Inspired by gregorum’s post concerning issues with startrek.website, which is ironic as lemmy.world is a bit glitchy right now and isn’t letting me upload and had to use my alt here.
And it’s always Discovery when these posts are made, isn’t it. Because Discovery never tried to be Star Trek in anything but name and when fans backlash, it’s always the fans’ fault, not the show’s fault (Paramount/CBS astroturf the shit out of this online, imo). Picard sucks too for similar reasons, and I just said so on an internet forum. So what?
Maybe I wish these shows hadn’t got made because they were a giant waste of resources, but at the end of the day, I’m still enjoying LD and SNW. But no, I can’t tell the world what a pile of dogshit Discovery is, oh no, that makes me a shitty fan who deserves to be banned.
Speaking of which, let me tell you about /r/startrek - those assholes can fuck themselves and if startrek.website is infected with that particular mind virus, it can fuck itself too. Being intolerant of opinions about a stupid tv show is far worse than any particular opinion could possibly be.
On /r/startrek? No, you can’t. You can be as reasonable as you please laying out your well-considered opinion and it won’t matter for fuck-all. The banhammer will have you.
This is the kind of thing that kept me out of the fandom for years. I have zero interest in hearing how bad you think Discovery or Enterprise or whatever is, but by God you and everyone else will be sure to explain it to everyone repeatedly. It’s tiring seeing it time and time again. I’ve enjoyed the shows, you didn’t, that’s fine. At least you aren’t belittling the people that do like it, but that happens, too.
It reminds me of the Simpsons fans and their weekly discussions about which was the last great season. Who cares? It’s just an opinion. Can’t we just enjoy things we like?
This is the kind of thing that kept me out of the fandom for years. I have zero interest in hearing how bad you think Discovery or Enterprise or whatever is, but by God you and everyone else will be sure to explain it to everyone repeatedly.
Only when asked. It’s a legitimate point for discussion and it comes up from time to time and so what? Can’t you read the subject line or look at the meme (see: OP) and just avoid clicking on the discussion? Why are you even here to read this? You knew what it was going to be!
The only thing that’s wrong around all of this is that when I give my perfectly reasonable and widely-held opinion, I’m liable to be fucking banned for it in certain places because people like you are wielding the hammer.
This keeps you out of the fandom? Jesus H. Christmas, maybe you need to spend your days in a room lit only by candlelight wearing earplugs and doing nothing but reading actual paper books? This is every fandom in existence on the Internet without exception.
You ignore my question as to why you’re even in this thread, naturally.
Or maybe they had a point, I’m not the only one calling you out.
Or maybe they fucking don’t. The top comment in this particular thread is “Na fuck discovery specifically,” and it has 6 upvotes. Second-most upvoted comment in this entire thread (currently 34 upvotes) is someone who says “No,” followed by “You have been banned from the community: Risa@startrek.website.”
So, my opinion about the practice of banning people for stating their opinions - as with my opinion about Discovery being dogshit - seems to be in a very comfortable majority, thanks.
Also, if it makes you feel better to call that a “personal attack” - as if that has anything at all to do with anything I have said - then by all means, knock yourself out.
Edit: And for anyone who might stumble upon this in the future, notice how this jerkoff both: a) refuses to respond to the perfectly reasonable question as to why he would even be here in the first place and b) downvotes me to zero because there’s nobody left in the thread to defend me because it’s been over for days. Get fucked you fucking coward. I’m guessing he’s an /r/startrek mod because petty and cowardly is what they do oh-so-well.
Dear doctor is one of those classic good eps of trek with absolutely terrible morality, much like every time Picard is like “these people have to die when we could easily help them because that’s what the universe wants”
When I found out there was a mirror universe two-parter, I IMMEDIATELY abandoned the conversation I was having to watch it. Fortunately, that conversation was with other Trek fans who understood and just laughed.
I really need to rewatch Enterprise at some point. I keep seeing people say the later stuff is good, but my recollection is it was annoying time travel stuff and actually worse than the earlier seasons. It’s making me doubt myself, especially given how long ago it was.
I felt like ENT had potential for greatness given its premise, but every single time time travel was involved, it actively made the show worse. It was supposed to be all about the early beginnings of the Federation and the first Enterprise’s journey into the unknown, but they kept interrupting it with random temporal cold war bullshit that nobody cares about.
That’s crazy lol, it was soooooo bad! I felt like that and some of the attempts to appeal specifically to straight men were the things that ruined an otherwise very interesting show.
EXACTLY. The premise got me so hard. pre-TOS? low tech, high stress/stakes scifi? See the origins of Starfleet? delve into the founding races of the federation? Fuck yes!
oh, wait. boring shit, irrelevant magic shit, new races we never heard of before or will see again and so on and so forth.
By the sideburns of Season 3 Kirk, just have fun with whatever flavor of Trek you have and let’s stop Elaan of Troyiusing over nothing. Let’s bitch about the Animated Series instead!
I appreciated how incredibly rational he was. His first reaction was, “This is all so silly, I must clearly be dreaming. I shall now scream myself awake!”
He did this again in Distant Voices. “I’m being mind-raped to death by a Lethian? Oh, I don’t think so! Take my 125 year old tennis serve, asshole!”
And again, at the near-end of DS9 with Chief O’Brien in tow when they both cybermindfucked Sloan to get the cure for the Changeling virus. (Yeah, they totally did that, and Sisko and Ezri watched at least part of it).
I also appreciated the almost hilarious irony in that he was, in an almost Doctor Who twist of fate, wrong. No, Dr. Bashir, you are, in fact, trapped in a silly alien game, and must sing and dance your way out of it.
I liked them. They’re the first time my wife got interested in Star Trek and an appreciation for sci-fi. It’s very hard getting people into this stuff using old studio shows from the 20th century.
My first new Trek was TNG, which I enjoyed, along with DS9. Then, I just lost interest and didn’t stick with anything until the Kelvin movies. That got me back in, though Discovery nearly killed it, then Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks reeled me back in.
The Kelvin movies are not the Trekkiest Trek media but they aren’t horrible movies.
Of course, nothing has yet to dethrone GalaxyQuest as the best Star Trek movie of all time.
I liked the “hand held one person cross galaxy transporter that can move someone from Earth to Qo’noS that fundamentally changes all aspects of several galactic civilizations including the concept of space travel via starship, but is for some reason never used or mentioned again by anyone in the universe because Abrams clearly gave no fucks at all about the source material and just invented something so utterly ‘not trek’ because he wrote himself into a corner and didn’t care about anything except the giant check he got.”
Neelix is killed while participating in a survey mission of a protomatter nebula. Using a technique devised by Seven of Nine, however, the Doctor is able to revive Neelix after being dead for nearly 19 hours.
I’m watching the first bit of that episode now, and in fairness, at least they attempt to sort of justify it by saying it’s just that the Borg assimilated species with better medical technology and that their ability to revive drones is limited to only up to 73 hours after death.
I don’t have a copy of the JJ movie conveniently to hand at the moment to check (I never bothered to obtain a copy because all the plot holes piss me off), but I don’t recall them even bothering to do any hand-waving to limit the scope.
Loath as I am to defend Into Darkness, this is arbitrary skepticism and Voyager is by far a worse offender.
It’s not explicitly said but the circumstances are much tighter: I’m pretty sure McCoy stuffs Kirk’s corpse into a cryo tube almost immediately after he dies and the gang also needs to capture, not kill a raging genetically enhanced warlord to have a shot at it. The two subsequent references to the Kelvin timeline after this offers no circumstance under which this technology could reasonably be used but wasn’t. If they somehow did manage to repurpose Khan’s magic panacea blood there’s no indication it would be more than an immediate revival drug–like something we see used in Lower Decks as a joke.
Figuring out a tech solution that could be applied to many other problems then completely forgetting about it in the next episode is what Star Trek is all about isn’t it?
Especially when the transporter is involved. They’ve used the transporter to cure diseases, then forget about it later. Scotty was in a transporter pattern for decades putting him into a perfect stasis. Whey don’t they do something like that for emergency situations if they’re running out of air or food? Forgot about it. Riker got split into two different Rikers. Wouldn’t the Dominion want to recreate this so they could quickly make millions of copies of fully trained Jem Hadar soldiers every time they rocked up to a planet they wanted to conquer? Guess they didn’t think about that. That time O’Brien transported to a ship when the shields were up. Few episodes later “we can’t beam over their shields are up!”
The list goes on and on.
I think it’s firmly established that transporters are basically magic in Star Trek. They can do whatever an episode needs them to do and they can’t do things whenever it would too easily solve a problem. If we’re ten minute into an episode: “nope transporter can’t do that even if it worked in a previous episode” Last 10 minutes of an episode: “We use the transporter by doing <technobbable>!”
I believe the implication is a lot of the people that ran the reddit Star Trek communities were the ones that migrated to startrek.website. You can imagine the quality of average Redditors that choose to moderate the star trek subreddits.
Is it tho? Other than the com badges, every random screenshot I see of Discovery looks like a totally different sci-fi franchise. Especially when the characters are holding phasers.
It, like every series before or concurrently, approaches the universe differently. They all have changes in style, effects, base premise, and acting. It’s Trek all the same. Doesn’t mean we have to like it.
I can’t say if I like it or hate it as a whole; haven’t watched the show it yet (so please don’t assume this or my previous statement are meant to disparage; that wasn’t my intention). But I also haven’t seen Strange New Worlds, which still aesthetically looks like Trek to me from images I have seen. The vibe and tone are way different. Discovery looks like it is trying to be dark and gritty, which isn’t very trekky IMO. Which is one of the two main reasons I still haven’t watched it (the other being Paramount+ fuckin’ sucks)
Trek is gritty as FUCK. TOS was quite gritty with ww3, genetic wars, khan… TNG had roving rape gangs. DS9 had apartheid space nazis. Disco is quite tame compared to the darker tones of DS9 by FAR. I think even behind the comedy, Lower Decks is darker than Disco.
Yeah DS9, specifically the Dominion Wars, is leaps and bounds the darkest Trek. It took the question of “how far must I go before I myself become the monster?” and applied it to a Star Fleet officer. And how far he was willing to go to protect the Federation was truly terrifying.
Here’s the thing: Trek was never gritty before. Trek acknowledged the hardships of how we got to that utopian place, but only as a… distant abstract. It was in the past. As Trek went on and new series premiered, more history was revealed. It was gruesome. WWIII.The Eugenics Wars. Khan— who we then met, twice, and, who, then became a person of galactic importance.
But it wasn’t until DS9 that we actually got a glimpse of post-contemporary Earth, but pre-WWIII. We saw San Fransisco in 2024. We saw something we had not yet, as a society, yet conceived in the mainstream: Sanctuary Districts.
Today is March 17, 2024.
I’m not gonna lie: in 1993, I was 14. Even then, I didn’t see how we could stop all this from happening.
I’ll be 85 in 2064. I really hope I live to meet the Vulcans.
The whole sanctuary districts thing was a response to what they believed was a homelessness crisis in the 1990s, but was nothing compared to today. The idea was that some president would eventually just corral the homeless into concentration camps.
You’re kind of right. Discovery S1 was trying to be a dark, prestige drama. It felt a lot more like BSG than Trek. I haven’t watched it since it premiered but I don’t remember hating it, though I didn’t love it either.
They fired their show runner pretty early, so there is another tone shift from S2 onward. The tone becomes a lot more like the new-Trek movies, and later much more like Strange New Worlds. Take a look at screenshots from Season 4 compared to Season 1 to see just how much it shifted stylistically.
The real issue isn’t aesthetic or tonal, it’s that the writing is excruciating.
Add comment