Holograms that were being enslaved and continually tortured by being forced to battle for their lives revolt, killing their opressers. Janeway sides with the oppressors, and the Doctor (also a hologram) gets transported the the liberationists’ ship. We ends up agreeing with them, until the tail half of the episode where suddenly the Holograms are evil and and are being just oh so mean to the oppressors by fighting back. The Doctor realizes he is a Liberal, and decides slavery and torture are a good thing actually.

Prisoners that are being transported to be executed are transported onto Voyager. Voyager keeps the prisoners hostage while they wait for a transport ship. One of the prisoners says his species is being oppressed and convicted of crimes far more than other species, and also get much higher death penalty rates. The guards beat someone nearly to death and give him some nanoprobes to heal his brain because he was so badly beaten. Neelix contacts a planet for information on the oppressed species and finds that they make up 10% of the population, and yet make up 80% of the prison population (sound familiar?) The doctor finds that after the nanoprobe injection, the prisoner feel guilt and is non longer violent. It is then explained that this species “conscious” is severed from their mind, and that’s why they make up a wildly disproportionate proportion of the prison population (Hmmm.) During an attack on Voyager, the prisoners escape, and end up taking one hostage that one guy goes to kill. The person who received the nanoprobes stops him because he now realizes that prisons are good actually, and gives the gun to the guard who shoots the other prisoner. Everyone ends up executed.

There’s a common trope in media where it’s revealed, most often near the end of the story (but sometimes right off the bat), that trying too hard to do good makes you evil. Game of Thrones, HBO’s Watchmen, The Hunger Games, and many other shows, movies, and games all have endings that seem to come out of nowhere, as if they’re imposed from without rather than obeying the story’s inner logic.

Any pop culture artifact is compelling to the extent that it taps into our real desire for change, justice, virtue, freedom, resolution, etc. But it can never go all the way down this road, it can’t consummate this desire, because that would be too threatening to the reigning social order. The very principle of free speech has shown symptoms of this same hysteria since its inception. John Stuart Mill, father of enlightened liberalism and one of the early advocates of free speech, explicitly warned against extending it to socialists:

An opinion that corn dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard. [1]

Why do stories that may start out so promising and suggestive seem to always turn to crap towards the very end? Because any consistent working-out of problems tends towards communism. Such a consistent working-out has to be sabotaged, thwarted; to do that, the principle of consistency itself has to be chucked overboard. A counter-revolutionary ending has to be passed off as a happy ending, meaning whoever represents the revolution must turn out to be a villain, no matter how implausible or visibly tacked-on this characterization is. Erik Killmonger, Daenerys Targaryen, Alma Coin, and Lady Trieu all break bad sort of inexplicably, punishing the viewer for supporting the power-claim of someone with good politics. The message is unequivocal: “Having good politics doesn’t make you fit to rule! Having no politics does! The restoration of the status quo is the best we can hope for.”

These stories cynically wring emotional identification out of the viewer by giving them a taste of communism, and then when they no longer need that emotional buy-in — because the show’s wrapping up — they insult the viewer for falling for it to begin with. Inglourious Basterds “gets us to share those fantasies [of killing Hitler] and then it starts calling the fantasies into question. … [Tarantino] hates us for liking his movies the way we do; he hates us because he can so easily bring us round to enjoying the sight of people being gathered into a closed space so that they can be exterminated.” [2] Christian Thorne is wrong to see this as a peculiar quirk of Tarantino’s: hating your audience is endemic to mass media.

This hatred and condescension is just a more specific case of the general form of liberal wisdom. Namely: the truth is always whatever conclusion you reach after you get over your youthful radicalism. Artists ostentatiously signal maturity and seriousness by condemning radicalism. This gesture is as obligatory and reflexive as making the sign of the cross when you walk into a church. No matter what interesting ideas you start out with (and there really are a whole lot of interesting ideas in my estimation), you must always end on a note of fidelity to the status quo. And this distorts the whole story, especially towards its end. Expectations (that is, the way the audience was hoping this would go) must always be “subverted” (that is, denied in conformity with overriding structural imperatives) to remind the audience that they can’t ever get what they want (that is, communism).

Who are showrunners accountable to at the end of a successful franchise? Certainly not the viewers, whose semi-conscious revolutionary desires fueled the thing’s success. Since the show is already a hit, it doesn’t need to end in a satisfying way to get people to fill seats. Showrunners are accountable only to future investors, who need to be reassured that the showrunners are a good investment. They find themselves obliged to engage in performative treachery as a way of virtue signaling to hypothetical moneymen. As Black Sails and Marx’s Inferno show, treachery is the founding sin of capitalism, and all major productions have to ritualistically reenact this gesture if they’re ever going to find their way into the big leagues. They demonstrate their value to power through a loyalty oath that gets woven into the script: “I made arrangements to ensure that when we leave here, it is with compromises in place that will diffuse any threat of widespread rebellion.” [3]

The swerve, capitalism’s yanking the football away at the last second, is comically predictable. It goes far beyond media: capitalism is a neverending practical joke, a sudden but inevitable betrayal that can’t stop repeating itself, worming its way into the substance of everyday life, making it ever stupider and more self-defeating (what Marx called real subsumption). But we shouldn’t blame each other for still making a run at Lucy’s football — like religion, mass media is both an expression of and a protest against real suffering. We may fall for the trick, but our steps get a little bit faster every time. It remains to be seen what a full working-through of the problem of communism would look like. Fortunately, we’ll never get it out of our heads (or off our screens) until we solve it.

[1] Shirley Galloway, 1993. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty: Only for the Exceptional Few. [web]

[2] Christian Thorne, 2011. Tarantino, Nazis, and Movies That Can Kill You — Part 2. [web]

[3] Robert Levine and Jonathan E. Steinberg, Black Sails. 04x10 — XXXVIII

Worst episode I’ve seen in this series so far. The episode is an analogy to rape. The away team barley investigates anything and Janeway and the crew just constantly downplay Seven’s repressed memories of being violated by a weapons dealer selling Voyager weapons. The writers then decided to write it that Seven is magically disproved, and every main cast member either starts being an asshole, or starts victim blaming. In the ending of the episode the weapons dealer trys to murder Voyager and gets blown up, and the ending is played as “oh its so sad this guy was wrongly accused then died out of fear of prosecution”. Was fucking awful to watch. Ruined my night

Had I thought that will have repercussions for me in my dating life. Was watching star trek and they used a laser to hear a cut instantly and my immediate thought was “oh cool someone could bite me as hard as I wanted and it would just get healed”. I will proceed to o nothing with this information

Filtered for my size in bra with padding and adjustable straps on this website and it only shows bras with 1-2/3 of the options in the results. Why have filtering if your gonna ignore it and put things I’ll have to return that will cost you money to sell me?