What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

I believe it started a very long time ago with Dali's "Un Chien Andalou"... Needless to say that it was a lot more artistic not to mention original back then.

 

I think Star Trek's "optimistic future for humanity" is really just gratuitous human chauvinism most of the time. Among an infinite number of intelligent species, humans are uniquely moral/virtuous, uniquely curious, uniquely generous, etc, etc, etc.

I love the Q episodes, but Q is one of the worst offenders, just by being an omnipotent entity (one of many throughout the franchise) that finds humans more interesting than any other species that's ever existed anywhere because....????

 

As I recall, doesn't Azetbur lampshade this in TUC?

Alas, since our supply of actors is rather limited to one species, it's rather difficult to portray non-humanoid sentients. Books and TAS have a leg (or other analogous limb) up on this.

Then, too, it seems like ENT made a point of humans having a talent for making new friends, and for serving as interspecies peacemakers. And for going out of our way to do both.

 

Yes, she does, quite well.

I think this is an important detail to remember. This is still a show written by humans and for humans and we are limited in terms of what can be demonstrated. Aliens are difficult to create, and difficult to write in a way that feels both familiar and alien at the same time.

 

Yes, and in a scene that was removed from the final cut, Scotty makes some racist remarks about her.

 

You write to your audience. First lesson any writer learns. Second lesson, you are your most important audience.

 

And in many cases your only one...

 

Yes. Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth novels succeed (and succeed brilliantly) with the insectoid Thranx (especially in the books about how they came to become Humanity's greatest friends and allies). But it's rather unlikely that any of us will live to see a Humanx Commonwealth movie, much less a Humanx Commonwealth TV series, even with the latest advances in CGI, simply because of the difficulty in depicting sentient arthropods with four trulegs, two foothands, and two truhands.

 

I don't know if "Klingon bitch" qualifies as racist per se but yeah, he does have unflattering words for her in a scene that's on the DVD and other home video editions of the film.

 

They didn't even establish that the Romulan language had more than one dialect until Star Trek 2009.

 

I'm not sure I'd describe it that way. It established that Vulcan and Romulan are as similar to each other as Spanish from Mexico and Spain.

 

It establishes there are three dialects, but also that the overall language is extremely similar to Vulcan. So in my analogy, Vulcan would be Castilian Spanish and Romulan would be Mexican, Peruvian and Argentinian Spanish.

 

The differences between any of those dialects are not that great, with a minor exception for Argentina which has Rioplatanese Spanish, which could still be understood by other spanish speakers, and Lunfardo but that is more like slang.

 

I'm confused? What established that Vulcan and Romulan are as similar as Spanish Spanish and Mexican Spanish? And how did it establish that?

 

It was established in Star Trek 2009 as being similar enough that one communications officer could not distinguish between the two.

 

It requires a certain amount of ego to put your work out there.

 

yes, that's exactly the point.

This is a very clear statement and I'm not sure why people are having trouble wrapping their brains around it.