Star Trek: SNW Reviews C

I am now starting to do “reviews” of episodes of the new Star Trek series “Strange New Worlds.” Unlike earlier ST review posts this time I’ll be doing, at least MOST of the time, one relatively long essay for a single episode that merits some significant commentary (I wouldn’t be surprised if out of a final total of 46 episodes I’ll do one or two posts that are very brief). I’ll be focusing almost exclusively on the political aspects of the episodes but will usually not comment on the pervasive multiculturalism and gender equality of ST.

“Ghosts of Illyria” Episode Three, Season One. See this for a plot summary. 

This raises the issue of genetic engineering, something I wrote about very briefly in a couple of  places here. I should be more familiar with the Star Trek aspect of this issue- there’s a two part novel about the “Eugenics Wars” and I read the first part about 30 years ago and then, about 10 years ago after I lost that book I bought the second book and then recently bought the first one. I remember very little about the first one, and not well enough that I would like to type up any kind of book report on it. I think that in a couple years or so I will read them both and then type up something on this blog. In the next paragraph I’ll repeat what I DO remember from different sources about the Eugenics Wars.

The EW took place at some point in the 1990s (of ST lore) and I believe they were not a truly global war but took the form of relatively isolated conflicts here and there throughout the globe, unlike WWII which consumed practically all of the European area, and practically all of the Pacific area but practically nowhere else. There was one scientific creator of the augments but they were separated after they were born and joined up many years later. They were advanced in many neurological and physical ways. Somehow they developed into a small movement and might have initially spoken of being for good, but ended up being autocratic, narcissistic, and bloodthirsty. They started many military conflicts and 30-35 million people were killed. They were eventually, somehow, stopped (probably at great mortal cost to democratic forces) and the surviving augments fled Earth. (The fact that they were initially said (by characters in the future) to have taken place in the 1990s is one reason I thought that at some point around 15 years ago maybe ST should have rebooted as the two different histories (reality and Star Trek) conflicted more and more)

In response to this history, the Federation bans genetic engineering, but in DS9 and in this series (beginning with this episode) those in charge of ST in recent decades seem to be saying that maybe it’s not that bad after all. In DS9 Dr. Bashir (a main character) and the station’s Chief Medical Officer is allowed to continue serving AFTER it’s discovered that he was engineered. In general I like that character, but an argument could be made that someone with that background shouldn’t be given room to become some kind of Dr. Frankenstein considering the power he had over medical stuff. I think there’s a conflict between that part of DS9 and most of the EW stuff in ST. Although I can’t remember any details about this in the SNW context except what there is in this episode, I know that Captain Pike defends Chin-Riley (his engineered second in command) when StarFleet comes after her.

Is this mostly new attitude towards genetic engineering reasonable? I don’t think so. I think it’s best said by Spock in “Space Seed” (The Original Series) when he says that “superior ability breeds superior ambition.” Some would say that *I* lack ambition and that’s why I’m saying this. To a small degree I kind of DO lack ambition, although I have some and I think it’s a healthy amount. The thing is, someone who probably CAN be among the very best leaders in a technical sense because of their enhanced abilities will probably think that they deserve to be THE leader at the very top, by any means necessary and with no democratic checks or balances on their power and such people will fight any democratic resistance to this and will fight, with bad effects for anyone nearby, other similar rivals.