Of Star Trek and Secular Scots: STNG, S7E14

No, Not That Secular Scot!

When it first aired in the 1990s, I watched the Next Generation infrequently. Robert Bork had recently been denied a chair on the U.S. Supreme Court and I recall being amused by a large Rubik's Cube flying through space decimating human diversity: Borg = Bork? It is a puzzle I never attempted to solve. I was content to admire the fact that the franchise had at last found a Captain who could act; it was never necessary that I attach myself to this new, heretical generation.

The root of the word heresy means to choose and the nefarious forces (not, note bene, Force) behind STNG chose to further stretch Gene Roddenberry's gauzy Unitarianism into utter materialism. In the Next Generation one finds all problems solvable by human techne and the power of positive thinking. The universe is filled with interesting and complex puzzles but devoid of substantive meaning.

"Sub Rosa" (S7E14) ambitiously seeks to destroy two mysteries in one squeamish episode: God and ghosts. I can imagine no drearier world than Scotland writ large (unless it were New York Planet), but STNG has a writer for that. Thus we move from the cold of the Scottish Highlands to a place with just a wee more warmth: a burial plot. 

The Best Plot in the Episode

We are on this grim planet because Dr. Crusher's grandmother has died and since the Borg threat is in abeyance. the Enterprise can make a visit. At graveside these words are intoned: 

And so now we commit her body to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In sure and certain hope that her memory will be kept alive within us all. 

Whether or not there was a hue and cry by Anglicans worldwide for this act of liturgical theft and redaction, I know not. Given the general trend toward theological drivel in the West, it may well have been viewed as "prophetic"! In any case, what is clear is that the "faith" expressed in those words are light years away from these from the Book of Common Prayer: 

In sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend our sister N. and commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless her and keep her, the Lord lift up his countenance upon her and give her peace. Amen. 

One is reminded here of Nietzsche: God is dead, and we have killed Him. Or perhaps in the futuristic vision, God died through our smugness. 

Seriously?

It gets worse. It was not enough to snuff out God but ghosts too must be annihilated. It turns out that Granny had a thousands of year young lover named Ronin. After she passes on into our memories, up pops an apparently supers-sexy spirit who plays doctor with the doctor. Well, rubes like us would conjecture, "Ghost!" but it turns out Ronin is a run of the mill rare life form. I think Beverly whacks him with a phaser but somehow he's disposed of.

This episode is terrible on many levels but it accurately portrays the series' metaphysical anemia: strange new worlds that dazzle the eyes but chill the soul; a universe that is a kind of Mega-Las Vegas - bright shiny objects, emptied of significance.

Total Recall, Total Dud

Dudley Done Wrong

Total Recall 2070. Directed by Art Monterastelli, performances by Michael Easton, Karl Pruner, and      Cynthia Preston, Alliance Atlantis, 1999

Stylized and cribbed from Blade Runner down to the Asian style among the denizens of an unnamed city, a synth-pop knock-off of Vangelis and a purposeless "Gaff" (James Edward Olmos) clone, Total Recall 2070 also steals the basic plot of a most excellent movie. This is not that movie.

In this movie, self-aware androids want more time to -- have memories -- and thus snatch a Rekall Corp. scientist but are thwarted by our hero, David "I Kid You Not" Hume (Michael Easton) who must have been a stunt double for David Duchovny at some point in his career. The androids are sneaky and end up grabbing the Mars-bound scientist in order to hold onto their precious yet fake memories and feelings.

Meanwhile a youngster who is a mind-reader (this is the future and radiation does great things in the future) and most excellent video game player is kidnapped from two distraught foreigners with the surname of Bimboo or Sordoo or Sodoor or somesuch. This sad couple mistakenly thought they went for a nice trip to the Galapagos Islands but really had a mind-job done on them by Rekall (or someone pretending to be a Rekall rep) and had their kid snatched along with any memory of even ever having a kid. What a nasty corporation!

No new ground is covered in the pilot but there are no less than three zingers that will give viewers a chuckle and/or a deep sigh:

1. After our protagonist, good cop, Officer Hume loses his partner in a gun-battle with androids, he gets a new partner with the personality of Lieutenant Commander Data from Star Trek the Next Generation but has no clue that this cop is - gasp! - an android. I'm a complete space cadet and it was clear to me from the first scene with Mr. Roboto and his "Caesar" haircut that this was a tin man. Remember, Hume's whole professional life revolves around paying attention to what's going on.

2. Much ado is made of the lethality of a 12mm pistol that Officer Hume has snatched from the scene of his partner's murder, but when he deploys the weapon he is (a) unable to hit the back side of a barn with it, and (b) when he randomly does hit his target, the victim dies no more surely or not than the bodies that seem to fall everywhere from ray guns in the hands of most everyone. 

3. Hume's highly principled and loyal wife, Olivia, is often on the verge of getting really, really mad with David but she always falls back and melts in his arms, and supports all of his crazy antics in the end such as going to Mars with his robotic Lurch-like partner.

This one was bad. Unfortunately is was not bad enough to be bad like Sharknado. I give it two out of five velotaxis. 

STNG "The High Ground" or Trolling for Relativism?

I have such a love/hate relationship with Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry was clearly both a visionary and a secular humanist on the scale and order of say, John Dewey, which makes him (Roddenberry) an interesting "educator" who suffers not from Dewey's turgid prose.

Here's an episode that can't just decide between good and evil. Are we heading ever upwards to the sunny peaks of progress or will we be bedeviled by our propensity toward violence and self-destruction?

The terrorist leader pictured above -- in desperate need of the ministrations of the Flowbee -- gets his comeuppance from the agile Kerrie Keane who just says No his shenanigans. Meanwhile, Picard and Riker dither and kindly suggest less lethal means for dealing with this shaggy sociopath. Well done, Ms. Keane. You've done the galaxy a favor by going where the men would go neither boldly nor at all. Sometimes it takes a woman to do men's work.

Pope Francis had this to say about the Paris mayhem: "These things are hard to understand. There is no justification for such things. This is not human." Recognizing the inhumanity in a situation is a clarity of judgment that is need now as it will be in the 24th century.