CBS AA planning a direct Discovery spinoff?

I think it’s actually the opposite in some ways because of the setting. Bashir is the perfect example. A bit stereotyped (everyone written as being from outside California was...even Alaskan Riker when it cropped up.) but fundamentally Bashir was Anglo of middle eastern/Asian descent. That his dad was basically a cockney wide boy, while he was more ‘posh’ because of his parents pressures was spot on. And he was drinking mates with a non officer Irishman! Yes, shades of old war films, that they played up on, but what it said was ‘people are people’ and just get on with things. Which is basically how real diverse cultures work. If nationality, ethnicity, and gender, of human beings no longer leads to any discrimination in the future, why would it be in the foreground all the time? It really wouldn’t be. It’s just important to have them there doing their thing for audiences now.
Even DSC does that. I did not see any markers of Burnhams ethnicity, or Ash, or frankly anyone else (two brits in the cast had to yankwash their accents though...) they are just there, doing their thing.
That’s why it works different for Trek. There’s an argument everyone becomes generically American, that’s certainly harder to ignore these days. And goodness knows the trend for lionised stereotypical Irish was flowing in the nineties. Look at Voyagers holodeck episodes. But generally, these things are not a big deal in Trek. Which is good. Because in Trek, those things don’t matter anymore, because of the setting. The idea that ethnicity comes with some great built in cultural program is a nonsense, and anyone growing up in an actually diverse place can tell you that. My best mate goes to folk music concerts, practices broadsword and medieval fighting, drinks real ale etc. He’s of black Caribbean extraction. It’s extremely likely there’s more MOBO in my music collection than his. Another acquaintance is so stereotypically Cockney it borders on the offensive...Pie and Mash, West Ham, Chas and Dave, Rhyming slang. He’s in his twenties and his parents are both from Portugal. Granted, in his case, there’s a feeling of someone trying too hard to make themselves an image, but he’s young. We do that when we’re young.
If they were characters in a modern TV drama, they would be criticised for not having their cultures represented. Which misses the point. The folk music, or the pie and mash...it is their culture. They grew up here in London, England, what sane person gives two figs about their genetics or skin colour? Sod that. This is their culture, and while I am sure someone can see the parallels with the daft idea of ‘cultural appropriation’ (as it has become, not as it was...there’s a difference between being nasty about a culture and just adopting it as part of your own identity) somewhere, it’s disgusting anyone would want to force people into some little walled flowerbed where they can only embrace a culture they have never experienced from hundreds of miles away just because of the melanin percentage in their skin, or who their ancestors were.
Harry Kim plays classical music and is a bit soppy. Should we have do some martial arts instead? We all saw how well poor Chakotay worked out trying to be generic Native American guy. Apparently every white male is represented by any other white male on screen. Which also a nonsense.
Nah.
Trek does it right by not making an issue out of the issue, and by simply getting on with stuff. As it should be in its optimistic future.

 

I'd say that Bashir is a solid example of this theory of 'Don't try for diversity, just cast the right actor'. The character was blatantly generic from the beginning, but they cast someone new and different. Siddiq isn't a bad actor, and technically Bashir the character shares that difference. But what kind of character depth did it produce? What did we ever get from him as a character in the first half of the show? The arrogant privileged doctor? The boyish womanizer? He was a walking cliche with no depth. They gave us nothing about his past beyond generic tales of his academic or athletic triumph. They gave us nothing about his present beyond wide-eyed optimism, his arrogance in his work and his generic obsession with women.

For the most part, he was barely a character at all until the genetically enhanced retcon came about, and while that absolutely added depth to him and improved his character, it still didn't make up for the lack of character foundations, because suddenly EVERY aspect of him was defined by the enhancement and nothing else. Why did he never get any decent backstory about his youth? Because he had to hide his enhancement. Why is he so good and arrogant? Because he's enhanced. Why is he salutatorian instead of Valedictorian? Because he had to hide his enhancement. Why he did he give up his athletic career? Because he had to hide his enhancement.

I don't want to sound to over the top, because I don't hate Bashir. But he is a one-note character, even in his better episodes, and I believe a big part of the reason for that is because the writers didn't have any plans or ideas for what made him different when he was conceived and found it difficult adding things in after the fact. That's why I prefer the characters to have their differences at least partially baked in from the start, because then you get the ball rolling right off the bat and I think the history of Trek shows that to be a stronger, more successful approach.

I'm not asking for him to talk about his people's culture or extoll the virtues of traditional middle eastern music/cuisine. Just little stories about where he came from - what his life was like as a child, what his family was like, what kind of things he was raised to believe, how his life was different from others' lives rather than how it was the same, etc. These things go a long way to making a well rounded character. Like Sisko's relationship to his father and his loss of Jennifer, his connection to Bajor and his feelings about history (both real history and sports history). Like Burnham's memories of being trapped between Amanda and Sarek, her holding on to Lewis Carroll (a symbol of her adoptive mother and her own terrifying lack of emotional control), and her childhood Klingon trauma (Burnham is still on thinner ground than I'd like, but she has only had 15 episodes so far).

When I say Pike isn't different enough to be an appealing prospect, I would like to see someone *very* different in that position, but that doesn't mean i'm blind to the varying scale of differences beyond the visual. Lorca was not all that different in appearance from Pike, but he was certainly far less a traditional character than Pike. Such things can work, and I have no problem with them when done well.

But based on Trek's past history, I believe it's clear that they are far more often done well when the character's differences are conceived from the very beginning, not when the character is just filling a position until the writers can figure out what to do with them. And based on Trek's past history, I think Trek writers have a natural tendency to conceive most regular human, non-minority characters as generic stand-ins waiting for something to define them.

 

Nope. Avoiding perfectly reasonable diversity given the setting and using tokenism as an excuse is just lazy writing.

True, but what is there about the "western feel" that requires the lead to be a white male? That made sense in an actual western, sure, but in a futuristic setting with an organisation representing a united human race why would one require the other?

DS9 was very much a western in space at times, but the cast was the most diverse to date and hardly tokenistic. The Cardassians also looked nothing like the indigenous people of North America.

Oh, congratulations though on your election!

 

For Lorca, that was actually Issacs’ personal choice. He wanted to do an American accent for the character. It wasn’t something requested by the show runners.

I dunno about Ash, but his backstory does have him from America, so that might have been the intention from the start.

 

They definitely did. DS9 was depressing and boring, while VOY was nonsensical and boring. Interestingly DIS is a combination of the two, being depressing and nonsensical, but I really cannot call it boring, so I guess that's some kind of an improvement.

 

I may disagree. But I also lolled.

 

Only thing I agree with this is about voyager.

 

It does indeed begin with VOY. I cannot disagree with this shorthand.

 

Are you saying DS9 didn't become boring until Voyager was on the air?

 

We definitely need more diversity across the whole spectrum....writers, producers, directors, etc.

Because, in a nutshell, any endeavor will be at its most worthwhile when it is a microcosm of the diverse society itself.

Progress is being made, but sometimes it feels like that lone person pulling a tractor-trailer with a rope....

 

To quote pop icon Katy Perry:



Plenty of Ls to go around.

 

@Rahul baby, don't worry, I'm saving the best GIF especially for you next week.

 

You got your fourth warning for making a threat towards Rahul, and now you seem intent on provoking him again. Infraction for trolling. Comments to PM.