Evidence of SNW being a possible alternate timeline from TOS

[Firebird]

When's Star Trek done this?

They haven't. It's a misogynist talking point that has no basis in reality.

 

[Tuskin38]

They'll probably mention that dick of a officer at the start of DSC Season 2.

 

[Turtletrekker]

They haven't. It's a misogynist talking point that has no basis in reality.

Much like most of TRON JA307020's assertations.

 

[Campe]

They'll probably mention that dick of a officer at the start of DSC Season 2.

He got what was coming to him.

 

[Tuskin38]

He got what was coming to him.

100%

 

[Detached Nacelle]

Evan Connoly? Yeah he was a dick. Bless that asteroid that shut him up.

But look at Picard season 1 Bjayzl and Narissa were both irredeemable bitches and Seven of Nine offed them both.

Not that real evidence is permitted in their courts.

 

[fireproof78]

Clancy had to eat crow too by the end of Season 1.

Star Trek has competent, limited competence and low competency. Stocker springs immediately to mind from TOS.


It's always a mix.

 

[TRON JA307020]

When's Star Trek done this? Asking honestly, I can't think of a single time, and I've seen DSC S1 and S2, and all of PIC/SNW/SFA.

Saru, Pike, Kirk, etc are all explicitly competent and heroic (Pike's writing goes up and down, but even when he's coming across as useless, the authorial intent is that he's admirable). Picard is made to look like a knobhead several times in early PIC but I don't think it's because he's male.

Akivas comments on "past captains" having toxic masculinity is all I needed to hear to convince me he was the wrong guy to head a show that has Captain Kirk as the lead character.

 

[Ovation]

Luke hardly looked like a fool, he helped saved the day at the end.

(general comment)

Luke was never as interesting a character as in TLJ.

And current Trek may not be to everyone’s taste but it’s hardly “destroying Trek”.

 

[Ovation]

Akivas comments on "past captains" having toxic masculinity is all I needed to hear to convince me he was the wrong guy to head a show that has Captain Kirk as the lead character.

Bit thin as evidence from which to draw such a firmly held conclusion.

 

[Turtletrekker]

Akivas comments on "past captains" having toxic masculinity is all I needed to hear to convince me he was the wrong guy to head a show that has Captain Kirk as the lead character.

Again. The link you provided, the one that was supposed to prove your point, says no such thing. This is you saying that, not Akiva Goldsman. And given your proven track record with your claims here, there is no reason why anybody here should simply take you at your word.

"Trust me bro" doesn't cut it. This whole thing comes off as fragile masculinity, toxic masculinity's often overlooked twin brother.

 

[TRON JA307020]

Again. The link you provided, the one that was supposed to prove your point, says no such thing. This is you saying that, not Akiva Goldsman. And given your proven track record with your claims here, there is no reason why anybody here should simply take you at your word.

"Trust me bro" doesn't cut it.

Read the whole article. He said kirk was problematic. Early captains were problematic.

Bit thin as evidence from which to draw such a firmly held conclusion.

Akiva said what he said.

 

[Starflight]

Akivas comments on "past captains" having toxic masculinity is all I needed to hear to convince me he was the wrong guy to head a show that has Captain Kirk as the lead character.

He doesn't seem to have made any such comments. I've earnestly looked both on the article you linked and a cursory search myself, but they just don't seem to exist. Here's everything Goldsman is quoted as saying in your link after the topic is introduced:

“I think [Star Trek’s] values have been consistent across time, across shows,” says Akiva Goldsman, co-creator of Strange New Worlds as well as one of the producers involved in bringing Pike aboard Discovery during its second season. He cites inclusion, optimism, and curiosity as among Trek’s most enduring philosophical tenets. “I think the stylistic manifestation of those qualities are cultural, and shift as eras and cultures shift. I think that, today, the kind of leadership that Jim Kirk expressed would feel problematic. I think that you wouldn’t write a character that way today [who] you were trying to make appealing. Modern storytelling requires, happily, a somewhat more thoughtful and contemporary approach to how human beings interact, or how non-human beings interact.

He uses the word "problematic" which I suppose is where your objection arises from, but he's talking about leadership - he's vague, but I assume he means Kirk's command style in some episodes can read as stern and abrasive to modern viewers who expect something more collaborative. The article itself makes the exact point you're making, by pointing out that Kirk's "womanizing" is more a construct of pop cultural discourse than of the actual show.

Then, talking about Pike, whom he contrasts with Kirk:

“He has grace,” says Goldsman. “He has a compassionate, forgiving view of his crew and the Federation, its enemies, its new friends and the galaxy itself. I think he is someone who’s led by compassion and the idea that what you don’t know is as important if not more important than what you do know.

“And by reaching into that metaphorical — or in our case, often literal — star-pinned darkness, we can learn, and if we learn, we will grow. And if we grow, we will be the better versions of ourselves, and each other. I think that is a tremendously humanistic and tremendously vital idea right now, in a time when empathy is sorely lacking and we see each other as the enemy because of any minor difference. Pike does not. He sees you as a potential friend and is open to connecting with you on your terms. I think that’s what we want today.”

Regardless, though, plenty of writers have had plenty of different interpretations of Kirk going all the way back to TOS, and even more with the 80s Pocket Books novels. His command style in TOS, TAS, and the books is anything ranging from militaristic and hard-nosed to warm and personable depending on the writer and the story.

Anyone who writes the character today is necessarily going to have to sort through a lot of conflicting depictions to settle on the essence of what the character means to so many people, and I don't think any successful depiction is going to include misogyny/toxic masculinity, just as the best depictions from the 60s - 90s didn't.

 

[TRON JA307020]

He doesn't seem to have made any such comments. I've earnestly looked both on the article you linked and a cursory search myself, but they just don't seem to exist. Here's everything Goldsman is quoted as saying in your link after the topic is introduced:

He uses the word "problematic" which I suppose is where your objection arises from, but he's talking about leadership - he's vague, but I assume he means Kirk's command style in some episodes can read as stern and abrasive to modern viewers who expect something more collaborative. Then, talking about Pike:

Regardless, though, plenty of writers have had plenty of different interpretations of Kirk going all the way back to TOS, and even more with the 80s Pocket Books novels. His command style in TOS, TAS, and the books is anything ranging from militaristic and hard-nosed to warm and personable depending on the writer and the story.

Anyone who writes the character today is necessarily going to have to sort through a lot of conflicting depictions to settle on the essence of what the character means to so many people, and I don't think any successful depiction is going to include misogyny/toxic masculinity, just as the best depictions from the 60s - 90s didn't.

Yup. He said problematic. The writer of the article framed what he meant. Its obvious. He doesn't like the way kirk was portrayed in tos. He thinks its a problem.

 

[Turtletrekker]

Read the whole article. He said that Kirk was problematic. Early captains were problematic
Akiva said what he said.

K.

In 1965, television producer Gene Roddenberry presented NBC with “The Cage,” the pilot episode of his space Western, Star Trek. The show starred film actor Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike of the USS Enterprise, a stern starship commander with a chip on his shoulder and a faraway look in his eyes. Flanked by a pointy-eared alien named Spock and a stoic first officer known only as “Number One,” Pike confronts a race of telepathic aliens who can make his darkest thoughts or deepest desires indistinguishable from reality. “The Cage” provides the audience with a shortcut to intimacy with Pike, revealing that his front as the strong, silent type hides a great discomfort and dissatisfaction with himself. It’s a heady and heavy tale, and NBC’s executives were wary of picking up such an “atypical” adventure show as a series, but they were intrigued enough to shell out for a second Star Trek pilot. When Jeffrey Hunter declined to return, Roddenberry decided that, rather than recasting Pike, he would create a new lead character. The less severe Captain James T. Kirk, portrayed by William Shatner, would go on to become one of the most famous fictional characters of the 20th century.
Now, the character who could have remained a curio in the history of Paramount’s crown jewel franchise is instead returning, by popular demand, to the captain’s chair for a new spinoff series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. No longer a relic of the 1960s, Christopher Pike has been resurrected as a poster boy for Gene Roddenberry’s idealistic future as we imagine it today, essentially emerging as a totally new character. But this opportunity might never have presented itself if not for one inconvenient fact: Making television is very expensive.

Early in the planning of the first season of Star Trek in March 1966, Gene Roddenberry suspected that a show this technically complicated would be likely to run over budget and behind schedule. To alleviate some of this pressure, he devised a way to reincorporate the first pilot into the ongoing series, essentially as a set of flashbacks. The resulting two-part episode, “The Menagerie,” established that Pike had been captain of the Enterprise before Kirk, and that Mr. Spock — the only character from the first pilot who made it to the series proper — had served under both.


Creating “The Menagerie” was a practical decision, allowing the production to squeeze two episodes out of the time and budget of just one, but it gave birth to Star Trek’s mythology, the sense that the Enterprise, its crew, and the galaxy they traveled had a history beyond the events of the show itself. Differences between the sets, props, and costumes in the old footage versus the new became evidence of the passage of time, giving fans license to obsess over the implications of any future aesthetic changes. The juxtaposition of the present of the show and a fully realized vision of its past was Star Trek’s first step from being a television show to being a universe.

Flash forward half a century, and Christopher Pike has become a central figure in that universe. In 2019, Hell on Wheels star Anson Mount took on the role of Captain Pike on Star Trek: Discovery, the flagship of Paramount’s new fleet of big-budget Trek series for streaming services. Like the feature films Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness (in which he’s played by Bruce Greenwood), Discovery casts Pike as an older, seasoned commander, a friend and ally to lead character Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green). Pike’s one-season tenure as a regular cast member on Discovery proved so popular among Trek fans that a spinoff featuring himself and the reimagined Number One (Rebecca Romijn) and Spock (Ethan Peck) became inevitable. After the test balloon of three 15-minute episodes of Short Treks featuring Pike’s Enterprise, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was officially announced in May 2020.

In some respects, Strange New Worlds is the series that Gene Roddenberry attempted to sell to NBC with “The Cage” back in 1965. It’s a deliberately old-school Star Trek show, returning the franchise to its roots as an episodic series that takes on a “problem of the week” and then boldly goes on to the next one. The cast includes younger versions of familiar characters from The Original Series, including Cadet Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) and nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush). Christopher Pike, on the other hand, is ahead of where we found him in “The Cage,” allowing Anson Mount to play him as someone who’s grown beyond the gruff, authoritative commander seen in the 1965 pilot. Thanks to the concerted efforts of both Mount and the Discovery and Strange New Worlds writers’ rooms, Star Trek’s original leading man has become a far more modern example of collaborative and empathetic leadership.

“Jeffrey [Hunter] gave us a very good rendition of ‘first act’ Pike,” says Mount. “He was a very young man, very self-involved. The writers wanted me to come onboard as ‘second act’ Pike, who’s a little more sure in his boots and knows the kind of leader and the kind of man he wants to be."

“I think [Star Trek’s] values have been consistent across time, across shows,” says Akiva Goldsman, co-creator of Strange New Worlds as well as one of the producers involved in bringing Pike aboard Discovery during its second season. He cites inclusion, optimism, and curiosity as among Trek’s most enduring philosophical tenets. “I think the stylistic manifestation of those qualities are cultural, and shift as eras and cultures shift. I think that, today, the kind of leadership that Jim Kirk expressed would feel problematic. I think that you wouldn’t write a character that way today [who] you were trying to make appealing. Modern storytelling requires, happily, a somewhat more thoughtful and contemporary approach to how human beings interact, or how non-human beings interact.”

It’s easy to see what Goldsman means. While Kirk’s reputation as a serial womanizer is more a product of pre-internet memes than the actual text, the scale of his ego has been only barely exaggerated. Kirk is an executive — Spock and Dr. McCoy are his close friends and advisors, but the rest of the crew are more or less treated as instruments of his will. He burdens himself with the need to remain larger than life in the eyes of his crew, putting him under great emotional strain that he is also compelled to hide. Fellow Star Trek Captains Picard, Janeway, and Hunter’s Pike suffer from similar afflictions.

But Mount’s Pike has no such insecurities. When he first appears on Discovery to take temporary command of the titular vessel, he finds a crew who has recently been traumatized by the manipulation and betrayal of their previous captain, Gabriel Lorca. Sensing their apprehension, Pike attempts to put them at ease by admitting his own vulnerabilities, like his childhood asthma and failing grade in astrophysics at Starfleet Academy. When he takes roll call on the bridge, he tells them to leave out their ranks, a gesture toward flattening Starfleet’s military-inspired hierarchy. In the midst of modern-day conversations about the legacy of toxic masculinity and male privilege, Pike seems to have left these ugly influences in his space dust.

“I think there’s a built-in optimism in Trek,” says Anson Mount, “and the idea that we’re all headed towards a better tomorrow and a more enlightened future. It’s a future where we don’t just learn three-dimensional chess, but where our better angels have won out and now we do have the luxury of being able to explore and find this universe where ethics — maybe not the obeisance to ethics — but a sense of ethics is kind of universal.” For his part, Mount has never liked the expression “non-toxic masculinity.” “True masculinity,” he says, in contrast to insecure macho posturing, “is not toxic.”[\QUOTE]

I'm reasonably certain that you edited your post after originally posted, in which IIRC you said that Goldsman called Kirk "toxic", which is typical goal-post shifting on your part. If this is the part that has your tighty-whities in a twist...

"“I think the stylistic manifestation of those qualities are cultural, and shift as eras and cultures shift. I think that, today, the kind of leadership that Jim Kirk expressed would feel problematic."

... he never said that Kirk was a toxic or problematic as a character, just that certain aspect about his portrayal are dated -- which is entirely legitimate. Much like McCoy's casual racism towards Spock. There are aspects of Pike's original portrayal that are dated and could be considered problematic as well. I mean, are we going to pretend that Kirk wasn't going after a barely-legal 18-year-old Lenore Karidian in The Conscience of the King?

 

[Starflight]

Yup. He said problematic. The writer of the article framed what he meant. Its obvious. He doesn't like the way kirk was portrayed in tos. He thinks its a problem.

What do you think he means? Like, what scenes or dialogue snippets from TOS do you think he's referring to when he says Kirk's command style comes across as problematic?

I'm asking because I feel that you and me are reading his remarks in different ways; you've suggested it's part of a push to alienate male viewers (by writing male characters a certain way, though I don't know what that way would be and neither of us can think of any examples), which I'm not seeing.

 

[TRON JA307020]

What do you think he means? Like, what scenes or dialogue snippets from TOS do you think he's referring to when he says Kirk's command style comes across as problematic?

I'm asking because I feel that you and me are reading his remarks in different ways; you've suggested it's part of a push to alienate male viewers (by writing male characters a certain way, though I don't know what that way would be and neither of us can think of any examples), which I'm not seeing.

Kirk wasn't emotional enough for him . He was too professional with his crew. Didnt cry every episode. Didn't over congratulate or gush over every thing his crew did. Made decisions off the cuff and stood by them without getting advice from his crew. Didnt change his mind about his principals like pike did after MBenga saved him from zombies. Kirk being a womanizer(not really) was probably another thing that bothers him. Kirk was a successful captain. Saved the earth and many planets over abd over again. His character is not problematic.

 

[Starflight]

That's the thing though, you said:

Look at shows like voyager. Captain Janeway was a strong female lead. The show itself never degraded or chastised the male co star characters to prove she was great. Movies and TV shows are no longer written thst way. They are writing for an agenda now. Its painfully obvious.

If your argument is that Goldsman made Pike's command style too passive, sure, I agree with you. If your stance is that you fear that Goldsman's Kirk may lack the character's trademark decisiveness and boldness because Goldsman finds those elements unappealing, sure, I agree that's a reasonable suspicion too.

But that's got nothing at all to do with TV shows being written for "an agenda" that "degrades and chastises" male characters - something that simply isn't happening in Star Trek, and which there don't appear to be any examples of - surely?

 

[Turtletrekker]

Kirk wasn't emotional enough for him . He was too professional with his crew. Didnt cry every episode. Didn't over congratulate or gush over every thing his crew did. Made decisions off the cuff and stood by them without getting advice from his crew. Didnt change his mind about his principals like pike did after MBenga saved him from zombies. Kirk being a womanizer(not really) was probably another thing that bothers him. Kirk was a successful captain. Saved the earth and many planets over abd over again. His character is not problematic.

Exactly none of that is in the article from the link you posted, of which I posted the entirety of. You're projecting more than a Cinemaplex. You're pulling all of that straight out of your ass and it smells like it.

 

[Campe]

Gosh. Almost like characters going on a journey.