Tuvix should have been a two-parter. Just wasn’t enough time to let the whole concept breathe in 42 minutes.
What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?
- Thread starter Amasov
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Yeah, so now I'm scared as to the real-world plausibility of this...
Eh, it's easy to imagine a million different dystopian futures from where we are now. But a guy like Trump clearly doesn't have the guts to nuke China for any reason. He'd roll over for a full-on Chinese invasion force. Hell, his insane dictator worship is so over the top, he might actually invite Xi Jinping in just to save face and make it look like it was his decision.
I love it when people tie the literal end of the world to their political opposites.
OTOH, it was pretty clear that when Picard 2 was made that they were expecting Trump to get a second term. It just landed in a really funny way given the actual outcomes.
I'm always amused that "Hopeful TOS" was made in Nineteen-freaking-Sixty-Eight but you give Sir Patrick Brexit and WE CAN'T HAVE OPTIMISTIC STAR TREK anymore.
If McCain had won in 2008 or Romney won in 2012, I wouldn't have cared. Trump is more than a "political opposite".
But getting back to Trek: even in TOS, the future got worse before it became better. The Eugenics Wars and World War III are both referred to in that series.
"Assignment: Earth" went so far as to briefly toy around with orbital nuclear warheads.
And stressed that if a nuclear war had happened in 1968 it would have been lights out. In hindsight the Vulcans wouldn't have stepped in nor even revealed themselves. We didn't yet have warp drive.
Go the next step and not label it a 2-parter, so people think the cast change is permanent for a week.
Exactly. Or have it a three or four episode arc. It has that montage where everyone comes to know and like Tuvix but the audience don’t get that chance.
There’s a couple of other tweaks I think might make it work better as an arc than an individual episode.
One amendment.
We saw Mike Pence's Jan 6 noose in the Strange New world Pilot.
I think that suggests that Trump Lost initially, and then he scammed an alternative successful count through fraud, the insurrection, and murdering Mike Pence.
Nothing makes me happier than when politics seeps into these otherwise nice, distracting, escapist Star Trek conversations. Because God knows, there aren't enough other places online where political discussions are taking place that we sometimes just need to escape from.
It’s nice there’s a film directed by Shatner, it focuses on the big 3, and some memorable moments and settings (Uuhra fan dance, the shuttle’s approach to the Enterprise, the setting of Nimbus III). I just do not think it is a strong film.
Though, remember if it had been released in place of TVH or TUC, we’d consider it a good film.
Even in Deep Space Nine, things got very bad before they got better.
The idea that Picard, which finally dealt in a serious way with longstanding Trek loose ends, is only dark because of Trump is silly.
Neither TOS nor DS9 nor ENT believed in a pollyanna Trek existence. PIcard follows those traditions.
The idea that TOS was "optimistic" when they were on the brink of war with Klingons and Romulans every other week (when one of them hadn't gone rogue and turned a planet into Nazis or the Roman Empire) is lol at best.
ENT literally had a Vulcan Ambassador lecture Archer on Earth being seen as not ready for deep space because it had just emerged from a global war. And "Cogenitor" went to show that human good intentions still lead to disaster and tragedy and unintended consequences.
I wonder how TUC would have been received if it had come after TVH. For me TUC has faded considerably over the years. But at the time it was One More With Kirk and it wasn't TFF.
It was optimistic if you looked out your window at late 1960's America every day. "Who got assassinated today? Oh look! Space ships!"
And really they were on the brink, no scratch that, at war with the Klingons ONCE. And they were so not on the brink of war with the Romulans that nobody even knew what they looked like.
I don't think that's the lesson of Cogenitor, not that it's any less dark either way.
Until they showed up out of nowhere and blew half a dozen stations out of the sky. And their history of war with the Romulans was devastating enough and in recent enough memory that the mere mention of them making a move set off a perfectly normal crewman into total panic and near-violent outbursts. And then the Enterprise had to go back and play James Bond in the Neutral Zone in order to neutralize the Romulans' military advantage.
Nothing but total optimism, right there.
I don't myself actually believe either will happen. Too much to get into here, but in the case of World War III: Mutually Assured Destruction has a lot to do with it. To quote Ken Cosgrove from Mad Men, "That's why I don't worry about the Atom Bomb."
Another Controversial Opinion: If Star Trek wants to retcon things, they should retcon how we transition from "our" world to the "Star Trek" world. Because, even with the updates, it's still rooted in 20th Century thinking.
Our society isn't going to get worse because of war. It's going to become worse due to running out of natural resources, not being able to cope with environmental changes, poor distribution of wealth, and too much short-term thinking.
It's easy, it scares people, and it separates them from their money, whether in the form of donations or spending at the movies or buying gold.
Reality is a far more mixed bag. We have good stuff, bad stuff, not-quite-sure-yet stuff, lots of in-the-middle stuff, and stuff that's got a full spectrum of effects.
TOS certainly wasn't all sweetness and light, but it was optimistic in saying, "yes, humanity not only survives, but fixes a lot of things." For the most part, that's what makes all the shows afterwards "Star Trek" for me. I don't know about you all, but I still need that message.
Star Trek doesn't dwell in those aspects because it fundamentally believes those things are only symptoms of the greater problem, and can and will be solved through technology and science. The underlying ethos of Star Trek is that all of the problems can be solved if only humanity will work together to explore instead of trying to kill and exploit each other.
Warp Drive is the seminal event that changes humanity forever, and gives every person on Earth a common destiny. Even Picard season 2 reflects that, since it's Picard's ancestor who finds an organism on Europa that somehow fixes climate change.
Blame the show for literally shoehorning in modern 21st politics into it. Pike literally blames Trumpism for a second American Civil War and World War III.
My opinion is that Trek should avoid that whole era and keep it up in the air. Earth collapses into Nuclear War, Cochrane makes warp ten years after. That's all we really needed to know.
He does not. He blames all of the various current conflicts. (Of which that would certainly be one of them.) The editors only showed the capitol riots and frankly that's their bad.
It almost undoes what is a really moving speech that was actually a little life changing. It had a bigger message and the visuals turned it into "Yeah man, those people SUCK." (I'm sure for some people it completely undoes it. And for others it might cause them to miss the point entirely.)
Yes, somehow we get from current American political conflict to... the Eugenics Wars?!? To World War III.
But I fell in love with the show anyway.
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