Amnesia of the Future: Justice

23rd November, 2009 2 Comments

If there were any justice in space, Wesley Crusher would have gotten laid. 

As an episode, Justice was a welcome surprise.  We seem to be back on track with good episodes and the about-face in direction during the episode was unexpected and well done.  Planet Marvin Gaye suddenly becomes Planet “We Don’t Talk About These Subjects At Cocktail Parties.” 

The episode starts with a few famous last words by Picard as his away team prepares to beam down to the reincarnated Garden of Eden, “Let’s just hope it’s not too good to be true.”  At first, I was expecting Riker to get caught with his pants around his ankles, resulting in some sort of intergalactic crisis because he was boffing the planetary leader’s number one gal or for bringing back space clap to the ship.  Switching to  a message of theology, capital punishment, and defining the moving lines of justice was crafty and intelligent.

My dislike of Troi continues.  Her acting seems more confident and therefore more believable, but she still can’t do her job as ship’s councilor.  All she feels on the planet is a lot of innuendo rather than Wesley’s extreme discomfort at being hugged.  In fact, it takes one of the natives to pick up on the fact that Wesley is extremely innocent.  The young girl hints at the fact that they should play a game of their own and what she wants to say is “show me how to play with your balls.”  But when Wesley starts stammering and turns beet red, she changes tactics and asks him to teach her to play ball.  Out of the three boys she’s hanging out with, Wesley should clearly not be her first choice in sports education.

I hope that for the ordeal that he’s forced to go through, Riker takes pity on the boy.  Not only did the kid not get laid in the land where everyone does the mattress mambo, he also gets a death sentence.  Set up the holodeck so that Wesley can have a “first encounter” because after his verbal stumbling in front of a sure thing he’s seriously never going to get a little sumthin’ sumthin’ that doesn’t involve a sock and some hand cream. 

Oddly enough, despite all the hanky panky going on among the Edo, none of the crew is partaking.  Instead they’re sitting around, still fully clothed…discussing capital punishment?  Wait, did I miss something here?  Or has Worf been given the job of setting Wesley up with a virtual hooker in the holodeck with the idea that ”capital punishment” involves whips, wax, and Wesley in the submissive role?  Nope, we’re really talking about the fact that forbidden fruit is now a forbidden plot of land and instead of being kicked off the island you get to die when you partake. 

I rather enjoyed the episode.  The subject matter is pretty surface-based, but similar to the fact that Picard really has to look at his own beliefs to discover the proper course of action, I think Justice, and Star Trek as a whole, encourages viewers to analyze the ethics and morality of various cultural values.  In day to day existence, it’s very easy to have faith like the Edo do in their god; it’s much more difficult to make choices based on free will. 

At one point, I even found myself understanding the point of view of people who believe that the Sphinx and Great Pyramids were built by aliens who have long since abandoned earth.  The idea is quite old with contemporary analysis of Mayan carvings on  the sarcophogus lid of King Pacal suggesting rulers flying in space ships and as Tom Stone learned while studying the mythology of Zeus, some Greek communities have and still believe that the Greek gods were actually aliens messing with and looking after human affairs.  I’m not about to go don my own tinfoil hat, but it does raise some interesting questions as the Edo worship an alien race that orbits their planet and looks after them.

Memories of the Future: Chapter 8

In the “Behind the Scenes” portion of the chapter, Wil Wheaton goes on a little tangent about a teacher encouraging him to check out the painting The Blue Boy which was housed at one of the locations used for this episode.  So here’s my own little tangent. 

In 1987, my family moved into a new house that we’d had built and proceeded to decorate room by room.  While my parents’ decorating choices involve comfortable furniture, the house has a “high-end bed and breakfast feel” to it.  My bedroom was one of the first ones complete with a typical 7-year-old girl theme that was classic enough to be appropriate years later after I’d moved out (had I not destroyed half the furniture and carpet over the years)–white frilled canopy bed, pink and blue floral wallpaper…and a print of The Blue Boy and his companion painting Pinkie.  Like Wil Wheaton, by the time I was 15, I was unimpressed with the paintings, felt the entire room made me a dweeb, and proceeded to cover the surrounding walls in Absolut ads.  Clearly I WAS a dweeb because rather than going collage style or adding clippings of cute actors and favorite bands, I arranged my ads all parallel to each other and would rearrange them as I added new ones so that there was never a lone ad–everything had to be squared off.

Wil Wheaton points out that, “It’s never easy to tackle things like capital punishment and religion, because you’re bound to offend someone, but we did it pretty fearlessly in this one.”  Star Trek handled the subject matter with class and elegance.  By acknowledging the tender footing that is required when dealing with a different set of beliefs and still remaining confident in presentation allows the episode to be successful. 

It is further proof to me that things are looking up.  Overall the episodes are much stronger than the earlier ones.  Occasionally there is a blip where things start to go downhill but I now look forward to forthcoming episodes for the general enjoyment and delight of them and the provocative philosophy they present.

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