Another takeaway from Picard 3:
For those who actually have an interest in watching it, I'll try to keep it vague enough not to cause spoilers.
The whole intent of this Season was nostalgia. They brought back the original TNG cast, threw in some DS9 villains, and featured a couple of Voyager characters.
*Sniff* It was perfect.
Enough time has passed that our TNG peeps are parents, like LaForge and Riker. This brought a new dimension, seeing them as family folk, no longer willing to risk their lives every Tuesday for the heck of it.
Yet they are also, quite clearly . . . old. The youngest actor is Levar, at 66—everyone else is close to or above 70.
Yet it is because of their age and experience that they end up saving the galaxy.
There was this tweet a few years back by Kathryn Ivey:
Why is "the chosen one" always a teenager? We're really gonna put the fate of the universe on someone with an undeveloped prefrontal cortex? Give me a story with a chosen one who is a 42 year old mom that has already seen some s**t and is totally out of f**ks to give
She has a point. The "chosen one" is usually a clueless child that has this insane burden thrust upon him. He doesn't need life experience, because he was selected to be an unwitting tool for forces beyond his ken. With regard to general fictional teenage heroes—adults are the clueless ones who need saving.
It sort of reinforces the trope that adults "don't get it," and yes, while that may be true for some people who were stupid their whole lives, most adults, due to their age alone, are "it-getters" (credit to Jon Stewart).
So while it may be that I am watching the last vestiges of my youth trickle through my fingers, it is also with the dawning horror that the kids today will find me irrelevant for my inability to take a decent selfie.
But there is more to life than technological savvy.
There was a scene in Picard where Jean-Luc is dining in a bar near the Academy, and he is besieged by starry-eyed cadets begging him for background details of his exploits. Jean-Luc has become an icon, a once hero. But he's not a relic of the past. He's not done yet. It's his experience that keeps him from becoming obsolete.
Ma would get so frustrated when she told us to do something a certain way and we wouldn't listen. She wanted to save us the trouble, that she had learned the right way to go about it, so couldn't we just listen?! She was usually right.
Moshe Rabbeinu is the closest we have to a "chosen one," and he didn't start leading until he was 80. He had life experience first as a prince, shepherd, husband, father. Because we don't believe that being chosen means you magically get there with no effort. The chosen people were chosen to bring our excellence, and we failed to such an extent that we were persecuted and murdered for 3,000 years.
Moshiach is gonna be old.
Rabbi Akiva had forty years of life experience as a shepherd before he even learnt to read.
ReplyDeleteI think that Chosen Ones are normally teenagers because they're written as coming of age stories. And I guess mythically the Chosen One is the young hero; the Wise Old Man was the hero of a previous story.
It's interesting that the Star Trek franchise has really leant in to the idea of their leads getting older. The movies are as much about Kirk and later Picard getting old as they are science fiction action films (though they are mostly that too). I think it's better than the Indiana Jones approach of pretending the lead isn't aging (they did that with Roger Moore as James Bond too).
And Rabbi Akiva was still awesome at 120.
ReplyDeleteHollywood is usually a victim of it's own prejudice. They spend so much time targeting the young audiences, failing to take into account that it's the older population that should be equally wooed. Older Americans now outnumber the youth. "The Kominsky Method" on Netflix is about old men, and it is fabulous (horrifically vulgar, but still fabulous).