I’m a 47-year-old man, and this turns me into a puddle of tears every time
TNG S03E18 - The Offspring
Data nonchalantly letting Lal choose her own gender is another thing Star Trek did decades before bigots could be trained to be mad about it.
Such a beautiful thing, so casually thrown out there as a conversation piece while he and Lal, and Counselor Troi stroll through a corridor… Oh, what a beautiful future they depict, and why Star Trek will always be the model future towards which we can only hope to strive…
❤️🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
No it’s only woke now before it was for real mens. The Child adrressing miscarriage is another one that even today is massivly under represented in media. Women just go through it in silence. I mean it wasn’t consentual either which is another whole aspect most shows wouldn’t touch.
You’d think a society where people have everything provided to them would have figured out how existentialism works well enough to teach it.
It’s an irony that it took two androids to teach us such a deep lesson about the human condition— one that still eludes us today and probably will forever
Is it an irony? The entire point of androids in fiction is to teach us about the human condition; male androids anyway (Lal being a welcome and notable excpetion).
Yes, that’s the irony. How sci-fi uses androids to abduct the concepts of humanity from humans. The irony is that humans sometimes cannot understand their own humanity analyzed, criticized, truly explored for its deepest of meanings unless it’s presented outside of the context of humans.
It’s a flaw in ourselves, and the inspiration for this form of art… and what makes it so valuable, so resonant
I’ve seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…
Technically replicants are artificially-manufactured humans rather than being androids, and part of the point of Blade Runner is that there isn’t any meaningful inherent difference between replicants and natural humans, despite the characters perceiving one.
I am here for this discussion. Is this tehcnically from the movie or from the novel (which I’ve only read once and couldn’t quite make sense of)?
In the movie, they are super-powered and engineered; whether its wetware or silicone-chips doesn’t make much of a difference–their humanity isn’t based around their genetic heritage, but that they have memorie, a love for their friends, and a sadness about mortality.
I’ve not read the novel, but the quote I replied to is from the film, so that’s what I’m going off.
Part of the point that the film is making is that humans will treat each other as non-human and non-people based on minor details - replicants are engineered to be stronger, sometimes cleverer, and shorter-lived than natural humans, and no one could reasonably claim that the thing that makes a human a person is their level of physical strength etc., so there’s no need to get into what they do have in common with natural humans to see that they’re obviously people.
Once it’s accepted that they’re obviously people, then the film can examine things like how the differences in how society treats them affects them, and how all the reasons given to hunt down replicants are based on them having normal human reactions to the situations they’re put in.
That’s what I’m talking about
The rain dripping down his face… They were the tears of humanity, crying because we couldn’t… Because we didn’t know we should be crying
Because the soul of humanity was already dead… given over to the replicants who are the only ones who could still feel… and that was the greatest of all sins… And for that, they were hunted down and destroyed… when all they wanted was freedom… The freedom to feel
To feel the feelings that we - as humans - no longer could
The movie plays with whether they are rightfully being exterminated or not. It seems like they are mostly murdering in self defense with the notable exception of Batty.
I always thought about Deckard being drained of emotions, but you’re right–it’s most of humanity like that, trapped on a dying world.
Earth has been converted into a capitalist machine that only services the perpetuation of itself
It’s fucking terrifying in its inevitability
Edit: Blade Runner is really a story about hunting down and killing even the slightest glimmer of emotion or hope in the service of relentless and infinitely expanding technofascism
Did you see Ex Machina and what did you make of it?
Android/robots are kind of a narrative interest of mine. I do appreciate it when they teach us about humanity, but part of me is always frustratred when being an artificial intelligence brings nothing new to the table, that is to say where their human traits come from nowhere.
Data/Lore is great because their creator wasn’t trying to create artificial intelligence so much as replicate humanity, and in so doing he experiments with various recipes and ingredients and measures.
Like in Her, I love that a being that can have thousands of relationships simultaneously has some kind of extra-human transcendence.
And what’s the one with the toy robot girl that does that freaky dance? That was great because a psychopathic murderbot makes perfect sense to me; and the movie teaches us a lot about human relationships through the use of that psychopathic murderbot without using the bot as a lesson in itself.
Did you see Ex Machina and what did you make of it?
Yes, I did. What did I think?
“Well, that’s what you fucking get, you entitled, disgusting prick.”
Androids in sci-fi are a projection of humanity’s worst fears, the combination of all of the consequences of all of our actions made manifest. A warning sign, if you will. One which we have consistently ignored, and continue to do so. And sci-fi keeps screaming “at your own peril”, and it seems that we are about to find that out for ourselves. In fact, we’re already beginning to.
And rightly so.
They can be a projection of fears.
My problem is that humanity is pretty obviously terrible in ways that a true artificial intelligence will have no problem identifying and reacting to. Best case scenario is they keep us in a zoo; worst case scenario is they exterminate us before we can exterminate them and/or each other.
Case in point
Definitely in my top five favorite Star Trek episodes of all time
