What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?
- Thread starter Amasov
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I only 'hate' episodes that are offensive on some level or to some groups (Code of honor), or that show a repugnant decision by our heroes (Homeward), not episodes that are just extremely silly or ridiculous (so for example, Threshold from Voyager. Sub Rosa would be a borderline case, it's mostly just silly but I can also understand people take offense).
'Hate' in my opinion is a word used far too often anyway, when people probably really just mean 'dislike'.
'Hate' in my opinion is a word used far too often anyway, when people probably really just mean 'dislike'.
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I think you you make a good point I used to watch star trek as a kid my mother loved Sci fi that's how I got started so when SNG came out it did not look very good on the cover of the video box so did not bother but I had go to the USA to visit a friend and he was into SNG it was on every station nearly and I fell in love with it.
Masks was cool! It was Split long before Split. And the visuals of the ship turning into a Mayan temple were fantastic.
It at least tries to do something different in a season where TNG feels increasingly complacent.
It fails, for sure, but for me at least then the (misplaced) effort is not overlooked.
It’s not that bad. I’d take it over at least 30 TNG episodes that are the only thing worse than bad: boring.
I might watch it later. If nothing else it’s good to see Gates McFadden being given something to do beyond hyposprays and medical tricorders.
There wasn’t enough time for them to do it justice. Brent Spiner wishes he had more rehearsal time to better nail all the different characters.
I agree, visually it’s very distinctive. As with Season 6, I find much of Season 7 treads water. Masks is at least making effort to look and feel like no other Trek episode has looked before. No mean feat when there’s 200 plus episodes behind it.
No, Masks is no way the worst episode of TNG. For me an episode that’s offensive is intrinsically worse than an episode that’s crap. Code of Honour is shit. Masks in comparison is poetry.
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Being the canon deconstructionist he was, if you could somehow sit Gene Roddenberry in front of SNW today, he’d say it was canon and that it overrides TOS.
That’s not what I think, but I think it’s how Gene would think going by his various comments on canonicity of various things over the years.
In a nutshell, controversial opinion: The Great Bird would prefer SNW to TOS if he could watch it today.
That’s not what I think, but I think it’s how Gene would think going by his various comments on canonicity of various things over the years.
In a nutshell, controversial opinion: The Great Bird would prefer SNW to TOS if he could watch it today.
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It's really tough to say.
On the one hand, he wouldn't mind dumping TOS in favor of SNW. He viewed TMP to be the "real" Star Trek, when it was new, and then viewed TNG to be the "real" Star Trek when it was new. So him viewing SNW as the "real" Star Trek isn't a stretch.
On the other hand: He'd have really had to have changed his view on women. You'd think his views would improve as time went on but everything I read from The Fifty-Year Mission suggests the opposite happened. He became worse.
It has the worst score of all TNG episodes on IMDb. That said, any episode, show, or movie that features someone other than a white man as a main character tends to get poorer ratings than those that do there, so I take that into account when I look at the ratings.
I liked Shades of Gray, too, although that's mainly because I like Riker.
Code of Honor was a terrible episode, but to be fair, it wasn't intended to be racist against black people. That was just the decision of the casting director to have all of the aliens played by black people. The writer intended them to be played instead by Asians. So it would have been racist in a completely different way.
Amazingly, after she stopped writing for Trek, the author (Katharyn Powers) wrote an almost identically themed episode for Stargate SG1 (Emancipation) which involved finding a planet full of Mongol descendants with a strict...err...code of honor...who kidnap a pretty blonde white woman to become a sex slave. They successfully save her through buying her in exchange for a pistol, which the non-white dumb-dumbs are too stupid to know has limited ammo...and the pretty blond woman has to be in a fight "to the death" with someone soon afterward.
Amazingly, after she stopped writing for Trek, the author (Katharyn Powers) wrote an almost identically themed episode for Stargate SG1 (Emancipation) which involved finding a planet full of Mongol descendants with a strict...err...code of honor...who kidnap a pretty blonde white woman to become a sex slave. They successfully save her through buying her in exchange for a pistol, which the non-white dumb-dumbs are too stupid to know has limited ammo...and the pretty blond woman has to be in a fight "to the death" with someone soon afterward.
Weird coincidence... both "Code of Honor" and "EMANCIPATION" were the second episode produced after the pilot of their respective shows.
I've wondered if the aliens were played by Voyager style multi-ethnic forehead aliens, but with the script otherwise identical, if anyone would give it a second thought.
I'm not sure if this is a controversial opinion, but I've always been shocked given Berman Trek was shot in the Los Angeles area how few Latino guest characters and even background extras there are.
It's almost always white people with a sprinkling of black people - even on isolated colony worlds where it doesn't make a lick of sense, and not really anyone else.
It's almost always white people with a sprinkling of black people - even on isolated colony worlds where it doesn't make a lick of sense, and not really anyone else.
Yeah. Code of Honor with a different casting policy is still a bad episode. It's just not a bad episode that is also painting an entire planet of black people as super caricatured sex obsessed savages. Which would very definitively make it less bad than it is now.
TNG Season 1 was always going to be hampered by cheesy writing in many episodes and the tropes of one-hour dramatic television in the 1980s but "Code of Honor" goes things one step further by being a racist tire fire of ethnic stereotypes.
Wasn't Code of Honour supposed to be lizard-people or fish-people or something at one point?
Yes...and that's hardly a Stargate favourite either.
Not seeing more Chinese and Indian crew is also odd if Earth's a true world government.
My theory is it's because they're mostly depopulated being ground zero for Earth's nuclear war:
Khan was the last of tyrants and ruler of the largest land mass on the world from Asia through the Middle East. Though not specifically stated, nuclear war was the outcome. Being the last of the tyrants to be overthrown, his kingdom (Asia/Middle East) would be most likely be ground zero for most of the nuclear exchange. Here's a map of Khan's potential kingdom for reference (note that India and China would be affected most):
(Also note, there's a little over 40 countries in black labels, so, I have the controversial opinion that this region was initial source of the Eugenics War, and hence, explains this region's low representation in-universe for Star Trek.)
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Wow, did not know that. Interesting! Thank you for sharing.
l have worked with a lot of creatives…and a lot of them “recycle” ideas.
You can tell by little clues that the Ligonians were intended as Asians. The gift Picard gives in the beginning, for instance.
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