When real life makes you insane...
Write about television. It's not a very well kept secret that sometimes Netflix Instant makes me afraid I'll never leave my apartment again. And I feel like it's time to write about Trek.
This show is the perfect brain candy for a Trekkie who is also a historian. Someone on the writing staff for this show must be the good kind of history buff, because the Bajor/Cardassia issues are really nice imaginings of both WWII issues and Cold War issues. "The Collaborator" really appealed to the part of me that had to spend two weeks reading about Vichy France for PhD exams. The really thorny thing about occupations is that they make questions of culpability and loyalty so central and yet so tangled. There's a popular framework for thinking about the years after World War II as "postwar" because the things the war left behind were still being worked through. Bareil's arc brings that out, since he loses his chance to be kai because Winn can exploit that unfinished business, and his loyalty. And she can use that same loyalty and patriotism to literally work him to death. I also love the episode "Civil Defense," which shows the crew operating in a postwar space in a very literal way--what they think of as home used to be something else entirely, and it almost kills them all.
The series is full of Casablanca homages-- Quark gets it most obviously "Profit and Loss" when he says goodbye to his Cardassian lover and gets to walk off with Garak, and whenever we're reminded the bar was there during the Occupation. But "Necessary Evil" works better for me as an homage to old movies. Odo is the perfect character to be in a noir story, and Kira's role in that story works better to showcase her complicated history than any monologue from Nana Visitor about her lost childhood does.
We just finished watching the Homefront/Paradise Lost two parter, the one that reads very differently in a post 9/11 space, with all the talk about civil liberties, blood screenings, and the fears of the enemy within. I think it's what will continue to make DS9 watchable in ways TNG isn't: the Federation isn't always right, and efforts to save other people with Federation principles are nearly always interrogated in ways that TNG so rarely did.
Also, DS9 wins best Klingon two parter where I actually cared. I think because they manage to set up a story where it's clear that High Council politics have a truly universal stake, and Worf's identity conflict is more compelling in those circumstances than it usually was on TNG.
.
Other things I've been watching: Dirty Sexy Money, Ugly Betty all the way through, and the Good Wife. Posts on the latter two are likely.
This entry was originally posted at http://dagnylilytable.dreamwidth.org/2641.html. Please comment wherever you like.
This show is the perfect brain candy for a Trekkie who is also a historian. Someone on the writing staff for this show must be the good kind of history buff, because the Bajor/Cardassia issues are really nice imaginings of both WWII issues and Cold War issues. "The Collaborator" really appealed to the part of me that had to spend two weeks reading about Vichy France for PhD exams. The really thorny thing about occupations is that they make questions of culpability and loyalty so central and yet so tangled. There's a popular framework for thinking about the years after World War II as "postwar" because the things the war left behind were still being worked through. Bareil's arc brings that out, since he loses his chance to be kai because Winn can exploit that unfinished business, and his loyalty. And she can use that same loyalty and patriotism to literally work him to death. I also love the episode "Civil Defense," which shows the crew operating in a postwar space in a very literal way--what they think of as home used to be something else entirely, and it almost kills them all.
The series is full of Casablanca homages-- Quark gets it most obviously "Profit and Loss" when he says goodbye to his Cardassian lover and gets to walk off with Garak, and whenever we're reminded the bar was there during the Occupation. But "Necessary Evil" works better for me as an homage to old movies. Odo is the perfect character to be in a noir story, and Kira's role in that story works better to showcase her complicated history than any monologue from Nana Visitor about her lost childhood does.
We just finished watching the Homefront/Paradise Lost two parter, the one that reads very differently in a post 9/11 space, with all the talk about civil liberties, blood screenings, and the fears of the enemy within. I think it's what will continue to make DS9 watchable in ways TNG isn't: the Federation isn't always right, and efforts to save other people with Federation principles are nearly always interrogated in ways that TNG so rarely did.
Also, DS9 wins best Klingon two parter where I actually cared. I think because they manage to set up a story where it's clear that High Council politics have a truly universal stake, and Worf's identity conflict is more compelling in those circumstances than it usually was on TNG.
.
Other things I've been watching: Dirty Sexy Money, Ugly Betty all the way through, and the Good Wife. Posts on the latter two are likely.
This entry was originally posted at http://dagnylilytable.dreamwidth.org/2641.html. Please comment wherever you like.