But in contrast, this lawyer (Neera) won by mainly by being a good lawyer (albeit in a tv legal drama kind of way). Setting things on fire with the first witness to create a bunch of fog and doubt about the premise of the case, realising that other important regulations impinge on the case and setting up testimony to substantiate the effect of those regulations.

My memory of most other officer-lawyers is that their methods tend to focus more on the moral “issyew” (Picard’s pronunciation of “issue” in Measure of a Man).

It is not unlikely that this is the allegory they had in mind primarily, but so much of the bigotry and hatred depicted applied to gays, blacks, jews, women and probably more groups, too.

We’re rhyming history, every generation we’re trying to overcome prejudice, oppression and hatred against a new minority, only for some to conjure up a new distinguishing feature to define a minroty to be ostracized. It feels like treading water sometimes, can’t we just cut through the bullshit in one go, but no, we have to go through all the steps, while some new group (or a subgroup of a previous group) has to endure all the pain this brings. Sometimes it feels like we’re not really getting better. But maybe we are. But it’s still too slow, it still repeats itself, and nowadays we might experience multiple such cycles in our lifetime, when at some point it took generations to get that kind of progress?

Ah, I’d missed that detail. I was on the fence about whether or not it was a trans allegory because it didn’t initially feel like there were as many similarities in her story to being trans as there was to homosexuality and being an undocumented immigrant but upon further consideration I have to agree. Though it does seem to me like it is also about those other groups I mentioned. I suppose it’s a bit of a catch-all (which worked great).

There were also parts of it that could easily be interpreted as Jim Crow era politics. Passing was a thing for Blacks as well. Splitting into two different cities reminded me of both redlining and “separate but equal.” Of course, history repeats itself, and this allegory could also be applied to Jews, Native Americans, and any other persecuted minority, including gay and trans people. Una’s whole situation could pretty easily be mapped onto a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation as well.

I really like this Spock, don’t get me wrong, but I’m finding his increasing “humanness” a bit distracting. I mean, making a joke in court? That was a bit far-fetched.

I think how the genetic augmentation ban was portrayed in Una’s case in particular - a military court martial - was similar to “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, so LGBTQ+ groups do seem to fit better than, say, race or sex. Even with DADT no longer in force, there’s topical parallels, like you suggest, with trans people. But there was an emphasis on the Illyrians’ genetic augmentation being “their custom”, so you can apply religious or cultural prejudice equally as the allegory.

I’m… not gonna lie, I get the Federation’s argument. Genetic engineering is a dangerous thing to start doing to sapient species, and it can lead to a resurgence of eugenics and other stuff like that.

The only real issue with their stance is that they discriminate against people who’ve been genetically augmented, instead of simply trying to prevent stuff from happening in the first place.

Yes, this. It’s setting a new bar. Fantastic design, well executed.

SNW seems to have hit a gestalt of not just production and costume design but also lighting and cinematography. Like TOS and early colour television, it’s making the most of the new UHD technology. Everything has come together and is reinforcing the impact.

Discovery was reaching for this in the 32nd century design, and even with the Enterprise bridge as originally built for Discovery season two. The principal ship sets from the first season were an ongoing constraint though. Costume designer a gersha Phillips found her initial attempts to put the Discovery crew into 32nd century uniforms did not stand out against the ship’s dark bridge.

It will be interesting to see if they can achieve something similar in the 32nd century with the new Starfleet Academy show.

The crew quarters with those slanted columns look really sleek.

You generally can’t make people incriminate themselves, and upping a charge from fraud to conspiracy would be exactly that. That is, in a court run by laws instead of TV logic she could’ve remained silent.

…unless there’s some special sauce in US law that says “once you take the stand” or something, dunno I don’t speak common law and Trek can’t help itself but assume US law but it definitely doesn’t look kosher.

I couldn’t help but wonder whether they’re setting him up as a badmiral or it was just Chekov’s gun from the Vulcan brawl. If the latter, they did a lousy job of tying them together … I was going with option A while watching and only considered B afterward.

And just to have measure of a man’s back for a second, the trial was decided on a fairly deep point: how we chose to discriminate against individuals becomes the way we chose to consign whole groups or races to awful fates, however obvious the individual differences seem and however much they seem to justify differential treatment.

Cuts across a lot of things, and more than the principles addressed in this episode especially the asylum technicality at the end (which I enjoyed just from legal drama standpoint)

I am European, we had an interesting talk about the travelling community at my work the other day. When certain groups of travellers come to town there is issues with their culture fitting with the settled communtity and a small but visible element of not following the laws and customs. From issues with their approach to educating their children especially girls, to petty theft, to resolving disputes with violence.

However they revealed among those at my work were several children of travellers or even those that had travelled and settled down. For the first time I heard my self internally saying “not you though your the good ones” and felt ashamed. Ina a sort of interview format they revealed people called local sites slurs in front of them or even they joke about his RV (he has still some connection) being a “[traveler slur] wagon” not realising his connection and that it does hit home to his roots.

It really opened my eyes to those in a communtity where there may be a large minority that have questionable practices but we should still treat individuals on a case by case basis.

a similar thought might be devout Muslims (e.g. personally I think following religious practice IS a choice) with community level mysogeny or homophobia. Again while we may not agree with the community, hating the individual is not humanity.

It was trying to do that, but then doesn’t have the time or space to set up how the Federation is going to regard Ilyrians going forward, or if anything is going to change. Its like they settled on “gene modification” as the one discrimination they thought the Federation held onto in the future and slotted it in for story purposes, but without the space to actually deal with the reasons why its taboo. Ironically I think if they had made it about something closer to an actual religious practice and said “Discrimination still exists in the future, lets talk about it” this episode would have worked way better for me

What I can’t get out of my head this morning is actually Bashir’s plotline with his parents on DS9, because it captures what’s so insidious about even “benevolent” genetic modification. He’s not angry at them just because they broke the law, he’s angry at them because they decided they didn’t like who he was and chose to transform him into someone else, someone he feels is a different person. And this is actually the fundamental argument against a social program of gene management in real life; it allows society to police what types of bodies and what types of minds are “normal” and flattens species diversity and experience diversity in favor of whatever the norms say is “better”. The danger isn’t just the risk of Khan like supermen, its a moral argument against determining how people’s bodies and minds are going to develop before they can even consent, even before they’re born.

As strongly as I feel about this, I do think you could create a case for why what the Ilyrians do is meaningfully different, the “adapting to other planets rather than making them adapt to us” idea is interesting and complicated, but it felt extremely cursory in this ep

I think it’s really hard to philosophically (which I think is needed as a base to write a law coherently, though I may be the only one) draw a line between medicine and “eugenics” at least as Sci-Fi explores the concepts. And I have real difficulty seeing why it’s not just a naturalistic fallacy to say evolution is good but genetic engineering for adaptation or reducing disease or even enhancing abilities is bad.

I see all sorts of problems with government forcing some sort of improvements or discrimination a la Gattaca. I have more trouble saying parents can’t make an informed choice however - the alternative seems similar to the Texas shooting where the police prevented parents from trying to save their kids. If there’s a treatment or prevention from a disease that causes horrible deaths at young ages - it feels a lot like swinging in the other direction way to far to say - well, we don’t want to “wipe out” the minority that dies horribly at 5 from this genetic disease that we otherwise could cure.

I suppose the other point of contention I’d have is I don’t have a belief system that says anyone is meant to be in some cosmic sense. So I don’t feel a sense of community around being fat let’s say. If I had a magic wand to genetically ensure my potential kids could never get fat - I’d think I was doing them a favor, kind of like the teeth sealing that came out too late to prevent cavities for me. I think it’s horrible to treat currently fat people poorly, but to let parents decide to stop that from happening to currently not existing people? I struggle to see who we’re harming.

Historically, Star Trek has been rather on the side of no cosmic plan, though the newer shows are muddier on that. I don’t know if the episode was claiming that the main reason the Federation was against genetic engineering was because it was seen as an “afront against God”, but they did call that out in one line. But even if the show was making a religious argument, that’s very weak to those of a different or no religion, and the new shows also make it clear the Federation is good with lots of different faiths and atheists too.

The danger of letting parents choose modifications they think will serve their children in life is exactly what Bashir expresses in DS9: it gives parents, and society more generally, the power to determine what’s acceptably “normal” and flatten out anything that deviates. Geordi similarly expresses at least twice that he doesn’t want normal vision, that his blindness is not a defect that needs fixing and what’s utopian about the Federation he lives in is that his difference is accommodated and supported.

I’ve always really appreciated Star Trek’s hardline stance on this, because its a moral problem that I feel we’ve lost a little bit of sight of and is going to emerge again in the next few decades in real life. I think you could make a case for the Ilyrian environmental adaptation being different, but to do that you would have to explicitly place it against the real arguments against gene editing and work through them, and this episode went in a different direction.

Can’t believe I have to tell you that deliberate genetic modification for the enhancement of individuals and species is the definition of eugenics, and that eugenics is not “so obviously acceptable that it’s impossible to even come up with an argument against it that stands up to scrutiny”.