He doesn't pick a gender for his child, instead letting them pick their own identity. Pretty wild gender theory for early 90s daytime television.
Data, constantly preoccupied by the idea of becoming human and his lack of emotion, ended up being more humane and understanding than the humans a lot of the time. I loved Data so much.
This just reminds me how far current star trek is from the ideals of TOS/TAS/TNG. Fuck you DISC/PICARD. You couldn't even pretend to make proper star trek. Sigh.
They did blow up that planet that was owned by that bougie alien.
I love how much you all hate the new Star Treks. I talk to libs about it and they love it.
Star Trek is unbelievably good. Earth is literally just understood to be a communist paradise without crime/hunger/social issues/currency and it is never even questioned at least all throughout TNG and up to as far as I am in DS9 (apart from the star fleet military coup attempt).
I havent watched the original series so I cant really say how it may differ in tone from TNG or DS9, but it really makes me wonder if boomers just pretend not to notice all the underlying social/economic lessons it tries to teach and all the parallels with communism.
Corruption is rooted in the complacency of revolutionaries. Struggle only intensifies when primary stage socialism is achieved. Capitalist roaders within our movements will engage more covertly in counterrevolution than they were able to before.
i haven't seen anything post-ENT (eh, 2008 i guess) but...taking it further than section31?
There is also a season 2 episode called The Outcast that is all about gender identity and being able to choose your gender. Probably one of the better episodes of that season.
Weird side note, but TNG wasn't really a daytime show, it was syndicated so markets would air it at their own discretion. Where I lived I would get new episodes every Sunday at 7pm and then reruns during the week at 9 and 10pm. It was a lot of Star Trek and I loved it.
Oh I didn't know that. It was an after school show for me
There was a really good episode where Riker falls in love with a person from a genderless society.
Another cool thing about that episode is that Jonathan Frakes wanted the character who he fell in love with to be played by a man.
That episode gives me such mixed feelings. It seems to be at the same time about sexuality and about gender identity, and conflates the two a bunch. Considering the cultural context it was probably intended to be primarily about sexuality, and ended up being about gender by accident because of that conflation. Or maybe more accurately, it tried to use gender as a metaphor for sexuality, but constantly muddles the metaphor by being outright about sexuality again.
It seems to a priori reject the idea of sexual and/or romantic attraction without one party being male and the other being female, which is... unfortunate for an episode about different conceptions of sexuality. Again, I think this is because the episode gets confused about its own metaphor.
On the plus side, it very much presents conversion therapy as an absolutely awful thing, which is great for the era, and it was clearly made with good intentions. It would have been much stronger if Soren was played by a male actor as Frakes wanted.
It's also just a great Riker episode. In general, I love how TNG has this big cast of characters who are all fundamentally good people, and still manages to create interesting conflicts between them, by presenting them with genuine moral dilemmas and have their philosophies play out. Why can't modern shows seem to do this?
My mom is a huge Trekkie, and when me and my bro were kids she took us to a convention. We got our Federation passports signed by George Takei.
my dad taught me to say Hab SoSlI' Quch to klingons at conventions before i had google to find out what it meant
yeh too bad i lost my parents to fox news or we'd prolly still be bonding over it :deeper-sadness:
I dragged my dad to so much Star Trek shit when I was a kid. He actually liked TNG so it wasn't a huge deal but God bless him for having the patience he did.
Parents like that keep me incrementally hopeful about humanity.
Yeah the first season was pretty bizarre and is very different from the rest of the series
Arsenal of Freedom is another one. They go to a planet that sells weapons and Riker says beware of the trickster merchants right before a Jewish characature hails the ship.
The bitterness is real; that my girlhood was killed when I was young. Because of gender assignment and the erasure of intersex people, I will always be a zombie ghost woman.
My husband and I watched Enterprise a couple years ago. We would shriek and whine every time that intro song played.
I didn’t hate Enterprise as much as I hate Discovery and Picard. Enterprise still tried to tell stories about people, rather than glossy ship battles with terrible stories strapped to the hood like Mitt Romney’s dog.
Discovery
Augh, why does everyone hate on Disco? DS9 is still the best, but Disco is fun and good.
