SPOILERS for Star Trek Enterprise potentially
I was noticing it was tough for me to get into shows that started after the 2000s, and talking to someone I mused about how it must be because of 9/11. I was watching Enterprise at the time, on the season just before 2001, and sure enough, the episodes after 9/11 had a complete shift in tone, the show becoming basically 24, sci-fi War on Terror immediately. It’s like a parody of ‘if Starfleet had to make the hard choices to make America safe from space Al Qaeda’ or something. Overall the show is better than I was expecting though, still got me hooked on the trekness.
It was clear there was a cultural shift after 9/11, especially in the mainstream US media. It was interesting to be able to see it so distinctly in a show that went from the pre- to post- era. Does anyone else have any good examples of that happening in shows that spanned that shift?
Thank Jehova, that Final Fantasy 7 came out 4 years before, else I wouldn’t be as influenced towards protecting the environment as I am!
edit: also, Captain Planet. Making polluters (usually businesses) the antagonists. Literally only something the 90s could have done. Now Captain Planet would be the antagonist stopping the good guys from making profit!
It was definitely a shift. But a stark one. I’d like to point out that there was another shift but a more subtle one that occurred with the collapse (via illegal dissolution) of the USSR and the end of the cold war with capitalist victory and end of history.
Nerding out
You can see it in DS9 and Voyager, though some of that is down to the death of Roddenberry himself as well no doubt. The shows closest to showing a communist future suddenly decided to get dark (whereas other more capitalist aligned shows were all sunshine thinking that the world was good and safe now), to insert fiat currency, gambling, etc prominently. It became unthinkable and too far-fetched to consider a better world, suddenly Star Fleet is being drawn to reflect American propaganda about the USSR, secret groups within it acting outright maliciously, crushing dissent, oppressing people, doing murderous conspiracies as part of an official secret “section” (secret police you might say) rather than say a group of bad people operating without official sanction and going rogue as happened in a TNG movie. Contrast to ToS where the problem was essentially ignorant or pompous commissar stand-ins throwing their weight around without understanding things “in the field” as Kirk did. You even have anti-state groups in the maquis who show up in DS9 to push the agenda that this communist galactic government is in fact so bad that there are those willing to rise up against it and be seen as heroes, something continued to a degree in Voy.
I’d say collectively the two shifts dealt a death blow to ST as a franchise. I lost interest in ENT very early on by the second season. There’s really no coming back from that kind of liberal restoration.
Gundam 00 is very post 9/11 but with an interesting perspective where the terrorists are also the protagonists.
Not really what you’re after, but the movie The Rock with Cage and Connery is from 1996 and it is extremely pre-911, just no possible way it could be made afterwards. It was a big budget blockbuster about US marines going rogue and aiming chemical weapons at San Francisco. If it had been made 10 years earlier, it would have been ex-soviet mercenaries, if it had been made 10 years later then it would have been Arab terrorists, and if it was made today, the marines would have been aiming chemical weapons at Portland and they would be the good guys. Instead however, it was made in that short few years when America had no “real” enemies and so the only bad guys powerful enough to do bad guy things to America was the US military itself.
Does anyone else have any good examples of that happening in shows that spanned that shift?
Farscape, and it handled it in a very interesting and unconventional-at-the-time way. 9/11 happened about midway through its run. The main character John Crichton is a human “IASA” (generic-brand NASA) astronaut who’s shot through a wormhole into some unknown distant part of the universe. The series arc is about him coping with the wild and wondrous and dangerous greater universe and trying to find his way back home.
Big spoilers below, don't read if you're planning on seeing it, which I highly recommend doing as it's a great series.
Later in the series, John and his shipmates and Moya make it to Earth. John finds the jingoism in wake of 9/11 in the US both distasteful and grimly funny, as he’s seen horrors far beyond what humans do to each other. To him our earthly concerns are laughably minor. He’s especially saddened by the nationalistic turn by his own retired-astronaut father. In the end he decides to leave Earth permanently and go back into the universe.
Big part of that is being an Australian show. No US produced show could ever, wouldn’t even be considered.
Resident Evil 3 -> Resident Evil 4.
Terrorist organization, integrated by zealot “peasants”, kidnapped the president’s daughter, formed their own paramilitary organization, and had future plans for biologic terrorism. All under the nose of the whole world. Meanwhile, during the whole game, you control a Secret Service officer.
Yeah. Post-9/11 coded. With the stereotypes and all that.
Still, they keept the anticorpo message in future games. And, later, Leon becomes an alcholic with ptsd.
Oh, and the same can be said of RE 5. But, at least, you got this secret dialogue from Chris.
I think a whole essay can be made around this tonal shift in RE. If only I had more time…
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The original CSI started in 2000, I’m surprised they didn’t shoehorn terrorism into that show.
They did!
It’s just that the writers realized that Vegas wasn’t a natural target for terror attacks by
MUSLIM EXTREMISTSso they settled for some white supremacist typesJustin Bieber played one of them and got vented by the cops
Then I’m surprised they went that route and didn’t make the terrorists Mexican like Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas.
it was pretty stark. prior media was very happy to lucky, like the biggest fear was not being fulfilled in work, “selling out” to be a corporate “drone”, being inauthentic.
then suddenly everybody has a single tear falling down their cheek, like Lee Greenwood himself had just been beheaded on TV and America would never be innocent and abundant again with free trips to the sundae bar at the buffet.
now we all had to get tough and hard to face an existential enemy nobody knew existed 20 minutes ago and send our big, beautiful boys to fight the baddies over there or else we’d be fighting them in the streets over here in the parking lot of the cheesecake factory after church.
its a testament to the control a few have over mass media that the tone shifted with such agility.
It didn’t shift, as it is present throughout having started in 2003 but the Battlestar Galactica reboot was basically the War on Terror in space. It took what Enterprise did and dialled it up to 11. Its batshit looking back on it now.
it’s the most 2000s show imaginable, but it’s cool that they show the good guysTM Space-USians living under foreign occupation for a few eps and resorting to martyr bombings
Not an answer to your question, but man, the fucking torture scenes from that era! Even Enterprise had at least one where the Vulcan woman gets sci-fi tortured.
I know 1984 is bad and anti-communist but I do credit the Ministry of Love sequence with helping make me viscerally, gut-level anti-torture.
That was the Battlestar Galactica reboot too.
good examples of that happening in shows that spanned that shift?
not good, so much as apt, but back when I was a lib I thought it was really neat how you could sense the cultural shift in the writing of The West Wing, especially during and after Isaac and Ishmael
I knew a guy on AIM two decades ago who blamed 9/11 for ER enshittifying, but I haven’t watched that show since a rerun of the episode where (cw: gore)
spoiler
the guy falls off his roof and impales himself on a picket fence
any good examples of that happening in shows that spanned that shift?
Sopranos literally got darker after 9/11, cinematography became all shadows
and they removed the twin towers from the intro for the second half of the show
Im watching for the first time ever, and I think I’m about to hit post 9/11 eps soon.
His therapist called out his racist remark against middle eastern people and I was shocked because I couldn’t see that ever happening in tv post 9/11
He was gay, Osama Bin Laden?
The mid-00s media landscape was fucking dire. All gray-brown military aesthetics, pro war, pro torture propaganda, and Islamophobia. It was the era that birthed the cancer that is the modern Call of Duty franchise. I was exposed to it an an impressionable age and it took years to deworm my brain.
AND we didn’t even get the Earth-Romulus War! They skipped the one major canon event of that time period!
