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29 Jan 2012 12:57 amSo we're watching Star Trek: TNG, and there's an American Indians episode. We immediately said "OH NO it's going to be full of fail, isn't it?"
It didn't really get off to a promising start when the Federation Council decreed over the protests of a colony world of American Indians that the colony was to be moved and the planet ceded to the Cardassians as part of a new treaty. The Enterprise was sent, over Picard's (and also Admiral Ncheyev's) protests, to relocate the colonists in what he pointed out unhappily was a disturbing historical parallel. In the first encounter, there was a mixture of a bunch of different Indian tribes represented, all wearing weirdly generic outfits and plastic beads, and we assumed that the painful badness was going to be about the honkies and Captain Picard saving the poor childlike Indians and reasoning with them...
BUT NO.
Then it turned out that this episode about white people relocating unwilling Indians isn't about the Indians at all.
In fact, it's about WESLEY CRUSHER'S MANPAIN.
The entire point of the Indians being present, we are explicitly informed by a Magical Indian possessed of psychic powers who approaches sulky!teenaged!Wesley at a banquet, is to HELP WESLEY. That's why the Enterprise REALLY came here! Luckily these Magical Indians are so mystical and can cure what ails sad white men of above average intelligence who have been gifted with every advantage in life up until they pissed it all away by participating in the coverup of an accidental death at Starfleet Academy, and are now butthurt because people for some reason censured them for that.
It didn't really get off to a promising start when the Federation Council decreed over the protests of a colony world of American Indians that the colony was to be moved and the planet ceded to the Cardassians as part of a new treaty. The Enterprise was sent, over Picard's (and also Admiral Ncheyev's) protests, to relocate the colonists in what he pointed out unhappily was a disturbing historical parallel. In the first encounter, there was a mixture of a bunch of different Indian tribes represented, all wearing weirdly generic outfits and plastic beads, and we assumed that the painful badness was going to be about the honkies and Captain Picard saving the poor childlike Indians and reasoning with them...
BUT NO.
Then it turned out that this episode about white people relocating unwilling Indians isn't about the Indians at all.
In fact, it's about WESLEY CRUSHER'S MANPAIN.
The entire point of the Indians being present, we are explicitly informed by a Magical Indian possessed of psychic powers who approaches sulky!teenaged!Wesley at a banquet, is to HELP WESLEY. That's why the Enterprise REALLY came here! Luckily these Magical Indians are so mystical and can cure what ails sad white men of above average intelligence who have been gifted with every advantage in life up until they pissed it all away by participating in the coverup of an accidental death at Starfleet Academy, and are now butthurt because people for some reason censured them for that.
