He said "damn." Damn is not a swear word, and no one needs to apologize for using it. Even if it were a swear word, an apology is still unnecessary as this forum has no rules against profanity.
Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
Regarding in-universe explanations vs. real-world explanations, I like to think that both are reasonable topics for discussion and that neither should be considered out of bounds or inappropriate. Heck, Trekkies have been interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff for easily as long as they've had been having fun making up "in-universe" theories about the imaginary world of Star Trek, as proven by the mountains of non-fiction books and articles about the making of STAR TREK.
And, for the record, Christopher is not the only individual who is occasionally frustrated by the way some posters seem so resistant to real-world explanations when it comes to discussing any given artistic choices or seeming discrepancies. Heck, I remember I once casually offered a real-world explanation for some plot device ("Oh, they built the shuttlecraft set because they got money from a toy manufacturer to do so") and, to my surprise, this one poster went off on me as though I had just barged into a children's Christmas party to announce there was no Santa Claus.
"Yes, yes, we know it's not real! Why do you have to spoil everything by reminding us!" (Or words to the effect.)
I admit to being taken aback by their reaction. We're Trekkies. I thought we loved behind-the-scenes trivia?
And, for the record, Christopher is not the only individual who is occasionally frustrated by the way some posters seem so resistant to real-world explanations when it comes to discussing any given artistic choices or seeming discrepancies. Heck, I remember I once casually offered a real-world explanation for some plot device ("Oh, they built the shuttlecraft set because they got money from a toy manufacturer to do so") and, to my surprise, this one poster went off on me as though I had just barged into a children's Christmas party to announce there was no Santa Claus.
"Yes, yes, we know it's not real! Why do you have to spoil everything by reminding us!" (Or words to the effect.)
I admit to being taken aback by their reaction. We're Trekkies. I thought we loved behind-the-scenes trivia?
Apparently, some haven't noticed that the show we're all here for has recently decided that swearing is really fucking cool.
Heh. This reminds of the time another Trek author casually used the f-word in a post and another poster took offense. I had to point out that a lot of us are past or present New Yorkers so that's just the fucking way we talk. No offense should be intended or inferred.
Trust me, get a bunch of Trekkies sitting around a bar at a convention and we're not going to talk like choirboys. We're going to sound more like Spock doubling down on colorful metaphors.
Excuse me, a proper new yorker prounouces it fuckin'Heh. This reminds of the time another Trek author casually used the f-word in a post and another poster took offense. I had to point out that a lot of us are past or present New Yorkers so that's just the fucking way we talk. No offense should be intended or inferred.
Trust me, get a bunch of Trekkies sitting around a bar at a convention and we're not going to talk like choirboys. We're going to sound more like Spock doubling down on colorful metaphors.
Heck, look at the writers on TOS. Roddenberry was an ex-cop who wrote a kinky sex farce after STAR TREK, Richard Matheson fought in the Battle of the Bulge and, among other things, wrote an erotic horror novel for Playboy Press, Theodore Sturgeon wrote an entire novel about a guy who drinks menstrual blood (great book, btw), Robert Bloch wrote Psycho, Norman Spinrad wrote Bug Jack Barron for Pete's sake, not to mention The Void Captain's Tale . . . . I don't think these guys would get the vapors over a swear word or two.
Heck, Spinrad is one of my old writing teachers. Trust me, he's been known to use profanity on occasion.
You mean that incident with the open usage of "New York Times Bestselling Kirsten Motherfucking Beyer"?
Yes, that's true. In a way Star Trek was a victim of its own success. TWOK ended up being very popular among the Star Trek films itself, and so a number of future Star Trek filmmakers felt the best way to sell tickets was to redux TWOK. On the one hand TMP was smart sci-fi, but it wasn't very popular. TWOK was less sci-fi but ended up being a blockbuster. Paramount saw that and wanted to capitalized on it. And I guess I can't blame them. Though TVH proved you could still do sci-fi to an extent and be a blockbuster--but then not every film should be like TVH either. They tried capitalizing on that and you ended up with TFF.
I frequently complained that we had 3 films in a row that borrowed from TWOK to various extents---Nemesis, Star Trek (2009) and STID. Now I liked all those films, but it did bother me a bit that it seemed the writers kept going to TWOK well. One thing I really liked about Beyond is that it broke that cycle for the most part. Oh, I'm sure you could find little bits that reminded you of TWOK, but overall it felt like a different film.
All great films as well. And you're right, everyone wanted to cash in on the success of Star Wars. Now I like Star Wars (though just the films for me, I never really got into it beyond that). But Star Wars was a space opera, fantasy. It was never meant to be serious sci-fi. Hell, I believe George Lucas has said as much in the past. It's a shame so much sci-fi has gone in that direction. Now I will say even TWOK is at least somewhat more intelligent that Star Wars from a science fiction perspective. It's weak in a lot of areas, but they made an attempt to provide some reasoning behind the story. I think you see some of the same parallels between Alien and Aliens. They were both great films, but I always loved Alien more. Partly because it was a bit more horror--being chased around a spaceship by a hostile alien (at least in that case it takes away the whole 'why don't they just leave' answer like you do in haunted houses). But it also was more serious. Aliens is a great action film certainly. But it's more popcorn fare. It's fun to watch, it keeps your attention and you never get bored, but it's not as high brow as its predecessor.
Ha-ha. So True. I'll admit I avoid using the f-word on forums and in print (partly because some forums I go on do cite you for it--and partly because I feel odd using it). Though I have used damn and Hell (though not always a 'curse' word).
And I'll even admit it bothers me just a bit when it was used on Discovery. It always seemed in the future they left 'more colorful metaphors' in the past, at least the F- word and the S- word and so forth.
But I don't get all bent out of shape when others use it. I was kind of shocked when they were upset about damn.
Yeah, another bit of an overreaction. I love discussing in-universe stuff. I'm not as into the behind the scenes stuff. But it's just personal preference so I sort of gravitate to that automatically, sometimes without realizing it. I don't get bent out of shape when someone wants to discuss the behind the scenes stuff.
I'm glad they didn't use some sort of made-up pseudo-profanity instead. Made the scene more honest. Plus, I thought it was fucking hilarious the first time I saw it.
It was actually the most financially successful Star Trek film prior to 2009, corrected for inflation. People had issues with its story, but it wasn't a commercial failure. The main reason it wasn't as profitable as Paramount wanted is because it was so expensive to make (especially since Paramount's creative bookkeepers lumped in the cost for all the previous, failed movie and TV revival projects in with the costs for TMP itself).
And it would've been possible to give a sequel more of a heart than TMP without needing to sacrifice the brain. To refine what they had rather than starting over from scratch.
Preaching to the choir, man. It's annoyed me for decades that popular culture came to see Star Wars as the embodiment of what science fiction was when Lucas himself explicitly did not consider it to be science fiction.
And what annoyed me even more was when people took that definition to heart and defensively said "It's not science fiction, it's plausible speculation" about things that really were science fiction by the proper definition. Like season 1 of SeaQuest DSV, which tried to be a scientifically plausible, well-researched extrapolation of the future, essentially hard science fiction, but whose executive producer insisted that it wasn't science fiction, because the public perception was that "science fiction" meant something brainless and fanciful, ignoring what the first 50% of the phrase is. And then the new producers brought in to retool it for season 2 said "Okay, now we're going to embrace doing science fiction" and what they did instead was mindless, incoherent fantasy that made Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea's later seasons look smart. As a science fiction fan and then-aspiring writer, I was deeply insulted that that was what they thought science fiction meant -- and really, that it was what most people in the general public thought it meant.
Fortunately, the reputation of SF has improved since then. It's no longer mistaken for mindless fantasy, and it's no longer a stigmatized label that people who want to do smart shows have to distance themselves from.
I don't even bother to make the comparison, because Star Wars has never tried to be science fiction or science anything. It's sword-and-sorcery fantasy and Eastern mysticism dressed up with the semantics of space opera, along with a generous helping of WWII movies, samurai movies, Westerns, and a frisson of American Grafitti.
I don't make a comparison there either, because they weren't even the same genre. Alien was a claustrophobic haunted-house horror movie in space, while Aliens was a military action movie. They weren't trying to do the same thing with different degrees of quality or intelligence; rather, they weren't even trying to do the same thing at all. They took the same core ingredient but made totally different recipes out of it, like the competitors in an Iron Chef episode. That's what makes Aliens such a good sequel -- the fact that it didn't just try to copy the original but followed it up in a totally fresh and expansive way.
Okay?
I see. However, when I brought up the movies in the first place, I wasn't really thinking about the stuff as pieces of art of their times, but as two interlinked stories, so we've been kinda having two different conversations.
I don't think any of us where.
Right.
Okay then.
Makes sense, although you could say that the same for a lot of Trek novels, too.
I kinda see the point, but that also assumes that the Federation would've been okay with the decision in the first place, which seems really dicey, at best -- esp. considering everything we've learned about Khan and the Eguenics Wars since. I mean, we now know that a century prior, rogue Augments nearly started a war with the Klingons when left to their own devices.
If the latter, wouldn't we need to take it into account when examining the series in the larger context of the franchise?
I think you're the only one doing that, as far as the interpretation part, I see what you mean, but would counter point that the original work has been added onto by other creators, so the vacuum that the show existed in during the '60s no longer exists.
Fair point, but it's TOS and everything else now.
Huh?
I would have to disagree:
Even in "Space Seed" itself, the "best of tyrants" scene has Spock pointing out that the "Nobel Demon" legend that has been built around Khan has very little basis in fact.
That doesn't sound right, but I can't really explain why.
We don't actually know that it wasn't unknown. All we know for sure is that Captain Terell didn't know a thing about it and that no support ever came, but it's never clarified if that was because Kirk kept it off the books or just something that fell between the cracks. Either scenario would work with the film as is, just depending on what you think is more plausible all things considered.
(For clarification's sake, do you not like the movie in and of itself, or just how it fits in with the rest of the franchise; I'm having trouble telling the difference here.)
Yeah?
Comics and the movies are two different things and what happens in the former is irrelevant to what happens in the latter. The only possibility to explain the problem is the idea in Days of Future Past that Xavier had that medicine to walk at the suppression of his powers, but that doesn't work because the two movies with him walking post-crippling (Origins: Wolverine and X-Men: The Last Stand) also show him using his powers at the same time.
Okay?
Last edited:
Again, why wouldn't they be? I've explained why using an uninhabited planet as a penal colony is something that 23rd-century Starfleet would probably have found reasonable under the circumstances, using the underlying logic intended by TOS's creators. I mean, a wilderness planet is pretty obviously escape-proof, barring outside visitors. It's not like they can just flap their arms and fly back to civilization.
Exile has been used as a standard form of punishment for criminals for thousands of years. It doesn't seem as viable to us today because the world has become so fully explored and interconnected, but it makes sense that it would be revived as a practice in the interstellar age, at least as portrayed on TOS where interstellar travel was not a quick or casual commute.
It's not an either/or question. Naturally it has been taken into account in an in-series context many times before. I'm just saying that it is also worth talking about it in backstage terms as well as onstage terms. One does not invalidate or drive out the other. On the contrary, you understand a work of fiction better if you consider it from both perspectives.
We've gotten so far into the weeds that we've lost track of where this started. My original point was to respond to the statement "Kirk often violated the Prime Directive" by explaining that that's a myth, an error that arises when people mistakenly assume that the Prime Directive in TOS was defined the same way it was in TNG. That argument applies both in-universe and in real life, because it can be taken either as a cultural change in how Starfleet interprets the Directive and a creative change in how writers approached it. They're actually parallel questions, because they both reflect the tendency to see only the letter of the non-interference rule and miss the underlying intention of it.
But it helps to understand the point if you consider it in both the in-story context and the real-world context, because the writers of Star Trek have always used the show as a commentary on the real world, an allegory for world situations and the writers' values. So understanding the difference between the activist, Peace Corps mentality of '60s America and the post-colonialist skepticism of cultural intervention in '80s and '90s America can help contextualize the difference in the in-story portrayals of the Directive. It doesn't benefit us to ignore the real-world context that shapes works of fiction, because works of fiction are meant to reflect and comment on reality, not to be utterly isolated from it. The whole reason they're valuable is because they address real-life concerns.
You're being too literal again. Obviously they're not the same continuity, but the point is proof of concept. It's not utterly impossible to believe that the movies' Xavier could've regained his mobility temporarily and then lost it again. Heck, it's far from the most inexplicable continuity glitch between X-Men movies.
Yeah, true. It was always eye rolling when someone made up some corny face swear terms--you knew what it was referring to but it was something made up.
It wasn't a huge deal--it's just that it seemed in Star Trek they purposely seemed to leave that behind. Even the films, at least up to Generations, kept it PG-13 level, and in TVH Spock and Kirk seemed unfamiliar with R-rated swearing.
One of those things, just because you can doesn't necessarily translate to you should. Though I'm glad they're not overdoing it. It would probably become a bigger deal if they were dropping F-bombs in every episode.
Yeah, that's true enough. Paramount and the public in general seemed to feel TWOK was the better film, so it ended up being the film a number of the future films used as a benchmark for success.
Really, though, it makes sense that people in the future would use different profanities than we use today. The perception of profanities changes over time, as words that are initially shocking become commonplace and even quaint. Believe it or not, "golly" was a shockingly offensive profanity in Shakespeare's day, because it was derived from "God's body" and referring to God as having physical form was considered highly blasphemous. Yet by the 20th century it had become a silly euphemism associated with children and innocent characters. Similarly, "rats" was probably a far more hard-hitting oath in the days of the Black Plague than it's become today.
You can see the same change happening with profanity today, as terms that used to be utterly verboten in polite conversation are now tossed around freely and casually and even spoken on TV. George Carlin's list of the seven words you can't say on TV has been increasingly whittled down in the decades since. So I don't think those words are going to have the same shock value to future generations that they've had in the past, so they may lose their role as expletives and be replaced by something different, much like "golly" or "rats."
Ok, maybe. It just sounds hokey sometimes. Voyager seemed to do things like that a lot (not so much to substitute for swear words necessarily but switching common phrases and it just sounded goofy a lot).
Heh. This reminds of the time another Trek author casually used the f-word in a post and another poster took offense. I had to point out that a lot of us are past or present New Yorkers so that's just the fucking way we talk. No offense should be intended or inferred.
Trust me, get a bunch of Trekkies sitting around a bar at a convention and we're not going to talk like choirboys. We're going to sound more like Spock doubling down on colorful metaphors.
Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, but it doesn't seem to fit somehow. IMHO, it feels as much a punishment as demoting Kirk from admiral to captain was in Voyage Home. Even without the hindsight of Wrath of Khan showing how it all blew up in their collective faces, I'm very unconvinced that Kirk leaving the Augments on Ceti Alpha V was the right decision (granted, that might make it a good companion piece to it's theatrical sequel, which does deal in part with the how the decisions and mistakes of Kirk's past have come back in his present).
Okay?
Huh.
The comics are the source material, but they're not very useful for explaining things in the movies, because the movies change things, meaning that it's impossible to know what "counts" and what doesn't. In the comics Havok is younger then Cyclops, where the movies reverse that. Comics Wolverine was put into Weapon X thanks to Romulus, while movie Wolverine was put in there because of an incident in Vietnam. Comics Rev. Stryker was a heretical televangelist who used his platform and followers to fight the X-Men, while. movie Maj. Stryker was a military scientist who headed up the Weapon X project. Comics Angel was a founding X-Men member, while movie Angel was never a member. Comics Laura Kinney/X-23 is a white American clone of Wolverine who lives in the present day and was the singular subject of the Facility's experiments, while the movies Laura/X23-23 is a biracial Mexican test tube baby who was one of many test subjects in Transign's experiments. Need I go on?
That may be, but with no reason to believe that there was one (except for the discrepancy itself), it's just fan theories all the way down.