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this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Star Trek
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Relying on cultural hot topics rather than real character building killed this show. The spore drive was also kinda "out there" though interesting. I wish the best for the cast.
The show has one non-binary character and a gay couple and suddenly they're relying on "cultural hot topics".
Please.
Disco had a lot of flaws, and most of them were the same flaws we saw in Picard: the writers just couldn't write full season plot arcs that were satisfying and believable. This is made worse because each season had to raise the stakes, to the point where it just got kinda exhausting. Meanwhile the show just took itself way too seriously, without really earning my emotional investment.
the gay men brushed their teeth wont somebody think of the children
No, it's the modern, basic portrayal of those characters and their issues that's the problem.
Star Trek is supposed to reflect on human problems and foibles with allegory. Not just slap you across the face with, "see, gays are normal, too!" Yes, we watch Star Trek. We know. Make it more interesting with an allegory tied to a other characters that aren't supposed to be professional officers from a species that's prescribed as already past these issues.
By putting so much basic and direct human drama in STD, they bastardized the entire bluepeint of the show.
im not sure how one is slapped across the face with normalcy but if you're saying discovery didnt go far enough with the barely-disguised left wing messaging we usually see in star trek i agree wholeheartedly
In fairness, that messaging has taken rather a back seat ever since Trek became big, probably because the networks see it as a cash cow, and no longer give it liberty to take the same risks.
DS9 only got as far as they did pushing the boundary because Voyager had most of the attention, for example.
You don't really see any new Trek show pushing the boundary quite like TOS did back in the day, to the point where it was very nearly cancelled outright due to the outrage it produced. Roddenberry even wanted to add an LGBT character to it at some point, but it was shot down by the other producers. Compared to TOS, Discovery's representation and messaging is almost contemporary, with relatively little boundary-pushing.
Compare to that to the Orville, which doesn't have that baggage by virtue of being new, and relatively unknown, so they can get away with more on-the-nose messaging a good bit more without getting into trouble. There's no established IP and format that the network would prefer that they keep to, or stay uncontroversial so it's still palatable to wider audiences.
I mean, yea, basically. They didn't let the concepts steep enough so the allegory took back stage to the simplified moralizing.
I'm not necessarily against any general angle they took, it just didn't really do the star trek intellectual thing where they're actually competent professional adults dealing with something. The general mood of the writing is just ... too straight forward plain Hollywood. Sure, Star Trek has its TV schlock, but it was that angle of at least trying to make everyone logic-first adults that made it great.
Ah yes, modern basic issues like being kidnapped into a multiversal network of spores and finding your murdered partner creeping in the wings destroying everything he touches.
Mondays, amirite?
Any "mundane" problems they faced were faced by most of the crew at some point, yet you're only complaining about non-cishets being "normal." You're not very good at masking your bigotry.
Those are specific details, not general nature of writing. I'm talking about analysis of the writing style, not how scifi it is.
I agree with the original post. It's what also killed it for me. Felt like the writers went for the lowest hanging fruit.
I mean it's Star Trek, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, nobody cares about that. Be whoever you want to be, you will be accepted. To me that's what Star Trek has always been about, you will always be included.
Don’t even remember when I stopped watching it, I tried a few episodes each season and I just gave up. Burnham has such a great smile but in all episodes she has a nervous breakdown and is always sad. At least that's how I remember the series in my head. Everybody's depressed. Don't remember anything else.
You're implying that Discovery showed characters giving a shit about someone's skin color, gender or sexual orientation?
The show wrIters OBVIOUSLY cared. So much so it shined right through the writing.
Yes absolutely! Well said. Progressive themes shined through in the writing, but on-screen the characters never made a big deal out of it. That's been very Star Trek since the days of TOS. An episode like "Let that be your Last Battlefield" would have a shoved-down-your-throat antiracist message, but it was a metaphor and not directly about Uhura, who's race was never discussed.
Well, except that one time by space Abraham Lincoln.
Everything Lincoln says to Uhura is the epitome of cringe. It was certainly a different time, but oh my gosh...
@MotoAsh @Lwaxana I think DS9 writers cared al lot more than Discos ones. Like, Sisko was misgendering Dax almost every time he addressed her (it wasn't serious as it was made obvious it was fine between them, but it was present in almost every episode). And Kor corrects himself quickly when Dax says she is Jadzia now, while the other klingons need more time to accept her. Meanwhile in Disco I only remember one instance of "I'd rather be addressed as this" "sure!".
Yea, that's sorta' what I mean. They cared about writing complex professional characters in ds9 and such, not drama queens doing contemporary art. Regardless of the high production value, it has the opposite soul of Star Trek for focusing on issues over humanized characters.
Ugh, it's so hard to describe good writing when I'm not a good writer. lol
The depression and other emotional issues is what got me. It's supposed to be Star Fleet, yet every character is like 12 flavors of drama that should be seen as unprofessional. I enjoy diversity, however Discovery constantly used it in a way where the characters are either struggling with their identity or have practically made it their entire personality, which is stupid because ST has made clear that in its future, no one gives a shit about that stuff because everyone is free to be who they are.
I mean, they even ran out of oppressed minorities and had to start making up their own like Saru's struggle with being a prey species. Or the fucking ship having an identity crisis.
Honestly, the alien stuff is exactly where there is most fertile soil for allegory there. That's what killed it for me, too. They're all unprofessional drama queens from the 21st century. Not space exploration officers from centuries in the future.
Some of the were exacerbated by the production issues that happened in the early seasons of the show, too.
They went through a bunch of different showrunners/producers in that time, and it shows. Much of Seasons 1 and 2 of Discovery felt like four different shows all overlapping with each other, which did not help in the slightest. It started to find its footing in Season 3, but after that was also when CBS took it off of Netflix, which also made it harder to watch, unless you were willing to subscribe to another service (that might not even be available in your country) for the one show.
It might have been more interesting if it had stabilised itself and found its footing early on, but alas. On the other hand, it being what was basically an experimental testing-ground for a bunch of different concept gave us the short treks, Strange New Worlds, and a few other shows besides, so can't fault it that badly.
I might regret asking this, but what "cultural" topics are you saying Discovery "relied on"?
It's not that they're the topic of an episode, but that the show is RELYING on the basic drama of the cultural topics.
Trek is supposed to make allegory for cultural issues, not just blandly do the cultural issues.
Maybe I would understand better if you gave an example from the show?
I understand what you're saying, but I'm not sure if I agree. I think of what Ira Steven Behr said about the portrayal of LGBT issues on DS9, he really feels they missed the mark because they went with a 'technicality', because Jadzia was married to a woman while in a male host, and those thoughts and feelings carried over, and he didn't feel it was actually a portrayal of a lesbian romance, but a cop-out.
There are other episodes which, while groundbreaking at the time, clearly used their allegory to soften the message somewhat. Frakes has lamented that Soren in "The Outcast" was played by a female actor, for instance. Using a female made the relationship more acceptable to the viewer.
I will say, however, that in Enterprise's "Stigma", which on the AIDS crisis via Pa'nar Syndrome, the allegory does allow them to hold up a mirror to intolerance and prejudice. Maybe that's what you're getting at? By showing the relationships and nonbinary gender identities as normal, rather than couching them in a metaphor so they could show the ugliness of intolerance, the writing doesn't go far enough?
It's an interesting point. My instinct is that we're mature enough to see things like gay relationships now without needing to obfuscate them in metaphor, even if the point is to highlight the flaws of intolerant views.
Yea, I'd definitely say they've made missteps in the past. I also hear Discovery is MUCH better in later seasons as well, so the juxtaposition in general writing style that highlights what I mean may be muddied by competence showing up later.
So, putting a gay couple on screen and just having it be a normal aspect of who they are (to be clear: the nature of their relationship was never a plot point on the show) is "blandly doing the cultural issues"?
Was casually putting Uhura, a black woman, on the bridge of a starship on a show airing in the 1960s, without ever calling attention to her race, also "blandly doing the cultural issues"?
My comment is not about any specific lgbtq content but about the general attitude of the writing. The focus on drama over logic completely shallows out the allegory until it's JUST a gay couple being contemporarily gay on screen.
It's not bad to have contemporary representation, it's just less inspired than what older ST did. Mind, I've heard later Picard seasons get better on the writing, and SNW I only stopped watching because I forgot more were coming, so I'm not trying to poo poo on anything except that which people largely already agree aren't that great.
Like the first season of TNG. It's uh... they had some decent episodes but boy were the bad ones something. lol Or the TNG movies for the most part. They're just ... different than the show. Entertaining, but that's not my only criteria for ST, personally.
Yeah. That's my point.
Maybe there is no allegory.
Maybe it's just a gay couple on screen.
Like Nichelle as Uhura was just a black woman in an elevated position on screen.
No message. Just simple representation.
Why is that such a problem?
Because if you ask people in the community, many will tell you they're kinda sick of the gay experience only be represented in a negative light, always a struggle, always a message, as opposed to just them simply and comfortably existing.
Yea, I see what you mean. Actual representation and not tokenization. I wouldn't accuse even STD or Picard of at least purposefully tokenizing. Although with the contemporary representation with a drama focus in the writing, it almost jumps the shark enough on the ST premise that the contemporary drama representation almost just feels tokenized, if that makes sense. I don't think it'd be obvious with better writing, and I hear they get better later, so I could see people disagreeing out of pure entertainment value in the least.
Pretty mean thing to say about Jonathan Frakes...
I enjoyed the wackiness that the spite drive introduced.
spore drive
I could get down for a spite drive too.
It would work thousands of years off of one drop of League of Legends solo queue.
One distilled drop of Star Trek fandom over the decades could take it to the edge of the universe and back at salamander-speed.
It's what you do, when you left your lover because they did something unforgivable.
I'd never pay for gas again.
That has been a disturbing trend