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).
“Final Mission” See this for a plot summary.
A non-political episode. I give it two stars out of five.
“The Loss” See this for a plot summary.
A non-political episode. I give it two stars out of five.
“Data’s Day” See this for a plot summary.
Something kind of political is a mention of the Hindu Festival of Lights being celebrated on the Enterprise, a sign that there are some in Starfleet who still believe in “Old Earth” religions
“The Wounded” See this for a plot summary.
This episode has some interesting stuff about war, and also about one of my favorite characters, Miles O’Brien.
1. Although later in TNG and DS9 we see O’Brien’s intermittent hostility (which could be called bigotry) towards the Cardassians, there’s one moment where he talks as if he has no problem with the Cardassians. His wife Keiko has to explain to him that there are people in the Federation who don’t like the Cardassians.
2. In the ship’s bar O’Brien talks with one of the Cardassians. He apologizes for a minor incident earlier. The Cardassian says that a massacre of civilians they carried out was a “terrible mistake,” and that they’d been told it was a military target.
O’Brien talks about an incident when he incinerated a Cardassian soldier with a phaser and how that was the first time he killed anything. He says “it’s not you I hate, Cardassian- I hate what I became, because of you.”
I 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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