Spectacle dream and an ST:TNG episode
Feb. 24th, 2013 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elabyI had a really interesting dream last night - I can't remember a lot about it, but it was epic in the way my world-ending dreams sometimes are. I was driving with Rachel toward a city where we would be staying on vacation. The city was under attack by gigantic beings: taller than skyscrapers, with lanky humanoid bodies in pale blue and green, faces with features that were squashed into the bottom halves of their heads like in some Brian Fround paintings, and long backwards-sloping rabbit ears. They lurched past the buildings, bent slightly forward, moving ponderously. The destruction they'd left in their wake had flooded the rivers, and we were stuck in traffic on a bridge above the water. The water rose and flooded the bridge, but for some reason I wasn't scared. Our car floated but was taking on water, and I looked out of the car window and saw that one of the bridge's trusses right next to it. It was only covered in an inch or so of water, so we could climb out of the car's windows walk along it. I told Rachel to start getting our luggage out of the car, and most of it was in these big rubbermaid containers, so they floated. We had to leave behind the stuff in the trunk, but it wasn't a big deal. We walked along the truss until we got to the city. We made it to our hotel but everyone was stuck there and no one was allowed to leave. We didn't really mind, though - we thought it would be relaxing to just chill in our hotel room.
In other news, we've been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation while we weave/draw/knit etc. We saw an episode the other night that I was absolutely sure was a veiled attempt to address queerness/GLBTQ rights. In it, a genderless race asked for the Enterprise's help with locating a missing shuttlecraft. A pilot, Soren, ended up falling in love with Riker (and he reciprocated) and it came to light that Soren identified as female. Binary genders were looked down upon by this culture, who considered them to be primitive (people had had genders long ago and evolved into a genderless people). This people, when they found out that anyone identified as male or female, would put them through a treatment that "cured" them and supposedly wiped out any desire to be different in that way. When Soren talked about her feelings, they were very clearly supposed to reflect those of a queer person - she had always felt different but didn't realize what it was until later in life, she had experienced bullying at school and had seen other people be bullied for the same thing she feared in herself, she met other people like her when she was older and realized that she wasn't alone or a freak. Soren was "outed" near the end of the episode and gave an impassioned speech about how no one should dictate who another person loves, how the kinds of relationships people like her have are no different than the relationships of the sexual majority, how she shouldn't be forced to deny her true self and how she wasn't "unnatural". I felt like they copped out by having Soren identify as a woman and be attracted to men (she was played by a female actress, too) but I could tell that they were trying. I've heard that some of the execs who took over Star Trek after Gene Roddenberry died vetoed his plans to bring GLBTQ characters onto the show, and they probably couldn't get anything overt past the censors even in the '90s. Jonathan Frakes evidently thought they could have done better, too: the Wikipedia article on the episode said Jonathan Frakes commented that the episode wasn't "gutsy" enough and that "Soren should have been more evidently male". As for myself, I was torn, because on the one hand it frustrated me that they didn't just face the issue without hiding it behind heterosexuality, but on the other hand I was so happy to see even an attempt at representation. There had been an episode with the Trill where Beverley fell in love with a Trill man whose symbiote had to be moved to a woman's body, and their relationship was dropped like a hot potato. It essentially said "two women can't be together and that's that." We were so discouraged by this that I never expected to see an episode that even tried to deal with queerness in any way. I was glad to be proven wrong, but the end of the episode was, predictably, unhappy - Soren was brainwashed into believing she had been a deviant and accepted the majority way of life as correct. Someday, there will be a character on Star Trek who's a gender or sexual minority, and I'm looking forward to that.
In other news, we've been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation while we weave/draw/knit etc. We saw an episode the other night that I was absolutely sure was a veiled attempt to address queerness/GLBTQ rights. In it, a genderless race asked for the Enterprise's help with locating a missing shuttlecraft. A pilot, Soren, ended up falling in love with Riker (and he reciprocated) and it came to light that Soren identified as female. Binary genders were looked down upon by this culture, who considered them to be primitive (people had had genders long ago and evolved into a genderless people). This people, when they found out that anyone identified as male or female, would put them through a treatment that "cured" them and supposedly wiped out any desire to be different in that way. When Soren talked about her feelings, they were very clearly supposed to reflect those of a queer person - she had always felt different but didn't realize what it was until later in life, she had experienced bullying at school and had seen other people be bullied for the same thing she feared in herself, she met other people like her when she was older and realized that she wasn't alone or a freak. Soren was "outed" near the end of the episode and gave an impassioned speech about how no one should dictate who another person loves, how the kinds of relationships people like her have are no different than the relationships of the sexual majority, how she shouldn't be forced to deny her true self and how she wasn't "unnatural". I felt like they copped out by having Soren identify as a woman and be attracted to men (she was played by a female actress, too) but I could tell that they were trying. I've heard that some of the execs who took over Star Trek after Gene Roddenberry died vetoed his plans to bring GLBTQ characters onto the show, and they probably couldn't get anything overt past the censors even in the '90s. Jonathan Frakes evidently thought they could have done better, too: the Wikipedia article on the episode said Jonathan Frakes commented that the episode wasn't "gutsy" enough and that "Soren should have been more evidently male". As for myself, I was torn, because on the one hand it frustrated me that they didn't just face the issue without hiding it behind heterosexuality, but on the other hand I was so happy to see even an attempt at representation. There had been an episode with the Trill where Beverley fell in love with a Trill man whose symbiote had to be moved to a woman's body, and their relationship was dropped like a hot potato. It essentially said "two women can't be together and that's that." We were so discouraged by this that I never expected to see an episode that even tried to deal with queerness in any way. I was glad to be proven wrong, but the end of the episode was, predictably, unhappy - Soren was brainwashed into believing she had been a deviant and accepted the majority way of life as correct. Someday, there will be a character on Star Trek who's a gender or sexual minority, and I'm looking forward to that.
