What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

[1001001]

Generations has huge gaps in logic, and several missed opportunities, but damn if I don’t love it.

It looks gorgeous (the champagne bottle opening was magnificent). I love the music, the lighting.

And I am fine with Kirk’s death the way it was. People say it wasn’t worthy of the character, but I think that’s ridiculous.

Kirk gave up eternity in paradise to save 230,000,000 people who will never know he even existed.

How much more fucking heroic can a death be?

I may go watch it right now.

 

[cooleddie74]

GEN has a lot of weaknesses but Kirk dying as a world-saving hero with only Jean-Luc Picard and possibly Guinan even knowing isn't one of them. Shatner might not have gotten an epic death for his character but it was a satisfying one in hindsight.

 

[Lord Garth]

My current ranking of New Trek seasons, now that I've seen all of them in their entirety:

PIC Season 1
DSC Season 1
DSC Season 3
DSC Season 2
LD Season 2
LD Season 1

Some of this has to be controversial. Disco S3 moved up upon re-watch IMO. And I ended up liking the second season of Lower Decks better than the first.

 

[tesral]

In the Jules Verne book "Mysterious Island, one of the men stranded on the island calculated their location.

The latitude was straightforward but when giving the longitude, Verne gave it relative to London, Washington D.C., paris, Berlin and I Think, Moscow and Rome. At the time Verne wrote the book, Greenwich hadn't been settled upon as the zero reference yet so you could say he was being politically correct by listing all those longitudes.

I found this to be interesting from a historical standpoint but good lord it would become very old very, very fast if the longitude had to be referenced in this manner every time it's mentioned.

So when people complain about Earth being the zero reference, the only solution would be to follow Verne's example and list Earth's location relative to every capital mentioned in Trek.

As for being bothered by references to Alpha Quadrant powers when Sol is supposed to divide the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, I wonder if people are bothered by the fact that a large portion of Western culture or civilization is in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Robert

One could center the galactic coordinate system on Sagittarius A*, I.E. the center of the galaxy. You still need a 0 degree.

 

[tesral]

Well yeah, but why should we continue making new SF which hews tightly to a mid 1960s worldview?

Freaking comic books get rebooted every 10-20 years.

It's an observation, not a blueprint. Any SF made Now, that is 2021 will reflect that.

 

[Commander Troi]

Oh, you can go home again. There's just no guarantee the decorations will be the same as you remember.

"You can never go home again [...] but I guess you can shop there."

 

[dupersuper]

My current ranking of New Trek seasons, now that I've seen all of them in their entirety:

PIC Season 1
DSC Season 1
DSC Season 3
DSC Season 2
LD Season 2
LD Season 1

Oooo, more lists!

LD Season 2
LD Season 1
Short Treks season 2
Short Treks season 1
DSC Season 3
DSC Season 2
DSC Season 1
PIC Season 1

 

[Commander Troi]

You can also ad Pol Pot to make it a quartet.

(ComicBookGuy voice Worst Barbershop Quartet EVER.

Two real rules:
Never take yourself seriously.
Don't sweat the small shit.

Two real principles:
Be excellent to each other.
Don't make us make a rule.

So say we all!

Oh wait, this is the Trek forum, right?

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

One could center the galactic coordinate system on Sagittarius A*, I.E. the center of the galaxy. You still need a 0 degree.

I already did that with my 3D Cartesian Coordinate based Milky Way Map system that is based off dividing the Map into Cube Sections =D

 

[Neopeius]

The way I'd put it is that TOS was a sincere attempt to bring literary SF of the time to the screen...meaning the full range of science fiction in the mid 1960s.

In contrast, later Star Trek drifted into being self-referential. It was no longer about exploring SF concepts, but exploring the existing Star Trek universe. Which is why later developments in SF (like transhumanism) get such short shift.

Well put!

 

[Neopeius]

Which is why I'd kind of like to have at least one series which is a full-on reboot of the Trek universe, as it would allow us to extrapolate off of our own present rather than the future circa 1965.

It's called The Expanse.

 

[Neopeius]

Yes, as a fan of TOS, I find it really odd that TOS is often swept under the carpet, with TNG instead being held up as the "original" gold standard by which all later Trek must be judged.

My controversial opinion: TOS is the Star Trek. It is its own standalone thing, separate from, and a cut above, the bloated "franchise" that came later. Everything else including TNG is just a spinoff which I do enjoy to varying degrees, but I don't consider all that stuff to be true Star Trek.

Kor

Ditto. (says the provincial putz).

My next unpopular opinion: TWOK was the death knell for Trek. It introduced so much nonsense that has been incorporated into every subsequent Trek franchise. Ships that duel at trireme ranges with ballista effectiveness, retrogressive technology, sizzle over steak, REALLY big consistency issues (why not blow up the Reliant instead of limping away in impulse? The Genesis device isn't a bomb.)

I enjoyed TWOK as a kid, but as a grown-up, it really disappoints.

 

[Vger23]

My current ranking of New Trek seasons, now that I've seen all of them in their entirety:

PIC Season 1
DSC Season 1
DSC Season 3
DSC Season 2
LD Season 2
LD Season 1

Some of this has to be controversial. Disco S3 moved up upon re-watch IMO. And I ended up liking the second season of Lower Decks better than the first.

Here’s mine:

DSC Season 1
PIC Season 1

DSC Season 2


DSC Season 3




LD Season 2

LD Season 1

 

[cooleddie74]

LD Season 2
LD Season 1
PIC Season 1
DSC Season 3
DSC Season 2
DSC Season 1

 

[fireproof78]

It's called The Expanse.

Not good enough...

...oh wait, controversial Trek opinions. Right.

 

[Tim Thomason]

My current ranking of New Trek seasons, now that I've seen all of them in their entirety:

PIC Season 1
DSC Season 1
DSC Season 3
DSC Season 2
LD Season 2
LD Season 1

Some of this has to be controversial. Disco S3 moved up upon re-watch IMO. And I ended up liking the second season of Lower Decks better than the first.

I hate that nobody considers Short Treks to be "true Star Trek" these days. It's the new version of The Animated Series.

 

[Nerys Myk]

It's called The Expanse.

Enterprise season 2 finale?

 

[Lord Garth]

I hate that nobody considers Short Treks to be "true Star Trek" these days. It's the new version of The Animated Series.

I didn't rank it because it's a collection of short films and four episodes plus six don't really constitute seasons IMO. I do consider it "True Trek".

I think quite highly of "Calypso" and "Children of Mars". I get a huge kick out of "The Trouble With Edward" and like "Q&A" a lot too. "Runaway" and "The Brightest Star" are good, but they're more like DSC Bonus Material, even down to starring characters from the cast.

 

[eschaton]

It's called The Expanse.

Well, yes and no. The Expanse is absolutely modern SF, but I don't think it really has the same ethos as Star Trek.

I was thinking more along the lines of a TV adaptation of Iain Banks' Culture series of novels. The background of the setting is pretty much the same (an optimistic, post-scarcity, utopian league of humanoid worlds) but it fully embraces posthumanism, including:

• Benevolent AI's pretty much run everything, which allows the majority of humanity (more or less) to just flit around and live hedonist lifestyles unless they get a bug up their ass to do something constructive.
• Ships are self-aware. and often funny characters.
• Humanoids are effectively immortal, and often have "backups" stowed away in case of body death. Though practically speaking most people choose to die within a few centuries.
• Intelligent self-aware robots are everywhere, and given full and equal rights.
• People switch genders more or less on a whim.

The author got around how boring such a society would be by having most of the stories center on a group called Special Circumstances, an ad-hoc organization which deals with external relations - often via espionage. So similar to Trek, the stories don't actually take place in paradise, but involve agents who are visiting much more primitive, nasty planets.

 

[cooleddie74]

Yeah, I give Short Treks a collective acronym(SHO) but they're not a series in and of themselves. Much like the TV Funhouse animated segments on SNL weren't their own series even though they had their own opening music and logos.