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MAS*H in space?
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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Do you mean a war in space with spaceships? some war on an alien planet? Or a war on earth?
I mean we follow a mobile hospital, similar to MAS*H. Different planets as the front moves. We've had a lot of the war on starships, and I'm sure that there would necessarily be some of that, too, but we have not seen a lot of the war "on the ground" in Star Trek. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this episode of SNW and "Seige of AR-558" (DS9 7x08) are really the only episodes of Trek that I can remember that have depictions of full-scale battles on planets (or maybe I need to do a series rewatch somewhere)
The difficult thing about planet-side battles in Star Trek is the phasers. When one is hit with a phaser on high power, there is nothing left worth saving by a medic. Weapons in Trek are too efficient to make surface war particularly entertaining.
So maybe we don't see many phaser wounds, but saying that there's nothing there ignores all the other ways people can get injured in a battle (explosions, crashes, etc). There may not be analogs to bullet wounds, but I bet there are plenty of other ways.
The problem is that they’re not really trekking anywhere at that point. I remember that being a big criticism of DS9 when it was first airing. DS9 partially made up for it by having a very cosmopolitan setting and the occasional offworld episode, but it wasn’t until a few seasons that they were regularly having adventures off station.
Interestingly, I think DS9 was also the most war-related series, at least of the first four. Voyager had their ongoing Odyssey combat adventures, but not a larger war the way the Dominion War was portrayed. Generally speaking, wars with the Klingons or Romulans just provided context for episodic plots, not drive a multi-season story arc.
I even think there were several MASH-like episodes - stories like Nog playing medic, Jake as a war reporter, Kira being forced to evict that farmer, and some others. They showed the cruelty and absurdity of war, but of course without MASH’s humor. And I think that’s what made MASH, MASH. The bitter, jaded, drafted doctors and medical personnel using humor as a defense. It’s not war that’s non-Trek so much as that kind of human attitude (even if it did surface in later episodes of later series). There’s no Burns and Hot Lips versus Hawkeye and Trapper kind of dynamic in Starfleet.
Come to think of it, Q was a literary trickster character, like Hawkeye. They both had a bemused but sometimes quite angry disregard for authority and did what they could to show it up as absurd. That analogy never occurred to me before. Q is what Hawkeye would be given the power of a god.
Although I see your point, I have to disagree with you here. Look at the Beta shift vs Alpha shift in Lower Decks. There's clearly room in Starfleet for both the serious and the goofy, even in a comedy show.
Well now I want to see that show!
I agree, but I was concentrating on the Roddenberry-verse, since I think we started with the idea that it would be something apart from his conceptualization of the world-building he was doing.
In fact, I think that Lower Decks is a comedy, and one of the organizing features of the humor is poking good-natured fun at Roddenberry’s conceptualization of the universe and the Federation. It’s not outright parody in the sense of Galaxy Quest, but the non-Trekness is deliberately used as a source of humor.
I think that’s the pivot point. The US Army is worthy of endless parody and it doesn’t have to be good natured. We’ve hit a weird part of our timeline where we (as Americans) are idolizing our military as heroic icons. As someone who has been there, I’d rather go back to what we had in the 70s and 80s (not the institutionalized homophobia, but the skepticism of civilians). Starfleet was created at a time of such skepticism, and was set up in deliberate contrast as a near-utopian future. We’re coming to a different place now, where any given soldier is a selfless defender of freedom around the world but Starfleet is getting a more comedic and skeptical treatment.
Anyway, I’d really love to see the idea get a treatment, but it’d be tough to balance the Trekness with the MASHness.