Happy Monday morning! Perhaps the second installment of my Fenris Rangers toy comic and help dull the ache of a new week, at least a little.
Anybody who’s ever tried to keep an aged car running should be able to sympathize with the challenges the Rangers face in maintaining their vintage starship.
We’ve also got one more familiar face among the crew (if you have some affection for season 2 of TNG, anyway…)!
(another of my archival blog post reactions to an episode of the first season of the Captain Picard Show follows below)
from February 3, 2020 (about episode 2):
(My written reaction to the latest episode of THE CAPTAIN PICARD SHOW is largely going to be confined to the events of the teaser before the opening credit sequence. If you haven’t watched the show yet, and are waiting, know that I’ll be discussing in detail one hugely significant element of the plot. I don’t know if it’s a spoiler, since it’s a major factor in the first episode, but I get wanting to go in to the show fresh. If you don’t want to read a long piece about the ways in which the Federation continues to disappoint, know that I liked this episode quite a bit. I’m a big fan of Picard’s Romulan house staff, and hope they don’t disappear from the show once he leaves Earth. I’m also really curious and terrified by the cross-governmental conspiracy into which Picard’s stepping. It seems a plan so risky that the possible rewards couldn’t possibly be worth it, but the older I get, the less interested the people in power seem to be in consequences, so that really rings true. My only significant complaint is that Picard’s beloved pit bull, Number One, was nowhere to be seen. I would like more Number One, please.)
It all comes back to “Measure of a Man,” the ninth episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s second season. In it, Commander Bruce Maddox (who looks to be the Colonel Kurtz of one of the stories that Picard is telling) decides that he’s within his rights to demand to seize Lt. Commander Data, strip him down to his component parts, and study him, in an effort to recreate the work of the cyberneticist who created him, Dr. Noonian Soong. Maddox so views Data as a tool that he calls him “it” (which, come to think of it, might be the first time I was made aware of pronoun use as a signifier of respect for a person). Picard has to argue for Data’s right to self-determination and possession of consciousness to forestall Maddox’s seizure, and does so in one of the most fantastic displays of righteous fury and indignation I’ve ever seen in a courtroom scene, on film or in television. But first, before he can find that righteous fury, Jean-Luc Picard has to sit down and talk with Guinan.
Guinan was a character that I puzzled over a lot. Not that there’s anything wrong with her, or Whoopi Goldberg, because they’re both excellent, but because she was the most clear example of how consistently TNG’s writing staff failed its star actresses. Female guest stars frequently got good stories, and material to work with. Dr. Crusher and Counselor Troi, though, the show could seemingly go half a season largely forgetting they were there (and after some of the episodes where they got to take the lead, maybe Gates McFadden and Marina Sirtis were happy to be forgotten, sometimes). It still seems to me that less than half of the scenes Picard and Guinan shared could’ve been scenes with Counselor Troi, deepening the relationship between two of our principal characters, and giving Marina Sirtis some more meaty material than she usually got. I like Guinan; I just wish her elevation hadn’t come at the expense of another character.
Anyway, back to “Measure of a Man.” Picard goes to Guinan the night before the trial for Data’s life, and they do what they always do: have a conversation that only friends can have. She helps Picard realize that to create a whole race of artificial life forms like Data to perform dangerous labor or highly demanding tasks for the Federation would be, effectively, to create a slave race. “There have always been disposable creatures,” she says. “They do the dirty work.”
Creating a race of superintelligent slaves should be antithetical to the core values of the Federation (any slaves, frankly – a being’s “intelligence” doesn’t determine its value, but Starfleet’s top decision-makers probably all spent a semester at whatever the 24th century’s version of McKinsey is), and Picard crafts an argument to that effect that bounces around in my head at least a dozen times a week.
In case you haven’t watched the scene in a while, I’d encourage you to take the three minutes to do it now!
This, from where I sit, is Star Trek at its best, drilling into what it means to be human, and interrogating if we honor our humanity in our actions and decisions. It didn’t require a huge visual effects budget, or even an outrageous set, just a writer with a good idea, and great actors, committed to playing their parts.
Picard, and Data, win the day, and Data is quite possibly the most gracious victor in the history of winning. He even manages to pick up the spirits of the morose Commander Riker, who’d been tasked with prosecuting Maddox’s case for Data’s seizure from the Enterprise. We close “Measure of a Man” feeling better, ourselves. The right side won! Life, and choice, were respected. We reaffirmed our fundamental values.
Though, ultimately, did Picard and Data win? This second episode of THE CAPTAIN PICARD SHOW opens in a flashback, at the Utopia Planetia shipyards on Mars. The laborers at the yards are, apparently, mostly “synthetics,” artificial life forms with the same skin tone as Data, but clearly significantly reduced cognitive capacity. Whether this is because no one has ever figured out how to produce an android equivalent to the Soong-type, or because it’s easier to treat the androids like slaves when they present as visibly “sub-human” isn’t discussed in the episode. What is apparent, though, is that the Federation always falls short of its stated values.
The synthetics clearly still think. They respond to stimulus, perform highly demanding (one assumes) tasks, are capable of interacting with their organic colleagues… They are clearly some version of alive, and are treated exactly as the “disposable people” Guinan promised they’d become. Did Jean-Luc Picard have an opinion about the synthetic labor force on Mars? Did he advocate for their rights as passionately as he did his friend’s? Might he have, if he’d not been otherwise occupied with the mass evacuation of Romulus?* He seemingly had decades to advocate on their behalf, but it was only when the nebulous legacy of his friend was threatened that he spoke up, and even resigned.
Jean-Luc Picard’s not a perfect man. He’s admitted it; we know it. But, he’s always trying to do better, to make amends, to live up to his ideals, and drag the rest of the galaxy along with him. That’s the kind of hero I need right now. I’m with you, Captain Picard, until the end of the line.
As far as I’m aware, Guinan’s not in this season** of THE CAPTAIN PICARD SHOW. Clearly, she should’ve spoken more with more top Starfleet brass than just her friend. I wonder if the court record of the Maddox v. Data case exists somewhere that is easily accessible? Maybe Starfleet leadership is as interested in understanding its critical documents as our leadership today is.
*I’m very glad that the show is trying to grapple with the fallout of the “supernova that threatened all life in the galaxy” from the 2009 STAR TREK film. Regardless of how you feel about the decision to destroy the Romulan home world, you have to admit, it opens up some interesting storytelling possibilities, and may allow for some pointed observations about stateless, asymmetric warfare in our present day.
**I have no interest in watching The View, but there is a nice little moment where, in the middle of Sir Patrick Stewart’s press tour to promote the show, he asks Whoopi Goldberg – who effectively had the character of Guinan created for her because she was a huge freaking star at the time, and loved Star Trek – to join him in the show’s second season. Apparently it’s been picked up for not just one, but two more seasons? Heck, if Stewart wants to do it, let him do it forever. I’ll watch that.