Our intrepid discussionists continued their Roundtable, coming across a portion of the episode that didn’t seem to sit well with some of them…
Tim – So here’s a question- did anyone else get somewhat uncomfortable or have strong feelings when they reveal what the Caretaker was doing to the crews of the ships he abducted?
Seth – Not strong ones, but it feels odd that not much attention is called to those overtones–especially considering basically everyone was violated for biological tests, to say nothing of the whole grabbing people from across the galaxy thing. The show in general seems to be too busy trying to gain our sympathy for the Caretaker to address how incredibly terrible its ethics are.
Tim – That’s definitely the vibe I was getting too, but once that reveal happened I lost all sympathy whatsoever.
David – But isn’t strange attempted fertalization just part of any good abduction? I know it was for mine.
Ryan – I found the visual of them suspended with their arms dangling and a needle being driven into their stomachs the most unsettling part. I talked with Tim about this a bit this afternoon, that essentially, the entire crew was getting drugged and blob-raped…
Tim – See, here I was going for the whole “he abducts and drugs crews in order to try to mate with them without their consent” thing. That’s just….bleechch. And, having gone ahead and watched a few more episodes, I’m actually somewhat shocked that Janeway acts as nonchalant as she did with it. In a different episode she goes to flipping town on a guy for doing what his species needs to survive (basically harvest organs). She threatens to murder him if he even comes near them again. But this time? It’s almost like the writers either didn’t care or didn’t recognize the implication they’d made, though maybe that’s a strong accusation on my end.
David – Well they never explained “how” he was going to do his thang, just that he was testing for compatibility.
Ryan – Definitely. I’d almost think the latter, as the Caretaker isn’t a being with sexual organs as we’d normally percieve of them
Seth – While we don’t know what the reproduction involved exactly, it’s still a pretty huge bodily violation that we know has killed many beings in the past. When it comes down to it, though, maybe Janeway didn’t see a point in morally lecturing a being that was about to die.
Ryan – She also desperately needed his cooperation to get her crew home
Ryan continued, making a point that caused the group to pause and speculate on the way the episode positioned the Prime Directive for the series.
Ryan – There was a whole ecological parable I don’t think anybody touched on yet. In Trek terms, the Caretaker plotline was a resounding endorsement of the Federation’s prime directive
Seth – True, what happens to the Ocampa under the Caretaker is exactly the sort of thing the Federation is trying to avoid through the Prime Directive
Tim – That’s somewhat surprising, I think, given what I’ve heard about The Next Generation muddying up the Prime Directive as a moral benchmark.
Ryan – Maybe it was a deliberate attempt to re-emphasize the Prime Directive?
Tim – Could have been. Voyager was supposed to be an attempt to get back to the adventure and vibe of the original series. They may have been positioning the Prime Directive in that way to be in support of that goal.
Seth – Or perhaps they wanted to raise it up early, given that it’s probably going to be hard for the Voyager to maintain it on their trip
David then quickly pointed out that the relationship between the Ocampa and the Caretaker had a parallel to another pilot in the Star Trek Universe, which in turn encouraged the group to reflect on the place of powerful beings in the Star Trek universe.
David – It’s also a flip / relation to the first episode of TNG. The first episode of The Next Generation featured a low tech people who had enslaved some greater etherealish being. In Voyager they are dependent on one.
Seth – That’s a good point about the contrast between the Caretaker and the being at Farpoint. In both cases, you have an injured being of great power. At Farpoint they decided to enslave it, the Ocampa selflessly helped in, but in both cases there was some nasty consequences.The interesting thing is, the Federation ends up dealing with much more powerful beings on a regular basis in the original series and TNG, but those exchanges are much briefer, usually, and the Enterprise is usually looking to disentangle themselves as soon as possible as opposed to setting up long term exchanges of information
Tim – That’s absolutely true, and your comment reminded me of the original series episode “The Squire of Gothos.” If anything a lot of these powerful beings are suggested in the writing (and by the Federation’s actions) to be more trouble than they are possible worth.
Ryan – Is that just a recurring sci-fi trope or is perhaps Gene Roddenbury trying to be a bit more allegorical? Something about the self-reliance of humanity maybe…
Tim – My personal thought is that Roddenbury is being allegorical, but he could have been riffing on the Twilight Zone/Lovecraftian vibes of the mid 60s sci-fi genre. When I was reading the synopses of the Original Series episodes, a lot of them read like horror stories. (Editor – Begins pasting episode descriptions from Wikipedia) …So setting up these powerful beings as being not only not useful to the Federation, but troublesome and something you want to get the hell away from, would be fitting in the sort of understanding of the genre. At least, that would be my thoughts-
Ryan – No, the theory sounds right to me, though I have no idea what Roddenbury’s influences were.
Seth – I don’t know that I’d compare it to Lovecraft. Lovecraft is all about the insignificance of humanity on the scale of the universe, while Star Trek and sci-fi like it is very much about how important humanity is.
Ryan – Seth has made a very good point
Seth – I mean, Q and Cthulhu are both incredibly powerful beings who could destroy humanity with a thought, but they relate to humanity very differently. Humanity is close enough to Q that he takes notice of them and considers them worthy of study and shaping. Humanity is so far from Cthulhu that it never even notices we’re here.
Tim – Very true.
Seth – I do think you’re correct in that Star Trek, especially the original series, draws a lot on horror. If you want to tell stories about exploration without the colonialism that that entailed on Earth, tossing some actual monsters in helps
Tim – Indeed. I actually watched the Pilot episode a day or so after watching The Next Generation episode “When the Bough Breaks” with my fiance, and found it really interesting that both episodes were willing to toy with the idea of regression as a historical process. In both episodes, mind, it’s the result of becoming dependent on an all-powerful deity-like being – in the case of the Ocampa it was the Caretaker, in the case of the Aldeans it was a computer program called the Custodian. Although…now that I’m talking, there is one glaring difference- I don’t remember if it was clear that the Ocampa were ever aware that the Caretaker -wasn’t- a deity.
Seth – Which is an interesting avenue for a series which normally adheres pretty closely to a progress narrative.
Tim – Whereas the Custodian was very clearly the result of advanced knowledge that the Aldeans lost as they became dependent on the program to provide for them.
Seth – I think this ties back to this re-occurring theme in Trek of technology not being completely a crutch. I mean, periodically people complain about replicators not getting food quite right, but people still cook for themselves as opposed to shrugging their shoulders and saying “oh well, it’s worth it not to have to do dishes.” And in the pilot for TNG, Picard has Riker manually guide the two sections of the Enterprise back together rather than use the automated system to demonstrate that humanity isn’t just letting the computer do everything for them.
Tim – Suddenly Paris’ complaints about Tomato soup make slightly more sense.
Join us next week for another installment of Roundtable Voyager! We’ll be discussing Star Trek: Voyager s01e02, “Parallax,” if you would like to watch the episode ahead of time and contribute your own thoughts in the comments.We’d love to have you help shape our discussion! Or if you’re more interested in “The Caretaker,” was there anything you feel we missed, or theories about the episode that you would like to share? Feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments section below!
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I absolutely love Voyager, and from my point of view The pilot had a very hard job to do. It had to sell a very diverse crew and a very female captain to a mostly male viewership. In my opinion the writers decided to take Janeway and give her just enough of a mix of Picard and Sisko to make her the most baddass of all the captains and then temper it with a bit softer treatment around the edges when she is not directly making commands. This in my opinion is to play on both male expectation, and to make her more likeable in general. Otherwise they had risked making her seem like a “bitch” and killing the show. I think any other actor would have failed at such a subtle mixture. The writers knew this show would either become the new series flagship by taking up the mostly male viewers and also appealing to the new female target audience of the 90’s or become a failure.
The Prime Directive is something that they felt the need to mention (shore back up) in order to show that Picard is not the only dictator and sculptor of it’s meaning, it is an imperfect Federation wide policy that each captain is responsible for interpreting.. This is also done in order to set Janeway up on a pedestal of high moral conviction in order to create a lofty place to fall from. It is easy to stick to Federation guidelines when you are part of fleet of hundreds and hundreds of ships and backup is always relatively just around the corner. What works in the alpha quadrant where you are a superpower is not necessarily what will keep you alive when you are alone.
Over all I agree with most everything you talked about!