I understand why they did it though. They had to do something and they couldn’t just say “well, Chakotay was a fake indigenous American all this time.”
They should have been more up-front about the whole thing, but I can see why they did it.
They could have kept most of that episode as a character background filler without the aliens traveling 70000 lightyears over multiple generations just to visit some primative tribe with no language on some backwater planet. That part seems to be the most awkward to shoehorn in.
Don’t forget that the technologically superior visitors who brought culture to the primitive natives were given the distinct visual design of being white. Nope, no unfortunate implications there.
I feel like they could have just stopped focusing on his made up culture. He could still bring up authentic bits of culture and trivia when relevant, but it could be featured about as prominently as Picard’s french heritage, rather than dominating the character like Worf’s klingon heritage.
They could maybe even throw in a line at some point about how much of his people’s heritage is lost due to that nuclear holocaust thing that messed the Earth up a bit back in the day. Acknowledge the disconnect with reality connecting it to the established lore.
Or it would have been fun to find out that he’s actually the descendant of a fraud and the whole culture he was raised to believe in was a scam. But that might have been a little too on the nose.
I understand why they did it though. They had to do something and they couldn’t just say “well, Chakotay was a fake indigenous American all this time.”
They should have been more up-front about the whole thing, but I can see why they did it.
They could have kept most of that episode as a character background filler without the aliens traveling 70000 lightyears over multiple generations just to visit some primative tribe with no language on some backwater planet. That part seems to be the most awkward to shoehorn in.
Don’t forget that the technologically superior visitors who brought culture to the primitive natives were given the distinct visual design of being white. Nope, no unfortunate implications there.
I’m not saying they did it well. I’m saying they were kind of forced into it.
I feel like they could have just stopped focusing on his made up culture. He could still bring up authentic bits of culture and trivia when relevant, but it could be featured about as prominently as Picard’s french heritage, rather than dominating the character like Worf’s klingon heritage.
They could maybe even throw in a line at some point about how much of his people’s heritage is lost due to that nuclear holocaust thing that messed the Earth up a bit back in the day. Acknowledge the disconnect with reality connecting it to the established lore.
Or it would have been fun to find out that he’s actually the descendant of a fraud and the whole culture he was raised to believe in was a scam. But that might have been a little too on the nose.