News Discovery New Character Breakdowns
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Pike has his accident that puts him in a wheelchair. His counselor wants him to talk with someone who has a similiar situation and they get in touch. They become friends and eventually he asks her if she wants a more challenging job and offers her the chief engineering job on the "Enterprise" or the "Discovery." Just one angle they could go.
Jason
Would people mind if the changed the year it happened? Is their anyway to fan canon it to happen this upcoming season?
Jason
Pike won't be injured for a good eight or nine years, as Nerys Myk points out. Plus, I think they want Pike to be a bad-ass. That's why they have the guy who played Bohannon on Hell On Wheels.
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I'm dead-sure they want Pike to be a take-charge kick ass and take names kind of guy. He'll be this season's Lorca. Minus the Mirror Universe and PTSD.
Okay by going off those words here is how to fan canon it. Pike starts out in a less awful wheelchair. The thing that Mendez is talking about is a change in his condition where they have had to move him into the awful version we see.
Jason
I wonder how much of the crew from "The Cage" we'll see. Who'll be back, who won't be, and who'll only be mentioned? I imagine they're dripping out information little by little instead of all at once.
Not only that but I wonder if we will see any Kirk era crew on the ship besides Spock. Scotty could already be chief engineer for all we know or just a random engineer who we know will be promoted. Dr M'Benga might be their or Boyce. Maybe Kelso.
Jason
True. They did go out of their way to put in his monologue into the teaser about how "I'm tired of being responsible for 203 lives, I'm tired of deciding which mission is too risky and which isn't, and who lives and who dies."
Knock it off.
From what we have seen from tech you would think the ability to help people who can't walk would most likely be more evolved than needing a wheelchair but that's never a good reason to do something. It's more interesting for drama and symbolism and all that to still use a wheelchair. Even when Nog lost a leg and the grew him a new one they were smart to give him a cane and to have him say he still feels pain. You don't want tech to take away human experiences. I just wish they still let people wear glasses. I'm always a fan of characters in glasses. It would be a nice human element to mix into a world full of high level tech that exists in Trek. Like how books are also still around and all music died at some point and people only listen to classical music or public domain stuff or a variety of rocking flute based jams.Even the Klingons listen to opera! That's like thinking a bunch of punk rockers or going to really dig some hip cool Amy Grant songs.
Jason
So for the fully human experience, you prefer an old, not efficient, and even not safer medical technology than a better, safer, and more capable new one? Just google how robotic exoskeleton tech help disability and paralyzed people to walk again. Right now, We are just at the beginning of the development. Just thinking about how this technology develop in 23rd century. With the premise of better future, you can't imagine that someone still can't afford a robotic Exoskeleton Technology, can you?
Still no nudity. Feh.
Ok Ted Sullivan called the wheelchair in DSC season 1 a hoverchair on Twitter
https://twitter.com/karterhol/status/925390673624231936?s=21
https://twitter.com/karterhol/status/925390673624231936?s=21
Star Trek is fiction written for people in the present and meant to be seen through a modern lens, it is not a depiction of the actual future. People use wheelchairs today, so they have fictional future people use fictional future wheelchairs in the fictional future.
This isn’t hard people.
Pretty sure they'd happily change it if they thought they could tell a good story. Same episode said Pike was "about [Kirk's] age", which would make him a 13 year old captain.
"About your age" means next to nothing. Someone told me the other day, without thinking, someone who's 25 was about my age.
Sorry, but no, I don't think so. As I said upthread, if you want to use a sci-fi setting to its fullest (e.g., the "literature of ideas") you need to do one of two things:
1. Deal with imaginative technologies, concepts, and settings and see what the ramifications are,
2, Use a setting which isn't the mundane present to tell an allegorical story.
I do agree that in general fiction cannot be viewed as anything other than "of its time" and regardless of intent science fiction will seem antiquated in some measures just due to the faulty projections that are made about the future. Trek has many examples of this - most notably that computer technology has generally been shown as less advanced than what is possible even today. Even Berman-era Trek basically didn't have anything resembling the internet shown on any of the shows, even though it was fairly well established by later period. Then again, a lot of "pros" effed this up too.
Regardless, this isn't the case of making a bad call about a future tech. This is a case of basically ignoring a tech which exists right now, which could be much sloppier. I will reserve judgement because we don't know how it will be depicted onscreen, but at minimum I would hope there would be some on-screen reference to use of wheelchairs being far more limited in the 23rd century than today.
But there is of course the other point - the one of allegory. This is why you didn't need 23rd century wheelchairs to tell a story about disabled people. Because a sci-fi setting allows you to expand the concept of disabled considerably.
Here's a hypothetical Discovery episode. The Federation makes contact with a race of beings who have augmented their neural functions with circuitry for generations - similar to the Borg, but to a more limited extent. Everyone is outfitted with a brain-computer interface in childhood. Information is "downloaded" directly into the brain as needed, with written language even falling out of favor. Physical or verbal interfaces have become a thing of the past, because people can just think computer commands. Most people that is. A small minority of the population has an overactive immune system which rejects the neural interface. They must do everything the old fashioned way. They have to learn things through the laborious process of study. They need to have special interfaces installed in order to get anything done. They might not be openly stigmatized, but they have their otherness constantly thrown in their face, having to work their way through a culture not designed for them.
See, I just put together the framework for an allegorical story about disability. Even better, the potential protagonist (er, guest star, I suppose) is someone we wouldn't see as disabled in our own culture. Hence it gets across the idea of what it means to be "disabled" to someone of normal ability. This is the core of what can make a science fiction story unique - what can only be done in a SFnal setting. And it's why just having a "future wheelchair" just seems monumentally cheap to me.
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