Early Criticism: What’s Unfounded and What Isn’t

[Michael]

never said "I wish", i think you are projecting there...again depends on the lens

Well, my “lens” is that of a person who wasn‘t born yesterday. I was framing my posts as me stating my perceptions of what you were saying. If I’m wrong, I apologize. But you‘ll forgive that in the years I‘ve been having these sorts of debates on the internet, I‘ve basically heard all the thinly veiled homophobic talking points there are. And I‘m sorry, but “Why do they have to behave so over-the-top gay?!” is a vintage classic. I‘ll trust that you‘re just genuinely curious and didn‘t mean it that way. But just as you know people have their various “lenses”, I know that certain people have their dogwhistles.

 

[Lord Garth]

I don't know where else to put this, but I just checked IMDB and SFA has a 4.2. If that's not review-bombing, I don't know what is.

For reference: DSC has a 7.0 and S31 has a 3.7.

The "they made it woke!" coalition and the "it's 90210!" coalition make for a deadly combination. Throw in the "STD sucks!" crowd too.

All I can say is: Hello! You're not the audience for this! Why are you still watching? Are you that into masochism? And if you're not watching, then why the Hell are you rating it?

None of that does the people with legitimate or honest criticisms any favors. SFA isn't my favorite Trek series, nor will it ever be, but a lot of what I've seen online is just so over the top. End of vent.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Regarding language:

'Star Trek' Legend Robert Picardo on Why the 'Starfleet Academy' Cadets Talk Like Modern Kids

The latest episode of 'Starfleet Academy' will give its young cadets a lesson in diction from the good Doctor himself.

gizmodo.com

Everyone seems to have skipped over this.

TL;DR, modern slang is part of the rough edges they came to school to sand off somewhat.

 

[Agony_Boothb]

Agreed with all the above. This is the first time a Star Trek show has had me questioning the casting of the lead role.Either Hunter did not research on military officers or she just didnt care . She could of even just watched a few episodes of Voyager and taken pointers from Kate Mulgrew. Her lounging around the captains chair like it's a living room sofa is the biggest turnoff for me. It completely destroys any believability for me in her character. She is way too non chalant and has sloppy bearing. No way someone that unsat would make it to that high of rank.

People can claim future or whatever excuses they want, but if the lead character isn't believable then the audience isnt going to care about further watching.

Ake WAS a stock standard military officer when she blindly followed orders and separated a mother from her child. This was a decision that lead to a young boy living a life of crime to survive and dealing with any number of traumatic events. The way Ake is now, is a direct response to that. Ake has become a teacher first and she's not going to allow herself to return to the person she was, which is why she is so non-traditional and anti-authoritarian. The character is also 422 years old, when I reach that age I doubt I'm going to give a shit about what anyone has to say about how I sit on furniture.

Swearing was something mostly no longer done in 23rd century earth so they didn't need to add futuristic swear words. Humans had grown beyond that kind of language for the most part(see star trek the voyage home). Now kurtzman 23rd century, late 24th and 32nd century we get f bombs and tons of other swear words. The 32nd century doesn't seem any different from now. Its totally idiotic. The writers cant write without using 21st century slang and vernacular?

Asimov once said the following:

'We could have told you that one of our characters paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything would have seemed ever so much more throroughly alien. But it would also have been ever so much more difficult to make sense of what we were saying. The essence of this story doesn't lie in the quantity of bizarre terms we might have invented; it lies, rather, in the reaction of a group of people somewhat like ourselves, living on a world somewhat like ours in all but one highly significant detail, as they react to a challenging situation."

If Asimov can not give a shit about language, so can you.

 

[flyerdog]

re: Michael

no problem you are a fine debater, i appreciate that...and my question was just that....we still see the "over the top" portrayals in media, although this IS changing...

I refer back to a guy (from another forum) I know who was pretty hardcore um..traditional: "Marriage is between a man and a woman, anything else is an aberration"

I spent months trying to convince him that there is no difference, often he'd point out these stereotypes with disgust...I had to remind him that you have to go under the surface to really know someone....

the (positive) change came for him when he was on vacation and he and his wife met a (married) male gay couple at the resort they were staying at, they ended up spending most of the week together, talking Stock Market, Football, etc...this couple talked about their adopted son and how much they adored him, and those feelings were nearly palpable to this guy....(just regular conversation, gay or not)

well he came back from that vacation with a completely changed perspective, admitted that his prejudice was unfounded, and that he had a change of heart (much like Obama).

the point is that I think that if that gay couple he met fit these particular caricatures, he might not have changed for the better, as he did, so a small victory.

 

[nightwind1]

I stumbled upon this over lunch. I have only seen the pilot for this show. I haven't seen the episode being reviewed. I don't know how true his complaints are about the episode, but he reviewed the episode in a way that make me laugh a lot.

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You don't have to agree with this guy to get a laugh out of this video.

I'm glad I've never watched that guy before. He's a fucking idiot!

He's like the anti-Steve Shives!

 

[tenmei]

well he came back from that vacation with a completely changed perspective, admitted that his prejudice was unfounded, and that he had a change of heart (much like Obama).

the point is that I think that if that gay couple he met fit these particular caricatures, he might not have changed for the better, as he did, so a small victory.

By your own admission then your friend only accepted the gay couple he met on holiday because they met his own heteronormative expectations?

So heteronormative straight acting gays = okay, everything else = not? As that's rhe subtext.

 

[Set Harth]

he had a change of heart (much like Obama).

Some people have a change of heart for reasons of political expediency.

 

[nightwind1]

Amputees famously used to get a lot of work in zombie films, which is obviously a bit on the tasteless side, but there's a wealth of cool opportunities for disabled actors in sci-fi/fantasy. Hemmer from SNW comes to mind.

You could cast an actor with paraplegia in a Melora-type role to inform the performance and bring their own experience to the role, it'd be great.

The drones Huey, Dewey, and Lewie in the movie Silent Running were all played by bilateral amputees.

 

[nightwind1]

Does 'unsat' mean someone who sits wrong?

It's military-speak for "unsatisfactory".

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

I don't know where else to put this, but I just checked IMDB and SFA has a 4.2. If that's not review-bombing, I don't know what is.

It's hard to say with IMDb as a lot of people click 10 for 'like' and 1 for 'dislike'.

I usually look at the curve on the ratings breakdown to get an idea of what people really think, as if no one's clicking the low numbers and then suddenly there's 41% of people voting 1s, that's incredibly suspicious. For each SFA episode and the series overall the chart dips at 4 and rises at either side, so that looks like a legit dislike for a decent number of users. Though the amount of 1s it's getting is still kind of excessive.

 

[ichab]

yeah very strange choice for such a heavyweight actress like Holly Hunter who has played characters with some heft in the past.
maybe she thought it would be endearing, quirky, funny. But the fact remains she is supposed to be in charge of an institution and supposed to garner respect and admiration, that it hard to convey when you are behaving like a pre-adolescent girl.

I was thinking the same . I still remember her in Batman vs Superman where she played a Senator. I totally bought her in that role. In this show she reminds me more of a Trekkie trying to cosplay at a Trek convention.

Agony_Boothb
Ake WAS a stock standard military officer when she blindly followed orders and separated a mother from her child. This was a decision that lead to a young boy living a life of crime to survive and dealing with any number of traumatic events. The way Ake is now, is a direct response to that. Ake has become a teacher first and she's not going to allow herself to return to the person she was, which is why she is so non-traditional and anti-authoritarian.

That has got to be the most weak and lame excuse ever concocted for trying to explain away bad characterization.

The character is also 422 years old, when I reach that age I doubt I'm going to give a shit about what anyone has to say about how I sit on furniture.

I hate to break this bit of news to you, but you will be lucky if you make it to a hundred.

But putting aside that silly argument, someone who doesn't care that much would have either left the service and retired somewhere, or they would have been thrown out.

 

[Michael]

Odd, this thread shows on the main menu but not when I go into the Academy foruk

It shows up for me on the main page, but something weird is definitely going on with the thread. For whatever reason I don‘t receive alerts anymore for new posts made in it.

 

[Agony_Boothb]

I was thinking the same . I still remember her in Batman vs Superman where she played a Senator. I totally bought her in that role. In this show she reminds me more of a Trekkie trying to cosplay at a Trek convention.


That has got to be the most weak and lame excuse ever concocted for trying to explain away bad characterization.



I hate to break this bit of news to you, but you will be lucky if you make it to a hundred.

But putting aside that silly argument, someone who doesn't care that much would have either left the service and retired somewhere, or they would have been thrown out.

It's really not a 'weak and lame excuse' it's literally what happens.

And no shit I'm not going to live to 422, do you understand what hyperbole is?

Ake did leave the service and only came back because Vance found Caleb. I assume you did in fact watch the first episode?

 

[Starflight]

The review-bombing is baffling; what do people actually hate so much about the show?

Even just anti-"woke" (if you'll excuse the term) stuff can't explain it because surely Discovery, Picard, and SNW would have taken a similar hit - especially since SFA might be the least "woke" of these shows, by virtue of just being a comedy with no point to make thus far. I know things have changed culturally but I'm not sure the atmosphere is that much more heavily charged now than it was in 2020/2021 when SNW and PIC came on the scene.

There's something really odd going on around this series. The only thing I can assume is that people are irritated by the ongoing (perceived) misuse of the Star Trek license, but again, I'm not sure SFA is much more egregious than DSC/PIC in that regard, and is arguably less so.

 

[Lord Garth]

It's hard to say with IMDb as a lot of people click 10 for 'like' and 1 for 'dislike'.

I usually look at the curve on the ratings breakdown to get an idea of what people really think, as if no one's clicking the low numbers and then suddenly there's 41% of people voting 1s, that's incredibly suspicious. For each SFA episode and the series overall the chart dips at 4 and rises at either side, so that looks like a legit dislike for a decent number of users. Though the amount of 1s it's getting is still kind of excessive.

When I look at the ratings for the individual episodes themselves, it looks like they're 5s and 6s, which seems more believable to me given the divisiveness.

I liked the first two episodes, but I haven't watched the third episode. It looks too kiddie for my tastes. I'll probably watch Episodes 3, 4, and 5 in close proximity to each other.

My main criticism is that it feels more like high school than a military academy. Most of the issues I have with SFA stem from there.

And I agree with the OP that the show is probably going to become dated fast, because it feels a little too Present Day.

That's about it. SFA feels like a cross between Discovery and Prodigy, but closer to Prodigy because I have to be in the mood to watch it. Whereas with Discovery (and Picard), as soon as it dropped I was there.

 

[Starflight]

Looking through imdb reviews, the attitude seems to widely be that people are deeply fed up with how Star Trek's been written in recent years, and feel that the franchise has been diluted to the point of meaninglessness. I think that's a very defensible position and one that I largely share, but then why does this show catch all the flak? It's no more egregious than DSC, PIC, SNW, and LD in that regard.

As someone who's enjoying SFA with cautious optimism I do actually get how on the face of it, it could feel like the most cynical corporate misuse of the Star Trek license so far (barring Scouts), but I think anyone who actually sits down to watch the show will find it surprisingly enjoyable at best, or disappointing but not really more abrasive than DSC/PIC at worst - certainly nothing that'd explain it being rated 3 whole stars less than DSC on imdb. Then again some people seem to really hate the way Ake sits in chairs.

 

[Turtletrekker]

The fact that people are complaining about how she sits in chairs tells me everything I need to know about their review.

 

[Detached Nacelle]

Not including the types of people who should be flat out ignored this discussion does make you wonder what happened to nerds? When did so many of us stop obsessively looking at small background details and coming up with all sorts of stories to explain everything and start making snap reactions and judgements based on practically nothing?

 

[Firebird]

Not including the types of people who should be flat out ignored this discussion does make you wonder what happened to nerds? When did so many of us stop obsessively looking at small background details and coming up with all sorts of stories to explain everything and start making snap reactions and judgements based on practically nothing?

Creativity has been replaced by slavishly adhering to the Stations of the Holy Canon. No new canon is allowed, everything must be to the word of Roddenberry’s Vision (praise be).