So I do like Star Trek a lot, especially TNG, DS9, and Below Decks. Voyager and TOS are fine. Space socialism is pretty good and I can’t get enough of it. There are a few common tropes that irk me. tho.
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Baseball is cracker Amerikkkan nonsense - You telling me that all these different species and planets get together to chill, and the vibe they’re gonna channel is Ohio?? Football (soccer) or some version of hockey make a lot more sense, you can pick up and start playing immediately. I can’t imagine Worf wanting to learn all those pointless rules about balls and strikezones and fowls. Sisko is arguably the best captain of any series, and I really get pulled out of an episode every time he drops some awful baseball trivia. It’s only slightly better than Nascar. I actually know one Scottish person who really likes baseball, and he’s literally the worst person I know.
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The tribunal - It’s so damn common. It seems like every season there’s got to be a court-martial, hearing, or appeal against a Starfleet decision. I guess Law and Order is big there. It’s probably a minor critique, but it does reinforce the ideology that Western courtrooms are fair.
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Kirk is a sex pest - This has been said to death, but leave your subordinates alone.
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Poker in TNG - Poker has to be the worst form of entertainment, and I genuinely like maths. I blame TNG for reigniting the poker craze of the 90s and ruining all my guy friends’ personalities.
In fairness, baseball is seen by most Trek characters as this weird-ass historical thing that regular people don’t really care about if they know about it at all.
It’s cheap to film with 20th century TV technology.
My biggest gripe with Star Trek is the anachronistic sexism in TOS and TNG. Guess which two sword-trained TNG main cast actors didn’t get to use swords in Qpid!
Also, the homophobia right up until Lower Decks. Maybe Discovery and Picard were good about queer issues, I wouldn’t know, I watched the pilots of both and decided not to continue watching either one. I haven’t seen any of Strange New Worlds because the same people IRL who recommended Discovery and Picard are recommending me Strange New Worlds, and I no longer trust their judgment.
There’s a DS9 episode where they talk about football (not the American king) and it seems like that’s the most popular sport in the Federation. Siskos baseball obsession is a niche thing he’s personally into, it’s like a guy being really into Scottish Games in the US .
Like golf?
Nah. Golf is actually quite popular in the developed world, you actually don’t have to be THAT rich to indulge and the West has a big enough class of labor aristocrats and petite bourgeois to make it popular. Heck I’ve met tow truck drivers with enough scratch to engage in it. The really regressive thing about golf is it takes up a fuck ton of land for a really boring sport that’s basically designed for rich people to get drunk while doing. Baseball just requires a field about the same size as any other sport field (albeit much more differently shaped) and can be enjoyed by people of pretty much all socioeconomic levels.
Wait you saying they had sword trained actresses that didn’t get used??
Gates McFadden and Marina Sirtis both had sword training, and also the most extensive out of the cast. Marina Sirtis did a lot if schlock in the 80s including a fair bit of low budget fantasy stuff and Gates is I’m pretty sure low key the most multi talented in the cast. She can act, she can sword fight, she can tap dance. And oh yeah, she did this tiny little project where she directed the choreography of this puppet show, you may have heard of it. It’s called FUCKING LABYRINTH! She choreographed the scenes where David bowie dances with puppets and a baby. If anything the show wasn’t good enough for her.
Wow I literally didn’t know that. So I went through the tap dancing episode in slow mo to see if they used a double, as I was legit impressed. Data seems to be a double at times (maybe I’m wrong), but I couldn’t see it with her. Thanks for the useful trivia. I’ll have better respect for both actresses now.
Spiner has a pretty solid chance of being a good tap dancer as well. He’s got s very 1930a guy taste. Dude rocks a Ink Spots tune hard.
Strange new worlds is way better than Picard and Discovery but it suffers from some of the same issues as all new Trek.
There’s an omelas episode in the first season and it’s actually pretty good.
True. I’m sad I didn’t think of this first.
A fair and understandable trepidation. I can say, watch SOME of Strange New Worlds. Some of it comes across very very well as a feeling of the old Star Trekish morality play episodic styling. And there’s even a Lower Decks crossover episode. Some of it however, is very much like Discovery and Picard.
If you want to avoid that particular feel, caution around these episodes All Those who Wander (Feels more like Alien than Trek, also just turns Gorn into space monsters). The Broken Circle (While a season opening, the directorial, cinematographic and story style just have a Discovery/Picard feel to them) Under the Cloak of War (It’s hard to trust someone that might be a killer) Hegemony (Again Gorn are space monsters for shooting and killing, also Scotty appears)
The rest go from strange alien relic stories, to wild musicals and alien entities turning the Enterprise into a storybook. Or actual episodes of moral quandry that don’t involve immediately siding with the “hard decision” typical in most other sci-fi writing.
It takes a lot of guts to run a show about the future, while in the midst of the evils and chaos in the world and say, “We will be better in the future, and things will be better too, even if we still struggle.” It’s nice when you can see it in a show, but rarer, and rarer, and rarer with each new atrocity and economic demise.
___Thanks for the info. Is Strange New Worlds an episodic show where I can just watch the better-rated episodes for now, to see if I’m the right audience for it? Or is there a long-form arc and I should just start at the start and not skip episodes?
That sounds pleasantly TOS-ey. I like that. I think a lot of people have forgotten just how weird TOS could get.
It’s episodic with some long form arcs but more like series long arcs, so you generally just get bits and pieces of ongoing character stuff and whatnot but it’s not like every episode is part of a larger plot specifically. It’s episodic with continuity moreso than serialized
One thing to be wary of is that the first episode does try to establish some P r e s t i g e TV feelings. One of the characters is in a Punished Snake arc, and you get to see Spock about to clap cheeks
It’s better than the rest of live action NuTrek even if the occasional Prestige TV bullshit does shine through (not enough to ruin it IMO)
Also Anson Mount is rad
what homophobia? queer stuff is underrepresented on-screen outside of
and the riker episode with the anti-gender fascist planet but if we’re calling that the show’s homophobia then the term is so broad it’s not useful to me.
I was thinking about the TNG episode “The Host”. Crusher has a romance with the Trill symbiont being transported inside Riker. The scene where Crusher looks disgusted at her lover now being in a female body has always disappointed me. It’s fine if Crusher’s not into women, but they could have written and played that scene much better.
the writing seems ok to me? especially for 1991
i’m shit at social cues and haven’t watched the remasters so i’ll believe you if Crusher’s face was doing disgust rather than sadness/emotional exhaustion after Odan’s “death” and the period of time where the symbiont was in riker’s body which she didn’t take that very well either as discussed with Troi earlier.
http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/197.htm
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