Strawman Has a Point: Difference between revisions
→Live-Action TV
(Doesn't really fit on consideration. The excuse for conquering and military buildup is only added in after the fact, by writers who are clearly planning to have the point lived up to, so Palpatine and Thrawn are never actually strawmen.) |
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** "I, Borg" has the crew find a living borg drone and seek to understand a way to use it to implant a self-destructive signal to destroy the entire collective. While everyone was on board at first, they grow attached to studying it and it eventually develops a personality, creating a new individual calling himself Hugh. Starting with Geordi and Crusher, the rest of the crew decide their plan to use it as a living weapon was immoral and the holdouts, Picard and Guinan (who have more personal issues with the Borg) are portrayed as allowing irrational feelings to cloud their moral judgement. Eventually they agree in the independance of the drone and let it return to the collective peacefully. Although the events are later continued in "Descent" Picard admits the moral decision may not have been the correct decision in the long run.
* ''[[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine]]:'' The official guidebook to the series refers to editor Donald Pabst as the [[Designated Villain|villain]] of the episode "Far Beyond the Stars" because of his reluctance to publish Benny Russell's stories about a black space captain on the grounds they would be considered controversial. This ignores the fact that Pabst was [[Fair for Its Day|actually pretty progressive]], employing Benny, a black man in 1950s Manhattan, as a writer at a time when most employers wouldn't have offered him anything higher than a janitor, and that, when he compromises and agrees to the story being rewritten as a black boy's dream of the future rather than objective reality, he is proven completely right and the publishers pulp the issue and fire Benny. [[Word of God|Apparently]] Pabst should have stood up to the publisher, even though doing so would likely have cost him his job and made no difference to Benny's situation.
** Even the characters that aren't willing to shout down Pabst angrily are essentially shamed, treated as if they're spineless jerks who don't really care about Benny. This is an unfortunate trait of any media dealing retroactively with racial issues... any character who doesn't hold a thoroughly modern (read: "enlightened") view on race is often treated as if they were little better than a raving Klan member, as opposed to simply accepting the way the world currently works even if they don't necessarily like it.
* ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]'':
** Bates, Kavanaugh, and Ellis usually have legitimate concerns or complaints, but because these are against the main cast of characters (Bates seeing Teyla as a security risk, Kavanaugh complaining to Weir about Weir degrading him in public, Ellis wanting McKay to cut the exposition and get to the point), the characters are presented as reactionary jerkasses. There is also a trend of portraying Kavanaugh, in his few appearances, as a coward even though every time he is up against a situation in which his fear is perfectly understandable.
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