Comment on The best answer to "when did Star Trek get woke?"
Kirk@startrek.website 3 weeks agoS-tier satire of the conservative “Trekkie” (please Gene, I hope you’re being satirical). I always think of Douglass Adam’s “rules” on growing old:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Anytime someone says Star Trek’s progressivism was never “hamfisted” I usual just point them to the after school special that is Let that be your Last Battlefield:
Anytime someone says Star Trek’s progressivism was never “hamfisted” I usually just point them to the after school special that is Let that be your Last Battlefield
I never understood that episode. I’m sure there’s some sort of metaphor there but I just couldn’t figure it out
It was clearly about how marijuana makes your children communist
Real comments like that always make me think of Douglass Adams’ “rules” on growing old
I would have thought my comment made you think of every digit of pi, because that’s also something you didn’t read all of before replying to me. Seriously, if conservatism were applicable, why would my thesis be trashing Voyager and Enterprise, and pretty explicitly pointing out that Enterprise is overall even worse than Discovery? Shows that came out when I was little, I might add, and about 20 years before I increased my lifetime watching history of Star Trek beyond a single digit number of episodes across all shows.
Plus, I never said older Star Trek shows didn’t have bad writing, but you chose a bad example. Let That be Your Last Battlefield isn’t hamfisted, it’s just a clear narrative about racism, obsession, and hatred that aired before there was any grass growing on Dr. King’s grave, but it admittedly doesn’t resonate with people who are so jaded they consider an objective and unambiguous moral position intrinsically corny and trite. I guess To Kill a Mockingbird is just a hamfisted after-school special too, huh? Do you know what Let That be Your Last Battlefield doesn’t have, though? I do: it doesn’t have an undercurrent of insincerity, nor does it have characters whose narrative function is contradicted by everything they say and do. In that way, DS9’s Meridian is not far from being a Discovery episode.
Star Trek has, at various times, televised episodes that were boring, nonsensical, transparently insincere, objectifying, hamfisted, acted poorly, or rife with grating and unnatural dialog. It wasn’t till Voyager that these became consistent (especially boring and nonsensical, which are rarely absent). Enterprise and Discovery very consistently share most or all of these qualities in abundance, though I will damn Discovery with the faint praise that it doesn’t really have characters whom elderly perverts shoehorned in to add sex appeal, like T’Pol or Seven of Nine (or arguably Troi, though she also got legitimate character moments whenever Gene Roddenberry and/or Rick Berman were distracted by sexually harrassing someone else).
Discovery isn’t the worst Star Trek, that honor goes to absolute trash that is Picard, but it’s still a bad Star Trek. And again, let me be clear because you probably skipped to this paragraph, that’s not because it’s “woke”. It’s not bad because it has LGBT characters (even having a select few who didn’t get killed off as soon as there was enough footage of them being gay to submit during awards season), it’s bad because they don’t have anything recognizable as personalities and still have a closet to come out of. It’s not bad because a the captain is a black woman, it’s bad because they can’t decide whether she’s a Starfleet captain, Jesus Christ, or the Rambo fantasy from UHF. Throwing the public a bone with representation for marginalized minorities is not the act of kindness it should be when what they’re being represented as is incompetent and unprofessional dolts who speak in monologues and act like they have lead poisoning. For wokeness done correctly, see Lower Decks, a show I intensely dislike but recognize is overall good. Discovery isn’t aspirational, it doesn’t have challenging ideas, it doesn’t incite emotion, it doesn’t make you think, and it doesn’t have any heart, at all. It’s still better than Enterprise, Picard, and TAS because the bar is so low it’s in the mantle.
BlueOysterCultist@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I’m mainly responding to your quote about new things being against the established order and my view of NuTrek is extremely biased since I mainly get my information from RedLetterMedia but do you think NuTrek ackchyually can sit on its own laurels?
I did watch Picard’s 3 seasons and I think it highlighted pretty well the problems with NuTrek:
I could probably come up with more issues, but it’s been a bit and I’m never rewatching Picard. NuTrek is a far cry from the old thinking man’s trek and is really watered down.
Nouvellalia@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I agree completely. Which is why I love Academy. It’s silly, it’s got heart, it tires to build up the power of care and chosen family, and it meta pokes fun at itself. It’s like they tried to make lower decks into a mainline show.
Which was exactly what we needed after the lens-flare, torture-porn, throw-every-shred-of-history-out-the-window bullshit we’ve had for a decade.