Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
Read more about how to comment at Daystrom.
Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
3. Be diplomatic.
Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
4. Assume good faith.
Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”
5. Tag spoilers.
Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.
6. Stay on-topic.
Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.
Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
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I think it would behoove the series to revisit this issue in the future, and maybe shed some more light on why the eugenics laws exist, and why they're implemented in the way that they are.
As it stands, they haven't done much more than gesture toward the Eugenics Wars and said, "we don't want that to happen again." That's pretty much the bare minimum of what they should do - past franchise instalments have suggested that (human) genetic augmentation tends to produce unstable megalomaniacs (as Spock crudely put it, "Superior ability breeds superior ambition"). It would be nice to know whether this is still a likely side effect.
I'd also like to see more examination of what other Federation worlds have to say about this. Have other species had their own Eugenics Wars? Have any of their societies flirted with Gattaca-style hellscapes?
Overall, I keep coming around to this idea that the series is presenting regulations on eugenics as a bad thing, and I think they need to shade in some of those grey areas.
What an interesting episode idea, combining Gattaca with some sort of Federation meltdown over the societal practices. I enjoyed S02E02 quite a bit, and would like to see more of these "tough situations" for the UFOP to be challenged on. In this episode, Pike chooses a side, but acknowledges that he shouldn't have to pick, that the ideals the Federation espouses are still subject to deep, deep misunderstanding or fear.
I've been catching up on Star Trek shows for the past few years, starting with TOS and running all the way through Discovery's timeline hop. It's been neat to see how the Federation responds to different things as you watch the agency age and the story's canon coalesce.
WHAT?!?!?! Going forward, in my head cannon, Gattaca lives in the Star Trek universe.
Cool idea, right? C'mon Goldsman, bring it to the screen!