I've watched Star Trek pre-Discovery ad-nauseum since I could watch TV; easily my favorite singular piece of media/franchise. What JJ Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and the rest of the production brain-trust have done to Star Trek is an absolute shame. Maybe it's hubris, money or a heavy-handed Paramount not fundamentally understanding Trek but it's been a real tragedy watching something I love being systematically torn apart and become a shell of it's former self in the worst way.
>The latest outing had them go back in time during season 2! And spent a significant time there. Is there any star trekking to this?
Several of the most revered Star Trek episodes ever, "City on the Edge of Forever," "Far Beyond the Stars," "Time's Arrow" as well as the end of TNG (generally well recieved by fans) involved time travel. Moral quandaries can be compelling even outside of the ready room and bridge.
I don't understand why people are so hung up on the franchise formula of "Strong captain dealing with ethical and moral quandaries in space." Those ethical and moral quandaries as presented were pathetically shallow more often than not and (thanks to the interference of people like Rick Berman) rarely challenging to any real-world establishment. Trek now is at least presenting a progressive view of a future that actually includes diversity and non heteronormative characters who aren't thinly veiled alien metaphors because God forbid our luxury space-socialist utopia offend people in the Bible belt.
But I guess old school fans just want adventure and pablum that appeals to their nostalgia and never rocks the boat. They can have it, but I personally like it when Trek takes risks, even if they fail sometimes.
The issue is Trek is traditionally fantasy utopia-esque escapism where Humanity is trying to solve, in large part, the galaxy's issues, not their own. Speaking for myself, when I watch Trek I don't want to be constantly bombarded with our current IRL problems - I want to escape.
Current Trek is the complete opposite; it's constantly punching you in the mouth with today's problems. If I want to be inundated with today's problems, I'll turn the news on. It's not risky, it's lazy. All of the writing is so on-the-nose it's insulting.
Star Trek has always been primarily about humanity's problems, and deeply entrenched in the politics of the day. TOS was Cold War geopolitics in space. TNG was a morality play with science fiction tacked on. DS9 analogizes any number of conflicts from Northern Ireland to the Kosovo War to post-Nazi occupied Europe. The galaxy's issues have almost always been metaphors for real-world politics.
Maybe between old Trek and new Trek, the politics were more layered in allegory and are now more overt, but it was always there.
I read this via RSS and came here to comment, only to find that the article was flagged. Did the critical examination of classic liberal values and current political trends hit too close to home? Most of the analysis seemed spot-on.
Also, it made me feel better about not watching Discovery or Picard.
I used to participate in the r/StarTrekDiscovery, an offshoot of r/StarTrek with a somewhat toxic fan base. If you write the wrong pronoun of a fictional character, it gets you a stern warning from the moderators, or a ban if you don't learn your lesson. Seems like it leaks into other social networks.
You didn't know? If you thought Michael being the angsty human stepsister of Spock who somehow was a better Vulcan than Vulcans was unrealistic, get ready for Adira.
Adira is a human non-binary girl who was in a relationship with Gray Tal, a transgender male Trill. TL;DR Gray gets hurt bad, and his symbiont gets passed to Adira (despite TNG establishing that humans aren't compatible hosts), becoming Adira Tal. The symbiont holds the memories of all the previous hosts, which somehow allows her to chat with Gray as a separate person. IIRC it even got to the point that Gray's vision can go and experience things independently of Adira.
> We can see it in the genuinely good first season of Star Trek: Picard (2020).
I could live with an attempt at an intensive reflection on the lack of optimism in any of the new Star Trek shows, but then the author had to go out and say they enjoyed the first season of Picard.
There can be a discussion about the future presented by those shows, but Star Trek: Picard was a mess with more producers than main cast members, and probably the lighting crew as well. It has been an atrocity of television, a fleeting attempt by a fading star to milk his cash cow one last time, and a farce of storytelling. The guys at Red Letter Media have them dead to rights.
They don't make it by committee. They change producers, and still have to credit the old ones. The more producers you see, the more troubled the production.
Initially, I attributed the difference in the sentiment of the show to them being developed by a different team of writers. However, reflecting further on the matter and taking into account that similar changes occurred in other sci-fi franchises such as Stargate SG-1 vs Universe, it does seem to be somewhat related to the eras' changes in their perception of the future.
Regardless what the reason may be, I would like to see a return to shows like Startrek Next Generation or Stargate SG-1 and a depart from their current versions. A return to the exploration and selflessness that contrasts our real-lives' hardships, socio-political discussions and routine. The utopia of Startrek.
I, for one, could not wait to engineer my next thing after an energizing episode of exploration focused sci-fi. Something that does not happen after watching the dark, emotional facsimiles of today.
I recently came across the term "hopepunk" which I think fits with your point. There is a line where hopeful, positive stories provide a lot of value before crossing into pandering/boring territory. I wish more modern stories built that up.
> Regardless what the reason may be, I would like to see a return to shows like Startrek Next Generation or Stargate SG-1 and a depart from their current versions
Seth MacFarlane's The Orville fills that void, even if it's scifi comedy. Clearly modeled after Star Trek TNG, it's refreshing to see adults behaving professionally, in control of their emotions. New Trek plots depend on their characters being immature, irrational, depressive and unstable psychological wrecks. Their seasons would be shortened to a few episodes if competent adults were in charge.
The cartoon show, Lower Decks, was made to compete with the Orville in the comedy department, and according to the fans, is unexpectedly good. I've lost count of how many simultaneous New Trek shows are going on now, if they were made by better people this would be a new Trek golden age.
I wonder how much this has to do with the philosophy and outlook at the time as opposed to just the mundane trend more and more action and fast-paced story telling and the need for stories that span many episodes. Some episodes of season 2 of Discovery were able to weave in the visit planets and explore stuff from older Trek, but it's hard to explore and discuss philosophical problems if you need to have a lot of action and conflict to keep an audience. TNG still had a strong following, but would a show that slow make the CFO happy today? It would get more fighting with the Borg, more war like in DS9, but without all the episodes about other stuff. In fact if you'd take the episodes related to the Dominion and make them faster and cut a lot of the interpersonal stuff, it would be much closer to Discovery than TNG.
What a surprise: TV shows are made to reflect the current public perception of the world so they appeal more watchers. News at 11.
Star Trek isn't alone in this shift. Budget and special effects aside, could anyone imagine the remake of Battlestar Galactica (a show I didn't like at all, btw), Breaking Bad, Lost etc. in the 80s along the cheesy shows of that time? Of course not as they could only be conceived after a certain set of events, which very likely are 9/11 and the following absurd Iraq invasion; those events changed everything in what we think of the world and the people around us, including our own governments.
Actually, TV shows were already transitioning to a less optimistic view of our society, which, speaking of SciFi, is clearly noticeable in B5 and DS9, but I think those events marked a milestone.
Also, from the 80s to the early 2000s, the biggest change affecting our society has been the ability to be online and engage in public discussion with others, which brought even more stimuli and opportunities -whether for the good or bad it's completely subjective- further accelerating our normal social evolution; the world has changed virtually centuries in 20 years. I couldn't imagine anyone seriously thinking of shooting today a remake of The A-Team series in which they maintain its original thousands bullets shot every episode but nobody dies format.
I could not watch Discovery, nor will I attempt to because the challenges/issues seemed stories rather than findings and solving with optimism. Too much emotional chaos than coming together towards building a future. It did not leave be in a better sense of mind, definitely left me feeling hopeless and demotivated toward tomorrow.
Season 2 & 3 get better - there was a major production shakeup between 1 & 2 and smaller ones for 3. Season 4 goes slows, but I think one of the biggest problems is the way the seasons are told. One large overarching story with minor character building because of it, instead of the episodic storytelling from TOS etc. It took some getting use too and I almost stopped watching the first season as well. Season 2 is good to watch if you watch Strange New Worlds, which does go back to the episodic stories making it more like Star Trek.
Also, Lower Decks is pretty funny - I put it on for background noise and ended up binge watching, something I rarely do.
It really is. The first few episodes were shaky as they were trying to decide whether it was Family Guy in space or TNG with more humor, but fortunately they chose the latter.
Also enjoying Strange New Worlds which takes itself much less seriously than Discovery and Picard.
Just like TNG, sometimes it was brilliant, and sometimes it wasn't. That's the risk with actual creativity instead of fistfights and non-stop action. Discovery looks good, but very thin on the meat.
She's the protagonist, all the show is about her. I suspect it's intentionally a divisive character, to form a small but hard fanbase at the cost of losing the rest. Demagogues follow the same formula, it's kinda interesting to see it applied on a TV show.
Burnham is a terrible officer, but also always trying to talk up Starfleet as if she isn't constantly acting like Starfleet doesn't know what the fuck it's doing.
It did look like it was going to get a bit better when S3 started but it's still a lot of moping and crying and even the ship's AI having existential issues and zero exploration and socio-politics.
Even the most high profile representatives of the different peoples are just a bunch of emotionally immature and persistently frightened individuals.
Same here, people kept telling to give it a chance, as TOS found its stride until season 3. The ending of season 2, and the beginning of season 3 looked like they were listening and addressing their flaws, only for it to redouble on them.
Their seasons can be resumed as: Michael is the beginning and the end, all things are about Michael.
I'm not sure you realize it, but TOS, TNG, DS9, and Voyager were all extremely preachy. Picard is literally known for lengthy preachy monologues about how people should be.
Perhaps but what differed with those shows was how the messages were presented in the form of an allegory. I wasn't annoyed by that and had a choice about how much I felt like engaging with it. If I had a long day I could just tune out and enjoy the story at face value.
> Perhaps but what differed with those shows was how the messages were presented in the form of an allegory.
Not really; I mean even when the main plot in outline could be seen as allegorical, they often had characters in-universe reference the specific “historical” (contemporary with the time of production) issue as a parallel the characters were reminded of by the events, peeling back the allegory, which in any case was only rarely not extremely heavy-handed.
IMO, why people often see the earlier ones different (and which constitute the “early ones” varies a lot by person who does this) is:
(1) People often will first have seen earlier series distant from the time of production, so heavy-handed framing in the terms of salient issues at the time of production will both be less likely to be politically sensitive and less likely to be a close match to current framing,
(2) People will often first have seen the earlier series at a younger age when they were less aware of issues being addressed and less sensitive to the commentary even if it was current.
I strongly agree with your opinion here: The reason people have issues with modern Star Trek is simply cognitive dissonance. They have strong beliefs and Star Trek is calling them out on it, and that hurts. Meanwhile, the Star Trek they grew up with is preaching stuff that they've already accepted, but was definitely pretty aggressive towards certain political groups at the time.
What if I've accepted all the stuff that nuTrek is preaching about, but I just disagree with how they're preaching it because I think the writing, cinematography, and overall tone is poor?
Sometimes shows are just crap. Anything done by CBS since the revival has been crap. Simple as that. No need for a discussion on the value of allegory or preachiness. It's just crap.
There is a distinct difference between earlier Trek's optimistic liberal humanism, and modern Trek's shrillness about specific political issues of the day.
>Picard is literally known for lengthy preachy monologues about how people should be.
His two notable TNG monologues are in
* "Measure of a Man", about freedom for sentient life.
* "The First Duty", about telling the truth no matter what.
And it isn't just these new Star Trek shows. Apple's Foundation follows the same formula, the plot is slow and nonsensical, and there are too many unwarranted action scenes. It's like they expect the viewer to be distracted on their phone and still be entertained when they look up.
I actually like the Foundation. Plot is slow and it is a huge pain point, but I enjoyed subtleties quite a lot. Especially the emperor's move against the religious order.
I personally liked the Cleon clones Dynasty gimmick, it blends perfectly with the Foundation theme, and is a brilliant workaround to have the same actors for the whole series. It's decently written, and my favorite part despite not being canon.
In fact, it feels like Foundation is three blended shows made by different people with different standards of writing:
1. Days of our Cleons - For adults, good.
2. Star Trek Salvor - For kids, action heavy
3. Gaal Dornick and the Philosoper's Stone - For children, nonsensical
There’s nothing to read into here. The writers of these shows are chiefly interested in set pieces that will sell CBS subscriptions via dramatic trailers. They aren’t considering the implications for the ST universe any more than they’re considering the internal consistency of any single episode.
Strange New Worlds is an improvement, certainly on the disastrous direction discovery took... but it still pales in comparison to The Orville. I'm convinced it's the best trek since the 90s.
A lot of the problems with the franchise is the same what the HN crowd sees all around with software development, hardware - with the digital boom of the 2000s, stakeholders see the possibility and sudden need to cater to EVERYONE. Who had the screenwriters in mind when writing scripts in 1989 or 1995? A wide enough geek minority that keeps the show afloat with healthy constant viewer numbers. Now they need to cater to the general population, and constantly seek ways to expand the crowd.
> This new wave of Star Trek is internally consistent, then, in harboring a pessimistic view of the future, one that seems to emerge from a particular contemporary sensibility.
This is very accurate. But it has nothing to do with liberalism.
The view of our current future is bleak if you're young. Climate change is poised to devastate large parts of the planet, disasters that used to be once in a century will be once every few years. Corruption is increasing, what leaders are getting away with now would have been totally crazy to think about 20 years ago. We live in a gilded age more extreme than in the 1920s, where the rich hoard the majority of resources. Many of the technologies that were supposed to lead to freedom and utopia have turned into a stark dystopia, like the internet, that threaten the very foundations of freedom. At the same time, the basic necessities (housing, education, healthcare) are almost out of reach for most young people. If you don't already have a house, it's hard to see how you will ever get into the market now. College is insanely expensive. And healthcare, particularly childcare since this affects the young most, has become completely unaffordable. New wealth isn't shared anymore, since income become disconnected from productivity. Social mobility is down significantly. The rich barely pay taxes compared to everyone else. Major new social projects are increasingly unaffordable, that's why our infrastructure is crumbling.
The US is coming apart at the seams in a way that hasn't been seen since the civil war. It's hard to see how the country will ever come back together. No one sees a path toward this. And one party is going down a dark road (they just had a convention in Hungary to learn how illiberal democracies work).
These problems aren't specific to the US. They're everywhere, different counties are just at different points along the path of decay. There's now a nationalist party running at the federal level in Canada. France almost voted for a Nazi party. Poland and Hungary are barely democracies. Almost every index worldwide is going down sharply, from freedom of the press to the corruption index.
Star Trek isn't dark because of liberalism. It's dark because in the 1960s through the 1990s we lived through a golden age. Housing was affordable. Education was affordable. Healthcare was affordable, and childcare wasn't a hurdle. Major climate wins were made (acid rain and the ozone hole). People were getting richer (at least until the 1980s). New technologies seemed poised to make life better.
Star Trek is dark because the future we see is dark. And it's getting darker.
Though the points you make are crushing, I want to thank you for expressing them so clearly. It makes me feel a little less alone to read articulate words which resonate both with my feelings about Star Trek, and more importantly, the state of America and the world.
The article claims that a particular political outlook is to blame. I don't agree at all. Reality is to blame. It doesn't matter what your politics are, the facts are that we are living in a society that is objectively in decay socially, economically, environmentally, and politically.
Science fiction has always been about extrapolation. It's no wonder that when we extrapolate now, what we see is only darkness.
Yes it does. In trying to deny that a particular pessimistic view of the future has anything to do with liberalism, you have presented what amounts to a U.S. progressive liberal view of the world's problems. People on the right see things differently.
One way to illustrate this is to compare how your concerns are treated in the U.S. Dem. party platform [1] vs the GOP party platform [2]. For example, "inequ" has 92 hits in the Dem. platform and 1 hit in the GOP platform. "climate" has 92 hits in the Dem. platform, and just 10 in the GOP platform, many of which are part of proposals the Dems would oppose, such as halting funding for the UNFCCC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Framework_Conve...).
> And one party is going down a dark road (they just had a convention in Hungary to learn how illiberal democracies work).
> Yes it does. In trying to deny that a particular pessimistic view of the future has anything to do with liberalism, you have presented what amounts to a U.S. progressive liberal view of the world's problems. People on the right see things differently.
That's simply not true. The left and the right see the same decay. The only difference is the causes they attribute to that decay, not the facts.
Literally, what was Trump's platform? Let's return to the 1960s-1990s era because the country/world used to work back then.
Nothing about housing not being affordable anymore has anything to do with have left or right wing politics. About college being unaffordable. About healthcare and childcare costs skyrocketing to absurd levels. It's not a partisan issue, it's an economic reality that people explain with their partisan views.
Nothing about corruption being out of control has anything to do about being on the left or on the right. The right believes that Clinton and Biden are extremely corrupt, to such an extreme that would be unimaginable 20 years ago. The left believes that Trump is extremely corrupt, to a similar level.
Both the left and the right are recognizing and responding to the same economic, social, and environmental decay. There's no optimistic outcome present on either side.
If someone on the right were to produce my list, it would be the same, except that they would swap out some of the dark actions of the right, with dark actions of the left.
First of all, they're based on the Horatio Hornblower novels-- they're basically those in space.
Second of all, Star Trek, the core before it lost its way (Enterprise and anything after it) is about aging. Either intentionally or unintentionally.
TOS, and TNG, both have a space alien telling humanity to stay home. In "The Cage" which is literally called The Cage (metaphor for not advancing), the telepathic aliens warn humanity about the dangers of space, while sheltering (parenting) a disfigured human woman. In my theory, this is the adolescent humanity.
In TNG, literally, a race called the Q warns humanity to stay home, we defy him and suffer through our teenage years straining against a well meaning but no longer welcome parental figure.
DS9 and Voyager, to me doubly so since they ran concurrently, are about middle to late age. DS9 a younger middle age where you're still in your prime but you have children now you have to think about and there are hard decisions to be made.
Voyager, because it starts with literally, "The Caretaker" dying (parents) and deals mostly with spirituality and ethics, and in my theory is placed later in life.
*This is my theory and my theory alone. I will take all shit :-)
So what's wrong with the new Star Trek? It's not liberalism, it's not lack of liberalism it's the same thing wrong with Star Wars and a lot of other entertainment out there-- its not GOOD.
The entertainment industry has lost and idea of subtlety or complexity. If TNG offered me loving viewpoints that were beyond their time ad now and then preachy (the trans episode for instance--where Riker falls for an alien who doesn't have a clear sex)... things like Discovery and Brave New Worlds just bludgeon you with bullshit, and then when you don't like the mess they're serving you-- they blame you for that.
I'd point to the Captain America debacle as the exemplar of this-- Brie Larson tells everyone the movie is for little girls (this was a deeply narcissistic, cynical and most of all dishonest viewpoint) and literally said she didn't care what 40 year old men thought about her movie and it "wasn't for them." Then she demonizes the same demographic for not showing up to see the movie she told them not to see.
We're in a weird growing-pains stages of society. I am a card carrying, Bernie Sanders progressive, and I can't tolerate most of this bullshit.
The author of this article really likes using the word “liberalism” as often as possible. We mustn’t have a moment while reading this review of a couple of TV shows wherein we’re not freshly reminded of the raw intellect that went into talking about how one Star Trek show differs from another Star Trek show that was made decades before.
I thought the author's use of "liberalism" was exactly correct. Maybe the issue for you is that "liberalism" has evolved into something more akin to communism over the past few decades. Freedom of speech is dead. Racism is back. Civil rights are under threat by some perceived "right to not be offended", and the US Government is becoming the very thing that the founders were trying to prevent.
Right?! When did it go away? When exactly did it come back?
I have met real people in real life that think racism ended around the ‘08 election and stayed away until a speech by a candidate in June of ‘15. I would not presume to know what the GP’s experience is though.
Racisim went away when governments passed laws (and began enforcing existing laws) to prevent discrimination based upon race (and lots of other protected classes). The racisim that remains is illegal behavior by a minority of individuals, except for the institutionalized racisim now being taught in public schools under the guise of Critical Race Theory, Equity (not Equality), etc.
You seem to be trolling me. Please read my posts above and tell me where I said they don't happen. Illegal behavior is a problem in every society and is not limited to racism. What is your solution?
You said racism went away because of laws. Why was that eradicated by laws and not other criminal behavior?
I’ll give you my solution once you extrapolate on when and how (with specifics) laws solved racism!
To clarify my question, what was the last day that racism was a problem before the hiatus? What day did it return as an issue?
I have no idea where you could possibly infer that I conflate liberalism with communism. That’s kind of a weird and unfounded statement about my internal state.
I’ll clarify: I think the author intentionally uses language to communicate how clever their opinions about Star Trek are (and how they should be received.) That was the whole post.
