Name your imponderables for Star Trek

[Green Shirt]

Why do starship databases contain such useless information? For example, in Flashback Janeway accesses logs from the Excelsior consisting of Sulu noting "routine maintenance" being done.

1) Wouldn't it make more sense for the ship's computers to access that from Memory Alpha or whatever?

2) Why is "routine maintenance" even considered interesting enough to be saved for 80 years?

I don't recall if it's from the TOS series or a novel or The Making of Star Trek, but the Enterprise computer was said to be the equal of the Federation's very best and had virtually infinite storage space. So why not cram absolutely everything in just in case a tiny tidbit became useful 100 years later?

(except for references to the Borg or the Ferengi or "holes in space" of course)

What might have been thought of as a useless tidbit, such as the 300 year old NASA code signal for Voyager to transmit its information sure became important in TMP. Its amazing that such data survived the both the Eugenics War and WWIII.

 

[milojthatch]

The world is changing. We had a Black man cast as a Norse god in Thor. Black actors are playing Presidents, Generals and businessmen.

I was actually not a fan of Marvel casting a Norse "god" as a black man. I have not been a fan of a lot of the re-casting of white characters into black characters in modern comic book films, and that one may be the dumbest. That is like taking a figure from an African myth that is very clearly black and re-casting him/her as white. Oh you know if that happend there would be all manner of complaining!

I have no issues with black actors playing roles of authority. I LOVE Captain Sisko, I though Danny Glover playing the US President in 2012 was fun and I'm really excited about the idea of seeing a Black Panther movie finally in the next few years. But retconning established characters to be more PC is the high of stupidity!

You want Spider-Man or Superman to have more black characters? Fine, make new ones! I don't understand why that seems to be such a hard concept for some in Hollywood?

 

[urbandefault]

Actors portray characters very different from themselves all the time. That's why it's called "acting."

Maybe someone should ask Ms. Park if she had a problem being cast as a Japanese character.

The world is changing. We had a Black man cast as a Norse god in Thor. Black actors are playing Presidents, Generals and businessmen.

The "Norse gods" in Thor are Asgardian, not Norse. Nitpicking? I don't think so.

 

[Jonas Grumby]

So it would naturally follow that Scotty should have been played by an actual Scot, or Chekov by an actual Russian? (I guess Anton Yelchin gets a pass.)

Is it ok if I were to be cast as my Native American grandfather, even though I have blond hair and blue eyes?

I think the discussion is starting to border on silliness.

I just wanna be able to watch the reactions when they start trying to tell actors they can only play what they actually are.

 

[Greg Cox]

If he's a Sikh, then they've fundamentally altered their hair styles as well as allowing for being beardless in that century.

I think Khan self-identified more as a "superhuman" than as a traditional Sikh. In my books, I addressed this by establishing that Khan felt that, as a "superior" being, he was not bound by merely human customs and traditions.

As I recall, there's even a big, dramatic scene where he cuts off his beard as a declaration of the fact that he represents a new breed of human who were going to create a brave new world, transcending the primitive taboos and superstitions of the past.

Or at least that's how I rationalized it. Khan's background may have been Sikh, but he was hardly devout. Certainly, he never says a word about being a Sikh in either "Space Seed" or the movie, but is instead constantly talking about how physically and mentally superior he is to baseline humans. There's absolutely no indication that his cultural heritage is a big deal to him.

He was an Augment (to use the later term) first and foremost.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

^Yes and that is where all his loyalties lie.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Actors portray characters very different from themselves all the time. That's why it's called "acting."

Maybe someone should ask Ms. Park if she had a problem being cast as a Japanese character.

The world is changing. We had a Black man cast as a Norse god in Thor. Black actors are playing Presidents, Generals and businessmen.

The "Norse gods" in Thor are Asgardian, not Norse. Nitpicking? I don't think so.

They're both. The Asgardians were worshiped as gods by the Norse. They are the Gods of Norse, therefore Norse Gods. IIRC, nowhere in Thor do they say they weren't worshiped as gods by the Norse.

 

[Greg Cox]

The Heimdall thing would perhaps be an issue if the THOR comics (and movies) were ever supposed to a historically accurate, faithful adaptation of the original Norse myths. But they aren't and they never were.

This isn't the Asgard of the actual myths. This is the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby sci-fi comic-book version of Asgard, so I couldn't care less how culturally authentic it is. The way I see it, complaining that Heimdall doesn't look Norwegian enough is like complaining that XENA was not an historically accurate portrait of ancient Greece. Or that MERLIN wasn't a faithful adaptation of the original Arthurian legends.

You're kinda missing the point . . .

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

People, people..

 

[JirinPanthosa]

This is why political correctness needs to die. This weird conception that everybody's subcultural identity is so holy that it is an act of aggression for any member of it to be played by anybody who is not a member of it. It's especially ironic in the context of Star Trek, a show about how we are all really just people.

Nobody bats an eyelash at gay actors portraying straight characters, it's gay activists who give gay actors a hard time for that. Or at straight actors playing gay characters, or Christians playing atheists, or just about anyone with brownish skin being cast as Muslim. Or Irish or Scottish people being cast as James Bond, or a woman being cast as Bob Dylan. It shouldn't be a question of who the actor is in real life, it should be a question of how accurately they can act their character.

Did you know the woman who plays Denerys Targarian isn't a real Dragonborn?! HERESY!

 

[Greg Cox]

I see your STARGATE and raise you THE WITCHES OF EAST END--which has its own take on "Asgardians."

 

[Nerys Myk]

The problem with Hoshi is that Western cultures has often portrayed Asian cultures as 'all the same', erasing differences among very diverse people. I'm not saying I feel this way per se, but it can be taken as sayiing 'eh, this actress is Asian - she's good enough to stand in for every Asian culture.'

That's true for most "ethnic" casting. A European can play just about any European. An African can play just about any African. A Native American can play just about any Native American.

We see non Italian, but European, Marlon Brando play Italian Vito Corleone

We see non Hutu/Tutsi, but African, Don Cheadle play Hutu/Tutsi Paul Rusesabagina.

We see non Lakota, but Native American, Graham Greene play Lakota Ziŋtká Nagwáka

 

[Greg Cox]

To be fair, the whole color-blind casting thing resists glib, one-size-fits all answers. There are legitimate historical reasons to object to "white-washing" non-white characters and to blackface and yellowface and a host of past abuses. Some sensitivity is required here, as well as a willingness to approach matters on a case by case basis.

But, yeah, people can take things too literally sometimes. Taken to an extreme, only Scots could play Macbeth, only Danes could play Hamlet, and only Austrians can play Maria Von Trapp . . . .

Don't laugh! I've seen fans argue in all seriousness that Wonder Woman has to be played by an actress of Greek descent and that Sherlock Holmes has to be played by a Brit and so on, which is being a bit too literal-minded for my tastes.

Actors pretend to be what they aren't. That's basically the job description.

 

[JiNX-01]

We, in this barbaric time of the 20th/21st century know to put in stairwells in addition to elevators. Why is there no stairs/ladders access on any of the starship bridges?

There were ladders in Star Trek.

The Naked Time





In Wrath of Kahn, Kirk used ladders to get to engineering.

 

[USS Triumphant]

How did NONE of the cast of Voyager read the script for "Threshold" and immediately decide they could be doing better things with their lives, like factory or farm work?

(Just rewatched it this evening, with my daughter seeing it for the first time. She was... less than happy. )

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Also, it was established in The Chase that a small vessel manned by one person can destroy the entire biosphere of a planet, and in By Inferno's Light that a small vessel manned by one person can supernova a star.

So why don't all wars last about five minutes?

 

[urbandefault]

To be fair, the whole color-blind casting thing resists glib, one-size-fits all answers. There are legitimate historical reasons to object to "white-washing" non-white characters and to blackface and yellowface and a host of past abuses. Some sensitivity is required here, as well as a willingness to approach matters on a case by case basis.

But, yeah, people can take things too literally sometimes. Taken to an extreme, only Scots could play Macbeth, only Danes could play Hamlet, and only Austrians can play Maria Von Trapp . . . .

Don't laugh! I've seen fans argue in all seriousness that Wonder Woman has to be played by an actress of Greek descent and that Sherlock Holmes has to be played by a Brit and so on, which is being a bit too literal-minded for my tastes.

Actors pretend to be what they aren't. That's basically the job description.

And ...

Yeah, yeah, dude looks like a lady.

 

[Elder Knight]

Laurence Olivier did play Othello in a 1965 film (i.e., quite close to Trek TOS time). He didn't just rely on burnt cork, but had an elaborate facial with body makeup as well. He indulged in some bodybuilding, and adopted a unique voice for the roll.

This was "the greatest actor of his generation" choosing to add one of the greatest theatrical roles to his resume. This would have gotten by without a peep in earlier decades.

However, by then, sensibilities had changed, and there was a lot of controversy. I doubt that any Caucasian performer has assayed that role since. (One studio did use Peter Ustinov as Charlie Chan in 1981, and regretted it!)

Had Star Trek debuted a year or two later, they probably would have had to make accommodations.

 

[BigJake]

Had Star Trek debuted a year or two later, they probably would have had to make accommodations.

Break me a give. It was momentous when the Trek franchise finally put a non-white in the big chair a quarter-century later.

White actors playing nonwhite roles became controversial because it was an expression of racism. Specifically the racist assumption that good God-fearing Americans didn't want dirty Indians and Negroes and what-have-you on their film and television screens. Therefore nonwhite actors were denied work in roles actually portraying their own cultures or were forced to work in ghettoes of largely negative and stereotypical roles. Those barriers began to collapse in the Sixties, but even now we're far from at the end of that process.

White actors do not suffer from any corresponding lack of representation or roles (except to the extent that there is still a paucity of good roles for women). Black actors are not being hired to portray negative stereotypes of whites. White actors are not being confined to portraying witless, expendable sidekicks or criminals or savages. It damages no-one that Idris Elba gets to play Heimdall; this is just another case of certain persons of pallor falsely imagining themselves to be victims of "racism" because other people are finally getting access to privileges they've always tacitly assumed to be rightfully theirs alone.

The idiotic babbling about "political correctness" always has to ignore extremely obvious, simple, plain facts like this.

 

[BobtheGunslinge]

Can you imagine a production like Dances with Wolves with Hispanic actors playing the parts of the Lakota people because the director though the skin tones were good enough? How weird would that be?

Galaxy Quest had a pretty funny take on this. Tony Shaloub played an actor portraying a character named Chen. Later on he says his real name (the actor's) is Kwan.

Also, Moragan Freeman in Shawshank Redemption: "They call me Red. I guess it's on account of I'm Irish."