I don’t dislike it because it’s woke. I dislike it because it’s a really bad show.
Comment on William Shatner And ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Actors React To News Of Series Ending
MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
William Shatner just said it best again:
And when the Next Gen came out; there was tons of hate because it ‘wasn’t Star Trek’ and the cast probably was in fear from the fans. Again when the series with Bakula came out, it too was panned by the fans because it ‘wasn’t Star Trek.’ Star Trek is different for everyone.”
So, to all the outspoken trolls and haters out there, a huge Fuck You for sabotaging the entire franchise.
Alchalide@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
ThePantser@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
Funny how we can influence a TV show into being canceled because it deals with “icky wokeness” but can’t do anything about the actual icky child fucker.
Sl00k@programming.dev 23 hours ago
What’s crazy is I can’t even pinpoint what they even mean by the wokeness? It’s really not overbearing, nor anymore than SNW or other TV shows. Maybe I’m just in a West Coast echo chamber
RamenJunkie@midwest.social 8 minutes ago
Academy is honestly less “woke” than Discovery, or even SNW.
Basically though, these jokers HATE the gay Klingon.
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 19 hours ago
The ones who aren’t being dishonest pieces of shit feeding into divisivism are usually complaining about the lack of quality of the writing and/or the overt nature of ‘leftist’ messaging, meaning anything remotely progressive like gay people existing or touchy-feely things coming from guys in a manner where those things are not directly relevant to the plot.
Often times there is some credibility to the complaints of the quality of writing, it’s just the ‘woke’ thing that triggered them to think about why the thing on screen is happening. Instead of noticing that it’s a general ham-fisted nature to the writing (which Trek basically always has in quite a few episodes of all series), they stupidly blame ‘woke’.
That is the power of the brainwashing coming from the dishonest propagandists like Ben Shapiro and their ilk: Legitimate shortcomings become things caused by “the other”, instead of basic variability of quality.
IMO, the bigger problem with Trek is Hollywood dumbasses like Kurtzman like pushing messaging more than writing good stories to challenge the alternate POV, which plays right into the shitty propagandists’ hands.
There are plenty of old episodes that would embarass modern Trek with being progressive since they didn’t make it an overt declaration (tell the audience), but showed why the bigoted view was bad. Whereas new Trek loves to just… declare the progressive view as good, and then go on to Main Character the problem away: Poor writing even when you agree with the message.
Sure, there are also quite a few hamfisted episodes of old Trek, but I’d much rather take 24 episode seasons smattered with ham than 10 episodes with an overarching story that loves to simply declare itself superior. It’s so much easier to ignore the poorly written episodes in old Trek when there is so much to take in, especially when there are some gems to find.
IMO, the overproduction is also hurting a lot of newer IPs even beyond being a huge cost. It’s so much easier to gloss over a 6/10 in writing which is inevitable no matter the message, when the visuals and the rest aren’t a 10/10 in every scene. I think it’s one reason why Lower Decks gets so much love. It’s “just a cartoon”, so when the writing nails a mature topic, it feels like a proper treat.
gnuplusmatt@reddthat.com 47 minutes ago
Whereas new Trek loves to just… declare the progressive view as good
can you cite example, not saying you’re wrong, but I always feel modern trek does representation without any clear messaging/opinion at all. Its a case of we “have these things” but fear actually using the things in a morality play. I’d be happier with modern trek if it actually took a proper side
pEg@startrek.website 43 minutes ago
echodot@feddit.uk 9 hours ago
The reason people like lower deck so much is because it was obviously written by an actual Star Trek fan rather than someone trying to write generic science fiction and then slap a Star Trek aesthetic on top. Which was what discovery was like in the early days.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 13 hours ago
I disagree that cartoons set lower expectations. I expected a lot from Lower Decks and that expectation was well satisfied. One thing LDS does benefit from is the 22 minute runtime. 45 minute episodes are too long.
Zaraki42@lemmy.ca 13 hours ago
If anything, Discovery was way more “woke”.
grue@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
I mean, it ain’t exactly The Honeymooners or Dukes of Hazzard, is it? That’s the standard that we’re measuring “woke” against these days!
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
I’m from North Carolina. No West Coast echo chamber here. Lemme splain.
The first thing we have to do is acknowledge this: Republicans are racist, sexist and homophobic. Their god has told them over and over again that black people are evil, women are inferior and gays deserve to die. The people who disagree with them on that are their enemy, that they are currently fighting and winning a holy war against.
“The Left” are their enemy. Back during the Obama administration, The Left would self-describe with the term “woke.” So The Right started using this as a slur for The Left. Being okay with black people is woke. Being okay with gays is woke. Being okay with trans is a whole new flavor of woke. These same kinds of people tend to also be into environmentalism and such. That is also woke, of their enemy. Hence giant pickup trucks and performative fuel wasting.
“But these people you’re talking about tend to like old Star Trek, and it’s been progressive since the 1960’s!” Yeah they mostly don’t see that. Because in both TOS and TNG, a white man is in charge, even if there are women and blacks on the crew. Old Trek tends to devolve into feats of military badassery or at the very least brinksmanship. Picard had a habit of out-badassing Romulans over the telephone. What about DS9? Didn’t watch it; stars a black man. Don’t like that show. What about Voyager? Watched a few episodes when Jeri Ryan joined the cast, didn’t get into it. Enterprise? Wasn’t on any channels I could get at the time.
Meanwhile, there has been a decline in Star Trek’s maturity level. TNG was a very mature show, and not in the Game of Thrones “They get their tits out” sense of the word. TNG is a show about high functioning grownups. I’ve heard it called “competency porn.” There’s an episode where Data is acting Captain of the ship, with Worf as his acting FO. Worf acts impatient with Data, and Data asks to speak with him in the ready room, and delivers a reprimand. He speaks in a stern but not raised voice. There is no shouting. Worf accepts his reprimand, comes to agree with Data’s way of thinking. Data dismisses him, and then checks in on a personal note, regretting if having to reprimand him has damaged their friendship, and Worf replies that he acknowledges he was out of line and that he’d like to remain friends. They behave like the kind of professional adults that should be in command of a warship.
That started slipping in the later shows, ENT went kind of sophomoric with all the attempts at sex appeal. JJ Abrams made a couple movies, during one Uhura tells Kirk during a critical shuttle flight to wait so that she could have a lover’s spat with Spock. On Discovery, they gossiped and backtalked like high schoolers, and then there’s a gag on Starfleet Academy where a cadet sheepishly admits to having swallowed her combadge. Apparently she put it in her mouth like a teething toddler.
Funny thing about the right wing, a lot of them have served in the military, or if they haven’t, they fetishize it. Old Trek was made by WWII veterans; Roddenberry flew B-17s for the USAAF and Doohan stormed Juno Beach on D-Day. Starfleet is a space navy, one that has gone more and less military over time but it’s still a military setting. Another aspect that makes Trek interesting and palatable to the right. Military service and especially combat makes one a “real man.”
There is no shortage of Hollywood types doing interviews listing off all the various “progressive” messages they intend to shoehorn into their works, Alex Kurtzman is among them. The thing is…they’re not delivering a message. Old Trek delivered messages. New Trek virtue signals. In the same way The Right tunes their trucks to run rich, “rolling coal” to performatively waste fuel, to be seen doing something The Enemy doesn’t like, New Trek (and indeed most of what Hollywood has done over the last decade) have been full of performative faggotry. “The cast is mostly female, trans and brown and practically all of them are gay except for one token white dude whose job it is to be always wrong.” The Left likes it because they think The Right won’t.
I want you to think about this: The Left is depicting themselves in these shows, yeah? By making all the characters brown and gay and retarded? No seriously, the more “Progressive messaging” and “representation” they cram into these shows, the characters get dumber and more childish. They’re depicting themselves as stupid pathetic children. Which makes it very easy for The Right to demonize them as dumbass manbabies who never grew up and shouldn’t be in charge of anything important.
Explain to me why they’re doing that.
backalleycoyote@lemmy.today 7 hours ago
Well, he wasn’t invited back for Home Alone 3.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
The fact that this is happening now and not at the end of season 2 implies studio shenaniganary and not listening to some dumb chuds.
Why would they sabotage viewership for season 2 instead of canceling it outright? Or at a minimum just dump the rest of it now?
My gut says it’s virtue signaling by management to the Ellison who’s gonna run the place in the not too distant future. Canceling the “woke” trek sounds like something sufficiently sycophantic for a Hollywood exec.
The worst part is now the chuds are taking a victory lap.
grue@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
More like “vice signaling.”
ohulancutash@feddit.uk 23 hours ago
Season 2 completed production a couple of weeks ago. SNW has completed production on its final 2 seasons. This is the first time there has been a clear deck with no Trek in development or production since 2005.
It isn’t necessarily virtue signalling. A new ownership team tends to like having a fresh start on key properties. It comes at the right time, with Kurtzman’s contract up at the end of the year.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
So if it had been popular would it have continued? Serious question, because it sounds like they weren’t going to continue SFA after season 2 in the first place.
StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website 22 hours ago
There was a report posted elsewhere claiming that the viewership has been greater than expected but they still canceled it.
ohulancutash@feddit.uk 23 hours ago
If it were a phenomenon then maybe it would have been continued, but Trek is expensive, and they don’t have Netflix paying for it these days.
I never got the impression it was a show that would stick around. Obviously it would be limited to 4 seasons anyway without replacing most of the cast, but I think it pretty much wrapped everything up in season 1.
ryper@lemmy.ca 23 hours ago
Why would they sabotage viewership for season 2 instead of canceling it outright? Or at a minimum just dump the rest of it now?
They can’t dump season 2 right now because it only finished filming a month ago and there’s a lot to be done after that.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Okay. Still doesn’t explain why they’d announce this now.
CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
Just a guess, but maybe because S02 finished production and now would be the time to begin production on S03 including signing contracts with the cast and crew. If they didn’t announce it, then all of those people out of work would sure as hell shout it from the rooftops.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
The franchise died because of poor ratings, not poor reviews.
Do you think The Bachelor stayed on air for years because of critical acclaim?
Soupbreaker@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Since the news broke that Academy was cancelled, I’ve seen a number of comments implying that people who posted negatively about it on Lemmy are in some way responsible for its cancellation. That’s a ridiculous notion. Nobody with the power to make that decision gives a single shit about what goes on here, nor are they even aware of our existence. I get that you’re frustrated, but your ire is misdirected.
teslekova@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
Ha! Blaming people on Reddit is barely believable. Maybe an exec is a big Reddit fan, or it gets back to the board because the social media pr team keeps tabs on Reddit to make sure AMAs aren’t being given in problematic fora.
But Lemmy? Delusion.
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 19 hours ago
He would be far more correct in the general sense if it were only bigots and idiots complaining that were never going to be fans of a more intellectual show.
New Trek has had lots of criticism from actual, existing Trek fans that want to see the IP flourish into another 100+ episode series. Of course the usual bigots and propagandists also hated on it, but they were always going to! To thusly pretend there are zero honest fans who didn’t like Discovery or Picard, etc, is to completely ignore valid critique.
Star Trek might be different for everyone, but there are many core throughlines that were heavily changed for New Trek. That doesn’t inherently make New Trek bad by itself, but it also means the old fans aren’t just whining to whine.
Maybe they actually have some good points when they’re comparing things that are getting dropped one after the other, not even approaching episode counts that the original hit with three seasons, when the rest of the older series all have significantly more than that.
Yes, they all had silly episodes, so why did these older things with plenty of sillyness garner so many fans? It’s foolish to pretend it’s all bigots and idiots simply saying, “it’s different!”.
Greddan@feddit.org 23 hours ago
People: “I think this TV show is kinda bad”
You: “REEEE STOP SAYING WHAT YOU THINK YOURE SABOTAGING THE ENTIRE FRANCHISE”
Maybe you should talk to people about what is good in this TV show instead? All I’ve heard about it is people like you claiming it’s being ruined by people who didn’t like it, and don’t watch it.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
TNG’s naysayers in the 80’s were upset they weren’t going to get to see more of their favorite characters. Imagine being told now in 2026 that they’re gonna reboot Friends with none of the original actors. It almost doesn’t make sense because the six friends WERE the show; just make another sitcom. And the first two seasons of TNG were pretty bad; in 1989 it was pretty easy for those naysayers to say told ya so.
The thing is, TNG had a solid premise, which was broadly the same premise as the proven original series. There were glimmers of greatness, diamonds in the rough, like Picard proving in court that Data is a person. It just had to exhaust obsolete old plots and executive producers and find its footing as its own show; by season 4 they had made some of the best television ever broadcast.
ENT had a different problem. It was the fifth series made in the franchise, fans were used to meeting new crews in new situations by now. But ENT came out and told us it “wasn’t our father’s Star Trek.” For the first two seasons, the show was just titled “Enterprise” and not “Star Trek: Enterprise.” It eschewed the traditional orchestral intro music for a pop ballad with vocals. And…the show’s values are worse. I think I just convinced myself that they set it as a prequel so they had an excuse to make the crew worse people. Archer would definitely have killed the Gorn. Could you imagine on TNG Geordi and Worf sitting around in a damaged shuttlecraft drinking whiskey and discussing how hot Troi’s ass is? That happened on ENT. Not only did they bring on another hyperintelligent but emotionally stunted hot chick with huge tits in a catsuit having learned the wrong lesson from Seven of Nine, but the entire crew spent at least some time in their skivvies, often rubbing baby oil on each other.
So ENT declared an intent to return the franchise to its classic premise after DS9 and Voyager in one hand, while masturbating half erect in with the other. Trek fans who watched the show for Kirk refusing to kill the Gorn, or offering his hand to the Klingon Captain on Genesis, or…list two Picard speeches here. Weren’t going to get it from Enterprise. You’d get Hoshi holding her tits in her hands though.
TNG had naysayers before it launched, who were proved wrong. ENT started out with the audience on board and lost people along the way.
So now we arrive at the present and they’re canceling Starfleet Academy. Trekkies seem torn into two factions about this:
There’s the diversity fetishists who are angry that a demographic list show was canceled. I remember once upon a time how, gay people for example, would ask to see more realistic, positive, nuanced gay characters in media and not just Straight Female Protagonist’s Flamboyantly Gay Friend. Now there is media made to pander to that audience, and it boils down to “there’s a woman and a gay and a brown and a fat and an autistic and a…” Elsewhere on Lemmy there was a thread about how mecha anime tended to feature gay characters and about half of the thread was like “What? GAY? WHERE!!! I want to see gay!” Them. The people who do not care if there’s a story or not, they just want to have the colors of the pride flag listed out loud.
Then there’s the folks who liked old Star Trek. Who remember Starfleet Academy depicted as a prestigious military academy that expected excellence in all fields out of their students. Wrath of Kahn opens up with Lieutenant Saavik being taught a lesson about facing death at Starfleet Academy. As a cadet, Wesley Crusher is involved in a fatal accident flying a banned maneuver and a cover-up about said accident, and he receives a strong dressing down, not only about the importance of following regulations but about integrity. The graduates of Starfleet Academy are not only extremely capable military officers, technicians that can operate and maintain the highly advanced systems of a starship, are adept at combat at any scale from hand to hand to theater naval engagement, they’re accomplished athletes, published scientists, many are classically trained musicians, they spend their free time playing 3D chess, cosplaying as Sherlock Holmes and putting on stage plays.
And then here comes the new TV show where a fat young woman walks up to Robert Picardo and sheepishly admits to having swallowed her combadge, and he replies “What, already?!” and you think “Oh, this is a show made by retards, about retards, for retards.”
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 12 hours ago
I was taking your comment seriously until the performative bigotry at the end. At that point I thought “Here is a person who is perfectly capable of thoughtful conversation, but is trying to look like an ass.”
minorkeys@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Yeah this is a stupid ass take. The show isn’t enough of what people liked about startrek. That’s not the audiences fault, it’s the showrunner’s fault, who famously didn’t watch startrek, didn’t care about the IP, didn’t care what people liked about to and just wanted to use the IP to promote ideology and worldview. Aka propaganda. Atleast the TNG to Enterprise era gave us enough of what we liked that we could sit through what we didn’t. This latest installment failed to strike that balanced because it intentionally and arrogantly and sadistically, never tried.
hopesdead@startrek.website 1 day ago
I hope those individuals whom latch onto what Shatner says, change their attitude.
skeezix@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
The show sucked dog balls and we’re glad it’s over. And it didn’t suck because it was “new” or “different”. It sucked because it sucked. The show sucks. Now I have to go because I think I swallowed my comm badge.
echodot@feddit.uk 3 hours ago
Surely it was the writers who sabotaged the show by producing this instead of literally anything else.