TOS came out at a time when people still talked of Columbus discovering america.
TOS came out at a time when Columbus was still being held in high regard. :)
Quick search suggests that the people of Columbia are still pretty happy with the name.
Meanwhile the people of Ohio's capital aren't
I live in NYC and no one is actually pushing to get rid of Columbus Circle.
otoh, Trump has a Building right on Columbus Circle, so maybe we should ask Mamdani to rename it Obama Circle.
which makes no sense, because even then, we knew Columbus wasn't the first person there.
To be fair, it would be a boring show if they didn’t.
Ship enters orbit of a planet
‘Spock, what do our scans show?’
‘Intense geologic activity, no atmosphere, no life signs.’
Ship spends the next 3 months in orbit collecting data, moves on to the next target
‘Spock, what do our scans show?’
‘Planet is frozen, no geologic activity, no life signs.’
Ship spends the next 3 months in orbit collecting data
Realistic sci fi is waaayyy too boring for a general audience.
I choose to believe that it's usually like that, and we're just seeing the days where something interesting happens.
I mean it has to be.
They age and have discussions of things we don't physically see.
Talking about the first encounter of the Q being 3 years ago not 1000 episodes ago
Yeah, it kinda feels like you could do a very ‘boring’ science series just showing all of that. But I feel like that’s just ‘sci’ with no ‘fi’.
Hey look, it's Starfield!
I'm glad you made this comment because I was about to.
Starfield, a surprisingly great framework for a game from Bethesda, but they forgot to put the actual game inside it
I mean the original line was "where no man has gone before" which at least made sense, although it didn't represent the female crew very well.
English uses 'man' and 'mankind' interchangeably.
Grammatically, 'no man' makes more sense than 'no one.'
I've always thought it was an odd change. I get why they did it, but the original clearly wasn't being used in the way the change implies.
It has the same energy as saying that you can't use the term "whitelist" and must substitute "allowlist", or "master bedroom" to "primary bedroom", or that time they changed "monkeypox" to "m-pox".
"Master bedroom" being changed is such a silly one. That term wasn't even used until the 20th century and referred to the master of the household. It has nothing to do with slave masters.
It speaks to a larger cultural ignorance or poor literacy to even consider it, in my opinion. I've seen similar reactions to talking about "plantation-style" home architecture. It's as if many people have only ever heard these words in connection with slavery from their lessons in school.
Yeah it’s be hard to argue TOS was excluding women in that sentence given the presence of female bridge crew members.
Someone else posted that they didn't consider getting rid of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben as big wins.
Most of the changes are performative and not material. imho.
They were big wins the same way getting rid of the Redskins was a big win for Native Americans. It’s not about the specific instance. It’s about what growing up in a world that tolerates that kind of portraying of ethnicity does to young minds.
I still think that Master and Slave were the most apt descriptions for IDE drive roles
"I am no man!" Says the female crew, who proceeds to stab the space Nazgul in the eye.
Yes, it did though. Women, too, are human.
It was a list:
Boldly yes, but It's been a long road gettin' from there to here.
Just watched an episode where they literally went to a section of space completely absent of all energy and matter and still somehow met this
Well, it was supposed to be where no 'man' has gone before, but people had to whine about it, and here we are.
I'm just realizing that the wording change made humans seem REALLY pretentious!
TBF in the ToS it was ”Where no man has gone before”, not “Where no one has gone before.”
So if it was aliens then the statement was correct, we’d just have to skip all the weird human populated worlds they found.
As progressive as the show was for its time, it is informed by narratives of the settler imperialism that helped Europeans "conquer the new world".
There's a reason why the intro casts space as "the final frontier." The frontier myth and its accompanying ideology of Manifest Destiny still formed the widely accepted version of U.S. history. Not the land-grabbing, genociding, slavery-spreading version we know today.
Bonus thought: Exploring space was obviously a big thing back then so it's understandable how Roddenberry came up with this line. But when you really think about it, time is the final frontier that we haven't managed to break through yet. Not space.
I mean, isn't this basically what every European did in the Americas and Africa?
Columbus: "Look, I'm the first human being ever to set foot here!"
200 Taíno people staring at him wondering WTF was going on
Columbus: "Look, I planted a flag, that way if anyone else ever comes here, they'll know this is Spanish land now."
There are parts where no one has gone, but landing on a barren rock probably isn't a good story
The people who were already there didn’t go there if they were always there
There wasn't even coffee in the nebula
And not just natives (who are invariably human shaped), they often have entire databases of info on them from presumably when they were "discovered".
Mass Effect was a better sci fi universe and I'll die on that hill.
I don't even think many people will disagree with that. The appealing thing about Star Trek was always the utopia, the idealism, the philosophical questions, and (in some cases) the sciency details. Most attempts to make Star Trek into some kind of uber-galactic-struggle-between-alien-races or quest-to-avoid-the-destruction-of-the-universe that were the focus of many later sci-fi shows ended up making it worse.
As fully fledged sci-fi universes that were explicitly written with these "big" stories in mind, Mass Effect or The Expanse are clearly ahead.
Just empire things.
They said no "one". They can go places as long as there are many things there.
Eh. You don't have to be the first person to discover something to discover it. This is what people always miss with the vapid line about Columbus not discovering the Americas. Sure, there were already people there. But the vast majority of the human population in 1492 was ignorant of the very existence of the American continents. And their discovery instituted an epochal change that upended both the Americas and the old world.
We can condemn genocide and displacement without becoming pedantic gotcha warriors.
If all that matters is the first person to discover something, no scientist in human history has ever discovered anything. After all, relativity was probably first discovered 5 billion years ago by some alien physicist living several galaxies away.
White version of discovery.
I have discovered this place! But we live here already. Nope, I'm the first to discover it!
Dunno. If i see my neighbor fucking cats i think i have made some sort of discovery, even if my neighbor clearly knew before me what he is doing.
The further we go the more we find ourselves.
Look, they are trying.
They just keep getting distracted on the way and where overtaken.
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