Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x02 "Ad Astra Per Aspera"
Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x02 "Ad Astra Per Aspera"
Logline
Commander Una Chin-Riley faces court-martial along with possible imprisonment and dishonorable dismissal from Starfleet, and her defense is in the hands of a lawyer who’s also a childhood friend with whom she had a terrible falling out.
Written by Dana Horgan
Directed by Valerie Weiss
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I think this episode was really good...if the issue of discrimination was over literally anything other than a social practice of genetic modification. Star Trek's hardline stance on linking social genetic modification to eugenics is one of the things that I've really appreciated, especially as corrosive "thought experiments" about it have sort of entered back into the discourse. I don't think you can practice genetic manipulation on a society wide level without it going very bad very fast. At least I don't think humans can, and the episode doesn't really make a case for why the Illyrians are better at it.
The core message of this episode is so important, especially at this current moment, and the right of people to self determination and to safety and security in their identities and differences is right at the heart of Star Trek, so I'm glad to see SNW continue to affirm it. But...just...there are reasons, real reasons, with lots of horrific history behind them, for why normalizing genetic manipulation in the name of improving or "fixing" populations of people is still a real third rail for me, and I wish the episode had figured out how to engage with that specifically a bit more. This episode does not actually convince me that in the far future utopia of the Federation the dangers of genetic modification as a practice have been addressed, and in absence of that "It used to happen and its bad, but stuff is better now and can't we relax a little" is a bit...hollow
I think you could fix this for me if you made it so that Illyrian genetic modification was something that members of their species voluntarily entered into in adolescence or early adulthood. Make it more of a practice that people voluntarily keep up and less of a program that their society runs and the whole thing works way better for me. That also makes the loose analogy to transgender people in our current time, and really just the right of bodily autonomy and self determination, way more coherent.
I really hated this episode for this reason. I hate the thought experiment of "what if we found a planet where everyone practices eugenics and so therefore it's racist to be against eugenics".
Like if the rest of the world had found an isolated Nazi Germany, would it have been discriminatory and prejudiced to be against their practices? To not let them into the military? Of course not
Like why even write that plotline? Why are the writers choosing to legitimize eugenics like this, like it ever could be neutral or good and not horrific? I'm unwilling to entertain the idea that there's a good way to do it, just as I'd be unwilling to entertain a fictional society that showed slavery in a positive light
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.
Again, the strange practice the writers chose for this planet was eugenics. It's like writing nazis as a minority. I'm a Jewish person and my family's entire town was slaughtered by nazis. Romani people were also slaughtered in the Holocaust. I'm sure they would not appreciate their murderers being framed as the victims.
The writers didn't have to depict eugenicists this way, as if their practice was a benign cultural tradition. Eugenics is an awful practice that's killed tens of millions in the real world. It doesn't need apologetics that make people question "but what if we're being mean to the nazis by not letting them do their tradition of genetic modification for the betterment of their race?"
It's illegal to practice eugenics in the star trek world because the eugenicists literally took over as despots and oppressed everyone during the eugenics wars. Do you think that it would be appropriate to have people who are proud eugenicists come into your society flexing their supposed genetic superiority (another piece of writing I protest btw) and teaching people by their presence that eugenics is actually benign and actually does make one genetically superior to others?
When I think of the situation with Una, it makes me think of cultural practices like genital mutilation, a backwards practice that parents make for their children, as individuals, that is traditional but hurts their child. It would indeed be fucked up to hurt someone in that way, and it's illegal for good reason. It's not benign, but it also would be cruel to blame the child for something their parents did to them and make it illegal for them to participate in society.
But genital mutilation isn't genetic modification for the betterment of the race. There's no such thing as genetic superiority, eugenics is a pseudoscience and it's messed up and irresponsible to depict it as an effective benign thing that works at actually making a race superior. The writers should have chosen a different practice than this instead of worrying an episode that does apologia for a terrible practice that is illegal (in universe, not irl unfortunately) for a good reason
I think they kept that genetic manipulation is bad for the reasons you suggest...but also that the children did not have a choice and shouldn't be punished for their heratige or things they didn't choose. It was more don't single.out the individuals
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
I agree with this. It was clear from when the lawyer called the eugenics laws "race laws" that Number One was going to get off somehow, but I really missed seeing in the courtroom somebody make the case that genetic augmentation is meaningfully different from genetic modification -- in particular in the case of Illyrians, that they modify themselves to exist harmoniously with their environment and not to breed superhumans. Eugenics is bad, and genetic augmentation is also bad and I think corrosive to society, as is covered in Doctor Bashir, I Presume.
Overall, I thought it was good Star Trek, but missing a robust engagement with the issue at hand which was disappointing. A better episode than last week, though.
Oh also -- it was very exciting to see a Tellarite! We barely see any of them, especially compared to the other three founding members.
EDIT: Thinking about it more, I do actually think it's a bit objectionable to call anti-eugenics laws "race laws". I get that Starfleet is fictional, but in our actual universe, "race laws" have tended to go hand in hand with eugenics, so it really feels a bit ... unfortunate. And based on this episode's Ready Room, they seem pretty comfortable with the idea that Starfleet and the Federation are in the wrong about genetic augmentation, and I don't feel like they drew the line in the episode or in the Ready Room episode between augmentation and modification.
But…just…there are reasons, real reasons, with lots of horrific history behind them, for why normalizing genetic manipulation in the name of improving or “fixing” populations of people is still a real third rail for me, and I wish the episode had figured out how to engage with that specifically a bit more.
Other episodes did, and I hope we'll see more of that. Specifically, it's about Illyrian culture: Genetic modification is deeply ingrained, required in their ethics: "We don't terraform planets, that's disrespectful of nature, we transform ourselves", as heard previous season (I'm sure someone will fill in the episode number). As such the practice doesn't root in a desire for dominance or superiority, but gentleness towards the universe.
That is, the issue with the eugenics wars wasn't genetic manipulation itself, but that humanity was war-like and out for dominance and superiority. The augments' attitude of supremacy simply reflect cultural attitudes back then, they were not caused by genetic modifications, but enabled. (Alternatively: The bad idea of imbuing augments with such a sense was due to bonkers scientists influenced by cultural attitudes).
Or maybe more like entheogens: Drugs that kill one society are used responsibly and for benefit by others because they have cultural practices regulating them, rites (regulations) saying when and where and why they should be used.
If the federation ever gets around to legalising genetic manipulation having regulations written by Illyrians and Denobulans sounds like a very good idea.
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
The tricky philosophical line here for me is - what are we allowed to say parents can't do in regards to what they see as improving their children's life? https://sopuli.xyz/comment/525354
is one comment I made, that I'll try not to repeat here, but will add to. Genetics is not destiny. However, before a person exists it's hard for me to see how adjusting that person is not liking who he was. To me, this is like saying you don't like your new car (when you don't have a car yet) and deciding to buy the SUV instead of the Pickup - and people saying you changed the car. This may be a weak analogy but the point is - Bashir didn't exist, he never "was" something else.
And what about schooling and other cultural influences? I would say we can make cases similar to yours about religion, about schooling, and more today. People are certainly changed from some ideal form of "what they might have been" - we're culturally a blank slate, something is going to fill that. We're fighting about laws that limit what people can be before they can consent right now in anti-trans laws in Florida, but somehow I feel like you might not be so pro bans in that case, even though it's basically the same argument - we shouldn't let parents decide to treat kids before the kids can legally consent (at 18) so we should just "let nature take its course".
I'm also stuck with the idea that society shouldn't "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”" I thing that's bad from a government imposed stance, but from a personal choice stance you seem to be doing the same thing, you're just imposing variations rather than conformity. But why is one better imposed by the government than the other? I also feel like policing norms, and heck, creating norms, is kind of a definition of a society. We might not like the extremes, but if there are no norms or policing, you have a large collection of individuals and anarchy, not a society IMO.
The tricky philosophical line here for me is - what are we allowed to say parents can’t do in regards to what they see as improving their children’s life?
Eugenics, parents can't do fucking eugenics
To me the vibe was that from the writer's perspective generic modification is so obviously acceptable that it's impossible to even come up with an argument against it that stands up to scrutiny, and that the racism against the genetically modified was just an idiosyncratic cultural trait of the federation that they would hopefully one day grow out of entirely. And I'd pretty much endorse that take. What risk of genocide could possibly be posed by letting parents give their children the modifications they think will serve them well in life? As the episode said, it's not like augments have Khan lurking within them or anything, they're morally no different from anyone else and no more likely to start a genocide.
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.
Huh those are both strange examples - was Bashir harmed in any way by his genetic augmentations other than having to face social prejudice for them? Seems like he's a success story, selflessly putting his enhanced gifts to work for the greater good. If only we had a 1000 more like him! The situation where society is deciding what's normal and banning deviations is the one where people like him are prevented from existing.
As for Geordi, you realize that he did in fact cure his blindness with his implants, which give him not just normal vision but better than normal vision? Another example of the benefits of allowing a different sort of voluntary body modification.
There just aren't any real arguments for banning this sort of voluntary gene editing, beyond perhaps a ban on giving children harmful traits.
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".
The problematic aspect of eugenics is sterilizing or killing people deemed inferior, people modifying their own children has none of the same issues.
That's really incorrect. I hate that this episode is spurring eugenics apologia like this
It is correct actually. Make an counterargument if you can, but as I've been saying, there really isn't one beyond trying to smear something reasonable like enhancing children with the brush of something bad like forced sterilizations by lumping them under the same "eugenics" label.
What you think "enhancement" means now is very different from what people might have said "enhancement" meant in the 60s which is very different from what they thought "enhancement" would have been in the 20s and is very different from what we might think it means in the 2050s. Homosexuality used to be a mental disorder, and it would have been an enhancement to "cure" it. There would have even been gay people who would have voluntarily taken that cure because of the distress society subjected them to, there are records of patients coming to medical professionals looking for treatment. I like the alternate solution to that problem we're currently making progress towards, in which we accept and support that there are diverse ways for people to exist, and I do not trust that we have correctly figured out what things about human being are currently "wrong" and which things can be "improved"
Is it really so different? I think the whole "smarter, faster, stronger, healthier" package we see in the enhanced Star Trek characters is pretty universal. Talk of curing real or imagined mental disorders seems like quite a different question - nothing in the show or in the reality of genetic engineering points to that possibility.
The idea that you can modify someone's genes to "enhance" them is bog standard "positive" eugenics. It's literally the definition of eugenics and it's upsetting to me that you are treating this like a debate.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127045/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41434-019-0088-1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_eugenics
New eugenics [...] advocates enhancing human characteristics and capacities through the use of reproductive technology and human genetic engineering.
You can see that you're just doing what I described and making an argument solely based on "eugenics" being a broad term that includes evil things right? What is the concern you have about letting parents modify their unborn child's genes, besides the fact that it could ungenerously be described as eugenics?
It's literally eugenics. There's nothing ungenerous about calling it what it is.
If you don't see the issue with genetically modifying children without their consent to "enhance" them or make them racially "superior" then I can't help you.
Children don't consent to their genes regardless. Not sure where you get "racially superior" or all these quotation marks around "enhance" - we're talking about the kind of augments we see in Star Trek, no racial component, just improved health, intelligence, strength, etc.
So yes, I am once again standing by the claim that parents should be allowed to help their children out in that way, and that we'd all be better off if doing so was possible. I guess I'm no longer expecting any reasoning from you about why such a world of healthier, tougher, smarter people would be worse except that the idea of encouraging those traits via genetic modification supposedly constitutes eugenics.
Thank you! Came on here because the episode left such a bad taste in my mouth. I'm a queer person with multiple disabilties, one of which is known to be genetic. Using genetic engineering as the metaphor for marginalized groups felt like a trojan horse to garner public sympathy for genetic engineering.
And through making genetic engineering acceptable then we're opening up the world to letting parents engineer the gay out of their children and to engineer the neurodivergence out of their children.
Instead of being a story about accepting marginalized groups to me it feels like they're actively pushing for a technology that can be used to wipe out marginalized groups. Why did the writers do this? They literally did not have to set this up or write it this way.
Also the references to the Eugenics Wars as though they are somehow irrelevant today just did not at all sit well with me as somebody who is high risk for covid. This whole pandemic the drumbeat has been "only those with pre-existing conditions will die" and we have been fighting for our lives to get the most minimal public health measures and the ableds just keep putting their conviences over our lives. Eugenics is still here, it's still going strong, but we're just not calling it eugenics anymore.
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.
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.
Evolution is neutral, eugenics is bad. This isn't hard
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
Cool, eugenicist fatphobia
I don't think it tries to justify that the Illyrians are better at it, or even that the practise should be justified in any way.
It's more about the treatment of others in a reasonable, decent way which seems to have been clearly lacking from Una's account. So regardless of what practices her people might have been continuing against Federation law, that did not and does not justify the behaviour of others.
So I agree, it doesn't try to justify the dangers of genetic modification though I do not believe that's the aim regardless. It's about treating others decently. From a continuity standpoint I don't think it'd make sense to do so anyway, but my concerns still lie here: how did the Federation manage to cover up the treatment of the Illyrians up through the TNG/DS9/VOY era?