and Kes kidnapped).
I hated the ending with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns. Seska gets her comeuppance by…dying because a console exploded. And that sexist jackass Culluh takes the baby to raise him to also be a sexist jackass. Really? We’re thankfully never going Culluh again, so why not have him meet his ultimate, well-earned fate? Well somebody’s gotta take this other baby because we already have a baby on Voyager . Great call, writers! (sigh).
The good news is we’re not going to see the Kazon again, except in flashback.
Which reminds me.
Krad, are you going to do another recap of “Flashback”, or are you going to use the recap from a few years back, during the DS9 rewatch?
Grandma was a bastard. The man named on her birth certificate is neither of the men to who great-grandma (who lived in the LA area in the early part of the last century) was ever married. All we have is the name, Jakob Cohen. Although 23 and Me reports that I have a lot of Jewish relatives in the MidWest.
Dad and I found it amusing to consider our unknown heritage, although his brother was horrified that his ancestry was something less than Pure.
Great-grandma would’ve been fun to know, I think.
One thing I want to say with regards Cullah getting to keep the baby (and this didn’t even occur to me until this rewatch, which shows its benefit), which I kind of alluded to on Part I: We get that whole spirit conversation between Chakotay and Kolopak about accepting a child conceived in less-than-ideal circumstances and Kolopak recalls their tribe’s women being raped by white conquerors and having children who were accepted into the tribe. Rightly, this is shown as a good thing. And then the Kazon show up, and it’s easy to miss amidst all the evil gloating, but it turns out that Cullah hasn’t responded to the situation by having Seska and the baby killed or enslaved after all. He believes that his woman was raped by an enemy and had his son, and instead of seeing it as a source of shame to get rid of, he’s accepted this apparently half-human/half-Cardassian child as his own son. I don’t know if anyone involved in the rewrites actually thought of that, but it does provide a tiny hint that he’s not 100% irredeemable.
(Incidentally, I recall sometime around Season 6 or 7 there was a rumour going round that Cullah and his son were going to reappear. I don’t know how much substance there was to it but obviously it didn’t happen. I did revisit the scenario in my fan fictions recently and had the Voyager ex-pats make a truce with Cullah and have his son join the crew.)
It seems strange to debate how Neelix and Kes communicated on the planet when we heard how they communicated – they spoke English. So what can we be certain of? They learnt English. So Christopher must be right.
@36 kkozoriz, you may be right that there are more people who speak Mandarin or Spanish than English as a first language, but only a tiny fraction of their total number of speakers speak them as a second language. With English there are far, far more who speak it as a second language than first, and overall it’s the language that has most speakers worldwide. Rightly or wrongly (or, as I believe, neutrally) English has become the lingua franca of the human race, of trade and diplomacy. It’s an official language of countries on every continent on Earth, and its use is growing. It wasn’t parochial of Gene Roddenberry to speculate that it’ll be our language in the 23rd century and beyond.
What is parochial though is to suggest Spanish isn’t a language of “white folks” as a quick glance at Spain will attest. The Americas are not the world.
@53/jmwhite: English is also the standard international language of spaceflight, science, and engineering, which I think will be the deciding factor as humans expand into space. (And Americans will have to for pity’s sake catch up with the rest of humanity and use the metric system if they want to be part of that.)
@54
Oh come on, we’ve only lost one multi-million dollar spacecraft because of Metric/English conversion issues!
America mostly is metric. The military has been metric for decades, the drug subculture likewise.
@55/wiredog: Sure, America has officially, legally been on the metric system since the Ford administration. But you’d never know it from everyday practice.
wiredog: America isn’t even a little metric. Trust me.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@57, No it isn’t. The problem is, for my generation at least, that metric measurements give no image of length or distance while the old feet and inches do.
@52, you are absolutely right. Culluh has the perfect chance to rid himself of the baby and he doesn’t take it. Obviously as far as he’s concerned it is his son and he wants to keep him.
@58/roxana: I don’t get that. A “foot” is significantly longer than most anyone’s actual foot, so it doesn’t give a good image. And what kind of image does “inch” suggest?
It seems to me that it’s entirely a matter of what you’re used to. If you were raised with meters and centimeters, you’d have a very clear image of their sizes, and no idea what an “inch” or “foot” might be.
CLB @59: And that’s exactly the problem. The generation that makes the transition has to deal with the confusion of and learning intuition in the new system, and it’s much easier for everyone to just keep the status quo and expect the next generation to be the ones doing all the hard work.
That attitude actually explains quite a bit about the way the world works, unfortunately.
You can never truly appreciate measurements until you’ve used them in the original kellicam.
I wish decimetres would take off. It fills a hole in the colloquial use of the metric system between a few centimetres and half a meter. As is, Canadians usually describe things between more than a few centimetres to a metre long in inches and feet. Then metres are more convenient once you get longer than 3 or 4 feet.
I’m 48, was taught the metric system in Jr High and loved the ‘just move the decimal left or right X number of places’ simplicity of it. I really wish we would just bite the bullet and convert.
@48 krad – I’m well aware of the originalc meaning of the wod. However, we don’t encourage children to use if the have friends whose parents are unmarried.
say what you like about the parents in such situations but to say that the child should be called a bastard for something that they had no power over is cruel.
Regarding language, just have them call it Federation Standard or some such and you avoid the cultural imperialism. As it is Earth is home to the Federation Council, the office of the President and Starfleet. Add to that the fact that in oder to be a member planet, you have to learn a human language.
Azetbur wasn’t wrong when she called the Federation a Homo Sapiens only club. Apparently the only planet that has any meaningful culture in the Federation is Earth and the anglo speaking portion in particular
@60/bad_platypus: “CLB @59: And that’s exactly the problem. The generation that makes the transition has to deal with the confusion of and learning intuition in the new system, and it’s much easier for everyone to just keep the status quo and expect the next generation to be the ones doing all the hard work.”
Even that’s an oversimplification. I’m from the generation of Americans that was taught both Imperial and metric and expected to make the transition, but people after us backslid and stopped trying.
Oh, now I’ve got this theme song running through my head:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlJ_zw8dx6w
Here’s a post explaining the show: https://ideas.rifftrax.com/forums/244244-rifftrax-movie-requests/suggestions/9587100-the-metric-system-pbs-tv-series-1978
@64
It’s almost as if Star Trek was produced by English speaking homo sapiens on the planet Earth for a primarily English speaking homo sapien audience. Those bastards.
I think the US just likes to be different from the rest of the world: Imperial system, iced tea, free condiments, supersized meals, free public restrooms, lack of a healthcare system…
@@@@@ 53 “What is parochial though is to suggest Spanish isn’t a language of “white folks” as a quick glance at Spain will attest. The Americas are not the world.”
For that matter, there are millions of White people in Latin America.
To further refute wiredog’s claim that “America mostly is metric”…..
If America was metric, we wouldn’t be told during this pandemic that we should maintain a distance of six feet.
If America was metric, speedometers in American cars would measure KM/H rather than MPH.
If America was metric, signs on highways would give distances in kilometers and meters instead of miles and fractions of miles.
America is not remotely metric.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@66 – While pretending to be inclusive and all with things like IDIC.
“We have seen the future and it’s still mostly white, American and male and that makes it better.” should be the tagline.
We can forgive TOS since they were actually pushing the boundaries of their time. Trek should be a lot more representative of the whole as a whole. But it’s mostly a paper thin veneer of tolerance. The leaders are still mostly white, male or American or a combination thereof.
By the time we got to Enterprise, the big change was that the two minorities had switched jobs. And the minority woman on the bridge was still mostly answering toe space phone when she being frightened.
We get to Discovery and have an asian woman as captain but she’s almost immediately killed off and replace by her evil counterpart.
We finally get a gay couple but then kill off the one who isn’t white. But we bring him back with magic space mushrooms because his white partner is sad.
Picard gives us a woman of colour but she’s unemployed due to the actions of her white mentor as well as being an alcoholic and a drug addict. But she gets rescued by a white man and her addictions magically go away without explanation.
Meanwhile, Picard himself is being a total asshole to everyone around him but they all think he’s just wonderful.
This isn’t to say that people of colour shouldn’t have challenges to overcome but they, more often than not, have traits that their white counterpoints do not.
White, male and American is shown as the pinnacle.
And on Voyager the young white guy keeps getting to play hero. At least Paris gets steadily less annoying as the show goes on.
@70 I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. Picard isn’t American, and while I agree that Picard is certainly an asshole through much of the first season of his series, he is usually called out for it, and vehemently so. Those who have known him continue to love him, but I don’t think they think he’s “wonderful” in those moments.
And if you watch closely, I think you can make the argument that Rafi saved Picard as much as he saved her. And I’m not sure why you think she has mastered her addictions. She relapsed even in the course of the rather short first season.
As for Voyager, I just finished my first watch at the entire series, and although you can certainly cherry-pick episodes where Paris gets to play the hero for no particular reason, I wasn’t left with the overriding impression that the glory, if you will, wasn’t spread around fairly well. In terms of gender, I think Voyager may be the most progressive of all the series, featuring three strong female characters. If there’s a star of the show, it’s obviously Janeway. For the last four seasons at least, Seven is featured as much as anyone. Torres is no one’s cupcake.
Beyond that. Tuvok has his share of moments, and he’s a dark-skinned Vulcan. So that leaves two other male characters, Chakotay and Kim, both Americans, who basically get knocked down the totem pole (no pun intended).
As someone else noted, this series was made by Americans for American television. Of course there will be an emphasis on Americans, probably less because of some jingoistic bias then because we can relate to them and their histories.
I think the UK is as messed with its units use as anywhere. Officially we’ve adopted the metric system, but…
You’ll put fuel in your car in litres, but then your car’s readout with be in miles per gallon. No, it’s not the same gallon as America uses – when you copied our system you wrote that one down wrong or something. The road sign distances to places will be in miles, but a road sign showing, say, the height of a bridge will be in metres. As will motorway markers used by maintenance teams.
All things are weighed in grams or kilos, except people. Babies are measured in pounds and ounces, stones and pounds for everyone else.
Short distances are measured in metres and centimetres. Unless that short distance is the height of a person, in which case it’s feet and inches. Long distances in miles. Unless you’re running or cycling that distance, in which case it’ll be km. “I’m running a 10k.”.
If you buy water or soft drinks it’ll be by the litre. Beer is sold by the pint. As is milk. Sometimes but not always. Wine is sold by the 750 millilitre.
Apparently if you buy cannabis dealers sell it in ounces, but the same dealer will sell you cocaine in grams.
Thankfully education, industry and government are all metric.
@70 A quick look at the numbers shows that 10 (just over 15%) of the 63 main Star Trek characters have been white straight Americans. And that’s if you include both Voyager’s doctor, and Lorca, the only main cast member to be a wrong ‘un.
It’s not a perfect show, and certainly not every decision taken in decades past holds up to modern scrutiny, but I think it is true to say that the casting of every single Star Trek series produced has been done so with progressive diversity in mind.
We certainly shouldn’t gloss over its failings, but nor should its failings detract from that pretty proud record.
@64:
Azetbur wasn’t wrong when she called the Federation a Homo Sapiens only club. Apparently the only planet that has any meaningful culture in the Federation is Earth and the anglo speaking portion in particular.
I mean, we all know the real-life explanation for that is Trek is an American-produced TV franchise, that there are budgetary limitations for doing alien makeup for background extras, etc.
I know KRAD, CLB, and the other novelists have been aware of it and were trying to keep pushing the diversity envelope more and more during the dry spell of the 2000s and early 2010s.
That said, for all the controversy of David Mack’s Section 31: Control, I did like how Mack quietly and cleverly addressed this and gave an in-story explanation and justification for why humanity seems to be first among equals in the UFP.
@72 – Paris, the white guy, comes on board as a prisoner and is given a temporary rank. During the show he’s court martialed, demoted to ensign and then back to Lieutenant. Meanwhile, the asian ensign remains an ensign throughout.
And let’s not forget about the utter embarrassment that is Chakotay. Trek’s second native American character that gets to speak (Ensign Walking Bear in TAS was first and there’s a shot of one in the rec deck scene of TMP but they’re never seen nor heard from again). Someone sells them a bill of goods about native tribes and customs and apparently nobody on staff thought to do any research into it at all.
Women get treated slightly less badly than minorities do but if you’re not white, male or American, the space at the top is a pretty lonely place. Sure we get Janeway and Sisko but white males predominate as captains, first officers and whoever plays the third corner of the trinity.
How about a series where white males are in the minority? Discovery looked to be that series for the first two episodes but then they killed the Asian woman and the African American became a criminal.
Just because a show is American based doesn’t mean that they have to adhere to the “White men are the heroes” trope so often. If Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations is supposed to be something other than a marketing slogan, Star Trek must be like V’Ger and evolve. Take some chances and stop trying to the franchise that plays it safe.
There’s time I think that Star Wars was the worst thing to ever happen to Star Trek. It made the franchise owners look at it as something that could rival Star Wars so they decided to play it safe for the most part. The Franchise is something that must appeal to as many people as possible and that means not upsetting the Kafarian apple cart.
The problem is that it has backfired on them. Trek is seen as the safe show. The one that keeps looking back. As early as Wrath of Khan, Trek’s future was anchored in it’s past. It’s become more about “How can we have these characters from the past make a guest appearance?”. Enterprise, Discovery and the upcoming Pike series. All rooted in the past. Even the reboot movies felt the need to tie into modern day Trek instead of simply cutting ties and trying to tell new stories.
Be bold. Be dynamic. Take a chance.
@76 I think Trek being backwards-looking (well, everything from TNG on, since TOS was genuinely groundbreaking) is true, especially because, in the decades between TNG and TOS, the world and SF changed *so much*. This is particularly obvious with Trek’s aversion to transhumanism (almost the only people to have cybernetic implants are evil- like the Borg, or scummy- like the criminals O’Brien and Odo meet on DS9. The only real exception I can think of is La Forge’s VISOR.).That was all well and good in the 60s, but in the post-cyberpunk era, Star Trek really did have the feel that it was the past’s imagining of the future. The aliens continued to be rubber-foreheaded and from cultures that have social structures pretty similar to earth, and many of the shows never lost the implicit theme that the best thing you could be was human, and if you can’t be that, at least try to be like humans. There were exceptions (one of the reasons I hate the attempts to “humanize” the Borg is that they were one of the very few semi-frequently seen specifies who were really, *really* different from humanity in their goals, structure, and values), but most of them tended to be like the Q or the Prophets- creatures beyond our comprehension who occasionally use their near godlike abilities to create havoc or hit the reset button, as needed. Meanwhile, SF literature and other media has become infinitely weirder, more technology based, and more willing to admit that maybe being human isn’t the end-all-be-all. I *love* Star Trek, but it is very much still rooted in a kind of sunny 60s optimism and outlook that just isn’t what most people think of when they think of “the future” anymore.
@77/wildfyre: I think Geordi’s VISOR and Picard’s artificial heart are signs that TNG’s early writers were open to transhumanism. Neither one was meant to be unique; the assumption was that similar prosthetics would be in commonplace use by that era. For that matter, “Unnatural Selection” showed that the Federation was open to genetic engineering experiments to improve humanity. But later showrunners lost sight of that notion and interpreted Roddenberry’s humanism too narrowly.
@78 yea, there are glimpses of it here and there, but never very much, and most of the more obvious examples we see of it are on bad guys. On the one hand, it makes a lot of sense in the Star Trek universe- where they have a severe phobia of humans that are modified in ways that make them super-human (as opposed to things like Nog’s leg, or Picard’s heart, which just bring them back to the way they were before, and even Geordi’s VISOR lets him “see” more than a normal human might, but it’s not over the top) due to bad experiences, both with Khan, with Lore, and even with those kids in TNG who caused everyone else to age and die. Even if the Federation was opposed to it, you’d think you’d see more alien species that didn’t have the same hang-ups, but very few do. On the other hand, considering how much visible cybernetics and prosthetics had become part of the aesthetic of SF during the cyberpunk era, TNG still looked remarkably like TOS as far as appearances went, and while I love the clean-cuts and bright colors, it certainly felt like the throwback compared to other science fiction of the time.
@79/wildfyrewarning:”yea, there are glimpses of it here and there, but never very much, and most of the more obvious examples we see of it are on bad guys.”
You’re missing my point by talking about the series as a unified whole. I’m talking about the difference between the intent of the early creators in the first season or two, that Picard and Geordi would just be two of the many humans with bionic or other enhancements, and the intent of the creators from season 3 onward, who never bothered to follow up on that notion. It ended up being rare because of the change in creators and intentions, but if the original creators had stuck around, it would’ve been different.
I can see Picard’s heart being commonplace but people are generally amazed by Geordi’s visor.
Picard being assimilated was the beginning of the end of the Borg in my mind. The first time we actually follow someone who’s been assimilated and it ends up it’s a special case. So, of course he’s freed from the collective. The Borg Queen was just the cherry on top of the “The Borg are no longer interesting” sundae. The fact that Voyager made it through their space essentially unscathed was one of the most annoying aspects of the Borg. They’re supposed to nothing like we had ever seen before according to Q and yet they end up keeping their promises and being susceptible to blackmail. Meh.
Add to that all the times that Seven’s various Borg implants were key to solving a problem and they became more like a Starfleet Army Knife.
@78:
I think Geordi’s VISOR and Picard’s artificial heart are signs that TNG’s early writers were open to transhumanism. Neither one was meant to be unique; the assumption was that similar prosthetics would be in commonplace use by that era. For that matter, “Unnatural Selection” showed that the Federation was open to genetic engineering experiments to improve humanity. But later showrunners lost sight of that notion and interpreted Roddenberry’s humanism too narrowly.
Yeah.
CLB, as you and I discussed back in the Picard discussions, we can thank Ron Moore for that one.
As I said back then, I get what RDM was going for with “Doctor Bashir, I Presume” and the Genetic Engineering Ban. I get how it was meant to explain in-story why transhumanism was absent from the 24th Century and to tie it into the Earth Trek backstory (i.e. Khan and the Augments).
But, again, I’ve never understood the Ban or why the rest of the UFP would’ve gone along with it and let Earth unilaterally dictate that particular legislation.
@82/Mr. Magic: “we can thank Ron Moore for that one.”
No, that’s mistaking the effect for the cause. As I said, the change began around season 3 of TNG or late season 2, before Moore was even on staff. The Borg were introduced, we stopped seeing any hint of human cyborgs or genetic engineering in the Federation, and the writers even stopped exploring the possibilities of Geordi’s VISOR, only using it as a means for bad guys to torture or brainwash him. The only reason Moore needed to introduce that retcon about the genetic engineering ban in 1997 is because the franchise had already spent the previous eight years ignoring the possibilities of transhumanism, except in a negative light with the Borg or the colony in “The Masterpiece Society.” He didn’t create the problem — he was trying to rationalize the problem that already existed. Although in so doing, he only created more problems.
@83,
Yeah, yeah, that’s true.
With the weekly grind of the TV production schedule (and with the prelude to the Dominion War’s formal kickoff underway at that point), I can laos forgive Moore, Behr, and the rest of the Writers Room for not anticipating the problems the Ban’s concept would end up causing instead of solving.
@84/Mr. Magic: Well, I think they did anticipate that it would create problems for the characters, which is why they went with it. Just fixing a continuity hole isn’t enough reason in itself to do something in a story; it’s only worth doing if it generates future stories, and stories are about characters facing problems. A continuity fix that wraps everything up in a neat little bow may be appealing for fans and continuity junkies, but for professional writers it’s not worth bothering with, because it doesn’t accomplish anything further. A fix that explains a past inconsistency in a way that generates new complications for the future, though — that’s worth doing, because you can get stories out of it.
Actually, I would say Discovery swayed in the other extremity: it’s as if they are afraid to show a straight white man as a good guy, because they know that everyone will blame them that they are not diverse. I bet if captain Pike was not already set as a white straight man in TOS he wouldn’t be in Discovery.
Without looking at numbers, I would say that Voyager was most progressive in regards to female characters (if you count Kes, there are four strong and interesting female characters), and I guess Discovery has the most racial diversity. But in regards to nationality, I would say TOS was actually most diverse. We have Checkov, Scotty, and I think Uhura was not supposed to be American too. All other shows have at most one token non-USA character.
As for the prevalence of humans in the Federation, my personal explanation was that we are just following ships that are mainly human. I bet that there are ships that are with almost entirely Vulcan crew. If the show was about such a ship, you would get a feeling that the humans are a marginal part of the Federation. Of course the real explanation is what everyone already stated: the show is made by humans.
@25
I presume that Seska and the Kazon missed Suder because their accounting style was the same as the one used in the Jurassic Park novel. They only counted who they expected to find. Suder was presumed dead (as stated by Harry) so they didn’t bother checking (a working culture habit of the Kazon that Seska pulls Cullah up on).
This was how they didn’t know that five of the dinosaur species were breeding in the JP novel, they only expected to find x amount of indivduals on their tracking systems and the computer automatically stopped counting beyond the expected number. When they asked the computer to search for x+1 dinosaurs, the computer found an extra individual.
@86 – We’ve seen two Vulcan crewed starships, the Intrepid in The Immunity Syndrome and the T’Kumbra in Take Me Out To The Holosuite. It’s likely that Starfleet crews are primarily crewed by one species with a smattering of others in the mix. We saw a fairly diverse crew in TMP but pretty much everyone we saw after the rec deck scene was human.
We’ve seen a number of Presidents of the UFP, all of whom are human or close enough to not make a difference. The one obviously alien President we saw was shown to be totally ineffective and actually declared martial law.
Part of the problem is that aliens are often seen as people that have a problem that our intrepid crews have to solve for them, teaching them a lesson in the process. I much prefer stories where members of Starfleet are the ones who learn the lesson, think Devil in the Dark or Errand of Mercy. We shouldn’t be out there solving other people’s problems, particularly when they don’t ask for our help. An asteroid is about to wipe you out? Sure, we’re glad to help. You’re having social problems brought about by your own people? Sorry, that’s your problem and you have to learn how to solve things for yourself. You want to ask us to act as mediators? Certainly, glad to help. But the solution will be agreed to by your people and not imposed by us.
To paraphrase David Gerrold, the Enterprise should not be a cosmic Mary Worth.
@86- Assuming by Non-USA character we’re meaning “Identified as being from a real-life Earth country or culture outside of the United States,” (thereby not counting, IE, Data, who was built in a lab on an alien colony long after the United States ceased being a thing…)
The Next Generation had Picard, as the world’s most English Frenchman, and Geordi La Forge, whom I’m told was born in Mogadishu (to be fair, I did have to be told this- I don’t recall that it ever actually came up in the series, apart from being briefly displayed on his medical records). Riker is definitely an American, but Miles O’Brien is Irish.
Tasha Yar is from a fictional space colony that I don’t recall being particularly identifed with any real-life Earth culture, while Beverly Crusher was born on the moon and raised by her grandmother on a colony inhabited by Reconstructionist Scotts (I remembered that one because it was the one where Beverly inherits her grandmother’s sex-ghost).
But certainly for all of these characters, their nationality was less a main facet of their characterization than it was for Chekov or Scotty.
@89/Benjamin: “Tasha Yar is from a fictional space colony that I don’t recall being particularly identifed with any real-life Earth culture”
Turkana IV is apparently named after a lake and ethnic group in Kenya, but the inhabitants were a mix of ethnicities, predominantly white. Tasha herself was meant to be of Ukrainian descent. (Before “Legacy” established its name, the novel Survivors identified Tasha’s birth colony as New Paris.)
@90/Christopher
Interesting! For our purposes, I think we can count Tasha as “Not American, but not a representative of a real life nationality.”
Of course, the United States as a political entity almost certainly no longer exists by the time of Star Trek, and it seems likely that Sisko, for instance, would identify his background in terms of New Orleans and Earth than the United States, but that’s just a hunch.
@88 “We’ve seen a number of Presidents of the UFP, all of whom are human or close enough to not make a difference. The one obviously alien President we saw was shown to be totally ineffective and actually declared martial law.”
The Efrosian Federation President in Undiscovered Country (named Ra-ghoratreii by Krad himself according to Memory Alpha) was decently alien, in my opinion. At least as alien as aliens tend to get in Star Trek, with the differing forehead and hair growth.
kkozoriz: We’ve only seen three Federation presidents, and only one was human. The president in The Undiscovered Country was very obviously alien.
I’m a lot more cranky about the fact that, until my 2004 novel A Time for War, a Time for Peace, every single Federation president established in any facet of Trek — screen, prose fiction, comic books, role-playing games, video games — was male. Lots of different species (for example, the comic Enter the Wolves had an early-24th-century president during early contact with Cardassia be Andorian), but all dudes.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
wizardofwoz77: Actually, the name Ra-ghoratreii came from the novelization of The Undiscovered Country by J.M. Dillard.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@94 I stand corrected. Actually, I sit corrected since I’m at my computer. Anyway, I mainly know the name from Sarek by AC Crispin. (One of my two favorite Trek novels so far, the other being Spock’s World, who cares that they manage to contradict the heck out of each other let alone later canon? Though I’m probably about to go deep-dive into some other novels now that I have a Kindle. /aside )
@85 / CLB:
Absolutely. “Statistical Probabilities” is a good example as it and the Jack Pack showed the inevitable dangers of the UFP blacklisting genetic research. And Bashir having hid his genetic engineering caused its own share of problems (“Inquisition”) or opened the door for new stories in the final two Seasons that wouldn’t have been possible (ex. “Extreme Measures”).
(Incidentally, if amusingly, it also caused problems behind the scenes. If I remember right, Alexander Siddig wasn’t consulted about the idea for the character and he was understandably not happy).
What I was trying say earlier was the larger repercussions of the Ban and trying to retroactively integrate it into TOS and preceding TNG era. Trek is a multi-decade multimedia tapestry with hundreds of creators having worked on it and will continue working on it with their own views and interpretation of Roddenberry’s sandbox. 100% Perfect logic and internal consistency is impossible (and it’s arguably miracle Trek‘s remained as internally consistent as it has).
But the internal logic…again, I just can’t understand why Earth was seemingly and unilaterally allowed to dictate an anti-transhumanism stance for the entire UFP. Yes, the Eugenics Wars and the Augment Crisis were terrible events and yes it would instill an enduring fear of the science….but I’d imagine there had been opposition from other worlds who favored genetic research. I’d actually been hoping we’d see that debate at some point in Rise of the Federation.
@96- I’ve argued before (albeit with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek) that it’s because the Federation’s understanding of evolution is rooted in the (in OTL widely discredited) ideas of orthogenesis and teleology, such that genetic engineering of humanoid species is considered a categorical wrong regardless of it’s actual utility.
Who would want to interfere with humanity’s glorious future as non-sapient giant newts, after all?
@96/Mr. Magic: Oh, no question, the ban idea makes no damn sense whatsoever. No way would a society be hamstrung by fears based on a crisis 400 years earlier. Nobody left alive would remember the crisis. And usually when there’s initial resistance to a new technology based on fear, it fades away in a generation or two. There was a time when people were afraid of electricity. There was a time when people feared railroad trains, convinced that traveling that fast was unnatural and humans couldn’t survive it. There used to be a whole subset of SF and horror about the evils of organ transplantation. Those kinds of fears always exist, but they always fade in time. No way would they persist 400 years. Society would learn to manage the risks and take advantage of the benefits, as it always does.
And that’s basically my point. The idea makes no damn sense, but they didn’t adopt it because it made historical or sociological sense. They adopted it because it generated stories and character conflicts. I just wish they’d found an idea that could achieve both.
@93 – But obviously human except for a bit of latex on the forehead and a wig. Still an obvious white male.
At least Jaresh-Inyo got full face makeup when playing an alien.
White, male and American is the default. Even Sulu was shown as being American despite Asians being the largest ethnic group on the planet. Nope, can’t have him represent one of the countries or the region.
Uhura has never been given a backstory on screen although Alan Dean Foster did show her growing up in Africa in one of his TAS adaptations.
@96 – ” I just can’t understand why Earth was seemingly and unilaterally allowed to dictate an anti-transhumanism stance for the entire UFP.”
Because Earth IS the UFP. Government based on Earth. Military based on Earth. Of course the policy is going to favour Earth. The whole reason the UFP exists is because of Archer pushing the other races for it. The Federation was basically imposed on the other planets. The whole thing is based on an Earth model.
We’re told that the Statutes of Alpha III forms part of the legal basis for the Federation but we never see what that looks like. Pretty much every legal proceeding we see in the Federation is based on the Earth/European/American model. When we do see other political/legal systems, the almost unilaterally shown to be corrupt in some way.
Look at the episode Justice, for example. The Edo legal system works for them but we obviously can’t have a member of the Federation face their legal transgression on that planet simply because the UFP think’s it’s unfair. Never mind the fact the the whole thing took place on the planet and they have no obligation to grant a waiver to Wesley. As they say, ignorance of the law is no excuse.
But, the laws of the other planets don’t apply to our intrepid spacefarers.
Quoth kkoroziz: “But obviously human except for a bit of latex on the forehead and a wig. Still an obvious white male.”
Nope, because he also had golden skin, a tone not found on any human on Earth. So not “white,” either.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@99/kkozoriz: “White, male and American is the default. Even Sulu was shown as being American despite Asians being the largest ethnic group on the planet.”
“Despite?” Choose your words with more care. There are tens of millions of Asian-Americans, nearly 6 percent of the US population, including both Sulu actors (though only Takei was born in the US). They deserve representation as much as Asians from other countries. George Takei was imprisoned as a child by a racist government that assumed being Japanese made him un-American. So by talking as though it were somehow illegitimate to portray Asians as American, you’re insulting everything he’s fought for his whole life.
@101 – And there are literally more than a billion Asians living in Asia. Claiming that the US is somehow representative of the entire planet and therefore having characters be portrayed as Americas is just as good as having characters represent all the people of the planet is a rather closed minded attitude.
The US is 4.25% of the world population. China is 18%. Add in the fact that Sulu is supposed to be pan-Asian in background according to Roddenberry, and the percentage grows even more. But somehow 6% of 4.25% is equivalent to that.
Asians are poorly represented on Star Trek. So are people from India. And Africa. And the Middle East.
IDIC is nothing more than a catch phrase. Putting it in today’s terms, it’s like saying “All lives matter”. It pays lip service to the concept while ignore the real issues. It’s saying “We support diversity but the majority of our characters are going to be white, male and American.”.
It’s not intended to portray Asians as being unworthy or unable to be American. It’s assuming that the default of characters is to be white and male and American. Portraying people of colour as being from some place other than North America or Europe is not saying that they don’t belong there. It’s acknowledging the fact that the vast majority of them live places other than white majority countries.
You could make the same argument about Uhura. Since she hasn’t been given any background, you could simply claim that she’s also American and to your way of thinking, that would be fine because there are people of African descent living in America. As a matter of fact, America has representatives of every ethnic group living within it’s borders, so by making characters American, you’re actually representing the entire planet. Which, of course, is nonsense.
But seeing as it took Star Trek over 50 years to even acknowledge that gay people actually exist, isn’t surprising.
I thought Uhura was a citizen of the United States of Africa? But I have no idea where I got that idea from. Her quarters were definitely decorated with a 1960s attempt at Afro-futurism.
@103/roxana: Uhura was established as a native of the United States of Africa in the TOS writers’ guide and The Star Trek Concordance, while The Making of Star Trek calls her “a citizen of the Bantu Nation of United Africa.” So it’s one of those bits of biography that have always been taken as fact but never explicitly established onscreen. However, “The Man Trap” and “The Changeling” established that her native language was Swahili, indicating an East African origin.
It was never established that Uhura’s native language was Swahili. It was established that she spoke it. She did retain her Swahili when Nomad mindwiped her but that does not prove that it was her first language. After all, Nomad was speaking English when it told her to think about music instead of telling her “fikiria juu ya muziki”.
As far as decorating her quarters, Sisko did the same and he’s from New Orleans.
@87: Seska and the Kazon realise fairly early on that there’s two crewmembers unaccounted for. There’s a kind of assumption that they were both on board the shuttle, but you’d expect them to make more than a cursory search of the ship and use the computer to double-check since it’s there.
@104 and @105: At the start of “Spectre of the Gun”, when the crew all hear the Melkots speaking in their own language, Uhura hears Swahili.
That’s true but it still doesn’t prove that it’s her first language. Perhaps she was recalling a story about a similar situation that she had read in Swahili. If that was how she was thinking at the moment, then the Melkot could have picked up on that.
Also, yet another case of the Enterprise going where they’re not welcome. So much for non-interference.
MELKOT [OC]: Aliens, you have encroached on the space of the Melkot. You will turn back immediately. This is the only warning you will receive.
—
KIRK: Our orders are very clear. We’re to establish contact with the Melkotians at all costs.
SPOCK: True telepaths can be most formidable, and we have been warned.
KIRK: What previous contacts have been made with the Melkotians?
SPOCK: No recorded contacts. If they ever ventured into space, they evidently withdrew immediately.
—
SPOCK: I prefer being a welcomed guest, Captain, but there seems to be little choice.
Spectre of the Gun
@107: They’d have to be pretty poor telepaths to make a mistake like that! Given that everyone heard it simultaneously, the idea seems to be that it was some sort of natural universal translator: The message was sent into their minds and they heard it in the language they’d understand.
Seeing as we have no idea how telepathy would actually work, I don’t see how you can say that. However, we did see that surface thoughts can be taken as more important that deeper ones when Kirk was being duplicated in What Are Little Girls Made If? Seeing as the machine was basically technological telepathy, organic telepathy might work the same way. On a similar note, Deanna wasn’t as formidable a telepath as most Betazoids so she only got surface readings such as emotions or lying and not deeper ones such as memories.
My personal ‘handwavium’ answer to the UT is that everyone serving on a Federation ship receives some kind of brain chip or cochlear implant (same as the Ferengi in ‘Little Green Men’). The UT works automatically, largely without fault, and doesn’t rely on the presence of any particular physical communication device.
@The UT problem: I’m with CLB on the idea that Neelix and Kes would have had to learn English if they were to remain onboard. It’s not biased, it’s simply prudent.
@Metric vs Imperial: To this day I still measure height and weight in imperial even though I’ve been around metric all my life. Height I can deduce in meters, but funny enough, I’m out to lunch [eating worms ;)] envisioning in my hands, the weight of a kilogram as opposed to a pound. It’s really weird.
My strongest take-away feeling from this episode is that the planet part had a bit of ’60’s trippy feel to it. A strange planet, no technology, eating worms (well almost), dinosaur/dragon/lizard creature in the cave, “primitive” people who want to swap females, but come around when you save one of them and then use their medicine to repay the favor. Not bad, just kinda something you might have seen on the TOS.
The ship part had a really great human drama man v. self aspect with good writing and great acting for the Suder story. Picardo was good as the Doctor but I think he may have decided to tone it down a bit to let Dourif, who had the strong story-line, shine. If so it was a great decision. I wasn’t really sorry to see Seska go and not really sorry to see the non-spectacular way she went. Her role as Moriarty never really clicked with me, maybe because Voyager does not really have a Holmes.
The universal translator/speaking English (or at least a common language) question sure has fostered an interesting debate – and lots of posts. After reading all the comments, I fall on the side that the writers just didn’t think about it or at least didn’t think it was important enough to deal with. I can’t really buy into the “Neelix and Kes spent a lot of off camera time learning English” fan-wank. Particularly because neither they, nor anybody else who may have started out as a non English speaker had even the slightest accent. I think Krad said it best @48. Just a slight indication that Neelix and Kes, and maybe Tuvok, Torres and Chakotay were not English speakers from birth would have been great. As a bonus, it would have been kinder to the character of Neelix if some of his miscues here could be chalked up to some communication issues. Although it would have been another reason to wonder why Janeway chose him as a group leader. All in all, the situation doesn’t bother me, but I do think it was just an overlook or a don’t care to address from the writers.
One thing that I found it little more odd than the language situation is how they managed to make a solar still to get enough water for the entire crew with one partially eaten uniform. Maybe other members of the crew donated some of their garments, but I don’t think they established that.
@112/Methuselah: I think there’s no reason to believe Chakotay and Torres wouldn’t have been taught and speaking English from birth since both have human parents. We’ve already seen in flashback Chakotay as a teenager speaking English with his father and in a future episode we’ll see in flashback B’Elanna speaking English with her father and he doesn’t have a Spanish accent himself. English is already considered a standard international language for communicating and conducting business today so I think that would only be more so among humans of the 24th century so it’s not even a question that B’Elanna and Chakotay would learn and speak English from birth.
@112/Methuselah: “I can’t really buy into the “Neelix and Kes spent a lot of off camera time learning English” fan-wank. Particularly because neither they, nor anybody else who may have started out as a non English speaker had even the slightest accent.”
But if they were speaking through translators, their dialogue wouldn’t match their lip movements and you could hear their real speech under the translation (like in Star Trek Beyond). What we’re seeing is a dramatization that simplifies certain things for convenience. So if you can accept the pretense of the actors speaking English when the characters are “really” having their alien speech translated into English, surely it’s even easier to accept the pretense that the characters are speaking English with an accent when the actors are not.
Not to mention that it’s completely unrealistic to expect that 24th-century Federation English will be spoken with the same accent as 1960s or 1990s or 2020s American English, or will even have the same vocabulary. By then it will probably have evolved substantially and absorbed hundreds of loan words and idioms from Vulcan, Andorian, Rigellian, etc, because that’s how language works in cross-cultural contexts, English perhaps most promiscuously of all. So the accents and vocabulary can’t be taken strictly literally in any case. Every word we hear is interpreted for our benefit, whether it’s meant to be translated in-story or not.
Besides, not everyone speaks a second language with an accent. An accent means that you’re pronouncing it wrong, that you have imperfect fluency. It’s a shortcoming that can be eliminated with hard work or a good ear for pronunciation. (For me, when I’ve studied languages, mimicking the sounds has always been the easiest part, though I struggle to remember vocabulary and grammar.)
@113/garreth: “English is already considered a standard international language for communicating and conducting business today so I think that would only be more so among humans of the 24th century so it’s not even a question that B’Elanna and Chakotay would learn and speak English from birth.”
Absolutely. English is the most commonly spoken second language on Earth. As I’ve said before, the majority of people throughout history — certainly most of the ones who lived in major population centers or traveled a lot — have spoken at least two languages, their own local language and the lingua franca of the region. There’s no reason to doubt that would be true of Federation citizens.
“Besides, not everyone speaks a second language with an accent. An accent means that you’re pronouncing it wrong, that you have imperfect fluency.”
This probably comes as a surprise to hundreds of millions of native English speakers whom have distinguishable accents from one another. [i]Everyone[/i] has an accent, and elevating any given one as ‘the right way’ is a nonsense proposition, with shades of racist/classist assumptions.
@115/foamy: Your point makes me wonder, what is proper pronounciation for English? English has evolved so much that it would be hard to communicate with an English speaker from centuries ago. Would one of the different dialects in the British Isles be considered proper pronounciation? We have the colonization of the new world and then the eventual spread of English. Nowadays we have southern accents, New England accents, Canadian accents, etc…
As a Canadian, I can tell between our accents and someone who is obviously not a natural English speaker. French Canadians, for example, have a distinct accent. Anyways, I’m rambling here. My point is only that the English language (and I’m not saying exclusively, only from my own single language experience) is just a collection of many dialects, isn’t it? To use my example, can’t a French Canadian’s accent be considered just another dialect and thus, not considered wrong?
Sorry foamy, I lost myself during my ramble. My comment is basically a long winded version of the point you were making. I didn’t realize until after I posted it
@115/foamy: “This probably comes as a surprise to hundreds of millions of native English speakers whom have distinguishable accents from one another. [i]Everyone[/i] has an accent, and elevating any given one as ‘the right way’ is a nonsense proposition, with shades of racist/classist assumptions.”
You’re willfully twisting my words. I was simply saying that it’s a stereotype to assume that foreign speakers must always retain their native accent when speaking a second language — i.e. that a native French speaker “should” invariably speak English with a French accent, a native Chinese speaker with a Chinese accent, etc. That has nothing to do with the range of indigenous English accents that exist, because that’s not the subject here at all.
@114 “English is the most commonly spoken second language on Earth.”
Which completely ignores the why of English being the second language of so many people. The British Empire imposed their language upon many countries and peoples. To a lesser extent, so did the French, the Spanish and others.
You’ve also got the situation where the conquering people not only demanded that the indigenous people learn their language, they also worked to prevent the natives from speaking or passing down their own language.
I have a hard time imagining that the Federation, with it’s miraculous, technology based artificial telepathy universal translator, would demand learning an Earth language as a condition of joining. The UN has six official languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) but somehow the Federation, with hundreds of different species, only has the one.
Also @114 “Not to mention that it’s completely unrealistic to expect that 24th-century Federation English will be spoken with the same accent as 1960s or 1990s or 2020s American English, or will even have the same vocabulary. By then it will probably have evolved substantially and absorbed hundreds of loan words and idioms from Vulcan, Andorian, Rigellian, etc, because that’s how language works in cross-cultural contexts, English perhaps most promiscuously of all. So the accents and vocabulary can’t be taken strictly literally in any case. Every word we hear is interpreted for our benefit, whether it’s meant to be translated in-story or not.”
Except we’ve seen numerous cases where people from the 23/4th centuries travel to the past an don’t have the slightest problem with accent, use of alien words or what have you. Edith Keeler didn’t remark about Kirk’s accent. Neither did any of the people from the recent Voyager re-watch of Future’s End. Everyone speaks perfectly understandable 20th century English with no confusion on the part of the native listeners.
Also, aliens are going to have a vocal apparatus that’s not only structured differently than a human’s, they’re going to be used to a different atmosphere. Their voices are naturally going to sound different to is, regardless of which language they’re speaking. Relatedly, their hearing is also going to be different that ours. They may hear higher pitches than we do, that part of their language being unpronounceable by humans.
@118/kkozoriz: The real-world explanation for that is Star Trek is an American-produced show and so of course the actors are going to speak primarily English. But we also have heard examples of characters speaking French and Spanish so those languages survive into the 24th century.
@119/garreth: Again, the majority of people speak two or more languages, so it’s not an all-or-nothing choice. Multicultural societies usually have a lot of regional languages plus a single common language for mutual comprehension, and people switch between their native language and the common tongue depending on the circumstances.
As has already been argued, the fact that English is already the common language of science, commerce, engineering, and space travel makes it plausible that it will continue to be. Okay, yeah, that status quo came about due to colonialism and oppression, but so did Latin’s dominance in the medieval world, but that didn’t stop Christianity from adopting Latin even though it was the language of the state that had killed their Messiah (well, actually Greek was the lingua franca in the Eastern Roman Empire, but that’s a technicality). Pretty much every world language attained that status through conquest. But that’s not the language’s fault.
@120/CLB: I think you were probably directing your points to @118/kkozoriz.
Even though it’s semantics at this point, I don’t want to keep describing the primary language of Starfleet as English. Even though ironically this two-parter is called Basics, I’m just going to call it Basic from now on in any future posts.
With that out of the way, Starfleet, like military service, is a job. In every job I’ve ever had, it was mandatory to speak the official language while working. That is not prejudice, it is simply nessessary for the efficient operation of a business where human interaction is essential.
Obviously we don’t have the technology of Star Trek at this point in history, but that is irrelevant. As has been mentioned in comments for this episode, technology can fail. To have people who are living and working aboard a starship, not learn the primary language, makes no sense. If expecting everyone to learn the primary language in a workplace is only essential for efficiency, I’m pretty sure it would be essential for a dangerous place like a starship. Again, that is not bias, it is just prudence.
And 99% of the ships have English names. And the Council. President & Starfleet are all based on Earth. Aliens are primarily shown to be deeply flawed and need a Starfleet officer (primarily white, Anglo Saxon and male. There are few exceptions) to show them the error of their ways.
As a vision of the future, it’s pretty much 1960’s America. Which helps explain why, despite it’s slightly liberal tilt, there’s many on the right (and far-right) who like it. You know, the folks who some fans say “Have they ever actually watched Star Trek?” when they complain about something on the show.
@122/Thierafhal: “Even though it’s semantics at this point, I don’t want to keep describing the primary language of Starfleet as English.”
It’s been explicitly referred to as English in numerous episodes and films. Even if it’s evolved and absorbed more alien influences by the 24th century, it will still be English, because that’s what English does. English is the Borg of languages. It assimilates other languages’ cultural distinctiveness into its own.
“With that out of the way, Starfleet, like military service, is a job. In every job I’ve ever had, it was mandatory to speak the official language while working. That is not prejudice, it is simply nessessary for the efficient operation of a business where human interaction is essential.”
Good point. Of course, what some have attempted to argue is that universal translators make that unnecessary, but that brings me back to the folly of expecting the technology always to function perfectly. A lot of Starfleet training is about developing the skills necessary to cope with emergencies, to do things when the tech fails. Clear communication would be a necessity in emergencies.
@123/kkozoriz: I’m optimistic that in this new TV era of Trek, we’re no longer getting exclusively Anglo-Saxon white males that are always coming to the rescue, Discovery with Michael Burnham being a primary example.
@24/CLB:
That is a good point and upon further thought, I do remember a few instances of that. Still, just as a personal preference, I’d rather just call it something more neutral. As has been shown in these comments, the idea that English is the Federation’s main language seems to be a sore spot for some
Agreed. I also made that argument too:
@CLB: I don’t believe I’m twisting your words. I just understand, and thoroughly disagree with, what you said. Declaring an accent wrong or a sign of ‘influency’ is to privilege one particular mode of speech — the speaker’s — over someone else’s.
Someone for whom ESL is a second language speaking with an accent, is, in fact, no more ‘wrong’ than all the other people who speak it as a first language who also speak with accents.
Everybody speaks with an accent. It doesn’t matter whether the language is your first or not. It is not an indicator of imperfect fluency; there are ESL people with what I would consider very pronounced accents who are nevertheless far more fluent in their use of English than myself and most other native speakers aspire to be.
T’be perfectly blunt, this entire chain about how the people of the future of Star Trek will of course be speaking English has been kind of uncomfortable to read. It’s more of the same The Future Is The United States (But Only Some Of It) that’s plagued a lot of Anglo SF since at least the age of Campbell, and to which I am somewhat sensitized. As another piece on Tor recently pointed out, about voice in the future, very few Anglo pieces commit even to having a future where English has more than one depicted accent, let alone something different than Middle American being the dominant one.
And of course, that includes Star Trek. You can acknowledge that that’s the case for various and sundry reasons to do with the fact that Trek’s primary target audience is and always has been American television watchers, but trying to defend that position via the constructed logic of the fiction itself is missing the point entirely.
‘esl as a second language’, excuse me while i die in shame
foamy: you can die in shame after you go to the ATM machine and enter your PIN number and go buy a DC comic. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@127/foamy: “@CLB: I don’t believe I’m twisting your words. I just understand, and thoroughly disagree with, what you said. Declaring an accent wrong or a sign of ‘influency’ is to privilege one particular mode of speech — the speaker’s — over someone else’s.”
Okay, I see what you’re saying now, and I apologize for a poor choice of words. I wasn’t trying to make a moral point or to say one thing was better than another; I was just saying that it’s possible to learn to speak a second language without your indigenous accent, that the fact that an alien character is speaking English without an “alien” accent can’t be used as conclusive proof that they’re speaking through a universal translator, because it is possible to speak a second language indistinguishably from a native. My use of “right/wrong” vocabulary was inappropriate.
I guess it just reflects the way I approach languages myself. I have a keen ear for sound patterns, so for me, the accent of a foreign language is the first thing I try to master, and really the only part I’m all that good at; I can learn the pronunciation of a foreign language far more easily than I can master the vocabulary or grammar. I see that as “getting it right” because that’s how I see it as a student of other languages, as a perfectionist trying to master their sounds. I never consciously intended it to be an aspersion on other people’s learning process, but I guess there was an implicit microaggression there I didn’t recognize.
Of course everyone speaks with an accent. My point was that if you learn a foreign language, you can learn to speak the language with its associated accent (whichever one of its accents you happen to study) rather than your own. That was all I meant to say.
“T’be perfectly blunt, this entire chain about how the people of the future of Star Trek will of course be speaking English has been kind of uncomfortable to read.”
Not everything is a moral statement. Saying that something is likely to be the case due to historical trends does not mean those trends are morally right or better than the alternatives. It’s just an extrapolation, not a celebration.
And I’m not saying “of course.” I’m just saying that it’s plausible that it could happen. Naturally it’s a presumption made since the work is produced in English for American audiences, but that doesn’t make it an objectively unreasonable prediction. It’s believable that it could happen. That doesn’t mean it “should” or “has to” happen, just that it’s a believable scenario.
“As another piece on Tor recently pointed out, about voice in the future, very few Anglo pieces commit even to having a future where English has more than one depicted accent, let alone something different than Middle American being the dominant one.”
In my original novel Only Superhuman, I tried to suggest a range of different regional dialects for asteroid colonists, as well as futuristic slang, some creolization here and there, etc. In my upcoming novel Arachne’s Crime, one of the female leads is an Anglo-Indian Londoner with a Cockney accent. The female lead in my Hub series is a Hong Kong expatriate who speaks Australian English and occasionally curses in Cantonese.
In my Trek writing, I described Enterprise-E security chief Jasminder Choudhury as having a “Denevan accent,” though I imagined her with a gentle Indian accent in my head. I guess I assumed a lot of Denevan colonists were from India and influenced the regional English dialect.
Several interesting points made, but nothing that would cause me to change my view. If people like Neelix and Kes were suddenly communicating with Janeway, et al without the aid of the universal translator, I just don’t think they would speak English without an accent. To me, the simplest explanation and the one I feel most likely is just that the writers didn’t think of this or care to deal with it.
From what I’ve read, the vast majority of people who learn a language after age 12 have some residual accent. I think that would apply to Neelix and I think even to Kes based on Ocampan development.
As someone stated above, this is not saying there is something wrong with their speech. Accents can be very pleasant. It is just that I would expect it to be there even if they had spent offscreen time learning English which would have to be an assumption we make.
This leads to an interesting question – how many accents have we seen on the various Trek series? I can remember several in holo-suite characters, but I’m guessing that is a matter of programming. Scotty had a bit of one. Checkov definitely (did they use universal translators back then, and if so, did they just pass on the accent?). I don’t know if you could call Picard’s or Bashir’s manners of speaking an accent or not.
Someone pretty fare above posited the thought of a device implanted sub-dermally or even inserted in the ear (like the hearing aids I wear) that the Kazon just didn’t confiscate. That would be a perfect explanation except of course they could not understand the natives.
Of course the whole thing could have been avoided if Trek had gone with the Babel Fish explanation. :)
@131/Methuselah: “Several interesting points made, but nothing that would cause me to change my view. If people like Neelix and Kes were suddenly communicating with Janeway, et al without the aid of the universal translator, I just don’t think they would speak English without an accent.”
As I said, if they were using a translator, their lips wouldn’t synch with the dialogue anyway. You can’t treat every detail in a work of dramatized fiction as if it were a data point about something objectively real. A lot of it is figurative and symbolic. We can assume that, in the Platonic ideal version of the story, the alien characters are speaking with an accent even if the actors pretending to be them are not. Just as we assume that characters speaking through a translator would “really” sound like what we saw in Star Trek Beyond rather than looking and sounding like they’re speaking perfect English. If you’re willing to ignore the fictional implausibility when characters are using the translator, then it’s contradictory to be unwilling to suspend disbelief the same way about characters who aren’t.
There are, after all, many works of science fiction and fantasy where alien or inhuman creatures learn English quickly and lose their native accent in a matter of weeks, because that’s a useful dramatic conceit to let the actors speak naturally. There’s a whole subtrope of movies and shows where aliens or supernatural creatures learn English in hours by binge-watching TV. Yes, it’s an implausible conceit, but a lot less implausible than magic universal translators or humanoid aliens or faster-than-light drive or telepathy. It’s just a story device, no more or less than translators themselves.
“Checkov definitely (did they use universal translators back then, and if so, did they just pass on the accent?).”
Oh, come on, this is getting ridiculous now. Obviously Chekov was speaking English as a second language. Obviously a person who was born and raised on Earth and spent four years at Starfleet Academy in San Francisco would have learned English.
And aren’t you contradicting yourself now? You were the one insisting that the lack of accent was proof of translator use. Now you’re trying to attribute translator use even to someone with a thick accent. You’re moving your goalposts away from yourself.
@131/Methuselah:
I can’t speak for others, but in my posts regarding the language discussion in this episode, I am not trying to say definitively that Kes and Neelix are speaking without UT aid. The point I’ve been trying to get across is only that it would be prudent for them to learn the primary language onboard the ship in case of tech failure during an emergancy.
As for accents, your right. If Kes and Neelix were speaking without UT aid as has been assumed by some about this episode, they likely would have an accent. Could this episode have depicted that? Sure, but for the purposes of the story they were trying to tell, I have no issue with UT handwave.
@131/Methuselah:
Lots of different accents have been depicted in the future on Star Trek across the various series. McCoy had a southern accent; Scotty had Scottish; Checkov had Russian; Picard had British (even though he was playing a Frenchman); Cristobal had a Spanish accent; B’Elanna had a Latin accent; Tucker had a southern accent; Captain Georgiou had a Malaysian accent; and it goes on and on. So an American Midwest accent is not the default by any means.
I must admit to my own prejudices regarding accents have evolved over the years. I grew up in central coast California until I was 7 and then moved to the Virginia suburbs of DC where pretty much I thought the people sounded the same as myself. Then I went to college in a rural town in the western part of Virginia. I recall I was about 18 and took a public transit bus there. I believe the bus driver and I exchanged pleasantries and asked where I was from because I had an accent. I remember feeling offended and thinking to myself if anyone had an accent it was the bus driver who had a southern accent. Being a good deal older since then I’ve since realized that we all have accents and there’s no normal or standard baseline for one should sound like and that I was most likely being classist and dismissive. I’ve had friends since then with even heavier southern drawls which I actually really enjoy hearing but I also feel bad when I hear them tell methat they actively try to modify their speech when it comes to employment or social situations because of the stereotype that a southern accent somehow equals dumb. I tell them to just embrace their accent (and who they are) and to hell with whatever someone else thinks of them. So I totally believe accent prejudice is a real thing and is something we all need to be cognizant of.
@132 – “Obviously Chekov was speaking English as a second language. Obviously a person who was born and raised on Earth and spent four years at Starfleet Academy in San Francisco would have learned English.”
Because English is the natural, best language on Earth? Spanish or Mandarin would be more likely. English is #3 in the world and slightly ahead of Hindi. English has such a high position solely because of it’s use as a colonizing/conquering language, something that apparently will continue into the future.
@134/garreth: “So an American Midwest accent is not the default by any means.”
I don’t know if Midwest was what foamy meant by “Middle American,” but I don’t think you hear that many Midwest accents in Hollywood productions. I’d think you’d largely hear California or New York accents, or whatever “default” American accent most actors in a given era are trained to use instead of their own. Leonard Nimoy often showed hints of his native Boston accent. In TOS’s era, many actors still used the artificial “Mid-Atlantic” accent that was a variant on New England diction and tends to sound English to American ears and vice-versa; for instance, both Mark Lenard and Jane Wyatt performed with that accent.
As far as personal accents go, I keep meaning to ask my New York friends (Keith, feel free to chime in) if they think I have a Midwestern accent. I think I have a pretty generic “urban” American accent, since I’m from Cincinnati rather than a rural part of the state, and because I was probably at least as influenced by TV and radio growing up as I was by my family, neighbors, teachers, etc. (Indeed, in my youth, I consciously modeled my speech mannerisms on Spock, and to a lesser extent Kirk and McCoy.) But of course it’s hard to be aware of one’s own accent.
I meant this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English. As with basically anything to do with accents — especially one spoken by such a broad swathe of people — the boundaries are a bit fuzzy, but geographically it’s centered the Great Lakes region. That’d include Ohio, which tracks with CLB thinking their accent is ‘generic urban American’.
@138/foamy: My pronouns are he/him/his.
And as I said, I think the accent of a city-dweller like me is probably closer to the accent of major cities in other parts of the country than it is to the accent of a rural Ohioan or Kentuckian, since city-dwellers are typically exposed to wider, more cosmopolitan influences. But as I also said, I’m not qualified to judge what people from other parts of the country think my accent sounds like, though I would be curious to find out.
@krad: Neelix is the local guide to the Delta Quadrant, and a space trader/scavenger. That doesn’t mean he has to know desert survival techniques.
@29 – GarretH: Neelix leading Starfleet officers happens because he’s main cast, same as Wesley having a pivotal bridge position on the Enterprise.
@76 – kkozoriz: “How about a series where white males are in the minority? Discovery looked to be that series for the first two episodes but then they killed the Asian woman and the African American became a criminal.”
Discovery is still that show. Lorca and Stamets are the only prominent white males in the first season, and Stamets is the first gay main character. The rest of the main or important recurring cast, even dismissing the evil Georgiou or Burnham who you deem “a criminal” despite the show obviously putting her in the right, are women, people of color, aliens, etc.
Even if Picard is the star of his own show (gee, it’s almost like it’s named after him), the rest of his crew does not include a single white Anglo-Saxon male (Rios is white, at least by Latin American standards, but still culturally distinct from what you are calling WHITE).
And then there’s Lower Decks (and no, you don’t get to dismiss it because it’s animated or comedy), where of the four main cast characters only one is a white human male, the captain is a black woman, and the two white male senior officers are meant to be white macho parodies.
Look at all the Short Treks episodes, and count how many of the main characters are white males. I’m sure they’re the minority.
Is the franchise made in the US by mostly US writers? Yes, but they’ve also improved the diversity of their production, writing, and directing crews exponentially. Have there been mistakes in the past? Yes, and there will continue to be. But Trek was always advanced for its time, and it has made great strides in over 40 years of franchise.
As for cyber implants and transhumanism, they’re correcting that with Discovery and Lower Decks.
@113 – garreth: Most of the time, characters in US TV shows speak English for the viewers’ and the actors’ sake, when within the fiction, they are actually intended to be speaking another language, even an alien language. And it might surprise you to learn that many, many, many native Spanish speakers speak perfect English without a “Spanish accent” that sometimes Hollywood likes to bestow upon Hispanic characters, going so far as having them speak in a cartoony accent.
Also, Chakotay was not born and raised on Earth, but rather in a colony founded by his tribe, looking to go back to their roots. So, it’s highly likely that his mother tongue is not English.
@140 “who you deem “a criminal””
It’s not me who calls her that, it’s the show itself. She’s tried, convicted and sentenced and later broken out of custody with nary a peep from Starfleet. Burnham was many things and a convicted criminal was one of them.
“But Trek was always advanced for its time”
Not when you consider that it took them until 2017 to even acknowledge the existence of gay people. Sure, we had Dax involved in a same sex relationship but that was shown to be the symbiots simply inhabiting female bodies at the time. Standard, everyday, run of the mill, next door neighbour gay people didn’t exist in Star Trek until 50 years after the show premiered.
Soap had a gay character in 1977, 40 years earlier.
Love, Sydney had a gay lead character in 1981, 36 years earlier.
The fact that it took Star Trek more than 35 years to catch up and show two men brushing their teeth together is hardly considered “advanced for it’s time”
Quoth MaGnUs: “Neelix is the local guide to the Delta Quadrant, and a space trader/scavenger. That doesn’t mean he has to know desert survival techniques.”
Yes, but he was put in charge of a group of people specifically tasked with employing desert survival techniques. If he doesn’t know shit about it — and he didn’t — why the fuck was he put in charge of it, especially since his stupidity was directly responsible for Hogan’s death?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@140/Magnus: Yes, I’m very aware Neelix is in the main cast, as was Wesley Crusher was on TNG. My point was in-story, it didn’t make sense for Neelix to be placed in charge of Starfleet officers when they have a command hierarchy he is not part of
@krad: Agreed.
@garreth: Preaching to the choir.
As always, we ask that you refrain from making disagreements personal; keep the tone of the discussion civil, and consult our moderation policy for further guidelines.
Though I’m obviously late to this 150-post debate regarding the UT…here’s my take.
I’m just going to point out Ocampa only live nine years. Kes probably learned English, not because she necessarily made any effort to go out of her way to do it, but because Ocampa brains probably pick up on that thing really easily given their life-span and also given the mental abilities they’ve been shown to have by this point in the show. She was studying Starfleet medical databases by the age of two. She’d also made comments by now regarding the EMH’s bedside manner and wanting patients to feel comfortable; speaking a common language to the crew would help with that. Regardless of this whole UT debate, and despite the obvious fact the writers didn’t use her character in this manner, it’s fair to assume she learned English and probably a few others.
Neelix is a somewhat harder sell on this point, but not by all *that* much. The show had already established Neelix was studying the crew’s cultures, and not exclusively in regards to culinary matters – he had already sung a Vulcan song and made mention of various holiday practices by this point (music is often a great way to help learn a language). He ran the mess hall, loved to talk, and attempted to be a morale officer. Surely a 24th-century computer had an equivalent to Duolingo or Rosetta Stone. Then there was the unfortunate Tuvix incident; I’d be very surprised if Tuvok didn’t speak English given his closeness to Janeway, extensive time in Starfleet, potential mind melds in the past (not sure if it’s established he ever did or not), and Vulcan attitudes toward intellectual matters, therefore passing at least some of that on with Tuvix.
And on Hanon, the crew wasn’t exactly engaging in deep, technical discussions using a bunch of esoteric words. A basic, functional knowledge of English would’ve been enough to get by without the UT. So yes, Trek in general glosses over the UT and language issues, but nothing in this episode suggests more than the Basics would be needed (pun totally intended).
No mention of the pointy-eared guy being an expert archer? Okay, guess I have to do it, belated as I am. Tuvok went full space elf this episode.
swiftbow: Eh, Spock already pulled that in “Friday’s Child” on the original series…. *laughs*
—-Keith R.A. DeCandido
Really surprised at such a high score for this, Suder had potential to be one of Trek’s most interesting characters.. and could have said a lot about redemption of criminals in society. Unfortunately they didn’t have the guts to go down that route and killed him off. Desperately disappointing decision. Not a great episode otherwise that stuff with the tribe and the monsters on the planet is almost Monty Python levels of ridiculous. A 5 out of 10 mostly for Brad Douriff . I suppose another positive is this being the last time we have to put up with the Kazon the other plus point is Martha Hacket being excellent as Seska, which by the way is another missed opportunity.. a Cardsssian being part of the crew could have produced some great stories..but again.. no.
@150/chad: I don’t know if it’s about guts so much as pockets. Could they have afforded Brad Dourif on an ongoing basis?
@150/chadefallstar
I wouldn’t have minded that, but I think a plausible reason they didn’t do it was because Cardassians were such an integral part of DS9’s narrative. Keeping the shows as different from each other as possible was definitely a thing with the showrunners.
Also, I agree with #151/CLB, that having Brad Dourif as a reoccurring character would have been expensive, sadly.
@ 151. ChristopherLBennett. Fair point I wasn’t thinking Brad Dourif becoming a regular but certainly a recurring character once or twice a season could have been worked out.
Hogan’s death has always annoyed me. He deserved more than to be reduced to a mere Redshirt (or is it Yellowshirt now?). It’s ironic that Janeway should lose her command again so soon. How did Seska and her child avoid detection by the internal sensors? The crew drive the natives off with rocks Krad, not fire. They’re the ones trying to force Chakotay’s group out of the caves with fire.
I don’t think Paris and the Talaxians is as good as Tosk and the Hunters. A pep talk from the Doctor – things must be bad. Did the guard watching Tierna’s quarters die in the explosion? Although not as epic as Scorpion or Year of Hell, VGR would go on to have great success with its subsequent two-parters. They’re one area where VGR will do supremely well.
My favourite line of the episode is the Doctor’s “You’re not just any hologram. You’re a Starfleet hologram!” And the Doctor says counterinsurgent, Krad. Hogan didn’t appear until about halfway through the second season. Martha Hackett didn’t like the way that Seska died, and so was gratified at getting a second chance to do it right in Worst Case Scenario. I don’t know how Voyager manages to keep bouncing back from all of that battle damage. I sense you’re a Fish Called Wanda fan, Krad?
5: That’s what the Doctor said about Suder in Meld. 6: Quark asked Sisko that same question about Ferengi in The Jem’Hadar. 11: Starfleet officers often seem lost without their technology; remember how befuddled that nurse was in Contagion or Jadzia in The Siege? I agree with everything Kira said. 16: Kira was a bit reluctant to help Damar but did it for the greater good. 29: I bet a lot of people were thinking that when Neelix was standing at the mouth of that cave.
32: I doubt Chakotay would have been as difficult a father as Worf. 47: Is that why B5’s CGI always looked so unconvincing? 48: I always liked it when Trek took the time to address the language barrier, e.g. Darmok; Sanctuary; The Swarm, etc. 50: The plot is perhaps too dependent on luck for it to work. 51: How does this apply to Basics? 69: How did we get from Basics to metrics?
81: The Borg didn’t keep their word in Scorpion – it was always they’re intent to betray Voyager once they got what they wanted. And Seven’s nanoprobes serve the same purpose as the ship’s main deflector – a quick fix. 96: Yeah, Siddig wasn’t comfortable with this development – he felt the writers were trying to turn him into the Data of DS9. 116: It happens, like in The Big Lebowski. 118: And yet Tuvok (and Rain Robinson) fail to understand the word groovy.
130: Is that because the actress who played I’lia was of Indian descent? 131: Yes, there was a UT in TOS, and Spock explained how it works in Metamorphosis. 140: Then why does Chakotay only speak English? 141: Bert and Ernie puts Trek to shame. 147: We’re not quite at 150 yet, as of this writing (now we are!).
@154: I was also annoyed that a lot of the recurring characters developed during the 1st and 2nd seasons were jettisoned during the second season and especially in this episode: Hogan, Suder, Seska, Jonas from a little while back, and they forgot all about Carey for awhile too, not to mention the Maquis misfits from “Learning Curve.” It would have been nice to broaden the Voyager ensemble beyond the main cast like DS9 was so successful at doing. Having Suder and/or Seska remaining aboard would have been great.
@154/David Sim: “Is that because the actress who played I’lia was of Indian descent?”
I said Denevan, not Deltan. Deneva was the human colony world in “Operation — Annihilate!” Jasminder Choudhury had been established as a Denevan native in David Mack’s outline for the Destiny trilogy, as I recall. (I was the first author to write the character in a story, but Dave created her for the trilogy that I was hired to write the lead-in to.)
Hogan’s death has always annoyed me. He deserved more than to be reduced to a mere Redshirt (or is it Yellowshirt now?). It’s ironic that Janeway loses her command again so soon. How did Seska and her child avoid detection by the internal sensors? The crew drive the natives off with rocks and not fire. They’re the ones trying to force Chakotay’s group from the caves with fire.
I don’t think Paris and the Talaxians is as good as Tosk and the Hunters. A pep talk from the Doctor – things must be bad. Did the guard watching Teirna get killed in the explosion? Although not as epic as Scorpion or Year of Hell, VGR would go on to have great success with its subsequent two-parters. They’re one area where VGR does supremely well.
My favourite line is the Doctor’s “You’re not just any hologram, you’re a Starfleet hologram” and the Doctor says counterinsurgent, Krad. Hogan didn’t appear until about halfway through the second season. Martha Hackett didn’t like the way Seska died and so was gratified when she was given a second chance to do it right in Worst Case Scenario. I don’t know how Voyager keeps bouncing back from all of that battle damage. I sense you’re a Fish Called Wanda fan, Krad.
5: That’s what the Doctor said about Suder in Meld. 6: Quark asked Sisko that same question about the Ferengi in The Jem’Hadar. 11: Starfleet officers often seem lost without their technology; remember how befuddled that nurse was in Contagion or Jadzia in The Siege? I agree with everything Kira said. 16: Kira was a bit reluctant to help Damar but eventually did it for the greater good. 29: I bet a lot of people were thinking this when Neelix was standing at the mouth of that cave.
32: I doubt Chakotay would have been as difficult a father as Worf. 47: Is that why B5’s CGI always looked so unconvincing? 48: I always liked it when Trek took the time to address the language barrier, e.g. Darmok; Sanctuary; The Swarm, etc. 50: The plot is perhaps too dependent on luck for it to work. 51: How does this apply to Basics? 69: How did we get from Basics to metrics?
81: The Borg didn’t keep their word in Scorpion – it was always they’re intent to betray Voyager once they got what they wanted. And Seven’s nanoprobes serve the same purpose as the ship’s main deflector – a quick fix. 96: Yeah, Siddig wasn’t comfortable with this development – he felt the writers were trying to turn him into the Data of DS9.
116: It happens, like in The Big Lebowski. 118: And yet Tuvok (and Rain Robinson) fail to understand groovy. 130: Is that because the actress who played I’lia was Indian descent? 131: Yes, there was a UT in TOS, and Spock explains how it works in Metamorphosis. 140: Then why does Chakotay only speak English? 141: Bert and Ernie put Trek to shame. 147: We’re not quite at 150 yet, as of this writing (now we are!).
I’m one of those people who never even think about the Universal Translator until it comes up onscreen, say via Farscape when they arrived on earth. I guess after watching years of tv shows set in space and everyone speaks English, you just kind of forget that not everyone should be speaking English. Though I did find it weird on DS9 when the Breen would speak their weird language and the Cardassians and Vorta would understand and correspond back in English (were they using UT’s too?)
That’s just because they wanted the Breen to be alien and unfathomable.
Killing off Suder was such a waste because he was a remarkably compelling character and they were stuck with him– no Federation rehab along the way where they could drop him off. And you actually feel for him, a remarkable trick considering his history.
He could have been that weird lingering element kind of like a Garak. And the show badly needed that because so many of the main characters were so bland: Kim, Paris, Chuckles, Tuvok (usually), Kes. It’s not like he would have to be in every episode.
At least Suder did have a great final story
I certainly do understand why they wanted to wash their hands of the first couple seasons and was very glad to see the ridiculous Kazon biker gang dispensed with. Why did it take so long to realize the glaringly low rent Klingon/Cardassian rip off were a failure? TNG figured out quite quickly that the Ferengi couldn’t be the new show’s big bad.
And Seska– decided to run off with the Kazon biker gang? Really?? That she was secretly a Cardassian– ok, plausible enough, but why would she abandon Voyager? Then the stupid soap baby plot? Geeze.
By this point, killing her off was fine, but only because the character had gone in such wacky directions. Like Suder, Seska was INTERESTING, unlike so many of the regulars.
I loved how Tuvok was the one tasked with making weapons for everyone. It feels like an homage to Spock who was also proficient at making primitive weapons as we see in “Friday’s Child” and “The Savage Curtain”. I guess “Spectre of the Gun” kind of fits in there too when he made the gas grenade.