• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Spoilers Can we itemize PIC S2 canonical mistakes.

Disco gets grief for LGBTQIA+ and a black female lead but that's just dumb noise from insecure older white men terrified of becoming obsolete, and symptomatic of a far larger problem than anything to do with Star Trek.

Well it's a shame that kind of dubious discourse had heavily polluted most fandom and entertainment in the 5 or so years and only now have casual viewers and studios have started re-adjusting to this kind of massive online fandom pressure grouping by anti-fandom.

RLM's YouTube stuff from the late 00s/early 10s has got a lot to answer for (same for TGWTG).

The actual critiques of the show itself are far tamer than Enterprise got back in the day. Pretty sure waybackmachine had a few choice pages from TBBS back then.

Discovery and Picard are actually fairly well received by most critics and regular viewers outside of gatekeeping segments. Also despite its massive success around 2005-2010-ish, NuWho was fairly widely panned by OldWho fandom as well (but the internet was still somewhat less invasive and social media barely out of being a cottage industry, so the outcry relatively unnoticed).

What the actual fuck?

That's what Rich Evans (the tubby RLM dude) has said, which is a bad mindset for IP stuff that doesn't exist and never will.
 
You think RLM are a gateway to more genuinely extreme/hateful content? The PewDiePie effect?

Yeah, why has online critiques (never uniformly great to begin with) get so, so fucking bad and devolve into repetitive, monotonous screeds?! And go rabid at the sight of Brie Larson?
 
You think RLM are a gateway to more genuinely extreme/hateful content? The PewDiePie effect?

Where is this line of reasoning coming from, beyond their dislike of Discovery and Picard? I'm honestly curious. I've been a fan since the beginning and I genuinely have no idea where this idea is coming from. Yes, they dislike those shows. No, they don't go all "Doomcock about it".

They present relatively reasonable reasons for their dislike. Can't say I agree with them, but I can respect their opinion. While Picard and Discovery are far from my favourite Trek shows, I do enjoy them. That said, they are clearly flawed, as are most shows in some way.

Beyond Trek, RLM can usually be counted on to give a fair, well thought out, and usually hilarious take on whatever they're watching. Best of the Worst is appointment viewing when a new episode drops.

Just trying to understand where the hate is coming from.
 
I stopped watching all YouTubers about 5 years ago when I realized I didn’t care about anyone’s opinion other than my own…….the shear volume of hate and bullshit just drove me away from them all. IF they called Picard “secular blasphemy” then that’s insane but I’m wonder if they said that or it was the posters take away……curious if they are THAT insane now.
 
Good luck with that .. Some people here love to sea lion...

Discovery is far more structurally polarizing than ENT, that's for sure. It certainly doesn't go for a broader middle of the road audience. I agree with Red Letter Media that parts of NuTrek are secular blasphemy. It would be great to do a survey of STD vs DSC/DIS people, asking where they fall on the Hidden Tribes report of political typology and also their MBTI type. I'm guessing progressive activists and NF types would be overrepresented among the DSC/DIS people, while moderate liberals and NT types among the STDers. Probably best a topic for TNZ or Reddit.

That said, Picard season 2 ~mostly~ does a good job sticking with canon, Guinan excepted. It manages to maintain constructive ambiguity about when exactly the Eugenics Wars happened, easter egg past time travel stories, and even respect TOS's much more expansive expections of early 21st century space travel. "The Star Gazer" feels like a "real" Star Trek episode. As it was actually shot last with the most influence of Terry Matalas, it's a reason to be hopeful for season 3.

I know Google is my friend, but could you go into a bit more detail around your points on the demographic splits within the Disco fandom please?

Obviously liberal (presumably not meant in the UK sense - see Lib Dems and it meaning socially progressive - but rather the US version around Libertarians) vs progressive I get but the MBTI, NF, NT stuff is outside my knowledge.

My gut instinct based on my limited knowledge is that there will be correlation along those lines and so having some more information to back that up would be helpful.

Also an expansion on "secular blasphemy" and specifically what issues were raised on this - presume it is the canon arguments and so it includes an element of subjectivity around where the line is drawn?

Cheers
 
I know Google is my friend, but could you go into a bit more detail around your points on the demographic splits within the Disco fandom please?

Obviously liberal (presumably not meant in the UK sense - see Lib Dems and it meaning socially progressive - but rather the US version around Libertarians) vs progressive I get but the MBTI, NF, NT stuff is outside my knowledge.

My gut instinct based on my limited knowledge is that there will be correlation along those lines and so having some more information to back that up would be helpful.

I'll link to two different political breakdowns of the US population. One is from the Hidden Tribes Report, the other used by the pollster organization Pew. The Hidden Tribes people also made one for the UK. But, yeah, liberal is a bad overall term to be using in comparative politics, but it the US it can mean just over the center to center-left, while progressive activists tend to be on the left or far left.

Meanwhile, this MBTI YouTuber made a good into to the topic of the 16 personality types. Past threads in the TrekBBS have shown that NTs (intuitive thinking types) are super overrepresented among ST fans. INTJs for example are also much less likely to be progressive activists per different MBTI forums, while intuitive feelers (NFs) tend to be drawn to progressive activism. So a hypothesis to explore at a later date is is NF / progressive activists might be overrepresented among pro-Disco ST fans, while anti-Disco people might overrepresent intuitive thinkers that are probably over the center line but not on the hard left. Plus you have a lot of people over on the right who have historically been ST fans as well.

Also an expansion on "secular blasphemy" and specifically what issues were raised on this - presume it is the canon arguments and so it includes an element of subjectivity around where the line is drawn?

Here is the secular blasphemy introduction in context of the RLM review. Basically Star Trek shouldn't be over feeling emotional, which draws back into the oversampling on NF part. Granted it also is a useful lens for analyzing the disregarding of continuity etc. I should add however that Picard season 2 was probably 70 / 30 for me, so I liked it a lot more than RLM did.
 
Well, TOS says different at times. So, Star Trek can be emotional as well as not emotional.
And none of that is blasphemy. Star Trek isn't a religion.

Oh sure, but episodes like "City on the Rdge of Forever" or "The Tholian Web" earn their emotional moments. It doesn't come from overdone melodrama. Granted that is in the eye of the beholder.

And yes, Star Trek isn't a religion, hence the secular qualifier to what is already a tongue in cheek term. But people take it very seriously, along with some sport teams, historical symbols... Come to think of it, there's probably an academic term for this in sociology or anthropology somewhere.
 
Last edited:
Oh sure, but episodes like "City on the Rdge of Forever" or "The Tholian Web" earn their emotional moments. It doesn't come from overdone melodrama.

I'm sorry, but the idea that TOS was immune from melodrama is just absurd on its face.
 
I'm sorry, but the idea that TOS was immune from melodrama is just absurd on its face.

Oh I'm not arguing that point... Especially with TOS season 3!

Just that overall TOS did a better job with emotional plot points. But one challenge is comparing episodic where a few bad episodes can fall into the background compared to NuTrek's implementation of serialized where it's a super long movie and if something isn't working it can be problematic for the whole.
 
Just that overall TOS did a better job with emotional plot points. But one challenge is comparing episodic where a few bad episodes can fall into the background compared to NuTrek's implementation of serialized where it's a super long movie and if something isn't working it can be problematic for the whole.

I don't disagree that serialization's drawbacks can include one element weakening things, but to argue that DIS doesn't "do a better job with emotional plot points" is just... I don't know what universe you're living in. No TOS character is drawn as consistently emotionally vividly as the DIS cast. Kirk and Spock have moments of being drawn with emotional vividness, but they are isolated as a natural result of the episodic structure of both plots and characterization in 1960s television. 1960s TV is just less sophisticated than modern TV, and that means shows like DIS inherently do a better job painting vivid, emotionally-realistic, three-dimensional characters.
 
but to argue that DIS doesn't "do a better job with emotional plot points" is just... I don't know what universe you're living in.

Oh in this case my argument is targeted specifically at Picard season 2... ref how Raffi treats Picard after Elnor's death, how mental illness was handled, Brent Spiner as James Bond villain, inconsistent Guinen and much more (putting it diplomatically as possible I'm so so out of Discovery after the end of their season 2, and think trying to move forward with what has been produced since with that series there would be unproductive for me).

What's really frustrating is I think 80% of the rough parts of this season would be fixable with some editing, ADR, and cutting it down to say 8 episodes. Bring on a re-edit a la Arrested Development season 4.
 
Basically Star Trek shouldn't be over feeling emotional,
Oh, emotions again. The Berman days are over, Star Trek is now a show which acknowledges humans have emotions. Yes, Disco can take their emotional moments to extremes, and I do mock them accordingly for that, but a blanket statement like "Star Trek shouldn't be emotional" is so completely wrong and tone deaf. Star Trek is about humanity after all, and emotions are an aspect of humanity.
 
And yes, Star Trek isn't a religion, hence the secular qualifier to what is already a tongue in cheek term.
Seeing as how I've seen the term seriously the qualifier means little. Who determines what is and isn't blasphemy then?
 
Alright, the whole Disco thing was already a tangent, and now we're bringing social politics into it. Take it somewhere else...Disco forum, Miscellaneous, TNZ, whatever.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top