With Patrick Stewart’s death, I think back to TNG.
I have called it the pinnacle of television.
To me the premise of the show very rarely has anything to do with space in the way that Star Wars does. The show is about adults solving problems. Those problems just happen to be in space, but it could’ve worked in any setting to me. You could say the sci fi setting allowed them to explore the idea of adults solving problems much better.
I may have mentioned it before, but I am tired of grit and self-doubt that makes up adulthood in modern times. I hope this is not a right wing talking point, but I feel through collectively exploring our emotions in the last 20-30 years the concept of strong capable adults has gotten weaker and weaker.
Look at how the characters in TNG deal with problems. The futuristic setting worked so well here because it was saying that we have matured to deal with things calmly and professionally in the future. Not to say there weren’t emotional outbursts, they happened when appropriate.
Utopian ideals reflect the society they come from and what is ideal. It feels like our current society can only come up with a dystopian future and anything else is seen as boring. It feels like our utopia wouldn’t be a world where adults solve problems, but where kids are allowed to have emotional outbursts when needed. (I really hope these are right wing talking points.)
The adults in TNG were measured, had empathy, and had to make tough decisions based on their morals, compassion and the information they had at hand.
I’m not the only one in thinking that it’s funny/sad that the real continuation of TNG is Seth MacFarlane’s satire of a show Orville, which despite having comedic elements, deals with very serious topics and having adults solve them just like TNG did.
To end on a massive tangent, I read that in Japanese fiction, old people use washi instead of watashi for “I” because it is the Kyoto way of saying it, and when the capital moved to Tokyo in the Meiji Period, the old people speaking of the old ways were from Kyoto speaking in a Kyoto way.
For me at my age, what an adult means is what I saw as adults in the 80’s when I was young, and this includes TNG. I do wonder if I would use the term adult differently if all adults I saw had fought in a World War and had PSTD, or if they were open with expressing self-doubt and didn’t see merit in controlling their emotions.
So seriously, hopefully not right wing talking points here, but I find adults solving problems in TNG very calming.
I hope I am, or at least I aspire to be an adult solving problems with morals, compassion and the information at hand.
