Was my thoughts in the theater when I watch and enjoyed it.
Which 23rd Century is canon?
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It's a sliding scale, nothing characters at one end and Khan Noonien Singh at the other.
Still don't get why fans can accept a million totally different Jokers but that there must only be One True Khan. It's a movie, ffs.
Welcome to the confusing world of fandom. Things are not important until they absolutely are.
Canon is like The Mafia. At one point we had James "Hoffa" Dixon.
why not, given the right conditions? We’re talking about a universe where literal USA and URRS developed on another world independently, down to flags and wordings in declarations.
Another story I got was to avoid shaving the guest actors’ eyebrows.
In any case it was a very odd choice, given that 1) the romulans ARE supposed to look identical to the Vulcans; TNG avoided featuring Vulcans for the most part anyway.
he was the transporter operator in a bunch of TOS episodes and had a cameo appearance on the reliant. The only memorable moment with him I can think of is when his mirror alter ego is punished by mirror Spock.
I just remembered commander Oh. Ok, she's Romulan in fact, but since she was supposed to pose as a Vulcan, it must mean that Vulcans of such appearance exist. (And Romulans and Vulcans are essentially almost the same species anyway).
In fact, she is actually half Vulcan, half Romulan, as per dialogue in Picard episode 1x8.
No, it's the movie where the director uses the conflict between the Joker and Batman in the larger context of the collapse of the traditional Gotham City power structure to tell an allegorical story about the seeming collapse of the American social contract after the Iraq War and the Bush Administration. You should actually engage with the material before you dismiss it.
And to be clear, the makeup for the Joker in The Dark Knight is supposed to look cheap, because he just put clown makeup on to make himself look weird. It's the Glasgow smile that serves as his originating physical deformity rather than skin that's been bleached in-universe.
You are thinking of Elementary, and he is not "an ordinary guy." He's still a super-genius detective.
You are wrong -- there are not more contradictions than before.
I don't really care if you like the storytelling in the context of this discussion, because the point isn't whether or not you liked it. The point is whether or not your assertion that it's all gloom-and-doom is accurate. It is objectively not accurate. You may not like recent DIS seasons -- though how could you know that if you haven't seen it? -- but it's still objectively not all doom-and-gloom.
It is not an echo of TNG. It is doing completely different things than TNG. It's not an echo -- it's a completely different paragraph.
None of that matters. What matters if whether or not your assertion that PIC is all doom-and-gloom is accurate. It is objectively not accurate.
Then you're using words inaccurately. Many things that you or I enjoy may be of objectively poor quality, and many things that you or I don't enjoy could be of objectively high quality. I happen to enjoy Tommy Wiseau's film The Room, but it is by any reasonable measure a terrible film. I do not enjoy Mad Men, but it is by any reasonable measure a television series of enormously high quality. Quality and enjoyment are entirely separate things.
Well, first off, I think Lower Decks has depth, but one only sees that depth over time after engaging with its subtext. I also think that Prodigy has a lot of depth. "A Moral Star, Parts I & II" are wonderful episodes.
As for "accurate" animation -- what is the point of animation if it's not stylized?
I'm sorry, but you're objectively wrong about that. Now, you may not enjoy the artistic purposes behind those creative decisions. You may argue that the decisions do not function well within the story. You may argue that the decisions do not achieve the goals the writers set for them. You may reasonably just respond, "I am too emotionally attached to these fictional settings to engage with the material so I didn't enjoy it." All those responses would be valid. But saying the writers didn't have an artistic purpose behind those decisions? That's not a matter of taste, that's a matter of objective fact. And it's just false.
Star Trek writers have always tried to maintain continuity but they have also always had to balance that goal against the goal of telling good stories in a limited production timeframe and on a limited production budget. Sometimes they make decisions that fit our personal evaluations of how to balance those two goals. Sometimes they don't. But it's not a matter of them "not learning" or of "ego."
Then you maybe give the Star Trek writers the same level of grace you would ask for yourself in their shoes?
Not always.
Oh jeeze. The worst uniforms in ST history as far as I'm concerned!
I haven't been able to watch Strange New Worlds yet but I will do that. Maybe something I would like!
I think you would probably like the show on the whole, even if you didn't like some elements of it.
A good, well-thought story is defined by its dramatic effect.
And, again, you don't have to like their creative decisions to not attack their character as individuals. I'm not here to tell you it was an inherently good decision to destroy Vulcan. I'm here to argue that:
1) Destroying Vulcan opened up as many new avenues for quality storytelling as it closed, and therefore is not an inherently good or bad creative decisions; and
2) That it is inappropriate to attribute creative decisions you don't like based upon your subjective aesthetics to poor character on the part of the artist. I don't happen to enjoy impressionism; that doesn't make Monet a bad person.
"Necessary?" No, but for that matter it's not "necessary" to hire actors or construct sets. They could just as easily write a short outline of each episode and then just transmit to everyone's screen.
They wanted to create that dramatic effect. That's the fundamental impulse behind almost every creative decision on a TV series. If you don't want that dramatic effect, that's legitimate. But the Klingon makeup redesign is a completely subjective thing -- your dislike of the design is neither objectively right nor objectively wrong. It's just aesthetics.
It is not character destruction and it is not stupidity. It is, again, inappropriate of you to attribute creative decisions you subjectively dislike based on your personal aesthetics to personal flaws on the part of the creators. If you don't like the Klingon redesign, that does not make Bryan Fuller et al egotists or stupid; if you do not like impressionism, that does not make Monet a narcissist or stupid.
Because Bryan Fuller wanted to get people to associate the idea of Klingons with the idea of aliens that look scary again. He felt that the Klingon makeup design of the TNG era was too familiar and no longer scary, and he wanted Klingons to be scary in the war story he wanted to tell with them.
If you don't subjectively like that idea or it doesn't work for you, that's totally legitimate. But it doesn't make your creative impulse in this circumstance superior to his.
I strongly disagree. They have made both of them more interesting than just doing the same damn thing over and over again with them.
What I'm taking from this is that you don't like change, and you want Star Trek to be a static franchise that hits the same basic creative beats over and over again.
That's a legitimate subjective aesthetic preference, but it's clearly not one the producers of DIS share with you. And the desire for evolution and change is just as legitimate.
Which goes back to what I said earlier: With so much Star Trek on the air today, there really can be something for everyone. I tend to want evolution and change over time -- Discovery and Picard are probably more to my tastes in that regard. You want the traditional formula -- Strange New World is probably more to your tastes. And in a world where we have five different Star Trek series on the air simultaneously, there should be a lot of room to meet both sets of subjective preferences.
And Vulcan society still exists and is rebuilding in the Kelvin Timeline, and Romulan society still exists and is rebuilding in the Prime Timeline.
Except you just went into politics. Your statement there is inherently political. In particular, it is political because the consequence of never re-imagining old white legacy characters as POC in a world where legacy media dominates popular culture, is that characters who were made white because they were created at a time when TV producers considered whiteness the "default" setting for American culture, will always outnumber POC characters. Which reinforces the unconscious assumption in the mass audience that white people are the default setting for the human race and that white domination of society is natural.
That's why it is often a good thing to reimagine white characters as POC characters: It undermines white supremacy.
I've run into plenty of people complaining about the idea of casting a Mexican actor of European heritage to play a character identified in dialogue as being Sikh, who is identified as having ruled in India, and who has a Sikh name.
And you can dislike that decision while also thinking Montalbán was wonderful!
I agree that Montalbán's performance was amazing! I also think that either the character should have been reconceptualized to match Montalbán's heritage once he was cast, or that a Mexican actor of European heritage should not have been cast to play a character of Sikh heritage.
It doesn't have to be for the decision to cast him -- and then put him in brownface! -- to have been racist.
Nope. It needed to be Cochrane, because it needed to be about a character the TNG stars had already been depicted as being familiar with from their history turning out to be different than their history had taught them. Cochrane had already been established as the guy who invented warp and as being venerated for it, and TNG had already established that inventing warp was when First Contact usually happens. Their plot mechanics required it to be Cochrane. And! Making it Cochrane added depth to what had been a very two-dimensional character in "Metamorphosis."
However, I would agree with this general argument with Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness. The writers should have created a new character for the role that Khan played in the script, 1) because making it Khan was not necessary based on their plot mechanics, 2) making it Khan did it add anything to the character or to the movie, and 3) casting a white guy to play an already-problematic POC character was still incredibly problematic. It was creatively arbitrary to use Khan in Into Darkness in a way that using Cochrane in First Contact was not, and it stepped on a lot of racial sensitivities for no dramatic purpose beyond the two-second thrill the audience was supposed to feel when he said, "My name is Khan."
But... who the hell identifies groups of people like that?
Nope, the TMP versions are different from the TSFS/TVH/TFF/TUC/TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT versions. They all only have a single boney ridge down the center of their foreheads -- totally different design from the numerous intricate bumps later Klingons have.
I think that's a completely legitimate interpretation!
No, but I also think the question is a bit more complicated with Spock. Spock isn't textually Ashkenazi Jewish, but he's clearly coded as such -- they even use the Jewish Kohanim priestly blessing as the Vulcan salute. So I think what you have in that situation is, between Spock being so visually iconic and there being this subtext, there's an obligation to make sure that any new actor matches Leonard Nimoy's broad appearance, to honor him specifically and his legacy as a Jewish actor playing a hero in popular culture (especially him doing so just twenty years after the Holocaust).
Nine out of ten of everything is bad, not just remakes. And remakes are part of how stories stay vital over time instead of fading into memory.
Which is silly, because of course people from a desert planet would be more likely to have dark skin!
I mean, is it any weirder than there being Vulcans who look white? If we can suspend disbelief enough to accept that there are "white" Vulcans, why not suspend disbelief enough to assume that Vulcans match the entire spectrum of human racial identity? Real aliens would never just look like humans with pointy ears anyway -- this is already unrealistic.
This is true, but, again, Spock is coded as Ashkenazi Jewish even if he is not textually so. And in the context of Leonard Nimoy, visibly of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, playing this enormously popular heroic character just twenty years after the Holocaust? I think casting a blond actor to play Spock would be uncomfortably close to Aryanizing the character, would be uncomfortably close to matching Hitlerian aesthetics.
I mean, outside of the specific context of Leonard Nimoy's legacy as Spock, I don't see how recasting a brown-haired or black-haired white character as a blond-haired white character is particularly problematic. Daniel Craig is probably the greatest James Bond ever, and he is very famously blond-haired in contrast to the traditional James Bond image.
Very true. There is a point where you gotta be like, "Who cares if this obscure cardboard cut-out is played by a white guy or an Asian guy?"
So are pointy ears! But every single Klingon in TMP had the exact same extremely specific makeup design of a single ridge down the forehead. There was absolutely no diversity in makeup design.
Yes, that is the way the Klingon makeup design changed after TMP.
Sure, if you want an in-universe rationalization for the differences between the Klingon makeup design in TMP vs. TSFS. But the makeup design is not the same. So Klingon makeup designs have changed at least three times: From TOS to TMP, from TMP to TSFS/TNG, and from TSFS/TNG to DIS.
It's not a matter of subjective evaluation. The makeup design changed. In TMP, all Klingons had a single boney ridge down the center of their foreheads; from TSFS to ENT, all Klingons had intricate bumps throughout their entire foreheads.
It's fair to say that you don't think the change is large enough to care about, but the change is objectively there.
But you clearly do. You care about some makeup differences but not others.
I would like to know where such critics are, as I've never encountered that complaint among the innumerable ST fans I've known over the decades. Again, Montalbán was always praised as Khan. As seen in the comparison to Poitier's character in To Sir with Love, unlike the Thackeray character, Khan's race was not a defining point / shaped who he was as a person, his decisions, worldview, interactions with others or any other relevant aspect of the character as presented. There was no need to cast a Sikh actor in the role.
Again, this is speaking from an assumed position that there was some fault in casting a Spanish/Mexican actor in the role, where no fault was ever registered about said casting in the 55 years since "Space Seed" aired, or the 40 years since The Wrath of Khan's premiere. However, I have seen the ST production(s) praised for casting a Spanish/Mexican actor in so prominent a role, then asking him to reprise it, rather than recasting him--a nod to the strength of Montalbán's talent and influence on the character, which was what the stories required. What it not require was checking a particular box to address a case-specific, nonexistent grievance usually championed by White Knight Liberals arrogantly / typically assuming they are qualified enough to speak for the feelings and self-identification / representation concerns of non-White groups (we have dealt with that for generations, and quite obviously, still do), which even Montalbán--a racial minority (by United States perceptions at the time) did not share in 1967 or 1982, unless one has a direct quote from Montalbán where he states his problem with being cast as Khan for that reason.
It did not "need" to be Cochrane, when another character could have been inserted into that one line of historical reference, no different than other instances where ST did the same. The "talents" behind First Contact were trading on ST fandom's interest in / awareness of a TOS character, when the main movie audience would have cared not a whit about Random Guy used instead of Cochrane in that convoluted plot--or use/develop the other, supposedly significant character--Lily Sloane--introduced into the film (instead of her running around being a pair of ears for Picard).
Walk into a hospital, school, a police station, sign up for the armed services, etc., and race is noted / identified, which is not racist in nature, but one of the ways people are identified. To this end, if someone discovered a vessel several centuries old with still-living passengers aboard, and the rescuers have a duty to identify them, they would not refer to them in any one-descriptor-fits-all manner, as if they are all the same.
"Clearly?" According to...?
You do realize that was Nimoy being inventive on the set and the salute was not in / created for Sturgeon's "Amok Time" script, right? It was not created because Spock--or Vulcans in general--were coded as Ashkenazi Jews, unless you have a source for that. If Spock's existence was coded as anything, it was a mixed-race person and his struggles in a (predominantly) White society (a heated topic in 1960s America, but TV rarely touched), which was a running reference / theme throughout TOS, and certainly examined in TAS' "Yesteryear".
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Re Yeoman Colt:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Colt
I see that Memory Alpha now treats the two Colts as separate crewmembers.
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