Neil, Leah and Anyone Else whose interested,
Just got into this thread about the supposed Britishness of the Federation pretty late.
I may agree to some extent with Leah that B7 is intended to show a picture of a future world that is not a representation of a specific nationality at all. Still, I think I read in Neil's comments that even in doing this, one still infuses a lot of what one (or what Terry Nation) knows -- i.e., 20th century British Culture -- into the mix. So what you have then is an attempt to chart a world of fantasy but one's imagination it seems is not totally limitless, but is in fact limited to the mundane reality of the world you have actually experienced. So even if you make up a future world that is totally different from the world you live in, it is still an anti-model of your real world -- so the reality as we know it always at some level serves as a kind of template to our construction of the imaginary, whether in a positive or negative since.
For example, as an American (I hate that term yank, btw) B7 is inescapably marked as British because everyone in the universe speaks British English. This of course is real world constraint given the BBC's limited budget and resources, but still the mode of expressing thought is inescapably 20th century British -- as it must be in order to appeal to 20th century British viewers.
The real world of 20th century Britain further shapes the show in the surprising lack of cultural diversity in the actors as well -- It seems the only people of color I remember seeing in the show other than Dayna and Hal "My name is Superfly" Mellanby, are some Black guys in the fourth season ep "Warlord" and man, I think the person who costumed the Space Rats, outfitted these dudes as well. Which means that they seemed to be someone's imagination of "far-outness" that was limited really to the costumers real life understanding (or misunderstanding) of punk or alternative youth culture.
So there aren't a lot of people of color in the universe during the New Calendar. This seems to be somewhat more reflective of modern British society's numbers of nonwhites overall which I think (please someone correct me here) is lower than in the States. Star Trek then is a reflection of American reality and the early impulses toward diversity -- witness Uhura and George Takkei -- though a lot of the world domination/NATO stuff gets thrown in the mix -- which is why the flight deck of the ship looks like a mini-UN -- led by of course the American Space Cowboy Captain Kirk. And the first interracial kiss on American TV I've heard was between Kirk and Uhura at a time when race, particularly the issue of integration of African-Americans in Society, was a big deal. But one should argue, Dayna has it all over Uhura in terms of characterization because she was a major character in B7 who got to do lots of vital things plot wise (I mean, Dayna got to BLOW STUFF UP!) whereas Uhura was just monitoring comm channels in pretty short skirts.
Finally, where I see the real world 20th century Britishness intruding in B7 occurs I think in the very changing depiction of Roj Blake not as a valorized and sympathetic "freedom fighter" as was strongly marked at the beginning of the show, but more and more as a kind of fanatical "terrorist" especially in series 2 where he seems to be a bit more drawn more like an anarchist of some sort. To some extent, I think the ambiguity in Blake's characterization here is wonderful -- the shades of gray as to what Blake is fighting for. It's such shades of ambiguity and complexity that so hooked me on the show in the first place. But I have always got the feeling that Boucher, Nation and company (though perhaps I need to distinguish them better than I'm doing) seemed a trifle bit uneasy with a show valorizing a figure whose only means of fighting politically is to destroy key aspects of the state apparatus, in a culture that is so marked by such real world "terrorism". I mean, does anyone else get the sense that real life British society's situation with say the IRA and other groups fighting the British State posed a problem for Boucher and Nation in terms of how to handle Blake's character?
Really, I've always felt that they took the easy way out by marking Blake so strongly as a fanatic by the time Pressure Point and Star One rolls around, Then, B7 as a popular show on the BBC, couldn't possibly be considered "political" in the sense of condoning so-called "terrorist" actions against the British State. In raising the gray area of Blake's commitment and fanaticism, I think Nation and Boucher were trying very hard to make viewers NOT read the Terran Federation as a metaphor of 20th Century British Society -- for to do so would implicitly condone and legitimate the actions of those so-called "terroristic" groups who were in armed struggle against it. Hence, I think we get a pronounced marking of Blake's ego investment in the cause in the ep "Pressure Point" where he says "we did it; I did it" (So much for collectivity here) as well as his similar remark to Cally in "Star One" where he says that not to blow up Star One would then mean that everything he's done was just meaningless acts of terrorism. (Again, I think he speaks in terms of I and not we)
And, well, the truth of the matter is, Blake doesn't blow up Star One -- he leaves it intact so as to help the forces of humanity fight off the Andromedan invasion. (A big aside here: This move, for any of you American lefties out there, seems to echo the old Communist Party USA's late 1930's and early 1940's "popular front against fascism" in which the American Communists -- who were the only real organized force actively fighting white racism on the streets as well as in the courts -- actively supported American National interests during the war and even adopted patriotic rhetoric. In supporting the American Capitalist State, the so-called "left" effectively abandoned any notion of "proletarian internationalism" or World-Wide transnational resistance against such capitalist states. Their anti-racist activities curtailed and the American "radical left" has never ever recovered from this adopted Nationalism. ) But still, if we are take Blake's remark to Cally seriously, in terms of the logic of the show, Blake didn't blow up Star One, so it seems at some level that all of his actions of armed struggle against the state (i.e., blowing up stuff) does amount to little more than isolated acts of "terrorism."
This is something I disagree with (yes, I did argue for Blake as Freedom Fighter during the recent Redemption panel) but I think Boucher and Nation (one day I really will learn to distinguish them better than I'm doing here) have loaded the dice, so to speak, so the 20th century British Public, will read Blake in just this way and simultaneously see real life potential counterparts of Blake as terrorists as well. Or phrased another way, we as the audience here in this reading are not reading British Society as being incipiently fascist a la the Federation.
Let me say that I think there's a lot of play in how people read and extrapolate from fiction to reality such that while I see Boucher and Nation loading the dice to make Blake less of a valorized character by making him look like more of a "terrorist," (always a negative term), I think many people (myself included) find enough internal evidence in the show to read against this loading of the dice. (Again, this degree of complexity in the show is what has made me such a fan for so long.) And I'm sure lots of people have come up with analogs of the Federation's practices in both British and American society. Still, to return to the original point of this post, I am very interested in the ways in which the real world context cannot help but shape, limit, color, bound, etc., a fictional construct even when as science fiction, that construct seems to have implicit license to go beyond the means of the limitations of contemporary thought into a realm of complete fantasy. My point here is that even with sci-fi, one can never indulge in pure fantasy as that fantasy always bears some relation to the real world context in which it was conceived,
Further thoughts, corrections, emendations, disagreements are welcome, especially as I don't own a TV set and haven't seen either B7 or Star Trek for ages.
Pat C. (Wow! I really did post something serious on Lysator.....Hijackers Welcome!)