On Sunday, the Heroes & Icons (H & I) digital TV network reran the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Q-Less.” Vash (Jennifer Hetrick) is found in the Gamma Quadrant and taken back to Deep Space Nine. She is Captain Picard’s close personal friend, if you catch O’Brien’s meaning.
And she doesn’t know about the wormhole. How did she get over to the other side of the galaxy? She was traveling with Q (John de Lancie), that seemingly omnipotent prankster who is often Picard’s bane.
And now Q is Commander Sisko’s bane. There are strange power outages throughout the station and everyone assumes Q’s behind it.
It’s not Q’s fault this time, but he does know what’s going on: one of the Gamma Quadrant artifacts Vash is trying to sell for several bars of latinum is actually an embryonic life form that could destroy the station when it hatches.
Once that situation is resolved, Vash resolves to move on with her life without Q. Quark (Armin Shimmerman) tries to convince Vash to go to Tartaras V instead of Earth.
QUARK: So, you're off to the Daystrom Institute. Bet you can hardly wait. Long, boring lectures, endless conferences, whining students dogging your every step. Sounds delightful. No, you wouldn't be interested...
VASH: In what?
QUARK: I hear they've uncovered the ruins of a Rokai provincial capital on Tartaras V. If you could obtain some Rokaian artifacts?
VASH: Forget it, Quark. I'm going back to Earth.
QUARK: Have it your way.
Q: An abysmal place.
VASH: Tartaras V?
Q: Earth. Oh, don't get me wrong. A thousand years ago it had character. Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, Watergate. But now it's just mind-numbingly dull.
VASH: Well then by all means, don't come with me.
Q: I think you'd be much happier poking about the ruins of Tartaras V.
This episode takes place in the year 2369, so Watergate would be not more like four hundred years in the past, not a thousand. But Q’s never been one for the sort of precise statement we’d expect from Spock or Data.
The current situation with traitor Donald Trump and his many different crimes is much worse than the situation with President Nixon and his crimes. Clearly Earth today is not as “mind-numbingly dull” as the fulfillment of Gene Roddenberry’s optimistic vision for 24th Century Earth.
And for Q, our current crisis is still centuries in the past. So why doesn’t Q mention it as an example of the character Earth once had?
The most obvious explanation is that, in 1993, when the episode first aired, writers Robert Hewitt Wolfe (teleplay) and Hannah Louise Shearer (story) couldn’t have known that business failure and utter joke Donald Trump would go on to lose the popular vote and win the Electoral College, and threaten the destruction of democracy.
Our democracy’s still in danger, even if Trump is impeached and removed (as he should be). Republicans have no integrity, no patriotism. Trump and Moscow Mitch are probably not the only Russian assets in the Republican Party.
The death of the republic our Founding Fathers built would not contradict the backstory of the United Federation of Planets. Though I’d prefer to get there without any intermediate steps that involve the United States being subjugated by a Russian dictatorship.
It would be too facile to think of Donald Trump as a cruel, horrible joke perpetrated by Q. However, the situation we find ourselves in today is not the result of a cosmic prankster snapping his fingers to fulfill a sudden whim.
Rather, it is the logical result of the gradual moral decline of the Republican Party, which began at some point after President Garfield but before President Nixon.
In one episode of Star Trek: Enterprise in which Crewman Daniels (Matt Winston) shows Captain Archer (Scott Bakula) that the timeline has been reset to its proper state, we see an image of President Bill Clinton and then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.
That Hillary Clinton would run for president is perhaps something that episode’s writers could have foreseen, but not that she’d win the popular vote yet lose the Electoral College. So it couldn’t have been in Daniels’s historical review.
We also see some shameful symbols in the historical review: the Confederate flag, Ku Klux Klan robes (worn by Klansmen) and the Nazi swastika. A Make America Great Again hat worn by Trump would not have been out of place.
That too couldn’t have been part of the historical review either. The producers also shied away from any images corresponding to World War III, perhaps thinking such images would not be recognizable as such.
Likewise, even if the Deep Space Nine writers could have foreseen the Trump trainwreck, they couldn’t predict what term will become a shorthand for these all too interesting times. Even we today don’t know what that term will be.
Still, there are “in-universe” reasons for Q not mentioning Trump in his paean to Earth of the past. Maybe Q wasn’t paying attention to Earth in the early 21st Century. Or maybe he thinks that Trump’s maladministration is such a shameful and repressed chapter of Earth’s history that Vash might not know about it.
Tonight, as part of “All Star Trek,” H & I will air the following Star Trek episodes: original series “I, Mudd,” Next Generation “Preemptive Strike,” Deep Space Nine “Move Along Home,” Voyager “Death Wish” (in which there are not one but two Q) and Enterprise “Daedalus.”
As usual for these Star Trek open threads, you may refer to anything in any Star Trek series that has ended for production. As for Star Trek: Discovery, commonsense and consideration for those who think knowing a few minor details about episodes they haven’t seen yet would completely spoil their enjoyment.
The open thread question this week: what do you think Q thinks of Donald Trump and his treasonous crimes?