chatter about starships
Jun. 17th, 2013 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotessebecause all I want is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, when you get right down to it :)
I am REALLY NOT OKAY with the Kazon, you guys. 2.14 made me backbutton all over the place – oh, it's been thirty years since we analogue-enslaved our analogue-Black people, how can they still be so angry and primitivicious? Watching Janeway drink with the owner-analogues was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life. (I get that they were doing a racism bait and switch, but that device has limited utility – if you push your characters too far into Unenlightened Racism, it can work to normalize and even But even before that, I was frustrated by the way that the Kazon pretty simply reiterate the Klingons, with all of their original issues intact.
I'm also pretty skeeved by the gaze the show directs at Kes. The fetishization of her youth creepy; Neelix's possessive paternalism and the generally incestuous character of their relationship is disturbing. I want Kes away from him – and I will admit to kind of shipping her with the Doctor – but more than that I would like for Kes' sex appeal to stop being so front and center to her part in the story. I want her to get dirty, or angry, to be unpretty; I'm tired of being pointed at her dewy freshly-rouged cheekbones by the camera.
also, I've been thinking more about the Prime Directive, and I think I've articulated one of my essential objections to it: it misdescribes a one-way flow of information as a nil encounter. What actually happens when a starship explores a new world is that the Federation potentially benefits from cultural contact in a hundred ways: they find new medicines, or ores, or myths, new inspirations and new art forms – and, crucially, new information to feed into their growing repository of sociological data, which in turn feeds their philosophical development. And the people on those “new worlds” (and, btw, this is why I think the “where no one” intro is worse than the “where no man” one: because men, or humans, might not have been to these worlds, but the beings that live on them have definitely been there for a while) get exactly jack. None of the reciprocal benefits to those the Federation explorers enjoy. Maybe inspiration, but Federation types tend to be awfully cagey and secretive, so I'm not sure how much you can really count them as an inspirational force.
The Prime Directive portrays this exploitative imbalance as a benign protective measure. It only seems like a good philosophy as long as you assume that colonizers can't learn from the colonized; but I think about the benefit that generations of my family have found in traditional Chinese medicine, in how central reading the yogis has been to my father's grieving process after my grandfather's death, and I think we can't conceptualize the impact of the cross-cultural encounter as only going the one way. bell hooks objects; if we aren't attentive to the desire of white people for contact with the other, we misidentify racism. Additionally, the Prime Directive is inhibitory to narrative – it's always going to work to prevent stories from happening, because stories bring transformation. It's a self-defeating narrative trope, which is why the characters are always having to strain against it – because the continuation of the story demands that the Prime Directive be at least bent, if not outright broken. What this shows is, I think, the ultimate impossibility of ethically doing the one about the Good Colonizers; without some degree of misidentification and handwaving, it can't be done at all.
So I finally went and bought my favoritest show, my dearest darlingest baby, on dvd, and the pilot has a commentary track! Which consists of Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict, and Herbert Jefferson just, like, hanging out in a room playing remember when and generally shooting the shit. It's deliciously low-production-values; you can tell these guys are not prepped. They do not have talking points.
The cutest part is listening to them all crack up, and crack up over each other. They snigger all through Starbuck and Athena's first love scene, and when that wonderful actress does her fantastic,YOUR WORD AS A WARRIOR?! they all simultaneously start giggling.
Anyway Richard says that he took the project because of Ralph McQuarrie's concept art in the script. Ralph McQuarrie did concept art for BSG? Hyperlike RALPH MCQUARRIE?! Why did I not know about this and where can I see it?
Richard is so much more softspoken and selfeffacing than Apollo, gosh. Hilariously, it happens twice in the first half hour of the track that Richard starts telling an interesting story – the second one was him talking about Mark Hamill, so you know I was pricking up my ears – and Dirk just starts talking right over him, and Richard kind of cuts off, and then tries to start again, little sounds not full words, and then gives up on it all together. You never do find out what he was talking to Mark Hamill about.
random pilot observations:
-One of the things that makes the show work is the dramatic irony – we're confident that Adama's not some crazy idealogue because we always already know that he's right. Earth is there.
-I actually really like the original concept of the Cylons, in that they're not man's creations come back to haunt us, which is a trope I find regressive and technophobic, and also am just plain tired of because I've seen it done so. Many. Times. It's kind of refreshing to have a tech enemy that isn't some sort of Garden of Eden replay, and idek I really like the sense of history and time their story gives the verse – the real Cylons are a long, long way back, different and strange in that way that distant history becomes, and the robot Cylons are the remaining relics of that difference.
I am REALLY NOT OKAY with the Kazon, you guys. 2.14 made me backbutton all over the place – oh, it's been thirty years since we analogue-enslaved our analogue-Black people, how can they still be so angry and primitivicious? Watching Janeway drink with the owner-analogues was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life. (I get that they were doing a racism bait and switch, but that device has limited utility – if you push your characters too far into Unenlightened Racism, it can work to normalize and even But even before that, I was frustrated by the way that the Kazon pretty simply reiterate the Klingons, with all of their original issues intact.
I'm also pretty skeeved by the gaze the show directs at Kes. The fetishization of her youth creepy; Neelix's possessive paternalism and the generally incestuous character of their relationship is disturbing. I want Kes away from him – and I will admit to kind of shipping her with the Doctor – but more than that I would like for Kes' sex appeal to stop being so front and center to her part in the story. I want her to get dirty, or angry, to be unpretty; I'm tired of being pointed at her dewy freshly-rouged cheekbones by the camera.
also, I've been thinking more about the Prime Directive, and I think I've articulated one of my essential objections to it: it misdescribes a one-way flow of information as a nil encounter. What actually happens when a starship explores a new world is that the Federation potentially benefits from cultural contact in a hundred ways: they find new medicines, or ores, or myths, new inspirations and new art forms – and, crucially, new information to feed into their growing repository of sociological data, which in turn feeds their philosophical development. And the people on those “new worlds” (and, btw, this is why I think the “where no one” intro is worse than the “where no man” one: because men, or humans, might not have been to these worlds, but the beings that live on them have definitely been there for a while) get exactly jack. None of the reciprocal benefits to those the Federation explorers enjoy. Maybe inspiration, but Federation types tend to be awfully cagey and secretive, so I'm not sure how much you can really count them as an inspirational force.
The Prime Directive portrays this exploitative imbalance as a benign protective measure. It only seems like a good philosophy as long as you assume that colonizers can't learn from the colonized; but I think about the benefit that generations of my family have found in traditional Chinese medicine, in how central reading the yogis has been to my father's grieving process after my grandfather's death, and I think we can't conceptualize the impact of the cross-cultural encounter as only going the one way. bell hooks objects; if we aren't attentive to the desire of white people for contact with the other, we misidentify racism. Additionally, the Prime Directive is inhibitory to narrative – it's always going to work to prevent stories from happening, because stories bring transformation. It's a self-defeating narrative trope, which is why the characters are always having to strain against it – because the continuation of the story demands that the Prime Directive be at least bent, if not outright broken. What this shows is, I think, the ultimate impossibility of ethically doing the one about the Good Colonizers; without some degree of misidentification and handwaving, it can't be done at all.
So I finally went and bought my favoritest show, my dearest darlingest baby, on dvd, and the pilot has a commentary track! Which consists of Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict, and Herbert Jefferson just, like, hanging out in a room playing remember when and generally shooting the shit. It's deliciously low-production-values; you can tell these guys are not prepped. They do not have talking points.
The cutest part is listening to them all crack up, and crack up over each other. They snigger all through Starbuck and Athena's first love scene, and when that wonderful actress does her fantastic,YOUR WORD AS A WARRIOR?! they all simultaneously start giggling.
Anyway Richard says that he took the project because of Ralph McQuarrie's concept art in the script. Ralph McQuarrie did concept art for BSG? Hyperlike RALPH MCQUARRIE?! Why did I not know about this and where can I see it?
Richard is so much more softspoken and selfeffacing than Apollo, gosh. Hilariously, it happens twice in the first half hour of the track that Richard starts telling an interesting story – the second one was him talking about Mark Hamill, so you know I was pricking up my ears – and Dirk just starts talking right over him, and Richard kind of cuts off, and then tries to start again, little sounds not full words, and then gives up on it all together. You never do find out what he was talking to Mark Hamill about.
random pilot observations:
-One of the things that makes the show work is the dramatic irony – we're confident that Adama's not some crazy idealogue because we always already know that he's right. Earth is there.
-I actually really like the original concept of the Cylons, in that they're not man's creations come back to haunt us, which is a trope I find regressive and technophobic, and also am just plain tired of because I've seen it done so. Many. Times. It's kind of refreshing to have a tech enemy that isn't some sort of Garden of Eden replay, and idek I really like the sense of history and time their story gives the verse – the real Cylons are a long, long way back, different and strange in that way that distant history becomes, and the robot Cylons are the remaining relics of that difference.