askchapo

Not communist enough. And NuTrek isn’t communist at all.

Baseball is cracker Amerikkkan nonsense

I know one man who disagrees

To expand on the Baseball thing, almost the entirety of Tom Paris' character. With the honorable exception of the episode about old black and white Sci Fi shows, Tom Paris seems like a stand-in for a character who happens to enjoy all the things the audience's dad likes. Referencing weirdly specific American 1900s culture is a common trope in Star Trek but with Tom Paris it seemed to magnify.

the usual gripes are that it's not gay enough because berman was a coward, that voyager and prequel shitshow suffer from production team burnout after doing it for a decade plus, the TNG movies break character a ton, the capitalists keep hiring people who don't understand why trek was good to make it (abrams, kurtzman) so all the live-action stuff after whatever the last good episode of voyager is has been terrible.

we need optimistic scifi now more than ever and nobody will make it

The mindset that began around DS9 and strengthened in the new treks.

While DS9 had some good episodes and good characters, and great acting, it also created fans that began to take all the wrong moral lessons from it, or the ones the creators intended. Militarism, military fetishism, and "ends justify the means" thinking. It was probably a reflection of what would become more and more common amongst the US populace going into the 2000s and onward. Culturally we make excuse en masse for our conflicts or our war crimes or support thereof like Sisko because "It had to be done". Related, I remember the scene with Dax/Sisko and the spent phaser coil from the ship. The "Take a good look people" and then a speech about pride of how long they keep on fighting and hanging that coil up on the wall as a trophy. I feel these sentiments have only carried on in the modern trek series even harder.

Which is why when Boimler in Lower Decks confronted his trigger happy, edgy, fellow crewmembers on the Titan with this line, I smiled. "I didn't join Starfleet to get into phaser fights. I signed up to explore! To be out in space and making new discoveries and peaceful diplomatic solutions. THAT's boldly going. And you know what? I'd love to be in a string quartet. I love that when Riker was on the Enterprise he was jamming on the trombone and catching love disease and acting in plays and meeting his transporter identical clone Thomas."

And I feel that's kind of what's missing in the newer treks. The sense that the lives of these people in the future are different, and not always conflict focused. They have time to stop, to pursue a hobby, paint a picture, go on vacation, find out what it is to be who they are, and THEN go on a wild space adventure for the episode carrying that discovery their little downtime gave them to provide new insights. Perhaps the lives of the people in new trek are more relatable, because they to have rare downtime and are task focused nearly 90% of the time. But it doesn't paint a picture that things will be better, only the same, with technology we don't yet have.

Holodeck episodes are literally the worst. I am watching a show about space socialism I don't want to watch an entire episode about the wild West or a New York detective or whatever just knock it off

Baseball is popular in a lot of countries, e.g. Cuba, Japan

Baseball is cracker Amerikkkan nonsense

In fairness, baseball is seen by most Trek characters as this weird-ass historical thing that regular people don't really care about if they know about it at all.

The tribunal

It's cheap to film with 20th century TV technology.

My biggest gripe with Star Trek is the anachronistic sexism in TOS and TNG. Guess which two sword-trained TNG main cast actors didn't get to use swords in Qpid!

Also, the homophobia right up until Lower Decks. Maybe Discovery and Picard were good about queer issues, I wouldn't know, I watched the pilots of both and decided not to continue watching either one. I haven't seen any of Strange New Worlds because the same people IRL who recommended Discovery and Picard are recommending me Strange New Worlds, and I no longer trust their judgment.

Baseball is cracker Amerikkkan nonsense - You telling me that all these different species and planets get together to chill, and the vibe they’re gonna channel is Ohio?? Football (soccer) or some version of hockey make a lot more sense, you can pick up and start playing immediately. I can’t imagine Worf wanting to learn all those pointless rules about balls and strikezones and fowls. Sisko is arguably the best captain of any series, and I really get pulled out of an episode every time he drops some awful baseball trivia. It’s only slightly better than Nascar. I actually know one Scottish person who really likes baseball, and he’s literally the worst person I know.

When I recently self-flagellated by catching up on Discovery, the moment that brought me closest to giving up was this scene where each of the bridge crew listed places on Earth they'd like to visit when they made it back. Every single one of them listed places in the US. Star Trek has always been US supremacist, but they don't even give a token nod to multi-nationalism anymore.

The series is just so much more right wing in many sense these days. It's a far cry from Roddenberry deciding that for a utopian future, there needed to be a Russian crew member despite it being the height of the cold war.

The only art-forms that are talked about are 'high' art-forms. Operas, symphonies, poetry and the like. Does nobody in the federation make pop music? Are there no holodeck programs that are considered art?

My biggest pet peeve is Enterprise specific, the fucking decontamination room scenes are just "Wow look at how hot T'pol is."

Yeah two big ones:

Starting with DS9 and then up to the present, the show leans waaaaaay too heavily on nostalgia and fans love of familiar characters. TNG is largely free of this other than that one Scotty episode. But in DS9, they just keep bringing back characters like Q, Lwaxana, etc. Maybe not the biggest deal when it’s just an episode or two but then they decided to bring back Worf for the last 4 seasons. He doesn’t really serve a point other than “hey, you all love Worf, right?” I really feel like all Worf did was steal the limelight from Sisko / Avery Brooks. After that it’s obvious how they do this in Nu Trek - I mean “Picard” is an entire show that runs on nostalgia. SNW literally brings back the Enterprise. “Discovery” I guess tried to not do this until they felt we needed more Spock.

The reason why it bugs me so much is I really think it stops the franchise from growing and changing in positive ways, the way overdosing on nostalgia tends to do for people. For example, the show runners originally wanted Ro Laren to be in the role played by Nana Visitor because hey, viewers know her from TNG. The actress who plays Ro didn’t want to do it so they hired Nana Visitor; and I don’t think any of us can imagine DS9 without her. But she never would have been hired if the producers had their first, nostalgic choice.

And other the first DS9 one, I despise mirror universe episodes. The first one in DS9 is great because it’s just a silly way for the actors to be able to let loose and play against type. But then they decided to make it a recurring theme, and then the novelty wears off fast. And then I actually stopped watching Discovery when they made the mirror universe a major plot point. Again, it’s just so silly and ridiculous but the way Discovery tries to play it straight and serious just doesn’t work for me.

Edit: I also wanted to add that I really hated the forced Odo/Kira romance. They spent years working together without a hint of romantic interest until the writers decided they needed to pair off someone. No chemistry and kind of an odd pairing. And why not just let Odo be ace, you know?

Poker in TNG

I like the poker in tng because it confirms my theory that the main point of divergence between the Trek universe and ours is that Texas Holdem was never invented.

The three white male captains get to command the biggest/fastest/most famous flagship in the fleet.

The black captain starts off as a commander on a broken down space station in a bad neighborhood.

The woman captain gets hopelessly lost in the first episode.

These are not good tropes.

Also, why the fuck are Starfleet naming conventions so human centric? We should see a bunch of Starfleet ships with Vulcan, Andorian, and Tellerite names. You can kind of handwave away the ones that are abstract concepts like Enterprise, Voyager, Defiant, etc by saying their names in each language are different. But there are so many ships named after Earth locations and historical figures. Where are the other races in all this?

not queer and communist enough. andorians canonically have 4 genders!!! imagine how genderfucked you'd be after several lifetimes as a joined trill!! so many missed opportunities that are canon but never explored.

I really hate multiverse stuff. This is a criticism I definitely didn't have until the past few years when the concept got ran into the ground, but I think Star Trek would benefit if they just retconned the whole thing with a bit where some Starfleet scientist proves mathematically that other universes can't exist and the ones we've seen have all been temporary aberrations in spacetime or something.

I always wonder why they've never explored weaponizing warp drives as a plot point. If they strapped a warp drive to an asteroid and fired it at Warp 9 towards a planet it'd be unstoppable. Like I guess this would just end up creating Mutually Assured Destruction in Space, but it seems so obvious to do that it's weird it's never addressed

baseball is more popular today in estados not unidos. The player Ben idolizes played for a london team, and i don't think they meant london ontario, and they got a Hawaiian actor.

lol watch the drumhead

kirk was well-behaved for the late 1960s

a bluffing game is great for the cast of characters they have at the table and teaching data lessons. the poker craze was pretty much all hold'em not the various games played on tng.

Poker is boring if there are no actual stakes.

I thought about this more today and it's actually all the plots where Troi is violated in some way. It feels like that's the only plot she gets until the final season when they actually give her some better plots to chew on.

I don't think anyone likes how the Prime Directive is used - if you agree with the idea of non-interference, it's too often used used as just a cheap tension builder for why they can't help people facing imminent extinction and if you don't, well, it's even worse.