Cynic Jester posted:

The idea that a gigantic intergalactic confederation of planets is entirely reliant on an old, privileged white man not giving up to avoid turning into speciest isolationists

Arglebargle III posted:

Star Trek has been bad for a long time my friend.

Season 4 of Enterprise, although it was too little too late.

Star Trek: Beyond

Drunkboxer posted:

I guess these two good things were so great they killed their respective series out of goodness.

Drunkboxer posted:

I guess these two good things were so great they killed their respective series out of goodness.

Tighclops posted:

Enterprise was probably hosed no matter what since UPN would have gone under anyway

Drunkboxer posted:

I’m rewatching Enterprise now and just got a few episodes into season 4. It’s a little better than 3 but it’s still a post-911 mess. Yes I know that fun mirror episode is coming down the pike but so is the shitshow of a finale. It’s bad. It’s a comfortably watchable bad to me, but it’s still bad.

Khanstant posted:

I read a take on another site earlier today that's kind of worming its way into my perspective, with regards to the jarring shifts between 90s Trek and Disco/Picard

Lizard Combatant posted:

_{very satisfied that "vajazzle" is catching on, my work here is done}

Alchenar posted:

I'm starting to get a bit of a Culture novel vibe from the series. Not as good, but I think I can see how you could take the initial script treatment and instead make it a culture story.

zoux posted:

I don't buy that Agnes had never seen such an ad.

Delthalaz posted:

Making this show about the individual Picard is looking like a big mistake.

zoux posted:

Picard haters: what's the most recent star trek thing you actually liked

Tiggum posted:

I would guess that about 90% of people who watched this episode had the thought "wait, did they just say that character's name is 'Vajazzle'?"

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Musta been a while since anyone else watched DS9, because the depiction of space outside the Federation or any other major power being a hypercapitalist hellhole absolutely has precedent.

Lizard Combatant posted:

Star Trek always reflected our world, but it didn't embody it. Picard has the Federation morph into present day America apparently in a vacuum with no thought as to how something like Trump actually happens. New Trek should absolutely reflect modern issues, but a lot of people aren't happy that it needlessly abandoned the ethos which defined the show more than any singular character.

ghostwritingduck posted:

It seemed like a real oversight to not have any Ferengi on a casino planet.

SpeakSlow posted:

From what I've watched, if anything Picard is a repudiation of isolationist political movements. In fact, even the isolationism is given a practical face with us getting actual insight into the political AND practical reasons that the decision was made.

The decision to isolate is still very wrong, but it seems every criticism of this large rear end plot point seems to ignore the world building in favor of criticism seen through a lens of things Star Trek never was.

Sure, the Federation was about a higher calling and bold faced values, but TNG itself dealt with the meathook realities of reconciling the ideal versus the reality. loving hell, Q was basically the author (in a grand sense) commentating on that very conceit. Right from episode one.

No one hates Q for pointing that out, I've noted. 😉

Lizard Combatant posted:

The message of the show is very much that Picard and the idealism of old Trek is naive and incompatible with reality. Vajazzle is shown to be someone absolutely worth killing and Seven is framed as the badass hero with accompanying Voyager fanfare.

Picard is ineffectual and his career is described by Seven as one of "misguided diplomacy". He doesn't offer a compelling argument to spare Vajazzle or an alternative to hold her accountable and he is either stupid or resigned to his own ineffectualness when he lets Seven leave with a couple of machine guns.

Drink-Mix Man posted:

I think the extent of the show's meta-critique of Star Trek was showing Picard daydreaming about the good ol' days as a stand-in for fans who want to keep living in the 90's.

Lizard Combatant posted:

And by repeatedly demonstrating that his way of thinking is a naive by-product that is yet to be anything but ineffectual in the harsh light of reality.

The Federation we remember from the 90s apparently now only lives as its embodiment Jean Luc Picard (which is individualist, superhero nonsense), as no one since ever took up the mantle. Certainly not the billions of other citizens and officers of the Federation. No, they were all just apparently waiting to see what the great Picard would do. So yes, Picard is the show's stand in for old Trek.

Picard might say the "right" things (which was never the be all and end all of his character, he acted decisively) because the show knows that's what is expected of his character, while the realists like Seven actually dispense justice.

"Pragmatism with the vaneer of idealism" I said and I stand by it.

HD DAD posted:

Travis Mayweather just appears to be piloting the La Sirena in several scenes. He says nothing, and no one acknowledges him.

Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:

The M in M-class planet stood for metaphor.

Captains log, supplemental. It appears the native inhabitants of Oomer Beta replaced their rigid caste society with a form of wage slavery...

Horizon Burning posted:

People are going to look back on this little time period of media, where everything has to be super didactic and beat you over the head with a Very Important Message About Hope Because The Orange Man Won as one of the most embarrassing time periods in pop culture writing. It'll be up there with Post-9/11 Insanity and the 2007 Writer's Strike as having a deleterious effect on the stories people were telling. It's like people need their entertainment media to swaddle them in clothes and pat them on the back and tell them, hush hush, that it'll be okay. But like, not by creating new media - no, that'd be a financial risk. By taking old properties and twistin them so you can Make A Point.

Lizard Combatant posted:

As silly and corny as this is (and Star Trek was frequently silly and corny) can you imagine how enraged crusty old fans would get having to look inwards like this?

gently caress I kind of wish this was actually the show.

Arglebargle III posted:

And this is another bad impulse for modern TV writing. Somehow if we make it so that a theoretical fan hates it, we have done a service to the world. It's almost like the famous underpants gnomes.

1. Subvert expectations
2. ???
3. Critical success!

Lizard Combatant posted:

I agree that the point of Picard the series is to comment on present day isolationism through the analogy of the Federation, but I'm saying that it's doing a poor job of actually exploring this.

How does a centuries old force of altruism and egalitarianism make such an about face in the space of 2 decades of relative peace?
And don't say the shipyards attack, because it had already changed before that point and they've weathered far worse setbacks in the past.

There's no organic link between the Federation today and the Federation we've previously seen, and by similarly ignoring the conditions that actually shaped our own situation it has nothing meaningful to say about the present - which would have at least been a trade off for making the Federation just as weak as we are.

Horizon Burning posted:

Lizard Combatant posted:

Ok but you're only quoting half my post, specifically the part that was replying to another poster suggesting people are mad that Picard is a political show. Which is not the case.

I totally agree the point of TNG was about reconciling its ideals with reality, and DS9 was just the logical extension of that. I don't see the two shows as being incompatible with each other at all.

I agree that the point of Picard the series is to comment on present day isolationism through the analogy of the Federation, but I'm saying that it's doing a poor job of actually exploring this.
How does a centuries old force of altruism and egalitarianism make such an about face in the space of 2 decades of relative peace?
And don't say the shipyards attack, because it had already changed before that point and they've weathered far worse setbacks in the past.

quote:

There's no organic link between the Federation today and the Federation we've previously seen, and by similarly ignoring the conditions that actually shaped our own situation it has nothing meaningful to say about the present - which would have at least been a trade off for making the Federation just as weak as we are.

quote:

So how do we get out of it at least?

Well again I think the show is muddled in what it's trying to say. But along the way I think it's making a clear case (whether intentional or not) for the idealism of old Trek being naive talk and illequipped to take action, particularly in its framing.

For example:
I've included the exchange you partially quoted since it doesn't make much sense devoid of context:

marktheando posted:

I'd say the Federation has consistently been portrayed as failing to live up to it's own ideals, with an endless parade of shady decisions and evil admirals, needing to be corrected by our hero captains. So it's pretty silly acting like the Feds portrayal in this show is some huge departure.

Anyway, here's Chabon responding to people asking about the violence in this weeks episode.

https://twitter.com/TrekCore/status/1230925053518327808?s=20

large_gourd posted:

sounds like he's not really on board with the eye gouging stuff.

man that was a stupid thing to include. i didn't think about it when it was happening (was mostly just thinking 'ugh, gross'), but i was on the bubble going into this episode and that mutilation scene definitely contributed to me just being done with the show by the episode's end.

SpeakSlow posted:

Pardon, but I'll absolutely use the shipyard attack as a prime example. The Borg, Dominion, Sphere Bulders, etc all took direct action against Earth, creating a "Fight Or Die" scenario for Starfleet itself, if not the entire Federation.

The attack on the Utopia Planitia Shipyards wasn't a Death Of The Federation attack, it was an attack on the ability for Starfleet to respond to ANY crisis. On top of that, the rescue fleet was likely made up of a massive coalition of unarmed ships all clustered in the same area.

IMHO, the shipyards attack was meant to cripple The Federation, not destroy it. The series so far has given us the full, practical reason why an altruistic, generational force for peace and justice could turn away from it's ideals.

Pulling back to the wide view, there have been plenty of attempts to swat The Federation on the nose in all series. Those attacks were fended off, usually in the space of a single episode.

The point then being, Picard is then about what happens when justice blinks. Then the fallout, sense of betrayal and general chaos that ensues when the gatekeepers are away.

I don't think I'm reading too much into this as the points above have been explained fairly well so far in the series itself It's possible then that a suggestion of a rewatch with wider eyes is needed, but I don't want to tell you your business so I'll leave it at that.


Allegory, from my understanding, doesn't need every specific event to be in-line between story and reality to be effective. In all honesty, it feels like the main negative reaction here could easily be reconciled through the lenses of time, distance and the nuts-and-bolts of producing a TV series in the eras those shows aired.

The criticism feels arbitrary to me, but I'm not you and your criticisms are likely very valid in the framework you present them in. Please just be aware that your framework feels limited from my perspective. Valid and useful, but limited when the scope changes.


I felt that I addressed that point, but to be clear it feels like that sub-discussion is putting the proverbial cart before the horse here. From what I've gotten from the series, Picard is more of a tempered idealist who is betrayed by the very support structure that used to buoy him in TNG and the movies.

What he's finding now is that while those ideals are right, just and good, in a pinch people will fall back into isolationism given enough of a threat and no real enemy to go out there and sock in the nose/Picard speech away in the space of an episode.

It's a perfect allegory for post-911 America, to be honest. We know our brand. The same brand we've been selling to others but only pay lip service to. Picard is then what happens when that bright idealism is forced to dig beneath the surface to reconcile sins of the past.

I hope that all makes sense and doesn't sound like fanfic. I've grown-up on TOS pining after BOP and Enterprise models sold only at auto shows, then watched every Star Trek show released since TNG started. TNG was a great portrayal of the hope for the future, but I feel the limitations of the medium severely hamstrung the ability to tell stories dealing with human, biological, red meat issues that we could never truly breed/educate ourselves away from.

Tighclops posted:

You guys are putting more thought into this than the people writing this show you know that right

Guns akimbo blam blam blam blam blam

Tighclops posted:

You guys are putting more thought into this than the people writing this show you know that right

Guns akimbo blam blam blam blam blam

SpeakSlow posted:

I mean, a former borg with targeting implants? Way too farfetched for me. Must be the cynical answer.

Tighclops posted:

You guys are putting more thought into this than the people writing this show you know that right

Guns akimbo blam blam blam blam blam

Admiral Bosch posted:

i think you're putting more thought into this than the writer did

pew pew