Don’t look at the future. We drew something awful on it.

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L.I. Underhill is a media critic and historian specializing in pop culture, with a focus on science fiction (especially Star Trek) and video games. Their projects include a critical history of Star Trek told through the narrative of a war in time, a “heretical” history of The Legend of Zelda series and a literary postmodern reading of Jim Davis' Garfield.

4 Comments

  1. them0vieblog.com
    February 15, 2015 @ 11:38 pm

    Maybe not her final final contribution.

    She and Michael Piller heavily revised The Offspring, I believe. According to Echevarria's commentary. Although she is not too fond of the episode, arguing (perhaps reasonably) that it covers a lot of the ground associated with Measure of a Man.

    Have you heard about her "Data triptych" pitch? Which sounds like it would have been interesting. (If controversial.)

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  2. K. Jones
    February 16, 2015 @ 8:02 am

    Interesting. The Offspring always felt to me like the only Data episode to feel like a real "sequel" to Measure of a Man, so that tracks.

    The High Ground is a fascinating episode. It's hard to draw a nuanced line between being brazen and a bit of a fortune-teller about the near future … and yet to still be kind of cowardly in the telling. But I figured Finn's line about "moral cowardice" when dealing with "non-aligned worlds" would be ripe for discussion here, just because it's really on the nose and really addresses a lot of questions that have naturally arisen over the last two seasons of analysis when we think of everything from Prime Directive worlds.

    It's like even the writers recognized what we were talking about and had somebody call the Federation on their bullshit. The problem was, they leveled the argument at Doctor Crusher, life science mystery solver … and possibly the least political member of the crew.

    You're right though that Pulaski might've turned the episode, indeed turned captivity into something different and more redeemable. But honestly this should've been an episode focused on Picard, maybe Riker and Worf, a lot more Troi (given that she functions so well in an anthropological/ambassadorial role) and maybe with a "Federation Bureaucrat" along for the ride the way the Original Series used to do, to represent that moral cowardice compared to our crew.

    It sounds like the original concept is way, way stronger of an idea. Using the Romulans as Napoleonic France seems genius to me, and would certainly still have been relevant (it's not like military powers have ever stopped "backing" revolutionaries trying to revolt against their military imperialist rivals)

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  3. Daru
    February 20, 2015 @ 12:26 am

    "This takes serious chutzpah to lay out for a number of reasons, not the least of which is positing a unification of Ireland thanks directly to the actions of the IRA years before Ireland did in fact get a manner of independence. The show deserves massive props for not only having the gall to come out and say this, but putting the entire matter about as eloquently, aptly and succinctly as it can be put. The rest of the episode may be trite and insulting, but this one scene almost redeems the whole production, and goes down in history as one of the series' finest moments even without it."

    This exchange stands out as one of the finest bits of dialogue with the questions it raises across TNG for me.My memory of this moment is strong and it eclipses the rest of the episode.

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  4. SK
    July 22, 2015 @ 2:14 am

    positing a unification of Ireland thanks directly to the actions of the IRA years before Ireland did in fact get a manner of independence

    What, before 1922? Really?

    Reply

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