That's not a clip show.
When Trek insults our intelligence
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
It would probably be more accurate to say it was done in the style of a clip show.
There you go.
Stargate SG1 had the best clip shows.
It does help if a clip show advances the story the show is telling which most of SG-1's did.
Sounds like you think the very premise of this thread is flawed?
It always frustrates me when I run across this sort of attitude, about any kind of art or entertainment... basically saying "it's just entertainment, turn off your critical faculties and enjoy it." I really can't wrap my head around that. To my way of thinking, a piece of art seeking to entertain me needs to engage me on multiple levels, emotional and intellectual. That's why I become a fan of shows like West Wing and The Wire and not Jackass or Jersey Shore. If a show lacks that I don't take it as a personal insult (of course not), but I do see it as insulting the intelligence of the audience in general (which is what this thread's about).
With Star Trek, moreover, the genre is a factor. We're talking about science fiction. SF by its very nature, in prose and on screen, has always appealed to people who can look beyond how things are to imagine how they might be — that is to say, people with more intellectual curiosity than average. So it's a hypocritical bait-and-switch if a SF story hooks me precisely by appealing to my intellectual curiosity, then in effect says "just take it all at face value and don't ask questions." That's not entertaining, and it's perfectly valid grounds for criticism.
Exactly. The constraints the writers, producers, directors, actors, camera-folk, extras etc. may have faced when making the show are quite frankly irrelevant. When you're criticizing a product, the only thing that matters is the final product. That's it.
Adam Troy-Castro put it well. You don't have to be a heart surgeon to criticize a heart surgeon, because even someone who's not a doctor can tell you if the patient has died.
I'm always amused by such statements. It's not like the person said "check your brain and just watch it." It becomes a question of how much detail pulling apart of a show must be done in order to fully enjoy it? It's the hardest part for me to grasp is the idea that it must be black and white thinking of either turn off the brain or analyze it to death.
Star Trek is not perfect, by any stretch. And I appreciate the fact that you pointed out that any insult isn't personally directed at any one audience member. But, there is a balance to be struck, and finding insult in entertainment is, in my opinion, overstepping that balance.
But, I also know that my approach to entertainment is vastly different than most. I don't go in to a media expecting it to hit a certain level of intelligence or imagination. I go in to it expecting it to entertain and challenge, on some level. More than that, I would like it to connect me with the characters in some way. Any thing that does that I'm willing to engage on some level. I don't expect Star Trek (or SF in general) to go any deeper than another genre.
Nicely put. There's a fine but crucial line between taking this stuff seriously and taking it too seriously.
It does seem to me that people sometimes forget that sci-fi shows and such are supposed to be fun.
Agreed.
I sort of take the McCoy approach....I will grouse about this and that which I would have preferred was done in a different way, but in the end it doesn't go as deep as it might seem. And along with that, my sometimes-mocking humor shouldn't be taken seriously, either.
I understand where you’re coming from, but I still could never feel “insulted” by it. Maybe I don’t have “above average intellectual curiosity” if that’s what you’re implying.
I can fully appreciate TPTB’s choices throughout the series. Good or bad.
Either way, it’s not science. It is science fiction. If they want to create some crazy reason for why the Klingons all look different, I’m going to accept it, because it’s their story and I’ve made the personal choice to come along for the ride. Fiction isn’t supposed to be believable by your own standards. It’s 200+ years in the future, how do any of us know what that would even remotely look like?
I don’t want to stress myself out with why an episode is wrong or dumb, I want to enjoy it and be entertained. I don’t want to constantly question it or the writers motives, because it’s taking me outside of what I’m trying to feel fully immersed in. When I’m watching TV or a movie, I’m sucked into it...until I try to pick it apart and find a flaw or a production problem. Star Trek isn’t perfect by any means but I’m not going to see the best parts of it if I’m tearing it apart all the time.
It’s not that I don’t have questions at the end of an episode that may be a little off, it’s that when I get the answer, I accept it. If the writers have an explanation for it, that’s enough for me.
That might be an unpopular perspective, but that is how I honor the Trek universe and my own appreciation for it.
No, I'm not implying anything about you. On the other hand, that's a pretty good summation of the feeling a viewer gets from the show in the kind of instances we're talking about.
What does it mean to insult someone's intelligence, after all? It's not direct insults we're talking about here — a show, or even a writer behind the scenes, is never literally going to say "ha, this doesn't make sense, but you're so stupid you'll accept it." It's a matter of implication. It's that bothersome feeling you get (or, at least, I get) when storytellers... or politicians, or salesmen, or basically anyone who wants you to believe something... send the unspoken message that you're not as smart as they are. They do this by offering weak stories (arguments, claims...) as if you won't notice the weaknesses. The thing is, I'm pretty damn smart, so I tend to notice.
Alternately, it's possible that they're offering this weak tea because they don't see the weaknesses, because they're actually not as smart as you are. That doesn't imply the same sort of condescension, but it's discouraging and off-putting in a whole different way.
(Of course, it's possible to do both at once... Donald Trump does this all the time, for instance, most recently just yesterday when he asked the American people to believe "in a key sentence in my remarks, I said the word 'would' instead of 'wouldn't.")
I like writing, on the page or on the screen, that is smart enough to pay attention to the little details, and assumes the audience is smart enough to do the same. Writing that works on multiple levels, that challenges the audience to keep up. That's why I like the work of people like Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, Connie Willis... of David Mamet, Joss Whedon, Joe Straczynski, Aaron Sorkin.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. FWIW, I would say the relevant standards are whatever makes Coleridge's famous "willing suspension of disbelief" reasonably plausible. It depends on the degree of logical consistency within a work. (Obviously SF is less "realistic" than memetic litfic, but that only makes the suspension of disbelief more important, something it achieves through the process Darko Suvin has described as "cognitive estrangement.")
Obviously I don't want to stress myself out either, and I also prefer my fiction to be an immersive experience. But achieving that is a task shared between author and audience, not a burden imposed entirely on the latter; readers/viewers can't be asked or expected to suspend all critical faculties. That's the crux of the whole problem here. When a story hinges on the viewer swallowing something that, essentially, no reasonably smart person would swallow, on ignoring something that you just can't help noticing, that's when it's insulting the intelligence of the audience. The kind of things that force you to wonder, "just how dumb do they think we are"?
(As an aside, this is probably the largest among the many reasons that I can't stand ST09. It's a pervasive problem from beginning to end of that film, an idiot plot so idiotic that it practically reaches out of the screen, slaps me in the face, and says "I dare you to pretend this makes sense!")
If the explanation makes at least a reasonable degree of logical sense by the story's own internal standards, I'm usually willing to roll with it. But that's not always the case... e.g., Brannon Braga was infamous for writing episodes (especially his time-travel plots) where the explanations just didn't hang together. Similarly, the "explanations" offered in DSC for how the Klingon war developed, and especially how it was resolved, just didn't make sense by any standard.
And then, of course, there are story elements for which no explanation is offered at all (and DSC is full of those as well), leaving the audience to do all the heavy lifting. That's a slightly different kind of problem, but an equally frustrating one.
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Ok, I've read through this and frankly I agree in principle with a lot of it, but I'm not sure how's its possible to reconcile with the reality of Trek as presented.
I know we've collectively had this debate before and have no wish to revisit it ad infinitum but the moment you start being insulted by poor logic, internal discontinuities, poor science and debatable use of allegory in Trek you find yourself in a quandary because it simultaneously manages to engage the viewer on a cerebral level whilst dropping the ball on all those things with such regularity it has spawned a stereotype of the frustrated trekkie hopelessly trying to reconcile everything.
Sometimes it's too much to ignore completely but to find that "insulting" per se seems a position doomed to disappointment. The franchise is simply too riddled with the legacy of fifty years of a multitude of writers all leaving their marks with little communication between them. Continuity errors abound even within story arcs, characters seem almost to have multiple personality disorders at times given the disparity between moral and ethical stances in episodes with seemingly comparable premises, even thematically sometimes it's hard to see one single coherent universe.
Why let it bother you? Why feel insulted? If you must apply any value judgement at all to the situation why not at least save yourself the heartache and be proud of your own analysis rater than scathing of the product being analysed?
I really appreciate you writing all of that and explaining your position on this in detail, but I don’t think we’re ever gonna fully agree on this one.
The writers are nothing like salesmen or politicians. They’re artists. They’re creating something, not selling it. I might agree with you on some misleading commercials or previews for the movies but generally, they’re trying to make something you’ll love. They know how smart ST fans are. A lot of us are nerdy and obsessive (me, for example) and pick up on every detail. They want us to enjoy it, that’s the prime objective. Enjoyment. I don’t think that’s Donald Trump’s prime objective, or anyone on the QVC
I got into Star Trek through ST09, I still love that movie, and I also love DSC. I don’t see the flaws in them that you see (or any other Trek for that matter, honestly I’m a TNG/DS9 girl). And quite frankly I don’t want to see those flaws, because I can feel how frustrating it is for you. That would push me away from the franchise.
There’s always more coming. Plot holes or unexplained occurrences will be filled in time and we’ll get a better understanding of things that don’t always link together. Fiction affects people differently and maybe I’m naive or too accepting of TPTB but I don’t feel that my intelligence is ever insulted by Star Trek.
No it isn't, the prime objective is the primary duty of all starfleet officers to.....oh, never mind.
Well, that's what makes threads like this interesting.
I'm not the one who chose how to frame this thread's question, that was the OP, @King Daniel Beyond; and he didn't coin the phrase either, of course. In the post above I was merely trying to clarify a reasonable understanding of what the phrase means, in response to a poster asserting that essentially nothing in Trek qualifies as insulting our intelligence. Along the way there have been other posters pointing out interesting personal examples, and here at the other extreme you're essentially arguing that everything in the show qualifies, so why bother?For the record, I don't spend a lot of time feeling literally insulted by Trek, and I do usually enjoy the process of devising clever ways to reconcile story problems (short of the point, as mentioned, where the effort is left entirely to the viewer). Still and all I think it's a reasonable question for a thread to ask, and it's obviously elicited a wide range of thought-provoking opinions.
Also for the record, I don't think Trek's track record is really as bad as you say. In fact, I'd argue that overall it has a better record for respecting viewers' intelligence, in terms of internal consistency and otherwise, than quite a lot of other fictional franchises. (Especially in its first thirty years, which is when almost all of the "good" Trek content was made.)
