That headline is a bit misleading… The season was rewritten because you couldn’t understand it unless you had seen every other bit of star trek and remembered everything that happened… It required too much star trek knowledge not that it was too similar to other star trek shows.
If you feel personally attacked when people voice their dissent against regressive discriminatory behavior, perhaps consider it’s your conscience trying to tell you something.
Trek is like beer. There is good Trek. There is better Trek. There is bad Trek. But bad Trek is better than no Trek. And any Trek is better than star wars.
I’d rather have no Trek than whatever bullshit is posing as Trek right now.
Or to use your metaphor, There is good beer, there is better beer, there is bad beer, and then there is that weird warm yellow liquid that turns out to be actual horse urine that got sold to you like beer. That’s what NuTrek is.
Nah, it’s just genuinely bad, and star trek in name only. I didn’t watch star trek for the action, I watched it for stories , thoughtfulness, morals, ethics, that sort of thing.
Nu trek is just mostly pew pew, cringe stories, and it’s made by people who literally said they don’t know trek, have nt watched trek, don’t like trek, but love using it as their political platform.
Nu trek being too progressive never was the point.
Picard managed to ruin TNG for me, thank you for that. I was amongst the biggest fans , thanks to nu trek, I’m done with it.
I’ve seen a little bit of lower decks and threw up in my mouth. Turned it off, not wasting my time…
New worlds? never gave it a chance and never will. I gave discovery a season long chance, wasted hours on cringy crap. I gave Picard a three season chance, it ruined star Trek for me and I wasted dozens of hours on that crap. I gave those godawful movies a chance, all because everyone kept saying how great that crap was, how great Pixard was, how great discovery was, just give it a chance! Just watch it and see! Yeah, I’m done.
my problems with nuTrek are almost exclusively with DSC. It’s the terrible writing, the retconning, and the over-the-top acting. but, specifically, with how they’ve handled LGBTQ+ characters-- horribly, imo.
Stamets and Culber
These two are often the target of being brutally treated, aka, the Bury Your Gays trope. Death/near-death constantly surround them, and it’s often tied to some function of their sexuality and/or relationship as gay men. Rarely are they seen as just crewmembers or Starfleet officers aside from them being gay, and i can’t help but see this as the showrunners and the writers, lacking all subtlety and nuance, saying, “LOOK AT HOW WE HAVE GAY CHARACTERS NOW!! LOOOOOOOKKKKK!!!” They’re props, objects to make Trek look good, and i don’t care for LGBTQ+ people being used that way.
In the shiny, bright future of Trek, nobody would care. It would be so normalized that nobody would notice and nobody would think differently of anyone for being gay, and having it constantly pointed out would be weird. So, when it’s done on the show, over and over, it’s weird and discordant, and out-of-character-- just like in the TOS episode when Lincoln called Uhura a racist term she didn’t comprehend because, as Kirk pointed out, it’s just not something people notice or think about anymore in the 23rd century.
Grey and Adira
I find this example more egregious for the same reasons. While i celebrate trans and enby inclusion in Trek (finally), what i find especially troublesome here is the tone-deaf and haphazard manner in which it was handled. First, again with the Bury Your Gays bs. We get this lovely character Grey only for them to get killed and only to exist henceforth as an f’ing ghost? That’s the only dignity this character gets? As a ghost?? And Adira doesn’t get the dignity of even existing without having to declare themselves and struggling to fit in as well. I mean, i understand trying to make the character relatable to a contemporary audience, but the whole point of Trek is to, again, show a brighter better future where all people are already accepted for who and what they are, where such struggles for tolerance and acceptance are well behind us. I shouldn’t be watching Adira struggle-- I should be watching them be able to confidently walk into the Engineering compartment knowing that nobody will judge them because, in the 23rd century, those bigotries and prejudices no longer exist.
But DSC betrayed what decades of Trek had taught us before about tolerance in the 23rd and 24th centuries and shit all over it by painting a picture of hostility, uncertainly, and doubt for LGBTQ+ people and how, apparently, we’re the target of a great deal of mysterious deaths and near-deaths. The future really isn’t too bright for us in the nuTrek future, and our struggles still abound 200 years hence.
There is never or rarely any positive aspect of the LGBTQ+ characters attributes being celebrated. It’s always some weakness to be exploited as a plot point, highlighted as something that will make them miserable, sad, and/or alone, something that sets them apart and makes them different. it’s always regarded as some type of survivorship. LGBTQ+ folx in Trek are not represented nor regarded as normal or regular people as they should be. They’re regarded as objects of pity, cudgels for plot points, set pieces, and fucking ghosts, but never with the dignity and respect that any other crew member receives, and that’s just fucked up.
The show’s use of the ‘bury your gays’ trope is so disappointing. It was so noticeable on first viewing, I remember thinking “why the hell are they killing them off?”
Ok, so you said something that really got me thinking:
And Adira doesn’t get the dignity of even existing without having to declare themselves and struggling to fit in as well.
Yeah, thank you for saying this. I hadn’t thought about this before, but Adira not even existing is crazy ironic because queer folks everywhere right now are fighting just to exist…not just as a byproduct that accompanies coming out in the modern era (having to explain your identity can be exhausting), but in the context of severe oppression where it’s a crime to be queer or where laws are being changed to restrict queer rights. Take your pick of which state, or country, for that matter…queer erasure is happening in a lot of places.
I wish I had enough faith in the writing team to believe this was intentional and meant to be an allegory, but nah. They were just tone deaf.
They’re regarded as objects of pity, cudgels for plot points, set pieces, and fucking ghosts, but never with the dignity and respect that any other crew member receives, and that’s just fucked up.
Thank you for saying this too. FFS, can’t we just have a gay character on screen without constantly having to O’Brien the poor dude? It is fucked up, it’s today’s version of making all your female characters victims of rape (poor Deana, how many times was she violated?). So incredibly fucked up
I think what this speaks to is the concept of queer agency and what that means— and how the writers clearly don’t understand it or how to be aspirational about it. Today, it’s defined by what we don’t have and are fighting for, whereas, in the 23rd century it doesn’t exist because everyone is equal. Queer people aren’t regarded as different or unequal in any way, so be regarded as different is a completely foreign concept. Having to define agency - or the need for it - does not belong in this context.
So, when you show these characters struggling with their identities, struggling to fit in because of them, and being defined first by them, it’s discordant with the setting, it’s discordant with Trek, and does a massive disservice to the characters themselves when, in what is supposed toy be a hopeful, utopian future where humanity is supposed to be far past such things, queer people are no better off than they are today because in a future where the concept of queer agency shouldn’t even have to exist anymore, it’s front and center whenever a queer character is on screen. Worse, when they end up suffering for it, over and over.
What bothers me most about what the writers did with Adira is have them get adopted by Stamets and Culber. It sort of felt like “let’s keep all the queer people together” as if they needed their own special section of the ship.
Argh I know! It’s like, they couldn’t think of something more original? Gotta keep them all in the same space? People who complain about this show’s “wokeness” specifically have obviously never seen it, because it’s strangely regressive in some ways.
That’s the biggest problem with how Hollywood and modern identity politics in general handles “diversity”. Those aren’t people who are gay, they’re characters because they’re gay. Instead of being people, they’re a DEI category to check off and showcase.
And Adira doesn’t get the dignity of even existing without having to declare themselves and struggling to fit in as well.
Contrast with Sisko, where him being black isn’t even mentioned until Season 6’s “Far Beyond the Stars,” or Jadzia’s bisexuality never being directly mentioned at all.
Exactly— Sisko only discussed his race in the context of comparing it to the unfairness of the past. It was never even noticed in the present— in fact, the only other time Sisko actually mentioned it was when discussing with Cassidy why he didn’t like going to Vic’s holosuite casino: because the 1960s-era representation was historically inaccurate of its representations of its attitudes towards people of color— in that the holosuite casino had no racism and, in reality, Vegas casinos were very racist at that time. He saw that as dishonest whitewashing of history. Cassidy countered that he should try to enjoy it, not as an account of history (as it was never intended to be), but as a representation of how things should have been.
And the message? Don’t forget the past, but also don’t let it get in the way of enjoying the present.
And THIS is how to use nuance to combine fantastic writing and acting and directing to communicate complex social concepts and to properly contextualize them in a utopian, equitable democratic socialist future referring to and being viewed by a contemporaneous audience in the 20th/21st century.
The writing directing and acting in discovery looks middle school improv by comparison. 
and, in reality, Vegas casinos were very racist at that time.
Not as much as you would think. The Rat Pack used their popularity to strong-arm the Vegas casinos into ending segregationist policies. The city was actually fully desegregated in 1960, in large part thanks to the Rat Pack’s actions. Vic seems to be a fictional member of the group invented by Felix, so it tracks that his personal establishment would be one of the most welcoming.
Never underestimate the ability of conservatives to ignore political messages that aren’t explicitly stated. Even something as in-your-face as TNG’s The Outcast is easily viewed by conservatives as “a funny alien story”, and not a metaphor for real-world political issues.
Seriously. They have enough trouble accepting people with different gender identities now. Thirty years ago? Even the concept of “gender identity” was enough to make their heads explode.
Amusingly, even the creators of The Outcast didn’t realise they were making an episode about gender identity. They saw it as an episode about sexuality, and about providing representation to gay people. Which isn’t an incorrect reading, obviously, but I think most people would agree that interpreting it as a trans allegory is a much stronger reading.
I don’t now, nor did I then see it as a representation or allegory for gay people… although… I suppose someone who knew little-to-nothing of trans (or gay) people might mistake it as such— and in 1992, a lot of people probably made this mistake. So, I can see this being the case back then.
But I have trouble believing the writers didn’t know what they were doing, as they seems to capture Soren’s struggle in a pretty heartfelt and accurate way. I think the only character whose sexuality may have been considered in that episode was Riker’s, as it immediately and unequivocally established him as pansexual without even mentioning it. And that’s how you do it. Just like Jadzei Dax’s bisexuality. Or Garak’s. It was a footnote at most. We only learned about either/both through incidental actions, not because it was either announced or made a spectacle of, and neither of those characters were ever defined by it.
Edit: For me, though, at the age of 13, this episode was my introduction to the concept of transgenderism. And, for that matter, the concept of being non-binary. And both were explained in very clear and simple terms, and in accepting, non-judgemental ways. And I’m so grateful that Trek thought me these lessons first before others tried to teach me another message later. For I knew that they were wrong because what Trek taught me was something different: love and understanding and empathy and compassion and acceptance— for without those things, people get hurt. People suffer. People die.
The key to the gay allegory is to take a much less literal look at it. It’s about representation of a person who is ostracised for reasons related to the broad category of “sex and gender expression”. It is a metaphor, after all, so there’s nothing wrong with being less literal about it.
Speaking of Riker, Jonathan Frakes wanted Soren to be played by a man, to make the message stronger to the contemporary audience. I think the studio chickened out?
Oh, regarding what the episode was supposed to be, IIRC, it was supposed to be a straight-up story about a gay male alien escaping an oppressive society that Riker hooks up with. Like, there wasn’t any metaphor or allegory beyond gay oppression in contemporaneous society, it was just that. And, of course, Rick Berman, an inveterate prick and widely-known homophobe absolutely shut that shit down. It got rewritten repeatedly into what it became, and, yes, Frakes still wanted Soren’s character to be played by a male, but Berman adamantly refused due to his own bigotries. Sure, Paramount may have gotten cold feet about it anyway, maybe not, but it never got that far.
Eventually, it got to the form we finally saw on screen, but, in retrospect, it’s a much stronger piece for it, and, at least in my eyes, the story is quite straightforward. It’s very plainly a trans character in an enby society which forbids gender expression of any kind, and that’s the source of the conflict. Additionally, there’s the allegorical references to the lgbtq+ community as a whole and otherism generally, but neither of those concepts are directly the subject.
Of course, people are going to read a lot more into it as they personally identify with it, and I’m not in any position to criticize or judge that. I’m just giving my own interpretation.
But I have a hard time believe people who complain about Trek being woke are actually trekkies.
Same here, and that’s why I singled out out bad faith actors in my post. They aren’t real fans of Trek any more than people who like to highlight black crime statistics in the U.S. are “just asking questions.” It’s bullshit, and they need to be called out on that bullshit. Star Trek has always had a progressive vision of the future; anyone who claims otherwise or complains about “wokeness” is sowing discord and trying to get people to subscribe to their brand of douchebaggery.
The meaning of woke changed. That is to say, TNG isn’t woke in the same way STD tries to be.
TNG is about self reflection, self improvement, professionalism, materialism, humanism, striving every day to make tomorrow better than yesterday.
STD is about emotions, entitlement… And honestly I struggle to find what the show actually says. There’s a focus on CGI spectacle. But since STD contains a black woman as captain, a gay couple, and a non binary individual, criticism of its lack of depth isn’t allowed.
We see the writers pat themselves on the back for things Star Trek has already done in the past, just to give themselves social brownie points, and if you don’t like it you’re a sexist bigot. That is what woke means today. It’s not true progressivism.
Discovery makes me sad. Some great premises and actors, very little of what makes/made Trek great. What a shame.
Lower Decks is nothing but joyous snort giggles. Well quite heartfelt at times.
SNW is wonderful fun. You get your progressive post scarcity utopia (yay) and more than a few sensible chuckles. And guffaws. Also the truly grim but still appropriately Trek stories like Under the Cloak of War.
Also I would kill for a proper Bat’leth Boys music video! You have not experienced K-pop until you’ve heard it in the original Klingon.
Discovery is a great Sci fi, but not that good at being Trek IMO, and didn't really respect the rest of Trek. It's better now that they moved it to the future of Trek where it's tech level makes sense, and there isn't a littany of other media in the same time period.
The first seasons of Picard were weird because it felt that it was more about other characters, and the TNG characters were more there for fan service to trick the fans into watching.
AFAIK, William Shatner is mainly a self absorbed twat and kinda a pain to work with, which was why he was on the outs with the rest of the crew for decades, but I’ve never seen him regurgitating right wing talking points like Kevin Sorbo or Chuck Norris.
After he did his AMA on reddit he took a look around and stated something along the lines of it having "too much of the bad internet" and didn't stick around.
Also he's Canadian and not from the Prairies, so unlikely to be alt-right. His biggest flaw I've heard of in a few places is that he "works to rule" in the union sense. He does things that make him money WRT his fandom and his acting.
E.g. the big fallout he had with George Takei was because in his eyes, Takei as a person would benefit more from Sulu staying on the Enterprise and playing more in the movie, because more screen time equals more cash.
Takei took the minor role because it made sense for Sulu as a character, as well as personally the representation of a Japanese (and then closeted gay man) as the captain of a starship.
Takei took the minor role because it made sense for Sulu as a character, as well as personally the representation of a Japanese (and then closeted gay man) as the captain of a starship.
Takei has suggested that while he is gay, Sulu is not. He objected to Sulu being gay in the Abramsverse and said they should have made a new character gay instead of shoehorning it into his character just because he’s a gay actor.
Which makes sense. Sulu could, at best, be bisexual. Not because there was no gay representation in TOS, but because he was shown being interested in women. He’s attracted to the titular women in Mudd’s Women, he “takes over” with one of the showgirls McCoy has on his arm in Shore Leave, and he’s arguably sexually interested in Uhura, albeit while intoxicated, in The Naked Time. As Takei himself knows.
I’m not gay, but if I was and was known for playing a prominent character in a popular show and then they remade the show as a movie, but made my character gay because I was gay… I’d be kind of insulted. It would basically suggest that every character I played was gay unless clearly indicated otherwise, which is not what I would want people to think of my acting abilities.
You probably get that from his social media which is run by another person. He basically allowed the head of one of his fan organizations to take over his internet presence and the guy running them is just like a shitposter and an asshole.
Feel like Discovery, Lower Decks, and Prodigy are only new trek. Rest is fan service that lacks the push of real trek series. SNW and Picard are fine but not very memorable. Except for the musical episode or cross over with Lower Decks.
I’m the opposite too, Disco really grabbed me in season 3. When Sadil told Burnham “that future is you,” I was sold. I honestly teared up, you could feel the weight he carried his entire life being lifted. What a line. Plus the future is a better fit for them and helps avoid continuity issues and all that.
All the gay killin’ was disappointing, I agree there.
I think I only got like three or four episodes into Discovery.
It’s just, the whole schwooping them off to a different timeline didn’t jive with me. It felt like they didn’t like the plot they’d done so far and decided to do a soft reset? Maybe they didn’t, but it was so strange and I couldn’t get back into it at that point. I loved the mushroom stuff. I wanted to see more of May Ahearn. I loved the bit with her and Tilly, and I didn’t feel like all that was done yet.
Have they picked that stuff back up since?
Yeah. Like, as a gay person I love seeing more LGBTQ representation, but it’s at the same time kind of annoying when we’re always killed off. I guess by some definitions ST:D doesn’t really fill the bury your gays criteria but it’s close enough to be irksome. Like, why must we always die? 😩
I think I only got like three or four episodes into Discovery
Disco had a rough start because the showrunner Bryan Fuller was fired during preproduction, and they drastically changed the story he had in mind and just ran with it. Fuller has writing credits for the first 3 episodes, which is about where we both gave up on the show (I started again a few years later and got caught up). Those first two seasons are real hit & miss for me, it kinda looked like they were scrambling to develop a compelling story but were under a tight deadline.
The part where they time travel was actually done well, I thought. I had some issues with the tone here and there, but I thought it made sense in universe. It’s really too bad Disco had so much turmoil wrt creative control, because I look at how SNW and LD hit the ground running, and it’s obvious they had a clear vision from day one and were able to plan everything properly.
Bryan Fuller was fired during preproduction, and they drastically changed the story he had in mind and just ran with it.
On the other hand, Bryan Fuller was responsible for the thing people hated most of all about the first season of Discovery:
The other Bryan Fuller contribution that remains is his redesign of the Klingons. “One of the things he really, really wanted to do was shake up the design of the Klingons,” Herberts said. “One of the first things that he ever pitched to us when we were deciding whether or not to come on the show was his aesthetic for the Klingons and how important it was that they be aesthete, that they not be the thugs of the universe, that they be sexy and vital and different from what had come before.”
I think I’m still on the fence about the revamped Klingon look; I would be 100% ok with it, though, if they reveal it’s just the way that Klingon house/subspecies evolved, as some of the fan theories go. The changes are so drastic (even moreso than the changes made between TOS and TNG) that it’s jarring. What I never got used to was the Klingon mouth prosthetics; they were so unwieldy that it was hard to understand the dialogue at times. I had to turn on closed captioning.
When disco fucked off to the future I started enjoying it more because it felt like it no longer didnt fit in with the timeline. And then it got to the cause of the big explosion thing and decided I hated it again for such a stupid cause.
Zero interest in Picard, feels too edgy grimdark.
LD/SNW by comparison have been enjoyable since day one.
Picard S3, while not perfect, is a hell of a lot of fun, and very obviously a love note to ST fans who grew up with the 90s series.
Agreed that the cause of the Burn was just… wat. Similar levels of “wat” for that seed ship interlude where the barzan father “phased partially out of reality due to grief”… like, come on, what in the Kentucky Fried Fuck is that bullshit?
I do think disco is mostly good, but it’s also about 5-10% catastrophically bad/nonsensical/poorly written, which can really take the wind out of your sails when watching parts of it. I must add, however, that I think the very prominent focus on mental health and trauma, as well as non-heterosexual/-heteronormative relationships was an excellent change that that series specifically introduced.
I do think disco is mostly good, but it’s also about 5-10% catastrophically bad/nonsensical/poorly written, which can really take the wind out of your sails when watching parts of it.
I like Disco, although I do think it has writing problems. But 5-10% would be a high mark for a Star Trek series.
Think of all the utterly shit episodes there were of TNG despite TNG generally being considered the show the other shows want to emulate in one way or another.
There’s bad episodes, and then there’s “this character was exposed to a spicy rock while in vitro and throughout childhood and then got upset one time and made all the spicy rocks explode and killed all the federation people”.
Trek’s variable episode quality is a well-established trope at this point, but disco has absolutely pushed the handwavey bullshit ceiling to new heights. Disco absolutely has some really good high points, but I wish the low points weren’t quite so low.
This is compounded by the fact that Disco’s format is much more of an “epic season-long tale” (compared to SNW’s much more episodic format), and the fact that the writers basically bunted on the singular climactic moment of the 3rd series when it should have been a grand slam is just embarrassing and disappointing.
I don’t see that as any more ridiculous than ‘if you go faster than infinite speed, which is somehow possible, you turn into a salamander’ or ‘Deanna gets energy-raped, gets pregnant, has a baby, it grows up in about 3 days into a kindergartener, then dies in her arms, but that’s all okay because an alien wanted to know what being human was like’ or ‘this is a planet that is exactly like Earth in every way except the Roman Empire exists with 20th century technology and that makes sense because we have a theory about it.’
Oh, don’t get me wrong - all of the instances you cited (as well as a few others) were… not good at all, and completely asinine.
The primary contrast I’m drawing here is that those were bad episodes… whereas the Burn was a season-long mystery that was tied up in a neat little bow with absolute nonsensical bullshit, which frankly cheapened the impact of the season overall, and makes me roll my eyes whenever they do a callback to something Burn-related in S4. If it was confined to a single episode (like the barzan seed ship stuff I mentioned earlier), it’d be far more excusable, but in my eyes, they kinda soured the entire season by just phoning it in for what should have been one of the most important segments of the season to really nail the writing on.
All that said: it’s overall still fun; I am rewatching it right now, in preparation for S5 starting to roll in April.
True, but Star Trek was mostly episodic, even when there were story arcs, before Discovery too. I think the problem is more about TV shows, especially sci-fi shows, leaning very hard on the season-long mystery plot arc. Because then you’re putting all your money down on a single story and if that story isn’t one of the more popular ones, you take a much bigger risk.
Yeah, I agree with that. Making your series into some sort of make-or-break mega-movie-ish thing can work sometimes… but it’s not the appropriate way to tell every single story, and producers seem to finally be starting to realize that. Personally, I blame the MCU and the related series for that being a screenplay writing fad for so long.
Fwiw, I do think SNW has largely nailed the format for the modern era - mostly episodic, but there’s a higher-level background plot that gets touched on every once in a while, and here and there you’ll find an episode purely focused on that overarching plot. And I also think my enjoyment of DS9 and Voyager back in the day stems from that broadly-comparable series presentation.
I have to get up super early for work and so I wake up the rest of my family one by one before I go. The other day, my brother complained that I woke him up first even though he leaves last. He asked if we could have a family meeting about it and said, “I think we need to have a more diverse woke agenda.”
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