I recently saw Star Trek Picard, the first season was okey, season 2 was awful, the season 3 was nice.
Acording some critics last Discovery season is bad, so now I’m afraid of looking a series who has a bad ending, it worth to watch or is as painful as Picard Season 2? Or I should watch Strange New Worlds and Enterprise instead?
I don’t think Adira is a nonbinary girl, I think they’re just nonbinary. Their boyfriend was also trans for what it’s worth.
Georgiou is also pansexual, though that’s not particularly progressive (classic depraved bisexual trope), and Jett Reno was married to a woman.
So while you’re right, most of the major cast is cishet, I think there’s more people who hate it for being “woke” than for being not progressive enough, as I haven’t heard the latter much but the former is annoyingly common from the usual suspects. There simply hadn’t been actual representation of any of those groups (except the depraved bisexuals) in Star Trek before Discovery.
Also, as for “Vulcan powers”: we’ve always known that Vulcan logic is learned and not innate. Vulcans are naturally wildly emotional, their logic is basically just advanced meditation techniques, so it makes sense that a human raised by Vulcans could learn them. We’ve also seen non-Vulcans use the iconic nerve pinch before, it’s essentially just a Vulcan martial art and nothing to do with Vulcan biology. Picard and Data could both do it.
The only “Vulcan power” tied to their biology really is the mind meld, and that’s because Vulcans are mildly telepathic. Non-Vulcan telepaths could learn it too. I don’t think we ever saw Burnham initiate a mind meld though.
When I said Adira is a nonbinary girl, I meant she is female of sex and nonbinary of chosen gender.
it was a big deal when they announced her, but the treatment was milquetoast and timid. Same with the few non-cis characters, they were tokens, the show didn’t have the courage to depict a future where a diverse gender philosophy is widely accepted. They yellowed out of it and presented as if it was still our time. I don’t dislike the show for being woke, I dislike it for being shallow woke.
Same with the rest of it, it was 90% SFX and 10% writing. With long series like TNG you can afford the luxury of experimenting and fumbling the ball some weeks, it Discovery and Picard and massive productions that only have 12 episodes a year. They had to make every one of those count.
About Michael ‘s learned Vulcan powers, I don’t buy that. She was best than the Vulcans at their own academy, seemingly an expert at hand to hand combat, basically a prodigy at everything she wanted to do. That’s bad writing, super geniuses are too easy to write, so they had to make her emotionally immature to give her some challenge. Given she cried almost every episode, I’d seriously doubt she took to heart those meditation lessons.
It is a very flashy but bad show overall. If it hadn’t carried the name of Star Trek, it might have carved a niche in Sci-Fi, though. Space novels were called Space Operas after all.
I just don’t understand this “Vulcan powers” criticism. She was a prodigy, sure, and pretty good at doing anything she wants, but that’s a broader issue. I don’t recall any point where she showed any Vulcan abilities that would be implausible for a human to learn from being raised in that culture. Even if you could argue it contributes to her being good at too many things, that has nothing to do with Vulcans specifically.
And I find it very ironic that you’re complaining about the portrayal of trans characters not being progressive enough while misgendering Adira. Adira is non binary. They are not a girl, and they explicitly make it clear in the show they use they/them pronouns. Girl refers to gender, not sex, and furthermore sex isn’t relevant to 99% of conversations so you don’t need to disambiguate by finding a replacement word.
Frankly, I think Adira and Gray’s transness was handled quite well. I’m not sure what makes them tokens to you. Adira has more lines than most of the bridge crew, and the little queer family unit of Stamets/Culber/Adira gets quite a bit of development and screen time. Gray gets his time in the spotlight too, and gets a bit of character development of his own.
Both Gray and Adira are immediately accepted and never questioned by anyone on the crew. That’s a far cry from presenting it as if it were still our time. No one trips up on either of their pronouns once. You yourself refer to Adira with she/her in your comment.
The main difference between Adira and Gray is that Gray already came out and transitioned off-screen, while Adira comes out on-screen. I think their coming out scene is well done and realistic; even in the Trek future people will have to come out to some extent because people clearly default to binary pronouns. They aren’t mind readers, and they haven’t replaced all pronouns with they/them, so it’s only natural that one would have to explicitly tell people their pronouns.
Stamets immediately accepts Adira, with zero questions about nonbinary identity or pronouns, and then seemingly informs the rest of the crew off-screen. I don’t know what you think coming out nowadays is like, but that’s not the reaction most of the time. Adira comes off as kind of nervous in the scene, but they’re talking to someone they barely know at this point who arrived from hundreds of years ago. Plus they’re just a nervous person in general. I think it works well.
And Gray doesn’t have to come out at all, he’s accepted as male from day one. His transness only ever comes up as vague references to transitioning. Seems pretty accepted to me!