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.
And it’s played entirely differently, that or characters cheat constantly. There’s a few videos breaking it down, but quite often the continuity of the cards on the table and sometimes just small script mistakes show with a closer eye, they’re usually playing wrong.
Yeah, I’ve seen them playing some kind of stud game but the count of up vs down cards didn’t look like a standard game.
I always like how shows depict poker as an entirely bluffing and reading bluffs based game. I lived with some old hippies who had masters degrees in math and read like 5 books on it and did algorithm poker to eek out a profit in a way I’d consider more miserable than working and also did tournaments sometimes in hopes of big money and often did win and I never once heard them talk about bluffs or tells when comparing notes. Like, it’s part of the game and it’s the part that works for drama, so I get it, but looking for tells above all else is some body language expert bs.