Don't get me started on ds9. A black captain? A trans lesbian officer? A gay interspecies couple? The federation using fear from war as an excuse to become a police state? Can't believe they made my colorful space communism show woke.
I can't be the only one who remembers Trekkies legitimately bitching about Tuvok because "Vulcans aren't black."
Like... really? You've been there and checked this out for yourself? Or is it that most (and not even all) of the handful of Vulcans you saw so far were white?
Tuvok is the best depiction of a Vulcan in all of Star Trek too and I will die on this hill (Spock is half human, so I am not counting him). Tuvok seemed to me like he found humans (and Neelix) to be illogical, difficult to understand, and somewhat annoying; but nonetheless he couldn't help but like them as well, though he wouldn't admit that to them (tangential hot take: Vulcans claim to suppress their emotions, but they still make decisions based on emotion and rationalise them as being based on logic after the fact)
Overall I like Tuvok as a character. My problem with Tuvok is they write him as if Vulcans have no emotion. He even says that.
Vulcans are supposed to have such strong emotions they need to constantly keep them under control and use logic to make decisions because the emotions cause them to make bad decisions.
I think that's a lot more interesting for a character. Nemoy said he played Spock as a guy who was constantly in wonder at things and keeping it under control.
You know what really grinds my gears about Vulcans? According to Trek lore their blood is green because they evolved using copper atoms to bind oxygen in the blood. But if that were the case they should have hemocyanin, and their blood should be blue.
I know for a certainty, however, that any inhabitable worlds we might find in the future will definitely look like a sound stage populated with Styrofoam boulders
Anyway, hardcore fans are dumb. I should know, I was one
Tuvok is black!?!?! I thought he was a Vulcan! I suppose the next thing you are going to tell me is that Odo isn't a Shapeshifter?
The same people now whine about there being black dwarves in rings of power
A gay interspecies couple?
Rick Berman:
Pretty sure the downvoters didn't finish reading that...
They sure didn't and only frothed as soon they saw WoKe.
woke is the new sheeple
...in that anytime anyone uses it to support their argument you immediately know they're a grade-a fuckewit.
I’m saving that. Not sure if and how I could use it as I (at least try…) avoid fanning flames, but…
To be fair, woke is a really annoying right now, essentially a conservative dog whistle for "I want to be racist but don't want to be called racist", so I don't blame a lot of people for not finishing. If I read everything that started off with woke I'd have a much higher blood pressure.
You hated Discovery because it was too woke.
I hated Discovery because it wasn’t woke enough.
We are not the same.
I hated it because half of the characters annoyed me and the other half didn’t have enough screen time
Picard: “We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity”
Tilly: “I went to Elon Musk junior high school”
Yeah, really. There wasn't much enlightened future stuff going on and they pointlessly killed (and then returned, but still) one of the gay guys for shock value(?). It's just so poorly written that neither that nor any of the empowerment messages landed for me.
Yeah.. exactly. Although after all that I only fully gave up on the show when they jumped forward in time to a depressing future in which the Federation had dissolved. Like, way to completely and utterly miss the point of the setting. I’m gonna go cry into my earl grey now.
I hated Discovery because it was written like a chorus of monkeys with typewriters and not a single one of them got close to Hamlet.
So Bald IS a hairstyle!
BALD?? I have hair! Why else would I visit the best barber in Starfleet?!
I assume because the writers thought it was hilarious
Because if he didn't, he would wind up looking like Hector Salamanca
I just couldn't get into Discovery or Picard because they felt... weird? Not that it wasn't like Star Trek in the stories or that it was "woke," but it just didn't have the same vibe as what I grew up with. Lower Decks has the vibe, but not the tone or anything else. I need to check out Strange New Worlds. It looks like it might be what I'm really missing.
Both Picard and Discovery were season long plots without episodic filler episodes to shake things up which made it painfully obvious that their overarching plotlines were terrible. Add some poorly done melodramatic scenes about how the leads are the most important people ever without showing why (and in a lot of cases showing the opposite) and we have two series that were just a slog to watch up to the point that I stopped.
Both sounded good on paper. Both had great casts. Both seemed to suffer from terrible writing and direction.
The final season of PIC was fun, and the second one had some good moments, mostly with Q. But that first season was still being written as they were filming and the second season had part of its budget appropriated for the third season and it shows in both.
I just watched Season 2 of Picard and all I could think the whole time was "TNG crew would have wrapped this up in 1 or 2 episodes..."
Yup, in order to make Discovery and Picard work, the writers had to give everyone the idiot ball.
Trek is at its best when it's competence porn.
As a note, to be in star fleet requires 4 years at the start fleet academy. You need to be somewhat good at your job and somewhat disciplined to even be considered for a slot on a ship.
My only major critiques for Discovery are that they walked back a Calvin-verse reboot after fan backlash (my interpretation), and that the theatrics usually don't mesh well with the action-oriented flow of the rest of the episodes around it.
The reboot thing was, to me, overly clear with the changes in aesthetics and technology. Especially the Klingons. And I get it: it's hard to dazzle audiences through vibrant creative direction, with decades of canon on your back. All that older stuff has compromises from old effects tech and budget baked in, so breaking from it is incredibly tempting. But the fans will not let you do this: just ask the Dr. Who production people. So we get some really oddball stuff happening in the first few seasons.
To the latter point, we get moments like: "The ship is going to explode in one minute, so let's argue for at least ten before we deal with that." This kind of thing happens a lot in Discovery and a binge-watch would have you thinking that the ship's counselor is either dead or contemplating transporter suicide. The dissent between characters feels valid most of the time, but other times is just jarringly out of character or contrary to self-preservation as to break suspension of disbelief. But there's usually angry, loud, arguing dissent. Which is a shame since these same episodes are hitting the mark on every other metric, IMO.
What's the "gay agenda" reference for TNG?
First one that comes to mind is "The Outcast". Not really gay, but for anyone who is triggered by anything different they would consider it "woke".
There's also:
The Host which has Crusher dealing with falling in love with a Trill who moves hosts. It can be seen in some very specific ways as a trans allegory and just challenging heteronormative assumptions about love and attraction.
The show really pushes a lot of 'Found Family' stuff which ends up being super popular in most LGBTQ+ media because we're disowned by other people. (Data accepted and accepting himself as part of the crew, Worf and Alexander aren't too awesome but Deanna steps up a bit there. You've got Wesley who's kind of adopted by most of the upper ranks after a while.
TNG is purely "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations" which people see as gay agenda because they wanna collapse anything pro-diversity as just being LGBTQ+ because they have fragile pathetic minds.
Q is aggressively queer coded. The hyper dramatic and flamboyant personality, the penchant for being a theatrical whore, openly flirting with Picard (and Riker) in such a way that you genuinely aren't sure if he's joking or not, he rejects every type of rigid norm from humanity, Voyager and a few other things even hinted in such a way that due to his ability to change form he's above gendered norms too and sort of gender fluid. Not to mention being the campiest motherfucker this side of the Alpha quadrant. "It matters to me. YOU matter to me. Even Gods have favorites, Jean-Luc. You've always been one of mine." There's also his deep fucking loneliness, something that a metric fuckload of people in the community suffer from. Part of a whole but ostracized and on the outside? Yea.
retconned Klingons to look super weird
TBF the Klingons were retconned in TMP
From now on, every Star Trek show should change the appearance of the Kinglons and the Trill. And also add a new color of Andorians.
Thanks for that review. Seriously, well said.
The only question I have about Discovery is: do you think Michael Burnham is ever capable of crying?
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