8.1.4 Truth Hurts
Absolute Candor
By the Prophets, I'm so sick of writing about Picard. I can’t fucking imagine how tired you all are of reading what I’m writing about it.
It's just the same sodding story every time, isn't it? Picard has to face up to the fact he messed up huge during the Romulan evacuation crisis, and must make amends. Someone tells him he's a worthless has-been, a pathetic figure whose pride has curdled to delusional arrogance now he no longer has the authority or power to justify his self-image. Then ACTION ensues, and Picard stands around looking confused, sad, exhausted, or some combination of all three. Then a woman sorts everything out for him.
The only relief from this pattern are the scenes on the ruined Borg cube, which are also just the same thing over and over. Narek tries to pump information out of Soji while trying to pretend that's the only pumping on his mind; Soji gets frustrated with Narek's secrecy and weird questions, but is just too into him to call it a day. All of this is seemingly building to some huge reveal, except that we’re not building upwards. It's construction akin to Gromit's panicked efforts in The Wrong Trousers, constantly throwing toy train track out ahead of him to keep the whole endeavour on the rails. Never has it been made to look like so much work to just keep going in circles.
And so every time I sit down to write up another Picard episode, I find myself having to find a clever new angle, to hide the fact I keep making the same points over and over. My first essay was broadly standard, I guess, though – even after telling myself not to – I couldn’t resist at least a little bitching about the fact the show had dared to not be what I’d most wanted, a sequel to a show Picard hadn’t even been in, after his pilot cameo. After that, though, things got properly ridiculous. I invented a parallel universe to talk about "Maps And Legends" in, because there just wasn’t any way to consider it in this one without wanting to abandon the blog entirely. Matters got still worse for "The End Is The Beginning". I just couldn't find a single coherent thing that story was trying to say, so I just used that emptiness as a blank canvas to scrawl political slogans on. Less a clever new angle; more the same shit I always do, but even less well hidden.
I’m not saying I regret those essays. Not really. Frankly, given my fear that I’m just taking the same approach to critiquing Trek over and over, looking for ways to break the mould is probably a good instinct. A nice way to season an otherwise bland blog (certainly a better one that my habitual overuse of italics). The problem, obviously, is that there needs to be something there to be seasoned. Otherwise you’re not cooking a meal, you’re overcomplicating a marinade you're about to pour over nothing.
Which is where we really reach the problem, isn’t it? A bad chef blames their ingredients. Sure, Picard isn’t the best- or most freshly-stocked larder. It’s still my job to cook up something people are going to actually want to eat.
And I just can’t figure out how to do it. I don’t know what to whip up from a serialised story trying to stretch a handful of themes across at least half a season. How do I draw up my menu for “Absolute Candor”? There’s the titular attitude itself, I suppose, and the Qowat Milat who practice it. I guess there was genuine potential here – a new form of the kind of extreme philosophical frames those originally hailing from Vulcan tend to engage in. But then nothing really gets done with it, does it? We don’t even see it enough for Jurati’s prediction that it’ll get annoying to come to pass. If anything, we get the exact opposite problem. Our new lad Elnor (totally not supposed to be reminiscent of Peter Jackon’s elves, no sir, that’s why his name is so totally different to “Elrond”) doesn’t grate by being overly honest, but by being a sulky passive-aggressive teenage dickhead. Refusing to tell Picard what’s wrong isn’t just a wearying cliché, it’s in direct contravention of the one thing his society have been introduced to us as doing.
They even try to lampshade this by having Zani insist that, no, Elnor totally does the absolute candour thing, but all this does is make clear how underbaked the new guy is. Jesus, lads. This isn’t the 90s US comics scene. You can’t just hand someone a frown and a katana and call them a character. Ooh, he's willing to murder people the moment he’s given an excuse? How grim. How dark. How we-no-longer-know-how-to-write-Trek-nor-do-we-particularly-care. Sure, Picard chews him out, just like Professor X might with Wolverine. No-one is supposed to actually conclude from that it would better had the blades stayed sheathed, though, are they?
But this is still just bitching about what I can put on the menu. Bitter words about bitter parsnips won't butter the unbitter ones.. I' m still failing to do what this blog supposedly exists to show me doing. I can try talking about the better elements here, maybe. We got a few. Well, a couple, anyway. It’s sweet to see Picard get the chance to truly bond with a child in a way he’s never really been able to, or perhaps even known how to, Now that he’s aged and been promoted out of his need for constant sternness, he can afford a little indulgent avuncularity. Narek pretending to have discovered a secret Borg ritual to give Soji a little uncomplicated delight makes sense in terms of his broader aims, but it’s also a nice moment of joy in an episode – and a show – that tends toward the saturnine.
With those brought from the cupboard, though, I’m left picking those pecks of pickled peppers left least puckered. The running joke of Rios having a fully hologrammatic crew all modelled after himself hasn't run out of steam yet. Seeing the original Romulan warbird design is fun, particularly since, unlike so much fan service in the franchise, nothing in the story suffers if the viewer has no memory or understanding of the historical significance of its inclusion, There's not really much point discussing Jeri Ryan's return until next time, but the possibilities of comparing and contrasting her post-Borg experiences with Picard are clear, and God knows Trek owed Ryan the opportunity to contribute from outside the ambit of Rick Berman's boob fetish.
It’s also interesting getting to hear from our briefly be-headed (before he becomes, well, you can fill the rest of the “joke” for yourself) Romulan Senator. We’re still no closer to understanding the broader picture, but the suggestion that the Romulans didn’t work as hard as they could have toward full evacuation because the Federation persuaded them they were happy to take on a lot of the load seems sensible. Ish? I guess? I'm having a hard time understanding why the famously, even boringly stereotypically paranoid Romulans (too suspicious to have actual front doors, as last episode informed us) would wait until the very moment that trusting the Federation would have the most disastrous consequences imaginable should they be betrayed is the moment to give peace a chance. You don't reach for an olive branch if it means leaping off a cliff.
On the other hand, for those of us quixotically even shamefully obsessed with the subject of Romulan expansion, we might process former Senator Adrev’s claims, and wonder what the Star Empire needed doing at that point which made the Federation offer to grant their fleet some slack so tempting. What did they need ships for so badly they didn't want them particapting in evacuating the home systems? (I’m sticking with my standard answer of keeping the Eastern Empire under control, for the record.)
But we're right back at the problem, Again, This isn't about analysing the episode. This is about how the episode doesn't harm my analysis of how a fictional race grew its fictional empire. New evidence fails to refute my ludicrously overbaked head canon theory. That's not anything I can expect anyone to be satisfied in reading about. Is this how I want people to think I think? Is this all I can deliver, having suggested this piece was worth ten minutes of your life?
And then the fear kicks in. Has that been the problem the whole time? What if this place has always just an endless parade of pet theories and petty gripes, shuffled into a slightly different order each month. Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations isn’t just a terrible name (though the working title was worse), it’s an outright lie. Not a lie to many of you, of course; it’s a good month when a post gets more than thirty views. The fact there’s barely anyone left to disappoint doesn’t exactly strike me as a win, though, particularly given the completely unjustifiable amount of time these essays take to put together. It took two and half months of shaking my cerebellum before "See The Light" dropped out (another terrible title). "Mirror Moves" (a dumb and obvious reference to an album most people won’t even have heard of, titling an essay where the central theme of mirrors is very clearly forced) only took a fortnight, but that’s because I worked on it two hours a day over pretty much my entire Christmas holiday. Fourteen people have read it.
So I thought: fuck it. Picard. Absolute candour. Sure, why not? Dash of a quick essay where I don’t put my standard filters up, get it done in a couple of evenings, and hope I can actually find something to say about “Stardust City Rag”. Chuck in a culinary metaphor to keep me amused, and then drop it when I get bored. Classic IDFC.
Except it didn’t work. I don’t mean aesthetically (though who knows whether anyone will enjoy reading this); I mean functionally. I kept having to go back on what I was writing because I just wasn’t comfortable knowing people could read those words. Certainly I wouldn’t want them to, which rendered the whole exercise even more pointless than usual. So I kept hitting delete. A mention of how, in one scene, I found a character particularly sexually attractive. A reference to the presumed colour of the veins on a Romulan’s sexual organs. A conversation I had with a family member about the fallout from the last time I was this honest on the blog, when I wrote about my relationship with my late sister (still by some margin the most-read piece on IDFC, which is pretty fucking bleak when you think about it).
You might think this is just ingrained English politeness, but I can assure you that’s not the case. Twenty years ago my worthless edgelord ass would have delighted in having an excuse to say the first thing that came into his head. It might be closer to the truth to say I've still not expunged my internal misogyny, that tells me the only acceptable emotion for a man to show is anger, and that all my years spent trying to deprogramme myself on that score has managed is to prevent me from channelling that anger anywhere except inward (witness this whole essay).
There's another possibility though. Maybe over a decade of being on the front line of the free speech wars has made me too suspicious of candour. I'm just too sick of hearing “I’m just being honest!” as a chaser to shots of self-centered liquid bullshit. It's the pathetic self-jusifitication of those who insist not only that they be heard, but that those hearing agree it is good that they have spoken. Trying to push past that, even in service to a bit, didn’t make me feel free. It made me feel sad.
Maybe I’d feel different in a society where everyone is encouraged – truly and honestly encouraged - to speak their truth, rather than this being behaviour venerated in the worst possible white people and considered despicable in just about anyone else. I mean, how do we improve society somewhat without achieving that situation - with the obvious caveat that we recognise certain people have shared their truths quite enough for the moment, thank you (casting a woman of colour as the House Leader is a stroke of genius in this respect).
But I'm not sure even that's true. I think empathy, properly applied. requires we actually take a second to think about how what we want to say is likely to be heard.
The rhetorical triangle has come up on the blog before. I can't remember where, and it's too late at night the day before this is due for me to want to go searching. I only deployed the damn thing to make it look like I knew what I was talking about regarding what we talk about. Anyway. To restate: the words we say form just part of communication. There's also the intent of the speaker, and the interpretation of listener. Total candour means those first two (the logos and ethos, respectively) always match. The effect this will have upon the pathos – how those hearing absolute candor will interpret that candor – isn’t considered. As a result, this approach is actually no less self-centered than the Vulcan obsession with logic, or the Romulan obsession with privacy. My truth. My logic. My secrets.
And yet for all I’m raising one peaked eyebrow at the idea of absolute candour in practice, I can't deny its power as an addition to Trek. It gives us another triangle (the shape so beloved by Vulcans and Romulans both), not rhetorical, but philosophical and cultural. The whole point of these kinds of triangular theory is that you’re supposed to find yourself taking into account all three points. Absolute candor isn't a point you're supposed to reach. It's a point you're supposed to let yourself be pulled towards, rather than seeing everything in terms of what you you need to be hiding. You can't figure out where your boundaries are until you come up upon them.
It's a lesson worth remembering, and an exercise worth trying - what's the most honest you're prepared to be, and what happens when you push against that limit? Maybe - just maybe - that's something worth saying. It seems less likely it's worth saying in a 2600 word essay, but I'll be damned if I'm starting this essay for a third time, so this will have to do. I guess that if I can't be good, I can at least be bad in new ways. A somewhat gonzo, show-your-working piece isn't something I remember having tried before. And I think it's good to show a little vulnerability from time to time. Even if you risk coming across less impressively than you might want, it's good to figure out where your boundaries are, and to let others know where they are as well.
And hey? You want absolute candor? I really don't think I can do any better.
Ordering
4. Babel
5. Absolute Candor
6. Phage
7. Unexpected
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