Search
1000 results for “madrox”
-
Those “100 Best Novels of All Time”
As it does from time to time, The Grauniad has compiled a list of what it claims are the best somethings. This time it was novels. The full list with an explanation of how the list was compiled, clickable links to comments and pictures of the book covers can be found here, but I’ve reproduced a simplified version below:
1. Middlemarch – George Eliot
2. Beloved – Toni Morrison
3. Ulysses – James Joyce
4. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
5. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
6. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
7. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
8. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
9. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
10. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
11. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
13. Emma – Jane Austen
14. Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
15. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
16. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
18. Persuasion – Jane Austen
19. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
20. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
21. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
22. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
23. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
24. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
25. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
26. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
27. The Trial – Franz Kafka
28. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
29. Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
30. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
31. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
32. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
33. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
34. Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel
35. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
36. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
37. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
38. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
39. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
40. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
41. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
42. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
43. Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
44. Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
45. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
46. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
47. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
48. The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
49. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
50. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
51. My Brilliant Friend – Elena Ferrante
52. The Golden Bowl – Henry James
53. The Transit of Venus – Shirley Hazzard
54. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
55. The Waves – Virginia Woolf
56. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
57. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
58. Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee
59. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
60. Howards End – E.M. Forster
61. The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald
62. Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
63. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
64. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
65. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
66. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
67. The Man Without Qualities – Rubert Musil
68. Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
69. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
70. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
71. Kindred – Octavia E. Butler
72. Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
73. Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
74. Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga
75. The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
76. Dracula – Bram Stoker
77. The Rainbow – DH Lawrence
78. A House for Mr Biswas – V.S. Naipaul
79. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
80. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
81. Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
82. The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
83. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
84. The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
85. The Vegetarian – Han Kang
86. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
87. The Line of Beauty – Alan Hollinghurst
88. Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
89. The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
90. Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf
91. Life and Fate – Vasily Grossman
92. Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
93. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
94. The Known World – Edward P. Jones
95. The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
96. Pedro Páramo – Juan Rulfo
97. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
98. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
99. The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley
100. My Ántonia – Willa CatherSuch lists are a bit silly, except for the fact that they might encourage people (including myself) to read more books, which is a good thing. I wouldn’t compile a ranking myself as I don’t think of books in terms of league tables. I don’t see how you can sensibly compare very different types of novel or novels from very different eras. Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist counting how many books on the list I have read. If you want to know the answer, it is 42. I’ll let you guess which ones.
I have read the Number 1 novel, Middlemarch and, although I thought it was very good, it surprises me to find it at the top of the list, above Ulysses The highest-ranked book I haven’t read is No. 2, Beloved. There are several others on the list that I’ve never even heard of let alone read. The only book on the list that I did at school was No. 78. A House for Mr Biswas, which I didn’t think was all that great. I’ve been meaning to read Tristram Shandy (No. 19) but I think I’ll get that out of the library rather than buying it.
To save you counting, here are the authors with multiple entries:
5 – Virginia Woolf
4 – Jane Austen
4 – Charles Dickens
3 – Henry James
3 – Toni Morrison
2 – James Baldwin
2 – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 – Gustave Flaubert
2 – Thomas Hardy
2 – Kazuo Ishiguro
2 – Franz Kafka
2 – Thomas Mann
2 – Cormac McCarthy
2 – Vladimir Nabokov
2 – W.G. Sebald
2 – Leo TolstoyI haven’t read anything by either Sebald or McCarthy or Flaubert. Among the omissions that surprised me are The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway, The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I’m not saying that any or all of these would be on my list, just that I’m surprised they don’t appear on the Guardian‘s.
If anyone would like to comment – especially with other notable omissions – please feel free to do so through the box below.
#100BestNovels #Guardian #literature -
When neighbors asked the city to make Lake Washington Boulevard safer for people walking and biking, the city kicked off a half-decade public outreach process that stalled out once Bruce Harrell became mayor before concluding with a lackluster plan to add some speed humps and a couple stop signs. Then without any outreach at all, Seattle Parks this summer announced they were cancelling the rest of the speed humps and stop signs after building just a handful of them.
But when a few business and property owners asked the city to allow cars to use the bus-only access point to westbound Union Street from Madison Street that was part of the extensive RapidRide G project, SDOT got to work making it happen without any public outreach at all. How will allowing car traffic affect crosswalk safety? How will the change impact safety for the eastbound bike lane? I cannot tell you because there is no project website, and SDOT has not yet responded to my requests for more details even though the project is already under construction. The only reason we even know this is happening is because someone from Central Seattle Greenways saw workers jackhammering away and asked them about it.
When Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck heard about the surprise change, she went there herself and talked to the work crews to find out what’s happening. Then she posted a video saying that she “disagrees with SDOT’s decision” and her staff is working on what to do “before this Saturday” when crews are scheduled to conduct more work.
-- Advertisement --https://bsky.app/profile/councilmember-amr.bsky.social/post/3m263tlgg2c25
The Transit Riders Union also has an online petition going to “Save our Union St bus lane!” that has 2,145 signatures as of press time. CHS also reports that TRU is planning a protest rally at the site 8 a.m. Saturday morning.
There are multiple layers of insult at work here. There’s the fact that the city would choose to allow cars to drive in what is currently a car-free access point to the Pike/Pine business district. Worse, the city is doing it without any public outreach or even any prior notification. Even worse still, the city is demonstrating a gross double-standard in which community efforts to improve our streets for walking, biking or transit are forced to slog through an endless public process while a change that benefits car drivers at the direct expense of everyone else does require any public notice at all. Worried about your kid getting killed while biking to the park? Organize a big public campaign, get your fix into the annual city budget, then engage with a public outreach consultant for one to five years and then maybe the city will fix the issue or at least do a little something that is better than nothing. Are you a property owner who wants to allow cars in the busway? Just fire off a few emails and it will happen with no process at all.
“Over the last few months, communications were restarted primarily at the request of Dunn & Hobbes, the owner of the Chophouse property, Hunters Capital, and Madrona Real Estate along with business representatives on 12th Avenue north of Madison Street,” an SDOT spokesperson told Capitol Hill Seattle. They went on to stress to CHS that the project is intended to help people driving into the heart of Capitol Hill from the Eastside and other wealthy Seattle neighborhoods. “While development in the area is meant to maximize the appeal of dense urban living, coming off the impacts of COVID and challenges of major street and sidewalk construction, representatives had specific concerns about customers who drive from the Eastside or neighborhoods like Madison Park and Madrona […] They are having a hard time getting to their destinations or are confused by the new traffic pattern.”
This is a pattern for the city under Mayor Harrell. When SDOT repaved Denny Way, there was hardly any discussion at all about adding desperately-needed bus lanes as part of the very high-budget project despite our city’s stated goals of prioritizing walking, biking and transit improvements when making transportation investments. The city was only forced to give their unconvincing reasons for excluding the bus lanes after hundreds of people clowned on them by racing (and defeating) the 8 bus while playing leap frog and line dancing and performing other silly displays of bus inefficiency on the street. As Ryan Packer at the Urbanist put it, “What’s easier than adding a bus lane in Seattle? Deleting one.” This little bus lane on Union Street is itself worth fighting for, but it is also representative of a larger recurring problem with Mayor Harrell’s SDOT that has been getting much worse since the departure of former SDOT Director Greg Spotts. Harrell is demonstrating how he will handle transportation issues in his second term when he no longer needs to convince voters to pass a major transportation levy, which is why Seattle Bike Blog has endorsed his opponent Katie Wilson.
Allowing cars through here will have a direct negative impact on biking and walking because people will now have a whole new source of car traffic to cross that wasn’t there before. There will be new conflict points and new delays. From what I have been able to discern, no bike groups were consulted about the changes or how to handle the new crossing. People heading east on Union need to transition from a one-way bike lane on the south side of the street to a two-way bike lane on the north side of the street. Before workers destroyed it this week, that transition happened near the bus lane, so people biking east only have to cross a single bus-only lane to get from the one-way lane to the two-way lane:
The bike crossing on Union south of 12th Ave before crews jackhammered the concrete triangle away.But by allowing oncoming car traffic, the city also feels the need to change the bike lane transition. It sounds like SDOT is rolling out their go-to solution that everyone hates: A diagonal bike lane crossing through the middle of an all-way stop intersection. I cannot confirm the details because SDOT has not published materials about them, but an SDOT spokesperson told CHS they would be “redirecting people biking eastbound to the north side of Union St sooner, to shift the crossing from midblock to the all-way stop controlled intersection at 11th Ave and Union St.” So I assume it will be the mirror version of the 9th and John intersection near Denny Park:
9th and John before the green paint (I guess I don’t have a more recent photo). I flipped it horizontally to give an idea of what 11th and Union might look like facing west with a diagonal bike lane crossing.Navigating an intersection like this is a dramatically worse biking experience than crossing a single bus-only lane. It is both less safe and less inviting to use. It’s not the worst possible bike crossing, but it has some significant issues. The problem with these diagonal crossings is that people biking have a very long crossing and must watch for threats in a 270-degree range the whole time because there are four different places where someone in a car could blow through the stop sign or proceed out of turn because they don’t understand that you are going to bike diagonally. Biking safely in a city requires riders to always be on the lookout for someone in a car who is not following the rules because you bear the consequences of their mistakes, and these diagonal crossings have so many possible conflict points riders have to watch for all at the same time. Would you feel comfortable letting an 8-year-old child navigate through this intersection on her own? Because that’s the all ages and abilities standard we are supposed to be trying to achieve, and it falls short here.
SDOT should cancel work on this project and restore the previous condition. Then if they want to put forward a proposal to reopen it to car traffic, they can make their case to the public about why we should invest public money to make it easier for more people to drive cars into the heart of the Pike/Pine business district and listen to people’s feedback. If they can’t make a good case, then they shouldn’t do it. Maybe realigning the bike lane is the best option for bus and street operations for reasons I can’t figure out on my own. That’s totally possible, but they haven’t given folks any chances to understand what is happening or why, so the public’s only real option is to demand that work stop. I’m not saying it needs endless outreach, but there should be some happy point between zero notice and a half decade of consultant-led meetings. And the same standard should apply to walk, bike and transit improvements as well. Propose a change, listen to feedback, make a decision.
I will update this post if I hear back from SDOT (I asked for project design drawings and whether they had conducted any outreach).
https://bsky.app/profile/mattbaume.bsky.social/post/3m26egjfuss2r
#SEAbikes #Seattle
-
📰 Świeży #Sroczyński:
"Obóz liberalny powinien rozumieć dość prostą rzecz: Tusk już jest za krótki, żeby was ochronić przed prawicą. On sobie poradzi, wyjedzie gdzieś do Europy, czy do stanowisk w NATO, umości swój klub partyjny wygodnie w Sejmie w formie przetrwalnikowej, a wy będziecie jeść pasztet monowładzy Konfy i PiS-u pod patronatem Nawrockiego - stan gry w nowej rzeczywistości politycznej opisuje Grzegorz Sroczyński"
"Klucz piąty: Zabić Razem
Przez najbliższy czas aż do wyborów Platforma będzie zwalczać Razem z równą zaciekłością jak zwalcza PiS. Istnienie te partii - a w zasadzie nie tyle istnienie, co rozrost - psuje bowiem Platformie master plan. Krytyka rządu ze strony PiS-u czy nawet Konfederacji ma zerowy oddźwięk po platformianej stronie barykady, natomiast jak wychodzi Zandberg i "mówi, jak jest", to coś jednak dociera. Platforma nie znosi organicznie Razem (dużo bardziej niż odwrotnie), bo rosnące słupki tej partii - a sprzyja jej fala antyestablishmentowych emocji - oddalają perspektywę miękkiego lądowania w ławach opozycji po najbliższych wyborach w charakterze JEDYNEJ siły "demokratycznej" z certyfikatem na prawość, mądrość i europejskość. Dlaczego Platformie i jej zapleczu tak zależy na tym monopolu? Dlatego, że są zwyczajnie kiepscy. Platforma MUSI być jedyna i bezalternatywna po tej stronie barykady, ponieważ jest to partia leniwa, słaba programowo i totalnie wyprana z jakichkolwiek osobowości (o to zadbał już Tusk). Zresztą widzą to dość trzeźwo jej wyborcy - nie da się tej partii kochać, i tylko jeśli jest JEDYNĄ OPCJĄ, może liczyć na dużą klientelę. I dlatego Razem (oraz każdy, kto nie chce iść na listy PO) zwalczany będzie jako kryptopisowiec oraz symetrysta." -
#Books and #stories completed in October:
2024-10: 26 ss | 03 nvt | 00 nva | 06 nov⁰
#Reading was down this month. The __Behold: Humanity__ series continues to be solid. Its episodic nature means you get a dozen different story threads in episodic chapters, so even if one or two aren't the best, the rest can still carry the narrative.
1983's _King of the Wood_ has an interesting #AlternateHistory setting: Refusing to convert to Christianity, some pagan Vikings settle the East Coast of North America in 995 CE. Christian Saxons flee Britain after William the Conqueror and take their own piece of the coast. Muslim Spanish settlers take Florida later. Amerind tribes remain significant polities, as do the Aztecs. Despite the promising setting, the story isn't fascinating, and was weakened by fantasy elements, IMO.
***
The Wheel - John Wyndham (ss) ●●●◐○ #ScienceFiction
Baby on Neptune - Clare Winger Harris & Miles J. Breuer (ss) ●●●◐○
Easy Money - Edmond Hamilton (ss) ●●●○○
The Vibrometer - Clare Winger Harris (ss) ●●●◐○ #SFF
Never on Mars - John Wyndham (ss) ●●●○○
Requiem - Edmond Hamilton (ss) ●●●●○
The Fire Rises - Ralts Bloodthorne (nov) {Behold: Humanity 9} ●●●◐○ #HFY
Fessenden's Worlds - Edmond Hamilton (ss) ●●●○○
The Distant Sound of Engines ⬗ Algis Budrys (ss) ●●○○○ #TimeTravel
Alternate Channels: Queer Images on 20th-Century TV - Steven Capsuto (nonfic)¹ ●●●●○
The Ape Cycle - Clare Winger Harris² (nvt) ●●●◐○ #SciFi
The Dark Came Out to Play ⬗ Zenna Henderson (ss) ●●●○○
If This Be Utopia ⬗ Kris Neville (ss) ●●○○○
King of the Wood - John Maddox Roberts (nov) ●●●●○ #AlternateHistory
Can Such Beauty Be? ⬗ Jerome Bixby (ss) ●●●○○
Comfort Me, My Robot ⬗ Robert Bloch (ss) ●●◐○○
Everybody’s Happy But Me! Frederik Pohl (ss) ●●●○○
Whiskaboom ⬗ Alan Arkin³ (ss) ●●●○○ #ClassicSciFi
That First Time ◭ P Z Walker (ss) ●●◐○○
The Stronger Spell ⬗ L Sprague de Camp (ss) ●●●◐○
Angelica Blackwine ◭ P Z Walker (ss) ●●●◐○
The Night Shift ⬗ Frank M Robinson (ss) ●●●◐○
Paratime Police Chronicles One - John F Carr & H Beam Piper (nov) ●●●◐○
Worlds to Barter - John Wyndham (ss) ●●◐○○
Undiplomatic Immunity ⬗ Poul Anderson & Gordon R Dickson (ss) ●●◐○○
The Carthaginian Crisis - Gorg Huff & Paula Goodlett (nov) {Queen of the Sea 4} ●●●◐○ #AltHist
Space Is a Province of Brazil - John Wyndham (ss) ●●●○○
Dance Macabre ◭ P Z Walker (ss) ●●●○○
Gunpowder God ⧨ H Beam Piper (nvt) ●●●◐○ #AltHist
Tonight We Steal the Stars - John Jakes (nov) ●●○○○
The Asteroids, 2194 - John Wyndham (ss) ●●●○○
Down Styphon ⧨ H Beam Piper (nvt) ●●●◐○ #AltHistory
Jupiter Five ⬗ Arthur C Clarke (ss) ●●●○○
The Venus Adventure - John Wyndham (ss) ●●●○○
Trojan - Hal Clement (ss) ●●●◐○
***
[0] Previous three months:
2024-09: 23 ss | 03 nvt | 01 nva | 13 nov
2024-08: 19 ss | 03 nvt | 01 nva | 08 nov
2024-07: 22 ss | 03 nvt | 02 nva | 09 nov⬗ = Legends of Science Fiction: Volume 1
◭ = Naturist Fiction Short Stories Volume 2 by P Z Walker, finished
⧨ = Paratime Police Chronicles, Volume Two - John F Carr & H Beam Piper & Roland Green[1] I'm counting this as a novel for length purposes. I read this here and there over several months; I'm putting it on this month's calendar because I finally finished it. #koReader
[2] Finished all twelve of the science fiction short stories ever written by Clare Winger Harris wrote, who mostly wrote in the late 1920s and early 1930s. (Her final story was written decades later.)
It was popular in the 1920s to say that atoms were like solar systems, with electrons whirling about the nucleus like tiny planets. Many authors wrote stories where characters shrank down and ended up finding civilizations on one of these micro worlds.
Two of CWH's stories did the reverse, and considered that Earth was but an electron in a molecule of a larger scale existence, and examined what happened if we had been part of a solid that suddenly melted, for instance.
[3] Yes, Alan Arkin the actor.
-
Let’s play “The first computer I used and/or wrote software for”.
The first computer I remember seeing was at a county fair in the back of a tractor trailer. They entered your birthday and it spit out your horoscope on a punch card. There were lots of blinky lights. But I seriously doubt there was actually a computer in there. :)
Technically the first computer I used was a CDC Cyber at UMASS Amherst. It was 1972 and I was in 6th grade. My father was spending a semester there to work on his PhD (he ended up being ABD), and so for a semester I was going to UMASS Amherst’s experimental teaching school, which was pretty amazing. The assignment was to enter some APL code (from a printout) on a teletype, and then it would print out a Christmas tree. I can honestly state that my first piece of software ran the first time with no errors. :)
Then in 1975/1976 I was at a private high school, I learned BASIC as part of freshman algebra. That was using a remote connection to Dartmouth, I presume to Dartmouth’s DTSS system (which I later accessed remotely in college too).
But really, the first computer I spent time on and actually wrote some software for was in 1976 (back in public school). It was a brand new school and they’d gotten funding for a computer. It was an HP9830A, basically a glorified calculator that ran BASIC. It probably cost around $6000, which was horrifically large amount for them to invest. You were supposed to use it only under supervision, but only one teacher had experience with it, and I already knew BASIC, so I had free rein. I wrote a Blackjack program for it. It had a single line, 32 character LED display, and you stored programs on audio cassette tapes. There was no way for it to generate random number seeds, so I had to prompt the user for a seed, or else they’d always get the same cards.
http://madrona.ca/e/HP9830/index.html
The first computer I owned was an Apple // clone called the MicroProfessor.
-
CW: Kolory tęczy, flagi i katolicka bigoteria
Parę dni temu podbiłem ciekawostki o kolorach:
https://apps.npr.org/lookatthis/posts/colors/
Wśród ciekawostek na temat koloru "indygo" znalazła się informacja, że kolor ten zawdzięczamy Newtonowi, który dołożył go po to, by #tęcza miała siedem kolorów. No i tak sobie pomyślałem: tęczowa flaga #LGBTQ+ ma sześć kolorów; ciekawe, który kolor usunięto. Wpisałem wyszukiwarkę "sześciokolorowa tęcza" i cóż ujrzały moje oczy?
https://opoka.org.pl/biblioteka/P/PR/mk2020-tecza (uwaga: #bigoteria)
Przyznam szczerze, że zabrakło mi zaparcia, by przeczytać całość, ale rzuciło mi się w oczy kilka stwierdzeń. Czytamy więc, że "tęcza LGBT+ składa się z sześciu kolorów, zaś naturalna tęcza z siedmiu podstawowych kolorów". Bla bla bla, siedem to doskonałość, sześć to szatan, bla bla bla, deprawacja, nieistotne. "Należałoby się zastanowić nad symboliką koloru, którego zabrakło w tęczy LGBT+ […]. Chodzi tu o kolor indygo. Symbolika barwy indygo wyraża odzwierciedlenie mądrości, sprawiedliwości i uczciwości."
Skupmy się na "mądrości".
Naukowo rzecz biorąc, tęcza to skutek rozszczepienia się światła słonecznego. Tęcza przedstawia więc *ciągłe* spektrum barwne. Technicznie rzecz biorąc, naturalna tęcza ma nieskończenie wiele kolorów — a wyróżnienie 6 czy 7 jest całkowicie arbitralne i sztuczne.
Oczywiście, artykuł pozostaje w całkowitej ignorancji historii. 7 kolorów to arbitralna decyzja Newtona, nie pod wpływem religii chrześcijańskiej, ale filozofii sofizmu. Flaga LGBT też ma ciekawą historię. W skrócie: pierwotnie miała 8 kolorów. Następnie zniknął z niej kolor różowy, ze względu na braki barwników. Z kolei połączenie dwóch odcieni niebieskiego w jeden to skutek dążenia do parzystej liczby barw, żeby można było je podzielić na dwie strony ulicy. Potrzeba chwili, nie żadna wielka filozofia.
Coś ten kolor indygo w "naturalnej" tęczy chyba nie przyniósł wiele mądrości.
Historia zatoczyła koło. XVII-wieczna "deprawacja" rozbiła niebieski na dwa kolory, a XX-wieczna scaliła je w jeden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_flag_(LGBT) -
Reflections on Deep Space 9
I’ve been (re)watching all of Star Trek in approximate stardate order (approximate because apart from anything else stardates are inconsistent across the series). I’ve just watched the final episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, so of course I have some extremely strong opinions about it.
Historical background
Star Trek: Deep Space 9 began broadcasting while its predecessor Star Trek: The Next Generation was still on the air. It is almost invariably discussed in terms of its various firsts: first Star Trek show made without Gene Roddenberry’s involvement; first to air simultaneously with another Star Trek, first with a black lead, first where the lead was a commander, not a captain (at first, anyway), first set on a space station, first where not all the main characters were in Starfleet, and so on.
I think it’s somewhat notable that, creatively anyway, at least one of these firsts was also a last: there’s never been another stationary Star Trek. Indeed, alert readers may have noticed this is a contradiction in terms. The showrunners eventually realised they really needed a proper ship and introduced the USS Defiant to serve as as a means of getting off the station from time to time. Similarly, perhaps aware of the optics of having the various white leads explicitly outrank the only main black lead on Trek, they eventually promoted Benjamin Sisko. Twenty years later, a different set of showrunners gave themselves a near-identical problem on Star Trek: Discovery and likewise solved it by making Michael Burnham, the first black female lead on Star Trek, a captain (although she was, oddly, a ‘co-captain’).
Space: The Final… Outpost, I suppose
Overall, DS9 is probably the most consistent of all the Star Trek shows. The Original Series was notoriously all over the place, The Next Generation was, just as notoriously, pretty poor for the first two seasons and also experienced a significant drop in quality in season 7, likely because the producers had stretched themselves too thin with TNG and DS9 airing simultaneously, and Star Trek: Voyager and the first TNG film, Star Trek Generations, also in production. DS9, by contrast, starts pretty strong and is mostly good to very good all the way through (although I do think that, like TNG, the middle seasons are the strongest). Unlike Voyager, there aren’t any characters that feel oddly pointless (Harry Kim) or just plain annoying (Neelix1). It has a much stronger sense of self than the later, strangely messy shows2, and that carries it through the odd rough patch.
The acting is also generally better than it had been on Trek up to that point. I have a theory that the overall quality of mainstream film and TV acting started to get a hell of a lot better in the ’90s but no theory as to why this is. Just look at how good someone like Michael B. Jordan is3 compared to the people we got starring in blockbuster films in the ’80s, for example; he absolutely blows away Stallone or Schwarzenegger or anyone else you care to name. DS9 may be an early example of that, bar a couple of performances which I’ll come to in a moment. Right from the start, Nana Visitor, René Auberjonois, Armin Shimerman and Colm Meaney4 (returning from TNG) are all excellent, as are recurring guest stars Andrew Robinson, Marc Alaimo, Louise Fletcher (who was, after all, an Oscar winning actress), Aron Eisenberg and Max Grodénchik5. Siddig el Fadil and Terry Farrell wobble early on, but both find their feet eventually, as the writers work out what they want to do with the characters and learn how to play to the actors’ strengths. Both also benefit later from being paired up with actors with whom they have great chemistry (respectively, Meaney and Michael Dorn, likewise returning from TNG, as Worf, from season 4 on), eventually getting some of the best episodes in the whole thing. Where the space station concept works well is in allowing them to have that strong recurring cast, who slowly build relationships with many of the regulars. The recurring guests introduced later on are also all fantastic: Casey Biggs, Jeffrey Combs and JG Hertzler6, in particular, are perfectly cast and routinely excellent.
The only major fly in the ointment as far as acting goes is Avery Brooks. I find him to be an utterly baffling actor, not least because I know that many people absolutely love him, whereas my view of him is that he cannot act at all.
Now, look, I could hardly enjoy Star Trek if I couldn’t put up with the odd wooden performance. The problems with Brooks come not when he’s wooden, though he often is, but that almost every time he does emote, he’s bizarre. People often say he got better when he shaved his head and grew a beard and this is true – but we’re coming from a low base here. And his fundamental issues never went away. Look at his performance in the first episode, ‘Emissary’, where he over-reads the line ‘We just can’t leave her!’7 so much – and so badly – that it’s unintentionally hilarious. Compare this to his climatic scene with Gul Dukat in the very last episode, where he also overdoes the line ‘I am!‘ to similar effect. His much-vaunted performances in ‘Far Beyond the Stars’ and ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ have the exact same problems: whenever he tries to show a strong emotion, it’s overdone (as in ‘Stars’); when he tries to just get through a scene without a single strong emotion, whether that’s because it’s a paint by numbers scene or one where there’s meant to be an ambiguity, he’s wooden (as in ‘Moonlight’). All he really has going for him is a beautiful voice8, but this really isn’t enough. His performance in DS9 does not encourage me to seek out his other work, but perhaps he’s just woefully miscast as Sisko, or poorly directed, and really shines elsewhere.
No Gods, No Masters
I think some of the issues with Sisko are the fault of the writing, particularly his plot arc as the Emissary to the Prophets (Bajoran gods/wormhole aliens). Trying to examine religion in Star Trek was a good idea. After all, most of the world and most of the USA is still very religious. It’s long-established in the Trek universe that alien cultures have their own religious beliefs, even the hyper-logical Vulcans, including various prophets, gods and ceremonies. In our own culture, where it’s been obvious for centuries that an interventionist god doesn’t – indeed, cannot – exist, there are still a great many religious people, and it’s not at all clear that that should change by the time the 24th century rolls around9. Additionally, there have always been plenty of godlike beings in Star Trek, from Trelaine, to that thing that can’t explain what it wants with a starship, to Q. It makes sense to explore this aspect of humanity more deeply than can be done with a single episode or recurring character.
But is it well-handled in DS9? I don’t think so. The Bajorans see the Prophets as gods and their home, the wormhole to the Gamma quadrant, as the Celestial Temple. However… they’re wrong, aren’t they? The wormhole is a wormhole, not a temple, and the things that live in it really are just aliens without a linear sense of time. Kai Winn, Louise Fletcher’s character, is not wrong to argue in the final few episodes that the Prophets don’t seem actually to care very much (or at all) about Bajor, Bajorans or even their Emissary, Sisko, who they arbitrarily whisk away to live with them, he having apparently served his purpose on this corporeal plain by pushing Gul Dukat off a cliff10, forcing him to abandon his friends and family forever, for no reason.
The concept of a species that doesn’t experience or understand linear time is really interesting and also a very Star Trek kind of idea. There’s genuine interest and bathos in the idea that the Bajorans have been worshipping these entities that not only do not but cannot understand them at all; the Prophets don’t seem to know what time is until they meet Sisko and he explains it to them, which storngly suggests they’ve never seriously interacted with the Bajorans at all. But this interesting idea gradually falls away and the writers, out of nothing more than inertia, turn the Prophets into traditional ‘good’ gods, complete with some opposite, ‘evil’ fallen angel/fire demon types in the form of the Pah Wraiths (who want to set the entire universe on fire, for some reason, but can’t, for some reason).11 This of course sticks the writers with a fictional version of the problem of evil12. In the real world, the solution to the problem of evil is that God isn’t real. In Deep Space 9, the gods/Prophets are real, and so the problem of evil cannot be solved. They’re just totally useless as gods.
The interesting notion of the uncaring not-actually-gods is undermined further whenever the Prophets act more like ‘traditional’ gods with an interest in Bajor, which they do more and more as the series goes on, culminating in the revelation that ‘the Sisko’ is a Jesus analogue who the Prophets actually created in order to fulfill the destined destruction of Gul Dukat and the Kosst Amojan13, both of which again, just fall off a cliff. Why do they need a special magic man to do the job of pushing a book and a person off a cliff? Anyone can push someone off a cliff. And why didn’t they just tell Sisko – or, again, anyone, really – to destroy the book at any given time in history? This book, the origins of which are never explained, is totally useless. Literally all it can do is release the Pah Wraiths (and thus destroy the universe14) and make Gul Dukat go blind, so why can’t an immortal, non-linear race of aliens who can speak to anyone at any time using psychic alien powers just tell someone to chuck it into a warp engine or out of an airlock? Or not write it?
Because gods move in mysterious ways!
This is not actually an acceptable argument in real life. It’s a clever-sounding way of saying ‘I don’t know’ and also a major reason we know that this type of god doesn’t exist: history unfolds in a way completely indistinguishable from random chance because that is, in fact, what is happening. You don’t need a guiding intelligence to the universe to make statistical chance happen15. However, this is a still more unsatisfying answer in narrative fiction. ‘Things just happen all the time for no particular reason’ is not a story.
The end result is that the conclusion to Sisko’s arc is unsatisfying. We’re presented with this guy who is a dedicated family man, who feels a bit ambivalent about his career in Starfleet and is considering the possibility that he may have to drop his career to be a good father to his son. He then has a third role, of Emissary to some annoying aliens, thrust upon him. He gradually comes to embrace all three of these identities and find some sort of peace and equilibrium within himself – only to then very suddenly abandon both career and family because a not very competent god told him to, for no reason that we’re ever given. This is annoying writing. It might even have been better to leave it totally ambiguous as to whether he died in the Fire Caves rather than insisting there was some reason that he just can’t tell Kassidy (or us). And he doesn’t speak to poor old Jake at all!
So, I find it difficult to sing unqualified praise for a series where the main character and his arc are both flawed as written and executed badly onscreen.
Moral grey areas
DS9 has also been much-praised for introducing moral ambiguity into the Star Trek universe. This is very welcome in the character of Kira Nerys, a former terrorist who now finds herself in a position of authority as chief representative on DS9 of the Bajoran provisional government. She’s gone from leader of a terrorist cell, carrying out bombings, sabotage and assassinations, to an army major. This outsider to insider journey makes her different from previous Trek characters. She’s the first really good female role the series had16 and provides a fascinating point of contrast to the upstanding citizens of the Federation, most of them male, that we’d seen up to this point. She’s deeply religious, a warrior, frequently (and understandably) angry about both the past and the present. The show neither blames her for having been a terrorist but nor does it ever entirely let her off the hook. Right up to the end, she’s explaining to people who would quite like to kill her that they are going to have to kill their own people if they want to win a revolution. It’s intense and difficult, but also difficult to argue with: after all, she’s right and it largely works (and, in a neat twist, the person who most objects to the idea of killing his own people in the name of the revolution is later killed, in the name of the revolution, by one of his own). Kira never apologises for her actions in the Resistance and never forgives the Cardassians as a group, although she works with them when she has to. Her arc works through never entirely resolving the ambiguity of her position. By series’ end, she’s had one last successful go as a terrorist, ironically fighting for the people who oppressed her planet for so many years, before she returns to Deep Space 9 as the commanding officer, but still outside of Starfleet and the Federation.
Kira really hits the ground running as a character. The first really stunning episode of the show is episode 19, ‘Duet’, which I don’t think the show topped till ‘The Visitor’ (more on which later). Kira meets a man she thinks is a war criminal, but who insists he isn’t. I don’t actually want to spoil the plot of this episode. You really should just watch it. It’s really impressive that DS9 delivers an all-time great episode so early on in its run.
Likewise, Odo is a great character. He’s a variation on a key Trek trope, the alien outsider who doesn’t fully understand the human (and Bajoran, Ferengi and Cardassian) people he lives among, but wishes to understand them better, and to be like them in key ways. In TOS and TNG, this role was taken by Spock and Data, who became the most beloved characters on their shows,17 so Auberjonois has some big Beatles boots to fill. The variation the writers came up with is of an alien who is not only living among aliens, but also not in his ‘natural’ state physically: he’s a shapeshifter, a species that doesn’t have a single form and spends most of its time linked to some indeterminately massive number of its fellows in a gigantic ocean of sapient goo, known as ‘the Great Link’, located on the other side of the Galaxy. Just as Spock and Data relied on abstract non-emotional frameworks to guide them (logic and a broadly defined positivism), Odo relies on justice. When he finally meets his fellow Changelings, he soon discovers they’re a race of imperialistic genocidaires, so that his sense of justice forces him to reject them. Again, the series maintains this ambiguity throughout: he recognises both that he can never truly be himself on Deep Space 9, among ‘solids’, out of his natural state, but that he also cannot be himself if he joins the Great Link while they’re still pursuing a war, because that would violate his sense of justice.
Like Kira, Odo came of age in the show’s ‘past’ during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. He likewise had a morally ambiguous role as a sort of police officer on the station, trying to find some balance between the violent, oppressive ‘justice’ of the Cardassians and his own still-evolving ideas of what justice should involve. As we see in various flashbacks, he didn’t always succeed but, as the show also makes clear, it would’ve been impossible for him to achieve justice while working with the Cardassians. As with Kira, the show makes it clear that he could have behaved differently, but never comes down on one side or the other as to whether or what he should have done.
In Odo’s case, his arc ends in a satisfying way, because the contradiction that animates him isn’t actually internal or inherent to him; once the external issue of the war goes away, he’s able to rejoin the Link. It’s still a wrench for him, because he has to leave Kira, but it makes sense: the idea of romantic love was something he’d learned from the Solids, so it’s something he’s able to leave behind.
Shades of… black? Evil? What do you call this colour? War crime grey?
Where the moral grey areas don’t work is when the writers try to create them within the Federation itself. At their absolute worst, major characters are simply allowed to commit crimes – serious crimes – that they get away with when the status quo is restored at the end of the episode. There are three particularly egregious examples of this.
The first is with Jadzia Dax, during one of her early pre-Worf episodes in which Farrell very much fails to give the impression that she’s several hundred years old. Dax goes on a mission of vengeance with a group of Klingons, so she’s party to what, in the Federation, is clearly murder, but to the Klingons is justified as part of a blood feud. Sisko explicitly warns her not to do it. She does it anyway. It’s obviously murder, but her entire comeuppance is that Sisko gives her an annoyed look when she comes back to the station. That’s it. Is this really Starfleet’s attitude to officers violating a direct order in order to take part in a – successful! – conspiracy to murder someone?
Apparently it is! Because, much later, Worf and Dax go on holiday to Risa, the sex pleasure planet. Worf decides that he doesn’t like sex pleasure, so he joins a group of terrorists for the weekend. Again, he is simply allowed to get away with this. Perhaps remembering that she also went on a terrorism-themed jolly once, Dax doesn’t even break up with him. Nobody ever raises the time Worf joined a terrorist organisation for a bit.
Starfleet’s shockingly lax attitude to criminality in its officers continues, however. in ‘For the Uniform’, when Sisko is faced with a (different) terrorist group, the Maquis, he responds by, I’m not kidding, committing an act of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing, by poisoning a planet’s atmosphere in such a way that it won’t be able to support humans (or similar) for fifty years. This is, unambiguously, a war crime and a crime against humanity. Having done this, with scarcely a single objection from the crew, he threatens to do it several more times unless the Maquis surrender. By the end of the episode, everyone’s laughing about it.
In a lot of the writing about DS9, it seems to be assumed that the society depicted in the earlier series was a morally unambiguous utopia. However, this is not the case at all and it’s honestly quite odd that anyone thinks so. Apart from the many times the Federation is nearly destroyed by conspiracy or invasion, some of the most celebrated episodes in TOS and TNG depict the Federation, Starfleet and the people within it as deeply flawed characters, who force our heroes into uncomfortable situations. ‘The Doomsday Machine’ sees the crew having to survive when they’re given suicidal orders by a revenge-obsessed captain, for example, and Kirk frequently cheats, bluffs and lies when he has to, including to his superior officers. His senior staff spend the entire time bickering and McCoy is kind of a racist. Utopia?
‘The Measure of a Man’, one of the most celebrated TNG episodes sees the Federation threatening to dismantle Data, potentially killing him in the process, because they think it might be useful to do so. Data has to go through an entire trial to prove to the Federation that he exists. Riker’s forced to act as the prosecution for his friend. Okay, Data and Picard win in the end, but ‘proving you have the right not to be dismantled simply because it seems like it might be convenient to dismantle you’ is hardly the stuff of utopia, is it?
‘The Measure of a Man’ is a perfect example of what makes for a good exploration of ethics in Star Trek (and sci-fi more broadly). It needs to take a moral issue that is not a solved issue, then add a sci-fi element. So, the questions in ‘The Measure of a Man’ are, What does society owe to the individual (and vice-versa)? (A moral issue we haven’t solved, hence the existence of democratic politics); and, Do androids count as individuals with rights? (which is, of course, the sci-fi element). In the episode, we as the audience naturally side with Data, because we know him. But the points made by Bruce Maddox (and by Riker, acting for the prosecution), are valid. Data is a machine. It would be really useful to have a Data on every ship in Starfleet. Where they collapse is in the fact that Data is a machine who can express real views about himself, and he does not want to be dismantled.
In Star Trek: Insurrection, there’s a similar situation in that Starfleet wants to do something and the crew of the Enterprise want to stop them. The reason it works much less well than ‘The Measure of the Man’ is that, while it has the sci-fi element (a mysterious anti-aging energy), the thing Starfleet wants to do is just wrong and it is a solved moral question: it is never okay to forcibly displace an entire population18 (are you listening, Captain Sisko?). We know this is the case, and so we know there’s absolutely no question that Picard and co. will refuse to help the Federation do such a thing once they know that’s what’s happening and, indeed, that they will turn against Starfleet if they have to, in order to prevent it, which they duly do.
Back to ‘For the Uniform’: Sisko decides that he’s going to poison a planet in order to commit ethnic cleansing (displacing the humans and Bajorans so that Cardassians, who aren’t susceptible to that posion, can move in). This is a crime. The sci-fi element isn’t really interesting. It’s not significantly different from using a hypothetical dirty bomb to make an area radioactive. So this episode fails both tests: a solved ethical problem and a sci-fi element that’s not different or interesting enough from what we have in the present, non-fictional world.
It also demonstrates what’s wrong with much of the ‘grey’ morality of DS9. Committing a crime against humanity isn’t morally ambiguous, it’s evil! There isn’t any question about this, that’s just what those words mean. People like to go on about how Janeway murders Tuvix in Voyager, but for some reason Sisko is let completely off the hook here by the fanbase and, indeed, by Starfleet and the Federation, when in fact he should’ve been tried at whatever the Federation’s version of the Hague is.
Another area where DS9 had a negative impact on the series was the introduction of Section 31,19 which is a branch of the Federation that does ‘morally ambiguous’ (again, read: evil) things, apparently without any kind of oversight or approval from the government. This kind of organisation is a dreadful, nonsensical fictional trope. Invariably it’s an excuse for writers to have a group of villains who just do whatever they like with no restrictions whether physical or logical, until the writers get bored and suddenly it turns out they can be stopped20. In the case of DS9, the writers team once again use Section 31 to make what they consider to be an ambiguous argument which in fact boils down to ‘Atrocities are okay when the good guys do them’ and, again, there’s no sense in which this is ambiguous, it’s just false and wrong.
Worse, with Section 31 in particular, it’s just lazy writing. The organisation is absurdly overpowered, with its agents able to walk into rooms without anyone seeing them (until the plot deems that it’s time for them to magically appear) or, equally, to spirit people away without their noticing. Even in a universe with near-infinite resources, it’s impossible not to wonder just how Section 31 gets so many, e.g., spaceships, without anyone questioning what’s going on. Plus, the main characters frequently plaintively ask each other how they can finally ‘reveal’ what Section 31 is up to, without ever considering that the sworn testimony of numerous high-ranking Starfleet Officers, not to mention the evidence of all the corpses lying all over the place or the fact that they’ve literally caught Luther Sloan, he’s right there! – might actually be enough to reveal everything.
But apart from all that…
Despite silly elements like Section 31 and the Pah Wraiths, the show is generally good or even great. Those things are in few enough episodes that I can mostly ignore them and there’s just so much to like that even the regrettable choice of Brooks doesn’t wreck the show.
One episode, in particular, is not only one of the best Star Trek stories but I think one of the greatest works of SFF ever written: ‘The Visitor’ from season 4. I strongly advise you to go and watch this if you haven’t but, in brief, the plot is that Sisko is killed in an accident, leaving Jake an orphan. However, Sisko begins to reappear at brief intervals, first weeks and then years apart, throughout Jake’s life, as a sort of ghost. For Sisko, time doesn’t pass at all between the intervals: he remains the same age while Jake gets older. Thus, eventually, Sisko sees his son as an adult, then an old man – older than Sisko himself. After several failed attempts to bring Sisko back, Jake realises the only way to save him is to commit suicide at the right moment; that this will allow Sisko to return to the time of the accident, and avoid it. The right moment, of course, turns out to be a time when Sisko is there, with Jake, so that Sisko cradles an old man who is also his son in his arms as he dies in order to save him. It’s absolutely stunning.
Brooks, for once, doesn’t overdo it, completely selling this impossible situation. Tony Todd21, as the older Jake, is also fantastic, as is Cirroc Lofton in his regular role as the Jake we know. The reason, though, that it’s such great SFF is that it creates a real, human story that could only be told with some sort of fantastic element (in this case the ‘temporal displacement’ that takes Sisko out of time). You could achieve the broad outline in a couple of ways, but never in a ‘realistic’ plot. Yet, you feel the entire thing as a real human being: Jake’s bereavement at losing his father, the impossible hope when he apparently returns, only to devastatingly vanish again, then Sisko’s sense of loss at his son’s death (even though he understands that this will allow him to live, with his son, again). It’s brilliantly, brilliantly done. You don’t often get a piece of fiction that not only works in itself but singlehandedly justifies22 the existence of an entire genre.
Deep Space 9 is mostly good and, when everything comes together, very good. It proved that you could do Star Trek without a ship called the Enterprise and that you could almost do it without having a ship at all. It increased the alien quotient in the show, finally delivered some really good roles for women and even had a kid in it who wasn’t annoying. I think overall it’s not quite as good as TNG was when it really got going, although you could persuasively argue that it’s average was better. I also think I still prefer the generally under-rated Star Trek: Voyager, though I’ll get back to you about that when I’ve finished watching it.
Book reviews
Queen Macbeth, by Val McDermid
This is a reasonably workmanlike book. It’s not really a re-telling of Shakespeare’s play; rather, it goes back to the source materal and re-tells that. I’m not sure I find Gruoch more compelling or even necessarily more sympathetic than Lady Macbeth, though. Fun fact of the day: While we all call her ‘Lady Macbeth’ and most modern editions of the play give this name in the stage directions, she’s never referred to as such in the First Folio, the only authentic text of Macbeth: she’s referred to simply as ‘His Lady’ and then just ‘Lady’. So, McDermid does her some justice by giving her her name back.
The Malcontent, by John Marston
One of the first tragicomedies, an entertainingly twisty turny play with a fun bit of metatheatre at the beginning, featuring Shakespeare’s pals Richard Burbage (‘Burbadge’ here), Henry Condell (co-editor of the First Folio) and William Sly arguing with each other and the audience. Still, oddly, feels pleasantly surprising when the tragic-seeming play ends happily. I imagine the first audiences were blown away.
Utopia, by Thomas More
Speaking of utopias (utopiae?), I also read the original this month. As David Wittenberg argues in The Philosophy of Time Travel, it’s to later utopian fiction that we owe the concept of time travel. Once there were no new lands to discover, utopian authors had to locate their societies elsewhere in time not, as More and later Swift, parodying the genre, did, on far-flung islands. Being both a hit in Shakespeare’s day and a predecessor to the time travel story, this ticks a lot of boxes for me.
What I found most interesting about it is that More’s Utopia is so similar to the various socialist/communist utopias people have come up with afterwards and also quite similar, mostly knowingly, to Plato’s Republic. I can’t tell if this is because we’re all so collectively unimaginative we can’t come up with anything new or if it just is the case that ‘some sort of communism [that works (somehow)]’ really would be the best way for humans to live. Anyway, it’s an interesting, fairly brief read, well worth the little time it takes to read it.
- With apologies to Ethan Phillips, who I think is a fine actor working with mostly terrible material. My strongest evidence for this is the episode ‘Mortal Coil’ (S4E12), where he gives a fantastic performance making one of Voyager‘s best episodes. ↩︎
- The strongest of which are Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Lower Decks knows that it’s a funny show about Star Trek and Strange New Worlds knows it’s a straight-ahead Star Trek about exploring. Discovery, however, starts off thinking it’s an anthology show, then becomes a show about Michael Burnham, then a show about found family (where we never get to know most of the family), then a show about a dystopian version of the Federation, etc. Star Trek: Picard thinks it’s a nostalgia show but spends season 1 stamping on everyone’s nostalgia (Hugh’s back! Okay, he’s dead now. Also, everyone hates Jean-Luc Picard, now, implausibly. And I bet you thought Riker and Troi would live happily ever after, right? Well, they did until their kid died, fuck you). In season 2 it gets even weirder before, finally, in season 3, giving everyone what they wanted in the first place and doing a nostalgia show but with an incredibly nonsensical plotline in which, at one point, someone gets assimilated by the Borg until someone talks them out of it. It’s a mess, is what I’m saying. Still, at least they brought back the theme music (eventually). ↩︎
- I wrote this sentence before he won the Academy Award the other day, but it does help my point. ↩︎
- As Major (later Colonel) Kira Nerys, ‘Constable’ Odo, Quark and Chief Miles O’Brien. ↩︎
- As Garak, Gul Dukat, Vedek (later Kai) Winn Adami, Nog and Rom. ↩︎
- As Damar, Weyon and Brunt, and General (later Chancellor) Martok. ↩︎
- Another oddity of either the actor or the character is that he always partially reverses the word order in this form of sentence, saying ‘we just can’t’ instead of ‘we can’t just’ every time. ↩︎
- I read somewhere that they planned to have an opening narration in the style of the famous ‘Space: the final frontier’ speech(es), but couldn’t come up with anything good enough in time. It’s kind of a shame because there’s no doubt that Brooks would’ve sounded fantastic doing this. ↩︎
- Out of scope, but I’m inclined to think we’re trending that way. However, trends don’t necessarily continue. ↩︎
- This kind of thing happens all the time in SFF, but it still annoys me: Gul Dukat in this scene has telekinetic powers and is able to kill Winn by waving at her, but then he dies because Sisko pushes him. Come on. Okay, he pushes him into a big fire, but he’s a fire demon who has already been shown to come back from the dead in this scene. Why does this kill him? ↩︎
- The reason we know the Pah Wraiths are baddies is that when they possess people, their eyes go all red and scary. It’s just so lazy. Why not at least make them ice demons or something? ↩︎
- Simply: if God is real and good, why did He create a world with evil in it? ↩︎
- It’s a magic book, don’t worry about it. ↩︎
- Of course, once they are released, instead of immediately destroying the universe they just spend several minutes hanging around in a cave, waiting for Sisko to show up so he can shove them. ↩︎
- I’m phrasing this carefully because strictly speaking it’s possible to argue that some sort of intelligence set up the universe from outside it and to argue that said intelligence may therefore have had some sort of aim in mind. However, that is all you can say about it and you’re already saying ‘may’. ↩︎
- Role, note, not actor. Nichelle Nichols, Denise Crosby, Marina Sirtis and Gates McFadden were never given very much to do or, as especially in Sirtis’ case, the stuff they were given to do was just silly (‘Captain, I feel this alien, the one screaming at us, is upset about something’). ↩︎
- Well, probably. We all love Kirk and Picard, too, obviously, and most of both casts have their fans. They’re great shows! They have lots of great chaacters! ↩︎
- That such things still occur isn’t relevant to my point. The people who do these things know it’s wrong, which is why they variously pretend they’re not doing it, or that they’re not doing it by force, or that those other people have it coming, or they, the perpetrators, were there first, so it’s self-defence, or some other such nonsense. You don’t need to invent justifications like this for things that are morally right, so if you are saying such things, that’s a clue that you’re doing something wrong. ↩︎
- Which was already a bad idea before the terrible Star Trek: Section 31 film, though I’d like to thank the producers of that film for helping me prosecute this argument. ↩︎
- The worst/best of these is in the show Scandal where there turns out to be some secret government agency that goes around murdering people and making speeches about how unstoppable they are. Eventually, the main characters go, ‘Hey, what if we just shoot them?’ and it works. ↩︎
- In an odd, sad coincidence, Todd died the day after I watched this episode. He also played Worf’s brother, Kurn. ↩︎
- I don’t think it needs justifying and, if you’ve read this far, nor do you do; but you and me ain’t everyone. ↩︎
-
Reflections on Deep Space 9
I’ve been (re)watching all of Star Trek in approximate stardate order (approximate because apart from anything else stardates are inconsistent across the series). I’ve just watched the final episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, so of course I have some extremely strong opinions about it.
Historical background
Star Trek: Deep Space 9 began broadcasting while its predecessor Star Trek: The Next Generation was still on the air. It is almost invariably discussed in terms of its various firsts: first Star Trek show made without Gene Roddenberry’s involvement; first to air simultaneously with another Star Trek, first with a black lead, first where the lead was a commander, not a captain (at first, anyway), first set on a space station, first where not all the main characters were in Starfleet, and so on.
I think it’s somewhat notable that, creatively anyway, at least one of these firsts was also a last: there’s never been another stationary Star Trek. Indeed, alert readers may have noticed this is a contradiction in terms. The showrunners eventually realised they really needed a proper ship and introduced the USS Defiant to serve as as a means of getting off the station from time to time. Similarly, perhaps aware of the optics of having the various white leads explicitly outrank the only main black lead on Trek, they eventually promoted Benjamin Sisko. Twenty years later, a different set of showrunners gave themselves a near-identical problem on Star Trek: Discovery and likewise solved it by making Michael Burnham, the first black female lead on Star Trek, a captain (although she was, oddly, a ‘co-captain’).
Space: The Final… Outpost, I suppose
Overall, DS9 is probably the most consistent of all the Star Trek shows. The Original Series was notoriously all over the place, The Next Generation was, just as notoriously, pretty poor for the first two seasons and also experienced a significant drop in quality in season 7, likely because the producers had stretched themselves too thin with TNG and DS9 airing simultaneously, and Star Trek: Voyager and the first TNG film, Star Trek Generations, also in production. DS9, by contrast, starts pretty strong and is mostly good to very good all the way through (although I do think that, like TNG, the middle seasons are the strongest). Unlike Voyager, there aren’t any characters that feel oddly pointless (Harry Kim) or just plain annoying (Neelix1). It has a much stronger sense of self than the later, strangely messy shows2, and that carries it through the odd rough patch.
The acting is also generally better than it had been on Trek up to that point. I have a theory that the overall quality of mainstream film and TV acting started to get a hell of a lot better in the ’90s but no theory as to why this is. Just look at how good someone like Michael B. Jordan is3 compared to the people we got starring in blockbuster films in the ’80s, for example; he absolutely blows away Stallone or Schwarzenegger or anyone else you care to name. DS9 may be an early example of that, bar a couple of performances which I’ll come to in a moment. Right from the start, Nana Visitor, René Auberjonois, Armin Shimerman and Colm Meaney4 (returning from TNG) are all excellent, as are recurring guest stars Andrew Robinson, Marc Alaimo, Louise Fletcher (who was, after all, an Oscar winning actress), Aron Eisenberg and Max Grodénchik5. Siddig el Fadil and Terry Farrell wobble early on, but both find their feet eventually, as the writers work out what they want to do with the characters and learn how to play to the actors’ strengths. Both also benefit later from being paired up with actors with whom they have great chemistry (respectively, Meaney and Michael Dorn, likewise returning from TNG, as Worf, from season 4 on), eventually getting some of the best episodes in the whole thing. Where the space station concept works well is in allowing them to have that strong recurring cast, who slowly build relationships with many of the regulars. The recurring guests introduced later on are also all fantastic: Casey Biggs, Jeffrey Combs and JG Hertzler6, in particular, are perfectly cast and routinely excellent.
The only major fly in the ointment as far as acting goes is Avery Brooks. I find him to be an utterly baffling actor, not least because I know that many people absolutely love him, whereas my view of him is that he cannot act at all.
Now, look, I could hardly enjoy Star Trek if I couldn’t put up with the odd wooden performance. The problems with Brooks come not when he’s wooden, though he often is, but that almost every time he does emote, he’s bizarre. People often say he got better when he shaved his head and grew a beard and this is true – but we’re coming from a low base here. And his fundamental issues never went away. Look at his performance in the first episode, ‘Emissary’, where he over-reads the line ‘We just can’t leave her!’7 so much – and so badly – that it’s unintentionally hilarious. Compare this to his climatic scene with Gul Dukat in the very last episode, where he also overdoes the line ‘I am!‘ to similar effect. His much-vaunted performances in ‘Far Beyond the Stars’ and ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ have the exact same problems: whenever he tries to show a strong emotion, it’s overdone (as in ‘Stars’); when he tries to just get through a scene without a single strong emotion, whether that’s because it’s a paint by numbers scene or one where there’s meant to be an ambiguity, he’s wooden (as in ‘Moonlight’). All he really has going for him is a beautiful voice8, but this really isn’t enough. His performance in DS9 does not encourage me to seek out his other work, but perhaps he’s just woefully miscast as Sisko, or poorly directed, and really shines elsewhere.
No Gods, No Masters
I think some of the issues with Sisko are the fault of the writing, particularly his plot arc as the Emissary to the Prophets (Bajoran gods/wormhole aliens). Trying to examine religion in Star Trek was a good idea. After all, most of the world and most of the USA is still very religious. It’s long-established in the Trek universe that alien cultures have their own religious beliefs, even the hyper-logical Vulcans, including various prophets, gods and ceremonies. In our own culture, where it’s been obvious for centuries that an interventionist god doesn’t – indeed, cannot – exist, there are still a great many religious people, and it’s not at all clear that that should change by the time the 24th century rolls around9. Additionally, there have always been plenty of godlike beings in Star Trek, from Trelaine, to that thing that can’t explain what it wants with a starship, to Q. It makes sense to explore this aspect of humanity more deeply than can be done with a single episode or recurring character.
But is it well-handled in DS9? I don’t think so. The Bajorans see the Prophets as gods and their home, the wormhole to the Gamma quadrant, as the Celestial Temple. However… they’re wrong, aren’t they? The wormhole is a wormhole, not a temple, and the things that live in it really are just aliens without a linear sense of time. Kai Winn, Louise Fletcher’s character, is not wrong to argue in the final few episodes that the Prophets don’t seem actually to care very much (or at all) about Bajor, Bajorans or even their Emissary, Sisko, who they arbitrarily whisk away to live with them, he having apparently served his purpose on this corporeal plain by pushing Gul Dukat off a cliff10, forcing him to abandon his friends and family forever, for no reason.
The concept of a species that doesn’t experience or understand linear time is really interesting and also a very Star Trek kind of idea. There’s genuine interest and bathos in the idea that the Bajorans have been worshipping these entities that not only do not but cannot understand them at all; the Prophets don’t seem to know what time is until they meet Sisko and he explains it to them, which storngly suggests they’ve never seriously interacted with the Bajorans at all. But this interesting idea gradually falls away and the writers, out of nothing more than inertia, turn the Prophets into traditional ‘good’ gods, complete with some opposite, ‘evil’ fallen angel/fire demon types in the form of the Pah Wraiths (who want to set the entire universe on fire, for some reason, but can’t, for some reason).11 This of course sticks the writers with a fictional version of the problem of evil12. In the real world, the solution to the problem of evil is that God isn’t real. In Deep Space 9, the gods/Prophets are real, and so the problem of evil cannot be solved. They’re just totally useless as gods.
The interesting notion of the uncaring not-actually-gods is undermined further whenever the Prophets act more like ‘traditional’ gods with an interest in Bajor, which they do more and more as the series goes on, culminating in the revelation that ‘the Sisko’ is a Jesus analogue who the Prophets actually created in order to fulfill the destined destruction of Gul Dukat and the Kosst Amojan13, both of which again, just fall off a cliff. Why do they need a special magic man to do the job of pushing a book and a person off a cliff? Anyone can push someone off a cliff. And why didn’t they just tell Sisko – or, again, anyone, really – to destroy the book at any given time in history? This book, the origins of which are never explained, is totally useless. Literally all it can do is release the Pah Wraiths (and thus destroy the universe14) and make Gul Dukat go blind, so why can’t an immortal, non-linear race of aliens who can speak to anyone at any time using psychic alien powers just tell someone to chuck it into a warp engine or out of an airlock? Or not write it?
Because gods move in mysterious ways!
This is not actually an acceptable argument in real life. It’s a clever-sounding way of saying ‘I don’t know’ and also a major reason we know that this type of god doesn’t exist: history unfolds in a way completely indistinguishable from random chance because that is, in fact, what is happening. You don’t need a guiding intelligence to the universe to make statistical chance happen15. However, this is a still more unsatisfying answer in narrative fiction. ‘Things just happen all the time for no particular reason’ is not a story.
The end result is that the conclusion to Sisko’s arc is unsatisfying. We’re presented with this guy who is a dedicated family man, who feels a bit ambivalent about his career in Starfleet and is considering the possibility that he may have to drop his career to be a good father to his son. He then has a third role, of Emissary to some annoying aliens, thrust upon him. He gradually comes to embrace all three of these identities and find some sort of peace and equilibrium within himself – only to then very suddenly abandon both career and family because a not very competent god told him to, for no reason that we’re ever given. This is annoying writing. It might even have been better to leave it totally ambiguous as to whether he died in the Fire Caves rather than insisting there was some reason that he just can’t tell Kassidy (or us). And he doesn’t speak to poor old Jake at all!
So, I find it difficult to sing unqualified praise for a series where the main character and his arc are both flawed as written and executed badly onscreen.
Moral grey areas
DS9 has also been much-praised for introducing moral ambiguity into the Star Trek universe. This is very welcome in the character of Kira Nerys, a former terrorist who now finds herself in a position of authority as chief representative on DS9 of the Bajoran provisional government. She’s gone from leader of a terrorist cell, carrying out bombings, sabotage and assassinations, to an army major. This outsider to insider journey makes her different from previous Trek characters. She’s the first really good female role the series had16 and provides a fascinating point of contrast to the upstanding citizens of the Federation, most of them male, that we’d seen up to this point. She’s deeply religious, a warrior, frequently (and understandably) angry about both the past and the present. The show neither blames her for having been a terrorist but nor does it ever entirely let her off the hook. Right up to the end, she’s explaining to people who would quite like to kill her that they are going to have to kill their own people if they want to win a revolution. It’s intense and difficult, but also difficult to argue with: after all, she’s right and it largely works (and, in a neat twist, the person who most objects to the idea of killing his own people in the name of the revolution is later killed, in the name of the revolution, by one of his own). Kira never apologises for her actions in the Resistance and never forgives the Cardassians as a group, although she works with them when she has to. Her arc works through never entirely resolving the ambiguity of her position. By series’ end, she’s had one last successful go as a terrorist, ironically fighting for the people who oppressed her planet for so many years, before she returns to Deep Space 9 as the commanding officer, but still outside of Starfleet and the Federation.
Kira really hits the ground running as a character. The first really stunning episode of the show is episode 19, ‘Duet’, which I don’t think the show topped till ‘The Visitor’ (more on which later). Kira meets a man she thinks is a war criminal, but who insists he isn’t. I don’t actually want to spoil the plot of this episode. You really should just watch it. It’s really impressive that DS9 delivers an all-time great episode so early on in its run.
Likewise, Odo is a great character. He’s a variation on a key Trek trope, the alien outsider who doesn’t fully understand the human (and Bajoran, Ferengi and Cardassian) people he lives among, but wishes to understand them better, and to be like them in key ways. In TOS and TNG, this role was taken by Spock and Data, who became the most beloved characters on their shows,17 so Auberjonois has some big Beatles boots to fill. The variation the writers came up with is of an alien who is not only living among aliens, but also not in his ‘natural’ state physically: he’s a shapeshifter, a species that doesn’t have a single form and spends most of its time linked to some indeterminately massive number of its fellows in a gigantic ocean of sapient goo, known as ‘the Great Link’, located on the other side of the Galaxy. Just as Spock and Data relied on abstract non-emotional frameworks to guide them (logic and a broadly defined positivism), Odo relies on justice. When he finally meets his fellow Changelings, he soon discovers they’re a race of imperialistic genocidaires, so that his sense of justice forces him to reject them. Again, the series maintains this ambiguity throughout: he recognises both that he can never truly be himself on Deep Space 9, among ‘solids’, out of his natural state, but that he also cannot be himself if he joins the Great Link while they’re still pursuing a war, because that would violate his sense of justice.
Like Kira, Odo came of age in the show’s ‘past’ during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. He likewise had a morally ambiguous role as a sort of police officer on the station, trying to find some balance between the violent, oppressive ‘justice’ of the Cardassians and his own still-evolving ideas of what justice should involve. As we see in various flashbacks, he didn’t always succeed but, as the show also makes clear, it would’ve been impossible for him to achieve justice while working with the Cardassians. As with Kira, the show makes it clear that he could have behaved differently, but never comes down on one side or the other as to whether or what he should have done.
In Odo’s case, his arc ends in a satisfying way, because the contradiction that animates him isn’t actually internal or inherent to him; once the external issue of the war goes away, he’s able to rejoin the Link. It’s still a wrench for him, because he has to leave Kira, but it makes sense: the idea of romantic love was something he’d learned from the Solids, so it’s something he’s able to leave behind.
Shades of… black? Evil? What do you call this colour? War crime grey?
Where the moral grey areas don’t work is when the writers try to create them within the Federation itself. At their absolute worst, major characters are simply allowed to commit crimes – serious crimes – that they get away with when the status quo is restored at the end of the episode. There are three particularly egregious examples of this.
The first is with Jadzia Dax, during one of her early pre-Worf episodes in which Farrell very much fails to give the impression that she’s several hundred years old. Dax goes on a mission of vengeance with a group of Klingons, so she’s party to what, in the Federation, is clearly murder, but to the Klingons is justified as part of a blood feud. Sisko explicitly warns her not to do it. She does it anyway. It’s obviously murder, but her entire comeuppance is that Sisko gives her an annoyed look when she comes back to the station. That’s it. Is this really Starfleet’s attitude to officers violating a direct order in order to take part in a – successful! – conspiracy to murder someone?
Apparently it is! Because, much later, Worf and Dax go on holiday to Risa, the sex pleasure planet. Worf decides that he doesn’t like sex pleasure, so he joins a group of terrorists for the weekend. Again, he is simply allowed to get away with this. Perhaps remembering that she also went on a terrorism-themed jolly once, Dax doesn’t even break up with him. Nobody ever raises the time Worf joined a terrorist organisation for a bit.
Starfleet’s shockingly lax attitude to criminality in its officers continues, however. in ‘For the Uniform’, when Sisko is faced with a (different) terrorist group, the Maquis, he responds by, I’m not kidding, committing an act of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing, by poisoning a planet’s atmosphere in such a way that it won’t be able to support humans (or similar) for fifty years. This is, unambiguously, a war crime and a crime against humanity. Having done this, with scarcely a single objection from the crew, he threatens to do it several more times unless the Maquis surrender. By the end of the episode, everyone’s laughing about it.
In a lot of the writing about DS9, it seems to be assumed that the society depicted in the earlier series was a morally unambiguous utopia. However, this is not the case at all and it’s honestly quite odd that anyone thinks so. Apart from the many times the Federation is nearly destroyed by conspiracy or invasion, some of the most celebrated episodes in TOS and TNG depict the Federation, Starfleet and the people within it as deeply flawed characters, who force our heroes into uncomfortable situations. ‘The Doomsday Machine’ sees the crew having to survive when they’re given suicidal orders by a revenge-obsessed captain, for example, and Kirk frequently cheats, bluffs and lies when he has to, including to his superior officers. His senior staff spend the entire time bickering and McCoy is kind of a racist. Utopia?
‘The Measure of a Man’, one of the most celebrated TNG episodes sees the Federation threatening to dismantle Data, potentially killing him in the process, because they think it might be useful to do so. Data has to go through an entire trial to prove to the Federation that he exists. Riker’s forced to act as the prosecution for his friend. Okay, Data and Picard win in the end, but ‘proving you have the right not to be dismantled simply because it seems like it might be convenient to dismantle you’ is hardly the stuff of utopia, is it?
‘The Measure of a Man’ is a perfect example of what makes for a good exploration of ethics in Star Trek (and sci-fi more broadly). It needs to take a moral issue that is not a solved issue, then add a sci-fi element. So, the questions in ‘The Measure of a Man’ are, What does society owe to the individual (and vice-versa)? (A moral issue we haven’t solved, hence the existence of democratic politics); and, Do androids count as individuals with rights? (which is, of course, the sci-fi element). In the episode, we as the audience naturally side with Data, because we know him. But the points made by Bruce Maddox (and by Riker, acting for the prosecution), are valid. Data is a machine. It would be really useful to have a Data on every ship in Starfleet. Where they collapse is in the fact that Data is a machine who can express real views about himself, and he does not want to be dismantled.
In Star Trek: Insurrection, there’s a similar situation in that Starfleet wants to do something and the crew of the Enterprise want to stop them. The reason it works much less well than ‘The Measure of the Man’ is that, while it has the sci-fi element (a mysterious anti-aging energy), the thing Starfleet wants to do is just wrong and it is a solved moral question: it is never okay to forcibly displace an entire population18 (are you listening, Captain Sisko?). We know this is the case, and so we know there’s absolutely no question that Picard and co. will refuse to help the Federation do such a thing once they know that’s what’s happening and, indeed, that they will turn against Starfleet if they have to, in order to prevent it, which they duly do.
Back to ‘For the Uniform’: Sisko decides that he’s going to poison a planet in order to commit ethnic cleansing (displacing the humans and Bajorans so that Cardassians, who aren’t susceptible to that posion, can move in). This is a crime. The sci-fi element isn’t really interesting. It’s not significantly different from using a hypothetical dirty bomb to make an area radioactive. So this episode fails both tests: a solved ethical problem and a sci-fi element that’s not different or interesting enough from what we have in the present, non-fictional world.
It also demonstrates what’s wrong with much of the ‘grey’ morality of DS9. Committing a crime against humanity isn’t morally ambiguous, it’s evil! There isn’t any question about this, that’s just what those words mean. People like to go on about how Janeway murders Tuvix in Voyager, but for some reason Sisko is let completely off the hook here by the fanbase and, indeed, by Starfleet and the Federation, when in fact he should’ve been tried at whatever the Federation’s version of the Hague is.
Another area where DS9 had a negative impact on the series was the introduction of Section 31,19 which is a branch of the Federation that does ‘morally ambiguous’ (again, read: evil) things, apparently without any kind of oversight or approval from the government. This kind of organisation is a dreadful, nonsensical fictional trope. Invariably it’s an excuse for writers to have a group of villains who just do whatever they like with no restrictions whether physical or logical, until the writers get bored and suddenly it turns out they can be stopped20. In the case of DS9, the writers team once again use Section 31 to make what they consider to be an ambiguous argument which in fact boils down to ‘Atrocities are okay when the good guys do them’ and, again, there’s no sense in which this is ambiguous, it’s just false and wrong.
Worse, with Section 31 in particular, it’s just lazy writing. The organisation is absurdly overpowered, with its agents able to walk into rooms without anyone seeing them (until the plot deems that it’s time for them to magically appear) or, equally, to spirit people away without their noticing. Even in a universe with near-infinite resources, it’s impossible not to wonder just how Section 31 gets so many, e.g., spaceships, without anyone questioning what’s going on. Plus, the main characters frequently plaintively ask each other how they can finally ‘reveal’ what Section 31 is up to, without ever considering that the sworn testimony of numerous high-ranking Starfleet Officers, not to mention the evidence of all the corpses lying all over the place or the fact that they’ve literally caught Luther Sloan, he’s right there! – might actually be enough to reveal everything.
But apart from all that…
Despite silly elements like Section 31 and the Pah Wraiths, the show is generally good or even great. Those things are in few enough episodes that I can mostly ignore them and there’s just so much to like that even the regrettable choice of Brooks doesn’t wreck the show.
One episode, in particular, is not only one of the best Star Trek stories but I think one of the greatest works of SFF ever written: ‘The Visitor’ from season 4. I strongly advise you to go and watch this if you haven’t but, in brief, the plot is that Sisko is killed in an accident, leaving Jake an orphan. However, Sisko begins to reappear at brief intervals, first weeks and then years apart, throughout Jake’s life, as a sort of ghost. For Sisko, time doesn’t pass at all between the intervals: he remains the same age while Jake gets older. Thus, eventually, Sisko sees his son as an adult, then an old man – older than Sisko himself. After several failed attempts to bring Sisko back, Jake realises the only way to save him is to commit suicide at the right moment; that this will allow Sisko to return to the time of the accident, and avoid it. The right moment, of course, turns out to be a time when Sisko is there, with Jake, so that Sisko cradles an old man who is also his son in his arms as he dies in order to save him. It’s absolutely stunning.
Brooks, for once, doesn’t overdo it, completely selling this impossible situation. Tony Todd21, as the older Jake, is also fantastic, as is Cirroc Lofton in his regular role as the Jake we know. The reason, though, that it’s such great SFF is that it creates a real, human story that could only be told with some sort of fantastic element (in this case the ‘temporal displacement’ that takes Sisko out of time). You could achieve the broad outline in a couple of ways, but never in a ‘realistic’ plot. Yet, you feel the entire thing as a real human being: Jake’s bereavement at losing his father, the impossible hope when he apparently returns, only to devastatingly vanish again, then Sisko’s sense of loss at his son’s death (even though he understands that this will allow him to live, with his son, again). It’s brilliantly, brilliantly done. You don’t often get a piece of fiction that not only works in itself but singlehandedly justifies22 the existence of an entire genre.
Deep Space 9 is mostly good and, when everything comes together, very good. It proved that you could do Star Trek without a ship called the Enterprise and that you could almost do it without having a ship at all. It increased the alien quotient in the show, finally delivered some really good roles for women and even had a kid in it who wasn’t annoying. I think overall it’s not quite as good as TNG was when it really got going, although you could persuasively argue that it’s average was better. I also think I still prefer the generally under-rated Star Trek: Voyager, though I’ll get back to you about that when I’ve finished watching it.
Book reviews
Queen Macbeth, by Val McDermid
This is a reasonably workmanlike book. It’s not really a re-telling of Shakespeare’s play; rather, it goes back to the source materal and re-tells that. I’m not sure I find Gruoch more compelling or even necessarily more sympathetic than Lady Macbeth, though. Fun fact of the day: While we all call her ‘Lady Macbeth’ and most modern editions of the play give this name in the stage directions, she’s never referred to as such in the First Folio, the only authentic text of Macbeth: she’s referred to simply as ‘His Lady’ and then just ‘Lady’. So, McDermid does her some justice by giving her her name back.
The Malcontent, by John Marston
One of the first tragicomedies, an entertainingly twisty turny play with a fun bit of metatheatre at the beginning, featuring Shakespeare’s pals Richard Burbage (‘Burbadge’ here), Henry Condell (co-editor of the First Folio) and William Sly arguing with each other and the audience. Still, oddly, feels pleasantly surprising when the tragic-seeming play ends happily. I imagine the first audiences were blown away.
Utopia, by Thomas More
Speaking of utopias (utopiae?), I also read the original this month. As David Wittenberg argues in The Philosophy of Time Travel, it’s to later utopian fiction that we owe the concept of time travel. Once there were no new lands to discover, utopian authors had to locate their societies elsewhere in time not, as More and later Swift, parodying the genre, did, on far-flung islands. Being both a hit in Shakespeare’s day and a predecessor to the time travel story, this ticks a lot of boxes for me.
What I found most interesting about it is that More’s Utopia is so similar to the various socialist/communist utopias people have come up with afterwards and also quite similar, mostly knowingly, to Plato’s Republic. I can’t tell if this is because we’re all so collectively unimaginative we can’t come up with anything new or if it just is the case that ‘some sort of communism [that works (somehow)]’ really would be the best way for humans to live. Anyway, it’s an interesting, fairly brief read, well worth the little time it takes to read it.
- With apologies to Ethan Phillips, who I think is a fine actor working with mostly terrible material. My strongest evidence for this is the episode ‘Mortal Coil’ (S4E12), where he gives a fantastic performance making one of Voyager‘s best episodes. ↩︎
- The strongest of which are Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Lower Decks knows that it’s a funny show about Star Trek and Strange New Worlds knows it’s a straight-ahead Star Trek about exploring. Discovery, however, starts off thinking it’s an anthology show, then becomes a show about Michael Burnham, then a show about found family (where we never get to know most of the family), then a show about a dystopian version of the Federation, etc. Star Trek: Picard thinks it’s a nostalgia show but spends season 1 stamping on everyone’s nostalgia (Hugh’s back! Okay, he’s dead now. Also, everyone hates Jean-Luc Picard, now, implausibly. And I bet you thought Riker and Troi would live happily ever after, right? Well, they did until their kid died, fuck you). In season 2 it gets even weirder before, finally, in season 3, giving everyone what they wanted in the first place and doing a nostalgia show but with an incredibly nonsensical plotline in which, at one point, someone gets assimilated by the Borg until someone talks them out of it. It’s a mess, is what I’m saying. Still, at least they brought back the theme music (eventually). ↩︎
- I wrote this sentence before he won the Academy Award the other day, but it does help my point. ↩︎
- As Major (later Colonel) Kira Nerys, ‘Constable’ Odo, Quark and Chief Miles O’Brien. ↩︎
- As Garak, Gul Dukat, Vedek (later Kai) Winn Adami, Nog and Rom. ↩︎
- As Damar, Weyon and Brunt, and General (later Chancellor) Martok. ↩︎
- Another oddity of either the actor or the character is that he always partially reverses the word order in this form of sentence, saying ‘we just can’t’ instead of ‘we can’t just’ every time. ↩︎
- I read somewhere that they planned to have an opening narration in the style of the famous ‘Space: the final frontier’ speech(es), but couldn’t come up with anything good enough in time. It’s kind of a shame because there’s no doubt that Brooks would’ve sounded fantastic doing this. ↩︎
- Out of scope, but I’m inclined to think we’re trending that way. However, trends don’t necessarily continue. ↩︎
- This kind of thing happens all the time in SFF, but it still annoys me: Gul Dukat in this scene has telekinetic powers and is able to kill Winn by waving at her, but then he dies because Sisko pushes him. Come on. Okay, he pushes him into a big fire, but he’s a fire demon who has already been shown to come back from the dead in this scene. Why does this kill him? ↩︎
- The reason we know the Pah Wraiths are baddies is that when they possess people, their eyes go all red and scary. It’s just so lazy. Why not at least make them ice demons or something? ↩︎
- Simply: if God is real and good, why did He create a world with evil in it? ↩︎
- It’s a magic book, don’t worry about it. ↩︎
- Of course, once they are released, instead of immediately destroying the universe they just spend several minutes hanging around in a cave, waiting for Sisko to show up so he can shove them. ↩︎
- I’m phrasing this carefully because strictly speaking it’s possible to argue that some sort of intelligence set up the universe from outside it and to argue that said intelligence may therefore have had some sort of aim in mind. However, that is all you can say about it and you’re already saying ‘may’. ↩︎
- Role, note, not actor. Nichelle Nichols, Denise Crosby, Marina Sirtis and Gates McFadden were never given very much to do or, as especially in Sirtis’ case, the stuff they were given to do was just silly (‘Captain, I feel this alien, the one screaming at us, is upset about something’). ↩︎
- Well, probably. We all love Kirk and Picard, too, obviously, and most of both casts have their fans. They’re great shows! They have lots of great chaacters! ↩︎
- That such things still occur isn’t relevant to my point. The people who do these things know it’s wrong, which is why they variously pretend they’re not doing it, or that they’re not doing it by force, or that those other people have it coming, or they, the perpetrators, were there first, so it’s self-defence, or some other such nonsense. You don’t need to invent justifications like this for things that are morally right, so if you are saying such things, that’s a clue that you’re doing something wrong. ↩︎
- Which was already a bad idea before the terrible Star Trek: Section 31 film, though I’d like to thank the producers of that film for helping me prosecute this argument. ↩︎
- The worst/best of these is in the show Scandal where there turns out to be some secret government agency that goes around murdering people and making speeches about how unstoppable they are. Eventually, the main characters go, ‘Hey, what if we just shoot them?’ and it works. ↩︎
- In an odd, sad coincidence, Todd died the day after I watched this episode. He also played Worf’s brother, Kurn. ↩︎
- I don’t think it needs justifying and, if you’ve read this far, nor do you do; but you and me ain’t everyone. ↩︎
-
Reflections on Deep Space 9
I’ve been (re)watching all of Star Trek in approximate stardate order (approximate because apart from anything else stardates are inconsistent across the series). I’ve just watched the final episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, so of course I have some extremely strong opinions about it.
Historical background
Star Trek: Deep Space 9 began broadcasting while its predecessor Star Trek: The Next Generation was still on the air. It is almost invariably discussed in terms of its various firsts: first Star Trek show made without Gene Roddenberry’s involvement; first to air simultaneously with another Star Trek, first with a black lead, first where the lead was a commander, not a captain (at first, anyway), first set on a space station, first where not all the main characters were in Starfleet, and so on.
I think it’s somewhat notable that, creatively anyway, at least one of these firsts was also a last: there’s never been another stationary Star Trek. Indeed, alert readers may have noticed this is a contradiction in terms. The showrunners eventually realised they really needed a proper ship and introduced the USS Defiant to serve as as a means of getting off the station from time to time. Similarly, perhaps aware of the optics of having the various white leads explicitly outrank the only main black lead on Trek, they eventually promoted Benjamin Sisko. Twenty years later, a different set of showrunners gave themselves a near-identical problem on Star Trek: Discovery and likewise solved it by making Michael Burnham, the first black female lead on Star Trek, a captain (although she was, oddly, a ‘co-captain’).
Space: The Final… Outpost, I suppose
Overall, DS9 is probably the most consistent of all the Star Trek shows. The Original Series was notoriously all over the place, The Next Generation was, just as notoriously, pretty poor for the first two seasons and also experienced a significant drop in quality in season 7, likely because the producers had stretched themselves too thin with TNG and DS9 airing simultaneously, and Star Trek: Voyager and the first TNG film, Star Trek Generations, also in production. DS9, by contrast, starts pretty strong and is mostly good to very good all the way through (although I do think that, like TNG, the middle seasons are the strongest). Unlike Voyager, there aren’t any characters that feel oddly pointless (Harry Kim) or just plain annoying (Neelix1). It has a much stronger sense of self than the later, strangely messy shows2, and that carries it through the odd rough patch.
The acting is also generally better than it had been on Trek up to that point. I have a theory that the overall quality of mainstream film and TV acting started to get a hell of a lot better in the ’90s but no theory as to why this is. Just look at how good someone like Michael B. Jordan is3 compared to the people we got starring in blockbuster films in the ’80s, for example; he absolutely blows away Stallone or Schwarzenegger or anyone else you care to name. DS9 may be an early example of that, bar a couple of performances which I’ll come to in a moment. Right from the start, Nana Visitor, René Auberjonois, Armin Shimerman and Colm Meaney4 (returning from TNG) are all excellent, as are recurring guest stars Andrew Robinson, Marc Alaimo, Louise Fletcher (who was, after all, an Oscar winning actress), Aron Eisenberg and Max Grodénchik5. Siddig el Fadil and Terry Farrell wobble early on, but both find their feet eventually, as the writers work out what they want to do with the characters and learn how to play to the actors’ strengths. Both also benefit later from being paired up with actors with whom they have great chemistry (respectively, Meaney and Michael Dorn, likewise returning from TNG, as Worf, from season 4 on), eventually getting some of the best episodes in the whole thing. Where the space station concept works well is in allowing them to have that strong recurring cast, who slowly build relationships with many of the regulars. The recurring guests introduced later on are also all fantastic: Casey Biggs, Jeffrey Combs and JG Hertzler6, in particular, are perfectly cast and routinely excellent.
The only major fly in the ointment as far as acting goes is Avery Brooks. I find him to be an utterly baffling actor, not least because I know that many people absolutely love him7, whereas my view of him is that he cannot act at all.
Now, look, I could hardly enjoy Star Trek if I couldn’t put up with the odd wooden performance. The problems with Brooks come not when he’s wooden, though he often is, but that almost every time he does emote, he’s bizarre. People often say he got better when he shaved his head and grew a beard and this is true – but we’re coming from a low base here. And his fundamental issues never went away. Look at his performance in the first episode, ‘Emissary’, where he over-reads the line ‘We just can’t leave her!’8 so much – and so badly – that it’s unintentionally hilarious. Compare this to his climatic scene with Gul Dukat in the very last episode, where he also overdoes the line ‘I am!‘ to similar effect. His much-vaunted performances in ‘Far Beyond the Stars’ and ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ have the exact same problems: whenever he tries to show a strong emotion, it’s overdone (as in ‘Stars’); when he tries to just get through a scene without a single strong emotion, whether that’s because it’s a paint by numbers scene or one where there’s meant to be an ambiguity, he’s wooden (as in ‘Moonlight’). All he really has going for him is a beautiful voice9, but this really isn’t enough. His performance in DS9 does not encourage me to seek out his other work, but perhaps he’s just woefully miscast as Sisko, or poorly directed, and really shines elsewhere.
No Gods, No Masters
I think some of the issues with Sisko are the fault of the writing, particularly his plot arc as the Emissary to the Prophets (Bajoran gods/wormhole aliens). Trying to examine religion in Star Trek was a good idea. After all, most of the world and most of the USA is still very religious. It’s long-established in the Trek universe that alien cultures have their own religious beliefs, even the hyper-logical Vulcans, including various prophets, gods and ceremonies. In our own culture, where it’s been obvious for centuries that an interventionist god doesn’t – indeed, cannot – exist, there are still a great many religious people, and it’s not at all clear that that should change by the time the 24th century rolls around10. Additionally, there have always been plenty of godlike beings in Star Trek, from Trelaine, to that thing that can’t explain what it wants with a starship, to Q. It makes sense to explore this aspect of humanity more deeply than can be done with a single episode or recurring character.
But is it well-handled in DS9? I don’t think so. The Bajorans see the Prophets as gods and their home, the wormhole to the Gamma quadrant, as the Celestial Temple. However… they’re wrong, aren’t they? The wormhole is a wormhole, not a temple, and the things that live in it really are just aliens without a linear sense of time. Kai Winn, Louise Fletcher’s character, is not wrong to argue in the final few episodes that the Prophets don’t seem actually to care very much (or at all) about Bajor, Bajorans or even their Emissary, Sisko, who they arbitrarily whisk away to live with them, he having apparently served his purpose on this corporeal plain by pushing Gul Dukat off a cliff11, forcing him to abandon his friends and family forever, for no reason.
The concept of a species that doesn’t experience or understand linear time is really interesting and also a very Star Trek kind of idea. There’s genuine interest and bathos in the idea that the Bajorans have been worshipping these entities that not only do not but cannot understand them at all; the Prophets don’t seem to know what time is until they meet Sisko and he explains it to them, which storngly suggests they’ve never seriously interacted with the Bajorans at all. But this interesting idea gradually falls away and the writers, out of nothing more than inertia, turn the Prophets into traditional ‘good’ gods, complete with some opposite, ‘evil’ fallen angel/fire demon types in the form of the Pah Wraiths (who want to set the entire universe on fire, for some reason, but can’t, for some reason).12 This of course sticks the writers with a fictional version of the problem of evil13. In the real world, the solution to the problem of evil is that God isn’t real. In Deep Space 9, the gods/Prophets are real, and so the problem of evil cannot be solved. They’re just totally useless as gods.
The interesting notion of the uncaring not-actually-gods is undermined further whenever the Prophets act more like ‘traditional’ gods with an interest in Bajor, which they do more and more as the series goes on, culminating in the revelation that ‘the Sisko’ is a Jesus analogue who the Prophets actually created in order to fulfill the destined destruction of Gul Dukat and the Kosst Amojan14, both of which again, just fall off a cliff. Why do they need a special magic man to do the job of pushing a book and a person off a cliff? Anyone can push someone off a cliff. And why didn’t they just tell Sisko – or, again, anyone, really – to destroy the book at any given time in history? This book, the origins of which are never explained, is totally useless. Literally all it can do is release the Pah Wraiths (and thus destroy the universe15) and make Gul Dukat go blind, so why can’t an immortal, non-linear race of aliens who can speak to anyone at any time using psychic alien powers just tell someone to chuck it into a warp engine or out of an airlock? Or not write it?
Because gods move in mysterious ways!
This is not actually an acceptable argument in real life. It’s a clever-sounding way of saying ‘I don’t know’ and also a major reason we know that this type of god doesn’t exist: history unfolds in a way completely indistinguishable from random chance because that is, in fact, what is happening. You don’t need a guiding intelligence to the universe to make statistical chance happen16. However, this is a still more unsatisfying answer in narrative fiction. ‘Things just happen all the time for no particular reason’ is not a story.
The end result is that the conclusion to Sisko’s arc is unsatisfying. We’re presented with this guy who is a dedicated family man, who feels a bit ambivalent about his career in Starfleet and is considering the possibility that he may have to drop his career to be a good father to his son. He then has a third role, of Emissary to some annoying aliens, thrust upon him. He gradually comes to embrace all three of these identities and find some sort of peace and equilibrium within himself – only to then very suddenly abandon both career and family because a not very competent god told him to, for no reason that we’re ever given. This is annoying writing. It might even have been better to leave it totally ambiguous as to whether he died in the Fire Caves rather than insisting there was some reason that he just can’t tell Kassidy (or us). And he doesn’t speak to poor old Jake at all!
So, I find it difficult to sing unqualified praise for a series where the main character and his arc are both flawed as written and executed badly onscreen.
Moral grey areas
DS9 has also been much-praised for introducing moral ambiguity into the Star Trek universe. This is very welcome in the character of Kira Nerys, a former terrorist who now finds herself in a position of authority as chief representative on DS9 of the Bajoran provisional government. She’s gone from leader of a terrorist cell, carrying out bombings, sabotage and assassinations, to an army major. This outsider to insider journey makes her different from previous Trek characters. She’s the first really good female role the series had17 and provides a fascinating point of contrast to the upstanding citizens of the Federation, most of them male, that we’d seen up to this point. She’s deeply religious, a warrior, frequently (and understandably) angry about both the past and the present. The show neither blames her for having been a terrorist but nor does it ever entirely let her off the hook. Right up to the end, she’s explaining to people who would quite like to kill her that they are going to have to kill their own people if they want to win a revolution. It’s intense and difficult, but also difficult to argue with: after all, she’s right and it largely works (and, in a neat twist, the person who most objects to the idea of killing his own people in the name of the revolution is later killed, in the name of the revolution, by one of his own). Kira never apologises for her actions in the Resistance and never forgives the Cardassians as a group, although she works with them when she has to. Her arc works through never entirely resolving the ambiguity of her position. By series’ end, she’s had one last successful go as a terrorist, ironically fighting for the people who oppressed her planet for so many years, before she returns to Deep Space 9 as the commanding officer, but still outside of Starfleet and the Federation.
Kira really hits the ground running as a character. The first really stunning episode of the show is episode 19, ‘Duet’, which I don’t think the show topped till ‘The Visitor’ (more on which later). Kira meets a man she thinks is a war criminal, but who insists he isn’t. I don’t actually want to spoil the plot of this episode. You really should just watch it. It’s really impressive that DS9 delivers an all-time great episode so early on in its run.
Likewise, Odo is a great character. He’s a variation on a key Trek trope, the alien outsider who doesn’t fully understand the human (and Bajoran, Ferengi and Cardassian) people he lives among, but wishes to understand them better, and to be like them in key ways. In TOS and TNG, this role was taken by Spock and Data, who became the most beloved characters on their shows,18 so Auberjonois has some big Beatles boots to fill. The variation the writers came up with is of an alien who is not only living among aliens, but also not in his ‘natural’ state physically: he’s a shapeshifter, a species that doesn’t have a single form and spends most of its time linked to some indeterminately massive number of its fellows in a gigantic ocean of sapient goo, known as ‘the Great Link’, located on the other side of the Galaxy. Just as Spock and Data relied on abstract non-emotional frameworks to guide them (logic and a broadly defined positivism), Odo relies on justice. When he finally meets his fellow Changelings, he soon discovers they’re a race of imperialistic genocidaires, so that his sense of justice forces him to reject them. Again, the series maintains this ambiguity throughout: he recognises both that he can never truly be himself on Deep Space 9, among ‘solids’, out of his natural state, but that he also cannot be himself if he joins the Great Link while they’re still pursuing a war, because that would violate his sense of justice.
Like Kira, Odo came of age in the show’s ‘past’ during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. He likewise had a morally ambiguous role as a sort of police officer on the station, trying to find some balance between the violent, oppressive ‘justice’ of the Cardassians and his own still-evolving ideas of what justice should involve. As we see in various flashbacks, he didn’t always succeed but, as the show also makes clear, it would’ve been impossible for him to achieve justice while working with the Cardassians. As with Kira, the show makes it clear that he could have behaved differently, but never comes down on one side or the other as to whether or what he should have done.
In Odo’s case, his arc ends in a satisfying way, because the contradiction that animates him isn’t actually internal or inherent to him; once the external issue of the war goes away, he’s able to rejoin the Link. It’s still a wrench for him, because he has to leave Kira, but it makes sense: the idea of romantic love was something he’d learned from the Solids, so it’s something he’s able to leave behind.
Shades of… black? Evil? What do you call this colour? War crime grey?
Where the moral grey areas don’t work is when the writers try to create them within the Federation itself. At their absolute worst, major characters are simply allowed to commit crimes – serious crimes – that they get away with when the status quo is restored at the end of the episode. There are three particularly egregious examples of this.
The first is with Jadzia Dax, during one of her early pre-Worf episodes in which Farrell very much fails to give the impression that she’s several hundred years old. Dax goes on a mission of vengeance with a group of Klingons, so she’s party to what, in the Federation, is clearly murder, but to the Klingons is justified as part of a blood feud. Sisko explicitly warns her not to do it. She does it anyway. It’s obviously murder, but her entire comeuppance is that Sisko gives her an annoyed look when she comes back to the station. That’s it. Is this really Starfleet’s attitude to officers violating a direct order in order to take part in a – successful! – conspiracy to murder someone?
Apparently it is! Because, much later, Worf and Dax go on holiday to Risa, the sex pleasure planet. Worf decides that he doesn’t like sex pleasure, so he joins a group of terrorists for the weekend. Again, he is simply allowed to get away with this. Perhaps remembering that she also went on a terrorism-themed jolly once, Dax doesn’t even break up with him. Nobody ever raises the time Worf joined a terrorist organisation for a bit.
Starfleet’s shockingly lax attitude to criminality in its officers continues, however. in ‘For the Uniform’, when Sisko is faced with a (different) terrorist group, the Maquis, he responds by, I’m not kidding, committing an act of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing, by poisoning a planet’s atmosphere in such a way that it won’t be able to support humans (or similar) for fifty years. This is, unambiguously, a war crime and a crime against humanity. Having done this, with scarcely a single objection from the crew, he threatens to do it several more times unless the Maquis surrender. By the end of the episode, everyone’s laughing about it.
In a lot of the writing about DS9, it seems to be assumed that the society depicted in the earlier series was a morally unambiguous utopia. However, this is not the case at all and it’s honestly quite odd that anyone thinks so. Apart from the many times the Federation is nearly destroyed by conspiracy or invasion, some of the most celebrated episodes in TOS and TNG depict the Federation, Starfleet and the people within it as deeply flawed characters, who force our heroes into uncomfortable situations. ‘The Doomsday Machine’ sees the crew having to survive when they’re given suicidal orders by a revenge-obsessed captain, for example, and Kirk frequently cheats, bluffs and lies when he has to, including to his superior officers. His senior staff spend the entire time bickering and McCoy is kind of a racist. Utopia?
‘The Measure of a Man’, one of the most celebrated TNG episodes sees the Federation threatening to dismantle Data, potentially killing him in the process, because they think it might be useful to do so. Data has to go through an entire trial to prove to the Federation that he exists. Riker’s forced to act as the prosecution for his friend. Okay, Data and Picard win in the end, but ‘proving you have the right not to be dismantled simply because it seems like it might be convenient to dismantle you’ is hardly the stuff of utopia, is it?
‘The Measure of a Man’ is a perfect example of what makes for a good exploration of ethics in Star Trek (and sci-fi more broadly). It needs to take a moral issue that is not a solved issue, then add a sci-fi element. So, the questions in ‘The Measure of a Man’ are, What does society owe to the individual (and vice-versa)? (A moral issue we haven’t solved, hence the existence of democratic politics); and, Do androids count as individuals with rights? (which is, of course, the sci-fi element). In the episode, we as the audience naturally side with Data, because we know him. But the points made by Bruce Maddox (and by Riker, acting for the prosecution), are valid. Data is a machine. It would be really useful to have a Data on every ship in Starfleet. Where they collapse is in the fact that Data is a machine who can express real views about himself, and he does not want to be dismantled.
In Star Trek: Insurrection, there’s a similar situation in that Starfleet wants to do something and the crew of the Enterprise want to stop them. The reason it works much less well than ‘The Measure of the Man’ is that, while it has the sci-fi element (a mysterious anti-aging energy), the thing Starfleet wants to do is just wrong and it is a solved moral question: it is never okay to forcibly displace an entire population19 (are you listening, Captain Sisko?). We know this is the case, and so we know there’s absolutely no question that Picard and co. will refuse to help the Federation do such a thing once they know that’s what’s happening and, indeed, that they will turn against Starfleet if they have to, in order to prevent it, which they duly do.
Back to ‘For the Uniform’: Sisko decides that he’s going to poison a planet in order to commit ethnic cleansing (displacing the humans and Bajorans so that Cardassians, who aren’t susceptible to that posion, can move in). This is a crime. The sci-fi element isn’t really interesting. It’s not significantly different from using a hypothetical dirty bomb to make an area radioactive. So this episode fails both tests: a solved ethical problem and a sci-fi element that’s not different or interesting enough from what we have in the present, non-fictional world.
It also demonstrates what’s wrong with much of the ‘grey’ morality of DS9. Committing a crime against humanity isn’t morally ambiguous, it’s evil! There isn’t any question about this, that’s just what those words mean. People like to go on about how Janeway murders Tuvix in Voyager, but for some reason Sisko is let completely off the hook here by the fanbase and, indeed, by Starfleet and the Federation, when in fact he should’ve been tried at whatever the Federation’s version of the Hague is.
Another area where DS9 had a negative impact on the series was the introduction of Section 31,20 which is a branch of the Federation that does ‘morally ambiguous’ (again, read: evil) things, apparently without any kind of oversight or approval from the government. This kind of organisation is a dreadful, nonsensical fictional trope. Invariably it’s an excuse for writers to have a group of villains who just do whatever they like with no restrictions whether physical or logical, until the writers get bored and suddenly it turns out they can be stopped21. In the case of DS9, the writers team once again use Section 31 to make what they consider to be an ambiguous argument which in fact boils down to ‘Atrocities are okay when the good guys do them’ and, again, there’s no sense in which this is ambiguous, it’s just false and wrong.
Worse, with Section 31 in particular, it’s just lazy writing. The organisation is absurdly overpowered, with its agents able to walk into rooms without anyone seeing them (until the plot deems that it’s time for them to magically appear) or, equally, to spirit people away without their noticing. Even in a universe with near-infinite resources, it’s impossible not to wonder just how Section 31 gets so many, e.g., spaceships, without anyone questioning what’s going on. Plus, the main characters frequently plaintively ask each other how they can finally ‘reveal’ what Section 31 is up to, without ever considering that the sworn testimony of numerous high-ranking Starfleet Officers, not to mention the evidence of all the corpses lying all over the place or the fact that they’ve literally caught Luther Sloan, he’s right there! – might actually be enough to reveal everything.
But apart from all that…
Despite silly elements like Section 31 and the Pah Wraiths, the show is generally good or even great. Those things are in few enough episodes that I can mostly ignore them and there’s just so much to like that even the regrettable choice of Brooks doesn’t wreck the show.
One episode, in particular, is not only one of the best Star Trek stories but I think one of the greatest works of SFF ever written: ‘The Visitor’ from season 4. I strongly advise you to go and watch this if you haven’t but, in brief, the plot is that Sisko is killed in an accident, leaving Jake an orphan. However, Sisko begins to reappear at brief intervals, first weeks and then years apart, throughout Jake’s life, as a sort of ghost. For Sisko, time doesn’t pass at all between the intervals: he remains the same age while Jake gets older. Thus, eventually, Sisko sees his son as an adult, then an old man – older than Sisko himself. After several failed attempts to bring Sisko back, Jake realises the only way to save him is to commit suicide at the right moment; that this will allow Sisko to return to the time of the accident, and avoid it. The right moment, of course, turns out to be a time when Sisko is there, with Jake, so that Sisko cradles an old man who is also his son in his arms as he dies in order to save him. It’s absolutely stunning.
Brooks, for once, doesn’t overdo it, completely selling this impossible situation. Tony Todd22, as the older Jake, is also fantastic, as is Cirroc Lofton in his regular role as the Jake we know. The reason, though, that it’s such great SFF is that it creates a real, human story that could only be told with some sort of fantastic element (in this case the ‘temporal displacement’ that takes Sisko out of time). You could achieve the broad outline in a couple of ways, but never in a ‘realistic’ plot. Yet, you feel the entire thing as a real human being: Jake’s bereavement at losing his father, the impossible hope when he apparently returns, only to devastatingly vanish again, then Sisko’s sense of loss at his son’s death (even though he understands that this will allow him to live, with his son, again). It’s brilliantly, brilliantly done. You don’t often get a piece of fiction that not only works in itself but singlehandedly justifies23 the existence of an entire genre.
Deep Space 9 is mostly good and, when everything comes together, very good. It proved that you could do Star Trek without a ship called the Enterprise and that you could almost do it without having a ship at all. It increased the alien quotient in the show, finally delivered some really good roles for women and even had a kid in it who wasn’t annoying. I think overall it’s not quite as good as TNG was when it really got going, although you could persuasively argue that it’s average was better. I also think I still prefer the generally under-rated Star Trek: Voyager, though I’ll get back to you about that when I’ve finished watching it.
Book reviews
Queen Macbeth, by Val McDermid
This is a reasonably workmanlike book. It’s not really a re-telling of Shakespeare’s play; rather, it goes back to the source materal and re-tells that. I’m not sure I find Gruoch more compelling or even necessarily more sympathetic than Lady Macbeth, though. Fun fact of the day: While we all call her ‘Lady Macbeth’ and most modern editions of the play give this name in the stage directions, she’s never referred to as such in the First Folio, the only authentic text of Macbeth: she’s referred to simply as ‘His Lady’ and then just ‘Lady’. So, McDermid does her some justice by giving her her name back.
The Malcontent, by John Marston
One of the first tragicomedies, an entertainingly twisty turny play with a fun bit of metatheatre at the beginning, featuring Shakespeare’s pals Richard Burbage (‘Burbadge’ here), Henry Condell (co-editor of the First Folio) and William Sly arguing with each other and the audience. Still, oddly, feels pleasantly surprising when the tragic-seeming play ends happily. I imagine the first audiences were blown away.
Utopia, by Thomas More
Speaking of utopias (utopiae?), I also read the original this month. As David Wittenberg argues in The Philosophy of Time Travel, it’s to later utopian fiction that we owe the concept of time travel. Once there were no new lands to discover, utopian authors had to locate their societies elsewhere in time not, as More and later Swift, parodying the genre, did, on far-flung islands. Being both a hit in Shakespeare’s day and a predecessor to the time travel story, this ticks a lot of boxes for me.
What I found most interesting about it is that More’s Utopia is so similar to the various socialist/communist utopias people have come up with afterwards and also quite similar, mostly knowingly, to Plato’s Republic. I can’t tell if this is because we’re all so collectively unimaginative we can’t come up with anything new or if it just is the case that ‘some sort of communism [that works (somehow)]’ really would be the best way for humans to live. Anyway, it’s an interesting, fairly brief read, well worth the little time it takes to read it.
- With apologies to Ethan Phillips, who I think is a fine actor working with mostly terrible material. My strongest evidence for this is the episode ‘Mortal Coil’ (S4E12), where he gives a fantastic performance making one of Voyager‘s best episodes. ↩︎
- The strongest of which are Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Lower Decks knows that it’s a funny show about Star Trek and Strange New Worlds knows it’s a straight-ahead Star Trek about exploring. Discovery, however, starts off thinking it’s an anthology show, then becomes a show about Michael Burnham, then a show about found family (where we never get to know most of the family), then a show about a dystopian version of the Federation, etc. Star Trek: Picard thinks it’s a nostalgia show but spends season 1 stamping on everyone’s nostalgia (Hugh’s back! Okay, he’s dead now. Also, everyone hates Jean-Luc Picard, now, implausibly. And I bet you thought Riker and Troi would live happily ever after, right? Well, they did until their kid died, fuck you). In season 2 it gets even weirder before, finally, in season 3, giving everyone what they wanted in the first place and doing a nostalgia show but with an incredibly nonsensical plotline in which, at one point, someone gets assimilated by the Borg until someone talks them out of it. It’s a mess, is what I’m saying. Still, at least they brought back the theme music (eventually). ↩︎
- I wrote this sentence before he won the Academy Award the other day, but it does help my point. ↩︎
- As Major (later Colonel) Kira Nerys, ‘Constable’ Odo, Quark and Chief Miles O’Brien. ↩︎
- As Garak, Gul Dukat, Vedek (later Kai) Winn Adami, Nog and Rom. ↩︎
- As Damar, Weyon and Brunt, and General (later Chancellor) Martok. ↩︎
- The Star Trek: Starfleet Academy producers let Tawny Newsome write an episode that was just an hour-long tribute to him! And it was really good! (It did not make sense but this is Star Trek we’re talking about.) ↩︎
- Another oddity of either the actor or the character is that he always partially reverses the word order in this form of sentence, saying ‘we just can’t’ instead of ‘we can’t just’ every time. ↩︎
- I read somewhere that they planned to have an opening narration in the style of the famous ‘Space: the final frontier’ speech(es), but couldn’t come up with anything good enough in time. It’s kind of a shame because there’s no doubt that Brooks would’ve sounded fantastic doing this. ↩︎
- Out of scope, but I’m inclined to think we’re trending that way. However, trends don’t necessarily continue. ↩︎
- This kind of thing happens all the time in SFF, but it still annoys me: Gul Dukat in this scene has telekinetic powers and is able to kill Winn by waving at her, but then he dies because Sisko pushes him. Come on. Okay, he pushes him into a big fire, but he’s a fire demon who has already been shown to come back from the dead in this scene. Why does this kill him? ↩︎
- The reason we know the Pah Wraiths are baddies is that when they possess people, their eyes go all red and scary. It’s just so lazy. Why not at least make them ice demons or something? ↩︎
- Simply: if God is real and good, why did He create a world with evil in it? ↩︎
- It’s a magic book, don’t worry about it. ↩︎
- Of course, once they are released, instead of immediately destroying the universe they just spend several minutes hanging around in a cave, waiting for Sisko to show up so he can shove them. ↩︎
- I’m phrasing this carefully because strictly speaking it’s possible to argue that some sort of intelligence set up the universe from outside it and to argue that said intelligence may therefore have had some sort of aim in mind. However, that is all you can say about it and you’re already saying ‘may’. ↩︎
- Role, note, not actor. Nichelle Nichols, Denise Crosby, Marina Sirtis and Gates McFadden were never given very much to do or, as especially in Sirtis’ case, the stuff they were given to do was just silly (‘Captain, I feel this alien, the one screaming at us, is upset about something’). ↩︎
- Well, probably. We all love Kirk and Picard, too, obviously, and most of both casts have their fans. They’re great shows! They have lots of great chaacters! ↩︎
- That such things still occur isn’t relevant to my point. The people who do these things know it’s wrong, which is why they variously pretend they’re not doing it, or that they’re not doing it by force, or that those other people have it coming, or they, the perpetrators, were there first, so it’s self-defence, or some other such nonsense. You don’t need to invent justifications like this for things that are morally right, so if you are saying such things, that’s a clue that you’re doing something wrong. ↩︎
- Which was already a bad idea before the terrible Star Trek: Section 31 film, though I’d like to thank the producers of that film for helping me prosecute this argument. ↩︎
- The worst/best of these is in the show Scandal where there turns out to be some secret government agency that goes around murdering people and making speeches about how unstoppable they are. Eventually, the main characters go, ‘Hey, what if we just shoot them?’ and it works. ↩︎
- In an odd, sad coincidence, Todd died the day after I watched this episode. He also played Worf’s brother, Kurn. ↩︎
- I don’t think it needs justifying and, if you’ve read this far, nor do you do; but you and me ain’t everyone. ↩︎
-
12 apostołów Trumpa
W gronie republikańskich polityków, celebrytów i bonzów high tech, którzy orbitują wokół Trumpa, uwagę przykuwa kilkanaście postaci. Są wpływowe i głośne. A może hałaśliwe? Listę sporządził Rolling Stone, opatrując jednoznacznym tytułem: „The 12 Worst People in Trump’s Orbit.”
Kto jest no.1 na liście? Bez zaskoczeń: Elon Musk. Dla ekscentrycznego miliardera (przesiaduje w posiadłości Trumpa doglądając rekrutacji nowych urzędników administracji Białego Domu) ważniejsza od zahamowania zmian klimatu jest kolonizacja Marsa – taki cel na wyciągnięcie ręki. Muskowi głowę zaprząta to, w jaki sposób powstrzymać dominację „woke culture”. A sen z powiek spędza niska dzietność Amerykanów i zalew nielegalnej emigracji, która ma być na rękę Demokratom (knują jak pomnożyć przychylny sobie elektorat). Elon Musk jest pewien swojej wyjątkowości: męskość i intelekt idą pod rękę z bogactwem i płodnością. Swoją płodność postrzega jako wzorzec godny naśladowania. Latem zdementował medialne pogłoski, że rozważa wysłanie swojej spermy na Marsa w ramach kolonizacji czerwonej planety.
O Stephanie Millerze mało kto w Polsce słyszał. To spec od czarnej migracyjnej roboty. W pierwszej kadencji Trumpa wpadł na pomysł rozdzielania rodzin na granicy i osadzania dzieci w specjalnych ośrodkach. Optował wówczas za (później odrzuconym sądowo) prezydenckim rozporządzeniem o zakazie wpuszczania do USA obywateli krajów islamskich. Ciekawe z czym teraz wyskoczy.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr to z kolei czarna owca i zakała rodu, od której wyskoków i politycznych afiliacji, odżegnują się krewni, członkowie słynnej dynastii. Robert Junior zasłynął, uwiarygadniając – swoim nazwiskiem – brednie o masowej kontroli populacji i szkodliwości szczepionek oraz fluoru dodawanego do wody. Chełpił się, że nosił w głowie robaka i że jest tym gościem, który porzucił martwego niedźwiadka w Central Parku. Chodzą słuchy, że za poparcie udzielone Trumpowi, ten skieruje go na „front polityki zdrowotnej”. Może być zabawnie, byle nie ze szkodą dla publicznego zdrowia i resztek rozsądku.
Potencjalnym kandydatem na prokuratora generalnego ma być człowiek, który groził „zemstą” politycznym wrogom Trumpa. Mike Davis nie trzyma języka za zębami. Po wygranej bosa wyraził „oburzenie” i zagroził zemstą na „wrogach” Trumpa. Wyrwało mu się, że „chciałby ciągnąć ich polityczne truchła po ulicy i zrzucić z muru”. Potem doprecyzował, że miał na myśli „finansowe, prawne i polityczne” konsekwencje. Ciekawy człowiek.
Z twardego krytyka przeobraził się w kompana na wyborczych objazdowych wiecach i przyszłego wice. Senatora J.D. Vance spopularyzowały nie tylko wspólne zdjęcia z Trumpem, co oryginalne wypowiedzi o „bezdzietnych kociarach” i twierdzenie, że „Soros zachęca kobiety do aborcji.” Gdy po necie rozlewały się miejskie legendy o Haitańczykach buszujących po suburbach i zjadających psy i koty, Vance nie prostował kłamstw. To były kłamstwa skuteczne – przysłużyły się kampanii wyborczej, więc dlaczego miałby je dementować? Skuteczne kłamstwa i skuteczny polityk. Wzór do naśladowania.
Laura Loomer paraduje z dumą po internecie ze sztandarem politycznej aktywistki i ambasadorki agendy Trumpa. Jej tyrady, peany, deklaracje i gesty bywały ostatnio kłopotliwe dla idola. Trump musiał się od nich publicznie zdystansować. Odstraszały umiarkowanych. Teraz mogą pomóc w konsolidowaniu poparcia wsród internetowego radykalnego audytorium Looomer, a ono jest bardzo liczne i wiecznie pobudzone na różnych formach, grupach i serwisach. Właściwie wszystko o czym mówi Laura obraca się wokół rozmaitych teorii spiskowych i podszyte jest rasizmem. Doprecyzowując brednie o zjadaniu domowych zwierzaków ogłosiła, że sprawcami jest 20 tys. Haitańczyków żyjących w Ohio. Konkret.
Czy mamy swoje Fox News nad Wisłą? Za takie pewnie uważa się TV Republika. Nie mam za to rodzimego Tuckera Carlsona. To konserwatywny popularny publicysta, który po odejściu z Fox przeprowadził dworski wywiad z Putinem i piał z zachwytu nad asortymentem moskiewskiego sklepu. Były komentator Fox News jest doradcą Trumpa. Widocznie Carlson ma wiele mądrości do przekazania przyszłemu prezydentowi (wait, Trump pewnie uważa, że nigdy nim być nie przestał, wszak wybory zostały sfałszowane). Jedna z carlsonowskich mądrości sprowadza się do twierdzenia, że huragany nękające USA to kara za aborcje.
O kim warto wspomnieć? Z 12-tki wybija się Russel Vought – konserwatysta chrześcijański ze smykałką do radykalnych planów, od których nawet niektórym republikanom stają włosy na głowie. Vought współtworzył Projekt 2025, który zakładał masową rekrutację armii nowych urzędników, którzy posprzątają do Demokratach i Bidenie. Facetowi marzyła się anihilacja federalnych agencji. Tak ciepło myślał o wojsku, że optował za użyciem armii do tłumienia ulicznych protestów. W 2022 roku ogłosił, że „Amerykanie żyją w okresie postkonstytucyjnym”. Mamy rok 2024. Kolejne 4 lata rządów Donalda Trumpa przed nami, więc do końca nie wiadomo, czy Vought przypadkiem nie pośpieszył się z diagnozą.
-
By David Tuller, DrPH
Last week, I spoke with George Monbiot, a British investigative reporter and political activist, who has been a columnist for The Guardian for almost 30 years. He and I have been in occasional communication in recent years over an issue of mutual interest—the scandalous mistreatment of patients suffering from the devastating illness (or cluster of illnesses) known as ME/CFS and, more recently, from Long Covid.
For years, I have been hoping that a prominent British journalist would take on the charlatans who foisted the fraudulent PACE trial upon an unsuspecting public. Last month, Monbiot gratified that desire with a scathing column that correctly characterized the treatment of ME/CFS patients as a “national scandal.” (I blogged about the column here.) As he explains, his interest in the issue was largely prompted by the actions of PACE investigator Professor Michael Sharpe. Three years ago, at an insurance industry gather organized by Swiss Re, Professor Sharpe essentially blamed Monbiot for triggering patient reports of Long Covid by having written about it. (Monbiot’s initial 2021 column on Long Covid is here, and his response to Professor Sharpe ridiculous criticism is here; my blog about the contretemps is here.)
I posted the video of our conversation here. Below I have included a transcript, which I’ve edited for clarity and readability.
**********
DT: Hi, so I’m here with George Monbiot. I’m very tickled to be having a conversation with you. Thank you so much for joining me to discuss this. You wrote a column in The Guardian earlier this year that got a lot of attention and was basically about the sad history of ME/CFS and the research into it and what’s happened. Why don’t you discuss first how you even got into this issue.
GM: Thank you, David, and first I’d like to say thanks so much for your sterling work, which has been a great influence for me and has been very useful in summarizing a lot of the issues, which for journalists like me is absolutely crucial. You know, I try to do as deep a reading as I possibly can, but it’s also really great to have someone laying it out and saying, ‘Here is the situation as it stands.’ And I think you do that fantastically well.
DT: Thank you.
GM: So I first became interested in the issue of ME/CFS as a result of my interest in the issue of Long Covid, and that started as a personal thing. I had what is technically defined as Long Covid in that I had severe symptoms for 14 weeks. I mean, it’s nothing by comparison to what so many people have suffered, but it was a very frightening time because it made me wonder if I was ever going to get out of it. For 14 weeks, I couldn’t walk to the end of the road, and I thought, ‘Is this going to be my life?’ Because as we know it now seems to be the life of many Long Covid sufferers, to have that and even worse.
And then it became clear to me that there are certain aspects of Long Covid that are strikingly similar to certain aspects of ME/CFS. And so I wrote a couple of articles about my interest in Long Covid and what it might do, and about how, through government neglect and a failure to engage with the real long-lasting impacts that Covid can have, we were creating a mass disabling event by allowing it to rage through populations. Following that strand, it became clear to me that there had been massive neglect of Long Covid patients but also of ME/CFS patients.
And I wrote an article about this, and about how poorly both groups have been served by governments and by the medical establishment, and how much more research and investment is required to properly meet the needs of these groups. And this extraordinary thing happened, which was that I found myself featured in a presentation by this man called Professor Michael Sharpe. It was a presentation at a meeting organized by Swiss Re, this huge reinsurance company with a very major interest in medical issues because of all the health insurance payments that need to be made, particularly for chronic medical issues. That can be very expensive for health insurers.
And in this presentation, Michael Sharpe blamed me for causing Long Covid and potentially ME/CFS–that I was causing it by talking about it. I was sort of bringing it into existence by discussing the phenomenon. This made me very worried, because I thought, ‘Well, you know, if I can do that with Long Covid, if I can create it by talking about it, maybe I’ve been doing this with all the other issues I’ve been writing about.’ I mean, you know, perhaps environmental collapse is my fault, that by spending 39 years writing about environmental collapse I’ve actually precipitated it. And the hideous thought arose that I might have caused more suffering than the entire cast of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Anyway, so I was gobsmacked by this.
DT: He was essentially calling you a super-spreader.
GM: Exactly. He called me a super-spreader of Long Covid by talking about it. I thought, ‘How do you create Long Covid by talking about it?’ And for me, that opened up Pandora’s Box. It was a discovery for me of this remarkable school of thought that Sharpe represents of the ‘biopsychosocial’ model, which is effectively saying that these devastating chronic illnesses are all in the mind that these are hypochondriacs, these are people who are imagining they’re ill, and people like me are encouraging them to imagine they’re ill, and that these aren’t physiological conditions, which seemed to fly in the face of everything I was learning about both of these sets of conditions.
DT: And learning from your own experience as well.
GM: Yes, exactly, frm my own experience. Like everybody suffering from those conditions, the one thing I wanted above everything else was to get better. You know, I wasn’t willing myself into that state. I was doing all the things which might have helped me to get out of it. Though basically it was just a question of sitting and waiting. That really was the only thing which was going to get me better. And all the sort of things which might intuitively make sense, like ‘I’ve got to push past it, I’ve got to exercise my way out of it.’ Far from helping, that actually makes you a lot worse, so I was very careful not to do that because I’d been reading a bit of the proper science on this subject.
DT: These people seem to have the idea that millions of people around the world want nothing more in life than to lie in bed and fulfill their ‘sick role’ and that they don’t want to get better. It’s kind of an extraordinary notion. .
GM: Well, this was what struck me more than anything, and the utter cruelty and ignorance of the position. Not least because I’ve got a couple of good friends who suffer from ME/CFS, and both of them were super active before they were struck by this illness. They were very dynamic, energetic people who had so much to offer and were doing great creative things. Actually, both of them were authors, but they did lots of other things as well, and they had these visions of all the things they wanted to achieve. And then—bam!–this condition hits them and they can’t do that stuff, and the despair they experience as a result of that is off the scale.
As you’ll be aware, there’s one study of the conditions of the life of people with ME/CFS, and by comparison to people with stage four lung cancer. And the people with stage four lung cancer have a higher quality of life than people with severe ME/CFS. They’re really saying that’s what people subconsciously want. They have this whole idea that you’d get better if you wanted to. In my article, I quoted something you’ve picked up on—a nurse in one medical paper saying “the bastards just don’t want to get better.” That is so far from my experience and the experience of my friends.
DM: So just to clarify–that’s a quote from a qualitative study of the people involved in delivering the intervention to very severely impacted patients. And so when they did this qualitative study, one of the quotes was that really astounding one blaming the patients explicitly for not wanting to get better.
GM: Yeah, it’s so scandalous. It’s the sort of thing you would expect in the 19th century. In 19th-century medicine, so much of it was about blaming the patient, about the underclass being inherently unhealthy. There were all these horrible prejudices, particularly in psychiatric medicine. And to see those now still surviving in the 21st century and some of the people promoting that idea getting all these honours and positions and chairs and government posts and all the rest of it, and you think, ‘This is crazy.’ I mean, what the hell is going on here?
And it seems to me that what is going on is that they tell a very convenient story, particularly for governments who don’t want to pay big welfare bills, who don’t want to be supporting people with long-term conditions–people who just can’t work. They cannot support themselves economically because their condition forbids it. It’s very much in the interest of government to deny that and to try to push them off the benefits rolls, and to ensure that they have to somehow fend for themselves. And so it seems that people who tell this completely false and highly misleading story make themselves very popular with governments even if there is no factual basis for what they’re saying.
DT: Well, one of the things that’s kept me interested in this is that this the research is so bad. We don’t really need to talk about the PACE trial, but let’s just say it’s really, I think, a fraudulent piece of work, but one that was published by The Lancet and accepted at the highest levels in the UK and in the US, too—I don’t want to exclude my own country. This was accepted as quality work, even though it’s been used in epidemiology classes at Berkeley as a case study of horrible research. So it’s extraordinary to me that this emperor-has-no-clothes mentality seems to have infiltrated the entire academic, medical, and government structures of the UK. I find it completely mind-boggling.
GM: In general, I’m a great supporter of science. I feel that empiricism is absolutely essential. In fact, we see far too little of it in society and we see far too little in the environmental movement, which is my main focus. Often we’re swayed by wishful thinking rather than by actual facts and numbers and research findings. The evidence should guide our moral reasoning, but I’m also aware that in many fields the evidence has been twisted, distorted, deliberately pushed in a particular direction by commercial imperatives or by political imperatives. And we’ve seen a long history within science of false results or false findings driven by commercial or political interests.
It’s a very dishonourable history and it’s one that all good scientists seek to distance themselves from. And it’s not to diss the principles of science, and it’s not to diss the importance of science, to say that sometimes science is done very badly. And sometimes something being done very badly is not just a simple mistake. It can be consciously or unconsciously as a result of certain pressures, and in this case it’s clear that science has been done spectacularly badly and continues by some people to be done spectacularly badly, and it gets harder and harder to see that as an honest mistake.
DT: So this brings us perhaps to the role of the Science Media Centre in London in disseminating this perspective, and the journalists who parrot the Science Media Centre line as it has been on this. You previously had looked at the Science Media Centre many years ago, and I don’t know how much you’ve looked yet at their role in this particular instance. But I’m curious how you see their role in all this.
GM: It’s an extraordinary thing that the Science Media Centre is treated as a respectable organization, even as part of the establishment. But they arose from this utterly bizarre group called the Revolutionary Communist Party, which was founded in the late 1970s at the University of Kent by a group of people centred around a man called Frank Furedi, a teacher at the University of Kent who’s now working for Victor Orban, the Hungarian far-right autocrat. This was always a far-right movement which very cleverly disguised itself as a Communist movement. It’s a really bizarre, weird 1970s group but with a history of endless splits and internal side warfare. But they hit gold when they realized that they could smuggle this sort of far-right agenda into the left simply by saying, ‘We belong to the left, we’re Communists.’ And it caused utter chaos and confusion on the left and was highly effective at disrupting and disturbing left movements.
It’s a sort of devious tactic that Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings and people like that have gone on to develop. These far-right figures have finally come home to roost in their far-right places. One of the leading lights of it was Claire Fox, who became a Brexit party MEP for Nigel Farage’s party and was eventually put into the House of Lords by Boris Johnson as a Conservative lord on the advice of his special advisor Munira Murza,
who is another member of the same network
DT: Claire Fox’s sister, of course, Fiona Fox, was the long-time head of the Science Media Centre.
GM: Yes, she co-founded it, and so this group took over almost all the infrastructure of science communication in the UK. It was an extraordinary thing, this remarkable coup—a whole series of groups, like Sense about Science, that they took over, which clearly to me was a concerted program. They recognized that this interface between science and media was going to be absolutely crucial in determining how we see ourselves and in the political direction that the country takes.
Now a big part of the ideology of the Revolutionary Communist Party, this far-right organization, was extreme individuation of blame and responsibility. You know, there’s no such thing as a social failing, there’s no such thing as a structural failing, a systemic failing, a state failing. It’s all about you–if something goes wrong, it’s your fault, and you and you alone have to pick up the pieces. They quite overtly at times said, ‘We should get away from this whole idea of there being victims, there’s no such thing as a victim, this is just a myth created by these do-gooding liberals, and you’re basically on your own and that’s how you should be.’
And this was a guiding ideology behind the foundation of the Science Media Centre. But if there’s one group of massive suckers in the world, and I say this as a journalist, it’s journalists. You can sell anything to a journalist as long as it aligns with the interests of power. You can’t sell anything to a journalist, however well-evidenced, if it bangs up against the interests of power. But if is in the interest of power, they’ll believe anything. Read The Telegraph, watch Fox News, read The Daily Mail, they’re just absolutely full of complete nonsense from wall to wall.
And so all the nonsense which is put out by these dark-money junk tanks, these so-called think tanks. Media report it verbatim as if it is something real. So everything the Science Media Centre said just gets accepted right across the spectrum of journalism as being true, because they think it’s science. And part of the problem is that there are very few scientists in the media, there’s a few specialist reporters, there’s a few people like me with a science background. But on the whole those who make the decisions–the editors, the newsroom staff, they’re not scientists. They’ve got a humanities background.
When someone comes along and says, ‘You know, this is science, we’re representing science,’ even if they themselves have no scientific credentials, which is the case with Fiona Fox and the whole of the rest of that Revolutionary Communist Party group, if they can speak the language of science and they can say we’re linking you up with these eminent scientists, there’s no questions asked. It just, ‘All right, that’s science, okay, we’ll just report that as is.’Right at the beginning the Science Media Centre recruited Professor Simon Wesseley, now Professor Sir Simon Wesseley, who was one of the leading exponents of this biopsychosocial model, which basically says it’s all in the mind.
And it was a good deal for him because he gets massively boosted and his position gets massively boosted in the media. But it’s also a good deal for the Science Media Centre, because by associating with eminent professors like him, with people with high standing, particularly with government, they make themselves look respectable. Whereas in reality they’re anything but. And so there is this sort of mutual back-scratching going on between the two, kind of a symbiotic relationship. And the most extraordinary things happened. So for instance they put out these pure biopsychosocial interpretations of ME/CFS and recruit journalists to parrot that line.
DT: As I’m well aware, having been the subject of one of these articles by someone who was a bestie of the Science Media Centre and actually appeared in promotional materials for their 10th anniversary. To me, that journalists are appearing in promotions for the Science Media Centre for their 10th anniversary bonanza seemed extraordinary.
GM: I know, that’s not a good look at all. And also that journalists were just taking their word for it about the purported harassment faced by these researchers as well. So the
story became not ME/CFS patients being very badly served by the current state of medical science, which is obviously the story anyone with any proper journalistic instincts would immediately see, but instead that these poor hard-working scientists are being threatened and abused by ungrateful ME/CFS patients. Well, okay, maybe some people sent some bad emails and that shouldn’t ever happen.
DT: Let’s acknowledge that that undoubtedly happened and that there were undoubtedly unpleasant emails or phone calls or things that happened from a very tiny cohort of troubled patients.
GM: But let’s be honest, it happens to journalists as well. Because I was very much against the Iraq War, I got a death threat at least once a day throughout the entire period during and immediately after the first Invasion. And I mean very lurid death threats. Often I didn’t take any of them seriously. You can either choose to take that stuff seriously or you could just say this is the bollocks that comes with e-mail and social media and stuff. It just goes withg the job. And I’ve had it all my working life, from when I was first a journalist in 1985—endless abuse and threats and stupidity and insults and all the rest of it.
It’s not good and no one should ever do it, but is that really the story, and did it even stand up in many cases? They were just taking the word of scientists and researchers that they’ve been threatened and abused. Maybe they had been, but you should still be looking at the evidence and asking what exactly was said and who exactly was saying it and is it exactly like they say it is.
DT: And those stories in the press never reported on or actually examined the concerns about the science. They just skated over those and presumed that because Sir Simon or because Michael Sharpe or because someone else distinguished said something or other that the science was incontrovertibly correct.
GM: What they were doing in all cases was simply taking the Science Media Centre word for it. It sounds like a respectable organization. I mean all these junk tanks sound like respectable organizations–the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, they’re all just founded by dark money, by very dodgy people with dodgy agendas. But they give themselves a grand name and journalists say, ‘Oh yes, that’s obviously a very serious, respectable organization.’ And then the most amazing thing is this journalist from the Today programme, who basically just repeated what the Science Media Centre was saying, was put forward by the Science Media Centre for a major journalism award, and he won it just for reciting their claims.
DT: Right, and they cited that in their account of their work—‘Oh, we gave him this story, then we nominated him for the award, and then he won the award!’
GM: Yeah, they were completely open about it. Then they boasted also about how they put Sir Simon Wesseley forward for the first John Maddox Award, which was set up by their sister organization Sense About Science, which was set up also by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party. So they put him forward for that award and he wins this award, and then all the journalists say, ‘Oh, wow, Sir Simon Wesseley has won the John Maddox Award, this is ultra-respectable, these are knights of the realm, these are these are good people who cannot be challenged.’
DT: Yes, and he won the won the award specifically because of his ‘courage’ in standing up for science against, you know, these horrible activists who were challenging him. I think we’ve seriously covered the Science Media Centre. I’m curious what the reaction to your recent Guardian piece was.
GM: So the piece got a massive and very supportive reaction from ME/CFS patients and those who advocate for them, who you know have been so badly served by the media. There have been so few people who have said, ‘Actually, this is a greatly neglected and abused community of patients who are just not receiving the care that they deserve, they’re not receiving the research and the investment which this condition merits.’ There’s a huge number of them and they are suffering massively, and yet that is just not being heard.
So a lot of people were very glad to see that article, and they expressed that gladness, which made me happy. Because you always want to try to do something useful, and as a journalist you know you’re never quite sure whether you’re speaking into a void or not, and whether you’re actually helping things to get better or not. And so that was good to see. I was really struck by how muted the pushback was. I was expecting, you know, that whole sort of Wesseley/Sharpe/Science Media Centre brigade to really pile on, but I think they’ve realized the jig is up. I think they’re now seeing that you just can’t keep pushing this any longer. And it was because of the expert advice I got from several people, yourself included, who are all experts in the field, and I’m evidently not.
For instance, calling it a ‘real’ illness. Of course psychological illnesses, as you and others pointed out, are ‘real’ illnesses. But physiological illnesses are not the same as psychological illnesses. Sometimes they overlap but sometimes they’re entirely separate. You and others were extremely helpful about getting the terminology right and clearing up some of my confusions. I think because we nailed it down there was really no room for them to pick up specious points or say he’s calling it this when it’s actually that. They had no room to maneuver. And it seemed to me from their responses very clear that they had nowhere they could go with this, and so they had a very limp and muted response to it. Because if they had said anything else they would have been so blatantly in conflict with scientific principles that they would have made life much harder for themselves than it was already.
DM: To clarify the point about ‘real’ or not ‘real’ illness, they really rely a lot on this. If you say this is physiological, part of their pushback is always, ‘Why are you denigrating mental health and why are you insulting people with mental health?’ And it’s such a red herring. Nobody has seriously questioned whether mental health issues are completely horrible and just awful experiences. But they take that and that’s their pushback, and it’s just ridiculous, and insulting as well.
GM: And also, of course, many people with ME/CFS do have very serious mental health issues. Why wouldn’t they? If I were bedbound or even housebound it would very seriously impact my mental health.
DT: Especially if nobody believes that you’re sick.
GM: Exactly. There was a Swiss study I cited in the piece showing that the greatest driver of suicidal ideation amongst ME/CFS patients was not being believed, was being gaslit by people who were telling them, ‘You’re just imagining all this, this is a psychosomatic condition.’
DT: How much do you think that the Long Covid situation has impacted perceptions of ME/CFS and perhaps brought more attention to it and to the fact that there is such a thing as post-acute viral illness, that this is something that happens after all viral illnesses and that it should not be a surprise that it’s happening now?
GM: Well, I can think of my own experience. Because until Covid came along, I had taken a binary view of infectious disease. It’s something that either kills you, or you get better. It’s one or the other. And if you get better, then everything’s fine and life carries on as it was before. If you don’t get better, you die. That that was how I saw it, and I was very naive in seeing it that way because I’d never really thought about it much. I’ve had quite a few infectious diseases like everyone’s had, and I’ve recovered from them and life’s got back to normal. You just assume that’s how it is.
But I think a lot of people, as a result of either having Long Covid or knowing someone who has it–and many of us know lots of people who have it or are hearing a lot more about it in the media–began to recognize it’s not as simple as that. There is recovery, there is death, but there’s something in between, which is not recovering or not fully recovering but suffering a different set of symptoms than the initial ones you had as a long-term sequelae of that infection. So I think quite a lot of people have undergone that change in mindset, like I have, of recognizing that this is a lot more complicated than the sort of popular misconception of how infectious disease operates.
DT: I think it’s also different because Long Covid has come in epidemic or pandemic form. It’s one thing if you see sporadic cases of someone who has a viral illness, and it’s happening here or there and not all at the same time. Now you see a worldwide phenomenon, with millions of people reporting very similar things, and either you think it’s mass hysteria and that all these people are so fraught with anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder so they’re having these sort of symptoms, or you actually think something is physiologically going on that’s triggering these symptoms and we need to figure out what it is. I don’t quite understand the motivation to go one way when the other way seems much more obvious or makes much more sense in any kind of normal world.
GM: Well, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to understand more and more how our moral boundaries are not created entirely by rational decision-making and how we’re influenced by deep themes–what the brilliant cognitive historian Jeremy Lent calls ‘root metaphors’ and cultural themes of which we might be completely unaware. I’m sorry to say that one of those is misogyny, and one of the very striking characteristics of both ME/CFS and Long Covid is that they disproportionately affect women. And there’s a very long tradition in medicine, but also in the wider culture going back many centuries of a disbelief in women, of not believing what women tell you, not believing the symptoms that women might have, not believing the suffering that women might be undergoing.
Medicine’s always been, or until recently has been, super male-dominated, and that luckily is beginning to change. But that legacy is with us still. And what we’ve seen in the history of scientific reporting on ME/CFS is some deep misogynistic strands–you know, not believing in it because it is largely women who suffer from it, and therefore it must be a hysterical condition and it must be all in the mind because women aren’t rational, women can’t reliably report their symptoms, women really don’t actually know what’s going on in their own bodies. This whole sort of long-term denigration of women’s experience and disbelief in women’s experience, I think, often entirely unconsciously still guides some decision-making even at the highest levels.
DT: Well, we’ve talked for a while now, and I like to keep these videos relatively short. So the final question–what comes next for you in this line of reporting?
GM: I want to properly investigate the role of the Science Media Centre, which I’ve touched on very briefly. That brings together these two strands of interest for me, because as you say way back in the early 1990s I’d started investigating this Revolutionary Communist Party group and the false claims it was making and the devastating impacts it was having on environmentalism. It managed to populate the media with claims that it was all imaginary, there’s no such thing as an environmental crisis, etc. So it brings together that interest with my more recent interest in ME/CFS and Long Covid. The denialism and minimization that has been pushed by the Science Media Centre is very much of a piece with the issues that they’ve pushed going way back, so I want to look more closely at that and at how journalists are just such total suckers for these narratives, and how we ought to–excuse my language–just grow the fuck up and actually be led by the evidence, not by what people with impressive-sounding names are telling you.
DT: I will look very much forward to that. Anything final you want to say before we end?
GM: It’s a great pleasure to talk to you, David, and I guess the one last thing I want to say is, look, we can theorize all this, but there are very large numbers of people suffering to an absolutely outrageous extent. Most of them women–not all of them, of course–often with very long-term conditions which have absolutely horrendous impacts on their well-being. And the fact that this is not one of our very top medical priorities is itself a massive scientific scandal.
DT: I would agree with that. And thank you very much.
-
what are some good summer tracks from the 2000s and 2010s? this is for a patio playlist that ppl on our block will hear passing through the alleyway, so ideally nice, non-weird stuff
-
what are some good summer tracks from the 2000s and 2010s? this is for a patio playlist that ppl on our block will hear passing through the alleyway, so ideally nice, non-weird stuff
-
what are some good summer tracks from the 2000s and 2010s? this is for a patio playlist that ppl on our block will hear passing through the alleyway, so ideally nice, non-weird stuff
-
what are some good summer tracks from the 2000s and 2010s? this is for a patio playlist that ppl on our block will hear passing through the alleyway, so ideally nice, non-weird stuff
-
#CurrentlyListening to "be a bitch" (2025) by american singer-songwriter maren morris. its been a while since ive heard a folk-pop song that felt authentic :blobcat_melt:
-
CW: explanation of the designs on the hat
so in #TheAmazingDigitalCircus, an AI sim traps humans and puts them through "fun adventures" that are actually horrible and stressful. the censor bar pictured on the right is the AI's tool to censor ppl inside the sim. his head is a chattering teeth toy but with eyes inside the teeth, and a lil tophat :blobcat_hearthug:
the bubble is kind of the antagonists companion/servant, but more chaotic comic relief, not evil.
-
:boost_requested: opening in walla walla, washington for applicants with 2+ years experience in senior management
position: executive director of supported living services, lots of direct interaction with disabled residents. salary range $120,000-$140,000
apply at https://www.valleyresidential.org/edpositionopening
-
hey queer ppl – why do we love rosé again? i forget
-
There ain’t no resurrection, there ain’t no second chance.
You only get one time through, so make it worth a dance.
God’s not here (he left with Elvis) - y’all are on your own.
The family you get or choose, and friends who stick it out,
That’s the crew you’ll take to the last show.
So pick them well and make sure YOU are worth their while. -
Sharing the song that's been stuck in my brain for the past couple of days - enjoy!
-
USMC history - I can’t find a good link for it outside Zuckbook, so here it is:
SFMF!
#usmc #marinecorps #usmchistory #korea #koreanwar #forgottenwar -
Because there’s nothing more relaxed than a tradie on smoko, I present to you - the Australian national anthem!
#Australia #weekend #partysongs https://youtu.be/j58V2vC9EPc -
@seth @EugeneMcParland What? Elon? Oh, gosh no, he's just a #FreeSpeechAbsolutist, he said so himself! </s>
-
Computing giant passes on - Gordon Moore is no more. Does this mean his law is suspended? Hmm…
#gordonmoore #intel #mooreslaw
https://www.dw.com/en/intel-co-founder-gordon-moore-dies-at-94/a-65119886?
-
My brain dredged this up the other day, so I'm sharing it with everyone. Cue the music!
"Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce,
Special orders don't upset us,
something something something something
At Burger King,
Have it yoouur way,
At Burger King,
Have it yoouur way
at Burger King now!" -
My brain dredged this up the other day, so I'm sharing it with everyone. Cue the music!
"Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce,
Special orders don't upset us,
something something something something
At Burger King,
Have it yoouur way,
At Burger King,
Have it yoouur way
at Burger King now!" -
My brain dredged this up the other day, so I'm sharing it with everyone. Cue the music!
"Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce,
Special orders don't upset us,
something something something something
At Burger King,
Have it yoouur way,
At Burger King,
Have it yoouur way
at Burger King now!"
