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Comment by Gunax | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to go on a tangent, but I am surprised how many TNG episodes have 'alien species that is thinly veiled stand-in for some human race'. And this is a show that would have been woke for it's time.

[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Up_The_Long_Ladder_(epi...

[2] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Code_of_Honor_(episode)

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Ah, the insane early TNG episodes... For every Measure of a Man and Q Who, there's loads of this.

Here's more fun recaps:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekTheNext...

Honorable mentions:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekTheNext...

Well science fiction is merely a way to examine current society. The SF angle is an attempt to get a little "outside" perspective.

It's pretty hard to make truly alien aliens, as the more alien they are, the harder they are to understand, identify with etc, making the stories themselves less interesting.

The aliens in The Gods Themselves are pretty alien but still have, from time to time, a human-like mode of thinking which Asimov used to explain their behavior. The Bug Wars is the only book I've read that has no humans at all, though the aliens' mentalities are somewhat human, again to make them comprehensible.

Famously "different" aliens (e.g. Moties, the bugs of Ender's Game & sequels) are actually pretty human in motivation.

And the inscrutable aliens (e.g. Starship Troopers) are clearly inscrutable stand-ins for contemporary political enemies.

The various literature on intelligent machines has the same problem.

Arrival was a good attempt at that

Not to detract from the whole point as far as Star Trek showing its social-commentary age, but AFAIK “Code of Honor” specifically was very much an early outlier in TNG history, including starting with a director who didn't direct any other Star Trek episodes.

The writer did get it made again as an early sg1 episode - though Sam Did look cute in her steppes princess outfit

Tangent on a tangent, but my daughter was recently binge-watching The Clone Wars animated series and at one point I had to ask: "So they have Space Asians there?"

Well, they already have Space Knights, Space Gunmen, and Space Witches, so why not.

Yeah, it's pretty bad. Babylon 5 is super blatant about it, bordering on racist stereotypes.

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