The Cassandra Page has a run-down of 54 media errors in 2005 and uses a very Trekkie-friendly analogy (none of those in the Blogosphere, right?) to summarize the media’s continuously obfuscatory performance last year:
No matter how the humans tried to fight the alien creatures, they could not trust their own observations. The illusions were too powerful and too constant. The humans did not know if their own efforts were successful or not, because the aliens could create illusions that masked the results of the humans’ attempts to liberate themselves. One of the Enterprise crew finally summarized the situation as follows:
“Their power of illusion is so great we can’t be sure of anything we do . . . anything we see.”
Funny enough, I’ve always assumed that one of the reasons why “The Cage” failed as the first Star Trek pilot was that its subtext was implicitly anti-television, especially with lines such as:
When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating; you even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought records.
No wonder NBC’s executives felt compelled to reject the pilot: if that quote doesn’t do a splendid job of describing the average television viewer, I don’t know what does.
Which, in a way, brings us back to Cassandra’s post. Don’t miss it.
(Oh, and don’t miss Lie #1 of 2006, either.)
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