“Shatner figured it out? Shatner? This is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts.”
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.”
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 it’s predecessor, all they do is talk about their emotions!
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.
That was an allegory??? (/s)
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.
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.
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.
There will never come a time in which we have everything figured out.
And new people who haven’t figured out yet are born all the time!
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.
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
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??
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.
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.
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
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…
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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?”.
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?
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!
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
Bro, IDIC.
This is perfect. Thank you for this.
Im always rather disappointed with this claim as doh, star trek is woke, it always was and nobody has complained about that part.
When people complain about the woke part they complain about that star trek WAS woke and intelligent, yet now just pretends to be woke and hangs it like dangling keys in front of us to hide the fact that it’s become so absolutely shit.
Seriously, every criticism I’ve seen about it (and also every criticism I’ve lobbed at it) always gets “rebuked” with “you just hate woke!”
No I don’t no we don’t. I’m love the progressivism of old trek. I hate nu trek because it’s empty vapid drek that just tries to cram a much “woke” in there not to be woke but just to hide the smell of shit.
Nu trek is awful.
People have been raving about brave new worlds but those same people were raving about the mental anguish that is discovery and cringe Picard. I’m a huge star trek fan, been so for 30 years, but after Picard S3 I simply stopped. I watched trek at least once a week for decades, buy I haven’t watched anything trek ever since Picard ended. That’s how off putting Picard was as a show.l, it managed to ruin TNG for me.
I know this will be down voted and people will just continue to say I am anti woke, that I love trumpmor whatever, even though none of that comes close to reality but nu trek fans have been… Different? Star trek fans were actually progressive and trying to make the world a better place. Ever since nu trek its been “think like us or fuck off”
I’m so done with star trek. Long live the Orville!
You like Orville but not Strange New Worlds or Lower Decks??? Also puzzling you gave up after Picard S3, that was the only decent part of the whole show. Felt like an extra season of TNG.
You didn’t mention the best modern Trek show.
The crossover episode with Strange New Worlds was my favorite episode of any Star Trek since TNG.
Same!
“For all I knew, you were dead, or stuck in a dystopian San Francisco in the middle of a riot!”
“Have you noticed that their references are weirdly specific?”
“Indeed.”
I like to think that 112 years later, Spock found out about Sisko’s trip and thought to himself, “Ah. That explains it.”
He must have been walking on eggshells all through Star Trek IV, just waiting for a riot to break out.
“Could taking these whales cause a riot? Humans are notoriously prone to illogical outbursts…”
