Star Trek Social Club
r/startrek: The Next Generation
Star Trek news and discussion. No slash fic...
Maybe a little slash fic.
Rules
1 Be constructive
All posts/comments must be thoughtful and balanced.
2 Be welcoming
It is important that everyone from newbies to OG Trekkers feel welcome, no matter their gender, sexual orientation, religion or race.
3 Be truthful
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5 Spoilers
Utilize the spoiler system for any and all spoilers relating to the most recently-aired episode. There is no formal spoiler protection for episodes/films after they have been available for approximately one week.
6 Keep on-topic
All submissions must be directly about the Star Trek franchise (the shows, movies, books, etc.). Off-topic discussions are welcome at c/Quarks.
7 Meta
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Upcoming Episodes
| Date | Episode | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 01-29 | SFA 1x04 | "Vox in Excelso" |
| 02-05 | SFA 1x05 | "Series Acclimation Mil" |
| 02-12 | SFA 1x06 | "Come Let's Away" |
| 02-19 | SFA 1x07 | TBA |
| 02-26 | SFA 1x08 | TBA |
In Production
Strange New Worlds (TBA)
In Development
Untitled comedy series
Wondering where to stream a series? Check here.
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Why are you even listening to the opinions of CHUDs?
The problem with new trek isn't "wokeness", too little or too much. It's that they abandoned what made Trek so unique: It's supposed to be a time after humanity has dealt with all of the stupid in-fighting and conservative BS. It's supposed to be about a time when the drama doesn't come from inside the house. When humanity is exploring the stars, not having a moment.
It's just a complete lack of imagination. It's not like Trek has ever been wanting for drama. They just decided to write new Trek in the lamest, same-old Hollywood way possible.
The problem is it's action and drama scifi now, and not a real vision of a better future. It's no longer unique.
Though they clearly haven't, even if they think so. For example, if you're not an organic humanoid, it's very much up in the air whether you'll be treated as a person, or as an inconvenience.
The Measure of a Man was constrained to apply to that one instance, in Data's case, and he had the Sutherland automatically assuming the worst of him and nearly comm itting mutiny. Both the ExoComps and the EMH suffer from people thinking they're malfunctioning and factory resetting/lobotomising them.
If you're in a war with the Federation, it's equally ambiguous whether they'll stick to their own rules of conflict. The moment they feel threatened, they'll do things like unleash a deadly bio-weapon/memetic-weapon against your species, start laying self-replicating mines, or just make plans to blow up your homeworld. At best, your fate is left to the whims of a handful of admirals and captains.
Even within the Federation, Admiral Satie was not a isolated instance. She only made two mistakes, in going up against an unusually accepting crew that would bat for one of their own, and losing her composure in front of another admiral. If she hadn't, her crusade against Romulans in Starfleet would have continued unabated.
The fact that she could start it would suggest that those attitudes exist and are underlying within Starfleet. At least, on a significant enough level that she wasn't treated as being unusually paranoid about a non-issue.
Also, – watching at the age I am now – it's hard for me to not notice how much carceral justice is taken as a given rather than anything remotely more restorative.
And treatment of mental disability still unfomfortably mirrors our current system than anything I'd hope for so far into the future.
I think we can accept that the premise is we've made astounding strides and there are still areas of improvement; I don't think that tarnishes the hopeful and utopian dream at the heart of Star Trek.
It doesn't, but it also shows that even in the future, they're not free from the foibles of being a person. Achieving and maintaining something like the Federation needs active, constant work. They can't just go bang, Federation, and be done with it for good. Constant vigilance is the price we must pay for our freedoms.
It's an angle that I'm honestly disappointed that hasn't been tackled yet, since it seems perfect for a Star Trek story. Early Picard seemed to be going that way, with former Borg drones being mistreated, and the Federation outlawing reproduction for inorganic beings, but then it veered off for the Season 3 plot.
There's a really juicy three-way conflict between people who think that the Federation is too soft to survive, those who think it's fine as it is, and those who think it doesn't go far enough, and should be expanded to cover more, that could easily come into play, and show how much work it took them to get and stay there.
Discovery went there in its first season, with the Federation prepared to sell its soul to win the war until they found another (problematic) way.
The post-Burn 32nd Century is coming at it from the other side, with SFA in particular reckoning with some of the choices that were made during the period when everything was falling apart.
I agree 100%, but I'm also saying that's exactly what's happening and we've (at least I) just been too blind to see it until SFA. This current era is portraying a future where "strength" doesn't mean swallowing your pain in order to conform and being ashamed of what makes you different. Real strength is the ability to be your true self, and (more importantly) the strength to radically accept others for being their true selves.
TOS taught us there's no need to fear people with different skin color. SFA is teaching us that there's no need to fear someone for exposing their vulnerabilities and expressing their emotions in a healthful way. It's a radical concept for our time.
EDIT because I want to reply to this:
If by "CHUDS" you mean the people I described as being "insecure and afraid" then the answer is I listen to them because they are human beings in pain. As Star Trek is trying to teach us, real personal strength comes from being able to listen with our whole hearts.
Star Trek has always been about accepting others for who they are. They make that explicitly clear many times in their interactions with other species and cultures.
I certainly won't disagree with that
And yet all the drama is derived directly from real world human issues, so what makes a difference between Starfleet characters creating it or some fictional alien race? The latter too closely resembles "American exceptionalism" by acting like Starfleet always has all the answers and can do no wrong and these uncultured foreign aliens need to bend to our will in order to solve their problems. I don't see that being super appealing considering everything that is happening currently.
Yeah, I've always found the "Starfleet must always be in the right" mentality to be patronizing at best, imperialistic at worst.
I can think of another sci-fi series where the highly advanced civilization is always in the right, and I've heard it kinda sucks
That is a grossly terrible charictarization of what it's supposed to be...
No wonder everything is going to hell if people cannot even understand what it means to be done working through shit...
What do you find to be grossly terrible about it?
If they were done working through shit then there wouldn't be any problems left to write a TV show about. What you're describing is one group of people being superior to another and that superior group swooping in to save the day much like the way America has viewed itself historically.
Nope. There are plenty of episodes with drama that comes from other sources, or from their adventuring, or interaction with different cultures, or just things plain going wrong. They've even already challenged the whole idea of the post-scarcity human culture being so superior in older treks.
So you're kinda' just further proving my point that it's a gross lack of imagination to assume it has to be a fascistic superiority complex.
You seem to have almost completely missed the point of allegory and metaphor in TOS. "Time after humanity has dealt with" as you put it is just a literary device to soften the impact when the show was inevitably confronted or viewed by real racists. It was never a really view of the future. It was always a reflection of our present through the lens of futurism, a clever narrative framing device. That narrative framing device could not possibly remain unchangeable through multiple generations without loosing everything that made it work. Attempting to do so, i.e. keeping the storytelling framework completely unchanged and not adapting to new generations and new social dynamics, would have shown a lack of creativity and imagination.
The show was from a time when the U.S. thought they had beaten fascism (past tense, done, a part of the past) and would soon beat racism, classism, etc. From a time when imperialism was seen as a fundamentally good social force by most of the imperialist public. Today we (mostly) know better. We will probably never truly erase any of them. They are things we'll have to remain vigilant for. A show today patronizing us with their perfected utopian society which remains VERY imperialist without shining a light on that contradiction just would not work. A show lacking any interpersonal drama also would not work and it's not even something that was really true for TOS, just a weird kink Roddenberry got into when producing TNG. That's the context of the way Star Trek has changed and it matters.
I think all the time about how early TNG largely reflected the falsehoods we were being sold at the time - that all of these things were Past Problems.