ENT: Demons

[Darth Wedgius]

I agree that some nuance from the villains of the weeks would be nice, and people could reasonably ask "how will this alliance compromise Earth's ability to govern itself" or "will this alliance drag Earth into an interstellar war" or even "how can we form an alliance with beings who don't even have the same basic feelings we do" (a misconception some in Terra Prime seem to have) so much as "aliens are icky." Mayweather's almost-ex might offer some of that nuance in part 2, if the whole "settings up colonies on uninhabited worlds is imperialism" thing wasn't just a front.

I can forgive it if it stays shallow. There are actual xenophobes, and maybe there's an uncanny valley-ish reason that a lot of man's monsters are beings mostly but not quite human-shaped. Besides, sometimes a really black-hearted villain is just fun, as long as a show doesn't pretend it's doing anything "deep" or "important."

[Beastro]

There are actual xenophobes,

And no wonder. Ask yourself how many tens, or hundreds of thousand of years tribes mulled about only to run into different looking groups, and one or the other, or both, suddenly got hit with a plague or something that devastated or wipe out their groups?

That happens enough and the lesson will sink in, people different from you are dangerous, even if they themselves exactly aren't.

"Better alive and scared than dead and complacent" is built into us, right down to the assumptions we instinctively make that help make up the delay between information from the eye being received, processed and interpreted that would leave us too exposed for that fraction of a second that it takes.

maybe there's an uncanny valley-ish reason that a lot of man's monsters are beings mostly but not quite human-shaped.

Note how many of the heroic or admired are human.

Most fictional creations are an exaggeration of some specific aspect of the human condition. Part of that is simply being unable to fully flesh them out, but in the case of ones like in Trek, it blends with what the show wants to tackle with races "specializing" in a way to highly and contrast, like klingons with war and violence, Romulans with paranoia and underhandedness, Ferengi with money and boorishness, the Borg with collectivism and obsessiveness over perfection, etc

[CharlesPhipps]

I like DEMONS because it's a little too late but still there example of what I wanted from Star Trek: Enterprise, which is the idea of showing how people from "our" world slowly became the people from the Federation. The show failed miserably in a lot of respects with the fact that it continually attempted to do regular Star Trek episodes (including recycling Voyager scripts) with the numbers painted off. The Prime Directive, transporters, polarized hull, and so on.

I think the absolute nadir for me was when they did that episode "Rogue Planet" when Archer and company sit around a campfire and say that NO HUMAN ON EARTH HUNTS ANYMORE. Apparently, the process has been completely banished because mankind wouldn't cull deer populations or engage in killing cute little animals. It was when I lost all faith that the people were interested in making a link from our world to the next.

I like Demons and TERRA PRIME because it has the acknowledged quality that a bunch of racist assholes are still part of Star Trek's Earth at this point. They're not interested in the fact that Earth is vulnerable unless it's part of a galactic version of NATO, the United Nations, economic pacts, and so on--all things that the United Federation of Planets provides.

They're purely isolationist blowhards who have a visceral disgust at the idea of mixing their blood with Vulcans (and I wish Archer had acknowledged he used to be a bigoted piece of crap himself). They also have the self-deluding belief of Americans circa WW2 that if they mind their own business that the galaxy won't smack them down. That a Klingon warship won't just show up one day and burn down New York because they're assholes.

These two episodes result in a faction of these guys getting destroyed but it's nice to acknowlege that they're things that just have to be outweighted and outlived. I would have liked a lot more, to be honest, but I'll take what I can get.

[9ansean]

I've been wondering: how differently the presence of Terra Prime might have been if anyone had known about the existence of Changeling? It would be harder to advocate the forced removal of all non-earthlings if you can't tell them by appearance. Would this have weaken support for Starfleet or diminished the group of Terra Prime?

[CharlesPhipps]

I've been wondering: how differently the presence of Terra Prime might have been if anyone had known about the existence of Changeling? It would be harder to advocate the forced removal of all non-earthlings if you can't tell them by appearance. Would this have weaken support for Starfleet or diminished the group of Terra Prime?

I imagine it would have dramatically increased the paranoia as we saw with even the relatively tolerant Federation going police state.

[CrypticMirror]

I think the absolute nadir for me was when they did that episode "Rogue Planet" when Archer and company sit around a campfire and say that NO HUMAN ON EARTH HUNTS ANYMORE. Apparently, the process has been completely banished because mankind wouldn't cull deer populations or engage in killing cute little animals. It was when I lost all faith that the people were interested in making a link from our world to the next

They completely forgot they were not writing TNG there. I can buy by the time of TNG there has been a global societal and cultural shift towards ending sport hunting and bloodsports, especially with the holodeck and the holodeck's antecedents, and by the time of TNG there has certainly been enough time for that sort of shift to happen. That is plausible enough, or at least not implausible; which is a slightly different thing.

Not on Enterprise though, while it is true that many great strides have been made towards that in recent decades, we are still parsecs away from bringing it to a close; and with ENT being only a few decades after a global nuclear war where hunting will be needed to survive; and which will no doubt cause some new hunting traditions to form in the aftermath of such a conflict, which will in turn almost certainly fuel a nostalgia ridden boom in recreational hunting to cosplay how their pappy and grandpappy lived in the fallout only without the actual discomfort and risk of starvation. No way, by the time of ENT, will that have died out so quickly.

It was a TNG moment in an ENT script. Of course, that is pretty much the first two seasons of ENT in a nutshell, recycling old script ideas instead of coming up with new ones. S3 was deeply problematic in its subject matter, but at least it tried; and S4 truly embraced the show's setting while keeping the franchise's general tone, but by then it was too late.

[CharlesPhipps]

I'm with those dog aliens who called humanity barbaric for their refusal to slaughter animals for food.

[CrypticMirror]

I'm with those dog aliens who called humanity barbaric for their refusal to slaughter animals for food.

You don't fancy the impossibleburger future meat future, then?

Can't say I blame you on that one either.

[Thebestoftherest]

I'm with those dog aliens who called humanity barbaric for their refusal to slaughter animals for food.

You don't fancy the impossibleburger future meat future, then?

Can't say I blame you on that one either.

Same.

[Deledrius]

Hey, that stuff ain't terrible.

If it can reduce the amount of non-essentials being used, that's a good thing.