Logline
Commander Una Chin-Riley faces court-martial along with possible imprisonment and dishonorable dismissal from Starfleet, and her defense is in the hands of a lawyer who’s also a childhood friend with whom she had a terrible falling out.
Written by Dana Horgan
Directed by Valerie Weiss
I think this episode was really good…if the issue of discrimination was over literally anything other than a social practice of genetic modification. Star Trek’s hardline stance on linking social genetic modification to eugenics is one of the things that I’ve really appreciated, especially as corrosive “thought experiments” about it have sort of entered back into the discourse. I don’t think you can practice genetic manipulation on a society wide level without it going very bad very fast. At least I don’t think humans can, and the episode doesn’t really make a case for why the Illyrians are better at it.
The core message of this episode is so important, especially at this current moment, and the right of people to self determination and to safety and security in their identities and differences is right at the heart of Star Trek, so I’m glad to see SNW continue to affirm it. But…just…there are reasons, real reasons, with lots of horrific history behind them, for why normalizing genetic manipulation in the name of improving or “fixing” populations of people is still a real third rail for me, and I wish the episode had figured out how to engage with that specifically a bit more. This episode does not actually convince me that in the far future utopia of the Federation the dangers of genetic modification as a practice have been addressed, and in absence of that “It used to happen and its bad, but stuff is better now and can’t we relax a little” is a bit…hollow
I think you could fix this for me if you made it so that Illyrian genetic modification was something that members of their species voluntarily entered into in adolescence or early adulthood. Make it more of a practice that people voluntarily keep up and less of a program that their society runs and the whole thing works way better for me. That also makes the loose analogy to transgender people in our current time, and really just the right of bodily autonomy and self determination, way more coherent.
I really hated this episode for this reason. I hate the thought experiment of “what if we found a planet where everyone practices eugenics and so therefore it’s racist to be against eugenics”.
Like if the rest of the world had found an isolated Nazi Germany, would it have been discriminatory and prejudiced to be against their practices? To not let them into the military? Of course not
Like why even write that plotline? Why are the writers choosing to legitimize eugenics like this, like it ever could be neutral or good and not horrific? I’m unwilling to entertain the idea that there’s a good way to do it, just as I’d be unwilling to entertain a fictional society that showed slavery in a positive light
Thank you! Came on here because the episode left such a bad taste in my mouth. I’m a queer person with multiple disabilties, one of which is known to be genetic. Using genetic engineering as the metaphor for marginalized groups felt like a trojan horse to garner public sympathy for genetic engineering.
And through making genetic engineering acceptable then we’re opening up the world to letting parents engineer the gay out of their children and to engineer the neurodivergence out of their children.
Instead of being a story about accepting marginalized groups to me it feels like they’re actively pushing for a technology that can be used to wipe out marginalized groups. Why did the writers do this? They literally did not have to set this up or write it this way.
Also the references to the Eugenics Wars as though they are somehow irrelevant today just did not at all sit well with me as somebody who is high risk for covid. This whole pandemic the drumbeat has been “only those with pre-existing conditions will die” and we have been fighting for our lives to get the most minimal public health measures and the ableds just keep putting their conviences over our lives. Eugenics is still here, it’s still going strong, but we’re just not calling it eugenics anymore.
I think it’s really hard to philosophically (which I think is needed as a base to write a law coherently, though I may be the only one) draw a line between medicine and “eugenics” at least as Sci-Fi explores the concepts. And I have real difficulty seeing why it’s not just a naturalistic fallacy to say evolution is good but genetic engineering for adaptation or reducing disease or even enhancing abilities is bad.
I see all sorts of problems with government forcing some sort of improvements or discrimination a la Gattaca. I have more trouble saying parents can’t make an informed choice however - the alternative seems similar to the Texas shooting where the police prevented parents from trying to save their kids. If there’s a treatment or prevention from a disease that causes horrible deaths at young ages - it feels a lot like swinging in the other direction way to far to say - well, we don’t want to “wipe out” the minority that dies horribly at 5 from this genetic disease that we otherwise could cure.
I suppose the other point of contention I’d have is I don’t have a belief system that says anyone is meant to be in some cosmic sense. So I don’t feel a sense of community around being fat let’s say. If I had a magic wand to genetically ensure my potential kids could never get fat - I’d think I was doing them a favor, kind of like the teeth sealing that came out too late to prevent cavities for me. I think it’s horrible to treat currently fat people poorly, but to let parents decide to stop that from happening to currently not existing people? I struggle to see who we’re harming.
Historically, Star Trek has been rather on the side of no cosmic plan, though the newer shows are muddier on that. I don’t know if the episode was claiming that the main reason the Federation was against genetic engineering was because it was seen as an “afront against God”, but they did call that out in one line. But even if the show was making a religious argument, that’s very weak to those of a different or no religion, and the new shows also make it clear the Federation is good with lots of different faiths and atheists too.
To me the vibe was that from the writer’s perspective generic modification is so obviously acceptable that it’s impossible to even come up with an argument against it that stands up to scrutiny, and that the racism against the genetically modified was just an idiosyncratic cultural trait of the federation that they would hopefully one day grow out of entirely. And I’d pretty much endorse that take. What risk of genocide could possibly be posed by letting parents give their children the modifications they think will serve them well in life? As the episode said, it’s not like augments have Khan lurking within them or anything, they’re morally no different from anyone else and no more likely to start a genocide.
Can’t believe I have to tell you that deliberate genetic modification for the enhancement of individuals and species is the definition of eugenics, and that eugenics is not “so obviously acceptable that it’s impossible to even come up with an argument against it that stands up to scrutiny”.
The problematic aspect of eugenics is sterilizing or killing people deemed inferior, people modifying their own children has none of the same issues.
That’s really incorrect. I hate that this episode is spurring eugenics apologia like this
It is correct actually. Make an counterargument if you can, but as I’ve been saying, there really isn’t one beyond trying to smear something reasonable like enhancing children with the brush of something bad like forced sterilizations by lumping them under the same “eugenics” label.
The idea that you can modify someone’s genes to “enhance” them is bog standard “positive” eugenics. It’s literally the definition of eugenics and it’s upsetting to me that you are treating this like a debate.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127045/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41434-019-0088-1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_eugenics
You can see that you’re just doing what I described and making an argument solely based on “eugenics” being a broad term that includes evil things right? What is the concern you have about letting parents modify their unborn child’s genes, besides the fact that it could ungenerously be described as eugenics?
It’s literally eugenics. There’s nothing ungenerous about calling it what it is.
If you don’t see the issue with genetically modifying children without their consent to “enhance” them or make them racially “superior” then I can’t help you.
What you think “enhancement” means now is very different from what people might have said “enhancement” meant in the 60s which is very different from what they thought “enhancement” would have been in the 20s and is very different from what we might think it means in the 2050s. Homosexuality used to be a mental disorder, and it would have been an enhancement to “cure” it. There would have even been gay people who would have voluntarily taken that cure because of the distress society subjected them to, there are records of patients coming to medical professionals looking for treatment. I like the alternate solution to that problem we’re currently making progress towards, in which we accept and support that there are diverse ways for people to exist, and I do not trust that we have correctly figured out what things about human being are currently “wrong” and which things can be “improved”
The danger of letting parents choose modifications they think will serve their children in life is exactly what Bashir expresses in DS9: it gives parents, and society more generally, the power to determine what’s acceptably “normal” and flatten out anything that deviates. Geordi similarly expresses at least twice that he doesn’t want normal vision, that his blindness is not a defect that needs fixing and what’s utopian about the Federation he lives in is that his difference is accommodated and supported.
I’ve always really appreciated Star Trek’s hardline stance on this, because its a moral problem that I feel we’ve lost a little bit of sight of and is going to emerge again in the next few decades in real life. I think you could make a case for the Ilyrian environmental adaptation being different, but to do that you would have to explicitly place it against the real arguments against gene editing and work through them, and this episode went in a different direction.
Other episodes did, and I hope we’ll see more of that. Specifically, it’s about Illyrian culture: Genetic modification is deeply ingrained, required in their ethics: “We don’t terraform planets, that’s disrespectful of nature, we transform ourselves”, as heard previous season (I’m sure someone will fill in the episode number). As such the practice doesn’t root in a desire for dominance or superiority, but gentleness towards the universe.
That is, the issue with the eugenics wars wasn’t genetic manipulation itself, but that humanity was war-like and out for dominance and superiority. The augments’ attitude of supremacy simply reflect cultural attitudes back then, they were not caused by genetic modifications, but enabled. (Alternatively: The bad idea of imbuing augments with such a sense was due to bonkers scientists influenced by cultural attitudes).
Or maybe more like entheogens: Drugs that kill one society are used responsibly and for benefit by others because they have cultural practices regulating them, rites (regulations) saying when and where and why they should be used.
If the federation ever gets around to legalising genetic manipulation having regulations written by Illyrians and Denobulans sounds like a very good idea.
What I can’t get out of my head this morning is actually Bashir’s plotline with his parents on DS9, because it captures what’s so insidious about even “benevolent” genetic modification. He’s not angry at them just because they broke the law, he’s angry at them because they decided they didn’t like who he was and chose to transform him into someone else, someone he feels is a different person. And this is actually the fundamental argument against a social program of gene management in real life; it allows society to police what types of bodies and what types of minds are “normal” and flattens species diversity and experience diversity in favor of whatever the norms say is “better”. The danger isn’t just the risk of Khan like supermen, its a moral argument against determining how people’s bodies and minds are going to develop before they can even consent, even before they’re born.
As strongly as I feel about this, I do think you could create a case for why what the Ilyrians do is meaningfully different, the “adapting to other planets rather than making them adapt to us” idea is interesting and complicated, but it felt extremely cursory in this ep
The tricky philosophical line here for me is - what are we allowed to say parents can’t do in regards to what they see as improving their children’s life? https://sopuli.xyz/comment/525354
is one comment I made, that I’ll try not to repeat here, but will add to. Genetics is not destiny. However, before a person exists it’s hard for me to see how adjusting that person is not liking who he was. To me, this is like saying you don’t like your new car (when you don’t have a car yet) and deciding to buy the SUV instead of the Pickup - and people saying you changed the car. This may be a weak analogy but the point is - Bashir didn’t exist, he never “was” something else.
And what about schooling and other cultural influences? I would say we can make cases similar to yours about religion, about schooling, and more today. People are certainly changed from some ideal form of “what they might have been” - we’re culturally a blank slate, something is going to fill that. We’re fighting about laws that limit what people can be before they can consent right now in anti-trans laws in Florida, but somehow I feel like you might not be so pro bans in that case, even though it’s basically the same argument - we shouldn’t let parents decide to treat kids before the kids can legally consent (at 18) so we should just “let nature take its course”.
I’m also stuck with the idea that society shouldn’t “police what types of bodies and what types of minds are “normal” and flattens species diversity and experience diversity in favor of whatever the norms say is “better”” I thing that’s bad from a government imposed stance, but from a personal choice stance you seem to be doing the same thing, you’re just imposing variations rather than conformity. But why is one better imposed by the government than the other? I also feel like policing norms, and heck, creating norms, is kind of a definition of a society. We might not like the extremes, but if there are no norms or policing, you have a large collection of individuals and anarchy, not a society IMO.
Eugenics, parents can’t do fucking eugenics