Proud Upstanding Members

I wasn't going to comment on the current American race riots that started in Minneapolis, mostly because this is NOT a current events blog, but also because both sides of the issue disgust me equally. On one hand, cops are pigs, and any arguments against that basic observation get endlessly counterpointed by daily evidence of them acting like violent petty thugs with badges. Working as hired muscle tends to appeal to a certain breed of the human ape, be they mafia enforces, gangbangers, soldiers, cops or prison wardens. On the other hand, the roaming swarms of degenerate vermin torching cars and beating random bystanders unconscious are certainly not "protesting" anything. They're violent petty thugs who would've gladly done the same thing in response to any other event from their local football team losing a match to the Aurora Borealis. Aside from a generalized case of cabin fever grace of COVID-19 amplifying such outbreaks of human nature, they are also convinced (not without evidence, sadly) that they will be able to play the race card if caught, that they will escape prosecution or conviction no matter the evidence against them for the government's fear of further protests.

However, skimming an article about CNN reporters getting arrested while filming a public arrest piqued my interest due to them being eventually released "once they were confirmed to be members of the media". What the hell does that mean? We know about George Floyd's murder in the first place because of a bystander's cellphone video of the event, posted to Facebook. Throughout history, atrocities have been more thoroughly reported by private citizens than by official observers. What exactly is this "The Media" whose blessing absolves one of the grievous crime of observation? Am I a video game journalist? A Science Fiction critic? An unpaid Google representative? Where do I apply for a license to point out the obvious?

Any person who is nonviolently observing a public event like a mass demonstration is a member of the media, whether filming it on a state of the art $20,000 corporate-funded recording rig or on a cellphone or just sketching caricatures in charcoal or hell... just watching. Observing. Keeping informed the old-fashioned way, through first-hand experience. Does no-one see the flaw in public officials apologizing for hauling a peaceful CNN reporter off to jail, as though anyone who isn't an appendage of a multinational disinformation conglomerate should be fair game to be fed to pigs?

Plahnn3tfawl

I'm revisiting Age of Wonders: Planetfall currently, as they put out a new rip-off pack with some irrelevant but quaint new global events and a new playable race: shapeshifting reptiloids from beyond the moon!

Well, at least these ones aren't psychic. Planetfall's a tactically deep and increasingly strategic series which at least attempts to instill an immersive atmosphere but is nonetheless marred by leaning too hard on generic pulp fiction crutches and wildly uneven, often incompetent writing (and in Planetfall, voice acting; they even managed to fumble one of the first technology voiceovers I heard from the new lizards.)

You've made a reptilian race and named one of their heroes after a famous mythological reptile. Fine, great, I'm all for it... but why misspell it? Why not use the accepted Latinized spelling? I mean, losers like me use creative typos as personal identity (or more often than not for lack of inspiration) but you're not just random matrix-trash like myself. You're designers. You're supposed to stand above the mentality of your moronic fans. Have some modicum of dignity!

Or were you afraid the crocodile god Sobek would show up to sue you for copyright infringement?

The World's End, ~minute 105

"The full moon peaks around the clouds as the gray wolves cry 
The hour's getting late and we've drunk every bottle dry
Just one more march from dusk 'til dawn 'til we finally arrive
At the gates of those who long ago burned our houses and took our lives"

The Dead South - The Dead South


My previous post about Role-Playing Game resting got me thinking about the role of the place of rest in RPGs. Not the place of eternal rest, which would likely concern either zombies or angels (or zombie angels) but the place where angel-zombie slaying heroes can set their heads down for the night. It's a wonder I've never played a game which has the player manage a high fantasy Inn&Tavern, given that "managerial" simulation games are an actual trend now and cRPGs have been making a comeback. After all, there's so much material to tap there.

Consider just the basic functionality of room and/or board. A few posts ago I reminisced of Planescape:Torment's Smouldering Corpse bar, with its collection of rare drinks from across dimensions. Do you see yourself importing fine dwarven rock candy (made of actual rocks, natch) or advertising fresh-squeezed maggot juice to discerning goblin palates, or brokering deals with devils for your fire-water? What about accommodating creatures of all fantasy sizes? Think yourself capable of building enough beds to fit both ogres and gnomes? Can you dig basement rooms for dwarves and a treehouse annex for elves?

Of course the clientele you manage to attract could come in handy, what with fantasy inns' uncanny magnetism for all sorts of drama, violence and intrigue. Your goblin customers might pick your pocket now and then but they'd also be the most likely to raise the alarm in case of assassins in the night. Elves and paladins are insufferable snobs, impossible to please, but you might want to roll out the red carpet while at the same time casually mentioning you've got a ghost that needs banishing by the forces of light. Vampires will pay through the nose for luxury, so long as you turn a blind eye to one of your other guests waking up a bit... drained. Werewolves can double as guard dogs when the moon is in the right phase.

And what about ancillary services? Will you accept a wizard's offer for long-term lodging just so he can build his laboratory in one of your rooms? Adventurers need a whole slew of merchants who may be willing to pay a slice of their profits for a prime location. Will you sign a contract with a potion-seller? A weapon stall for the local blacksmith's son? Would that just mean more trouble when a brawl breaks out? Maybe you should just stick with a couple of shrines to the more popular deities, so your cleric customers can conveniently kiss some divine ass before bed. What do you do if your hired minstrel happens to sing a ballad about the local duke's wife's... generous... proportions, just as he's stopping in for the night?

And what about the inn's traditional role as a hub for quest hooks? You could accumulate a well-stocked map room to cater to those looking for buried treasure, or give discounts to those adventurers willing to divulge their secret goals... which you can then sell to their competition or opposition for a tidy profit. Let one of your local "legitimate businessmen" "rent" a room at your inn in exchange for the sort of information one can only acquire in low places. Even if they can't afford rooms, keep a trough filled for your local Baker Street Irregulars in exchange for being the first to hear about new faces in town.

In truth, a few games like this either already exist or are in development, like Fortune's Tavern or Crossroads Inn or Tavern Keeper but aside from reputations as slapdash, hopelessly buggy messes, they all seem to play up a goofy, kid-friendly lighthearted atmosphere. While that can certainly be your in-game marketing strategy, it shouldn't be the tack for the game's aesthetic in itself.

Think about what actually happens during your average RPG campaign. Plagues run rampant at the mere anticipation of adventure. As soon as the hero steps into town, innocents start turning up dead in the gutter every morning, zombies swarm to outnumber rats, every evil sorceror within a week's travel starts evoking fireballs every which way like there's no tomorrow, houses start going up in a blaze every night despite being built of solid stone, dragons take to the skies like locusts and every day there's an even chance of a barbarian horde crashing their decade-long rampage into your town. If the hero "solves" any problem, it's likely by throwing a castle at it! And that's all just before the eldritch abominations show up.

Fantasy tavern management shouldn't be about cheerfully serving drinks. Your struggle to stay in business should center on your innkeeper's role as middle-man to the forces out to destroy the world, a conniving tool and accessory, a racketeer, a money-launderer, an accomplice, an enabler to the universe's gutterspawn and all the grandstanding, self-righteous loose cannons who stand in soi-disant opposition to "evil" forces. Your progress as a fantasy innkeeper should come at the cost of all your neighbours' houses going up in flames around you, the starvation of orphans and the suicide of despondent maidens, the senseless waste of bright-eyed young hopeful princes more-or-less-charming, the blazing ruination of your town, your kingdom and your world. Your victory? To remain the last building standing amidst the ashes of what might've been... and as the scattered survivors pick up the pieces, to open your doors once again to yet another band of drunken brawlers and power-hungry, cadaverous magi looking for a dark corner to lurk in.

Welcome.
Welcome, to The Wolfe's Den.

A(dventuring) Body at Rest

"In the circles we made with our fires
We talked of the pale afternoon
The clouds were like dark riders
Flying on the face of the moon"

Sting - Something The Boy Said


In the past couple of months I finished up one final playthrough of both Tyranny and Torment: Tides of Numenera, in preparation of moving on to new RPGs. It's a wonder we have any new cRPGs these days, especially good ones, after a fifteen year dry spell punctuated mainly by the overall mediocrity of the Neverwinter Nights series and one quickly betrayed glimmer of hope in the form of Dragon Age: Origins, both lost in a sea of "action" titles and MMO gear farming.

Resource management, abandoned by computer game developers somewhere around the time of Morrowind as too complex for their new cretinous mass-market audience, was grudgingly reintegrated into these new strategic, party-based RPGs. This included resting at specific safe locations instead of just plopping your ass down wherever you want to recover all your daily spells, a mechanic which utterly invalidated the Neverwinter Nights series' feigned difficulty. The Elder Scrolls series was little better; most players probably only rested once in a blue moon to trigger specific quest steps. Dragon Age: Origins at least gave resting some functionality in curing wounds.... then immediately invalidated it by filling the player's inventory with cheap, plentiful wound cures. Tyranny went one better by instead tying wound curing to resting and tying resting to a few specific locations which required travel

... though unfortunately travel time had too little effect to lend resting its due relevance. TToN took the more usual route, charging you cold, hard cash for restoring your action pools

 

... though it, in turn, undermined its relevance by providing entirely too many action point restoring consumables and infinite free lodging as quest rewards. Plus, while the cost is greater than the mere token amount it would be in most such games, it still falls an order of magnitude or two below your accumulated wealth by the last act.

A couple of centuries ago by the time of Alexandre Dumas, rented rooms, inns and taverns were accepted intrigue-riddled set pieces in tales of swashbuckling adventure; later wild west saloon scenes followed suit and the "you all meet in a tavern" stage of role-playing campaigns was again cemented by Tolkien's Prancing Pony. While the motif is slavishly copied into every cRPG, finding a place to rest has rarely achieved its due impact on gameplay. Pillars of Eternity threw a nice wrench in the works by offering specific bonuses for sleeping in some locations, but these were still trivialized by their low cost and on-demand availability. For rest to truly become relevant to gameplay, the time spent resting must somehow affect your campaign. TToN copied the original Torment's scarcity of safe havens but still compromised on this point much like The Elder Scrolls by treating rest as a trigger for a select few quests (the most blatant being a murder spree in the first act which continues every time you rest.) The mechanic only comes into its own in games where everything functions according to a calendar / clock.

The old Dune game from '92, with its odd mix of linear adventure and light RTS (before RTS was even a genre) provides an early example. Everything took time, from your own travel to your Fremen armies' travel and battles to spice mining or the spread of vegetation or smugglers replenishing their stockpiles. While resting was not a mechanic per se, you could decide (or be forced by your script) to wait in some sietch or another while the world shifted around you.

More recently, Mount&Blade or Dead State or Pathfinder: Kingmaker all made a better show of it.

Dead State enforced a strict daily cycle, in which you had to return to your home base to rest every night or risk a hefty morale penalty. Each day you had to both ensure a profitable loot haul from your travels and allot competent workers to care for the shelter's own maintenance and production in your absence.

M&B didn't rely much on you yourself resting, but your injured troops required time to heal. Early on you might pay for their rest & recuperation at an inn. Later you might pass by one of your forts now and then to swap fresh soldiers in and your wounded out of your army. All the while, food was consumed, populations grew, taxes and expenses accumulated, bandit bands, armies and caravans traveled across the map in fitting indifference or malice as to your squandered hours.

Kingmaker being split between traditional adventuring and kingdom management emphasized getting your adventuring done in a timely manner so as to arrive back at your capital in time to deal with the various events plaguing your realm. While the initial implementation was quite aggravating, with too little control and too many triggers rewarding the player's foreknowledge and not foresight, it also added up to the most multifaceted. Not only did you need to recover spells but even the muscleheads in your party would need to clear the hefty penalty to their physical attributes through fatigue / exhaustion.

All three of these most satisfying examples share an integration of the resting mechanic with other facets of gameplay. You or your companions' skills might affect others' healing / recovery times. Kingmaker's camping especially rewarded you for bringing along multiple characters competent as lookouts, hunters, cooks, etc. and if I had to be honest, Jaethal the undead inquisitor's most pervasively useful ability was simply her immunity from fatigue letting her dive into all too frequent ambushes fresh as a rotting daisy. And, in each case such roleplaying and strategic choices mitigate the entropic drag of the game world on your own schemes and plots, the resources automatically decaying or consumed, the inexorably encroaching enemy forces.

Conclusion: a resting mechanic is nearly guaranteed a pointless waste of both developers' and players' time for a traditional plot-driven Adventure game or RPG in which the player actively moves the plot forward by his actions. In order for rest to have a meaningful impact, there must be a world outside your adventuring party which progresses while you are inactive. There must be events not_at_rest. As a prelude to death, sleep carries no threat unless the universe keeps swirling in the darkness outside our feeble fires, hounding us with every unconscious breath.

Brain Damage

"I'll keep you by my side
With my superhuman mind"

3 Doors Down - Kryptonite


Reason #57 to play Torment: Tides of Numenera :: you get to use a tasp.

Given that I tend toward squishy, back-row support caster roles anyway, I'm halfway to roleplaying a Pierson's Puppeteer already. May as well own my Hindmost aspirations.

Reason #23 not to play T:ToN :: it places Intelligence on the same level as physical attributes.

One of my earliest actions upon starting this blog was to state my disgust with Gardner's "theory" of multiple intelligences, a mercenary, meaningless pablum marketed to parents who find themselves stuck caring for degenerate, moronic offspring and whose egos demand re-labelling "intelligence" as any subhuman aptitude those offspring might possess. Thus you hear of instinctive emoting being promoted as intelligence or of musical pitch-matching intelligence, athletic match-pitching intelligence and other aberrations. Intelligence is the aptitude for abstract thought. It is the defining aptitude of existence itself (you are your thoughts) and responsible for every advancement ever made past the state of flea-bitten apes grubbing about the forest underbrush for food one handful at a time. No amount of strength or manual dexterity or flawless painter's eyesight would have built the computer you're reading this on without intelligence.

Role-playing games are all to some degree or another descended from Dungeons and Dragons, and though most slavishly copycat its set pieces the better ones will attempt with some regularity to move past the stylistic apex of 1974. T:ToN is one example of trying to avoid the good / evil dichotomous character alignments even as the Numenera setting continues using other DnD staples like the twenty-level fighter / thief / wizard archetypes. Other games might try to do away with character levels or use skill-based progression instead of preset classes, etc.

Attributes are their own can of worms. Charisma, Agility and so forth all have their various decades-running arguments over their respective validity, both within DnD and its copycats. If intelligence is ever debated, it's as a balance issue within the context of linear warriors, quadratic wizards with many gamers complaining that it's unfair for wizards to become so much more powerful (and especially, versatile) than their swashbuckling fellow adventurers late in campaigns.

Fair? Unfair? By what definition? It's fitting, therefore fair.
The fruits of intellect should not be equated to pre-sentient physical activity. An understanding of the world really should count for more than swinging a damn stick. And, there are plenty of ways in which this could be accomplished. Characters' mental and physical attributes can be placed in separate categories with their own pools of attribute points to be distributed, making all characters de facto battlemages. Physical attributes could be raised by combat while mental ones are raised by role-playing choices. The best option is best exemplified by Heroes of Might and Magic's core concept, with spellcasters acting as leaders for armies of brawling grunts - although it bears mentioning even HoMM routinely watered down this idea by instituting Barbarian or other heroes based on inflicting damage directly.

T:ToN makes an interesting example because being heavily based on skill checks and roleplaying choices instead of combat, it could not avoid the primacy of Intellect. About half your skill checks seem based on INT, with the other half split between strength and speed. Yet still it toed the usual RPG line in demeaning intellect to just another stat and implementing weapons and attacks derived from it, magic missiles, which work just like hitting things with a stick.

Why not go full anti-retard?

Forget balancing them; thought and physicality should not even occupy the same playing field in the first place. Give thought its due dignity as a realm above brawn or fee-fees, the pinnacle and self-definition of existence. Let Intelligence govern those abilities which alter the playing field altogether, and leave crass damage-dealing or emotive play-acting to less worthy animal attributes. Crafting a tasp should be a mental task. Using it to paralyze an opponent can still be a matter of base physicality, of reflexes and practice, and can be carried out by dumb grunts while the more intelligent Puppeteer handles the decision-making.

It's been fifty years. Isn't it past time to stop demonizing Lex Luthor and move beyond the Stockholm Syndrome of role-playing geeks idealizing Conan the Barbarian as an equal to Elrond Halfelven?

Pascal's V'ger

"Feeling unknown and you're all alone
Flesh and bone by the telephone
Lift up the receiver, I'll make you a believer"

Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus

 

Oddly enough, my previous post on first encounter scenarios in ST:TNG had been planned for months in advance, ever since re-watching the episode First Contact (the one with the kinky nurse.) It was sheer dumb luck that I decided to write it up just as the American government publicly admitted three short "UFO" videos are real. Which is to say, they really are videos and they really do show grainy grains on the grainy horizon, and that's all they show. The usual lens flare or "aluminum pie pan on a string" crap. A couple of days ago when I finally became aware of last week's "news" I immediately felt as though I should have something to say about it. After all, here I am a Chaotic Neutral SciFi fanboy three decades running and confessed former squinter after unidentified flying bigfoots. Should I not be first in line to cheer the loosening of our nefarious shadowy overlords' obfuscation of the Truth which Is surely Out There?

Well, no. Because you see, my cryptid/psychics/UFO phase was part of my intellectual growth as an individual, which implies growing past childish credulity. So that phase started at about ten years old and ended at about twelve. Thus, this post is not about exceedingly-identified flying artifacts of data-gathering. This post is about credulity. In fact the topic takes me back to 2012, when this blog had already gone on several months longer than I thought it would. I'd listened to a religious nut railing against Bill Maher. The cri de coeur of "you hate God!" finally made me realize that religion precludes realism, and the religious erroneously view atheism as a religious conflict. And it's not. Realists don't hate gods. Realists can't hate gods. There's nothing there to hate.

By the same token I find myself amused at articles and TV interviews decrying the lack of interest in this latest expedition up Mount Molehill. How come the whole world isn't talking about this a-may-zing discovery of extraterrestrials!?!
...
Well, in our defense, most of us here in the States are a little distracted by our commander in chump and his cartel deliberately murdering their constituents by refusing to treat a pandemic seriously. But, more to the point, we're not discussing it because there are no extraterrestrials to discuss. If there even was a government cover-up until now, I doubt it required more than a handkerchief. A glorified lens flare, wishful thinking and pareidolia do not an alien invasion make.

First off, it's been remarked that our brain is a pattern-seeking device. Most impressively, it seeks intentionality, deliberate action or presence, in the sensory data we receive. Optimists will tell you it helped our ancestors avoid leopards and bears when they heard a rustle in the grass, by assuming the worst. Me, I don't buy it. There was always a worse predator to kill-or-be-killed much closer to home: we, ourselves, each other. In any case, your brain is primed to see the Virgin Mary in the burn pattern on a pancake and to see little green men in an errant pixel on a video screen, leaping past the myriad more likely but less exciting explanations like temperature gradients, electromagnetism, abnormalities in albedo, flotsam and balloons, seagulls or hoaxes, etc. (It amazes me that the same conspiracy theorists so ready to believe their government is screwing them over by hiding information will never consider the same government would also screw them over by fabricating distractions... in an election year.)

Second off: nothing. No, really, think about that. Think about the nothing. Void. Think about the endless, lifeless, airless, heatless void, quintillions of kilometers in every direction, as you cling to the comparative safety of this transient little marble spinning about one insignificant star. Getting dizzy? Not a pleasant thought, is it? Wouldn't it be nice if there were other, smarter people out there for us to share it with? People who might actually know what the fuck is going on with the universe instead of fumbling from cradle to grave like we do? Humans are a heavily neotenized species. Perhaps not the most extreme such example in strict anatomic terms but certainly an obvious one, and given our extensive behavioral repertoire is rooted in such instincts we should not be surprised that we continue to seek protectors and caretakers, parental figures, even into adulthood. Hero worship provides one outlet for this instinct. Religion provides another. It's hardly surprising that when our mythical extraterrestrials are not described in strictly xenophobic terms as wolves rustling in the interstellar grass, they tend to toe the Messianic line, holding promises of golden ages and life after death. Our crops used to be withered by witches. Now it's flying saucers. We used to get possessed by demons. Now it's "thetans". Zeus used to ride around on a cloud. Now it's a pimped-out X-Wing.

There is a great and superhuman presence our there... and it cares enough to personally probe you.

If I told you there's a pot of gold at the bottom of a canyon based on three pixels on an infrared camera, would you dive down after it? Here's the funny thing: even if alien visitation turned out to be real, you would still be a moron for believing in it. Even if, tomorrow, Klaatu stepped out of his superluminal aluminum boob clad in his futuristic belted condom and welcomed humanity into the galactic community (pending GalacticEPA compliance) you would still be an imbecile for having believed in it before Klaatu showed up. When every theory that was held up based on such flimsy evidence, from mermaids to angels to the Cottingley fairies, has fallen flat throughout history, believing in the latest one doesn't make you a transcendent visionary. It makes you the retard who buys a lottery ticket. Even if you win, your belief in the likelihood of such an event, based on the evidence at hand, is not retroactively validated.
It was still retarded.

I Want To Believe, but belief follows reason.

ST:TNG - First Contact

In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
_____________________________________

"To seek out new life and new civil-eye-zations."

First contact with an alien species is one of the thematic cornerstones of Science Fiction, growing out of the genre's precursors of mythical beasts and the mysterious lost kingdoms of Darkest Africa... and darkest Rocky Mountains... and darkest Alaska... and darkest South America... and darkest Polynesia... and darkest Antarctica and darkest India and darkest Atlantis and cave systems and the myriad crumbling castles of Ruritania and Uberwald and the hollow Earth and everything else cooked up by writers of Romantic Age (or just plain romantic) exploration stories as the boundaries of knowledge got pushed farther and farther until finally being pushed straight off the planet altogether and yes this would be one helluva run-on sentence even by the standards of Victorian florid prose but I can't seem to stop myself oh dear gods what is happening to me why isn't anyone helping me what is wrong with my brain is this a stroke is this what a stroke feels like am I dying where is E.T. and his messianic healing touch when you need him!

See, I bet you thought I couldn't bring that one home again. Mad Mad Libs skillz, yo.
Anyway, space aliens: important. Especially important for Star Trek which banked so heavily on its exploration theme. Though TNG deliberately expanded the Original Series' colorful episodic conflicts into a more consistent political milieu, encounters with novel alien races still outnumbered scripts dealing in Klingon / Romulan intrigue. Now, to me the most interesting scenarios deal with truly alien, incomprehensible star-beasts or other more abstract phenomena, the discernment of whose mere physical properties occupies the bulk of the plot. But, when it comes to first contact scenarios, most viewers expect an alien capable of a bit of light chit-chat, so for the purpose of this post I'll be sticking to a few first meetings with species of sentient, social individuals.

Let's start with a couple of negative examples from the frequently horrendous first and second seasons of the show.

________________________________________

Seriesdate: 1.05
The Last Outpost

The 'Yankee traders' episode in which the Ferengi make their first appearance. Unfortunately they were obviously intended first and foremost to provide the Enterprise with recurring weekly villains and therefore designed to invoke instinctive, automatic disdain, disgust and hatred from the audience. So they're all male, as per the eternal "man bad, woman good" dogma. Also they're short and bald and hobble about hunched over and have crooked teeth and disrespect tha wiminfolks and quickly get into the habit of kidnapping human females to boot.

Beyond that we learn little to nothing about them. What should have been an exploration of a novel people and what makes them tick resolves to a half-hour farce trying to get the audience to yell at the screen, two minutes' hate style.

And yes, they're wearing skunk furs, for no particular reason than to further hammer their 'barbarian' threat level into the audience's subconscious. Sneaky, ugly, greedy, mean old space chimps armed with whips are coming to steal your women!

___________________________________________


Seriesdate: 2.15
Pen Pals

Oy, I'm chokin' on tha schmaltz already!

Data's been clandestinely messaging a little girl and now he's promising to take her away from all this. Eventually he drugs her unconscious and carries her off.
... I should probably contextualize the preceding statements before the lynch mob reaches Brent Spiner's house. The Enterprise has found a star cluster where the planets keep exploding. Cool. One of the planets happens to be inhabited by wrinkly forehead "alien" species #482, which they discover when Data picks up one of their adorable children's adorable distress call via his latest futuristic science project, a ham radio.

Most of the episode is plagued by a severe infection of Wesleyitis (though at least the brat doesn't get magic powers this time around.) The B-plot concerns the Enterprise breaking the Prime Directive (with some tediously slow-paced dialogues on the topic) to save an entire planet (using Wesley's brilliant solution) from getting its crystal sheets resonance-quaked by dilithium volcanoes... or something. However, we learn absolutely nothing about this culture. Their aesthetic tastes look like something a studio executive might order his personal assistant to collect. Their technology is supposed to be pre-space (for the Prime Directive to apply in its usual interpretation) but their doors materialize and dematerialize at a touch, suggesting even more advanced matter fabrication than the Enterprise. But, if the cleanliness of that kid's hair is any indication, their culture's mostly stuck at a Renaissance 'pockets full of posies' understanding of microbial life.

None of which we're supposed to care about, because we're meant to be too busy fawning over Wesley and swooning over the little girl's cuteness: her little quavering voice calling for help, her hugging and clinging to Data and begging not be separated from him, etceteree, etceterah. Cue the overemotional soft string music for the ending... in which nothing bad actually happens. The girl, wiped of her recent memories, gets returned safely to her now volcano-proofed homeworld.
Even the random technobabble makes more sense than this excuse for a plot. They entirely jumped the gun on Data's emotional development by focusing on his obsession with rescuing an adorable little girl. Remember, there would be no reason for him to be afflicted with human parental instincts fixated on mammalian neoteny. Also, after a couple of off-hand comments halfway through, the Enterprise makes no effort to discern the natives' technological level, and no-one states the slightest interest in studying them as per their voyage's continuing mission.

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Seriesdate: 3.04
Who Watches the Watchers

The one with the Bronze Age "proto-Vulcans" a.k.a. Mintakans being observed by the Federation in secret. There's a subtext to the notion of non-interference. It encompasses not only avoiding conflict or the effacement of nascent cultures by more powerful ones, but simply acknowledging the existence of others outside of one's own viewpoint. If setting a bar on "sentience" is to have any meaning, then on both a personal and cultural level it is necessary to acknowledge other sentients as independent actors, capable and responsible for their actions within their own sphere.

In many ways the plot acts as the antithesis of PenPals. The Prime Directive is treated as a noble set of guiding principles and not like an arbitrarily oppressive law making little girls cry. The imminent danger comes from societal dysfunction (a.k.a. a relapse of faithosis among a people who've been sane for centuries) instead of conveniently impersonal volcanoes. As would happen several times throughout the show, a single representative of a pre-space society is given a chance to act overawed in dialogue with the mighty space-men. Note particularly how much more meaningfully the grand reveal of showing a primitive mind its home planet from orbit plays out here than it did for Pen Pals' forcibly adorable little poppet. That an innocent child would be impressed means nothing. The Mintakan leader on the other hand, despite her primitive culture, possesses both the intelligence and frame of reference to grasp the implications of such a view, not only for herself but for her species, spaceflight implicit in intellectual advancement, rightfully earning herself a couple of moments of sheer admiration from Picard.

Nuria:  "You have taught us there is nothing beyond our reach."
Picard: "Not even the stars."

Unlike in the previous examples, the other culture takes center stage. Instead of reducing the nominal 'aliens' to either boogeymen or to a clingy, whiny little girl begging for the mighty spaceship to fix her planet, Nuria and her people look forward to advancing their own society to a future they now know to be possible.

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Seriesdate: 4.15
First Contact

As previously discussed, a season later, the show's writers were ready to go one better. Aside from treating the alien culture as an independent entity responsible for self-determination, they squeezed multiple alien factions into a single episode, treating us to the viewpoints of individuals contending a contentious issue. More importantly, they stopped treating the Prime Directive as an absolute. Although in the final tally the Malcorians are deemed unready for inter-species contact, the Enterprise accepts rescuing at least one superior mind, the scientist responsible for designing their first warp drive, from her people's stupidity.

Also, contact is not delayed indefinitely. The planet's leader is left to promote an educational system capable of elevating the next generation's thinking until they can mentally handle the wonders of the universe. Human thinking is categorical, and fiction follows suit. Characters and worlds are classified and re-classified; everything *is* or *is not* a friend or an enemy, worthy or despicable. Rarely does a piece of popular entertainment take transience, pluralism and mutability into consideration.

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Seriesdate: 1.18
Home Soil

Despite its overall low quality, the first season also contained a surprisingly bearable episode about a terraforming station suffering a spate of haunted machinery. Upon investigating, the Enterprise discovers a mineral sentience living in shallow clay deposits under the planet's crust. Never mind how they learned Federation programming languages to take over mining lasers. By the end Picard apologizes for humans' unwitting invasion and the Federation abides by its Prime Directive, respecting the clay demons' demand to GTFO their planet and leave them alone.

Instead of shoving all-too-human emotional cues down the audience's throat (lovable little girls or hate-able old men) the plot focuses on the aliens' alien nature and the difficulties of interspecies communication. The clay/crystal piezoelectric micro-brain trapped aboard the Enterprise even proves to be a bit of a jerk, calling humans "ugly bags of mostly water" and declaring war on them... but is nonetheless held as objectively in the right in retaliating against a human invasion terraforming its species to death. Imagine that. Likeability does not necessarily correlate with the right to existence.

The whole thing exemplifies Star Trek's best and most central theme: meeting inhuman cultures and achieving coexistence (if not necessarily collaboration) by opening lines of communication and learning about them.


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Seriesdate: 6.05
Schisms

In contrast, this is not a line of communication:

Seriously, Wizards of the Coast called; they want their cliches back. By season 6, the show began gradually running out of steam. So, once again, crew members are succumbing to inexplicable amnesia, only now it takes the form of "missing time" and unexplained disappearances, as well as vague dreams about being someplace else. It turns out that extra-dimensional invaders have been abducting our heroes (notably Riker) while they sleep and performing gruesome medical experiments on them.

Now, I have to tip my hat to the notion of orchestrating an alien abduction scenario aboard an interstellar spaceship. In itself it's a solid concept, but the undue lengths to which the writing and directing went to equate these experiences to the delusions of self-styled abductees in the real world left too little room for an actual plot. No attempt is made to explain the aliens' behavior, or to communicate with them or investigate them in any way. No explanation is given as to why the aliens would be sawing off human arms and reattaching them when they already know enough human anatomy to sedate their subjects and wipe their memories with near-perfect accuracy.... and they're apparently already monitoring the entire Enterprise 24/7 since they know when you are sleeping and know when you're awake. The whole thing makes as little sense as supposed abductees' probing fantasies. To quote Paul: "Am I harvesting farts? How much can I learn from an ass?!?"

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Seriesdate: 7.13
Homeward

By season 7 they were spinning their wheels quite a bit.

The Federation has been monitoring yet another primitive society (these guys look vaguely tail-end neolithic) whose planet is being destroyed by volcanoes thunderstorms, this time. Ignoring all lessons previously learned, once again we're treated to booming re-statements of the Prime Directive's absolute importance. Once again, said directive is interpreted myopically as the absolute letter of the law, to the point Picard is willing to let an entire species die. Luckily, Worf's human step-brother is willing to break the law in order to save one tribe by teleporting them into a holodeck re-enactment of their native planet's caves without their knowledge. They're shipped to a new planet and left to develop "naturally" while their young historian, who had blundered his way out of the holodeck, commits ritual suicide rather than live his whole life unable to tell his people what a lie they're living. It's not a terrible episode (Worf is portrayed as competent, for once!) but it is a rather forgettable one, largely due to the writers' self-imposed amnesia as to the Prime Directive's interpretation.

Not interfering with a society's natural development is one thing (don't give phasers to chimps) but you'd think exceptions can be made when their entire species is about to get wiped out by a natural disaster. At that point, further development being moot, saving the individuals about to die should become a priority, not to mention salvaging some small remnant of their culture. Or do individuals not warrant consideration in the glorious post-scarcity future of the Federated Order of Planets... oh, right... planets, not people. While some sanity is regained by the episode's end, it doesn't explain why the whole issue had to be re-hashed from an absolute "thou shalt not" dictum, ignoring ten or so previous episodes which did exactly the same thing.

What's the good of an exploration vessel if you're willing to let new civilizations die right in front of your eyes, denying the possibility of exploring them?

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Seriesdate: 5.02
Darmok

The situation is of course somewhat different when individuals make an informed choice to take a personal risk to further the cause of communication.

Picard:  "Uzani's army, with fists... open!"
Dathon: "Sulkath, his eyes uncovered!"

(I believe they're saying "come at me, bro")

The Enterprise meets up with wrinkly forehead "alien" species #355, a.k.a. the Tamarians, who though not aggressive have never been able to communicate. Though the words they speak are translated flawlessly by the Federation's universal translator, their phraseology is incomprehensible, consisting almost in its entirety of names, places and situations disjointed from (current) context. Frustrated at their continued impasse, the Tamarian captain has himself and Picard teleported down to the nearest planet to knife-fight a nondescript electrical-invisible monster together. (Think of it as an extreme team-building exercise.) After much tribulation, Picard finally realizes the Tamarians communicate via metaphor, likening everything around them to historical or mythological object lessons.

Now... I'll admit there is a lot wrong here.
For one, the phlebotinum of the "universal translator" was best left unanalyzed. Does everyone have one? Does everyone have the same model? Why do we never see it? Is it implanted in their skulls? If the Federation has it, they should be able to understand everyone else, but why does everyone else understand them? What about all the times they start swearing in Klingon? Does the universal translator come with a profanity filter? These are questions you really should not have tempted your audience to ask...
More to the point here, the idea of communicating entirely in metaphor is a non-starter. How do they even educate their children? How do you teach said history and myth in the first place? Conversely, given said metaphors already contain basic words, shouldn't it have been fairly easy to cobble together some starter phrases like "use knife on monster" or "hero knifes monster" or "Darmok/Dathon, his knife in the beast"?
Also, once Dathon is lying there mortally wounded hearing Picard telling stories that actually make sense, why not have them both teleported back immediately, the impasse being passé.
Also, Picard should really know enough military history to immediately spot a fundamental pincer maneuver when it's being set up for him.

Despite all that, it holds together surprisingly well once it gets rolling, especially the central scene in which Picard learns the phrase "Temba, his arms wide" (translation: generosity / gimme more) and starts pumping Dathon for information. Having Picard re-tell the Tamarian myth about two strangers meeting to fight a monster as the myth of Gilgamesh and Enkidu fighting the bull of heaven was a stroke of genius. Aside from the universality of human(-oid alien) myth, it also sets up Dathon's demise and the immortalizing of the two captains' diplomatic adventure in Tamarian vocabulary. It creates one of the show's most memorable moments, at once wistful, tragic yet hopeful in its dogged pursuit of knowledge.

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Seriesdate: 5.25
The Inner Light

The Enterprise encounters a fairly primitive space probe, which shines a flashlight onto the bridge, immediately zeroes in on the best actor it can find and knocks Patrick Stewart's ass out cold. The rest of the crew discover the link can't be broken without killing their captain, while Picard finds himself transposed into a peaceful industrial society, told his name is now Kamin, and subjected to the eternal torment of trying to learn to play the flute.

Not that I'm bitter about my high school recorder lessons or anything...

While 25 minutes of real time pass, Picard experiences 40 years' worth of Kamin's life, learning to love his new wife, fathering two children and raising them until they run off to college, dedicating himself to ecological research and struggling in his role as a minor representative in the planet's political struggle to discern why their ecosystem's gradually failing. Long story short, their sun's about to go nova. With one last concerted effort as a society, they launch a probe into space to imprint the memories of one of their finest onto whomsoever it should encounter. Belatedly, Picard realizes it's himself the probe will find, a millennium into the future a.k.a. present, and Kamin's wife and descendants declare their motivation:

"The rest of us have been gone a thousand years. If you remember what we were... and how we lived... then we'll have found life again."

Once again, logical inconsistencies are not hard to spot. The script presents us with a civilization which struggles with irrigation and can barely launch basic rockets but has mastered some kind of brain imprinting technology fully and automatically adaptable to unknown alien physiology, condensing a lifetime into 25 minutes without fusing its receiver's synapses, plus some method of transmission that not even the Federation' finest vessel can crack a thousand years afterwards. And then it goes offline, yielding no more information whatsoever, as though no objective data was worth transmitting and only one alien was worthy of experiencing the life of one of their own. So they find life, only to die again once Picard dies? What was the freakin' point?

And yet, once again, I find myself caring very little because the overall effect is both intriguing, poignant in its struggle against existential despair and touching in the impact the whole experience leaves on Picard, shown in the last scene mournfully playing his penny whistle which had been packed onto the probe... instead of, y'know, for the same mass, two dozen thumb drives containing every book their species ever wrote, including their version of Darmok / Gilgamesh.

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The theme of first extraterrestrial contact is so central to Science Fiction that you have to wonder at how often it's handled poorly, even in series like Star Trek which pin their central concept on it. Appealing to the public's stupidity, we get plot after plot where aliens are to be avoided or defeated and not investigated. Everyone conveniently forgets that while The War of the Worlds was ostensibly about an invasion, H. G. Wells also provided quite a bit of unprecedented speculation about the aliens' incompatibility with human technology (never discovered the wheel) as well as their unfortunately (for them) high compatibility with Terran biology.

Plots like The Last Outpost or Pen Pals fail to provide the science to their fiction by employing aliens merely as recognizable set pieces: chittering, cowled boogeymen embodying fear of the unknown, lovable females in distress and hate-able barbarian males. However, when the propagation or search for knowledge is given the primacy it deserves the results are much more memorable... or at least memorable in a positive sense. Darmok and The Inner Light are not only high points of ST:TNG in the eyes of both critics and fans but have left their mark upon popular culture as a whole. If you've played Pillars of Eternity think back to how the Chanter class functions and try to tell me its writers, who like me grew up watching TNG, weren't inspired by Tamarian phraseology. Or think back to all the snowglobe encounters in Role-Playing Games of the past decades, where your character gets drawn into experiencing a long-lost culture first-hand; they may as well be scored by Patrick Stewart tootling on his little tin flute. TNG may not have originated such concepts, but it did them justice enough to make them stick in our communal consciousness.

Gilgamesh, and Enkidu, at Uruk.

On the downside, the show's interpretation of its Prime Directive failed to live up to this ideal. As late as the last season, writers kept falling back on it as an absolute dictum to artificially insert legal conflict into inter-species encounters. Logically, if the Prime Directive is meant to prevent homogenization or destruction of other cultures, then it would serve that function by also deliberately interfering when a culture's destruction is imminent. Duh. Whatever increases the sum of rational thought in the universe should guide the implementation of any such law. If a culture's about to die out, then by all means save at least a thousand of them and integrate them into the Federation as 24th century citizens, or if they're incapable of outgrowing their primitive superstitions then relocate them. If a species is incapable of utilizing its foremost intellects for its overall advancement, then by all means save those superior minds and give them a place in your own society, let their experiences and mindset ripple out through the web of galactic knowledge.

Neophobia

Trying to finish my next post, which is running much longer than I'd intended, reminded me of an aspect of speculative fiction I haven't thought about much. Science Fiction and Horror are diametrically opposed in one crucial aspect: curiousity. It's neophilia vs. neophobia. In one case, you're supposed to shine a light on the thing in the shadows; in the other, run from it. Popular culture, because it banks on fear of the unknown for thrills and constantly reinforces the status quo, has not been kind to SciFi. In fact, aside from being action-oriented, most SciFi movies featuring any non-human or post-human entities are Horror with a flimsy spackle of lasers and spaceships, presenting the audience with an easily hated monster or enemy tribe juxtaposed against the plains-ape status quo. Think about it: was anything about the aliens in, say, Independence Day, relevant to the plot? Aside from being an enemy army?

Very few flicks, like the original Alien movie for instance, truly manage to straddle both genres, to instill both curiousity and fear in their audience. Worse, so much of the best SciFi, like Clarke's The Wire Continuum or A Meeting with Medusa or Childhood's End, has never been done justice because it is intrinsically transhumanist, because it denies its audience the horror label for the unknown, that cozy retrenchment into simian instinct, emotion and stupidity.

Oh, disgust, disgust, disgust.

Don't be surprised if a bloodhound's labored wheezing sounds like chuckling. After all, they were bred for scents of humour.