39,327
edits
What Measure Is a Non-Human?/Live-Action TV/Star Trek: Difference between revisions
What Measure Is a Non-Human?/Live-Action TV/Star Trek (view source)
Revision as of 03:36, 16 April 2014
, 10 years agoMass update links
m (categories and general cleanup) |
m (Mass update links) |
||
Line 3:
** It's a little inconsistent. The first season had the clearly intelligent "Salt Vampire" created treated like a [[Monster of the Week]], while a little later, they actually took the time to talk to the Horta.
*** The Salt Vampire was a legitimate threat to others. Kirk was well within his rights to kill the Gorn captain, considering how the Gorn attacked a settlement, but Kirk decided on the Advanced Trait Of Mercy.
* ''[[Star Trek:
** Later episodes on the topic featured Data defending the right of other artificial sentients to live, and the question of Data's "daughter," Lal and his parental rights concerning her.
*** In the court and then again in the custody dispute over Lal, everyone seemed to ignore the obvious point that Starfleet has never otherwise granted rank or medals and commendations to ''property''. Or, that if he ''were'' property, Starfleet wouldn't have any real claim to ownership of him (they didn't make him, they simply found him and turned him back on after his creator/father was forced to abandon him during a disaster).
* The ''Next Generation'' episode ''The Quality of Life'' dealt with it as well. A scientist invented "Exocomps", droid-like multipurpose tools with sophisticated AI. Occasionally an Exocomp would start to exhibit odd behavior, such as disobeying commands that would put it in danger. This leads Data to suggest that the Exocomps are becoming self-aware. Their inventor disagrees and wants to erase their memory and start over. The episode treats the question seriously and concluded that there was no easy answer.
* ''[[Star Trek: Voyager]]'' explored the rights of the holographic doctor, including his right to have a say in his treatment. In one episode, rather than delete months of his memory (and personality), Janeway eventually allowed him to work through psychological problems that could have kept him out of Sickbay for weeks or even months -- despite the risk this might pose to the crew. Janeway had initially decided to just reboot the Doc, but changed her mind upon talking to Seven of Nine. When Janeway pointed out that the Doc was more like a replicator than a human, Seven pointed out that she, too, being Borg, was composed of parts not unlike the replicator, and wondered whether Janeway would eventually override her free will as well.
** In one episode of ''Voyager'', the Doctor had written a novel and submitted a draft, pre-editing, that the publisher thought was delightfully salacious in the way it seemed to impugn the Voyager crew, and promptly started distributing. The Doctor sued to have it stopped; the publisher argued he couldn't sue because he wasn't a person. This editor was waiting through the entire episode for someone to look through Starfleet's records and discover that an artificial being that has intelligence that can improve itself, have sex, and express itself artistically ''is'' a person, because Data was found to be so in the ''[[Did Not Do the Research|second season]]'' of ''The Next Generation''. This was done again with polymorphic tools called Exocomps that were proven to have gained low-level intelligence and were excellent problem-solvers. Admittedly, ruling that the Doctor was a person would open the door to ruling the same for Mark I EMHs all over the Federation, who had by then been consigned to manual labor; meanwhile, there was only one Data. It gets even less justifiable when you consider that the Doctor is essentially a [[Projected Man|Projected Android]].
*** [[Squick|Wait, the Doctor and Data can ''have sex''?!]]
Line 18:
* In a [http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/In_a_Mirror%2C_Darkly Mirror Universe] episode of ''[[Enterprise]]'', this trope is played with to an almost sadistic degree. The viewers get to see the crew torture an insect-like Tholian by lowering the temperature in its prison cell to uncomfortable depths. (Tholians naturally exist at extreme levels of heat and pressure.) To really drive it in, we get a close-up view as the creature explodes. What makes it worse is that the Tholians are fighting against the Federation and [[Humans Are Bastards|their cruelty towards non-humanoids]] in this Universe (for the record, there's ''no'' closeup as a helpless humanoid Gorn gets shot half a dozen times). Given the lurid special effects during the torture scene, this became a deeply [[Family-Unfriendly Aesop]] for many.
** It's the [[Mirror Universe]]. It's ''supposed'' to have the [[Family-Unfriendly Aesop]] regarding aliens.
** Since the crew are ''villains'' in the [[Mirror Universe]], ''nothing'' they do is an [[Aesop]]. As for the producers being less willing to show human(oid) giblets than an alien shattering... the fact ''is'' that [[Most Writers Are Human]] and most viewers as well, and it would have been more disturbing to most (if it got through the censors at all.) A [[Gorn]]-filled<ref>[[Gorn]] as in the trope, not the lizard guys</ref> horror series is something ''[[Star Trek]]'' does not aspire to be; it's got ''enough'' of a [[Star Trek
* The treatment of duplicates in ''Trek'' is even more schizophrenic. Just to examine two episodes featuring [[Star Trek:
** In ''Up the Long Ladder'', the crew encounters the Mariposans, a planet whose [[Planet of Hats|hat]] is reproduction through cloning, but the [[Cloning Blues|replicative fading]] (a real phenomenon) is starting to catch up to them. They rip off DNA from Riker and Pulaski. When this is discovered, Riker and Pulaski (a ''doctor''!) find the lab and blithely massacre the duplicates. Riker states that the clones' existence "diminishes" him.
*** The clones that Riker destroyed were only partially formed things, looking diaphanous and only vegetatively alive. Despite being somehow adult-shaped. Which would make it more akin to abortion, but ''Trek'' wasn't going to touch ''that''.
| |||