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).
“Bound” See this for a plot summary.
This episode brings up the issue of slavery. The Orion Syndicate traffics in slavery, although this episode makes it unclear whether or not the Orion female slaves are really slaves.
Although I kind of spaced on this the last time I discussed the slavery of the Orions, it reminds me of the trafficking in slaves, often of a sexual nature, today. I’m not familiar with that, but hopefully some progress can be made at stopping that.
One thing that was disappointing was Archer’s interest in dialogue with the Orion Syndicate. Criminals such as they should be stopped, not reconciled with.
“In A Mirror, Darkly” parts 1 and 2 See this and this for a plot summary.
In some ways it’s very political and I could write for hours about this two-parter, but I’m gonna keep this brief. It’s about an imperialistic, amoral, bigoted and more or less fascist StarFleet in a different dimension. When Archer learns of his counter-part who was important to the founding of the Federation, he says: “Great men are not peace-makers- great men are conquerors!”
Earth’s empire includes many alien species who are considered inferior to humans. Discipline within StarFleet is quite harsh and physical.
I give this two-parter four stars out of five.
“Demons” and “Terra Prime” See this and this for a plot summary.
Once again, a two-parter that I could spend hours typing about the politics involved. But I’m going to keep this fairly short. It’s largely about xenophobia and extreme hostility to people who are half-human and half-alien (obviously in real life it would be people of two or more different races).
There are three things that I want to comment on:
1) A friend of Travis apparently told him that exploration of space is a form of colonialism. In Star Trek, at least the vast majority of the time, only planets with no indigenous intelligent population are colonized by the Federation. It’s not colonialism.
2) The leader of the xenophobic organization benefits from alien medical science. When he is confronted about his hypocrisy, he says that he’s not the first leader to fall short of his own ideals. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some situations where that’s not a big problem, but in general it is hypocrisy of the sort that should be held against the leader involved.
3) I generally like the idea of mergers between different nations and states, and I like how this episode is about an effort to establish some kind of inter-planetary alliance which will later turn into the Federation.
I give this episode four stars out of five.
“These Are The Voyages...” See this for a plot summary.
Aside from something about movement towards creating the Federation, which I referred to in the review immediately above for the episodes “Demons” and”Terra Prime” there is more or less nothing political in this episode. The part about Riker studying Tripp’s dis-obeying Archer’s order is a very creative way to end the series. It would have been better if Tripp had done something else- for example, in some battle where Archer is wounded and he tells Tripp to leave him and Tripp stays, and gets killed. Something like that I think would have been better.
I give it four stars out of five.
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