Real Life in Star Trek, The Game
John Colagioia
Disclaimer
In these posts, we discuss a non-âFree as in Freedomâ popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names serve as trademarks of the owners, and so forth, and everything here relies on sitting squarely within the bounds of Fair Use, as criticism that uses tiny parts of each show to extrapolate the world that the characters live in.
PreviouslyâŚ
I initially outlined the project in this post, for those falling into this from somewhere else. In short, we attempt to use the details presented in Star Trek to assemble a view of what life looks like in the Federation. This âphaseâ of the project changes from previous posts, however. The Next Generation takes place long after the original series, so we shouldnât expect similar politics and socialization. Maybe more importantly, I enjoy the series less.
In plain language, you shouldnât read this expecting a recap or review of an episode. Many people have done both endlessly over nearly sixty years. You will find a catalog of information that we learn from each episode, though, so expect everything to potentially âspoilâ a story, if you happen to have that irrational fear.
Rather than list every post in the series here, you can quickly find them all on the startrek tag page.
The Game
This episode will hurt, unfortunately. Not even our impressive guest can fix a clunker that simultaneously wants to simultaneously play into the moral panic around video games and pitch Wil Wheaton as a leading manâŚ
RIKER: Etana? I know youâre back there. Donât make me come after you. Give me that.
Ten-to-one, theyâve done this running around for his entire vacation, but heâll talk about how much sex that he had, when he gets backâŚ
ETANA: Go get it.
RIKER: I donât believe you did that.
I guess that he doesnât care about the disposition of his work computerâŚ
ETANA: Your reward for clearing the first level.
I blame this episode for creating social mediaâŚ
RIKER: Itâs starting to get busy around here. Five new science teams just beamed in from the Zhukov. Quarters are filling up fast.
The Zhukov got a mention in Hollow Pursuits and Dataâs Day, so you can read about Georgy (ĐоОŃгиК ĐŃкОв) and his (alleged) obsession with smuggling Coca-Cola into the Soviet Union by camouflaging it as vodka in the latter post.
PICARD: On top of everything, thereâs been a change. Weâve been given only two weeks to complete the exploration.
RIKER: Two weeks? Thatâs not enough time to explore a region that size. I thought we had five weeks.
While we could imagine that Starfleet values the Enterprise so much in diplomatic missions that they had no other choice, cutting a mission like this by sixty percent, despite the overhead of loading and unloading teams from across the Federation. But it seems more likely that they either have insufficient people and ships, or they donât consider this exploratory mission at all important.
PICARD: Oh, and one piece of good news, weâre to rendezvous with a shuttlecraft carrying Wesley Crusher. Heâs on vacation from the Academy.
OK, but when do we get to hear the good news�
LAFORGE: You know Robin Lefler.
As I mentioned in Darmok, you may recognize Lefler as a young Ashley Judd, who has gone on to do much better for herself than this episodeâŚ
TROI: Really? I never met a chocolate I didnât like.
Ah, the depth of character that theyâve given the counselorâŚ
TROI: Of course it does, but itâs not just a matter of taste. Itâs the whole experience. First of all, you have to spoon the fudge around the rim, leaving only ice cream in the middle. Then, you gently spoon the ice cream around the sides, like youâre sculpting it. Relish every bite. Make every one an event. And then, with the last spoonful, close your eyes.
DidâŚthey try to make this scene sexy? If so, why?
RIKER: I brought something back from Risa. Better than chocolate.
TROI: Oh? What is it?
RIKER: Just a game.
Way to sell it, Commander. And yetâŚTroi seems far too excited about this pathetic excuse for a prospect.
PICARD: Oppido bonum. Your Latin has improved.
Why would Starfleet Academy teach LatinâŚ? No, really, I ask for two big, maybe-related reasons. First, I see no benefit in teaching a dead Earth language to students who will presumably soon need to deal with an abundance of languages that bear absolutely no relationship to Latin. Second, and maybe more important to our overall project, fascists tend to see their projects as continuations or revivals of the Roman Empireâas in, who do you think ran the âfirst Reichâ that certain German nationalists got so excited about a century ago?âand so carrying that interest into the distant future seems worrying.
Or maybe this has nothing to do with fascism. After all, one other organization has regularly obsessed over Latin in the modern era, the Catholic Church. Perhaps instead of seeing fascism, the Federation represents a Catholic state, in a timeline where the Second Vatican Council didnât allow for substituting vernacular language in Mass. That would fit with Spock pulling out so many Biblical references in the original series. Doesnât that make you feel cozierâŚ?
WORF: Wesley. Tarvokian pound cake. I made it myself.
Iâd like to point out that this little line makes Worf far more interesting than Troiâs ode to chocolate, earlier, did for herâŚ
DATA: I particularly remember the phenomenon of practical jokes, several of which I fell victim to.
Much like Starfleet possibly presenting itself as an arm of a revived Roman Empire, it seems like the continued presence of interpersonal pranks should prompt some concern. The most charitable explanations for practical jokes suggest that you use them to âhumbleâ the target, or in other words to make them feel worse about themselves. And again, that qualifies as a charitable reading, whereas other descriptions outright call it bullying, especially when targeting someoneâsuch as Dataâwho wonât share the joke in the aftermath.
DATA: I also found social gatherings difficult. There was one event, an Academy tradition, the Sadie Hawkins Dance?
Wow. I have a headache, and we havenât even gotten to the main plotâŚ
OK, a Sadie Hawkins dance derives from a 1937 Al Capp comic strip, and posits a topsy-turvy world where women and girls can ask men and boys to escort them. Let me rephrase that for clarity: For this single event, women may ask men out on dates. And why do I need to deal with this nonsense?
First, once again, all culture in the Federation derives directly from the 1930s. Now go back a few quotes and tell me that I over-reacted to the use of Latin, if we connect it to that decadeâŚ
Second, and far more importantly, Sadie Hawkins doesnât make any sense as a character, unless you have a culture that expects women to passively serve as nothing more than prizes for men to claim and win.
WESLEY: The Dancing Doctor? She tried to teach me too, but I just donât have the knack.
We now officially know that we have Wesley back, because nobody has tried to undermine Crusher in a long time, but he makes sure to spread a nickname that she knows makes her uncomfortable, as we learned in Dataâs DayâŚ
WESLEY: Youâre kidding. The computer has to do this.
You know, I skipped over Wesley feeling entitled to a big welcome, but now that he whines about the prospect of doing even the tiniest amount of labor on his own, I guess that we canât skip the rant about his constantly acting like a self-entitled snot.
Honestly, I donât know if Iâve brought this up beforeâapologies if I didâbut I might as well say it here: When the show aired, fans hated Wesley, but they did so for exactly the wrong reason. They didnât like that they gave him Roddenberryâs middle name and made him a genius whoâd save the day. And while Iâd call that a flaw in the show, that has nothing to do with the character, because they couldâve done the same with Riker, and everybody wouldâve probably taken it in stride.
No, everybody should have hated Wesley for his utter self-absorption, his racism, his sexism, his mindless devotion to Picard that certainly wonât become a major plot point for us to deal with in September, and maybe most importantly the show elevating him as some sort of example, up until that devotion ends.
WESLEY: He didnât remember you, sir. At first. I found an old yearbook photo, and he remembered you right away. He said heâs very proud of you that youâre Captain of the Enterprise.
Oh, hey, Picard has his self-entitlement issues, too, expecting a groundskeeper to remember him after, what, thirty years? I went to a tiny college that has since closed, rather than a military academy, and speaking as someone fairly close to Patrick Stewartâs age when this aired, Iâll tell you that it would please me to no end if the staff at my college remembered me, but it would also impress me to no end, given how many other people they needed to work with, before, during, and since my time there.
WESLEY: Sir, what do the initials A F stand for?
WESLEY: Boothby said he caught you carving those initials into his prized elm tree.
Apparently, weâll quietly gloss over the fact that young Picard took it upon himself to deface school property and potentially cause environmental damage along the way. Seriously, maybe only in my part of the world, but even in 1991, that sort of thing felt crass, and only really the sort of pseudo-affection that youâd get from the sort of teenager who thinks that they need to carry a knife around at all times.
And OK, one comment on the initials: I can absolutely see Picard as the sort of kid whoâd run off on his own with a knife, then pat himself on the back for marking a landmark tree as âJean-Luc AF.â
WESLEY: You have a funny way of looking at conduit configuration, but it works.
Ugh. Did Wesley invent negging, here? Worse, did this episode train a generation of television viewers to believe that insulting a woman would make Ashley Judd like you�
LEFLER: No. But Iâll meet you for dinner.
âŚWhy?
Seriously, weâve seen him do nothing but complain about people not showering him with sufficient praise, so either his insults somehow worked or he did something endearing that I missedâŚ
CRUSHER: No. Wesley, you are on vacation. You have done enough already.
WESLEY: Yeah, maybe youâre right. Computer, increase light level.
It took Wesley exactly one âmaybe you should relaxâ to completely abandon his comatose friend.
LEFLER: When your parents are the only plasma specialists in the sector, you do a lot of travelling around. We went from base to base to base. I felt like a piece of luggage after a while. I spent all of my time around technical gear. My first friend was a tricorder.
This seems to give some indication of the Federationâs economic conditions, if a âplasma specialistâ spends their entire life as what sounds like an itinerant laborer without attracting any competition in the region.
WESLEY: Really? My very first friend was a warp coil.
That probably happened, because he treats warp coils with far more respect than he does any actual people. Also, speaking of respectâŚwhat did they dress him in? He seems to have a mock turtleneck with corduroy neck, shoulder pads or epaulets, and cuffs.
LEFLER: Itâs stimulating the septal area.
WESLEY: Thatâs the pleasure center of the brain. Whatever this thing does, it must feel pretty good.
The septal area does, in fact, exist.
WESLEY: The game initiates a serotonin cascade in the frontal lobe of the brain. Now I know thatâs nothing conclusive, but it could explain why everyone is so attracted to it. And at the same time, it stimulates the brainâs reasoning center. I donât know what thatâs all about.
ThatâŚdoesnât sound bad. âIt feels good and makes you thinkâ would make for high praise in almost any other context, but here they seem to want to use video games to draw yet another drug metaphor. And the Federation does appear to still conduct the War on Drugs, most recently poking its head out in Night Terrors.
WESLEY: She said no thanks.
Look, we all know that I donât like Wesley and why I donât like Wesley, but grabbing Leflerâs wrist to angrily drag her out of a situation that she already resolved feels way creepier than it needed to. Especially combined with his âaffectionateâ insults above, not to mention his âabandon your people so that we can run away together, and you can rely on me for everythingâ pitch back in The Dauphin, makes me half-wonder if we never see Lefler for far more scandalous reasons than Judd having a far more successful career ahead of herâŚ
PICARD: Welcome, Etana. The Enterprise has been secured. We await your further instructions.
Good to see that ships have literally no safeguards against someone taking over the crew. Otherwise, theyâd need to take computer security seriously, and we all know that would never happenâŚ
ETANA: The expansion will proceed as follows. Commander Riker, you will pilot a shuttlecraft to the Cleon system, where you will rendezvous with the starship Endeavour. Proceed with distributing the device to that vessel. Commander La Forge, Counselor Troi, take a shuttle to Starbase sixty-seven. Distribute the device to all starships currently docked there.
The Endeavor last got a mention way back in Amok Time, which probably takes its name most directly from the now-retired space shuttle, which NASA introduced about six months prior to this episode airing, even though it wouldnât fly for another six or so.
Captainâs log, stardate 45212.1. We have delivered the Ktarian vessel to Starbase eighty-two and are now on a course to rendezvous with the Starship Merrimack, which will transport Wesley Crusher back to Starfleet Academy.
The Merrimack last appeared in Sarek, similarly taking the guest star back home. Actually, given next weekâs episode, I wonder whether they chose the ship deliberately. Now that I think about it, the Endeavour also vaguely connects, too.
LEFLER: Here. A gift, so youâll remember. Robinâs Laws. All one hundred and two of them.
She seems to have printed them out on extremely rough paper, then bound them in some sort of plastic box. It almost seems impressive.
WESLEY: A couple of light years canât keep good friends apart. Bye.
Sure, but tens of thousands of light years probably would, and that seems like the more typical scenario for the Enterprise.
Conclusions
We see what passes for fashion, which I can only describe as âanything goes.â Paper, or something like it, also seems to exist for communication.
The Bad
We see people act careless with official equipment when off-duty. Maybe related, everybody seems so bored with their jobs, on the eve of allegedly one of their most exciting and now stressful projects, that merely telling them that a new game exists will cause them to leap at the opportunity to try it.
Based on what we see at Starfleet Academy, regressive Earth culture seems to have a strong sway over the populace. They teach Latin. People expect women to take passive roles in relationships, except at certain exceptional times, and including when receiving âaffectionateâ insults. They dismiss bullying as camaraderie. Students get to deface school property without consequences.
We see a return to trying to diminish a female doctorâs accomplishments, because she also does other things, sometimes.
Wesley and Picard both show how much the culture indulges self-entitlement, where at least people of a certain class expect that everyone will welcome and remember them at all times, and that theyâll only get assigned the most interesting work available at any given time. Wesley also completely abandons a close friend in a medical crisis, because heâd rather relax before his date, but does manhandle said date instead of trusting her to step away from a bad situation on her own.
Ships donât appear to have any failsafe systems for when the crew abandons their mission.
Next
Come back in a week, when somebody considers the possibility of boosting ratings by bringing back a fan-favorite character in the franchise, in Unification, part 1.
Credits: The header image is Shuffling through the METAVERSE by Steve Jurvetson, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
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Tags: scifi startrek closereading