Captain Kirk

Captain Kirk

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

See? We were right about Star Trek vs. Star Wars

Via Pandagon - read the whole thing, but here's the relevant part:
Star Wars (or what became of it) ended up being a rather terrible story about a society run on genetic predeterminism. The police force of the “good old days” were the secretive elite of a crypto-religious sect who fully accepted that at all times, two of their members would be trying to destroy civilization as they knew it. Membership was based on an accident of genetic luck, and those who lacked the access and wherewithal to get screened at the proper time were out of luck, stuck at the whim and mercy of their telekinetic, mind-altering overlords. Government was largely ineffectual, a dysfunctional democracy latched onto a decaying royal system. The entire lesson of Star Wars is that this highly traditional, morally unyielding system fails, and it fails miserably, as the billions of people killed in the Sith insurrection would have testified, had they, well, lived.


I'll take the meritocracy and the technology, please.

2 comments:

Iddy said...

"...lay largely in the toughness of the main character: Jean-Luc Picard was a moral hardass where the Captain Kirk of the earlier show was more of an easygoing, cheerful swashbuckler..."

WTF??!! Excuse me but have they even watched TOS?? How many times did Kirk kiss off the Prime directive because of his moral opinion?!

The only thing *easy* about Kirk was that he was easy on the eyes...

Marz said...

Did they really just call James Tiberius Kirk a "swashbuckler"?! So, so wrong.