Went to my uncles cabin in the woods for a few days to relax, he’s got the box set of the show and decided to give it a rewatch, was a pretty big fan in college. Got through like 3 episodes and shut it off.
Yes, Whedon is a creepy and maybe knowing that affecting my judgment, but honestly does feel like I’m noticing things my younger brain didn’t. A lot of the dialog seems overwritten, some of the “quirky” shit the characters do comes off more obnoxious than endearing, also the story is giving me weird AnCap vibes. I mean yeah the Alliance clearly is pretty evil but we never get much explanation as to what the Brown Coats political program is, why did they want to succeed? Them being confederate coded sure as shit doesn’t help.
Also, it almost leans TOO much into the whole western asethic sometimes, to the point I find it unbelievable. Okay, sure, humanity hastily colonized some planets and now some have regressed into SciFi Deadwood, I can dig that. But like, people on horses with cowboy hats seems a bit too comic for me.
Idk, just some random observations.
Edit: oh yeah and the intro song fucking sucks. That was something I thought even back when I liked the show.
I don’t know about Firefly I never watched it but I’ll say my view of Trek also changed over the years, as I moved further left the glaring limitations and the world view portrayed by some of the writers(through some very questionable episodes) made me move from thinking TNG was FALGSC to understanding it is merely some good optimistic future based entirely on western liberal values.
The “dog whistles” people point out e.g Picard saying there is no money are just that, dog whistles at best, a full understanding of what communism actualy means would also lead to some very undesirable changes e.g
-The Earth government is just the UN and it is very much hand waved away, same with the “economy”. This wasn’t an issue until the whole shit with Picard series and the vineyard.
-The “military” is actualy in charge and people think its fine.
-The way the entire premise is human focused, obviously with rooted in the cold war mentality but it leads to some very silly stereotypes only DS9 realy managed to even begin to tackle properly(ferengi as more than capitalist troupe, Klingons are more than just “barbarians”).
There is more but yeah what you went through isn’t uncommon, for my take I still love Trek but I am very much aware of what went on behind the scenes and to be quite honest, the franchise is quite top heavy i.e a small percentage of extremely excellent episodes and a huge percentage of average to mediocre TV.
The Picard series was so bad it made me question if star Trek was ever good to begin with.
trek was very good in the 1990s except for a couple of the movies and some stinker episodes. grading on a curve it was incredibly good in the 1960s although some things are usually lost on modern audiences like the short skirts being a symbol of womens’ liberation at the time or how amazingly progressive the diversity of the cast was. Dr. King famously, among trekkies, convinced Nichelle Nichols not to quit the show.
enterprise was trash, ruined by production burnout and 9/11. nemesis is worse than the star wars holiday special. the abrams/kurtzman movies are awful and everything that those pieces of shit and their friends touch is awful which is why discovery and picard are like that.
Watching TOS for the first time just now and (as you say, grading on a curve) I’m greatly enjoying it.
Even though I frequently disagree completely with the cast, the way that they’re able to discuss alternate philosophies, change their minds through experience, and admit to being unhappy when their solution is imperfect - it shouldn’t come across as refreshing as it does.
And it’s just fun whenever Spock goes smash and starts crumpling props.
Oh yeah definitely. I hate Abrams and kurtzman so much I can not properly express my hatred for them in this brief moment. I had mentioned in this thread that strange new worlds reminded me of what I loved about the earlier series and pulled me out of my trek slump, even though it is very far away from being the best star trek. I’m probably just going to watch the old ones and pretend that the new stuff doesn’t exist from now on.
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It’s like people who told me mandalorian season 2 was good because Luke shows up at the end. I don’t fucking care about your CGI nostalgia bullshit, that makes it even worse not any better!
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I pulled myself out of the Star Trek slump after Strange new worlds. SNW isn’t great but it is good enough to convince me that there is something good in there and there are still some people out there who can see it too (sometimes).
it’s literally not the military. the federation president was some alien guy. you’re stuck in a 20th century mindset.
Starfleet is among several other things a sort of paramilitary reserves. the primary function of it is not military but when a hostile external force tries to start shit they already have the organizing and logistics to engage on that level. They are not professional warfighters nor do they seek to be.
There’s not much real world equivalent to this but we could imagine the primary missions of the US military being NOAA, NASA, search and rescue, and the corps of engineers i.e. doing science and maybe building things rather than killing brown children and serving capital. It starts to not look like “the military” pretty quick the same way post-abolition “prisons” would still exist because you’ve got to protect society from serial killers, but that “prison” would be so different from what we have now that calling it with the same term is misleading as fuck.
I’m well aware of the in-universe justifications of Starfleet’s function, that is part of the problem but not the main issue though there were very notable exceptions to this, DS9 Homefront is an attempted coup by the
militaryscience and peace loving civilian organization.Imagine working for NASA and you’re court martialed because you looked at the director funny and didn’t follow your “orders”.
NASA did not call the Space shuttle craft “USS Columbia”. Small things like that requires suspension of disbelief and they all add up. In the real world we know why, its all because of early TOS lore wasn’t as developed and it actualy was very much based on “USA in Space” theme of the cold war and 50s sci-fi, almost everything we think of the Federation today was established later specially on TNG.
I love that, just like I love competence porn. But it is sure damn convenient everything is in English and every ship is USS something isn’t it? Again it is peak liberalism to think everyone is just going to forget the actual meaning of “USS Enterprise” when you see it, specially the Vietnamese/Chinese/Koreans lol.
Again in-universe, I’d love it, just press a magic button and everything is perfect, we have space communism*(terms and conditions apply). Trek is comfort food and its ok. But I know exactly what they did and why and it is hard to completely ignore.
What do you mean by very undesirable changes?
The romantization of the military is an easy one. If you remove the entire naval background and influence it loses a lot/most of its character. Trek is defined by the bridge crew, the military hierarchy etc.
In more realistic sci-fi space missions and space craft would not necessarily follow those traditions.