Alex Kurtzman on the Fine Line Between Adding to, and Staying True to, Star Trek's Canon

You'll note that I said I have no problem with other characters using the F-Bomb. I've also defended when Tilly said, "That's so fucking cool!" and then Stamets backed her up.

But one size doesn't fit all and there are other factors to consider. If Picard drops it, that's exactly what the other side wants even though they claim otherwise. They want Picard to say "fuck" so they can act outraged. They'll use it as their main hook to complain about Star Trek today. Especially since that crowd holds up Picard as their knight in shining armor. Shining Old Trek Armor. It's going to carry more weight than if Tilly said it, no matter what.

There's a character in Oz, a turn-of-the-millennium HBO prison series, who never swore. Which is unusual since it was a maximum security prison. So when he finally did use that word, it carried more weight than it would've otherwise if it were just casual. So it depends on who's saying it and why.

If Picard drops an F-bomb, I want an in-character case for it with context. Something I can argue. Not just "It's the 2020s!", which is also what the other side wants to hear from people who defend it.

 

They erected force fields all the time in TOS if/when they thought a story or plot point needed one. They were just usually 100% invisible for the most part (IE someone usually walked up to one and touched it with something to produce a spark/light reaction. If the era didn't have VERY RELIABLE forcefield tech, I doubt they'd be using it for the Brig, the Security area on Delta Vega in TOS S1 - "Where No Man Has Gone Before"; or to prevent beaming in and out of the Tantalus colony (TOS S1 - "Dagger of the Mind"); or to be able to shield the Penal Colony planet as well as the prison cells in TOS S3 - "Whom Gods Destroy" (Hell, the 1701 couldn't bring the Planetary one down - even in a 'weak area' with full Phasers).

So yeah, sorry, but I don't get where "The ST: D Forcefield tech is 'too advanced', comes from. yes, they have the VFX to make it visible 100% of the time now at a cost production can afford. Welcome to 2017-2019 production values.

 

Maybe? While TNG did have an offhand comment that entertainment TV had been phased out (and it seems like VOY made the occasional comment that watching a non-interactive story over playing a holodeck game of the same tale was a novelty), movies were still being made during the ENT era.

Could be that TV is like baseball and money-based economies; Earth doesn't use them officially, but people can put together their own organizations and stuff if they want to.

 

Or 'Broadcast/Streaming Television started to become Broadcast/Streaming Holovision by the mid 21st century

 

Maybe? "Past Tense" (DS9) implied that something called "Interface" merged the internet and TV together in the early 21st century. "The Neutral Zone" (TNG) stated that entertainment TV wasn't a thing after 2040 and TOS implied at one point or another that TV wasn't really a thing anymore (although, as noted, the ENT crew watched movies, as did the VOY crew, so make of that what you will).

It seems like movies and news broadcasts outlasted TV in general, and even the former may or may not be a something only preserved by people like Tom Paris who like stuff from that point in history. Can't say I see a huge discrepancy if PIC show that news broadcasts are still around.

 

Star Trek has never spent much time on Earth. If there's ever a long story arc set on Earth, it would be hard to avoid. But aboard a starship where everything you need is provided, it just doesn't matter much.

 

For me it's a matter if Star Trek is transitioning from a franchise strictly about a bunch of Role Models in Space to also include Human Beings in space, then I don't see the problem with expletives being thrown about every once in a while as a consequence to stressful situations or by characters such swearing is typical for. Keeping Star Trek a expletive free zone just keeps it from fully exploring the human condition, IMO.

 

I was probably talking about producers and TPTB (the powers that be) that'll veto an idea if its considered too risky, out of character or controversial to show in an episode.

And usually in hindsight now, what it considered too risqué, out of character or controversial is nothing by today's standards. I've read about things they were reluctant to show, because of the times, because of fear of upsetting some TV viewers.

Nah, I was talking about the back log of literature that goes way back, like the war between the republic and Sith, the rise of the Sith, Yoda's beginnings, etc.

They have a lot of novels and background history that they could easily turn into a new set of movies.

 

It was early this century I think. Before holodecks or advanced tech, so what did people do? I think it was meant to be a futuristic comment on TV being sort of bad, but then it left out a major form of communication and entertainment.

If you take what you see in Trek seriously, people play instruments, watch plays, study tech manuals, go to orchestras, or just work. There isn't a version of social media either.

If you want to add bartering and trading things for services and goods that leaves humans in a weird almost pre modern tech situation.

I don't need for the characters to curse, but it would be refreshing to hear them sound , basically like normal humans.

And "oh crap" would be just as interesting to hear. Troi and Crusher talked about boobs getting firmer in the movies.

I noticed this change post TNG. It's not the cursing itself, but the way the characters express themselves.

Sometimes when I watch TNG, it feels like I'm watching fantasy characters instead of future humans in space. There always seemed to be a limit to how much they could express themselves and most that expression had to be clean, ideal, totally limited and related to the plot at hand.

 

Totally agreed. TNG had the Double Whammy of staying bound to Gene's Vision and being a Family Show. Kind of an odd contradiction since Gene wasn't really a family-friendly type of person. I wonder how much of Picard's dialogue in "Encounter at Farpoint" made him an avatar for Gene Roddenberry. "I'm not a family man, but because [the creator of Star Trek] has to have an image of geniality, you're to be sure that's what I project."

I'd love it if after that Romulan tells Picard, "Be the Captain they remember," they'd have Picard say, "Merde." Like he doesn't want to do it. We could have Picard in his "real" mode and then once he's aboard the La Sirena, he goes back into "captain" mode. Cue the soundbite from the trailer. "Engage."

 

I'd find cursing far more believable coming from the young people in the cast than I would from Picard.

Picard is supposed to be this disciplined military officer with decades of experience behind him. You wouldn't think that anything would rattle him to the point of cursing.

 

Cursing on TV isn’t a big deal unless it’s annoyingly forced for some artificial effect, which is exactly how I found Tilly’s line and Stamets’s response to be. Even the creators of South Park, who wrote the book on cursing for effect, realized how unfunny random cursing is. It’s actually funnier when the curse words are bleeped out.

 

I'm confused as to why cursing should be seen as solely the realm of humor on TV. In comedies, fine. In dramas, not so much. So do people think Star Trek is and should be seen as a comedy show? For instance, last year's Twilight Zone had a lot of cursing, none of it bleeped. Why aren't people up in arms the way they have been about cursing in Star Trek? Its not like cursing has ever been a feature of the Twilight Zone in any of its iterations either.

 

Was the cursing in The Twilight Zone natural, or was it forced? Because I felt that Tilly’s and Stamets’s lines were incredibly forced.

 

Pretty much all the dialogue in Twilights Zone was natural vs. dialogue in Star Trek.

Are you annoyed because a piece of dialogue in Star Trek seemed forced to you? Because that has been the style of Star Trek since day one so it's pretty late in the franchise to start complaining about dialogue seeming forced in Trek, no matter what the content of the dialogue is, because that's a feature of Star Trek, not a bug. And given how Star Trek handles dialogue, my personal view is then, what is the context? Does it fit the context of the situation presented? And for me the answer is yes. I find it again, telling that of all the forced dialogue we've gotten in the show and movies over the decades, it's only a scene with an expletive that has people up in arms about a piece of dialogue seeming forced.

 

^I love the scene we're discussing here and I think it fits the characters involved and the situation perfectly, but to be fair this most certainly isn't the first and only scene people have ever got down on for having forced dialogue. It's just that most episodes that exist are literally decades old at this point, so the conversation about how forced their dialogue is or isn't has long since died out, for the most part. (Though I can personally think of at least one such conversation that happened a few months ago about the TNG ep Symbiosis.)

 

Fair enough that people have complained about forced dialogue in the past in Trek. However, I Can't think offhand an episode of the show that didn't feature forced dialogue for some stretch.

 

I think all cursing in TV is pretty much useless at this point. Discovery's scene felt more natural, if scripted awkward, than most.

 

Personally I think the more pointless thing is agonizing over which cursing is 'natural' and which isn't. A pronounced absence of cursing usually comes across as equally unnatural, and very few works of fiction ever have truly 100% believable dialogue in the first place. In fact, in general, you shouldn't want a tv show to have truly 'natural' dialogue, because the way most people actually speak is just not engaging enough to hook an audience for a long term story.

 

There’s a difference between such things as forced dialogue, over-the-top acting, bad writing, and cursing for no real inherent reason other than for shock value (or the idea that “we couldn’t do it then but we can do it now so let’s do it!” type of attitude. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should do it.) I’m speaking specifically about the latter.