The Star Trek Thread

[Mothra]

Liked the time-travel episode a lot. I'm not so sure about this Kirk, but he was (again) playing an alternate-timeline version, so that works as an excuse, at least. He was a lot of fun, he just didn't seem very much like Kirk. (Well, Shatner Kirk. He definitely had a Pine Kirk thing going on.) I do kind of like the idea of only having Kirk show up in alternate timelines (notwithstanding his brief appearance in the Prime timeline at the end of the episode).

I don't have a whole lot of love for the "would you kill baby Hitler?" trope, but I love the explanation that there's a whole Time War constantly swirling around the Eugenics War with different factions constantly trying to kill Khan and other factions saving him to reset the timeline (and I also love that they explicitly use this to explain the frequent retcons on when the Eugenics War actually happens). And I like how it's the inverse of City on the Edge of Forever -- instead of "to preserve the timeline, a good person must die" it's "to preserve the timeline, a terrible person must live."

Got some bad news for Kirk about the whole "if I restore the timeline, my brother will live" thing, though.

I really liked "Among the Lotus Eaters", too. A very TOS-style "planet with a gimmick" setup, but I thought it was a good gimmick used for effective character work.

I liked the time-travel ep as well. It wisely focused on the Lifetime Original Movie romance plot and gave the full run of the ep's airtime to La'an and Kirk being cute together. Really made it an enjoyable one that earned the kiss.

It makes it all the more insane when they slam in "romulans did 9/11" into the infodump from the Rom time traveller in the eleventh hour, to say nothing of literally having child Khan there.

Overall, loved it for the romance, but I'm again amazed that the concept of this ep - like the concept for SWN in general - is incredibly lazy and dumb, but it happens to be written very well, acted well, and done in a way that makes it a joy to watch. The entire concept of La'an as a character, being the descendant of fucking Khan, is a terrible idea, as is the concept that we should BRING BACK the temporal cold war plot thread that killed Enterprise. But this show somehow does it and makes good Trek out of it! It's amazing.

Part of me is wondering if some Berman-style dipshit is cooking up these tired-ass ideas and dropping them onto the best writing team in modern Trek, and they're weaving garbage into gold.

[Mothra]

The Lower Decks x Strange New Worlds crossover was as much a joy as I'd hoped. Very pleasant and enjoyable ep, in a way that only SWN could actually pull off right now.

[Mothra]

The musical ep was good, glad they actually managed to pull this off.

It has a few issues that are not much more than gripes: [1] Pike does a lot of "well THAT just happened..."-style winking at the camera and like, yeah, we get it, [2] the big final musical number, as is usually the case in these things, is too broad and unfocused to be a good song, [3] the idea of a musical reality existing is sorta too absurd to swallow, but I don't know how else they could've tried to ground this as a thing that actually happened.

Beyond that, every character progresses their story this season in a very fun, very satisfying way. I think La'an and Uhura's are my favorite by a country mile, those hit the hardest, but I also really loved Chapel's and Spock's conflicting songs. Sam Kirk is a real standout this season for me, he's the perfect background character - just a big enough dipshit to bring out fun moments with Spock and Kirk, but clearly one of more fun hangs on the ship.

SWN continues to achieve what Disco aspired to: This crew feels like they've become friends in an earned way. You can see how they live their lives on this ship, and that universe feels like a place people could and would exist naturally within. On the Trek podcast I've been listening to, The Greatest Generation, they have this idea of "Star Trek is a place", and SWN really nails that feeling. We're seeing one block of time in the lives of people that had history before the show started and will have lives after its over, however beepy that life may be.

My favorites:

[Thad]

so yeah apparently my baby likes showtunes

i don't know what to do with this information

[Thad]

okay that's a lie obviously i put on the score of hms pinafore

[Thad]

God dammit if "We'll Always Have Paris" isn't the biggest waste of a premise I've ever seen.

It's not that I'm not interested in Picard's romantic past. That's fine, it's an excellent source of character drama and a chance for Stewart to show some range outside what the role usually calls for.

But you can't just throw out something like time distortions and not use them for anything more interesting than characters running into other thems a couple times!

[Friday]

Curious what I wrote about it in my TNG tier thread.

We'll Always Have Paris: D Tier

Picard's first romance episode when an old flame shows up. Incredibly boring to the point where saying "basically nothing happens" would be an apt description. I don't mind character episodes but this one lacks any spark of joy. Most of the episodes in the early seasons suffer from early TNG jank, but I don't know if even doing this during the height of TNG would have saved a script this boring.

So basically I agreed with you. A waste of an episode. Luckily, most of Picard's later romance episodes are great.

[Mothra]

[Friday]

Good video that sums up why Conservatives like Star Trek, and also touches on some stuff near the end that's also important: namely, that Star Trek has and always has had a bunch of legitimate Conservative shit in it, while of course being overall slanted progressive.

[Friday]

Actually I wanted to state my own thoughts on something the video touches on.

So nowadays there's a bunch of Magachuds who are upset that Trek has become "woke" or "political". This makes certain people go "dude wtf it's always been this way" but actually, no.

I don't mean that it wasn't always political. It was. TOS has some of the preachiest, more sermonizing episodes of any of the shows, and TNG and DS9 have a lot of that shit too.

The difference is, with somewhat of the exception of DS9, that the older shows did their political commentary through aliens.

Like they'd just offload all of humanity's problems to the Romulans or the Cardassians or the Klingons or the alien race of the week. It's not that we as a society are horrible to gay and trans and nonbinary peoples, it's these weird aliens who don't have any gender and send anyone who claims to have a gender to a brainwashing camp to "fix" them. It's not that humans are horrible racist nazi pieces of shit who set up concentration camps to work those we view as lesser than ourselves to death, it's Gul Dukat. It's not that humans are aggressive militaristic expansionists who are completely obsessed with glorifying the warrior, it's the Klingon Empire.

You get the idea.

Now, more recent Trek is different. Now Trek isn't bothering as much to put that single, simple layer of obfuscation over the points about humans it's trying to make. Now it just points the finger directly at ICE. At Neo Nazis. At police. At us.

[Thad]

It's an interesting observation, but if that were really the defining reason dipshits were saying "Star Trek is woke now", they wouldn't be saying the same thing about X-Men.

[Friday]

X-MEN IS WOKE NOW?!?!?!

[JD]

When DS9 went back in time to 2024, it was still 29 years in the future of when the episode aired, so it could stand as an allegory for the modern day. When Picard did it, it was a direct depiction of the modern day. ICE isn't a metaphor to explore the morality of ICE, it's literal ICE. The viewer already made up their mind before the show aired.

There's a very "meta" Voyager episode where B'Elanna crashes on a planet and gets roped into helping to write a play for a rich warlord. During production, the warlord prepares to go to war with another nobleman. B'Elanna and the playwright subsequently change the story so that the characters make peace instead, hoping to illustrate to the warlord the virtues of non-violent resolution.

[Thad]

I don't think we ever got around to mentioning it, but season 2 of Prodigy is coming to Netflix. No word on a season 3 but it sounds like it's at least a possibility now.

Meanwhile: Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz have a podcast called Our Opinions Are Correct; I just listened to June 1's Episode 131: The State of Star Trek, with Mike McMahan. They spend the first half of the episode on general Star Trek talk and I think they're still two of the sharpest science fiction critics out there; the last half is an interview with McMahan, the creator and showrunner of Lower Decks, and he has some interesting things to say too. (I like his observation that it's much harder to write a good comedy that's also good Star Trek than just to write one or the other. I wish they'd talked about The Voyage Home a bit, because I'd say that's the only Star Trek film that's a comedy. A lot of the other movies have funny bits -- intentionally or otherwise -- but Voyage Home is the only one I'd describe as a comedy.)

[Friday]

If Galaxy Quest counts as Trek (and I'd argue it does) it counts too.

I honestly think the magic of TNG and TOS was that they combined goofy nonsense with serious stuff. The plots were always serious, but the characters behaved as normal humans do and fucked around with each other. DS9 had some of that too, especially with Quark and Bashir.

That's what I've noticed is lacking from Picard. The characters never just fuck around. Unless sliding down the hallways of Borg Cubes in your socks with your android girlfriend counts.

[Thad]

If Galaxy Quest counts as Trek (and I'd argue it does) it counts too.

Galaxy Quest gets a mention too, but it's not the same thing; it's pastiche. That brings its own separate set of challenges; they're not "Spaceballin' it", as McMahan put it, but it's not an official, canonical Star Trek movie, either. (I'd put Redshirts in the same category; it's pastiche.)

Something that's not Star Trek but feels like Star Trek, that's a deconstruction and a comedy but has a satisfying emotional and narrative arc, is a tightrope walk too, and takes talent to pull off. But that's not what Lower Decks is. Lower Decks really is Star Trek, officially and canonically; it takes place in the same continuity as all the other TV series and the first ten movies. On the one hand, they have that whole huge sandbox to play in; on the other, they're (mostly) constrained by the rules and backstory those series already established. Plus the expectations of the fandom that invented fandom.

[Mothra]

Those last two LD eps were good'ns. I particularly loved that second-to-last one.

[Upthorn]

I really appreciated that most recent season of Lower Decks managed to write a season climax other than "two huge fleets shoot at each other for an entire episode."

[Mothra]

Yes, very much appreciate how Lower Decks seems to do a stellar job on their season finales, whereas all other Trek, even SWN, tends to fall flat with another eye-rolling action shlockfest.

I think the best one in recent memory was that LD finale where they took the hull off the ship, that was some new, cool, fun Trek nerd shit.

[Thad]

SWN

You keep doing that. Is this a joke I'm not getting, or one you're not getting?