Like many of my opinions on Star Trek: The Next Generation, my opinion of Captain Jellico, specifically, has come full circle. I wish there was some nuance in his character, but he's just gratuitously aggro. No conflict with the Cardassians was so imminent that he couldn't just let Riker finish a sentence. Granted, our leads burrow into their roles as planets orbiting Captain Picard instead of breaking out as their own independent characters, so both of our bike tires are flat this time.
It turns out the nerd fraternity is Lambda Lambda Lambda, which was actually a fraternity for black students that within the fictional "Revenge of the Nerds" universe allowed the nerds to use it.
Really, the harping I do about Star Trek losing its ideological way reaches its climax here. I know other people (and me. Actually, most me) gripe a lot about Star Trek: Picard, but STP is really a natural extension of the changes in Star Trek most clearly seen in "Chain of Command." I mean, is there any context in which "Starfleet does covert ops and does them badly" doesn't leave us pretty far from the space where we started? And are there any merits to that deeper space?
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source https://anchor.fm/tbntb/episodes/Chain-of-Command--Pt-I-eg427q
7 comments:
Instead of bringing in a new Captain with lots of changes, it could've been Riker making these changes on being promoted, with Troi taking people's complaints.
A "Relics"/"Rascals" mashup would be a fair way to get Picard into Cardassian territory.
Oh hey, Jellico framed the children's drawings and mounted them behind his desk.
"Starfleet does covert ops badly" could be a meritorious lense for an episode to examine Starfleet ideology through. (Not gonna consider the question further than that today, though.)
I could see another scenario delivering Picard to the Cardassians. I'd be eager to see that.
We hammer the Doylist explanation for Starfleet being bad at covert ops. I guess my take is that the Watsonian perspective makes Starfleet bad at covert ops because of its ideals, but it's also doing them in contravention of those ideals. It contradicts the notion that, CIA jokes aside, any polity willing to do covert ops would have to be reasonably good at them.
It doesn't work. Admittedly, I'm not trying hard to make it work, but it doesn't.
Putting Captain Picard on the mission doesn't work, but I think the general concept - that however competent the major powers are, Starfleet happens to be less competent than the Cardassians - is fine.
Is the Doylist/Watsonian distinction largely synonymous with literalism/language-of-television, or should I be treating those as different dimensions?
It comes from Sherlock Holmes stories, which were written by Watson in-universe. Watsonian reasons are the in-universe rationales and Dolyist reasons are the writer/creator rationales.
I like the Cardassians being scrappy underdogs that have to be a bit sharper than the Federation. That they don't have a cult of personality built around an idiot trying to maintain an air of omniscience at the center of their oppressive authoritarian state would have been worth some exploration.
I'll take that as a "yes" to synonymity, then.
Come to think of it, DS9 does take that angle on the Cardassians, doesn't it? Don't their self-interested power brokers install a(n only semi-cooperative) puppet at some point?
Yeah, eventually Dukat legitimizes what has got to be a soft Dominion invasion which makes Cardassia into a vichy government.
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