And don't forget Mirror Earth, but that one's on Ira Behr.
And Kirk encountered two alien threats in two consecutive seasons that reduced populated star systems to rubble in moments (and I believe a third one in TAS?). The threat of imminent total and complete destruction of your homeworld is just part of the package of being part of a science fiction universe and Star Trek has never been an exception to that.
I think they’re both different/well-executed enough to both constitute as classics, but they are quite similar to each other (“The Immunity Syndrome” is on my list of things to rewatch but it’s pushed back to the end of the list since I’ve seen “The Doomsday Machine” in the last month).
The use of destroyed planets since
Trek 09 has been as a mix of things to motivate emotional turmoil in a lead character and as 9/11 allegory. I don’t think they’ve gone to that well that often but it’s often been front-and-center of stories and character backgrounds, and it’s such a blunt, unsubtle story device.
Maybe a better comparison would be Michael Piller’s interest in the politics of land rights and removal—it might have been interesting in the context of late TNG/early DS9 and VOY, but by the time he was using it in
Insurrection it was a case of, “Oh, we’re going here
again?” Piller, to his credit, had by this point pretty much acknowledged that he was exhausted with Trek, had already handed the reins of DS9 to Behr and VOY to Jeri Taylor, and after
Insurrection had no plans on doing anything beyond the occasional note or suggestion as creative consultant.
It’s that sense of overdrawing from that same well that makes me think that some degree of either rest or creative turnover (not that I’d trust anyone new given Paramount’s current state) would be helpful.
In recent series like SNW and DSC, characters often feel a lot more homogenous on the inside, even when they look diverse on the surface.
It was striking to me that DSC finally started casting with greater diversity and gave everyone, well, American white person names. I’ve actually heard Asian-Americans glad that the characters didn’t have Asian names, which I think comes from a perspective based on difficulties Asian-American actors face. However, I also thought of an acquaintance who admitted that he was always a bit surprised when a mixed-race kid at his children’s school had an Asian last name rather than a European one, and what that said about the attitudes and insecurities he’d accumulated over the years as an Asian-American male.
To be fair to SNW—and I’m only a few episodes in, so maybe I’ll be proven wrong—I feel like they’re doing a better job at this. Although Uhura’s attitude really isn’t typical of people who grow up in polyglot societies (you typically grow up in your own tongue, the lingua franca, and maybe a couple of others, and then switch a ton based on context rather than learning everyone’s language), her gregarious, “I want to know my neighbors better” attitude reminded me a lot of a Botswanan acquaintance’s feeling towards other Botswanans of diverse backgrounds. Now, Kenya is definitely not Botswana, but we’re talking centuries in the future where ethnic politics have changed (and bonus points for languages not disappearing in utopia), Uhura is an exceptional person, and I do like the attempt to bring a specific social environment into her backstory.
I don’t know that much about La’an yet, but it seems to me like there’s some attempt so far to contextualize her as someone who grew up on the frontier and with an unusual background, both of which are 100% science fiction but I again I appreciate them trying to stretch their imagination (idk why she’d keep the last name—just go with Singh, one of the most common names or there, or Noonien, or Nguyen or Nun or whatever’s close enough—and it
completely takes me out of the story whenever they mention it).
