Thank goodness.
Swearing in Star Trek - Steve Shives
- Thread starter Tuskin38
- Start date
Thank goodness.
I didn’t argue that Stewart couldn’t exercise creative control. I merely stated he was unsettled.
It’s you that outright stated he wasn’t unsettled, then you made your point about creative control.
Regardless of his status, beyond being the series lead, he was unsettled by the language. Which was my point.
If it were me I’d say “oh, thanks for the link, I was mistaken” but if you want to say you won the internet then that’s alright by me too. It’s just a swear word in a TV show.
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Having been around both supposedly refined grandmothers and nervous students I can say that they swear far better than they are ever given credit for.
Admiral Norah Satie looked like a sweet grandmother but she was a McCarthyite witch hunter who almost destroyed careers as well as lives. So...yeah.
Is this:
Sheer hubris
Improved by this:
Sheer fucking hubris
Not really.
Sheer hubris
Improved by this:
Sheer fucking hubris
Not really.
Yes.
Why?
I want to add, I liked Picard well enough. I'm not in a froth about it and now the dust is settled on Season 1, well, so what? Swearing in Star Trek. I just don't see, as an aspiring writer myself, why adding a swear word into the middle of a sentence improves it? It seems arbitrary and cheap.
I've just been enjoying The Boys. They all swear like troopers throughout and I do so myself. It's not a case of being a prude, it's more a case of just wondering why it was necessary for Star Trek when it markedly hasn't been so before.
It's not necessary. I just find one version more belivable. Largely because "sheer hubris" doesn't sound right. It sounds incomplete. It doesn't have to be a curse but the phrasing feels stunted as just "sheer hubris. "
Fair enough I suppose. Thanks for the response.
Yes. Because they didn't swear in Next Gen, it gave it 10x the impact.
Trek's first angry F-bomb (Tilly's was a positive thing and cute) will always be the most memorable and impactful one.
Fair. I also get that it signposts that everything is not well within Starfleet.
How about later examples in the season though? i think Raffi and Rios? What did it add to anything?
Honestly, I'm very weirdly trapped between not caring at all and wondering about the necessity of it all in the first place.
It feels a little like how nobody dropped F-Bombs in the first season of The Expanse, before things loosened up a bit and Avasarala got her potty mouth back from the novels in Season 2. But there at least they were including F-bombs in order to be more true to the source material.
I just can't help thinking it was done for the sake of it and unfortunately when I watched, it threw me right out of the show.
cadence
you have to feel it.
If I hit my thumb with a hammer, it's not "that hurts!" it's "goddamnit!" or maybe just a loud "FUCK!" to the heavens.
It rolls off the tongue perfectly, either way.
In Breaking Bad, Walter White makes his point in his "Say my name speech" when he says "you're goddamned right" not "sure tootin, fellas!"
This is nothing new.
The ancient Roman Poet Catullus, in Poem XVI.. you know actually I don't think I can even paste that poem here. I might get moderated. Look it up. Anyway, people have been using "Bad words" a fucking long time, and there's no reason to believe they're not going to stop.
I suspect the primary reason for even having decency standards is so we can have the release of breaking them now and then. Which is why I don't overdo it. Once it sounds like you're a fucking smurf just wanting to smurf everyone in their smurfing smurf and smurf all over their smurf all the smurfing time you've lost the beat and are just a smurfed up snork.
Breaking Bad being an odd example, being a show about drug-dealers/addicts/cops/criminal empires where nobody drops on F-Bomb for the entire run of the show...
But... that's what I mean about a show having a vocabulary.
Further, would the line be better as "you're fucking right"?
Would the admiral's line be worse if as "sheer goddamned hubris?"
First, thanks for the poem. I love history and that's fantastically graphic.
I wouldn't debate the fact that crude language has existed for a long time. You can find it in English centuries back and that's all well and good. I'm not trying to extrapolate the F-Bomb in Picard with the real world, I'm holding it up to Star Trek's world which in Patrick Stewart's own words "had never been a part of previous Star Trek". It's more for me about how every work of fiction has it's own vocabulary and that is why the F-Bomb jarred.
See what I said about The Expanse too... No F-Bombs in Season 1, then suddenly in Season 2 they come. That for me was easier to adapt to though, as there'd only been one series previous to it. But still it's an alteration of a show's vocab.
I'm not offended. I just don't think it's consistent with what came before and that jars. To clarify consistency, I am not bothered about spore drives, or the aesthetic of Discovery not tying with TOS, or that we've had three people play Spock now, because I understand the reasoning behind those things. I actually understand the reasoning behind the Picard F-Bomb. They wanted to shock. But shock in and of itself is something that I find to be quite hollow if there isn't an underlying purpose behind it.
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My take on it, and my take and half a dollar won't buy a can of soda, is that a great deal of Star Trek takes place on the bridge and almost ALL of it takes place within the structure of the senior staff of whatever show is being shown. More decorum is going to be expected and shown in those settings, such that when Tilly made her exclamation to Stammets, it IS a faux pas, and Stammets, crusty but loveable crab that he is, laughs it off anyway because their solution WAS a big deal. As much as it is an enjoyable "That's so Tilly" moment, it is also one of the real humanizing points for Stammets (not to mention Stammets did not really want to be an officer in the first place. He basically used Starfleet to fund his experiments then got stuck in a war and then a subsequent series of events that have kept him on board, making him one of the least Starfleety officers apart from Mariner. I digress).
In the case of Picard it was in the Admiral's private quarters, one admiral to another. She felt he had betrayed the service. He felt the service had betrayed everyone, and there was a lot of bile needing to be spewed. Whatever choice of words were going to be used by her, I am glad they didn't pull a punch. I admit on the second re-watch, I have become a little less enamored with PIC. it started strong, but became a series of never ending gut punches that unfortunately didn't pay for themselves with a reward of a well done ending.
If any show should have had cussing, it should have been DS9. Of course that wasn't going to happen. It would have been cool to see the Maquis adopting some non-Federation colorful metaphors as well, but as with many things Voyager and Maquis, it was another missed opportunity.
In the case of Picard it was in the Admiral's private quarters, one admiral to another. She felt he had betrayed the service. He felt the service had betrayed everyone, and there was a lot of bile needing to be spewed. Whatever choice of words were going to be used by her, I am glad they didn't pull a punch. I admit on the second re-watch, I have become a little less enamored with PIC. it started strong, but became a series of never ending gut punches that unfortunately didn't pay for themselves with a reward of a well done ending.
If any show should have had cussing, it should have been DS9. Of course that wasn't going to happen. It would have been cool to see the Maquis adopting some non-Federation colorful metaphors as well, but as with many things Voyager and Maquis, it was another missed opportunity.
The rest of them were from non-Starfleet or ex-Starfleet people on a privately owned ship. It just shows that the rest of the galaxy isn't as squeaky clean as Starfleet's finest.
Remember also that Picard himself said "shit" in French in TNG season one.
Of course. Data says it in English (or at least it's heavily inferred) in Generations too. But I think we understand that there are degrees between cusswords. I wouldn't be surprised to hear shit, pussy, bitch etc. in Star Trek. Fuck isn't a top tier word like cunt, but it's not that far away.
I don't have a problem with the word. I understand that it's the limitations of TV guidelines that meant 'Fuck' has never been uttered in previous Star Trek. But the result of that goes back to what I said about vocabulary. Half a century where it wasn't needed, so why is it needed now?
Breaking Bad was brought up above. A show that deals with drugs in terms of addicts, dealers, manufacturers and larger crime syndicates. Yet in all its' five seasons nobody says "Fuck".
I mean, that's actually more egregious than Picard's use when I think about it. In the latter, a swear word causes a moment of disconnect for some, but in the former... when you think about it, why the hell doesn't a character like Jesse Pinkman (or his meth addicted buddies) who otherwise have a potty mouth (bitch, shit, dick etc.) say "fuck"?
It hasn't stopped Breaking Bad from becoming acclaimed, iconic television though. Nobody thinks any less of it for not having 'fuck' inside and that's because the show has a vocabulary which it establishes in it's first season and sticks too. After four seasons without it, if Jesse had turned to Walter in Season 5 and said "go fuck yourself you stupid old fucking bitch" then I'd experience a similar disconnect.
50-odd years without it, I still haven't heard a great justification for it. As above with Walter White, "You're goddamn right" would not have been improved by "You're fucking right" and a lot of the reason for that is that it's established that people just don't speak like that in whatever pocket universe Breaking Bad is supposed to exist in.
The Expanse has been talked about as well. First season and Avasarala doesn't use it, then in the second season it does and the show stuck to it. On the other side of the debate, if Amazon had decided to kick it back out in Season 4 when they took over it would have caused a similar problem for me. We as TV viewers get used to the language that's used in the different shows we watch and understand that some shows have 'bad' language, while others don't.
I've seen it justified in here as grammatically odd, like "sheer hubris" needs something in the middle to make sense, but surely it's just an adjective followed by a noun? Total destruction, absolute terror, complete surprise... sheer hubris. I've seen it said that it's a matter of cadence, followed by an example from another show where the comparatively light "goddamn" was used to create an iconic TV moment just as well. I don't buy it.
To me, pretty much throughout Trek there is often a childish attitude towards sex. Just recently I watched Shadows of P'Jem and found the scene where Archer and T'Pol escape by rubbing themselves together before Archer gets her tits shoved into his face embarrassing, and I was watching it by myself. Cringeworthy tits and ass humour that wouldn't be allowed near the show today. The appearance of "fuck" in Picard seems to stem from an idea that including it is inherently shocking in itself, or (as you said above) that a first "F-Bomb" is something Star Trek needs somehow, akin to a first woman captain or first trans regular. To me it simply comes across as childish and... well, I know this gets thrown around a lot, but lazy writing.
As above. Would the scene in Breaking Bad mentioned earlier be better if Walter said "you're fucking right"? And would the scene in Picard be worse if the Admiral said "sheer goddamned hubris"?
One more thing, cause I'm relatively new to this forum and I don't want anyone to think I'm baiting or looking for an argument. In fact, I'm enjoying checking back every few hours for some debate and I don't want to make any enemies. Hope we are all good...
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Swearing is part of human nature. It's not something we're going to "evolve" beyond. Even in an alleged "utopia," people are still going to spill their coffee, stub their toes, and use strong language sometimes. Because sometimes "fuck" or "shit" is the precisely the right word for the moment.
Let's be honest: the only reason we seldom heard swearing on the older shows was because of Standards & Practices. Does anybody really think that Scotty wasn't swearing blue blazes offscreen whenever the plasma injector tubes were acting up. He was an old Aberdeen pub crawler for Pete's sake, not a Sunday school teacher.
And Jim Kirk, famously, was no Boy Scout.
Swearing has nothing to do with 'human nature'.
Its just learned behavior. That's it.
If humans were taught emotional control and lived in a society that doesn't turn their existence in drudgery (like we do now), they would have little in regards to emotional outbursts (because they would know how to deal with them internally without negative repercussions) and would have no need to use curse words in the first place.
In all honesty, swearing makes Trek characters less relatable for me and it makes them seem uninteresting (as if they have an emotional maturity and control of a toddler)... similar for adults in real life.
I experience that type of behavior in reality from others on a regular basis... I don't need it in Trek as it really adds little or nothing to the experience.
A lot of people reach for curse words because they weren't taught how to express themselves without using them while still being direct and honest.
Fuck yeah it is!
I thought the impact of someone being so disrespectful to Picard was jarring and unexpected. It let you know we're in a different time and place, for sure.
First of all, that Catullus was a potty mouth! ;-)
Second, "pussy" is far worse for me than "fuck". In the context of a swear word (not just a colorful anatomical reference) it has conotations of sexism and, unlike emotions, I would hope these isms would be extinct.
People will have emotions even in a... let's call it "almost utopian" setting. Will there be less cause for anger or sadness? Hopefully. But they will still have those emotions. They won't turn into robots who, when the computer malfunctions, go: "Oh thank you for giving me the opportunity to learn more about repairing you!" They will slap the console in frustration or curse or whatever. So-called negative emotions are necessary and valid, if psychology is to be believed.
Second, "pussy" is far worse for me than "fuck". In the context of a swear word (not just a colorful anatomical reference) it has conotations of sexism and, unlike emotions, I would hope these isms would be extinct.
People will have emotions even in a... let's call it "almost utopian" setting. Will there be less cause for anger or sadness? Hopefully. But they will still have those emotions. They won't turn into robots who, when the computer malfunctions, go: "Oh thank you for giving me the opportunity to learn more about repairing you!" They will slap the console in frustration or curse or whatever. So-called negative emotions are necessary and valid, if psychology is to be believed.
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