Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about.
gurty@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Agreed. People should dislike modern Star Trek for it’s bad writing, not because it’s progressive.
The best progressive writing Trek did was when they addressed a social issue by having the actors pretend it wasn’t an issue at all.
Uhura was a bridge officer who was a black woman, and nobody cared or even noticed because in-universe there was nothing special about that.
I like how in Discovery a character came out as non-binary and everyone is like “ok cool” and that was that and it was never brought up again (because why would it be)?
You can tell by the absolute meltdown conservative spaces had about that five second clip that it was absolutely the right thing to do.
The best progressive writing Trek did was when they addressed a social issue by having the actors pretend it wasn’t an issue at all.
Is Jay-Den being gay not exactly that? Nobody cares in universe. But somewhat it is a big thing for a lot of people for no reason at all.
It is exactly that. Same with the meltdowns over Adira.
I mostly agree, but with shows like Starfleet Academy, the writing is bad in part because of the forced inclusive themes. You’re broadly correct: these could be handled with tact for a better show. I still think these themes are handled best when they give the audience room to consider nuanced and complex ideas. Don’t shoot me, but instead of a classic New Generation episode I’m going cite an episode of The Orville - “About a Girl”. Bortus and Klyden have a baby, who is born female. They try to argue that she should be allowed to remain female, but ultimately the court rules that she undergo the Moclan gender reassignment procedure.
This touches on contemporary issues but also doesn’t present the situation as “this side is 100% right, and this side is literally Hitler.” The audience is actually left wondering, where does this sit in the contemporary debate? If a child is born one sex, should they be given the right to remain as that sex? Or should a court be allowed to step in and reassign sex? The episode also brilliantly explores the difficult dynamic between Bortus and Klyden, and doesn’t portray one as a cartoon villain and the other as a male Mary Sue.
This is where New Trek fails horrible. Zero nuance. Everything is presented in the first 10 seconds as “this is good, this is bad. Accept the message we are feeding you are you are a bad person.” That’s not Star Trek. Most importantly, that’s not interesting. It’s not good storytelling. It might appeal to people who really like circlejerking about that particular issue, but that’s a minority of people.
That’s a lot of words to not provide a single example from a show of what makes “forced inclusion” different than “inclusion”
I saw that but I didn’t see anything about what makes inclusion “forced” in one series but not in another.
Can you give me a practical example of Starfleet Academy lacking the kind of nuance you would like to see?
A specific example would be “Vox in Excelso.” Jay-Den learns the Klingons have become an endangered people after the Burn, General Obel Wochak rejects the Federation’s offer of asylum on Faan Alpha because accepting it as charity would dishonour them, and the episode resolves that by staging a fake battle so the Klingons can claim the planet “by conquest”. To me, that lands too neatly. The episode tells you very quickly that the Federation position is the sensible one and the Klingon objection is mostly pride that needs to be worked around, rather than really sitting with the possibility that their view of dignity, sovereignty, and survival might have more weight than the script gives it.
Another example is “Ko’Zeine.” Darem is pulled back to Khionia for an arranged royal marriage to Kaira, and the episode is clearly building toward the conclusion that suppressing your real self for duty and tradition is tragic and wrong. That is a fair theme, but the show signals the moral endpoint so early that there is not much room left for genuine ambiguity. Kaira ends up being understanding, Jay-Den is framed as the voice urging honesty, and the traditional path mainly exists to be rejected. Compare that with something like older Trek, where you were more often left to wrestle with whether duty, culture, and individual freedom could all make a legitimate claim on the character at the same time.
So when I say the show lacks nuance, I do not mean it should avoid these themes. I mean it too often starts from the answer and then builds the episode backwards, instead of letting the conflict stay uncomfortable long enough for the audience to think. And when the story concludes, they make it VERY clear which way the audience is expected to land. They do not allow for any ambiguity or moral disagreement. They present the “right and true” path, and make it clear that any deviation is wrong and immoral.
I am not disagreeing with you, but old trek does this all the time.
In season 5 episode 17 (the one with the J’naii androgynous race) the setup is exacly the same as Ko’Zeine: from the start you get the answer that suppressing your true self is bad. The J’naii are seen as bigoted and the federation position as the right one. I do not think there is any ambiguity about which side the viewer is supposed to take. The only difference is the end result. Or look at how Dr. Crusher treats Klingon ritual suicide in season 5 episode 16: their culture is treated entirely as a stubborn, barbaric hurdle to be overcome by the ‘sensible’ 24th-century human perspective.
And TNG is also full of examples of “the federation knows best”. In Season 7 Episode 13 the federation works around a similar problem with the forced migration on the holodeck. Or Season 2 Episode 18, where the enterprise force the merge of the Bringloidi and the Mariposans. Or when in Season 1 Episode 8 we dismiss Edo society position immediately as immoral despite them living in a paradise society.
I appreciate you referencing the Orville’s most pivotal episode. And honestly, the twist involving Klyden’s reasoning for reassigning Topa, as a trans sci-fi nerd, broke my heart.
I agree completely with your point about the Orville. It was really well done.
I don’t agree with your assessment of New Trek, however. I know it’s all very variable and I don’t want to generalise, but even if we accept this:
Everything is presented in the first 10 seconds as “this is good, this is bad. Accept the message we are feeding you are you are a bad person.”
Then, I have to point out the obvious: if it’s so lacking in nuance, then yes, if you don’t accept it you are a bad person. For example, if it’s saying, “gay people are ok and normal”, there’s no subtlety to that because it’s not something anyone in the future will hopefully give a shit about. And if someone in their society did, then yes, they would be in the wrong. 100%.
But this is exactly my point. “Gay people are ok and normal” shouldn’t be a plot. It’s like a “murder is bad” plot. Yes, murder is bad. We know. That’s just not an interesting theme to explore. Maybe if it were presented as a trolly problem, where a crew member were forced to kill someone in order to defend their own life, or the life of a friend, that could be an interesting plot. Forcing the viewer to explore the tension of morality between killing or being killed, or taking an innocent life to save another innocent life. That could be interesting television.
We could apply this to a “gay” plot as well. What if the crew met a civilization that were on the brink of extinction for some reason, and they had outlawed homosexuality for reasons of survival. The crew could explore the tension between individual liberty and existentialism. Someone might argue, “our civilization doesn’t deserve to survive if we strip people of such basic human rights.” Another might argue, “if our civilization is to survive we must make hard decisions as we have always done during war and other crises.” They might argue it’s only “temporary,” and someone else might argue, “it’s been 30 years!”
The issue is driven by one-dimensional plot.
Trek expresses gay people being normal. It’s explicitly not the plot. There’s no plot point about it. The plot is about kids (for a certain Steve McQueen value of “teenager”) being in school and battling Space Foes. I’m picking on “being gay” as a point because I imagine it’s what the people who cancelled the show had an issue with, but I could well be wrong.
There was no exploration of the things the right-wing hate in Academy. They just exist. There’s no ongoing plot about anyone’s sexuality, or if you think there is then it’s dwarfed by the same plot with other straight characters.
It sounds so much like saying you can’t have a gay character unless there’s an interesting moral plot point about why they’re gay. That’s not what Academy did.
Discovery writing is all over the place I agree, but Starfleet Academy writing does not look that bad to me. What is so much worse then previous trek? If we do not cherry pick the best of the past against the worst of the new, writing is better or on the same level of what we saw before.
Yeah, nothing is organic. Feels like it’s not normal to the characters too, because they have to keep explaining it to themselves.
The message is not the issue, the inability of the writers to insert it in the story is.
I find the actual problems they face to be more organic than other series, there’s always at least a semi-good reason why the threat of the week is occuring rather than something stupid like flying through enemy territory with no shields or someone rando just beaming out your ships main computer being a huge weakness that no one ever thought might be a problem.
Glytch@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Trek writing has never been consistently good. Half of TOS is unwatchably bad. TNG sucks until Riker gets more hair. DS9 sucks until Sisko gets less hair. Voyager’s all over the place (even though it’s my favorite). Enterprise is mostly bad. Only the even numbered TOS movies are good. Only the first two TNG movies are good.
I say this with a genuine love of Star Trek, but the quality of the writing has varied greatly over each individual series.
GalacticGrapefruit@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
As a Star Wars nerd, I feel this so intensely. It sucks when you love the setting, but the actual writing is a crapshoot.
myrrh@ttrpg.network 12 hours ago
…holiday special: don’t colonialise life-day…
ContriteErudite@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Season three TNG is peak Star Trek. That said, and at the risk of being flayed by the Star Trek community at large, I think DS9 was the best series, taken as a whole.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 8 hours ago
Subjectively agreed, although ds9 is not as suitable for random watching since some characters have like real arcs and there’s a plot (which we can probably thank b5 for)