A few years back, I was speaking to a roommate. I complained that the (then) new Star Trek had forced diversity. He immediately shut me down, “Star Trek has ALWAYS been like that”. He was a huge fan of Star Trek
Agreed. People should dislike modern Star Trek for it’s bad writing, not because it’s progressive.
Trek writing has never been consistently good. Half of TOS is unwatchably bad. TNG sucks until Riker gets more hair. DS9 sucks until Sisko gets less hair. Voyager’s all over the place (even though it’s my favorite). Enterprise is mostly bad. Only the even numbered TOS movies are good. Only the first two TNG movies are good.
I say this with a genuine love of Star Trek, but the quality of the writing has varied greatly over each individual series.
I mostly agree, but with shows like Starfleet Academy, the writing is bad in part because of the forced inclusive themes. You’re broadly correct: these could be handled with tact for a better show. I still think these themes are handled best when they give the audience room to consider nuanced and complex ideas. Don’t shoot me, but instead of a classic New Generation episode I’m going cite an episode of The Orville - “About a Girl”. Bortus and Klyden have a baby, who is born female. They try to argue that she should be allowed to remain female, but ultimately the court rules that she undergo the Moclan gender reassignment procedure.
This touches on contemporary issues but also doesn’t present the situation as “this side is 100% right, and this side is literally Hitler.” The audience is actually left wondering, where does this sit in the contemporary debate? If a child is born one sex, should they be given the right to remain as that sex? Or should a court be allowed to step in and reassign sex? The episode also brilliantly explores the difficult dynamic between Bortus and Klyden, and doesn’t portray one as a cartoon villain and the other as a male Mary Sue.
This is where New Trek fails horrible. Zero nuance. Everything is presented in the first 10 seconds as “this is good, this is bad. Accept the message we are feeding you are you are a bad person.” That’s not Star Trek. Most importantly, that’s not interesting. It’s not good storytelling. It might appeal to people who really like circlejerking about that particular issue, but that’s a minority of people.
“When did Star Trek get so woke?” — My idiot former boss.
I believe it was also an old Shatner tweet (well, if memory serves, he technically asked when it got political) Surprised to see this shift from him. It’s a welcome one but I’m still not sure if I should trust this.
Back in 1965.
The science fiction and adventure part of the show is absolute garbage. If it has been good, people would be able to have their cookie while being lectured to about what they should believe.
I didn’t personally care for it but I realized it wasn’t exactly for me so whatevs, just because there is a show in same universe as the other imaginary space shows I watch that I don’t like I realize I can just watch something else because I’m an adult (surely lol). It’s a damn shame scifi is full of such small minded persons, I certainly know scifi fandom has had a lot of problems in the past but things seemed to be improving, though I suspect this is more of a loud minority situation, unfortunately the loud minority are billionaires.
I’m of the unpopular Opinion that SNW was @ boring rehash of anything I could get from any other show that already exists, and Academy was something fresh. All these irate chickenshits would love SFA if it just had the serial numbers filed off, except that “its woke” because it acknowledges that people just fucking exist.
But hey, can’t jeopardize the popularity of a thing that’s someone else’s “property,” not even if that’s what it takes to live up to the actual legacy of the Original. Just leaving it to the community would actually let us make something beautiful, as we have done before, so that can’t be allowed.
I guess we’re just gonna get more Original Series fanfic that lands hollow for me, maybe a hunting-terrorists spy flick, and another mindless cash-grab movie whose screenplay will probably be mostly written by AI.
No more moral questions, no more interesting discussions of what an identity means, no more of what makes science fiction worthwhile as a genre - we have ships to explode - IN SPACE!!!1!!
Prodigy, a show written for literal children will be more interesting a topical exploration than a Larry Ellison property.
What a muddy comment. Took me two reads to try to figure out the argument therein, after which I stopped.
i dont think SNW was that good, the acting is too wooden, and some of the endings in seasons were like"is that it"? prodigy and lower decks were way better. With ellision in control of trek IP, fans that are usually “left” leaning, how are they going to justify watching and supporting someone like ellison.
These days it seems like most things getting called “woke DEI crap” are totally in line with the norms of society, but someone wants to change that.
it applied to all SCI fi show both pre-STD(DISCOVERY) thats what really got thier panties in a wad, when kurtzman made all the women have lead roles.SG1 wasnt spared either, as recently Invincible was called woke, just because the female general in coalition took command of the ship (the planet of ragnarrs) to refreeze the beasts.
there was definitely a concerted effort around 2020(thats when woke became super prominent in comments of shows like star trek) around election time to illicit more voters to side with conservatives through propaganda.
the moment maga calls something woke… I embrace that game/tvshow/movie/book. they all turn out to be pretty good (other than a few gacha games)
There have been a few examples I can think of where they’ve called something woke and it was legit pretty mid or outright bad. But usually that’s down to it being a game by committee by people who only interact with marvel level writing, like Dragon Age: Veilguard which is just shit or Mass Effect: Andromeda which honestly just kinda mid.
Its how I pick media these days too. Now that SFA is over, what are we watching?
Please don’t make me get a Truth Social account to mine for our viewing list.
Sometimes they’re accidentally right about something sucking, but always for a different reason than culture war BS. Ghostbusters 2016, for example.
i noticed that to, STD was one, the show sucked bad. they almost are selfaware, they said terrible writing but then said it is due to wokeness and having women in the show. SG1 was an oddball it got called woke/lib by both tankies and conservatives. right about lucifer in sandman being casted by gwendoline, shouldve been the way in mythology and comics. but comes up with wokeness as the reason.
I disagree, Ghostbusters: Answer the Call received way more hate than it deserved. I really enjoyed it and I have rewatched it a bunch of times, more than I’ve rewatched Ghostbusters 2. Holtzman is my favorite character and I love the goofy dance she does with Abby. And I love Chris Hemsworth’s character, he does big goofy handsome guy really well.
It was way better than the last 2. I watched Afterlife once and I have no interest in watching Frozen Throne at all.
My only issue with that movie was the timing of a few jokes (they made them longer than they should so they stopped being fun) and that the trailer spoiled half of the jokes. The movie itself is cool.
The newest ones? their only redeeming quality for me is Egon’s granddaughter. The kid is really good. Everything else is just the dumbest nostalgia bait ever (even having the mom’s boyfriend a literal stand in for the kind of fan the movies pander to).
I’m with you. 2016 may not compare to the original, but it was a solid comedy with a good heart. The bloody meltdown parts of the internet had over it was insane.
Holy fuck, how many of the things have they made? Jurassic fucking Park over here lol.
JP series with chris pratt is also bad, but i dont see conservative complaining about that, oh becauses the one as the lead, and not someone J Lawrence. i bet they love him even more now that he identifies as a far right christian.
Yeah, that movie was so ass. My perfect summation of it. We rented it, my daughter picked it out. Like ten minutes in, she says something like, “This is so terrible, I am going to my room.”
Now, normally, she will just ignore whayever is on and play on her phone or whatever and ignore it, this, she actively wanted to flee from.
It was actually impressive just how bad it was. It’s like they were trying to make it unbearable to watch. The fact that it carried the name of an all-time classic made it so much worse.
I was reading your comments thinking, it wasn’t that bad guys. One quick google search revealed I was thinking about the 2021 movie and had completely blocked all memory of the 2016 one. You’re spot on, it was atrocious!
don’t remind me of that abomination. that 2016 movie doesn’t exist. erase it from my memories.
I never thought of it like that. Fuck, that’s depressing.
99% of what you hear people like that accuse others of is pure protection. They’re telling you what they want to do without realizing it, so “woke agenda trying to brainwash our kids!” could be translated into “we want to brainwash kids toward our ideology.”
I remember a coworker saying something about trans people and how we can’t say anything anymore because it all has to be about them or something. I never got the impression this person was bigoted. It seemed completely out of character. I said something like (“They just want equal rights and the same respect as you and I. What’s the issue?”) Maybe people should worry more about weather or not their kids are learning the life skills they need to survive and less about weather or not their kids see two dudes kissing in a movie. Mom and dad need to untighten their buttholes. Even if I don’t understand something, I try to be empathetic and understanding to those who are different from me. I wish everyone else did.
They’re trying hard to change it. Almost like they have a playbook of some kind…
I did Nazi that coming
It’s a silver lining to see Shatner using his platform for the greater good.
I recently learned that Shatner and Takei don’t actually use social media and all the posts you see from them are just some employees that were instructed to speak in their style.
I really dislike Takei’s one (Jay Kuo) because of how shamelessly he uses it to promote his own substack sometimes… and because of a specific substack post of his where he said “oh no it’s so bad Arizona got abortion banned… but there’s a silver lining, maybe they’ll learn to vote blue the next time” or some shit like that.
+3M people losing their body autonomy and the first thing you think is “hey this can be a good thing for our campaign”?? fucking ghoul…
Yeah, I always thought he was kind of a douche, but I guess his heart is in the right place.
I think Shatner is complicated because (a) he’s 95 years old, and can’t be expected to be fully “in touch,” and (b) he has definitely had some questionable people handling his social media over the years.
true, and he went with BEZOs into space as a tourist and became disappointed after, only for bezos to laugh for no reason after spraying him with ALCOHOL.
Yeah, it’s shatner so
youone expects him to be crass, andyouone forgets he was the first star trek captain. and agreed with the ideas being shown on screen (unlike, IDK, Barclay’s actor)Jeffrey Hunter was the first Star Trek captain.
Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t realise the starring role of the TOS series , Captain Kirk was played by Jeffrey Hunter. How many episodes was he in?
Captain Christopher Pike was played by Jeffery Hunter in the first Star Trek series, but was only in the pilot or something before Shatner took the reins. If you were sincerely asking.
The first pilot that wasn’t aired. It’s what got turned into the Talos IV episode with Pike, they used that footage for his “dream” life
If you were sincerely asking.
not really. When people are thinking about their favourite captain, especially before the revival, Jeff was never in the running. Hell, Bakalar is barely in the running.
I agree. It’s one of those nerd pedantic facts that people throw out.
Huh? What’s up with Barclay’s actor?
Right wing propaganda guy. Dwight Sclutz
fits, hes always a wierdo that needs a psychological help in the show, probably a wierdo in real lfie. he played the same wierdo character on sg1, 1st season i believe as the “virtual reality guy”
@Skullgrid @Maestro Never meet your heroes.
Sooo many of them too. I just can’t rewatch Hercules or Lois & Clark.
Boy, do I wish I hadn’t read this comment. This makes me sad to know.
What really gets to me is that he’s fucking Mung Daal in Chowder, whose actor is was a literal kid. God knows what kind of poison lies he fed that boy. I really liked him in chowder too.
No more! I had no idea of that, either! I friggin loved that show! I am now double depressed. I wish to know no more!
Aw man v.v
just, don’t ask him how many horses he owns
Yeah. I wish people like him, sulu, and stephen king would abandon it already though.
Looking at the downvotes, I don’t think anybody realized you meant “abandon Xitter,” not “abandon using their platform for the greater good.”
Lol! That’s too bad
shat is part of the problem, outspoken anti-trans
I’m not defending him, but let’s be honest with ourselves here. He was born nearly a decade before World War II. It’s amazing that he’s this progressive, plus he actively supported African American rights. And if you don’t believe me, why not hear it from Nichelle Nichols herself. Credit where credit is due.
He is.
Doesn’t mean we can’t take him out of context and use his words to advocate for more than just the things he thinks they advocate.
He has it right here. That he doesn’t fully know that is his problem.
He’s such a straight white cis man! (Apparently that’s a slur to him.)
How dare you use the Star Wars term!
quelle irony
The new trek was cancelled because some people hated it and had outsized influence.
So thanks, those of us who liked it don’t get any more of what we liked because a few dicks had outsized influence.
I don’t get to enjoy something because you didn’t like it. Thanks.
You could have just not watched it, but instead you had to ruin it for me too.
Fuck you. We all need to stop watching these fuckwits who think they know more than us. Unsubscribe from these channels. Stop watching them. They’re ruining our ability to watch things.
academy? kurtzman ruined every trek he showrunned, if they dint figure it out with STD, SNW, AND picard they arnt going to with academy. they are running out of Ideas for a trek show. making the show only 10-12episodes per season hurts it as well.
The new show was cancelled because not enough people watched it.
“Outsized influence” my ass.
Money talks. You think if the show hit the top ten in the streaming Nielsen stats that they’d cancel it because some people “didn’t like it”? Get real.
People are allowed to like something. People are allowed to dislike something. If enough people like it, the show gets enough viewers to continue. If not. It doesn’t.
People who don’t like it aren’t obligated to watch it just to prevent it from being cancelled for your sake.
Sorry, what happened?
This is the one thing I will never understand. If you don’t like something just ignore it. If you think you are in the position that your opinion matters in any way you can declare why you don’t like something once and then move on. All those grifters and their brainless drones consume stuff they don’t like willingly and regularly. People who are of sound mind don’t do something like this.
i’m pretty sure it’s because they tried to make degrassi in space.
The show felt unfocused and confused. The characters, like the storylines, were kinda all over the place and didn’t really seem to know where they were going. Too much effort seemed to be put into the show’s set and setting, and not enough effort went into the things that went into the sets and settings. It had a lot of potential, but it all of it never really seemed to come together.
It was the first season (and only 10 episodes in, at that, because TV production is stupid these days).
Imagine if you could only judge, say, TNG on the first 10 episodes.
Yeah unfortunately nothing works like it did during TNG-era anymore. There’s no more syndication, no soft continuity resets, no time to try different things. Every season of a show has to be a 12 hour movie, with every episode integral to the last. You just can’t do that for more a handful of seasons before show runs out of steam dramatically. Shows have be in the groove from the start or they’re just going to be cancelled.
It’s why I don’t even bother torrenting any series anymore. It’s a failure of the modern enshitified financified mega monopoly dystopia rather than the shows themselves though.
On one hand, I would say that it was, by far, the worst first season of any Star Trek show so far. On the other hand, I don’t think it deserved to be canceled. Just heavily reworked, much like TNG after its first season.
But Kurtzman has a pretty poor track record, and it’s just been getting worse and worse and worse. With the exception of Lower Decks, which was exceptionally awesome. seriously. That show was fucking amazing, and I really miss it.
Academy has a great premise, and I actually really like all of the actors and the prototypical concepts for the characters, but the rendering of all of them is just a total mess. it’s hard to say what to do with all of them because, honestly, I hardly even know where to start. There’s just so much… I don’t even know where to start. It’s a lot. It’s like I have all of the ingredients for a really awesome Thanksgiving dinner, but someone put them all in a blender. And now I have to deconstruct the whole thing and start from scratch. Like, it’s all there, but someone makes it all up the wrong way. I don’t know.
I didn’t know the show was canceled. That’s too bad. It deserved another chance. You could tell all of those actors were working really really hard, and they all had a lot of talent. Honestly? I think that they deserved a lot better.
Imagine if you could only judge, say, TNG on the first 10 episodes.
Still better, more original, with characters (and actors) on a WHOLE DIFFERENT LEVEL.
In that level? Better production staff
They DESPERATELY needed more episodes. Like they had this whole War College thing (don’t get me started on the stupid name), and then suddenly it was just kind of gone.
We got ten episodes, 4 were dedicated to.Caleb/Nus/Metaplot.
Two were centered on SAM, one on Jay-Den, and like 1.5-2 on Tarima. Genesis and Darem basically shared 1.5 episodes.
OK, so with modern TV production, that’s never gonna happen. What they need to do is find some way to transition the style of storytelling to 10 episodes per season. I honestly don’t know how they’re gonna do that, but they need to figure it out. And Alex Kitzman certainly doesn’t know how to do it. So they need it first of all get rid of his ass. He sucks his whole production team sucks.
They also need to get rid of their visual effects team. I really am sick to death of this hyper realistic unreal presentation of this needle in your brain CGI graphics. I hate it so much.
I really think they need to take a break for a little while and figure out how to adapt the 90s storytelling style to contemporaneous production style. Kurt‘s been tried and failed, and they need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to do it again. And if the price we have to pay is waiting a few years before we get more Star Trek, I’m willing to make the sacrifice.
All new Trek series feel unfocused and confused in their first season. Watch the first season of TNG or DS9 and tell me it was tight. Every Trek is kind of a mess at first.
Well… yes, but not anywhere near as bad as this. This was like a bad GHB trip, crazy nightclub setting and all. For any new television show, there are at least a couple dozen foundational elements that set the overall direction of the show and where it’s going, but for this show, all of them were crazy haywire, pointing in a bunch of different directions none of them coordinated. For a normal TV show, when a few of them don’t really work out, they can be re-oriented or smooth out or whatever, but that is made easier because they’re all kind of heading in the same direction. With academy, none of them were ever heading in the same direction, none of them really knew what they wanted to be or what they were even about, or where they were going, so there’s no way to smooth them out or rework them, because any new version of them is still gonna be going in some random direction and wouldn’t know what they were going to be.
If I were the one who was in control of all of this, the first thing I would do, besides firing Alex Kitzman, would be to reboot the show entirely. To make sure that, from the start, everything was coordinated and aligned, and everything was all heading in the same direction, and everything knew what it was, everyone knew what they were or at least where they were headed, and what they were eventually going to be, and we were all on the same page. That everything made some sort of sense, or at least would eventually makes sense, and that we were all on a journey to the same destination. Because, if anything was extremely obvious about this show, it was that nobody had any sort of destination in mind.
Luck, I get what you’re trying to say. Star Trek is very famous for having terrible first seasons for their shows. But this one… This one was different. This first season be lied the fact that no one was thinking of the same thing. No one had any sort of central planning for where they were going. Everyone working on the show was thinking of something different, and there was never any possibility of it all coming together at the end, and we saw that because, at the end of the season, it really didn’t come together at all. At the end of the season, every character, every storyline, every different location, ended up somewhere completely on its own. And nothing really ended up, making any sense at all. And, for every other Star Trek show, during its first season, they were at least able to resolve it in one way or another. All the arcs came to a conclusion, all the storylines ended up in one place, and everything was resolved. But in this case? We were no better off than when we were in the beginning. Lost and confused.
Good shit to him. He’s 100% right here.
Uh…yeah…no shit?
I wouldn’t say woke is against norms, rather against traditionalism. Traditionalism itself is often abnormal, even within its own culture.
In the early iterations of the 1960s smash hit Star Trek, audiences were shocked and titillated to see a white male officer in a romantic relationship with a black woman officer.
This continues to be shocking today, as modern audiences are not ready to see any (fully clothed) woman in any form of Sci-Fi media doing anything at all.
I guess i’m in the minority of people who thought Janeway was the best starship captain as a kid. She’s badass and she drinks coffee.
I agree, I love Picard don’t get me wrong but Janeway was always my favourite, she kicks ass and is just fucking cool
I really like Picard and Shran as favourites but I’d much rather work for Janeway. I really enjoyed the duality of her morals from Admiral Janeway breaking temporal directive to try to go back and save her crew at any cost. When I was younger I couldn’t understand how Admiral Janeway was so different but now that I’m older, I get it.
How can you not enjoy watching Tom and Harry strike out every 4th episode with the mythical twins as well. Absolute cinema. Also Borg ship ablative armor was fire.
With you 100% on that. I love Picard, but it’s Janeway I’d trust to get me through the delta quadrant.
modern audiences are not ready to see any (fully clothed) woman in any form of Sci-Fi
What? Pluribus was the biggest new Sci Fi TV show last year, was liked by critics and audiences, and won a bunch of awards.
Same with Silo and Foundation. This is like “reverse racism” but sexism instead.
Isn’t shatner maga scum?
Edit: apparently not. Who the hell was I thinking of?
You are also thinking of Shatner lol but his ego makes everything confusing.
Possibly lt broccoli
Nah, he’s a good Canadian.
Okay, he’s rich, out of touch, and a total dick to his coworkers. But I’ve never seen him express any particularly bad political views.
I think (but don’t remember specific instances) Shatner is conservative leaning but I guess the canadian perspective makes him very different to MAGA.
You are probably thinking of Robert Beltran? he went open about MAGA shit on twitter shortly after jan 6 IIRC.
That makes sense of it. It was years ago, and my memory was diluted by my contemporaneous stress. Thank you for making me feel a little saner.
Startrek XXX… I had a different joke in mind but now I just want Startrek 10 the movie staring Vin Diesel 😎
Pretty sure that was just Star Trek Beyond, the movie where the crew defeated a horde of ravenous space insects by blasting Beastie Boys hit single “Sabotage”.
Star Trek X was Nemesis, but who’s counting?
spoiler
Never mind; I just checked the release dates: the 10th Star Trek movie was actually Galaxy Quest.
😏
LOL
