It's not grim if there is a positive ending. Struggling is not darkness and challenges are not grim. By the way people talk about Picard DS9 is even darker and grimmer.
Picard: Is it really that dark?
- Thread starter Charles Phipps
- Start date
It's telling that DS9 is the only Star Trek series where a villain of Dukat's repute enjoys a disturbing amount of fan support (as in "Dukat was correct.") and where the purported heroes engage in war crimes yet are heralded as "badass".
Khan is also heralded, as are the Klingons, like Kor.
Life does not exist in black and white always.
Spare me.
I will. Life won't.
PIC S1 began dark and ended in light.
DS9 as a narrative and the overwhelming majority of DS9 fans condemn Dukat.
You mean like the multiple episodes where Picard was willing to allow entire species to go extinct from natural disasters?
DS9 was a deconstruction of TNG's Federation nationalism. That meant its characters needed to be more flawed and go to darker places than TNG.[/QUOTE]
As I've argued before, I don't think Picard is really "that grim." That said, I disagree with the notion that a grim show would be all not-grim as long as it ends. Sure, it would end on a positive note. The overall impression, for me, depends on what happens throughout the show, how it was depicted and framed and, of course, how it resonates with the viewer. If it leaves me frustrated or depressed, I suspect it was a tad grim imho.
Deconstruction is useful.
There is nothing "elevated" or superior about not using a swear word. Swear words are not actually bad or inferior -- they merely express strong emotion, and the belief that it's even possible for some words to be "better" than others is chauvinist nonsense.
Prime example: The word golly used to be the worst obscenity in English, because it was a contraction for the blasphemous phrase "God's Body." It was literally considered more obscene than the word fuck. Today, it is considered the epitome of innocence and naivete.
I'm sorry, but if you understand the concept of a deconstruction and how it works, then this argument is just false. Deconstructions allow people to examine how a story functions and what ideas that story is promulgating to its audience. Deconstructions say something about the story being deconstructed.
To "defecate" on a story, by contrast, is to have nothing to say -- it is merely to disrespect the story without examining the story or the ideas the story is promulgating to its audience.
Star Trek: Picard is a deconstruction of the Jean-Luc Picard character. It takes him apart and examines how he works, and it makes an important statement about how he is. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine did the same thing to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Neither are defecations.
A better example of a defecation would be Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, a film that tries to use the brutal language of deconstructionism on the characters of Superman and Batman, but which in the end does not actually understand how either character works and makes no meaningful statement about either character.
Similar threads
