Remembering Andromeda: The Politics of "Slipfighter the Dogs of War"

With an immediacy and specificity rare in scripted television due to the lag time between the conception of an episode and its airing the November 2002 Andromeda episode "Slipfighter the Dogs of War" dove into the political fray of its moment with a plot very obviously taking a side in one of the more consequential controversies of American politics in the twenty-first century. Here in the wake of the recent restoration of the Commonwealth that was its hero's object from the two-part opener forward, the protagonist Dylan Hunt discovers evidence that the oppressive and aggressive planet of "Marduk" is producing "nova bombs," and decides that the only right-thinking action is to put a stop to it militarily with a strike on the "reactor" producing the required "voltronium," which he and two of his crew execute in "slipfighters."

"Nova bombs," of course, were the Andromeda universe's equivalent of nuclear weapons, "voltronium" an obvious analogy with the fissile material required to make nuclear weapons that is frequently produced in nuclear "reactors," and "Marduk" the name of the Babylonian hero-god in an all too obvious evocation of the nation-state today occupying Babylon's territory, Iraq--which the Bush II administration had, of course, accused of secretly attempting to acquire a nuclear arsenal and other weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to make it a threat to the world. At the same time the episode evoked an earlier action specifically directed against a nuclear reactor which other nations claimed Iraq intended to use to produce fissile material for bombs--the Israeli air strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981, which was executed with the fighter aircraft that are the real-world counterpart of the show's slipfighters.

The writers of the episode, apparently approving and valorizing the 1981 strike, and commending such military action as the proper course in such a situation, specifically seemed to think it was an appropriate precedent for the military action that the Bush II administration advocated against Iraq, which ultimately took the form of the 2003 invasion that was presented to the world as a "preventive war" securing a presumably necessary "regime change." Indeed, even as one of the sticking points in the American debate about the action was the objection of the international community to the invasion that in many eyes made it illegal, illegitimate and the more likely to miscarry for the lack of broad support from allies, the episode had the authorities of the Commonwealth (readable as a stand-in for that international community as represented by the United Nations) winking at the action that Hunt would take in apparently "loose cannon" fashion to give them "plausible deniability"--the implication here that "Those foreign politicians can't admit they want us to do this, but they know full well that this thing has to be done and that we're the ones to do it, so don't take their objections seriously, all theater don't you know," all as they rather patronizingly told the public that really, it would all be very tidy and practically over before you know it, except for the ways that the world would be changed for the better! (For of course, it all goes exactly according to plan here, despite the misgivings of an unusually anxious and reluctant Tyr.)

Considering the episode, a reminder of the simple-mindedness or dishonesty of those insistent on Hollywood's "liberalism," I am struck by how un-Gene Roddenberry this all was for all the selling of the show as "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda." Of course, one cannot know for sure what Mr. Roddenberry would have thought and said about events that happened over a decade after his death. This is all the more the case as people do change, and in these years politics was moving rightward in just about every way that mattered, such that by that point this complex figure may not have been the same man who overcame the prejudices and the odds of Cold War-era America to (to the misanthropic fury of those who despise Star Trek for that, and have been crapping disgustingly all over it ever since, not least the Suits at Paramount and the online nitwits who justify them) give us Star Trek's Wellsian-Stapledonian vision of a rational, peaceful, progressing interstellar World State. Still, the existence of room for speculation about what Roddenberry might or might not have endorsed in 2002 is a different thing from attaching his name to such a blatant piece of propaganda for the opposite of what he had stood for in life, and frankly seems more in tune with the outlook and influence of "Friends of Abe" member Kevin Sorbo than Mr. Roddenberry, who was not merely the star of the show but a producer with rather clear ideas about where he wanted the show to go. (Good guys vs. bad guys! Zap, biff, pow!) At the same time, if all things considered this rather minor syndicated space opera's influence on the march to war in Iraq that proved such a disaster for the region and the world (the consequences of which extend beyond two decades of metastasizing conflict in the Middle East the very opposite of the wave of democratization and peace the neoconservatives promised, to the monetary policy that precipitated the 2007 financial crisis, and the subsequent Great Recession and refugee crisis that have so fed extremism in and outside the region), few today would consider it a creditable one. At the same time few would defend the results as art, "Slipfighter" a reminder that contrary to the great art lies, yes, all art is propaganda, rightist art included, and yes, bad rightist art is no better than bad leftist art, especially from the standpoint of those who cannot even accord it any credit for at least having had a Worthy Message to offer, or any great need of courage to present it.