Conservatives hated star trek when it first aired in the 60s.
There isn’t a single thing in life that they can just accept as it is.
If they don’t control it they can’t accept it
Or if they aren’t being controlled.
And now they whine constantly about how woke the new Trek is and how much better the old Trek was because it didn’t hit you over the head with such liberal concepts like racism, sexuality, or politics. 😂
I will say how awesome would it be if children came out genderless till adulthood then they touch a seashell to pick on their 18th birthday. Solve so may problems. STEM becomes more accessible to woman. No pink tax on toys.
When did it become woke? The Cage. When there was a competent women wearing pants, as 2nd in command and not used as a damsel where Pike occasionally slapped her ass and called her toots.
Not to mention a black woman as communications officer on the bridge. All this happens within the first few … seconds of the pilot?
Roddenberry always wanted it to be moral plays disguised with prosthetics and effects. It’s been woke since conception.
It didn’t become woke after Enterprise, just mostly shitty. With showrunners that like to hide behind the supposed wokeness as a defense against criticism and rightwing assholes happily blaming the shittiness on wokeness.
It was shitty writing with zero subtly.
Kinda like the original Footloose where it introduces how strongly against dancing the reverend and town is and only later does it slowly build to the revelation his son died after a night of partying.
But the remake has to open with the party and deaths, funeral and banning dancing.
Trek was conceived woke. If anything it’s moved away from that with its overuse of Section 31 and the mirror universe. And now there’s a war college.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve despised Section 31 almost from its inception. I don’t mind the concept of the Federation having spies and stuff, but an out of control shadow organization who claims it’s secretly running things is a little too X-Files.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve despised Section 31 almost from its inception.
It was intriguing back when it was one guy and you didn’t know if he was sane. Now they’re the Heroic Protectors Of Starfleet! The post-scarcity diverse utopia needs unaccountable fascists slinking around in black pleather behind the scenes in order to function, after all.
1966 is the answer
My biggest problem with NuTrek is that it’s too dark. Not in a “thematic” sense but in “projected photons” sense. I feel like I’m straining my eyes to see what’s happening on the the set.
It’s one of the reasons I loved Lower Decks so much. I could see what was happening.
The difference now isn’t a matter of woke vs not woke. The stories have become way more interpersonal drama rather than the older sci-fi focused story telling style, and that just happens to make it seem like there are more woke issues being featured.
At least that’s my take on it.
That’s probably a good way of putting it. It seems like there is a greater appetite for personal narrative driven drama in general of late. I prefer a more plot driven narrative probably because I deal with personal narratives more than I’d like to already IRL.
I think it’s very easy to claim ‘woke’ with modern star trek, but I think the issue is that politics used to be more tightly wound into the plot in that they used to express leftist viewpoints in a natural way that served the plot. The episodes were well thought out and were rich with allegory and metaphors.
Now the political views have remained largely the same from before, but the writing has suffered to an extent that things feel forced and no longer serve the plot in a natural way. It’s less thought provoking, and more “here’s the moral of the story”. Which for better or worse only really underscores Star Trek’s leftist views.
You never watched TNG right ? It was literally either a philosophical lesson or a critic of society by episode …
Maybe take a little of that energy you spend watching Trek closely and put it towards reading comments more carefully?
That’s a very valid comment 😂
Sometimes I skim for “what makes this jerk wrong” too. Welcome to the club.
Yes, that was literally my point. I’m uncertain where the disagreement is?
TNG was rich with thought provoking philosophy, you would be left to ponder the morality of the episode long after the fact. Sometimes things were intentionally ambiguous, sometimes not. But the episodes always invited viewers to come to conclusions.
The writing style has shifted from that approach, with modern Trek the answers require significantly less digging, sometimes it feels like the lesson is being underscored. The morality is the same only how it is presented has shifted.
So what I’m saying is the politics is the same as it ever was, what has changed was the writing style.
I’m not even going to place a value judgement on that shift, some might prefer the face value appeal of modern Trek. Personally I prefer the writing style that was used on TNG, you may like a modern series better, either way it’s all good.
You’re acting like Star Trek used to be more subtle when it had episodes like “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”.
Valid point, TOS wasn’t always subtle. In my defense I was referring to the TNG, DS9, VOY, (and sometimes) ENT era. Whose writing often felt significantly more polished and less rushed than TOS.
So if you are trying to say modern Trek is written in a style closer to TOS, then yes I 100% concede to that point.
I would not say TNG was particularly more subtle. A gendered alien from a genderless race being put through conversion therapy is about as subtle as Let That Be Your Last Battlefield was. A planet of literal Native Americans in space being forcibly moved by Picard, who finds out he is the actual descendent of a 17th century coloniser, is somehow even less subtle. The Measure of a Man would have worked without explicitly bringing up slavery, but they made sure that it was brought up, and that it was a black woman who did it. Star Trek has pretty much always shouted its message for the people in the back row.
I think the problem is that in some of the newer trek, the political references are crude and sometimes tacked on when they are not even relevant.
Reread your post and I “may” have misunderstood you at first 😁
Bullshit. Modern star trek is fine I guess, but like, wasn’t the captain in ‘discovery’ ever so slightly faschy? There’s the ship that runs on doing mushrooms and an openly gay character. That’s like it. It’s not even the wokest star trek, what with the other one having the trans wormgirl and the sheriff who turns into a cloud for fun and the space-palestinian security officer and all the explicit antifascism while the semi-defecting fascist spy flirts with Dr. twink under the watchful eye of black space-jesus(n’awlins edition).
Compare it to actual woke fiction from the decade previous, three mediums:
Sense8(TV): the main character is just a trans woman, everything is a metaphor for ‘drugs are great, fuck the state’, and everything is queer. There’s a ‘detransition is murder’ arc. There’s a hive-mind-body-swapping orgy. Several, I think. Magical prison support is a major theme. Also prison breaks. Cops in your affinity group fucks everything up.
Pillars of eternity(video game): the druid is straight up an indigenous bisexual furry. If you’re too racist, he will seduce your wife, turn into a wolf, seduce your dog, and then steal your cart with all your beer on it on his way out. the paladin is transmasc-not-trans misotheist secret agent of kinda-revolutionary-kinda-dugallist france. he wizard is literally two spirit and a gay uptight British schoolboy/ancient appalachian party girl. The Americans worship the goddess of fire and conflict above all others and literally did the high fantasy Manhattan project to murder the god of forgiveness rebirth and being nice to each other when he popped into a dirt farmer and declared communism-jihad in canadappalachia. Everything is so Hegelian it hurts. There’s a joke ancap paladin subclass. The main plot is about the brutal violence of manifest destiny and its echoes through history, a stillbirth epidemic, and Americans all being howling fascists led by a shadow government of CIA telepaths. Doctor/scientists actually trying to solve the problem, who might even have a shot, are regularly lynched basically for being nerds.
I won’t even start on recent books, partially because I don’t look at publication dates for those, and partially because nobody else has ever read one. But let’s just say the nearest non-star-trek-branded equivalent to ‘star trek’ in literature (not a consideration in other media, went for 'within a decade) is the ‘culture’ series, which is falGsc(explicitly anarchist) where literally everyone is trans and drugs are a thing you get from your drug glands that grow in during puberty. Authority always turns out badly.
Discovery was generally written badly, so yeah, the message also suffered from that. If there even was one.
And that’s kind of what I’m getting at, the writing for Discovery was lacking in a way that everything felt forced and rushed. The plot, pacing, the character relationships, etc. Why would we expect the politics to feel subtle when nothing else in that show was subtle?
Honestly I think the difference perceived by the “too woke” brigade is that a lot of the older storylines featured what felt like exceptions to the norm. Smaller instances of people being accepting. An example might be a trans person existing was a whole storyline usually with a gimmick rather than just a given that was treated as the norm that requires no explanation. Individuals being chill very rarely is their problem. It’s when someone tries to get them to change their ways and accept something as “normal” that they go bonkers
But yeah… Woke is such a non term referring to any cultural advancement of acceptance at scale that of course Star Trek was always “woke” it was culturally transformative and minority aware from the beginning
Excuse me. Pint of order. I never grew up.
I’ll have a pint of order too.
I’ll take a shot of perspective
Nah Star Trek just grew up to be flat out garbage.
Old Trek didn’t focus on politcal issues, it focused on social issues.
Of course there’s a lot of overlap between social issues and politcal issues in the old venn diagram and old Trek didn’t shy away from that overlapping area (nor should they have).
Writers now are looking for a pat on the back and need to insert politcal non-sequiturs which don’t actually say anything real. Just mentioning inequality exists or whatever. And in places that actually hurt the overall message of the show.
I only have Picard Season 1 to go by (not interested in prequel bullshit and didn’t bother with S2) but they have a character complaining about inequality. Which implies that in the future we eliminate inequality and then later decide to go back to it? It’s really a very pessimistic outlook when you think about it.
Also everyone is suddenly racist against robots for some reason. Which sure that’s a social issue, but again you’re saying humanity moved past racism but then later decided to become racist… against robots LOL. Why did people in the future suddenly get so stupid? In TNG if the robots malfunctioned they’d run a level 3 diagnostic and determine it was a virus that caused it before the next commercial break. In new Trek everyone is too stupid to do that because… they watch Fox News I guess? Or maybe that’s just a political reference they don’t actually do anything with.
In old Trek, they’d rock up to a planet in their awesome starship and gawk at some racist aliens, and warp off to another planet laughing about how backwards they are. Someone would mention humans used to be that way, everyone would be find that unbelievable. The point was that these social problems would be alien to an ideal future society. It wasn’t wagging the finger at the audience it was saying things like racism is something weird and alien and gets in the way of building awesome spaceships.
Old Trek was just better at taking on these topics in a sly way. The writers now need to beat people over the head, wag the finger, and lecture the audience so they can get cred. But they’re just preaching to the choir so it’s not at all effective at changing anyone’s outlook on any topic.
Like the above example… well yeah he’s building an android so it makes sense to have them choose their appearance. Let that just seep into the audience’s brain and maybe if someday they encounter something analogous to this situation they might think a little differently about it. Or maybe not. But forcing people to link it to a current political issue doesn’t accomplish anything, they just say “this sucks it’s too political” and stop watching.
You’re missing out if you pass on SNW. The Hair is so Hair
Why are so many in this thread grown up as bad people instead of just you know… Well it’s pointless to say because there just going to bring up stupid reasons in response to whatever I say anyways. Hence the bad people.
instead of just you know…
I really don’t… I have no idea what this comment is supposed to mean.
