We used to watch a lot of Star Trek: TNG back in the day and there was this one episode I’m sure my parents were a little uncomfortable with - ‘Justice’. After around 10 minutes of watching the half-naked inhabitants of Rubicon III indulge in guilt-free sex and other pleasures (and my mother’s glares), we were asked to leave the room  (damn you, understandable but misplaced fears).

I finally watched the episode last night, 16 years later. It was pretty silly but thematically more substantial than I recall. The USS Enterprise makes contact with a planet whose peaceful inhabitants live in fear of their god, an advanced alien being kicking it out in the planet’s orbit. When Wesley Crusher breaks a trivial rule, the Enterprise has to prevent his execution and this isn’t easy considering they’re sworn to the Prime Directive. The reason I prefer TNG over the original series is because of the former’s obvious moral core.

Anyway, Captain Picard saves the day with a speech.

I don’t know how to communicate this, or even if it is possible. But the question of justice has concerned me greatly of late. And I say to any creature who may be listening, there can be no justice so long as laws are absolute. Even life itself is an exercise in exceptions.

Let me digress, but only slightly. The IT law overhaul in India is clearly a bad idea but shouldn’t we be worried that there are people out there making arguments like this?

(Click on the pic for the entire strip.)

Contrary to what Wheeler and Feynman may have postulated, to us lesser mortals, time travel have and will always seem inherently paradoxical. The Terminator films completely ignored the paradoxes involved while the more recent Star Trek sidestepped them by calling on a plot device that could either have been brilliant or just plain lazy screenwriting. But the best time travel films have always been the ones that completely embraced the absurdities involved; case in point being the ultra low budget yet supremely brilliant 2004 indie, Primer.

Los Cronocrimenes (Timecrimes) is a lot like Primer even though it descends into slasher territory mid way through. Like Primer, it employs a single timeline albeit one populated by multiple copies of the protagonist. Apart from the usual problems involved with time travel, the fun also lies in figuring out whether to root for the original Hector (Hector 1) or the ones that follow him.

Pulp science fiction rarely gets better.