Greatest Moments in Trek: The Final Installment. Voyager

Hello again. So, now we come to the last trek series in the greatest moments of trek blog cycle, Star Trek Voyager. You know, I watched most of it when it aired and have all of it now, so naturally I've watched it since. But nothing will compare to how I actually saw the series' final episode. I was at the Tennessee School for the Blind, and I had my own set of rooms there. Long story, but suffice it to say, I and a few other people participated in a program there during which we lived in on-campus apartments, and I had one with no roommate. Rather nice. Anyway, I'd been following the series as it built up towards the last show, and on the night of the final episode, "Endgame," I barricaded myself in with a Papa John's double pepperoni pizza and a gallon of chocolate milk, unplugged the phone, locked the door, and sat back to watch. It was a great show. Though as far as finales go, I think "What You Leave Behind" takes the cake. And I don't just say that because I'm a DS9 fan; I felt that way even then. "Endgame" was certainly better than TNG's last show, but I digress. I'm not talking about the final episode of Voyager in this blog, so I won't spend any more time strolling down memory lane.

So, the first female captain. The first artificial life form serving as a doctor (and boy didn't we get a crap ton of good shows out of that), the first Klingon engineer, the first African-American to play a Vulcan character (great Job, Tim Russ), a Borg on the crew, lots and lots of firsts for Voyager. I wanted to tick those off before getting into the meat of things. You know, the interesting thing Voyager had going for it was the ship's isolation. In every other series, the characters had a Federation and a Starfleet to fall back on. Voyager was alone out there in the Delta Quadrant, and what strikes me as particularly admirable about it is how the show repeatedly sent the message that you should continue to obey your principles and stick to your rules of good conduct, even if nobody's looking. As Janeway told Ransom during Equinox, it's especially in those sorts of circumstances that your principles matter most, because without them, what are you? So I tell you, I had a really hard time picking out just two exemplary episodes from Voyager, but I have finally made my choices. They both come from the seventh season, but that in no way means that I think it was the best season or that the others are just chopped liver. Actually, if you asked me which season of Voyager was the best, I'd have a really hard time with that one. That being said, I doubt you'll be disappointed with my choices.

"Repentance"

Story by Mike Sussman

Wikipedia Summary:

Voyager responds to a distress call, beaming all the people off a Nygean ship that's about to explode. Most are sent to Voyager's cargo bay, but two of them are sent to sickbay, where one takes Seven of Nine hostage. It turns out that the ship Voyager rescued was carrying prisoners to a facility where they are scheduled to be executed. Since there is no capital punishment in the Federation, the crew are uncomfortable with the situation, but the Prime Directive forbids them from interfering. They provide makeshift cells for the prisoners, who are treated brutally by the Nygean guards. Neelix insists that the prisoners must be fed and The Doctor insists they must receive proper medical care. Seven considers this a waste of resources, since the prisoners are going to be killed anyway, but the guards agree to allow the prisoners to have meals.

After a particularly brutal beating by a guard, one of the prisoners, Iko, is seriously wounded. Captain Janeway subsequently orders that Voyager's security personnel take over guarding the prisoners. Iko undergoes a medical procedure in which Borg Nano probes are injected into his system; not only do the probes repair his injuries, they also seem to have restored the parts of his brain responsible for conscience and normal emotional response, and he begins to feel remorse for his crime. At first, Iko wants to be executed for all he has done, but he becomes close to Seven, who sees in him a reflection of her own struggles for atonement for all she did as a Borg. Since under Nygean law, the Victim's family decides the punishment for all crimes, Iko eventually appeals to his own victim's family for leniency. He tells them that he is cured, is sorry for what he has done, and that he is hoping to start a new life on Voyager. The family denies his request.

Meanwhile, Neelix becomes friendly with a Benkaran prisoner named Joleg, who explains that minority Benkarans are subjected to racial profiling by Nygeans. Joleg persuades Neelix to get a letter through to his brother, but this turns out to be a ruse - Joleg has hidden Voyager's coordinates inside the letter, and the ship is attacked by others of Joleg's race. Joleg has organized a prison break so that his co-conspirators can free him, but the plot is foiled by the Voyager crew. Neelix, who understands that he was being manipulated, turns his back on Joleg.

What a great commentary on the American system of capital punishment. What's interesting is how people see the show in whatever fashion  they wish to. Some, for instance, see it as endorsing capital punishment, because Janeway delivers Iko over to be executed. Others see it as a vehement protest against the death penalty. What's most interesting to me is that it appears to be neither. It's a show that highlights the issue of capital punishment without telling us what to think about it. There are those in the show who have no particular objection to capital punishment in principle, while others object to it out of principles just as deeply held. I was born and raised in the American South, the part of the country most in favor of the death penalty and where it is most often used. Yet, I go to school in a state whose governor just signed a bill forever abolishing its death penalty. So, in art as in life, Americans are forever divided these days on the issue on moral, humanitarian, economic and judicial principles. And no, I'm not telling you what I think of capital punishment myself, nor will you be able to infer my opinions from reading this blog.

The other thing to note here is the element of racial profiling that comes up in this episode. Do Benkarans commit a disproportionately high number of violent crimes? Do Benkarans commit the same numbers of crimes as anyone else and get tougher sentences for them? We don't know. We're never told the whole story. What the show does suggest, however, is that we would do well to evaluate people as people, not as Benkarans or Nygeans or Blacks or Whites or whatever. Now it happens that this particular Benkaran was quite shameless in his manipulation of Neelix, and if Neelix is angry at the end of the show, it's not because the man's a Benkaran or even that he may be a murderer. Neelix just doesn't like being played for a sucker, which is what this particular Benkaran, regardless of any other Benkarans who may or may not be unjustly accused, did in this case.

Finally, recall what I said about Voyager's crew sticking to its principles. The Prime Directive is a good law. The principle of non-interference is, by and large, an honorable one and one that ought to be respected. We could do with a Prime Directive in this country. That's not to say that it is easy or that following it always coincides with your conscience. It's even been famously violated on several occasions. Yet, it is a Starfleet officer's highest duty when dealing with other races. And Janeway carries it out. I only mention it here, because Starfleet officers can sound rather moralistic and on their high horse when they throw that directive around, can't they. Yet in this case, Janeway likely wished it wasn't there and that it wasn't binding. Maybe another commander would've thrown it to the winds, but not Picard, not Sisko, probably not even Jim Kirk, and Not Kathrin Janeway.

"Critical Care"

Story by Robert Doherty

Summary: (again, I had to write my own.)

The Doctor's program is stolen from voyager and transferred to a medical facility orbiting an unknown world. When the Doctor is reactivated, he discovers that he's been sold to the medical facility for his services. As he reluctantly goes to work treating patients, the Doctor discovers that this society has imposed the ultimate in managed healthcare. Each patient has their own treatment coefficient, TC, a value assigned to them that measures the level of medical care they receive based on their current status in, and likely future abilities to contribute to, society. The Doctor is infuriated to discover that patients are dying in droves, while lifesaving medications are reallocated to patients with higher TC's and being used as preventative treatments rather than the desperate lifesavers they are. When a scheme of the Doctor's backfires and results in the death of a patient who had been given more drugs than his TC permitted, if not enough to actually save his life, the Doctor takes desperate action. He takes the hospital administrator hostage, poisons him, then alters the man's TC in the computers, so that the computer system will deny him the appropriate medical treatment. As the episode ends, the administrator gives in to the doctor's demands for drug allocation reform at the hospital, and the doctor is wondering whether he has behaved ethically at all.

On the bonus disk to the DVD collection of the seventh season, Robert Picardo, the Doctor, describes this episode as an indictment of HMO's. ... You know, how many of us have ever been afraid to go to the doctor, afraid that our insurance wouldn't pay? How many of us have hesitated at the thought of potentially life-prolonging surgeries because of the cost? I have. I can tell you that in this country, when a doctor tells me I need something, my first question is, "how much will I have to pay?" What does it say about the relationship between medicine and insurance if I have to ask that question, to actually ask it as the first thing out of my mouth?

Now, I'm not going to sit here and give my opinions on how to reform the American healthcare system. Like capital punishment, it's a topic that polarizes and gets people very hot under the collar very fast. However, that the system needs reform and needs it desperately, I don't think too many people would disagree. If you do disagree and think the American medical establishment's doing fine, you probably head an HMO. The fact of the matter is, you have to have money to get good medical care in this country. And if you have some form of cancer or cystic fibrosis, and if your insurance carrier decides to drop you, you're probably SOL. That is what happens when capitalism and medicine join hands, folks. I've seen it happen.

Now this episode shows us what the extreme would look like. Imagine your whole life being reduced to a number. Well actually it is, your insurance group number when you're admitted to the hospital. But imagine that this number was derived from a formula that took in your education, your occupation and what the lawyers like to call, your earnings potential. If you are, say, a high school dropout working two jobs to make ends meet, you'd better not get sick. If you're a teacher with a Bachelor's Degree, don't get too terribly sick. If you're an engineer working with NASA, get as sick as you like, because we've got you covered. That is what a TC would determine and that is what our society would look like. What does it say about us when our society already has those tendencies in it? Is it too hard to imagine that the events of "Critical Care," couldn't come to pass? I look at that episode and you know something? I can see it. I can't sit there and laugh it off or say, how preposterous. It's not funny, and they weren't being preposterous when they wrote that story.

Once again, star trek has done what Jean Roddenberry, four years in his grave when Voyager aired, meant for it to do. It strikes home, asking hard questions and making us look in a mirror and see ourselves. Sometimes what we see is very uplifting, and we want to become that type of human being. At other times, star trek is an indictment of the society we are and of the people who make it up. If the episode, "Repentance," tries not to state an opinion, "Critical Care" emphatically takes a stand on health care in our country. That sort of inquiring and probing is what star trek was best at. I say, was best, because with the advent of Star Trek Enterprise and especially of the Star Trek 2009 movie, it's turned away from those things, and what has replaced them, sadly, is no improvement. Well, that concludes the Greatest Moments in Trek series. I realize that once again I haven't picked someone's favorite episode, nor my own. But that's the beauty of star trek. There's always more to say. But the series is closed, and now this blog will go on to other trek-related things. Thanks for reading.

Greatest Moments in Trek, Part 4. Deep Space Nine

Well, I'm back. How's everybody been? I see from looking at my Trek blog that it's been just over a month since my last post. In case anyone's under the impression I've forgotten my Greatest Moments in Trek series, let me say it isn't so. I've been on vacation visiting my fiancé’s family in North Carolina and my friends and family in Tennessee. I also attended the Nashville star trek convention, and I intend to repost my blog about that from my main blog to this one here with some expansions and revisions for trek fans. Still, that comes after I finish the series.

When approaching Deep Space Nine, I found myself in a bit of a pickle. I already have a longish post devoted to DS9, so should I really write another one? Admittedly, I didn't know when I wrote that post that I'd be taking up this series, so there is a question of thoroughness and consistency to be considered. Finally, I decided to write a DS9 post for this series, but in doing so, I've decided to impose this rule on myself:  I will not discuss any episodes that were mentioned in the long DS9 post found earlier in this blog. After all, why make you read something you've already read before, right? Otherwise, I'm following my by now customary formatting. That is, I’ll discuss two episodes of my choosing, providing a short summary for each followed by my discussion of what, to me, are its most hard-hitting points.

The interesting thing about DS9 is the ways in which it departs from star trek that came before it. Most notably, we see a new vision of the star trek universe emerging. As Richard Arnold once put it, Jean Roddenberry imagined that with time, we would change as a species and his trek universe imagines us as we could one day be. Michael Pillar and Ira Stephen Bear, on the other hand, suggest that the more things change, the more they stay the same and that humanity will be much as it is then as it is now. That's certainly a more historically consistent, if less idealized, portrait of the future, and it ticked off a number of fans. What resulted, in my opinion, is something of a compromise. Earth is still a great place to live in DS9, a paradise according to more than one person. Many of our social ills have indeed been vanquished and humanity is undoubtedly much better off in that time than this. In that sense, Pillar and Bear didn't tamper with Roddenberry’s design. Yet, it remains true that there will always be those who don't play by your rules of good conduct or espouse your values. Enter the Dominion. And there will always be those who see it as their sworn duty to uphold your way of life, even when it means sacrificing every principle you hold dear while doing so. Enter section 31. I find the result, Deep Space Nine, to be something that functions with greater character depth and richer levels of complexity than The Next Generation or the Original Series, each of which stands well on its own with many deep characters and profoundly complex moments.

While I had seen about a third of Deep Space Nine prior to the 2004 Los Vegas convention, I came home realizing that there was much I hadn't seen and more I needed to know about characters like Worf and O'Brian, characters who had become known to me throughout TNG. By the end of 2004, I had watched the series the whole way through, and have done so at least four times since then. This meant that by the time of the 2011 Nashville convention, I had gained a deep appreciation for the character development of non-Federation characters like Martok, Damar and Kei Winn. Likewise, I came to realize that only DS9 tackles these questions consistently over time and with such depth. It's not that TNG or Voyager or TOS fails to tackle tough questions, but DS9 demonstrates what a television series can do when those questions persist, recurring again and again. That being said, here we go.

"Tribunal"

Story by Bill Dial

Summary:  All the summaries of this episode (and of all the Deep Space Nine episodes for that matter( are entirely too long and written by people who obviously have no idea how to summarize. So, I pen my own short, concise summary below:

Miles O'Brian and his wife Keiko are on their way to a much needed vacation when their runabout his stopped by a Cardassian warship. The Cardassian commander, Gull Evek, boards the runabout and upon discovering a consignment of photon torpedo warheads in the runabout's cargo bay, takes O'Brian into custody.

O'Brian is taken to Cardassia Prime, where he is slated to stand trial, a trial in which his verdict is already sealed. Back on DS9, Sisko and his crew examine the evidence, discovering in due course that a Cardassian, surgically altered to look like an old shipmate of O'Brian's, covertly recorded voice samples from the chief and used them to gain access to the warheads and to plant them on the chief's runabout. When the Cardassian court proves unwilling to entertain this new evidence, Sisko brings the Cardassian plant directly to the court room. The judge, seeing that this attempt to discredit the Federation has backfired, releases O'Brian.

This episode marks a couple of firsts. It's the first time we see the Cardassian home world, a bleak and spartan sort of place. It's also the first, last and only in-depth look we get into the Cardassian legal system. It was as though, in their attempt to fashion this Kafkaesque machine, Pillar and Bear went out of their way to create a legal apparatus that functions on the most diametrically opposed basis from the American one as possible. And they were successful.

Whatever its flaws, the American, and to a greater degree, the other judicial systems of the western world, function on the presumption of innocence; that is, you are thought to be and are treated as though innocent until the state proves that you're guilty, and it's up to the state to provide enough evidence to convince a judge or jury of your guilt. In a forum like the American judicial system, a trial is the proving ground where your defense matches wits with the state and attempts to convince a judge or jury that the state's case just isn't strong enough. Not so on Cardassia. On Cardassia, the state gathers the evidence against you, considers it and renders its verdict of guilt, always guilt, before you see a court room. There is still a trial and it is a public trial, but its purpose is to allow the state to publically explain its verdict of guilt and to allow the people, in a mentality somewhat akin to Orwell's two-minutes hate, to revel in the triumph of the state. You even get a lawyer, a conservator, as he's called, and you also get an advisor, a nestor. The conservator and the nestor are charged not with your defense, but with persuading you to concede to the state and to confess publically, thereby reaffirming the essential rightness of the state in its conviction of you. O'Brian's conservator, Kovat, explains the whole mentality, and I've reproduced Kovat's statement here, leaving out O'Brian's interjections:

Whatever you've done, whatever the charges against you--none of that really matters in the long run. This trial is to demonstrate the futility of behavior contrary to good order. Everyone will find it most uplifting. Once again, justice will prevail. Our lives will be reaffirmed safe and secure. Here on Cardassia, all crimes are solved. All criminals are punished. All endings are happy. Even the poorest of our citizens can walk the streets in the dead of night in perfect safety. You are only one man, but your conviction will be a salutary experience for millions.

As I was preparing to write about this episode, I read the blog of a public defender here in America. He said that to him, the most brutal and crushing aspect of his job wasn't the low pay or the overwhelming case load. It was the seeming presumption by just about everyone, media, John Q Public, even implicitly, potential jurors, that your client is guilty. That's a sentiment I've heard many times, that the presumption of innocence is a myth in this country. The common wisdom seems to be, "if they arrested you and put you on trial, you must be guilty." Nowhere in our judicial system does this seem more true than in a rape trial. Now, rape is a brutal and savage crime, and none of what I'm about to say should be seen as taking anything away from genuine victims or as vindicating or absolving actual rapists. However, sex crimes have this unique distinction:  once accused, you're ruined. All it takes is a word, even a false accusation. And you, usually the male suspect, are forever tainted. You're seen as guilty, and it is very hard to defend yourself against the charge of rape, mostly because most defenses turn on trying to prove consent. Now, some say that growing skepticism and the advancement of DNA technology is reversing this trend in thought, but I doubt it. I doubt it very much. Want a concrete example?

I remember the recent arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, in May of this year. He was charged with sexually assaulting Nafissatou Diallo, a thirty-two-year-old maid at New York City's Sofitel Hotel. He was indicted, placed on a million dollars bale and placed under house arrest. Now as it happens, that case has pretty much collapsed, because the prosecution has come to believe that the alleged victim was full of shit, which, from what I can tell, she was. She lied repeatedly to investigators and to the grand jury. All in all, this is a woman who gives genuine rape victims a bad name. But let's consider Strauss-Kahn. He resigned his post at IMF on May 18, and I doubt he will ever be reinstated. The rest of his professional career will be overshadowed by these events. Yes, I am presuming his innocence, because in the aftermath of the arrest, what did I hear? Too often did I hear sentiments like, "and he thought he could get away with that; well, they wouldn't arrest a high profile fellow like that if he wasn't guilty; [and as the case wound down], I can't believe he got away with that." How do you defend yourself against this? Often times, you don't.

In truth, I sometimes feel that we in America come closer to Cardassian justice than we do to our own espoused ideals. The episode, "Tribunal," explores what our worst presumptions of guilt, like in the Strauss-Kahn affair, might look like if we acknowledged them and made them both institutional and state policy. It's a little scary, isn't it? But even if we don't put on puppet trials like those of the Cardassians, that's not to say that we couldn't. Right now the closest examples I can think of are the Moscow show trials during Stalin’s purges of the 30's, or McCarthy’s activities with the House on Un-American Activities Committee in the 50's. We have got to be careful to preserve the notion of guilty until proven innocent, to do more than pay lip service to the ideal. Better indeed that ten guilty men go free than to hear, "Mr. Blair, whatever you have done, whatever the charges against you--none of that really matters in the long run. This trial is to demonstrate the futility of behavior contrary to good order."

"Rocks and Shoals"

Story by Ronald D. Moore

Summary:

Sisko and his crew crash their stolen JemHadar ship on an alien world deep inside a nebula. Unknown to them, a unit of JemHadar has also crash landed on that planet. The Vorta is gravely injured and, upon learning of the Starfleet presence on the planet from a captured Nog and Garak, enlists the aid of Dr. Bashir. With Bashir and Sisko present, the Vorta, Kevan, reveals that he has the smallest amount of Ketrecil White remaining, not enough to maintain the discipline and sanity of the JemHadar soldiers he commands. He offers to send them into a Starfleet ambush, thereby killing the JemHadar before they can go berserk and saving the rest of their lives, including the Vorta's own. When Sisko fails to persuade the JemHadar commander to surrender, the JemHadar attack as ordered and are wiped out. The Vorta then surrenders his communications equipment and himself to Sisko's custody.

This episode is one of the most compelling of the early Dominion War. What no one I've read has yet mentioned is the tie between this episode's title and the notion of discipline and good order. "Rocks and Shoals," is the title of the old U.S. Navy regulations manual detailing offenses and punishment codes of the American Navy. I should add that, since World War II, it's been superseded by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but no naval officer would fail to recognize the title of this episode and suspect some of its themes.

Let me start by saying that I'm not ignoring the Terok Nor subplot in this episode because I think it unimportant. However, the burgeoning resistance to Dominion rule on Terok Nor is a multi-episode-spanning concept, and only a fraction of it is dealt with in "Rocks and Shoals." I've decided to forgo it in light of the main themes of the show.

Discipline and a soldier's right duty are the major themes of the episode, and they are depicted well. Watch it again and take note of Third Remata'Klan. As JemHadar go, he is portrayed as an intelligent soldier, with more dialogue than most JemHadar get in the series. He believes passionately in self-discipline and in his role as the only one who should discipline his own men. As he says to Kevan after his botched reconnaissance mission,  "You can discipline me, but only I discipline the men. That is the order of things." I'm sure there are many soldiers who wished their platoon leaders would stick up for them like that, and many more who could see in this moment a section commander who did, in fact, stick up for them in a moment like that one. Of a man like Remata'Klan, we can say what Eisenhower is alleged to have said of the German General Rommel, "a good man who just happens to be fighting for the wrong side." Remata'Klan is not blind to his commander's betrayal. But to him, two wrongs don't make a right. That is why he doesn't feel he has the authority to surrender his men when the Vorta hasn't authorized it. I'm not saying what he did is right. I don't believe in blind obedience to orders. But part of me has to admire the dedication of a soldier who pursues his duty with the absolute certainty that it will be his death. Sisko points out the betrayal and asks the soldier if he is really willing to give up his life for the order of things. Remata'Klan's answer is reminiscent of the ultimate sense of duty and honor. It is an answer that frustrates and anguishes Sisko, but one that General Martok would have understood perfectly:  "It's not my life to give up. And it never was."

The other notion of right and wrong here that I want to pick out and explore is the idea of rules in warfare. We often take it for granted that things like ambushes and attacks on civilians and so on are somehow against the rules these days, somehow less in keeping with honorable warfare. A bit of that mentality comes out when Sisko and his officers are preparing the ambush. O'Brian and Nog bring this out, with O'Brian pointing out that there are rules even in war. Garak represents the other side, pointing out that humans' notions of rules in war frequently make winning harder. Which one is right? Well, as Sisko points out, it's not a vote. This discussion among his men about the rightness of what they're about to do throws some ambiguity into what otherwise might be a situation we take for granted, attacking the enemy. Is it right that we behave as they do? Shouldn't we be better than that? Or is it about survival, survival at any cost and by any means necessary. The trouble is that I think both answers are correct. Sisko seems to think so too. His loathing of what he's done comes out in his attitude towards the Vorta. Note the loathing on Sisko's face and in his voice as he tells O'Brian to take the Vorta into custody. Finally, I like it that Sisko orders the JemHadar buried. It may be inconsequential to them and it may change nothing about what's happened, but it is a sign of respect here from one soldier to another. Indeed, Sisko in this episode definitely has much more in common with Remata'Klan than with the Vorta, Kevan.

This is not the first episode of star trek to deal with a soldier's duty and the notions of right and wrong in times of war. But it makes the Dominion War more personal and puts it on a face to face and man to man level. It's easy to kill an enemy who's on another ship or star base or planet. It's harder to do so when you've looked him in the eyes, talked to him and established some common ground. Just some more food for thought furnished by star trek. Now, on to Voyager.