Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

[TaimuRadiu]

@Judge Holden

You are completely right in your breakdown. The thing was Sisko was actually a very principled man who hated himself for having to compromise his positions even a millimeter and acted with visceral disgust whenever he had to be around Dukat or accept his help for literally anything. It may not be hard to be a saint in paradise, but Sisko was saying that because he was trying to force himself to be a saint in the hinterland. Dukat was an evil person even for a Cardie, he was a fascist militarist who sold his people out to the Dominion to gain immense power for himself, and when he said he should have exterminated all Bajorans that's kind of a hint that he's not such a great guy.

Meanwhile you get Emperor George or whatever and a;lsdkfja;dsjfa;lsdfja;lsdjf you know what Discovery takes place in a completely different timeline and that's why nobody acknowledges it ever on pain of torture. I don't think it's referenced in SNW or LD even. Also Section 31 is smashed to bits in Discovery because evil computer bibbly bobbly.

Okay, but realistically the Bajorans weren't using those resources, and while people like to bring up the death rates on Bajor during the occupation; I would argue it's being misleading. I think we should look at some recent numbers from Qonos, and compare to during the occupation.

The Bajorans were outright stated to have been in a state of basically cultural stasis for some tens of thousands of years. Aside from the occasional freak incident like a Bajoran explorer making first contact with Cardassians before either species had any kind of controllable warp drive nothing really happened there; the same can be assumed to be for their medical science.

 

[Flexo]

It was not merely about respect for Rodenberry to keep the basic rules intact, quite a number of the writers have talked about how it steered them away from "easy" stories based around big splosions and gunfights and seething soap opera tier melodrama between the characters along with predictable "evil government conspiracy" or "edgy dystopia" plotlines which were in vogue at the time on TV which would have made the franchise just generic sci fi slop, and forced them to work their asses off in creating/ripping off stories that were interesting in their own right, or at least tried to be. Obviously this was not always successful as the writers could still fuck up or just be bad in general, as most clearly shown with early TNG and the rougher seasons of VOY and ENT, but even in badly written episodes there still remained the basic 'feel' of the franchise.

Exactly this. Hack artists will always talk about pushing boundaries and stuff, but true artists know, "art comes from adversity" and when you have a challenge - even a self-imposed one - you'll make something better.

Roddenberry needed to loosen up just a little, but he did have the right idea to push the writers to think deeper, and broader. What's interesting is that the makers of DS9 at least carried this idea and regularly pushed themselves into challenges (like turning a single episode they had planned into a 2-parter). What makes Voyager so disappointing is that for all the set up they had to challenge themselves, they ultimately played it safe. By that point they had turned Roddenberry's box not into a challenge to push themselves, but a comforting blanket to wallow in.

As much as we may deservedly shittalk the show's hard swerve to "DUKAT IS LITERALLY HITLER GUIZ SO STOP LIKING HIM!" at least they had the decency to treat him as literal hitler thereafter and had been treating him near enough this beforehand for it not to be too incongruous. Contrast with Georgiou who the protagonist decides to love based entirely on her own retarded shaniqua mommy issues and melodrama despite casually out-evilling the entire fucking Dominion all by herself between the genocides, murders by her own hand, cannibalism, and general atrocities she is casually noted to commit, and all this is just swept under the rug because of how the centre of the universe that is Michael Burnham wuvs her due to how she looks like her old mentor and....thats literally fucking it aside from how she is written to speak and act like a BPD edgelord zoomer in a wrinkly asian granny body, which inexplicably makes everyone love her too.

Piss off the "good guys" and ESPECIALLY "the hero" in any way and you are the vilest and most despicable monster in the universe and your death will be justified and hilarious, especially if you happen to exist as white or male or some unholy mixture thereof.

It is really hard not to look at the first season of Discovery and come away with the idea that the writers really believe if you are a white man - you are guilty and deserve death, no matter what you do (poor Cp. Lorca) while if you are a woman, especially a minority woman, you can do literally anything and be given unlimited chances for redemption.

Or basically if Hitler had actually looked like this:

The Discovery writers would be talking about how she was actually decent deep down.

 

[Gay Sex Enjoyer]

Okay, but realistically the Bajorans weren't using those resources, and while people like to bring up the death rates on Bajor during the occupation; I would argue it's being misleading. I think we should look at some recent numbers from Qonos, and compare to during the occupation.

 

[Judge Holden]

You are completely right in your breakdown. The thing was Sisko was actually a very principled man who hated himself for having to compromise his positions even a millimeter and acted with visceral disgust whenever he had to be around Dukat or accept his help for literally anything. It may not be hard to be a saint in paradise, but Sisko was saying that because he was trying to force himself to be a saint in the hinterland. Dukat was an evil person even for a Cardie, he was a fascist militarist who sold his people out to the Dominion to gain immense power for himself, and when he said he should have exterminated all Bajorans that's kind of a hint that he's not such a great guy.

I think a lot of it stems from how Nu Trek treats everything, from the setting to the lore to the notion that the characters are supposed to be actual working professionals and experts to basic fucking morality, as nothing beyond cheap and disposable aesthetics to paint over preening theater kid relationships and feelings centred melodrama in which the DEI interns and simpering hacks in the writing room act out their latest therapy sessions along with masturbatory fantasies about being the smartestest kid in high school whom everybody loves and beating up whatever chud-boogieman is in vogue to hate and how everyone wants to have sex with them and party with them because they are so sexy and cool and stuff.

Old Trek even at its nadir tried to treat characters like they were mature and functioning adults capable of performing their duties with professionalism without bursting into tears or starting fistfights or smoking space-crack while on duty, with failure to abide by these basic standards usually being a plot indicator that there is some chemical/mind control fuckery at play. Furthermore it generally treated evil as....well....fucking evil. As in "shit that is not written off because the writers decided the scumbag doing evil shit is badass and sexy" and the idea that one of the various blood drenched tyrants and sociopaths of the week would unironically and literally become besties with Kirk or Picard or Sisko or Archer or hell even Janeway would be fucking absurd because of how fucking despicable it would make these characters look. Sure they could act cordial enough if there was some contrived diplomacy reason or "greater threat" bullshit that justified them not throwing them in the brig for a one way trip to the New Zealand Gulag, but that was as far as they would go.

Sisko's hate for Dukat was both abstract in terms of "he murdered millions and caused horrifying suffering for countless others" but also extremely personal due to how much he had come to love and care for Bajor and its people despite being an outsider, with Dukats claims of also loving and caring for Bajor and its people despite being an outsider understandably enraging him given all he did to them.

Burnham in the hands of even a shit writer working under the assumption that she was not a nigh sociopathic retard whose moral compass was based solely on who asspatted her the hardest should have had a near equal hatred for Georgiou not only in the abstract "jesus fucking christ she is literally super space hitler" but also that she is a gleefully cruel and remorseless monster wearing the face of her mentor/mother figure and casually pissing over everything she stood for while presuming to act as Burnham's new mentor and mother figure. I.e. someone utterly anathema to her and what she is supposed to believe in.

View attachment 7774547

Now imagine if he actually was Gul Darheel and after hearing his sermon on why genocide was fuckin hilarious Kira decided she liked the cut of his rizz enough to treat him as her best friend/father figure while Sisko and O'Brien acted like giddy fangirls around him and Quark happily gave him drinks on the house, and the Guardian of Forever itself eventually manifested to declare him an official good guy who did nothing wrong and you will understand why I am angrily spergwalling more than usual today

It is really hard not to look at the first season of Discovery and come away with the idea that the writers really believe if you are a white man - you are guilty and deserve death, no matter what you do (poor Cp. Lorca) while if you are a woman, especially a minority woman, you can do literally anything and be given unlimited chances for redemption.

The only morality the writers had was whichever "vibe" was strongest that week in the woke media/consultancy bubble they exist in, which naturally resulted in black woman mommy issues and seething over facing consequences for retarded actions and not being fawned over enough being the centre of the show's moral universe with perpetual weeping over feelings and enforced celebration of how h*ckin valid every stunningly brave woman of color and size being front and centre while trillions die unmourned and unremarked in the background

 

[TaimuRadiu]

I think a lot of it stems from how Nu Trek treats everything, from the setting to the lore to the notion that the characters are supposed to be actual working professionals and experts

Human beings are still supposed to be human beings in the 23rd century aboard the Enterprise in TOS. A dictum for scriptwriting was something like "if it wouldn't fly on the bridge of the USS Iowa, it wouldn't fly on the bridge of the Enterprise." That was why when you had episodes like Kirk with a rapey transporter clone that was bad, since Starfleet was supposed to attract the best of the best and this was a bad thing. Even aboard the Ent-D, when humans were supposed to be a kind of super post-human, you saw raw emotion sometimes; DS9 was very much a reaction against TNG, but the characters were still supposed to be principled people, Sisko, Bashir, O'Brien, they all had principles, but they were still professionals in the Starfleet. You're completely right that when things happened they really were things happening - Spock getting high on space mushrooms and being all emotional wasn't supposed to be a good thing, Scotty starting a fistfight with Klingons over them insulting the Enterprise was winked and nodded at but still treated as massively unprofessional, etc.

Some stuff in nu Trek can be forgiven as the times changing, a 40 year old captain of a starship is going to bantz like Kirk did, there's going to be worries about ethnic intimidation, you wouldn't expect an ensign fresh out of the Academy to be as mature as a captain. I think Spock trying to come to grips with his human emotions is a good thing, a lot of fandom reaction against Vulcanians showing emotion I've already addressed in this thread. Spock was also much younger than most of the times we've seen him too. There's going to be fraternization aboard a deep space vessel anyway.

Furthermore it generally treated evil as....well....fucking evil.

See above my comments about even when Sisko or anyone had to work with Dukat it was still treated as basically an American Jew working with Hitler. There were outliers like things that were truly alien like Nagilum or the Borg, the Borg being enough of a threat that the Federation had basically a kill on sight order for them - and this was very well handled in TNG, with Picard, who had been assimilated and forced against his will to see the Borg use his Starfleet knowledge to kill tens of thousands if not millions of sentient people, still try to not just fucking kill them all and vociferously objecting to this when he was ordered to do so by Starfleet.

>Burnham

Burnham was blamed for the latest Klingon War that we never heard about ever and that the Enterprise didn't show up doing anything in. (My personal fan theory is that the Enterprise was doing shit for the United Earth Space Probe Agency and *not* the Federation Starfleet, but whatever.) I can understand having an amazing amount of guilt over that, I can understand seeing a woman who looked exactly like your mother figure and trying to bring her back with you, but Discovery outright showed Burnham selecting someone who was Mirror Saru literally for dinner and was forced to eat his brain while the Emperor looked on and smiled approvingly. You can say "let them die!" like Kirk did in a moment of weakness to Spock about Klingons, but Joe Klingon who lost his family in the Praxis disaster deserves help if offered and wasn't the person in charge who directed "hurr moon won't explode mine more!" (I know all of that was a metaphor for US/USSR detente and the Chornobyl disaster.) Them, not her, specifically, who was doing such a piss poor job of managing the Empire that there were several active resistance fronts and ran her super big starship off unstable mushrooms or smth. Then she was used by the Federation to plant a bomb inside Qo'nos and then uh . . . You know what Discovery's writing is just shit.

The only morality the writers had was whichever "vibe" was strongest that week in the woke media/consultancy bubble they exist in

Mirror Lorca was automatically worse than Emperor George because he said MAKE THE EMPIRE GLORIOUS AGAIN! And when you look at what happened after this, the Empire was clearly in a state of flux enough for the alien Spock to become Emperor, and the Empire fell as a result to the *even worse* Klingons and Cardassians.

 

[Hey Johnny Bravo]

I think a lot of it stems from how Nu Trek treats everything, from the setting to the lore to the notion that the characters are supposed to be actual working professionals and experts to basic fucking morality, as nothing beyond cheap and disposable aesthetics to paint over preening theater kid relationships and feelings centred melodrama in which the DEI interns and simpering hacks in the writing room act out their latest therapy sessions along with masturbatory fantasies about being the smartestest kid in high school whom everybody loves and beating up whatever chud-boogieman is in vogue to hate and how everyone wants to have sex with them and party with them because they are so sexy and cool and stuff.

To put it simply: the writers for Nu-Trek see everything as all-good or all-bad and that simplistic view of the world seeps into the writing. Even in TNG with Picard, he was faced with serious moral and ethical conundrums that he and the rest of the crew openly wrestled with. Nu-Trek is childish in its approach to topics that older Trek series would spend an entire episode exploring.

Dukat in the final season of DS9 stands out as particularly hamfisted because, for the whole series, he was a complex character. Imagine every character being extreme like Dukat in a Trek series and there you have Nu-Trek.

 

[Chunky Salsa]

The idea that Female Ming the Merciless can be redeemed after doing this like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sM590_eSEI

Is genuinely insane. She glassed an entire hemisphere of a planet as a casual move. Also, the negress actress playing the MC is bad. She watched an entire planet die and she looks like she's just been cut up in traffic or something.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Empire was clearly in a state of flux enough for the alien Spock to become Emperor, and the Empire fell as a result to the *even worse* Klingons and Cardassians.

In Mirror, Mirror, the Terrans weren’t really any "better" or "worse" than the Klingons. The only reason it feels that way is because Mirror Kirk has a magic murder mirror that knows everything and can vaporize anybody who even thinks about disagreeing with him. Not saying the Terrans were sympathetic... But then Kurtzman gets his hands on it and suddenly the Terran Empire has committed more genocide than literally every other species in the show combined, just so they could parachute an Oscar winner into the main cast again. (Brilliant idea killing her off the first time, btw.)

And when she comes back it’s not even as a sympathetic, reformed Harley Quinn sort. No. She's still evil except now she is a government employee. Georgiou was so indispensable to Starfleet that they had to replace her with someone who looks like her but acts absolutely nothing like her, and also she owns a nightclub.



That’s a pretty big ask for the audience. And if the rumors are true, I’m not shocked Skydance shat their pants when they saw Kurtzman’s oily contract, because he is not worth it.

 

[TaimuRadiu]

The idea that Female Ming the Merciless can be redeemed after doing this like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sM590_eSEI

Is genuinely insane. She glassed an entire hemisphere of a planet as a casual move. Also, the negress actress playing the MC is bad. She watched an entire planet die and she looks like she's just been cut up in traffic or something.

Sonequa Martin Green actually is a great actress, she was playing the character as if she was colonized by the Vulcan into forgetting her heritage and language.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Sonequa Martin Green actually is a great actress, she was playing the character as if she was colonized by the Vulcan into forgetting her heritage and language.

If Martin-Green’s supposed to be playing some emotionally incontinent alien, then hat's off. Because if that was her actually “acting” then she made Denise Crosby look like Daniel Day-Lewis.

 

[Curzon Dax-sama]

re Section 31, the organisation, not the movie that shall not be named:

It’s not that they operate in the shadows or engage in morally questionable acts that makes them dangerous. Their very existence implies that all the shining, morally upright heroes like Picard are merely children playing games in a glorified playground, while the grown ups do the real work. That Star Trek’s ideals falter when confronted with the universe’s darkest realities—that the Federation’s ideas don’t really work.

I think that's somewhat accurate, but not entirely. See, the thing here is that people like Sloan still share the same set of ethics and ideals at the core. Infact, I am convinced they are stronger believers than Picard or Bashir are. They do what they do so that Picard and Bashir don't have to, without diminishing their achievements. An utopian society like the Federation has failure points. Section 31 protects those failure points against hostile actors, fully understanding the moral consequences that'll have for them on the individual level. They can protect paradise, but will never live in it.

What that also means is that Sloan would fail at doing what Picard does. And he knows it.

Section 31’s very existence is one of the most dangerous concepts Star Trek has ever introduced— but not in the way the brain-dead Kurtzman thinks. It’s because it undermines the core ideals of the franchise.

Maybe. I think most people never fully understood Section 31, not even the people who created it. They think it's an anti-thesis of Federation core values, when that's not the case. I mean, Sloan said as much outright: we sacrifice those ideals in our daily lives in order to protect them, so that you, Bashir, won't be forced to make such a choice.

Kurtzman thinks Section 31 is all about abandoning the core principles and ethics that make the Federation what it is to do weird, evil edgy spy shit. Words used to have meaning, and there used to be a difference between sacrificing something vs. abandoning something. Not that Hollywood-retards would get that...

 

[Gay Sex Enjoyer]

In Mirror, Mirror, the Terrans weren’t really any "better" or "worse" than the Klingons. The only reason it feels that way is because Mirror Kirk has a magic murder mirror that knows everything and can vaporize anybody who even thinks about disagreeing with him. Not saying the Terrans were sympathetic... But then Kurtzman gets his hands on it and suddenly the Terran Empire has committed more genocide than literally every other species in the show combined, just so they could parachute an Oscar winner into the main cast again.

The Kurtzman Mirrorverse feels like a parody. The costumes are somehow more dumb looking than the TOS ones and the hammy acting is even worse.

I can't take them seriously at all.

you can’t always quote Shakespeare, brag about humanity, and lecture alien species to win. Sometimes hard choices must be made, but that doesn’t mean you have to become a monster.

 

[Chunky Salsa]

I can't take them seriously at all.

It's because it's just fucking smeared with self referential irony. It's like everyone is constantly miming 'Lol, I'm Trek, what a nerd I am!'

 

[Screamer_2]

New episode coming tonight. I've seen no previews. No nothing about it.

What will be going on with Spock and La'an? Will they move on from just having fun?

Will Uhura and Oretega's brother finally go on a date?

Will the Enterprise crew actually explore a strange new world?

Will it be a gimmick episode?

Will it involve a set that is small to accommodate being in the volume?

What will be like something from Community?

 

[Mr. Racewar1488]

What will be like something from Community?

Paintball episode, calling it now. Spock and Scotty have to share quarters.

They should hire Joel McHale to play a captain in Starfleet. He's gotta be cheap to hire and he can act better than most people on the show.

 

[Flexo]

the idea that one of the various blood drenched tyrants and sociopaths of the week would unironically and literally become besties with Kirk or Picard or Sisko or Archer or hell even Janeway would be fucking absurd because of how fucking despicable it would make these characters look

There was 1 exception.

Kor.

Later in the episode we even get this bit:
"Attention. Attention, all Organians. Attention. This is Commander Kor. The two Federation prisoners have escaped, obviously with outside aid. They will be returned immediately. So that you will know we mean what we say… listen."
"Those are Klingon phasers. Take the door. Get down, gentlemen."
"In the courtyard of my headquarters, two hundred Organians have just been killed."
"Two hundred of them…"
"In two hours, two hundred more will die, and two hundred more after that until the two Federation spies are turned over to us. This is the order of Kor, son of Rynar."

- Kor and James T. Kirk

(Yes I know, technically given what we learn about the Organians, they probably didn't actually die, but I don't think he is absolved of his sins for a lack of ability.)

But years later? Oh Dax will hang out with him and they'll be best buddies! He'll go on adventures with Worf!

We'll even do a touching funeral for him.

The idea that Female Ming the Merciless can be redeemed after doing this like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sM590_eSEI

Is genuinely insane. She glassed an entire hemisphere of a planet as a casual move. Also, the negress actress playing the MC is bad. She watched an entire planet die and she looks like she's just been cut up in traffic or something.

Damn the Discovery lead just cannot act, can she? Forget Shatner, I'm surprised her eyeballs weren't popping out and slamming into the sets there.

Sonequa Martin Green actually is a great actress, she was playing the character as if she was colonized by the Vulcan into forgetting her heritage and language.

You, are high.

Maybe. I think most people never fully understood Section 31, not even the people who created it. They think it's an anti-thesis of Federation core values, when that's not the case. I mean, Sloan said as much outright: we sacrifice those ideals in our daily lives in order to protect them, so that you, Bashir, won't be forced to make such a choice.

Know who did get it?

Wasn't the divergence point in the Mirror universe that Rome never fell?

No, it actually was the day of First Contact. In the Shatner books, it was a mishap with the memory erasing procedure on Cochrane. He had vague memories of the Borg and was debating whether to voice his experience to the Vulcans. The implication being that in the Mirror Universe, he did so and thus humans + vulcans went hard core to try and prep to fight the Borg and became a bit fascist in the process.

In Enterprise it was just flat out the people storming the Vulcan ship.

 

[Gay Sex Enjoyer]

In Enterprise it was just flat out the people storming the Vulcan ship.

Well yeah I remember that one.

My assumption was that humanity was more war-like culturally prior to first contact specifically because of Cochrane whipping out the Boondocks Special on some space elves.

In the main universe he was just a hapless inventor that drowned his sorrows in booze and chased some fantasy about getting rich and living easy before meeting his destiny, so there must be a reason he (and everyone else) is strapped and trigger happy in the Mirror-verse.

 

[Flexo]

Well yeah I remember that one.

My assumption was that humanity was more war-like culturally prior to first contact specifically because of Cochrane whipping out the Boondock Special on some space elves.

In the main universe he was just a hapless inventor that drowned his sorrows in booze and chased some fantasy about getting rich and living easy before meeting his destiny, so there must be a reason he (and everyone else) is strapped and trigger happy in the Mirror-verse.

After WW3 when they even say there's very few governments left in the world, it really makes perfect sense for him to be strapped and trigger happy.

If anything it's a bit more strange why he would have given the aliens a chance. I think the idea in Trek is that his fateful decision altered the whole galaxy there - would mankind be better or worse, etc etc.

 

[Captain Syrup]

a set that is too small to accommodate their volume?

This comment pulled me back into those endless fat Tilly jokes, and now I’m nostalgic-sad.

 

[Gay Sex Enjoyer]

After WW3 when they even say there's very few governments left in the world, it really makes perfect sense for him to be strapped and trigger happy.

Well yeah of course, I'm just saying the difference must be explained by something. WW3 obviously wasn't the deciding factor, given prime Cochrane's biggest moral failing was pissing outside and being kinda selfish.


Though the idea that Prime Cochrane also had the shotgun and he just decided not to use it is extremely funny.