So I do like Star Trek a lot, especially TNG, DS9, and Below Decks. Voyager and TOS are fine. Space socialism is pretty good and I can't get enough of it. There are a few common tropes that irk me. tho.
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Baseball is cracker Amerikkkan nonsense - You telling me that all these different species and planets get together to chill, and the vibe they're gonna channel is Ohio?? Football (soccer) or some version of hockey make a lot more sense, you can pick up and start playing immediately. I can't imagine Worf wanting to learn all those pointless rules about balls and strikezones and fowls. Sisko is arguably the best captain of any series, and I really get pulled out of an episode every time he drops some awful baseball trivia. It's only slightly better than Nascar. I actually know one Scottish person who really likes baseball, and he's literally the worst person I know.
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The tribunal - It's so damn common. It seems like every season there's got to be a court-martial, hearing, or appeal against a Starfleet decision. I guess Law and Order is big there. It's probably a minor critique, but it does reinforce the ideology that Western courtrooms are fair.
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Kirk is a sex pest - This has been said to death, but leave your subordinates alone.
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Poker in TNG - Poker has to be the worst form of entertainment, and I genuinely like maths. I blame TNG for reigniting the poker craze of the 90s and ruining all my guy friends' personalities.
if i could personally reboot star trek and make only one major change it would be this
modern star trek is just liberalism + unlimited energy sources and instant matter/energy conversion
i would even be happy if there was more explanation between "and then WW3 happened" "yadda yadda mad max then vulcans came and we did global unified liberal democracy"
should be "ww3 happened, global war communism established in the aftermath, pockets of misery persisted, hail mary warp ship launched by an opportunist living in a commune, vulcans come and are impressed with unified global communist government rebuilding the wasteland and do aid programs"
that would build a foundation for what United Earth and later the federation really came from. the strict pacifistism and bio-essentialism make sense form a lore perspective (icky genetically enhanced warlord armies and global nuclear war) but where did the communism come from?
A lot of people believed at the time that communism would just sort of manifest once scarcity effectively stopped existing.
there's lots of people that still believe this
once energy becomes "too cheap to meter" or we develop at home fabricators with cheap feedstocks...boom...communism!
people forget you need a social revolution too or else now you just have capitalists controlling the fusion reactors and fabricator tech and can turn that shit off at the push of a button what are you going to do about it serfs enjoy your "free" fabricated mush and be happy you have a tiny stipend to live off of or the robotic hunter-killers liquifiy your brain with a micro explosive shaped charge
Baseball is cracker Amerikkkan nonsense
I know one man who disagrees
Baseball is only cool when played in Cuba and maybe like 3 other Central American countries. It is sad to see Cuban teenagers trying to make it into the US professional league in order to life themself out of poverty. That's gotta be one draw for them, tho.
It's also just a game that's pretty fun to play even if your skill level is low and doesn't require much land or very expensive equipment. It's popular for the same reasons soccer is. Also yeah it was invented by kkkolonizers, but like, poor urban working class kkkolonizers in industrial East Coast cities, a lot of whom were immigrant who didn't really count as "proper-white" back when it was invented.
To expand on the Baseball thing, almost the entirety of Tom Paris' character. With the honorable exception of the episode about old black and white Sci Fi shows, Tom Paris seems like a stand-in for a character who happens to enjoy all the things the audience's dad likes. Referencing weirdly specific American 1900s culture is a common trope in Star Trek but with Tom Paris it seemed to magnify.
Good point. I really never vibed with Paris, and I could never figure out why.
Michael Piller had very dad tastes and was sort of the reason baseball became a thing in ds9. He was a huge baseball fan and then in his first tng script he established in canon that it was a dead sport. Ira Steven Behr who took over as shortener on ds9 and helped develop it mad Sisco a baseball fan partly as an inside joke and it took off from there.
He was a huge baseball fan and then in his first tng script he established in canon that it was a dead sport.
You know, that I don't mind. I'm not american, so I get to watch star trek in a way as an artifact of american cultural sensibilities over time. And it's a great source since it started in the 60s. Sisko being into baseball, a dead sport, is an echo of baseball's decline in popularity over time. I don't mind that Riker is really into Jazz either. But God Tom Paris sometimes felt like a character written to sell Boomer merchandise. Tom Paris figurines! He likes Cadillacs!
the usual gripes are that it's not gay enough because berman was a coward, that voyager and prequel shitshow suffer from production team burnout after doing it for a decade plus, the TNG movies break character a ton, the capitalists keep hiring people who don't understand why trek was good to make it (abrams, kurtzman) so all the live-action stuff after whatever the last good episode of voyager is has been terrible.
we need optimistic scifi now more than ever and nobody will make it
the usual gripes are that it's not gay enough
we need optimistic scifi now more than ever and nobody will make it
Hard agree
The mindset that began around DS9 and strengthened in the new treks.
While DS9 had some good episodes and good characters, and great acting, it also created fans that began to take all the wrong moral lessons from it, or the ones the creators intended. Militarism, military fetishism, and "ends justify the means" thinking. It was probably a reflection of what would become more and more common amongst the US populace going into the 2000s and onward. Culturally we make excuse en masse for our conflicts or our war crimes or support thereof like Sisko because "It had to be done". Related, I remember the scene with Dax/Sisko and the spent phaser coil from the ship. The "Take a good look people" and then a speech about pride of how long they keep on fighting and hanging that coil up on the wall as a trophy. I feel these sentiments have only carried on in the modern trek series even harder.
Which is why when Boimler in Lower Decks confronted his trigger happy, edgy, fellow crewmembers on the Titan with this line, I smiled<typo>. "I didn't join Starfleet to get into phaser fights. I signed up to explore! To be out in space and making new discoveries and peaceful diplomatic solutions. THAT's boldly going. And you know what? I'd love to be in a string quartet. I love that when Riker was on the Enterprise he was jamming on the trombone and catching love disease and acting in plays and meeting his transporter identical clone Thomas."
And I feel that's kind of what's missing in the newer treks. The sense that the lives of these people in the future are different, and not always conflict focused. They have time to stop, to pursue a hobby, paint a picture, go on vacation, find out what it is to be who they are, and THEN go on a wild space adventure for the episode carrying that discovery their little downtime gave them to provide new insights. Perhaps the lives of the people in new trek are more relatable, because they to have rare downtime and are task focused nearly 90% of the time. But it doesn't paint a picture that things will be better, only the same, with technology we don't yet have.
Amen. We need filler episodes so this can happen. Nu Trek doesn't really do chill episodes or show much of the crew just kinda dicking around doing day to day stuff. The 10 episode season is the culprit imo. It can be good for a show to just burn off an episode or two and focus on something a bit more low key. 26 per season seems like waaaaaay too big a workload, but 15-20 seems fine along with the expectation that they don't all need to be bangers. I don't really need a plot to enjoy star trek. Just watching that world exist is fun. We gotta get some bottle episodes and episodes where they clearly had to save budget for the bigger ones. They'd never make Data's Day or Our Man Bashir nowadays.
Holodeck episodes are literally the worst. I am watching a show about space socialism I don't want to watch an entire episode about the wild West or a New York detective or whatever just knock it off
Lol when I see those episodes, I just assume that they just ran out of set design money.
There are some kinda bad ones, but I like em. It's cool that an episode of Star Trek could be literally any genre. Usually it's sci-fi/(other), but holodeck and similar episodes can let em get a bit weird with it. Beats going to a bunch of planets that are coincidentally just like a time period in earth history like TOS.
Baseball is cracker Amerikkkan nonsense
In fairness, baseball is seen by most Trek characters as this weird-ass historical thing that regular people don't really care about if they know about it at all.
The tribunal
It's cheap to film with 20th century TV technology.
My biggest gripe with Star Trek is the anachronistic sexism in TOS and TNG. Guess which two sword-trained TNG main cast actors didn't get to use swords in Qpid!
Also, the homophobia right up until Lower Decks. Maybe Discovery and Picard were good about queer issues, I wouldn't know, I watched the pilots of both and decided not to continue watching either one. I haven't seen any of Strange New Worlds because the same people IRL who recommended Discovery and Picard are recommending me Strange New Worlds, and I no longer trust their judgment.
There's a DS9 episode where they talk about football (not the American king) and it seems like that's the most popular sport in the Federation. Siskos baseball obsession is a niche thing he's personally into, it's like a guy being really into Scottish Games in the US .
Nah. Golf is actually quite popular in the developed world, you actually don't have to be THAT rich to indulge and the West has a big enough class of labor aristocrats and petite bourgeois to make it popular. Heck I've met tow truck drivers with enough scratch to engage in it. The really regressive thing about golf is it takes up a fuck ton of land for a really boring sport that's basically designed for rich people to get drunk while doing. Baseball just requires a field about the same size as any other sport field (albeit much more differently shaped) and can be enjoyed by people of pretty much all socioeconomic levels.
Strange new worlds is way better than Picard and Discovery but it suffers from some of the same issues as all new Trek.
There's an omelas episode in the first season and it's actually pretty good.
Guess which two sword-trained TNG main cast actors didn't get to use swords in Qpid!
Wait you saying they had sword trained actresses that didn't get used??
Gates McFadden and Marina Sirtis both had sword training, and also the most extensive out of the cast. Marina Sirtis did a lot if schlock in the 80s including a fair bit of low budget fantasy stuff and Gates is I'm pretty sure low key the most multi talented in the cast. She can act, she can sword fight, she can tap dance. And oh yeah, she did this tiny little project where she directed the choreography of this puppet show, you may have heard of it. It's called FUCKING LABYRINTH! She choreographed the scenes where David bowie dances with puppets and a baby. If anything the show wasn't good enough for her.
Wow I literally didn't know that. So I went through the tap dancing episode in slow mo to see if they used a double, as I was legit impressed. Data seems to be a double at times (maybe I'm wrong), but I couldn't see it with her. Thanks for the useful trivia. I'll have better respect for both actresses now.
Spiner has a pretty solid chance of being a good tap dancer as well. He's got s very 1930a guy taste. Dude rocks a Ink Spots tune hard.
Also, the homophobia right up until Lower Decks.
True. I'm sad I didn't think of this first.
I haven't seen any of Strange New Worlds because the same people IRL who recommended Discovery and Picard are recommending me Strange New Worlds, and I no longer trust their judgment.
A fair and understandable trepidation. I can say, watch SOME of Strange New Worlds. Some of it comes across very very well as a feeling of the old Star Trekish morality play episodic styling. And there's even a Lower Decks crossover episode. Some of it however, is very much like Discovery and Picard.
If you want to avoid that particular feel, caution around these episodes All Those who Wander (Feels more like Alien than Trek, also just turns Gorn into space monsters). The Broken Circle (While a season opening, the directorial, cinematographic and story style just have a Discovery/Picard feel to them) Under the Cloak of War (It's hard to trust someone that might be a killer) Hegemony (Again Gorn are space monsters for shooting and killing, also Scotty appears)The rest go from strange alien relic stories, to wild musicals and alien entities turning the Enterprise into a storybook. Or actual episodes of moral quandry that don't involve immediately siding with the "hard decision" typical in most other sci-fi writing.
It takes a lot of guts to run a show about the future, while in the midst of the evils and chaos in the world and say, "We will be better in the future, and things will be better too, even if we still struggle." It's nice when you can see it in a show, but rarer, and rarer, and rarer with each new atrocity and economic demise.
___Thanks for the info. Is Strange New Worlds an episodic show where I can just watch the better-rated episodes for now, to see if I'm the right audience for it? Or is there a long-form arc and I should just start at the start and not skip episodes?
The rest go from strange alien relic stories, to wild musicals and alien entities turning the Enterprise into a storybook.
That sounds pleasantly TOS-ey. I like that. I think a lot of people have forgotten just how weird TOS could get.
It's episodic with some long form arcs but more like series long arcs, so you generally just get bits and pieces of ongoing character stuff and whatnot but it's not like every episode is part of a larger plot specifically. It's episodic with continuity moreso than serialized
One thing to be wary of is that the first episode does try to establish some P r e s t i g e TV feelings. One of the characters is in a Punished Snake arc, and you get to see Spock about to clap cheeks
It's better than the rest of live action NuTrek even if the occasional Prestige TV bullshit does shine through (not enough to ruin it IMO)
Also Anson Mount is rad
, the homophobia
what homophobia? queer stuff is underrepresented on-screen outside of
and the riker episode with the anti-gender fascist planet but if we're calling that the show's homophobia then the term is so broad it's not useful to me.I was thinking about the TNG episode "The Host". Crusher has a romance with the Trill symbiont being transported inside Riker. The scene where Crusher looks disgusted at her lover now being in a female body has always disappointed me. It's fine if Crusher's not into women, but they could have written and played that scene much better.
the writing seems ok to me? especially for 1991
i'm shit at social cues and haven't watched the remasters so i'll believe you if Crusher's face was doing disgust rather than sadness/emotional exhaustion after Odan's "death" and the period of time where the symbiont was in riker's body which she didn't take that very well either as discussed with Troi earlier.
CRUSHER: The operation to implant Odan into the new host was completed at nineteen hundred hours and appears to have been successful. There were no difficulties in assimilation.
KAREEL: Doctor Beverly, could we talk for a moment?
CRUSHER: You should be sleeping. You need to rest.
KAREEL: I've never felt better, except once or twice. My poor Beverly. This has been so hard for you. I want to thank you for your caring, for your standing by me.
CRUSHER: I congratulate you. You averted a war that would have cost many lives.
KAREEL: Yes. It seems as though everything has turned out for the best. And yes, I am still Odan, and I still love you. I cannot imagine that ever changing.
CRUSHER: I am glad that you're all right.
KAREEL: Is there to be nothing more?
CRUSHER: Perhaps it is a human failing, but we are not accustomed to these kinds of changes. I can't keep up. How long will you have this host? What would the next one be? I can't live with that kind of uncertainty. Perhaps, someday, our ability to love won't be so limited.
KAREEL: I understand.
CRUSHER: Odan, I do love you. Please remember that.
(Kareel takes Beverly's hand and kisses her wrist)
KAREEL: I will never forget you.
Amerikkkan colonies, past and present.
Edit: Sorry to beat the anti-baseball drum. But I saw the Colin Kaepernick documentary some time ago, and his feelings on baseball rubbed off on me a bit.
Ironically, lacrosse is an American Indian sport but nowadays it's mostly played by preppy white future CIA agents.
Weird trivia. Lacrosse is the national sport of Canada. Not hockey.
For the record I really don't like football (soccer), and even more than that I hate the fans that I interact with near daily. I just thing that baseball is super goofy.
It would be nice if there was some culturally neutral international sport, but soccer is the de facto world game same way as English is the world language.
I feel like the two are footie and basketball. I feel like you can go anywhere and find a game and people to play with. It does suck that EPL and European leagues have made football so fucking gross and unappealing, but such is capitalism.
I am very anti-football, but I do want to suggest to the young Americans to get into it a bit. When traveling, I've had so many random non-English speaking strangers invite me to a game. It was really rad having village kids in Vietnam spontaneously invite me into their game last year, even tho I am shit.
The only art-forms that are talked about are 'high' art-forms. Operas, symphonies, poetry and the like. Does nobody in the federation make pop music? Are there no holodeck programs that are considered art?
Lower decks again, but the cast does make a micheal bay-esque movie in the holo deck
Voyager actually had an entire running subplot of Paris liking cheesy b-movies.
He was "fascinated with the 20th century"
They brought it up all the time, like that episode where they met Amelia Earhart or when they went back in time to 1997 Los Angeles.
There's that weird chuchu band in lower decks. When they added the third chu it was crazy
They're also 'Public Domain' art forms. There are holo-novels that seem to be as respected as normal novels are now. I think part of the reason in universe is that you only really see this on tng and Voyager, on TNG it's the diplomatic flagship so operas and classical concerts are probably regularly scheduled entertainment on the off chance they're transporting some stuffed shirted asshole alien diplomat, which happens constantly. So it's like how you don't bring a visiting foreign diplomat to a punk show or McDonald's, you go to an opera and a fancy restaurant. The ship is fucking massive and there's a lot of crew, so I'm sure people are doing stuff that's actually fun elsewhere. Like in Lower Decks.
My biggest pet peeve is Enterprise specific, the fucking decontamination room scenes are just "Wow look at how hot T'pol is."
Baseball is cracker Amerikkkan nonsense - You telling me that all these different species and planets get together to chill, and the vibe they’re gonna channel is Ohio?? Football (soccer) or some version of hockey make a lot more sense, you can pick up and start playing immediately. I can’t imagine Worf wanting to learn all those pointless rules about balls and strikezones and fowls. Sisko is arguably the best captain of any series, and I really get pulled out of an episode every time he drops some awful baseball trivia. It’s only slightly better than Nascar. I actually know one Scottish person who really likes baseball, and he’s literally the worst person I know.
When I recently self-flagellated by catching up on Discovery, the moment that brought me closest to giving up was this scene where each of the bridge crew listed places on Earth they'd like to visit when they made it back. Every single one of them listed places in the US. Star Trek has always been US supremacist, but they don't even give a token nod to multi-nationalism anymore.
The series is just so much more right wing in many sense these days. It's a far cry from Roddenberry deciding that for a utopian future, there needed to be a Russian crew member despite it being the height of the cold war.
Yeah two big ones:
Starting with DS9 and then up to the present, the show leans waaaaaay too heavily on nostalgia and fans love of familiar characters. TNG is largely free of this other than that one Scotty episode. But in DS9, they just keep bringing back characters like Q, Lwaxana, etc. Maybe not the biggest deal when it’s just an episode or two but then they decided to bring back Worf for the last 4 seasons. He doesn’t really serve a point other than “hey, you all love Worf, right?” I really feel like all Worf did was steal the limelight from Sisko / Avery Brooks. After that it’s obvious how they do this in Nu Trek - I mean “Picard” is an entire show that runs on nostalgia. SNW literally brings back the Enterprise. “Discovery” I guess tried to not do this until they felt we needed more Spock.
The reason why it bugs me so much is I really think it stops the franchise from growing and changing in positive ways, the way overdosing on nostalgia tends to do for people. For example, the show runners originally wanted Ro Laren to be in the role played by Nana Visitor because hey, viewers know her from TNG. The actress who plays Ro didn’t want to do it so they hired Nana Visitor; and I don’t think any of us can imagine DS9 without her. But she never would have been hired if the producers had their first, nostalgic choice.
And other the first DS9 one, I despise mirror universe episodes. The first one in DS9 is great because it’s just a silly way for the actors to be able to let loose and play against type. But then they decided to make it a recurring theme, and then the novelty wears off fast. And then I actually stopped watching Discovery when they made the mirror universe a major plot point. Again, it’s just so silly and ridiculous but the way Discovery tries to play it straight and serious just doesn’t work for me.
Edit: I also wanted to add that I really hated the forced Odo/Kira romance. They spent years working together without a hint of romantic interest until the writers decided they needed to pair off someone. No chemistry and kind of an odd pairing. And why not just let Odo be ace, you know?
Discovery totally takes itself too seriously and forgets that ultimately Star Trek was always kind of silly and was the better for it.
Discovery takes itself too seriously and at the same time wants us to treat the mirror universe seriously.
Very true, btw. I cringed throughout the Scottie episode, and I didn't like Worf in DS9. I never thought about how fan served ruined Star Trek, but ya I didn't like the newer reboots.
I actually really liked Nana Visitor's character, she's so central to DS9, so I'm glad that they picked her.
I cringed throughout the Scottie episode
you will take the depression scotty episode from my cold dead hands
I agree that nostalgia baiting is bad and keeps the show from growing, but I'm sure we can all agree that it accelerated over time. One episode with a TOS crewmember didn't keep TNG from inventing the Borg and so on.
Agreed, I'm not seeing the problem with the older, cozier series that get to breathe with 24 monster of the week episodes having some fun nostalgia peppered in. They don't rely on it. And, as someone who is totally enamored with Nana Visitor, Michelle Forbes is the same caliber actor and it's hard to imagine the series being worse(just different) just because they used an established character.
Nutrek is built on nostalgia bait and subverting that nostalgia for cheap shallow cuts and boring grim prestige TV tropes. As someone pointed out elsewhere with the Boimler quote, Nutrek forgot the Trek mantra, and is "boldly going" nowhere.
The cringe part was the Dyson Sphere. I don't really think they understand how big I would be. Also a really interesting plot device to then throw away after the first act.
I so can't get over it. WHO THE HELL LIVED IN THERE?!!? (no I will not consume the expanded universe to find out).
The reason why it bugs me so much is I really think it stops the franchise from growing and changing in positive ways
Star Wars has the exact same problem. I don't want to see another show about what Glub Shitto was doing during the Clone Wars. I don't give a fuck about thr Skywalker name. I don't need to know that all the cool backstory Han Solo had was boring as shit and took place over a single weekend
It's why I love Andor, Rogue One, first season of Mandalorian. They at least showed us something different for a change
Poker in TNG
I like the poker in tng because it confirms my theory that the main point of divergence between the Trek universe and ours is that Texas Holdem was never invented.
And it's played entirely differently, that or characters cheat constantly. There's a few videos breaking it down, but quite often the continuity of the cards on the table and sometimes just small script mistakes show with a closer eye, they're usually playing wrong.
Yeah, I've seen them playing some kind of stud game but the count of up vs down cards didn't look like a standard game.
I always like how shows depict poker as an entirely bluffing and reading bluffs based game. I lived with some old hippies who had masters degrees in math and read like 5 books on it and did algorithm poker to eek out a profit in a way I'd consider more miserable than working and also did tournaments sometimes in hopes of big money and often did win and I never once heard them talk about bluffs or tells when comparing notes. Like, it's part of the game and it's the part that works for drama, so I get it, but looking for tells above all else is some body language expert bs.
not queer and communist enough. andorians canonically have 4 genders!!! imagine how genderfucked you'd be after several lifetimes as a joined trill!! so many missed opportunities that are canon but never explored.
that's a really cool concept! the only thing even close to it that I can think of is the book The Lives of Dax in which each chapter is a vignette from each of Dax's hosts. a show like that would be really interesting, such a shame that the worst people have their hands on the IP.
The three white male captains get to command the biggest/fastest/most famous flagship in the fleet.
The black captain starts off as a commander on a broken down space station in a bad neighborhood.
The woman captain gets hopelessly lost in the first episode.
These are not good tropes.
Also, why the fuck are Starfleet naming conventions so human centric? We should see a bunch of Starfleet ships with Vulcan, Andorian, and Tellerite names. You can kind of handwave away the ones that are abstract concepts like Enterprise, Voyager, Defiant, etc by saying their names in each language are different. But there are so many ships named after Earth locations and historical figures. Where are the other races in all this?
Apparently each member species retains their own space force after joining the federation and starfleet was formed around what was earth's.
Also, why the fuck are Starfleet naming conventions so human centric? We should see a bunch of Starfleet ships with Vulcan, Andorian, and Tellerite names. You can kind of handwave away the ones that are abstract concepts like Enterprise, Voyager, Defiant, etc by saying their names in each language are different. But there are so many ships named after Earth locations and historical figures. Where are the other races in all this?
Thankfully Lower Decks fixed a little of this. Star Fleet is just one fleet organization in the Federation. With apparently the Andorians and Vulcans having their own ships running about doing their own things too. Like the Sh'vhal in Lower Decks, having to come in and save the Cerritos. Star Fleet is just the biggest of the bunch and more likely to be "out there" doing exploration instead of local system patrol or whatnot.
From a storytelling/production standpoint: Humans are easier/cheaper to costume. Human sized corridors easier and cheaper to build for doing shots with human sized chairs you can get out of a Lexus. So Starfleet is a very human fleet. Also in the early days of models, TOS just reused the enterprise over and over with different number combinations on the hull and a different name, so they don't have to build new models. TNG they had money, but kept a design style going cause they had the molds and its cheaper to follow a style rather than start a new ship whole cloth. Thus why some alien ships in TNG are just models they built for the movies turned upside down or backwards and repainted. DS9 and on they started to breach using CGI so they got to expand a little but still had that same style to focus on. Modern trek they got lazy and copy pasted ships :P
Overall it is impossible to write a sci-fi and avoid human centrism in any fashion, even the abstract, because we only know the perspective of being human, and humans are the only ones we yet know writing fiction. Even in fiction where humans are say, the one amongst many, and not the most important in things, (And not throwing a fit about it like Anakin Skywalker. Looking at you Mass Effect) The story is usually from a human persepctive trying to understand the unknown alien ways that exist around them. Kind of like the impression I got from the Chanur novels by C.J. Cherryh but it's been a decade or more since I read it so I may be wrong.
any time I see garak and Bashir in a scene together
get em boys
