The social commentary messages were done so much better in old trek. Occasionally they got a little preachy with a few Picard speeches here and there but ethical conflicts and debates were handled with care. Ethical debates had both sides treated like actual people with opposing views and hashed things out like adults and not immature children. No Interjections telling someone to stfu, no emasculation of male characters required, etc. Nu trek is just there to have one sided preachfests by fat dykes on soapboxes.
I'm not sure what the wider thread's opinion of Vic Lasagna's
Star Trek Continues fan show is (I find it very hit and miss, but am impressed by the production effort), but I've always been struck by how it's got two particular episodes that illustrate how to represent social topics in Star Trek, vs how not to.
In Episode 9, "
What Ships Are For", the crew of the Enterprise visits a world that, due to a non-sense Treknobable reason, exists in black and white, like a 1950's TV show. The prosperous residents are at war with a nearby world that has constantly been sending invasion attempts due to their own world's increasing inhospitality. Kirk and team overturn their society by allowing them to see in color, where they find the invading peoples are unknowingly already everywhere in their society, even in their own families. It's obviously an allegory with a pro-immigration message (where they shoved a bunch of money at John De Lancie to play a bit role for 5 minutes).
The other example is Episode 7, "
Embracing the Winds", where Spock is in competition for the vacant captaincy of a starship with a young ambitious and questionably capable female. Admiral Erin Grey (of 70's Buck Rogers fame) serves as judge. Very little happens in the episode, aside from Commander bossy-pants giving long speeches about early 2010's fourth wave feminism that could have been copied directly from a contemporary Anita Sarkeesian diatribe. All the characters nod along politely throughout her terrible arguments noting what good points she's making. Then the episode resolves with the vacancy no longer available, leading to nothing happening, other than Captain Vic pondering how wahman have been so done wrong.
Now, being an evil xenophobic right-wing patriarchal monster, I think the message behind both of these episodes is utterly retarded. However, the immigration episode, whatever you think of it's technical merits, at least tries to handle the modern day topic indirectly like a proper TOS episode. Similarly to how racial conflicts in the 60's were handled with the bi-colored Cheronites in the TOS episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield". I may disagree with the message, but I sympathized with the characters and could enjoy the story, and perhaps I might think further on the underlying message it presented.
Embracing the Winds just hits you upside the head with modern politically correct opinion and then grins at you with smug satisfaction. I'm not entertained. I have no sympathy for the characters. I definitely won't think further on the topics. I just end up wanting everyone annoying asshole involved in the production to be put in camps. All of the NuTrek writing is like this.
As an aside, on double-checking the spelling of
Cheronite, I discovered that Nutrek had ruined that episode too, featuring multiple examples of this species surviving their extinction as shown in TOS, completely negating the key message of the episode. Also, amusingly both of the survivors they showed were of the right-side-black
