8.1.3 Adult Romulan Female

The End Is The Beginning

This month's question: Just what are the Zhat Vash up to, anyway? Risking a billion Romulans to keep Romulans alive? Let's use the power of triangles to square the circle. Kind of. Mostly, this'll just be me yelling at bigots.

Diegetic Eisegesis

Somehow, I made it forty-five years and change into this specific mortal coil before I learned the word "eisegesis". This perhaps is more than a little ironic, given what I tend to get up to around here.

I don't feel too bad about that, you realise. It's not like I'm charging you anything to read this (though spare a thought for the handful of people who've bought my book). Plus, pretty much what every critic has to engage in eisegesis, to some extent or other. I'm just waring it rather more proudly on the sleeve of my Starfleet uniform. Something something subtext; something something cowards.

Also - and this is why it's this particular essay I'm opening this way- it feels like I have to inject my bullshit into Picard, just so the show has any density to it at all. To return to a topic we touched on last week, being a Rorscharch-soundbite delivery system for people to mistake for wisdom is only one of the defining characteristics of a fortune cookie. The other is that elsewise, they're completely hollow.

"The End Is The Beginning" feels empty of actual meaning. This is true right from the start: that name does nothing but gesture towards the season arc's use of cyclical extinction events, something also used by Mass Effect, Star Control III, and X Files, to name just three examples. Picard doesn't even do a particularly good job of laying its groundwork here; Soji just starts pontificating on Romulan mythology almost wholly without evidence. I'm sure this is intended to demonstrate her intellect, but in practice it seems presumptuous. "I'm so clever I can intuit your relation to archetypes from just two sentences!". That's like me claiming I can reverse-engineer Babylonian arithmetic with their times sign and their symbol for six.

And even if the Romulans do see their archetypes as perpetually playing out in the now, what actual use is that to anyone? Especially since we actually have our own word for archetypes long since established which are nevertheless identifiable throughout history and into the present day. That word is "archetypes".

It's tempting to assume this is simply Ramdha having some fun with this earnest but thoughtless Federation anthropologist, who's so endearingly sure she needs mere seconds to reverse-engineer the lore of a culture which venerates secrecy, in an interview with a profoundly traumatised woman with absolutely no reason to cooperate, This would at least gesture toward a theme, actually, given Picard's repeated failure across the season so far to read how he's perceived by the people he's talking to. It would also make some sense of the otherwise bonkers idea that Romulans are so paranoid about strangers they prefer speaking with their backs to them. Alas, it doesn't really stick as a reading. Soji's trenchant hypothesis/obvious blind guess fits too well with the not-technically-mythic nature of how the Romulans will interpret what's about to happen.

Despite the episode introducing two main characters (if we discount Rafi's few minutes in "Maps And Legends"), and bringing back Hugh, this is really the only depth we're given to swim in here. All the digging done goes sideways, as the show continues to lengthen the tunnel of the season's central mystery, a space being dug out beneath us without any thought to shoring up structure. Total collapse was an inevitability.

I'll save discussion of that disaster for when it happens - it's nice to know I'll have at least something to talk about in later essays. Instead, let's tackle head on the question Picard poses to Rafi: why would any faction within Romulan society want to sabotage the evacuation of almost a billion of their own people? It reads as a question the show wants the audience to ponder, especially given what we know about Commodore Oh and Lieutenant Rizzo. And what else are we to make of the introduction of Romulan triangle-tarot, if not an invitation to attempt to predict the future of our story based on the contents of our own mind?

This is actually an extension of a question I asked when we first started considering this show - why are the Romulans being portrayed as simultaneously helpless victims left to rot by Federation cowardice, and a foe so dangerous and bold they'll happily assassinate a Federation citizen within Starfleet Headquarters itself? This originally struck me as somewhat inconsistent; a failure to really think about what the show wanted its relationship with the franchise's oldest adversaries to be. On reflection, though, figuring out why a society capable of running and arming the Zhat Vash couldn't mount an evacuation of its core systems is no harder than figuring out why a society capable of maintaining six active battlefleets couldn't mount an evacuation of New Orleans. They didn't want so save civilians, they wanted to be able to murder foreigners with impunity at a moment's notice. It's a question not of capacity, but of preference, the Sauron/Spider-Man/dinosaurs vs curing cancer meme played straight.

The Zhat Vash themselves are a step further, of course; they're not just ignoring the actual danger from a natural disaster because they're so obsessed with being ready for an entirely hypothetical attack, they're exacerbating that disaster's death toll. Not so much fiddling while Romulus burns, as fiddling with every fire extinguisher they can find until they can be sure it won't work any more. But why? What prompted the Zhat Vash to attack the Federation evacuation fleet, risking the lives of hundreds of millions of their own people? The most obvious and most convenient conclusion to draw is that they're simply fanatics, and as such, their cost/benefit analyses are almost definitionally incomprehensible. That only shifts the question one step along, though. What are they fanatical about, and why? Put differently, given this is fiction, who are these fictional fanatics supposed to be? What are the real-world parallels to people willing to risk or even guarantee colossal harm to the people they claim to be acting on behalf of, in the pursuit of an obsession almost no-one can really fully define, let alone understand?

Here's my pitch for filling in the blanks; for substituting eisegesis for exposition. While there's probably any number of ways one could usefully map the Jhat Vash onto real-world fanatics, my own tessellated triangles tell me the most plausible candidate is entirely clear.

Fanatics, In Fact

Before we get into specifics, though, let's make sure the charge of fanaticism sticks. Not because I think it's particularly hard to describe being willing to risk the lives of 900,000,000 of your own people because that just isn't the real issue as fanatical behaviour. I just want to make sure we distinguish between fanatics and extremists.

I am, as is almost certainly obvious by this point, a political extremist, I mean this in the simple sense that the political views I hold, and the societal models I would consider superior to what we currently use, are extremely far away from what is generally (nebulously, problematically) considered "mainstream". It's a comparative term - what I want and what the people who are in charge want are oceans apart.

This is not the same as being a political fanatic, which means to be uncritically and obsessively devoted to a cause. To think one thing and one thing alone matters, and everything else just has to be ignored, or be denied, or be twisted to fit within whatever narrow schema has been chosen as What Needs Doing. For all that I'm prepared to blame capitalism for everything from famines to my tennis elbow, I work pretty hard to keep as far from fanaticism as possible, by recognising the difference between a root cause and a sole concern.

This isn't so say no correlation between extremism and fanaticism exists. The magnitude of that correlation is much smaller in magnitude than others would have us believe, though. Fanaticism in service to causes fully within the mainstream is perfectly possible, and on likely on the rise. It's just that this particular flavour of fanaticism is, well, ignored, or denied, or twisted to fit within the narrow schema of what those with all the microphones consider permissible actions. Fanatics on the extremes are dangerous lunatics [1]. Fanatics in the centre are dedicated, publicly-minded people of substance, even as they, to take examples wholly at random, expel people objecting to child poverty, demolish the human rights of an entire minority group, demand the end trial by jury, or lock people up for protesting a genocide.

It doesn't require extremist views to become a fanatic. All you really need is a suspicion of nuance, an echo chamber to retreat into, and an enemy you can identify as needing to be crushed completely before anything else can possibly be addressed.

How the Zhat Vash deal with nuance isn't particularly addressed in Picard, (though neither Narissa nor Oh seem inclined to subtlety in their thinking), but it's hard to think of a more secure echo chamber than setting up a secret society inside another secret society. The ultimate foe is pretty easy to identify here, as well. Synthetic life has got to go, no matter how many squishy meatbags get got along the way. They're happy to risk catastrophic blowback against not just themselves but the entirety of Romulan society, by committing acts of war against a culture that's already beaten them in war once, has expanded far more rapidly than they have, and isn't losing more and more core systems to an expanding sphere of deadly radiation, in a culture built around central control with an actual centre that's now cinders and memory.

Because all of that isn't the real issue. No loss of life is too great a cost in their pursuit of obliterating the "real" enemy. Their hatred is so great that they will literally spew their own acidic bile onto themselves to die in agony rather than just, you know, getting a hobby.

They're both fanatics and bigots then, which probably doesn't shrink our list of suspects all that much. Neither does the fact that Zulu Victor manages to do tremendous damage despite constantly being an absolute shitshow. They spend so much time gabbing in Dahj's apartment she has time to activate, forcing them to resort to a frontal attack on Starfleet Headquarters in broad daylight, one that only works because a busy square suddenly becomes deserted moments before they attack. Then they try to launch a sneak attack on an unguarded chateau, only to get completely pummeled by an octogenarian, two long-retired agents, and a passing scientist. It is absolutely staggering how completely they screw up at every turn, and yet the havoc they wreak is colossal, because they're happy to just keep doing fucking awful things at every opportunity, and occasionally it works out for them.

And if there's one thing we've learned in the last ten years, one miserable, unavoidable, maddening fact, it's that just constantly screwing up until you accidentally score a win is an absolutely viable strategy, just so long as you have money to burn, and you're incapable of self-reflection. The Zhat Vash are idiots, but they're exceptionally well-funded idiots.

Our parallel, then, is surely entirely clear. The Zhat Vash are the UK anti-trans movement.

How To Get Away With Stochastic Murder

Once the link is made, it becomes unmissable. We've already covered how the Zhat Vash are both pathetically incompetent and yet horribly dangerous; how else to describe a movement which has had terrifying success at stripping away trans people's human rights, and creating an atmosphere which is getting individual trans people killed, while doing such stupefyingly ludicrous things as declaring fascistic corpse-god Donald Trump a feminist icon?

Then there's the monomaniacal focus on the enemy. The anti-trans movement are no more pro woman than the anti-abortion movement (which of course has a huge intersection with the anti-trans movement) are "pro life". At any given point where the choice is between defending actual cis women and attacking the trans community, the former option is off the table faster than a chunk of dog-accessible cheese on a table I've turned my back to. Again we need only point to the celebration of adjudged rapist and known friend to paedophiles Donald Trump (far from the only man with a history of sexual assault tolerated within the movement) to see what value is actually being put upon the safety of women.

Similarly, it is not despite the fact the evacuation fleet is berthed at Mars that the Zhat Vash launch their attack, it is because of it. Not because they actively have any desire to see Romulans hurt, but because they know an attack then will maximise the harm they can cause to the public image of synthetic life, and that's their only actual concern, even while justifying their obsession in terms of the need to ensure Romulans aren't harmed.

Which, of course, is something the Zhat Vash had to do, because up until then, no-one actually really gave a crap about synthetic people. Sure, there might have been a sense of vague unease from some quarter - partially as we saw driven by a fear of replacement by the machine [2] - but nothing like the phaser-proof bigotry that was needed to justify ostracising an entire population.

Just as with anti-trans laws (including legislation retroactively declared anti-trans, as with the UK Supreme Court's ruling on the Equality Act last year), the anti-synthetic laws imposed by the Federation stem from a deliberately manufactured moral panic. I'm not saying bigotry is any less bad, or any more excusable, for having the weight of history behind it. I'm just noting the similarities in the speed and success of these Astroturf antagonisms.

We can take this quite a bit further, actually. The thing about building a culture of hatred out of whole cloth is that it isn't actually all that easy, for all that the so-called "gender critical" movement have made it look easy, by managing it despite their tiny numbers and colossal incompetence. Taking people we've all been very dimly aware of for decades, without any kind of issue, and retconning them into the greatest threat civilisation faces, requires quite a bit of sweat. Particularly when, as mentioned, most of your movement can do nothing but charge screaming at everything that moves and hope occasionally to fluke a win, and when you have distinct person-power problem; the Zhat Vash due to the simple need to keep themselves secret even from both Starfleet Intelligence and the Tal Shiar [3], and the gee-cees because they generally look and act like cultists who don't even enjoy being in a cult.

Sure, they got the funds. And hey, maybe just constantly putting everything on 36 red is a reasonable betting strategy, if you know someone who's always going to pass you more chips. Even with all the cash reserves in the quadrant, though, it's going to be a problem if you don't got the boots on the ground.

This posed a real problem to the anti-trans movement. Their foot-soldiers, by and large, do seem to genuinely believe the obvious lie that they represent the opinion of most women, and that poll after poll demonstrating the vast majority of women disagree with their cruel crusade evidences only an uncontrollable terror of ticking boxes in anonymised forms. Their generals, though, tend to be a mite more self-aware about how unpopular they are. This is why, as Kemi Badenoch once smugly confessed, they chose to pursue a strategy of institutional capture. You only need one person to grab a lever, after all; make sure you have your faithful in front of the right controls at the right time, and who cares how many other people would refuse to pull what you're planning to?

The Zhat Vash version of this trick involved making one of their agents the Director of Starfleet Security, where she could work against lingering pro-synthetic feeling on the grounds of, well, security. For the UK anti-trans movement, it meant ensuring the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Office for Students - on the front lines of this particular war because of the success transphobic professors have had in framing expressing vocal bigotry as “academic freedom” - were run by people they could trust to make life harder for trans people at every opportunity.

The actual capturing is only a part of institutional capture, though. You also need to be able to hold on to the territory you’ve claimed. Here again, both our fanatical groups took same approach: making sure the broader power structure either didn't want to be rid of them, or actually found advantages to their presence. Doubtless some of that was done just by playing on the innate sense of superiority among the powerful (we’ve talked before about Starfleet’s arrogance poisoning): we are great, and they are not we, and so it stands to reason they must be less than we are.

Beyond that, it's a game of carrot and stick. The stick is obvious - give us what we want and we won't sic our media allies on you, gumming up your every waking moment with accusations of misogyny, demands for apologies, public character assassinations, and the "throw enough mud" approach to legal action. The carrot is a little more subtle: political scapegoats are useful, lads, and we just happen to have one you can use straight off the peg.

For Starfleet, that would be synthetic life, banned throughout the Federation in a stunningly cynical overreaction, which I'm convinced was intended to cover up their colossal failure in evidence gathering [4]. You can see the cynical logic involved. Every minute people spent hating androids [5] was a minute they didn't spend wondering how someone pulled off a catastrophically damaging surprise attack on a planet never more than twenty light minutes away from Earth.

Meanwhile, trans people proved very handy as people for the UK political class to throw to the wolves, as a distraction from the barely-managed decline of the country as capitalism slowly dies and drags every ecosystem down with it. Hell, what is the Romulan supernova but the most extreme case of global warming imaginable? A catastrophe of unimaginable scale, that is somehow wholly ignored in favour of yelling about a miniscule fraction of the population. If the Zhat Vash and their unwitting [6] Starfleet allies are the anti-trans movement, then the rest of us are your average Romulan, forced to watch colossal ecological catastrophe claim or ruin life after life, while the people who could actually do anything to help keep insisting they have smaller fish to fry.

Biology Isn't Destiny

I've talked a lot above about how the war against trans people is both a distraction from much bigger problems, and how those waging it are clearly comfortable with essentially any amount of collateral damage. While both of those things are clearly true, though, they could be wholly false and the anti-trans crusade would still be a deplorable moral outrage. We simply do not get to legislate on the topic of who people are.

The last and most damning parallel between the Zhat Vash and transphobes is their inexplicable insistence that there is literally nothing worse than people who are living in the wrong way. Their obsessions are remarkably close in form. Both pretend to see biology as the sole arbiter of who we are (which is already a nonsense), while actually believing the determining factor is how we are perceived as being created. Everything else is just reverse-engineered from the despicable insistence that there can be only one way to be alive.

To be anti-trans is to be hollowed out by implacable, senseless hatred. It is to be a shambling bile-golem, animated by the darkest shitomancy in the service of ruining the lives of people almost uniquely ill-placed to defend themselves. It is to cynically steal and corrupt the language, history and iconography of the fight against the oppression, all while pointedly ignoring every actual front in that war in favour of attacking people who are just going about their day. It is to look at the lazy, incoherent quarter-bake of what passes for the motivations of the Zhat Vash and to say "Just needs a bit more hypocrisy". It is to be compared to the sneering cartoon villainy of Oh and Narissa, and to fail to live up to that standard.

Using all that as a framework for your primary antagonists, and the useful idiots in power who are ultimately one the same side, is in fact sharp and relevant. It's prescient, even, given much of what I've referenced above happened after "The End Is The Beginning" aired. We return to our own beginning here, in fact, with Ramdha's tarot pointing to the future by reflecting past and present, and knowing they'll always be someone out there obsessed with making other people miserable to justify a roiling gut reaction they refuse to interrogate.

The parallels are too remarkable for me to believe nothing is at work but coincidence. It might be primarily or entirely subconscious, of course. It might also be that the Zhat Vash are intended to sketch out a different group of people whose politics, to quote Judith Butler, "belong to a history of fascism", and I'm just drawing what are to me the most obvious connections. We return here to the application of eisegesis, though again; if I'm listening to my own echo, it's only because this structure is so hollow.

What I think is a bigger concern with regard to this reading is what it implies about the ending of the season. Yes, the Zhat Vash are shown to be callous, unthinking fanatics incapable of empathy or self-reflection. They are shown to be willing to accept any body count, no matter how literally astronomically high, in the pursuit of their goals.

They are not shown to be wrong. Indeed, we learn that synthetic life genuinely could bring about civilisational collapse, and almost does.

There are much stronger reasons to get annoyed at the ending of this season, though. As my essay on "Maps And Legends" hopefully made clear, I'm trying hard to limit the extent to which the show's squandering of its potential stops me talking about what that potential was. It's clear that even doing this is difficult, of course. This is twice in a row I've had to deliberately limit my engagement with the actual text to find something I thought was worth saying. But I did find them, deep beneath the surface, moving slowly and with weight.

The fact they turn out to the giant mecha-tentacles of the almighty AI-zathoth is a problem for another day. For now, we have a story that allows for a reading that rejects a principal pillar of 21st century. Whatever we now know this was the beginning of, it seems fair to fete this as an end unto itself.

[1] This is half-right, in fairness, emphasis heavily on "right".

[2] Which I call lazy writing, if not somewhat problematic. Linking the perfectly valid fear of losing one's job to automation with a suspicion of people different to you is fairly bog-standard class snobbery - the bourgeoisie aren't any less racist than the proletariat, they can simply afford better dog-whistles. It's also a framing which makes precisely zero sense in the context of a post-scarcity society. Of course, this is also the episode where Rafi strongly implies one's real estate options are dependent on one's career choices, so I guess it's clear we're just giving up on what made TNG unique more generally.

[3] Three hundred quatloos says Commodore Oh only chooses to give Narissa a second chance because she has literally no other asset she can call on.

[4]. Likely this is why Rafi got fired so quickly after Picard resigned - she was demonstrating a concerning determination to dig away under the cover story.

[5] Something I'd meant to say about this last time buf forgot: consider; just how often biological Fleet officers taken over by hostile alien minds. And yet ain't no-one suggesting the Federation forgoes fleshforms, are they? We see here echoes of the anti-trans movement holding up the vanishingly small number of trans women criminals as evidence that an entire class of people should be treated as dangerous.

[6] Assuming they are. Again; a foreign agent was running Starfleet Security for at least nine years. Which possibility does Occam's Razor cut closest to: that Fleet scrutiny processes completely failed, or that Fleet scrutiny processes were allowed to fail, to avoid the scandal that would erupt if the truth about Mars reached the public?

This is why - to anticipate a criticism of this essay - it doesn't actually matter that I'm comparing infiltrators of a foreign power with people whose true motives are fully known to those putting them in positions of authority.. What matters is the comparison being made by the ruling class between the price of opposition, the price of acquiescence, and the price of enthusiastic collaboration.

Episode Ordering

Ordering

1. A Man Alone 

2. Strange New World

3. Where No Man Has Gone Before 

4. Context Is For Kings

5. One Of Our Planets Is Missing 

6. The End Is The Beginning 

7. Time And Again

8. Code Of Honor