The Star Trek Thread

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Friday
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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Friday » Wed May 11, 2022 5:45 pm

Also remember the very first time Q showed up was to announce that humanity was being wiped out due to being "a savage, child-like race".

And then when they successfully freed a giant space manta ray, Q came back later and was like "lol we're killing you anyway."

A lot of more recent Trek has been showing humans as shit not only because the writers are shit but because we, as a species, are grappling with the very real world and why it isn't starting to resemble anything Utopian that the 60s predicted in any way and instead is now starting to resemble 1350 but with drones.

tl;dr: it's hard to show a future in which humans are enlightened and cool when it's 2022, which used to be a date that writers would use as "futuristic", and we're still acting like it's 1350. Complete with endless war, rampant and socially damaging superstitions, and fascist tyrannical rulers who are endorsed by the people they oppress.

But still, mostly shit writing.
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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Mongrel » Wed May 11, 2022 6:25 pm

I honestly don't even get how you have writing THAT BAD on so many major franchises when TV writing has shot for the moon over the past 20 years or so.

At least something like GoT had the excuse that their writers weren't all that good anyway, so once they lost their training wheels the other wheels fell off too. But like... we had 30+ years of good - even awesome - Trek, and at this point even the colossal damage Rick Berman did is no excuse.
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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Thad » Wed May 11, 2022 7:04 pm

And it's not like there aren't talented writers on Picard! Michael Chabon is a fucking Pulitzer winner!

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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Mothra » Wed May 11, 2022 11:30 pm

I think if season 1 of Picard taught us anything, it is that Michael Chabon has somehow secretly been a hack this entire time.

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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Sharkey » Thu May 12, 2022 2:32 am

I think I realized that when I read Telegraph Avenue while living on Telegraph Avenue.
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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Crick » Thu May 12, 2022 9:26 am

I totally get the difficulty of writing optimistic fiction in these shitty, shitty times, but I also sorta feel that it means optimistic fiction is most needed now. People need the idea that it can get better even if it's not right away. Something that isn't cloying, that is optimistic and reasonable. I mean it's not like the 60s were necessarily a great time where everything was looking up. I still think it can be done.

I think a part of the problem-- maybe one of the bigger parts-- is that the exec producers for all the New Trek, Kurtzman and Goldman, seem to be your stock standard wealthy, pro-status-quo, center guys, you know what I mean? Like, outside of perhaps the ICE story, as mentioned above, there really isn't much of a hard stance on any modern stuff. Climate change is bad (no mention of how they "fixed it" as a society), it would be bad if we were a fascist dictatorship, etc. As far as I know, there isn't the usual talk of abandoning money, working together for a common better purpose, enriching your own life through personal pursuits, etc. I believe Kurtzman has said there is money in this new timeline. Feels like a Star Trek where just the center holds and things get better on their own. No need to demolish the status quo and build something different, something better.

Sorry, this turned into a ramble.

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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Büge » Thu May 12, 2022 12:18 pm

Friday wrote:tl;dr: it's hard to show a future in which humans are enlightened and cool when it's 2022, which used to be a date that writers would use as "futuristic", and we're still acting like it's 1350. Complete with endless war, rampant and socially damaging superstitions, and fascist tyrannical rulers who are endorsed by the people they oppress.


Hey, c'mon. It's not like 1350.

We barely had a fraction of the environmental impact back then as we do today.
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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Sharkey » Thu May 12, 2022 1:33 pm

I guess you can't always expect the beneficiaries of the status quo to challenge it. It's a damn shame Banks is dead because I could sure use some more Culture books about now. Not that putting dodgy AIs in charge sounds like the best idea, but the prospect of the future just being the same awful shit but more of it is really harshing my groove.
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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Mongrel » Thu May 12, 2022 2:02 pm

I mean having optimism and imbuing your writing with it is one thing, but the ability to form a basic more-or-less structurally-sound narrative is another, and it seems like they can't even manage the latter, never mind the former.
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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Crick » Thu May 12, 2022 2:21 pm

Aw man, more Culture books would rule.

The inability to form a decent season-long arc is one thing, for sure, but also making it a world where people are the same as now and sorta side-sneering at how low humans are is like double shitty. Like a house built with a bad foundation but then you ALSO go in and decorate it gaudily.

I've always wanted a "boots on the ground" Trek show, or at least an arc, showing what it's like on Earth during Federation times. Could've been an interesting setting to show some of the stuff the New Trek tries to address. Surely not every human is pure Federation material, we've seen it in DS9 I think, but that conflict would've been interesting. Instead of, you know, diminishing what already existed.

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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Friday » Thu May 12, 2022 2:51 pm

I totally get the difficulty of writing optimistic fiction in these shitty, shitty times, but I also sorta feel that it means optimistic fiction is most needed now. People need the idea that it can get better even if it's not right away. Something that isn't cloying, that is optimistic and reasonable. I mean it's not like the 60s were necessarily a great time where everything was looking up. I still think it can be done.


I agree 100%.

I think the main difference is that the 50s and 60s (the golden age of optimistic, Utopian Sci-Fi) came right after WW2, which felt pretty damn final to people. Hitler and the Nazis and the rest of the Axis forces had been overthrown and destroyed and good had triumphed. The Cold War was "heating up", sure, but that felt like something that could eventually be resolved through diplomacy. Humanity had had it's final brush with evil and said "no."

Psyche!

Turns out there is no such thing as a final brush with evil. And just like Sauron after Morgoth, evil doesn't really change. It's always a giant metal guy who wants to kill and enslave everyone. Just the name changes. And now, as Buge observed, we've got Climate Change on top of everything else.

I still maintain that the reason new Trek is a fire that is on top of a dumpster that is on top of a pool of lava that is in hell that is in Lolth's Abyss that is in janky 2nd edition rules is that the writing is just fucking bad. Brent and I watched through Picard s1 and while there WERE some good moments, like.

Okay.

A lot of the reason New Trek is a horrible depressing shithole might be explained by our interesting times. I'm the one who advanced that theory after all. But like. There's this Romulan character. He's sort of a bad guy but then he does a heel turn and helps the crew, etc. Fairly important dude in the plot. And after he does his thing, he just... vanishes. He's completely absent from the ending. It's very weird.

They interviewed them about it and they straight up admitted "oops yeah we forgot about him."

So yeah, uh. Writing!

And please don't get me started on how stupid it is to have a group of all-female Romulan ninja assassin samurai nuns who have a single male member who decapitates people with a not-katana but katana in Trek.

(I actually sort of like his character)

Edit: While you were typing etc

The inability to form a decent season-long arc is one thing, for sure, but also making it a world where people are the same as now and sorta side-sneering at how low humans are is like double shitty. Like a house built with a bad foundation but then you ALSO go in and decorate it gaudily.


The thing is that Trek has always been about current event stuff. It just usually makes the issue some alien planet instead of just having it be Earth so that its commentary isn't showing HUMANS as having shitty racism, it's those guys who have half and half black/white faces.

Changing the commentary back to humans destroys that thin veneer of "dude it's totally not us being horrible and warlike and racist and homophobic any sexuality/gender at all and wanting to bone Riker, it's these weird aliens who are dumb and doing it for no logical reason". Which... well, illusions are important to people. Humans do not like thinking of themselves as, you know, what we are. It's depressing as fuck. No, really. And more and more it's become obvious to people that our bad shit isn't "our darker natures that pop up from time to time", it's business as fucking usual. The whole world built on it and funded by it.

That fundamental realization clashes REALLY HARD with Trek's core concept, that no, humans are cool and good and it's the weird aliens that have all these SUSPICIOUSLY FAMILIAR problems.

But still, mostly bad writing.

And yeah I agree that it would be really nice to have an optimistic show in these times.
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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Thad » Thu May 12, 2022 3:34 pm

Friday wrote:And yeah I agree that it would be really nice to have an optimistic show in these times.

SNW's got potential. As Mothra and Sharkey noted, they did pull some "both sides" bullshit in the first episode, but it's still a pretty solid debut that's got me looking forward to more.

And Discovery took a few seasons to find its feet, and it's still far from perfect, but its latest season arc was pretty fundamentally about the importance of diplomacy and peaceful solutions and, moreover, the importance of sticking to those principles even when you're threatened and scared.

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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Friday » Thu May 12, 2022 3:47 pm

Yeah hearing Discovery gets better over time actually gives me some hope that s3 Picard (in combination with the full original cast returning) might actually be good. Come on, guys. All I want is Beverly to get turned into a dog again. Make it happen.
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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby beatbandito » Thu May 12, 2022 4:41 pm

I know I'm bringing this off-topic. But Friday's point in general makes me think of Drow. I had been playing Baldur's Gate 3 and general DnD stuff, and recently starting playing the new pathfinder crpg (war of the righteous) where drow are just all evil all the time and it's so... boring? Dumb?

Anyway, what I've seen of picard and discovery feels like going back to that kind of racial characterization after DS9 and TNG together was largely about individuals growing past those aspects.
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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Büge » Thu May 12, 2022 5:03 pm

So glad they're getting rid of the "Race A is Always Alignment B with Culture C and Religion D (exceptions apply. consult your DM for details)" problem in D&D
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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Thad » Thu May 12, 2022 5:36 pm

beatbandito wrote:I know I'm bringing this off-topic. But Friday's point in general makes me think of Drow. I had been playing Baldur's Gate 3 and general DnD stuff, and recently starting playing the new pathfinder crpg (war of the righteous) where drow are just all evil all the time and it's so... boring? Dumb?

Anyway, what I've seen of picard and discovery feels like going back to that kind of racial characterization after DS9 and TNG together was largely about individuals growing past those aspects.

I'd maybe agree on the first season or two of Discovery, but I think seasons 3 and 4 show a future that, while still full of squabbling factions, doesn't have those factions break down as cleanly on racial lines. Vulcans are still Vulcans; it's not like the "entire alien race defined by a single personality trait" thing has gone away. But I feel like there's more variation within any given alien race, and even sects rooted explicitly in a particular alien culture have members who aren't part of that race (I'm thinking of that Romulan sect from Picard that Burnham's mother is a part of in Discovery).

I feel like Picard was, as in most things, kind of at odds with itself in season 1. On the one hand, we find out that Picard spent the final years of his time in Starfleet trying to advocate for displaced Romulans; on the other hand, most of the Romulans who actually show up in the story are badass warriors who belong to one extremist sect or another.

Season 2 of Picard doesn't really have enough aliens in it to do the "alien race defined by a single personality trait" thing. Though it does kinda call back to previous series' arcs about hostile alien races joining the Federation with its development of the Borg -- which, like I said, I think is a solid idea that feels totally abrupt and unearned in context.

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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Crick » Thu May 12, 2022 7:07 pm

Friday wrote:The thing is that Trek has always been about current event stuff. It just usually makes the issue some alien planet instead of just having it be Earth so that its commentary isn't showing HUMANS as having shitty racism, it's those guys who have half and half black/white faces.

Changing the commentary back to humans destroys that thin veneer of "dude it's totally not us being horrible and warlike and racist and homophobic any sexuality/gender at all and wanting to bone Riker, it's these weird aliens who are dumb and doing it for no logical reason". Which... well, illusions are important to people. Humans do not like thinking of themselves as, you know, what we are. It's depressing as fuck. No, really. And more and more it's become obvious to people that our bad shit isn't "our darker natures that pop up from time to time", it's business as fucking usual. The whole world built on it and funded by it.


Yeah, 100% true, but I think it's more than putting distance between the viewer and an issue, I think it establishes a place from which the show can speak. It's not just that these aliens are racist to people with tails, it's also how the show can say "not only is racism corrosive, here is how we can learn to move past it". Sure, the Federation wasn't perfect-- it'd be super boring otherwise, but it still showcased conflict from the Federation's point of view. An allegorical conversion that is trying to say something.

That's sort of a problem I was trying to get at with the-- admittedly little-- New Trek I've seen (outside of the aforementioned bad writing). It doesn't seem to have a point of view outside of things that are very obviously bad are bad. It's brutally status quo.

Maybe it's because the solutions to our real world problems are looking more and more radical, I dunno. Maybe it's that the showrunners and exec producers themselves don't believe in them, maybe the mega corps that make these don't want to be endorsing it.

Maybe it is simply bad writing and they're incapable of communicating all that.

I dunno.

For me, the whole thing was, for the most part, pro-compassion and justice and people over materialism. That's just sorta what I want to see in more media, I guess.

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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Thad » Thu May 12, 2022 8:18 pm

I think Picard's message is "The darker and more fucked-up the universe gets, the more we need people like Jean-Luc Picard who speak to the better angels of our nature." The problem is that it spends way too much time on the former and, as I believe Sharkey put it, if I wanted a cyberpunk dystopia I have a door that goes outside.

Discovery was kind of a mess its first two seasons, but 3-4 the message is that the Federation does real good in the universe, it brings people together and gives them a set of values to aspire to. Season 4 articulates those values more clearly, with a season arc surrounding a galactic threat and the good guys being the people who convince everyone that we need to start with diplomacy, not retaliation.

So I'd say both shows -- all three, really, judging by SNW's first episode -- have basically the same message, and it is a message of looking to hope and optimism and a better world. But Discovery took awhile to hit that beat, and Picard is more interested in wallowing in violence and misery and telling us why we need more optimism than actually showing us any. And SNW kinda whiffed the delivery in the first episode, but it's still off to a much stronger start than the other two shows' so hey, maybe they'll get it right next time.

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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Crick » Thu May 12, 2022 8:27 pm

That's good to hear! I perhaps gave up on it all too soon.

I've watched the first two SNW eps, and outside of the problems mentioned before, I definitely think it could be a step in the right direction.

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Re: The Star Trek Thread

Postby Friday » Thu May 12, 2022 10:49 pm

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