It looks like the embargo on Section 31 reviews has lifted, so feel free to use this thread to link to reviews, so the main feed doesn’t get too cluttered with them.
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RogerEbert.com - Star Trek: Section 31 (one star out of four)
I’m finding God for a moment today to pray that this debacle finally and utterly strips Alex Kurtzman of whatever warlock-ass pact-magic power he must have ensorcelled around him
Star Trek either needs to go to Ron Moore and Jane Espensen, or it needs to go back into storage for a decade.
It can be so, so, so much better than all of this!
I haven’t liked everything to some out of this era, but on balance I think Kurtzman has done a very good job with the franchise. One streaming movie that’s a bit of a dud (assuming I don’t like it when I actually see it) isn’t likely to change my opinion on that.
I’m glad you’ve been able to enjoy it! For me, I feel like the franchise on the whole has fundamentally lost its way; Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, and Prodigy have many virtues, but even when at their best, they’re still tacking against the wind.
It’s interesting - I guess in my mind, the stuff SNW is doing is about as close to “traditional” Star Trek as it’s possible to get in the current landscape. What do you feel is missing?
It’s a little tough to explain without sounding glib, but the gist is that in my opinion the purpose of Star Trek, when functioning properly, is not just to be optimistic, but aspirational; it’s to show us a vision of a future in which we’ve surmounted the problems that face us today.
TNG has so far been the keenest example of this, moreso than TOS or any of the Treks that followed. DS9 may be my favorite Trek, but it’s also responsible for setting a dubious precedent of darkness in the property that I don’t think subsequent showrunners have been capable of fully wielding, or even of fully understanding.
A major part of this, for me, is the nu-Trek focus on “optimism” over “aspiration.” Yeah, it might sound like arguing semantics at first, but I really don’t think it is. Regardless of the dictionary definition of those two words, we use them in specific ways in modern parlance.
I feel like most people understand optimism as a positive attitude, a glass-half-full outlook, or even just a sunny disposition. At best, it’s understood as personal traits adhering to a broadness of vision, generosity, and kindness. Yeah, these are good and virtuous characteristics; but they’re not really the same as something being aspirational.
A future we aspire to is a very different thing than a future containing positive people. There are positive, optimistic people all over the place in today’s world, and yet… just look around. We kind of live in hell!
I guess what I’m saying is that optimism is mostly an emotion, whereas aspiration is a goal.
Star Trek, when functioning as it should, is aspirational because it shows us what humanity and society could be like once we surmount the problems facing us today.
So I guess that this, for me, is the principal failing of Abrams and Kurtzman-era Trek; in this future, humanity still succumbs to the pains and pitfalls of present-day life in a way that suggests we won’t grow out of them. Sure, they contain positive, optimistic, kind, gentle, generous people, but society as a whole has simply iteratively progressed instead of having wholly transformed.
There are so many little specific cumulative examples I can give of this, but I know once I start listing them, I’ll forget to list ten more that are better. Maybe I’ll make that list someday when I have some time to kill; but for now, the biggest offenders are the constant tropes of The Galaxy Facing a Danger Unlike Anything We’ve Ever Seen, and the handling of Section 31 as an organization + subsequent reality of the movie.
Oh, and another major problem is that the seasons are all too short, so we rarely ever get any breathing room downtime with the characters! 20+ episode seasons are a vital, crucial, fundamental component of Trek as a property, and it’s really not adapting well at all to the modern format of shows.
Long answer woops!!
I agree with your positions about short seasons and brand new big bads.
However, I don’t think TNG, and classic Trek at large, have a future totally devoid of “the pains and pitfalls of present-day life”. For instance, Captain Maxwell blows up a bunch of Cardassian outposts, and there was that whole incident with the Pegasus and the cloaking device. These are clear instances showing in TNG’s world, we haven’t completely grown out of the darker parts of our nature.
I think the ideal of Star Trek is there is a future where we have overcome many of our problems, and when new (or old, sometimes) arise, we can work together to overcome them and improve ourselves.
In some ways, I think that Lower Decks embodies this extremely well. Because it’s supposed to be a comedy, it liberates the show from a lot of modern sci-fi conventions; this allows a largely utopian environment for our Federation characters where they’re free to help each other evolve far beyond the borderline insane sitcom archetypes they started the show as.
I appreciate the long answer - this is supposed to be a space for discussion!
I appreciate your perspective, too - I think if there’s a difference in our perspectives, it might be that I prefer to see aspiration through struggle. The TNG “sunny ways” were fine for its time, but I think it’s more meaningful - especially in the times we’re living through - to portray the eternal vigilance and struggle to get to the Federation “utopia” (I kind of hate that word, but you know what I mean) - and to maintain it once you’ve got it.
Long answer, but good answer friend.
This in particular is gold:
in this future, humanity still succumbs to the pains and pitfalls of present-day life in a way that suggests we won’t grow out of them
I thought Section 31 was some shit clinging to the bowl, but the writers keep assimilating it into the Star Trek matrix so much so that it implies the Federation of TNG is a naive facade 😔
You found the one reviewer who liked it. I bet they like season 1 of TNG, too.
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