Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 3x01 - "The Next Generation"

I guess my viewpoint is that while vulgarities themselves may not be immoral, I find them to be a "slippery slope" so to speak. Yes, you can describe a car as a four letter word or whatever, but how long before someone slips up and starts using that to describe a person, or a group of people, etc. Whereas while avoiding vulgarities will of course not eliminate hate speech, it cuts off a slippery slope avenue in my opinion of using objectifying language towards a person or people.

And to be fair that may just be how I see things. For example, I don't drink alcohol. I respect that it's not illegal to drink it but all I see is something that has no real use and can easily be a gateway to other problems. I'm not equating using vulgarity with alcoholism but what I see is something that I don't see any use for, the rare positive uses of it are slim or nonexistent or can easily be replaced by less potentially harmful alternatives, and instead it just ends up a potentially needless slippery slope to worse things when that can be cut off much earlier. So I see your viewpoint now, mine is different, and I guess that's just how things are.

 

From my perspective, and other psychological professionals, vulgarity has it's uses as a "release valve" in dealing with intense emotions. Now, I currently swear a lot in the course of building my own house. I also swear when driving in the snow because, well, winter driving sucks. Nowhere have I wished violence upon, or insulted other people in my vulgarity. "Fuck it! Damn it! and Shit!" are about it.

Since starting in building a house I have discovered that it actually takes the edge of to just sigh and go "Fuck" when something goes wrong. I can move on from it and it's done.

The slippery slope argument only works for me if people are incapable of taking responsibility. By saying vulgarity leads to violence it basically assumes a moral imperfection that is uncorrectable if one uses certain words. Which, for my mind, strikes me as a stretch, and, if we supposedly can evolve as Star Trek fans would have us think, implies that we cannot engage in self-control with out ridding our words of vulgarity.

It's an interesting line, though it reminds me of bit of the Hayes code and how I felt about certain people in high school when they swore.

 

Also, as a member of a marginalized minority that is currently at the dead center of the most vitriolic and hateful moral panic and political/legislative crusade of today, this just reminds me of all the tone policing and calls for respectability politics from both within the LGBTQ community and from people calling themselves allies. We can't use uncouth language, we can't swear, we can't tell the losers on twitter calling for literal genocide against us or the billionaire financing legislation targeting us what to do with themselves because it will be identified with the the trans community and will be used to paint us all as violent and hate-filled people, and we need to be always presentable, always polite even to people wanting to kill us, always prim and proper, always censor ourselves to only show the most family-friendly and mainstream-acceptable facets of our existence because anything that could be used against us will be used against us, and could even alienate potential allies by itself by making them uncomfortable.

 

Not to mention if the Mintakans really WERE 'Proto-Vulcans; at this stage of their society they should be fighting amongst themselves and killing each other.

(But hey TNG never got taken to task for a writer not knowing STAR TREK lore/history - it's the most 'consistent' version of Star Trek...)

 

Well it just seemed they were using swear words because they could. Now Jr's commonplace in star trek. In STTVH there's a whole scene where Kirk is explaining to Spock how humans used to communicate by swearing ever other word. It's obviously not commonplace any longer by the 23rd century. I always liked this about Star Trek. Yeah s occasional light swear word like Dammit or Hell abd Data saying "Oh Shit" but it was kept to a minimum. Now it's much more and every writer seems to be in love with the word "piss" or "piss off". It's just getting tiring and sounds like every other Sci fi show.

 

But commonplace means every episode and more than once in each. DSC goes many episodes without swearing. I don't remember more than a "shit" any maybe another word in last week's PIC. If it were suddenly Jay and Silent Bob Go To Qo'noS maybe I could see it being a bit much but Trek's not a comedy nor even an edgy Gen X dramedy. It's a sci-fi franchise that even now doesn't have a character drop F bombs every five minutes. It's done in surprising moderation considering this is a streaming platform not governed by FCC obscenity regulations.

 

Yeah. It's only "commonplace " in the imagination. Certainly not from watching the show.

 

When we see Picard's old logs being played on the Eleos, is Beverly listening to them reliving the past or Jack getting to know dad.?

 

It was research by Beverly. The log entry is from the same mission that the code word for the Virus is from which Riker reveals shortly after.

 

While that was the one being on screen, there's multiple logs on the computer from various times.

 

Sure, she was looking through several to find a code/chiffre that works for her purpose.

 

The episode had a very Wrath of Khan kind of vibe, I liked it, and like Captain Liam Shaw and his temperament and he's consistent throughout. This was something I was hoping for Seven where it wouldn't be easy for her to deal with a CO who may not see things the way she does. I like this conflict and I hope it progresses to something fruitful in the future of this final run. Picard and Riker was like old hat, chemistry was on point, something I look forward to as this serial goes on.