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"Your Honour, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life. Well, there it sits. Waiting." - Picard
(lemmy.world)
TNG s2e9 "The Measue of a Man"
this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
148 points (98.1% liked)
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Absolutely the hell not. Ad Astra Per Aspera actually has all the issues people sometimes attribute to Measure of a Man with the added problem of being effectively a rehash of Measure of a Man with a much worse script.
I mean, in Ad Astra they are literally having a hearing about an officer having illegal genetics because she was modified by her parents. The entire notion is absurd, as the implication is that had she disclosed her mods she would have been rejected while hiding her mods is itself illegal. So suddenly Starfleet doesn't just outlaw making genetic modifications, it straight up makes people WITH genetic modifications illegal.
Which is crazy and wouldn't even fly on any semi-reasonable legal system today. It's straight up genocidal, as presented. At the very least it's actively racist. And for lore reasons they end up needing to simultaneously let her off the hook while keeping what is now recontextualized as outright apartheid stand because it needs to remain in place to still not make much sense when it applies to a different character later in the lore.
I get what they were going for, but man, it was one of the early instances of SNW wanting to do a thing and not quite getting the point of the thing they were trying to do.
All fair. My guess would be Kurtzman and the suits at Paramount not wanting to "shake the apple cart" more than necessary.
Nah, it's a pretty consistent issue with the writing in SNW, honestly. And it's not like they had another option, given that the show is very early in the timeline and the lore is all set.
The problem is wanting to do Measure of a Man around this idea for the character in the first place. It didn't fit but they went for it anyway. They could have come up with a different, interesting sci-fi setup, but they just had to be referential. Which, admittedly, does seem like an issue with how the show is conceptualized, at least as of S2.
Very easy fix: Data is captured by people on a planet who argue that they can keep him because he isn't alive. The Enterprise crew has to work within the system because blah blah Prime Directive or treaty negotiations or whatever.
Suddenly the whole episode works.
Hard disagree. The entire point of the episode is reflecting on how "we" (as in, presumably the US, which is what the Federation has always been a stand-in for) dehumanize people for convenience. Very much in the first person. There's a reason it's Goldberg making the slavery argument and not, say, Troy.
If you turn it into something that happens to a different, less "evolved" society it suddenly is no longer a metaphor of acknowledging the faults it suddenly isn't self reflection and instead becomes gloating about how the US fixed racism.
So yeah, no, it's pretty fundamental to the point that it's Starfleet's legal system that is threatening to dehumanize a sentient being, and not anybody else's.
I wouldn't say suddenly, that was what was made clear in DS9 as well. Bashir was going to have to go to whatever asylum they put the crazy augments he met in.
Honestly, it's ludicrous to take the position that because of one war on one planet centuries before it was formed, all genetic modification in the Federation is illegal. "Oh, you carry the sickle cell gene? Nope, we're not modifying your DNA. Enjoy the anaemia."
Why the hell would the other founding members agree to that anyway? If anything, considering their whole purity thing, you would think Andorians would be in favor of it.
I think in-canon there are exceptions for medical treatment, although writers seem to forget about that depending on what metaphor they're trying to put on top of augments. Not that it's particularly consistent anyway, early in TNG there is a whole federation colony of genetically altered psychic rapidly aging children with infectious progeria and nobody seems particularly outraged by this.
And yeah, it doesn't work in DS9, either, but that's why you shouldn't be trying to make a prequel to DS9 where you debate that specific issue in court. It just doesn't work to give the episode a feel good ending to then leave the issue unresolved for centuries for nerdy lore reasons.