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.
The mindset that began around DS9 and strengthened in the new treks.
While DS9 had some good episodes and good characters, and great acting, it also created fans that began to take all the wrong moral lessons from it, or the ones the creators intended. Militarism, military fetishism, and “ends justify the means” thinking. It was probably a reflection of what would become more and more common amongst the US populace going into the 2000s and onward. Culturally we make excuse en masse for our conflicts or our war crimes or support thereof like Sisko because “It had to be done”. Related, I remember the scene with Dax/Sisko and the spent phaser coil from the ship. The “Take a good look people” and then a speech about pride of how long they keep on fighting and hanging that coil up on the wall as a trophy. I feel these sentiments have only carried on in the modern trek series even harder.
Which is why when Boimler in Lower Decks confronted his trigger happy, edgy, fellow crewmembers on the Titan with this line, I smiled<typo>. “I didn’t join Starfleet to get into phaser fights. I signed up to explore! To be out in space and making new discoveries and peaceful diplomatic solutions. THAT’s boldly going. And you know what? I’d love to be in a string quartet. I love that when Riker was on the Enterprise he was jamming on the trombone and catching love disease and acting in plays and meeting his transporter identical clone Thomas.”
And I feel that’s kind of what’s missing in the newer treks. The sense that the lives of these people in the future are different, and not always conflict focused. They have time to stop, to pursue a hobby, paint a picture, go on vacation, find out what it is to be who they are, and THEN go on a wild space adventure for the episode carrying that discovery their little downtime gave them to provide new insights. Perhaps the lives of the people in new trek are more relatable, because they to have rare downtime and are task focused nearly 90% of the time. But it doesn’t paint a picture that things will be better, only the same, with technology we don’t yet have.
Amen. We need filler episodes so this can happen. Nu Trek doesn’t really do chill episodes or show much of the crew just kinda dicking around doing day to day stuff. The 10 episode season is the culprit imo. It can be good for a show to just burn off an episode or two and focus on something a bit more low key. 26 per season seems like waaaaaay too big a workload, but 15-20 seems fine along with the expectation that they don’t all need to be bangers. I don’t really need a plot to enjoy star trek. Just watching that world exist is fun. We gotta get some bottle episodes and episodes where they clearly had to save budget for the bigger ones. They’d never make Data’s Day or Our Man Bashir nowadays.