cast of Stargate SG-1 seasons 1-8: Multicultural, intergalactic do-gooders, or a neo-fascist paramilitary commando team?

Yeah, that's right, I said it. I re-read John Zerzan's old essay against Star Trek (1994), in which he says:

What Star Trek conveys about technology is probably its most insidious contribution to domination. Not only is a structure of hierarchical orders a constant; so is the high-tech, anti-nature foundation of the drama as a whole. Always at home in a sterile container in which they represent society, the crew could not be more cut off from the natural world. In fact, as the highest development in the mastery and manipulation of nature, Star Trek is really saying that nature no longer exists.

I'm inclined to agree, but I'm looking at it from a writer's perspective: to utilize the vast amount of science-fiction ideas that the writers had, you have to have an antiseptic set-up, such as Star Trek does. Maybe it's better for me to break it down by plotline, since genre fiction is plot-driven, rather than character-driven (which literary fiction aspires to be).

Standard Sci-Fi Show Plotlines

What's really going on? Our heroes are thrown into a messy situation, like alien A is fighting alien B. A classic example is the episode of ST:TOS where you have the black & white aliens fighting each other, and nobody understands why, until the "big revelation" that one of the aliens is black on one side and white on the other, and the other guy is the reverse ("Let That Be Your Last Battlefield">. In any case, the big denouement comes when our intrepid Americans (not even with accents or alien appendages are the main characters any less than prototypical Americans) expose the "real" issue, and pronounce their/our moral superiority by solving the problem (or not).

"As you can see, it is I who has penetrated you!"

Doppelgangers - for some reason, aliens or others seem to think making copies of the main characters will accomplish something, rather than being the stage for mistaken identity gags.

Mirror, Mirror In the evil universe, Kirk and Spock have started a glam-rock band.

Well, there's plenty more to go, but other people have compiled far more extensive, detailed lists of clichés in sci-fi - my list is more general, of course, because I wanted to identify writing patterns more than actual themes. Moving on...

Trends In Science-Fiction Shows

Less episodic, more serial - This in itself is a good thing. Obviously, it's one of the reasons that the new Battlestar Galactica is so much better than the old - not so much the special effects and near-nudity.

Babylon 5: The United Nations, in space, except with less language barriers, and an incomprehensible plot.

I don't remember, exactly, when Babylon 5 aired - something like the middle of Star Trek: The Next Generation and while Deep Space 9 was on - but it was a show ahead of its time: it had some sort of crazy plot involved a galactic war or something, with some sort of conspiracy, drug dealers, secret alien spies, and about ten thousand other things I can't really remember. The problem: too much plot for us stupid monkeys to remember. And there was this inordinate focus on plot rather than character - which becomes a problem for serial shows, since serials require the audience to become emotionally invested in the characters.

Stargate SG-1 started out almost entirely episodic: the first ep of the first season introduced Apophis as a main bad guy, as well as establishing the show's premise, but the entire season is spent in random directions and eps that do nothing to advance the main plot, until ep 20 or so. Worse, ep 21 is a clipshow that is an attempt to justify the Stargate program, that to me seems like a clever way to try justifying the show itself, which leads to the next point, but hold on: the reason people love Stargate so much are the four main characters (and maybe even the two extra ones brought in after Richard Dean Anderson left the show). Four characters, and many plots that focus on just one of them - you don't have a whole ship of people to spread your sympathies across. Not only that, the characters grow on you - they make jokes about how many times they died, or roll their eyes when someone spews too much techno-babble, which brings me to the next point:

"Zev" from LEXX: Isn't this the real reason guys watch sci-fi shows?

LEXX, as trippy and low-budget as it was, was a great show. The characters were craven, or horny, or deprived of something or another that made them miserable, and they evoked great sympathy from the viewer. Even as ridiculous as some of LEXX's concepts were, it still remained a sci-fi show at its heart: here were three people, one a cowardly fool, one a curious vixen, and one of them a dead, in a stolen, living spacecraft that could destroy worlds, exploring worlds and generally make a mess of things. Some plots were driven purely by Stanley's desire to get laid, actually. The show tried many strange sci-fi things, and never once lost sight of human nature - a tricky balance to achieve. Humor is key to that - I mean, how many times can you remember the crew of the Enterprise bursting out in laughter at the sight of the aliens they encountered? They should have.

Oh, and let's not forget Red Dwarf. That show also occupies a space dear to my heart. It was always a comedy, even if some of the later eps tried to involve some sort of contiguous plot. Well, enough about that.

What was my original point going to be, anyway?

Oh, right: I was going to talk about how the Federation in Star Trek, despite having defeated scarcity, seemed to be a gigantic, military machine with no discernible political process, akin to Heinlein's benevolent, militarist meritocracy in Starship Troopers (1959), which is called the "Terran Federation." The idea that Heinlein is a fascist or whatever is of course an old debate, something that begins flame wars and something I don't want to get into.

But think about Zerzan's points (you've RTFA, right?) about the sterile ship (the Enterprise that delivers the characters to the next plot/planet: it is a cutting-edge military machine. They have ranks, orders, and no sex life. When they do, it's awkward, repressed, and always too clean. Stargate does the same thing, and it's no coincidence.

I believe this show was called Hercules in Space

Militarism and sexual repression (suppression) go hand-in-hand. Critics of Starship Troopers have said as much, pointing out that jarheads and grunts are the last people you'd expect to be eunuch-like in their approach to sexuality. Militarists seem to have this idea that military discipline will override all their primal "urges" - that guys exploring a planet full of sexy babes will never leave their phasers too far. Hah!

Second point: both shows depict military power being completely entrusted to a bunch of independent-minded, ultra-moral, hyper-intelligent individuals who constantly buck authority, but are always vindicated in the end. On SG-1, a reoccurring theme is that a civilian oversight committee (the "IOA") keeps disrupting the Air Force's efforts to conduct a completely covert, intergalactic war (in four galaxies, no less!).

The military is ideally a meritocracy (people who achieve merit are promoted), but what constitutes "merit" in the military is generally how I define pathological fascism: the ability to follow orders, carry out duties, and for officers, the ability to command others well. Confucious advocated this kind of social structure, as did Thomas Jefferson. What's wrong with that? Well, for starters, both of those guys have been dead for hundreds of years. Besides that, both of them were from societies in which "virtue" was as clearly understood as how we understand the TV guide. Obviously, it was closely coupled with religion, also known as science's enemy.

Often, the religion depicted in Stargate or Star Trek is merely a way of causing conflict - the religious nuts believe something blindly, and it's up to our rag-tag team of intrepid atheists to show them that they're really just worshiping a bunch of rocks or evil, parasitic worms inhabiting human bodies. Or, the made-up religion is a symbolic practice that's part of some lame sci-fi concept, like how George Lucas ruined the whole "Force" mythology. True, blind obedience to religious leaders is a form of pathological fascism, but there's a difference between political religions and spiritual religions - the former acts like any political hierarchy, reinforcing power for power's sake. The latter includes Christian Gnosticism, Buddhism, Taoism, and all the other religious practices that are self-guided, and some mainstream, congegration-based religious practices as well that aren't simply apparatuses of State control. (the period of time when religions wielded State power is pretty much over, anyway).

The reason that fascists hate religion (or non-sanctioned religions) is that historically, religion was a competing source of information, leadership, and morality. Hence the threat of religion to the power-hungry Air Force commandos or Federation lackeys - that is, until they triumph in the end and prove who's in control.

The fourth Doctor, Leela, and K-9 - I wouldn't exactly describe them as "threatening."

It's all about the power fantasy.

Remember the first ep of ST:TNG? Well, the Enterprise is "judged" by a god-like being ("Q"), and is let off the hook at the end by passing the test, but just barely. Effectively, this shows that even 100 years later, the Enterprise is still vulnerable to cosmic powers and whatnot - that humanity is weak and therefore threatened by such beings. Keep watching the series, and Q reappears, but each time, the god-like being has less and less power, until at some stage he is actually at the mercy of Picard and crew.

Similiarly, Stargate SG-1 has a similar progression of events: in the beginning, even a minor alien posing as a god is a threat to Richard Dean Anderson and company. As the series goes on, the Air Force accrues more and more alien artifacts, more allies, more technology, and by the end (season 10), they're cruising around in their own gigantic space-battleships, and having completely defeated all threats in our own galaxy, have to look for enemies in other galaxies (to continue the show in Stargate Atlantis, for instance.)

The rise-to-power arc is standard sci-fi fare, but it has its roots in ancient mythology; the idea of the normal man becoming heroic is the oldest theme in any fictional genre. What I am concerned with is the telling of a story, rather than simply having an entertaining fantasy about spaceships and guns (many Stargate eps are thematically identical to Westerns - each ep, a new town, a new bad guy; then there's a gunfight, and the heroes leave). In Doctor Who, the Doctor never carries a gun, has almost no resources at his disposal (his one technological gimmick, his spaceship/timemachine, is merely the vehicle to and from the story), and his greatest asset is his brain and his companions. In LEXX (mentioned earlier), the characters have as their ship the most powerful weapon in the universe, yet it never seems to serve in their favor, since everyone in the universe just wants to steal it from them, and since using their weapon means destroying an entire planet, something they'd rather not do.

I guess what I'm saying is that there are alternatives to shows that worship military power - but they're either limited in appeal, or foreign. Maybe it just goes to show that Americans are power-worshiping, pathologically fascist, violence-transfixed technophiles?

Or maybe we just need some new programming.