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0335 - Perfectly fine. - 2024.03.04 |
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Comment: One of the things Gene Roddenberry gets shit for - perhaps deservedly so - is that in TOS and early TNG, he made a point that, in addition to the greed of capitalism and the lust for war, Federation crewmembers have evolved past interpersonal problems and emotional incompatibility. (One wonders what, exactly, Bones calling Spock a "green-blooded hobgoblin" was, if not an interpersonal problem, but let's leave that aside.) Once Gene was out of the picture, Trek writers were able to delve more deeply into issues like guilt, grief, and trauma. Many critics insist that early Trek characters seem, at times, inhuman in their blasé reactions to death or their seeming immunity to tragedy. There have been, in recent years, quite a few depictions of post-traumatic stress disorder in popular media, some more sensitive and accurate than others. Seems to be quite a popular topic across multiple genres of fiction, as a matter of fact, whether it's kicking off a violent rampage or metaphorically becoming a ghost or simply acting as the subject for some A-lister's lunge towards an Oscar. But is it so wrong, to imagine a future where issues like PTSD are alleviated, if not cured entirely? After all, we have a far better understanding of it now than we did just a few scant decades ago, and after over a century of research into the condition by well-funded institutions like every military on Earth, surely further advances will be made, yes? It wasn't too long ago that diabetes was a death sentence, are we less human for having changed that? Indeed, of all the metrics by which to judge someone as realistically human, why the hell would you pick a goddamn disorder? If you met someone in your real life who was otherwise perfectly normal, but who shrugged off traumatic events without subsequent nightmares and trigger episodes, would you recoil from them as monstrous? And what is science fiction, if not an exploration of new things? How poor a species would we be, if we were incapable of change, and why would we not seek to change something that brings such pain to so many? Is curing trauma - or calming its negative symptoms so much that it is, effectively, cured - truly such an impossible thing to imagine? Is it any harder to imagine than a warp drive or a half-alien science officer or an end to poverty? ...which is not to say that trauma does not exist in the world of Forward, any more than Lee is truly immune to depression - the symptoms are alleviated to the point of effective nonexistence, but without their assorted bioneural implants and advanced therapeutic treatments, both Lee and Caleb would not be attending class right now. All of this is to say that, whatever you may think of this current plotline, please do not mistake Caleb's sudden shift in demeanour to be indicative of some sort of combat PTSD reaction. After all, if there's one thing we should all have learned by now about living in the future - there are new problems. |
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