After the first season, it felt like less of a kid's show. But I enjoy it. I haven't watched the Bad Batch.
Are you "aging out" of Star Trek?
- Thread starter Omega-Trekker
- Start date
Bad Batch is fantastic. Better than Clone Wars in my humble opinion.
I don’t reject progress, diversity, or humanism. Star Trek has always stood for those things.
What I’m critical of is didactic storytelling - ideology first, character second.
Classic Star Trek handled difference by universalizing it. Race, gender, class, belief, and identity were explored through allegory and culture, not through labels. The stories trusted the audience to engage and reflect rather than instructing them what to think.
Old Trek also emphasized competence and aspiration. Characters weren’t symbols; they were capable professionals facing moral and existential dilemmas. The meaning emerged from character → conflict → choice → consequence, not from overt messaging.
That’s the key distinction for me.
When identity becomes a character’s primary on-screen trait, characters stop feeling like explorers and start feeling like talking points. With Discovery and Starfleet Academy, the pattern often feels like:
“Here’s another checkbox, here’s another lecture, here’s another subversion - without the dramatic work to support it.”
Classic Trek structure:
Character → Conflict → Choice → Meaning
Current Kurtzman-era structure often feels like:
Representation → Identity → Message → Story
Take the example of a gay Klingon in Starfleet Academy. I don’t object to the idea at all - in fact, it could have been excellent Trek storytelling. From a Klingon cultural perspective, Worf in TNG was practically coded as an outsider already.
In older Trek, this would have been:
- a cultural schism
- a test of honor
- a trial by combat
- a story about exile, shame, reconciliation, or reform
Instead, it’s often presented as a shrug, followed by applause, and then the story moves on. That’s not progress - that’s dramatic laziness.
Star Trek works best when it explores uncertainty, not when it declares conclusions.
When a show replaces curiosity with certainty, it stops exploring.
And a ship that stops exploring…
is just a floating manifesto.
And we're only two episodes in, so how do you know that this story won't evolve into a cultural schism, a test of honor or any of those other words that you used?
Ah, a redshirt joke instead of a bridge discussion. Fair enough.
For clarity, here’s my actual position (as I already explained to Nerys):
Are you "aging out" of Star Trek?
I have. My wife has been binging it and the Bad Batch. Yes, the themes mature but it never felt like a kid's show the way other shows did. Even the droid death scenes are over the top. After the first season, it felt like less of a kid's show. But I enjoy it. I haven't watched the Bad Batch.
www.trekbbs.com
I can tell you haven't bothered watching the show because the sexuality of Jay'Den has not been a plot point in the series at all yet. You're ginning up an argument for something that hasn't been an issue for anyone but yourself.
You can gussy up your viewpoint with pretty words as much as you like, but you've already made it plain what your agenda is.
Yep. Two episodes in TNG was actually going back and rehashing an original TOS plot and as a direct sequel to that 1966 episode. Almost no character development had happened to anybody short of learning Riker and Troi were once a romantic thing and Tasha had grown up amidst violent rape gangs on a colony world. Worf was still one-dimensional and the rest were barely more fleshed out.
Judging any series just two episodes in is just ridiculous.
Maybe it's a trigger word in the USA and GB. For me as a Belgian it was the best description for what I meant. I've elaborated already in my reply to Nerys.
But I like ridiculous.
Agreed. I do love Soji and would've loved to see more of her.
My agenda? I'm talking about why several Star Trek shows 'lost' me, and several of you are focusing on one word I used. Most importantly they have poor writing and are not very 'Trek'.
Strange New World I'm actually enjoying even though I still consider it weak television.
Ahaaa, can't fool me, this is written by an LLM! The random bolding of certain words, the asterisk-based checklist, the tone, the snappy sign-off...
I'll be fair, that I don't really watch Trek for strong writing and haven't since Voyager or the Kelvin films.
Why would I ask an LLM to write my reply for me?
People ridiculed my position because they disagree with it, that’s fine. Disagreement is part of discussion. But dismissing an argument by implying it must be AI-generated is just avoiding the substance.
What’s ironic is that some responses accuse me of “not understanding Star Trek,” while then describing how a TNG-era officer would behave in ways that directly contradict how those characters actually behaved on screen. That’s not engagement; that’s projection.
And yes, my post is structured.
Structure didn’t appear with AI. Essays, arguments, and reasoned debate existed long before it.
If someone wants to challenge my points, I’m happy to discuss them.
If the best response is questioning my intelligence or authorship instead of the argument itself, that says more about the discussion than about me.
I have no idea, but everything about the tone, structure, and formatting is 100% the default system instructions of GPT/Gemini.
Doubly so because it complained about the handling of the "gay Klingon" in SFA, when as of episode two, there is no gay Klingon in SFA, and it hasn't been handled with a "shrug followed by applause" (due to it not being handled at all, since it's not in the show). That's the LLM just taking you at your word, mirroring you, and enthusiastically building on whatever you said, which is exactly what they're set up to do!
And you're using an example that doesn't exist in the episodes that have been aired as a core part of your argument.
I echo Starflight's assertion that you're just parroting back something ChatGPT threw together for you without proofreading it worth a damn.
You’re making two separate claims here, and neither really holds.
First: Calling something “AI-like” because it’s coherent is not a serious critique, it’s just a way to avoid engaging with the content.
Second: on the Klingon point, fair correction on timing. The character's been discussed before the episodes aired, but the gay-factor is dripping off the screen. OK. That’s on me, and I’ll own that distinction. But that doesn’t magically invalidate the broader argument about how modern Trek tends to foreground identity framing before character-driven conflict. You’re refuting an example, not the structure of the critique.
What is telling, though, is that instead of addressing:
the character → conflict → choice → meaning argument
the comparison between allegory and didactic storytelling
or the difference between exploration and declaration
…the response shifts to questioning my authorship and intelligence.
If you want to disagree with my interpretation of Star Trek, fine, that’s what the forum is for.
But “this sounds like AI” is not an argument. It’s a deflection.
I’m happy to debate Trek.
I’m not interested in debating whether clear writing is suspicious.
It's not because the writing is "coherent" or "clear", it's because it 1-for-1 matches the template used by GPT/Gemini in cases where the user hasn't supplied their own system prompt.
Like, this "mic-drop" sign-off:
People are wary of replying to the content of the message because, if it is written by an LLM, there's not really anything to reply to; it's just a simulation of a post comprised of likely words without a core meaning. It's hard to reply to "old Star Trek was allegorical, not didactic" when the post itself doesn't really clarify what that means.
Like, if we're just taking that at face value (and going with the "ideology first, character second" suggestion), then TNG at its worst was ten times more didactic than anything in SNW/SFA (neither of which really seem to have anything to say, most of the time). If you want an earnest reply, I guess I'd ask what ideology you think SFA has pushed so far in its first two episodes, beyond "woke".
Like, this "mic-drop" sign-off:
Is 100% part of the default way these models speak, GPT especially. Combined with the random bolding, the bullet-point list, the "character → conflict → choice → meaning" schematic, and especially the confident proclamations about things that are factually incorrect, it screams "written by LLM acting under default instructions".
People are wary of replying to the content of the message because, if it is written by an LLM, there's not really anything to reply to; it's just a simulation of a post comprised of likely words without a core meaning. It's hard to reply to "old Star Trek was allegorical, not didactic" when the post itself doesn't really clarify what that means.
Like, if we're just taking that at face value (and going with the "ideology first, character second" suggestion), then TNG at its worst was ten times more didactic than anything in SNW/SFA (neither of which really seem to have anything to say, most of the time). If you want an earnest reply, I guess I'd ask what ideology you think SFA has pushed so far in its first two episodes, beyond "woke".
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