🇵🇸Martin “Doomsday” Pfeiffer🏳️‍🌈: I feel like “darts” is the odd item out in this list of (presumably) Americana. In any case, a gentle reminder that the USA has hundreds of missiles carrying nuclear warheads ready to launch… …and that the President of the United States has virtually unrestricted nuclear launch authority.

I feel like “darts” is the odd item out in this list of (presumably) Americana. In any case, a gentle reminder that the USA has hundreds of missiles carrying nuclear warheads ready to launch… …and that the President of the United States has virtually unrestricted nuclear launch authority.

I don't think Quark is naming American things, he's naming Earth things, and all he knows is stuff Bashir, Sisko, and O'Brien have shown him, which includes darts.

Well, Old Earth things specifically.

That makes sense. AND EVEN SO! :p

the (rather grim) implication of 60s-90s Trek is that the US was the big winner of the Eugenics/Third World War.

(Sulu is from San Francisco. Kim codes Asian-American very hard. Sato is from Japan. We don't see an Asian from Asia as a major character until I think Georgiou on Discovery? One or two South Asian characters.)

Forgot - Rutherford is Filipino! But it seems like something happened to mainland East and South Asia and it wasn't good.

Do they say that anywhere? Or is it just based on Eugene Cordero?

When he builds a hot rod, he calls it 'Sampaguita' - not outright confirmation, but certainly a tell.

I'm pretty sure Keiko's family is mentioned to be from Japan, and I THINK Hoshi is also from Japan.

I think it is implied Starfleet headquarters is where it is because it's one of the few major cities that wasn't destroyed (along with Paris apparently?).

Which is funny b/c every major city on 3 continents would be destroyed. And/or covered in lethal fallout.

I wonder if SF was/is a hardship posting for Vulcans. You've got to think that was a lousy place to live, especially in the pre-TOS era when the environmental tech wasn't there.

Yeah, I messed up - should have said "An Asian from mainland Asia." Forgot that Georgiou (like Michelle Yeoh) is canonically of Malaysian descent.

If I recall, the original timeline had WWIII start with a conflict between a Chinese lead alliance and a renamed EU, with the Eugenics war being a separate earlier thing, but I think Picard changed that to them being either the same thing or concurrent? Haven't watched S2 or 3 of Picard.

Georgiou may very well be Chinese Malaysian (as is her actor)

So she could be from Ipoh, say, instead of Beijing

she canonically is, yeah!

Yeah, so that means I don’t think we have any Chinese (as in from China proper) characters in the setting

It's my belief that after two centuries of a world government, transporters, universal translators, and a post-scarcity economy, we'd see a humanity being a lot more ethnically mixed. However, in the real world of 21st century TV, I think it's better to be as visually diverse as possible.

Uhura is from Kenya, fwiw.

And Geordi is from Somalia! Sisko is the first major Black character to actually be African-American.

Given that his parents were senior officers in Starfleet, I'm surprised he was born on Earth at all!

as opposed to extinction from large scale nuclear exchanges.

Isn’t there also the factor of Khan’s reign? Didn’t he canonically wipe out a lot of mainland Asia’s population during his time?

Well, Khan personally didn't go in for that sort of thing, if Space Seed can be trusted. Still, the fact that the franchise's most famous South Asian is a guy who ruled in the 1990s and _lost_ something called the Eugenics Wars - hm.

Regarding Khan personally… that’s fair. About the war itself… we’re kinda bad at naming wars. My impression was that it was kinda called “Eugenics Wars” because they were fighting against the Augments (Khan and others), and that one outcome was the total ban on genetic modification.

Sorta correct. I think the Augments were just one kind of genetically engineered soldier in that war.

And Earth = USA about 99% of time in Trek

I remember the episode where O'Brien invites Quark over for a root beer float and shows him the atom.bomb he's been working on in his spare time

Interesting that he specifies "atom bomb" rather than "nuclear bomb", implying the dominance of fission over fusion.

at the risk of violating the spirit of the page, Quark is visiting 1947 Earth at the time of this speech.

Ah! I don't remember the scene but that contextualizes it perfectly then.

Yes! This makes sense!

Anlther example of how all human communication requires contextualization drawn from outside the immediate communicative encounter! :D #Semiotics!

Darts is such a ??????? thing considering it was very much a British thing. Unless by the time of the 24th century, it was assumed that the "United Kingdom" was some break-away portion of the "United States" to those not aware of general world history?

two of the main characters on DS9 are Irish and British and they play darts regularly, so that'll be why its included

yeah, aware of that it was more in that from I recall this being the Roswell episode from what I recall in terms of being described as Americanisms

Ah! A Roswell Episode! I love those! Futurama remains one of my favorites.

And it explains so much about Fry...

why, fry, why.

Futurama's always a great show.

fair enough, although I think its reasoanble that a non-human, non-federation character wouldn't necessarily make much of a distinction

yeah hes more just listing human things hes aware of

^Indeed, when pairing nuclear weapons with sports, it's always horseshoes!^ 😉

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