On Good and Evil

Many people claim that complex representations of good and evil are superior to black-and-white distinctions. I tend to agree with this claim, especially when representing reality. Very rarely in real life are there people who would, with proper 'fellow-feeling,' be entirely evil. Stories depicting reality in black-and-white terms are, more often than not, destructive. When art is trying to imitate life, then, strict boundaries of good versus evil are not productive. 

That said, I was reflecting upon many of the stories that I love. Harry Potter. The Lord of the Rings. The Hunger Games. Star Wars (to a lesser extent). And, heck, I'll even throw in Atlas Shrugged. What these have in common is that they do not in any way match my avowed ideal depiction of good versus evil. At best, these stories try to generate sympathy for the villains by showing where they 'went wrong,' like with Smeagol or Tom Riddle. But, while the 'merit' of evil is not always unambiguously placed at the feet of the character, there is no doubt that evil is the result. 

Now, in my defense, I like quite a few stories where things are less black and white. The Stars My Destination, anything by UK Le Guin, the Ender series (the first one), Song of Ice and Fire, Star Trek on good days... but it's not the overwhelming majority that I would have guessed. 

So, what's the purpose of sharp distinctions between good and evil? By making one side unambiguously evil, it frees up the story to explore what it means to be 'good.' By caricaturing one side, all of the focus can be on the exploration of, and a more complex depiction of, what it means to be good, to live a good life, and so on. Angels vs Demons is boring, to be sure, but complexly imagined good guys vs Demons is something that works. In Harry Potter, we get a very clear vision of good: one who is forgiving, reliant on friends, compassionate, imperfect, and so on. In LoTR, the good is pastoral, simple, self-reliant as much as possible, and so on. The villains may have some level of complexity, but their values do not. It's probably why Rand was a Romantic: it allowed her to spend the time presenting her image of the good, which was the entire point of her project. Imagining the villains of Atlas Shrugged complexly would have been more realistic, but it would have made the endeavor less successful; LoTR would not have been improved by complexly imagining Sauron's philosophy.

I will say that when it comes to historical or contemporary fiction, especially when dealing with somewhat political events, my original 'good and evil should both be imagined complexly and not as a dichotomy in reality' maxim still applies. I think that's why I found The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak so non-compelling. He tries to depict a real life situation, Nazi Germany, and does so by clearly labeling people 'good guys' and 'bad guys' depending on their relationship to the party. I get it, Nazis are evil. But if you are going to depict a group of people who actually existed, there should be some attempt to try to get inside their heads. At the very least, you will be able to discover how normal people can find 'evil' so compelling. Perhaps this is one of the benefits science fiction and fantasy, where depicting someone as 'pure evil' does not dehumanize actual people, and so understandings about what is 'good' can be explored more acceptably.

(This is my "Ryan discovers what he would have learned in week 3 of his Lit 101 class" post)

Ryan Reviews: The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester

One of my all-time favorite books. The Stars My Destination (originally called Tyger, Tyger) is, basically, the Count of Monte Cristo in space but a lot shorter.

Gully Foyle is our antihero. He begins the book as a nobody who just happens to be stranded on a ship. He lives in a utility closet, leaving each day to replenish his food, water, and air. His entire life has been a story of wasted potential: intellect but no education, strength but no finesse, opportunity but no effort. We are told that psychologists have tried, and failed, to find the ‘key’ to ‘unlock’ Foyle. That key arrives during one of Foyle’s daily gatherings. His salvation, the SS Vorga, approaches his ship when Foyle fires off his emergency flares, but bypasses him.* Foyle’s rage engages his mind. He educates himself using the manuals on the ship, and ingeniously gets his dead ship moving again. An extremely weird ‘Scientific People,’ the barbaric decedents of a lost scientific expedition, collect Foyle’s ship and brand him with a hideous face tattoo. 

The middle of the book follows Foyle’s attempts to get revenge on Vorga. He is single-minded, ugly, and amoral (and occasionally evil). He is imprisoned for refusing to tell people the location of his ship and the powerful PyRE that was aboard. He escapes with the unfortunately named Jizz McQueen, a woman who educated him while they were both in prison, able to speak only by a quirk of geology. After the escape, the two go to get Foyle’s tattoo removed. Unfortunately, the removal is only partially successful: when blood rushes to Gully’s face, the ugly mask returns. Emotion becomes Foyle’s greatest enemy.

He and Jizz are successful at liberating the cargo of his ship, but Foyle loses Jizz in the process. The fortune aboard the ship allows Foyle to rebrand himself Geoffrey Fourmyle, a man who exists only to be noticed. Fourmyle is more articulate and educated than Foyle, and with control of his emotions. People recognized Foyle only by his mask, so as long as Fourmyle kept his emotions under control, he was free to continue his pursuit of Vorga. Unfortunately, he falls in love with Olivia Prestign, who turns out to be the person who was in command of the Vorga when it left Foyle to die (and turned out to be an awful human for other reasons). 

As the book nears conclusion, Foyle starts to encounter a burning man. The burning man, it turns out, is him—from his future. Foyle is concussed while trying to protect PyRE, and the concussion interacts with his enhancements (that make him move more quickly than his prey and heighten his senses) to cause a weird bout of synesthesia. The burning man is Foyle, fully unlocked. While most humans can only jaunte (teleport using the mind) between 50-1000 miles, and only terrestrially, Foyle turns out to be exempt from this limitation, jaunting through space and time (the confused Foyle tries to warn his past self, showing up only as the strange burning man, unable to communicate through his synesthesia). Once he returns to normal, he is faced with a moral dilemma: what to do with PyRE. PyRE could potentially destroy the world, or it could end the war (between the Inner Planets and the Outer Satellites). His options: respect the property rights of the rightful owner of PyRE; give the weapon to the Inner Planet government, to give them a fighting chance against the more powerful Outer Satellites; or to be pragmatic, giving both sides PyRE with the hope that neither will use it for fear of retaliation. 

By now Foyle is a transformed man. Foyle’s conscience is like a muscle, atrophied after years of being unnecessary (since he could just coast along), but growing stronger as he begins to face dilemmas. His decision is to take the decision away from the Great Men. A society where the great, the tigers, choose for the many is a society where the many become like Foyle at the beginning of the book: willing to act only to meet their necessities. He distributes the PyRE among the common people of the Earth, giving the choice of ‘living or dying back to the people who do the living and the dying.’ 

While Foyle may be unredeemable (rapists usually are), his arc is one of moral growth and transformation. Even though his goal throughout the book is vengeance, hardly commendable, he is forced into situations where he must choose to act morally or immorally. By having a goal, Foyle had choices to make, whereas when he had no power, he needed make no choices. The anti-authority, pro-moral-autonomy message is one that I, of course, like quite a bit. 

A friend of mine (Anthony) said that this book was full of ‘casual ridiculousness’ (did I get it right?). Very true. The concept of teleportation with the mind, as an inherent ability of all humans, is ridiculous. The Scientific People are ridiculous. I could go on. If you’re looking for any hard Sci-Fi, look elsewhere. This is Star Wars logic, not even Star Trek, and perish the thought of Hal Clement. While the scientific aspects of it all were patently ridiculous, the social aspects of it resonated, for the most part. A new technology makes important resources that some nations rely on completely worthless, leading to political instability? Check. Ridiculous conspicuous consumption by the rich? Check (though I could do without the ‘business as clan’). Groups of people circling the world in perpetual night looking for places to loot? Sure. People cutting their brains off from their senses, so that they live voluntarily as vegetables? Yeah, especially given the universal lack of moral autonomy.

Finally, I love Bester’s style, at least for this book. He’s brisk and cinematic (making his transition into Comic Book writing unsurprising).

This book is imperfect, of course. Bester is steeped in Freudian psychology, though it manifests itself only lightly in this book. Bester is also sexist; not the (not really) benign neglect that characterizes most Sci-Fi authors of the Golden Age, but a sexism that actively defines a role for women as generally subservient to men. It peeks through in this book, given the hyper-Victorian treatment of women, but it is concealed by a couple strong female characters (who are unusual in their strength, it is noted). I would have written the sexism off as a purposeful way of showing the alienness of the world caused by jaunting,** but readings elsewhere of his speeches and non-fiction writings show a fairly unrepentant sexist. In addition to that, some of the tropes that Bester plays upon are probably a lot easier for me to swallow, given my love for random old sci-fi, than it is for someone going in for a straightforward story.

*Bester was inspired by a story during WWII, where a seaman on a lifeboat was ignored by both Axis and Allied ships, though both had the opportunity to save him. Both thought the lifeboat was a trap laid by the other. 

**My rule of thumb is to believe that fictional worlds represent ideas that the author finds interesting, rather than aspects of the author’s ideology. Some people call Robert Heinlein a fascist, because in Starship Troopers only those who have served the government have the right to vote. Of course, that makes him an anarchist for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. (People usually only do this when they disagree with the author’s real views. Heinlein a libertarian? That’s basically a stone’s throw away from fascism anyways! Le Guin portrays a socialist society with some subtlety? She must be a commie-relativist-hippie! Mixing politics with reading is lame. Yes, I know I’ve just been doing that for the past several sentences.)

Ryan Reviews: The Colorado Kid - Stephen King

3 out of 5 stars.

More of a novella than a novel, The Colorado Kid features three newspaper writers, two old men and a young lady. The newspapermen, deciding that the young lady is a good egg, let her in on their Island’s most interesting unsolved mystery: the death of the Colorado Kid. 

That the mystery is unsolved is the point of the story. Stories in newspapers or in books often have clean beginnings, middles, and ends. Stories in life do not. The Colorado Kid subverts the standard expectations that this book sets forth. Does a new set of eyes shed light on the mystery? Not at all. Is she inspired to find clues to solve the case? No. Most stories that we observe in real life have no endings, and we are perpetually suspended in the midst of stories that are not really stories. Because there is no closure to these stories, people rarely recite them, since they are inherently unsatisfying (something King thought most readers would feel about The Colorado Kid). 

Being a one-of-a-kind story gives CK a bit more impact. If it became common for books to take a post-modern turn and tell stories-that-aren’t-stories, it would get tiresome quickly. Heck, there are a lot of bad books that are unintentionally stories-that-aren’t-stories. Read as a commentary on the stories we tell, CK works. 

Now, the book’s biggest detractors cite its place in a series of books meant to be hard-boiled, pulp detective novels. As a detective story this book fails—whoever decided to market it as a detective story did this book no favors. There is mystery, yes, but recounting some amateur detective work of twenty-five years ago does not a detective story make. 

As an aside… One thing that drew me to this book was the Syfy (*cringe*) TV show Haven, which is fun but not great. The show is a paranormal police procedural, where the townsfolk are cursed with psychic ‘troubles’ that… well, cause trouble. Haven shares three things with the Colorado Kid: it takes place in Maine, the newspapermen are named Vince and Dave, and someone named the Colorado Kid died mysteriously, long ago. The two have less in common than Asimov’s I Robot story collection has with the eponymous Will Smith movie. That said, the worst that the association did was point me to this book, so I can forgive it. At least I didn’t come to it expecting a hard-boiled detective novel!

Ryan Reviews: Nexus - Ramez Naam

This is hard sci fi going where lots of soft sci fi has gone before. Telepathy and collective intelligence shows up, notably, in Bester's Demolished Man, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside, and many, many more; not to mention the collective intelligences featured in Star Trek and Doctor Who (and many, many, more.) The innovation of Nexus is its focus on neuroscientific and nanotechnological foundations of collective intelligence. 

The central mechanism in the story is Nexus 5. This drug, when first ingested, goes about mapping and 'rationalizing' the mind, making intelligible what would otherwise be unintelligible to others (or to the self). People can program their bodies to react in certain ways, overriding weakness of body and will. It then allows people to access and alter other people's minds at varying levels, allowing mental 'texting' and communication of emotions, but also the domination of the senses and body. Lane, the protagonist, uses this aspect of the drug to force Sam, an anti-drug government agent, into a state of sensory deprivation. Lane gets dominated, later, by posthuman Chinese scientist Su-Yong Shu. The most interesting implication comes from the merging of minds without coercion, when the merging of minds creates an emergent, greater, intelligence. It is fitting that the people most interested in this are hippies and Buddhist monks. 

Naam's biggest success is the idea of Nexus 5. His execution of the story based around the concept is less of a success, but still enjoyable. The descriptions of the effects of the drug were, frankly, not weird enough. Nexus often just seems like Google Glass that can make your body a video game character (indeed, the 'Don Juan' pick-up program reminded me a lot of the dialog choice interface in the Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic video games). The more radical implications of Nexus suffer from being told to us instead of shown. 

Kade Lane, the protagonist, is an optimist regarding the potential of Nexus to do social good. His opposition is Sam, who fears the abuse of power that Nexus allows. Sam's arguments against Nexus are shot down by Lane by statements of 'I won't allow that to happen,' which are never really that reassuring. The government gets Lane to work with them in exchange for leniency for his friends in a drug bust, and Lane and Sam attend a Neuroscience conference in Thailand. There, Sam and Lane argue about the merits of Nexus and 

Sam's character arc comes to a close when she discusses her reasons for being against the Nexus drugs. Turns out, her family was dominated by a precursor to Nexus; a commune decided to expose itself to a virus that made all of them more altruistic--but (in a parable out of Ayn Rand) in the land of the altruistic, the selfish man is king. Sam escaped, while her family did not. She confesses all of this to Lane while they are under the influence of Nexus and another mood-enhancing drug. She releases her pain, but then ceases to be a driving character. Like the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek 5 when Sybok took their pain, Sam's emotional resolution leads to a loss of agency.

The resolution of the book ignores the characters, cementing Nexus as the central purpose of the book. Lane uploads the Nexus formula, and despite the efforts of governments around the world, it spreads to everyone. Lane's victory in the debate between him and Sam is not really the victory of his ideas, but in the loss of Sam's agency and the evil of his enemies. 

The shape of the story (a la, Vonnegut) is an incomplete version of 'Man in a Hole.' We have a well-off character who is dumped into a hole... and he's supposed to get out and be better off for the journey, but instead it ends with him being still in the hole while Nexus gets out. Visually:

Some unanswered questions: How does consciousness work? When we're given the perspective of the characters under domination, their internal monologues remain their own, their thoughts remain untouched; only the 'machinery' aspects of the mind are affected. Was this description of the mind intentional? It seems to cut against the possibility of collective intelligence, instead pointing to the drug as an extreme form of communication (which is even hinted at by the comparison of Nexus to reading and writing).

Overall, ***.5/***** (rounded up for Goodreads). An intriguing subject and easy read, somewhat limited by an unsatisfactory handling of the story and description.

Ryan Reviews (short): The Magicians

The Magicians by Lev Grossman (Audiobook)

** (out of *****)

A 'postmodern' take on the wizard school genre. The protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, is a boy who has little investment in the real world and is chronically unhappy. He's smart but doesn't care that much about school, has only a handful of friends, and is not that close to his family. His main escape is magic (as in sleights-of-hand) and a fantastical world of Fillory (which is, by the way, the dumbest name ever). He's whisked away to a school of magic, where he excels but fails to find contentment. After graduation, he moves to Manhattan where he does nothing but slide further into motionlessness--until an old acquaintance returns with a way into Fillory. Blessed with the opportunity to live his childhood dreams, Quentin, of course, finds nothing but despair and tragedy. The experience leaves him so disillusioned that he returns to New York and gives up magic, instead settling for a menial job provided as a sort of welfare for disillusioned magicians.

I expected a lot from this book and was disappointed. The 'deconstruction' of the 'boy-magic' genre is superficial, and turn instead into 'what would Hogwarts be like if it kind of sucked' along with 'Quiddich that kind of sucks.' The biting social commentary is, sadly, absent. The book touches on some important subjects: What do you do in a 'post-scarcity' situation, when the main struggle of life is not satisfying your wants, but in finding things to want? [Iain M. Banks's Culture series tackles this question much better.]
The lack of direction experienced by Quentin resonates, at first, but he quickly turns into a caricature, severing any degree of sympathy between him and the reader.

The failings of the book lie in the weakness of the main character, Quentin. Quentin exists simply to be disappointed by things. Not for any deep reason; that is just his m.o. Unfortunately, merely describing someone feeling disappointment is not enough to get the reader to go along with the character's disappointment. The fantasy genre is full of paper characters who have no purpose other than to let the author tell us how wondrous everything is; paper characters who only let the author tell us how disappointing everything is not much of an advance.

What should Voyager have been?

This post is a continuation of the post the other day (or yesterday, depending on when I finish this) about Star Trek: Voyager.

Voyager is broken up into two parts: pre-Borg and post-Borg. Seasons 1-3 were an attempt to acclimate the crew (and the viewers) to Voyager's predicament, establish relationships, and introduce the alien-ness of the Delta quadrant. Seasons 4-7 gave up any trappings of continuity and became TOS in the Delta quadrant.

Assuming that Seven arrives in Season 4, and the Borg are introduced, my suggestions:

When Voyager arrives in the Delta quadrant, they are essentially on the fringes of civilization. No replicators, and even water is scarce. Caretaker actually sets this up pretty well, but it fails to follow through. It needs to show the implications of scarcity (outside of Voyager). It's easy for Voyager to be all high and mighty when the Kazon are all a bunch of douche-nozzles.

The Kazon could be cast as a slave race from a recently disintegrated 'Roman Empire' type civilization. The first three seasons of cruising through the Delta quadrant would be like walking through eighth century Europe: some semblance of a common background (common law, similar but diverging languages and cultures, half-a-dozen wannabe heirs to the throne). You already have the Vidiians, who are suffering from a plague, who would fit right in as former members of this 'Roman Empire.' The common background doesn't prevent vastly different outcomes: Voyager could do away with the annoying Trek Tropes of: all (non-Federation) civilizations are single-species (Dominion excluded, kind of); and all members of the same species (non-Federation) share the same attitudes, culture, and political system. Some Kazon sects may be really friendly to Voyager, straining their desire to withhold technology, while others can be classic Trek villains.

As season 3 draws to a close, Voyager comes to discover the cause of the 'Roman Empire's' disintegration: the Borg.

Something has to be done to make the Borg more interesting. Season 3 episode, Unity, offers an interesting possibility (this is the episode where Chakotay meets the former Borg who want to re-collectivize). What would happen if the Borg collective were destroyed (without all the Borg being destroyed?) Picard chooses in TNG's Hugh not to use a virus that would potentially destabilize the collective. After First Contact, it seems like Starfleet Intelligence would be more than willing to do something to get rid of the Borg threat. As Voyager enters Borg space, they encounter a strong Borg, but at some point they get word from Starfleet that the Hugh-solution has been activated. The central collective collapses, but there remains some odd trillion individuals still around. The former Borg have a myriad of reactions--some wanting to re-form a collective, some wanting to remain 'Borg', but individuals, and some wanting to re-join their former civilizations.

(I don't love Species 8472. It was kind of a 'we need someone with an EVEN BIGGER stick' moment, which Voyager fell victim to often.)

The Borg who want to re-collectivize enable a story arc that provides a sympathetic picture of the Borg. Sci-Fi is at its best when it presents conflicts as between two legitimate points of view (Star Trek, though, does this poorly as a rule. The best Trek villains--Borg in TNG and 8, Kahn in 2, the Dominion, are, perhaps, understandable, but never sympathetic). The collective could really push the logic of "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." A single civilization provides its distinctiveness to a billion people or so, while that culture assimilated benefits trillions upon trillions of Borg.

The Borg who want to re-integrate with their original society provide a way for Voyager to interact with new civilizations. I'm sure Voyager could play on some immigration/war crimes stuff, with the returning Borg being accepted, shunned, or persecuted for war crimes.


What would the relationships have looked like?

Harry Kim would have had a much more intimate relationship with dead.

Kes. I would have like to have kept Kes aboard. I don't dislike her relationship with Neelix. I like her relationship with Janeway (though having both Seven and Kes aboard would have strained Janeway's motherly side). Seven and Kes could have had a good relationship, I think? (Also, why don't the Borg have Telepathy or empathic ability?)

Neelix should have been the social center of the ship. Everyone eats at the mess hall--Maquis, Starfleet, Dayshift, Nightshift, every department. Voyager shows occasional social fragmentation (outside of the bridge crew). He's ostensibly a morale officer, but that doesn't go very far. His fear of becoming useless once Voyager goes beyond his knowledge of space is a great character arc, but I think the solution of kinda making him a security officer and kinda making him an ambassador isn't satisfying. Instead, Janeway should have emphasized that Voyager is a society, not just a starship, and his role as opinion leader, connector, and 'morale officer' is a real job. (Another Trek Trope: no one outside of Starfleet ever does anything useful).

I also like the early season relationship between Janeway and Chakotay. I think the trend of passionate, but respectful, disagreement is good. There could be more tension between Chakotay and Tuvok, as Tuvok often feels more like a first officer than Chakotay does. The thing missing from Chakotay was something missing from the show in general: real tension and distinction between the Maquis and Starfleet crew.

I would have like to have seen a story-arc involving Tuvok-as-Javiert. A group of Maquis are troublemakers, and Tuvok zealously pursues them--rightly in most of the cases, but in one case he ends up pursuing, and ruining, a truly repentant Maquis crewman, and Tuvok must deal with his over-reach.

The Doctor, and Tom and B'Elanna, are fairly well done. T&B stagnated for a bit (the fake-crew T&B marriage lampshades this), but they're fairly positive. Janeway, too.

What does everyone think? Obviously there are lots of other things I would tweak, but I don't want this post to get to be longer than most of my papers.

Ryan Reviews: Star Trek Voyager

Star Trek: Voyager is kind of the whipping boy of the Star Trek community. The people who didn't like DS9 or ENT simply avoided them, while Voyager offered a sort of perpetual hope that it would improve, so more people stuck through it than other Treks.

I was originally among the haters, but since Anna had fond memories of Voyager, and we are kind of on a completionist kick. My earlier conceptions have been confirmed, but I've been enjoying it more than I used to.

Voyager's biggest problem is that it was set up to be a serial, but ended up being the most episodic show of the modern-era Treks. In terms of sheer quality, it's not that far from DS9, and closer to TNG than it seems. In terms of fulfilled potential, it's extremely low.

The acting: On a character-by-character basis, the case of Voyager is very strong. Janeway, Tuvok, the Doctor, Kes, and especially Seven are all very strong actors, with B'Elanna and Tom right behind. Neelix is sabotaged beyond all hope by terrible writing, and Kim should have been killed off instead of Kes.

Chakotay is much better than I remember, at least in the first four or so seasons. He is a victim of bad writing as well, as other than the 'otherness' of his being Native American he has very little depth. His spirituality is occasionally used to good purpose, but not enough. As the seasons progress he becomes more and more a cipher (turning in fewer and fewer good performances). His relationship with Janeway, when they actually develop it, is one of the strongest of the series: Janeway is able to have a less-hierarchical relationship relationship with him than she does with any other member of the crew (except Seven, who eventually replaces him as the-person-who-has-a-relationship-with-Janeway).

So, the problem is not the cast. What about the plot?

The plot is not the problem. In fact, if you described the premise of each show to a person who knew nothing of the execution of the show, Voyager is by far the best. The Maquis-Starfleet crew combination is a perfect way to generate tension--TNG was great, but there was little inter-personal conflict. The 'journey home' aspect ensures that the villains are not simply re-hashed TNG villains, keeping the canon intact but without any of the baggage that being a sequel entails. The scarcity of resources--something that normal Trek never has to deal with--is an actual problem. The scarcity of people cuts off one of the cheapest Trek (and otherwise) tropes: introducing a (good-guy) character and killing him off in order to resolve the plot.

The problem was the writing.

In particular, three problems: continuity, bad science, and a lack of originality.

Voyager ended up adopting the episodic nature of not only TNG, but TOS. It seemed like the studio was fine having one Trek telling a serialized story--DS9--but wanted a Trek that people could tune in to and not miss a beat. Now, I have nothing against episodic TV shows, but Voyager *needed* to maintain some continuity. The Maquis-Starfleet plot would have involved rapidly changing relationships, tensions over different issues that sometimes exploded into a plot point, and so on. Resource scarcity can allow for the crew to set, and achieve goals over many episodes. Travelling through the Delta quadrant can allow for some foreshadowing (kind of like they did with Borg space) and show a gradually changing alien landscape. On this same point, the lack of continuity let the writers allow for characters to become disconnected from one another. Sure, there were some relationships, Tom-B'Elanna, Tom-Kim, Janeway-Chakot/Seven, Neelix-Kes-Doctor, Doctor-Seven, and so on. But there were so many holes in the relationship-network. In TNG (and DS9 to a lesser extent), every character had some sort of unique relationship with the other members of the crew. Not the case in Voyager.

It's obvious that some among the writers wanted to promote continuity, as episodes like The Year of Hell and Course: Oblivion prove. But such glimpses of continuity only served to remind us what Voyager could have been normally.

Bad Science. This manifests in two forms. First, the techno-babble. Techno-babble, even more than killing off new characters, is a plot crutch. A good plot confronts the characters with a challenge, and requires that characters come up with some creative resolution or make some sacrifice in order to solve the problem.

Because techno-babble decreases the price of one sort of resolution, it allows for the creators to 'produce' more 'problem,' in other words letting the writers get the characters into and out of bigger problems. This leads to an unfortunate spiral (that started in TNG), where drama requires problems of increasing intensity, and increasingly contrived solutions. This ultimately makes it impossible for the writers to credibly commit to danger or drama of any type.

The science itself is also terrible, especially regarding DNA and Evolution. The infamous 'Threshold,' where Paris and Janeway exceed Warp 10 (to infinity- and beyond! To hell with evolution, basic fractions escape the writers. If you exceed infinite speed, this means that you travel and infinite distance in some finite length of time. They would never have seen the Delta Flyer again). They then turn in to lizard people from their DNA changing. The writer of that episode, Brandon Braga, stated that he wanted to convey that 'evolution doesn't always go forward - it can go backwards too!' In Distant Origin, Voyager 'simulates what a dinosaur would look like if it evolved for another 300 million years.' The 'progressive modernist' view of history is annoying enough, a 'progressive modernist' view of evolution (evolution without selection, a.k.a., not evolution) is worse.

The lack of creativity manifests itself in two places, one of which is more obvious looking back than it is now. One is a lack of technological change. It's been joked elsewhere, that some of the most life-changing technologies in our lives are completely missing from Star Trek. Social media (#ShitSiskoSays), interactive display devices (for more than reading), any sort of technology that makes people 'better,' or cyborgy, is completely lacking from Voyager. I don't expect these exact things (but human modification seems a no-brainer, especially with the precedent of Geordi), but the only technological advances that Voyager makes are 'in universe' advances and not 'lifestyle' advances. Bioneural gel, Slipstream drive, etc, are all 'advances' that have zero implications for the characters.

The second creativity failure is in the failure to produce a good Delta Quadrant culture. They tried with the Kazon, but 1) They hung around for *TWO YEARS* going at high warp. The same Kazon. and 2) the Kazon sucked. What would it be like to travel across the United States on foot? There are certainly distinct cultures, but the change is gradual, people know the surrounding area, and have relationships with each other. In Voyager, it's a little bit like stepping from the Bronx into downtown San Francisco, then the next block is Amish country, and so on. And then you get to the Borg. Kind of.

To be fair, there are quite a good number of 'creative' episodes which are really good. The episodic nature of Voyager allows it to come up with a really good stand-alone now and then (while Enterprise and DS9 had to deal with both the arc and the episode, for the most part). I'll come up with a list of them soon. It's probably as long as DS9's list.

Next time: What should Voyager have been?