Have the new Star Treks lost the progressive edge?
- Thread starter Oorang
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While I've only seen a few of the episodes, it seemed obvious that Crosby's character was the brains of the team, unfortunately you can't say the same about the character of Uhura.
If it was actually "progressive" would Gene have had to keep telling you?
It certainly wasn't as left as the political spectrum went in the day in U.S. politics. I'd like to think all reasonable folks would've supported the tenets equality by the 23rd century whether they were otherwise liberal or conservative. (Of course, there seemed to be some implicit prejudice against Spock on board the Enterprise.)
To be honest, there wasn't a lot on the show to offend anyone's 1960s sensibilities except on the most extreme right and left. Extreme right for the equality, extreme left for the apparently large (and expensive) military presence in the quadrant (whatever 23rd century form it takes).
As a practical case, I'm sure Roddenberry wanted Democrats (northern and southern) and Republicans to watch the show in large numbers, and the show was tempered accordingly.
While I've only seen a few of the episodes, it seemed obvious that Crosby's character was the brains of the team, unfortunately you can't say the same about the character of Uhura.
If it was actually "progressive" would Gene have had to keep telling you?
The only "leftist" idea Gene ever tried to nudge along was his ridiculous reverie about [no] money. And I say that only because it takes anti-capitalism/free market to such an extreme, the whole concept makes the most militant Occupier look like a fascist Randian Sith spawn. But it's only "leftist" because it's probably not on the right. However, the whole concept is so quixotical that it's impossible to find the windmill anywhere on the spectrum. It's probably standing on the sidelines blowing hot air furiously up The Real Star Trek Fans' collective ass.
What's really embarrassing is I totally bought into that shit when I was a teenager.
All the other squawking that wheezed off Picard's bully pulpit wasn't so much meant to be political/ideological badminton as it was weekly life coaching seminars on how not to be an idiot. Or a douche.
What's really embarrassing is I totally bought into that shit when I was a teenager.
All the other squawking that wheezed off Picard's bully pulpit wasn't so much meant to be political/ideological badminton as it was weekly life coaching seminars on how not to be an idiot. Or a douche.
And it wasn't even his idea, just another one he "borrowed". It first shows up in Star Trek during The Voyage Home.
Same here. So don't feel bad.
Yet Picard came off as a douche much of the time while delivering it!
I always found TNG to be more conservative than TOS. Especially when you factor in that Roddenberry didn't have the oppressors at NBC constantly over his shoulder.
The idea was always thrown around to fit the need of a story.
The word "credits" was thrown around in TOS and again in the subsequent series. Looking back, I just see it as a fairly prescient view of electronic banking and paperless economies. It could also be that the last pretense of the currency being backed by anything valuable like gold or whatever has been done away with by TOS time.
I'm not an economist, but I'd think that any society that places a value on things would have to have some kind of currency for exchange. It's just no one in TOS is carrying around a wad of bills.
In TOS, remember, Jones was selling tribbles, and the miners wanting wives from Mudd certainly weren't going to get them for nothing (and it was inferred they were getting rich as miners). In some episode Kirk did refer to Starfleet spending a lot of money on their training. I also remember some character once saying he'd bet, "Credits to navy beans," about something being true. It's still a phrase I like better than "dollars to donuts."
I think that what TOS did do was change around what society considered valuable at that time (like in "Catspaw" when Kirk says the gems mean nothing to him because his ship can replicate them many times over). Food and necessities may have been virtually cost-free. Health care and general human well-being may have also become virtually cost-free as a form of welfare state grew (which would've been a logical extrapolation from the 1960s) and technology made it cheap to expand care.
Bottom line: in an economy with few scarcities, the need for currency for most of everyday life, and maybe the need to accumulate great wealth in general, is problematic.
Picking up the phone on a starship is not a three-dimensional role? Gene should have gone with a 3D telephone to go with the 3D chess... But it is too late now.
Now back to trying to beat my computer on Microsoft TicTactics...
That's true. For some reason I was thinking that the no money thing creped in a TOS episode at one time and Nicky or Harvey got the idea from there. But you're probably right.
After all, TWOK was the first time Spock dove into the Stuart Millian utilitarian headwaters, right?
WEEKEND UPDATE:
This implies that currency is somehow inherently bad. It isn't. It's a completely neutral construct. At its most basic state, it's nothing more than a way to regulate barter. It gives appropriate relative value to a good or service in correlation to a different good or service. All throughout human history--even before the first printed coins--something served that purpose with in a community, whether it was cows, chickens, eggs, beans, or kindling sticks.
And especially in a society where it's possible to create and destroy matter on a whim is such a construct necessary. If everything is completely devalued but everything can be created and then destroyed and then created again, what is its worth? Who does it belong to?
Your replicator just made you that nice juicy steak. But it isn't worth anything and you can make as many as you want. So I'm taking it. Go make another.
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That was a show where they could've taken some chances, but I did read they had to hold back a bit because the show was in syndication, and they didn't always know what time slot it was going to be shown in (like after school or in the "family" hour). From what I also remember, Paramount considered it a family show and marketed it that way.
Still -- .
Pardon the double post.
No, currency isn't inherently bad, sorry if I conveyed that point. I took one economics class in college and got a "C." So, I'm very dangerous when I talk economics.
Still, it has to cost something for a replicator to work, and there has to be incentive to create one and build them (which came first, the replicator or the replicator?). I doubt Richard Daystrom gave his computers to Starfleet. I mean, how are you going to by a tribble without money? Or a Willie Mays baseball card?
That also means you have to be earning something like money.I just think thematically Roddenberry wanted us to assume a world where people were no longer driven to accumulate wealth only for wealth's sake, whether that be money, jewels, precious metals, art, or real estate. But I have a feeling that if I want something like a bowl of Sisko's dad's real jambalaya with a glass of wine from a real vineyard, it will cost me a few credits versus dialing it up on the replicator.
Well I'm going to say it again: I don't watch Star Trek to be educated or steered in my moral values. I watch it to be entertained.
Yes. A bit heavy-handed for my tastes, but the message was there.
You meant fabulously, right ?
Why ? Don't we have, you know, real life for that ?
Really ? Well, I hadn't heard that one before. So why did Roddenberry drop the character ? She was awesome.
I'm not, but I feel like the episodic format has been exhausted for that franchise, unlike, in my opinion, Mission Impossible, which I would love to see as a new TV show. But a Trek show with a continuity a bit like DS9 would be welcome. And as someone mentioned, a smaller number of episodes a season, like Doctor who, could help focus on the story and make for better special effects.
That show was all kinds of awesome.
Marvel does it pretty well with gratuitous shots of Chris Hemsworth. I'm straight and I still think the guy's a hunk.
What is the "point" of Trek ?
A 60s show that tackled certain "social" issues with much more sophistication than "Star Trek."
My favorite example is the episode featuring Eartha Kitt as a heroin-addicted jazz singer. When Cosby's character Scott gives Kitt's character a chance at escape from her abusive drug lord boyfriend, she refuses because she can't chance leaving her main supplier. Without commentary, without pomposity, without hanging a lantern on it, "I Spy" showed us the grip of addiction and how there aren't always easy ways out of it.
And that's something I wish Trek did more of.
Of course, like Trek, "I Spy" went from being a more nuanced show to an all-out action-adventure one. When it showed a drug addict in one of its later episodes, it was your typical television portrayal with as much subtlety as a brick through a glass window.
No. I'm talking about the 60s and the phrase I used was "more front and center than Star Trek". Julia and I Spy were the ones were the characters were actually front and center as leads. I don't know about LOTG, as I never really watched it but Ivan Dixon in Hogan's Heroes and Greg Morris in Mission Impossible, were more front and center than Nichelle Nichols in Star Trek. Lloyd Haines and Denise Nichols in Room 222 were the show's leads and ( gasp!) a romantic couple! Hari Rhodes was the second male lead on Daktari. Prior to Star Trek's debut Cicely Tyson was one of the stars of a show called Eastside/Westside which tackled controversial issues)
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I feel like I have a slightly better grasp on 24th century economics that I do 23rd century.
I think by the 24th century basic needs are provided for everyone. You can get a basic apartment, food, utilities and computer entertainment, books, music, films for free. Things like travel, eating out, art requires some form of credit exchange. This frees people up to be able to get whatever kind of education they want to pursue their interests. I still find it hard to understand who's choosing to wait tables at Papa Sisko's. I've read a lot of speculation on that, with suggestions that people wait tables in exchange for cooking lessons, or just to earn credits for eating out and such. With no one being forced to work menial jobs as wage slaves a part time service job wouldn't be seen as the thankless drudgery job it is now.
I think by the 24th century basic needs are provided for everyone. You can get a basic apartment, food, utilities and computer entertainment, books, music, films for free. Things like travel, eating out, art requires some form of credit exchange. This frees people up to be able to get whatever kind of education they want to pursue their interests. I still find it hard to understand who's choosing to wait tables at Papa Sisko's. I've read a lot of speculation on that, with suggestions that people wait tables in exchange for cooking lessons, or just to earn credits for eating out and such. With no one being forced to work menial jobs as wage slaves a part time service job wouldn't be seen as the thankless drudgery job it is now.
To make money for its owners.
The delta?
Thanks for the correction, and which book is this?
Again, thanks for the correction (especially for the reminder about East Side/West Side.) You'll still have to forgive me if I still don't regard the black characters are being little more than sidekicks, though.
You forget the DS9 episodes 'In The Pale Moonlight' and the one where Bashir can't do anything to stop a deadly virus unleashed on a population by the Dominion as a punishment for defiance and rebellion against them-there was no quick or easy solutions in those episodes.
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Believe it or not, some people will watch it.To make money for its owners.
Yes, some were sidekicks. (though Haines, Carroll and Cosby were leads) Which is an upgrade from nonexistent and comic stereotype. That said, Uhura wasn't even a sidekick. McCoy and Spock were the sidekicks. The other characters, not so much.
