Rambling on about a TV Show

I’ve been working my way through Star Trek: Enterprise.

One of the things that really strikes me is that its really a very liberal piece of entertainment. Some might argue that Star Trek was always liberal, but I’ve read analysises that Star Trek: The Next Generation has a Neo-conservative bent to it. Deep Space Nine did as well, until Steven Ira Behr got ahold of it and made it some of the finest entertainment on television. (The latter seasons would have been at home on HBO.)

Sure some people will pull out the fact that no Star Trek series has had an openly gay character. That is definitely a deficiency that perhaps could be remedied in the future, but I think at this point Star Trek has missed the boat. But they did a one up and tackled consensual non-monogonomy in Enterprise.

One Kudos I will give to Enterprise is that perhaps with the exception of the original series, it was the most timely in addressing the issues of its time in a big consistent way. Sure TNG, DS9, and Voyager stopped for an episode or two and did a nice “issue” episode, but Enterprise spent whole seasons on it.

There is a strong argument against Xenophobia and Colonialism in Jonathan Archer and his fellow explorers.

Time for a detour here.

I’ve thought that the form of “democracy” that we’ve brought to Iraq is an idiotic falsehood. Sure people have elections have happened but when you mass exoduses driven by your need for safety does it really matter if you can vote for your leader? The well identified pitfall is that the collation forces didn’t make allies of the preexisting non-political power structures. (e.g. We disbanded the Baathist functionary government officials and the Iraqi Army.)

Archer ends up being a proponent of cooperation and alliance building even when Earth is faced with decimation. Compare this to the past seven years of the United States’s leadership.

So that was a bit of rambling, but the bottom line of the whole thing is Enterprise is a damn good series..