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.
“The Broken Circle” Episode One, Season Two. See this for a plot summary.
There is some good dialogue about the need to avoid war. There is some talk about the Enterprise’s second-in-command being prosecuted for lying about her species and the fact that she was genetically engineered, something I go into here. And there is an incident of a StarFleet officer, a main character on this show, engaging in torture.
War and Profits
The main story is that a mining syndicate on a planet that had benefitted financially from the Klingon-Federation War of a few years earlier was determined to get the war started again in order to make massive profits again. I think that sort of thing happens fairly often in reality. One thing I want to highlight is that in this case it isn’t a BANK that wants war, it’s a MINING COMPANY. I think that sometimes the role of banks in capitalism is exaggerated by some people who oppose capitalism and the role of banks in war is exaggerated by some people who oppose war (I also believe that some socialists, as tempting as this is, exaggerate the role economic forces play in the development of wars) . Although banks might be somewhere between important and key to capitalism, they are/were part of social democracy and Soviet communism and in capitalism are often not on the front lines of the class war- corporations are not puppets whose strings are pulled by banks- corporations that bust unions do it for there benefit, not because banks want them to. Arms manufacturers are thinking more of their profits when they push for militarism than they are thinking of whether or not they can get a loan. Believing that banks are key to capitalist efforts to push nations into war for their own financial reasons is a good fit for anti-Semitism, considering the untrue stereotype of Jewish people and bankers.
Torture and Star Trek
There is one scene where a StarFleet officer very briefly engages in what is basically torture- about 60 seconds of questions and physical assault. Star Trek and it’s fictional creation the Federation are generally against torture, but there was a tiny bit on Voyager, a bit more on Enterprise, and now on this series (and maybe one more on Discovery and/or Picard that I can’t remember). On Voyager, the second-in-command objects when Captain Janeway tortures and I wrote the following in a review of VOY episode “Equinox”:
“There is one bit of politics. At one point Janeway engages in what is basically torture and is stopped by Chakotay. She ends up suspending him but shortly after she re-instates him, she says something which could be acknowledged as admitting that she was wrong (she says that Chaoktay might have been justified if he had taken control of Voyager in response to what the Captain was doing).”
On Enterprise the torture was also limited to 1-3 incidents and I wrote the following in a review of the ENT episode “Home”:
In the last post (while discussing the episode “Zero Hour”) I talked about how Archer did some things that were immoral during the mission to find the Xindi weapon. I basically said that although he shouldn’t be tossed in jail or even tossed out of StarFleet, he should get some punishment, to make other officers understand that there are consequences for breaking or bending the rules, even for hero Captains, and they should only do so when very necessary. There is nothing about him getting in any trouble in this episode, nor the three after it (I sometimes do reviews at a slower pace than I watch the episodes at). At the end of his de-briefing, the Vulcan ambassador says that he (Archer) did some immoral things, but says they were necessary for his mission to succeed.
It turns out that in some ways, Archer is doing what needed to be done about his immoral tactics. Mountain climbing with a fellow Captain (Erika Hernandez), Archer explains why he wanted to go climbing.
Archer: I figured this was the last place I’d run into anyone who’d want to shake my hand or take my picture or tell me I’m an inspiration to their children. If they knew what I’d done...
Hernandez: You did what any Captain would have done.
Archer: Does that include torture or marooning a ship full of innocent people- Cause I don’t remember reading those chapters in the handbook.
I’m still disappointed that he didn’t receive some kind of punishment, but that exchange is better than nothing.
In this episode, the StarFleet officer is trying to stop something that could easily re-start the war and he is very familiar with what war is like. It might also be relevant that he injected himself with some kind of sci-fi version of the spinach that Popeye the Sailor ate, which might possibly have had some effect on his brain.
Some of the writers, etc. behind the show and many people in America might say that it’s just realistic to have them torture once in a while. The problem is that, in addition to torture being amoral and illegal, the idea that it is effective is what’s UNREALISTIC. Something like most of the time, or at least a lot of the time and maybe all the time, people being tortured for information will say whatever they think will end the torture- if they DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEIR TORTURER THINKS THEY KNOW, THEY WILL MAKE SOMETHING UP. This is well illustrated in the 2007 movie “Rendition.” People acting on information gathered through torture might not realize it’s bad intel until they do something horrible and/or unjustified, and/or unhelpful, and/or dangerous to those acting on the bad intel.
