Unfortunately, times (and tastes) have changed. People would complain that it was "unrealistic and unrelatable".
1) Darker is often more sophisticated. Sorry, it's just true. People know that they live in complex times and they want more sophistication in their shows to help them process that.
2) But people also still want more optimistic shows designed to create a sense of reassurance rather than to challenge us. That's why we're getting SNW and why we have LD. That's why TNG and TOS and VOY and ENT are all still available to stream. That's why shows like
The Orville exist.
A wide variety of tastes, including yours, are being catered to.
As a side note, I don't object to Picard (or Trek in general) being topical and political, but for God's sake don't be blatant about it, especially in the media. That was the mistake they made with Discovery.
Nine months after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, TOS aired "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," an episode about the crew encountering an alien species whose members experienced racial conflict on the basis of some of them being black on their right side and white on the left and others being white on their right side and black on their left.
But go on, please regale us with complaints about how DIS is so much less subtle than older ST.
TOS was way more blatant in its political messages than anything on DSC. Most of the obsession over 'politcalness' in DSC isn't on screen at all, it comes entirely from trekkies trying to read between the lines, which has produced various obviously bs ideas like how T'Kuvma is really Trump or Boris Johnson (he has almost nothing in common with either)
I agree with you that DIS is less blatant in its political commentary than TOS, but there is a clear similarity between T'Kuvma and Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. All three of them are politicians who ascended to political leadership by appealing to xenophobic, racialized concepts of in-group purity needing to be protected from dangerous "others" from outside the in-group. For T'Kuvma, that mean denouncing Federation multiculturalism as a threat to Klingon supremacy. For Trump, it meant painting Latinos and Muslims as a violent invading force and black communities as degenerate violent hellholes that threatened suburban (white) communities. For Johnson, it meant appealing to anti-Eastern European prejudice and sublimated English nationalism in the context of leaving the European Union. But all three of them built their power on a form of nationalism and upon a rejection of multiculturalism. It is an entirely fair comparison.
or how DSC is somehow anti-men just because it features a lot of female characters (it still has just as many men, usually in larger roles than most of the women, Burnham excepted).
I agree with you here.
I'm not shifting goalposts. You can post all you want about how late into his teens he was, or the age of the actor; we still started watching him early enough that I feel we met him as a kid,
Your feeling is wrong. You objectively did not meet him as a kid.
and my feelings matter when discussing why I was put off by watching him get tortured to death.
Sure! But you did not meet him as a kid and did not watch him grow.
dupersuper said:
Sci said:
dupersuper said:
Sci said:
It wasn't entertaining for me either! Art is not always about "entertainment." Sometimes it's about deriving aesthetic pleasure from an artistic confrontation with difficult or upsetting themes that causes us to think about our values and our relationships.
I would barely call Picard season 1 art...
Then you're being deliberately obtuse, because all of Star Trek is art. All television programs are art. Good or bad is an entirely separate question.
Congratulations: you are technically correct, which we all know is the best kind of correct.
But seriously -- art is art whether you like it or not, and claiming something isn't a work of art because it involves confronting unpleasant subject matter is absolute nonsense.
dupersuper said:
Sci said:
We hadn't connected to Thad for 15 years of adventures before jumping to 2399! Thad's role is not meaningfully different from that of Will's mom or Troi's dad.
Clearly not to you; I obviously disagree.
Except this is not an area of subjective disagreement! Thad is objectively
not different from Will's mom or Troi's dad: He is a character we never meet from the past who is only important because of the emotional impact his absence has on the characters the story is actually about.
You may
want for the character to be more important, but he wasn't. He was, like Will's mom and Deanna's dad before him, a plot device.
I shudder to think what you're watching.
Like most of us, a combination of shows that challenge me and shows that reassure me.
Kirk never thought the deaths were unimportant.
Kirk
routinely showed no pain or significant concern for the deaths of redshirts. It was common for a redshirt to die and then for him to be in a good mood for the episode's happy, upbeat ending. It was such a cliche that the novel
Redshirts parodies the lack of concern TOS as a narrative has for its supporting characters' deaths.
What would be a high enough percentage for you to accept their views as valid?
Give me
a percentage first.
Completely off topic, out of debate question: is Pandora any good?
Well, I'd say this: I like and respect Mark A. Altman. His work on the ST franchise is great. His podcast is a delight.
The premise is interesting. Some of the actors are good. And the writing becomes solid C+/B- work after a few episodes in.
There are, however, scenes where the writing an acting in the early episodes are just
painful.
But. The actors are all very pretty, and I am an easy lay for space opera.
"Author, Author" made it absolutely clear that they had not taken on the job voluntarily and were being used for compulsory uncompensated labor out of a false belief on the UFP government's part that they were not sentient beings.
I know, but I need to sleep at night.
I think the best way to sleep at night is to accept that the fictional Federation is an imperfect society comprised of imperfect beings who had an understandable mental blindspot that kept them from understanding the severity of the sentient rights violation they were committing, and that the Federation has moved past that horror in part as a direct result of Picard's actions in PIC.
The Federation is not pure evil, even at its worst!
Slavery's pretty damn close...
On the other hand, most Federates did not
understand that that's what was happening, because the idea that AIs that were designed
not to be sentient could become so en masse was completely alien to Federation experience. They didn't go out looking for sentient beings to enslave; it would be more like if someone told us tomorrow that our cell phones had all become sentient.
That doesn't excuse what they did, but I do think it precludes them from pure evil.
And add to that the simple fact that the Federation is a democratic polity that has solved the oppressions of racism, sexism, cisheterosexism, religious bigotry, disease, and classism? I'm sorry, but that's still a remarkable accomplishment even with the EMH abuses.
But even in TNG, it was a deeply flawed society
We may have watched different TNGs...
No, we didn't. The difference is I don't let the
tone of TNG as a work of art get in the way of analyzing what the UFP is actually like if it's doing the stuff TNG depicts it as doing.
Much earlier in this thread, I wrote the following two paragraphs. I stand by them:
I think the utopianism of TNG is over-sold. If we go back and watch the show, there is clearly a lot of corruption and shady shit within the Federation -- Pressman and the phase cloak in "The Pegasus," the admiral who tried to get Ensign Ro to do some shady shit in "Ensign Ro," Admiral Satie's witchhunt in "The Drumhead," Maddux trying to turn Data into a slave in "The Measure of a Man," the admiral who tried to steal Lal away in "The Offspring," the Federation allowing entire civilizations to die out in "Pen Pals" and "Homeward," the culture of idolization and hero worship built up around elite squads at Starfleet Academy like Nova Squad and Red Squad in "The First Duty" (and DS9's "Valiant"), the Federation's blithe willingness to engage in a war of genocide against the Borg in "I, Borg" and subsequent episodes where Nechayev ordered Picard to genocide them if he got the chance, the Federation's refusal to do anything substantive to help the Bajorans before they drove off the Cardassians in S6, the Federation's willingness to forcibly relocate a Native American settlement after totally ignore their wishes (and their complete blindness to the idea that those folks could just leave the Federation and accept Cardassian rule), and their general attitude towards the Maquis in S7, their willingness to forcibly relocate the Bak'u in INS -- these things all come to mind as examples of how the Federation was far from pure.
I think what PIC has done is, it has changed the tone and focus. Instead of focusing on morally righteous heroes who are always powerful enough to do the right thing without suffering negative repercussions for it and for whom moral corruption always comes from without, PIC focuses on Picard and company as morally imperfect political actors embedded in a morally imperfect society, who are trying to do their best and to redeem their society for its bad choices, but who are not themselves always perfect and who do not themselves always have enough power to make the morally correct choices. Instead of reassuring us that in the future, things will be better and we'll mostly make better choices as a society like TNG did, PIC is challenging us to ask if that will really always be the case and to think about how we can make sure that that is the case when we're faced with problems that are more complicated than TNG presented us with.
