David Gerrold's Post- Fascinating

[T'Girl]

Yes, the Ocampa age a decade for every terran year and have roughly not much greater a proportional lifespan than us now. Which is scary and depressing but there it is.

I've considered that the Ocampa might experience time differently than most species, also that they don't need to sleep. By the time Kes was two Earth years of age, she had already personally experienced mentally eighteen years of life.

Wasn't there a theory that homosexuality, if one assumes it is a natural evolutionary trait, was one of nature's way of curbing population explosions.

This presupposes that all Humans have some kind of connection and we can collectively realize when there's a population problem, at which time a increased percentage of Humanity would be genetically gay at the time of conception.

An interesting idea, but I don't think that's what's happening.

 

[urbandefault]

If someone was looking for the meaning of life, I don't think I'd point them at a TV show. I don't care how deep it was supposed to be.

But statements like this are kind of insulting because you're telling other people they're not entitled to take anything away from their entertainment besides cheap thrills and escapism. That's not all people get out of it and it isn't fair for anyone to dictate what people should or shouldn't get out of it. Art is ultimately filtered through the mind of those who experience it.

For instance, there's a film coming out shortly called Ex Machina that is getting a lot of press. You know why? Because it is deeply infused with gender politics. It's got a 90-somthing rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on people who have already seen it (as it's come out already in other countries). On the surface, it's a thriller, but the filmmaker has an agenda, which is to use his characters to explore a heated topic. And people are already calling it one of the best films of 2015, in part because it does inspire you to think about these issues. To me, this is a big part of what our entertainment should do. It's a philosophical essay framed as narrative and buried to such an extent that it should be kind of subliminal. Think of all other sci-fi out there with a "big point" to make. 1984, Brave New World, Clockwork Orange.

I could go on, but I just think it is insulting to the art-form of film/tv and to fans who get a lot out of it to make the "it's just dumb entertainment" argument.

You have every right to feel insulted, but the statement was "I, I, I" and not "You, you, you." I can't speak for anyone else.

But on the whole, yes. I do see television as mostly "just dumb entertainment."

 

[T'Girl]

But on the whole, yes. I do see television as mostly "just dumb entertainment."

Unfortunately this includes the "news."

 

[urbandefault]

But on the whole, yes. I do see television as mostly "just dumb entertainment."

Unfortunately this includes the "news."

Quoted for Truth. :/

 

[Shawnster]

And the author has been extremely irritated over this for decades.

Probably also irritated over Roddenberry forcing him off the show and not crediting him with the large amount of creative work he did in bringing TNG into existence.

Mr. Roddenberry kept a standing offer out, even at conventions, for a script he liked that would finally bring same sex preference 'normalcy' into TNG without the Grand Opening Factor.

Roddenberry simply having one of the hero main characters be openly gay would have accomplish that in the pilot. Captain Picard would have been a excellent choice.

Easy.

No. Not so easy in 1987. No network would have aired the show. Not even in syndication.

 

[BillJ]

No. Not so easy in 1987. No network would have aired the show. Not even in syndication.

Maybe not easy for to have the lead be gay. But TV was dealing with gay characters and situations for quite a while by the time TNG came on the air.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1980s_American_television_episodes_with_LGBT_themes

For a series that was suppose to be progressive, TNG and the rest of the spinoffs look absolutely archaic in comparison.

 

[T'Girl]

One of the reasons that Picard (as written) might have made for a better choice for a gay character in 1987 is that Picard actually wasn't very sexually active. So while he would have been established from the beginning as openly gay, the information wouldn't have been a part of every episode, it would have been overt in perhaps one episode per season.

In the seven years of TNG we only saw Picard kiss two or three women, and we saw him in bed with someone only once, and that was with Q.

 

[ThankYouGeneR]

Star Trek is a fun, cool show about space adventures. That's about it.

As much as people like to say Star Trek is merely entertainment and nothing more ...<snip>...I'm guessing that everyone who's ever wrote for Star Trek would cringe at the notion that they aren't providing anything better

This is also from David Gerrold:

I was there. I know what Gene Roddenberry envisioned. He went on at length about it in almost every meeting. He wasn’t about technology... he was about envisioning a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out. Gene Roddenberry was one of the great Social Justice Warriors.

Most of the stories we wrote were about social justice.

Star Trek was about social justice from day one.

And this from an interview with Mr. Roddenberry:

In contemporary [TV] shows [1960s] I found I couldn't talk about sex, politics, religion, and all the other things I wanted to talk about. It seemed to me that if I had things happen to little polka dotted people on a far-off planet, I might get past the network censors, as Swift did in his day. And indeed that's what we did.

You cannot ignore a medium which hits fifty million people in one evening. I think that the purpose of all writing is to reach people and say something you believe in and think is important. You may do it as a scientific or philosophical tract, but with fiction and drama and a certain amount of adventure you reach them easier and you reach more of them.

I think people forget too often that literature ...usually fiction... is responsible for more changes in public opinion than news articles or sermons.

Historically this has been true of literature and whether we like it or not, television is literature. It may not be very good literature usually, but of course not everything that is printed is very good, either.

I'm a storyteller. And producing is merely and extension of the storytelling function.

There's no difference between writing that "he spoke slowly, uncertainly, unsure of himself" and being a director who makes sure the actor does it that way or being the producer who hires an actor who is capable of doing it that way.

"Star Trek" took points of view. It talked about meaningful things.

 

[T'Girl]

This is also from David Gerrold:

Gene Roddenberry was one of the great Social Justice Warriors.

Most of the stories we wrote were about social justice.

Star Trek was about social justice from day one.

Most of the stories we wrote were about social justice.

Really? In that case where did "most" of these stories go? Here's the first fifteen episodes.

Encounter At Farpoint
The Naked Now
Code of Honor
The Last Outpost
Where No One Has Gone Before
Lonely Among Us
Justice
The Battle
Hide & Q
Haven
The Big Goodbye
Datalore
Angel One
11001001
Too Short A Season

Episodes about the crew getting drunk, playing on the holodeck, a meaningless Q story, intro the Ferengi, intro the Traveler. There are a few "message" episodes in the mix, but hardly most.

 

[ThankYouGeneR]

Oh dear. I should have been clearer. The above quoted comment was about Star Trek rather than The Next Generation.

My bad. Apologies for the easy confusion.

 

[Nightdiamond]

This is also from David Gerrold:

I was there. I know what Gene Roddenberry envisioned. He went on at length about it in almost every meeting. He wasn’t about technology... he was about envisioning a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out. Gene Roddenberry was one of the great Social Justice Warriors.

Most of the stories we wrote were about social justice.

Star Trek was about social justice from day one.

This is still a good example about how Trek is perceived to be about human improvement in the 24th century. There are always those interviews, articles, documentaries and such.

I still think there's not much excuse not to know what Trek is about, as far as content.


On the issue of featuring gay characters in TNG;

"In universe", they had the green light. But "out of universe" they could never do it.

Trek just seemed to be too weary of offending certain elements.

A show that is about human progress in the 24th century but avoids featuring gay characters.

Strange, because there were shows from the 80's that boldly and not so boldly had gay normal characters.

And there have been sci fi shoes that showed women in authority (captains) way before Voyager appeared.

So why would Trek, of all shows, have these extremist fans and elements?

 

[T'Girl]

Oh dear. I should have been clearer. The above quoted comment was about Star Trek rather than The Next Generation.

Strange, because while Gerrold submitted a half dozen story ideas to the original Star Trek, he only worked on a single script, The Trouble with Tribbles.

This would seem to make his statement of "Most of the stories we wrote were about social justice," sound (again) strange. Gerrold never wrote stories in the plural. And from reading his book, he didn't have much interaction with Roddenberry, but rather with Gene Coon.

Gerrold was on the staff creating TNG, and just from the sound of it the quote would seem to be referring to that show, and not TOS.

 

[BillJ]

Strange, because while Gerrold submitted a half dozen story ideas to the original Star Trek, he only worked on a single script, The Trouble with Tribbles.

He also has an uncredited rewrite of "I, Mudd" and the story credit for "The Cloud Minders". Then he has two credits on the animated series: "BEM" and "More Tribbles, More Troubles".

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0314775/

 

[Darren Mooney]

The "social justice" line is a lovely piece of myth-building. However, it's largely not borne out. That multinational crew? Not Roddenberry's idea. It was added at the behest of the network. The evil network.

Look at the way fandom treats Uhura. You would imagine her to be a torch-bearer, a character who broke the mold. It's great that she inspired people like Whoopi Goldberg and Mae Jameson, and Nichelle Nichols deserves credit for that.

However, Uhura was not groundbreaking or trend-setting. Actual African-American lead characters existed in shows like I, Spy or Julia. I, Spy even beat Star Trek to the punch when it comes to interracial kissing.

In contrast, Uhura's biggest character moments in the series come in The Changeling, where Nomad completely wipes her mind. There, the show seems to literally suggest that Uhura doesn't need personal memories; there's no loss of a person when Nomad wipes her mind. Instead, Uhura simply needs to relearn technical information so she can continue to function as part of the crew.

The novels did much better work with the character afterwards.

And that's before getting into the whole "lack of homosexual characters" thing. The writers may have wanted it, but that isn't enough on its own. Gerrold, to be fair, at least wrote a script. Producers rushed down to the set on The Offspring to prevent Jonathan Frakes from shooting a same-sex couple holding hands.

This "social justice" narrative is a nice one, but it is a piece of retroactive mythologising by a lot of those involved in the show.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Producers rushed down to the set on The Offspring to prevent Jonathan Frakes from shooting a same-sex couple holding hands.

Really?

 

[Darren Mooney]

Neelix's and Kes's relationship was never depicted as anything other than one between two consenting adults, and neither harmed the other. That's all anybody should be concerned with.

You don't see any abusive undertones in the way that Neelix treats Kes in episodes like The Phage or Twisted? Where he is incredibly emotionally manipulative and controlling, not to mention passive-aggressive, which becomes extra creepy when you factor in the difference in age between them, the fact that he is the one with his own space ship and the fact she'd never been into space before?

(That is what makes the relationship creepy when coupled with their respective ages, and why Ezri/Jadzia and Worf/Bashir is less problematic. If Jadzia was as controlling as Worf, it might have been an issue.)

And then there's the fact that Kes was apparently happy enough not to be dating Neelix, but wasn't able to break up with him herself. An evil alien warlord breaks them up while in Kes's body, and then they stay broken up. There is no way to present that as a functioning relationship.

Kes doesn't need to be arriving in Sickbay with two black eyes for it to an abusive relationship. A large part of the toxic dynamic is Kes' age.

Producers rushed down to the set on The Offspring to prevent Jonathan Frakes from shooting a same-sex couple holding hands.

Really?

“According to the script, Guinan was supposed to start telling Lal, ‘When a man and a woman are in love …’ and in the background, there would be men and women sitting at tables, holding hands,” Arnold says. “But Whoopi refused to say that. She said, ‘This show is beyond that. It should be “When two people are in love.”‘ And so it was decided on set that one of the tables in the background should have two men holding hands — or two women, or whatever. But someone ran to a phone and made a call to the production office and that was nixed. [Producer] David Livingston came down and made sure that didn’t happen.”

Source: http://www.salon.com/2001/06/30/gay_trek/

 

[Darren Mooney]

Double post.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

You don't see any abusive undertones in the way that Neelix treats Kes in episodes like The Phage or Twisted? Where he is incredibly emotionally manipulative and controlling, not to mention passive-aggressive

Neelix may be overly possessive and paranoid, but that doesn't change the fact that Kes was not a child (by any definition of the term) at the time. There is no connection between the two.

When they met, Kes was 2 years old, which by Ocampa standards IS ADULTHOOD.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

An evil alien warlord breaks them up while in Kes's body, and then they stay broken up. There is no way to present that as a functioning relationship.

Well, if two break up and stay broken up, then, yeah, that's pretty much the definition of a non-functional relationship.

But that's got nothing whatsoever to do with whether Kes was a child while she and Neelix were together, which was the actual point in contention.

Calling their relationship "creepy" doesn't carry any weight. Neelix never abused Kes, she never abused him (at least when she wasn't being possessed), Neelix never bullied Kes to remain with him. So, get over it already. She was an adult. And when she exercised her prerogative not to date Neelix, he respected that.

Can we get back to discussing David Gerrold yet?

Anyway, that's all I have to say about this. It just gets rather tiresome whenever it comes up, and it does so repeatedly, that's all.

 

[Avon]

looks like the people he said wouldn't get it, didn't get it.