That’s why we love Daddy Data 💕 🤖
The problem is that when people say “New Trek”, they actually mean Discovery.
Discovery is a poorly written show made by people who do not grok Trek, and think that high ranking naval officers behaving like teenagers makes for good TV. SNW is alsio Nu Trek and manages to be faithful to the original vision while introducing new concepts.
Calling people critical of poory written shows bigots is very discrespectful. You may like it, but that doesn’t mean that everybody else has to like it as well.
But don’t you get it: woke is when no cleavage plunges.
What I liked was how casually they were progressive. Like no biggie, this is just a thing, it’s the future so why would it be a big deal. When they wanted to speak to a modern day issue with more gravity, either some time travel to create a human context where it could be controversial, or some alien metaphor that was super obvious but still technically not humans being backwards.
Discovery had a habit of being a bit too over the top about it and self congratulatory in media.
A good modern example of all things I think was the Orville. Humans again are casually progressive, so they had the all male species be the focus of gender issues.
What was that show that had the first recognized interracial kiss? Way back in November 22 1968 … honestly, if Star Trek had done that it would have been considered shocking and “woke”.
Star Trek has ALWAYS been controversial.
not only that, interracial crew, a Japanese, russian and a black woman on the main crew!!!
They made because they’re not awake.
I hate posts about some vocal asshat complaining about something being woke. Anybody who uses the word woke derogatory is an asshole who doesn’t deserve a moment of my attention.
Honestly just miss everyone working together. I only did about 1.5 seasons each of Picard and Discovery, but I just couldn’t take all the “the enemy is each other”. If I wanted that I’d watch the expanse? Ftr I will watch them in entirety and fully judge at that point, rn I haven’t so can’t say they offer nothing. SNW seems to get it though which I appreciate and hope continues. There are so few optimistic sci-fi shows I really want trek to stick to that niche.
Idk, I think Discovery just sucks.
Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks kick ass, though.
Edit: Discovery and Picard. Picard sucks ass, too. I just cannot force myself further than episode two.
I just gave picard another go and knocked it off but jeeeeeesus. So much nonsensical bullshit and how can you faff about so much with so few episodes.
Yeah, I also absolutely hate the lighting. Everything is either way too dark or way too bright or somehow both at the same time. I remember seeing a trailer for one of the later seasons and the federation ships seem like they’d super uncomfortable to be on.
I think the difference is because Disco and Picard are serialized while SNW and LD are episodic.
On serialized Trek, if the writers get a bug up their asses to do a mirror universe storyline or a section 31 storyline, you’re stuck with that tedious bullshit for at least half a season. If episodic Trek has a stinkburger episode that everyone mocks for decades (Sub Rosa), the next week can give you a premise so beloved that they base a whole series on it (Lower Decks).
Episodic Trek can take more risks. I kinda miss the longer seasons for the same reason.
Yes, upon rewatching TNG, I realized that I might actually like less than half of the stories that much, but that still leaves so many stories I do like.
If I was inclined to like a discovery story to start with, it will wear out its welcome pretty soon because they drag it out so long.
Picard sucks
But how can this be? They are shoving so much fan service down your throat.
As we all know, after 2 bad seasons, fan service makes good show!
That’s fair.
Try Picard season three though, that was way better than seasons 1&2. :-)
No it wasn’t
I always understood that particular emoticon to mean the same thing as /s. Or mom emailed me…in 1997
I liked the first few minutes of Picard but nothing after.
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Meh, there were a few times where the comedy could have probably taken more of a backseat than it did, but the comedy didn’t overall bother me that much. I did like that it was a more unpolished take on what life in Starfleet is like, and the comedy was the vehicle that that view was delivered through. I mean, take Shax and T’ana making it super uncomfortable to be roomed close to the holodecks; realistically, who isn’t going to get up to some freaky shit with tech like that? The live action shows kinda dance around it, but I like that Lower Decks was able to address it outright because it’s allowed to take itself less seriously.
theres a time and place for comedy but for a scifi should be kept to a minimum.
I think of all things The Orville demonstrates that on both sides - for a show whose premise is “Seth MacFarlane wants to be a TNG-era Star Trek captain” you can see more of his comedy at the start than afterward, presumably because it needed to be a Seth MacFarlane comedy to get funded and then not so much once the funding was secure.
The humour in The Orville was shockingly weak, but that doesn’t speak to sci-fi in general. Red Dwarf, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Galaxy Quest, Spaceballs, and Futurama are all great space based comedies.
It annoys me that new trek got wrapped up in this discourse because my dislike of it is because of the image above
Old trek was super “woke” and optimistic, I see new trek as too focused on war and it paints the future as though they never achieved luxury space communism free of scarcity
Picard falls over because what should be left as a character study has clumsy attempts to jam ‘action trek’ up it, often derailing it. DISC tells us the universe is dark and full of terrors. Both tell us we fucked up and that we should fear.
PIC and DISC remain trapped in the time and political and emotional states of their making. Jihadists and racism, the same political and bigoted circles over and over. SNW and LD - and yes The Orville - like classic trek show us a version of this - but then reach past to show we could have something better. To normalise that something better.
And it’s in the normalisation where Trek’s REAL power has always lain. You can tell a thousand aesops, clumsy or skilled on the fool who oppressed his equal, but they don’t hold a single candle to the simple fact Uhura is a bridge officer. To McCoy yielding without second thought to M’Benga as a more skilled MO. To former enemies in the crew, women in command, loving single black fathers, genderqueer species, Autistic ciphers, queer couples, trans children. All of them normalised. All of them not begging, demanding, fighting for respect - but simply receiving it. The disrespectful are the denormalised, and they must be fought. A better life is not a dream to strive for held out of reach, it’s simply the base state of existence.
Picard and disc forgot that, and its a real fuckin’ shame.
I think that, starting with the Marquis, Trek was trying to address issues that might arise even with luxury space communism.
“It’s easy to be a saint in paradise.”
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I think your comment could reasonably apply to early Discovery and Picard, but not so much to the rest of nuTrek. It could equally apply to DS9 and Enterprise - but not so much to the rest oldTrek (Voyager might straddle the line).
I think it’s most accurate to say that Star Trek as a whole has generally shown alternating waves of reifying and challenging the utopian future concept. Overall that gives a message that a better society can be achieved, but the work of living up to that vision can never end. It works for me.
nutrek was bad from start to finish, lowerdecks and prodigy was much better shows than the kurtzman 3 he did.
nuTrek has been pretty great for me, overall. Prodigy never managed to win me over, though. I’m well out of its target audience, so that’s no surprise.
Old trek was super “woke” and optimistic, I see new trek as too focused on war and it paints the future as though they never achieved luxury space communism free of scarcity
At least on that front, it seemed to be rather conditional. If you were not an organic humanoid, you had a much more difficult time.
Just look at Measure of a Man, and what Starfleet later tried to pull with Lal, or what happened on the Sutherland. Or the ExoComps. Or what happened to the deprecated EMH Mk. I units, and the Voyager’s EMH and his holonovel. Or the UGLY BAGS OF MOSTLY WATER crystal aliens. Or the Horta. Or Hugh.
I cannot imagine that the Federation would have ordered the developing a form of memetic virus that would telepathically spread amongst the Klingon population and wipe them all out when they were at war with the Empire.
But they did order it against the Borg, intending to use Hugh as a vector.
In fairness I think the memetic virus was meant to stimulate individualism and perhaps general revolt in the Borg, and Picard and co didn’t think it would result in the collective simply purging entire cubes remotely just to keep the contagion contained. The memetic virus was meant to be the nonlethal option. It turned out to be lethal only because Picard and co underestimated just how ruthlessly it would be crushed. Of course, then again, perhaps I’m misremembering.
In fairness I think the memetic virus was meant to stimulate individualism and perhaps general revolt in the Borg, and Picard and co didn’t think it would result in the collective simply purging entire cubes remotely just to keep the contagion contained
No, the virus was meant to exploit a fault in their visual programming to kill the Borg drones and wipe them out. The individuality came as an accidental side effect, when Hugh developed a taste of individuality after losing his connection to the Collective, and roamed around the Enterprise.
When they came to collect, the collective re-assimilated Hugh and also got the individuality he gained, which then led them to explode cubes.
Yes, and it was shown as a huge internal conflict in TNG, and honestly even TOS had a bunch of inconsistent morality that didn’t quite fit a utopian society, you have a lot of state secrets, a lot of espionage, paranoia, and a cold war that includes violating the prime directive on a regular basis as long as they think the Klingons will also violate around the same degree, and that’s really not a very good idea, I really doubt the Vulcans would arm a bronze age civilization on a developing planet with muskets if they thought the Klingons might also do That.
I really doubt the Vulcans would arm a bronze age civilization on a developing planet with muskets if they thought the Klingons might also do That.
If anything, I think that it might be more likely for the Vulcans to do such a thing. Don’t forget that they did interfere with human development a bunch, because they could not readily put them into their existing categories, out of concern for what might happen otherwise.
It does not seem unreasonable that under the same circumstances, they might find it logical to arm a bronze-age civilisation against an alien enemy.
i remember its the reason why the borg even exist, someone mention gene roddenberrry was fighting people that the parasites in that one episode was susceptible to evil and corruption if they are bieng controlled. so they created a borg as a compromise. the episode where the parasites was controlling star trek command and it sent a signal to the delta quadrant, sound familiar just the like borg.
The idea of the borg feel more like “hey, the federation sounds suspiciously like communism that works, can’t we introduce “evil communism” to show how evil it is”?
i think the parasites were suppose to be the og borg, but gene or someone dint like that idea, that the starfleet can ben controlled by an alien.
Sounds probable judging from the stories of the writers fighting Roddenberry’s story mandates. And as soon as he was dead, they did the infiltrating founders anyway on DS9.
that episode was wierd, since everyone thought there was a followup. because they send the big bad signal to the delta quadrant which indicates they were from there about to invade, the queen that was controlling the host had the "map of sectors in the background, which i was taken to say he was sending it there). later replaced by the borg which did the same thing.
If only Rick Berman would’ve let us have luxury gay space communism this wouldn’t have happened
It’s easier on the writers when they take away all the easy. There’s an episode of DS9 where the Defiant’s computer is broken and they have to do everything manually. The scene of them undocking and leaving ds9 was pretty dramatic. It let them show off the crew’s hyper competency without the use of the future tech.
I really hated when Discovery jumped to a post apocalypse future, but those ended up being the best seasons of the show.
they jumped 900years in the future to get away from thier horrible 2 seasons. i once so a trailer for s4, yup as i predicted they went all in margianalized the other people in the show that made trek great.
That argument is indeed stupid, but Kurtzman Trek is inferior in every other way.
- the plots are often incoherent
- the tone strays too far from what made classic Star Trek compelling
- the overuse of action and spectacle comes at the expense of thoughtful Sci fi
- Character development feels shallow to nonexistent
- and so much more
Everything is just bad.
I still maintain that as great as DS9 was, it started Trek on a self-destructive path of constantly trying to go even darker and edgier. Gene had utopian rules for a reason, and although some of them were probably too restrictive, the whole point of Star Trek, the unique selling point it possesses that no other franchise has, is that it offers us a vision of the future that isn’t a dystopian hellscape. A positive look at what the future could be for us if we follow our nobler instincts. DS9 eroded that by suggesting that it was all bullshit, that the Federation was just as unenlightened as we are today, and although it made for a great show in the short term, in the long term it hurt the franchise because darker and edgier yields ever diminishing returns.
That’s my impression from DIS, but isn’t SNW supposed to be decent?
SNW is decent. S2 E2 is an especially strong episode.
Nope.
I tried a few episodes because someone said they’d done a great space battle. The battle was 8/10, but every thing else was just dumb.
I found SNW to be a fresh breath of air after the garbage that Disco was. Sure, some filler episodes were weird, but at least I got a chuckle out of the Klingons rapping.
The problem with the K (for Klingon, of course) Pop scene is that the song didn’t last long enough.
Shit, you’re right! I had more of a Hiphop vibe in my memory. I love how the Klingon is so annoyed that he can’t prevent the singing. Peak comedy.
Here are two shows worth watching.
“Utopia” a group of comic book fans discover that their favorite read is a secret message from an escapee from a sinister organization.
“The Prisoner” The grandfather of all paranoid fantasy shows. An unnamed civil servant resigns and is kidnapped. He’s taken to The Village, where he’s told he is Number 6…
Thank you for the recommendations!
In case anyone wants to watch those, too, they’re “Utopia (2013)” and “The Prisoner (1967)”. There are quite a few series and movies with those names.
also make sure to watch the UK version of Utopia, not the very very bad US remake
silly me
snw was too robotic, seems like the actors were being forced to say those lines every scene. they had good premise but the execution was poor, as the other 2 series. picard was equally cringey as std, again they had so MUCH history they can use for the show, but it ended falling flat, and they were using source material from fan novels. (the friendly borg, the rogue changelings,etx) all came from various novels.
prodigy and lower decks were much better shows than the 3 though. too bad t hey got cancelled too fast.
dint kurtzman do the transformer series? i dont know why he was chose for this. almost end of every season, was universing ending event, the exact same plot as the previous season, and then they drop it the next seasons. remember the horrible klingon look, and thier cloaking, people had so much issues they partially dropped it on the 2nd season, and "Escaped to the 31st " century.
If he’s the one behind “Strange New Worlds” I have to agree. Watched about three episodes and gave up.
Team lands on a strange object with the power to move a planet. “Hey, let me grab this thing!”
SNW was just too much like the other 2. had a big bad romulans at the end of season 1, but they dint do anything with them the next season, just completely disappeared.
To be fair, the Romulans only showed up because this was an alternate timeline version of a TOS episode.
What I’d like to see is a complete reboot. No humanoid aliens with five fingers; only nightmare creatures. Erase all prior canon. Start with an Earth based starship with a crew of five hundred humans. And get some real scientists to come up with plots.
enterprise wouldve gone on longer if les moonves dint trash the show. that wouldve been a good start.
I feel pretty much the same about anyone who complains about something being “woke”, no matter the topic - if perceiving and objecting to harms against and struggles of others not like yourself offends you, if seeing others actively try to work in support of those others is something you just can’t stomach, then you aren’t someone whose opinion I care about.
Plus the folks making those complaints can rarely define what woke is, or struggle to without using language that will immediately “out” their actual objections.
If anyone ever uses the word woke you can automatically assume they’re a moron who only gets outraged at what fox news tells them to be outraged at.
Or we used it ironically.
We should only watch the real old trek.
I mean, it was one of the first shows ever to:
- have a woman in a command position,
- depict a black person in a non-servile role,
- show Russians and Americans working as a team during the Cold War, and
- have an Asian character portrayed by an actual Asian actor,
but it wasn’t woke!
MLK Jr himself called Nichelle Nichols to encourage her to play Uhura. First interracial kiss on scripted television. She worked with NASA after Trek to encourage and recruit black and female astronauts.
First interracial kiss on scripted television.
That’s a common myth. There were several others before, some of which also had Shatner as one half of the kissing pair, believe it or not. Trek’s was definitely more high-profile, though, and with several of the others it may have been hard to notice with that particular combination with the quality of televisions at the time; European man with Asian woman probably wasn’t noticeable on a tiny '50s black and white TV.
Which sounds wholesome (and I don’t say it’s not at all) until you realize Nichols wanted to do something else, I think it was musicals, and King convinced her by saying “we need you to have representation. When you’re gone, anyone can take that position, even an alien” and so she stayed instead of self realization.
Certainly, worse things happened to her in her life.
Have a Japanese character about 20 years after ww2.
Have a Russian character during the Cold War.
but it wasn’t woke!
If it wasn’t for Kirk banging his way around the galaxy, it would have been.
Nothing compared to Riker.
It’s all Old Trek that came before the J.J. Abrams movie reboot.
but it wasn’t woke!
Define woke then, please.
Define woke then, please.
do you kids today really need /s behind every s?
You have no idea how many wild claims my autistic ass has seen that were absolutely serious.
It is because sarcasm needs tone. Which you do not have in text. As there is a person for every possible opinion out there and they have become more vocal in the internet i personally am annoyed by the motion that we are supposed to spot sarcasm. We all should just put that ugly s behind it, it is not that hard.
I guess i should have replied to the comment before you btw.
It is because sarcasm needs tone.
not necessarily. you need context and it comes from other places than just tone of voice.
if someone just drops “of course star trek is woke” in the middle of written text in random place, it can be harder to decipher the intent than it would be in voice. but the original commenter did quite a good job to guide reader to understand their position on the topic. combined with what community we are in it is a no-brainer.
yeah, sometimes there are stupid people on the internet, but sometimes a joke is just a joke. in the old days when internet sounded like a tortured robot, people used to say “be conservative in what you send out and liberal in what you receive”. times have indeed changed, but the rule still can come handy sometimes.
It is because sarcasm needs tone. Which you do not have in text.
“Frodo didn’t offer her any tea”
“And the more they drank, the more sober they were becoming”
Just off the top of my head.
So you disagree that in many online conversations sarcasm is confused for serious statements and vise versa?
No, that’s not what I said. Just that to make clearly distinguishable and good sarcasm you don’t need “/s”. Most people can’t, of course.
were they, or did you just assume so?
Do you really want to say they weren’t? Do you really want to deny my experiences?
Edit: don’t bother answering, I’m blocking you. I don’t like people referring to middle aged people as ‘kids’ and I don’t like people doubting others’ experiences without any knowledge about said experiences.
Do you really want to deny my experiences?
i do. you just did not recognize pretty clear sarcasm, it is documented in writing above. it is unlikely that it was only time in your life it happened. so yeah, some of these experiences in your past were also cases where you did misread the situation.
your badly acted offense does not change anything about that.
All those were token characters regularly repeating stereotypes about said groups, but OK.
Showing people from different sides of the curtain working together in future was kinda normal for science fiction.
The whole PR representation of the Cold War was like “friendly competition” or “hostile agreement” or a schism of the same religion. A good faith disagreement. USSR in some sense pretended to be like USA, but a better one, to bring the next stage of humanity’s development. You know all those failed\cancelled continuations, Half-Life 3, KotOR 3, Perl 6, FreeBSD 5 (ok, that transpired and didn’t kill FreeBSD completely, but), Gnome 3, KDE 4, Star Wars after 2005 and till being bought by Disney. Or ambitious alternative projects that went nowhere.
At the same time there were various levels of propaganda on either side, at the bottom for one it was the free world about to nuke dem damn commies, for the other it was the civilized peaceful humanity about to squash decadent anglosaxon zionists. But note how both variants imply there is good in the other side, just suppressed because they are possessed by evil.
So - not so strange. People perceive that friendliness as something new and the current hostility as something old, sometimes that’s not true. In some sense our time is more chauvinist than 60s and 70s, not less.
Yep. I just watched ‘Past Tense’ this week, where DS9 spends an entire two-parter advocating for the humane treatment of homeless and unemployed people through an economic policy of full employment. The characters succeed in bringing this about by staging an armed uprising largely led by a black man. It’s not only ‘woke’ but explicitly socialist!
Wait till you get to ‘Far Beyond the Stars’. Exploring racism from the pov of a black man in the 50s is different.
STD and picard is pretty much the reason why they start calling it woke, they dint care of the plot/and the series were crappy, just that the showrunners try to overemphasize certain characthers that they are not white, and straight and men. also the problem with STD, was naming an unlikable characther/actor as the lead role and to captain with a name that is only assigned to one gender, they were hoping this is a distraction for a poor series/writing overall. an analagous media, is J lawrence being a goodie two shoes, mary sue about her importance.
Picard? The series literally laser focused on and named after the cis white man?
conservatives were ignoring the premise, they only care about which characthers were acting out of thier traditional roles.
