Why Star Trek's Gates McFadden Struggled With Gene Roddenberry's Work - /Film

One of the things I've liked from all the "new" Trek (Discovery, Strange New World, Lower Decks, and Picard) is that writers who grew up with TNG and its flaws (which shared similar flaws with the other Trek of that era) have very pointedly been fixing those things, or at least lampshading them.

And it's just really cool to see newer Trek, which was written by writers raised on old Trek, learning from and doing better than its predecessors. It's kind of a meta thing, almost...Trek is about learning and doing better, and now writers who watched it and wanted to learn and do better are learning and doing better. (And making mistakes here and there--but that's only grist for the NEXT generation to learn from, eh? Haha.)

Like, I remember in Discovery when an Admiral who was previously a ship's councilor showed up. It felt very much like a response to how Troi was handled. (Although I admit I didn't like how Troi was handled in the last season of Picard, as I was hoping her to show some competence in a certain scene. Sigh.)

felt that creator Gene Roddenberry had some unenlightened ideas about women

I can't help but suspect that men with "enlightened" ideas about women in the 1960s were still fairly rare, especially for 2020s values of "enlightened". For Hell's sake, we still have people who think women's suffrage was a mistake, and a Supreme Court that decided that it was a good idea to make women's ownership of their own bodies (particularly their reproductive organs) once again subject to the whims of state legislatures after 49 years of protection under Federal case law.

(And I blame the Democrats; these assholes had 49 years to ram through a Constitutional amendment or at least solid Federal legislation guaranteeing a woman's right to decide when and if she would have children.)

She's definitely not wrong, but the constant comparisons to Picard don't help. Making this about one of Star Trek's best series vs one of its absolute worst series is a weird choice.