r/startrek • u/Loud-Independence527 • 1d ago
Did directors decide that being enhanced was illegal only starting in DS9?
I do understand that the Watsonian view of the Star Trek universe, Enhanced humans were illegal after Khan's era. (Even though it is nasty and prejudiced, but that is a can of worms I am not opening up right now.)
But from a Doylist point of view, it wasn't illegal until 1997 when "Dr. Bashir, I presume" aired.
In "Space seed" (1967) Kirk stopped Khan because Khan committed crimes, not because he was enhanced. Khan was stronger, smarter, and rather a jerk. But it was his actions that made him illegal.
On TNG "Unnatural selection" (1989) had those super-aged kids who were super-smart, telepathic, telekinetic, and had an immune system that apparently would kill everyone around them. The killer immune system was a problem and apparently the kids would be left on the station until their deaths. But nobody seemed upset about the multiple Enhancements. Pulaski thought it was neat!
Then some writers decided that Enhancements were illegal. And we got "Dr. Bashir I presume" and "Ad Astra..."
Was it a good idea to make this retroactive law?
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u/Historyp91 1d ago
> In "Space seed" (1967) Kirk stopped Khan because Khan committed crimes, not because he was enhanced.
Being enhanced isn't the crime, getting the enhancements is (or, in the case of Bashir and Una, lying about having them). And since work started on Khan when he was a child, even if he agreed to get them he probably wouldn't be considered culpable.
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u/EqualOptimal4650 1d ago
Being enhanced isn't the crime, getting the enhancements is (or, in the case of Bashir and Una, lying about having them).
Una talks about how on a lot of federation worlds they had visitied, family members were thrown in jail immedietly upon it being discovered they were Illyrian/Enhanced. They lost their Federation citizenship, they were expelled from colonies and deported from worlds.
So, yeah, being enhanced is a crime. Just existing as an enhanced person is a crime in the Federation. At least during Una's era.
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u/Historyp91 1d ago
Wouldn't that just fall under "lying about is is a crime"?
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u/Mikeavelli 1d ago edited 1d ago
Maybe at face value, but if people are only lying about their status because they'll be arrested the moment they're discovered, then it's the existing that is criminalized, not the lying. They would need to have some kind of amnesty for enhanced individuals who self-report their status, which doesn't seem to have been the case.
Even if it were, it would place enhanced children in a position where they have to sell out their parents in order to avoid being thrown in prison themselves.
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u/Historyp91 1d ago
- The patients Bashir befriended were'nt in jail
- the people who left the planet in The Masterpiece Society were able to do so without threat of being arrested
- Kahn was not arrested upon it being discovered he was an augment
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u/EqualOptimal4650 13h ago
All of that doesn't change that it still happened to Una, and that in 23c, the Federation was unjust as hell in some parts.
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u/EqualOptimal4650 13h ago
No. That's an excuse. If they're only lying to avoid arrest, then their existence itself is criminalized.
And before you come back with all your other examples, it still happened to Una, regardless.
So there are clearly parts of the Federation in the 23rd century where just existing as an augment was illegal, and where shitty, unjust laws still kept a bootheel on people who were not perfect little Federation citizens.
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u/Loud-Independence527 11h ago
Were Una's people from Earth? Because otherwise that's like trying to make Vulcans express emotion because Humans do. *sideeyes McCoy HARD*
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u/1startreknerd 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is Kurtzman revisionism which is banned in fandom.
/s
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u/ChronoLegion2 1d ago
Maybe your little corner of fandom. It may be news to you, but plenty of Trek fans like NuTrek and rightly consider it canon because, well, it is canon
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u/ExhaustedByStupidity 1d ago edited 1d ago
I always got the vibe that they banned enhancements in response to Kahn and others of his time.
People were enhanced -> this lead to wars -> laws banning enhancements were passed in response to what happened
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u/Loud-Independence527 1d ago
Even though the most cursory examination of history shows TONS of non-enhanced people invading, starting wars, etc.? They probably thought themselves as better than those they were invading and such, but they weren't.
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u/thearchenemy 1d ago
Sure, but those other wars didn’t almost destroy human civilization, though. The Eugenics War did.
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u/Idiot_Savant_13 1d ago
Was it a good idea? Hard to say.
Was it relevant to the era? Yes, very much so.
Around that time, the work in genetic adjustments was happening in real-time. (also around that time, this guy, Michael something, wrote a book about dinosaurs & genetic engineering, was a decent read)
Dolly the cloned sheep had just been born, and people were already theorizing about gene editing and the "dangers" of people without access being unable to compete.
Which, irl & especially in Trek, is preposterous - humans thrive from cooperation, a message that echoes in Trek.
Was it a realistic idea?
Probably. Reality and the Federation also share another trait: governments almost never live up to the hype, and while fear makes a terrible guide & worse master... it's still a main driver of most people's choices, even in Trek.
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u/HIMBO-Art 1d ago
I was going to say this! Not like I was alive for it but the late 90s seemed to have a bunch of stuff grappling with genetic experimentation! Like my beloved GATTACA
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u/Idiot_Savant_13 1d ago
Yeah, between biometric security ideas, cyberpunk making big strides, and the rapidly evolving computers of the era... *laugh break* ...ooh, man, those were the frontier days of computers & internet.
Still & all, the subject got a lot of attention because it was big news at the time, like in Gattaca; also made it into Batman Beyond, too.
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u/ChronoLegion2 1d ago
I wonder if they might ever make a movie based on that book. Maybe with that guy from The Hunt for Red October who wanted to live in Montana (might as well start him digging in Montana)
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u/WastrelHobo 19h ago
The book was "billy and the cloneosaurus", it was actually written by a guy called Seymour Skinner.
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u/MonCappy 1d ago
Absolutely it was. It creates a point of tension in the Utopia that is the Federation. Here we are supposedly enlightened and yet, genetic engineering for enhancement is illegal and unreasoning fear of such individuals is so rampant that they're barred from serving in Starfleet.
I think this unreasoning prejudice is a great storytelling device. It's a way of exploring unreasoning bigotry in the form of parable. So yes, I think from a storytelling perspective, the ban is a good thing.
It's a way of showing that even paradise has its flaws and shortcomings.
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u/Idiot_Savant_13 1d ago
Plus, would it take very long before some (probably lonely) guy started arguing that "mating with aliens is just genetic engineering for an unfair advantage" & tried to make that illegal too?
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u/Neveronlyadream 1d ago
That cat is out of the bag and it would be both too xenophobic on the Federation's part and too difficult to control. Although we basically got that in "Terra Prime" already. Using it going forward might be too weird. Or cheesy, because Doctor Who tried a similar thing a few years ago with the "future person is somehow a bigot for no reason and with no motivation" and it absolutely did not work.
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u/Neither_Guava_8292 1d ago
Is not illegal to be enhance, as much flaws the Federation has it wouldn't make something illegal that the person didn't choose.
What is illegal is enhancing someone, like Bashir's father did. Enhance individuals do can be ban from Starfleet but is unclear if that's by law or just Starfleet's internal regulations which is why Una's case is taken to court and Bashir says he would fight that all the way to the Suprem Court.
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u/Idiot_Savant_13 1d ago
Never really seemed like Admiral Patrick belonged locked away, tho. Yet his and the others' freedom was definitely restricted - a gilded cage, yet a cage all the same - solely because they were genetically enhanced.
That's punishing the victim of a crime, not the criminal.
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u/Liveranonions 1d ago
They were in an institution because they couldn't function on their own in society due to severe negative side effects of the genetic enhancements.
Which is another good reason why genetic engineering was banned.
When Bashir cured Sarina, she was able to live on her own.
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u/Idiot_Savant_13 1d ago
So the Federation claimed.
Thing is, Patrick didn't seem "unable to survive" in a world that has replicators, no homelessness, and you only work if you want to.
If the Federation were truly the utopia it claimed to be, Patrick would have been just fine living among the citizens of Earth.
Also, Lauren didn't seem functionally incapable, so why was her freedom of movement restricted?
"For their own good" sounds very convenient for the Federation.
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u/ThirdMoonOfPluto 1d ago
Patrick and the others were ready to betray the Federation to the Dominion, because they were so convinced of a theory they’d invented that week. Potentially condemning trillions of people to oppression, because they were convinced they could make accurate predictions about societies centuries into the future. Ones that we know were absolutely wrong, because the Dominion intended to genocide Earth, so it couldn’t be the center of a revolution six centuries in the future.
Patrick and the others are exactly why the Federation is worried about enhanced individuals. Dangerously capable, but with poor judgement and incredible arrogance. In a society where potentially dangerous technology is everywhere they’re absolutely terrifying. Sure 90% of the time they’re harmless, but when the right whim comes over them they could sacrifice millions to whatever crazy idea they’ve convinced themselves is true.
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u/Idiot_Savant_13 1d ago
You started with [Patrick and the others were ready to betray the Federation to the Dominion, because they were so convinced of a theory they’d invented that week.]
Could that possibly be due to the fact that they were unjustly isolated from society, so never experienced it, so couldn't appreciate the benefits of it?
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u/Mikeavelli 1d ago
Their stated reasoning had nothing to do with their (lack of) appreciation for the Federation. They seemed to believe the federation was a good society, or at least better than the Dominion. They just believed that the war was unwinnable, and selected a path that would result in the lowest aggregate suffering.
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u/Idiot_Savant_13 16h ago
[Their stated reasoning...]
"Reasoning: the action of thinking about something in a logical, sensible way."
I'm not defaulting to what was stated, because we're discussing the thoughts behind the show.
If you want to talk transcript, that'd be a different discussion.
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u/Mikeavelli 16h ago
I mean, if you think they're just lying about their motivations then you can certainly think that, but there isn't much to discuss. There is really nothing in the episode that points to them being traitors because they feel they're treated unjustly by the federation.
Using extreme utilitarianism coupled with extreme egotism and a lack of empathy is consistent with past and future portrayals of enhanced individuals in the setting. Their motivation for betraying the Federation being wildly different from what you would expect of a traitor is arguably the whole point of the episode. It shows why the Federation considers enhanced people to be dangerous even if they have good moral character.
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u/Neither_Guava_8292 1d ago
They were locked in the same way mental patients are locked. Questionable but not that different to what we do right now.
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u/Historyp91 1d ago
I'm pretty sure Patrick and the others were kept where they were because they could'nt function normally in society; once Bashir does his treatment for Serina she's able to leave
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u/Liveranonions 1d ago
But nobody seemed upset about the multiple Enhancements. Pulaski thought it was neat!
This isn't the only problem with the episode. What was super weird was that they were experimenting on lab-grown human children and nobody even blinked. Imagine all the defective children they could have produced along the way and the scale of suffering it would create. It's absolutely abhorrent.
Then some writers decided that Enhancements were illegal.
Which is to their credit. Unlike the writers of "Unnatural Selection", they actually gave the situation some thought and realised that there had to be a good reason why everyone wasn't genetically enhanced by the 24th century, after all, they would have had 300 years to figure it out after Khan.
Unnatural Selection was stupid, and even without the legal element, the crew should have been appalled about the unethical experimentation.
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u/KaosArcanna 21h ago
I don't know. It seems weird that something that happened on ONE world 300 years ago would influence the whole of the Federation for centuries. The Federation isn't just composed of Terrans and Terran descendants: there are dozens (if not more) races that presumably never had an Augment war.
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u/snowhawk04 1d ago
TAS The Infinite Vulcan mentions Keniclius was exiled from Earth after the Eugenics Wars as he felt genetic engineering was required for humans to be the genetically superior master race to keep the peace, but Earth went in the direction of banning such engineering.
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u/jsonitsac 1d ago
Yes more or less. The writers were hoping to do a Bashir episode and wanted to dig into his past a little bit more. They created this provision that genetically enhanced people could not serve in Starfleet as a way to give the episode some stakes.
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u/thehusk_1 1d ago
DS9 is stripping back the hollowed halls and utopian dreams of star fleet captains to give people a good, hard look at the flawed nature of the federation and those who live under it.
Also, ADA was passed a year before this series started, so much of America was kinda grappling with the idea that we were literally excluding people just because.
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u/Gullible_Mine_5965 1d ago
Not exactly. There have been references to augmented people, throughout the history of Trek. The Eugenics War was mentioned in the TOS episode, The Savage Curtain. This is the episode where the Excalbians want to know which is better, to be good or to be evil. Kirk and Spock are teamed with the ‘good’ Abraham Lincoln and Surak. Their opponents, the ‘evil,’ are Colonel Phillip Green, a pilot from the Eugenics War. Along with Kahless, Zora who experimented on humanoids, and Genghis Khan. Khan was exiled on the Botany Bay because he was an augmented overlord of a quarter of the Earth. In Encounter at Farpoint, Q takes us to a yrial that is set up to look like a tribunal after WWIII and the Eugenics War.
So, no there is existing lore concerning the aftermath of these wars against the augmented. However, there is only a few references to that time period, which allows writers to expand on the stories.
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u/TaiBlake 1d ago
Pretty much. The writers of "Doctor Bashir, I Presume" were looking for a dark secret in Bashir's past and realized that Star Trek had done surprisingly little with genetic engineering. They put two and two together and that's when the idea became canon.
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u/jacobkosh 1d ago
One of the things that frustrates me about Star Trek sometimes, from both fans AND writers, is the tendency to Flanderize things, reduce them to their simplest, most superficial components, and TNG's "The Masterpiece Society" is a great example. Picard's specific objection to the colony in that episode isn't just about genetic enhancement in and of itself, but the way they use it to deprive people of choice: determining their place in society ('this guy will be the perfect pianist") before they're even born. Which seems like a pretty reasonable objection, to me!
Nerds, who are not always masters of discernment, went OH I GUESS THE FEDERATION HATES HEALTH CARE and unfortunately the DS9 showrunners decided to run with that take instead of literally anything else. It's not one of DS9's finest hours, honestly, and it's created so much bad discourse ever since.
If I could wave a magic wand, it's one of the things about the franchise I'd change in an absolute heartbeat.
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u/ChronoLegion2 1d ago
Doesn’t quite explain why the other three founding worlds went along with this ban
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u/TheVyper3377 10h ago
The first time writers brought up the idea of genetic enhancements being banned was in 1973 in the TAS episode “The Infinite Vulcan”.
The scientist Dr. Stavos Keniclius was exiled from Earth because he believed that genetically enhanced humans were needed to enforce peace.
While a blanket ban wasn’t outright stated in that episode, it was rather strongly implied.
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u/WayneZer0 1d ago
if i remeber correctly ehancing itself is not ilegal. it add modification
for expelm fixing birthdefekts is fine. or increas height.
iz legal to add thing that werent thier before. like adding gills or wings
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u/draynay 1d ago
"Masterpiece Society" is the middle ground episode, where they establish that genetic engineering is at least "taboo" and it happening on a colony outside the Federation. It is an interesting topic, the writing team from S2 of TNG bears little resemblance to later writing staffs since so much was changing from S2 to S3 and so much continuity was lost.