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Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1x05 - "Spock Amok"

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  • Total voters
    232
I think people want to move past the heterosexual label and keep everything else. Which is why so many lgbtq are clamoring for Kirk to be bisexual.

I think that's a bit much. Mind you, different people want different things, and wanting to see yourself or desires in your favorite show is perfectly normal.

Also, plenty of horny fangirls, err, fanwomen, loved Kirk and Spock.
 
What?!?! People aren't satisfied with the best LGBTQ+ depiction Trek had to offer?!? [/sarcasm]
This episode cracks me up. To me it was the ultimate cop-out on the part of the show runners. If they had wanted to truly be edgy, they would have cast the androgynous character with a male actor. That would have been jarring, especially back in those days.
 
This episode cracks me up. To me it was the ultimate cop-out on the part of the show runners. If they had wanted to truly be edgy, they would have cast the androgynous character with a male actor. That would have been jarring, especially back in those days.
Or a… gasp… actual non binary person. But then I am not sure the show runners were aware back then of non binary people’s existence.
 
I do think this T'Pring is less cold-hearted than her TOS counterpart, and more likeable.

Not sure I agree. I will say this, however: the actress playing her is doing a mixed job with her performance:

The good: she can do the Vulcan stoicism / suppression of emotion very well.
The bad: Her delivery of her lines is terribly stilted, and often rushed. Worse, Ethan Peck's delivery begins to match hers when they are playing off each other. The sad part is I've watched TOS so many times I can hear how Nimoy would deliver those same lines in my head, as plain as day.

I feel compelled to add as an old horndog: while the actress who played TOS T'Pring was certainly exotic looking, this gal in SNW is just movie-star beautiful.
 
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Kirk being straight is most likely. But seriously, does it offend you that some people leave open the possibility that, between CANON scenes, Kirk may have once or twice considered a man attractive? Kirk was also never shown shitting on a toilet, but I think it's not outside reason that he may have taken a dump in his life. (This is hyperbole.) Straight people are not on the way out.

I think with all the lgbtq characters in Star Trek now it's ok to leave Kirk a heterosexual. Chapel now being a bisexual doesn't mean every tos character has to be. How much representation does anyone group need these days to feel represented?
 
Or a… gasp… actual non binary person.

That's why they use 'actors' and it's called 'acting.' As good as Hemmer's performance is, you should check out Max Von Sydow playing a blind man in Russel Crowe's version of Robin Hood. Sydow is a spectacular actor and he sells it completely.

And the whole point of casting a male actor in that role, gay or not, is that it would put an obviously male androgynous character against the male Riker, versus an obviously female androgynous character. Because no matter how you do the makeup, at the end of the day every guest star in TNG was either a male or female human.
 
Kirk/Spock slash has been around since the '60s. From what I understand, Kirk/Spock is what invented Slash Fanfic. It pretty much got to the point where Gene Roddenberry acknowledged the issue when he wrote the TMP Novelization with Alan Dean Foster.

There could be something there but Kirk -- at least the William Shatner version of Kirk -- will deny it to his dying day.

SNW or anything else that spins off from it will do whatever they do with Kirk, but if they made him bisexual, it wouldn't be based off nothing. It would be based on something people picked up on half a century ago, but the people making Star Trek never would've been able to acknowledge in a '60s TV Series or an '80s Movie Series that was Rated PG. It just wasn't happening then. But it can happen now.

I'm not clamoring for it. I'm just saying I could see where they'd be coming from if they went that way. That's my take on it.

The perception is there and it's been there since before I was born.
 
I think with all the lgbtq characters in Star Trek now it's ok to leave Kirk a heterosexual. Chapel now being a bisexual doesn't mean every tos character has to be. How much representation does anyone group need these days to feel represented?
Would you feel ok with 1% or even 10% hetero representation? Cause that is what you are expecting of non hetero viewers.
Everyone is assumed cis hetero until they are not.
The difference is a single story worth telling.
 
I think with all the lgbtq characters in Star Trek now it's ok to leave Kirk a heterosexual. Chapel now being a bisexual doesn't mean every tos character has to be. How much representation does anyone group need these days to feel represented?

I wasn't sure if I'd heard that right with Chapel or not.

To be fair - pretty sure GR's view or the future would have had everyone as bisexual/try-sexual (if you know, you know...).

I do agree that Kirk does, for all evidence thus far, present as straight (doesn't discount him appreciating a man's beauty), although I wouldn't put it past PineKirk having the odd dabble for the right woman, and so I don't feel he needs to be changed.

That said, if it doesn't actively impact something specifically stated before then it wouldn't bother me
 
That said, if it doesn't actively impact something specifically stated before then it wouldn't bother me
Sums up Trek for me. There is way too much fan assumption around these characters that I just never knew where things I was to care about.
 
Would you feel ok with 1% or even 10% hetero representation? Cause that is what you are expecting of non hetero viewers.
Everyone is assumed cis hetero until they are not.
The difference is a single story worth telling.

Non hetero had more than 10% representation now I'm tv and movies especially tv. The estimates are 20% much larger by about 2x than the actual non hetero population. I have no trouble with representation I do have a problem with over representation and changing established character to make a statement which is what modern writers want to do.
 
I think with all the lgbtq characters in Star Trek now it's ok to leave Kirk a heterosexual. Chapel now being a bisexual doesn't mean every tos character has to be. How much representation does anyone group need these days to feel represented?

The point is, the assumption he is straight is an assumption. It is not canon because Kirk hasn't said he's never had any same-sex attraction. There isn't a quota for labels or identities, and perhaps unfortunately, you cannot gatekeep what people think about a person who does not actually exist.
 
That's why they use 'actors' and it's called 'acting.'
Listen to yourself. No. That's erasure.

They should look at actors that the character represents first (within human reason, obviously there's no alien actors), then look for alternatives.

They just took the mind transfer from 'Return to Tomorrow' and expanded on it.

There is another homage to the original TOS I have not read being mentioned. The Enterprise bingo has one of the challenges being a "Turbolift Two Floor Shout Challenge".

In TOS, turbolift two was first mentioned on a sign in the episode "The Man Trap". Yeoman Rand uses this lift when she delivers food to Sulu.

Are you joking? Because the 'two' in the challenge is referring to both of them yelling a different floor number at once. 'Two floor'.
 
This episode cracks me up. To me it was the ultimate cop-out on the part of the show runners. If they had wanted to truly be edgy, they would have cast the androgynous character with a male actor. That would have been jarring, especially back in those days.

Frakes was vocal on such an idea so were many others. Berman rejected because he was worried it'd go too far and jeopardize the numbers they had buying the episodes.
 
But that‘s the thing. Unless you can point to a character that was clear cut established as hetero, you cannot say they changed something fundamental about the character. They expanded them or filled in blanks that could go either way.

Also, I don’t think it‘s over representing necessarily either.
I am sure many people are not aware of their own non binary nature out of ignorance or ingrained social expectations. They simply never considered that they could be not entirely cos hetero. As long as they manage to fit their life into those categories it‘s no problem for them and they have no reason to expand their horizon and self explore.

I did that for over 40 years. I only recently started to consider that I might be on the ace spectrum, which explains a lot of things about myself.
 
Non hetero had more than 10% representation now I'm tv and movies especially tv. The estimates are 20% much larger by about 2x than the actual non hetero population. I have no trouble with representation I do have a problem with over representation and changing established character to make a statement which is what modern writers want to do.
I've heard the 10% figure since the 90s. I don't take much stock in it because it's probably based on self-reporting from decades ago when being gay was far less acceptable than it is today. It probably doesn't even reflect the idea of transgender or non-binary people at all.
 
Would you feel ok with 1% or even 10% hetero representation? Cause that is what you are expecting of non hetero viewers.
Everyone is assumed cis hetero until they are not.
The difference is a single story worth telling.

I hesitate to dive into this argument because it's one of those things I don't really care about one way or the other, except when it comes to truth in advertising.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/329708/lgbt-identification-rises-latest-estimate.aspx

The link above is to a 2021 Gallup survey that shows that about 5.8% of adults in the U.S. identify as LGBTQ. So, rounding up, we'll say 6 people in a hundred. Given the representation of LGBTQ characters on modern shows and in the media, you can safely say that they are a tremendously vocal minority compared to their actual numbers.

That implies that on a starship with a crew of 230, you'll have 13 LGBTQ+ people if you use 2021 statistics as a sampler for fictional 23rd Century demographics. Statistically speaking, it is unlikely that ANY of the major characters on the show would be LGBTQ. But on this show, you've got Ortegas, maybe Chapel, and people are already thinking about shippng Una and La'an. That is disproportionate based on statistics, but the showrunners can do whatever they want with their characters.

For all I care, they can make the whole cast LGBTQ. But if people jumped on here and said it was an accurate statistical representation of the real society we live in, that would be totally disingenuous.

That's the last I'll say on it. These topics never end well anyway.
 
Well, it was bound to happen, the first dud of the show. The Pike stuff involving the new aliens was good, but everything else was absolute garbage. What the "comedy" stuff reminded me of the most was the comedy segments of Star Trek V that made no sense and made a lot of characters look like morons. Katra swapping peoples minds was moronic and I'm pretty sure the Vulcans would have ran into that situation at some point if it was possible, and the dialog between the mind swapped Vulcans felt like it was written for characters on The Orville instead of characters on actual Star Trek. I also didn't like the other subplots, but I don't care to list them, they just sucked but not in a very memorable way.

The show has been great until now so I'll just consider this a bump on the road, even the best shows have terrible episodes. Hopefully they don't try full on comedy episodes again in the future, its the one thing the SNW creative people apparently cannot pull off.

I voted 3/10, and Pike's stuff (including the return of the green command tunic) are the only reason its not lower. Its far from the worst episode of Trek, but it was disappointing to get an episode this bad on a show thats been as great as SNW has been so far. Hopefully next episode is a return to form.
Oh get a sense of humour.
 
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