Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

[Curzon Dax-sama]

I think it's dumber than some supposed imminent collapse of the global order: the current stock of showbiz writers just suck ass and it's all propped up by political nonsense. The cast and crew for Academy can and will piss and moan until they breathe their last breath that the chuds killed their show, not their incompetence, and stupid fans will parrot that in the ridiculous hope that they can seem intelligent to some poor AI scraping 2020's Internet sites for data. Nevermind the fact that these fans would happily scalp the people they supposedly support if it meant 5 minutes of Internet fame.

Societies wither away and collapse solely for dumb reasons: incompetence, arrogance, dissonance/disconnection between elites and the general population, greed, grift/graft. What kind of culture they produce before they do is indicative of the dumb reasons at play, and it's always the same. Usually, some sort of notion of 'equality' has set in by that time.

Current year+11 Trek is full of that noise.

You know, thinking about all of that crap, I do wonder what a North Korean version of Trek might look like.

 

[Hey Johnny Bravo]

Societies wither away and collapse solely for dumb reasons: incompetence, arrogance, dissonance/disconnection between elites and the general population, greed, grift/graft. What kind of culture they produce before they do is indicative of the dumb reasons at play, and it's always the same. Usually, some sort of notion of 'equality' has set in by that time.

Current year+11 Trek is full of that noise.

I get your point and I like you but, respectfully, I disagree with the notion that current Star Trek being dogshit is indicative of an incoming American societal collapse. It's just bad TV.

You know, thinking about all of that crap, I do wonder what a North Korean version of Trek might look like.

This is what I come to Kiwi Farms to discuss.

 

[Curzon Dax-sama]

I get your point and I like you but, respectfully, I disagree with the notion that current Star Trek being dogshit is indicative of an incoming American societal collapse. It's just bad TV.

If it was only Trek and only one bad series I'd agree. But since it's everything else too and culture is a reflection of society, well... And no, this isn't only about America. This happens everywhere in the western world.

This is what I come to Kiwi Farms to discuss.

Normies wouldn't understand, lol.

 

[m1ddl3m4rch]

If it was only Trek and only one bad series I'd agree. But since it's everything else too and culture is a reflection of society, well... And no, this isn't only about America. This happens everywhere in the western world.

Normies wouldn't understand, lol.

I wish @Gehenna ז״ל were still with us.

Even so, if the end of the world is ten years off, I'd rather have a few more things done by then instead of giving up today. As much as there is to complain about, under Biden I would've been so happy to know things have reversed as much as they have, and people have awoken as much as they have.

 

[Captain Syrup]

They were gonna recycle the Strange New Worlds sets for Paul Wesley’s Year One (such a derivative title), but the thing is they took the sets apart already. Were they just going to keep repainting the same corridor like Voyager did with TNG sets? Apparently they decided it still wasn't worth the money.

I haven’t seen anyone hyped about Wesley as Kirk, either. They made him subdued, like he’s the thoughtful voice of reason, because Chris Pine had a monopoly on being a crazy idiot.

Ethan Peck looks like a Calvin Klein ad. I don’t think there’s massive demand for a solo show with those guys.

I shall take my Maori statues and halfmoons, thank you very much. But deep down you know I'm right.

 

[Curzon Dax-sama]

One day, your granite and moonrock supplies will run dry. But fortunately, it is not this day!

 

[OutInTheRain]

I get your point and I like you but, respectfully, I disagree with the notion that current Star Trek being dogshit is indicative of an incoming American societal collapse. It's just bad TV.

I don't think so either. What I think it is a broad sign of an industry collapse. Entertainment has spent the last 15 years getting flooded with money. Money from rather dumb investors playing Masters of the Universe to assuage the guilt from how they made their money in the first place.

You also have the clash between high culture and pop culture. High culture wants to be really gay and ultra feminist. Pop culture wants explosions and cool shit. All the people who could write pop culture have been pushed out of the industry and have moved elsewhere. Like Youtube or streaming. You have people who want to write high culture now writing pop culture and they hate it.

Now I do think as the money leaves entertainment, you will see a small correction and productions begin to move elsewhere, as there is always a desire to create and to entertain. But we will stop seeing anything on the scale we have had. Any established franchises are done though.

 

[Gay Sex Enjoyer]

 

[William Murderface]

As for "Far Beyond the Stars," I thought that was a great episode, so I don't see a problem with it.

I'm not saying it wasn't. It was. But it was no longer timely or relevant. It takes place in the 1940s, so 50 years before the airdate of the show. All those things like the rampant and overt racism were gone, the 1965 Civil Rights Act had been in place for decades (not to mention cases like Heart of Atlanta or Little Rock being older than that), the idea of a space station led by a black officer was just the norm, and we had blacks in every position in America by that point. We had black members of Congress, the Supreme Court, the media, CEOs, surgeons, astronauts, movie stars, professors, governors, musicians, writers, and were a mere decade from the first black president. The situation that Benny Russell faced was in the rear view mirror. And for Benjamin Sisko, it was 500 years in the past. It should have been him waking up from the dream in a cold sweat and saying "I can't believe bad stuff happened to my ancestors like that. Oh well, we're long past that nonsense." Just to give the same time span, my English ancestors 500 years ago were killing each other over whether they were Catholic or Protestant.

Star Trek pried itself on being a mirror to reflect society as it was at the time via the prism of sci-fi, but we had Behr writing an episode about stuff that had been fixed when he had been a child just so he could stroke his dyed beard and click his tongue.

A better episode, and one that was still relevant in later 1997 and early 1998, would have been O'Brien and being transported back to The Troubles in Northern Ireland. At least that was still going on at the time of the episode's release. But everyone could say "yeah, racism is stupid. Thankfully it's in the past." It was just Trek playing it safe while still saying how cutting edge societally it was because once upon a time it had been. The Baby Boomers who showed up to run TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT really didn't need to do a lot of the same coded writing their fathers did with TOS and shows like Twilight Zone had because by the 80s and 90s most of the big societal problems outside of homosexuals had been solved. But they needed to pretend they were still pushing that envelope and could only really do that by looking at the past.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Star Trek pried itself on being a mirror to reflect society as it was at the time via the prism of sci-fi, but we had Behr writing an episode about stuff that had been fixed

I don’t know how you can say Trek is just holding up a mirror to modern problems when Kirk has to stop fascism not once but twice.



If Janeway showed up in 1950s New York she wouldn't be fine with being a housewife. The point was not the racism, the point is that people who notice problems are often considered insane.

 

[William Murderface]

I don’t know how you can say Trek is just holding up a mirror to modern problems when Kirk has to stop fascism not once but twice.

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If Janeway showed up in 1950s New York she wouldn't be fine with being a housewife. The point was not the racism, the point is that people who notice problems are often considered insane.

The Enterprise stopped fascism several times, just in various color clothes, because the writers in the 1960s saw that human freedom was worth fighting for. Sometimes they were Nazis, sometimes the Roman Empire, sometimes Klingons, but that fascism was always going to show back up and always needed to be opposed. The writers of DS9 didn't say "the people pointing out problems are painted as crazy, just look" and couch it in anything but good old fashioned racism for any reason than it was low hanging fruit. They could have made it with O'Brien and anti-Irish sentiment or put Sisko in a past where blacks were in charge and he was the editor responsible for squashing a white writer because his publisher didn't want any blancos getting above their station and that Benny Russell had to fight for it, or any number of other ways to make the point. 1940s racism was just the quick and easy way to tell the story and give Brooks yet another excuse to over emote.

They could even have had an episode where the ancestor of Sisko was selling another ancestor of Sisko into slavery in the 1700s and yet another ancestor of Sisko was saying how it was wrong. Explore that story if you really want to tackle the black experience and the message of how the people pointing out the problems are treated by the rest of society.

 

[Hey Johnny Bravo]

I just liked the 1953 setting and seeing all the cast out of makeup.

 

[William Murderface]

I just liked the 1953 setting and seeing all the cast out of makeup.

It was a nice change of pace. It would have been funny if the Benny Russell character kept doing a very slight double take each time someone like Michael Dorn or one of the other actors who normally had his or her head covered in latex showed up on screen the first time like "wait a minute..."

 

[m1ddl3m4rch]

If the Pah-Wraiths wanted to trap someone in a delusion that the half-Prophet half-human emissary was really an insane 1950s sci-fi writer, the episode would include racial issues if the human half was black, and wouldn't if it were white.

Trek has always been morality plays in space. Sometimes the moral is one we already know pretty well.

As for fascism I'll just observe that the most vocal about it are the worst at spotting it. They're also very prone to taking every depiction of it and hobby horsing around.

 

[Hey Johnny Bravo]

Can you niggers stop talking about the racial themes of Star Trek and get to discussing what a North Korean Star Trek episode would look like?

 

[William Murderface]

If the Pah-Wraiths wanted to trap someone in a delusion that the half-Prophet half-human emissary was really an insane 1950s sci-fi writer, the episode would include racial issues if the human half was black, and wouldn't if it were white.

Trek has always been morality plays in space. Sometimes the moral is one we already know pretty well.

As for fascism I'll just observe that the most vocal about it are the worst at spotting it. They're also very prone to taking every depiction of it and hobby horsing around.

If we're going that route, TOS already did "racism is bad" far more effectively with Let That Be Your Last Battlefield where the crew outright says "racism is fucking stupid" and the two black and white guys show up to find their entire world was destroyed by their race war. Or when Abe Lincoln comes to town and calls Uhura a charming nigress and she says not to worry about it because in the future we didn't worry about words.

 

[William Murderface]

Can you niggers stop talking about the racial themes of Star Trek and get to discussing what a North Korean Star Trek episode would look like?

Short, very skinny (except for a fatter Captain Kilk and Mistel Spock) but everyone has the same Pyongyang-approved haircut.

 

[Curzon Dax-sama]

If we're going that route, TOS already did "racism is bad" far more effectively with Let That Be Your Last Battlefield where the crew outright says "racism is fucking stupid" and the two black and white guys show up to find their entire world was destroyed by their race war. Or when Abe Lincoln comes to town and calls Uhura a charming nigress and she says not to worry about it because in the future we didn't worry about words.

Yes, and then comes your average millenial coastal shitlib and goes full on "AKSHUALLY, sweety, even 400 years from now whitey has to be found guilty for things he didn't do and should be punished, emasculated, and genocided". I'm so sick of millenials and their playdoh understanding of society and politics.

As for fascism I'll just observe that the most vocal about it are the worst at spotting it. They're also very prone to taking every depiction of it and hobby horsing around.

Fascism is socialism in decay. Socialists have historically a very, very bad track record at detecting fascism. Not that shitlib millenials would understand that, because they don't know much about anything. But it explains neatly why they're so bad at subliminal messaging and writing stories. Everything is fucking hamfisted, gay, retarded, incompetently done and stupid. These people are fundamentally incapable of assuming a perspective that's not their own. They can't conceive of belief systems, world views and opinions that are not their own. They don't have a theory of mind for that. Say what you want about boomers, but at least they knew how to do Trek in the 90s.

 

[Captain Syrup]

If we're going that route, TOS already did "racism is bad" far more effectively

I feel you're comparing apples to oranges,

They could even have had an episode where the ancestor of Sisko was selling another ancestor of Sisko

I forgot what your original point was.

Wait, how often does Sisko talk about racism? Does he walk in like "Hello I am Captain Black History Month"?

“Far Beyond the Stars” is not necessarily about Sisko nor is any one scene actually "happening," it's similar to Picard in "The Inner Light".

The other 'old Earth" episode is "Past Tense", which is more about class, inequality, blight. All current day issues.

In "Bada-Bing, Bada-Bang" he complains about the the dress-up casino simulation because the real Vegas was a literal Sundown Town.



Frankly I think it makes his over-the-top BIG MONEY BIG MONEY performance funnier in hindsight.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

If we're going that route, TOS already did "racism is bad" far more effectively with Let That Be Your Last Battlefield where the crew outright says "racism is fucking stupid" and the two black and white guys show up to find their entire world was destroyed by their race war. Or when Abe Lincoln comes to town and calls Uhura a charming nigress and she says not to worry about it because in the future we didn't worry about words.

iirc one of the bits of LTBYLB that people don't bring up much is the guy Riddler was chasing actually killed a lot of people and shit

In "Bada-Bing, Bada-Bang" he complains about the the dress-up casino simulation because the real Vegas was a literal Sundown Town.

I loved how literally everybody is like "ben calm your tits it's a fucking game"