Newsgroup: it.fan.startrek
Titolo: Xindi attack on Earth reflects the attack on the Twin Towers

http://scifi.about.com/library/weekly/aa112403.htm
Trip comes up with a great way to increase engine stability at high warp,
but during the test run the ship encounters a cloud of space stuff that
wipes out warp drive and almost kills Trip. Trip must be saved at all cost,
so Phlox creates a short-lived mimetic simbiot of Trip to serve as a brain
tissue donor. But whoops -- the simbiot is a person in its own right with
Trip's memories and feelings. But whoops -- it doesn't matter. The simbiot
still needs to serve as a donor to save the real Trip, even though it means
the sim's death.
So we get a nitty-gritty dilemma with no easy solution that causes a
desperate moral compromise. Sound familiar?
One year ago, I voiced at some length that the problem for me with
Enterprise wasn't its breaks in continuity, or the acting, or that Archer
was a wuss, or that it was old and tired. Rather, I was mad that the little
morals we were getting -- most often in a long speech with the patriotic
music playing in the background -- reflected groundbreaking moralism of the
1960s, not issues and problems facing us today.
While I think the odds that my article has anything to do with the shift in
Enterprise's sensibilities are about…oh…the square root of zero to
infinity, it feels as much a duty as a pleasure to say I couldn't be
happier to see the show take on the issues it's grappled with this season.
For those playing along at home, the entire Xindi attack on Earth reflects
the attack on the Twin Towers in New York -- a surprise attack with
devastating consequences that changes the Rules of Engagement. (And thus it
can stand in for a variety of such events in history, but the Twin Towers
is most recent.)
There's a strong argument to be made that the world -- or at least parts of
it -- is currently fighting World War III. We just don't call it that
because this war, like some wars before it, is so different from past wars
that we don't recognize it yet. After all, when the fighting got going in
1913, people didn't walk around saying, "Hey, WW I is about to start!"
Regardless of what history calls our present circumstances, we're
implementing foreign policy that cannot be whitewashed effectively with
"peacekeeping measure." Indeed, Americans need to remember that we won our
freedom from Britain with guerrilla tactics that those straight-laced,
military-elite Red Coats didn't know how to deal with. In 2003, America is
the straight-laced military elite that doesn't know how to fight
effectively against terrorist tactics.
So either we learn how to answer suicide bombers and "frontless assaults,"
or, quite frankly, we'll lose.
The Enterprise crew's reaction to the Xindi Expanse is an excellent symbol
for America's general response to terrorism. Archer & Co. keep thinking of
their mission in linear fashion: "We must get the Xindi weapon." But the
nature of the threats facing them is anything but linear. It is land mines
and sneak attacks, spatial anomalies where the old rules don't make sense,
and hidden pitfalls that sabotage attempts to meet even the basic perils of
the situation.
But while so many episodes this season have been doing a great job
demonstrating the chaos of fighting in a zone of trap doors and broken
rules, "Similitude" does the best job yet in dealing with the most painful
casualty of redefining warfare: not the loss of lives, but the loss of the
High Moral Ground.
No one willingly becomes a monster in their own eyes. When we fight, we all
have rules that allow us to sleep better at night. But when the world is at
stake, what right do we have to a good night's sleep? Yet if we do become
monsters to save the world, what sort of world have we saved?
These are a couple of the Real Issues here. Janeway drove herself nuts
trying to keep up the balance between honor and survival in Voyager, but
she at least had the luxury of being far from the judgments of home while
confronting dangers she at least had the technology to recognize.
Archer spent the first two seasons as Earth's ambassador, flying the flag
of friendship and generally shoving Earth's moral superiority in everyone's
face. That was both annoying and dull. Now he's got to succeed in his
mission at any cost, which means he's learning just what a luxury he used
to enjoy. Failing at his mission used to be a bummer. Now it's the
destruction of humanity and six thousand refuges huddled on some rock
waiting the final Xindi attack.
So, Tucker's going to die, and he needs Tucker to live. Phlox offers him a
grotesque solution that at least has one moral hidey-hole: the "sim" will
live its "natural" life. Of course, it won't seem natural to the sim, but
it's enough gray area to allow Archer to give the order. Once this flimsy
camouflage is taken away, however, we get to the real issue: it doesn't
matter how grotesque this gets. Tucker must live.
And it's not like even this sci-fi poser is completely "out there." We'll
have cloning technology soon enough and will be facing some of these very
issues. But more to the point, these are the sort of problems worthy of a
first deep space mission for humanity: problems that can't be solved,
problems that will haunt the people who make them and invite the
temptations of revisionist history. In short, they suck. And that's life.
So Sim's little speech at the episode's end about how giving up his life
for Trip is what he was born to do is just a Band-Aid to conscience, a bit
of scrambled-up nobility to deal with the fact that if he doesn't lie on
the table of his own free will, he'll be strapped down. The same is true of
Archer's eulogy. He can talk about self-sacrifice, but it's all talk. Truth
is that Archer and Phlox made a person to be a slave, a medical tool for
the salvation of another's life and the mission for which that life is so
important. They, and we, can dress it up however they like, but when it
comes to survival, ethics go into the drawer until we can use them again.
The last shot of Trip's attempt to process just what's been done to keep
him alive suggests we may hear his own views in a later episode. I hope so.
Talk about carrying a burden of responsibility! And I really like that Sim
gets more into the whole war effort once he remembers "his" sister.
I can't make up my mind about the whole Sim-loves-T'Pol thing. It's an
obvious choice for emotional punch, and it plays again with the whole "will
they or won't they" thing that's really just so tiresome. But it's also
very well-played, particularly the kiss, and Sim's line about going-away
presents. Still, we get more emotional punch from Sim's success in pulling
the ship out of the field and thus demonstrating his worth in his own right.
The only real problems with the episode are technical. Sim should not get
Trip's memories. Since the writers needed that element, they should have
given us medicobabble to explain something about the procedure beyond, "I
guess humanity uses genetic memory." Bleh.
Even worse, I don't care what those cables are made of, there is no way in
hell those two little things could support the weight of overcoming the
inertia of a bazillion-ton spaceship. Can we say "chain strain," people?
But whatever. It's still a great episode. B&B, keep 'em coming!
-- 
Jolan Tru, Filippo "Hytok" Simone: l'oracolo sampdoriano di Sunnydale
La Casa degli Elfi - 
http://lacasadeglielfi.altervista.org/
Enclave del Dominio - S.N.S. Despiser - 
http://ildominio.altervista.org/

Interrompendo la lite tra Bele e Lokai, Hytok ha detto:
 > (oggetto)
Quando l'ho detto io mi hanno riempito d'insulti...........
-- 
< 1d4 >
< togli .invalid per inviare e-mail >
< swaz hie gat umbe,
   daz sint alles megede,
   die wellent an man
   allen disen sumer gan! >
--

Quando l'ho detto io mi hanno riempito d'insulti........
Chi?


 Chi?
E chi si ricorda.........


> Quando l'ho detto io mi hanno riempito d'insulti...........
Il silenzio della ragione genera uomini arroganti e imbecilli. C'è sempre 
chi vede la fantascienza come semplici storie, invece che una metafora 
sociale. Sai com'è, ognuno fa quel che può con quel che ha... 

 sociale. Sai com'è, ognuno fa quel che può con quel che ha... 
Il tuo commento è ironico o va preso com'è? Per me fa lo stesso ma è 
esiziale per poterti rispondere.


 esiziale per poterti rispondere.
Tradotto in linguaggio terrestre significa che più la gente è ignorante e 
limitata, più tende a criticare, prendere per il culo ed essere arrogante. 
C'è chi prende storie di fantascienza come storie senza significati che 
vanno al di là di quello che si vede succedere. Non capiscono ad es. il 
paragone tra la serie xindi e la politica estera usa, non ci arrivano di 
testa, ma invece di star zitti e cercare di comprendere dagli altri li 
sfottono, deridono e attaccano.
Per capirci, un mio caro amico che reputavo persona intelligente, ha 
commentato la guerra dei mondi cosi: "Un po noioso, arrivano gli alieni, 
sparano, tom cruise scappa per tutto il film e poi gli alieni muoino, non 
succede molto!"
Buffo il contrasto con la risposta dell'altro amico che (grazie al cielo) ha 
replicato: " Il film si ispira a un libro di wells, che fu allora una feroce 
critica al colonialismo inglese. La versione moderna invece cerca di 
riprendere la situazione politica attuale, attaccando la politica usa nei 
confronti dei paesi arabi, facendo vivere allo spettatore "dall'interno" 
l'angoscia di un padre di famiglia che vede il paese attaccato da una 
superpotenza che semina morte, e dalla quale scappa cercando disperatamente 
di salvare i suoi cari..ecc ecc.."
Risposta del primo: "Ma non dire cazzate!"
AHAHAHAH!!!
Ergo, il mondo è pieno di fessi senza pensiero astratto, e li si riconosce 
dall'aggressività e dall'arroganza, nonchè dalla incapacità pensare idee 
profonde. 

 dall'aggressività e dall'arroganza
Non posso che quotare.
