This is one of my posts where I “review” Star Trek episodes. I will be giving each one a star rating. I sometimes will make some comments about non-political parts of them that I like or don’t like. I’ll sometimes use the issues raised in the episode to discuss similar issues in real life. And I will sometimes simply high-light the progressive politics of ST. ST is in-line with the three original themes of this blog, as I explain in the first ST post where I offer some general thoughts about ST.
I’m not very familiar with The Original Series and there might be some small amount of material there that would affect what I say about Star Trek (i.e. how often religion is mentioned)
Lastly. multi-culturalism is such a pervasive theme in ST that I only comment on it when it goes beyond the norm (i.e. inter-species partners).
“The Homecoming,” "The Circle," and “The Siege” See the links for a plot summary.
This three-parter raises the issue of “Bajor for Bajorans” and the related issue of Starfleet’s presence on Bajor’s space station that I already addressed in the first DS9 review, while discussing the episode “Past Prologue.” Some other notes:
1) I like the part about rescuing the Bajoran POWs. This is mostly because the Bajoran resistance was a good cause and I’ve gotten the impression that they conducted their struggle honorably. I also like POW stuff in general, especially World War II Allied POWs and Irish Republican POWs.
2) Considering that the station is Bajoran, the “Bajor for Bajorans” people don’t like the many non-Bajorans on DS9. It even affects Jake when his Bajoran date cancels on him beccause her father won’t let her date non-Bajorans. At one point, as the coup drives further wedges between Bajorans and non-Bajorans, we learn that a human Starfleet officer is engaged to a Bajoran. Although it’s nothing new on ST and I won’t be making a note every time this comes up, these two items are obviously good swipes at hostility towards inter-racial dating.
I recently looked up some polls on the sectarian or anti-sectarian attitudes of people in N. Ireland. I was surpised at how high the percentage of Protestants who say they’d have no problem with a close relative marrying someone of a different religion was (68%) and how low that figure was for Catholics (85%) (the figures for those who would mind a lot were 3% for Catholics and 9% for Protestants (almost everyone else was in-between with their attitude)). Even though my earlier estimate for those figures was off by about 10 percentage points (i.e. I thought about 95% of Catholics were comepletely okay with such marraiges, I knew there was a problem with that. (I wouldn’t be surprised if the reality isn’t quite as positive as what the survey indicates).
3) The politician who is launching a kind of coup is in agreement and alliance with the conservative, fundamentalist clergy member vedek Winn who I described in the last DS9 post, while discussing the episode “In The Hands Of The Prophets.” When Sisko bends his orders and ignores what the new government (after the coup) says about how non-Bajorans need to evacuate the station, I wonder if that counts as a (justified) case in which he doesn’t respect Bajoran independence. On one hand, Sisko’s Starfleet superiors believe that Sisko resisting the coup is in violation of the Prime Directive because the coup is internal to Bajor (there’s evidence of some minor Cardassian involvement, but it is basically a Bjaoran coup). On the other hand, Sisko had reason to believe that the Cardassians were helping the coup-plotters because they wanted the Federation to be tossed out by Bajor so that they could then re-occupy Bajor as part of seizing control of the worm-hole and he was also kind of following his original orders in terms of trying to maintain a positive relationship between the Federation and Bajor. Also, as a viewer, I feel better about what Sisko does knowing that (and this is not a big surprise) the “Bajor for Bajorans” forces are also allied with conservative religious fundamentalists.
Overall a very good three-parter. The plot is good, the action is good, the politics are good. All together I give it four stars out of five.
“Invasive Procedures” See this for a plot summary.
A very non-political episode, but a good one. I’d give it two stars out of five.
This blog is mostly about 3 themes- Irish Republicanism, Star Trek, and opposition to bigotry, primarily in America (racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, etc.). It is mostly about Northern Ireland. It will mostly be about these issues in general and past events and will only sometimes touch on current events. Feel free to comment on the earlier posts.
About My Blog
My blog is about history, popular culture, politics and current events from a democratic socialist and Irish republican perspective. The two main topics are Northern Ireland on one hand and fighting anti-Semitism, racism and homophobia on the other. The third topic is supporting the Palestinians, and there are several minor topics. The three main topics overlap quite a bit. I have to admit that it’s not going to help me get a graduate degree, especially because it’s almost always written very casually. But there are some high-quality essays, some posts that come close to being high-quality essays, political reviews of Sci-Fi TV episodes (Star Trek and Babylon 5), and a unique kind of political, progressive poetry you won't find anywhere else. (there are also reviews of episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and reviews of Roseanne)
(my old blog was not showing up in Google search results AT ALL (99% of it wasn't being web-crawled or indexed or whatever) and there was another big problem with it, so this is a mirror of the old one although there will be some occassionnal editing of old posts and there will be new posts. I started this blog 12/16/20; 4/28/21 I am now done with re-doing the internal links on my blog) (the Google problem with my blog (only 1% of this new one is showing up in Google search results) is why I include a URL of my blog when commenting elsewhere, otherwise I would get almost no visitors at all)
(The "Table of Contents" offers brief descriptions of all but the most recent posts)
(I just recently realized that my definition of "disapora" was flawed- I thought it included, for example, Jews in Israel, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and with the Irish diaspora, the Irish on that island. I'll do some work on that soon (11/21/20 I have edited the relevant paragraph in my post about Zionism))
(If you're really cool and link to my blog from your site/blog, let me know) (if you contact me, use the word "blog" in the subject line so I'll know it's not spam)
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