I've been watching Enterprise off and on
Jul. 15th, 2020 12:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyI know, I know, but I never did see it all the way through. (And I'm not seeing it all the way through this time - I skip past a lot of episodes I remember not liking!)
Yesterday I landed on Cogenitor, and yup, I hate the ending just as much as I did the first time around. It's right up there with that episode with Tuvix for how much I hate it.
So, first of all, Trip barely speaks to any other human on board while having his little crisis of conscience, and I kinda feel like some of them might have had an opinion other than "Can't argue with culture!"
It also seems to me that somebody might've made the argument that such a technologically advanced civilization could try to do something to redress the gender imbalance in their society - because clearly, nature's "perfect balance" only works when you carefully set up society to work around it.
And then fucking Archer trying to blame Trip for this person's suicide at the end - no, it damn well isn't his fault. All he fucking did is give them a self-teaching pad so they could learn to read, and offer them asylum. Which they were richly entitled to, thanks. "It's not just that death, there's a child that won't be conceived now!" Oh, please. What if that poor hypothetical child were one of this third sex? What then? That's not an idle question - 3% of the population isn't even given a name, and people treat them with less consideration than they would the family dog or sourdough starter. How are they raised? What happens when they're born? For that matter, what happens when the cogenitor reaches the end of its useful period? Given that nobody bothers to give them fucking names I have my suspicions, and they're not pretty. What do we do with chickens that stop laying, or at least slow down?
These and other questions will never be answered, but I do feel like somebody might at least have asked them.
And I get that it's tricky because if this essential third sex only comprises 3% of the population, and if they, like humans, have only one child at a time then it seems that each of that third sex has to be part of at least 34 pregnancies in order to maintain a stable population. But, again - an advanced technological society ought to at least look for a solution other than heinous oppression. "Oh, what if one of your porters whom you force to work for you asked us for asylum!?" Well, if we were in the habit of oppressing them and enslaving them, I really hope that you'd take that request seriously. Was that supposed to be a gotcha?
The only way I'd like this episode is if we got a follow-up where they fixed their damn society and, btw, stopped blaming Trip for not accepting their shitty status quo just because they happened to be nice and smile a lot.
Edit: Upon reflection, I have questions about that suicide as well, not to mention the way they went out of the way to tell Enterprise about it. Are we supposed to take this at face value?
Yesterday I landed on Cogenitor, and yup, I hate the ending just as much as I did the first time around. It's right up there with that episode with Tuvix for how much I hate it.
So, first of all, Trip barely speaks to any other human on board while having his little crisis of conscience, and I kinda feel like some of them might have had an opinion other than "Can't argue with culture!"
It also seems to me that somebody might've made the argument that such a technologically advanced civilization could try to do something to redress the gender imbalance in their society - because clearly, nature's "perfect balance" only works when you carefully set up society to work around it.
And then fucking Archer trying to blame Trip for this person's suicide at the end - no, it damn well isn't his fault. All he fucking did is give them a self-teaching pad so they could learn to read, and offer them asylum. Which they were richly entitled to, thanks. "It's not just that death, there's a child that won't be conceived now!" Oh, please. What if that poor hypothetical child were one of this third sex? What then? That's not an idle question - 3% of the population isn't even given a name, and people treat them with less consideration than they would the family dog or sourdough starter. How are they raised? What happens when they're born? For that matter, what happens when the cogenitor reaches the end of its useful period? Given that nobody bothers to give them fucking names I have my suspicions, and they're not pretty. What do we do with chickens that stop laying, or at least slow down?
These and other questions will never be answered, but I do feel like somebody might at least have asked them.
And I get that it's tricky because if this essential third sex only comprises 3% of the population, and if they, like humans, have only one child at a time then it seems that each of that third sex has to be part of at least 34 pregnancies in order to maintain a stable population. But, again - an advanced technological society ought to at least look for a solution other than heinous oppression. "Oh, what if one of your porters whom you force to work for you asked us for asylum!?" Well, if we were in the habit of oppressing them and enslaving them, I really hope that you'd take that request seriously. Was that supposed to be a gotcha?
The only way I'd like this episode is if we got a follow-up where they fixed their damn society and, btw, stopped blaming Trip for not accepting their shitty status quo just because they happened to be nice and smile a lot.
Edit: Upon reflection, I have questions about that suicide as well, not to mention the way they went out of the way to tell Enterprise about it. Are we supposed to take this at face value?
no subject
Date: 2020-07-11 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-12 01:39 am (UTC)I don't think I agree with that: Roddenberry didn't idolize Vulcan logic so much as he saw it as an opportunity for angst and later writers have read it strictly as repression and my intermittent and incomplete experience of Star Trek suggests that in common with most science fiction it could parallax everywhere from "we'll have solved all these problems in the future" to "people who think too much will kill us all." What you're describing with the implied expectation that Charles has to earn or otherwise demonstrate their right to be treated as a sentient being sounds to me much more like a direct, unexamined transfer of pernicious ideas about civil rights. Do they behave well enough by our standards to deserve being treated as people? Are they asking for their rights in a manner we deem appropriate? Do they contribute to society on a scale whose value we set? And so forth. It doesn't matter what the coin is; it's a rigged game to demand the buy-in at all.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-12 02:13 am (UTC)Heck yes.