Have the new Star Treks lost the progressive edge?
- Thread starter Oorang
- Start date
It wasn't just ham fisted, it was four sets of pigs knuckles.
It shoved a big, overlong love scene in right in the first act featuring two characters we'd barely met. Gay or straight it was the wrong place in the story for it. You want to know characters a little before you get stuck watching them in very intimate circumstances.
But, then, the entire "Blood and Fire" script was a padded overlong melodramatic mess, and that scene was the least of its probems.
As to "progressive", sitcoms were hitting the gay issue head on 10 years before TNG, as in...
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It was shoehorned in there, I agree. Still, I have to admire their willingness to just put it all up front.
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Hence the "put it all up front" portion of my post.
That whole episode had a string of problems, though. Oh, and I should say up front how biased I am because Brent Corrigan.
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I wonder what "Star Trek" would've been like if Norman Lear had had a shot at it.
I didn't need to see that, actually.
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I didn't need to see that, actually.
Well, it's too late now, and all we have are our memories.
I've been having an idea for a long time for a transgender person on Trek (or another SF show set in the future). Would be interesting to explore even on a technical level, as sex change operations must have progressed a lot by then, maybe even to a genetic level.
I would imagine by the 24th century it would be rather simple.
We almost got that on "Babylon 5." In one of the early iterations of the arc, Delenn was originally a male character, played by a female actress, who was to undergo a sex change when he went into the chrysalis so that she could mate with Sinclair.
This was the intent during the filming of "The Gathering" pilot film. JMS, however, didn't care for the voice modulation to make Mira Furlan's voice more masculine and decided to just make Delenn female, losing the modulation and later having her makeup made less masculine when the series got picked up.
You can hear Delenn's modulated voice in this old "Sci-Fi Buzz" preview (@1:17):
[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9xMd0ln_rE[/yt]
It's pretty bad. I dunno why they couldn't let Furlan keep her normal speaking voice with the masculine makeup. It made Delenn feel more alien that way.
Honestly at this point I don't care if Trek includes a gay charter in this newest incarnation or not. Just want a good movie.
As it relates to that particular topic Trek has for the most part already missed that boat. I'm not really sure they could add more the discussion that hasn't already been done elsewhere.
Kind of like how a politician "evolves" on Gay Marriage aka when the polls suggest they won't get slaughtered in the voting booth if they put their support behind it.
As it relates to that particular topic Trek has for the most part already missed that boat. I'm not really sure they could add more the discussion that hasn't already been done elsewhere.
Kind of like how a politician "evolves" on Gay Marriage aka when the polls suggest they won't get slaughtered in the voting booth if they put their support behind it.
I think Enterprise's 2nd Season episode "Stigma" can very easily be seen as a Homosexuality/AIDS story. In it, T'Pol has a treatable but ultimately fatal disease that she contracted when she was assaulted by a member of a stigmatized minority.
The TV sitcom Soap had an openly gay main character in 1977 whose sexual preference was handled in a smart, respectful, and non-patronizing (to the audience) manner.
Sure -- it was a major plot point that he was gay (it WAS still a 1970s TV sitcom, afterall), but the writers never really hit us over the head with the social aspect of it.
Like I said, the way Soap portrayed a gay main character was respectful and non-patronizing -- both to gay people and the viewing audience.
Lumping homosexuality and AIDS together is problematic to start with. AIDS doesn't discriminate and is a straight issue just as much as it is a gay issue. That they tried to promote an AIDS metaphor as being a gay story was kind of insulting imo.
I agree. But you're obviously intelligent and educated. Most people aren't either and AIDS, to this day, is generally stigmatized as a "gay disease". So, you agree w me on the fairly obvious parallels that were meant by the episode, regardless of how we feel about those parallels?
Yes, I agree parallels can be made, although it's not without problems. The Vulcans who are mind melding "rape" T'Pol for one thing, so if seen as a metaphor it's depicting the gay metaphor characters as rapists, so they don't come across as sympathetic as they really should. The whole story idea isn't as well thought out as it should've been.
