Did the 24th century shows get too insulting/condescending about TOS?

[JonnyQuest037]

White writing this post over in the "What was your opinion of Trek 20 years ago?" thread, it occurred to me that several of the references & tributes to TOS that TNG, DS9, and VOY often came off as backhanded compliments. I don't know if they were consciously putting down the original show to build theirs up, but it seems that this was often the case, and all of these references had a cumulative effect.

In TNG's "Unificiation," Picard speaks disdainfully of Spock's history of "cowboy diplomacy" right to Spock's face, even though he also admits that Spock played an instrumental role in peace with the Klingon Empire:

SPOCK: You cannot remain here, Captain Picard.
PICARD: And I will not return without a full explanation. Ambassador, with great respect for all that you've achieved on behalf of the Federation, this sort of cowboy diplomacy will not easily be tolerated any more.
SPOCK: Cowboy diplomacy?
PICARD: If you wish to undertake a mission with obvious repercussions to the Federation, then you should discuss it with the Federation. I'm here as their representative. You'll have to discuss it with me.

When Scotty returned on TNG's "Relics," it was implied that Scotty had always been inflating the times on his repair estimates, interpreting an ironic joke from Star Trek III unfortunately literally:

SCOTT: Do you mind a little advice? Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way, but the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want.
LAFORGE: Yeah, well I told the Captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour.
SCOTT: How long will it really take?
LAFORGE: An hour.
SCOTT: You didn't tell him how long it would really take, did you?
LAFORGE: Of course I did.
SCOTT: Oh, laddie, you've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker. Now listen--
LAFORGE: Captain Scott. I've tried to be patient, I've tried to be polite. But I've got a job to do here, and quite frankly, you're in the way.

So I guess Scotty was never a miracle worker after all, he was just a talented BS artist.

DS9's second season episode "Crossover" revealed that Kirk very possibly made the Mirror Universe worse for his interference, not better:

INTENDANT: Perhaps you'd recognise the name Kirk.
KIRA: I'm sorry, I don't.
INTENDANT: Interesting. On my side, Kirk is one the most famous names in our history. Almost a century ago, a Terran starship Captain named James Kirk accidentally exchanged places with his counterpart from your side due to a transporter accident. Our Terrans were barbarians then, but their Empire was strong. While your Kirk was on this side, he met a Vulcan named Spock and somehow had a profound influence on him. Afterwards, Spock rose to Commander in Chief of the Empire by preaching reforms, disarmament, peace. It was quite a remarkable turnabout for his people. Unfortunately for them, when Spock had completed all these reforms, his empire was no longer in any position to defend itself against us.
KIRA: Us?
INTENDANT: The Alliance. The historic coming together of the Klingons and the Cardassians.
KIRA: And Bajor is part of this Alliance?
INTENDANT: We'd been under Terran occupation for decades. When we were freed, we petitioned for entry and were accepted. We have become quite an influential power within the Alliance.

I find that "what Kirk did was wrong" is a common trap that many TOS sequels tend to fall into. They get a little tiresome after a while (Although I generally enjoy DS9's Mirror Universe episodes).

DS9's "Trials and Tribble-ations" largely kept free of this stuff, probably because they were actually inserting themselves into a genuine TOS episode, so they couldn't write to the cliche version of TOS as the other shows tended to. However, they just couldn't resist throwing in these lines from Dulmur & Lucsly about how Kirk just couldn't stop breaking rules and disobeying orders:

SISKO: This was the first Enterprise. Constitution class.
DULMUR: His ship.
LUCSLY: James T Kirk.
SISKO: The one and only.
LUCSLY: Seventeen separate temporal violations. The biggest file on record.
DULMUR: The man was a menace.

Kirk really didn't disobey orders very much on TOS at all. Seriously, watch the show & see. He may occasionally bristle against his orders or interpret them creatively, but he always followed them until Spock's life was in danger in "Amok Time." The cliche of Kirk as the maverick rule-breaker who was constantly disobeying orders comes from the movies more than anything else.

And when VOY did their own TOS tribute episode, "Flashback," they had Janeway talk about how of course Kirk & company would all be thrown out of the more enlightened Starfleet of the 24th century.

JANEWAY: You may be right. Nevertheless, I've been studying the Excelsior logs.
KIM: What do they say?
JANEWAY: Unfortunately, they don't say anything at all.
KIM: Nothing?
JANEWAY: It would seem that Captain Sulu decided not to enter that journey into his official log. The day's entry makes some cryptic remark about the ship being damaged in a gaseous anomaly and needing repairs, but nothing else.
KIM: You mean he falsified his logs?
JANEWAY: It was a very different time, Mister Kim. Captain Sulu, Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy. They all belonged to a different breed of Starfleet officer. Imagine the era they lived in. The Alpha Quadrant still largely unexplored. Humanity on verge of war with Klingons. Romulans hiding behind every nebula. Even the technology we take for granted was still in its early stages. No plasma weapons, no multiphasic shields. Their ships were half as fast.
KIM: No replicators, no holodecks. You know, ever since I took Starfleet history at the academy, I always wondered what it would be like to live in those days.
JANEWAY: Space must have seemed a whole lot bigger back then. It's not surprising they had to bend the rules a little. They were a little slower to invoke the Prime Directive, and a little quicker to pull their phasers. Of course, the whole bunch of them would be booted out of Starfleet today. But I have to admit, I would have loved to ride shotgun at least once with a group of officers like that.

Ugh. If that's their idea of a tribute, I'd hate to see them get insulting.

And "Q2" couldn't resist retroactively throwing in another Prime Directive violation into Kirk's past, again with the implication was a common thing for him:

ICHEB: Though it was a blatant violation of the Prime Directive, Kirk saved the Pelosians from extinction, just as he had the Baezians and the Chenari many years earlier. Finally, in the year 2270, Kirk completed his historic five year mission and one of the greatest chapters in Starfleet history came to a close. A new chapter began when Kirk regained command of the Enterprise.

Like I said, after a while these types of references add up and have a cumulative effect. Viewers of the newer shows get the impression that Kirk was a maverick Captain who broke the rules whenever he felt like it rather than only under extraordinary circumstances. And these new revelations become part of the canon for the TOS characters, slowly drifting them over to the pop culture cliche versions rather than the competent professionals we usually saw on TOS.

What do you think? Did you find any of these references to the TOS era insulting or condescending? And if so, do you think it was intentional? Or did this sort of thing never bug you one way or the other? I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.

 

[Lord Garth]

It would be too easy to go with Janeway's "The whole bunch of them would be booted out of Starfleet today" in "Flashback" but I'm not going to do it. She was romanticizing about what the 23rd Century was like. Not looking at how it "really" was and still said she would've loved to have served with officers like that.

I'm instead going to go with Picard talking down to Spock about his Cowboy Diplomacy in "Unfiication". Most of Spock's career as an Ambassador would've been during the 24th Century not the "rough 'n tumble" 23rd. Picard's not one to look back on that time with any sentimentality, so he's harshly judging Spock for acting like what he perceives to be a maverick for reaching out to the Romulan underground. Spock was looking toward the future, a future where the Vulcans and Romulans could be united and trying to think outside the box to start achieving that. Picard was the box personified, demanding that Spock do everything he was trying to avoid.

 

[Jayson1]

None of them. I always felt the shows were simply making a point of just how different Berman Trek was from "TOS" and that era of the franchise. KIrk and his people being tossed out of Starfleet like Janeway says is her actually admiring the kind of wild and less restricted ways of that era. People sometimes actually wish for more simple and less complicated times, even if in reality they were just as complicated as modern times just in different ways.

Jason

 

[The Old Mixer]

The way I always took both of the lines about Scotty inflating his estimates is that he quoted times by the book, but then cut every corner he could to get things done faster. It was a testament to his skill that he knew every such corner that could be cut.

 

[Jayson1]

The way I always took both of the lines about Scotty inflating his estimates is that he quoted times by the book, but then cut every corner he could to get things done faster. It was a testament to his skill that he knew every such corner that could be cut.

My take on it was he didn't start inflating his estimates until he started to pull off those miracles and basically started to have fun with it once people started to notice.. Kirk was game because he likes Scotty and he also knows that when things get serious he is going to get the job done and Scotty will always know when to be serious instead of just making some jokes or friendly banter with him.

Jason

 

[Lance]

Kirk really didn't disobey orders very much on TOS at all. Seriously, watch the show & see. He may occasionally bristle against his orders or interpret them creatively, but he always followed them until Spock's life was in danger in "Amok Time." The cliche of Kirk as the maverick rule-breaker who was constantly disobeying orders comes from the movies more than anything else.

This has been a bugbear of mine about the post TOS series era, starting with Wrath of Khan. It's been a massive misinterpretation of the character. Kirk was a quick thinker with a gift for coming up with solutions on the fly, but it wasn't a defining character trait to the point of him being a maverick by any stretch.

My take on it was he didn't start inflating his estimates until he started to pull off those miracles and basically started to have fun with it once people started to notice.. Kirk was game because he likes Scotty and he also knows that when things get serious he is going to get the job done and Scotty will always know when to be serious instead of just making some jokes or friendly banter with him.

Also true. Consider a scene in "The Naked Time" where Kirk seems to expect Scotty to pull one of his usual miracles, and the full gravity (ahem, literally ) of the danger they face is underlined by Scotty's insistence that, no, he's actually telling the truth when he says he needs more time than they've actually got if he's going to restart the engines.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Scotty being a bullshit artist in "Relics" bothered me, as did how everyone treated him in that episode.

The Voyager "Flashback" one I never took as a jibe, I took it as an admission that Starfleet officers have become stodgy and boring in the century since TOS.

 

[SpocksOddSocks]

I don't think any of them are either.

On the Scotty quote, hadn't his inflated repair times been mentioned in The Search for Spock?

 

[Mytran]

It was a one-off joke in that movie between Kirk and Scotty which has been parotted and taken literally far too many times since

 

[CorporalCaptain]

It was a one-off joke in that movie between Kirk a Scotty whixh has been parotted and taken literally far too many times since

This.

 

[The Wormhole]

Janeway's speech about "the whole lot of them would be thrown out of Starfleet today" is the only one that really comes close to being "condescending" and even then, I think fans who interpret that line as an insult to TOS or an attack on are overreacting. Clumsily written, maybe, but it does seem to be TOS romanticism at its finest.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

KIrk and his people being tossed out of Starfleet like Janeway says is her actually admiring the kind of wild and less restricted ways of that era.

If "admiration" is what they were going for, they should've cut the line about "of course, they'd all be thrown out of Starfleet today." Reading it now, it's the "of course" that really gets me. It carries the clear subtext that Kirk's crew just wasn't up to the same standard as the 24th century. "Oh, we'd never put up with that sort of thing now."

This has been a bugbear of mine about the post TOS series era, starting with Wrath of Khan. It's been a massive misinterpretation of the character. Kirk was a quick thinker with a gift for coming up with solutions on the fly, but it wasn't a defining character trait to the point of him being a maverick by any stretch.

Agreed. It's really amazing how much the movies have changed the popular conception of TOS, even among Trek's creators. But I guess more people watch the movies than the series at this point.

Also true. Consider a scene in "The Naked Time" where Kirk seems to expect Scotty to pull one of his usual miracles, and the full gravity (ahem, literally ) of the danger they face is underlined by Scotty's insistence that, no, he's actually telling the truth when he says he needs more time than they've actually got if he's going to restart the engines.

Absolutely. That's a great scene. I love Scotty's expression right before he says "I canna change the laws of physics. I've got to have thirty minutes."

It was a one-off joke in that movie between Kirk and Scotty which has been parotted and taken literally far too many times since

Yeah. Watch that scene again. It's obvious from Shatner and Doohan's performances that neither one of them means it. Kirk is just ribbing his old friend about his famous efficiency, and Scotty is basically "Yes, and"-ing on Kirk's joke. "Oh sure, I've always inflated my repair estimates by three. That's how I've maintained my reputation all these years. Didn't you know?" Both of them play the scene with ironic smiles on their faces.

 

[Mytran]

Not to mention that if this had really been a big secret, why would Scotty confess without being caught, and over an open comm for the whole ship to hear!

It was a joke.

 

[Jayson1]

If "admiration" is what they were going for, they should've cut the line about "of course, they'd all be thrown out of Starfleet today." Reading it now, it's the "of course" that really gets me. It carries the clear subtext that Kirk's crew just wasn't up to the same standard as the 24th century. "Oh, we'd never put up with that sort of thing now."
.

I think Janeway saying,Just once I would have loved to ride shotgun or something to that effect though ends up saying more. If anything it's more of her kind of regretting how ridged modern Starfleet is more than a knock on the old times. Not a complete knock because I do think she values 24th century values and procedures only sometimes she kind of thinks she would prefer the old ways. Te me it would be kind of like wishing I could have experienced the hippie days in the 60's but in reality I know I think I would much prefer modern times. Not to mention the entire fascination everyone always has towards the very concept of time travel. A desire to go experience the past. A nice place to the visit but I wouldn't want to live their kind of view I think most people tend to have with the past.

Jason

 

[XCV330]

The way I always took both of the lines about Scotty inflating his estimates is that he quoted times by the book, but then cut every corner he could to get things done faster. It was a testament to his skill that he knew every such corner that could be cut.

He could do a patch job that might not last longer for 30 minutes, like in Doomsday Machine, but it got the job done, and it was i think understood his engineering team came back and fixed it properly, later, when they had time.

Her comment that they would have been kicked out of Starfleet was also on a certain level reflective of the pre-war stodgy Starfleet that was arrogant enough to put families with young children on front-line heavy cruisers. The Postwar Starfleet she returned to was culturally probably very different.

 

[Lord Garth]

TNG being a product of 1987 and TOS being a product of 1966, I wonder if the vibe they were going for was along the lines of "Those crazy hippies!" or "What were we thinking?" It would definitely serve as a metaphor for the Generation Gap.

Spock's the "radical" who wants to unify with the Romulans. Picard's the "left of center" New Democrat who says he'd love for the Neutral Zone to be abolished but there's a process to go through.

Then you have Janeway continuing the metaphor being like, "Ah, the '60s. Protests, demonstrations, make love not war, bra burning. Of course, they all would've been booted out today, but what a great time it must've been to be alive..."

 

[Riker'sMailbox]

I found them kind of complimentary. Later shows had to show the growth of the Federation and it's ever changing rules. I think all of the above examples were more later captains and starfleet members being a little wistful of the freedoms that existed during the time of TOS.

 

[Tom]

How do we view and talking about people from the late 19th and early 20th century? We can be a bit condescending (and rightfully so on some things) about how things were done (slavery, lack of women's rights, the list goes on...). Star Trek is no different. How will people talk about us in 2118? "Man, I can't believe those people elected someone like Donald Trump, what were they thinking back then!" LOL

 

[Lord Garth]

How will people talk about us in 2118? "Man, I Can't believe those people elected someone like Donald Trump, what were they thinking!" LOL

That's how I talk now!

 

[BillJ]

I think the only one that grates on me is "Relics". Though I think it has more to do with how it is acted than how it is written. I mean the whole repair estimate stuff originates with Star Trek III.