Thursday, September 25, 2008

Star Trek Quote of the Time Being

Been recording late night showings of Deep Space Nine for a while. Love that particular series quite a lot. But, to tie this in with the skeptical theme, got a quote here that pretty well describes the crazy about Creation "Science", where they change the explanation for a given thing, like whether archaeopteryx was "fully bird" or "fully reptile."

Anyway, the DS9 episode was "The Wire." Doctor Bashir starts digging into the past of Garak, the disgraced Cardassian spy, and gets him to tell the story, or rather stories of why he was exiled. After everything's resolved, Bashir complains about the contradictions:
Bashir: "Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?"
Garak: "My dear Doctor, they're all true."
Bashir: "Even the lies?"
Garak: "Especially the lies."
I find myself thinking about that a lot when I bump into a YEC.

7 comments:

King Aardvark said...

DS9 was okay, and a hell of a lot less irritating than Voyager, but I don't think I would ever go out of my way to record it. Been watching a lot of the remastered TOS recently. Some of them are truly awesome.

My personal theory for why Garak was exiled was that he was the tailor who designed the horrible Cardassian uniforms for their first appearance in TNG, so as punishment, they bannished him.

Bronze Dog said...

I like DS9 for the setting, and I like TNG for the crew. Think it'd be interesting to mix those two aspects.

My view on Voyager: When you aren't banging your head on the wall, it manages the accomplishment of being very mediocre Trek. Big annoyance: The sheer volume of Negative Space Wedgies.

Tom Foss said...

I like the mythology and politics of DS9, myself. When you remove the "exploring space and encountering a new Planet of Hats each week" aspect of Star Trek, it really allows for much deeper storylines and much more interesting interplay between alien cultures and characters.

Bronze Dog said...

Yeah, I'm big on that, Tom. One really annoying thing that I've heard is that the Gilligan's Island premise of Voyager was the result of DS9's lower ratings: The meddling executives thought it was the lack of exploration and not the slide towards more cynicism.

Anonymous said...

DS9 was my favourite of the ST franchise, and Garak was probably my favourite character in it. I like moral ambiguity. Unfortunately, it seems that network executives and / or audiences don't (see Farscape, Firefly).

Anonymous said...

Have to agree with dunc, I liked DS9 the most, but preferred Babylon 5 to all the Trek series because of the ambiguities and the complexities of character and story.

IAMB said...

Definitely preferred DS9 if only for the fact that it was much darker and less utopian than all the other ones.

And ditto on Garak being a favorite...