In this episode an old Starfleet officer gets an experimental medical treatment from aliens to reverse his aging and make him an old man again. It doesn’t work right because he is impatient and takes all the dosage at once to speed up the effects.
And his wife and Picard and the Doctor and everyone are mad at him and telling him it’s not right to use those techniques.
Anyway the point I wanted to discuss is where do they draw the line at what is acceptable. They already use medicine to increase people’s lifespan and humans in the future commonly live over 100 years. If this rejuvenation method worked correctly why wouldn’t it be ok to use that to keep extending life even longer?
I just don’t understand what the Federation logic is sometimes
I’ve held for awhile that “Federation logic” makes more sense if you assume a lot of heavy indoctrination and social programming to ensure a manageable, and admittedly genuinely content and bereft of social ills, “Brave New World”-esque “Utopia,” at least on the human-populated worlds.
…well, that, and Roddenberry was rather enamored of 80s New Age woo-woo stuff, and the “perfection” of His Enlightened Vision of humanity’s future. And the drugs.
The Mission Log podcast guys have fun with Federation Logic and they are just about done with the animated series (having already completed TOS) and will be starting on the movies and TNG shortly. I look forward to their recap of this episode.
(I have two favorite podcasts. Mission Log and Hardcore History.)
Heck, rig up a transporter the right way and you can enter as an adult and emerge as a 12 year-old with all your adult memories intact. Screw taking drugs.
But in any case, as I recall, that Admiral wasn’t just old, but suffering from some incurable degenerative disease (I think it was was called “Iverson’s Syndrome” or something). The still-reasonably-spry retired admiral from the first episode, played by DeForest Kelley, was much older.
It isn’t so much bad Federation Logic, but short-cut dramatic writing.
You have to have someone taking the “anti” position so there can be dramatic tension.
Someone here on SDMB (Café Society) noted the effect in Captain America, Winter Soldier: Nick Fury is supporting a bad point of view, solely so Captain American can be adamantly opposed to it.
It’s a kind of straw-man drama.
We saw it a lot on ST:TNG, in episodes about Data’s humanity. Half the people you met said, “He’s a person, just like anyone else” and the other half – and just as often good guys as bad guys – said, “No, he’s not a person.” You’d think the matter had long been settled: they gave him a Starfleet officer’s commission! But it was important to the drama of the episode that the matter be explored, and explored by framing it as a debate between opposed sides.
ETA: I didn’t put the accent mark over the e in Café Society! Internet Explorer insists on auto-correcting me. Grrr.
I often disagree with “Federation Logic”, and in this case I agree with the OP. Why is it anyone’s business whether the guy can take the drug in small doses or all at once?
I also think there should be legal exceptions to the Prime Directive.
And of course Data’ a person (and he knows how to pronounce his name).
It would have been better had they found Data in the first episode, dealt with the dilemma about whether he’s a sentient being with rights, and had him go on to join Starfleet and earn rank. Makes no sense to debate it after he’s been an officer for years.
Come to think of it, it’s a rather odd rule for the Federation to have, from a drama perspective. It boils down to “Never uplift primitive societies, because so many things could go wrong.”, but botched upliftings could be the bread and butter of a sci-fi TV series.
I wonder how much of Iain M. Bank’s The Culture series of books was a reaction to Star Trek. In The Culture, the organization Contact is all about uplifting the barbarians, and their attitude is “Yes, there could be unforeseen consequences, but we’ve been doing this for a very long time, and we’ve gotten very good at it. We’re not going to condemn billions of people to a life of barbarism (i.e. a short life full of disease, exploitation, ignorance, fear, etc.) when have the means to save them.”
Star Trek is the poster child for forgotten and glossed over repercussions of the crap they throw out to make an episode. Stuff that, once discovered, would change the Universe, but is quietly brushed under the rug because they don’t want to or know how to deal with it.
But then, a lot of scifi and fantasy is like that, even down to comics. If superscience existed, there’s no way in hell we’d continue to live in the same manner with the same technology in our everyday lives, completely ignoring such things.
For examples; If that many people were dying on a regular basis in a small town in California (Buffy), it would be international news regardless of any attempts to cover it up, and the truth would out in short order. In Doctor Who, there have been so many alien invasions, ships showing up and other crap, that the world would be very different than it is portrayed as being. The orgs that deal with it would be many, varied, and publicly known, not small and secret. The tech recovered would also make it into our daily lives within a few years. Computer tech, battery tech, energy tech, etc would find a huge and lucrative market awaiting.
Two handy examples are Westworld, and the Six Million Dollar Man.
In Westworld, the tech to create interactive, lifelike robots, that you can have (apparently enjoyable) sex with would change everything, not just be used for an expensive Disneyland. The computers alone are a big change - think of the amount of computing power needed to create a Turing-level thinking machine in a human sized container. With that much power, everyone would have smartphones way more powerful than we have now, and self-driving cars, and who knows what else. (and sex-bots. lots of sex-bots.)
In 6MDM, functional bionic limbs alone would be something everyone who ever lost a limb would want. Look at the current demand due to our recent military actions - they shouldn’t keep that secret. Any company that could make those would make tons of money. Plus, the tech that can make lifelike skin, with hair, that feels real to the touch - that would have many other uses. And eyesight to the blind! It would be criminal to keep that top secret.
I wonder what a modern future with that tech would look like. Almost Human, maybe?
One the few TNG episodes that gets me very angry is the one where Riker had been on a secret mission developing a cloaking device. There had been an accident and it was trapped inside an asteroid. Riker’s former Captain (now an Admiral) arrives to retrieve it.
Great episode up until the very end when Riker becomes a stinking [DEL]traitor[/DEL] hero. :rolleyes: He reveals the cloaked ship to the Romulans. All because the precious, noble Federation was breaking a treaty. Something the Romulans did all the time. I was literally shouting at the tv the first time I saw that episode. I hate that noble, holier than thou attitude that pops up in TNG. I kept thinking that secret technology could be the deciding factor in a war.
There’s a strong anti-authoritarian streak in ST that always puts the cast at odds with their superiors. And every single time the casts’ *superior morality * (as defined by the writer)comes out on top of the rules and regulations with no negative consequences. Just once I’d love to see the cast say no to the admiral de jour, get bitch-slapped by the military justice system, and be shown to have been thoroughly wrong in their position.
You are so right. I call it “failure of nerve” and it totally pisses me off. The writer doesn’t want to disrupt his nice simple world with the consequences of his plots.
Another example is Ghostbusters. I know it is a comedy, but if some guys really proved the existence of the supernatural, every physicist in the world would drop everything to investigate, and they would definitely not being doing kids parties.
It’s why the ST Prime Directive is such nonsense, at least in the TOS era. Knowledge of the existence of life outside ones planet would be disruptive in so many ways. The only reasonable way of following it is hands off. Yeah, fewer plots and no reuse of Paramount sets.
That drug was rare. There are a few things they have trouble synthesizing properly.
And I doubt it was FDA approved, considering it ultimately killed him if I remember the episode correctly.
Wasn’t there a human staff remotely controlling or at least directing the bots? That could still be significant - have sex with a gorgeous robot which is being controlled by a faraway ugly person.
“Directing,” yes, in the sense of a director of a movie spotting actors, urging them to show more emotion, etc. But in the movie, the robots really were pretty largely self-motivated.
I seem to remember it being ambiguous whether the robot revolt was controlled by central computers, or whether the robots took on full localized autonomy. I just know I wouldn’t want to fast-draw against Yul Brynner or his avatar. He had a really impressive “mean glaring stare.” Superb man for the role.
ETA: my memory is really dim here. Didn’t the heroes break in to the central computer room and destroy it, ending the revolt? If so, never mind: the robots were under central control. Ah… Been too long!
