Are the Maquis doing the right thing?
Thanks for the lively discussion all! My take is that the sci fi elements mean you can’t cut and paste their experiences onto our morality exactly, but it makes the feeling of conflict relatable, at least emotionally.
In a fully-automated luxury communist utopia, the Maquis are selfish assholes. Clinging to a planet because of the inconvenience of having to relocate. A planet which was never theirs to give or take in the first place. They talk a big talk about being “farmers who made something of the land,” and maybe that’s true. But they have replicators; farming is a hobby, not a livelihood.
Human, Vulcan, Bolian, etc. Maquis could lead happy, safe lives if only they were willing to lead happy, safe lives. They are not oppressed; they are not fighting in a righteous cause.
Bajorans, such as Ro, have different motivations. Bajor is not a party to the Federation-Cardassian Treaty, and Bajoran colonies were not sacrificed. Ro’s motivations are sympathy for the Maquis and hatred for Cardassians. Understandable and relatable motivations, but not heroic.
Ro’s decision is understandable if you consider her life experiences.
The Maquis are not created in universe to be good or bad. They are not black or white, they are gray all the way. Because that’s how all freedom fighters/terrorists are in their time. They get their marks from history. Some upstart colonists in the 1770s tend to get a more favorable score from history. For the communists in Cuba it depends who you ask.
Reality is a clusterfuck and politics is the art of what’s possible. No one designed the situation to place colonists on these planets, to have a war in the neighborhood, and then have to come up with a compromise to end the killing. It happened and now they have to deal with it. I’d like to see the SWOT analysis of each colonized planet, just to see if they considered risking setting off the stereotypical fascist race in the neighborhood by their presence. That is to say the colonists may not be entirely blameless either. But regardless, the federation made an agreement to end the killing in a big war. They drew a line on a map and that’s never not caused other problems in history. In the middle east, in Korea, in Europe, etc. It’s often the best solution to end or prevent the fighting but it’s still a shit solution that doesn’t solve all problems. Indeed, one might argue it may only be a temporary reprieve. So the Maquis are borne out of gray, they do things that are gray, often more on the darker spectrum, and then the authorities come in and also react in dark gray when they poison an entire planet’s atmosphere. The writers even threw in some native American tribes having to relocate or accept Cardassian rule to perfect the clusterfuck.
The way some of the Maquis stories are told in late TNG and then DS9 is not the best Trek has to offer. But if you zoom out, the overall situation they’ve created is realistic and believable. The Maquis are ambiguous, the role of the federation is ambiguous. It’s all just gray. And while I don’t think it’s super unrealistic that they just get wiped out by the Ketracel White addicts, I thought it’s a lazy writers’ end to a great scenario they had created.
The Traveler showing up to further Wesley’s Hero’s Journey feels a bit easier to swallow when framed as a “part of the clusterfuck” episode.
As far as I’m concerned, that and PIC S2 NEVER HAPPENED!
I’m never going to be able to swallow Wesley Crusher getting turned into a demigod for being The Most Specialest Boy™ and helping Space Native Americans keep their Space Land.
The most insulting part is that I’m not even using Space Native American as an overly reductive dismissal of a fictional race, they were literally fucking Native Americans in fucking space. It’s like one of the writers saw the TOS episode with the black and white people and said, “Nah, too subtle. We need to reenact the Trail of Tears…but in space!”
Critical Space Theory
I always felt like they did a pretty poor job of making the audience feel any significant level of sympathy for the Maquis (assuming that was the goal).
I think the main goal of the Maquis was not to evoke sympathy for them, but to put the main characters in interesting moral/ethical quandaries. Both TNG and DS9 did “forced relocation” episodes where the narrative focus was on the fact that there were no “right” answers, only “less wrong” ones.
In that sense, it’s like the Kobayashi Maru: the main characters are presented with a no-win scenario and the purpose of the episode is that watching how they deal with that tells us more about who these characters are and what they stand for. Kira’s episode certainly helped define her character, especially when Sisko summed it up for her: she was used to fighting for the underdog, but she was on the other side now.
