What bias do I have? Trek bias?
Poll Is continuity important?
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
Weird that Doug speaks of Wrath of Khan saving Star Trek, when it introduced a new look and dragged Trek's in-universe technology backwards quite a bit from what TMP and even TOS established.
I know Doug takes his job very seriously, but Trek will always be characters and story first, LCARS graphics and RCS thruster placements very distant.... fifteenth? Strange New Worlds, reimagining TOS and getting away with it, being top of the streaming charts and the huge success of the 2009 reboot over a decade ago show what really matters.
And citing an alt-right qanon guy like Andy Probert (link) does not help one bit. I don't care how deeply he imagines his starships, he's the antithesis of what Star Trek stands for.
I think it is personally. Just my personal opinion, I believe that Star Trek has a lot of holes in it. It doesn't make it unwatchable, but I feel as if with several episodes throughout the series that the canon situation changed a lot. Like throughout Voyager, they had a lot of issues within that context.
Your point about Probert .... (a) Drexler's sentence is literally "Design practicality, form following function, and dogged adherence to established design history is one of Trek's super-powers [...] Trek designers like Okuda, Sternbach, and Probert know where it’s all going, how it comes apart, and what it does. We relish that part of it, and that’s what gives it its pedigree."
But - this is important, since I find this a really troubling response - (b) why should it matter? Must we be so bloody closed-minded? Who else might be those frightening bogeymen and bogeywomen? Such horror, let's ignore them! Rather than talking, discussing, engaging - which feels far more Trekian than ignoring someone who says things you don't like? Sorry I just find this attitude - puritanical partisanal exclusion of someone for believing in something one does not - to be far more the "antithesis of what Star Trek stands for", and very close to the kind of exclusionary zealotry the franchise condemned again and again. People are complicated and I'm sure I'd be able to identify a 100 ways that I vehemently disagree with a person - but to use any of that as a pretext to shut them down, doesn't accord with my sense of ethics or progressivism, it just sounds like censorship. Presumably Probert always was a Republican and that doesn't affect what his friends and colleagues seem to think of him, or the respect given his work.
Sorry to write a length, but I find this attitude really troubling and, yes, frightening. Yes Probert has politics you and I don't agree with, but again why does that matter - especially when not talking about politics? It just feels like fundamentalism run amok.
On TWOK, Drexler is quoting Meyer as saying "Creativity demands boundaries, and thrives on restrictions". While yes TWOK created a new costuming language, it didn't upset the starship designs of TMP and was rather adherent to the language established even in TOS. Drex isn't just talking about design here - but I'd say SNW is doing a far better job of sticking by that established design language than Picard before the Okudas and Drexler came back to it, and certainly far better than Discovery. It feels much more akin to a TMP or TWOK version of TOS
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Star Trek is about inclusivity. The post I linked to featured anti-Muslim sentinents and wild conspiracy nonsense. Perhaps Doug would feel differently about him if he was Muslim himself?
It's easy to look the other way when you're not the target of hate and you like the pretend spaceship diagrams someone makes, but doing so always leads to terrible things.
This is all off topic and I do apologise for bringing it into this thread, but Doug isn't doing himself any favours. Not that I know anything about his politics.
I think if you really feel this, do write it on his wall - let him know this, since non-friends can respond to his posts, rather than an anonymous post on the internet. Of course it could be rude to do this, too. But I just feel you are taking a single mention of a name and making something too much out of it.
The challenging thing about inclusivisity is that you will include those you disagree with - that's the challenge of truly being inclusive. At what point do you stop being inclusive and become exclusive, or even exclusionary, because of potential harms? At what point do you yourself become "x"-phobic in order to be inclusive, yet at the same time stop being inclusive? I can't answer that, as I don't think there is a good answer - but I do feel that talking with someone you disagree with - and certainly with someone who has unfortunately been taken in hook, line and all by some of the most potent disinformation campaigns of recent memory (birtherism, Qanon, the big steal, etc) - might be for the best, for them, and maybe for you too, in terms of developing empathy both ways (which again I think is very Trekian). I am not even talking about confrontations or interventions - but just how one might help someone who is also damaged, stuck and in need of help by being decent to them rather than exclusionary?
Another thing is that we all are subject to constant disinformation and misinformation too - wherever one is on the political or cultural spectrum. How much of what we feel we know is true, or close to it? That is the great "joy" of our social media and mass media era, and this is something which is really hard to disentangle from any of our lives, which will continue to grow more and more as a problem.
I was just about to copy that to here, but I was waiting for his permission. This essay says it all. I think this paragraph covers what I was trying to say earlier:
Works such as the Star Trek Encyclopedia, and the various tech manuals, make writing and designing for Star Trek that much more difficult. Trek writing staffs have long felt hog-tied by what was perceived as restrictive rules and regulations. But consider this, director\writer Nicholas Meyer, a man credited with saving Star Trek with "The Wrath of Khan" once said, "Creativity demands boundaries, and thrives on restrictions".
Basically, a good writer should be able to work within the established setting of the world he's writing for. Moreover, use established continuity, and make your creativity work with it to come up with good new stories within that universe.
That is a very Star Trek perspective, which I remember being explored in old TOS novels when discussing possible peace with Klingons. However, I do not pretend to have Trek's ideal values and often fail to rise above my anger upon seeing displays of racism and ignorance.
Man, if you're worried about the politics of a guy on the show's design crew, or hell even the actors, you're never going to enjoy anything. I'm somewhere in the middle, and most actors sound like loons to me when they talk politics, far left and far right. I still enjoy their shows and movies. Ya gotta lighten up and not let politics run your thoughts.
Being inclusive does not mean tolerating bigotry.
But not engaging them with anything other than anger just drives them further into their bigotry. Tough issue to navigate.
Indeed. Roddenberry himself discarded the TOS aesthetic when he could, and for no other reason than an update. The idea that Trek must abide by these rules is one that hasn't rung true in quite some time.
We first have to understand who Roddenberry was. A man who would do anything for money and only concerned with his own interests.
Not only that, but the times in which he lived. Where opportunities for shows were fleeting at best. I recall Nimoy discussing his worry about financial stability, and thus his use of a bicycle to save on money. It was a different time, to be sure.
When I look at Trek's history I do see that view of looking to the producer's own interests, but also one that endevoured to try and update itself as it saw fit, rather than be static in to making more money and perhaps vain efforts to remain relevant.
That would be the same film which introduced Kirk's never-before mentioned son and a far stronger military aesthetic, a film which Roddenberry tried to sabotage and openly criticised.
Another of Meyer's films, which featured racist, mass-murdering Starfleet officers - more egregious than anything modern Trek has done - is something which he openly admits broke the Trek mould. If Roddenberry had more power, those boundaries and restrictions would have prevented it from ever being made.
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Meyer also had the Enterprise bridge downgraded in Star Trek VI from the all-touchscreen and carpeted aesthetic of V (specifically designed by Herman Zimmerman as a bridge between TOS and TNG) to a dark bridge with metal floors and physical buttons, which were obvious sound mixers. He also had the turbolift doors moved to physically impossible locations.
Not quite what Drexler said. He wrote that Nicholas Meyer is "credited with saving Star Trek." He's talking about the popular perception of Nick Meyer, not his personal opinion of the guy, or of TWOK. From Drexler's post:
And outside the uniforms, Meyer largely continued the TMP aesthetic. He pretty much had to, since he had to reuse the same bridge components, Enterprise model, and certain effects shots from TMP for budgetary reasons. But Meyer did what he could to freshen up the look by rearranging the pieces of the bridge set, bringing it closer to the configuration we saw on TOS. (Spock was once again to Kirk's right, rather than directly behind him, as he was in TMP, for instance.) And the tricorders, phasers, and communicators used in TWOK all looked a lot closer to the original TOS props than the TMP versions did.
And yes, restrictions can make you more creative. You have to stay within a certain time limit, or word count, you have to dye the previous uniforms a new color, you only have the budget for three sets, or your guest villain has to be back on the set of Fantasy Island by a particular date. So you find creative solutions to those problems within those limits. As Meyer said, he was pouring new wine into old bottles.
Agreed. Heck, TMP and TWOK ideas like the crew wearing field jackets when they're beaming off the ship go all the way back to "The Cage." And the new TWOK uniforms even retained most of Robert Fletcher's department colors from TMP. Yeah, Meyer added more blinky lights to the sets, but so what? It added more visual interest to the sometimes too bare and bland sets of TMP. I think @Donny said on one of his Enterprise design threads that since the ship launched prematurely in TMP, the revised sets we saw in TWOK were the completed version of the refit, and that's a rationale that makes a lot of sense to me.
I don't know. There were entire volumes of Nitpicker's Guides published in paperback back in the day, for all of Trek.
The difference is that back then, spotting the occasional hiccups in continuity was all in good fun. Nowadays, any inconsistency is taken as "proof" that the latest Trek production is callously running roughshod over "canon," that it's obviously set in an alternate timeline, that the current creative team don't know anything about Trek, etc.
Or so it sometimes seems to this lifelong Trekkie . . .
Yes, and in the style of the old Marvel Comics No-Prizes, Phil Farrand would offer the occasional facetious "solution" to his nitpicks, too. That certainly added to the fun.
And yeah, I don't remember him ever saying anything like "This episode can't possibly count because of XYZ!!!" in his critiques.