And DS9 is the conservative one with all the religion and the baseball and the war crimes and stuff.
TNG was run by a Frenchman who thought allowing bronze age species to believe in God was a barbaric act and went to bat as a human rights lawyer for an android who in turn let his first child pick their gender at will. All that while his polyamorous first officer was busy arguing against conversion therapy when pushed upon his trans nonbinary partner.
Yeah DS9 was good, but it took me a long time to get past the fact that they made the Federation freaking space NATO. Martial law, biological weapons on your own citizens, papers please, most with the subtext (or lengthy deleted personal log) that morality is for peace time, and some of your favorite values should be abandoned when the stakes are high.
I think ENT is the most conservative tbh. Who else would go that far to get revenge for Florida?
To this day I have a visceral reaction to all the online nerds complaining about NuTrek not being Starfleet enough but having memory holed that DS9 got that exact pushback at the time for honestly way more legitimate reasons.
Out of all the shows I've seen over the decades, out of all the characters I've seen, Garek is probably my absolute favorite. When top tier writing meets top tier acting. Beautiful.
Silurian is a type of alien? It's a whole geological period. Calling something "Silurian" could refer to thousands of different species in the fossil record.
Quite woke of them to give representation to a conservative too. We wouldn't want to ignore any minorities. Not unless they shrink into nothingness. I hope.
Conservatism ... in DS9 they gave them an entire planet called Ferenginar.
I'm really loving the episodes with Brunt, Liquidator of the Ferengi Commerce Authority ..... if any being in the galaxy embodies taxation, it's Brunt. I love him because I absolutely hate him, a truly genius piece of character creation.
This sums Dico up perfectly for me. I consider myself "woke", I share the values they are advocating in Disco very much. But it's just. So. Shoved. Into. It.
It's not subtle, it's not something coming naturally to the story in most cases. It's just badly writen into a already badly written overall show.
I disagree that it's because of ''shoved'' or overt politics. It's just God awful writing and a terrible idea for a ST show. They made it a chronological story about one protagonist. There's consistent bridge crew we don't even know their names, their character or story, or even get to hear them talk besides ''there's a [thing] captain!'' Type of shit.
No ensemble stories, no stand alone stories, and very close to no science fiction at all. It's all just trying to give you high stakes action scenes with close to nothing else happening.
For a great example of this sort of thing done right, compare The Expanse books to the show.
The books kinda glossed over the head of the fucking entire earth's story and plotline. In the show, she was a highlight. Also, a few characters were merged into one female character, and women, in general, were given more prevalence. Poly relationships were given good voice, and overall, things just fit and felt natural.
That is to say: It can be done right. Disco just doesn't do right, imo.
My biggest problem with Discovery is that whenever they see something interesting they have to cut to a reaction shot to every single person on the bridge but don't even show us what they're seeing.
My second biggest problem is the writing. They don't talk like Starfleet, they talk like people from the 2020s.
There's so much wrong with it. Where's the 80s office décore?
If it doesn't have some elements of kitsch, it's not Star Trek.
Star Trek is NOT a Netflix production that can be churned out with improved dark, edgy, and abstract lighting, sleek sets, and dutch angle cinematography.... Star Trek is a series of Hallmark SciFi philosophy questions, set on fresh carpet with weird sculptures and props throughout.
Star Trek is NOT a Netflix production that can be churned out with improved dark, edgy, and abstract lighting, sleek sets, and dutch angle cinematography…
Well... It's exactly like almost all the others. Netflix managed to hit some 3 shows that got improved this way.
The first interracial kiss on TV was between Kirk and Uhura in 1968. Star Trek is and always has been set in a time when humans have achieved a post-scarcity leftist utopian. Shit's been this way since way before your uncle started calling everything he doesn't like "woke" which was only like 4 years ago for the record.
Know what was really woke? Keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics. For real. I'm quoting this article lol.
Anything that progressives do is something they try to turn into a curse. They even try it with the word progress and progressive, but it doesn't have the same effect which they really struggle with.
The problem isnt woke, the problem is CW level writing. I've watched every episode of star Trek up to season 2 of Picard and the writers of discovery not understanding the speed of light, and it feel like the writers are just in qualified for their positions. It's so bad.
The writing for all the previous shows all had their highs and lows, but characters acted within their characterization and had genuine motivations. Picard season 1 was a rip off of mass effect and old man's war, with the facade Picard shoe horned in. Season 2 you have him chummy with a cold blooded murderer who faced no consequences.
I liked discovery for the first few seasons, but the plot holes, inconsistencies, and poor characterizations, left me feeling like watching the show was more habit or chore. I also never really felt like I got to know characters because their actions are so off the wall that you don't figure out the algorithms of their personality and motivations.
I honestly feel like lower decks has been the best Star Trek made in this new era, but I haven't seen brave new worlds yet or Picard season 3. I just needed a break after Picard season 2.
SNW is much better. It's not a single story stretched to fit over a whole season helps a lot. It's definitely one of the best of new era Trek.
Season 3 of Picard is better than the first couple, but doesn't really add anything.
The stand out surprised at how god damned fucking good it is though is Prodigy. The first few episodes are a little bit childish, but after that it is excellent.
I'll have to give prodigy a chance, I loved Voyager and I heard there is a lot connections but the Voyager connections to Picard season 2 is partially why I needed a break from Trek, lol.
SNW is legit really good. A return to form. They experimented with different genres like you mentioned on the other shows then when they were writing SNW some brilliant person was like "hey, how about if we tried making star trek?"
Agree SNW followed by LD are the best ones recently. And by far the best episode is the crossover of them both.
I feel like to enjoy discovery I need to mute and turn off subtitles and just enjoy the graphics because they're really good. But we'll the most important things is that it open the doors to so many new series at same time, more than ever happened.
I think it was more "how about we create some actually likable, interesting, and multidimensional characters making actually sensible decisions?" I think SNW is better here than even all the old shows. I have the feeling that stuff like Worf being such an inexplicably bad dad or Sisco completely out of character committing genocide in one episode would not happen in SNW.
Picard s02 was a fever dream that fortunately didn't go onward (s03 is a totally different contained story). I agree with you tho, Disco had different writers at the beginning but turned into a festering disaster and killed itself.
white/black Riddler duking it out with black/white guy in an allegory to race relations
Abraham Lincoln calling Uhura a “a charming negress” followed by a brief discussion about the future’s take on linguistics and equality
the pilot episode had a woman named Number One who was so named because she was number one at everything she did. She excelled at all the things on the ship. A woman being better than men? Impossible. That’s woke.
the Enterprise and a bunch of klingons once showed up to a planet so woke they ended war and used space magic to make the humans and klingons also do no wars in their vicinity.
in another episode the Enterprise went to a planet that still had war but they calculated the results of battles using a video game console and then sent casualties to their death in a disintegration chamber and the Kirk blew up the video game console to force them to either negotiate or go back to actual war as a lesson in ignoring the Prime Directive directly.
there was a Nazi planet and the Nazis were the bad guys.
there was also a Yankee planet where they somehow independently wrote the Declaration of Independence in broken pidgin English and used it to defeat the Space Soviets.
the episode where Kirk and a woman exchange bodies was… not handled well and is not a good example.
the klingons were soviets, btw.
basically every episode of the original series had something “woke”, okay? It was literally the whole point of the series.
Well said!!! To continue with your points, I really enjoyed this video essay that goes through a lot of what you’re talking about. Really proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that trek valued diversity in regards to both civil rights with race and LGBTQ. (Even though there’s no need to prove an obvious fact). It starts with DS9 but stretches to the rest of trek and even some non trek references
Odo is an identity-seeking pre-proto-fascist who redeems himself. (pre and proto both because he's not a fascist but he might have become one if the Kardassians Cardassians kept power)
I forgot the symbiote was a worm thing. They really only showed that in one episode if I remember correctly, and that was already a retcon from what they did in TNG originally. I was also confused by the trans part because the symbiote doesn't really have a gender identity, the host does.
Quark is more of an inside track informant than an outright villain. While he often held to the Rules of Acquisition, he found himself going against the grain enough to be exiled.
I liked the purity of quarks character. Always after whatever provided the most opportunity and profit. He frequently was thwarted in his shady dealings in the pursuit of profit, but that's capitalism baby!
Not to imply I'm a fan of capitalism, far from it, but he was portrayed so perfectly as the embodiment of pure, unfettered capitalism. Regulations were little more than a suggestion and if breaking them didn't result in a loss (of profits), or if it had a fairly low chance of affecting his profits, in his mind, then he would simply ignore rules and do whatever the hell he wanted.
Looking at the world today, that's exactly what capitalism is doing. If you have laws but no enforcement, corpos will do it because the punishment is basically non-existent. If you have laws and enforcement, but they can hide/relocate/obfuscate that they've broken any of those laws, then they'll do whatever they damn well please, and just hide it. If the punishment for the infraction is less than the profit to be made by ignoring the laws, they'll do that too.
One notable example I like to go back to frequently is relating to tobacco. The laws are there but enforcement is stretched so thin that the chances that you'll be caught are pretty minimal. So many places, like corner stores and gas stations, don't give enough of a shit to enforce the laws. They make so much from just selling to whomever asks regardless of how old they look and whether they have ID or not (within reason, I don't think anyone is selling to 10 year olds), they'll just do it anyways. When/if they catch a fine for it, they'll easily pay for it with all the profit made from not giving a shit about identifying people. As long as you look old enough, or choose enough to old enough, you can buy some. I'll strongly express that not every place is like this, but there's a nontrivial number that are.
If you take that same approach with everything, you get corpos just eating EPA fines for polluting that are a fraction of what they would need to spend to properly dispose of their industrial waste. There's probably thousands of examples, but I won't waste everyone's time to dig them up and cite them.
He was the perfect embodiment of this profit-first mentality. Easily one of the best ferengis in any of the trek universe.
Good news! If the MAGA party wins in November they'll surely defund, gut, or do away with the EPA entirely, so pollution fines will drop to zero, clearly indicating pollution is gone!
I always thought of Quark as the moral center of DS9. Hear me out. It's a darker show, much more shades of grey, a bit of a break from Roddenbury's vision of star trek. Instead of Jean Luc's pompous speeches, and Janeway's infuriating (and inconsistent) adherence to the prime directive, DS9 actually toes the line and crosses it many times. Quark meanwhile has his own code, and he sticks to it as faithfully as anyone can. He is true to himself and his species and pretty much never crosses his own line - he crosses our line for sure, but rarely if ever his own. Pretty much the only time I can remember him doing something un-ferengi is when he turned down a gazillion bars of latinum to run weapons for those people planning on blowing up a planet with a few million people on it. At the end of the day you can always count on quark doing the right thing. He's quite complex, and by far one of my favorite characters in all of Trek.
This is my problem with this meme whenever it comes up.
There are so many direct occasions to bring up representation and acceptance in Star Trek, so why do people always jump straight into platonic erasure and make up sexualities that aren't there?
I for one always loved the ability for people in Trek to work and live close to each other and develop deep friendships without resorting to coupling up. Turning every friendship into something more romantic just seems disrespectful, because people are perfectly capable of being friends without needing to make something more of it
Babe, this 'platonic erasure' comes from the original airings.
It was the 90's, we were starved of everything. There was no overt representation. The comm still operated heavily in code, so if a show threw us circumspection we read between the lines.
People are weird. Trying to see things that aren't there. Because.....? Hell if I know. I'm just here for the shows. Not to question who might bang who.
Seriously, I've never personally seen anyone complain about startrek being woke now...
I have seen many people (including myself) complaining that star trek went from actually woke to just only virtue signalling and putting itself on the back on how progressive it suddenly is and yet somehow forgetting how to make people think about a ethics subject in a well written and entertaining way like it did in the past. Star trek has sucked ever after enterprise. Badly.
Commence the down voting and telling me I'm a racist....
And I’ve never personally seen anyone called a racist for criticizing a show’s writing quality. In fact, there are plenty of people in this thread expressing distaste for Discovery who don’t seem to be getting much flack for it at all.
For my part, while Discovery had its faults, I’d favour its writing over Enterprise’s any day of the week. Seems like a lot of fans have really warmed up to Enterprise in the past few years, but in my day it was almost universally derided, and every time I’ve tried to give it a rewatch it’s only reinforced that impression.
I couldn't stomach Enterprise back in the day and it kinda turned me off to Trek until SNW and Lower Decks. Discovery is different but I still enjoyed it.
Ive never watched DS9 but op makes me think I should lol
Oh look. It's this one again. Honestly that list is like the worst fanfic from the people who would be banned by the horney hammer. Stop being suckered in and let the stories an characters tell their own story. You know why no one goes on about this shit in Star Trek? Because it's not supposed to matter. Aspire to this.
Many of those who worked on trek from the very beginning would very much disagree with you.
This video is a great essay that backs up the above statement in a few different ways: https://youtu.be/j5_g1DY1FLg
I encourage you to sift, if not watch through it. It’s not exactly short and succinct but it takes you through a journey of trek history in the context of LGBTQ, and as it goes on draws more and more parallels to other trek projects beyond DS9 and JulianxBashir, in addition to general film history on the subject of both LGBT and civil rights.