Star Trek Social Club

TNG's naysayers in the 80's were upset they weren't going to get to see more of their favorite characters. Imagine being told now in 2026 that they're gonna reboot Friends with none of the original actors. It almost doesn't make sense because the six friends WERE the show; just make another sitcom. And the first two seasons of TNG were pretty bad; in 1989 it was pretty easy for those naysayers to say told ya so.

The thing is, TNG had a solid premise, which was broadly the same premise as the proven original series. There were glimmers of greatness, diamonds in the rough, like Picard proving in court that Data is a person. It just had to exhaust obsolete old plots and executive producers and find its footing as its own show; by season 4 they had made some of the best television ever broadcast.

ENT had a different problem. It was the fifth series made in the franchise, fans were used to meeting new crews in new situations by now. But ENT came out and told us it "wasn't our father's Star Trek." For the first two seasons, the show was just titled "Enterprise" and not "Star Trek: Enterprise." It eschewed the traditional orchestral intro music for a pop ballad with vocals. And...the show's values are worse. I think I just convinced myself that they set it as a prequel so they had an excuse to make the crew worse people. Archer would definitely have killed the Gorn. Could you imagine on TNG Geordi and Worf sitting around in a damaged shuttlecraft drinking whiskey and discussing how hot Troi's ass is? That happened on ENT. Not only did they bring on another hyperintelligent but emotionally stunted hot chick with huge tits in a catsuit having learned the wrong lesson from Seven of Nine, but the entire crew spent at least some time in their skivvies, often rubbing baby oil on each other.

So ENT declared an intent to return the franchise to its classic premise after DS9 and Voyager in one hand, while masturbating half erect in with the other. Trek fans who watched the show for Kirk refusing to kill the Gorn, or offering his hand to the Klingon Captain on Genesis, or...list two Picard speeches here. Weren't going to get it from Enterprise. You'd get Hoshi holding her tits in her hands though.

TNG had naysayers before it launched, who were proved wrong. ENT started out with the audience on board and lost people along the way.

So now we arrive at the present and they're canceling Starfleet Academy. Trekkies seem torn into two factions about this:

There's the diversity fetishists who are angry that a demographic list show was canceled. I remember once upon a time how, gay people for example, would ask to see more realistic, positive, nuanced gay characters in media and not just Straight Female Protagonist's Flamboyantly Gay Friend. Now there is media made to pander to that audience, and it boils down to "there's a woman and a gay and a brown and a fat and an autistic and a..." Elsewhere on Lemmy there was a thread about how mecha anime tended to feature gay characters and about half of the thread was like "What? GAY? WHERE?!?! I want to see gay!" Them. The people who do not care if there's a story or not, they just want to have the colors of the pride flag listed out loud.

Then there's the folks who liked old Star Trek. Who remember Starfleet Academy depicted as a prestigious military academy that expected excellence in all fields out of their students. Wrath of Kahn opens up with Lieutenant Saavik being taught a lesson about facing death at Starfleet Academy. As a cadet, Wesley Crusher is involved in a fatal accident flying a banned maneuver and a cover-up about said accident, and he receives a strong dressing down, not only about the importance of following regulations but about integrity. The graduates of Starfleet Academy are not only extremely capable military officers, technicians that can operate and maintain the highly advanced systems of a starship, are adept at combat at any scale from hand to hand to theater naval engagement, they're accomplished athletes, published scientists, many are classically trained musicians, they spend their free time playing 3D chess, cosplaying as Sherlock Holmes and putting on stage plays.

And then here comes the new TV show where a fat young woman walks up to Robert Picardo and sheepishly admits to having swallowed her combadge, and he replies "What, already?!" and you think "Oh, this is a show made by retards, about retards, for retards."

He would be far more correct in the general sense if it were only bigots and idiots complaining that were never going to be fans of a more intellectual show anyways.

New Trek has had lots of criticism from actual, existing Trek fans that want to see the IP flourish into another 100+ episode series. Of course the usual bigots and propagandists also hated on it, but they were always going to! To thusly pretend there are zero honest fans who didn't like Discovery or Picard, etc, is to completely ignore valid critique.

Star Trek might be different for everyone, but there are many core throughlines and principles that were heavily changed for New Trek. That doesn't inherently make New Trek bad by itself, but it also means the old fans aren't just whining to whine.

Maybe they actually have some good points when they're comparing things that are getting dropped one after the other, not even approaching episode counts that the original hit with three seasons, especially when the rest of the older series all have significantly more than that.

Yes, they all had silly episodes, so why did these older things with plenty of sillyness garner so many fans? It's foolish to pretend it's all bigots and idiots simply saying, "it's different!".

Funny how we can influence a TV show into being canceled because it deals with "icky wokeness" but can't do anything about the actual icky child fucker.

The fact that this is happening now and not at the end of season 2 implies studio shenaniganary and not listening to some dumb chuds.

Why would they sabotage viewership for season 2 instead of canceling it outright? Or at a minimum just dump the rest of it now?

My gut says it’s virtue signaling by management to the Ellison who’s gonna run the place in the not too distant future. Canceling the “woke” trek sounds like something sufficiently sycophantic for a Hollywood exec.

The worst part is now the chuds are taking a victory lap.

Since the news broke that Academy was cancelled, I've seen a number of comments implying that people who posted negatively about it on Lemmy are in some way responsible for its cancellation. That's a ridiculous notion. Nobody with the power to make that decision gives a single shit about what goes on here, nor are they even aware of our existence. I get that you're frustrated, but your ire is misdirected.

I hope those individuals whom latch onto what Shatner says, change their attitude.

Its been standard practice to blame online communities for bad numbers or office politics for most of the last decade.

Yeah this is a stupid ass take. The show isn't enough of what people liked about startrek. That's not the audiences fault, it's the showrunner's fault, who famously didn't watch startrek, didn't care about the IP, didn't care what people liked about it and just wanted to use the IP to promote ideology and worldview. Aka propaganda. Atleast the OS to Enterprise era gave us enough of what we liked that we could sit through what we didn't. Just because trek was progressive doesn't mean all the fanbase was on board with all of it. The progressiveness wasn't the only thing of value that it was. This latest installment failed to strike that balanced at all because it intentionally and arrogantly and sadistically refused to even attempt to.

People: "I think this TV show is kinda bad"

You: "REEEE STOP SAYING WHAT YOU THINK YOURE SABOTAGING THE ENTIRE FRANCHISE"

Maybe you should talk to people about what is good in this TV show instead? All I've heard about it is people like you claiming it's being ruined by people who didn't like it, and don't watch it.