I get not liking Discovery, but do people really think Lower Decks, SNW, Picard are “Woke?”
Also, obviously, sci-fi is at its best when tackling politics… Isn’t that kinda the point?
It's woke because they're so unhinged that basic human decency is woke now.
Always was
"Woke" has long since lost its original meaning.
Used to mean something positive and progressive. Then it meant something that tried writing itself off as something progressive, but was simply stupid and entitled (i.e. That Batwoman series), now it's anything a right winger hates, even if it isn't trying to be progressive in any way.
Truth is, with NuTrek, it doesn't have a single progressive bone in its body, and the writers don't have the skill to pull off any sort of commentary.
Truth is, with NuTrek, it doesn’t have a single progressive bone in its body, and the writers don’t have the skill to pull off any sort of commentary.
It’s not that bad, though I don’t totally disagree.
Also… I’d argue a problem is having their hands tied. Ironically, anything that would hit really hard couldn’t be aired in this day and age. The whole franchise would probably be mothballed if they pushed the envelope as hard as TOS.
SNW has like 90% female crew members. Also the pilot lady has short hair. Therefore woke.
Probably.
Yep, snw and picard get 'woke' complaints. LD they tend to just attack for being animated
Nichelle Nichols was at one point thinking of quitting the show but stayed because MLK Jr. himself told her how important her character was.
And without Nichelle Nichols on Star Trek, she wouldn't have been hired by NASA and then we wouldn't have had Sally Ride, so she is a legitimate space hero.
She thought about leaving because she didn't feel like her character got to do enough - a common sentiment of supporting actors.
It was TNG that really established an ensemble cast formula; TOS was Kirk-Spock-McCoy and the rest. It took TNG a couple seasons before they got the idea of a true ensemble cast where everyone gets to star in some episodes. TOS wouldn't have had more than one episode starring Reginald Barcklay with Geordi and Dianna in supporting roles, but TNG had at least two.
“Shatner figured it out? Shatner? This is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts.”
I havent gotten past the original series yet (I started with that), so far Star Trek seems like the entire point is to get into complex social and political issues that other companies would be too scared to cover.
Guaranteed if original Star Trek came out today, it would be decried as "woke" and "DEI" and there would be outrage over it from the usual culture warriors.
Just out of curiosity, what do you think is more progressive: a spaceship where all female crew is forced to wear miniskirts, a bridge crew that has exactly one woman, the part in the pilot where "Orion sex slaves" are introduced in the horniest possible way, or the married producer who was cheating on his wife with the only two relevant female cast members?
The 1960s was a long time ago. While there are a lot of TOS that aged very well, the idea that the show would be decried as woke is straight up delusional.
Not to be that guy, but in the 60s, mini skirts were considered an empowerment. It was the beginning of the sexual revolution after all. In contemporary times it won't be a miniskirt, it would be something else.
When people say "if star trek were made today" they don't mean time travelling Roddenberry, studio, and crew to today without changes. They mean creating star trek to today to tackle contemporary issues.
Okay, I've finally looked up what DEI means... Diversity, equity, and inclusion are things people are berated for??
DEI is the current iteration of affirmative action, that’s all.
The problem with DEI is that it’s an imperfect solution that only came about because racists and other bigots couldn’t behave themselves. Forcing the hiring of specific demographics isn’t going to result in the best possible outcomes in every case but those groups also need opportunities even though they’ve been systemically given worse educations and have been generally shat upon. Removing race we’d also probably hire the white man more often but not because they’re inately better, but rather because they are simply more likely to be able to afford to have pretty looking resumés compared to disadvantaged minorities.
We wouldn’t need DEI in the first fucking place except people like an old boss, who saw an immigrant classmate of mine’s resumé come up and because of his African last name said “no thanks I want to keep jobs in Canada”, need to be forced to do the right thing. They create the problem and throw temper tantrums when we try to fix it. These people are obstacles and it’s getting tiring.
TL;DR: They feel as if they have a point because DEI can result in a more qualified person being turned away, which I get feels unfair. However, they refuse to acknowledge the fact that said person was only more qualified because we make it so difficult for minorities to fucking do anything. I’m getting so sick of right-wing bullshit.
The outrage the far-right spun over DEI is by trying to portray it as hiring vastly underqualified applicants simply because of their belonging to an underrepresented group (often even being portrayed as vastly underqualified because of their race as white supremacist rhetoric). Of course in reality this wasn't true and it was just a foghorn for racism/an ethnic slur, but that's how it started.
Counterpoint: As long as they consider the women "hot" they will accept them as part of the franchise.
Nichelle Nichols I think was probably hot enough to not draw their ire.
Those culture warriors are somehow always okay with women they view as "fuckable." Women only have value in their eyes if they want to sleep with them by their looks alone.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QFspemhHmsw A Critique of Star Trek Discovery — Part 1 #RIPStarTrek
This whole essay is worth listening to, but 15:46-30:33 in particular gets at the heart of a big reason why classic Trek rocks and why nuTrek is shit.
Lower Decks remains very good. CBS has tried to pivot Star Trek from Sci-Fi to Space Adventure, and that's been ugly. But not every series they've spun out took that tone.
Also Orville - particularly the latest season - has been incredible. Everything Star Trek is supposed to be.
Lower Decks remains very good.
It's finished. The final episode aired last week.
Also Orville - particularly the latest season - has been incredible. Everything Star Trek is supposed to be.
That show surprised the hell out of me, especially because the first season has more of Seth's typical touch, but then he drops some of the silliness and dives right into being a Trek replacement. It feels like every episode or two has some powerful commentary and things don't always go the way you think they should because situations are more complex than simply right-or-wrong... Like old Trek.
I am still bummed Lower Decks is over. Great finale, and I'm glad they wrapped up the story nicely. My only complaint is to Paramount not giving us more seasons.
They didn’t have everything figured out back then. For one, they bullied Spock for what we could only describe today as his neurodiversity.
The message I got from McCoy was that humans got along because they found new people to be racist against instead of each other
There will never come a time in which we have everything figured out.
Yes but that doesn’t mean we should never look back and see how far we’ve come, just as we look forward and see how far we have to go.
excuse me, i have a degree in bullshit. We have figured out everything. 1+1=2. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
And new people who haven't figured out yet are born all the time!
And there will be things that are being created today that's considered progressive that in 20 years, will be considered as missing the mark.
McCoy called Spock "green-blooded" on multiple occasions - and once a "hobgoblin". And I would call the Vulcan penchant for logic a cultural trait, not neurodiversity.
You should see the episode when a woman body swapped with Kirk, and how the Enterprise crew suspected something was wrong
The one I always feel like I need to warn people about is the treatment of Rand in The Enemy Within. Particularly since that happens so early in the series.
McCoy was racist as shit and would not only have been cashiered, he probably would have been charged for hate speech
They were even more upfront about it in TOS for some issues too.
I remember many instances where they say "We have women in our crew in the future." It's not like DISCO flaunted around saying "we don't hate gay people in this ship."
Like I understand that DISCO isn't everybody's favorite, and sure it has some issues, but all the flak it got for being "woke" and "preachy" was weird to me.
Part of Kirk's whole thing was preachy speeches, and Picard had many moments too.
Fun fact: Katherine Janeway didn't attend Starfleet Academy; she was in ROTC at the Samantha Carter School of Character Introduction.
I don't care about the woke nonsense. STD has very few redeeming qualities. Bad writing, bad acting. They spent little to no time flushing out the characters. I guess they didn't have time what with the universe about to end every 10 minutes. I only watched for Anthony Rapp, Doug Jones and Michelle Yeoh. Everyone else was a stinker or didn't get enough screen time.
I quite agree STD wasn’t everyone’s favourite, in any case it wasn’t mine, although I really tried. But whining about it being woke was just stupid.
Saying discovery is woke with their crew split in two parts, the queer ones all packed together and then the "normal" ones, seems like a stretch.
The gay couple basically adopts the non binary one who is in a couple with the trans one, are friends with the gay engineer, but barely even talk to the rest of the crew? Ah and sex scenes between straight people but the most the gay couple gets is sitting next to each other, brushing teeth and a small kiss (not that it's a bad thing on its own, it forced the writing to actually show a relationship and not just a bunch of sex, which is positive)
That did really bother me, shoehorning all the queer people into their own little box after being far more progressive in previous seasons. Literally anyone else on the crew could have adopted Adira (who I didn't really care much for as a character anyway, she was basically SNW Uhura but not as good an actor), but they had it be Stamets and Culber. How about making it, say, Detmer?
It’s not like DISCO flaunted around saying “we don’t hate gay people in this ship.”
Well, after DS 9 it would just be repetitive. Also TNG spent a few episodes on this exact point, but it wasn't a main topic.
But people tend to focus their complains about things being "preachy" when those things put the preach above the story-telling. DISCO absolutely had this flaw in some point or another. Never for very long, though, so it really wasn't a main characteristic. Anyway, when a show is simply good, almost nobody gets bothered by the preaching.
The only issue disco has ever actually had is their serialized episodes. People hate on the other shit cause they're bigots. Its still good Trek. The story is just less flexible.
The only issue disco has ever actually had is their serialized episodes.
And not spending enough on light bulbs in some episodes. I wondered if my TV was broken, at one point. Lol.
Kind of yeah, but Gene Roddenberry used allegories like the half black and half white dudes who hated each other - which took more effort than having characters just walk around in the present saying, "Wow, look at all the social injustice."
Yeah he was real subtle. Not full of preachy monologues at all.
Roddenberry was both a genuinely progressive guy and an extremely 20th century man. "In the future we're going to cure disease and hunger and everyone of all races and creeds will work together there's gonna be a black woman, an asian guy, a Russian and an alien with funny ears on the bridge all working as a team and the women will all wear wrist length gogo dresses and there's gonna be an episode where the crew is utterly baffled at the very concept of racism. We're gonna paint some actors with half of their faces white and half of their faces black and they're gonna be really horrible to each other and when asked why they're gonna say "They're white on the left side and we're white on the right side" and it's gonna make racism sound really dumb."
I struggle to have a problem with a guy whose message is "Systematic hatred is extremely bad and stupid, let's look at sexy legs instead."
cough mark of gideon cough
Hey, i'm an old fart and guess how many times i heard people say that exact same shit about TNG? The pussy version of trek, nothing like its predecessor, all they do is talk about their emotions!
Because that's what you had to do to get past the executives and the censors in the 1960s.
Just like how "Last Train to Clarksville" is about Vietnam.
That was an allegory??? (/s)
Holy Motherforkin Shirtballs! A The Good Place meme in the wild!
I remember this exact conversation in the show, too.
"It's like: Who died and put Aristotle in charge?"
Points to board "Plato."
Hey now hey now!
It's a cashless classless society, it's about economic class justice, too!
That part's just more in the background.
Not for Sisko it isn’t. I wish I’d been born on the other side of the Bell riots and WW3 but at least we have cool digital watches now
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
EDIT: I only noticed the username after I posted this, since it's clear this is what you were making reference to ha
We really should never have left the oceans.
Bro, IDIC.
This is perfect. Thank you for this.
OP what do you think of Discovery?
I ask this because 9/10 times someone talks about how Star Trek was "always woke", they are usually just salty people don't like Discovery and trying to pretend that most people who criticized it were bigots.
The other 1/10 times it's someone who doesn't even watch Star Trek trying to hijack the sub to push a bunch of performative culture war nonsense. However that usually involves a Tumblr post implying the Klingons were socially progressive because of how Kor treated Jadzia Dax.
how Kor treated Jadzia Dax.
For anyone who wasn't there, this moment was revolutionary, at the time.
"What should I even say if my friend comes out to me as Transgender?!" wasn't something everyone knew an answer to.
Having any character (Klingon or otherwise) handle learning that their friend's gender has changed, and react in a healthy way, on screen, on prime time television, was an important positive moment for a lot of clueless future-ally scifi fans.
You cant take the actions of one Klingon and assume that describes the behavior of the species. That's racist.
In the defense of people who constantly post the meme, they've never given enough thought to Star Trek to consider that some random Tumblr screen grab isn't accurate.
I'm always stunned how many people on this subreddit come off as vocally progressive, but don't bother actually watching the show. I guess that would take a modicum of effort.
Given that everyone who didn't like the show was a bigot it made me super interested in liking it.
Im always rather disappointed with this claim as doh, star trek is woke, it always was and nobody has complained about that part.
When people complain about the woke part they complain about that star trek WAS woke and intelligent, yet now just pretends to be woke and hangs it like dangling keys in front of us to hide the fact that it's become so absolutely shit.
Seriously, every criticism I've seen about it (and also every criticism I've lobbed at it) always gets "rebuked" with "you just hate woke!"
No I don't no we don't. I'm love the progressivism of old trek. I hate nu trek because it's empty vapid drek that just tries to cram a much "woke" in there not to be woke but just to hide the smell of shit.
Nu trek is awful.
People have been raving about brave new worlds but those same people were raving about the mental anguish that is discovery and cringe Picard. I'm a huge star trek fan, been so for 30 years, but after Picard S3 I simply stopped. I watched trek at least once a week for decades, buy I haven't watched anything trek ever since Picard ended. That's how off putting Picard was as a show.l, it managed to ruin TNG for me.
I know this will be down voted and people will just continue to say I am anti woke, that I love trumpmor whatever, even though none of that comes close to reality but nu trek fans have been... Different? Star trek fans were actually progressive and trying to make the world a better place. Ever since nu trek its been "think like us or fuck off"
I'm so done with star trek. Long live the Orville!
You like Orville but not Strange New Worlds or Lower Decks??? Also puzzling you gave up after Picard S3, that was the only decent part of the whole show. Felt like an extra season of TNG.
Haven't watched strange new worlds. Everyone and their mother hyped discovery, and not only was it toe curling cringy bad, it was toxic. Had nothing to do with star trek.
Then there was Picard. Yay, the crew comes back toge... O wait. 3 godawful seasons where they managed to ruin Picard, then Q, then the entire TNG cast. The last season of Picard was based on a mind bogglingly dumb premise, characters were all different (as per usual in the Picard show). Watching Beverly go from risking her life and disobeying a direct order in order to save a victim to being a cold and efficient killernis just... Uugghh. The shape shifters have been turned into drek, manage to ruin that too, and well, the Borg was already castrated by Voyager, but that show at least still gave a damn. New trek does not.
After that Picard s3 I was done. No more. I used to watch trek at least once per week, haven't watched anything anymore ever since Picard.
Now everyone is raving about strange new worlds, and I'm not going to do it. I watched the Orville instead and LOVE it, adore it, it's the new star trek. Too bad it seems to have died an early dead, especially with Covid. Oh well.
Eithe
I hear you, but that last bit is just heresy
If it wasn't clear, the part about toxicity is about the fandom. Star Trek fandom has become quite toxic but quite in the opposite of what you'd think.
If you say that discovery is godawful (it is) then you're immediately antieoke and *phobic
I'm neither. I just don't want to watch a show that places virtue signalling above actually being a good show.
I also want a fandom that is honest enough to see that any post enterprise trek is NOT the same writing/acting/progressive quality as pre all that.
I've said this multiple times, on Reddit and Lemmy and so far most responses are "you're a Nazi" or something in that direction
No, they alternated.
Sometimes they did proper scifi.
Sometimes they did politics.
I'm in it for the scifi mself.
Sometimes they did proper scifi.
Sometimes they did politics.
Sometimes they did Space Wizards and sometimes they did Politics and sometimes they did both.
But the harder they leaned into actual Science Fiction the more they inevitably tackled the socio-economic ramifications of those technologies and discoveries. Legal Theories like The Prime Directive and social experiments like The Kobayashi Maru training exercise and the very depiction of aliens - the ultra-logical Vulcans who constantly resist their base emotional instincts, the war-loving Klingons, the xenophobic Romulans, the problem of domesticating an invasive species like the Tribbles - all convey political attitudes and ideologies.
This is inescapable. You can't create good apolitical Sci-Fi. Presenting the idea of a futuristic society without exploring the consequences of your modernizations is cowardly and boring.
Your assertion that any sci-fi at all isn't political is a particularly bold one.
But it's a fascinating thought, so I'm going on an unrequested quest:
Here's my attempt at "let's name a hard science fiction that isn't making a political statement".
Perhaps...
- "Frankenstein" is about grave robbing and biology horror and in no way an analogy for mistreatment of neurodivergent individuals.
- "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" is about a cool submarine and not about an ultra rich man's extreme rejection of modern societal norms bending the world of those around him.
- "The Martian" was about the cold hard science of a man surviving on Mars, and not all about humanity briefly overcoming our national rivalries to do the human thing and being one person home safely.
- "The Robot" is just about a time traveling robot, and not a sad prediction of mankind's likelihood to erradicate ourselves leaving only our automation to remember us by.
- "Bicentenial Man" is about robotics advances and has nothing to do with marginalized people fighting to have their human rights acknowledged.
- "The Expanse" is just about how dangerous space is, and not at all about how humanity tends to break off into adversarial groups.
- "Snow piercer" is about a cool train in the cold.
Okay, now I'm not even trying anymore, lol. (Snow piercer is blatantly deeply political, no matter how much I love the cool science train.)
I'm coming up short, arguing myself out of my best ideas, so far.
Hang on, I've got two:
- "Around the world in 80 days" is arguably at least slightly more about globe trotting and less about putting up with a rich employer's bullshit.
- "Journey to the Center of the Earth" is mostly about cool caves and dinosaurs?!
I should reread these two, but I don't remember many political messages.
(Edit. I bet someone is going to point out the political messages I missed in 80 Days and Journey. Considering how political I remember 20,000 Leagues being, I wonder if I just misremember the other two...)
At The Earth's Core is about how you can't mesmerize british people, and big mac boxes can breathe fire. I'm not sure if that's political or not.
You're a gross person
Since when is wokism about social justice?
Since when does wokism have meaning? Its just something the right uses to describe everything they dont like, like equal rights.
in a technical sense? yes.
in a practical sense? it's superficial, generally without any actual actions to address anything about it. they will praise a company for plopping rainbows on everything ONLY during the exact days of pride month while funding Christian gay conversion camps
