From: Bizarro7@aol.com

<<but to go looking for specific incidents in particular episodes is unlikely to turn up anything. The Britishness of the

Federation

(by which I mean here its ideology, the mindset of its citizens, not its social or political structure) is vague and elusive, wafting through the scripts, unseen but yet subliminally perceptible. >>

And there endith this discussion for me, in a nutshell. If you've got a 4 series television show about which you can't cite a specific proof of

British

origin for its society...save for that which is vague, elusive or

subliminal,

then you have a future society of Earth.

I was never trying to cite a British origin of society. I've been back through the archives to try and see how this musunderstanding has evolved. It seems to go like this:

Annie (21/02): Even if we want to extrapolate that many of the B7 characters were meant to be "British" in the far future, who's to say that the *behavior* of people that far in the future will be the same when it comes to emotions or *anything*? Hundreds of years ago in England, did people think and talk the same way that they do today?

Me (21/02): By which argument, it becomes perfectly reasonable to posit that people in Blake's time think, act and feel in a 'British' manner, even if those people are not British themselves.

Helen (22/02): That's what I thought the question was! Not 'are they all citizens by birth of a place analogous to Britain' (aas is said in quotes above, who says Brits in that time will act British?), but are they culturally akin to the Brits of today?

Which is the question I was trying to answer, as should have been abundantly clear. It is a state of mind that makes B7 British, and it happens to be *my* state of mind, which means more to me than the Union Jack, Her Maj, Cadbury's Creme Eggs or driving on the left. I don't appreciate anyone trying to dispossess me of it. Least of all because it's the strongest connection that holds me to the series itself.

Not a future society of Great Britain. If Terry Nation had wanted to portray a British-decended society,

he

could have easily done so, in some manner as jingoistic as Roddenberry's OMEGA GLORY episode of Trek, or as subtle as a relic of the Empire on Servalan's desk.

That's subtle? There's a picture of Winston Churchill in Sarkoff's collection, you'll have to make do with that. Not that it means much, seeing as it's in a museum, and the same goes for Jenna's Mercury Dime ring.

I believe he went to some trouble to make it a future society that was NON-specific to any nationality, and as far as this non-British viewer perceived it, he succeeded perfectly.

Not as far as the non-white nations (and I believe there are some) are concerned. The virtual exclusion of all ethnic groups bar one is not in my definition of perfect success.

Neil

Leah