ST: TNG - Dark Page and the sanctity of dwarf minds

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.
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Man, it's been years since I've done one of these. Alright, let's see, where can we pick up... oh, here's a good one, and by good I man bad.

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Seriesdate: 7.07

Dark Page

 

Lwaxana Troi, in her last TNG appearance, drops into a coma from bad thoughts, and only a journey to the center of her mind can save her. Which is to say the action's about 30% overextended takes of empty corridors, 30% characters squinting at each other and another 30% grudgingly slow dialogue justified by a telepathic species' difficulty in talking out loud. In other words: filler episode. Even the standard issue bulbous brain case telepath make-up effect looks lazier here than in its '60s Original Series incarnation.

Heeere's Johnny's bulging temples!

Within all these flaws' limitations however, the cast give pretty good performances, from Sirtis in fine form (for once I mean that in more ways than one) all the way down to the child actress who turned out to be Kirsten Dunst shortly pre-Claudia. And it's nice as usual getting more background on a core character. But you do have to wonder why a standard TV serial script about a familiar face's repressed mental trauma required telepathy, when the same routine's been rehashed countless times in countless other series without it. Brain-magic's addition adds nothing to that familiar plot's resolution of "deal with your shit" or even to its setup, which explicitly dodges supernatural causes of Lwaxana's coma as a red herring.

So... why?

Aside of course from the titillation of mental invasion for its own sake, aside from the social impulse to destroy integrity wherever it may appear, to invade and tear apart others' most intimate selves, to wring them bare and helpless and leave them nothing of their own.

And, more importantly, to fabricate a moral imperative to commit this crime. If you don't unravel your mother's innermost self and strip her bare of her deepest experiences, you are killing her! You don't want to kill your mother, do you? DO YOU!? Then rape her mind.

 

But enough about TNG. Turning now to sports... I got nuthin'.

Turning now to turn-based caravan management role-playing games, I've been revisiting Vagrus, the Misspelled-My-Name-In-The-Preorder-Credits Realms to bring my campaign up to date before they put out another zone sometime soonish. This includes running through one of last year's quest packs giving you a choice between two NPC companions: one a brusque, unforgiving, unliving knight of a bloodthirsty order enforcing the laws of the evil slaver empire, the other a polite, personable sorcerer of a trendily exotic background whose superpower just happens to be reading thoughts. Relieved at being handed an easy moral choice, I recruited the rage zombie. I would argue this duality (on its face a simple light vs. dark side routine) reveals rather the unspoken implicit evil of telepathy by the sheer bulk of stereotypical dark side traits the non-telepathic counterpart must carry in balance of that one unforgivable crime.

 

Not that you'd admit it.

 

Moving on to comics, I also tried catching up on The Legacy of Dominic Deegan, which started so promisingly before the pandemic only to devolve over the next couple of years to the stupidest blend of bland moralistic posturing and emotional diarrhea the likes of which had plagued the author's older comic at its worst. It doesn't seem to be recovering either. I glanced at just three of the latest pages before giving up on it again in disgust. If you can't tell, the character proclaiming the sanctity of the mind is supposed to be the villain, and he promptly gets disintegrated on the next page. As to why he deserved it, no doubt the author has provided ample justification, much like TNG's writers, and approaching my pet rage zombie's litany of nastiness, all to craft some tortured convolution of unreason by which erasing individuality is presented as the positive choice.

 

It's an old joke that if you have to start your every statement with "now I'm not a racist but..." you're probably a racist butt. Well if you have to start your every character bio with "she's not a mind-rapist but..." this well worn pop culture trope deserves a bit of cross-examination. I'm amazed, thinking back, just how passively I accepted such plot devices and protagonists in the past, but it takes little digging to hit at least one massive cultural lodestone skewing all our moral compasses on the matter of mental invasion. Religion. We have all grown up being told our every thought is being monitored by supernatural forces, with an eternity of absurdly overcompensating punishment at stake for every stray depolarization, and have been ordered to be grateful and praise the supposedly benevolent tyranny that would deny this most fundamental right of personal integrity. Except (aside from the personal angle) every social advance is a break with the law of the past and must begin as unspoken, sneaking suspicion that the current system may not be entirely right, privately held and evaluated until it can be nurtured by the weight of evidence and reason in its favor. Every authoritarian, every sadistic oppressor yearns for divine omniscience. They've always read your mail, tapped your phone, spied on you through your webcam, tracked your each step via satellite, catalogued every text you've ever sent, bribed your coworkers and cousins to inform on you. As above, so below, the hoi polloi have aped this impulse with candid camera shows and the voyeurism of "reality" TV. Mind-reading follows naturally from that same impulse as the ultimate advancement in dictatorship, and every plot struggling to justify this quintessentially unforgivable transgression, every Inception, every Troi no matter how cuddly, has done more than its part driving our culture's suicidal slide toward the end.

 

If your true character is who you are in the dark, I have no trouble determining the character of those wishing to bake in the blinding light of absolute scrutiny.