nigel-18854

You know that term white witch, it's supposed to describe a person who practices magic just like an ordinary witch only a white witch is good. Oh right that's okay then, he/she being good, everything is hunky dory and we need not bother about plagues of toads and such only -- what exactly does good mean? Is this witch good all the time, some paragon of virtue, illuminating the world with their beneficence, because that would be quite unique seeing that most ordinary people don't even approach that level of consistent benevolence . We might be good some of the time, we might not but it's a practical certainty that aren't gonna be good all of the time, in fact it might be likely that we're bad quite a lot of the time.

In fairy tales we have the good fairy and evil step sister stereotypes, in reality though, it's a little different. Yeah we understand that Hitler was evil if he was evil wasn't the same true of Stalin, good ol' uncle Joe they used to call him when Russia was an ally in the war, it was convenient to label him a despot until Adolf had chomped on his cyanide pill. And what about Harry Truman, dropping the bomb, killing tens of thousands in an instant and condemning many more to a lingering death, what could possibly be more evil than that?

Real life just isn't like fairy tales, good vs evil isn't just a dichotomy trivially resolved for the convenience of the plot, it's something we confront every day. There's the casual deceit of politics and the media, the ever present hypocrisy of public life, and the petty conflicts and drama of our own personal lives, all can be viewed as conflicts between good and evil.

I could go on but you get the general idea, while the concepts of good and evil are intrinsic to a lot of drama they tend to get stylized and assigned to specific roles. It's a case of black hat/white hat or in the case of Deep Space 9 Cardassian/Bajoran. To be fair there was some attempt to explore the grey areas of morality with the Federation vs Marquis conflict portrayed in TNG, but they couldn't quite get it done right. The Marquis were optionally stereotyped as either idealistic dupes or irresponsible rebels for the convenience of a particular plot.

The stereotyping continued with DS9, the Bajorans had suffered a long occupation, ruthlessly imposed by the despicable Cardassians. The occupation was portrayed as something like the Belgian rule of the Congo crossed with German occupation of France in the second world war. Rapacious exploitation of resources and labour along with mindless repression and spontaneous acts of barbarism. A tale of woe and misery indeed but happily all this his behind them because now the Federation is here all is sweetness and light. Yeah because that happens all the time in the real world when a repressive regime is overturned don't it? All was proceeding as expected in DS9, with the writers and script editors working a rich vein in the stereotype mines and then along comes Mark Alaimo and his portrayal of the character Gul Dukat...

It's still difficult to try and understand what happened but somehow, no matter how hard the writers tried to write him as lame caricature, Alaimo managed to make the character of Dukat resonate. They'd make him pompous, arrogant, deluded, foolish, randy as a coot, licentious, vein, oafish, murderous and Alaimo would just stride through the role and make it work. So DS9 became the Mark Alaimo show whenever his character featured in an episode.

I imagine his was not a circumstance that was particularly well appreciated in Trek town as it's pretty evident that Watlz is an effort to hammer a nail through the heart of Dukat's fan appeal. Well they pretty much succeeded, turning him into a gibbering imbecile, ranting his malevolence in terms so literal he may as well be wearing a badge with the word 'evil' printed on it. Of course in doing so, they pretty much threw the show's credibility, which was pretty low already, into the deepest part or the ditch.

So you're you find yourself in dire straits in the midst of the delta quadrant being pursued by a deadly foe bearing down on you about to strike a deadly blow. If that doesn't seem bad enough, your find that as captain of the Voyager you're lumbered with a wholly unrealistic moral imperative to uphold the -values- of the federation, these being peace love and vegetable rights. All seems hopeless and you and your crew are about to come to sticky end when at the last desperate moment a thought occurs and your summon all your determination to issue the order, 'Target their weapons array'.

With that single command a flurry of activity ensues accompanied by special effects and reaction shots. Instantly your troubles evaporate in a spectacular plot convenience. Thanks to god (or maybe the script editor) that the principles that govern star ship engineering dictate that all weapons are located in a discrete area that is trivially targetable by your most effective weapons fire, while concurrently leaving all personal upon said star ships, unharmed, leaving your morals and your noble sensibilities immaculately intact.

And that's he problem with all the TNG trek related series, they foster the lie that force can be applied as a rational means to resolve conflict, without harm, hindrance or any other negative consequence for anyone. Oh yeah -- well go tell that to the families of the staff working at the Belgrade Radio and Television headquarters in 1999. Voyager is the most egregious offender in this regard of the TNG era series. By the time Voyager came along the conventions had been so engrained so rigorously that you can schedule the utterances of stereotyped lines. There'll be a 'Target their engines' at the end of the first act, a 'see if you can get a transporter lock...' in the second act, the list goes on...

Of course this kind of thinking got a severe kick in the teeth after 2001, unfortunately instead of a adopting a more realistic attitude towards conflict and war, the response has generally been towards an apologetic tone, seeking to justify and even obfuscate them.

We find our heroes displaced to what appears to be a brutally utilitarian industrial context. With no recollection of their prior existence they're condemned to a life of drudgery and servitude, sustained by the most meagre rations and living with the most basic comforts, does any of this sound familiar? Well it should do, it's a plot that's featured in Farscape and Star Trek Voyager for starters and if memory serves, wasn't there something like this way back in the seventies in the original BSG?

But the resonance goes beyond the familiarity of the plot for the thematic focus of this episode is a concept that has become one of the cornerstones of science fiction literature and drama, that is the concept of false consciousness. They Live, The Matrix, Dark World, City of Ember they all examples of plots focused on false consciousness, which is the notion that, your reality can be manipulated through deception, until it is so remote from actual reality, that you can be conditioned into virtual slavery. Generally when you explain it like that, people baulk at the idea and laugh it off while muttering 'conspiracy theory' under their breath.

Once the seed has been planted though, it doesn't take long before those first inquisitive leaves of inquiry attentively poke through the soil and they're back asking, 'what exactly do you mean false consciousness?' I tell 'em it's like the card game you thought was honest but turns out to have been fixed, you were labouring under the notion that you were unlucky instead you were being robbed. And so it is your daily lives an example being: the rapturous reception those living on a minimum wage give to the news that they're getting a pay rise. Only to find that in six months time not only are they're struggling just as hard to make ends meet and the little they have put aside is now virtually worthless because, surprise surprise, their wage rise coincided with a drop in interest rates.

That's why the idea of false consciousness finds such resonance for audiences, that's why authors and script writers find it such a compelling topic because it's REAL.

So if this is all so familiar and the script has been done before, why have I marked this episode up with eight stars? Well it's the good ol' SG1 magic, not only is the script so much better than the usual SFTV standard, lots of nuance and detail but it's the cast, they nail it just right. When I first encountered SG1, I thought McGyver, are you kidding? and to be sure it did take them a little while to work out the wrinkles but by season four it's as smooth as silk.