Flit

LILEKS HITS THE NAIL ON

LILEKS HITS THE NAIL ON THE HEAD AGAIN

I always wondered why I hated Star Trek: Voyager... now, thanks to James, I know. It really was the way everything stayed pristine... there was never any drama about whether the ship would fall apart (discipline-wise or mechanically) or get home, first:

Look, when you’re 60 years from home, the dress code is going to break down after half a decade. Stuff is going to break. There will be scuff marks in the turbolift. The captain will have to wrestle with a policy on cheek-piercing. The show needed stubble, but it was freshly-shaved every week.

There's precedent for this. The navigational accomplishment of William Bligh and his remaining obedient crew after the mutiny amounts to possibly the greatest small-boat voyage of all time. They kept good discipline, and they pretty much all got home to their families alive. By contrast, Fletcher Christian and the successful mutineers couldn't get their act together and fell to feuding and going native. But which one of the Bounty fission products is the protagonist in the stories? This year has seen a resurgence in Shackleton, who like Amundsen was an incredibly meticulous polar explorer who never lost a man. Up 'til now, however, when people thought the races to the poles they thought of pikers like Scott and Franklin, who took big chances and lost lives when their expeditions fell apart far from home. Do I really need to mention Lord of the Flies?

Voyager took as its first assumption that Starfleet technology and discipline would survive and thrive even when the inhabitants of a highly-technologically reliant ship were entirely cut off from their logistical and cultural base, possibly forever. Being fairly familiar with the reliability of, say, the computer on my desk (or the continued amiability of my colleagues if they couldn't see their families every night for that matter) I could only suspend my disbelief so high.

A SOCIETY APPARENTLY BENT ON

A SOCIETY APPARENTLY BENT ON SELF-GENOCIDE

Again with the killing of American civilians. Again with the dancing in the streets. If I were a Yank, that would just about settle any lingering doubt, actually.

PS: I agree with the ineluctable logic of the Shark on this one.