This is an excellent analysis. And you are totally right about Chakotay: he is never ever referred to as “Lieutenant Commander”. I like your Watsonian explanation! That’s a really interesting take.

Of course, this is also the show that was bizarrely inconsistent with Tuvok’s rank. Interestingly, between Kes, Neelix, the Doctor, and Seven, I think VGR may have had the most rankless characters of any series up to that point. I suppose DS9 could be tied, since VGR only had three rankless characters at once, as did DS9 (Quark, Odo, Jake).

But yeah – I wonder if this reflects a larger trend. ENT definitely leaned on simplified ranks as well – instead of the TNG-era 7-rank scale, we only ever see four on ENT: Captain, Commander, Lieutenant, and Ensign. (It’s not clear to me that the costume department even designed a “hollow pip” for the ENT uniforms.) Under that analysis, we see a gradual trend toward de-emphasizing rank, from DS9 to VGR to ENT to DSC to PIC & PRO (though not LDS).

This is an excellent comment, and honestly should be visible higher up. You should make a top-level post out of this!

I’ve always been a little unconvinced about this particular story. Memory Alpha seems to suggest “Kim Noonian Wang”: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Khan_Noonien_Singh#Background_information

But, I dunno… it seems like a little bit of an odd way to reach out to an old friend. This friend was supposed to be Chinese… if so, why give him the additional decidedly un-Chinese names of Khan and Singh (and in more prominent positions)?

There’s also an odd pan-Asian quality to the name: Khan is a South Asian name, usually given to Muslim men; Noonien is apparently supposed to be Chinese; and Singh is usually associated with members of the Sikh faith.

This calls to mind the origin of Sulu’s name: the Sulu Sea, apparently so named because Roddenberry wanted Sulu to represent all of Asia.

In both cases, we have this peculiar situation of various Asian backgrounds being smooshed together into a single character. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are lots of people with mixed Asian backgrounds, so it’s not that either Sulu or Khan are impossible. But… I dunno. It just makes me think that Roddenberry came up with a cool-sounding name and then figured out an impossible-to-prove backstory to provide for it.

I really like this analysis!

2383 (speculative): Construction of the Romulan Rescue armada at Utopia Planitia is underway.

This is likely earlier, since the Mars attack resulted in the loss of a portion of the rescue armada (if not all of it), and the Federation deciding that it was not worth the price of another new fleet is what triggered Picard’s resignation.

Yes, I agree – I’m not entirely sure when the fleet construction would have begun, so that’s why I was somewhat vague here and just said “construction is underway”. My point is that, regardless of when it began, construction must have been in full swing by '83. I suspect construction actually began in '82, and it can’t have been earlier than '81 since that’s when Picard was promoted (I think) and he was the one who came up with the idea.

The Synth ban might be intentionally bidirectional. Because of the risk of a set of potentially-sapient artificial constructs going rogue again, the ban might have been to protect them by preventing their creation.

Yeah, this is a really interesting point. Perhaps the Federation believe it was possible that the synths went rogue because they gained sentience inadvertently (despite, I’m sure, Maddox’s assurances to the contrary). Honestly, that makes for the most compelling argument in favor of the Synth Ban that I’ve seen: while I don’t agree with it, the idea of preventing the creation of synthetic lifeforms because we can’t be sure when/whether they’ll become sentient at least has some air of “responsible creation of life” to it. (Vaguely akin to “Don’t have a child if you aren’t able to take care of it.”)

I’m not sure that [the 2390s] were all that troubled.

This is a fair point. I’m basing my assertion here on a “between the lines” reading of PIC S1, where there is a consistent theme of “Starfleet no longer being Starfleet”. To your point, the vibe I get isn’t that there were lots of crises in the 2390s, but rather that it was a decade of Starfleet not living up to its ideals, having lost its way, etc etc. But I agree that this is implicit in the text rather than explicit.

Oh that’s a really good point about the Holo-Revolt. And it’s interesting – now that you draw attention to it, I don’t think we have seen any holograms serving on ships we see on LDS. I wonder if a Holo-Revolt did happen and lead to Starfleet banning holographic officers… with Chakotay and Admiral Janeway managing to lobby for a one-off exception for the Protostar given a) the exceptional circumstances of returning to the Delta Quadrant and b) Janeway’s personal desire to never return to the Delta Quadrant but Chakotay insisting that her expertise was indispensable. Holo-Janeway could have been a one-off compromise.

… so, Romulans were running the show.

In theory, we already knew this: Commodore Oh is a Romulan agent, and we are shown that she is in a position of power within Starfleet Security in 2385. In fact, given how quickly the Synth Ban is overturned in-universe, I think Chabon wanted to leave us with the general impression that Romulan/Zhat Vash influence was both pervasive and the driving force behind the Ban; once removed (by way of Oh’s exposure), the Federation seems to quickly revert to its “good” “uncompromised” self.

Now, I think that’s an overly simplistic depiction of institutional prejudice and societal change, and I think it undercuts the attempts PIC S1 made to question the moral purity of, well, everyone: Picard as a person, Starfleet as an organization, the Federation as a society. The handwave of “…and it was all the Romulans’ fault!”, in my opinion, lets everyone off too easily.

But I definitely believe that the textual intent was to indicate significant Romulan influence over Federation policy in the 2380s and 90s, and I think the backstory from PRO and LDS creates additional complexity and therefore additional opportunity to weave a more nuanced portrait of Romulan involvement.

appears to ban synthetic lifeforms themselves.

This part, though, has never sat right with me. It deserves a lot more examination than the line or two we got in the season. Right, and that’s part of my point. The suspension of research I agree is one thing, and is better justified in the show. But the outright banning of synths is racist and reeks of fascist regimes in a way that, I agree, is completely underexamined in the show.

My point is that we can recontextualize the Synth Ban into something that isn’t a reaction to a single event but is rather a reaction to a series of mounting crises. I’m not saying that it puts the Federation in a better light, but to me it makes it more believable.

To draw a potentially provocative comparison: if the Attack on Mars is 9/11, then the Battle of the Living Construct is the Oklahoma City Bombing, and the Battle of the Texas Trio is the 1993 Bombing of the World Trade Center. And I’d argue that those are important pieces of historical context to understand the reaction to 9/11; 9/11 punctuated the emerging narrative from 1990s terrorism that the world Was No Longer Safe.

Setting aside the plausibility questions though, one way or another the franchise has established this series of three AI catastrophes in short order (to say nothing of DSC’s Control Crisis, nor PIC S3’s use of interlinked starships); whether or not they needed to do this to justify the Synth Ban is, I agree, debatable. But yeah – intentionally or not, they do seem to have created a more complex backstory here.

Yet—and it’s obvious where I’m going with this—“Spock murdered EvilKirk” is not a meme. …[W]hy does he get a pass while Janeway is condemned?

I’m gonna cheat here a little bit. There are lots of things about the Tuvix debate that really are not about Tuvix; we’ve seen Tuvix elicit underlying opinions about everything from abortion to the trolley problem, and we’ve often seen thinly-veiled misogyny lurking beneath the surface as certain folks appear interested in finding any flaws in Captain Janeway they can.

So, yes, somewhat trivially, I think that Spock does not get condemned in part because he enjoys the luxury of not being targeted by misogynists. I think it’s a small part, but surely a part.

I think the reason there aren’t memes is because, well… “The Enemy Within” is an old episode, it never attracted attention through debate, and also it’s a gross episode where EvilKirk straight up attempts to rape Yeoman Rand, and then Spock makes a joke (! Spock! A joke!) about it at the end of the episode. I’m sure it’s an episode numerous folks have tried to forget. (I know I have.)

So, in terms of using the episode as a barometer to evaluate our own reactions to the two situations, I think there are overriding contextual factors that drown out any insight we might gain.

As an aside, I also think there is a pretty straightforward argument that EvilKirk (and GoodKirk, for that matter) was not mentally competent. He was, by definition, the remnants of an individual who had had a significant piece of their person torn away from them traumatically.

I think there’s actually an odd but useful comparison to dementia here: dementia does cause some individuals to behave “out-of-character”, immorally, or just meanly. If there were a “transporter reintegration” equivalent to treating dementia, and the patient said, “No, I want to stay like I am”… then I think probably the patient’s wishes would be ignored.

Part of the reason “Tuvix” is hard is because, at least superficially, Tuvix appears mentally competent, so it’s much harder to justify ignoring his wishes.

(As a second aside, one thing that always surprises me about the Tuvix Discourse™ is how little attention is paid to Tuvix being… well, somewhere between an asshole and a creep. He is incredibly manipulative toward Kes, preying on both her feelings for Neelix as well as her mentoring relationship with Tuvok. Neelix of course always was a bit possessive and jealous, but he at least was written “with a good heart”; I felt like Tuvix took those same qualities, but added a Tuvok-esque cold calculation to it. In any case, to me there’s a mildly interesting parallel between these two episodes where there’s this tone-deafness to the way the writers treat the behavior of the “transporter accident individual.”)

Good call! Yeah, I think it’s really interesting how the two animated series have utilized more of those callbacks and deep cut references. I had mixed feelings about the last season of LDS, but PRO felt wall-to-wall like solid Star Trek and good television. These recent tax writeoff shenanigans notwithstanding, I imagine that the animated series are cheaper to produce – I wonder if on the whole it might just make more sense for the franchise’s future to sit in the animated world.

(Of course, I’m tacitly suggesting here that “deep cuts” and “callbacks” are what “make” something into good Star Trek, and I don’t really believe that at the end of the day.)

I propose that the Enterprise-E became somehow entangled in something it could not be removed from. I have a mental image of the ship somehow stuck in “spatial quicksand” or maybe an infinite timeloop – some situation where Captain Worf saved the crew and the ship but then was not given the resources needed to extricate the vessel, leaving it to be abandoned in its place.

More heroically, perhaps the Enterprise-E “saved the day” by hooking itself into, say, the mainframe and physical hull of some starbase that suffering from some sort of collapse of software and/or hardware – saving the station from imminent destruction, but irrevocably welding the ship and station together. Again, perhaps Worf thought he’d be given support from Starfleet to eventually extricate the ship, which would explain why he would later feel justified claiming that the ship’s ultimate fate “was not his fault”.