“It feels like an Original Series episode that was rejected, but they dug it out of the trash twenty years later and did it anyway.”
Stranger
“Code of Honor” ran almost back to back with an episode in which a planet was populated exclusively by shiny, happy Aryans. Maybe they were trying to strike a balance.
Star Trek was never big on racial diversity except among humans. Only rarely did you see a token alien, usually standing in the background, who differed from other members of his species. The populations of other planets were overwhelmingly uniform.
The Aryans condemned Wesley Crusher to death for trampling one of their gardens, but Picard of course violated the Prime Directive and (unfortunately) saved him. Why did they even bother having that stupid rule in the first place? Hardly anyone ever followed it.
They look uniform to us, but who knows if they look that way to each other. There’s a field near my apartment where a lot of Canada Geese stop on their migrations. I can’t tell one from another, but I’m pretty sure the geese can.
I think it had more to do with having sexy, stupid, scantily-clothed people running around the Huntington Library Botanical Gardens. I’m pretty sure the producer watched the beginning of Logan’s Run on television late at night, and then stormed into the writers’ room the next day demanding to, “Give me some of that!”
Still not as bad as “Up The Long Ladder”, where they relocate a bunch of Celtic-esque colonists to another planet occupied by clones who steal tissue samples from Riker and Dr. Pulaski to add to their genetic diversity. When they realize that they’ve been duplicated, they flat-out murder their clones with no discussion about the ethics, and then force the clone-people to have sex with the Fake Irish colonists to continue their society. It doesn’t get listed on most “Worst Episode” lists but it’s pretty awful and nonsensical.
The point of the Prime Directive was to create artificial conflict where none existed so the entire bridge crew could sit around debating about it instead of flying the ship. In general, Star Trek: The Next Generation was not nearly as progressive or philosophical as people seem to recall, and when it does attempt some kind of allegorical story it generally cops out rather than actually put characters in any real jeopardy with permanent consequences. If it weren’t for the high production values and John de Lancie I don’t think the show would have made it to a third series.
Stranger
There’s an episode of the original Star Trek that I think is a bit problematic today. A transporter malfunction splits Kirk into the two people; one who has his compassion and intellect, but is a bit of a milquetoast, and one who is aggressive and violent. Aggressive Kirk tries to kiss Yeoman Rand, about as close to rape as they cold probablly show on '60s TV. Emo-Kirk has the knowlege, but is a poor commander. he needs to merge back with aggro-Kirk to get the decisiveness that he needs to be captain. The idea that the version of Kirk who attacked Rand also includes some positive qualities seems like it would be a tough sell these days.
Mining Freud for plot-themes is the last recourse of a screenwriter desperate to meet a deadline.
Stranger
I remember there was a black palace guard in “The Cloud Minders.” He really stood out from his white compatriots. Maybe he had worked his way up from being a Trog, who knows?
One of the dumbest things TNG ever did was contrive that stupid story about why Klingons look different now than in TOS. A medical experiment? Really? And the results were completely reversible? Pull the other one!
It had been established long before that the Klingon Empire consisted of many worlds, so there was bound to be a lot of diversity among its inhabitants. That’s the simplest way of explaining the makeup change.
Even in TOS, the Klingons’ appearance differed occasionally due to inconsistent application of makeup. One author explained the difference by saying they were clearly from different races of the same species.
I think they did it best in DS9. In the episode where some of the crew go back in time to the Tribbles episode, when asked why the 23rd century Klingons look so different to him, Worf says ‘we don’t like to talk about it’, or something similar.
Perhaps. I think most younger people would get what the episode was all about and they wouldn’t be all that offended by it. They’d probably just think it was really cheesy though.
Was that actually in the show or was that something from a book or some other source? I don’t remember them trying to explain the different look in TNG, but then it’s been decades since I watched an episode.
I think it was more of a case that they didn’t have the characters and tone of the show well established yet. It was the fifth episode. (Fifth one shown, I think; don’t know where it was in terms of writing and filming.)
Good question. I’ve never read any of the TNG novels, so I must have picked it up from the show or Memory Alpha.
I’ll get back to you if I remember the source.
In general I find it interesting to see how the concepts of good drama, or good comedy, or good story telling changed through the years. It’s a statement of how we the general public have changed. Of course, some ideas are just bad ones that were never good, at any time.
Bakula’s days on the Enterprise, IIRC.
The separation of id and super-ego, and integration through ego is fundamental Freudian theory, and despite how evidentially baseless Freud is, is a place screenwriters love to go to sound smart, albeit generally not as literally as this transparent Dr. Jykell and Mr. Hyde ripoff utilizing the transporter as a yet again unreliable piece of crucial future technology.
Stranger
I’m prety sure TNG never acknowlegded the cosmetic differences at all. DS9 had the offhand qauip in The Trouble With Tribbles, which they shouldn’t really have done but it was a light hearted fluff episode so whatever. It wasn’t until Enterprise they decided to make a plot point out of it.
Paint Your Wagon was not exactly a Broadway hit - it only ran 289 performances - but there was a fad in the late 60s for Broadway musicals and something from Learner and Lowe seemed like a good bet after My Fair Lady.
The best explanation for the appearance of the Klingons came from Star Trek editor John Ordover: they always had the ridges, but TV cameras in the 60s weren’t advanced enough to show them.
I have never actually seen ‘Soul Man’, but I’ve heard a lot about it. Things certainly have changed over the years with the way it’s allowable to address racial issues in popular entertainment. Ironic depictions of blackface, done to make a purportedly anti-racist point, such as in Soul Man, still used to be acceptable as recently as the early '00s. Now comedians who are typically thought of as liberal and progressive, such as Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman, have had to apologize and walk back their ironic depictions of blackface on their TV shows, and cornfield the episodes. I think the only ‘modern’ ironic depiction of blackface that still gets a societal pass, at least to some degree, is Robert Downey Jr.'s depiction of an Aussie actor playing a black man in the 2008 ‘Tropic Thunder’. And that’s probably only because the irony depicted there was not so much a pseudo-woke anti-racist message, but more of a ‘Hollywood stunt-casting is crazy’ message.
And then there’s the ‘white savior’ complex Gyrate mentions, where white people come to the rescue of persecuted or disadvantaged black people, which was very acceptable not that long ago: movies like ‘The Blind Side’ and ‘Green Book’ were popular and award show darlings at the time, and face backlash now. Then there’s the other side of the coin; the ‘magical negro’, a term I believe coined by Spike Lee, in which a wise black person, often but not always having some sort of magical or supernatural power, is depicted as their only agenda or purpose in life being the assistance of privileged white people in need: ‘Driving Miss Daisy’, ‘Green Mile’ and ‘The Legend of Bagger Vance’. Again, popular or awards show darlings at the time (well, maybe not so much Bagger Vance), but not so admired today. Of course, these depictions, both the ‘white savior’, and the ‘magical negro’, while done with good intentions, often suffer from one-dimensionality, pandering, and general short-sightedness and lack of full understanding of the real issues involved. Also, in the case of historical dramas, there is often retro-fitting of reality to make the white people seem better or more virtuous than they actually were. ‘The Blind Side’ movie seems particularly guilty of that.
The problem with Soul Man (ironically) isn’t the blackface (although it’s very cringe). It is, as I said, that the film reinforces all the racist stereotypes it purports to be fighting.
Take, for example, a scene in gym class playing basketball. All the black people are assumed by the white people to be naturally good at basketball. And they are. But of course the protagonist is terrible at basketball because he’s not really black, which mystifies all the other people because he looks like a black person who is bad at basketball. That is the entire point of the scene. Yet somehow we’re supposed to come away with the conclusion that it’s racist to assume all black people are naturally good at basketball, even though the film itself does this. This is typical of the entire film.
I get your point about the movie, but the problem has become the blackface too, now. Even if the movie had been more sensitive to not depict the very same racial stereotypes it was purportedly fighting, there’s no ‘ironic’ depiction of blackface that’s socially acceptable now, and rightfully so. No matter how well-intentioned the reason may be, the depiction is too fraught of a minefield of racial insensitivity.