Remember that one time Dr. Crusher activated a gene in Barkley so he could fight off a flu and she wound up accidently turning the entire crew into animal people?
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
Liked episode 3 a lot but the show badly needs to move past every character either having a deep dark secret or a tragic backstory
Remember that one time Dr. Crusher activated a gene in Barkley so he could fight off a flu and she wound up accidently turning the entire crew into animal people?
That episode was silly fun.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I really don't like the augment stuff and how shows have handled it.
Where prior shows had just kind of not addressed genetic augmentation, DS9 - either for the sake of Conflict! or in a bid to explain something that didn't need explaining - decided to go "no this stuff is definitely illegal and Julian has this dark secret oooooh", and for the sake of reemphasizing and re-canonizing this deeply mediocre story we got a whole thing in Enterprise about it and it just keeps getting brought up when at any time we could have just dropped it the way the franchise has happily dropped other bad ideas ("I can't get used to a woman on the bridge!").
I'm curious as to why you think that genetic augmentation being illegal is even remotely a bad thing.
Point number one, genetic augmentation at the embryo (or even at the pre-embryo) stage is hideously unethical. Informed consent of the person who will have to live with the experimental results is impossible, and the final results are uncertain.
Point number two, even by the time of DS9 the full complexity of human genetics is still not understood and plenty of surprising things still happen with humans. Augmentation is banned specifically because the results are unpredictable; you might end up with a Julian that is a fully-functioning member of society, or you might end up as somebody who spends the rest of their life sealed inside their own mind because the physiological side-effects prevent them from ever being able to speak or gesture or anything. But the results could also have been a Julian so smart and so ruthless that he's just playing a long game to literally overthrow the Federation, with the intellect to fool everybody and actually pull it off.
Point number three, legalized genetic augmentation would inevitably, and horribly, upend society in an arms race of getting the best, newest features. If anybody is doing it, then everybody has to do it if only to keep pace. Then you're in a situation where genetic "upgrades" are being implemented at a rate tens or hundreds of millions of years faster than natural, with society completely incapable of absorbing the flux. The world as we know it would collapse into something we likely can't even properly imagine, but it wouldn't be good. Something like the Eugenics Wars where superhumans like Khan destroying or enslaving "lesser" people would become a very real possibility and with no way to counter or control the problem.
Genetic therapy I can understand. It can be done in adults who can provide informed consent and who have prior behavior and data to compare results to. Even in the embryonic stage, single-gene defects that would otherwise be crippling or lethal can be treated with an acceptable level of control. Or objecting to Julian himself being an "illegal" person, but the Federation still had a measured, reasonable response to that: Julian was subjected to augmentation and had never demonstrated instability, so the Federation overrode its own rule of no augmented individuals in Starfleet. But a standing rule of no augments in Starfleet? Entirely rational.
But in the Star Trek setting, genetic augmentation is a tremendous risk to both the subject and the society. Even in real life, we are centuries away from achieving a level of genetic knowledge to safely be able to do even minor upgrades to our biology on any scale and thus far we have no idea at all what the side effects could be. Genetics has a standing rule of not fucking with the human germ line, and that rule exists for good reasons. The way Federation society handles the augmented is a different story but yeah, it should definitely be illegal to perform genetic augmentation, at least for a really long-ass time.
I really don't like the augment stuff and how shows have handled it.
Where prior shows had just kind of not addressed genetic augmentation, DS9 - either for the sake of Conflict! or in a bid to explain something that didn't need explaining - decided to go "no this stuff is definitely illegal and Julian has this dark secret oooooh", and for the sake of reemphasizing and re-canonizing this deeply mediocre story we got a whole thing in Enterprise about it and it just keeps getting brought up when at any time we could have just dropped it the way the franchise has happily dropped other bad ideas ("I can't get used to a woman on the bridge!").
I'm curious as to why you think that genetic augmentation being illegal is even remotely a bad thing.
Point number one, genetic augmentation at the embryo (or even at the pre-embryo) stage is hideously unethical. Informed consent of the person who will have to live with the experimental results is impossible, and the final results are uncertain.
Point number two, even by the time of DS9 the full complexity of human genetics is still not understood and plenty of surprising things still happen with humans. Augmentation is banned specifically because the results are unpredictable; you might end up with a Julian that is a fully-functioning member of society, or you might end up as somebody who spends the rest of their life sealed inside their own mind because the physiological side-effects prevent them from ever being able to speak or gesture or anything. But the results could also have been a Julian so smart and so ruthless that he's just playing a long game to literally overthrow the Federation, with the intellect to fool everybody and actually pull it off.
Point number three, legalized genetic augmentation would inevitably, and horribly, upend society in an arms race of getting the best, newest features. If anybody is doing it, then everybody has to do it if only to keep pace. Then you're in a situation where genetic "upgrades" are being implemented at a rate tens or hundreds of millions of years faster than natural, with society completely incapable of absorbing the flux. The world as we know it would collapse into something we likely can't even properly imagine, but it wouldn't be good. Something like the Eugenics Wars where superhumans like Khan destroying or enslaving "lesser" people would become a very real possibility and with no way to counter or control the problem.
Genetic therapy I can understand. It can be done in adults who can provide informed consent and who have prior behavior and data to compare results to. Even in the embryonic stage, single-gene defects that would otherwise be crippling or lethal can be treated with an acceptable level of control. Or objecting to Julian himself being an "illegal" person, but the Federation still had a measured, reasonable response to that: Julian was subjected to augmentation and had never demonstrated instability, so the Federation overrode its own rule of no augmented individuals in Starfleet. But a standing rule of no augments in Starfleet? Entirely rational.
But in the Star Trek setting, genetic augmentation is a tremendous risk to both the subject and the society. Even in real life, we are centuries away from achieving a level of genetic knowledge to safely be able to do even minor upgrades to our biology on any scale and thus far we have no idea at all what the side effects could be. Genetics has a standing rule of not fucking with the human germ line, and that rule exists for good reasons. The way Federation society handles the augmented is a different story but yeah, it should definitely be illegal to perform genetic augmentation, at least for a really long-ass time.
DS9 is pretty explicit that they ended up with their disabilities because they had to use back-alley illegal doctors, not that the tech doesn't exist. In universe, it absolutely does
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I really don't like the augment stuff and how shows have handled it.
Where prior shows had just kind of not addressed genetic augmentation, DS9 - either for the sake of Conflict! or in a bid to explain something that didn't need explaining - decided to go "no this stuff is definitely illegal and Julian has this dark secret oooooh", and for the sake of reemphasizing and re-canonizing this deeply mediocre story we got a whole thing in Enterprise about it and it just keeps getting brought up when at any time we could have just dropped it the way the franchise has happily dropped other bad ideas ("I can't get used to a woman on the bridge!").
I'm curious as to why you think that genetic augmentation being illegal is even remotely a bad thing.
Point number one, genetic augmentation at the embryo (or even at the pre-embryo) stage is hideously unethical. Informed consent of the person who will have to live with the experimental results is impossible, and the final results are uncertain.
Point number two, even by the time of DS9 the full complexity of human genetics is still not understood and plenty of surprising things still happen with humans. Augmentation is banned specifically because the results are unpredictable; you might end up with a Julian that is a fully-functioning member of society, or you might end up as somebody who spends the rest of their life sealed inside their own mind because the physiological side-effects prevent them from ever being able to speak or gesture or anything. But the results could also have been a Julian so smart and so ruthless that he's just playing a long game to literally overthrow the Federation, with the intellect to fool everybody and actually pull it off.
Point number three, legalized genetic augmentation would inevitably, and horribly, upend society in an arms race of getting the best, newest features. If anybody is doing it, then everybody has to do it if only to keep pace. Then you're in a situation where genetic "upgrades" are being implemented at a rate tens or hundreds of millions of years faster than natural, with society completely incapable of absorbing the flux. The world as we know it would collapse into something we likely can't even properly imagine, but it wouldn't be good. Something like the Eugenics Wars where superhumans like Khan destroying or enslaving "lesser" people would become a very real possibility and with no way to counter or control the problem.
Genetic therapy I can understand. It can be done in adults who can provide informed consent and who have prior behavior and data to compare results to. Even in the embryonic stage, single-gene defects that would otherwise be crippling or lethal can be treated with an acceptable level of control. Or objecting to Julian himself being an "illegal" person, but the Federation still had a measured, reasonable response to that: Julian was subjected to augmentation and had never demonstrated instability, so the Federation overrode its own rule of no augmented individuals in Starfleet. But a standing rule of no augments in Starfleet? Entirely rational.
But in the Star Trek setting, genetic augmentation is a tremendous risk to both the subject and the society. Even in real life, we are centuries away from achieving a level of genetic knowledge to safely be able to do even minor upgrades to our biology on any scale and thus far we have no idea at all what the side effects could be. Genetics has a standing rule of not fucking with the human germ line, and that rule exists for good reasons. The way Federation society handles the augmented is a different story but yeah, it should definitely be illegal to perform genetic augmentation, at least for a really long-ass time.
DS9 is pretty explicit that they ended up with their disabilities because they had to use back-alley illegal doctors, not that the tech doesn't exist. In universe, it absolutely does
Just because the tech exists isn't even remotely a good reason to use it for that application. We can alter DNA right now, it's not even hard. It's a fucking horrible idea to do it without a huge amount of testing into potential results and a very, very good idea of where things will end up. The same tech the Federation uses to, say, stop cancers could probably just as adroitly alter DNA. That the tech exists isn't any kind of issue.
And I don't remember at all that they had to use illegal or second-rate doctors, especially as there's just no reason for those to even exist in the Federation. You don't get paid more, there's no limit on education, no restrictions on accessing training materials, etc. If you suck at medicine, you just... don't do it. There is zero downside. Julian went to the same kind of unethical doctor as the others and the only reason he turned out functional was partly because of blind luck and partly because his parents didn't overdo the augmentation, not because the doctors fucked up. And if we've seen anything in Star Trek, it's almost certain that the doctors who did the shady shit were smarter than average and wanted to experiment but the pesky ethics of the Federation were in the way. Further, if getting augmented requires going to an outright illegal, second-rate operation so they'll experiment on your kid, you're waaaaay out in the quadrant of abandoned ethics. None of these people needed augmentation, they just had shitty parents obsessed with having the best kid or being embarrassed about having a slow kid.
The way the Federation treats augments is problematic, but universally banning augmentation is logically and ethically the way to go.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I really don't like the augment stuff and how shows have handled it.
Where prior shows had just kind of not addressed genetic augmentation, DS9 - either for the sake of Conflict! or in a bid to explain something that didn't need explaining - decided to go "no this stuff is definitely illegal and Julian has this dark secret oooooh", and for the sake of reemphasizing and re-canonizing this deeply mediocre story we got a whole thing in Enterprise about it and it just keeps getting brought up when at any time we could have just dropped it the way the franchise has happily dropped other bad ideas ("I can't get used to a woman on the bridge!").
I'm curious as to why you think that genetic augmentation being illegal is even remotely a bad thing.
well I mean the short answer is that isn't what I said and it's not at all what I'm talking about! I'm speaking out-of-universe about a creative choice made by baseball-hat wearing writers on a 1990s TV show that I think was a bad call that led to years of unfortunate and unnecessary follow-up stories and dumb internet arguments.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I really don't like the augment stuff and how shows have handled it.
Where prior shows had just kind of not addressed genetic augmentation, DS9 - either for the sake of Conflict! or in a bid to explain something that didn't need explaining - decided to go "no this stuff is definitely illegal and Julian has this dark secret oooooh", and for the sake of reemphasizing and re-canonizing this deeply mediocre story we got a whole thing in Enterprise about it and it just keeps getting brought up when at any time we could have just dropped it the way the franchise has happily dropped other bad ideas ("I can't get used to a woman on the bridge!").
I'm curious as to why you think that genetic augmentation being illegal is even remotely a bad thing.
well I mean the short answer is that isn't what I said and it's not at all what I'm talking about! I'm speaking out-of-universe about a creative choice made by baseball-hat wearing writers on a 1990s TV show that I think was a bad call that led to years of unfortunate and unnecessary follow-up stories and dumb internet arguments.
Hey, I sort of covered that possibility too! Much later and buried deeply in many words, but I wasn't entirely certain which thing was your gripe.
But yes, I agree with your gripe. It just didn't seem something that all needed attention, with everything else the setting has to offer. Particularly in the case of Enterprise, it struck me as very much a case of being lazy and using ToS material as a crutch to try and give the show relevance. Tying it in to the Klingons was even worse; Worf's statement of "we don't talk about" was all it ever needed and was a pretty great way to just say don't think about it much and move on already.
Ninja Snarl P on
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Liked episode 3 a lot but the show badly needs to move past every character either having a deep dark secret or a tragic backstory
this is the number one symptom of Kurtzmanitis that I would really like the show to move past.
HOWEVER! something I forgot to mention earlier is that I am pleased as punch, practically glowing with an inner light, that the incredibly stupid thing I foresaw and was 100% certain would happen with a particular character
La'an Noonien-Singh
not only failed to happen, but the show actually went hard in exactly the opposite direction. It's legitimately the biggest surprise (good or bad) all of modern Trek has had for me. Up till now, while I've loved SNW, I kind of watched with anxious, sweaty palms, dreading the moment when
it turns out she's a SINISTER AUGMENT and when something bad happens, like she and Spock bone but he breaks up with her, she goes crazy and Nazis the ship or something.
I was blown away when, with this really obvious chance to dial the drama to a ridiculous 11, they seized the dial and sent it down to a 2 instead. Instead it turned out the character
is kind of bummed out and pissed off about the teasing she got in childhood about her name, and feels hurt that Una didn't confide in her, but not to a crazy degree, and seems fine now
which is shockingly mundane and reasonable and, like, chilled-out for Kurtzman Trek.
I mean, there’s still time. They could still fuck it up with a retcon, but it would be supremely dumb if they did.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
You're right, I'm not going to feel completely out of the woods until the season is over - sadly the current team just has not earned that level of trust and credit with me - but where I began SNW thinking "hey, this looks ok, they might actually hit most of the easy layups the other shows have whiffed" I'm now actually starting to think they can pull off some real slam dunks. At the very least I feel like they've avoided walking into almost any obvious rakes.
Oh yah, while it was silly to have in the first place, it's being done in a fairly unobtrusive way you wouldn't expect from this creative team, which I suppose is a minor blessing in itself.
"Go down, kick ass, and set yourselves up as gods, that's our Prime Directive!"
Something that'd be terrible but I'd laugh so much if it happens in SNW:
If Una's genetic alterations start being the everything solution. I'm mostly thinking of Mr Jinx in Starslip, with his ever-growing list of freakish abilities to solve the problem of the week; able to clone himself, spew anaesthetic saliva, etc.
Something that'd be terrible but I'd laugh so much if it happens in SNW:
If Una's genetic alterations start being the everything solution. I'm mostly thinking of Mr Jinx in Starslip, with his ever-growing list of freakish abilities to solve the problem of the week; able to clone himself, spew anaesthetic saliva, etc.
I really don't like the augment stuff and how shows have handled it.
Where prior shows had just kind of not addressed genetic augmentation, DS9 - either for the sake of Conflict! or in a bid to explain something that didn't need explaining - decided to go "no this stuff is definitely illegal and Julian has this dark secret oooooh", and for the sake of reemphasizing and re-canonizing this deeply mediocre story we got a whole thing in Enterprise about it and it just keeps getting brought up when at any time we could have just dropped it the way the franchise has happily dropped other bad ideas ("I can't get used to a woman on the bridge!").
Also Im sorry but I do not believe any descendants of Khan would keep their last name.
I have a podcast now. It's about video games and anime!Find it here.
Didnt they say she came from a generation ship? I'd swear that was mentioned somewhere. So there may have been a greater impteus to track family lineages, etc. It may also be a "fuck letting my ancestor define me" type thing, for good or for ill.
Something that'd be terrible but I'd laugh so much if it happens in SNW:
If Una's genetic alterations start being the everything solution. I'm mostly thinking of Mr Jinx in Starslip, with his ever-growing list of freakish abilities to solve the problem of the week; able to clone himself, spew anaesthetic saliva, etc.
Oh, you mean like Seven's nanoprobes?
To be fair, nanoprobes are an incredibly versatile tool, they just acknowledged that.
I'm thinking more make it up as you go along:
"Well, we're stuck, unless one of you can turn invisible."
*vwip*
"How did- oh right, Illyrian."
Nobody remembers the singer. The song remains.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
I wonder how much of the whole genetic augmentation being illegal thing was specific to wanting to give Julian a dark secret vs. it being a vaguely natural outgrowth of the weird takes/reverence the TNG/VOY/ENT shows had towards evolution and the Prime Directive, though still driven by wanting to give Julian a secret past.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
I wonder how much of the whole genetic augmentation being illegal thing was specific to wanting to give Julian a dark secret vs. it being a vaguely natural outgrowth of the weird takes/reverence the TNG/VOY/ENT shows had towards evolution and the Prime Directive, though still driven by wanting to give Julian a secret past.
On a surface level it's makes sense that such prohibitions would be society's knee jerk reaction to the war. But like Trek technology, the writers didn't bother to think about the broader implications of such laws.
Say you had genetic modification to be taller to be a basketball star. How would you be able to even identify the genetic distinction between that and someone naturally born tall? Is it simply illegal for anyone tall to join Starfleet since there's no way to tell the difference? Bashir was smart and had good coordination. How do you tell that apart from any "natural" highly intelligent athlete to a degree of confidence where you are willing to strip rights from people based on that? How much "better" can someone naturally be at something before being suspected an illegally modified person? Do you arrest Mozart because he is a genius composer above the norm?
I can certainly believe humanity going down the road of effectively making all "exceptional" people illegal through such laws, but society would end up a horrible racial purity testing dictatorship, not anything that could become the Federation.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
“This one - the most emotional, unhinged headshot of the bunch - that must be frantically flipping a single napkin covered in scrawled notes over and back, over and back this ‘Spock’, right?”
Let's be fair, the article seems written long before release "this fall" so who knows what kind of studio synopsis or leaked information they were basing this on.
For all we know someone at staff meetings kept pushing for Geordi to be "the new Spock" but got overruled and this journalist is just reporting what they're hearing at the time.
I wonder how much of the whole genetic augmentation being illegal thing was specific to wanting to give Julian a dark secret vs. it being a vaguely natural outgrowth of the weird takes/reverence the TNG/VOY/ENT shows had towards evolution and the Prime Directive, though still driven by wanting to give Julian a secret past.
It was mostly the first. The entire Bashir Genetic Engineering story was an extremely last minute ass-pull by Moore because he felt the story really needed Zimmerman to uncover some deep dark secret about Bashir. There were apparently conversations about how Star Trek doesn't really talk about genetic engineering, which is a sci-fi thing, so that's why they decided to go with it. It seems to have had little to do with what ST had been doing before.
Let's be fair, the article seems written long before release "this fall" so who knows what kind of studio synopsis or leaked information they were basing this on.
For all we know someone at staff meetings kept pushing for Geordi to be "the new Spock" but got overruled and this journalist is just reporting what they're hearing at the time.
It's just weird to caption it differently from all the others because the article lists his character's name, it's not like they didn't know it at the time. And it's not like Stewart is captioned "the new Kirk" to be consistent with the article either. "the new Spock" is clearly the author desperately wanting a direct replacement to match the Kirk, Spock, and Bones of TOS as they were the most popular and just jammed in who they thought fit. And considering they characterize Data as just being strong, they may not have had all the info about the characters. But that doesn't excuse the captioning.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
Learn Burton looks like an escaped mental patient in that photo. Why would he submit that headshot?
I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is racism and that was the kind of shot most black men were expected to submit during the early 80's. Might be wrong.
Thing about Augmentation is, that I can't help wonder if there isn't a much better argument for it (assuming you can work out the kinks in terms of possible negative effects) when faced with so many otherwise "superior" races. For example, there is little about Vulcans that isn't biologically superior. Klingons too I believe are baseline stronger. If you have the ability to upgrade your baseline species, I almost can't help but wonder if you shouldn't. I think there is room for discussion and exploration but... yah, I agree, the way Trek has largely handled it can at BEST be described as hamfisted and.... "bad".
The problem with genetic engineering in Star Trek is probably that it wants to be human relatable, and the Borg would be pretty tame in terms of body modifications that a spacefaring species would really get up to, especially ones that aren't going to have similar ethics to humans.
It's actually one thing I like about "far future" sci-fi is that you often end up with sub species of human that don't even realize they're subspecies because they've drifted so much.
To what degree was genetic engineering known about when TOS was made?
In the same way that 'radiation = superpowers' for a lot of comic characters back in the day (rather than, you know. Cancer and death), I figure the scare stories were probably the loudest part. Then TOS made those canon, so everything that followed had to deal with that.
Yes, they could have retconed it, but that's a lot harder to get away with once you've focused on it in a significant way.
If Khan hadn't come back to be Wrathful, it would have been easier to explain/ignore going forwards.
Saying genetic engineering shouldn't be a thing because they might produce another Khan is just flat out bigotry, pure and simple. (And the show agreed with this, surprisingly)
It's suggesting that anyone who has genetic enhancments (Remember this is in support of a blanket ban, not a "in some situations" ban) could start thinking they're superior and begin a regime of genocide and oppression because of it. Why? Just because they're "better?" by some observable metric? Are there any other "better" people that this distrust is extended to? They have so called "superior" people running around who are not genetically engineered and they don't fear that from them. They have aliens with capabilities far outstripping those of humans but they're not barred from the Federation for potentially being the next mass murdering psychopaths who view humans as inferior.
This episode even gives of a glimpse of an entire race of genetically modified people who seem A-OK. There's no mention of them waging a galactic war of supremecy or anything. They were so chill, a group of them were even willing to give up their genetic alterations to try and join the Federation, which wound up getting them all killed.
Meanwhile there's a plethora of non genetically engineer assholes running around at a constant clip. There's a multitude of Klingon warlords, but that didn't bar Worf from entering Starfleet.
You can't just judge people because they share traits with other people who turned out to be monsters. Well, I guess you can, but it's called bigotry.
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
to talk about Bashir quickly:
I think the genetic modification stuff did WONDERS for the character and set up some fantastic O'Brien moments. I know Siddig fuckign HATED IT and tried to tank it when it first happened but what an amazing retcon, it explains so much of his attitude in the first few seasons and gave way to so much growth.
Thank you for listening to my bashir 30 second talk
I will say that anyone with the goal of genetically augmenting humanity as a whole should absolutely not be trusted with that power. Anyone with the goal of augmenting some of humanity to create a "superior" race should REALLY not be trusted with that power. If someone was like "I want to genetically engineer humanity to give us less shitty knees and ankles", I'm willing to hear them out, but it's always framed in terms of combat ability.
Another item of note: Is increased strength even that good? How often, in day to day life, would being able to fistfight a bear actually come in use? Even today, and much more in Star Trek, we have machines to take care of things that require excessive strength. I'd bet on the guy with a forklift against a Klingon in a lifting competition. Increased intelligence might be more useful, but messing with that is the easiest way to screw up tremendously.
I thought Siddig hated they way they started writing him like Spock, talking about everything to the decimal point. If I remember right, they dialled back on that after a while.
I thought Siddig hated they way they started writing him like Spock, talking about everything to the decimal point. If I remember right, they dialled back on that after a while.
Yeah, it kinda came and went. Ultimately the reveal does nothing good or interesting for the character and just led to sporadic bad writing.
I thought Siddig hated they way they started writing him like Spock, talking about everything to the decimal point. If I remember right, they dialled back on that after a while.
Yeah, it kinda came and went. Ultimately the reveal does nothing good or interesting for the character and just led to sporadic bad writing.
The way they did it in some ways really thrashed at Star Trek in general. Now the reason Bashir was coming up with cures in days and such was more about being an Augment, not because Star Fleet doctors (like Crusher) were that well trained and equipped.
Saying genetic engineering shouldn't be a thing because they might produce another Khan is just flat out bigotry, pure and simple. (And the show agreed with this, surprisingly)
It's suggesting that anyone who has genetic enhancments (Remember this is in support of a blanket ban, not a "in some situations" ban) could start thinking they're superior and begin a regime of genocide and oppression because of it. Why? Just because they're "better?" by some observable metric? Are there any other "better" people that this distrust is extended to? They have so called "superior" people running around who are not genetically engineered and they don't fear that from them. They have aliens with capabilities far outstripping those of humans but they're not barred from the Federation for potentially being the next mass murdering psychopaths who view humans as inferior.
This episode even gives of a glimpse of an entire race of genetically modified people who seem A-OK. There's no mention of them waging a galactic war of supremecy or anything. They were so chill, a group of them were even willing to give up their genetic alterations to try and join the Federation, which wound up getting them all killed.
Meanwhile there's a plethora of non genetically engineer assholes running around at a constant clip. There's a multitude of Klingon warlords, but that didn't bar Worf from entering Starfleet.
You can't just judge people because they share traits with other people who turned out to be monsters. Well, I guess you can, but it's called bigotry.
You need to remember (or not, your choice) when and how this came about. TOS was about 20 years after WW2, and the movies were only 40. Naziism and eugenics and the horrors of them were still something people could actively remember. We've mostly just rolled with it in Trek since then and are only now coming around on it when most of the people who lived through that are gone.
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That episode was silly fun.
I'm curious as to why you think that genetic augmentation being illegal is even remotely a bad thing.
Point number one, genetic augmentation at the embryo (or even at the pre-embryo) stage is hideously unethical. Informed consent of the person who will have to live with the experimental results is impossible, and the final results are uncertain.
Point number two, even by the time of DS9 the full complexity of human genetics is still not understood and plenty of surprising things still happen with humans. Augmentation is banned specifically because the results are unpredictable; you might end up with a Julian that is a fully-functioning member of society, or you might end up as somebody who spends the rest of their life sealed inside their own mind because the physiological side-effects prevent them from ever being able to speak or gesture or anything. But the results could also have been a Julian so smart and so ruthless that he's just playing a long game to literally overthrow the Federation, with the intellect to fool everybody and actually pull it off.
Point number three, legalized genetic augmentation would inevitably, and horribly, upend society in an arms race of getting the best, newest features. If anybody is doing it, then everybody has to do it if only to keep pace. Then you're in a situation where genetic "upgrades" are being implemented at a rate tens or hundreds of millions of years faster than natural, with society completely incapable of absorbing the flux. The world as we know it would collapse into something we likely can't even properly imagine, but it wouldn't be good. Something like the Eugenics Wars where superhumans like Khan destroying or enslaving "lesser" people would become a very real possibility and with no way to counter or control the problem.
Genetic therapy I can understand. It can be done in adults who can provide informed consent and who have prior behavior and data to compare results to. Even in the embryonic stage, single-gene defects that would otherwise be crippling or lethal can be treated with an acceptable level of control. Or objecting to Julian himself being an "illegal" person, but the Federation still had a measured, reasonable response to that: Julian was subjected to augmentation and had never demonstrated instability, so the Federation overrode its own rule of no augmented individuals in Starfleet. But a standing rule of no augments in Starfleet? Entirely rational.
But in the Star Trek setting, genetic augmentation is a tremendous risk to both the subject and the society. Even in real life, we are centuries away from achieving a level of genetic knowledge to safely be able to do even minor upgrades to our biology on any scale and thus far we have no idea at all what the side effects could be. Genetics has a standing rule of not fucking with the human germ line, and that rule exists for good reasons. The way Federation society handles the augmented is a different story but yeah, it should definitely be illegal to perform genetic augmentation, at least for a really long-ass time.
DS9 is pretty explicit that they ended up with their disabilities because they had to use back-alley illegal doctors, not that the tech doesn't exist. In universe, it absolutely does
Just because the tech exists isn't even remotely a good reason to use it for that application. We can alter DNA right now, it's not even hard. It's a fucking horrible idea to do it without a huge amount of testing into potential results and a very, very good idea of where things will end up. The same tech the Federation uses to, say, stop cancers could probably just as adroitly alter DNA. That the tech exists isn't any kind of issue.
And I don't remember at all that they had to use illegal or second-rate doctors, especially as there's just no reason for those to even exist in the Federation. You don't get paid more, there's no limit on education, no restrictions on accessing training materials, etc. If you suck at medicine, you just... don't do it. There is zero downside. Julian went to the same kind of unethical doctor as the others and the only reason he turned out functional was partly because of blind luck and partly because his parents didn't overdo the augmentation, not because the doctors fucked up. And if we've seen anything in Star Trek, it's almost certain that the doctors who did the shady shit were smarter than average and wanted to experiment but the pesky ethics of the Federation were in the way. Further, if getting augmented requires going to an outright illegal, second-rate operation so they'll experiment on your kid, you're waaaaay out in the quadrant of abandoned ethics. None of these people needed augmentation, they just had shitty parents obsessed with having the best kid or being embarrassed about having a slow kid.
The way the Federation treats augments is problematic, but universally banning augmentation is logically and ethically the way to go.
well I mean the short answer is that isn't what I said and it's not at all what I'm talking about! I'm speaking out-of-universe about a creative choice made by baseball-hat wearing writers on a 1990s TV show that I think was a bad call that led to years of unfortunate and unnecessary follow-up stories and dumb internet arguments.
Hey, I sort of covered that possibility too! Much later and buried deeply in many words, but I wasn't entirely certain which thing was your gripe.
But yes, I agree with your gripe. It just didn't seem something that all needed attention, with everything else the setting has to offer. Particularly in the case of Enterprise, it struck me as very much a case of being lazy and using ToS material as a crutch to try and give the show relevance. Tying it in to the Klingons was even worse; Worf's statement of "we don't talk about" was all it ever needed and was a pretty great way to just say don't think about it much and move on already.
this is the number one symptom of Kurtzmanitis that I would really like the show to move past.
HOWEVER! something I forgot to mention earlier is that I am pleased as punch, practically glowing with an inner light, that the incredibly stupid thing I foresaw and was 100% certain would happen with a particular character
not only failed to happen, but the show actually went hard in exactly the opposite direction. It's legitimately the biggest surprise (good or bad) all of modern Trek has had for me. Up till now, while I've loved SNW, I kind of watched with anxious, sweaty palms, dreading the moment when
I was blown away when, with this really obvious chance to dial the drama to a ridiculous 11, they seized the dial and sent it down to a 2 instead. Instead it turned out the character
which is shockingly mundane and reasonable and, like, chilled-out for Kurtzman Trek.
We should start demanding all TV shows have villains with irrefutable Step On Me energy.
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Also Im sorry but I do not believe any descendants of Khan would keep their last name.
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I'm thinking more make it up as you go along:
"Well, we're stuck, unless one of you can turn invisible."
*vwip*
"How did- oh right, Illyrian."
Learn Burton looks like an escaped mental patient in that photo. Why would he submit that headshot?
On a surface level it's makes sense that such prohibitions would be society's knee jerk reaction to the war. But like Trek technology, the writers didn't bother to think about the broader implications of such laws.
Say you had genetic modification to be taller to be a basketball star. How would you be able to even identify the genetic distinction between that and someone naturally born tall? Is it simply illegal for anyone tall to join Starfleet since there's no way to tell the difference? Bashir was smart and had good coordination. How do you tell that apart from any "natural" highly intelligent athlete to a degree of confidence where you are willing to strip rights from people based on that? How much "better" can someone naturally be at something before being suspected an illegally modified person? Do you arrest Mozart because he is a genius composer above the norm?
I can certainly believe humanity going down the road of effectively making all "exceptional" people illegal through such laws, but society would end up a horrible racial purity testing dictatorship, not anything that could become the Federation.
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Let's be fair, the article seems written long before release "this fall" so who knows what kind of studio synopsis or leaked information they were basing this on.
For all we know someone at staff meetings kept pushing for Geordi to be "the new Spock" but got overruled and this journalist is just reporting what they're hearing at the time.
It was mostly the first. The entire Bashir Genetic Engineering story was an extremely last minute ass-pull by Moore because he felt the story really needed Zimmerman to uncover some deep dark secret about Bashir. There were apparently conversations about how Star Trek doesn't really talk about genetic engineering, which is a sci-fi thing, so that's why they decided to go with it. It seems to have had little to do with what ST had been doing before.
It's just weird to caption it differently from all the others because the article lists his character's name, it's not like they didn't know it at the time. And it's not like Stewart is captioned "the new Kirk" to be consistent with the article either. "the new Spock" is clearly the author desperately wanting a direct replacement to match the Kirk, Spock, and Bones of TOS as they were the most popular and just jammed in who they thought fit. And considering they characterize Data as just being strong, they may not have had all the info about the characters. But that doesn't excuse the captioning.
I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is racism and that was the kind of shot most black men were expected to submit during the early 80's. Might be wrong.
In the same way that 'radiation = superpowers' for a lot of comic characters back in the day (rather than, you know. Cancer and death), I figure the scare stories were probably the loudest part. Then TOS made those canon, so everything that followed had to deal with that.
Yes, they could have retconed it, but that's a lot harder to get away with once you've focused on it in a significant way.
If Khan hadn't come back to be Wrathful, it would have been easier to explain/ignore going forwards.
It's suggesting that anyone who has genetic enhancments (Remember this is in support of a blanket ban, not a "in some situations" ban) could start thinking they're superior and begin a regime of genocide and oppression because of it. Why? Just because they're "better?" by some observable metric? Are there any other "better" people that this distrust is extended to? They have so called "superior" people running around who are not genetically engineered and they don't fear that from them. They have aliens with capabilities far outstripping those of humans but they're not barred from the Federation for potentially being the next mass murdering psychopaths who view humans as inferior.
This episode even gives of a glimpse of an entire race of genetically modified people who seem A-OK. There's no mention of them waging a galactic war of supremecy or anything. They were so chill, a group of them were even willing to give up their genetic alterations to try and join the Federation, which wound up getting them all killed.
Meanwhile there's a plethora of non genetically engineer assholes running around at a constant clip. There's a multitude of Klingon warlords, but that didn't bar Worf from entering Starfleet.
You can't just judge people because they share traits with other people who turned out to be monsters. Well, I guess you can, but it's called bigotry.
I think the genetic modification stuff did WONDERS for the character and set up some fantastic O'Brien moments. I know Siddig fuckign HATED IT and tried to tank it when it first happened but what an amazing retcon, it explains so much of his attitude in the first few seasons and gave way to so much growth.
Thank you for listening to my bashir 30 second talk
Another item of note: Is increased strength even that good? How often, in day to day life, would being able to fistfight a bear actually come in use? Even today, and much more in Star Trek, we have machines to take care of things that require excessive strength. I'd bet on the guy with a forklift against a Klingon in a lifting competition. Increased intelligence might be more useful, but messing with that is the easiest way to screw up tremendously.
Then again I like The Culture more than The Federation in every conceivable way and they'll turn their kids into potted plants for a themed event
Yeah, it kinda came and went. Ultimately the reveal does nothing good or interesting for the character and just led to sporadic bad writing.
The way they did it in some ways really thrashed at Star Trek in general. Now the reason Bashir was coming up with cures in days and such was more about being an Augment, not because Star Fleet doctors (like Crusher) were that well trained and equipped.
You need to remember (or not, your choice) when and how this came about. TOS was about 20 years after WW2, and the movies were only 40. Naziism and eugenics and the horrors of them were still something people could actively remember. We've mostly just rolled with it in Trek since then and are only now coming around on it when most of the people who lived through that are gone.