Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
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Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
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Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
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Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
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“Ferengi talk about Wall Street as if it were holy ground.”
—Kathryn Janeway
I seem to recall a producer, maybe the Great Bird himself, saying that Ferenginar was created to show the ridiculous logical conclusion of the US obsession with capitalism and accumulating wealth.
Oh definitely. I think everyone writing Ferengi episodes had this in mind.
But at some point in DS9's run, I think someone (probably Ira) realized that the worship of the "free market" was becoming even worse than the fictional and cartoonish economics that they invented for the sole purpose of making fun of capitalism, to the point that they somehow got away with giving Quark, of all characters, the moral high ground when criticizing human history.
True. Little did we know how crazy it could really get. :D
Honestly, your "the most stable and ethical expression of capitalism" thesis has made me realize just how right Quark was. With humanity, the wealth gained through unchecked capitalism inevitably gets parleyed into political power that destroys the free market that enabled it in the first place. For Ferengi society to be stable, that dictatorial tendency would have to be absent, which means they really are better.
@CaptObvious @commander_la_freak
Yes, TNG started before the breakup of the USSR, so criticism of capitalism was a pretty radical thing to put in primetime in America in the late cold war. The Ferengi were explicitly analogized with "Yankee traders" to make it clear that they were basically "Evil Space America" as a twisted mirror alternative to the Federation's "Good Space America" with only the nice parts.
Again IIRC, that was part of why Roddenberry kept it off the Big 3 networks. After having too many TOS stories gutted by NBC executives in the 60s, he wanted to TNG to reflect hisvision of the future.