Actually, with my hyper specific life I've never felt more of a connection with a character like Bashir. He is a character that is a competent human being that has recovered from significant life altering medical trauma. I may appear neurotypical, but like Bashir i am wired differently than the rest of humanity and it shows for the better. For me I had a brain surgery when i was very young, for bashir it was his genetic manipulation. Just because somebody has made progress in healing from medical trauma doesn't mean they aren't disabled anymore.
@@crypticmirror That's not a very good way to put it. He wasn't a lobotomised person or someone with a brain injury before. He had developmental delays, unspecified. I get that you're trying to be funny but is it appropriate right here?
@@crypticmirror Technically Bashir views himself as "Julian" a different person from the "Jules" that his parents fixed/killed. On this view changing his body/brain would not be returning to the former state it would be replacing himself with yet a third person.
I'm sorry but as someone who has been wheelchair bound since birth Pike's fate scares me, the lack of personal agency, inability to communicate and total dependency on others is one of my greatest fears. I'm 30 years old and still rely on my parents for some extra chores and personal hygiene but I still have a job, hobbies and my own friends but the fear of being totally helpless or loosing my voice is a nightmare I face every night as the ventilator's automatic breaths slowly put me to sleep.
I know this an old comment but thank you for making it. You put words to feelings I could not express with a genetic disorder. Thank you again I hope you are well.
I'm don't have a physical disability but I absolutely see where you're coming from. That's the one point where Steve lost me. At the VERY least, we can interpret the horror of Pike's visions to be an overt emotional reaction which is still hasn't been able to come to terms with. I'd absolutely have a similar reaction; not because I think disabled people don't deserve to be accommodated in any way possible or that they can't live full lives, but because that's a HUGE life change even assuming our society was 100% accessible... which it unfortunately is very much NOT. That said, I can see how people may see this as explicitly negative representation, but we really haven't seen the end of Pike's story yet. Ideally, they can show him gradually coming to terms with his fate over time. Even so, you elucidated reasons that would very much justify his shock at such an outcome.
Hi, I trust this finds you well. I thought a while about your fear of losing your voice, I would like to recount an experience. A friend, very vocal, knowledgeable, comical/dry/cutting sense of humour, completely lost his voice due to throat cancer. He/we hardly missed a beat, within a few days we had adapted and by lip-reading and hand-gestures and occassional writen short-hand notes, it was soon business as normal. The main thing we avoided, except for 'another pint?' etc, were asking him Yes/No questions, that way he was contributing to the conversation as much, if not more, than before. His only irk was that occassionlly people would impatiently finish his sentence too soon, and/or step on a punch-line, and he would have to correct them (usually by shaking his head and making yak yak sign with his hand). Losing your voice is not actually that big of a deal, as long as other people lend you their ears (No pun/joke intended). Unfortunately my friend succumbed to the cancer about a year later, so he cannot tell you himself what I'm fairly confident he would have told you, 'some people talk too much without saying anything, its better to keep quiet and be considered stupid, rather than speak and remove all doubt'. The quiet actually gave him time to appeciate his other qualities, for one his guitar playing became much more powerful and meaningful. I hope you don't fear 'losing your voice' so much, it's not so isolating as you might initially suspect. It certainly didn't slow Steven Hawking down much. Peace.
I'm a year late to this comment, but thank you for putting this into words, because Steve kind of lost me on this. I'm not currently physically disabled, but I'm very likely autistic and do struggle with many things NT people consider basic. Losing my agency in any way or being unable to care for myself, especially if living alone, is a very real fear. Not only is becoming physically disabled obviously a huge change in someone's life, it's an understandable fear I think and I think it's ok to admit that and face it, especially given how society sees and treats ND and disabled people and also given that most people will likely become disabled at some point. From injury, age, whatever the case may be.
As an autistic person myself Odo stands out for me. He is heavily dependant on routine, he finds social interaction and small talk difficult, he notices details that no other character would and is extremely analytical. He also "reverts to his natural state every 16 hours" which could be seen as him masking through the day and then being himself when he gets back to his quarters (or bucket in earlier seasons).
I'm also Autistic and identify with Odo. His backstory of growing up being studied and experimented on at the Bajoran Science Institute feels like an allegory for the dehumanizaion of Autistic People.
Yes. The "revert to his natural state" could be some autistic persons need for alone time or doing something the find relaxing. I like how they just see it as totally fine because if it normal for him, he can just do his thing. :)
Btw Data is in many ways a steotypical depictions of autism. Not that it is a bad thing, because some autistic see themself interily in him while others see traces. Btw btw. The vulcans have always stiked me as an autistic alien race. xD
When I first saw that episode with Nog when I was younger I just thought he was being a jerk. Then I joined the Air Force, served overseas, and had my leg destroyed in a severe accident. Then I saw that episode again during my recovery and it hit me hard. I can see how it's hard for people to identify with the struggle people go through in becoming disabled.
I've never acquired a disability (I was born disabled) so I can't relate to that, but it does sound like that episode was fairly realistic in terms of emotional reactions. Especially in Ferengi who represent some of the more proud or stubborn aspects of humanity.
Event with all the empathy in the world, it is almost impossible for someone who haven't lived with a disability to fully understand what it mean to live like that. All the small things it impact, all the changes you make in your life because of it without even thinking about it because it have become a part of you.
Idk watching that episode i had full sympathy for him because i think the episode luckily speaks to all forms of trauma as well, especially in the final dialogue between Vic and Nog where he talks about being scared to face the real world again. Idk that shits hits me hard everytime, and im very lucky not to have had any injuries. I think the episode does a good job though showing how dismissive everyone around him is, especially Ezri who sees his pain as fake, I feel they’re dealing here with phantom pain as well though its not clear how his new leg works
I think that Episode isn't just one of the best DS9 episodes, but is one of the best Star Trek episodes. It handles both the horror of war, and the aftermath of major battles brilliantly..
I'm a wheelchair user, myself, and as to your closing point (about how disabled people should be just part of the world), I've come up with a "Bechdel Style Test" for disability in fiction, that I call "The 1,001 Problems Test": 1.There's a Disabled Character 2. Who wants something (for themselves) 3. Beyond Revenge, Cure, or Death 4. And tries to get it. Meanwhile, I'm feeling Melora's pain, right now. I am a wheelchair user, and *more than a **_year_** ago* I started the process to replace the chair I had, which was breaking down, with the same make and model. The paperwork was completed in September, and it wasn't until January 14th that I got word that Medicare approved it... *ten weeks* later (after I'd already paid my deductible), my new chair was delivered, *and it was not the model I'd ordered* -- I didn't find out until the guys delivering it were driving it into my living room. There are features of this chair that make it a lot less usable. And all I was told was: "The company doesn't make your model, anymore. What do you expect us to do about that?" *You could have told me.* I could have figured out adaptations before you dropped it in my lap. (or dropped my lap into it, actually). Grr. And I bet the writers thought they were being so clever and original...
OMG getting identical replacements for specific accommodations you need to get by with your disability is a NIGHTMARE as various things just keep ceasing to be manufactured. This is a double nightmare when you're autistic and need to find the perfect stuff that doesn't give you sensory issues.
Fellow wheelchair user here. Evan Carlos Somers was the original story writer for "Melora" and he's also a wheelchair user, so I think he was trying for a more nuanced take in the episode, but my impression is that got muddled and even kinda rehashed by the able-bodied writers and director. It's unfortunate and frustrating. Hope your new chair works out and doesn't give you too much grief. I'm in a similar boat with my new pair of leg braces/AFOs.
@@convex242 Oh, yeah. It's easy to see that that story was written from a wheelchair user's POV. That's why diversity behind the camera is as important as diversity on stage.
Agreed, though I do like the idea that Cardassian architecture is intentionally hostile to disabled or non-Cardassian individuals. Makes a great deal of sense within the context of that culture.
I've been looking forward to this video. My father was a "first generation" Trekkie. Watched it in the late 60's when it first aired. My dad was blind and in a wheelchair all his life. The most he ever said about the depiction of disabled people in Trek was in regards to Geordi and how he was sorta jealous that by then Blindness has more or less been cured. My dad had a variety of health issues too so he was in hospitals A LOT, and I remember him often citing a line by Dr. McCoy in Star Trek 4: "What is this, the Dark Ages?", "Sounds like a god damned Spanish Inquisition!", "Dealing with medievalism here!" My Dad LOVED using Trek's optimistic future - especially the advancements of medicine in the show - to rag on modern medical science and politics. My dad is one of my reasons on why many of the doctor characters are my favorite characters in the series - ESPECIALLY McCoy, Flox, Bashir and The Doctor.
Also when mccoy asks the woman in renal failure what the treatment is and she says dialysis he says how barbaric and the physicality of the surprise lurch and his body always killed me. Those lines from him have been my favorite spoken in the franchise since I saw it. 10 years after star trek 4 came out I lost 95% of my vision and 7 years after that I went into renal failure. Trust me I used all of mccoy's lines Plenty in all the treatments I got especially the eye surgeries. Gotta kidney pancreas transplant in 04 and it's still going strong but I still dropped those mccoy lines whenever possible. I found out recently that lavar Burton only had 15% of his vision while wearing the visor so he figured out how to use the set lights as monuments to maneuver around props et cetera. That's exactly what I do or I get lost in my own living room. Thanks for telling us about your dad. Take care.
There was the TOS episode "Is There in Truth No Beauty?" that had a blind woman with a sensor vest she used to get around. It was like halfway through the episode that we even found out she was blind, and she made a very big point of saying it didn't affect what she was capable of.
And the only character who knew before anyone else was dr. McCoy who kept it to himself, stating that it’s none of his business and if she wanted the others to know, she would have told them herself. I really liked that.
I was fumbling to mention this one, kept falling asleep mid comment. Popped awake again to finish and find all I'd typed gone. Grr There could be theoretically 2 differenced here. Miranda Jones is first and foremost a Telepath who is powerful enough and Skilled enough to traverse a bridge that exists between two species as the most notable of their innate difference is that humans are corporeal and Medussans are NON-corporeal, so how could we ever pretend to understand the differences between us, a difference that could preclude EVER understanding the difference between species Medusans are non-corporeal, energy based life forms, what common ground could we ever share? Finding that Miranda Jones is blind. It is her blindness that actually allows her to engage with Ambassador Kollos, in a way that seeks the common-ground that LIFE might share. Miranda being blind allows a different piece of Common- ground. During the story Mirranda seems to show jealousy towards Spock, her dialogue leaving us to believe it is as she states that Spock's telepathic ability might make a connection between Mirranda Jones a more complete understanding of what could bring two such different species together Mirranda's jealousy had nothing to do with the lies she has told herself and us, the audience. The jealousy was over Kollos himself, a romantic interest that likely grew during a penpal or letter / communication exchange. Is there in Truth tricks the audience into thinking it's about beauty, a trickery further hammered into our subconscious knowledge of beauty by the name Medusa. Love is the point of "is there no beauty" Mirranda is blind. It is that blindness which allows Kollos and Miranda to find a love between each other. 2 Houses...alike in dignity. Sort of Romeo and Juliet here as the obstacles seemed insurmountable, but Miranda and Kollos sids't give up and quit. If you can't tell, i hate Romeo and Julliet Thanks for reading it. Glad I stayed awake long enough to type this out.
As a disabled person I’ve always assumed that they’ve been able cure most disabilities. I suffer from a very debilitating illness that affects me life as a father, as a husband etc and some days I find it hard to get out of bed sometimes. Trek for me is an escape, and I’ve never felt and negativity towards Trek regarding how disability has been handled. I guess I’ve never thought about it. On the bit about how Pike reacts to seeing his future; I can tell you now, if younger me, had seen what was going to happen to me, I would have been terrified, horrified maybe worse. The way it was handled actually seemed fair to me when I think about how I might have reacted.
As someone else who suffers from a debilitating disability, that was my same thought. The idea that we don't want to be cured, that we want our conditions to be preserved just so we can exist as a "culture" comes a little close to the notion of romanticizing disabilities for my taste. I hope absolutely nobody's left with my condition in the future.
I think part of the challenge is that disability is, in itself, diverse, and disabled folk are not a monolith. Disabled individuals can verywell be ableist towards other disabled folks (especially those with very different disabilities than themselves) or have internalized ableism themselves. I am disabled in some ways, but I have to remain mindful that my experiences are not universal, and I can't speak for everyone, and that I can behave in a manner towards others that is verymuch ableist, too. One thing others have mentioned, that possibly drives this home, is that Bashir is likely neurodivergent himself, at least, arguably, at one point. That possible truth doesn't mean he didn't behave problematically towards other disabled/neurodivergent folks in the several episodes this video highlights him in. That said, I agree with the video, that overall, portrayal in the Star Trek Universe is a mixed bag. What people see and resonate with, and how they feel about that mixed bag, probably has a lot to do with their own unique experiences and perspectives, too.
So less the idea that physical limitations are a bad thing, and more the idea that Pike knows this is what will happen to him and there is no way out. Not the form he will take, but the knowledge that he will lose the form he has now.
I feel like a plain simple tailor should have been included in this, his struggle with claustrophobia is not only incredible onscreen but you could tell Andrew Robinson put his own struggle into that character
@@Vesperitis To be fair Garak had more than anxiety issues going on, he was one of several DS9 characters struggling with PTSD (Sisko & O'Brien being notable others). It definitely had a hand in shaping his personality, and was handled pretty well in the most part (IMHO). The term PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) itself problematic, it could be argued as a perfectly normal response to extreme circumstances and therefore not a disorder at all. Another example of those working in mental health treating those they serve as defective.
@@AnthonyIlstonJones I remember Nana Visitor saying that because of her son, she doesn't say the disorder part. It is a way for the mind and body to adapt and survive extreme stress and conditions.
@@Vesperitis has claustrophobia, build things that are hardly larger than the body > congratulations you played yourself I grew up watching MASH so I always enjoy that actor
Troi losing her telepathy!! I thought this was a really good episode for showing an able bodied person suddenly experiencing a disability and unable to cope with the loss psychologically. *Especially* because it’s a healthcare professional. I think it really shows those of us who assume we’d be stoic & brave in the same circumstances might be kidding ourselves. I also thought it was good that they didn’t rush her acceptance, it felt like it was beginning but would be a long process. Of course we don’t see that because she suddenly gets her power back again, and it all gets wrapped up with a bow by the end of the episode - but that’s TNG.
The biggest thing, for me, about that episode was how *clueless* everyone else was about her loss. Because she lost an ability that none of them had, they had no frame of reference for her loss. They were like, "So you're just like us now, and we're OK, you should be, too."
@@jimhenry5552 Yeah, for being so evolved, they should had been more empathetical towards her. I felt many degraded her feelings and experiences. Same as with how several degraded Worfs feelings at several occasions. If one of the crew suddenly lost their ability to fly with wings, I doubts anyone would go "Well whatever, we never could fly, so you should be acclimated already, because we don't even know what you're missing!"
@@TheGrinningViking That's a fault of the writers not utilizing the character. I feel that the loss was more of something of how Troi functioned and saw the world, and suddenly she lost a layer of her vision, so to speak. Whether or not her ability to empathize was well depicted or utilized in her job and the series, it was a loss to *her*, and that was what the episode focused on.
I would hardly call Pike's fate "merely sitting in a wheelchair." He is grossly disfigured, barely able to communicate, and as I interpreted it, in constant pain. As a disabled person who lives with constant pain (I still have mobility, however) yes, it deserves a pretty a horrified reaction.
Agreed with you, and I think his comparison to Kenneth Mitchell's battle with ALS is honestly a pretty horrid one. I don't think it's "merely sitting in a wheelchair" that is potentially harrowing for Mitchell and his family... or most others dealing with ALS. It's the fact that his motor neurons will progressively shut down. The physical and mental pain that will progress over time before the *most* terminal condition possible (re: death) is what causes the distress, not some idea that "wheelchair = bad." This is certainly the anguish my mother felt (although, thank God she did not have chronic pain before she went) dealing with MS for three decades. It's honestly rather tone deaf from Steve IMO, and it kinda feels like he's treating it as if all wheelchair-bound have the same lot in life. And that couldn't be farther from the truth.
@@davidthedeaf tone deaf is describing the inability to perceive the nuances in a conversation, in this case Steve kind of downplays the situation Pike ends up in and makes a broad sweeping statement about those in wheelchairs being in the same situation. I believe this opinion is something he may have concluded to himself rather than those actually in wheelchairs, Pike isn’t just disabled he’s unable to operate; the best starfleet could do to accommodate their best officer was the beep chair which shows how bad it is, only being able to say yes/no while in constant pain is barely living, he can’t feed himself, he can’t clothe himself, he can’t even go to the bathroom by himself.
@@pjaypender1009 It’s a neuro-divergent observation at worst. Being “tone deaf” is not an physical/mental disability, Just the lacking levels of situational awareness in terms of the emotions and feelings of others in a given situation.
I think the closest analogue would be why most drivers ed doesn't teach kids manual transmission anymore. In Trek the artificial gravity seems to be so reliable that it remains working even in the most catastrophic situations (and yes in the meta sense we know why that's the case, a cheap tv show can't fake zero g on a whim), so why would Starfleet bother training most cadets on zero g procedures? I expect certain tracks (O'Brien and Sisko would almost certainly know) dealt with it, but why would the guy in Starfleet Medical have to devote time to it.
@@JRMcCarroll But I think there is a difference in someone who is simply trained for "zero-g combat" and someone who almost naturally lives in said environment. Think about it as the difference between watching a human trying to swim as gracefully as a dolphin in the ocean. Sure you can learn how to do it but would you ever be as graceful and fluid as said dolphin? At least this is what I think they were going for here anyway.
@@chrisblake4198 I see your point but i think the difference here is that automatic cars dont just randomly become manual but theoretically grav plating could fail at any moment edit: also you never now when you encounter a ultra low gravity planet such as the elaysian homeworld and you probably dont want your diplomats to crack open their heads on the ceiling because they stood up too fast and shot upwards to the roof. Also it would be incredibly easy for starfleet officers to be trained in Zero-G. just take a week each year where the cadets are trained on a space station and shutdown gravity in their quarters and classrooms
@@sehfisch2350 I do wonder if its like basic training in the military. As in at the academy, before Bashir went into specialist medical training he received the minimum amount of Zero-G training sufficient to prevent him from hurting himself in an emergency (how to get to the nearest locker with mag-boots or whatever).
Garth was wounded in battle, his body was wounded.He was given power to repair his body by thought. After a wile he lost it mentally over his new condition, that led him to Elba 2.
Get this: I'm a presenter and one of my most popular class is "Sex And People With Disabilities! I teach respectful ways to approach/hit on both temporarily able and people with various disabilities. The other half of the class is show and tell: i bring in a bunch of toys, furniture, positioning pillows, etc. It's the more popular half (people like to try to sneak in for the second part) and it proves what Steve said. ETA: the toys and stuff are adaptive gear, not just sexy stuff to buy. Oh, and no live sex demonstrations either.
Good video. Although I have to say with Pike, he isn't merely limited to a wheelchair, but largely unable to do much of anything. Even his communication is severely curtailed. As someone with multiple disabilities which are progressive, I think there can become a point where it does become a huge problem for the person. I for one would not want to be a quadriplegic who cannot communicate. For me, that'd be hell.
That was part of the point of the episode since the damage to Pike was so severe that it was "hell" it was preferable that he would accept the illusion that the people of Talos offered as a viable alternative and that out of loyalty to the best interests of Pike, that Spock would go to such lengths to give Pike that opportunity
Yeah, Pike's disability, and more specifically his assistive device, was always portrayed as distrubingly limited given it's, you know, the 23rd century. Comparing it to Steven Hawking's setup, it's a severe lack of imagination.
Also, keep in mind, Pike had been OFFERED this (illusion on Talos IV), and he accepted it. Pike was far beyond just "disabled"...it's basically a situation where he's trapped in his own mind, unable to interact with the world at all. We don't see all of the discussion, but Spock had clearly discussed something with him. Kirk specifically asks him if he wants to go back to Talos IV at the end, and he says yes.
I agree. He's not just "in a wheelchair", not just disabled, but far beyond that. His body is extremely irradiated, he's quadriplegic, has lost nearly all ability to communicate or interact with anyone beyond a binary answer, and that doesn't even factor in what the levels of his physical pain on a moment to moment basis might be. Anson Mount's reaction isn't in response to "I'm in a wheelchair!", it is to seeing himself in that frankly mutilated state, a reaction I think most anyone would have to seeing themselves after a terrible accident. But, I also recognize in that scene he gets up, accepts that future is his future, and he goes onward, knowing that he does in fact survive, and accepting it as something he CAN do.
Stephen Hawking is a great example of how that exact issue isn't necessarily a "huge problem". He had a hard life, sure. But he made a huge contribution to society and is widely revered by scientists and non-scientists alike. He even used his disability to his advantage by visualizing black holes in his mind in a way that wasn't possible before his condition advanced to the point where he was stuck in his own mind more or less.
Melora's situation ties into something I've been thinking about lately. Her disability isn't really a disability at all in the way we conventionally think about such things. On her home planet she's perfectly normal. What makes her disabled is living in a society designed for people adapted to higher gravity. Conversely, Geordi, who we would normally consider disabled, isn't, because society has adapted, socially and technologically, to allow him to go about his life with the same ease as sighted people. I think that gets at the true nature of disability. It's not what your body or brain prevents you from doing, but what sort of person society is structured for. Consider a world where everyone was autistic. Or had dwarfism. Or pick any other "disability". The people living in such a society would not consider themselves disabled, because society would already be structured in such a way that they experienced no difficulties. And I think viewing disability in this way opens up interesting avenues of discussion. What other people, who we might not consider conventionally disabled, are effectively made disabled by society being structured in such a way that it limits their ability to live their lives?
Absolutely. This is known as the social model of disability (if you want to do further research), and it’s very important in many disability activism communities. A few countries have even officially adopted the social model into their laws or constitution or whatever, and a few more are proposing to do so soon.
Good point. With Geordi I think his visor could be considered like a prosthetic leg. He’s close enough to operating as the world expect that people almost forget he even is different until he can see something other people can’t. The audience almost has to be reminded that while he has some ‘sight’ it’s not actually the same sight most humans are born with. Like I thought my friend’s brother just had a bit of a limp until he joked about his prosthetic leg around the campfire (he was a bit drunk, lol) and proceeded to pull it off. So while technology exist to aid the disability to almost invisible, it is interesting that there are these moments of ‘oh yeah, it’s a bit different for you’.
There's a short story that addressed that kind of thing where a man falls down a cliff to an area sealed off for a valley where everyone is congenitally blind due to some barrier keeps the eyes sealed. He thinks he'll rule because he can see but they can't understand this 'sight' thing he goes on about and eventually decide it's some DISability he suffers from and once they remove his eyes he'll be cured and fine like everyone else. Barely escaping he crawls back up the cliffside to the 'normal' world.
yesss the social model of disability! if I lived in a society where people could fly, I would be disabled if my school was at the top of a tree. accessibility for me would be an elevator, or prosthetic wings. furthermore, everyone is only temporarily abled-disability is an inevitable part of ageing! inaccessible architecture is not just hostile to disabled people, but to EVERYBODY'S futures... no wonder people are afraid to get old. mortality is enough to be afraid of already, without also grieving the loss of being able to participate in society.
I’m a disabled Marine. When I was first told my shoulder injury was a permanent and degenerative pain condition (CRPS) I immediately remembered Nog. Honestly that helped a lot.
Barkey's episode was one of the only times in TNG that I looked at the cast and thought, "wow, what schmucks". I mean they're blatantly so agitated by someone acting different that it makes one wonder how they tolerate alien species at all.
I suppose it's _different_ in them for two reasons. 1) They're all the "Crem de le creme" of the force. The Big-E-D is the Flagship and pride of the fleet. And as humans they feel they know how humans are _supposed_ to act. So they have a sociological bias there. 2) With aliens, they're aliens so acting "weird" is "just how they are". It's why, people might get irked with Data (see "Paulaski"), but they kinda shrug it off with "Well he's an android".
The main cast is often shown chafing at their responsibilities when other complicated aliens are interacted with. Picard, Riker, and Geordi have full episodes where they voice their displeasure at doing something out of the ordinary to please aliens.
Geordi's rapport with Riva. Both had an instant connection. Levar Burton seemed to light up during that scene like never before. This episode often reminds me to say hi to people in wheelchairs and make eye contact...often the person pushing the wheelchair assumes I was talking to them when the hello was not directed up there.
That’s very arrogant of the carer, especially if they’re just hired help and not a family member or something. Most of my wheelchair using friends push themselves, but one gets a nurse in once or twice a week (pre pandemic) for going out. She hates that crap. She also hates how many of them seem to push with no regard for her comfort, no avoiding potholes, randomly tipping her back without warning to go up kerbs, and so forth.
You could also argue that applies to the Geordi/Data friendship as well. One of Data's most touching scenes ever to me is when he describes how Geordi was the first person he ever encountered that treated him like an equal.
I try to do the same, try not to stare but try not to look away at the same time. I work in a fabric store so we get some people with mobility issues. With the pandemic, we put tables in front of the counter, so its hard for people to reach. I try to but their fabric as close as possible or I just walk around and dive it to them. I know people like to do things for themselves, but I was taught growing up to help.
As an able bodied RN I have had several discussions with co-workers about life after injury or illness. We discuss what we would and would not accept: quadriplegia, paraplegia, traumatic brain injure, severe burns and the like. What we did not discuss is this fact - almost all, like 99.9% of patients who survive with disability choose to continue on in a new way. We forgot to factor in reality. The fear of possible disability blinded me to the simple fact - if I were disabled, I would want to continue to live, be seen and interact with the world. Thank-you for this episode and the thoughtful discussion.
Yep! The number of suicides of disabled people in no way mirrors the number of people who claim 'I'd rather be dead.' One thing I find many medical professionals fail to realise is that they in fact know very little about the realities of disabled life. The confines of a hospital and a tiny part of our lives and the medical issues are very different than living in an environment (both social & physical) constructed to exclude you.
I find that interesting too, as someone whos worked as a "personal assistant" (atleast thats the swedish term) as well as a carer in a home for people with mental dissabilities to the point of not being able to live independently, and in nursing homes with severely dement and or end of life patients, I find that the sentiment "Id rather be dead" only very rarely is expressed in discussions on the topic whereas "thats not a life" is far more common. Like, Ive seen the everyday lives of people whove gotten to the pont where Im thinking to myaself "yeah, if that ever happened to me I would rather be dead", and Ive had patients literally tell me "This is not a life worth living, you have no dignity and basically just wait to die. Do yourself a favour and dont grow old." (muscle deterioration and incontinence that couldnt even feel it when they shit themselves but clear head that they tried to dull with alcohol) but it has to come to an extremely extreme point for that to kick in. The worst cases for me to immagine having happen to ones self is where you can no longer properly process or communucate with the world around you, leading to extreme stress and insecurity when things arent a certain way cause you cant process why and people cant understand your distress. Thats not much of a life at all, stuck in your head with your fear
My disability is very minor compared to many, but was still permanently life-altering. It's not just your lifestyle that adapts when you lose ability, it's your mindset. Those thoughts able-bodied people have about what kind of injuries they would be willing to accept are replaced with thoughts along the lines of "What's the minimum ability I'd need to maintain to continue, should things get worse?" Able people think in maximum pain thresholds. Disabled people think in minimum functionality thresholds.
@@LucyLynette indeed, plus people who’ve never had to adapt before think they’re incapable or that it would be too difficult or traumatising. But most disabled people just find ways around things, even if that’s just “I simply had to accept I couldn’t do as much between breaks”. One of my wheelchair using friends, whose permission I have to tell her stories, often complains about ambulatory folks seeing her “struggle” with a door. She’s like “I’m not struggling, it’s just a multi-stage process”. But other people leap in to grab a door for her, even when she says “trust me, it’s easier for me if I just do it myself, you’re not really helping”. 9/10 times they end up standing in the doorway while holding it open and there’s not enough room for her to get past them. So then she has to awkwardly tell them where to stand, or just has to wait until they figure it out, or so on. One time she even had a guy, who actually had different disabilities, shout to her “you cripples, you’re always so ungrateful, I’m only trying to help; I’d be overjoyed if someone helped me” after a tense stand-off, where he not only refused to let her use the door, but also refused to not stand in the middle of it while “helping”, so she literally couldn’t get past at all and was trapped with him while he got increasingly angry and irate at her for “being ungrateful”. She described it as one of the few times she really feared it might erupt into violence.
I don't think you mentioned this one - The 3rd Season TOS episode "Is there in Truth no Beauty?". Diana Muldaur portrayed a blind woman (Dr. Miranda Jones ) who is the telepathic interpreter/aide to the Medusan Ambassador Kollos. She had a sensor net garment that allowed her to sense the area around her. It was not precisely visual, so it was in a way somewhat different from Geordi's visor. But she seemed to have the ability to know where everything was around her, as well as sense things like people's heart rate, body temperature and exact distance. I don't remember everything about the episode, but I remember she was portrayed as being confident and independent. I have had the condition called GBS or Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a few years ago. I was lucky to be diagnosed early, and I made a much better recovery than a lot of folks. However, for a time, I was paralyzed and unable to speak or move. Trying to communicate in the early stages was scary and frustrating. It took months of being totally dependent on the staff at the hospital, and then the those at rehabilitation facility. I had to learn to use a wheel chair, to slide in and out of bed on a board, how to walk again, and some other indignities that humbled me and made me appreciate what therapists, nurses and doctors go through trying to help those under their care. It also exposed the limitations and how even the best intentioned of health care providers can get it wrong, or not understand what someone is going through. I was able to make a partial recovery, but though I am able to walk short distances, my legs are weaker now than before the illness. There is a distinct possibility I will become wheelchair dependent in the future. I currently use a cane sometimes, especially if I am on my feet for more than a few minutes. Its affected my employment and career. So, I can appreciate this topic on a level that I probably wouldn't have before my struggles over the past few years. "Walk a mile in someone's shoes", as that saying goes (it takes on a whole new meaning).
Nog losing his leg and dealing with pain was interesting and well thought out. A lot of what he experienced rang true with me - and how I experience pain since losing my leg.
When my Grandad lost his legs to diabetes, he refused to be seen in public. He let very few people see him in person. So when Worf is crippled in the accident, its like watching it happen to my Grandpops all over again. I can see why Worf wanted what he did, not through myself but because he echoes the exact things my Grandad did.
I'm not disabled so grain of salt here... but the thing with Pike to me never seemed to be so much that he was in a chair. It seemed to me that a lot it was the incident that caused him to go into the chair was PAINFUL, like big time painful and probably always painful from there on. And given the technology of Trek and the fact that he can only say yes/no? Seemed to me like he was closed to locked into his own mind. Whilst in constant agony. And that is a whole different ball game to being in a wheelchair or paraplegic. Spock was still in the wrong, but finding that out with no warning (and possibly feeling it too) is different from finding out you'll be in a wheelchair one day. I'd imagine.
Yeah... Steve did lean into the aesthetic a bit when the real concern seemed to be about the amount of pain and suffering between point A and point B. It's one thing to see what you'd look like in the future, but to actually feel every moment of pain that was endured along the way, or even just the pain being felt by your future self in that moment... it could be a real eye opener (or in Pike's case, a real screamer). It'd probably be like reading a list of side effects from a prescription drug and experiencing those side effects [as you read them] *one hundredfold* _before_ even taking the drug.
"Maybe you're just different. It's not a sin, you know. Though you may have heard otherwise." - Tam Elbrun, ST:TNG s3e20: Tin Man. My absolute favourite depiction of neurodiversity in Star Trek.
I actually found the quartet of Mutants to be (at least in my personal experience) a sort-of solid representation of the many conditions ADHD, at least in the 1990s. They each had features that can be found in such people; with Jack of course being hyperactive, and more high key anxiety (as well as him being seen biting his nails, which can be a common way to stim such feelings), Patrick being the mental age difference and constantly worried about security, Lauren to be the impulsivity and sometimes lack of social awareness, and Sarina being the lesser known but common silent sufferer, who seemed overwhelmed more with the noise in her head than by the outside world. All of them in their room sort of was like neural imagery, with so many thoughts and actions going on at once that it can be hard to catch up, as well as being distracted by silly things despite knowing the reasons (the expansion of the universe) as well as genuine wanting to help, but not always being able to work out the full situation. IDK, I mean for the 90s its alright, and modern TV isn't all that better now with ADHD, especially since it's still a new frontier for a lot of people to fully understand, but as someone with ADHD, I felt sort of seen watching these guys putter around in ways all too familiar.
This was spot-on, especially the DS9 critique. It's ironic since Bashir was later found to have been intellectually deficient in his youth but his parents had him genetically modified to overcome his developmental disability. Maybe that's why he thought he could "fix" her.
Yup. Bashir was being a tool in that episode. Like really. When people tell you something, they are generally telling you the truth. She didn't want special treatment and he KNEW that.
I think this observation is the real lesson of the episode. Bashir is the main character because he's an example of what not to do. It's easy for Star Trek fans to think we're woke enough to be immune to Bashir's mistake, and that's why it (kind of) works.
It would have been better (or at least, less problematic) if Bashir had sent her a space memo saying, "If you adjust the [Technobabble] you'd get around the station easier", it was the fact that he just went ahead and altered it because he (thought) he knew better than Melora. I imagine that would piss anyone off.
I'm shocked that you didn't mention that Melora was written by Evan Carlos Somers, who is in a wheelchair himself. While I don't think any of the criticism of the episode is at all invalid, I do think there's a drop of irony in not mentioning that a disabled person was heavily involved when the whole point is about inclusion. To me, Melora as an episode is in a very complicated grey space where it's clear that the feelings of disabled people are not just one unanimous voice, and that they're individuals and often disagree just like any other group of people is bound to do. Evan Carlos Somers obviously liked this portrayal for Melora (At least, as far as I'm aware) and that doesn't invalidate other people's relationship with the episode.
That’s true, and he based her struggles on his own experience, and her decision to stay herself just as he said he would if faced with the choice. But it’s also worth noting it went through an uncredited rewrite by the writers room. So unless he’s done an interview where he claims ownership of specific parts of the script, it’s hard to determine where some of the attitude comes from. Especially the middle part seems inconsistent with the beginning and ending, with the curebie side showing through before it snaps back. That could also be down to the choices of the director, of course, but... yeah. There’s a whole bunch of cooks stirring that pot.
Somers submitted the original draft, and the writing staff did not receive particularly well. Steven Baum first did rewriters, then Michael Piller and James Crocker. Only after that last rewrite did the teleplay get approved. It's obviously Somers' story in credit, I don't think we can say if his entire intent got across.
Many of my friends who use prosthetics and assistive devices to relate to her, yes. Her frustration with having to spend so much time going for checkups and maintenance, for instance. But also her casually being like “my x is superior”, like my wheelchair using friends move around so fast on good terrain and leave ambulatory folks in their dust.
You did not mention the original series with Miranda and the medusa an ambassador. Her blindness was an asset and that she was able to work with the ambassador without being driven insane by looking at him. When Spock was blinded as part of the cure from the Denovan parasites he considered his blindness to be an equitable trade for regaining his sanity. I am blind and I appreciated both of these events
Hey, if this is okay to ask, do you use Audio Descriptions? All my Trek DVDs have subtitles, but no AD, as far as I can tell. So I’m curious if there are ADs available for Trek out there somewhere.
I just asked a person about keeping your third eye open. I have a personal friend that might be able to helps as well. if i find an answer I'll let you know.
I recently commented on your follow-up to this video. I hadn't seen this one yet. I had a bunch of stuff to say about Pike, some of which you actually mention here. I want to thank you for trying not to speak over disabled people and for calling out the way Pike's disability is framed uncritically as body horror. I want to add though that I think it's reductive to say that Pike is "merely sitting in a wheelchair." He's had a profound injury that has affected his ability to communicate and almost entirely taken away his mobility. I think Anson played the scene well in that context. Pike is a robust, physically active man who is used to being in control of basically everything around him. He's the Captain of the Enterprise. It *should* terrify him to see himself suddenly frail, unable to speak, hardly able to move, etc. My problem is that after the vision, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds doesn't do anything to let him process or re-evaluate his reactions. (I know I've said this before, because I say it every time I comment on Pike, but...) he served with Ariam, Detmer, and Tilly. He *knows* that having a disability is not the end of the world, and he has seen with his own eyes that there is technology available to give him more agency and mobility than the "beep-chair." If the new-Trek writers want to play around with the TOS-era canon, they should at least be able to present a consistent level of medical technology between Discovery and TOS. I know they aren't going to re-write canon to the extent that Pike gets to remain in active service, but having him keep saying that he "saw his own death" when he talks about the vision of his future is really bad.
Ok, this topic is outside my wheelhouse so I'm gonna talk about Deanna Troi instead. OK, now you see how in the Marvel movies it's necessary to nerf, Hulk, Vision, and Captain Marvel? That's what happened to Deanna!! If you think about it she could solve almost every problem they run into! "There's a cloaked Romulan ship 1000 meters off our starboard side, captain." "They're lying captain." "The entity is benevolent, captain." There would be 10 minute long episodes if they didn't nerf her!
As a deaf person, "Loud as a Whisper" really hit me. Riva demanding that they address him and not the interpreter is something that people need to be reminded of, constantly. The fact that they depict it this way... as if 300 years later, people still don't understand this is both mildly depressing, and extremely realistic.
Add a shout out for Airiam. We only found out she was a cyborg because of an accident in the episode where she died, but we did still get some stuff from her perspective. Another TNG moment worth mentioning: the cameo by Stephen Hawking. The professor was light years better off than Pike ended up being.
True, they should've had a robo-voice at least (they had that concept in the 60s). But his "Wheeled chair" was a self-propelled iron lung (the iconography of his head poking out is kinda the point).
@@hellacoorinna9995 The thing was they (the writers/production team) were doing everything they could to hide the fact they re-cast the Pike actor (if only they knew, over 50 years later, Pike would end up recast anyway 😅😅) Him being trapped to that yes/no beep chair was a story choice to intensify the visual misery of his character and fails to hold water when we already have tech that exceeds what the beep chair can do.
Also Bashir was born with learning disabilities as a kid and underwent treatments he found traumatic as a child, so I think that would change his perceptions of not only himself but also other disabled folks.
Taking that into consideration, it's interesting what made him go medicine given his background. You'd think the man would be scared of doctors, nurses and medical instruments.
@@Animalwon I’d argue that anecdote. There’s a difference between selfishless and a limit of perspective. I can’t pay attention to someone else’s needs if I’m constantly trying to fulfill my own, because my needs aren’t filled making it harder to do stuff and not paying attention to anything beyond the next thing needed to get done or my head will explode.
I never understood why Pike couldn't just beep in Morse code. We know they know Morse code in the 23rd century, because we saw Scotty using it in Star Trek V.
I am now 61, been a Trek fan for years. I now have Arthritis in my legs, it's just something to live with but , I thank you for this episode of disabilities in StarTrek.
Considering delta radiation can cause cellular disruption, one can imagine that if the delta rays hit the brain that it could severely damage or outright destroy the many of the neurons in the brain, and in Pike's case it hit the neurons that are responsible for communication, leaving him only able to communicate in yes/no.
I would have tossed Plato's step child in to the conversation, where being a person with out Mind powers is a disability, and Alexander's response when offered a drug to boost his mind powers ... to Paraphrase "I am not ashamed of who I am, but get me out of this society that hates me for who I am,"
As someone who has a mental disability (dyslexia) it was very profound that Spock (probably the smartest person in the room at times) struggled with and adapted to the increased struggle we deal with everyday. Really allowed me to connect with Spock as a character more than before. Having an "invisible" disability is sometimes harder than a physical one in gaining those accomodations needed to flourish as an individual because people will look at you and say you don't have a disability because there is nothing physically wrong with you so they see no need to accommodate you.
This video is excellent. I've been doing a rewatch of DS9 and got to the Melora episode, I have a physical disability that affects my mobility and I suddenly started thinking about the representation of disability in the Star Trek universe. This covered everything I hoped it would.
Erin's description on the embarassment around adaptive devices reminded me of the principle of that boarding school for hearing disabled kids I used to work at, who refused to add sign language to the kids' curriculum. In his words, it was because "sign language would be an advantage they wouldn't have 'in the real world'" -- I wasn't very happy with that principal's attitude, to put it mildly, especially since the kids felt extra disadvantaged after learning ABOUT sign language... Fortunately, this backfired gloriously when the teens figured out they could learn sign language on the internet at the dorm, taught it to each other and the younger kids and, since neither the principal nor most teachers understood sign language, they could use it to... let's say, "communicate covertly" in class with impunity, thus putting the teachers AND the principal at a severe disadvantage.
To your account of that principle for that school for the hard of hearing, I guess he never heard of Douglas Hoy, Douglas was a baseball player in the 1900s, he was mute, using sign language and a notepad to communicate, he taught his teammates his sign language, establishing it as a tradition in baseball, for baseball players to learn sign language, and invented the baseball signing system, from his sign language.
To your account of how Star Trek handles mental disabilities, (With a brief mention of Lore), Data and his brother Lore and Data's daughter Loll could be viewed as neurodivergent, with Lore fitting many of the defining traits associated with Psychopathy, including his arrogance, ego centric tendency, his lack of empathy and sympathy, his lack of personal social morality, and his violent antisocial outbursts against others, well Data and Loll might be more likely to be comparable to autism, we might just not think of them that way, because they are not only not human, but are in fact not biological species, they are all androids, with the response to Data and Loll's social awkwardness being to simply chalk it up to Dr Sune's AI technology simply not achieving human level social sophistication, and Lore's antisocial behavior simply being a defect in his AI design, but in reality maybe Dr Sune didn't fail to achieve human level social sophistication, but in fact made his androids a little too human, creating them with vary human mental disabilities. Namely, Antisocial Personality Disorder in the case of Lore, and then Autism in Data. With Data then passing that Autism to Loll.
For me, I want to see chronic physical pain addressed. I'd happily go back in time and make the TNG writers incorporate Frakes' back issues into Riker's character. He's still a fit, strong person who is good at his job, and pushes himself to keep going, even in the more physically demanding aspects of his work. But he's in pain. Pretty much constantly. And his pain threshold has shifted over time so that what someone else might call 7/10 pain is something he shrugs off as "Tuesday." Not that I'm projecting, or anything. But the point stands. Chronic pain sufferers with mostly functional bodies live differently, but often the difference is invisible. Seems like just the thing Trek should have been talking about since way back when they had a guy with chronic back pain on the bridge.
I relate to Frakes a lot and even call it the riker when I put my foot up on something to ease my back pain. But dear God I hope there are none of us left in a century or two.
I think the biggest point you missed with Bashier is his learning arc. He went from admiring her for how she overcomes her disability but in the end he learns to admire her for who she is. Also Pikes vision of himself in the beep chair is very different from someone ending up in a wheelchair. Can you imagine loosing all ability to move, talk and even look after yourself. That is much more of a horror than ending up in a wheelchair.
I've been disabled since 2013; the left side of my body is nearly nonfunctional. Interestingly, the episode that speaks to me on the subject is the one where Deanna temporarily loses her powers...
@@paulhunter1525 it is super unfortunate, because despite the crew's constant attempts to show her how she could still lead a fulfilling life with her disability, she refuses to even consider it, right up to the very end. She learns nothing
@@k1productions87It took me _years_ to mentally accommodate and accept my disabling injury. I don't mind that Troi wasn't able to in 40 minutes. (Or a few days in universe.)
Thanks for covering the episode where Worf wanted to put himself down due to a spine injury. As someone with severe scoliosis that required extensive spinal fusion to correct - not fix, _correct_ - that episode's been stuck in my mind since I first saw it.
Captain Pike: can't move anything but his eyes and can only beep in the 23rd century Stephen Hawking: can't move anything but his eyes, spoke and advanced theoretical physics in the 20th century. Wait, what?
well, our technology overtook some of TOS' tech decades ago. A brain-computer-link would make Geordies visor a real possibility (and there are prototypes around since the 90s, giving blind people monochrome vision, but they were discontinued when the inventor/surgeon died) and could help with LOTS of other disabilities (bridge nerve damage, connect protheses and controlling all devices remotely). In about 25 years, we might get to Borg-Level tech for our bodies. Nanites, neural interfaces, artificial skin with sensors and denser batteries to power all this are already in the prototype phase and will be available in time. First to those with needs, then to those with wants and then everybody will need it to keep pace with augmented people (because thought controlling a computer will be faster than mouse and keyboard).
I think Pike's vision is more than just envisioning himself sitting in a wheelchair. It's not just that one day Pike switches from able bodied to disabled, accepts it and happily carries on with his life. There is pain and trauma that gets him there that he has to go through. And there are lots of things he'll lose, dreams he'll have to give up. Sure, it can also be a new beginning with new dreams, but it's unrealistic to expect that a person can cope with such a change easily. Nog, who is also used as an example in this video, struggles for weeks because of his lost leg, and he is barely limited by his new leg, compared to Pike's future disability. Of course for Pike the vision of his future would be a nightmare at first, especially in time where medicine is so advanced. It would take some time to work through that and gain a positive perspective on it. It's important to include disabled characters in the series and show that they can have happy and productive lives, but I think the series should also be honest about the difficulties of getting used to that new life.
I liked Voyager's B'elanna's self harm episode "Extreme Risk". I found it to be a accurate depiction of PTSD-depression, my only problem is that after this episode is over, belanna never has to deal with her mental health and trauma again. where as in reality, this will likely be chronic in nature.
One problem I have with the argument against Pike's fate is that, it's not about him ending up in a wheelchair. It's the sheer extent of the injuries, leaving him horrifically maimed, in constant pain, and barely alive. They could have left him perfectly ambulatory and his fate would still be horrifying to nearly anyone. The Wheelchair isn't the part that scares him.
Pike's repeated "no"--I have always thought--was more an expression of his concern for Spock and not wanting Spock to get courtmartialed/executed for helping him. It's true that Spock takes control and doesn't respect Pike's explicit wishes, but Spock was right about what was in Pike's best interests--as Pike confirms at the end of Part 2 when they ask him if he wants to go down to Talos IV. He chooses freely to go there. Spock was faced with a truly difficult dilemma, morally-speaking. I think the ethics of the situation went beyond, "Well, you have to respect a person's choices." In addition, Pike wasn't simply disabled; his case was very extreme, and it's rather hard to see how he could have made a meaningful life for himself. I stand with Spock on this.
Hey Steve my name is George I am a disabled Fan of star trek I want to thank you for doing this video it's something that I think is long past due and something I hadn't considered. I will mention one Instance of a disabled person that you did not mention in the video that's Admiral Jameson from TNG to short a season. Another one that I just thought of hwas the inventor of the transporter from enterprise Who was also physically disabled.
Missed the EMH from Voyager, he clearly regards himself as disabled, as he expresses to his crewmates in "Author, Author" by making his mobile emitter a giant 50 pound backpack.
This is a wonderful video! Thank you for spreading information about disability in a kind and sensitive way. When I first saw the crewman in Discovery using a modern manual wheelchair I literally cried out of happiness. When we do see disabled characters they often have futuristic mobility aids. It's exciting to see speculation about how mobility aids could change in the future with better technology. However, I love the acknowledgment that sometimes the best mobility aid for someone is the type of manual chair we have now. I use a lot of different mobility aids depending on the situation, but my manual wheelchair looks so similar to the one in the show. It felt very nice to be seen in that specific way. Lt. Alara Kitan from the Orville is my personal favorite disabled character in sci fi. She is kind of the polar opposite of Melora, coming from a planet with higher gravity than earth, making her incredibly strong in normal earth gravity. After much time aboard the Orville she has great difficulty returning to her home planet, because she has adjusted to a much lighter gravity. She is a great example of an ambulatory wheelchair user, much like myself, meaning she is able to walk, but with great pain and difficulty. She ultimately decides to return home rather than stay onboard the Orville and undergo a series of painful gravity treatments. It's an incredibly powerful moment that helped me make the decision to take some time off from college to do physical therapy and get a variety of different tests and treatments that will likely benefit me in the long run, a lot more than pushing myself to the absolute limit trying to live on campus. Her story can be seen as a metaphor for the rapid onset of a chronic illness, and I really love that. I also love the detail that in the alternate universe where they are fighting a war, her decision is different. In this reality she does decide to undergo gravity treatments in order to retain her strength and fight the war effort. I love this detail and it shows that disabled people's choices can be impacted by their environment.
Thank you so very much for this episode. I am so happy you brought up Autism "cures" as terrible. I never thought folks would be having these conversations. It is very encouraging.
Back when fanzines were mimeographed, I remember a short story (the only one I remember) that was called "The Kingdom of the Blind." The plot was based on the TOS crew visiting a planet where sight was consider a a birth defect. The society, which had to wear something because the planet was cold, didn't give much of a toss about what they looked like. They understood that sighted cultures did become distracted when they showed with badly matched colors and weird looking dress. So the folks with the birth defect of sight were employed to solve this problem. It was a "honor" to have the job for a sighted person since it was the only job really available to the sighted folks meant anything. The job was also an "honor" because it wasn't much needed.
I'm autistic and grew up not knowing it (not diagnosed) and always felt attached to Data who I often found myself learning human habits with. I had finally found another "person" who is asking many of the same questions I was. I didn't have everything in common with him obviously I'm human, but seeing a character trying to understand people despite the seeming impossibility gave me some drive to keep trying too.
I don't understand this interpretation of Pike's predicament in The Menagerie. Pike wasn't just a paraplegic. He was utterly unable to interact with his world in any way other than to send a yes/no flashing light signal through his rolling coffin. He couldn't move any part of his body the way I remember the episode. I never saw him even looking around the room with his eyes. Christopher Pike in The Menagerie finds himself in a full-on literal "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" situation, not just inconvenienced with a broken ankle -- oops, TWO broken ankles.
Oh, and I forgot to point out that whatever happened to him couldn't be fixed with 23rd Century technology. He wasn't just regular-crippled; he was space-crippled.
As a disabled person with a very similar disability to Melora. I will say that I absolutely love that episode. It portrays the struggles that disabled people with disabilities like mine extremely accurately as well as the attitudes and responses of people around us. I can't tell you how many times someone has done something to try to help without asking first and it just wind up making things more difficult. Along with the occasional person that feels the need to insert themselves into my life in as many ways as they can to try to help the disabled person that even if they admire in some ways, they pity in others I'm glad Star Trek kept it this way. Human nature will not change by the 24th century, especially not when it comes to how people respond two things and people they don't understand when they are trying to help them.
Thank you for this! As a disabled Star Trek fan, I really appreciated your take on this subject. And, I also really appreciated you talking about mental health issues. (Your Lenore stuff is the one part of the Ensign's Log that I haven't really cared for.) We are all working toward a better future.
Hey Steve! I'm a long-time viewer and first time commenter (ish? I may have once before...). I'm also neurodivergent (Autistic and ADHD) and run my own Facebook page and UA-cam channel called Differently Wired through which I try to champion Neurodivergent pride and Neurodiversity. I just wanted to take a moment to comment here and say thank you for this! You highlighted several important points lots of us in the disability rights community often say, and even taught this grizzled old activist a few things (for some reason, while the DS9 episode with the people from the Institute never sat right with me, I never clued in on them being Autistic-coded, and now I'm even angrier haha). I really appreciate this video and your attempt to uplift/center marginalized voices here. Keep up the awesome work! ...and you know...I'd be honoured if you followed my page/channel too...but no pressure... :P
It's more than "just sitting in a wheelchair", though. FAR more than that. The man is trapped in his own body, unable to do ANYTHING in ANY way. If it were in fact an ACTUAL wheelchair, Pike would have even less than he has. Wouldn't even be able to move himself. Likely thanks to future tech it's probably hooked into his nervous system. That review at 30:15 is just... wrong. I get the implication, but in reality there are people with this level of disability, and for those who DO manage to communicate, well... they're usually not thrilled about continuing to live. It's NOT a beginning or "continuation in a different form". Those that do communicate more often than not describe it, in reality, as a kind of hell. They just do. Yes, you have the other character in a wheelchair, but once more, Pike's condition is FAR more than "just sitting in a wheelchair".
I watched your vid a few days ago and I've been thinking about it (I know you posted it a while ago, but I recently found your channel myself). As a neuroatypical individual myself, I would be happy to discover that my children and future generations would not need to deal with the difficulties I have dealt with in large part. I agree that when a character does have a disability it should be dealt with better, but I would be quite sad to find out that my issues would be common hundreds of years into the future. There is an episode of House that I really loved for this, where a patient is refusing treatment because her whole identity is based in her disability, one that she shares with her mother. The mother doesn't want to tell her daughter to get the treatment because having this disability "builds character" and House responds with something like "how much character does your daughter need?" People who chose not to accept a form of treatment should be respected for that choice, people with disabilities should be respected the same as those without, but I would be saddened if the future portrayed by Star Trek had a ton of people running around with my issues, as I hope medical treatments improve and not stagnate. I would hope that people who need wheelchairs today by Enterprise era would have the ability to get some regenerative treatment or a chip (or something science fiction tech) to be able to walk.
At least in the eyes of his parents, "Jules" Bashir was seen as developmentally disabled, hence the reason why he was "cured" by illegal genetic engineering.
@@inajar7947 Some people are quite unable to treat their children as anything else but platforms for trophies. Well I'm the platform with no trophies and I'm proud of it.
@@JK-dx4ob It really does as an interesting wrinkle to those plots. I have absolutely no qualifications to draw it out myself, but I do think you found an interesting through-line to explore.
@@inajar7947 absolutely. My teachers were worried about me falling behind etc in my first few years of school. Then I rebounded, caught up, and overtook them. I relate hard to Bashir’s description of before his treatment, and when he shouts “you never gave me a chance!”. I think things like, if my parents had the option his had, would they have decided I’d taken long enough and intervened? Cos that would suck. I like who and where I am.
I've spent my life around people with various disabilities. Family members, friends, and people I've worked with. Adults and children. I'm honestly glad that Trek hasn't always done well in addressing the issues around disabilities. The imperfectness of these stories is one of the most realistic things in the history of Star Trek. It's an excellent mirror of ourselves in society. Thank you for covering this topic.
Great video Steve. I would love to see you do a video on how Trek has portrayed aging, getting old. From the original series episode where the crew got old early to dialogue in the movies, to Majel barrett in TNG, the new show Picard and more it would be a nice topic to cover imo.
Pike in the "beep chair" is probably the single most haunting scenario Ive seen in TOS. Im reminded of the movie "Jonny Got His Gun" which was used extensively in Metallica's "One" video. I believe either scenario transcends the idea of "disabled" into straight nightmare fuel. I think including Pike's chair in a discussion on disability in Trek is quite ridiculous. Obviously this is a special case and needed to be treated as such.
One notable positive representation for me: Martok losing his eye in DS9. He struggles to adapt for a little bit but then he does and it's nbd and he goes on to do other things as a character. I liked that so much. What I really want Trek to do better on is to *cast more disabled people*. Even in the rare cases when Trek writes a disabled character okay, it's still really disappointing to see abled actors play those roles.
YES YES YES YES YES to everything you said about The Menagerie and Pike's total lack of agency. It's one of those things that flew over my head as a kid, but I rewatched it a couple of years ago and felt kind of sick at how everyone (including Spock!) treated him.
Me- Clicks like before the video even starts, "I should have waited to the end of the episode to do that." End of episode Me- "Nope! Another excellent episode, as always."
“I do! Not! Want! An artificial eye!” “Then you must accept the fact that you have a disability, and-“ “You are trying my patience, doctor!” (or something like that. I do like how Martok just wanted to get on with things.)
The only main 1 that I think needed mentioning was voyages Lon suder who had .....something that made him have violent tendencies and I think he was done fairly good
I think he was a Betazoid without empathic/telepathic ability which rendered him unable to connect emotionally and left him in a condition roughly analogous to what we'd call a psychopath.
It should be noted that Pike's circumstances are far worse than just being unable to move or talk, it was stated in "The Menagerie" that there was no certainty that Pike would be unable to use the chair after a certain point, that's why Spock and the Talosians unilaterally decided to have Pike live the remainder of his life on Talos.
Even though technically not a disability, the Enterprise D crew's initial treatment of Reg Barkley because of his social awkwardness wasn't called for. Everyone was calling him demeaning names behind his back even though his intelligence probably surpassed everyone on the ship (excepting Data).
@@kryptiqk2141 That in of itself is an ableist mindset. Look man, PTSD is a form of anxiety, as well as other things, usually brought upon by some outside traumatic experience, for some it about being tough. It's about learning to heal after something deeply life shattering. IE, warfare, rape, and terrible abuse. It's not as black and white as you are making it to be.
@@kryptiqk2141 Who counts as being able to take care of themselves? The vast majority of the population of the USA would die if put in a hunter gather situation. So are they disabled? Disability is a culture construct. What is or is not reasonable accommodation is a culture construct. All that mental toughness you mentioned was also accompanied by heavy drinking or other behaviors we now consider unacceptable. I've worked with hard drinking tough guys. Their drinking was accommodated, by the other guys. It was literally more acceptable to be hung over that to be sick with the flu.
I’m not disabled but assistive technology in 1964 when The Menagerie was filmed was very limited. A beep chair is terrifying. Assistive technology has come a long way-we can do more today than what they imagined. Keith Mitchell who has ALS, uses assistive language to speak now as well as a motorized chair.
Melora" is basically another standard "Bashir being a jerk who gets humbled" episode - because what are disabled people but stepping stones for the "growth" of abled folks, right? * facepalm *
"Doctor Bashir, I Presume?" is, to me, a glaring omission from this discussion, because based on that episode (and the first episode where Sarena, Patrick, et al. appear) and his general awkwardness, I read Julian as also being on the autism spectrum along with the other genetically engineered folks. In fact, I'd argue Julian is massively important for the representation of neurodiversity, because he represents the neurodivergent people who are "neurotypical-passing". Basically, even though we appear to be neurotypical at a glance, we are neurodivergent and experience fallout from our neurodivergence. But because we're able to pass as neurotypical, we aren't discriminated against, locked away, shunted aside, or taught to doubt our own abilities the way so many disabled people are. And a lot of NT-passing neurodivergent folks go on to become successful professors, artists, lawyers, or...doctors. The moment where Jack calls Julian "Mr. Normal Starfleet Man!" and points out that Julian isn't locked up because he seems "normal" basically confirms this reading, imho. And "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?" is the episode where this aspect of Julian's character really comes out. Because he rejects the idea that his parents "fixed" him. He identifies as someone ("Julian") who was created by the death of a child named Jules Bashir. And then the episode kind of lets the parents off with a pass for doing that...but still, I think it's a really important moment with implications for reading Julian as a "high-functioning" autistic that reverberate throughout the series.
"To turn every 'it was' into 'thus I would have it,' only this do I call redemption." This is my favorite quote by Nietzsche. I've always felt that it is something everyone should strive to achieve with all their problems, knowing full well it will never actually be achieved.
I was unfamiliar with that quote until a moment ago, but the concept . . . it's more realistic than you might think. I can honestly say that I have no regrets in my life, even though I have made some stupid choices and the people around me haven't always done the right thing either. I have certainly suffered in various ways, including a period of depression so bad I couldn't function, but I don't regret a moment of it. Most of what I've been through has already worked out for the best, and what hasn't yet, I'm confident will someday, because that's the kind of God I'm in a relationship with.
Okay this is a subject very close to my heart obviously. I watched 2 minutes in and I'm doing this stream of consciousness style so you might have addressed it later. I don't comment often but this one I have to comment on . For those curious about accommodations I'm using voice dictation without any changes so you can see how it has to work and needs to improve because why not use one teaching tools to possibly learn another lesson. Also I'm lazy right now. I love this episode of Jordy. I distinctly remember watching it as a six or seven year old with one of those parents who shouldn't be parents specially of disabled children. This is why representation is important because I had no one to tell me this I didn't. I've learned this lesson way into my adulthood and I wonder what would happen if we had more positive representation everywhere. Def episode- Yes thank you for mentioning this. Disabled people are not Unix we can and do have very fulfilling sex lives but I feel it's important to also mention it's not something to be fantasized either. I have a feeling I know what episode is next and we'll talk about Nightingale syndrome then. This is a great example of disability making you look at problem solving differently. And why it's important to actually use disabled actors if you can in the story allows for it. Molora-okay this episode this is the episode that I wrote the comment for but then had thoughts and other things. I have the most bizarre love hate feeling for this episode and you put it into words. I love melora I hate how they reacted. Do not do something a disabled person tells you not to do you will hurt them. I have had people try to grab my hips when I transfer into my wheelchair. Lift me in ways that don't make sense even try to put body parts in certain positions that they just don't bend. Don't do this. Please if there was was real life and she had to transfer out of that chair for whatever reason she is going to hurt herself because of how you have to train. If you take nothing else from this comment take that. Bryshere has classic Nightingale syndrome and it's a pain in the ass. He wants to come in and save and we as disabled are supposed to fall for him be grateful to him. You can see it he wants the appreciation. Also the way they expect that person to act. Do you know how many inappropriate questions I get on a regular basis. I have a very small platform on tiktok like 500 people if that I've been asked three times today how I have sex...….. just today no. This is the final thing that annoys me and you brought it up but I feel like I have to put it in my own words. Would I change the experiences that I've gone through? No I wouldn't they made me who I am but you know how much I wish I was malora to just press a button and for it to stop. I wouldn't change the past but if I could snap My fingers and fix it sign me up. Most disabled people are like this the major exception coming to mind is the deaf community because they see it as more of an identity. Okay I think I'm done now. Wharf episode This episode is complicated even for me. I was born disabled so this has been my life forever I have many friends who were hurt and became disabled that way. These are very common feelings for my experience let's just say I hate me before you, but I would be lying to you if I said I won't live past 60. (Don't worry I'm only 30) I need to know there's an end to in order to get up. Okay I haven't watched the LG Star Trek or Discovery so I won't comment much except I agree with the person you quoted. And there is definitely a hierarchy of disabled just like there is colorism. I had a friend in high school who was paralyzed and 26 he could only communicate using his hand board I got to talk to like I was 10 he got talked to like he was three. Mental illness/divergent-I don't really have much to contribute to this one there's plenty of videos out there. Look up how autism is portrayed in Star Trek. 36:54 oh The institute can't wait to see what you say I'm sure I will have things to add on this one. Okay I lied I don't have the energy for this one. I'm already an hour and a half into this little project of mine I don't have the energy for this one so all I will say is locking people away permanently is not the solution and I hate everything about the eugenics this year story. It shouldn't even be an option. I hate it. Kill it with fire. And I've already explained about bashir's Nightingale syndrome kill this whole thing with fire. Leslie two things you didn't mention that I feel like I should. One thing I like about jordy's representation is that he does not always like that he's blind yes do we accept ourselves and all of that wonderful b******* totally do that but sometimes like when you're kidnapped by Klingons it sucks and pretending it doesn't doesn't help anyone. And lastly thank you for mentioning your own mistakes and I hope you learn something from this process as well. If you got to the end of this almost 2 hours later yes that's how long this all takes congratulations you get a cookie. I just needed to shout into the void
Indeed indeed. I’ve had strangers lift my cane off the ground when I’ve collapsed from my chronic fatigue. I push it back down to push off of to lift myself and the “helpful” strangers lift it off the floor again! When really that’s what it’s there for - when my knees turn to jelly. It’s all so performative, and no real thought goes into it. People want to be seen by others to be helpful more than they want to genuinely help the people they’re “helping”. And one of my wheelchair using friends has horror stories of trying to leave a bus or train and having people lift her chair in the air even while she’s shouting at them not to do it because she doesn’t feel safe. I wish this kind of experience wasn’t so damn common.
I’ll watch this just as soon as I finish my day’s work in disability services. Edit: Great points! What I’d like to see is a new disability (e.g. Nog or a brain injury) that evolves over time, capturing the trauma, adaptation, and acceptance of today in an optimistic future.
I feel like an episode about depression has the potential to be really powerful if done right. I can imagine something like Barclay’s first episode except it’s one of the main cast getting irritable/sad/angry for seemingly no reason and trying to cover it up but ultimately finding acceptance and love from their friends
They did that with Torres in Voyager one time. Though that’s another one that gets mixed feelings, especially because it has to be over by the end of the episode and Chakotay kind of, uh, shouts her out of it. But up until that point it’s rather well done, and Roxann Dawson based her performance on her own experience of postpartum depression IIRC.
As far as I've always understood, Pike not only sits in a wheelchair with a burned off face, but he is in a constant state of agony without any form to expres that. (but I could be wrong)
Not only that but the man spent the better part of a decade anticipating his ultimate fate, without even the comfort that he would be effectively rescued by Spock.
Also remember what Commodore Diaz(was that his name?) said Pyke is a functioning brain in a dead body. Thats more than parallesis or using a wheelchair. Its effectively waiting for death because he can't really take any action. His communcation is only re-action to others. And bringing him to Talos is maybe not that far away from a prostetic. The telepathic illusion is like a krudge for his brain to feel unhinged.
@@niemandzuhause4897 Commodore Mendez was his name. And yes, he was essentially a chronic vegetable that is still conscious. It is not merely a disability one could adapt to, but being in complete paralysis yet not under sedation. Some people use Stephen Hawking as an example of someone who could live through it, but Hawking still had a method of communication. Pike did not. And even then... would anyone BUT Hawking actually chose to remain living that way?
I saw The Menagerie as a child, and somehow I interpreted the tragedy of Pike not that he was in a wheelchair but that he was in pain and unable to find relief, then when I saw Anson Mount's response to the vision I again interpreted it as he was horrified not by chair but by the unending pain he would eventually be in (although it was a little over the top).
yeah that was my understanding too. It'd be one thing if he was like paralyzed from the waist down. That's a disability, and it would I imagine be unpleasant to get used to but afterwards he would almost certainly still be able to live a good and fulfilling life. The problem is that pike's condition is far worse. He's suffered massive radiation burns all over his body, he's completely immobile, effectively mute, dependent on a machine to survive, and in near constant pain. I think it's fair to call that a horrible fate. Not the being in a wheelchair part, but the "radiation burns everywhere and living in constant pain" part.
Telling someone wallowing in their own misery to get out of their own ass and see that others need them is ACTUALLY the right thing to do. Particularly for someone as honor bound as Worf. Demonstrating to them that they are still valuable for (and loved by) others can't be a bad thing either.
I (a physically able person) always viewed the terror of Pike's future was the lack of ability to communicate, not the wheelchair. Multiple people in my family have had a form of ALS that Hits the brain and not the body first, and watching them not being able to think, or communicate, or understand what's happening, but still live for years afterwards is terrifying. I think tying that fate up the wheelchair is a bad thing though.
When in discovery made spock have dyslexia. I had to pause it and go "O My God. HOLY FUCK! Spock has DySlExLa like ME!!!" It made my day. It made my year. I cried. I never thought I'd be seen. Not by a character I love too.
Pike's condition seems to be like a person trapped in a nearly comatose yet aware of his environment. As far as communication, having a bipolar yes/no ability is in no way the same as using a communication device. Also, Troi losing her empathic abilities temporarily is a potential discussion topic.
Hey Steve this was a great episode! When you started mentioning the franchises misses in handling the topic of disability I kept waiting for Season 4's The Loss to come up. Troi treats the loss of her empathic abilities as a disability and spends most of the episode telling all her friends and collogues how they will never understand what it's like to be disabled and how she can no longer preform her duties on the ship because of it. When we find out at the conclusion that it was just her misunderstanding interacting with the 2 dimensional aliens we're left with an episode of an able bodied character preaching about how hard it is to be disabled... Meanwhile she and Geordi do not have a scene together in this episode.
I think you're forgetting Pike is also in constant pain. Not all disabilities are the same, and while it's absolutely correct to see most of them as simply a part of someone like Geordi, there do exist situations like Pike where it simply isn't the case that life can be full and happy.
Thank you for making this video. It does need to be said and as someone who is neurodivergent and a Star Trek fan I thought you did a great job! Yes Star Trek has historically treated issues like these as if we're broken and need to be fixed which we don't. We're just wired differently. I absolutely enjoyed watching this.
How you gonna talk about Geordi being blind but not mention the episode where he is stuck with the Romulan who asks him about his family "letting him live?!"
I'm blind and can't tell you how many times I've been asked why my parents let me live. I really wish this was covered or even mentioned, because it's a very real experience that so many disabled people deal with.
You forgot Dr. Ann Mulhall in In Truth Is There No Beauty of TOS. It is most ironic since you mentioned the Vulcan IDIC which was also shown in that episode. Dr. Mulhall was a blind telepath who used her dress to see. Also Gul Dukat became blind in the last season on DS9.
Roddenberry’s edicts over no cloning and no genetic engineering in the Federation were somewhat about maintaining tension, like limiting the top speed of warp engines, because perfect worlds were thought to be boring and the assumption seems to always be MASTER RACE is the default result when it comes to eliminating suffering.
Thank you for another great video that made me think, Steve. Speaking as a neuro-divergent person, I appreciate what you said about people like me being expected to "fit in," and then penalized for not doing so and treated as a problem to be dealt with. I think the situation with Reginald Barclay was handled very well in the episodes of TNG and V where he appeared. One important thing you didn't mention about Barclay's debut episode was how Geordi, also disabled but in a different way than Barclay, was one of the people that disliked him the most due to his quirks and social awkwardness (Barclay was part of Geordi's engineering team), even proclaiming at one point, "I can't stand being in the same room as the guy!" That changed when Picard ordered Geordi to try accept Barclay and become his best friend to provide an example as the leader of the engineering team and work to bring out the best of him, rather than simply admonishing and ridiculing him, thereby stifling his potential. This is a great example of showing how members of minority groups are not immune to judging those with differences that are different from their own differences (Geordi is blind, not neuro-divergent). Picard handled that in a way that was far more compassionate than anyone I ever met in our present day society, who always treated me as a problem and would have sympathized far more with Geordi than Picard on this. One thing I must disagree with you about, however, is a matter which ignores a major difficulty in a future society like where Star Trek takes place, one with technology, including medical technology, far more advanced than what we have now. How likely is it for people with at least physically debilitating disabilities, whether due to natural causes or accidents, to still exist in numbers comparable today? This is one of the difficulties of depicting such a future society while insisting every social, political, and economic aspect being relatable to us today. Accomplishing this takes a good amount of creativity, otherwise you end up with some blatant anachronistic elements that take away from the suspension of disbelief. It also correlates with an assumption you seem to make: most disabled people prefer to live with the disabilities rather than seek a cure because it's an essential part of them. For starters, please read what @aaronlitz7049 said down below in the comments. I also know what it's like to also suffer from chronic illnesses where you're in constant pain, or constantly sick, etc., to the point where it's very debilitating at times. Yes, I've lived with it and have made the best of it, but I am not for one second going to say I would refuse an available cure because a cured me "would not really be me." Yes, I can contribute with these disabilities, but that doesn't mean I'm okay and contented with being in constant pain, or that I think absolutely every type of debilitating condition is better than death. In fact, this morbid terror of death is another aspect of our society that puzzles me, and certainly puzzled people in the Star Trek future, as Dr. Crusher noted in "The Neutral Zone" episode. I would never blame anyone for seeking a cure, or considering it cruel or patronizing for a medical professional to offer one. I do think, however, that it's a bit different with conditions like neuro-diversity, because these often come with assets and are connected to our personality, and hence are truly part of "what makes me be me." But something like chronic fatigue syndrome (which I had for a long time) or losing the ability to walk? No, I believe there is a notable difference, especially if it involves a condition that you were not born with. For another view of this based on a real-life event, please see the movie "Whose Life is it Anyway?" with Richard Dreyfuss: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whose_Life_Is_It_Anyway%3F_(film)
"The Beep Chair" sounds like something that would come from Lower Decks. However, if lower decks was canon, the fact that Pike was being taken away from a paradise medical facility would have explained all of those NO beeps.
Disabled veteran here, I would argue with the Pike controversy on this point. Pike isnt just in a wheelchair. Hes completely paralyzed and unable to communicate outside yes and no answers. It's an exceptional case, not DISABLITY, but INABILITY. Its similar to the classic movie "Johnny's got a gun" featured in Metallica's "One" video. It's a terrible fate. Regardless of how other disabilities are typically depicted or thought of, or actually are. As a veteran, as a disabled veteran, I can tell you that going from "superhero" who could do ridiculous things without a sweat to being unable to accomplish basic life tasks without pain or even ridicule, nevermind the quality of life that Pike experiences post injury, is extremely difficult to deal with emotionally... Mentally. And I'm putting it lightly, seeing a fate like Pikes as a military member would feel as a nightmare scenario for almost any veteran, especially before receiving years of therapy.. . I'm no necessarily saying its healthy.. but its ACCURATE.
You forgot to mention that Bashir himself was also a disabled person who got "fixed"
And wasn’t too happy about being fixed. They couldn’t accept him for who he was so they went and fixed him.
Actually, with my hyper specific life I've never felt more of a connection with a character like Bashir. He is a character that is a competent human being that has recovered from significant life altering medical trauma. I may appear neurotypical, but like Bashir i am wired differently than the rest of humanity and it shows for the better. For me I had a brain surgery when i was very young, for bashir it was his genetic manipulation. Just because somebody has made progress in healing from medical trauma doesn't mean they aren't disabled anymore.
@@crypticmirror That's not a very good way to put it. He wasn't a lobotomised person or someone with a brain injury before. He had developmental delays, unspecified. I get that you're trying to be funny but is it appropriate right here?
Bashir was an ingrate and whiner who would rather have a low IQ than fulfill an awesome destiny his parents sacrificed for him
@@crypticmirror Technically Bashir views himself as "Julian" a different person from the "Jules" that his parents fixed/killed. On this view changing his body/brain would not be returning to the former state it would be replacing himself with yet a third person.
I'm sorry but as someone who has been wheelchair bound since birth Pike's fate scares me, the lack of personal agency, inability to communicate and total dependency on others is one of my greatest fears. I'm 30 years old and still rely on my parents for some extra chores and personal hygiene but I still have a job, hobbies and my own friends but the fear of being totally helpless or loosing my voice is a nightmare I face every night as the ventilator's automatic breaths slowly put me to sleep.
I know this an old comment but thank you for making it. You put words to feelings I could not express with a genetic disorder. Thank you again I hope you are well.
Thank you, calling it JUST sitting it I a wheelchair is SO reductive. It's a lot more than that.
I'm don't have a physical disability but I absolutely see where you're coming from. That's the one point where Steve lost me.
At the VERY least, we can interpret the horror of Pike's visions to be an overt emotional reaction which is still hasn't been able to come to terms with. I'd absolutely have a similar reaction; not because I think disabled people don't deserve to be accommodated in any way possible or that they can't live full lives, but because that's a HUGE life change even assuming our society was 100% accessible... which it unfortunately is very much NOT.
That said, I can see how people may see this as explicitly negative representation, but we really haven't seen the end of Pike's story yet. Ideally, they can show him gradually coming to terms with his fate over time. Even so, you elucidated reasons that would very much justify his shock at such an outcome.
Hi, I trust this finds you well. I thought a while about your fear of losing your voice, I would like to recount an experience. A friend, very vocal, knowledgeable, comical/dry/cutting sense of humour, completely lost his voice due to throat cancer. He/we hardly missed a beat, within a few days we had adapted and by lip-reading and hand-gestures and occassional writen short-hand notes, it was soon business as normal. The main thing we avoided, except for 'another pint?' etc, were asking him Yes/No questions, that way he was contributing to the conversation as much, if not more, than before. His only irk was that occassionlly people would impatiently finish his sentence too soon, and/or step on a punch-line, and he would have to correct them (usually by shaking his head and making yak yak sign with his hand). Losing your voice is not actually that big of a deal, as long as other people lend you their ears (No pun/joke intended). Unfortunately my friend succumbed to the cancer about a year later, so he cannot tell you himself what I'm fairly confident he would have told you, 'some people talk too much without saying anything, its better to keep quiet and be considered stupid, rather than speak and remove all doubt'. The quiet actually gave him time to appeciate his other qualities, for one his guitar playing became much more powerful and meaningful. I hope you don't fear 'losing your voice' so much, it's not so isolating as you might initially suspect. It certainly didn't slow Steven Hawking down much.
Peace.
I'm a year late to this comment, but thank you for putting this into words, because Steve kind of lost me on this. I'm not currently physically disabled, but I'm very likely autistic and do struggle with many things NT people consider basic. Losing my agency in any way or being unable to care for myself, especially if living alone, is a very real fear. Not only is becoming physically disabled obviously a huge change in someone's life, it's an understandable fear I think and I think it's ok to admit that and face it, especially given how society sees and treats ND and disabled people and also given that most people will likely become disabled at some point. From injury, age, whatever the case may be.
As an autistic person myself Odo stands out for me. He is heavily dependant on routine, he finds social interaction and small talk difficult, he notices details that no other character would and is extremely analytical. He also "reverts to his natural state every 16 hours" which could be seen as him masking through the day and then being himself when he gets back to his quarters (or bucket in earlier seasons).
I'm also Autistic and identify with Odo. His backstory of growing up being studied and experimented on at the Bajoran Science Institute feels like an allegory for the dehumanizaion of Autistic People.
Even the enforcing the rules created by another society that doesn't seem to really want to follow there rules , they just like the concept of rules.
I LOVE. Odo. SO MUCH.
Yes. The "revert to his natural state" could be some autistic persons need for alone time or doing something the find relaxing. I like how they just see it as totally fine because if it normal for him, he can just do his thing. :)
Btw Data is in many ways a steotypical depictions of autism. Not that it is a bad thing, because some autistic see themself interily in him while others see traces.
Btw btw. The vulcans have always stiked me as an autistic alien race. xD
When I first saw that episode with Nog when I was younger I just thought he was being a jerk. Then I joined the Air Force, served overseas, and had my leg destroyed in a severe accident. Then I saw that episode again during my recovery and it hit me hard. I can see how it's hard for people to identify with the struggle people go through in becoming disabled.
I've never acquired a disability (I was born disabled) so I can't relate to that, but it does sound like that episode was fairly realistic in terms of emotional reactions. Especially in Ferengi who represent some of the more proud or stubborn aspects of humanity.
Event with all the empathy in the world, it is almost impossible for someone who haven't lived with a disability to fully understand what it mean to live like that. All the small things it impact, all the changes you make in your life because of it without even thinking about it because it have become a part of you.
Idk watching that episode i had full sympathy for him because i think the episode luckily speaks to all forms of trauma as well, especially in the final dialogue between Vic and Nog where he talks about being scared to face the real world again. Idk that shits hits me hard everytime, and im very lucky not to have had any injuries. I think the episode does a good job though showing how dismissive everyone around him is, especially Ezri who sees his pain as fake, I feel they’re dealing here with phantom pain as well though its not clear how his new leg works
I think that Episode isn't just one of the best DS9 episodes, but is one of the best Star Trek episodes. It handles both the horror of war, and the aftermath of major battles brilliantly..
I'm a wheelchair user, myself, and as to your closing point (about how disabled people should be just part of the world), I've come up with a "Bechdel Style Test" for disability in fiction, that I call "The 1,001 Problems Test": 1.There's a Disabled Character 2. Who wants something (for themselves) 3. Beyond Revenge, Cure, or Death 4. And tries to get it.
Meanwhile, I'm feeling Melora's pain, right now. I am a wheelchair user, and *more than a **_year_** ago* I started the process to replace the chair I had, which was breaking down, with the same make and model. The paperwork was completed in September, and it wasn't until January 14th that I got word that Medicare approved it... *ten weeks* later (after I'd already paid my deductible), my new chair was delivered, *and it was not the model I'd ordered* -- I didn't find out until the guys delivering it were driving it into my living room. There are features of this chair that make it a lot less usable. And all I was told was: "The company doesn't make your model, anymore. What do you expect us to do about that?" *You could have told me.* I could have figured out adaptations before you dropped it in my lap. (or dropped my lap into it, actually). Grr. And I bet the writers thought they were being so clever and original...
OMG getting identical replacements for specific accommodations you need to get by with your disability is a NIGHTMARE as various things just keep ceasing to be manufactured. This is a double nightmare when you're autistic and need to find the perfect stuff that doesn't give you sensory issues.
Fellow wheelchair user here. Evan Carlos Somers was the original story writer for "Melora" and he's also a wheelchair user, so I think he was trying for a more nuanced take in the episode, but my impression is that got muddled and even kinda rehashed by the able-bodied writers and director. It's unfortunate and frustrating. Hope your new chair works out and doesn't give you too much grief. I'm in a similar boat with my new pair of leg braces/AFOs.
Hope you find a good chair soon. I'm going to have to replace mine soon and its such a difficult process on its own without all the red-tape etc
@@sunyavadin Oh, ack! commiserations.
@@convex242 Oh, yeah. It's easy to see that that story was written from a wheelchair user's POV. That's why diversity behind the camera is as important as diversity on stage.
What annoys me most about “Melora” is not in the episode. It seems all those ramps have disappeared following this episode.
THIS!
Agreed, though I do like the idea that Cardassian architecture is intentionally hostile to disabled or non-Cardassian individuals. Makes a great deal of sense within the context of that culture.
In fairness, altering a show's carefully-crafted aesthetic isn't something to be done lightly.
I don't like that she didn't get a gravlift wheelchair
Maybe they're really deployable and we have seen people pull up the floors to access circuits
I've been looking forward to this video. My father was a "first generation" Trekkie. Watched it in the late 60's when it first aired. My dad was blind and in a wheelchair all his life. The most he ever said about the depiction of disabled people in Trek was in regards to Geordi and how he was sorta jealous that by then Blindness has more or less been cured. My dad had a variety of health issues too so he was in hospitals A LOT, and I remember him often citing a line by Dr. McCoy in Star Trek 4: "What is this, the Dark Ages?", "Sounds like a god damned Spanish Inquisition!", "Dealing with medievalism here!" My Dad LOVED using Trek's optimistic future - especially the advancements of medicine in the show - to rag on modern medical science and politics.
My dad is one of my reasons on why many of the doctor characters are my favorite characters in the series - ESPECIALLY McCoy, Flox, Bashir and The Doctor.
What about Captain Picard's artificial heart ????.
Also when mccoy asks the woman in renal failure what the treatment is and she says dialysis he says how barbaric and the physicality of the surprise lurch and his body always killed me. Those lines from him have been my favorite spoken in the franchise since I saw it. 10 years after star trek 4 came out I lost 95% of my vision and 7 years after that I went into renal failure. Trust me I used all of mccoy's lines Plenty in all the treatments I got especially the eye surgeries. Gotta kidney pancreas transplant in 04 and it's still going strong but I still dropped those mccoy lines whenever possible.
I found out recently that lavar Burton only had 15% of his vision while wearing the visor so he figured out how to use the set lights as monuments to maneuver around props et cetera. That's exactly what I do or I get lost in my own living room.
Thanks for telling us about your dad. Take care.
There was the TOS episode "Is There in Truth No Beauty?" that had a blind woman with a sensor vest she used to get around. It was like halfway through the episode that we even found out she was blind, and she made a very big point of saying it didn't affect what she was capable of.
Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve how did you miss this one!!!!!
THANK YOU! I couldn't remember thr name of the episode. I was going to look it up, but I see you beat me to the punch. Kudos!
That was Diana Muldaur
And the only character who knew before anyone else was dr. McCoy who kept it to himself, stating that it’s none of his business and if she wanted the others to know, she would have told them herself. I really liked that.
I was fumbling to mention this one, kept falling asleep mid comment. Popped awake again to finish and find all I'd typed gone. Grr
There could be theoretically 2 differenced here.
Miranda Jones is first and foremost a Telepath who is powerful enough and Skilled enough to traverse a bridge that exists between two species as the most notable of their innate difference is that humans are corporeal and Medussans are NON-corporeal, so how could we ever pretend to understand the differences between us, a difference that could preclude EVER understanding the difference between species
Medusans are non-corporeal, energy based life forms, what common ground could we ever share?
Finding that Miranda Jones is blind. It is her blindness that actually allows her to engage with Ambassador Kollos, in a way that seeks the common-ground that LIFE might share. Miranda being blind allows a different piece of Common- ground.
During the story Mirranda seems to show jealousy towards Spock, her dialogue leaving us to believe it is as she states that Spock's telepathic ability might make a connection between Mirranda Jones a more complete understanding of what could bring two such different species together
Mirranda's jealousy had nothing to do with the lies she has told herself and us, the audience. The jealousy was over Kollos himself, a romantic interest that likely grew during a penpal or letter / communication exchange.
Is there in Truth tricks the audience into thinking it's about beauty, a trickery further hammered into our subconscious knowledge of beauty by the name Medusa.
Love is the point of "is there no beauty"
Mirranda is blind. It is that blindness which allows Kollos and Miranda to find a love between each other.
2 Houses...alike in dignity.
Sort of Romeo and Juliet here as the obstacles seemed insurmountable, but Miranda and Kollos sids't give up and quit.
If you can't tell, i hate Romeo and Julliet
Thanks for reading it. Glad I stayed awake long enough to type this out.
As a disabled person I’ve always assumed that they’ve been able cure most disabilities. I suffer from a very debilitating illness that affects me life as a father, as a husband etc and some days I find it hard to get out of bed sometimes. Trek for me is an escape, and I’ve never felt and negativity towards Trek regarding how disability has been handled. I guess I’ve never thought about it.
On the bit about how Pike reacts to seeing his future; I can tell you now, if younger me, had seen what was going to happen to me, I would have been terrified, horrified maybe worse. The way it was handled actually seemed fair to me when I think about how I might have reacted.
As someone else who suffers from a debilitating disability, that was my same thought. The idea that we don't want to be cured, that we want our conditions to be preserved just so we can exist as a "culture" comes a little close to the notion of romanticizing disabilities for my taste.
I hope absolutely nobody's left with my condition in the future.
I think part of the challenge is that disability is, in itself, diverse, and disabled folk are not a monolith. Disabled individuals can verywell be ableist towards other disabled folks (especially those with very different disabilities than themselves) or have internalized ableism themselves. I am disabled in some ways, but I have to remain mindful that my experiences are not universal, and I can't speak for everyone, and that I can behave in a manner towards others that is verymuch ableist, too.
One thing others have mentioned, that possibly drives this home, is that Bashir is likely neurodivergent himself, at least, arguably, at one point. That possible truth doesn't mean he didn't behave problematically towards other disabled/neurodivergent folks in the several episodes this video highlights him in.
That said, I agree with the video, that overall, portrayal in the Star Trek Universe is a mixed bag. What people see and resonate with, and how they feel about that mixed bag, probably has a lot to do with their own unique experiences and perspectives, too.
So less the idea that physical limitations are a bad thing, and more the idea that Pike knows this is what will happen to him and there is no way out. Not the form he will take, but the knowledge that he will lose the form he has now.
I feel like a plain simple tailor should have been included in this, his struggle with claustrophobia is not only incredible onscreen but you could tell Andrew Robinson put his own struggle into that character
oh, he even states so in interviews. "I didn't have to act for that seen."
That plain simple tailor also had his claustrophobia develop into crippling anxiety issues, which I would have liked to see analyzed as well.
@@Vesperitis To be fair Garak had more than anxiety issues going on, he was one of several DS9 characters struggling with PTSD (Sisko & O'Brien being notable others). It definitely had a hand in shaping his personality, and was handled pretty well in the most part (IMHO).
The term PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) itself problematic, it could be argued as a perfectly normal response to extreme circumstances and therefore not a disorder at all. Another example of those working in mental health treating those they serve as defective.
@@AnthonyIlstonJones I remember Nana Visitor saying that because of her son, she doesn't say the disorder part. It is a way for the mind and body to adapt and survive extreme stress and conditions.
@@Vesperitis has claustrophobia, build things that are hardly larger than the body > congratulations you played yourself
I grew up watching MASH so I always enjoy that actor
Troi losing her telepathy!!
I thought this was a really good episode for showing an able bodied person suddenly experiencing a disability and unable to cope with the loss psychologically.
*Especially* because it’s a healthcare professional.
I think it really shows those of us who assume we’d be stoic & brave in the same circumstances might be kidding ourselves.
I also thought it was good that they didn’t rush her acceptance, it felt like it was beginning but would be a long process.
Of course we don’t see that because she suddenly gets her power back again, and it all gets wrapped up with a bow by the end of the episode - but that’s TNG.
‘The Loss’ is a very appealing episode for all sorts of reasons ☹️
It would have been more impactful if she had ever used her telepathy to state things that weren't terribly obvious. Ahem.
The biggest thing, for me, about that episode was how *clueless* everyone else was about her loss. Because she lost an ability that none of them had, they had no frame of reference for her loss. They were like, "So you're just like us now, and we're OK, you should be, too."
@@jimhenry5552 Yeah, for being so evolved, they should had been more empathetical towards her. I felt many degraded her feelings and experiences. Same as with how several degraded Worfs feelings at several occasions. If one of the crew suddenly lost their ability to fly with wings, I doubts anyone would go "Well whatever, we never could fly, so you should be acclimated already, because we don't even know what you're missing!"
@@TheGrinningViking That's a fault of the writers not utilizing the character. I feel that the loss was more of something of how Troi functioned and saw the world, and suddenly she lost a layer of her vision, so to speak. Whether or not her ability to empathize was well depicted or utilized in her job and the series, it was a loss to *her*, and that was what the episode focused on.
I would hardly call Pike's fate "merely sitting in a wheelchair." He is grossly disfigured, barely able to communicate, and as I interpreted it, in constant pain. As a disabled person who lives with constant pain (I still have mobility, however) yes, it deserves a pretty a horrified reaction.
Agreed with you, and I think his comparison to Kenneth Mitchell's battle with ALS is honestly a pretty horrid one. I don't think it's "merely sitting in a wheelchair" that is potentially harrowing for Mitchell and his family... or most others dealing with ALS. It's the fact that his motor neurons will progressively shut down. The physical and mental pain that will progress over time before the *most* terminal condition possible (re: death) is what causes the distress, not some idea that "wheelchair = bad." This is certainly the anguish my mother felt (although, thank God she did not have chronic pain before she went) dealing with MS for three decades.
It's honestly rather tone deaf from Steve IMO, and it kinda feels like he's treating it as if all wheelchair-bound have the same lot in life. And that couldn't be farther from the truth.
@@adamdobrowolski2510 “tone deaf”??
@@davidthedeaf tone deaf is describing the inability to perceive the nuances in a conversation, in this case Steve kind of downplays the situation Pike ends up in and makes a broad sweeping statement about those in wheelchairs being in the same situation. I believe this opinion is something he may have concluded to himself rather than those actually in wheelchairs, Pike isn’t just disabled he’s unable to operate; the best starfleet could do to accommodate their best officer was the beep chair which shows how bad it is, only being able to say yes/no while in constant pain is barely living, he can’t feed himself, he can’t clothe himself, he can’t even go to the bathroom by himself.
One trouble I had with The Menangerie is that no one seems to have invented Morse Code by the 23rd Century. Of course it was needed for the plot...
@@pjaypender1009 It’s a neuro-divergent observation at worst. Being “tone deaf” is not an physical/mental disability, Just the lacking levels of situational awareness in terms of the emotions and feelings of others in a given situation.
The most confusing part about that Ds9 episode for me is that Bashier made it through Star Fleet academy without ever experiencing zero gravity.
I think the closest analogue would be why most drivers ed doesn't teach kids manual transmission anymore. In Trek the artificial gravity seems to be so reliable that it remains working even in the most catastrophic situations (and yes in the meta sense we know why that's the case, a cheap tv show can't fake zero g on a whim), so why would Starfleet bother training most cadets on zero g procedures? I expect certain tracks (O'Brien and Sisko would almost certainly know) dealt with it, but why would the guy in Starfleet Medical have to devote time to it.
I know, right? In First Contact, it's definitely indicated that zero-G training is standard. Picard and Worf talk about it.
@@JRMcCarroll But I think there is a difference in someone who is simply trained for "zero-g combat" and someone who almost naturally lives in said environment. Think about it as the difference between watching a human trying to swim as gracefully as a dolphin in the ocean. Sure you can learn how to do it but would you ever be as graceful and fluid as said dolphin? At least this is what I think they were going for here anyway.
@@chrisblake4198 I see your point but i think the difference here is that automatic cars dont just randomly become manual but theoretically grav plating could fail at any moment
edit: also you never now when you encounter a ultra low gravity planet such as the elaysian homeworld and you probably dont want your diplomats to crack open their heads on the ceiling because they stood up too fast and shot upwards to the roof.
Also it would be incredibly easy for starfleet officers to be trained in Zero-G. just take a week each year where the cadets are trained on a space station and shutdown gravity in their quarters and classrooms
@@sehfisch2350 I do wonder if its like basic training in the military. As in at the academy, before Bashir went into specialist medical training he received the minimum amount of Zero-G training sufficient to prevent him from hurting himself in an emergency (how to get to the nearest locker with mag-boots or whatever).
Pike: *beeps eight times*
Kirk: There, you see? He just said no four times!
Spock: No, he said yes eight times.
Underrated comment just here.
@@frankharr9466 Cue Fatboy Slim video... :)
Picard: THERE.... ARE.... FOUR.... BEEPS!
I didn't read Pike's horror as being in the wheelchair. I read his horror as "Oh my God I'm melting!"
“Disabled people are out there throwing down just like everybody else”- Steve shives 2K21
Garth was wounded in battle, his body was wounded.He was given power to repair his body by thought. After a wile he lost it mentally over his new condition, that led him to Elba 2.
O' Brian should tell Basher that , " HEY , so you cured her don't mean you can date her." ......
Get this: I'm a presenter and one of my most popular class is "Sex And People With Disabilities! I teach respectful ways to approach/hit on both temporarily able and people with various disabilities. The other half of the class is show and tell: i bring in a bunch of toys, furniture, positioning pillows, etc. It's the more popular half (people like to try to sneak in for the second part) and it proves what Steve said.
ETA: the toys and stuff are adaptive gear, not just sexy stuff to buy. Oh, and no live sex demonstrations either.
Good video. Although I have to say with Pike, he isn't merely limited to a wheelchair, but largely unable to do much of anything. Even his communication is severely curtailed. As someone with multiple disabilities which are progressive, I think there can become a point where it does become a huge problem for the person. I for one would not want to be a quadriplegic who cannot communicate. For me, that'd be hell.
That was part of the point of the episode since the damage to Pike was so severe that it was "hell" it was preferable that he would accept the illusion that the people of Talos offered as a viable alternative and that out of loyalty to the best interests of Pike, that Spock would go to such lengths to give Pike that opportunity
Yeah, Pike's disability, and more specifically his assistive device, was always portrayed as distrubingly limited given it's, you know, the 23rd century. Comparing it to Steven Hawking's setup, it's a severe lack of imagination.
Also, keep in mind, Pike had been OFFERED this (illusion on Talos IV), and he accepted it. Pike was far beyond just "disabled"...it's basically a situation where he's trapped in his own mind, unable to interact with the world at all. We don't see all of the discussion, but Spock had clearly discussed something with him. Kirk specifically asks him if he wants to go back to Talos IV at the end, and he says yes.
I agree. He's not just "in a wheelchair", not just disabled, but far beyond that. His body is extremely irradiated, he's quadriplegic, has lost nearly all ability to communicate or interact with anyone beyond a binary answer, and that doesn't even factor in what the levels of his physical pain on a moment to moment basis might be. Anson Mount's reaction isn't in response to "I'm in a wheelchair!", it is to seeing himself in that frankly mutilated state, a reaction I think most anyone would have to seeing themselves after a terrible accident. But, I also recognize in that scene he gets up, accepts that future is his future, and he goes onward, knowing that he does in fact survive, and accepting it as something he CAN do.
Stephen Hawking is a great example of how that exact issue isn't necessarily a "huge problem". He had a hard life, sure. But he made a huge contribution to society and is widely revered by scientists and non-scientists alike. He even used his disability to his advantage by visualizing black holes in his mind in a way that wasn't possible before his condition advanced to the point where he was stuck in his own mind more or less.
Melora's situation ties into something I've been thinking about lately. Her disability isn't really a disability at all in the way we conventionally think about such things. On her home planet she's perfectly normal. What makes her disabled is living in a society designed for people adapted to higher gravity. Conversely, Geordi, who we would normally consider disabled, isn't, because society has adapted, socially and technologically, to allow him to go about his life with the same ease as sighted people. I think that gets at the true nature of disability. It's not what your body or brain prevents you from doing, but what sort of person society is structured for. Consider a world where everyone was autistic. Or had dwarfism. Or pick any other "disability". The people living in such a society would not consider themselves disabled, because society would already be structured in such a way that they experienced no difficulties. And I think viewing disability in this way opens up interesting avenues of discussion. What other people, who we might not consider conventionally disabled, are effectively made disabled by society being structured in such a way that it limits their ability to live their lives?
Absolutely. This is known as the social model of disability (if you want to do further research), and it’s very important in many disability activism communities. A few countries have even officially adopted the social model into their laws or constitution or whatever, and a few more are proposing to do so soon.
Good point. With Geordi I think his visor could be considered like a
prosthetic leg. He’s close enough to operating as the world expect that people almost forget he even is different until he can see something other people can’t. The audience almost has to be reminded that while he has some ‘sight’ it’s not actually the same sight most humans are born with. Like I thought my friend’s brother just had a bit of a limp until he joked about his prosthetic leg around the campfire (he was a bit drunk, lol) and proceeded to pull it off. So while technology exist to aid the disability to almost invisible, it is interesting that there are these moments of ‘oh yeah, it’s a bit different for you’.
There's a short story that addressed that kind of thing where a man falls down a cliff to an area sealed off for a valley where everyone is congenitally blind due to some barrier keeps the eyes sealed. He thinks he'll rule because he can see but they can't understand this 'sight' thing he goes on about and eventually decide it's some DISability he suffers from and once they remove his eyes he'll be cured and fine like everyone else. Barely escaping he crawls back up the cliffside to the 'normal' world.
yesss the social model of disability! if I lived in a society where people could fly, I would be disabled if my school was at the top of a tree. accessibility for me would be an elevator, or prosthetic wings.
furthermore, everyone is only temporarily abled-disability is an inevitable part of ageing! inaccessible architecture is not just hostile to disabled people, but to EVERYBODY'S futures... no wonder people are afraid to get old. mortality is enough to be afraid of already, without also grieving the loss of being able to participate in society.
I’m a disabled Marine. When I was first told my shoulder injury was a permanent and degenerative pain condition (CRPS) I immediately remembered Nog. Honestly that helped a lot.
CRPS. Damn. Painful.
Barkey's episode was one of the only times in TNG that I looked at the cast and thought, "wow, what schmucks". I mean they're blatantly so agitated by someone acting different that it makes one wonder how they tolerate alien species at all.
I suppose it's _different_ in them for two reasons.
1) They're all the "Crem de le creme" of the force. The Big-E-D is the Flagship and pride of the fleet. And as humans they feel they know how humans are _supposed_ to act. So they have a sociological bias there.
2) With aliens, they're aliens so acting "weird" is "just how they are". It's why, people might get irked with Data (see "Paulaski"), but they kinda shrug it off with "Well he's an android".
The main cast is often shown chafing at their responsibilities when other complicated aliens are interacted with. Picard, Riker, and Geordi have full episodes where they voice their displeasure at doing something out of the ordinary to please aliens.
I disagree Reg was not fulfilling his duties. They lightened up once he became competent
Geordi's rapport with Riva. Both had an instant connection. Levar Burton seemed to light up during that scene like never before.
This episode often reminds me to say hi to people in wheelchairs and make eye contact...often the person pushing the wheelchair assumes I was talking to them when the hello was not directed up there.
I was actually surprised the way Riva and Geordi connected with immediate understanding of each other wasn't touched on.
That’s very arrogant of the carer, especially if they’re just hired help and not a family member or something. Most of my wheelchair using friends push themselves, but one gets a nurse in once or twice a week (pre pandemic) for going out. She hates that crap. She also hates how many of them seem to push with no regard for her comfort, no avoiding potholes, randomly tipping her back without warning to go up kerbs, and so forth.
You could also argue that applies to the Geordi/Data friendship as well. One of Data's most touching scenes ever to me is when he describes how Geordi was the first person he ever encountered that treated him like an equal.
I try to do the same, try not to stare but try not to look away at the same time. I work in a fabric store so we get some people with mobility issues. With the pandemic, we put tables in front of the counter, so its hard for people to reach. I try to but their fabric as close as possible or I just walk around and dive it to them. I know people like to do things for themselves, but I was taught growing up to help.
Picard going though PTSD in Family S4E2. This is going to be with you a long time, Jean-Luc. A long time.
at least ptsd can often be resolved. CPTSD is very difficult. OBEPTSD is fairly easy. PLCPSTD takes a lifetime to get over.
As an able bodied RN I have had several discussions with co-workers about life after injury or illness. We discuss what we would and would not accept: quadriplegia, paraplegia, traumatic brain injure, severe burns and the like. What we did not discuss is this fact - almost all, like 99.9% of patients who survive with disability choose to continue on in a new way. We forgot to factor in reality. The fear of possible disability blinded me to the simple fact - if I were disabled, I would want to continue to live, be seen and interact with the world.
Thank-you for this episode and the thoughtful discussion.
Yep! The number of suicides of disabled people in no way mirrors the number of people who claim 'I'd rather be dead.'
One thing I find many medical professionals fail to realise is that they in fact know very little about the realities of disabled life. The confines of a hospital and a tiny part of our lives and the medical issues are very different than living in an environment (both social & physical) constructed to exclude you.
I find that interesting too, as someone whos worked as a "personal assistant" (atleast thats the swedish term) as well as a carer in a home for people with mental dissabilities to the point of not being able to live independently, and in nursing homes with severely dement and or end of life patients, I find that the sentiment "Id rather be dead" only very rarely is expressed in discussions on the topic whereas "thats not a life" is far more common. Like, Ive seen the everyday lives of people whove gotten to the pont where Im thinking to myaself "yeah, if that ever happened to me I would rather be dead", and Ive had patients literally tell me "This is not a life worth living, you have no dignity and basically just wait to die. Do yourself a favour and dont grow old." (muscle deterioration and incontinence that couldnt even feel it when they shit themselves but clear head that they tried to dull with alcohol) but it has to come to an extremely extreme point for that to kick in. The worst cases for me to immagine having happen to ones self is where you can no longer properly process or communucate with the world around you, leading to extreme stress and insecurity when things arent a certain way cause you cant process why and people cant understand your distress. Thats not much of a life at all, stuck in your head with your fear
My disability is very minor compared to many, but was still permanently life-altering. It's not just your lifestyle that adapts when you lose ability, it's your mindset. Those thoughts able-bodied people have about what kind of injuries they would be willing to accept are replaced with thoughts along the lines of "What's the minimum ability I'd need to maintain to continue, should things get worse?" Able people think in maximum pain thresholds. Disabled people think in minimum functionality thresholds.
Most people who become disabled have a difficult first year and then return the the levels of happiness they had before the injury.
@@LucyLynette indeed, plus people who’ve never had to adapt before think they’re incapable or that it would be too difficult or traumatising. But most disabled people just find ways around things, even if that’s just “I simply had to accept I couldn’t do as much between breaks”. One of my wheelchair using friends, whose permission I have to tell her stories, often complains about ambulatory folks seeing her “struggle” with a door. She’s like “I’m not struggling, it’s just a multi-stage process”.
But other people leap in to grab a door for her, even when she says “trust me, it’s easier for me if I just do it myself, you’re not really helping”. 9/10 times they end up standing in the doorway while holding it open and there’s not enough room for her to get past them. So then she has to awkwardly tell them where to stand, or just has to wait until they figure it out, or so on. One time she even had a guy, who actually had different disabilities, shout to her “you cripples, you’re always so ungrateful, I’m only trying to help; I’d be overjoyed if someone helped me” after a tense stand-off, where he not only refused to let her use the door, but also refused to not stand in the middle of it while “helping”, so she literally couldn’t get past at all and was trapped with him while he got increasingly angry and irate at her for “being ungrateful”. She described it as one of the few times she really feared it might erupt into violence.
I don't think you mentioned this one - The 3rd Season TOS episode "Is there in Truth no Beauty?". Diana Muldaur portrayed a blind woman (Dr. Miranda Jones ) who is the telepathic interpreter/aide to the Medusan Ambassador Kollos. She had a sensor net garment that allowed her to sense the area around her. It was not precisely visual, so it was in a way somewhat different from Geordi's visor. But she seemed to have the ability to know where everything was around her, as well as sense things like people's heart rate, body temperature and exact distance. I don't remember everything about the episode, but I remember she was portrayed as being confident and independent.
I have had the condition called GBS or Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a few years ago. I was lucky to be diagnosed early, and I made a much better recovery than a lot of folks. However, for a time, I was paralyzed and unable to speak or move. Trying to communicate in the early stages was scary and frustrating. It took months of being totally dependent on the staff at the hospital, and then the those at rehabilitation facility. I had to learn to use a wheel chair, to slide in and out of bed on a board, how to walk again, and some other indignities that humbled me and made me appreciate what therapists, nurses and doctors go through trying to help those under their care. It also exposed the limitations and how even the best intentioned of health care providers can get it wrong, or not understand what someone is going through. I was able to make a partial recovery, but though I am able to walk short distances, my legs are weaker now than before the illness. There is a distinct possibility I will become wheelchair dependent in the future. I currently use a cane sometimes, especially if I am on my feet for more than a few minutes. Its affected my employment and career. So, I can appreciate this topic on a level that I probably wouldn't have before my struggles over the past few years. "Walk a mile in someone's shoes", as that saying goes (it takes on a whole new meaning).
Nog losing his leg and dealing with pain was interesting and well thought out. A lot of what he experienced rang true with me - and how I experience pain since losing my leg.
When my Grandad lost his legs to diabetes, he refused to be seen in public. He let very few people see him in person.
So when Worf is crippled in the accident, its like watching it happen to my Grandpops all over again. I can see why Worf wanted what he did, not through myself but because he echoes the exact things my Grandad did.
I'm not disabled so grain of salt here... but the thing with Pike to me never seemed to be so much that he was in a chair. It seemed to me that a lot it was the incident that caused him to go into the chair was PAINFUL, like big time painful and probably always painful from there on. And given the technology of Trek and the fact that he can only say yes/no? Seemed to me like he was closed to locked into his own mind. Whilst in constant agony. And that is a whole different ball game to being in a wheelchair or paraplegic. Spock was still in the wrong, but finding that out with no warning (and possibly feeling it too) is different from finding out you'll be in a wheelchair one day. I'd imagine.
Yeah... Steve did lean into the aesthetic a bit when the real concern seemed to be about the amount of pain and suffering between point A and point B. It's one thing to see what you'd look like in the future, but to actually feel every moment of pain that was endured along the way, or even just the pain being felt by your future self in that moment... it could be a real eye opener (or in Pike's case, a real screamer). It'd probably be like reading a list of side effects from a prescription drug and experiencing those side effects [as you read them] *one hundredfold* _before_ even taking the drug.
Trust me on this, the lock-in syndrome is what’s causing him more intangible pain than anything a nerve ending could experience.
Add in the fact that his face was LITERALLY MELTING ON SCREEN
"Maybe you're just different. It's not a sin, you know. Though you may have heard otherwise." - Tam Elbrun, ST:TNG s3e20: Tin Man.
My absolute favourite depiction of neurodiversity in Star Trek.
I actually found the quartet of Mutants to be (at least in my personal experience) a sort-of solid representation of the many conditions ADHD, at least in the 1990s. They each had features that can be found in such people; with Jack of course being hyperactive, and more high key anxiety (as well as him being seen biting his nails, which can be a common way to stim such feelings), Patrick being the mental age difference and constantly worried about security, Lauren to be the impulsivity and sometimes lack of social awareness, and Sarina being the lesser known but common silent sufferer, who seemed overwhelmed more with the noise in her head than by the outside world. All of them in their room sort of was like neural imagery, with so many thoughts and actions going on at once that it can be hard to catch up, as well as being distracted by silly things despite knowing the reasons (the expansion of the universe) as well as genuine wanting to help, but not always being able to work out the full situation. IDK, I mean for the 90s its alright, and modern TV isn't all that better now with ADHD, especially since it's still a new frontier for a lot of people to fully understand, but as someone with ADHD, I felt sort of seen watching these guys putter around in ways all too familiar.
This was spot-on, especially the DS9 critique. It's ironic since Bashir was later found to have been intellectually deficient in his youth but his parents had him genetically modified to overcome his developmental disability. Maybe that's why he thought he could "fix" her.
Yup. Bashir was being a tool in that episode. Like really. When people tell you something, they are generally telling you the truth. She didn't want special treatment and he KNEW that.
I think this observation is the real lesson of the episode. Bashir is the main character because he's an example of what not to do. It's easy for Star Trek fans to think we're woke enough to be immune to Bashir's mistake, and that's why it (kind of) works.
Bashir is problematic like 90% of the time
@@gregaaron89 I think that is residual of his own disability before his parents augmented him.
I really don't know how anyone could take anything away from Bashir's behaviour in that episode other than 45 minutes of uninterrupted cringe.
It would have been better (or at least, less problematic) if Bashir had sent her a space memo saying, "If you adjust the [Technobabble] you'd get around the station easier", it was the fact that he just went ahead and altered it because he (thought) he knew better than Melora. I imagine that would piss anyone off.
Melora clapping back at the Klingon running the Klingon Restaurant is one of the best moments in DS9.
I'm shocked that you didn't mention that Melora was written by Evan Carlos Somers, who is in a wheelchair himself. While I don't think any of the criticism of the episode is at all invalid, I do think there's a drop of irony in not mentioning that a disabled person was heavily involved when the whole point is about inclusion. To me, Melora as an episode is in a very complicated grey space where it's clear that the feelings of disabled people are not just one unanimous voice, and that they're individuals and often disagree just like any other group of people is bound to do. Evan Carlos Somers obviously liked this portrayal for Melora (At least, as far as I'm aware) and that doesn't invalidate other people's relationship with the episode.
That’s true, and he based her struggles on his own experience, and her decision to stay herself just as he said he would if faced with the choice. But it’s also worth noting it went through an uncredited rewrite by the writers room. So unless he’s done an interview where he claims ownership of specific parts of the script, it’s hard to determine where some of the attitude comes from. Especially the middle part seems inconsistent with the beginning and ending, with the curebie side showing through before it snaps back. That could also be down to the choices of the director, of course, but... yeah. There’s a whole bunch of cooks stirring that pot.
Somers submitted the original draft, and the writing staff did not receive particularly well. Steven Baum first did rewriters, then Michael Piller and James Crocker. Only after that last rewrite did the teleplay get approved. It's obviously Somers' story in credit, I don't think we can say if his entire intent got across.
I wonder if you guys think 7 of 9 should count. She requires a lot of accommodations, but no one really makes a big deal about it
Many of my friends who use prosthetics and assistive devices to relate to her, yes. Her frustration with having to spend so much time going for checkups and maintenance, for instance. But also her casually being like “my x is superior”, like my wheelchair using friends move around so fast on good terrain and leave ambulatory folks in their dust.
That's because giant tits balance out a bad personality when Berman is in charge.
@randy b OK but she was abducted and forcibly augmented into that so the argument can also be made that it ain't the same at all
@@markhoffart622 7 of 9 is the result of that the Borg did to a human being called Annika Hansen. She's not alien. Human.
You did not mention the original series with Miranda and the medusa an ambassador. Her blindness was an asset and that she was able to work with the ambassador without being driven insane by looking at him. When Spock was blinded as part of the cure from the Denovan parasites he considered his blindness to be an equitable trade for regaining his sanity. I am blind and I appreciated both of these events
Hey, if this is okay to ask, do you use Audio Descriptions? All my Trek DVDs have subtitles, but no AD, as far as I can tell. So I’m curious if there are ADs available for Trek out there somewhere.
I just asked a person about keeping your third eye open. I have a personal friend that might be able to helps as well. if i find an answer I'll let you know.
I recently commented on your follow-up to this video. I hadn't seen this one yet. I had a bunch of stuff to say about Pike, some of which you actually mention here. I want to thank you for trying not to speak over disabled people and for calling out the way Pike's disability is framed uncritically as body horror. I want to add though that I think it's reductive to say that Pike is "merely sitting in a wheelchair." He's had a profound injury that has affected his ability to communicate and almost entirely taken away his mobility.
I think Anson played the scene well in that context. Pike is a robust, physically active man who is used to being in control of basically everything around him. He's the Captain of the Enterprise. It *should* terrify him to see himself suddenly frail, unable to speak, hardly able to move, etc.
My problem is that after the vision, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds doesn't do anything to let him process or re-evaluate his reactions.
(I know I've said this before, because I say it every time I comment on Pike, but...) he served with Ariam, Detmer, and Tilly. He *knows* that having a disability is not the end of the world, and he has seen with his own eyes that there is technology available to give him more agency and mobility than the "beep-chair."
If the new-Trek writers want to play around with the TOS-era canon, they should at least be able to present a consistent level of medical technology between Discovery and TOS. I know they aren't going to re-write canon to the extent that Pike gets to remain in active service, but having him keep saying that he "saw his own death" when he talks about the vision of his future is really bad.
Ok, this topic is outside my wheelhouse so I'm gonna talk about Deanna Troi instead. OK, now you see how in the Marvel movies it's necessary to nerf, Hulk, Vision, and Captain Marvel? That's what happened to Deanna!! If you think about it she could solve almost every problem they run into! "There's a cloaked Romulan ship 1000 meters off our starboard side, captain."
"They're lying captain." "The entity is benevolent, captain." There would be 10 minute long episodes if they didn't nerf her!
As a deaf person, "Loud as a Whisper" really hit me. Riva demanding that they address him and not the interpreter is something that people need to be reminded of, constantly. The fact that they depict it this way... as if 300 years later, people still don't understand this is both mildly depressing, and extremely realistic.
Add a shout out for Airiam. We only found out she was a cyborg because of an accident in the episode where she died, but we did still get some stuff from her perspective.
Another TNG moment worth mentioning: the cameo by Stephen Hawking. The professor was light years better off than Pike ended up being.
True, they should've had a robo-voice at least (they had that concept in the 60s). But his "Wheeled chair" was a self-propelled iron lung (the iconography of his head poking out is kinda the point).
@@hellacoorinna9995 The thing was they (the writers/production team) were doing everything they could to hide the fact they re-cast the Pike actor (if only they knew, over 50 years later, Pike would end up recast anyway 😅😅) Him being trapped to that yes/no beep chair was a story choice to intensify the visual misery of his character and fails to hold water when we already have tech that exceeds what the beep chair can do.
Also Bashir was born with learning disabilities as a kid and underwent treatments he found traumatic as a child, so I think that would change his perceptions of not only himself but also other disabled folks.
Taking that into consideration, it's interesting what made him go medicine given his background. You'd think the man would be scared of doctors, nurses and medical instruments.
@@Animalwon I’d argue that anecdote. There’s a difference between selfishless and a limit of perspective. I can’t pay attention to someone else’s needs if I’m constantly trying to fulfill my own, because my needs aren’t filled making it harder to do stuff and not paying attention to anything beyond the next thing needed to get done or my head will explode.
I never understood why Pike couldn't just beep in Morse code. We know they know Morse code in the 23rd century, because we saw Scotty using it in Star Trek V.
Perhaps the accident also affected him mentally? Like he is still able to understand language but is not capable of more complex speech anymore?
I am now 61, been a Trek fan for years.
I now have Arthritis in my legs, it's just something to live with but , I thank you for this episode of disabilities in StarTrek.
Considering delta radiation can cause cellular disruption, one can imagine that if the delta rays hit the brain that it could severely damage or outright destroy the many of the neurons in the brain, and in Pike's case it hit the neurons that are responsible for communication, leaving him only able to communicate in yes/no.
I would have tossed Plato's step child in to the conversation, where being a person with out Mind powers is a disability, and Alexander's response when offered a drug to boost his mind powers ... to Paraphrase "I am not ashamed of who I am, but get me out of this society that hates me for who I am,"
Alexander is one of my favorite one-off characters in ST or in fact in any show. He's a better person than the "normal" people who control him.
As someone who has a mental disability (dyslexia) it was very profound that Spock (probably the smartest person in the room at times) struggled with and adapted to the increased struggle we deal with everyday. Really allowed me to connect with Spock as a character more than before.
Having an "invisible" disability is sometimes harder than a physical one in gaining those accomodations needed to flourish as an individual because people will look at you and say you don't have a disability because there is nothing physically wrong with you so they see no need to accommodate you.
This video is excellent. I've been doing a rewatch of DS9 and got to the Melora episode, I have a physical disability that affects my mobility and I suddenly started thinking about the representation of disability in the Star Trek universe. This covered everything I hoped it would.
Erin's description on the embarassment around adaptive devices reminded me of the principle of that boarding school for hearing disabled kids I used to work at, who refused to add sign language to the kids' curriculum. In his words, it was because "sign language would be an advantage they wouldn't have 'in the real world'" -- I wasn't very happy with that principal's attitude, to put it mildly, especially since the kids felt extra disadvantaged after learning ABOUT sign language...
Fortunately, this backfired gloriously when the teens figured out they could learn sign language on the internet at the dorm, taught it to each other and the younger kids and, since neither the principal nor most teachers understood sign language, they could use it to... let's say, "communicate covertly" in class with impunity, thus putting the teachers AND the principal at a severe disadvantage.
To your account of that principle for that school for the hard of hearing, I guess he never heard of Douglas Hoy, Douglas was a baseball player in the 1900s, he was mute, using sign language and a notepad to communicate, he taught his teammates his sign language, establishing it as a tradition in baseball, for baseball players to learn sign language, and invented the baseball signing system, from his sign language.
To your account of how Star Trek handles mental disabilities, (With a brief mention of Lore), Data and his brother Lore and Data's daughter Loll could be viewed as neurodivergent, with Lore fitting many of the defining traits associated with Psychopathy, including his arrogance, ego centric tendency, his lack of empathy and sympathy, his lack of personal social morality, and his violent antisocial outbursts against others, well Data and Loll might be more likely to be comparable to autism, we might just not think of them that way, because they are not only not human, but are in fact not biological species, they are all androids, with the response to Data and Loll's social awkwardness being to simply chalk it up to Dr Sune's AI technology simply not achieving human level social sophistication, and Lore's antisocial behavior simply being a defect in his AI design, but in reality maybe Dr Sune didn't fail to achieve human level social sophistication, but in fact made his androids a little too human, creating them with vary human mental disabilities. Namely, Antisocial Personality Disorder in the case of Lore, and then Autism in Data. With Data then passing that Autism to Loll.
For me, I want to see chronic physical pain addressed. I'd happily go back in time and make the TNG writers incorporate Frakes' back issues into Riker's character. He's still a fit, strong person who is good at his job, and pushes himself to keep going, even in the more physically demanding aspects of his work. But he's in pain. Pretty much constantly. And his pain threshold has shifted over time so that what someone else might call 7/10 pain is something he shrugs off as "Tuesday."
Not that I'm projecting, or anything.
But the point stands. Chronic pain sufferers with mostly functional bodies live differently, but often the difference is invisible. Seems like just the thing Trek should have been talking about since way back when they had a guy with chronic back pain on the bridge.
I relate to Frakes a lot and even call it the riker when I put my foot up on something to ease my back pain.
But dear God I hope there are none of us left in a century or two.
I think the biggest point you missed with Bashier is his learning arc. He went from admiring her for how she overcomes her disability but in the end he learns to admire her for who she is. Also Pikes vision of himself in the beep chair is very different from someone ending up in a wheelchair. Can you imagine loosing all ability to move, talk and even look after yourself. That is much more of a horror than ending up in a wheelchair.
I've been disabled since 2013; the left side of my body is nearly nonfunctional. Interestingly, the episode that speaks to me on the subject is the one where Deanna temporarily loses her powers...
@@paulhunter1525 it is super unfortunate, because despite the crew's constant attempts to show her how she could still lead a fulfilling life with her disability, she refuses to even consider it, right up to the very end. She learns nothing
@@k1productions87It took me _years_ to mentally accommodate and accept my disabling injury. I don't mind that Troi wasn't able to in 40 minutes. (Or a few days in universe.)
Thanks for covering the episode where Worf wanted to put himself down due to a spine injury. As someone with severe scoliosis that required extensive spinal fusion to correct - not fix, _correct_ - that episode's been stuck in my mind since I first saw it.
Captain Pike: can't move anything but his eyes and can only beep in the 23rd century
Stephen Hawking: can't move anything but his eyes, spoke and advanced theoretical physics in the 20th century.
Wait, what?
well, our technology overtook some of TOS' tech decades ago.
A brain-computer-link would make Geordies visor a real possibility (and there are prototypes around since the 90s, giving blind people monochrome vision, but they were discontinued when the inventor/surgeon died) and could help with LOTS of other disabilities (bridge nerve damage, connect protheses and controlling all devices remotely). In about 25 years, we might get to Borg-Level tech for our bodies. Nanites, neural interfaces, artificial skin with sensors and denser batteries to power all this are already in the prototype phase and will be available in time. First to those with needs, then to those with wants and then everybody will need it to keep pace with augmented people (because thought controlling a computer will be faster than mouse and keyboard).
I think Pike's vision is more than just envisioning himself sitting in a wheelchair. It's not just that one day Pike switches from able bodied to disabled, accepts it and happily carries on with his life. There is pain and trauma that gets him there that he has to go through. And there are lots of things he'll lose, dreams he'll have to give up. Sure, it can also be a new beginning with new dreams, but it's unrealistic to expect that a person can cope with such a change easily. Nog, who is also used as an example in this video, struggles for weeks because of his lost leg, and he is barely limited by his new leg, compared to Pike's future disability. Of course for Pike the vision of his future would be a nightmare at first, especially in time where medicine is so advanced. It would take some time to work through that and gain a positive perspective on it. It's important to include disabled characters in the series and show that they can have happy and productive lives, but I think the series should also be honest about the difficulties of getting used to that new life.
I liked Voyager's B'elanna's self harm episode "Extreme Risk". I found it to be a accurate depiction of PTSD-depression, my only problem is that after this episode is over, belanna never has to deal with her mental health and trauma again. where as in reality, this will likely be chronic in nature.
One problem I have with the argument against Pike's fate is that, it's not about him ending up in a wheelchair. It's the sheer extent of the injuries, leaving him horrifically maimed, in constant pain, and barely alive. They could have left him perfectly ambulatory and his fate would still be horrifying to nearly anyone. The Wheelchair isn't the part that scares him.
Pike's repeated "no"--I have always thought--was more an expression of his concern for Spock and not wanting Spock to get courtmartialed/executed for helping him. It's true that Spock takes control and doesn't respect Pike's explicit wishes, but Spock was right about what was in Pike's best interests--as Pike confirms at the end of Part 2 when they ask him if he wants to go down to Talos IV. He chooses freely to go there. Spock was faced with a truly difficult dilemma, morally-speaking. I think the ethics of the situation went beyond, "Well, you have to respect a person's choices." In addition, Pike wasn't simply disabled; his case was very extreme, and it's rather hard to see how he could have made a meaningful life for himself. I stand with Spock on this.
Hey Steve my name is George I am a disabled Fan of star trek I want to thank you for doing this video it's something that I think is long past due and something I hadn't considered. I will mention one Instance of a disabled person that you did not mention in the video that's Admiral Jameson from TNG to short a season. Another one that I just thought of hwas the inventor of the transporter from enterprise Who was also physically disabled.
I had to look up the latter, Dr Emory Erikson. I can't recall the episode but I just saw a clip. Now I'll have to watch it and see what I think.
Missed the EMH from Voyager, he clearly regards himself as disabled, as he expresses to his crewmates in "Author, Author" by making his mobile emitter a giant 50 pound backpack.
This is a wonderful video! Thank you for spreading information about disability in a kind and sensitive way. When I first saw the crewman in Discovery using a modern manual wheelchair I literally cried out of happiness. When we do see disabled characters they often have futuristic mobility aids. It's exciting to see speculation about how mobility aids could change in the future with better technology. However, I love the acknowledgment that sometimes the best mobility aid for someone is the type of manual chair we have now. I use a lot of different mobility aids depending on the situation, but my manual wheelchair looks so similar to the one in the show. It felt very nice to be seen in that specific way.
Lt. Alara Kitan from the Orville is my personal favorite disabled character in sci fi. She is kind of the polar opposite of Melora, coming from a planet with higher gravity than earth, making her incredibly strong in normal earth gravity. After much time aboard the Orville she has great difficulty returning to her home planet, because she has adjusted to a much lighter gravity. She is a great example of an ambulatory wheelchair user, much like myself, meaning she is able to walk, but with great pain and difficulty. She ultimately decides to return home rather than stay onboard the Orville and undergo a series of painful gravity treatments. It's an incredibly powerful moment that helped me make the decision to take some time off from college to do physical therapy and get a variety of different tests and treatments that will likely benefit me in the long run, a lot more than pushing myself to the absolute limit trying to live on campus. Her story can be seen as a metaphor for the rapid onset of a chronic illness, and I really love that. I also love the detail that in the alternate universe where they are fighting a war, her decision is different. In this reality she does decide to undergo gravity treatments in order to retain her strength and fight the war effort. I love this detail and it shows that disabled people's choices can be impacted by their environment.
Thank you so very much for this episode. I am so happy you brought up Autism "cures" as terrible. I never thought folks would be having these conversations. It is very encouraging.
Back when fanzines were mimeographed, I remember a short story (the only one I remember) that was called "The Kingdom of the Blind." The plot was based on the TOS crew visiting a planet where sight was consider a a birth defect. The society, which had to wear something because the planet was cold, didn't give much of a toss about what they looked like. They understood that sighted cultures did become distracted when they showed with badly matched colors and weird looking dress. So the folks with the birth defect of sight were employed to solve this problem. It was a "honor" to have the job for a sighted person since it was the only job really available to the sighted folks meant anything. The job was also an "honor" because it wasn't much needed.
I'm autistic and grew up not knowing it (not diagnosed) and always felt attached to Data who I often found myself learning human habits with. I had finally found another "person" who is asking many of the same questions I was. I didn't have everything in common with him obviously I'm human, but seeing a character trying to understand people despite the seeming impossibility gave me some drive to keep trying too.
I don't understand this interpretation of Pike's predicament in The Menagerie. Pike wasn't just a paraplegic. He was utterly unable to interact with his world in any way other than to send a yes/no flashing light signal through his rolling coffin. He couldn't move any part of his body the way I remember the episode. I never saw him even looking around the room with his eyes. Christopher Pike in The Menagerie finds himself in a full-on literal "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" situation, not just inconvenienced with a broken ankle -- oops, TWO broken ankles.
Oh, and I forgot to point out that whatever happened to him couldn't be fixed with 23rd Century technology. He wasn't just regular-crippled; he was space-crippled.
As a disabled person with a very similar disability to Melora. I will say that I absolutely love that episode. It portrays the struggles that disabled people with disabilities like mine extremely accurately as well as the attitudes and responses of people around us. I can't tell you how many times someone has done something to try to help without asking first and it just wind up making things more difficult. Along with the occasional person that feels the need to insert themselves into my life in as many ways as they can to try to help the disabled person that even if they admire in some ways, they pity in others
I'm glad Star Trek kept it this way. Human nature will not change by the 24th century, especially not when it comes to how people respond two things and people they don't understand when they are trying to help them.
Thank you for this! As a disabled Star Trek fan, I really appreciated your take on this subject. And, I also really appreciated you talking about mental health issues. (Your Lenore stuff is the one part of the Ensign's Log that I haven't really cared for.) We are all working toward a better future.
Hey Steve! I'm a long-time viewer and first time commenter (ish? I may have once before...). I'm also neurodivergent (Autistic and ADHD) and run my own Facebook page and UA-cam channel called Differently Wired through which I try to champion Neurodivergent pride and Neurodiversity. I just wanted to take a moment to comment here and say thank you for this! You highlighted several important points lots of us in the disability rights community often say, and even taught this grizzled old activist a few things (for some reason, while the DS9 episode with the people from the Institute never sat right with me, I never clued in on them being Autistic-coded, and now I'm even angrier haha). I really appreciate this video and your attempt to uplift/center marginalized voices here. Keep up the awesome work!
...and you know...I'd be honoured if you followed my page/channel too...but no pressure... :P
It's more than "just sitting in a wheelchair", though. FAR more than that. The man is trapped in his own body, unable to do ANYTHING in ANY way. If it were in fact an ACTUAL wheelchair, Pike would have even less than he has. Wouldn't even be able to move himself. Likely thanks to future tech it's probably hooked into his nervous system. That review at 30:15 is just... wrong. I get the implication, but in reality there are people with this level of disability, and for those who DO manage to communicate, well... they're usually not thrilled about continuing to live. It's NOT a beginning or "continuation in a different form". Those that do communicate more often than not describe it, in reality, as a kind of hell. They just do. Yes, you have the other character in a wheelchair, but once more, Pike's condition is FAR more than "just sitting in a wheelchair".
People don't want to acknowledge that actually exists, too. It's not all rainbows.
I watched your vid a few days ago and I've been thinking about it (I know you posted it a while ago, but I recently found your channel myself). As a neuroatypical individual myself, I would be happy to discover that my children and future generations would not need to deal with the difficulties I have dealt with in large part. I agree that when a character does have a disability it should be dealt with better, but I would be quite sad to find out that my issues would be common hundreds of years into the future.
There is an episode of House that I really loved for this, where a patient is refusing treatment because her whole identity is based in her disability, one that she shares with her mother. The mother doesn't want to tell her daughter to get the treatment because having this disability "builds character" and House responds with something like "how much character does your daughter need?" People who chose not to accept a form of treatment should be respected for that choice, people with disabilities should be respected the same as those without, but I would be saddened if the future portrayed by Star Trek had a ton of people running around with my issues, as I hope medical treatments improve and not stagnate. I would hope that people who need wheelchairs today by Enterprise era would have the ability to get some regenerative treatment or a chip (or something science fiction tech) to be able to walk.
At least in the eyes of his parents, "Jules" Bashir was seen as developmentally disabled, hence the reason why he was "cured" by illegal genetic engineering.
I'm deeply reminded of the way Autism Speaks treats autistic people, when I look at the Bashirs.
Which, in hindsight, makes his obsession with "fixing" Melora and Sarina a lot more interesting!
@@inajar7947 Some people are quite unable to treat their children as anything else but platforms for trophies. Well I'm the platform with no trophies and I'm proud of it.
@@JK-dx4ob It really does as an interesting wrinkle to those plots. I have absolutely no qualifications to draw it out myself, but I do think you found an interesting through-line to explore.
@@inajar7947 absolutely. My teachers were worried about me falling behind etc in my first few years of school. Then I rebounded, caught up, and overtook them. I relate hard to Bashir’s description of before his treatment, and when he shouts “you never gave me a chance!”. I think things like, if my parents had the option his had, would they have decided I’d taken long enough and intervened? Cos that would suck. I like who and where I am.
I've spent my life around people with various disabilities. Family members, friends, and people I've worked with. Adults and children. I'm honestly glad that Trek hasn't always done well in addressing the issues around disabilities. The imperfectness of these stories is one of the most realistic things in the history of Star Trek. It's an excellent mirror of ourselves in society. Thank you for covering this topic.
Great video Steve. I would love to see you do a video on how Trek has portrayed aging, getting old. From the original series episode where the crew got old early to dialogue in the movies, to Majel barrett in TNG, the new show Picard and more it would be a nice topic to cover imo.
Pike in the "beep chair" is probably the single most haunting scenario Ive seen in TOS.
Im reminded of the movie "Jonny Got His Gun" which was used extensively in Metallica's "One" video.
I believe either scenario transcends the idea of "disabled" into straight nightmare fuel.
I think including Pike's chair in a discussion on disability in Trek is quite ridiculous. Obviously this is a special case and needed to be treated as such.
One notable positive representation for me: Martok losing his eye in DS9. He struggles to adapt for a little bit but then he does and it's nbd and he goes on to do other things as a character. I liked that so much.
What I really want Trek to do better on is to *cast more disabled people*. Even in the rare cases when Trek writes a disabled character okay, it's still really disappointing to see abled actors play those roles.
YES YES YES YES YES to everything you said about The Menagerie and Pike's total lack of agency. It's one of those things that flew over my head as a kid, but I rewatched it a couple of years ago and felt kind of sick at how everyone (including Spock!) treated him.
Me- Clicks like before the video even starts, "I should have waited to the end of the episode to do that." End of episode Me- "Nope! Another excellent episode, as always."
You forgot to mention Martok, who lost an eye and rejects in S5 E21 even the idea of getting a replacement.
Why do I feel, in retrospect, like that was contrasting with G'Kar on B5? He got an artificial eye after losing his.
“I do! Not! Want! An artificial eye!”
“Then you must accept the fact that you have a disability, and-“
“You are trying my patience, doctor!”
(or something like that. I do like how Martok just wanted to get on with things.)
The only main 1 that I think needed mentioning was voyages Lon suder who had .....something that made him have violent tendencies and I think he was done fairly good
Fairly "well".
I think he was a Betazoid without empathic/telepathic ability which rendered him unable to connect emotionally and left him in a condition roughly analogous to what we'd call a psychopath.
It should be noted that Pike's circumstances are far worse than just being unable to move or talk, it was stated in "The Menagerie" that there was no certainty that Pike would be unable to use the chair after a certain point, that's why Spock and the Talosians unilaterally decided to have Pike live the remainder of his life on Talos.
Even though technically not a disability, the Enterprise D crew's initial treatment of Reg Barkley because of his social awkwardness wasn't called for. Everyone was calling him demeaning names behind his back even though his intelligence probably surpassed everyone on the ship (excepting Data).
it’s widely accepted that reg is autistic coded so in that light it is a disability
Severe social anxiety can be a disability even if you don’t consider Reg to be Autistic.
@@kryptiqk2141 That in of itself is an ableist mindset. Look man, PTSD is a form of anxiety, as well as other things, usually brought upon by some outside traumatic experience, for some it about being tough. It's about learning to heal after something deeply life shattering. IE, warfare, rape, and terrible abuse. It's not as black and white as you are making it to be.
@@kryptiqk2141 Man, if you had to live one day in the life of a neurodivergent person's mind, you'd change your tune real quick.
@@kryptiqk2141
Who counts as being able to take care of themselves?
The vast majority of the population of the USA would die if put in a hunter gather situation.
So are they disabled?
Disability is a culture construct.
What is or is not reasonable accommodation is a culture construct.
All that mental toughness you mentioned was also accompanied by heavy drinking or other behaviors we now consider unacceptable.
I've worked with hard drinking tough guys.
Their drinking was accommodated, by the other guys.
It was literally more acceptable to be hung over that to be sick with the flu.
I’m not disabled but assistive technology in 1964 when The Menagerie was filmed was very limited. A beep chair is terrifying. Assistive technology has come a long way-we can do more today than what they imagined. Keith Mitchell who has ALS, uses assistive language to speak now as well as a motorized chair.
Melora" is basically another standard "Bashir being a jerk who gets humbled" episode - because what are disabled people but stepping stones for the "growth" of abled folks, right? * facepalm *
as a queer i'd like to say i feel this trope
Melora and Serina are basically the same process with Bashir. Problematic, to say the least.
"Doctor Bashir, I Presume?" is, to me, a glaring omission from this discussion, because based on that episode (and the first episode where Sarena, Patrick, et al. appear) and his general awkwardness, I read Julian as also being on the autism spectrum along with the other genetically engineered folks.
In fact, I'd argue Julian is massively important for the representation of neurodiversity, because he represents the neurodivergent people who are "neurotypical-passing". Basically, even though we appear to be neurotypical at a glance, we are neurodivergent and experience fallout from our neurodivergence.
But because we're able to pass as neurotypical, we aren't discriminated against, locked away, shunted aside, or taught to doubt our own abilities the way so many disabled people are. And a lot of NT-passing neurodivergent folks go on to become successful professors, artists, lawyers, or...doctors.
The moment where Jack calls Julian "Mr. Normal Starfleet Man!" and points out that Julian isn't locked up because he seems "normal" basically confirms this reading, imho.
And "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?" is the episode where this aspect of Julian's character really comes out. Because he rejects the idea that his parents "fixed" him. He identifies as someone ("Julian") who was created by the death of a child named Jules Bashir. And then the episode kind of lets the parents off with a pass for doing that...but still, I think it's a really important moment with implications for reading Julian as a "high-functioning" autistic that reverberate throughout the series.
"To turn every 'it was' into 'thus I would have it,' only this do I call redemption." This is my favorite quote by Nietzsche. I've always felt that it is something everyone should strive to achieve with all their problems, knowing full well it will never actually be achieved.
I was unfamiliar with that quote until a moment ago, but the concept . . . it's more realistic than you might think. I can honestly say that I have no regrets in my life, even though I have made some stupid choices and the people around me haven't always done the right thing either. I have certainly suffered in various ways, including a period of depression so bad I couldn't function, but I don't regret a moment of it. Most of what I've been through has already worked out for the best, and what hasn't yet, I'm confident will someday, because that's the kind of God I'm in a relationship with.
Okay this is a subject very close to my heart obviously. I watched 2 minutes in and I'm doing this stream of consciousness style so you might have addressed it later. I don't comment often but this one I have to comment on . For those curious about accommodations I'm using voice dictation without any changes so you can see how it has to work and needs to improve because why not use one teaching tools to possibly learn another lesson. Also I'm lazy right now.
I love this episode of Jordy. I distinctly remember watching it as a six or seven year old with one of those parents who shouldn't be parents specially of disabled children. This is why representation is important because I had no one to tell me this I didn't. I've learned this lesson way into my adulthood and I wonder what would happen if we had more positive representation everywhere.
Def episode-
Yes thank you for mentioning this. Disabled people are not Unix we can and do have very fulfilling sex lives but I feel it's important to also mention it's not something to be fantasized either. I have a feeling I know what episode is next and we'll talk about Nightingale syndrome then. This is a great example of disability making you look at problem solving differently. And why it's important to actually use disabled actors if you can in the story allows for it.
Molora-okay this episode this is the episode that I wrote the comment for but then had thoughts and other things. I have the most bizarre love hate feeling for this episode and you put it into words. I love melora I hate how they reacted. Do not do something a disabled person tells you not to do you will hurt them. I have had people try to grab my hips when I transfer into my wheelchair. Lift me in ways that don't make sense even try to put body parts in certain positions that they just don't bend. Don't do this. Please if there was was real life and she had to transfer out of that chair for whatever reason she is going to hurt herself because of how you have to train. If you take nothing else from this comment take that. Bryshere has classic Nightingale syndrome and it's a pain in the ass. He wants to come in and save and we as disabled are supposed to fall for him be grateful to him. You can see it he wants the appreciation. Also the way they expect that person to act. Do you know how many inappropriate questions I get on a regular basis. I have a very small platform on tiktok like 500 people if that I've been asked three times today how I have sex...….. just today no. This is the final thing that annoys me and you brought it up but I feel like I have to put it in my own words. Would I change the experiences that I've gone through? No I wouldn't they made me who I am but you know how much I wish I was malora to just press a button and for it to stop. I wouldn't change the past but if I could snap My fingers and fix it sign me up. Most disabled people are like this the major exception coming to mind is the deaf community because they see it as more of an identity. Okay I think I'm done now.
Wharf episode
This episode is complicated even for me. I was born disabled so this has been my life forever I have many friends who were hurt and became disabled that way. These are very common feelings for my experience let's just say I hate me before you, but I would be lying to you if I said I won't live past 60. (Don't worry I'm only 30) I need to know there's an end to in order to get up.
Okay I haven't watched the LG Star Trek or Discovery so I won't comment much except I agree with the person you quoted. And there is definitely a hierarchy of disabled just like there is colorism. I had a friend in high school who was paralyzed and 26 he could only communicate using his hand board I got to talk to like I was 10 he got talked to like he was three.
Mental illness/divergent-I don't really have much to contribute to this one there's plenty of videos out there. Look up how autism is portrayed in Star Trek.
36:54 oh The institute can't wait to see what you say I'm sure I will have things to add on this one. Okay I lied I don't have the energy for this one. I'm already an hour and a half into this little project of mine I don't have the energy for this one so all I will say is locking people away permanently is not the solution and I hate everything about the eugenics this year story. It shouldn't even be an option. I hate it. Kill it with fire. And I've already explained about bashir's Nightingale syndrome kill this whole thing with fire.
Leslie two things you didn't mention that I feel like I should. One thing I like about jordy's representation is that he does not always like that he's blind yes do we accept ourselves and all of that wonderful b******* totally do that but sometimes like when you're kidnapped by Klingons it sucks and pretending it doesn't doesn't help anyone. And lastly thank you for mentioning your own mistakes and I hope you learn something from this process as well.
If you got to the end of this almost 2 hours later yes that's how long this all takes congratulations you get a cookie. I just needed to shout into the void
Thank you for sharing these thoughts, they were very illuminating
Indeed indeed. I’ve had strangers lift my cane off the ground when I’ve collapsed from my chronic fatigue. I push it back down to push off of to lift myself and the “helpful” strangers lift it off the floor again! When really that’s what it’s there for - when my knees turn to jelly. It’s all so performative, and no real thought goes into it. People want to be seen by others to be helpful more than they want to genuinely help the people they’re “helping”. And one of my wheelchair using friends has horror stories of trying to leave a bus or train and having people lift her chair in the air even while she’s shouting at them not to do it because she doesn’t feel safe. I wish this kind of experience wasn’t so damn common.
I’ll watch this just as soon as I finish my day’s work in disability services. Edit: Great points! What I’d like to see is a new disability (e.g. Nog or a brain injury) that evolves over time, capturing the trauma, adaptation, and acceptance of today in an optimistic future.
I feel like an episode about depression has the potential to be really powerful if done right. I can imagine something like Barclay’s first episode except it’s one of the main cast getting irritable/sad/angry for seemingly no reason and trying to cover it up but ultimately finding acceptance and love from their friends
They did that with Torres in Voyager one time. Though that’s another one that gets mixed feelings, especially because it has to be over by the end of the episode and Chakotay kind of, uh, shouts her out of it. But up until that point it’s rather well done, and Roxann Dawson based her performance on her own experience of postpartum depression IIRC.
As far as I've always understood, Pike not only sits in a wheelchair with a burned off face, but he is in a constant state of agony without any form to expres that. (but I could be wrong)
Not only that but the man spent the better part of a decade anticipating his ultimate fate, without even the comfort that he would be effectively rescued by Spock.
Also remember what Commodore Diaz(was that his name?) said Pyke is a functioning brain in a dead body. Thats more than parallesis or using a wheelchair. Its effectively waiting for death because he can't really take any action. His communcation is only re-action to others. And bringing him to Talos is maybe not that far away from a prostetic. The telepathic illusion is like a krudge for his brain to feel unhinged.
@@niemandzuhause4897 Commodore Mendez was his name. And yes, he was essentially a chronic vegetable that is still conscious. It is not merely a disability one could adapt to, but being in complete paralysis yet not under sedation. Some people use Stephen Hawking as an example of someone who could live through it, but Hawking still had a method of communication. Pike did not. And even then... would anyone BUT Hawking actually chose to remain living that way?
I saw The Menagerie as a child, and somehow I interpreted the tragedy of Pike not that he was in a wheelchair but that he was in pain and unable to find relief, then when I saw Anson Mount's response to the vision I again interpreted it as he was horrified not by chair but by the unending pain he would eventually be in (although it was a little over the top).
yeah that was my understanding too. It'd be one thing if he was like paralyzed from the waist down. That's a disability, and it would I imagine be unpleasant to get used to but afterwards he would almost certainly still be able to live a good and fulfilling life. The problem is that pike's condition is far worse. He's suffered massive radiation burns all over his body, he's completely immobile, effectively mute, dependent on a machine to survive, and in near constant pain. I think it's fair to call that a horrible fate. Not the being in a wheelchair part, but the "radiation burns everywhere and living in constant pain" part.
Telling someone wallowing in their own misery to get out of their own ass and see that others need them is ACTUALLY the right thing to do. Particularly for someone as honor bound as Worf. Demonstrating to them that they are still valuable for (and loved by) others can't be a bad thing either.
While I agree with the premise of what you said, your terminology is very rude.
I (a physically able person) always viewed the terror of Pike's future was the lack of ability to communicate, not the wheelchair.
Multiple people in my family have had a form of ALS that Hits the brain and not the body first, and watching them not being able to think, or communicate, or understand what's happening, but still live for years afterwards is terrifying. I think tying that fate up the wheelchair is a bad thing though.
When in discovery made spock have dyslexia. I had to pause it and go "O My God. HOLY FUCK! Spock has DySlExLa like ME!!!" It made my day. It made my year. I cried. I never thought I'd be seen. Not by a character I love too.
I am here, you can start now.
We need a watch party ♿️
Pike's condition seems to be like a person trapped in a nearly comatose yet aware of his environment. As far as communication, having a bipolar yes/no ability is in no way the same as using a communication device.
Also, Troi losing her empathic abilities temporarily is a potential discussion topic.
Hey Steve this was a great episode! When you started mentioning the franchises misses in handling the topic of disability I kept waiting for Season 4's The Loss to come up.
Troi treats the loss of her empathic abilities as a disability and spends most of the episode telling all her friends and collogues how they will never understand what it's like to be disabled and how she can no longer preform her duties on the ship because of it. When we find out at the conclusion that it was just her misunderstanding interacting with the 2 dimensional aliens we're left with an episode of an able bodied character preaching about how hard it is to be disabled...
Meanwhile she and Geordi do not have a scene together in this episode.
I think you're forgetting Pike is also in constant pain. Not all disabilities are the same, and while it's absolutely correct to see most of them as simply a part of someone like Geordi, there do exist situations like Pike where it simply isn't the case that life can be full and happy.
It's Only a Paper Moon was the episode I put on when I heard of Aaron Eisenberg's passing.
Thank you for making this video. It does need to be said and as someone who is neurodivergent and a Star Trek fan I thought you did a great job! Yes Star Trek has historically treated issues like these as if we're broken and need to be fixed which we don't. We're just wired differently. I absolutely enjoyed watching this.
How you gonna talk about Geordi being blind but not mention the episode where he is stuck with the Romulan who asks him about his family "letting him live?!"
I'm blind and can't tell you how many times I've been asked why my parents let me live. I really wish this was covered or even mentioned, because it's a very real experience that so many disabled people deal with.
I can understand taking that attitude towards the mentally retarded. But ppl with 4/5 functioning senses? Seems a bit extreme to me.
You forgot Dr. Ann Mulhall in In Truth Is There No Beauty of TOS. It is most ironic since you mentioned the Vulcan IDIC which was also shown in that episode. Dr. Mulhall was a blind telepath who used her dress to see.
Also Gul Dukat became blind in the last season on DS9.
Roddenberry’s edicts over no cloning and no genetic engineering in the Federation were somewhat about maintaining tension, like limiting the top speed of warp engines, because perfect worlds were thought to be boring and the assumption seems to always be MASTER RACE is the default result when it comes to eliminating suffering.
Thank you for another great video that made me think, Steve. Speaking as a neuro-divergent person, I appreciate what you said about people like me being expected to "fit in," and then penalized for not doing so and treated as a problem to be dealt with. I think the situation with Reginald Barclay was handled very well in the episodes of TNG and V where he appeared. One important thing you didn't mention about Barclay's debut episode was how Geordi, also disabled but in a different way than Barclay, was one of the people that disliked him the most due to his quirks and social awkwardness (Barclay was part of Geordi's engineering team), even proclaiming at one point, "I can't stand being in the same room as the guy!" That changed when Picard ordered Geordi to try accept Barclay and become his best friend to provide an example as the leader of the engineering team and work to bring out the best of him, rather than simply admonishing and ridiculing him, thereby stifling his potential. This is a great example of showing how members of minority groups are not immune to judging those with differences that are different from their own differences (Geordi is blind, not neuro-divergent). Picard handled that in a way that was far more compassionate than anyone I ever met in our present day society, who always treated me as a problem and would have sympathized far more with Geordi than Picard on this.
One thing I must disagree with you about, however, is a matter which ignores a major difficulty in a future society like where Star Trek takes place, one with technology, including medical technology, far more advanced than what we have now. How likely is it for people with at least physically debilitating disabilities, whether due to natural causes or accidents, to still exist in numbers comparable today? This is one of the difficulties of depicting such a future society while insisting every social, political, and economic aspect being relatable to us today. Accomplishing this takes a good amount of creativity, otherwise you end up with some blatant anachronistic elements that take away from the suspension of disbelief.
It also correlates with an assumption you seem to make: most disabled people prefer to live with the disabilities rather than seek a cure because it's an essential part of them. For starters, please read what @aaronlitz7049 said down below in the comments. I also know what it's like to also suffer from chronic illnesses where you're in constant pain, or constantly sick, etc., to the point where it's very debilitating at times. Yes, I've lived with it and have made the best of it, but I am not for one second going to say I would refuse an available cure because a cured me "would not really be me." Yes, I can contribute with these disabilities, but that doesn't mean I'm okay and contented with being in constant pain, or that I think absolutely every type of debilitating condition is better than death.
In fact, this morbid terror of death is another aspect of our society that puzzles me, and certainly puzzled people in the Star Trek future, as Dr. Crusher noted in "The Neutral Zone" episode. I would never blame anyone for seeking a cure, or considering it cruel or patronizing for a medical professional to offer one. I do think, however, that it's a bit different with conditions like neuro-diversity, because these often come with assets and are connected to our personality, and hence are truly part of "what makes me be me." But something like chronic fatigue syndrome (which I had for a long time) or losing the ability to walk? No, I believe there is a notable difference, especially if it involves a condition that you were not born with. For another view of this based on a real-life event, please see the movie "Whose Life is it Anyway?" with Richard Dreyfuss:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whose_Life_Is_It_Anyway%3F_(film)
"The Beep Chair" sounds like something that would come from Lower Decks.
However, if lower decks was canon, the fact that Pike was being taken away from a paradise medical facility would have explained all of those NO beeps.
In the lower decks episode much ado about boimler there is a background character on a beep chair and they are referred to as being in a "pike chair"
@@stef_trek and IIRC there’s two more at the resort getting attended to
Disabled veteran here, I would argue with the Pike controversy on this point.
Pike isnt just in a wheelchair. Hes completely paralyzed and unable to communicate outside yes and no answers. It's an exceptional case, not DISABLITY, but INABILITY. Its similar to the classic movie "Johnny's got a gun" featured in Metallica's "One" video.
It's a terrible fate. Regardless of how other disabilities are typically depicted or thought of, or actually are.
As a veteran, as a disabled veteran, I can tell you that going from "superhero" who could do ridiculous things without a sweat to being unable to accomplish basic life tasks without pain or even ridicule, nevermind the quality of life that Pike experiences post injury, is extremely difficult to deal with emotionally... Mentally. And I'm putting it lightly, seeing a fate like Pikes as a military member would feel as a nightmare scenario for almost any veteran, especially before receiving years of therapy.. .
I'm no necessarily saying its healthy.. but its ACCURATE.