I get not liking Discovery, but do people really think Lower Decks, SNW, Picard are “Woke?”
Also, obviously, sci-fi is at its best when tackling politics… Isn’t that kinda the point?
“Woke” has long since lost its original meaning.
Used to mean something positive and progressive. Then it meant something that tried writing itself off as something progressive, but was simply stupid and entitled (i.e. That Batwoman series), now it’s anything a right winger hates, even if it isn’t trying to be progressive in any way.
Truth is, with NuTrek, it doesn’t have a single progressive bone in its body, and the writers don’t have the skill to pull off any sort of commentary.
It’s woke because they’re so unhinged that basic human decency is woke now.
SNW has like 90% female crew members. Also the pilot lady has short hair. Therefore woke.
Probably.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QFspemhHmsw A Critique of Star Trek Discovery — Part 1 #RIPStarTrek
This whole essay is worth listening to, but 15:46-30:33 in particular gets at the heart of a big reason why classic Trek rocks and why nuTrek is shit.
Lower Decks remains very good. CBS has tried to pivot Star Trek from Sci-Fi to Space Adventure, and that’s been ugly. But not every series they’ve spun out took that tone.
Also Orville - particularly the latest season - has been incredible. Everything Star Trek is supposed to be.
I havent gotten past the original series yet (I started with that), so far Star Trek seems like the entire point is to get into complex social and political issues that other companies would be too scared to cover.
“Shatner figured it out? Shatner? This is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts.”
“When I have a problem that phasers can’t solve, I just kiss a beautiful alien. Then suddenly, I have a completely different problem!” - Jason Tiberius Kirk
Edit: I may have drifted into the Kelvin timeline…
“I’m a legit snack” - Nyota Uhura
More like the main course 😏
Nichelle Nichols was at one point thinking of quitting the show but stayed because MLK Jr. himself told her how important her character was.
And without Nichelle Nichols on Star Trek, she wouldn’t have been hired by NASA and then we wouldn’t have had Sally Ride, so she is a legitimate space hero.
She thought about leaving because she didn’t feel like her character got to do enough - a common sentiment of supporting actors.
It was TNG that really established an ensemble cast formula; TOS was Kirk-Spock-McCoy and the rest. It took TNG a couple seasons before they got the idea of a true ensemble cast where everyone gets to star in some episodes. TOS wouldn’t have had more than one episode starring Reginald Barcklay with Geordi and Dianna in supporting roles, but TNG had at least two.
TOS wouldn’t have had more than one episode starring Reginald Barcklay with Geordi and Dianna in supporting roles, but TNG had at least two.
Three, even. Horny holideck, barkley gets his groove on, and transporter cuddles.
“Transporter cuddles”.
No, they alternated.
Sometimes they did proper scifi.
Sometimes they did politics.
I’m in it for the scifi mself.
Sometimes they did proper scifi.
Sometimes they did politics.
Sometimes they did Space Wizards and sometimes they did Politics and sometimes they did both.
But the harder they leaned into actual Science Fiction the more they inevitably tackled the socio-economic ramifications of those technologies and discoveries. Legal Theories like The Prime Directive and social experiments like The Kobayashi Maru training exercise and the very depiction of aliens - the ultra-logical Vulcans who constantly resist their base emotional instincts, the war-loving Klingons, the xenophobic Romulans, the problem of domesticating an invasive species like the Tribbles - all convey political attitudes and ideologies.
This is inescapable. You can’t create good apolitical Sci-Fi. Presenting the idea of a futuristic society without exploring the consequences of your modernizations is cowardly and boring.
Your assertion that any sci-fi at all isn’t political is a particularly bold one.
But it’s a fascinating thought, so I’m going on an unrequested quest:
Here’s my attempt at “let’s name a hard science fiction that isn’t making a political statement”.
Perhaps…
- “Frankenstein” is about grave robbing and biology horror and in no way an analogy for mistreatment of neurodivergent individuals.
- “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” is about a cool submarine and not about an ultra rich man’s extreme rejection of modern societal norms bending the world of those around him.
- “The Martian” was about the cold hard science of a man surviving on Mars, and not all about humanity briefly overcoming our national rivalries to do the human thing and being one person home safely.
- “The Robot” is just about a time traveling robot, and not a sad prediction of mankind’s likelihood to erradicate ourselves leaving only our automation to remember us by.
- “Bicentenial Man” is about robotics advances and has nothing to do with marginalized people fighting to have their human rights acknowledged.
- “The Expanse” is just about how dangerous space is, and not at all about how humanity tends to break off into adversarial groups.
- “Snow piercer” is about a cool train in the cold.
Okay, now I’m not even trying anymore, lol. (Snow piercer is blatantly deeply political, no matter how much I love the cool science train.)
I’m coming up short, arguing myself out of my best ideas, so far.
Hang on, I’ve got two:
- “Around the world in 80 days” is arguably at least slightly more about globe trotting and less about putting up with a rich employer’s bullshit.
- “Journey to the Center of the Earth” is mostly about cool caves and dinosaurs?!
I should reread these two, but I don’t remember many political messages.
(Edit. I bet someone is going to point out the political messages I missed in 80 Days and Journey. Considering how political I remember 20,000 Leagues being, I wonder if I just misremember the other two…)
At The Earth’s Core is about how you can’t mesmerize british people, and big mac boxes can breathe fire. I’m not sure if that’s political or not.
Guaranteed if original Star Trek came out today, it would be decried as “woke” and “DEI” and there would be outrage over it from the usual culture warriors.
Okay, I’ve finally looked up what DEI means… Diversity, equity, and inclusion are things people are berated for??
It’s not what DEI means. It’s about what it stands for.
Conservatives don’t want to be told to treat people with decency. They want to treat however the fuck they want, and then tell you that you aren’t treating them decently.
It’s about wielding power.
This is what they mean with those “My rights don’t end where your feelings begin” bumper stickers. The only right they’re losing is the right to being a bigoted asshole.
DEI is the current iteration of affirmative action, that’s all.
The problem with DEI is that it’s an imperfect solution that only came about because racists and other bigots couldn’t behave themselves. Forcing the hiring of specific demographics isn’t going to result in the best possible outcomes in every case but those groups also need opportunities even though they’ve been systemically given worse educations and have been generally shat upon. Removing race we’d also probably hire the white man more often but not because they’re inately better, but rather because they are simply more likely to be able to afford to have pretty looking resumés compared to disadvantaged minorities.
We wouldn’t need DEI in the first fucking place except people like an old boss, who saw an immigrant classmate of mine’s resumé come up and because of his African last name said “no thanks I want to keep jobs in Canada”, need to be forced to do the right thing. They create the problem and throw temper tantrums when we try to fix it. These people are obstacles and it’s getting tiring.
TL;DR: They feel as if they have a point because DEI can result in a more qualified person being turned away, which I get feels unfair. However, they refuse to acknowledge the fact that said person was only more qualified because we make it so difficult for minorities to fucking do anything. I’m getting so sick of right-wing bullshit.
Also, DEI is trying to diversify the points of view in the workplace. Homogeny of thought is NOT better when it comes to problem solving. Varied voices can create amazing solutions to problems one didn’t know really existed. If allowed, it builds creativity.
In my field anyway it’s not about background, it’s shitty managers not listening to anyone and only wanting to hear about how great they are. I am a tall white man and they still don’t wanna here even the littlest bit of polite feedback. I handled them more carefully than children and they still moaned and cried.
Diversity is good, and I do not think my experience is a reason to not care about it, but removing those worthless bosses is the only thing that will actually allow real change to actually happen.
YES, it’s insane. It’s like saying “be a decent person” and people going “Fuck you, commie bastards, I do what I want.”
From 2020 on we’ve seen that telling people “hey wear the most basic of facemasks when you’re out in public because the morgues are running out of space all over” causes them to start screaming at the Walmart greeters and throwing tantrums like children. We are still stupid apes in a lot of ways
The outrage the far-right spun over DEI is by trying to portray it as hiring vastly underqualified applicants simply because of their belonging to an underrepresented group (often even being portrayed as vastly underqualified because of their race as white supremacist rhetoric). Of course in reality this wasn’t true and it was just a foghorn for racism/an ethnic slur, but that’s how it started.
A lot of people seem to use “DEI” as a stand-in for the “n-word.”
Same people who couldn’t pronounce “affirmative action” without scare quotes and italics.
“It’s these “Affirmative Action” people…”
My brother in Christ…
Yeah, I’ve heard it called “Didn’t Earn It” and the idea is that people are given preferential treatment in job or services based on their ethnicity and not their qualification. As with all things the truth is somewhere in the middle.
No, it isn’t.
Guess I’m wrong, thanks arbiter.
Let’s meet halfway between fact and fiction.
Meet people who aren’t like you, please.
Counterpoint: As long as they consider the women “hot” they will accept them as part of the franchise.
Nichelle Nichols I think was probably hot enough to not draw their ire.
Those culture warriors are somehow always okay with women they view as “fuckable.” Women only have value in their eyes if they want to sleep with them by their looks alone.
They didn’t have everything figured out back then. For one, they bullied Spock for what we could only describe today as his neurodiversity.
The message I got from McCoy was that humans got along because they found new people to be racist against instead of each other
It helps when every other planet is a severely flawed monocolutre.
I think that’s the real message of Star Trek in general!
And TOS/ENT in particular
ENT gets bonus points for shran calling humans “pink skins” when Travis is right fucking there on the bridge
And there will be things that are being created today that’s considered progressive that in 20 years, will be considered as missing the mark.
There will never come a time in which we have everything figured out.
excuse me, i have a degree in bullshit. We have figured out everything. 1+1=2. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
Yes but that doesn’t mean we should never look back and see how far we’ve come, just as we look forward and see how far we have to go.
And new people who haven’t figured out yet are born all the time!
McCoy called Spock “green-blooded” on multiple occasions - and once a “hobgoblin”. And I would call the Vulcan penchant for logic a cultural trait, not neurodiversity.
You should see the episode when a woman body swapped with Kirk, and how the Enterprise crew suspected something was wrong
The one I always feel like I need to warn people about is the treatment of Rand in The Enemy Within. Particularly since that happens so early in the series.
McCoy was racist as shit and would not only have been cashiered, he probably would have been charged for hate speech
Kind of yeah, but Gene Roddenberry used allegories like the half black and half white dudes who hated each other - which took more effort than having characters just walk around in the present saying, “Wow, look at all the social injustice.”
Yeah he was real subtle. Not full of preachy monologues at all.
Roddenberry was both a genuinely progressive guy and an extremely 20th century man. “In the future we’re going to cure disease and hunger and everyone of all races and creeds will work together there’s gonna be a black woman, an asian guy, a Russian and an alien with funny ears on the bridge all working as a team and the women will all wear wrist length gogo dresses and there’s gonna be an episode where the crew is utterly baffled at the very concept of racism. We’re gonna paint some actors with half of their faces white and half of their faces black and they’re gonna be really horrible to each other and when asked why they’re gonna say “They’re white on the left side and we’re white on the right side” and it’s gonna make racism sound really dumb.”
I struggle to have a problem with a guy whose message is “Systematic hatred is extremely bad and stupid, let’s look at sexy legs instead.”
As transparent as Gene’s little parables were, I vastly prefer that method of social commentary over just saying “They certainly were unenlightened in the early 21st century weren’t they - shame on them!”
I haven’t watched any Star Trek since Enterprise. Are they worse at it now? It has been a long road getting form there to here.
IMO Picard season 1 is fantastic and season 2 has some embarrassingly awkward social justice preaching but a good story about the Borg queen. Haven’t seen season 3 or Below Decks yet.
Haven’t seen season 3
Uhhhh… Just so you know, most of us consider Season 3 the good one.
I enjoyed all three, but S3 was particularly a beautiful love letter to TNG.
Let’s talk about all the social injustice in the world while all positions of authority are held by white dudes.
He tried to put a woman in a position of authority (first officer) but the studio shot him down.
cough mark of gideon cough
Hey, i’m an old fart and guess how many times i heard people say that exact same shit about TNG? The pussy version of trek, nothing like its predecessor, all they do is talk about their emotions!
to say nothing of Star Trek IV
“Double dumbass on you!”
I’m an old fart too. I had a friend who said all they did on TNG was sit up straight and say, “Engage.”
Your friend clearly does not appreciate the Picard maneuver of straightening the shirt, or the Riker maneuver of throwing one leg over the chair to sit
Because that’s what you had to do to get past the executives and the censors in the 1960s.
Just like how “Last Train to Clarksville” is about Vietnam.
Just like how “Last Train to Clarksville” is about Vietnam.
TIL. That is a really subtle reference (at least from the perspective of somebody born a couple of decades after the fact, anyway).
Yeah, but the executives were terrified of any and all conflict. That’s why so many shows of that era are incredibly bland.
That was an allegory??? (/s)
They were even more upfront about it in TOS for some issues too.
I remember many instances where they say “We have women in our crew in the future.” It’s not like DISCO flaunted around saying “we don’t hate gay people in this ship.”
Like I understand that DISCO isn’t everybody’s favorite, and sure it has some issues, but all the flak it got for being “woke” and “preachy” was weird to me.
Part of Kirk’s whole thing was preachy speeches, and Picard had many moments too.
I don’t care about the woke nonsense. STD has very few redeeming qualities. Bad writing, bad acting. They spent little to no time flushing out the characters. I guess they didn’t have time what with the universe about to end every 10 minutes. I only watched for Anthony Rapp, Doug Jones and Michelle Yeoh. Everyone else was a stinker or didn’t get enough screen time.
I quite agree STD wasn’t everyone’s favourite, in any case it wasn’t mine, although I really tried. But whining about it being woke was just stupid.
Saying discovery is woke with their crew split in two parts, the queer ones all packed together and then the “normal” ones, seems like a stretch.
The gay couple basically adopts the non binary one who is in a couple with the trans one, are friends with the gay engineer, but barely even talk to the rest of the crew? Ah and sex scenes between straight people but the most the gay couple gets is sitting next to each other, brushing teeth and a small kiss (not that it’s a bad thing on its own, it forced the writing to actually show a relationship and not just a bunch of sex, which is positive)
That did really bother me, shoehorning all the queer people into their own little box after being far more progressive in previous seasons. Literally anyone else on the crew could have adopted Adira (who I didn’t really care much for as a character anyway, she was basically SNW Uhura but not as good an actor), but they had it be Stamets and Culber. How about making it, say, Detmer?
How about making it, say, Detmer?
Who? You sort of trailed off there; all I’m seeing is a blank space.
How dare you talk about my pretend girlfriend like that!
but the most the gay couple gets is sitting next to each other, brushing teeth and a small kiss
While you’re absolutely right, I think the record should show that tooth brushing scene is one of the sexiest scenes in television history. Those two have some serious on-screen chemistry.
Once again, the “don’t show too much gay” policy they seem to have forced them to show a relationship through actual intimacy, in contrast to the usual “relationship=sex” that shows usually have (which we can see with most heterosexual relationships in the same show, for example). Even the doctor that is portrayed by an actor that, let’s say, likes to show his body (most of the google results are him half naked) was not sexualized stupidly like they usually would ; a positive thing, except that it’s probably only because they don’t want to “show the gay” (Book for example is always naked and fucking).
So yeah, taken independently it’s a better relationship image than most relationships in most shows, but in the context it’s pretty horrible.
So yeah, taken independently it’s a better relationship image than most relationships in most shows, but in the context it’s pretty horrible.
Absolutely. I think a lot of the audience realize that if they weren’t a gay couple, we would see them with their shirts off together at every opportunity.
The silver lining is that the actors are so attractive and doing such a beautiful and convincing job, that the omission makes the show runners look prudish and silly.
The only issue disco has ever actually had is their serialized episodes. People hate on the other shit cause they’re bigots. Its still good Trek. The story is just less flexible.
it’s still good Trek
Everything with Pike and crew and pretty much everyone except Michael is decent Trek. Deus ex Burnham in every century Starfleet exists in is boring as shit and the nacelles not even being attached to the ship anymore is veering into Star Wars level of nonsensical ship design.
If floating nacelles is what does it for you but you can accept people being torn apart to the atoms and rebuilt somewhere else Idk what to tell ya bud. The saucers detach and float around, idk how that is sensical as it would create unnecessary weak points in the hull of the ship. The worst parts about discovery were how they were stuck trying to tell grand stories instead of being able to focus on the characters much. They didnt have that tight A plot B plot action that Trek does. But it was far from stinky poo poo terrible like most people say.
I just wish a single ship weren’t saving the Federation/Galaxy/Multiverse every season.
It also waffles hard between “The important part of the Federation is it’s ideals” and “Section 31 is pretty badass right?”.
The single ship thing is annoying and its in Picard, too.
Section 31 is pretty badass, right?
I have to say, I hated that. It feels like C suite “promote our upcoming show” meddling, to me.
Have yet to see anything outside of DS9 use Section 31 well. It’s inclusion manages to turn what’s supposed to be a hopeful story of the future into just another police procedural that happens to use Star Trek™ branded props
Yeah it’s nuts how it went from “These are the bad guys. This is antithetical to the point of Star Trek and the Federation.” to “Secret agents in space that can just shoot ‘bad’ guys is cool though right?”
The only issue disco has ever actually had is their serialized episodes.
And not spending enough on light bulbs in some episodes. I wondered if my TV was broken, at one point. Lol.
It’s not like DISCO flaunted around saying “we don’t hate gay people in this ship.”
Well, after DS 9 it would just be repetitive. Also TNG spent a few episodes on this exact point, but it wasn’t a main topic.
But people tend to focus their complains about things being “preachy” when those things put the preach above the story-telling. DISCO absolutely had this flaw in some point or another. Never for very long, though, so it really wasn’t a main characteristic. Anyway, when a show is simply good, almost nobody gets bothered by the preaching.
Holy Motherforkin Shirtballs! A The Good Place meme in the wild!
I remember this exact conversation in the show, too.
“It’s like: Who died and put Aristotle in charge?”
Points to board “Plato.”
Hey now hey now!
It’s a cashless classless society, it’s about economic class justice, too!
That part’s just more in the background.
Not for Sisko it isn’t. I wish I’d been born on the other side of the Bell riots and WW3 but at least we have cool digital watches now
We really should never have left the oceans.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
EDIT: I only noticed the username after I posted this, since it’s clear this is what you were making reference to ha
I mean, my watch is pretty sweet. It’s the damn little green pieces of paper that are causing all the problems
Have you tried… moving them around?
What an odd thought though, it’s not like they are the ones unhappy:-).
Since when is wokism about social justice?
Since when does wokism have meaning? Its just something the right uses to describe everything they dont like, like equal rights.
in a technical sense? yes.
in a practical sense? it’s superficial, generally without any actual actions to address anything about it. they will praise a company for plopping rainbows on everything ONLY during the exact days of pride month while funding Christian gay conversion camps
Bro, IDIC.
This is perfect. Thank you for this.
