Spoilers Let’s talk about the destruction of Trek utopia…

Lorca in DSC, multiple times (might have the record for being tortured the most times, certainly has a record for being killed the most times: brightness torture by L'rell, a choose your pain beating by Klingon Guards, and multiple times in the agonizer).
Soval tortured by everyone's buddy Shran
Chekhov, bug in ear
Terrell, bug in ear
Kelvinverse Pike, bug in mouth
everyone on USS Voyager: living with Neelix for years

there's a lot of torture in this show, I never noticed really.

 

Yeah, torture is not new to Trek. I remember a comic where the Klingons capture Talosians and use their powers to inflict the Enterprise crew's worse fears.

 

McCoy in "The Empath."

 

Pike wasn't physically tortured by Talosians in the Cage/Menagerie but the fire and other unpleasantness seemed to be real enough to him in his mind.
Worf: forced to repeatedly fight by the Dominion
Archer: beaten by the Xindi to get him to talk. (fools.. Archer never stops talking! It reminds me of this trip I took one time to East Africa. I saw a gazelle giving birth..)
O'Brien: systematically maltreated and starved for 20 years in a virtual prison as punishment for espionage

where.. the more you dig the more you find. this is a really torturey show

 

Gem herself in "The Empath", and that's still a scene that creeps me out, her writhing in pain while the Vians look at each other with these satisfied looks as they do it.

 

Worf's Ascension ceremony, with the pain sticks. Although he seemed to enjoy that, so maybe it doesn't quite qualify as torture.

 

Did see this on the 'Torture' episode list:
TOS S3 "The Cloud Minders"
http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/74.htm

 

If it were not Worf, but a human character being tortured, perhaps for sexual purposes, would the same people still object?

 

a LOT of DS9 episodes were "Let's torture O'Brien" episodes. there were at least two or three each season

 

Let's not forget he was married to Keiko. He was tortured in every episode.

 

Keiko is my spirit animal

 

I don't like it!
I don't like it at all!

I'm referring to how Icheb was killed of in "Picard".

Honestly, this is what I feared would happen. A typical case of itchy-fingered producers who just have to destroy and kill off beloved characters from previous (and better) series.

Not to mention that it had to be in a scene with sadistic and bestialic torture, so typical for this sh***y, sick decade. (Oh sorry, it's a new decade now but obviously the same doom-and-gloom crap we had to stand in the previous decade).

I never cared that much about Icheb as a character but I find this treatment of him downright disgusting and insulting.

So what will be next? Janeway being gang-raped and tortrured before killed off? Tuvok being slowly cut to pieces in a blood-soaked slow-motion scene? Beverly Crusher being burned alive in another slow-motion scene? Paris getting his head cut off by a "Klingon" Ninja Turtle?

Come on producers! Who's next? Can we make bets on which StarTrek character who will be destroyed next?


It's ironic actually. I've been waiting so long for a 24th century series which I hoped would be better than the recent NuTrek movies and the horrible "Discovery".I've should have known better but I didn't think of the fact that we are living in the dark ages now with lousy doom-and gloom "entertainment".

For me it feels like Star Trek has reached its final station. Fortunately, the old series are still available on DVD and I will stick to them in the future.

 

Wow...

 

Don't even get me started on Whispers... that episode is basically pure Social Anxiety distilled into a Star Trek episode with the replicant O'Brien not having a clue why everybody's so cold and distant towards him and how he constantly feels watched, his computer is broken into, etc... I shudder at the thought of ever having to rewatch it.

 

I'd actually volunteer.

 

Well, I agree with others that say.. Its an optomistic future, one that has all disesease, famine, war etc. taken care of, have replicators so no one is in need.. That in a way is Utopia.. but Utopia is a personal definition.. Being retired sitting at home doinging nothing may be a utopia to somebody, but mind numbingly boring to me.. and go stir crazy after a week.

Its the "Mind set" of the people as a whole.. in the 50's to the 80's people were in general optomistic, and this reflected in star trek series. were optomistic about humanity and the future. now post 9'11 and everybody all down trodden and being a victim mentality.. they think of the future as grim and dark.
But even in an optomistic future, there will still be slavery, seedy underground, poverty.. It might be minimized or even gone on Earth, but on other planets, or colony's .. Humans will sadly be humans.

 

You may be overstating how optimistic people were back in the old days. Every generation thinks that previous eras were happier than today, but in fact, those eras also thought that the world was going to hell in a hand basket.

And when it comes to science fiction, TREK was unusual in its day because it purported that there would be a bright and shiny future. Most SF shows and movies of the era were of a paranoid bent, full of alien invasions, post-atomic wastelands, soulless computer overlords, etc. See INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, THE TWILIGHT ZONE, THE OUTER LIMITS, THE INVADERS, LAND OF THE GIANTS, PLANET OF THE APES, SOYLENT GREEN, FAHRENHEIT 451, DR. STRANGELOVE, THE OMEGA MAN, LOGAN'S RUN, MAD MAX, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, THE TERMINATOR, THE X-FILES, etc.

Dystopia were the norm, not the exception, long before 9/11. And even STAR TREK, back in the 1960s, acknowledged the Cold War paranoia of the time. Remember Roberta Lincoln talking about her generation was rebelling because they didn't know whether there was going to be a future, what with the Bomb and all?

Post-War America was not all sunshine and optimism. It was also backyard bomb shelters, the Cuban Missile Crisis, McCarthyism, Viet Nam, race riots, political assassinations, and the constant shadow of thermonuclear war. Heck, for a while there, pretty much every movie set in the "near-future" of the 1990s assumed the nineties were going to be a dark ages of barbarism and destruction. (Hi, Eugenic Wars.)

 

What was more torture for me was realizing that one of the Klingons doing that to Worf was John Tesh.

 

Which is funny because there is evidence of the poverty rate going down and standard of living improving.

One wouldn't know it from the news but life is actually improving in places.

And the best part about TOS was the fact that the optimism was that humanity survived the nihilism and was willing to work together-that's it. Disease was not eliminated, bigotry was still present in some places, etc.

Despite the constant drum beat of depressing news there has been human improvement since TOS aired.

 

@Greg Cox
All true, Forbin Project, Logans run where anybody over 18 was killed, Soylent green being people..
And also true, Star Trek was one of a few that shown that humanity would get past all this crap and be a shining "Planet" in the universe to look up to..
Just seems that Star Trek has takin a not a hard left turn to grim dark, but showing everything isn't rainbows and lolipops in the future.