Agreed. People should dislike modern Star Trek for it’s bad writing, not because it’s progressive.
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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The best progressive writing Trek did was when they addressed a social issue by having the actors pretend it wasn't an issue at all.
Uhura was a bridge officer who was a black woman, and nobody cared or even noticed because in-universe there was nothing special about that.
I like how in Discovery a character came out as non-binary and everyone is like "ok cool" and that was that and it was never brought up again (because why would it be)?
You can tell by the absolute meltdown conservative spaces had about that five second clip that it was absolutely the right thing to do.
Trek writing has never been consistently good. Half of TOS is unwatchably bad. TNG sucks until Riker gets more hair. DS9 sucks until Sisko gets less hair. Voyager's all over the place (even though it's my favorite). Enterprise is mostly bad. Only the even numbered TOS movies are good. Only the first two TNG movies are good.
I say this with a genuine love of Star Trek, but the quality of the writing has varied greatly over each individual series.
Agreed. Season three TNG is peak Star Trek. That said, and at the risk of being flayed by the Star Trek community at large, I think DS9 was the best series, taken as a whole.
As a Star Wars nerd, I feel this so intensely. It sucks when you love the setting, but the actual writing is a crapshoot.
You hold up Andor, Rogue One, and the Animated Clone Wars Saga next to the Sequels, the Christmas Special, or Revenge of the Sith, and it makes your heart hurt.
Discovery writing is all over the place I agree, but Starfleet Academy writing does not look that bad to me. What is so much worse then previous trek? If we do not cherry pick the best of the past against the worst of the new, writing is better or on the same level of what we saw before.
Yeah, nothing is organic. Feels like it's not normal to the characters too, because they have to keep explaining it to themselves.
The message is not the issue, the inability of the writers to insert it in the story is.
I find the actual problems they face to be more organic than other series, there's always at least a semi-good reason why the threat of the week is occuring rather than something stupid like flying through enemy territory with no shields or someone rando just beaming out your ships main computer being a huge weakness that no one ever thought might be a problem.
I mostly agree, but with shows like Starfleet Academy, the writing is bad in part because of the forced inclusive themes. You're broadly correct: these could be handled with tact for a better show. I still think these themes are handled best when they give the audience room to consider nuanced and complex ideas. Don't shoot me, but instead of a classic New Generation episode I'm going cite an episode of The Orville - "About a Girl". Bortus and Klyden have a baby, who is born female. They try to argue that she should be allowed to remain female, but ultimately the court rules that she undergo the Moclan gender reassignment procedure.
This touches on contemporary issues but also doesn't present the situation as "this side is 100% right, and this side is literally Hitler." The audience is actually left wondering, where does this sit in the contemporary debate? If a child is born one sex, should they be given the right to remain as that sex? Or should a court be allowed to step in and reassign sex? The episode also brilliantly explores the difficult dynamic between Bortus and Klyden, and doesn't portray one as a cartoon villain and the other as a male Mary Sue.
This is where New Trek fails horrible. Zero nuance. Everything is presented in the first 10 seconds as "this is good, this is bad. Accept the message we are feeding you are you are a bad person." That's not Star Trek. Most importantly, that's not interesting. It's not good storytelling. It might appeal to people who really like circlejerking about that particular issue, but that's a minority of people.
That's a lot of words to not provide a single example from a show of what makes "forced inclusion" different than "inclusion"
Someone asked that question two hours ago and I replied with two examples. It's underneath my comment. I'm not sure which application you're using to browse Lemmy but you should be able to see it.
I appreciate you referencing the Orville's most pivotal episode. And honestly, the twist involving Klyden's reasoning for reassigning Topa, as a trans sci-fi nerd, broke my heart.
Spoilers about the most crucial arc of the story
That's the perspective that a lot of people don't have when they see that episode. It's easy to take Klyden's lawyer's argument as legitimate when he makes the point of comparing it to the cultural version of a cleft lip.
And then Haveena walks into the room. And she proves, conclusively, that she is a woman and she would never choose to be anything other than what she is. That her gender is a gift. And then, later on, we see the hidden planet of the female Moclans, and it is so radically different from Moclus that you'd hardly believe this is the same species.
We see Moclan men testing weapons anywhere they please above civilian airspace, and the backdrop is an industrial wasteland because they never developed ecocentrism... because safety laws, industrial regulation, and other 'soft' ideas went unobserved and unvalued.
Contrast the Hidden Planet, and we see Moclan women, dancing in a style that they invented, revering the planet that protects them. We see women warriors carefully watching the Orville's crew as little girls play in the street. It feels indescribably very... honestly, African. I can't put my finger on why, but it does.
All of those differences are deliberate. And they were set up very, very early.
Can you give me a practical example of Starfleet Academy lacking the kind of nuance you would like to see?
A specific example would be “Vox in Excelso.” Jay-Den learns the Klingons have become an endangered people after the Burn, General Obel Wochak rejects the Federation’s offer of asylum on Faan Alpha because accepting it as charity would dishonour them, and the episode resolves that by staging a fake battle so the Klingons can claim the planet “by conquest”. To me, that lands too neatly. The episode tells you very quickly that the Federation position is the sensible one and the Klingon objection is mostly pride that needs to be worked around, rather than really sitting with the possibility that their view of dignity, sovereignty, and survival might have more weight than the script gives it.
Another example is “Ko’Zeine.” Darem is pulled back to Khionia for an arranged royal marriage to Kaira, and the episode is clearly building toward the conclusion that suppressing your real self for duty and tradition is tragic and wrong. That is a fair theme, but the show signals the moral endpoint so early that there is not much room left for genuine ambiguity. Kaira ends up being understanding, Jay-Den is framed as the voice urging honesty, and the traditional path mainly exists to be rejected. Compare that with something like older Trek, where you were more often left to wrestle with whether duty, culture, and individual freedom could all make a legitimate claim on the character at the same time.
So when I say the show lacks nuance, I do not mean it should avoid these themes. I mean it too often starts from the answer and then builds the episode backwards, instead of letting the conflict stay uncomfortable long enough for the audience to think. And when the story concludes, they make it VERY clear which way the audience is expected to land. They do not allow for any ambiguity or moral disagreement. They present the "right and true" path, and make it clear that any deviation is wrong and immoral.
I am not disagreeing with you, but old trek does this all the time.
In season 5 episode 17 (the one with the J'naii androgynous race) the setup is exacly the same as Ko'Zeine: from the start you get the answer that suppressing your true self is bad. The J'naii are seen as bigoted and the federation position as the right one. I do not think there is any ambiguity about which side the viewer is supposed to take. The only difference is the end result. Or look at how Dr. Crusher treats Klingon ritual suicide in season 5 episode 16: their culture is treated entirely as a stubborn, barbaric hurdle to be overcome by the 'sensible' 24th-century human perspective.
And TNG is also full of examples of "the federation knows best". In Season 7 Episode 13 the federation works around a similar problem with the forced migration on the holodeck. Or Season 2 Episode 18, where the enterprise force the merge of the Bringloidi and the Mariposans. Or when in Season 1 Episode 8 we dismiss Edo society position immediately as immoral despite them living in a paradise society.
A few years back, I was speaking to a roommate. I complained that the (then) new Star Trek had forced diversity. He immediately shut me down, "Star Trek has ALWAYS been like that". He was a huge fan of Star Trek
Star Trek (TOS) never needed to BE about diversity, because it was set in a utopian future where racism, and sexism weren't problems anymore. You had an entire multi-racial cast on the bridge of a starship so just from THAT you knew that racism wasn't a problem in the future. There was no more war, poverty, disease or crime. Conflict only came from humanity's meetings with alien races.
TOS Star Trek never needed to beat you over the head every 5 minutes with how gay someone was because that wasn't a problem in the 23rd century. Nobody gave a shit.
Are you one of those people who believes Discovery had a coming out as nonbinary plot
What does that even mean?
Why would you even complain about that in the first place?
People tend to think that "forced diversity" is something being pushed from the top, but the people who own Hollywood are literally paying money to the right wing who limits diversity.
My personal belief is that there are simply a lot of homosexuals and trans people in the art world. Whether it be make up artists, actors or screenwriters, i think aaaaall of this is a lot more normal amongst creatives than it is among the regular population.
So obviously, its gonna show up more in movies and shows, than in real life. Because the people making the art knows these actual people.
People tend to forget when watching a movie, that just like when looking at a painting, they are in fact watching someone else art, and they are welcome to just not look at it, or find artists that more aligned with their bigoted views.
“When did Star Trek get so woke?” — My idiot former boss.
Back in 1965.
Only 37 years to go.
I believe it was also an old Shatner tweet (well, if memory serves, he technically asked when it got political) Surprised to see this shift from him. It’s a welcome one but I’m still not sure if I should trust this.
I didn't personally care for it but I realized it wasn't exactly for me so whatevs, just because there is a show in same universe as the other imaginary space shows I watch that I don't like I realize I can just watch something else because I'm an adult (surely lol). It's a damn shame scifi is full of such small minded persons, I certainly know scifi fandom has had a lot of problems in the past but things seemed to be improving, though I suspect this is more of a loud minority situation, unfortunately the loud minority are billionaires.
I'm of the unpopular Opinion that SNW was @ boring rehash of anything I could get from any other show that already exists, and Academy was something fresh. All these irate chickenshits would love SFA if it just had the serial numbers filed off, except that "its woke" because it acknowledges that people just fucking exist.
But hey, can't jeopardize the popularity of a thing that's someone else's "property," not even if that's what it takes to live up to the actual legacy of the Original. Just leaving it to the community would actually let us make something beautiful, as we have done before, so that can't be allowed.
I guess we're just gonna get more Original Series fanfic that lands hollow for me, maybe a hunting-terrorists spy flick, and another mindless cash-grab movie whose screenplay will probably be mostly written by AI.
No more moral questions, no more interesting discussions of what an identity means, no more of what makes science fiction worthwhile as a genre - we have ships to explode - IN SPACE!!!!!1!!
Prodigy, a show written for literal children will be more interesting a topical exploration than a Larry Ellison property.
What a muddy comment. Took me two reads to try to figure out the argument therein, after which I stopped.
Lol "muddy" about sums it up
i dont think SNW was that good, the acting is too wooden, and some of the endings in seasons were like"is that it"? prodigy and lower decks were way better. With ellision in control of trek IP, fans that are usually "left" leaning, how are they going to justify watching and supporting someone like ellison.
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