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I've Got a Theory
Feb. 9th, 2013 11:57 pmAbout Star Trek.
So I was taking a break from translating Beowulf (as happens) to read about seventeenth century radicalism in England (as happens) and ended up developing a theory about the new Star Trek (…as happens). Okay, so we know JJ Abrams likes to reference well-known philosophical and political thinkers in his stuff, e.g. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau from Lost. Now in my reading I found out about a guy named James Harrington who was a member of the Diggers, a proto-communist group who wanted to reclaim land from the government for use by the poor as a means of socio-economic improvement. During the Revolution, this didn’t go so well, obviously, but there were several attempts to essentially squat on unused lands for farming that led to conflicts—sometimes but not always violent—with the government.
Now consider the terrorist of Star Trek Into Darkness, John Harrison. (Not exact, but close, right?) Now, there’s a lot of theories trying to tie him back to Khan, but Khan never saw himself as a terrorist or a protestor, he was always just the usurped authority. The terrorist group we have seen close to this time period is Terra Prime, during the period of Enterprise—whose continuity is confirmed intact with Reboot, since the alternate timeline would start ~50 years after Archer establishes the Federation, and there’s reference to both Archer and his beagle, with writers’ confirmation that it was the SAME Archer. Now, Terra Prime was initially established in the wake of the Xindi attacks on Earth, and assumed to have been successfully dissolved in the latter episodes of Enterprise. Now, in Reboot there were several devastating attacks—the Kelvin Disaster, followed 25 years later by the Battle of Vulcan and the Battle of Earth, with the cumulative loss of multiple Starfleet vessels, the entirety of Vulcan, and a chunk of San Francisco. Obviously there would be huge socio-economic outfalls from this; we can already extrapolate from Reboot that the Kelvin Disaster not only expedited technological change but also the enhanced militarism we see during the film (I’ve always been struck by Pike’s reference to Starfleet as a “humanitarian and peacekeeping armada” which implies general benevolence but ALSO implies a standing heavy military force; and historians will note—HI ANTON—that the term “armada” has only ever really been connected with the Spanish armada, eg a heavily ideological force primed for invasion.)
So we could conceivably extrapolate a few things from all this: Harrison, as a member of a self-identified terrorist organization on a planet reeling from significant attacks (Earth) wants to reclaim a bit of control for the betterment of “the common man.” (There’s no such thing as an upper-class terrorist.) It would make sense that one method such an individual could see would be wanting access to government-controlled properties—eg M-class worlds that Starfleet visits but regulates the colonization of. Going back to the historical Harrington, he would see land lying fallow that working people should have access to. Therefore it would make sense that he would want access to both the land as an ultimate goal and the destruction of Starfleet as a method to get there.
Alright, folks. DISCUSS.
So I was taking a break from translating Beowulf (as happens) to read about seventeenth century radicalism in England (as happens) and ended up developing a theory about the new Star Trek (…as happens). Okay, so we know JJ Abrams likes to reference well-known philosophical and political thinkers in his stuff, e.g. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau from Lost. Now in my reading I found out about a guy named James Harrington who was a member of the Diggers, a proto-communist group who wanted to reclaim land from the government for use by the poor as a means of socio-economic improvement. During the Revolution, this didn’t go so well, obviously, but there were several attempts to essentially squat on unused lands for farming that led to conflicts—sometimes but not always violent—with the government.
Now consider the terrorist of Star Trek Into Darkness, John Harrison. (Not exact, but close, right?) Now, there’s a lot of theories trying to tie him back to Khan, but Khan never saw himself as a terrorist or a protestor, he was always just the usurped authority. The terrorist group we have seen close to this time period is Terra Prime, during the period of Enterprise—whose continuity is confirmed intact with Reboot, since the alternate timeline would start ~50 years after Archer establishes the Federation, and there’s reference to both Archer and his beagle, with writers’ confirmation that it was the SAME Archer. Now, Terra Prime was initially established in the wake of the Xindi attacks on Earth, and assumed to have been successfully dissolved in the latter episodes of Enterprise. Now, in Reboot there were several devastating attacks—the Kelvin Disaster, followed 25 years later by the Battle of Vulcan and the Battle of Earth, with the cumulative loss of multiple Starfleet vessels, the entirety of Vulcan, and a chunk of San Francisco. Obviously there would be huge socio-economic outfalls from this; we can already extrapolate from Reboot that the Kelvin Disaster not only expedited technological change but also the enhanced militarism we see during the film (I’ve always been struck by Pike’s reference to Starfleet as a “humanitarian and peacekeeping armada” which implies general benevolence but ALSO implies a standing heavy military force; and historians will note—HI ANTON—that the term “armada” has only ever really been connected with the Spanish armada, eg a heavily ideological force primed for invasion.)
So we could conceivably extrapolate a few things from all this: Harrison, as a member of a self-identified terrorist organization on a planet reeling from significant attacks (Earth) wants to reclaim a bit of control for the betterment of “the common man.” (There’s no such thing as an upper-class terrorist.) It would make sense that one method such an individual could see would be wanting access to government-controlled properties—eg M-class worlds that Starfleet visits but regulates the colonization of. Going back to the historical Harrington, he would see land lying fallow that working people should have access to. Therefore it would make sense that he would want access to both the land as an ultimate goal and the destruction of Starfleet as a method to get there.
Alright, folks. DISCUSS.
